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Electric Bat Pinpals :: Episode 7 :: The Walking Dead by Stern

Electric Bat Cast·podcast_episode·3h 21m·analyzed·Nov 2, 2025
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.029

TL;DR

Electric Bat predicts Walking Dead rules changes and launches add-a-ball complexity analysis.

Summary

Electric Bat Cast hosts Rachel (substituting for Kale) discuss The Walking Dead pinball by Stern in depth, predicting rule changes before the November 4th reveal. The episode features a detailed breakdown of add-a-ball systems across modern pinball machines in a new segment called 'Pinball Science Corner,' corrections to prior Ghostbusters flipper gap claims, and exclusive news that Stern plans to change Uncanny X-Men's Beast add-a-ball system to a character perk before Thanksgiving.

Key Claims

  • Stern intends to change Uncanny X-Men's add-a-ball from Beast system to a character perk, likely Professor X, in a future code update before Thanksgiving

    high confidence · Host (Electric Bat Cast) citing conversations with 'friends over there' (Stern)

  • The Walking Dead pinball will be revealed on November 4th

    high confidence · Host statement at beginning of episode

  • Ghostbusters flipper gap appears larger due to flipper alignment being flopped, not CAD mistake or design intent

    medium confidence · Swinks (Pinside user) detailed post analysis showing measurements of 7.125 inches post-to-post across Trudeau games; contradicted by Rachel's account of Dwight Sullivan at Expo saying it was a mistake

  • Walking Dead has no mystery reward add-a-ball system

    medium confidence · Host statement during add-a-ball system breakdown

  • John Schopple won last year's Indisc World Champion Classics

    high confidence · Host introduction of John Schopple as 'Man on the Streets reporter'

Notable Quotes

  • “If we predict the rules of the game before it comes out? And that's what we're going to do today, basically a mega deep dive into Walking Dead code, along with a wish list slash prediction of what additions or changes Stern is going to make to the rules.”

    Electric Bat Cast Host @ early in episode — States the episode's core premise and approach to discussing Walking Dead remaster

  • “Kale is currently the Walking Dead, if I understand that right... He's the dead in bed, but alive.”

    Rachel @ opening segment — Humorous context for why Rachel is substituting for Kale

  • “I have no idea who Swinks is. But he's not a fly-by-night guy... I could sense the obsessive madness in him. And I love it.”

    Rachel @ Ghostbusters flipper gap discussion — Expresses admiration for detailed technical analysis in pinball community

  • “These are some of the 1% or the 99% that like to laugh at the 1%... Both are welcome here.”

    Electric Bat Cast Host @ add-a-ball complexity discussion — Acknowledges podcast appeals to both hardcore rules enthusiasts and those who enjoy the absurdity of rule complexity

  • “I just don't think it's a good idea. Rules, man. If anybody gets rules, it's you... I just don't think that's an area where you need it to be unnecessarily complex.”

    Rachel @ complex add-a-ball discussion — Makes case against over-complicated add-a-ball requirements despite understanding rules depth

  • “Stern has listened to us, and we have some breaking exclusive news on Pin Pals here that Stern intends to change this Addaball completely”

    Electric Bat Cast Host @ Uncanny X-Men section — Claims direct influence on Stern's design decisions through podcast coverage

Entities

Electric Bat CastorganizationRachelpersonKalepersonStern PinballcompanyThe Walking DeadgameUncanny X-MengameSwinkspersonJohn Trudeauperson

Signals

  • ?

    announcement: Walking Dead pinball remaster will be revealed on November 4th

    high · Host states: 'when the game is revealed in a few days, which is November 4th, I believe'

  • ?

    code_update: Stern planning to change Uncanny X-Men Beast add-a-ball to character perk system (likely Professor X) in future code update

    high · Host: 'Stern has listened to us, and we have some breaking exclusive news on Pin Pals here that Stern intends to change this Addaball completely'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Comprehensive mapping of add-a-ball system complexity across 20 years of modern pinball machines; categorized by simplicity level (single area, mystery, character perk, complex multi-step, pre-multiball coordination, no add-a-ball)

    high · Host creates detailed chart with rows showing add-a-ball complexity progression and multiple game examples in each category

  • ?

    community_signal: Swinks from Pinside conducts detailed flipper post measurements across multiple John Trudeau games; documents 7.125 inch standard spacing and flipper droop variations between early and late production runs

    high · Host extensively reviews Swinks' Pinside posts with detailed measurements, diagrams, and technical notes; Rachel expresses admiration for 'obsessive' research quality

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Host and Rachel debate whether add-a-ball systems should be simplified; both agree overly complex systems (like Venom's 10-infected requirement) alienate casual players despite appealing to rules enthusiasts

    high · Rachel: 'I just don't think it's a good idea... There's no reason for it... doesn't add to interesting depth'; Host frames podcast as appealing to both '1% rules enthusiasts' and '99% who laugh at the 1%'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.604

0:00
Hello everyone and welcome to the Pin Pals. Do not adjust your screens. Today we are joined by Rachel, the better half of Rachel and Kale from the Electric Bat. Rachel, tell us what's happening and why you're here instead of Kale. I am here because Kale is feeling under the weather, so a long lost Pin Pal, me, stepped up to ask you about what we're talking about today. What is that? It's going to be Walking Dead, and Kale might be in the background of this episode, hopefully not too far off. You know, the good news is that this is on brand for today's episode of Walking Dead because Kale currently is the Walking Dead, if I understand that right. He's the laying dead. He is. He's the dead in bed, but alive. He's alive. Okay, good. He just can't really talk right now. He's laying in the background battling through his own zombie virus right now. Correct, yes. And we will all wish him good luck defeating it. But, Rachel, if you have to pause the podcast to shoot a crossbow through his head, don't think twice about it, Rachel. Do what you know has to be done. Couldn't do it. All right, good.
1:07
So back to today's episode then. So normally, Rachel, we're the go-to podcast, and really the only one podcast that breaks down the rules of a game the day it comes out. But I thought we could do something even crazier for this episode. What if we predicted the rules of the game before it comes out? And that's what we're going to do today, basically a mega deep dive into Walking Dead code, along with a wish list slash prediction of what additions or changes Stern is going to make to the rules. And maybe when the game is revealed in a few days, which is November 4th, I believe, we could follow this up with a mini episode after they launch the game to check in and see how much we got right and how much we foolishly got wrong. How does that sound to you? That sounds wonderful, and I think this is an excellent time for me to finally learn the rules to Walking Dead, a game I've been playing since it came out, yet I rarely know the depths of what I should actually be doing. Oh, we're going to get there, that's for sure. But first, as is tradition on Pin Pals, we will cover comments and corrections. Is that okay with you? Absolutely. But I promise to make it interesting, otherwise we'd put it at the end. But I think we can make this interesting.
Dwight Sullivan
person
John Schoppleperson
Ghostbustersgame
Creature from the Black Lagoongame
Game of Thronesgame
Venomgame
John Wickgame
Ray Dayperson
Spookycompany
Deadpoolgame
Electric Bat Arcadevenue
Pinsideorganization
  • ?

    personnel_signal: John Schopple (last year's Indisc World Champion Classics winner) hired as Electric Bat Cast 'Man on the Streets reporter' to investigate game mechanics by opening glass and testing switches

    high · Host introduces Schopple role and shows text messages documenting his detailed mechanical investigation work on Uncanny X-Men Beast add-a-ball and Deadpool

  • ?

    product_concern: Ongoing technical dispute about whether Ghostbusters flipper gap is designer intent (Trudeau standard), manufacturing error, or optical illusion from flipper alignment/droop; sources contradict each other

    medium · Rachel reports Dwight Sullivan said it was a mistake; Swinks provides detailed measurements showing 7.125 inch standard and flipper droop explanation; Host presents both views without resolving

  • ?

    content_signal: Electric Bat Cast launches 'Pinball Science Corner' segment to document add-a-ball systems across modern games with crowdsourced corrections via Discord and Google Docs comments

    high · Host introduces new segment with jingle, creates detailed chart accessible via Discord and YouTube description, invites community to make corrections as comments

  • ?

    industry_signal: Electric Bat Cast claims Stern is responding to podcast coverage; reports exclusive news of code changes influenced by on-air discussion

    medium · Host: 'Stern has listened to us, and we have some breaking exclusive news' about X-Men add-a-ball change; suggests future follow-up episode post-Walking Dead reveal

  • ?

    community_signal: Electric Bat Discord community includes industry participants (Ray Day, Spooky) and operators discussing best practices; described as 'great Discord of hundreds of people' not just local to Arizona venue

    high · Rachel notes Ray Day and Spooky comment in Discord; mentions operators learning from operators in community; host encourages viewers to join via electricbatarcade.com

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Modern pinball machines show wide spectrum of add-a-ball complexity; simplest (single shot/mystery reward) dominates Stern portfolio; most complex requires pre-multiball coordination that players generally dislike

    high · Host charts show mystery reward and single area are 'majority of Stern games'; complex pre-multiball systems like Venom's 10-infected requirement are rare and unpopular; Rachel confirms '99%' of players don't engage with ultra-complex systems

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Community consensus emerging that add-a-ball systems should balance accessibility with depth; overly complex systems alienate majority of players; character perks offer good middle ground

    medium · Rachel and host discuss preference for simple systems; host notes John Wick and MXV using perk-based add-a-balls as emerging standard; both agree unnecessary complexity serves only '1%' of player base

    • 2:19
    All right, so I'm going to share my screen as I do. And, Rachel, by the way, you can make it full screen on your end if you right-click the menu and just zoom out. But anyway, I won't mess it up for you. But otherwise, the viewers at home can see everything. And so on our most recent X-Men episode, which was a whopping three hours, we claimed that there is an increased flipper gap on Ghostbusters, even more so than the usual flipper gap that the designer of the game, John Trudeau, is known for. And Cale had suggested that this was due to a CAD software mistake, a computer-aided design software mistake. But Josh Groob, 84, says, and we have the comment up here for those viewing the podcast, I'm only up to the Ghostbusters part, but I wanted to jump in in case it takes me a week to finish it. It was a very long episode. But the CAD mistake theory was debunked. Swinks on Pinside had discussed it at length with the designer and did all the measurements post-to-post to back it up. The gap itself feels larger because of the flipper alignment being flopped. What do you say to that, Rachel? There you have it. Do you have an opinion on it? I know Kale still does. Well, I was actually with Kale at Expo when we asked multiple people, including Dwight Sullivan, what was the reason for this gap?
    3:42
    And the answer was, it was a mistake. So they're saying that it really was wider than it should have been. Yes.
    3:52
    Well, Rachel, I have a surprise for you. I brought in a surprise guest. Okay. Can you guess who? It is Swinks from Pinside. No, not in person, though. But I found all his posts on this, and we're going to go over them together with our viewers to really get to the bottom of it for once and for all for this, because I know there's been some back and forth, including from Dwight himself.
    4:16
    And so here is Swinks' post on Pennside. Now, he has hundreds of posts, and it's all about this subject. And I'm only showing them to you to impress you with the level of detail he's done. And, you know, I don't know if this is going to be interesting or not to everyone else, but I'll tell you what I love. I have no idea who Swinks is. But he's not a fly-by-night guy. Correct. Or now. That's right. I could sense the obsessive madness in him. And I love it. Absolutely. Game-recognizing. Yeah.
    4:49
    You know? And he's out there. All right. So what he said, I'm not going to read everything that he said here, but the flipper pivot points are Trudeau's standard distance, but wider than the standard Stern games. The illusion of the gap being even bigger than Trudeau's traditional gap is that in the first six months that the game was produced, the flippers were more droopy than normal to be able to hit the right side ramp and the left scoop. And then after about six months of production, the flippers were later lifted up. And so then it becomes sort of a more traditional gap in those games. So that's what he said. Then he basically, then he says he's taken the glass off on both Creature from the Black Lagoon and Ghostbusters, both of which are John Trudeau's games with increased flipper gaps. And he checked, and they both have the same signature gap, measuring from the center, and he spelled center with an R-E, suggesting he's British. We've got a clue. So we know he's already wiser than all of us, right? No, I'm kidding. But he's measuring it flipper post to flipper post, and he saw that the measurement is exactly the same, specifically seventh and one-eighth inches of post gaps, which is sort of a John Trudeau standard. And he keeps on going, and I won't show all the messages, for example, but just to show you his sincerity within this and my sincerity of looking at his posts, you know, at least here. And then he even measures it. Here's his measurements on Creature from the Black Lagoon, which he measures flipper post to flipper post at seven and one-eighth inches. To be honest, I don't quite see exactly what's there. So he's noting it in inches and not centimeters. Am I right that he's noting it in inches? Am I crazy? I think so. That's right. I mean. Well, it's American manufacturing, right? I don't know.
    6:34
    And then here's Ghostbusters, for example, which he's also measuring perhaps at the same thing. and then he even measures the droopiness of the flipper to show that it was sort of, because he's saying the spacing is a little bit more than usual in the first production run because the flippers are a little droopier, and so that gives it a slightly more wider than normal appearance. And then he even gets this level of detail, which is showing this would be a B here, B being designer John Trudeau likes to have seventh and one-eighth inches between posts, making the gap between the flippers wider.
    7:19
    And so these are kind of the guidelines of different games with different lettering here. And that's the level of detail that we're talking about that some of the people out there in pinball land have. With that, I will pause here. What do you say to that, Rachel? Does that change your opinion? It doesn't have to. I appreciate the obsessiveness. and the research, and now we also have Ghostbusters, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Judge Dredd. We've got some Trudeau games at the back. All at the back.
    7:50
    Maybe I'll go in later and completely set aside all the work that I was going to be doing and just start measuring things to see all of this. I think it's very interesting one way or the other. I'm not in a position to have an authoritative opinion about this, I guess, not being the designer or, you know, I guess all of these measurements are meaningful.
    8:15
    It is curious that multiple people who were very close to the production of this game would contradict this information. That, I find, you know, reality is different for everyone. So true. Very much for me. So maybe that's what we're, we could be looking at a case of this. Trudeau is unfortunately not an easy person to get a hold of, I would think, these days. I was going to visit him, I thought, after he got better. I don't know. I'm joking. Keep going. So it does not change my opinion. It only adds to the interesting complicatedness of this debate about something that no one outside of pinball could even imagine that people are arguing over an eighth of an inch or less. Well said. So I put that in our corrections episode, but we're not ready to correct it just yet. I just wanted to present the data as existed out there. Swink's made a good case. We've got Dwight on another area. We've got other people feel somewhere in between. But those are the details. The real answer is let's all measure our games, everybody out there. Between two flippers with Serge and Rachel. That's right. That's the side shoot podcast from here that will happen. All right. Our next important update in this section is that, as you know, Rachel, we are becoming more of an investigative journalist pinball podcast, you know, as we just talked about. and after all we have hired last year's Indisc World Champion Classics winner John Schopple as our Man on the Streets reporter and just last episode he took off the glass on Uncanny X-Men and he figured out once and for all how the Beast Adaball system works on a pro here's all his text messages which I don't want you to read but I do want you to notice how much effort he puts into it so just as a quick recap of the Adaball in Beast you have to make five combo shots to level up Beast to level two and you have to do that before you even start the multiball. So make any five combo shots before the multiball starts and then during multiball you hit the Beast stand up repeatedly to get the add-a-ball and that's this thing. So you have to get it to level two and then before multiball, then during multiball, that's when you hit the Beast stand up and that gives you the add-a-ball. So that's how it works. And thank you John for that. It wasn't easy and was way above my head and that's when I call them the big guns like John Schaapel. But Stern has listened to us, and we have some breaking exclusive news on Pin Pals here that Stern intends to change this Adaball completely, and instead, in a future code update, they will assign Adaball as a perk to one of the X-Men, removing it from the Beast system. Probably Professor X, and if so, that will radically change my recommended strategy on the last episode, where instead I would say, hey, pick that mode to start Ball 1, rather than the fiery assault storm versus pyro mode. That one lets you get multiball extender on Sentinel, but that would only apply to Sentinel, and it's also much harder to beat the storm mode than it is the Professor X mode. So if and when they make that change to the Adaball system, which should be in a future code update, then that's when we can formally correct this, and it's not really a correction now, but just a way to say that this show matters and people are listening, and sorry John but everything you do we're going to have to forget all of that after this meticulously detailed investigation and then it will be a simpler different add-a-ball system in the game so I'll pause there what do you say to that Rachel? I think we're going to have to run it again with updates addendums whenever that comes out now do you believe that's going to be a true add-a-ball like add to any multi-ball is this going to be a swipe-a-ball do you have any thoughts on the My prediction will be once you get the perk, it applies once per multiball per ball so that you could use it three times in a three-ball game. Well, that would be huge if you had three Atta Balls in the chamber. That's right. I agree. And they're going to go for the perk system. And John Wick recently did that too, and MXV and his team are working on that as well, where the Atta Ball is a perk. And I think they'll move it to a perk here. and who knows when that will be, but I bet it will happen in the next few code updates. Yeah, I have had some conversations with some friends over there and I believe we are going to see this roll out relatively soon. Love to hear it. I'm going to predict before Thanksgiving.
    13:01
    Yes, I bet you're right about that. and then with that I am happy to go to a new segment that I thought of that this conversation around the complexity of the uncanny X-Men Adaball system made me want to document the Adaball system for most modern pinball machines and we're going to do that in a new segment I'm going to call Pinball Science Corner and here's our Pinball Science Corner now my one fear is I did create a jingle for it but I don't know if the I'm going to play the jingle. Yes, there is a jingle for it, Rachel. It comes with its own theme song. I'm going to play it, and I want you to tell me if you could hear it. Okay? Okay. Otherwise, I might have to... Maybe there's a setting I should have started with.
    13:50
    I knew it. All right. I might have to let go of the jingle. It was a good jingle. Nobody's going to believe me, but it was a good jingle. You didn't hear it, right, Rachel? I didn't, but if you could just sing it for us, maybe that would suffice. It's Pinball Science Corner. with the pin pals and their friends. It goes something like that. And then, you know, it's got like a full house sort of 90s sitcom vibe ending. I was proud of it, but that's okay. We'll get it next time. We'll figure that out and how to put the theme song in here. But let's get to the data. Nobody's here for the theme songs of our segments, I think. Very few people, maybe me. Something to look forward to for the next Pin Pals episode. That's right. So here's the data. And these are the last 20 years or so of modern pinball machines. I recognize this text may be small as you're watching this on your phone in the bathroom. This is too small for ants. That's right. But we will include the link to this chart and all future charts and past charts we've done. What I thought we could do is include the link in our Discord, and also we'll see if we can get it in the description of this video as well. And we'll put it on commenter mode. So if you want to actually make corrections out there as viewers, you can do so on the file as comments, and I'll update it. I know we have so many intelligent and attractive viewers of the show that love this data stuff, and I love the idea of crowdsourcing the science here. So we'll all have our Pinball Science Corner data on there. But with that, let's go through the data on this particular chart.
    15:16
    The data is arranged in rows, where each row is the way you achieve Adaball in the game. One column is for Stern Games, one column is for JJP Games, and another column is for other games outside of those companies. and the rows go from least complex, which is the simple life here, for example, where you just have to hit one single area over and over and over again, to the most complex, which is, hey, you have to do a whole bunch of stuff during the multiball. And then the final row is the North Korea of add-a-ball rules, if you will, where you don't get an add-a-ball. So shout out to our North Korean listeners. But with that, I can embiggen the data a little bit by getting rid of my nonsense jokes here. So a little bit larger of font. And maybe what I thought I could do is go through a bit of the data, not every row, but hopefully this data is all accurate.
    16:10
    First, to give a definition here, when I say the term addable, what I mean is that you've started a multiple, and then you do something in the game to literally addable. That sounds like an obvious definition, but let me tell you what I'm not counting here. I don't count multiball extenders. So, for example, in James Bond, there's a bird one multiball, which is the up-the-middle shot after you hit the drop targets. And if you get three flashing shots once the multiball starts, there's a timer on these sort of two-side loop and side ramp shots. And if you hit any three of them, that activates your extender on that multiball. So that means when you get down to one ball in that multiball, the whole thing will automatically restart, and I'm not counting that. But you did Scared Stiff. Yeah, Scared Stiff is another example. A simpler version of that when you get the extender on the little spinning wheel. Right. Multiball Extender is its own chart, in other words. This is an add-a-ball chart, and exactly like you said. And the other thing I'm also not counting is I'm only counting main multiballs. I'm not counting, like, wizard modes, for example. And that's important because let's say you take Elvira House of Horrors. in the main multiball, the garage multiball, and also the trunk multiball in that most recent Elvira from Stern, there is no add-a-ball system, and so that's why it's on the bottom row. Technically, if you get to the mini wizard mode, which is house party multiball, for example, there is an add-a-ball in that if you get to the super jackpot, and if you time it where the eye of the house is looking at you as you hit the shot, it's kind of complicated but interesting, and then that adds a ball, but I'm not counting that. So add a ball here. This chart is for true add a balls, not extenders, and for main game multi balls.
    17:51
    I'll pause there. Does that, the definitions make sense? We're all good. Okay. So a little bit of the first row. Again, this is the simplest thing you can do. All you have to do is, what do you do when you get into multi ball? Hit one area repeatedly. So, for example, in Jaws, you hit the captive ball. And I do list for every game here the actual thing you have to hit. and that text might be small but that's why you could click the link. So in Jaws you just have to hit the captive ball on the main multi-ball and in King Kong on the main multi-ball you hit the gong and in the 2017 Star Wars you hit the drop targets and on the 2025 Star Wars you hit the spinning cup, for example, and that's your addable. So that's the simplest type of addable and it kind of shares the prevalence in Stern with the next most simplest way, Mystery Awards. And we're going to talk about mystery rewards a lot as we cover this Walking Dead, because Walking Dead has no mystery reward, for example. But mystery reward in lots of games exists. Like in Rush, you hit the scoop and you get the mystery. In Guardians, you hit the lower right scoop and you get the mystery, and so forth. And so even King Kong has a mystery award in the cave on the right side. And in a lot of games, the mystery will give you an edible. So that is just as equal in Stern games as in the single area. Together, those two are the majority of Stern games. Either you hit a single area or you get the mystery. And I list all the mystery games. Like in King Kong, if you can get... Did you say that there is one in... Well, yeah, so there is a nuance here, which is some games I put an asterisk on. And I put an asterisk whenever they fall in multiple categories. And L1 games are very typical to do this. So in King Kong, for example, the main multiball, which is like shoot the drops and then up the center ramp repeatedly, that main King Kong multiball, the add-a-ball there is hit the gong over and over and over again, two times specifically. Whereas also in King Kong, there's a pit multiball, which is that little magnet spider on the bottom left, and in that one, the add-a-ball is the mystery award, and the mystery award is in the lower right scoop on that what's called the concave vuck area. And so I lift King Kong twice, and other Elwynn games are similar. Iron Maiden is another example of this, where in Iron Maiden you have to hit the mystery award for Ace is High, and that's the captive ball in the lower left. Anyway, I'll pause there. Does that answer your question, Rachel? Correct, yes.
    20:23
    And so these are the easier ones to remember. You just have to remember what to do in one singular area or in the mystery award. Let me get more complex here. the one below this is character perks and so what i mean here with the character perk is we were just talking about how um how there's a character perk in uh john wick for addable which i don't think i put in there is interesting oh no i know what i have to do yeah uh no not yet sorry sorry sorry uh character perk but you have to choose the character before you start the game that's what this is so uh it's a little we're going to get even more complicated after this but this is a character perk that you pick before you start the game. As an example, in Game of Thrones, you get to pick your choose your house, you know, and there's one character called Martel. As long as you pick that character, then for the rest of the game, if you're in multiball, once per ball, you get in a multiball, you press the button, get through your addable. So you don't have to do anything else. It's complicated because you have to know which character to pick, but as soon as you pick your character, that's all you have to do. But this is one of those risk-reward pros and cons of various characters. Right. Because you have to know who the other characters are and are they better. Right. Depending on your play style and how far away the multiball is and how much you think you're going to get from the multiball, that may or may not make sense. That's exactly right. But, yes, I understand. And this is a common Dwight thing, so he did it for Game of Thrones. He also did it for Venom, which is if you pick Flash Thompson on your ball one, specifically, then it will give you an add-a-ball when you're in the multi-ball. It's just that simple. You have to know that, so it's a bit complicated in that sense, but all you have to do is pick the right option, and if you pick that option, you get an add-a-ball. And it's also in JJP Pirates with their 22 characters that you pick from. One of them has that kind of thing. And so that's kind of character perks. The next thing, though, is another level of complexity of add-a-balls that you can do during the multiball, but you have to do a whole series of things, and they're unique. And so in ACDC, for example, you have to hit all five major shots on ACDC in order to get an add-a-ball. As soon as you hit that fifth major shot, you get your add-a-ball. There's also a VIP pass, which can spot a shot, but you have to do a bunch of stuff, multiple different shots, not in the same area. Metallica is actually an example of a complex add-a-ball. You have to hit four pick targets, and then you hit the snake, for example. And I list a bunch of other examples there that I won't go through all of them, although I do explain what you do in each one in the chart. But does that make sense as well, Rachel? Absolutely.
    23:02
    And then next, let's do complex, the most complex of all. Something that you have to do, a series of things that you have to do, but you have to do them before the multiball even starts. So you can't do it after the multiball. It's not something you pick at the beginning of the game. You have to coordinate what you're doing before the multiball even starts in order to get the addable. And these are some other perks. So, for example, in John Wick, there's a mode perk. If you beat the specific mode of the right ramp and then start the multiball, sorry, you hit the right ramp, start the mode, beat the mode, which is like 10 shots or whatever it is. You have to beat that mode, then you get a perk, then later you start the multiball. After you have done everything I just said, which is a minimum of 12, 13 shots, right, then you start the multiball. Then you have an add-a-ball option as a button that you have to press. So that's an example of complicated, right? Beat level two would have been complicated. You have to get five combo shots to get it to level two before you even start the multiball. Then when you start the multiball, you could hit the add-a-ball target. And there are not many examples like this, and it's because people generally don't like that. Right. Exactly. And you answered it for me with the thankfully. People just do not like that, you know, generally. No, these types of addibles are created only for, I would say, less than 1% of players because you and I know a lot of players that really get off on all of these little details, and even this is too much for them. Like, it's just unnecessarily complex, in my opinion, and I would venture to say in 99% of people who hit the start button. Yeah, it sometimes makes me wonder, why are people watching this podcast?
    24:51
    I agree with you. This is for the 1% that really want to know this insanity. All right, and what you're telling me is that there's one even worse, or should I say more complicated than that? Well, no, I was going to say that it's either for the, this podcast is either for the 1% or the 99% that like to laugh at the 1%. And I'm good with both groups. You're both welcome here. Both are fine. Right, exactly. And it's fun to look at how complicated pinball can get and why it gets sometimes so complicated. And this row is really the, you know, piece de resistance there is what I would say. Like Venom is another example from this. I mentioned that you could pick a character, and you can, to get the edible. But if you don't pick that character, and most people don't because it's not the right choice, generally strategically, to pick that character, for other reasons that I won't get into. But in Venom, you have to, before you start a multiball, there are a bunch of stand-ups around the playfield. And they represent infected. You have to hit a stand-up, then it flashes on a timer, and then you have to hit that stand-up again on a timer. And you have to do that thing I just said ten times to get ten infected. And then you start a multiball. And then you have to select sleeper at a ball, and you unlock Sleeper by getting 10 infected, and it's as complicated as I made it sound there, in other words. I said it right, and yet it's quite complicated. And I just don't think people love that. It's hard for me to get behind an out-of-all system like that personally. I mean, I think this would be fine if that was the only thing you were focused on while you were playing the game, but it isn't, right? There's also a multitude of other multi-layered things that you're going to be doing in the game, and this just doesn't, it's too much, in my opinion. I think we should have a poll on the Electric Bat Discord about people's preference. What's your preference for multi-ball complexity? Oh, I would go single area and mystery award. And it's not like I don't get rules. That's not the issue. I just don't think it's a good idea. Rules, man. If anybody gets rules, it's you. I appreciate that. I just don't think that's an area where you need it to be unnecessarily complex. There's no reason for it. It doesn't add to interesting depth to get it to become that complex. The final row I have here, though, is the North Korea option, which is the no-add-a-ball. And I'm not necessarily saying I'm against that. I like to make a joke about it. But I'm not saying I'm against it necessarily. There's not many examples of that. Dungeons and Dragons actually has no add-a-ball in the gelatinous cube multi-ball and in the dragon multi-ball. There are reasons for it. So, for example, the dragon already shoots out at you like 18 balls or whatever it is, right? So, like, that doesn't quite make sense. Almost infinite add-a-ball for a certain amount of time. Exactly. And then the gelatinous cube, you can do things before the multi-ball starts to give yourself either two or three or four balls in it. And so you can make it a big multi-ball. You can't add a ball to it once it starts. But I get that, you know, for example. And then Elvira, House of Horrors relies on the expender that we mentioned earlier, for example. So I'm not counting that. There are some J.J.P. examples. J.J.P. gives you already a lot of multiballs, so it makes sense not to give you an addable for those multiballs on many of their games. So anyway, that's this chart.
    28:09
    That really wraps up this chart. I don't know if you want to say anything else about it, Rachel. I don't, but I think for people that are looking for the link, aside from in the YouTube, section down below. It's going to be on our Discord. If you don't know how to get into our Discord, you can go to electricbatarcade.com, go in the podcast tab, and then underneath that there's going to be a little link that says join our Discord, and that's how you can get there. Yeah, and it's really a great Discord of hundreds of people, not just people who play here at the Bat in Arizona, like you might think. A lot of industry people are there. I know Ray Day's been commenting there, and Spooky has comments there, and And so it's a good conversation, too, of people all over the world that are into pinball, and also operators who want to learn from other operators are in there as well. Yes, thanks for the plug. I'm good at that. When Cale isn't here, I'm going to have to help with the plug.
    29:01
    I know you do it, too. But I want to give a shout-out, as I wrap this up, to our local reporter, John Schaupel, here, who does help us to collect some of this data. Again, I'll show you another one of the texts he sent us just to let you know how intrepid and important he is to our whole organization here. He opens the glass. He activates switches until we get to the bottom of the story for you fans out there. He did this for Deadpool, for example, and he discovered, this is for the 1% again. For the 99%, ignore what I'm going to say. But for the 1%, Deadpool is a particularly unique mystery add-a-ball within all Stern games, as far as I'm aware. in all Stern games that have a mystery award in order to add a ball, and there are a lot of them that I list, all you have to do is light the mystery, get in the mystery, and you get an add-a-ball. In Deadpool, quite specifically, the mystery can only give you add-a-ball once the ball save ends, and it really ends without a grace period. Then it ends, then you get in the mystery, and then it gives you an add-a-ball. If you do it during ball save time of the multi-ball, it will not give you an add-a-ball. It's the one exception. Why they programmed it, I can't tell you. but that's why sometimes you're like, I got it, and it didn't give you the mystery, and then you wasted your mystery, and it's really hard to like the mystery in Deadpool, by the way. You have to have the stand-ups on both sides and all that. So it's just sort of a nuanced but interesting point for Deadpool specifically, and a plug for John who could find that level of detail there. You guys are a fantastic team of data miners. That's right. Now, you might think from this chart, by the way, that I am saying always do the simplest thing, and I do favor the single error in the mystery award. So you might think I'm saying never do something unique. Don't do something different with these common rules features. Code the out-of-all, the mode selection, the play field multipliers, all of that, just like everyone has done it before. Don't rock the boat with crazy new ideas. Don't take risks. And to that, I want to be clear. I wholly support risk-taking in code. In fact, one of the ten criteria we'll talk about today for good code, and which Walking Dead has, is to do something with innovation in the code, something that hasn't been done before. But, and here's the critical point, if you're going to be bold, and do something new to standard rules that everyone else is used to, you're going to have to need to pair that with the other important criteria, which is clarity. And we talk about that each episode, too. You need to communicate these things to the player. And, you know, when I was talking about these complex add-a-ball rules, like I don't think they're well communicated to the player whatsoever. You have to do deep dives to figure it out, like when we were talking about the mode perk or the weapon in Rush, for example, or Venom Sleeper infected. It's just not obvious to the player.
    31:39
    And what I thought I could do, actually, Rachel, is give you a recent example of a bold kind of new way to do something and then talk about how they broke it down. So I do want new code, new ways to do things in code, but I just want to pair it with kind of clarity and communication to the player.
    32:00
    Is that fair to start with, Rachel? Certainly, and I agree 100%. That communication is of paramount importance. Good. So I want to talk about Over at Barrels of Fun, where first-time game designer and first-time rules designer, Carl D'Angelo, is doing something very unique with Barrels of Fun. And I'm going to bring in the layout here again for a moment.
    32:25
    And it's really interesting. He's doing something new with playfield multipliers, for example. A lot of people have done the same thing over and over again with playfield multipliers. You hit the bell three times in ACDC, it gives you 2x. In Foo Fighters, you hit the right orbit three times, and it gives you 2x, for example. In Iron Maiden, you hit a bunch of stand-ups, and then you're in an in-lane, and then you're in 2x. Whereas in King Kong, you hit a bunch of stand-ups, and you're in 2x. So there's a lot of tried-and-true playfield multiplier ways to achieve it in pinball. But Carl's trying to do something new here. And you might say, Serge, why are you focusing on this boutique pinball company with their new game that will only have 525 copies made? And I'll tell you why. Because really, those sort of boutique companies with these small runs like that are where fresh new ideas happen. It's true in any organization I've worked in where, you know, you look at the passionate new people that had so much passion, they created an entire new pinball company from scratch. And that's where you will find new ideas and design and code. I'm not saying whether that means you should buy the game or not. There's so much more that goes into that decision for a buyer beyond the passion of those making the game. But if you're a competitor manufacturer or you're a game designer or rules designer, you might want to pay attention to those new ideas and see how they're doing with them. So that's my intro to why I'm covering this. And before you get started, I don't know if you've talked about this before, but Carl is, or the game, I guess, has a nod to Lyman, who's thought to be like the greatest pinball coder of all time. And I agree.
    33:56
    In the planchette where it has the little W on the apron there, if you look at that carefully, you can see that that is LFS for Lyman's initials. And I did not know that, and that makes me happy. So there's some pinball trivia and nod to Lyman, who we're talking about today a little bit later when we get to the Walking Dead part. Absolutely. I promise we will get to it, people who are listening. You guys have to know at this point how I roll, and this is it.
    34:29
    And so back to his idea for a playfield multiplier rule. So the way you activate the playfield multiplier is you get enough spinner hits. That goes through here, and that raises your spirit meter. And then you have to hit a stand-up. And once you do that, you're in your 2x multiplier period where all your shots are multiplied. So far, standard stuff. But here's the twist, is that when you get in play-thru multiplier, the evil spirits, they freeze all your points that you earned during this time period of amplified scoring. And once the 2x period ends, you have 15 seconds to make a certain shot, specifically on the right orbit, for example, to suck all those points back from that spirit. if you don't make that shot during that 15 seconds, you lose them all, actually. And not just the 2x, but you're at 0x for everything you just did, in other words. So it's a double-edged sword of a play-thru multiplier. That is sort of interesting, and to my knowledge, that's never been done before. And if this very new idea was not communicated well to the player, I'd have issues with it, because then you'd say, you know, what? I got in this 2x and I got nothing, and the game didn't tell me that that was going to happen, you know, for example. And you'd be pretty ticked off, I would say, as a player, even good players who like knowing about rules. But let's take a look at how Barrels has done it with the holy trinity of communication, the lights, sound, and display. So that's what I thought I would show next and kind of explain how they've kind of, I think, successfully managed a new rule. And I'm using this as the concept of make new rules, make innovative stuff, but communicate it well to the player is the point. So when you get into the 2x play field, and I'm going to play it right now.
    36:13
    So you're going to notice, look at the screen right here. The ball is going to hit in just a moment. It's going to hit right there. And now I'm going to pause for a second that he's got his spirit meter to full, and suddenly there's something on the user interface. But it's not just something on the user interface. It's the most salient thing on the user interface. Look how it flashes.
    36:37
    It actually shows you 2x spirit energy activated. There's also a call out, which you can't hear because I didn't set up the audio through my computer, and I apologize for that.
    36:47
    So there's the flashing animation here that calls your attention. Not only does it flash your attention, but it actually freezes your score here. Normally the score is right there, but I'll show it just for a moment here. I'll go back because it's worth it. No. Let me just show that again. So normally the score is in the bottom right of the, come on, you, load you. There it is. So normally the score is right here. But as soon as he hits that thing, it takes away your score. And that's already a cue to the player that something, there it is, about to freeze over, that something has happened and instead you should stare at here. All points are being captured by the spirits. and then not only that, look at the lighting. The entire game has turned blue. Not like one insert, but something big has happened is what the game is saying. That it matches the blue of the animation on the screen that it tells the player that something unique has happened. You know, a lot of games that are in 2X, they don't make a big deal that you're in 2X. Maybe they give you a call out about it, but they're not changing the whole light to indicate that. But here, Carl knows that he's made something new here with this new rule. So he has to draw your attention that something new has happened here. And then the call-out is, like, very clear, like, double playfield activated, something very immersive. I actually spoke to Jeff Dodson, who's the sound master of this game over at Dirty Pool Pinball, by the way, a friend of the podcast, to get some further clarity on the call-outs. And I really, really appreciated his philosophy here. If you rely on only very specific pinball call-outs, like double playfield activated, for example, That's a very specific, you know, game callout. Or shoot the right spinner or hit the cap the ball for jackpot. That does convey information and clarity, but it does so often at the expense of theme immersion because you're, like, playing a game and suddenly it's like you're in this mystery house and then it's like 2X, and that just sometimes can take you out. And so what he does, which I really like, is that he gets a variety of callouts for the same thing. One callout might be very specific pinball-y, like 2X playfield activated. Whereas other call-outs might be the spirit has frozen you, for example. And he randomizes the call-out so that the first time that you're in it, it might say 2X. But the next time that you're in it, it might say the spirit has frozen you. And that gives you the theme immersion. By itself, it wouldn't help you tell you what to do. But if you could alternate the call-outs so that sometimes it's pinball-y and sometimes it's theme immersion-y, then it gives you the kind of overall both theme immersion and clarity.
    39:26
    And I give him a lot of credit for that is what I'm saying. So let me pause there. What do you say to that, Rachel? Kind of lighting, sounds, and display, making an argument for a pinball moment. I think that that's really important. And I would always argue that most of the things that are on the display are for the people you are playing with who are watching you. It helps them learn. Most of the time, especially in these sort of frenetic moments within a multi-ball, you're not spending a lot of time looking up away from the play field. So I think a lot of this stuff, I learn about things on the display whenever Cale and I are playing together or anybody else, and I'm looking to see what they did. So I think that the fact that they've got audio, visual, that they're using all three is very important. Yeah, and I would even add what they have going for them here with a game like this is there's actually three displays that they can give you for conveying the information. Because you're totally right. As good as that display choice is, you might not look at it as a player. And so they also have a display in the back that isn't currently being used for this, but I'm sure will be to communicate, hey, you have 2X. Here's the timing running, for example. And then more than that, they have the apron. And the apron also can put a timer on it of lit numbers that go down. And I'm not saying a player is going to look all over there, but having multiple places to convey the information is quite useful. Different people play differently. Right. So I think they'll use all three screens probably for something like this, which is really great. One thing I'd suggest is a lot of pinball coding can often come down to prioritization. so should jackpot callouts win or should the 2x playfield callout win for example and personally I think whenever you're doing something new in pinball like this rule, it should take priority over almost everything else in the game which it doesn't quite now as I watch the screen and if you did all of that I think you'd have yourself a bonafide pinball moment so you take something new and innovative in the game, you make the lighting special where everything turns blue you make the callout special You make the display special on all of your possible displays. And then it creates a moment out of a 2X play field, which otherwise wouldn't be a moment. But now you have to hit a right orbit shot, and it gives you the callout, you know, like unfreeze the points or whatever it might be. And they have multiple callouts for that as well in the way I described before. Like shoot the right orbit versus collect your spirit energy or, you know, whatever it might be to give you the theme immersion but also the specifics. and so if you do that I think you could have a pinball moment. There's one game that is the only other game I could think of that has done something similar to this concept, making a playfield multiplier a double-edged sword. It's good because it increases your points, but in this case it's bad because you have a timer that you have to hit the right orbit on.
    42:25
    And that game would be John Wick, actually, because it gives you the lights out and during the lights out that's great because you're a 2x, but you also can't see what's lit because Donnie Yen is blind, as we all know, in the movie. And so it actually kind of some players don't even want to go there. They don't want to use their 2X because they don't want the lights to turn off, for example. So the stirring gives you an action button press to decide if you want to do it or not. I'll pause there. Any reaction to the John Wick of it all? I enjoy that mode not when I'm playing in tournaments. If I'm just playing for fun, I think it's fun and innovative. if I'm playing in a tournament, I want to see the shots I am supposed to be hitting.
    43:08
    Good, good. And I agree there, and I think it is a good rule, that 2X. I have nothing against it. I like that kind of innovation, and it's also theme immersive in that case for the movie. But with that, that's Pinball Science Corner. What do you think, Rachel, of the new segment? Pinball Science Corner. Yeah. You're so close. Man, we've got to throw that in there. We're probably not going to be able to edit it over, but you know what? I'll put it out there on our Discord. And so with that, that's Pinball Science Corner. And if you listeners have other data you want us to review in this format, for example, charts, like one user in our Discord said, what about play field multipliers and shot multipliers, for example?
    43:53
    Or I have an idea for hardest shots in pinball and what's too hard at a certain point what you should code for those hardest shots, for example. Extra balls. Extra balls is an answer. Exactly right. And so we could definitely do that in the future. Also, if you like this idea where we look at a specific feature, like the 2X play field in Winchester, and just go over what makes it good and how it can be communicated well, I'm always happy to do that as well. That's kind of how I think about this pinball science corner. So with that, I'll go on to our comments. I promise we're going to get to the episode here, Rachel, But we give three comments. I like to push also the insanity of it all and see what's too much. I'm okay with crossing the line, and that's what I'm actually going to push it every time until I find out what crosses the line. You won't know until you've reached it, until you've gone over it. Exactly, exactly. If I could have set up the audio, by the way, I was going to also give a shout-out to VicVP, who also filmed this and captured some of the call-outs I was mentioning. But the audio is not working. But I will give a shout-out to Vic for another reason. He made us T-shirts, and I showed them off on your roundtable podcast here. And that's so nice of him. He even got my shiny head and beard in there under pinpals. And I very much appreciate it, Vic. Check out his channel. But let's get to Vic. Yeah, thank you, Vic. Let's get to the comments. So our Australian pinpal Enzo from Gonzo's Pinball Flipperama YouTube channel, which you all should check out too, says, With Harry Potter pinball, I like that Voldemort is not easily seen. I have sort of complained that in the giant art of Harry Potter, the main villain of Harry Potter is this little tiny outlane over here. And he says, you know, I like that Voldemort's not seen really. You hardly see him until the end of the last movie. He's not present much in the films. Having him as a bash toy, for example, wouldn't make sense. And I just want to say I very much appreciate that comment, Enzo. And this is what I get from veering away from my lane, which is deep code knowledge, into art territory. That's where I get over my skis, Rachel. Art's very subjective, and even though I thought it was odd to make Voldemort so small in the art, other fans disagree, and it's obviously a great-selling game. And one thing we should all be able to agree on is that if you played Harry Potter, I think it's an incredible layout, like top-ten layout, and actually very innovative. It has a lot of ramps, but despite having ramps, there's no in-lane feeds from those ramps. It's the only game, I think, that has ever been made like that. Instead, it zooms through the outlanes, which is really clever, and it can be a very fast-playing game. It's a lot of fun. Anyway, I'll pause there. What do you say to that, Rachel?
    46:27
    You know, as somebody who has very little Harry Potter knowledge, I thought the same thing as you. I thought, like, man, I've heard of this Voldemort fellow. He seems not good. It seems like he should be the, like, dude that eats your ball when you drain or, like, something more noticeable in the game. But it sounds like Enzo actually has some knowledge of Harry Potter canon, and maybe his opinion should be deferred to in this. It's interesting to think about what other people are seeing in these games. Harry Potter, whenever I play it, I still have very little idea about what's going on because it's telling me to shoot X, but X is something in Harry Potter. And since I don't know who anybody in Harry Potter is, I just kind of don't have a good idea yet of where all of those different shots are.
    47:27
    And that seems to be a consensus opinion amongst people who are unfamiliar with the franchise. However, there are very few people on Earth who don't know very much about Harry Potter. I just seem to have those people as my friends. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. I will give one director's note for the layout here, which I actually think is like A-plus layout, top ten layouts maybe of all time. I think it's super fun to shoot. Genuinely, when I play it, I think it's a lot of fun. I'll give one note. This would be like in a movie where you slip a note to the director and they throw it out. But I'll tell you one pet peeve of mine, all right, and then that will cause a different controversy for the next episode, is the game plays beautifully fast, but it has one spinner that's in the left out lane that is unhittable forwards, and the only time you hit that spinner is when it goes reverse in this direction, and there's nothing more unsatisfying to me than a reverse spinner. It breaks my heart. It's the only way you can hit it. It's like an unrest spinner is like a spinner in mourning, you know, and that's what I have to say. Why they couldn't put that spinner on a center shot like, you know, for example, there. We'll never, I just can't accept it. But otherwise, besides that, I'm okay with it. I think it's a great game and great layout. So I have one other note that I think is just a funny thing about stuff Rachel doesn't know. The symbol, the Harry Potter symbol that you see in the middle of the play field.
    48:59
    The Horcrux-related symbol. So, you know, you see this on people's cars all the time, and I saw this start popping up. I think that's a Proud Boys thing, Rachel. I don't think that's a different... I'm kidding. Sorry, keep going. Well, I thought it was an Alcoholics Anonymous thing, because it's very, very close to the AA symbol, and I just thought, like, all of a sudden, you know, when Harry Potter just happened to be around this time, I thought, man, we have got a lot of people in AA.
    49:29
    It turns out it was all just Harry Potter fans, so... Interesting. Can't have people... Yeah. Harry Potter's anonymous. Exactly. All right. So that's that comment. Second comment, we're going to do three comments.
    49:44
    All right, our second comment is from Scott Avery, who says, Your show could be the absolute best, but I had to stop listening. If I hear it, does that make sense? One more time, my ears, my eyes, sorry, may bleed. Maybe AI could help me get rid of it. And, well, Scott, I don't know if you're asking if AI could get rid of me saying, does that make sense, or if you're asking whether AI could get rid of your eyes bleeding. but regardless I will say I do respect your feedback on this show I obviously give a lot of tough but I hope fair criticism of pinball rules and I just said layouts for example and if I going to give that kind of critique I have to be open to hearing it myself It doesn mean I have to agree with the feedback or change because of it but I should be open to it So in this case, Scott, I actually think you're right. I do say that too much. I've caught myself doing it before. I've probably said it several times already. But starting today, from now, not what happened previously, I will take a shot of this fine Kentucky whiskey next to me if I say that line more than twice for the rest of the episode. So I ask you, Scott, does that make sense?
    50:44
    Wow. I'll put my money where my mouth is on that one. We're going to try it. The rules could get real weird towards the end of this. You're darn right. Okay. All right, so no more of that. But next comment. Our last commenter is Brad Albright, who actually is the artist for Winchester Mystery House. And he says so nicely, you guys brought tears to my eyes. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to look closely and discuss the artwork and design details, as we did in the prior episode. If I may, I would also like to shine a light on Joshua Clay for his stellar work on the user interface, interior 3D modeling and animation, as well as Julian Brown and Trent Armstrong for their amazing animation work, and to Blake Dumas-Mill, I hope I said that right, for the gorgeous logo treatment on the back glass. And normally I don't like to share the complimentary comments on our videos, because, Rachel, that is way too self-serving. But in this case I made an exception, because Brad is also calling out the work of these other great artisans on the team that made the very much sold-out Winchester Mystery House. And I do think those artisans deserve the praise as well.
    51:43
    So what do you think, Rachel? Fair? Yes, and I had the pleasure of spending a little bit of time with Brad at Expo this year, and he is a genuinely lovely human being, and it's always nice to see cool people having successes. So kudos to Brad and the whole Winchester team. Right. Now, initially I chose these art-focused comments, by the way, carefully, because we were supposed to cover the history of pinball art controversies in today's episode, but we delayed that instead to talk about Walking Dead because Stern released the teaser for it. And with that, I think I'm ready. So we called an audible to cover Walking Dead. We're going to go through the whole game now. Are you ready for it? One hour later, Rachel. I am ready. Let's go. All right. So first, the headline. The Walking Dead code is a masterpiece. That's my opinion on the subject. Some of you might not like the layout because it's a drain monster, or you don't like the flow of the game, or you don't like the theme or the art or the call-outs, for example. And I might agree with many of those comments, so you don't like the game. And I don't think that view is a crazy take either. If you look at Pinside, for example, not that that's the be-all, end-all for these decisions, it's currently number 57 on Pinside next to The Mandalorian. But it's not at all like The Mandalorian and how the community feels about this game. this game is very very polarizing or maybe for you math nerds there is a large standard deviation here so what i mean there is for some people this is my walking dead chart for example on a scale of hate to love walking dead has people that really hate it and walking dead has people that really love it whereas mandalorian is like oh i like that game and there those are two different ways to get to number 57 and 58 on the top 100 chart here. What do you say to that, Rachel? How do you feel about it? Agreed. I find that people who play tournaments and know the rules to this game tend to absolutely love this game and celebrate how wonderful it is. And I also see the people that plunge the ball, it comes down through the pops and then kind of bounces down the middle, and there's a lot of swearing, a rinse-repeat. Those people would be on the hate it side. So I agree that this is a fair assessment of people's opinions. Walking Dead is a love it or hate it. Right, and sometimes you don't get that from a chart with the numbers, but Walking Dead is a love it or hate it. And what I thought I could do is actually show some of the comments, even just to give you a sense of this. So this is from somebody just 15 days ago. This is my favorite game of all time for some reason. You know, you're going to find very few Mandalorian comments like that, I'll be honest with you, right? If literally any. But you're going to see comments like this on Walking Dead. This is my favorite game of all time. Of all time, I love everything about it. It's hard as hell, but I always come back for more. Let me show you a flip side comment, for example. This is from Lobo2k. How this game is in the top 25, let alone 100. Back then it was in the top 25. Let alone top 100 is beyond me. Not much to shoot at. Magnet that stops a ball, then drops straight down without hope of save. Repetitive voices. You know, hard game for sure. I'll admit I don't know the rules or want to learn them. I've played this game so many times near my work, but I always end up rage quitting. I can't even think of one positive thing that would make me want to own this. So those are, like, kind of... And that's what I was saying, the people that know the rules and the people that don't know the rules. The rules are a very, very important part of this game. Some games you can bing-bong the ball around, and it's just a lot of fun. There's just a lot of general kinetic satisfaction, to use Keith's phrase.
    55:27
    This game, you need the rules for all of the magic to come to life. And you're here to tell us what that is. Oh, I surely am. I'll even show you just one or two more comments. This is another Pinsider who says, I think it's mostly been all said about this game, but it's kind of hard to rate because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The code is just beautiful, just like you said, Rachel. Due to the scoring and build towards many Weser modes, the game's constantly trying to take your ball away, which is half the fun. Top ten stern and very unique one in its difficulty and rule structure. Dots are awesome. Sound effects, 10 out of 10. And then again, another person saying, I'm not a great player, but I'm not terrible either. I find the game drains way too much. It's ten times as nasty as Alice Cooper, for example. I'm baffled about how this game is rated as high as it is. So, you know, we're just showing, again, the real bipolar nature of the reaction. This is a polarizing game. But back to the code. The code is great. It's Lyman doing peak line and stuff. It's the work of a true artist. It's the perfect game for this code-focused podcast because the code elevates the other aspects of the game. For the people who appreciate this, they see that the code makes it better. It's really kind of a shining example of how code can make some players love a game. And I'm actually not saying that code is necessarily perfect. In fact, there will be some new additions with the latest code that we're going to try to predict in this podcast. but it does so many things right that I'd say it's like a towering achievement in rules design. So my goal here today will not be to convince you listeners for those who don't like the game that The Walking Dead is a great game. I personally think it is, by the way but we are all entitled to have very different opinions and feelings on that as you can see from these comments but I think that this is one of those games that can really be like an artsy band or movie sometimes where it's like somebody will make you feel bad about not liking a game and they'll be like oh you don't know about Neutral Milk Hotel? You know, what a monster you are. You know what I mean? I thought you'd read that reference.
    57:23
    But I'm not going to do that, Rachel. That's not what this episode is about. It's okay not to like this game, but I do want to convince you that it's great code and the work of a true code master. So some will love Walking Dead already, but for those that hate The Walking Dead, the question is, can you appreciate an amazing acting performance in a movie that you don't like? That's what the goal of it will be. What do you say to that, Rachel? All right, 100%. All right. So back to The Walking Dead. But for this episode, I want to give you a viewer's structure of how I'll be making my case for the Walking Dead code. And we will cover five things, all right? We're going to cover, because I'm only getting crazier on each episode, Rachel, as you know.
    58:04
    We're going to cover how does the unique layout affect rules design? How does the history of Walking Dead code, how did that change? Strategy, what if you're going for $30 million, $100 million, or $1 billion on the game? Then we'll get into our traditional 10 criteria for good code. And then uniquely for this game, because we're doing it three days or so before the game comes out, what might Stern do in the remaster? Can we predict it? So those are our five things. Let's get into the first one, which is how does the unique layout affect the rules design? And for that, I have to bring in the layout here. And I am going to do that in just a moment by bringing it up. Okay, there we go. and when we covered X-Men, we went over how it had such an unconventional layout that the code needed to take that into consideration and we actually have the same conversation that we need to have for this game. We don't always need to have it for all games, right? But some games aren't that unconventional in their layout, like frankly the most recent Star Wars. But when a layout is very unique, then you need to talk about how you should design rules with that in mind, with that unconventional layout. what did Lyman see here that was special, and what did he do to deal with it? And I'll give you a few things to consider. So the first thing is that the right side of the game is rarely used. It's a standard body game, but it feels much more claustrophobic in its layout than other games. And as an example, let's take the two most recent Star Wars, and that's what I'll show here. So this is the 2017 Star Wars. And what I'm going to do, a little kind of a... The Steve Ritchie Star Wars. The Steve Ritchie Star Wars, right, exactly. is I'm going to draw the largest square I can on the play field without hitting something. That's going to be my goal. So, for example, I'm going to draw a square here. It goes right up to the top of the slings and then goes right there. Does that square make sense? This is free space. The largest square I can fit in. That is your second use of that phrase, so we're almost to drinking time. Oh, darn it. Boy, that happened. You know what? You're going to catch me. I didn't even realize that one. That's a little scary. All right. That's it. I appreciate it. And we only have, like, six hours left, so it should be fine.
    60:17
    Okay. Yeah. So now, oh, my gosh, I'm scared. Big old square. All right. Big old square. All right. We're going to draw another square on this Star Wars, the 2025 John Borg Star Wars. And John Borg also did Walking Dead, by the way. And so I'm going to go here, and I'm going to go to, like, there, probably. That's the last square. What's that? I should have said rectangle. Okay. You know what? I apologize. I meant to say the largest rectangle. you can fit in. That's what I should have said.
    60:46
    Got it. By area. The largest rectangle by area. Not like by height or by width, but by area, height times width, if you will. All right. I'm going somewhere with this, Rachel, I promise. And maybe some of this is obvious, too, but I want to prove it if I can. And so I'm going to draw another square here, and I'm going to draw it like that. Would you agree that that square is fair? Yes. Or rectangle? ball. And I've got to stop saying square. And then you see the difference between these three games. That just the larger space, if you're looking at the game, you could say, well, isn't it weird to draw a square? Shouldn't it be like some sort of curved linear shape? And maybe. But what I mean to say is, this is the larger space where the ball will just be moving around in without hitting anything. For example. And it's just much larger on the most recent stars. And these are all two-flipper games, by the way. So it's not like adding in complexity of the three-flippers or four-flippers. But just how much free space does the ball have for you to move around in and just look at and react to.
    61:47
    And so to this game, this game is much more claustrophobic than that. In this game, you feel somehow like it's more narrow than a typical standard body. It's more confined than those games do, those other games are like. The well walker is really like out front in the middle and ready for a bad bounce to send it down the middle. exactly right exactly right and um and it has a magnet on there that can affect it as well too at least on the premium as the remaster will be so the gameplay uh the game layout it compels you towards the left side and hopefully you can kind of get a sense of that here uh it doesn't push you towards the right side it compels you towards the left side for most players and so lineman matched the code to that layout he made the key to the game and i'll get rid of the squares now and zoom back in, he made the key to the game the left side drops. He continued to kind of feed into the idea that you're going to go towards the left side of this game. And the drops end up being the gateway to the rest of the code. You need them. You need them for modes. You need them for bloodbath, one of the three multiballs. You need them to add time to your modes. If you're on a premium, you need them for walker bombs, for example, which are the action button uses. So you're going to use, and it's going to divert your focus towards the left side of the game more and more and more.
    63:14
    What do you think about that, Rachel, that point? Agreed. Okay. Next point about the layout and what makes it unique is The Walking Dead is hard. And I mean really hard. Game times are really, really short. I want to show you, this is the chart we made. I cleaned it up from one of our first episodes on the Pin Palace, where we looked at a bunch of fan layouts and a bunch of non-fan layouts. and this is a non-fan layout even though it's two flippers. We looked at a bunch of, in my opinion, it's a non-fan layout by putting that like Wellwalker, for example, there.
    63:46
    And we looked at, here's one-player games and four-player games. So a lot of games are around the five-minute mark for most one-player games, but fan layouts tend to be shorter than non-fan layouts in that several of them are kind of on average about 16% less, I'd say, than the non-fan layouts. we wanted to get the same data for The Walking Dead but because The Walking Dead was made back in 2014-2015 in the DMD era it doesn't have as great of audits on there but I know Rachel you did do some investigation here and I don't know if you want to speak to this I quoted you here because I didn't know you were going to be on this episode so why don't you maybe you speak to it instead well I went in and checked the game times and almost all of them were between one and one and a half minutes, or one and a half and two minutes. So that's an incredibly short game. And you have to account for people playing at the bat. This is not going to be the same as it is for people at home that are playing it at home or people who know what they're doing playing it on location. We're taking into account all of those casuals that walk up to it and recognize the Walking Dead property and put in their tokens and play. So that is bringing that average game time down. But as you discussed earlier, this is a super short game for people who aren't maybe as accomplished pinball players. This isn't going to be the one that's going to make your money last the longest. Right, exactly. So we can't be sure exactly if the times match up, but we can be sure to say that this is a fast-playing game. Yes, and again, and I think he's got the quote down there from before, I'm not quite sure how they're calculating this. I assume that they're calculating those game times from the very first switch hit to the final drain and not from when you hit start because, as we all know, there can be a lot of chit-chat or any other kind of distractions that would extend that game time. I'm assuming they're counting actual game time, play time. Right, and so this is a hard game. It's a fast-playing game. So we should say, what did Lyman do about this? So in the vast majority of games, the vast majority of playing Walking Dead, I mean, you're not usually going to have a long game that builds towards a big moment. There's no smart missile shot, like in Jurassic Park, for example, or fastball special on Uncanny X-Men. There's no pause in the gameplay, like the Showtime callout on Adam's Family. When you start this game, you're fighting for your life the whole time because of its layout. And so what Lima did is something, he did something that he didn't do on literally any other game to my knowledge. He opened up the stacking rules. Stacking rules are just like a core principle of the coding team at Skirn in particular for almost all games, where if you want to start a multiball, once you start a multiball, you cannot bring in a mode. You have to start the mode first. This is literally true on almost every Skirn game that has modes, I could say, where you have to start the mode first and then start the multiball. But he opened up the stacking rules. So rather than isolate the modes and multiballs, he did almost a JJP type thing, which they do in a lot of their code, where he let them flow into each other because he figured that the game won't last long enough to do one thing at a time. And so you kind of let it flow better. And generally speaking, you know, and this is good to catch my own exception, I would say, like, boy, I really don't like when everything stacks on top of each other. And I don't. But this game is an exception because of how fast it is. sometimes with a lot of J.J.P. games, which I love in so many other ways, because the code all stacks on each other and there's multiballs happening all the time, it's not a short-playing game. You could play a J.J.P. for a lot. They stuff a lot of code into it, but then they make it stack on top of each other so you can't really always, in my opinion, appreciate everything that happens in the code. Whereas in scrim games, most games, they let you appreciate what's going on. Walking Dead allows it. It's sort of a good idea to make it stackable on default settings because it's so short that the game isn't about building any one particular moment. The game is about a vibe, basically, kind of a continuous zombie danger vibe that Lyman was going for here, in my opinion. What do you say to that point? I do think that's a good idea, and I think that that speaks to Lyman's next-level ability as a coder. Because the multi-balls are fairly easy to start, that gives you some extra balls to bang around to actually get the mode started. But there's another thing that I think makes this more doable in Walking Dead than, say, a JJP game. When you think about JJP games, there's visually, like, just so much going on. You've got, like, just rainbow bonanza happening. In Walking Dead, you have almost nothing visually. I'm thinking about in terms of color palette, you've got just the DMD, so there's not like a lot of color and visuals flashing at you, and that allows your brain to be able to handle the other things that are going on, and it just kind of takes that down a level.
    69:09
    Totally agree with all of that. And so we're still talking about the layout and what makes it unusual and how to match the code to it. I'll give you the third parameter that is interesting about the layout,
    69:20
    and that is that the game has no traditional staging area. And what I mean by that is that staging is sort of a pinball term of art that refers to any point in the game where the ball is held up on purpose so that the rules designer can transmit information to the player during a pause in that gameplay. They can use this for mystery awards like the scoop in Rush or mode selection, like if you hit the 2017 Star Wars left ramp, and that holds the ball with a post, and then you pick a mode. Or you can create a time shot, like the in-lane post in Jurassic Park, where it says 3, 2, 1, and you have to hit the smart missile shot, for example. Those are staging elements of the game used for moments. But Walking Dead, it has no scoop, for example. It has no ramp post. It has no in-lane post that comes up, like in Jurassic Park, there's an in-lane post. in lots of games, a lot of L1 games in particular, they have that. But there is no such thing here. So those are traditional staging areas of the layout. It does have some things, technically. On all models, it has this rarely used Woodbury shot that we can get into later that brings the ball back to the shooter lane. It also has a magnet on the prison, but that doesn't always hold the ball necessarily. The premium, which the remaster is going to be, adds another magnet on the well walker, and it also adds a crossbow. But all four of those are sort of non-traditional staging areas. It's not a scoop. It's not a saucer. It's not a post. It's not a ramp post. It's not an in-lane post.
    70:48
    What do you say to that, Rachel? Agreed. Okay. There are consequences of this design choice to the code. The code, because of this, cannot really have a traditional moment because on a Jurassic Park Pro, even a Pro, you can have a smartness moment. You could have an in-lane post that comes up, and you could say, three, two, one, shoot. But on a Walking Dead Pro, you really definitionally can't have something like that. You know, maybe you could say, well, Surge, it has that shooter lane, though. And so let's say you're playing Walking Dead, and you get the ball back to the shooter lane, for example. What are you going to do? You're not going to have, like, a three, two, one, and then a high adrenaline plunge. You know, it doesn't work the same way.
    71:29
    And that's why I mean it's not a traditional staging area. The game has some technically staging errors, but none traditional, I would say, in its layout. So it's just not going to work to have a smart missile type shot in this game, in other words. So back to the code. Lyman recognizes this, and instead, he opts for no traditional moments in the base game. By base game, I mean the non-wizard mode part of the rules. There's going to be some talk we can get into about Horde, which is a wizard mode. But instead of moments, then, he doesn't pause the gameplay for a moment. He just goes for this continuous vibe. And I mentioned it earlier. You're always battling zombies. You're always just trying to survive. Every shot you hit kills a zombie in some way. No matter what mode it is or what multiball it is, almost all of them, it just hit a shot, kills a zombie. It's the vibe of it overall. It's sort of a strategy. It's an anti-moment kind of game to me, other than the wizard modes, which we'll get into. And I'll get into that in the moments section. It also means this layout has no mystery award, for example. And it's one of the few Stern games made without a mystery award. So there can't be a mystery addable, for example, like we touched on in the earlier chart.
    72:35
    And it works fine with mystery awards in most themes in pinball, like in Rush, if you get a mystery. Okay, that's fine. But if you're going for a vibe, you don't want to be a constant zombie vibe killing type of atmosphere. You don't want to be fighting zombies, and then you get in a scoop, and there's a gameplay pause, and you look up at the display, and it has an award that says, add bonus X or time bonus added to mode or whatever. Like, that's just an inside pinball thing. Takes you out of the immersion. Exactly, exactly. So it's a heavy immersion. You might not like the theme. Not everyone loves Walking Dead, but you are immersed in it when you're playing it, I feel like. And I want to say something about that, too. I am not a Walking Dead person. Like, I never watched the show. I've watched a few episodes, but I don't know very much about Walking Dead, but I know a lot about zombies. and that much like the winchester like what we were talking about earlier winchester is kind of a stand-in for generic haunted house and i feel like walking dead does a fantastic job of being a game about zombies i really love that i think generally speaking uh it's not a crazy idea to take like really obscure licenses that are even like winchester mystery house and then use them as a platform for a generic theme, like the generic haunted house or the generic zombie kind of thing. It's better than just making a totally generic one. I think, like, imagine if they made, like, a haunted house, but it didn't have any connection to anything. I actually think that would be less impactful, even though most of us didn't know anything about Winchester, for example. I think you did, but maybe a lot of us didn't, right? And just, like, having a connection that tells a real story that maybe is interesting. And I think, so I like the idea of taking, like, an obscure IP, but then using it not to really tell the story of that IP as much as telling the generic story behind it. I'll give you one thought I had just as I was saying that. You take Houdini, for example, which is American Pinball's first big game that they made, and they could have used it to be a generic magic-themed game, like Theater of Magic, for example, but in my opinion, one of the flaws of the game is that they didn't do that. They cared so much about the theme that they didn't make it a generic magic theme. They made it a Houdini theme. Like, it gives you text about Houdini. In 1923, Houdini did this and this and this. I like having Houdini there to introduce me to magic, but I don't want to actually learn that much. In my own time, I'll read a book about Houdini, but I don't need it in my pinball game. So that's my rant. You don't need pinball to function as essay. Exactly, exactly. So I very much support obscure themes, but then using them for generic purposes, you know, is, I think, that's the sweet spot, I think, for thematic journalism. And that's how you bring in the larger audience, right? I mean, it just makes sense. Because there's only going to be a small slice of the pie that's into whatever theme it is, even if it's something as big as Harry Potter, right? The bigger piece of the pie is going to be if you can bring that to everyone, make it relevant. Right. well Rachel we were saying that this game is one of the few games from Stern without a mystery award and as you know I love pinball trivia and whenever we stream at the electric bat I love to give trivia questions to the chat and perhaps too many uh one could argue but uh and I'm going to carefully delicately bring in the concept to this podcast and here's how Rachel um your trivia question dear viewers is what modern Stern games do not have a mystery award and let me explain how this is going to work. Whoever responds first in the comments with three correct answers to this question, other Stern Games without a mystery award, will get a shout-out in the next episode. Maybe one day there'll be a free t-shirt involved. We're not there yet. But for now, trivia question for the chat in the comments. Three non-Walking Dead Stern Games with no mystery award. That is my trivia question. I won't make you answer it now, Rachel. Well, I won't, because then it would be a freebie for the comments. Let's leave that for the viewers. Right. There's also another fun layout point about this. This is one of the few John Borg games without double in-lanes, for example. Most John Borg, including the most recent Star Wars game, has two in-lanes on one side or the other, Aerosmith and so forth. But this one does not, and maybe we'll save that for another future trivia question. But with all of that, that is the section one of five of what we're going to cover today on Walking Dead. Section one is talking about how the layout influences the code. Do you have any more questions or comments on this point, Rachel? I do not. I'm ready to move on. Okay, so we're going to go to now the second section, which is the Walking Dead code history. So this code is very unique. I'm not going to do this for every game, but this game deserves it. I can't think of another game that's been through something like this. It's been through three versions of code. Version one was in 2014 when the game came out. A lot of people did not like that version of the code. I don't know if you were around for that back then and were into pinball that much. I was. Did you experience that? I did. Okay, good. And I wasn't, by the way, so you'll know it more than I did. But version two was in 2015 when Lyman worked his magic around June and started bringing out his version of the code. and then now in 2025 Anno Domini, we enter version 3 where presumably somebody, and I'm not even sure who yet. I don't know if you know who is working on the code. I thought it could be Ray Day, but he's doing the other code for Star Wars. Do you know?
    78:11
    From what I've heard, there are multiple people working on it. There isn't a single person. I think it may have changed hands at some point. So I cannot answer confidently who is going to be the lead updater on this. I think that this game has been around long enough that the people at Stern all are very familiar with it, and there's probably some consensus about what needs to be done to bring this forward a decade, and I think it's just a matter of who's available to make that happen. Exactly. So we'll talk about, very briefly, Version 1, because that's way in the past, 10 years old now, and nobody knows about it anymore. And we'll talk about Version 2 for a real deep strategy conversation. And then we'll talk about Version 3, what we think will be in it. So Version 1, very quickly and briefly first. I thought it was funny that you won't hear the audio, which is sad, but Stern made their actual own Walking Dead tutorial from over 10 years ago when the game first came out in 2014. And I thought it was really funny because I'll just play it very briefly. Um, so, uh, let's say it's going to talk about The Walking Dead, how to play. And I'm just, I'm not going to show the whole thing. Uh, but I thought the first thing they show on how to play this game is pretty comical. Uh, you'll see it in just a moment.
    79:34
    So you want to fight to survive a lot of attacks, right? Until you're the last man standing. But, uh, keep going. How to start the game. Insert money.
    79:46
    Press start. How to make a skill shot. And so I just thought it was really funny that we talk about the comedy of this podcast going as deep into rules as it does. But really, when the game comes out, you really need to tell people how to insert money and how to exchange money for goods and services. You know, that's like an important part of tutorials. Well, if you notice on the stern LCDs, whenever they're just in a track mode, they show the person putting the money in. Right, right. That's so funny. You're right, actually. That's a good point because it's just not obvious to modern people about what to do about it. So one of the fun bits of research, though, for this episode for me was looking at the Tilt Forums conversation. That's where a lot of great tournament players go. Pinsiders maybe more where collectors go. And I go both. I like both. But at ToeForum's conversation, as this game went from version 1 to version 2, people really didn't like the first code attempt on this game, but Lyman worked his magic. It turned things around. And you could see the excitement level from the forum. At that time, so many great players were regularly posting Keith Elwin, Bowen Karens, Escher Lefkoff, Colin McAlpine, Ray Day, Josh Sharp, more people. But this was all before they worked for pinball companies, and at that time they could be even freer in their opinions. And so I thought it would be fun to take a little internet memory lane stroll through this forum for these comments just to show you some of the player reactions for the game at the time. This is all the pre-Lyman code. Here we have at the top here, like, Keith Elwin saying he doesn't like the shot multiplier rule, for example. You often accidentally start it during multiball. Doesn't work for Bicycle Girl. Then you have Colin McAlpine is here, number two. and he's talking about that the multiplier rule doesn't work. And then you have Keith Johnson here who's now like programmer for JJP and, of course, did Lord of the Rings way earlier than that, getting into it as well and getting into the details of what they don't like about certain rules. For example, I'm not going to show through all those comments. But, you know, a flash forward to the next code update when Lyman takes over and then there's just very different opinions from it after that. Um, so this is still before the code. The code came out around, like, June 2015. And here you have both, like, Bowen and Elwin complaining about how, like, uh, the game, uh, goes from pop bumpers to the center drain. You know, for example. And it's hard to avoid getting the ball out there. And, you know, Keith's talking about how it's, like, T3, you know, as well when you hit the lock shot and it fires straight down the middle. So you're not crazy, in other words, to have these opinions of the game. And, like, it's kind of a little messed up how the ball comes out of the pop bumpers or how it comes off the magnet, that sort of thing. Flash forward years later. Can I interject really quickly? Please do. So one thing that we did at the bat that I spent a lot of time doing was adjusting the way the ball comes out of the pops. And there's a post rubber there, too. And some people will make that fatter with, like, a yellow rubber or thinner with a super band black post rubber. or any color, and doing that can wildly adjust the frequency of center drains. So I think that's another reason that people have this harsh feeling about it's a drain monster, a center drain monster, not one. The way that this game is set up, and it does take some finessing, all games take a little bit of finessing, but this one is very noticeable, what you can do to make the game play more enjoyably. It's very well said, and I can guarantee you that when they reveal this game, they will talk about how they've designed the game a little differently in that area so that you don't even have to make adjustments, and it's going to be a good feed, I bet. And I also bet they're probably going to add a ball stave, and we could talk about that, you know, if it goes down the center drain there. But I'm sure, you know, it's sort of like if you look in the right orbit of Ghostbusters, They put sort of a gate there so that the ball, when it comes out of the right orbit, it almost always comes out in a certain way out of the right orbit, because if they didn't do that, it might go right down the center drain kind of thing. And I wonder if they're going to do something similar. I know you described a way to do it, but I wonder if they're going to copy the Ghostbusters right orbit kind of setup into Walking Dead, just a little bit of a theory. I'm not sure if that's the solution they're going to take, but I would agree that they're going to do something with physical design. Exactly, exactly. And just now, this is, again, pre-Lyman code. And now Lyman starts to do the code, and they're saying, now since Lyman's doing the coding, I know the rules will be improved. So he was getting a lot of love back then, even at that point. And then once he started coding the game, and now we're flashing years later, and this is column at Galvin, for example, I believe, and now suddenly more coding scoring goodness from Lyman, and people start really loving the scoring of the game and getting into it, and we see that over and over again. And so that is kind of my section on the history of Walking Dead code, which is still to be written based on this version 3 that's coming out. Any questions on the history? No questions. I was there for that. Okay, good. And I was not. But I'm getting there, and I'm getting caught up to speed. And I think this is something that we see. This is not uncommon. And I think it's wonderful that these companies are willing to revisit these games even a decade later to do this sort of thing. I think we were seeing it recently with WIC and X-Men.
    85:27
    I think it's a wonderful way to refresh these games and continually improve them. I do too. I know they very much did it with Metallica where they remastered the entire code, and it's also Lyman code, and it was great code, but they made it better, I think. And we could get into that on a different episode. But I think they'll do the same here, even though I also think the Walking Dead code is a masterpiece. And yet I think that there are things you can do. So we'll get into that. But now we go to our third of five sections here in Walking Dead, the third section being strategy. Kale asked me, he said, why don't we talk about strategy for games before we do the deep dive? Like what should you do when you're walking up to this game? And so to that I'll bring back the layout.
    86:07
    And it can be tricky to give a strategy guide for Walking Dead because the brilliance of the code is that there's not one way to play it. If I'm talking about Venom, I'm going to tell you a specific set of things you should probably do to stack mayhem and carnage together kind of thing. But here, Walking Dead has different pathways, and it also depends on what you're going for. Are you going for 30 million points? Are you going for 100 million points? Or are you going for a billion points? And those are very different strategies. In a typical league night, you'd go for the 30 million point strategy, in my opinion, on a Tuesday night at the bat, for example. If you were at InDisc and you were playing a single-player qualifying game where you had to get the highest score and you're just playing by yourself as a one-player game, I would never go for the 30 million point strat. It's a completely different strat to go for. It won't help you at all to get that 30 million strat, for example. And so you might go for the 1 billion point strat. So I'm going to start, though, with the 30 million point strategy because that's probably the most common one that people would want if they're playing up on a league night. is that fair Rachel what do you say to that it's the most attainable I think we should start from easiest to hardest right and you have to ask yourself actually when you walk up if you really want to get into the detail of it of strategy you actually have to know three things before you walk up thing number one is is this on a competition setting or not the default setting not competition is everything is stackable like I mentioned you can play a multi-ball and then bring in a mode And that's really important to know if it's the default setting, because there's no reason to start a mode right away and focus on the dangerous drop targets. Instead, focus on the multiball, and then you'll get a mode while you're in multiball. Whereas if it's on competition mode, it's a very different point there, where in competition mode, it is traditional stacking rules in that you have to start the mode and then bring in the multiball.
    87:59
    And so any questions on that stacking nuance? Nope. Okay. Second thing you have to know. is this a pro or a premium? Because the pro doesn't have the action button in the center, Walker Bombs, whereas the premium does. And the remaster will be a premium, so it will have Walker Bombs, and everything I'm saying about the non-Walker Bombs won't be relevant. Of course, though, at a lot of arcades like the back, currently they have a pro there, and so you don't have Walker Bombs there. So we're going to talk about Walker Bombs later, but just keep that in mind. and there's going to be an action button thing. And we'll talk about innovation later. This is, to my knowledge, the first boom button in a game, in other words. And this game has them and uses it very specifically in a strategic way that we have to know about as we get into it. But the number three thing about this game is, are you a prison guy or girl, or are you a well walker guy or girl? You have to pick one of them, I say. I'm a well walker. That was going to be my question, too. Are you a well walker girl?
    88:58
    Because both multiballs require a certain number of hits. Here's the well walker. Here's the prison. And both multiples are okay decisions, but you have to pick one and keep it in mind. And I'm going to give you the pros and cons of both as we go through this. Like, you should focus on one, and that's that. And so the well walker, first, that requires ten hits. It's a lot, but it's to a single shot. And I find it surprising, given how close this is, it's surprisingly not that sort of kind of dangerous, but sort of is, you know, of hitting it. But every shot is dangerous in this game. So I'm just saying relative to other shots in this game. I always try and get my Will Walker as many as I can while I've got my ball save on. It's a good idea. And it's ten total shots. And when I say ten total shots, I mean ten total shots. So, for example, in Metallica, in Sparky, it also requires roughly around the same shots. But it gives you credit for two shots in Sparky and Metallica in the electric chair if you hit it in the very center of the chair. And it gives you one hit if you hit it on the edges. And so there, it doesn't have to be as many shots as it appears. It could be far fewer. But here, it really is ten shots, in other words. So when I say ten, I mean it. So that's Well Walker. Pretty easy to explain. Get ten shots and you're in it.
    90:10
    Prison. A little challenging to explain. But short answer, if you're not memorizing this, is nine shots to the prison, and you will start prison multiple instead of the ten shots for Well Walker. Personally, prison is what I prep for, and I'm going to give you multiple reasons. I'm going to give you five reasons, Rachel, why I support prison over Well Walker. But that said, it's like a 60-40 kind of decision. So I think Well Walker's not crazy, but you should stick one and go with it. But let me give you my case for why one should go through prison instead of Well Walker. So prison is a three-ball multi-ball instead of a two-ball multi-ball. So in that sense, it's a little better than Well Walker. You have more balls going on, more things to hit that can hit switches. It's nine shots instead of ten shots, like I mentioned. So it's just minimally easier to achieve in that sense. I mean, you still have to hit it, and it's farther away than this big shot over here, but it's hittable, and then you get nine shots, right? And then it's worth more on average in my experience, but that's a subjective thing. It depends how you play it. The fourth reason I'll give you is there is a wizard mode tied to the prison called Siege that you will very likely never get to, but at least you have the chance of getting to it. Where if you get 12 jackpots or two super jackpots in prison multiball, it will give you a wizard mode called siege multiball, whereas Wellwalker has no such thing tied to it, and it's therefore sad because of it that way. And then I'll give you a fifth reason, and here's where it gets complicated.
    91:48
    Well, it's always going to get complicated. But Wellwalker is 10 hits, only there, whereas Whereas prison, how it works is it's two hits there, and then it lights a whole bunch of arrows. And from that point, you could hit any of those arrows or the prison to count as the rest of your hits. And it's even more complicated than I'm describing. Once you hit an arrow, it unlights that arrow. But the point is that you have more opportunities and shots to advance prison than you do with the hacker. Essentially, there's two shots per shot that you can do. You can either hit the prison or one of the shots you're aiming for. And that is a really good point for this because there's a lot of these shots that are very easy to make, and then there's always, you know, it's different for different people, but there's always a couple that you really are going to use that prison shot to do it for you. Exactly right. And so the kind of, in this game, after you hit two shots for the prison, it preps the prison so that it lights all those shots around the play field. And then, in essence, you can stop even focusing on the prison. You can start focusing on other things like modes and then hit mode shots, and that's advancing you in prison as you're doing it. Whereas in Well Walker, you just have to say, I am going for Well Walker, period, full stop, and there's nothing else you get out of hitting the Well Walker. So I put some extra value on the prison because you don't have to exclusively focus on it. It's fewer shots, worth a bit more, three balls instead of two balls, and you don't have to exclusively focus on it. All right, you heard it here. Serge loves prison. Correct. But now I'm going to give you the sixth secret reason for prison, which you may not know because we have a pro mainly at the electric bat. But the praying nails where you've been, they bring in the action button. And we do have to talk about the action button. This was the first, to my knowledge, use of a boom button in pinball. You correct me if I'm wrong. And for that, we have to start talking about these drop targets. So when you first play the game, you're going to see a light rove from food to first aid to weapons and then back again. as soon as you hit the targets, it locks in whatever light it's on. So if I hit the targets, any target, this one, this one, or this one, right now, it would lock in on food, for example. And then once you hit all three drop-downs, drop targets down, you would get one food, for example. And now then we have to talk about, well, what does the one food mean versus one weapon versus one first aid? So one food means it's an action button that lights so that you could advance Well Walker by one. So let's say you are at nine hits to the Well Walker. You need ten total to start it. But you're at nine hits, and somehow you know and have the wherewithal to know that you're at nine hits and not the tenth hit, right? And that's not easy to do. But let's say you're paying attention, and you're like, I'm at nine hits. Then if you're on a premium, go for food, wait until the light is on food right here, and then hit the drops, any drop, and then hit the rest of them, and then you'll have an action button. And at that point, you want to not go for Well Walker again for the rest of the ball. And the reason is you forget about Well Walker. You play anything else. You play modes. You make those shots. You start helping with the prison advancement. Whatever you need to do, that isn't a Well Walker. And eventually, you're going to drain. And as you're draining, then you press your action button, which isn't right here, but you know what I mean, below that. If you have food and you know you've had food, that action button, and then if you do that, that food will feed the well walker one shot. It will activate your multi-ball because it was only one shot away. So all it does is spot one shot to well walker, not any shot, but one shot to well walker. And if you get it, if you have eight hits to the well walker and you press that while it's draining, that doesn't help you. You're going to lose your ball. But if you're nine hits to well walker and you know that, and then you drain and you have that action button, It just saves your ball and starts a multiball. Do you have any questions about that food for well walker? I don't. Can you talk about how it works in the pro? It doesn't work in the pro. There is no value from hitting food over first aid over weapons. It is just an interesting insert, for example. You have to, for what it's worth in the pro, and we'll get to this in the multiball, You have to get the food, all three drops for that, then wait until the roving inserts on weapons or first aid, and then get all three drops for that, and then the other one and get all three drops for that. So nine drops in order to light bloodbath. But it isn't inherently interesting to get food versus first aid versus weapons. It's only inherently interesting on the premium.
    96:34
    Does that answer your question? Yes. Because back then, I don't even think the pro, you can tell me if I'm wrong, does it even have an action button on it?
    96:42
    I can't remember. I feel like it doesn't, actually. I don't think that it does. Right. Back then, they didn't put action buttons on all of their games. It was a relatively new thing, you know, for them to have action buttons. And this was the first boom button, and this is how they did it. So I mentioned food gets you one spot shotted for Well Walker, so it pays if you're playing the Well Walker strategy on a premium to get to nine, Pay attention when you're at nine, and we'll talk about how hard it is to do that because there's some clarity issues here. But let's say you did that, and then it would spot you a shot and bring you into well walker. The same thing is true for prison and first aid. So if you're going for the prison strat, then you do the first aid drop target. In other words, you wait until the insert is lit on first aid, time it, and then hit the drops, and then hit all of the drops at a certain point before you drain. and that will give you the first aid bomb, for example. And first aid, that means it spots you a shot. So I mentioned that the prison was nine shots to start it. There you'd want to get eight shots. And you'll know it's eight shots because you'll start seeing the prison letters rove back and forth. So it's a bit easy to spot on that one.
    97:54
    And then collect your first aid and then you get to the prison within one shot of starting it and then you avoid prison, you play the rest of the game, and if you drain, you use your action button as you're draining, and that starts prison. So how does the game prioritize if you've already gotten, if you're getting food, but then you have, yes, if you have them both, how does it prioritize? If I recall, it can add up your walker bombs, but keep in mind that you can't, It's hard to add multiple walker bombs because you could add one weapon, one first aid, and one food. But it's hard to do both because it's hard to do one on top of the other because you have to hit the drop targets down and then a new thing lights, and then you might hit a new thing and add it up. But you can get multiple bombs. That is true on multiple of these first aid weapons and food, as I recall. How does it prioritize between first aid and food for the multi-ball? Let's say if you had both lit. I actually don't know. That's a fair question. This is when I call in John Schaapel, by the way. Yeah. All right. This will be the John Schaapel update on the next.
    99:05
    Of course, we've got to find somebody with a premium. I don't, almost nobody, I know of one person who has an LE, or I guess I'll have to call him.
    99:15
    And then I've hopefully explained, I didn't talk about the weapons because that has nothing to do with it, but of these bombs for the purpose of multiball. But I was talking about prison versus well walker. and I explained, hopefully, what the bombs, the action buttons do, food versus first aid. I always remember food, well, well walkers are hungry, I guess. They've been in there for a while, and they need to eat. So well walkers, the food one, and prison, there's always a prison doctor, and they need first aid. That's my memory trick, anyway, for what it's worth. But I was also going to say, given that both are these bombs, I still think that on a premium, you should especially go for the prison, and a few reasons for that. One is that I find it easier to accidentally hit Wellwalker than it is to accidentally hit prison.
    100:03
    And so let's say you got Wellwalker one shot away, and you're like, I'm going to wait until I drain to use that action button. You might accidentally start it very frequently, and that whole plan is thrown out the window, whereas prison, it's less likely to accidentally hit it. And if that wasn't nuanced enough, I'm going to give you the very super nuanced deal here. As I said, it is nine shots to get to prison and ten shots to get to Wellwalker. But the bomb only works and you could only accrue the bomb even when you have quote prepped the multiball The prep of the multiball for prison happens after two shots and the well walker happens after five shots So the point is that it is easier to accrue the bomb in prison than it is in well walker because you first have to hit well walker more times before you can get the bomb to use.
    100:58
    Got it. It's a super nuanced point. And also it should be said that prison is nine shots on default settings. Those settings can be changed to make it harder or I don't know if you can make it easier, but you can certainly make it harder to start. Right. And we are talking strategy and we're talking about what you should do in this game. And everything I just said is before you play the game, you have to decide. This is the way I roll. You have to decide, is it a pro or premium? Is it stackable modes or not? like as a default versus competition settings, and then only then you can decide are you a prison or a well walker person, and then only then can you now plunge, and now plunging.
    101:45
    Skillshot actually matters in this game, especially in League Knight, because it could be worth over a million points progressively as you play the game, and oftentimes like three, four, five million points might win this game. Nobody does anything in this game, and so just skillshots win it. And so I found a lot of games end with a million points between two players on a game like this. Maybe one who comes in first place, fine, they get 30 million. But second, third, and fourth place might be like six, five, and four million, you know, for example. And so the first thing I want to say is at the top of the skill shot, you want to plunge your ball into one of these lanes. But you can choose which lane is lit before you plunge. And the answer is always this one. So you want to move the skill shot with the right flipper to ensure that the flashing circle is over the right in lane. And you want to do this for a few reasons. The point of the skill shot is to go here and then go into a lit lane. But 80% of the time, when you plunge, on most walking deads, it will go into the right.
    102:41
    Another 20% on most walking deads, it will bounce and then go into the left. And even if it was 50-50, and you're like, it's just a 50-50 chance, When it goes into the right lane, it very quickly goes into the right lane. When it goes into the left lane, it slowly goes into the left lane because it hits that and then it bounces. Right, it's going to have to bounce. Right, it's going to have to bounce to get there. And so, in other words, even if it were a 50-50 chance and it's not, you would still put it on the right in lane because you plunge, and maybe it's on the 50-50 chance going to go right in there, or maybe it's not and it's going to hit that and bounce. All right, so then you move the in lane at that point.
    103:19
    Agreed. So a very subtle but important point that often will win you even just one singular advanced position in a league night is just move that light to the right end lane instead of the left. So that's the plunge. All right, now the ball comes out of the pop bumpers here, and hopefully you get the, quote, good feed. And by good feed, I mean it goes here, bounces off the left flipper. You don't use it when it's on the left flipper. You let it bounce, and it goes to the right flipper, and now you're trapped up. And at this point, let's say you're a prison person, for example. Then what I would say, if you're a prison guy like me, is you could do it with the right or left flipper. You hit a shot during ball save time, especially to the prison. Should we call this episode Prison with Serge? Yeah, Prison with Serge or Well Walker with Rachel. So like you said, you use your ball save time to hit the well walker. It's okay whichever one you choose, but choose one and then use your ball save to hit it. Especially the prison, after you hit two shots to the prison, then it traps it on the magnet and then will often throw the ball directly down to the center drain. And if you could somehow do that very quickly in your ball save, maybe you're going to be okay, you know, for example. And I imagine they're going to put a ball save, by the way, in the remastered, so you don't even have to worry about this point. But if it shoots down the middle, you'll get your ball back. I don't know how I feel about that, but they're going to do it. And so anyway, make your two shots to prison. Fine. Now you've prepped your prison. Here's the key point again. is this a premium or is this a pro? If it's a premium, you want to time your shot, your next shot to be on the drop targets when it's lit on the first aid insert so that you could build up your prison bomb, in other words. And regardless, if you're on a pro, you're still going to go for the drops at this point because getting one set of drops starts your mode selection. So you get on the first game, before you start any mode, one set of drops lights your modes, and the modes are picked from your five various shots here. And if you're going for the 30 million point strat, the answer is barn. And the reason you go for barn is that shot starts barn after you hit the drops. It also will now spot you one shot towards your prison, as we mentioned earlier, if you've prepped that. If you're getting the good feed, it comes out of the orbit, hits the left flipper, goes to the right, and now all you have to do in this mode it is the simplest mode in pinball to describe is hit the left orbit and when it does that again you let it bounce and you hit the left orbit and if you can do that and I know this feed is unreliable but especially if it's a good feed it's better than nothing and you just hit the left orbit and that's all you have to do and if you do that a few times you're at 30 million points and you often will win the game so that's my 30 million and I'll get to the $100 million in a second, but any question on the $30 million? Well, can we go back to the skill shot? I'm not sure if you said it, but I'm going over the rollovers. You're right. I didn't do it. Timing the rollovers. So the skill shot is not only about going through the in lane when the circle is lit. It's also about timing your plunge because you're going to see these two lights, these two rollover lights, and Stern brought back the rollovers for this game, which I don't think I've been in a game for a while before it. Probably with good reason. Probably with good reason is right. But so you're going over these rollovers, and the lights will flash first this one and then both and then none. And so it goes between just one light or both lights or none. And you want to plunge it so that it rolls over timed so both lights are lit and then goes through the lit in lane. Basically, you're trying to hit three lit shots on the plunge. And over ball one to ball two, ball three, these lights will get progressively faster and harder to time, which I think is a nice feature. And their value is increased. But you are dealing with the special thing that is a rollover, meaning that if you go too far to one side, depending on how your specific game is physically put together, it's possible that it may not trigger that switch, which is always frustrating as a player. I believe hours at the bat trigger 99% of the time. Have you experienced rolling over, lit rollovers on this game and them not working? Yes. Okay, so it does still happen.
    107:59
    And that is just a function. I've had it happen a lot at games not at the bat. Yeah. Ours, you know, we've tried to fiddle with them to make them sensitive so that you get credit when you roll over a shot because there's few things as frustrating as not getting credit for a shot that you've made. That's exactly right. I totally agree there. So you made your skill shot. You've prepped your prison two times. You went back here. You timed it to first aid if you're on premium. If you're on a pro, you don't care, but you still hit the drops anyway. And you play your barn. You hit as many shots as you can in 30 seconds. Eventually you drain out because, you know, that's what happens. And now you're on ball two. So you're on ball two. You take a breath, and you see where you're at on your prison progress. And prison progress, like I said, is nine shots total until the arrows are roving. Not arrows, the insert that spells prison is roving. You also take a look at your bloodbath progress. So to get bloodbath, I mentioned before, you have to hit nine drops, but not just any nine drops. You have to hit them in the precisely right way. If I got food and I got all the drops down, and then the next time I randomly bounced into the drop targets, it was still on food, that doesn't progress me towards bloodbath. So you need to time. The first time you hit that area, you don't have to time it. But the second time you do, because the first time, if you don't care about the bombs and you get food, let's say, that's fine. And just the next time you hit the drops, it either has to be weapons or first aid. And then the third time you hit the drops, it has to be the other one of those two. And then if you do that, Bloodbath will light. But the point is you want to take a stock of your progress here on Ball 2. Like are you close to Bloodbath or are you closer to prison? Or if you went Wellwalker, how close are you to that? But the point is that now you've been ignoring much of these for Ball 1. You may have made some errant hits to them. You've gotten some progress there. and at some point then you've hit enough drop targets, and now what you want to do as you're playing this game, you progress your bloodbath, and now you've hit another two drop targets, and now you're in your next mode to light. This is, as I said, an unusual game because you can start a mode first and then multi-ball, or start a multi-ball first and then mode. So I don't mind on ball two ignoring this, in essence. If you're, let's say you're close to prison, and just start prison. If you're on factory settings, non-competition mode, where you could bring a mode after multiball. So you start prison, and then as you're starting prison, then you wail on the bloodbath targets here. Hopefully you've timed it well so you're progressing towards bloodbath. But even if you're not, that's going to light a mode for you, again on default non-competition settings. And then when you're in multiball, the mode you want to hit is this one, the mode shot, when the modes are lit after you hit two sets of drop targets. For the first mode, you only have to hit one drop target completion, but for the second mode, it's two. And then you hit the riot shot. And the reason you want to hit the riot shot, which is not an easy shot to hit, is that mode is a switch hit-based mode. So enough switch hits, for example, from the pop bumpers, will increase the value of this riot shot. So during the multiball, you want to keep plunging to hit a bunch of switch hits. I've even seen some people purposely drain when they start the multiball with riot, just so that, because there's no spinner on a pro, but on a premium at least there is, So it depends what you're on. But you want to build up switch hits and then make that shot through the riot. So that is the riot strategy. And if you've done that, you'll probably get to $100 million. And the reason is that the riot shot not only is valuable in a multiball, but it also acts as your 2x playfield. And the reason is that there's a 2x playfield here. and to qualify the 2x play field you need to hit this stand up and that stand up, which you've probably done by now especially if you're going for a prison kind of thing and then once you hit those two stand ups this shot is lit to start your 2x at the tower, you'll specifically see this insert lit called tower and that's your 2x so now you're in 2x with multiball and riot and there's your quick 100 million points if you've ever seen that happen any questions on the 100 million point strategy? No questions. Now, one thing I haven't focused on yet is your shot multiplier. I've talked about your playfield multiplier. It's pretty easy to describe. It's only 2x. It's not complicated. Stand up, stand up, tower shot right there. That's that. And I haven't on purpose talked about your shot multipliers, which are going to be on the end lanes. And I will get into that. But that's more advanced. We're going to cover that later when we dive even deeper into the code ritual, which we're going to do. so also notice I haven't given you the 1 billion point strategy because that requires a particularly in-depth knowledge of the shot multipliers and also the CDC mode which is particularly interesting because the CDC mode for most players is the lowest scoring and most baffling of modes I often say something weird about this game is the simplest mode in pinball is on the left orbit the hardest most complicated mode in pinball is right next to it on the left ramp and for most players the CDC ramp the CDC mode they shouldn't be doing it on average, it has, in my experience, the lowest value of all modes, but it has the highest ceiling of all modes. If you know exactly what you're doing, and we will talk about it later, that is the one billion point strat on the game, and it is tough to execute, and it's its own special section later. So for now, we'll just keep that in mind, and we'll call it some obscure billion point strategy. But with that, that covers the main scoring strategies of version two code of Walking Dead before the third one comes out in a few days. That's all about to change, I imagine.
    113:43
    And we'll dive into that too. But now we can get to Section 4, which is where we talk about our 10 criteria for good pinball code. Are you game for that, Rachel? I am. Did we talk about stacking Bloodbath and Prison and Bloodbath and Will Walker? We didn't, but we will later. For now, I'm happy to say it. I mentioned before about the modes in multiball stacking, how on default settings, non-competition, you can start mode and multiball in any order, but also the multiball stack with each other. So to your point, but not all of them. So you can stack bloodbath and wellwalker in any order. You could stack bloodbath and prison in any order. But you cannot stack wellwalker and prison.
    114:27
    Once you start one, you cannot stack the other. So that's just the simple answer of it. Excellent. All right. So the traditional segment of Pin Pals Now where we go through 10 good code criteria, moments, theme immersion, breadth, depth, clarity, risk and reward, fair and balanced, innovation, pacing, and bugs. And we'll start with moments. And it's a tricky category to start with because I find, and I sort of touched on this earlier, that Walking Dead is more of a vibe game than a moment game. you know when you play this game you feel like you're battling for your life it's one of the hardest layouts stern's ever made we talked about the game times earlier it makes sense for the theme and the whole game has that vibe of survival that rather than any one moment that feels so distinct from the rest you know the whole game you're battling this game and killing zombies but i don't want to bias too much do you feel it has a moment do you like i you know that's awesome when i got into this thing like you might feel on metallica sparky for example Well, I think any time I get into a multi-ball, that is a special feeling. But I don't think it has what you're talking about when we think about specifically like a grab-you moment. Like if you have a new player and you're like, you've got to see this, would you tell them you've got to see when you get to Sparky or would you tell them you've got to see when you get to Prison? They're both around nine hits. Right. Sparky is definitely a more notable moment than prison. It is cool when the little doors open up, but it's not the same thing. Yeah, it just doesn't feel the same way. And so this game is sort of unique among all games, Stern games, like I said, how everything flows into each other. And I think that's part of the vibe that I'm talking about, that it doesn't even pause so much for different multiballs. We just said you could stack this multiball with that one and so forth. And you wouldn't want it to. So, like, that is the theme of zombie apocalypses, is you are fighting the whole time. You're never safe. There's never a pause for anything. Yeah, it gives you, I would say, when I say the word vibe, I mean it gives you a continuous feeling or continuous moment, in a sense, of anxiety. Anxiety and maybe fear when you're playing this game. Like, walking through a haunted house on Halloween, it's not something you'd want to feel every day. But once in a while, it can be strangely fun to feel those feelings, some catharsis of just having nonstop anxiety and then it's over afterwards. But I think that's what this game is. So put in your tokens, folks. Most of nonstop anxiety. Exactly. You know, haunted houses, they get business not 365 days a year, but they get business around one time of the year, and they get a lot of business at that time of the year. And I think this game sometimes can feel like that. It's just a vibe of anxiety purposefully and masterfully designed to be so is what I mean. He didn't want you to have a pause in most games while you're playing. He wanted you to feel the feeling all the time. And there is one asterisk here that the game has wizard modes, quite a few of them. I believe it has four wizard modes in the game. And that is quite a lot for 2014, now 2013, when he did the Code Stern game. There is one in particular that's worth talking about that is truly a moment that has a traditional moment called Horde. The only thing is most players don't see it. It's one of the best wizard modes ever made, but I don't usually like to use wizard modes as a moment when we break down code because most players won't see it. Have you played and gone to Horde? I think I have one time. Exactly, exactly. It's kind of like, you know, if a moment falls in the forest and no one's there to witness it, is it a moment? And I'm not sure it is, although if you get to it, it's really, really a lot of fun. It is worth maybe just showing that for just a moment.
    118:17
    Ironic, I'm saying moment. So to get into Horde, it's complicated. You need to do any six of these 14 things on this list, any six of them. If you do any six of them, then it will light a woodberry shot in the lower right for your Horde. So if you didn't memorize this, which is hard to memorize, what it basically means is do well in stuff. And stuff. Yeah. So you don't have to memorize it. There are five modes. Do well in those modes. How well you can memorize it, but don't. Just do well in the mode. There are three multiballs. You have to do well in them. How well, you don't have to memorize it, but just do well. Get a bunch of jackpots in those modes. There's some other ancillary stuff that shows up. bicycle girls and fish tanks and how many times you have to drop targets and combos and crossbows and woodberry shots and which also require fish tanks and we can get into that and maybe we will in a little bit but the point is do stuff in the game and you get to hoard any questions on that no because i my question was i'm not sure how i did it and now i see that most people probably don't know how they do it it just like shows up like you're playing pretty well and then all of a sudden you're in Horde. Yeah, and it's interesting. Sometimes you want a very specific set of things to do to know how to get to a wizard mode. Oh, I have to play all the modes. Oh, if you play in James Bond, you have to play one jetpack, one bird one, one henchman, one main villain. And if you do all four, you get to Bond James Bond mini wizard mode. And so it's a very specific set of things to do. In this game, it's just do well and stuff to get to Horde. And I don't think this chart exists. I'm showing it, you know, but it's not about memorizing that. It's just about do well, and you'll get there.
    120:02
    And then what I thought I could do is show you a little bit of what makes it so masterful. When I say I think it's one of the best wizard modes in the game, I think I want to say why. We won't hear the sound for it here, but I want to give a shout-out here to Mixertuna on Buffalo Pinball's channel for his amazing tutorial video on Walking Dead where he goes over it in over two hours, I believe. And I also really appreciate Buffalo Pinball's channel. They've made so many tutorials on games that I've learned a lot from over the years. So a few things make it great. When you qualify it, after getting all six weapons lit, it's going to light the woodberry shot on the bottom right, and that's going to be, let's see if I could coax it to work. And if it doesn't work, we're going to move on. But you have to, here he has all his weapons lit, and that's lit the horde, and the shot is flashing like crazy. You almost never see this in the game because it's hard to get to. So it's a moment because you've built up to this huge thing that's lit like nothing else has been in the game. And now he's in it. And what makes this mode really, really great, so many things make it, to me, the best. I would sometimes say it's the best wizard mode in pinball, but it's certainly one of the best if you don't buy that. When it starts, it's a multi-ball, which, like a lot of wizard modes are. But one thing I really love about it is the mode continues even when you get down to a single ball. Most wizard modes are not like that. most wizard modes you're in multi-ball and as soon as you get back down to drain to one ball it's over and there's sort of an anti-climax there because you're still in play and you still have a ball left and that could lessen the emotional impact of the wizard mode whereas in this game back to its vibe it's a zombie killing apocalypse and if you were in a multi-ball and then you drain down to one ball during the wizard mode he's still in it right now in one ball play for no he's in two ball at this point. When you're in it and you get down to one ball, you still feel like you're up against the final boss now. You're playing and you're not leaving until you either die or beat it, in other words, until you drain completely. And I really, really like that, especially for the theme of this game. The anxiety is maximal. On the screen, zombies are coming out at you, mainly from five places. There are five animations where the zombies could come out at you, and they represent the five shots around the play field. The closer the zombie is to getting to you on the screen, as we'll show here, the more lights are on the inserts. So what I mean is, and I should show it in a moment here,
    122:28
    so right here there's a zombie right there, for example, that's getting close to you, and so it has two lights flashing on this shot. This one is getting really close to you, and it has three lights flashing on that shot. So even if you weren't looking at the screen, you know where to go based on the most lights on the shot.
    122:48
    Any questions on that? No, that's great the way that they've shown you. Yeah, it's just so elegant in giving you that. It's immersive because there are zombies coming at you and you feel them coming at you. And by the way, look how close that one is. And this one.
    123:05
    And that one. Yeah, look at them try to kill you. And also the closer they get to you, the more valuable they are. So there's a risk and reward for that as well. But you also feel the anxiety, the pressure building up as four inserts light, and they get the closest place to you. So there's four places they can get close to you. And then the point about the one ball thing.
    123:29
    If you drain your ball, what do I want to say? Sorry, I should say, if a zombie gets too close to you, they kill you. power is killed to the flippers and horde ends you get your ball back to plunge now for the rest of that ball but the mode truly ends and you die and if you play it on competition mode by the way is that um is there the ball really will end on when the zombie bites you and it's one of the few games i could think of this is another random trivia question the few games where you can actually lose the ball without draining.
    124:06
    Yeah, like in Dungeons and Dragons, you can see that if you're fighting something, then the flashes get faster and faster, and then all of a sudden, you know, you've lost one of your guys, but it's not going to end your ball.
    124:24
    Right, exactly. This is one of the, and I'd love people to tell me if they know of other games on the trivia in the chat of what other games can you actually truly lose your ball without going down the center left or right drain and not jumping over a flipper or anything like you just did something poorly in the mode and the game ends this is one of those games where that happens and that is innovative in itself to me it's also innovative because in a theoretical way there is no limit to horde how it works is you have to make enough shots you have to kill enough zombies that are coming out at you, this horde of zombies. Once you do, this woodberry shot will be lit to escape. You have to hit it in there, and then it asks you a question. Do you want to continue fighting, or do you want to escape? You could escape, and the mode ends, and you've won. Or, and I believe it's actually lit right now for escape, but you could choose, and if you fight, continue on, you continue playing the mode, and you could also get add-a-balls from killing enough zombies in a wave, it gives you a super jackpot and an add-a-ball. There's actually no known limit to the number of waves in this game, and they get progressively more valuable. And so it's just, hopefully I've given a solid argument of how it's like the best thought through wizard mode in perhaps all of pinball. Brilliant. Brilliant. And don't you think that Oxygen Destroyer is sort of along these lines, but just as like an homage to something like this? And I know that we also saw it in Wizard of Oz, as far as like... He escaped, by the way. That's like a ball saved versus losing your ball, but in Oxygen Destroyer, you do get that chance to continue on or you lose your ball because you didn't do the thing that the game wanted you to do. Totally agree. I think far more elegant. Yeah, in a few ways, a few games have used the Oxygen Destroyer strategy, like Dune had it with the pain box, where you drain, but you can get it back if you do this one thing. you know, for example, and Godzilla had it with the Oxygen Destroyer, whatever it's called, and excellent. But this game, like you said, is just so elegant in how it does it. So moments. In a sense, it has no moments except for this horde. In another sense, it's all a moment. It's just a huge vibe of anxiety, you know, I'd say. Theme immersion. It has a singular, almost Buddhist-like focus on theme immersion, which is all you have to say is shots kill zombies. So let's say around the play field you have walkers lit. I'll show you, for example, back to, let's go back to here.
    126:56
    Here in this game, you're going to do things, and walkers will be lit here on these inserts. Whenever you hit them, you'll hear a zombie getting killed, for example. So just walkers kill zombies. Let's say you're in barn. Every time you shoot that shot, it kills a zombie on the screen. And then on the display, a new zombie comes out, and you have to kill it, too. What do you have to do? Hit that left orbit, kill a zombie. Let's say you prep the prison like we talked about earlier, and there's six shots around the playfield now that are lit, this one and this one and this one, the prison itself, the tunnel, the arena ramp. You kill, let's say, that right ramp, then that zombie will die, for example, on the animation. You kill this left ramp, then this zombie will die on the animation. So you could play this as the pro, this is the premium with a DMD or whatever, also attach a color DMD. But here, again, he's killed some zombies, for example. Shots kill zombies. You're in horde, the wizard mode we just saw, and the zombies are coming towards you. The closer they get, the more it's worth when you kill them. How do you kill them? You shoot the shot. So it's a very singular theme immersion of just zombies, zombies, zombies on every shot. It's not like, well, if you hit this shot, you get, I don't know, a bonus. I don't know what else one could say as another mode. You know, like if you're playing King Kong, you're playing save N. In that version, some shots save N. and another one you're playing pterodactyl and you have to kill the pterodactyls or whatever, you know, on a cave shot. And so shots represent different things. But on this game, it's singular focus. Every shot is killing zombies over and over and over again. And that's back to that kind of vibe mentality. It's just focused so singularly on that theme immersion that I think is warranted, actually, in this game and might have been weird in another game, you know, where it's like, imagine you were playing King Kong and every time you hit a shot it just punches a dinosaur. You know, first time would be cool. It would be kind of weird after enough times, you know, to just only be punching a dinosaur in every shot, you know, for example. But this game is literally killing a zombie on essentially every shot that you do.
    128:58
    I really love how this game narrows its focus in every way, in the code, in the design, also in the aesthetics. It is all just very pointed towards what it is. I think it all works to represent this singular thing that we're talking about. There's not a bunch of jazz. You're not going to see a lot of purple and blue everywhere. You're seeing blood and guts and killing things. Precisely. Totally agree. Singular focus and quite brilliant. And that's really it for my theme immersion because that's all there is to say about it. Any other questions on theme immersion? Although you covered it too.
    129:46
    No, I feel like this is a 10 out of 10 on theme immersion. Right. You may not love the theme. Maybe you're not into zombies. But it does exactly what it should with zombies. You know, we can say that. That's why the code is sort of the towering achievement it is. But now breath. like we often get to in Breath we talk about four M's of pinball rules, modes, multiballs multipliers and missions also called the side quest so modes, we talked about how to get the modes ready to qualify the modes you have to hit the drop targets and then you shoot one of the five shots and we showed this chart a long time ago this is a mode choice where the player chooses via a shot so that would be like the new Star Wars for example has eight character modes lit you hit that and that's your mode. Or Stranger Things or Jaws or, in this case, Walking Dead and Ghostbusters is another example too. And so you just decide which shot you want. There are five modes. We talked about Barn already. We talked about Barn, how it's just hit the left orbit. And one thing I really love about Barn, just to say about it, is it's a great argument that a mode does not need complex rules necessarily. It just needs complex choreography. So Barn is the easiest mode to explain. You just have to hit the left orbit as many times as you can. But it doesn't feel boring when you're playing it, to me at least. It feels intense, like the intensity of making that shot and killing that zombie and hearing the gunshot of the zombie coming out of the barn at you. How do you feel about it? I agree with that. And I think another interesting thing, this actually sort of goes back to theme immersion, sorry, but there are many characters in Walking Dead. There's a lot of characters that people identify with.
    131:25
    But this game doesn't focus on any of the particular characters. It really is focused on zombie, like generic zombie, killing zombies. And I would actually be remiss here if I didn't mention a Kale trivia story. He's too sick to tell it himself, but he actually knew Michael Rooker, who plays Earl. Who's also in Guardians of the Galaxy, by the way. Also in Guardians of the Galaxy. And you know what? He met Michael Rooker when him and Chris Penn, brother of Sean Penn, and Tim Roth showed up to one of his shows when he was still touring.
    132:14
    So he was at a show, and then Michael Rooker, Tim Roth, Tim Roth of Pulp Fiction, so that's also another pinball related. and we've got three pinball games between them.
    132:27
    So you've got Michael Rooker, Tim Roth, and Chris Penn all wanting to hang out with Kale. They were just, like, big fans at the show. But this was a long, long time ago. This was before Michael Rooker was Merle.
    132:41
    Still kind of hadn't done as many things at that point. But that is to say, there are characters in this game. you can ask Kale if you want to hear specifics of stories about these nights I don't think I'm not quite at liberty to divulge all of the all the juicy details but Merle was one of the characters that I as a non-Walking Dead fan knew of in the game you don't need to know any of the characters in this show so whenever people are saying like this show was over a long time ago why are they bringing this back, which is, we're hearing a little bit of that. The show doesn't matter. It's the theme, the overarching zombie theme that matters. And I think that whenever people realize the brilliance of the code that you're sharing with us, that's one of the things that really stands out. We are just killing zombies in really cool ways. beautifully said too and uh good story kind of a half story there but there we go um so modes i'm not going to go through the rules of all five modes but but i will say we talked about barn already and how that's amazing with its very with its simplicity but but very involved in choreography and that's a good single ball strategy mode for 30 million points we talked about riot how that's a good multi-ball strategy mode for 100 million points. If you've already played Barn, Arena is a good choice for single ball mode after Barn, because it's also hit the right ramp as many times as you can, especially in a combo, then it's worth more. And it has an added twist that's almost the same as Barn, in that you just hit the shot a bunch of times. It's harder to hit, I think, because it's so close to the flippers on the Arena shot, which is that right ramp. But I will, and that's this one, but I will also say that As you build up the arena shot, you can end the mode in this shot by getting, as soon as you hit that, that gives you 20% of all the added up value you got on the right ramp arena. So it adds a little twist of like a risk and reward there on arena shot. And then we're going to get to CDC later in the clarity section because it's unclear. But those are your basic modes. I'm not going to talk about tunnel. Nobody goes for this mode, and they shouldn't. But those are the main five modes. And then multiballs. Well, we talked about a lot of it already, and the multiballs are the easiest to explain. Repeated shots to the prison basically gets you your prison multiball, with the added point about the other shots lighting that you can help you progress it. Wellwalker, that's very simple to explain, 10 shots. But let me get a little bit more about it, and what I want to say is that there's some odd stuff going on with Wellwalker that I do think should be tweaked, and I bet you will be in the latest code. So after you hit Well Walker five times out of the ten that you need, it is prepped. And what happens is then you'll see the letters strobe back and forth in Well. That doesn't tell you that the multiball is ready, and that's a confusing thing. People are like, okay, the multiball is ready, because when prison letters strobe back and forth, prison is ready. And in Metallica, when you see the inserts flash back and forth, that's saying Sparky is ready. But Well Walker is not like that. So Well Walker, you're going to see the letters flash back and forth after five times. And then something really odd happens, and I will show it. Sorry, that was back in the chart of least to most freedom of mode choice. It was somewhere in the middle of Walking Dead there. But let's talk about the strobing lights of Wellwalker. This is some nuanced deep dive code.
    136:22
    The lights after five hits, and that's why you see five, five, and five here. That means you have five hits left to start it. And so it does tell you on the DMV only after you get to these five hits here.
    136:34
    And you're going to see the letters rove back and forth. But what actually happens is it starts to light all of them, one, then two, then four, then three, then four letters. And it's the strangest thing. If you hit the well walker when there's one light hit, you get 55,000 points. If you hit it when it's two, it's 60,000. If it's three, 65,000. If it's four, 75,000. So there is a kind of a deep code of when you want to hit the well walker with as many lights or as flashing on it as possible. Not for 20,000 points. Exactly. Now, there's the issue. It is the strangest thing. It just must have been forgotten to history that when you play well walker, it matters when you hit it, but not really, because we're talking about the difference of 20,000 points, and you're not thinking about that while you're playing. So I do like the rule, But the scoring needs to be totally tweaked for that, and I bet will be. That's one of my things I bet will happen on the new one. Very small point there. But you know what? We're here for details, right, Rachel? But at the same time, if people are hitting this randomly, most people are not going to know this rule regardless. If it was huge, I mean, there's got to be a real careful sweet spot there where you're not accidentally giving somebody like a million points because they happen to have hit it unbeknownst to themselves, at the ideal time. True, and I'll be curious about that. And I'll also be curious, maybe one thing they could do is make the multiball more valuable when you get it the more you hit it when it's full letters. But I don't know. We'll see what they do with it. That's one thought I had.
    138:07
    And so deep cut rules there. Prison we talked about already, but the one thing I want to say about the prison in addition to what I said before about hitting the shots representing the zombies and how that's great immersion and it's all true is that Prison is unique that it has its own wizard mode associated with it. If you get two super jackpots in Prison, which is another way to say 12 jackpots in Prison during Prison Multiball, then it will light Siege for you, which is an entirely other wizard mode that's extremely hard to get to. And I always find it curious that of the three multiballs, only that one gets a special mini wizard if you do well in it. And I wonder if in the latest code that they're going to add a mini wizard for doing well in Bloodbath and Wellwalker, for example. That said, it's pretty hard to achieve. It's just an interesting nuance. It's probably one of the hardest wizard modes to get to.
    139:02
    Bloodbath is the third multiball. We talked about that. And it's the only one that has adaballs. So we said you have to hit three drops when it's on food, three drops when it's on weapons, any three drops when it's on, all three drops when it's on first aid, and you have to time it because the first time you hit it doesn't matter unless they're walker bombs. But it doesn't matter for bloodbath. You just hit it. Then you get all drops down. The next time is when it matters. You have to choose either weapons or first aid and then you get all the drops down. The third time it really, really matters because there's only one light left. Let's say first aid and you just have to hit it and get all the drops down. Then it doesn't matter because the fourth time bloodbath will be lit and then you just hit the drops down no matter what timing it's on. So essentially you need 12 drop targets to get to bloodbath. Two shots out of the 12 drop targets. Best case is 12 drop targets. And only two of those 12 shots, 12 drop targets, shots, have to be well-timed is what it comes down to.
    140:01
    Is that clarifying? Two of 12. Two of 12, exactly. In my case, it's more like 20 shots. 20 shots, right. Me too.
    140:12
    And it's interesting. There's no Adaball on prison. There's no Adaball on Wellwalker, but there are actually two Adaballs in Bloodbath. If you hit the drops down one more time, that's an Adaball. Another time, another Adaball. So it's just an interesting variation there. It's sort of like actually kind of similar to Tron where Korra has two Adaballs if you hit the center stand-ups repeatedly. And so that's multiballs. We talked about modes. We talked about multiballs. Any questions on those? No questions. And now we go on to our third M, multipliers. One is really simple to explain, and the other is a bit complicated. So we talked a little bit already about the 2X. To get the 2X, you have the 2X play field. That's the simple one. Stand up, stand up, tower shot. You're in 2X. Timed 2X for 20 seconds. You could keep on hitting these targets, and that extends the 20 seconds, you know, for example. And so 2X, pretty easy to explain. And now we enter the shot multiplier, which is hard to explain. but worth explaining so the shot multiplier is on your in lanes and it's a controllable shot multiplier meaning if I press any flipper when it's here it will move to there and so good players preserve it for the right moment and you build up your shot multiplier but then you don't use it so let's say I hit a ramp and I hit the CDC ramp and I know the ball is coming back here I will quickly, if I don't want to use it I will move the multiplier to this other side so that it doesn't roll through the switch when that in lane is lit. And the way you get your shot multiplier is walker kills. So the walker kills are these lit circles inserts here, and here's one, and there's one, for example. You always have at least four of them lit around the playfield randomly. When the game first starts, I believe all six are lit, but you always have four lit around the playfield, and hit that shot, and you get a walker kill. As you get walker kills, it builds up these inserts at the bottom. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, you know, it adds up cumulatively like that. Every two walker kills you get gets you a shot multiplier. So if I kill two of those shots, this one and this one, for example, this arrow, this insert will suddenly turn yellow, and now you'll have 2x. If I kill another one, 3x. Sorry, another 2, 3x. Another 2, 4x. And so here you see that you could build up your shot multiplier. Actually, there is no upper limit to how you could build up the shot multiplier. It builds up infinitely, essentially, as far as we know, that if you build up the, and I'm sure there's a coding thing where it has to max out, but it builds up just humongously, in other words.
    142:48
    And this is the chart for that. There's no apparent ceiling that we know of for the multipliers, but you want to time it. So let's say you have that barn mode lit. You hit the barn mode a bunch of times, then hit the ramp, the CDC ramp, go through the in lane, and then hit the barn shot, and it'll be worth a lot more, 4x, 5x, 6x, however many you've gotten that multiplier to. So that's the shot multiplier. Any questions on that? I do have a question. So let's say that I use it. Let's say I have 10 walkers killed. So I use it and I have a 6x multiplier.
    143:23
    Then I kill some more walkers. Starts from the bottom. Okay, so if I kill 10 and then use it, I get a 6x. And then let's say I kill four more, then I've got it available again for 3x. Yeah, it is a true shot multiplier. And I say true shot multiplier because other games aren't true. Like in Star Wars, 2017, Richie Star Wars, where there's like three lights lit and you're at 2x and 3x. And if you hit the stand-up so where the TIE fighters are, it could build it up. And you make a shot using the shot multipliers. You could still use those shot multipliers over and over and over again as long as they don't time out. And you have to hit the stand-ups to keep them going. Not this one. This one is truly a one-time use. It goes through that lit-in lane and you make your shot. That's it. It starts back down from 1x at that point, and you have to get all new walkers to build it up. So it has to be a very deliberately used thing at a perfect time for it to matter. And people who love scoring love that, too, because you can build up to a moment where one shot matters, and then you timed it so that you're going to go through that shot, and then suddenly you went from 5 million to 600 million in the game because you've done that. Like CDC. And that's what we're going to talk about, exactly.
    144:32
    Very soon, I promise you. But hopefully, in order to get to the CDC and explain that strategy, we had to explain the shot multipliers. Very important. And hopefully we've done that. And complicated. And that was our M, our multipliers, the third M. And now the fourth M, mission, also called side quest in the game. There are two side quests in this game. There are walker kills and there are multi-kills. personally I wish they replaced multi-kills with like weapons or something because it's these things in the center that all represent like a hammer and a gun all the things that are weapons correct correct those are your quote multi-kills right but that's what they call them multi-kills anyway those are the central inserts to get those multi-kills we talked about what to do you have to do 14 things and I'm not going to go through them again but those are the 14 things so that's when I say mission or side quest this is stuff that's happening in the background of the game that you're not focusing on as the main thing of the game. The main thing you're in, you're focusing on the multi-ball, you're focusing on the modes. Maybe you're also thinking of the multipliers. But in the background, whether you're in single ball or multi-ball, this thing is going on in the background, and you will get multi-kills in the background. Walkers, we also talked about. When the game starts, you have six walkers lit. At least four of them will always be lit. When you hit one, it unlights, and it moves it to another light, in other words. Also runs in the background. There is a tie-in. These are two different missions because they have two different wizard modes. One wizard mode, if you get the six multi-kills from doing all those six, sorry, the six multi-kills from doing six of the 14 things here, that gets you your horde, and we talked about that before. The walkers, if you get 115 walkers, which is very hard to do, and it's a random number, but that's when all of these numbers add up, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20, 30, 40. When they all add up, it adds up to 115. If you get 115, that's your last man standing wizard mode. So they are two separate wizard modes. But there is something interesting overlap here. A little extra bonus. When you get a multi-kill, it will turn on a yellow light.
    146:37
    So let's say here's a multi-kill, and then it turns on a yellow light. It only works on that ball when you get the multi-kill. And if you hit that multi-kill, that yellow light, it counts for two walkers.
    146:48
    Okay. And that's a small, subtle point. But when I talk about pacing in this game, the scoring, how the scoring is explosive in this game, you play it for five minutes, you get eight million. You play it for ten minutes, you get like 35 million. You suddenly play it for 20 minutes, and you're like 500 million or something like that. Like, that's one of the reasons. So imagine you get a multi-kill. You did well in a mode. Now suddenly that shot is two walkers, which means every time you hit that shot, it gives you a shot multiplier, which is two walkers. so it allows for escalation of score because of that nuanced point of how these things relate to each other. It's not something to memorize, but it's something to... I'm citing it as, when I talk about pacing later, how the game is really brilliant in its explosive scoring like that. Doing better makes you do a lot, lot better, you know, as you go. That's really interesting. That's not something that I knew about. Yeah, yellow circles mean two kills when you hit that, and that's actually why they call it a multi-kill. I know why they call it a multi-kill. I just don't like that they call it a multi-kill. It should be called a weapon, but whatever. Multi-kill is because it gives you two kills when you see a yellow light, in other words. All right, so that's it for Breath. Pretty good on Breath, especially for a 2014-15 game. You have three multi-balls. You have two side quests. You have five modes. You have a complex multiplier system for both Playfield and ShotX. There's a lot of ways to play it. The strategies are varied. and so I think it's very strong on breath to me. There's a lot of things to do, in other words. I think it could be stronger. We'll talk about that later, but I think it's pretty darn good. And for its time, it's one of the best, I'd say. Depth, I could be pretty fast here. This is depth meaning when you go far in the game, what do you get? And it's very, very good for its time. It has four wizard modes here. it has, if you play all five modes for example, 1, 2, 3 4 and 5 you get a wizard mode called Escape Terminus I mentioned before if you play the prison well, you get Siege if you get the multi-kills, you get Horde if you get 115 walkers, you get Last Man Standing most of those wizard modes are very hard to achieve the easiest is Horde, I would say you usually get it without realizing you got it but I like that there's a variety of wizard modes for a game like this I think that's impressive, and I think no game of its time has anything close to that in that way. Agreed. I find it innovative.
    149:15
    All right, clarity. Here's where it's not that great, I would say. When you get a multi-kill, it never tells you why. So I mentioned there are these 14 things, but it's hard to learn what you got to do it, other than showing you that chart I mentioned, right? I could show you that chart, but you're not going to memorize that chart. The game could give you some sort of hint as you go along. you're not going to know it right away, but something that tells you multi-kill, you know, it says multi-kill, but it doesn't say why you got it. It doesn't say anywhere, you know, as far as I know, why you got it. So just the thing to consider that it would be nice if that was a little clearer somehow.
    149:51
    Then the other thing I would say is there's a billboard light that's always on. This is the type of thing that would only drive me crazy. It's always on because it's always lit for something called a fish tank progression. I'm not even going to get into the fish tank, but that's a whole other thing that's confusing, this fish tank thing.
    150:08
    The real thing, two other things, maybe two or three other things to talk about in clarity here, Woodbury's skill shot. Here's where we get crazy. You've seen the screen before? This was explained to me years ago, and then I remembered it for a day, and I no longer know what's happening whenever I get this. Right. So, first of all, getting it is different on the pro versus the premium. I believe on the pro you have to shoot the right ramp three times and then it lights the woodberry shot on the premium you Just have to hit the drop target and get in there a bunch
    150:39
    But anyway, you're in there when you're in there. It's super duper confusing the basic premise is and I'm gonna say it quickly But don pay attention because I sure they going to change this in the latest code because of how confusing it is But ever you you decide which award which light you want Do you want light bit which is one Do you want this the third option which is if you notice it corresponds to a number. So if you highlight this one, it corresponds to number one. If you highlight that one, it corresponds to number three. If you highlight that one, number four. This one would be number two. And that corresponds to your four lights, one, two, three, four, around the skill shot. So let's say you go for one. If you're on one, it lights that right there, the first rollover. And your goal is to plunge just to that rollover and no more. If you lit two, which was here, then you would light this rollover and you would want to plunge to that rollover and then go backwards and no more. If you did three, you'd want to plunge to this light and no more. And if you did four, you'd want to plunge to that light and no more. But the reason I don't make sense... So the obvious answer is... Correct. You'd say it. Like, you only... You want a million, and the four shot is the only one that you can really fairly reliably do. Exactly. It's not a skill shot because you're always... As long as you understand what's going on here, you always should go to four, definitively. No question about it. Because it's the most reliable full plunge. And even then, sometimes you plunge and it doesn't even go anywhere. It just hits the pops and goes down. But maybe they'll fix that in the layout. But you plunge it, and it's going to go in here around 80% of the time. So why wouldn't you do that? It gets even more ridiculous of a skill shot because you see these awards here? You can actually change their value. Not only do you change the position of the flipper, which one you're going for, and the answer is always four, but let's say you press the right flipper a bunch and it gets to four. Keep on pressing the right flipper and it's going to cycle which of these four awards you will get if you get into that light over there. And that's one of the things, That's an additional thing that I found very confusing about this is how I'm cycling through it and how I get to, you know, because then I might end up with 100,000 on four. Right. Why would you want lesser points? That's also crazy. You know, like why would they have options to choose lesser points? So you're always going to want to keep on pressing the flippers until it matches this, number four and highest value, whatever it might be. And then you plunge and hopefully you get into it and maybe you don't. If you get into it, by the way, if you do it a few times, if you do it like three times, that's also a multi-kill, for example. But nobody's getting a multi-kill that way, but you can that way. And so that's the Woodbury skill set. It's super confusing. They have to make that better. I bet you they will. Do you think that Lyman just, like, it was on his to-do list and then, like, something came up that day? I believe this was there in version one and he just didn't fix it in version two. Yeah, just, like, too busy on to the next thing. Right. He didn't know that ten years later there would be an episode talking about it. It will still be the Woodbury thing. Right. It would still exist, you know, but that's where we're at.
    153:41
    ShotX, I think, could be better. We talked about the ShotX before, but one thing about it is it doesn't tell you what it's at unless you go to the info screen and trap up, and nobody's doing that. I'm sure it's going to be on the LCD, and they'll make it simpler that way, and we can get to that later. But now we get to the real, singular, confusing thing of The Walking Dead. Are you ready for it? I'm ready. Rachel, and that is the CDC mode.
    154:04
    All right. Let's take a deep breath. As is tradition on Pin Palace, Rachel, in every episode I do a deep dive, but for a certain section I do an especially deep dive for a few minutes, usually in this clarity section where I talk about something that's ridiculously unclear, and I try my best to explain it, and I get it right, but it's still unclear, and that is this section right now. I recognize that I don't do this with the intention of explaining it to most people. I do it to prove that it is unexplainable is my point, And this is the section where I encourage you to get out your pillow, if you haven't yet, doze off for 10 minutes or so. But for a select few of you, this is where you will learn how CDC works. And it's ironic, as I said, because the CDC is the most complicated mode in almost all of pinball, next to the least complicated mode, which is the barn. But in order to explain the CDC, I'm going to pull in Escher Lefkoff, one of the best players of all time, and someone who has done a very deep dive here, the level of dive that would impress anybody among the Pinball's listeners. And this is where, as he says, he does, quote, the thing. The thing is pinball speak for executing a strategy that is far more valuable than anything else one can do in the game. So shout out to him. This part all comes from his video he made. You can still find that on YouTube, on his channel, Escher Levkov. And he did the research. He gets the credit. So you hit the drop. And the drop's target gets the mode ready. and then you hit the CDC left ramp, and now you're in the CDC ramp mode. There are three phases, and this is, again, where you could stop paying attention, Rachel. Just go in other directions if you want, but feel free to try. I dare you to pay attention. I'm going to get it right, but it's going to be impossible. I can do it. I can do it. All right. Three phases of this mode. Once you start it, hit the drop, start the left ramp, you're in the mode. Phase one, build phase. You shoot the left ramp as many times as you can. The more you shoot it, the more the value builds. It builds up in this way I'm describing, but I won't talk about the value. I'll just say shoot the left ramp a bunch, and it builds up the value. It's also true that with every ramp shot you hit, it lights a completely other red arrow somewhere else in the play field. So you shoot the left ramp as much as you can, and then when you're ready, you shoot one of the red arrows to start phase two. So elsewhere, there will be red arrows. So left ramp a bunch of times. Now non-left ramp shots is phase two. So you feel like you've started the mode, and you've hit the left ramp a couple of times, and you feel like, well, I'm really starting to press my luck here, and I've got the ball in the trap. Correct. Time's running out. So I should go maybe try for whatever this red shot is. You got it. Exactly right. Okay. So now you shoot a red arrow, and you shoot – the more red arrows, the better. Here is also a phase where you start to collect value. if you the more red arrows you hit the more they're worth the value of the red arrows uh has to do with the phase one how many times you hit the left ramp so the point is press your luck shoot the left ramp a bunch and now red arrows are worth money so collect all your money on the red arrows that's the value that's the value that's it for phase two any questions on that no in phase two you don't want to hit the left ramp so phase one left ramp only phase two not left ramp. As soon as you then hit the left, so you've hit the left ramp a bunch, you hit a red arrow, now you're in phase two. As soon as you hit the left ramp, it ends phase two, and it starts phase three. So now we're in phase three of the mode. Any questions before I jump to phase three?
    157:34
    Are the red arrows, is that timed? They are not timed. The entire mode is timed, like 30 seconds or whatever, and you could add time, by the way, by hitting all drops targets down. People may not know that, But no, none of these shots are timed. The entire mode will end, but you have as much time within that mode to do any of these steps. Okay. So you could press your luck on phase one, phase two, and phase three. Phase one, build the left ramp as many times as you feel comfortable within the 30 seconds or so of the mode timer. Phase two, shoot as many red arrows as you'd like to collect all those points that you spawned through phase one. So I do have a question then. So on phase one, am I collecting those or I'm just building it? All you're doing is building it. It's worth, to minimize points, and nothing zero. It's just worth very little. But it's not worth, like, in this example where you're seeing the 750, 775. All I'm doing is, it's sort of like in Mandalorian where you feel like you're in the white shot thing. Correct. It does nothing. The ambush mode. Ambush, yes. You're doing nothing by hitting those white shots. So this is the ambush mode of Walking Dead. Correct. Correct. You're building up, and phase one is building up left ramp shots. Doesn't get many points, just builds up. Phase two, collect those points. You could do pretty well in the mode if you collect those points. Then phase three, hit the left ramp. And once you hit the left ramp, after you've done phase two, however many red shots you want, then it stops the red arrows, the red arrows go away, and then you have to hit the left ramp one more time to finish it. And that final left ramp is the mega collect phase. So phase two was a collect phase. You hit the red arrows and that collects you. But in phase three, that's the mega collect phase, where it's worth the total value of all the red arrows you made.
    159:29
    So phase one, build on value on red arrows. Phase two, get red arrows. Gets you points. Real points. And on the red arrows, they are like a bunch of fish. There should be four maximum, because one of them is the CDC, and the others are the four major shots, the barn shot, the riot shot, the tunnel arena. And once you hit them, do they disappear? Correct. Okay. So you have to hit them all, and then they would relight. Correct. Okay. That is correct. And so then, phase three, you shoot the left ramp to start phase three, and then you shoot the left ramp again to end the mode. With that final shot as the biggest value shot of the mode, it will equal the total value of all the red arrows you made in phase two. And that is VDC mode. How are we so far? So now I see why I want to have all of these walker multipliers because phase three is a two-shot phase, and it's the same shot. The first one doesn't really matter that much, but the second one matters like a metric ton. Correct. So imagine a scenario where you've played a lot, built up your walkers exactly as you're saying. You've played CDC. You've hit the left ramp once. It goes through the in-lane. Move the in-lane multiplier to the other side, to the left in-lane. Let it go through. Well, no, sorry. Sorry, I messed that up. Hit the left ramp to start phase three. Go through the in-lane multiplier on the right in-lane, and we'll mess that up, and then hit the left ramp again. And if you do that, that would be your mega collect multiplied shot. And that is why the CDC is the most valuable shot in Walking Dead when played correctly. Wow, that is, that is, now I'm excited to try it. Well, what I thought I could do is first show you a little even more that Escher takes, everything I said is accurate, but it is also true, this is where Lyman makes explosive scoring, the pacing of the scoring, where when you play modes later on, and you play new modes, the mode you've already played also helps you increase the value of the mode you're playing now. I know that sounds confusing, so let's say you played Barn already, or let's say you played, yeah, let's say you've already played Barn, for example, and now you're on a completely other mode. In this game, if you're started that new mode, you're in Riot, you're in the Riot mode, Shooting barn adds value to the mode that you're on. So prior modes make future modes more valuable.
    162:02
    You don't have to know the number. You just have to know. Play CDC the way I said. But let's say you played barn first and then played CDC the way I said. You would make even more points, in other words. And that's because it would start your base value at a higher number or the increment would be major? How it works is. Unfortunately, neither. It allows you to build up the mode even more if you make the shot on the mode that you've already played. So let's say you've played Barn, and now you're in CDC. You could shoot Barn repeatedly. Remember I said, like, oh, start by hitting the left ramp on CDC in Phase 1? What if I told you there's a Phase 0 of CDC now? In Phase 0, imagine you've played Barn already, and now you're on CDC. Forget about Phase 1, which was hit the left ramp as many times as you can. first hit the barn shot as many times as you can, because that will increase the value of the CDC shot that then you'll hit to build up the value of phase two, which builds up the value of phase three. So let's say that I hit that barn shot a bunch of times before I started CDC, or have I already started CDC? You have to start CDC, left ramp, so drops, then left ramp, then don't start phase one. Yeah, this is the high level billion point strat that we're getting into now. Now, everything I said about CDC is true, phase one, phase two, phase three. The problem and the confusion comes, especially, because there's a phase zero now. Phase zero is only available to you if you've already played another mode and you take advantage of phase zero by starting CDC, but then shooting the left orbit of barn to build up before you even start phase one. Will there be anything lit that would indicate this is going to be a value? Square on barn. But it doesn't do... But that indicates you've played it already. So really, this is something that you kind of just... Deep. No. I mean, obviously, to even be at this point, you need to know what's up, but... Right. So you'll just need to remember this. So listen, pen pals. Yes.
    164:05
    Some things to remember. Okay. I got it, though. I feel like I could explain this to somebody. Yeah, now we're going to get even more deep Escher stuff here. This is all from Escher, by the way. I don't want to take any credit here. I understand it, but I don't want to take credit. So in CDC, you want to start, if you're getting the billion-point strat, you want to play barn first. Then as soon as you start the left ramp in CDC, don't shoot another left ramp because as soon as you do, it starts to spawn red arrows. And then if you were to then hit the barn shot, you would end phase one, the build phase, and you would go on to phase two, and that's not how you get the billion-point strat. So the order has to be play barn, then play CDC, then shoot the left orbit as many times as you can, then shoot the left ramp as many times as you can, then that spawns red arrows, get the red arrows, then go to the left ramp again, shot multiplier, mega collect.
    165:03
    And the thing that really should be said about all this is you have to be a player that can aim for the left orbit and not hit the left ramp. So true. So true. And if you do... And that's where the big problem is. If you do all of that, I'm not even going to go through the rest of this. And I'll just say, I'll show you what he does. He then goes through a mathematical formula. Actually, this is from his dad, Adam Lefkoff. The mathematical formula that can be programmed, if you're curious, of... All right, so how many left orbits versus how many left ramps should you hit for maximal craziness value, right? And so there's a formula about that. Or you can go to the spreadsheet he made, which is this many barn shots, followed by this many ramp shots. So this is your phase zero. This is your phase one. So, for example, what he decided is that balancing how much time is in the mode versus the shots you have to make, the right answer is the red boxes. For example, what he would advocate for is make three barn shots, then three left ramp shots, and that gets you the best overall value given the time you have left in the mode. and how well he plays to make those shots.
    166:17
    Crazy, right? Wow. Yes. But with all of that, this is, for example, him making a singular shot worth 384 million points, you know, for example, off of that mega collect. But it can get up much higher. You can get it to a billion if you needed to.
    166:33
    Wow. It gets pretty nutty, in other words. Yeah. So this is a strategy for the ZMAX, the Eschers, the people who can reliably hit shot after shot after shot after shot. Right. It's why I did not cover it in my strategy section because it is not a viable strategy for people. Most 99% of people who are watching this. Are mortals.
    166:55
    I'm only covering it here in the clarity section because it's so unclear is what I'm saying. I would not tell you that this is a strategy. But I will say, having said all of that, do you know about the Chinese barefoot doctors, Rachel, as an aside?
    167:12
    Things I didn't think I'd hear today. I know about Chinese foot binding. Does that count? It doesn't. No, no. Well, can I tell a quick aside of my Chinese barefoot doctor story? I need to hear it. As you know, Rachel, I'm no fan of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong. Sorry to all of you Mao heads out there, you know. But there is an interesting program he pushed for during the Cultural Revolution that is worth considering here. And you'll see where I'm going in a moment, I promise. I can't wait. Rachel. So now he wanted to promote better health care in rural areas, to his credit, but not a good person, just saying. So his plan was to create an army of rural doctors. And it had to be a quick education to create them, right? Like none of the stuff we do in America, four years of high school, four years of college, four years of medical school, five years of residency or whatever, that wasn't going to work. So the barefoot doctors, they only graduated from high school, and then they got three to six months of training. That was it, at a hospital, and that was it. So in 1968, he had this barefoot doctors program that became integrated into national policy. Officially, it was called, like, RCMS, the Rural Cooperative Medical Systems. But really, the barefoot doctor title stuck. That's not my title. That's just what they called it because a lot of the practitioners were from southern farmers, and they would often work in the rice paddies, and you did that barefoot. and then they'd go off and work as doctors. So they called them the barefoot doctors. It wasn't about that they were treating people's feet. They themselves were barefoot. And with that short training, they never learned the why. They just learned the what. If you see a fever and cough, you give this. If you check blood pressure and the number is X, then you do that. And sometimes that's good enough. And so, for example, this, again, they never knew why it worked. They just copied algorithms and said, okay, I'm going to do this when this happens. and they changed life expectancy dramatically in China, actually. It went from 35 to 68 years. Infant mortality went down from like 200 deaths per 1,000 live births to 34. It just really dropped, just a massive success in health care that way. Somebody who's watching this will say there's a lot of cons, and I won't disagree with you, by the way, about those cons, but this is not a full three-hour podcast about the Chinese barefoot doctors. The reason I'm pointing this out is to say, back to pinball, if you want to try the CDC strap in the barefoot doctor approach without me having explained anything whatsoever, here's what you do you shoot the drops one time then you shoot the barn in the left orbit that ends, then you shoot the drops again two times, you start the CDC you shoot the left orbit three times, you shoot the left ramp five times, then you shoot all red arrows but avoid the left ramp and riot by the way will typically get you 2x playfield while you're doing this, then you shoot the left ramp You roll over the inlane X, you shoot the left ramp again, and then you get your billion points. That's my barefoot doctor approach. So this is what people need to screen grab just to experiment with trying to do this insane strategy that is not for mere mortals. Right. You could even take off the glass and just see what would happen if you did this, and you'll get the idea. So this is the secret X number of shots, and it destroys the entire game that way. But it's so hard to do, so it should be worth that much. So I have no problem with that.
    170:24
    And so that is everything in the clarity section. We're really rolling along here, Rachel. Do you feel it rolling along?
    170:31
    Yes. Okay. All right. Next section. And hopefully I think the rest of these will be a lot shorter because we've covered so much already. Risk and reward. A-plus here. Do you push your luck with the shot multiplier? where it's interesting because the 2017 Star Wars often gets so much hate for its maximum 40x shot multipliers. There's 40x, and people joke, like, how ridiculous is that? And I know that's a broad generalization. I know there are lots of players that love the 40x Star Wars multipliers. Maybe by lots of players I mean a minority of players. But it's still a lot of players if you put them into, like, a medium-sized Waffle House, you know? But generally, most players are like, that's ridiculous, you know, that way on that Star Wars. Aren't all Waffle Houses the same size? I guess you might be right. It would get crowded in that Waffle House, though, if you put all the players in the entire world that love the 40X multiplier rule. I think it would get crowded in there, but otherwise, not many people. And I think it's interesting that a lot of tournament-focused players or scoring-focused players can love Walking Dead, which has an unlimited shot multiplier system, and not love the 40X system on Star Wars, on one of them, I'd say. And I'll give you three big reasons why I think that is, and it goes for coding rules here that I would take heed on, is that number one is that in Star Wars, you have to move your hands off of the flippers a lot. You have to press the button and move it over and red and green arrows, and it causes a bad type of anxiety. like stress in a bad way that makes you just not want to deal with that. It feels like you're doing too much that's not playing pinball. Exactly. It feels like you're doing too much that's not playing pinball. This game, the entire time your fingers are on the button, and you get to decide when to use the shot X multiplier. In Star Wars, people get confused. The red, if you have to press the button, that helps you move the arrows, but then you have to press it again to lock it in and make it green. There was a pinball expo recently, and LaserLos was commenting on it, and he was laughing at what he called the Red X players. The Red X players are like, you have the Red X, and you forgot to lock it in with the action button, and now your shot multiplier is 1X. It's nothing. And it's only when you lock it in can it be anywhere from 2 to 40X.
    172:53
    So like Red Xers versus Walking Dead, it's just go through the in lane and then hit a shot. That's it. That's number one. Number two is in Star Wars, you're always in shot multiplier situations, whereas in Walking Dead, you build it up, You use it singular time, and that's it. So in Star Wars, you're wrong if you're not always thinking about it in Star Wars. If you want to win at Star Wars in a league night, somebody knows these multipliers, somebody doesn't. You're screwed. Whereas in Walking Dead, there's other things going on in the game, you know, besides that one singular thing. So right now, he's in 1X in Star Wars, or he or she. If you just press the button and they were green, suddenly those shots would be 2X, even if you didn't do anything else. It doesn't seem well integrated into the game. No, it's poorly integrated. It's like an extra thing that's on top of pinball. It's like, okay, you're playing a pinball machine, but then now you're also playing a shot multiplier move around, enable, disable game. Right, exactly right. And then also in Walking Dead, even though the shot multipliers theoretically don't have a ceiling, practically they do. 99% of games don't get to 40x shot multiplier in Walking Dead. You would be winning if you got there anyway, if you're playing that long. They're getting to 3, 4, 5x, you know, practically speaking, and then you use them. Whereas in Star Wars, like, you really could be consistently in 20x multipliers and, like, have to keep it going. And some people are into that. Most people aren't, in my opinion. And I was thinking about this level of detail because there was a request from a reviewer in our Discord for the next Pinball Science Corner. Rachel as you know a very important section of our exactly it came with a whole dance it was a whole thing it's a real shame but and to cover shot and playful multipliers and I was thinking about that but I was recognizing that it's a difficult story to tell because Walking Dead has higher multipliers theoretically than Star Wars does but Star Wars is the worst is the bad multiplier game and Walking Dead is a great one in my opinion at least it's a subjective opinion it's the right one but it's a subjective opinion and so anyway it's going to be a difficult story to tell but I'll think about that as we go along anyway that's my risk and reward which is A plus on Walking Dead yeah well I think that the difference between Walking Dead and Star Wars is that your multipliers seem commensurate with the way that you're otherwise performing in the game whereas Star Wars that multiplier 40 seems like an arbitrary number to begin with but you could get up to 40x and be having a total shit game so like it just doesn't seem it doesn't seem to go along with the game in any way, in the way that you play it, the way that you achieve it, the way that you use it, totally out of bounds in all three of those. Whereas in Walking Dead, it is well integrated, and it's something that can be used for maximum strategy, like what I've just learned about CDC. But it's also something that Joe Blow can use whenever you're just like, oh, cool, I have a multiplier. Now I got, like, an extra million points, and that was cool. Exactly right. risk and reward he's a master of it Lyman so a plus there next criteria fair and balanced the layout you could argue was unfair we talked about that top feeds all that sort of thing not talking about the layout the code is very fair and balanced what I mean there is there's nothing you do that ruins another player's game so it's not like Pirates of the Caribbean or Godfather from JJP no issue there could it or should it have a ball save when it's coming out of the pops I know they're going to add one I mean I'm pretty sure they're going to add one right on the next game, and I guess that's a good idea. But on the other hand, you could argue the game's supposed to be brutal, so some magnetism there. Balanced, is the scoring so lopsided that it makes you ignore timeout modes? Absolutely not here. It's like Ambush you mentioned in Mandalorian. People just trap up the flipper, and you can see this on that last Pindalexo. People just trap up the flipper and they don't play the mode because it's a badly designed mode. Here, everything scores you points. Barn scores you points if you play that 30 million. Riot can score you more. CDC, if you're really going high risk and reward, super balanced. In other words, you really claw your way for every million points in the game. I mentioned the skill shot matters, you know, even in this game. You know, that way everything matters in this game, in a tough playing game like this.
    177:06
    Another thing for balanced I look at is it's so lopsided that you always make the same shot over and over and over again. Like middle lorry and, you know, just hitting the center shot over and over and over again to get the multi-ball and then another multi-ball. And like, no, there's a lot of viable different strategies here. You're hitting the drops. You're hitting those shots. You're hitting the arena. It's all over the place.
    177:27
    And the game doesn't reward you for nothing. It's not like it gives you a multiball after two shots. You have to earn everything you do in the game. So I'd say it's, like, super balanced that way. What do you say to that? I think so, and I think you get greater dopamine release whenever you have earned the multiball versus when it just is thrown at you. So I think that's one reason why people who know how to play this game and can play this game love this game.
    177:56
    100%. 100%. I feel the same. Innovation. Next one category. So 2014 was when this game first came out, and 2015 was when Lyman took it over. And this is really the dawn of the side quests. There had been a bit of things before that. Metallica came out a year before, by the way. and that was really the dawn of the side quest with the crank it up and you get all these items and that lights crank it up for you for getting enough crosses and chairs and caulkins and snakes. But this came out soon afterwards and number one, it included inserts that let you know near your flippers to really message to you that you needed zombie kills and those zombie kills matters. And I'm calling them zombies. They're supposed to call walkers in the show or whatever. I don't care. Anyway, but zombie kills. And it also had the innovation of having two side quests or missions. It had the zombie kills and it had the multi-kills for the horde. And so some great innovation there to balance out kind of a set of what is now codified as pinball rules, like these M's, you know. I also think it was the first boom button, which we talked about earlier, the walker bombs. It had a controllable shot multiplier we talked about where it moved from the end lanes and you could decide when to use it. I don't know if another game had done it before like that. I don't think so. It was used in later games like Iron Maiden, for example, has a playfield multiplier that you choose to use on the inlanes. You know, similarly, I know other games have used that too.
    179:19
    It was the first walking dead pin with all LED lighting from Stern. It was the first pin from Stern that did that. It even, it's such a scoring, it's such a game for people who care about tournament balancing scoring. For example, we were talking about that X shot, that shot multiplier. it goes out of its way to give you a high champion for the best X shot that you made, for example. That was innovative. Normally games would tell you grand champion. Maybe it would tell you how well you did in a mode. But here it tells you nine things about it. It goes like, or it says, okay, here's your X champion. Here's how much value it was. Here's how high you got that value up to based on a 5X shot. And here's what made it valuable. you got a barn walker worth 62 million and a combo worth that much all in one all of this is in a singular shot in other words so it just gives you a lot of information for some people who like achievements and are focused on that and are not about the journey of a game but are more about these sort of achievements it gave you so much inside information that i find it worth calling out with how innovative that is what do you agree uh agreed i would also add that it was innovative or at least daring to remove almost all of the color.
    180:39
    I remember that when it came out, people had very strong opinions about it. And I think that it was with intent. You know, there's a nod to the comic book there, Black and White Comics, even though we're talking about the show, that we didn't. We've only seen, really, we saw it again in Munsters, but this was like a notable thing of its time. And as you said, this was the first game that was fully released all LEDs by Stern. Metallica started off with incandescent, then you could get the Metallica LED version. But this one, like, ooh, all LEDs, which does affect your lighting and the way that the play field is going to look while you're playing it. Yep, exactly right.
    181:28
    So innovation. That's it for innovation. I think there's a lot of it in this game. Hopefully I've given a few examples. Any other comments or questions about innovation?
    181:37
    No. Okay. We're on to our ninth out of tenth criteria, which is pacing, or what I sometimes call I was so close. The crossbow. We can call that innovation that wasn't quite, they tried. It was a miss. The crossbow was a miss. And also the crossbow misses a lot. Yeah, but the effort was there to try something where on the apron you have another tool at your disposal on the apron. Yep, yep, absolutely. Swing and a miss. Swing and a miss there.
    182:12
    And maybe they'll fix that in the next one. Pacing, you could kind of think about it in two ways. One way is pacing of the journey, and one way is pacing of the score. When I mean journey, when you're playing King Kong, you're always close to something. A treasure hunt, a New York City event, a Deadeye skill shot, a T-Rex battle,
    182:32
    an island treasure, a King Kong multiball, a Pit multiball. You're always close to something in that game over and over and over again, an event of some kind. Walking Dead is not quite that way. You're not really close to much in that sense. You're close to death. You're close to death always. But what it does have in pacing, because it's not really that kind of game of a journey, you don't feel the journey as you're going through that with a bunch of distinct events. It's not designed to be that, but it really gets pacing and the scoring really well. The scoring doesn't feel like wood chopping. For that feeling of wood chopping, to avoid that, you need to have exponential scoring in some way the more you play. I said it earlier, like five minutes, you know, you get this many million, but let's say five minutes you get 10 million, but 10 minutes you get 50 million, you know, for example, that it starts to just rise really quickly. And there's a lot of stuff you have to do to get there, but you can't just trap up the ball and wait for 20 minutes, I mean, but on average, and often without realizing why, as you play longer, your score will exponentially rise in Walking Dead, so you don't feel like you're wood chopping to get that great score. Think about Venom, for example. In Venom, you get to the mayhem multiball with the carnage multiball. You do the thing, you execute, you get 300 million points, and then you're going to play another 10 minutes, and you're going to get like 3 million points. You know, that's a pacing that I have an issue with, personally. Some people like Venom. They're wrong, also, but there are people out there, you know. I know, like, everything I'm saying is a broad generalization. You know, I keep that in mind. But I mean to say, like, there's a problem with pacing in that game and scoring, if you buy what I'm saying, that pacing like this matters. And in Walking Dead, it's just exponential scoring rise. And there's so many reasons why that is. I mentioned before the multi-kills, that it gives you two walker kills instead of one, so it adds to your shot X multiplier that much faster, for example. But I'll give you another thing for that, is that the yellow circles, when you hit them, if you get multi-kills, will give you 5% of your total mode points scored up until that point. And what that means is, as you play more modes and you hit those yellow shots, they suddenly become worth 10 million, 20 million, 40 million points if you've played really well in your modes to that point. Like, if you had a huge CDC mode, all you have to do is hit yellow shots after that, and you're going to be racking up points just from that. And it's a little complicated, but the point is, there are all these features like that, without getting into any more nuance of it than that, where making one shot adds much more value later on in the game if you've survived long enough against the zombie horde. So that's my pacing, and I give it an A-plus there on the scoring side of pacing, which is all good. Last category to talk about is bugs, and it doesn't really have them, and I always mention this category. It ends somewhat anticlimactically because, you know, bugs matter, and a lot of scoring games don't. This one doesn't. It operates perfectly in an arcade without any issues. I assume you agree, at least the pro. Agreed, yes. And so even though it's sort of boring to say, it's never a small feat for a programmer to accomplish a zero-bug situation like that. And many other companies have tried and failed. I think you could talk about it in terms of like a physical, like what we talked about about how sometimes when the ball comes out of the pot on a particular copy, it may go straight down the middle. So that's sort of a physical bug of game design, I would say, but that's also something that the game owner can ameliorate. True.
    185:54
    And that is it for the fourth but not final section, Rachel. Are you ready? It won't be that long, I promise, but the last section, if you're ready, is to then finally predict what are they going to do in the next game. We've gone through all the rules, I think, at this point. I don't think there's anything left unturned, any stone there. But what are they going to do in the next game? Slash, what do I want them to do that I don't think they are going to do? I should say that to you. Okay. Are you ready for that? And you can obviously chime in, too, here. What might Stern do in the remaster? First, let's talk about the art. What they're going to do is they're going to make the display DMD scenes converted into LCD. There is really three options, as far as I can imagine, Stern had three options here on the art. they could have gone on the TV show with clips they could have gone away from the TV show with the comic book and the TV show was based on a comic book or this third option where they just reuse the DMV scenes and animate them and maybe add some new scenes through animations but it's not from the comic, it's not from the show it sort of is from the show scenes are from the show but it's not like actual clips from the show and so that's what they're going to go with and the art I think on Playfield for example I think they'd probably go for like a cartoonized TV show. If you think about like the Star Wars comic edition from 2017 Richie game where they made, it's still Luke, it's still, you know, Leia and Harrison Ford and all of that, but they just make it look a bit more like a cartoon. My personal preference, only preference, is that it's a comic style, which they won't do. So that's that. But I'll pause there. What do you say, Rachel? What do you think they should do or will do? I'm not sure about changing the play field art at all. I'm not sure if this, I guess we might see that.
    187:42
    But I think that the right move is on the DMD or on the LCD to keep it as generic as possible. I don't think that you want clips from the show because the show, as people have stated, the show has been done for a long time. No cultural relevance anymore. I don't feel that the specifics of the show, there are some things that people remember that are notable, but I think that we're getting into new generations of players that didn't watch the show and aren't tied to that, and I don't think that those will have the payoff that they're intended to. I think where this game's strength is, and we've talked about it several times on this episode, it's just that it's a generic zombie-killing game with Walking Dead as a backdrop. So I think that you want to keep it somewhat generic with the zombies and just reanimate or animate, make it real cool and gory and gross what they already have on the display. Let's just gross it up. Totally agree there. I wouldn't want the TV show. We did take a poll for what it's worth in our Discord, and I'll show the results of that. No, not yet. I will show it here. Not that. I'll get to that. But most people did end up preferring the comic style with tie for TV show versus original game reanimated into the LCD. But we'll see how it ends up turning out. The reason I'm so confident that this is the case here is back to the teaser. So in the teaser, it shows you this animation where the extra ball shoots through this guy's head, you know, as you'll see, like, right there. And then the reason I'm showing it is courtesy of Ray Day from many years ago here. And just he's playing it. That's the same as the extra ball animation in the original game.
    189:39
    And so you just line it up. And, by the way, shout out to our regular listener, Gutter Ghoul, for pointing that out. And I know it's not loading here, but you get the idea. There it is. And I think it's important to keep this color palette, this very limited color palette. And I think if you're going to redo any of the art, I don't think you want to go black and white. I think you want to do black, white, kind of some browns and grays with yellow and red. Yellow and red are visceral colors. We are biologically attracted to these sorts of colors because the nature, if you see this, this means like food, death, Just the very strong, very small part of your brain is attracted to these, and I think that's what this game is geared towards. Right. It's sort of gross in the right way. Yes. Yep. I agree. And so that's our art thing and prediction there. Anything else you want to say on the art, Rachel? Nope. Okay. Hardware. What might Stern do in the remaster? So they're going to improve the magnet design on the prison and the well walker. Maybe they'll set it up so it doesn't throw it down the center for you, more likely. I think that will improve the crossbow reliability and the accuracy. Prison Door always often had a problem with registration with the zombie head in there. I don't know if you've had that problem, Rachel. I have not. Yeah, I don't think it's not at the abat. So it's not at the abat. I've experienced it elsewhere. Sometimes the Bicycle Girl ramp isn't so smooth on the premium, I mean, because it lifts up on that ramp and it can cause like an edge that makes it hard to hit the ramp reliably. I think they could fix the skill shot plunge so that it more likely goes up into the top lanes. That's not easy to do, but I bet they're going to do that. I bet they're going to have a reliable feed from the pop area in the way that you described earlier. I'll tell you my wishes, what I don't think they're going to do, but I want them to do. One would be a walker counter on it. Think about TNA, Rick and Morty. So right now, Walking Dead has all these inserts with all these numbers. I want something like this or something like this, a walker counter. that tells me it matters, and I don't have to do math to add it up.
    191:45
    And you could use that counter for so many things. You know, you could use it for walker kills, for example. But you could also flash it every time you get walker kills and get a shot multiplier. It could tell you very quickly what your shot multiplier is at, for example. It could tell you how many shots left are on the well walker for multi-ball every time you hit the well walker, and it could flash a number on it. So you could use it so much. I think Stern should lovingly borrow some ideas from the competition. You know, when JVP went to LCDs with Wizard of Oz, Stern followed with Aerosmith and Batman 66, and Spooky has done this counter now in TNA. It's done in Rick and Morty. I think it's a really useful idea for games, especially where there's a counter going on. So that's my wish. That won't be done, I think. But what do you say to that? I also do not think it will be done. And I think it's a good idea because it very quickly will say, like, oh, I have, you know, 22 walkers and not adding up how many walkers I have. Right. And so with that, let's get to the software to end this.
    192:49
    And there's a lot there. I'm going to tell you what I think they're going to do, and then I'm going to tell you what I want them to do. So they're going to probably put a magnet ball save from the prison when the magnet catches it and it shoots straight down the middle, and they're probably going to code an outlane ball save. So, for example, they did that on a Metallica. The original Metallica didn't have that. The new Metallica does have that. If you hit the inline drop targets on the grave marker, it gives you an outland ball save. And I figure they're going to do the same for Walking Dead. Probably thematically you might do it with the first aid drops when it's lit on first aid because first aid is ball save. But you're already using those drops for the walker bombs, so I don't know. So you might do it on the Woodbury skill shot. Maybe they're going to redo the Woodbury skill shot, which also has a right spinner on the premium. And so you might do a number of spins or Woodbury skill shot. But something like in Iron Maiden where the left lower spinner gets you a revive, I bet they're going to do something. This is what I really think they're going to do. Either the Woodbury skill shot or right spinner gets you an outlying ball save. That's my prediction. What do you say to that? I think that would be amazing. I think that like on Metallica Remastered, whenever the snake would spit the ball straight down the middle, that still was happening with the new code from Metallica Remastered. And we were fortunate enough to have some friends in the department that handles those sorts of things there and were able to request, hey, could you please put in a snake ball save? So I think that it's going to be possible that even that, as far as I know, is the reason that that ball save exists now.
    194:25
    I think maybe our friends will also be listening now. and I'm sure that they are already well aware of the importance of some of those ball saves.
    194:38
    Depending on how you feel about the brutality, whether you're pro or con brutality in this, maybe code that in for us. Yeah, I think the general, by and large, it seems that the market wants a less brutal game. So I think that's where they're going. I think people don't want to feel like they suck at pinball, which I get. I sometimes like to feel like I suck at pinball. So I like the brutality. But this is where they're going. I don't think there's a question about it. So I think this is where they're going. And I think on average this is what most people want. So I get it. Nothing wrong there. And I would love to see something like that on Woodbury, where you have a choice of points or features like an outlay and ball take, so that you're making a real decision. Right. I bet that's exactly what they'll do.
    195:24
    Multi-kill perks, what I mean there is there will be six weapons, and right now there's no meaning to getting one weapon over the other, the crossbow versus the gun versus, I mean, the crowbar or whatever it is. And I bet you they're going to add some sort of perk to each multi-kill.
    195:40
    I thought in my head, I thought, get the shot in the woodberry, maybe they'll turn it into a video mode. I wondered that, actually, to redo it. I'm like a 20% confidence on that one, but I'm throwing it out there as something that I do. Again, not saying it's something I necessarily want or don't want, But I think that's, I'm just putting the bets out there so you can see how wrong I am in like four days. In other words, that's the purpose of this. So, you know, it's more fun that way, I think. I didn't get into the whole fish tank thing, which is like hit the right ramp three times. But they're going to do more things with the fish tanks. And now let me get into my wishes, what I want them to do on this game to close out this podcast.
    196:18
    One, a small point. Well, Walker strobing values, the 55,000 points. I want them to matter. And I think they'll do that, by the way. They're going to redo the Woodbury skill shot. I want that, and I think they're going to do that. But here's what I really want, and I don't know that they're going to do. Right now, you have to get 115 walker kills to get to last man standing. And the number before 115 doesn't really matter along the way. And I think they're going to program more mini wizard modes. I want them to, and I probably think they will. I'm like 70% confidence on this, where they're going to have a mini wizard mode when you get to 25 or 50 or 75 walkers. I feel like there's a few of you still standing. Correct. Some are still standing. It's not the full Elton John, but it's like 25% Elton John. Still standing. Now, and also if they added the counter, which they won't, then it would make that much more involved too. You'd feel it like when you're at 25. It could flash when you're at 25 or 50 or 75. So I don't think that's going to happen. I think that is going to happen. Maybe not those numbers, by the way. They might do like 35 and 75. We'll see about that. That's my bet of what they're going to do. 35 and 75, you heard it here first. Okay. But I would say like 25, 50, 75. And then a mini wizard mode for playing all three multiballs. They did that in Metallica as the new code where you're playing all four multiballs, and that gets you to Black End, I believe. And so here I expect the same thing where you're playing all three Bloodbath and so forth, and you get to mini wizard mode. That would be nice. I don't know if they're going to do it. I think they should.
    197:45
    Siege is this wizard mode for prison. I would add wizard modes for going far in the other multiballs, doing well in Bloodbath, doing well in Wallwalker.
    197:53
    Something I know they're not going to do, but I'm going to put it here anyway, is let's say you play through the levels. The next time you play the levels, they're different, entirely new. You could play two different barns, and it's a different experience the second time you play it with its own mini-wizard mode after those level twos. If you're going to give them a lot of more ball saves, if you're going to make this a longer player and less mean, then you also have to extend the code more, and that's why I'm adding these things. you don't have to do, I'm not saying the original Walking Dead is missing these things necessarily but what I'm saying is as you commensurate with making the code, the game more playable, which I bet they're going to do I also think you need to start adding things because suddenly that's you know, there's a balance there final thing, shout out to Mark Pearson our local tech and other things he does at Electric Bat and he had a suggestion for Double Tap which is actually from the zombie movie zombie land, different property, but imagine you get a crossbow during a multiball, you shoot it in the left ramp, and you follow it with another ball trapped in the right flipper, also up the left ramp. That's your double kill, double tap award, and something happens like that, like a big hidden super jackpot or something like that. So those are my full coverage of what I think Speran will do in The Walking Dead. So we can go back and check in just a few days for those of you who got to this three-hour podcast and decided, was I right or not? And with that, I will close. Rachel, what say you? Well, I think also that this is not unlike any other Stern release. I think we're going to see some amount of code whenever it's released, and then as people play it and there's some feedback, then we're going to see more and more and more build on it. So I think that we're going to see that you're right about very many things off the bat. We might find that you become more right or less right as time goes on and we get to see a little bit more of the game as the code develops in the ensuing weeks and months.
    199:59
    Awesome. I sure appreciate you teaching me so many new things about Walking Dead that I did not know before. This game, you know, I've been playing it since it came out, and it's just one of those games where I kind of will focus on, like, Well Walker or doing a few things, and then accidentally, you know, I'll start, like, a mode and then kind of get into that, but not with the intention that I'm going to have now, thanks to my pin pal, Serge. Well, thank you very much, Rachel. It's been a pleasure having you on. You are more than just a substitute for Kale. You are often better, and we love Kale. we love Cale very much and hope that he feels better in the next time that he does not turn into a walking dead himself yes I especially maybe with that I will close by saying does that make sense and you know what Scott Avery I believe it does make sense fantastic closer phenomenal alright bye everyone
    201:07
    See you later. Pass out.