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Episode 33 - Fun Times

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 25m·held·Apr 24, 2017
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Spooky to manufacture Total Annihilation; Skit B's bankruptcy hearing reveals alleged misappropriation of company funds for house purchase.

Summary

Eclectic Gamers podcast episode covering pinball and video game updates. Major news: Spooky Pinball will manufacture Total Annihilation in unlimited batches of 50 units with no production cap; pricing expected $5,000-$6,000. Also covers legal proceedings in the Skit B's/Predator Pinball bankruptcy case, where trustee presented evidence that company funds allegedly purchased Amanda Kulik's house, leading to a judge's order preventing its sale.

Key Claims

  • Spooky Pinball will manufacture Total Annihilation with no production limit, making batches of 50 units

    high confidence · Official Spooky Pinball announcement discussed by hosts; described as confirmed news

  • Total Annihilation is expected to price between $5,000-$6,000

    medium confidence · Host speculation based on Spooky's typical pricing and bill of materials; not officially announced

  • Paper trail shows Predator Pinball company funds were used to purchase Amanda Kulik's house

    high confidence · Trustee presented documentation in recorded bankruptcy hearing; amount matched withdrawal from Skit B bank account and PayPal transfer

  • Amanda Kulik's name was removed from house title the day of signing, after Kevin's name was initially on it

    high confidence · Documentation presented in bankruptcy hearing showing title transfer timing

  • A judge issued an order preventing Amanda Kulik's house from being sold

    high confidence · Stated as outcome of bankruptcy hearing by trustee

  • Amanda Kulik did not appear at the bankruptcy hearing

    high confidence · Hosts note hearing was recorded and available on SoundCloud; Amanda's absence noted

  • Amanda Kulik's lawyer quit the case during proceedings

    high confidence · Trustee informed of lawyer departure; departure conveyed in 'abrupt' or 'blunt' manner

  • P3 Heads Up game features online internet-enabled head-to-head play without requiring physical machine linking

    high confidence · Correction from Pinside listener; hosts confirm this clarifies previous misunderstanding about machine linking requirement

Notable Quotes

  • “I have to admit, I did like the Puddles pity party version of Pinball Wizard to Folsom Prison Blues.”

    Dennis @ intro — Casual reference to pinball culture and Puddles Pity Party content creator

  • “Does anybody want to buy a kidney? I got two. I don't need them both. So send me an email if you need a kidney and have, I don't know, like $100,000.”

    Dennis @ Total Annihilation pricing discussion — Humorous exaggeration of excitement about Total Annihilation manufacturing, reflecting extreme enthusiasm for the game

  • “If it's under 5, I'll consider getting one. But if it's over 5, I won't. Because that's my hard cap for even considering.”

    Dennis @ Total Annihilation pricing discussion — Clear statement of purchasing threshold; demonstrates price sensitivity in market

  • “It was my favorite game of DbF. It was such a good game. I could have played that game all weekend and been happy.”

    Tony @ Total Annihilation discussion — Indicates personal play experience and strong positive reception of game at recent event

  • “I like single level playfields it's part of the charm that Firepower has that I really enjoy”

    Dennis @ Total Annihilation discussion — Indicates collector preference for specific playfield design philosophy

  • “The trustee indicated... the way he was informed of her quitting the case was in a manner that... was let's say at least blunt... she quit and at least conveyed some information in a way that was kind of abrupt possibly rude.”

    Tony @ Skit B's hearing discussion — Describes unprofessional manner of Amanda Kulik's lawyer withdrawal from case

  • “The amount of money put down on the house for the mortgage was the same amount of money that was taken out of the Skitby bank account.”

    Tony @ Skit B's hearing discussion — Key evidence of alleged misappropriation presented by trustee

  • “The judge went ahead and he, I guess, put out an order or was getting ready to put out an order to arrange for the house to be unable to be sold.”

Entities

Spooky PinballcompanyTotal AnnihilationgameP-RockproductKevin KulikpersonAmanda KulikpersonPredator PinballgameSkit B'sorganizationP3productHeads Upgame

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Amanda Kulik's legal representation abandoned case during proceedings in unprofessional/abrupt manner; wife did not appear at hearing

    high · Hosts describe lawyer quitting in 'blunt' and 'abrupt' manner; Amanda's absence from hearing noted

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Total Annihilation positively received by hosts and broader community; described as 'favorite game' at DatABase Fest with strong play experience

    high · Tony: 'It was my favorite game of DbF. It was such a good game. I could have played that game all weekend and been happy.'

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Strawberry Hill Strikeout tournament on April 29th potentially competing with Cactus Jacks Papa Circuit event in Oklahoma City; hosts uncertain about attendance impact

    medium · Dennis notes: 'I think it's going to be against that. Cactus Jacks... Papa Circuit event... Turnout may be a little dampened'

  • ?

    regulatory_signal: Skit B's/Predator Pinball bankruptcy trustee presented evidence of alleged company funds used to purchase Amanda Kulik's house; judge issued order preventing house sale

    high · Recorded hearing available on SoundCloud; trustee presented documentation showing matching amounts between house down payment and Skit B bank withdrawal

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Total Annihilation artist announced but no draft art publicly shown; community reaction to artist announcement was non-negative

    medium · Dennis: 'They're known for a certain style... no one reacted poorly to the artist who was named'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.257

0:00
Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, April 23rd. It's episode 33. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And today we're going to be talking about pinball and video games. and once again, pretty much no tabletop. Also, we've got a, just in case you hear it in the background somewhere, my neighbor has decided that he can do his own widening of his driveway and has rented a Bobcat and has obviously never actually used a Bobcat. So if there's some random loud sound, it's probably my neighbor driving through his house.
0:53
That's unfortunate. He probably should have started smaller with a Bobkitten maybe. Yeah, something. It's definitely been kind of a thing watching him on and off this afternoon as he's trying to make it work.
1:09
Well, I wish him luck, but not really, because it would be kind of funny. But nonetheless, so Tony, what's been going on? We've had two weeks since an episode. People need to know. What do people need to know? It has been a pretty busy two weeks. I'm still working on organizing my new desk.
1:30
We had some people off, so I picked up an extra week or most of an extra week of on-call. So I've basically been on-call. I'm going to end up being on-call for almost two straight weeks, just under two weeks.
1:45
And that's eaten a lot of my time. I've been playing some games. most of which I'm going to talk about later.

Tony @ Skit B's hearing conclusion — Outcome of hearing preventing asset liquidation

Domino's
game
Firepowergame
Silver Sluggergame
The Expanseproduct
Deep Space Nineproduct
Boschproduct
Overwatchproduct
Tonyperson
Dennisperson
Handel Solar Valueperson
Strawberry Hill Strikeoutevent
  • $

    market_signal: Spooky Pinball's commitment to manufacture Total Annihilation signals strong confidence in game's market demand and reception

    high · Dennis: 'I'm glad they're going to get more than that as people play this game... I think it speaks volumes, though, that Spooky went ahead and committed to this. It shows how well it's been received publicly.'

  • $

    market_signal: Total Annihilation expected to price between $5,000-$6,000 based on Spooky's typical pricing, bill of materials analysis, and comparison to Domino's ($5,200)

    medium · Host speculation: 'My guess is that it will be offered at $6,000... I could see a $5,000 table'; comparison to Domino's as cheapest current Spooky offering

  • ?

    announcement: Spooky Pinball officially announces manufacturing of Total Annihilation with unlimited batch production runs of 50 units; no production cap; pricing not yet announced

    high · Direct statement from hosts regarding Spooky's official commitment to manufacture the game

  • ?

    product_strategy: Total Annihilation single-level playfield and LCD/alphanumeric display as key differentiators; pricing legitimacy debated among collector segments

    high · Dennis discusses whether LCD justifies price; mentions Firepower as charm example of single-level design; notes disconnect between lighting-focused buyers and budget-conscious buyers

  • ?

    technology_signal: P3 Heads Up confirmed as first internet-enabled head-to-head pinball game without physical machine linking; online matchmaking system in development

    high · Correction from Pinside listener confirming internet-enabled play and development of challenge/matchmaking system

    • 1:53
    And just to remind people, next Saturday, which will be April 29th, is International Tabletop Day. We'll include a link so you can throw in your zip code and find out if there's any local area meetups or stuff going on on that day if you want to go play board games and stuff in your area.
    2:13
    I don't actually know if I'm going to attend this year because, man, we have so much stuff going on locally on the 29th. I mean, it's International Tabletop Day, of course. Planet Comic Con is running that weekend here in Kansas City, and I've been kind of debating maybe taking the oldest one to her first ever convention. I haven't decided if I'm going to do it yet.
    2:35
    And then I know we have a pinball tournament, the Strawberry Hill Strikeout. Yeah, I'm still trying to decide if I'm going to that. I haven't decided if I'm going either. I mean, I know there's always a good turnout. It's a fun tournament, but there's just so much other stuff going on. Well, I think that one's running against the Cactus Jacks in Oklahoma City Papa Circuit event, so I don't know how the turnout's going to be, actually. Oh, is it? I think. I'm not certain. Well, now I'm going to have to look that up. Cactus Jacks. Let's see if I can spell tournament.
    3:11
    You're right, it is. It is going against that. well, maybe all the people who destroy me won't be there. Yeah, maybe we can win. That's what you're thinking. No, no, I'm not going that crazy.
    3:26
    Let's not go that far. I'm realistic here. Turnout may be a little dampened, though, because that's with such within driving distance for a lot of our better players who are interested in trying to position themselves through the Papa circuit. So we'll see. But, yeah, so I don't know what that will do to turn out.
    3:49
    But, yeah, just another thing on the 29th to consider. Yeah, and I'm sure there's even more. So, wow, for some reason that last weekend in April, just everybody scheduled everything for it. Because I know there's some other, there's like three other tournaments of things I follow in the area running that weekend. It's nuts. I think it's because it's the fifth weekend. And so anything that's regularly scheduled on a recurring is easily avoided because they're so rare to have five weekends. That's a valid point. Other than that, I have fully caught up with the current airings of The Expanse. And if you haven't watched The Expanse and you like sci-fi, I recommend it.
    4:34
    I'm going to go beyond how I would normally go. not only is it the best sci-fi show on TV currently, it is probably one of the best sci-fi shows on TV in the last 15 or 20 years.
    4:50
    That's pretty bold. It is. It is very bold, but I am greatly enjoying it. I would say that, and again, it'll be hard to tell until the actual show is completely done, how it stacks up to other shows that are completed. But it's really, really been good And I think part of that is because Like Game of Thrones It's taking a book series And based upon that So it's got a better run than you get with like Your normal Star Tracks Or other sci-fi shows Or, I mean, stuff like Battlestar Galactica That started so strong And then got real weak towards the end or such. So, I mean, it's been, I've been, I've been really enjoying it. I've also been doing a full rewatch of Deep Space Nine and I'm over halfway through, I'm halfway through season five and I now remember why. I mean, it's a good show. I enjoy it a lot. It's definitely one of my favorite Star Trek series. I think Babylon 5 was better.
    6:07
    Hmm. Interesting. You know, it was only a few years ago I finally watched Deep Space Nine. I never watched it while it was on the air, but I went back and watched it. And, yeah, you know, I think overall, I probably agree with you. It's, I don't know, it's kind of rough because I think Babylon 5, season five is pretty poor and season one it's slow it pays off though whereas with deep space nine i don't think there's the same payoff for the first couple of seasons which are kind of slow but yeah season one and two are both weak but but the rest of the series i thought was really good i'd probably go ahead and say that and i've still not seen voyager so i guess bear that in mind but Deep Space Nine overall is probably the strongest Star Trek series I've seen. Yeah, I would say that. I think it's the series more than anything else that I think has the best combination of overarching story and kind of your week-to-week one-off type stories. But I think that's the stuff that made Babylon 5 stand out more Is what happened on episode 1 had importance to every other episode What happened on episode 5 had importance to every other episode And even Babylon 5 small episodes that were kind of stand-alone-ish Still had overarching things that tied the whole thing together Kind of like Battlestar Galactica did the same thing Even their stand-alone episodes had more of an overall arc tie-in where in most Star Trek series, they would choose a character and something really bad would happen to that character, and the next episode, they'd be fine.
    8:03
    Right, right. It was very situational, sort of. Yeah. Mishap or mission of the week sort of thing. And you had that overall, I guess, maybe the term serialization with Babylon 5. The Lost gets a lot of credit for popularizing that style, but Babylon 5 predates it and I thought it was, at least up until Lost, the best example I could come up with where you had a plot narrative that was threaded all the way through. Well, all the way through to about season five where it got a little weird, but I understand why because of the production. Like a lot of shows, that was an upper management thing that stepped in, I think, and messed everything up. messed up yep i yep it happened a lot and it happened to crusade after where i thought i was going to get more in that universe and now that universe is dead and i mean it's kind of like what the same thing that happened to to like firefly and a whole lot of other shows that they don't get that they either get a lot of management touching and and and playing with things and they hurt what would be their actual fan base by trying to aim it for something else.
    9:20
    And that's one of the things I like. The Expanse, I mean, The Expanse is a space opera that uses a fairly decent, I like how they run their science and such, and it's been a really enjoyable show, and I recommend it to, like I said, everybody because it's great. The storyline's great. The characters are great. the way they do everything in it that's enjoyable. Well, I've been watching some stuff too. Actually, I saw that Amazon Prime on their original programming had the third season of Bosch, which I really liked the first two. It's a police procedural style based off of the books by Michael Connelly, who is an author I have read, though I can't recall if I've actually ever read any of his Bosch books. I've heard really good things about that series. Yeah, it's good. I really like how it goes. The lead actor, I'm not I wasn't really familiar with his body of work. It's Titus. Oh, I blank on his Welliver, Titus Welliver. He played the smoke monster guy in Lost, actually going back to Lost there for a moment. So that's what I knew him from. But anyway, and I just got through. They tend to do 10 episode seasons. So I actually watched half of it yesterday. And then I just got through the second half of it before I got on the air here. So I'm all caught up with that. And then on the gaming front, I have some video game news to get in through the intro. I won't cover what I'm currently playing because that will be for the video game segment. But let's see. I reported last time that I had been playing Battle Group 2, which was a game gift from the Linked Cable podcast. I've won it, won all the missions. Last five were pretty rough. I actually had to go back to prior levels and farm oil so I could purchase upgrades, buy the best battleships there were, and I even still had to use some of the consumable power-ups to actually punch through some of it because the amount of stuff you have to deal with on the screen was just too overwhelming. I don't know if I'll play it anymore and go for the rest of the Steam achievements or not because most of them are cumulative kill counts, and it's hard for me to gauge if they're going to take a really, really long time, and I don't like replaying stages like that repeatedly. once I've mastered them. And a lot of them I've already four-starred, so I can't really rate them any higher. But I liked it. Far Cry Primal, finished that up. When I was getting near the end, I looked over the achievement list. A lot of times I don't look anymore before I play a game because I don't want to be put off. I used to go for achievements very aggressively, but sometimes I found I was deciding not to play certain games because I was worried about the achievement list. And so I try not to look anymore, so I don't care. until it's too late. And I went in, I took a look at it, and I thought, wow, actually, I think I can full clear this game, or as the PlayStation people would call it, plat it. You know, get your platinum trophy for earning all your trophies. We don't have that on the Xbox side, but you 100% them. So I decided to full clear the game because, and the whole reason why I decided it was the collectibles. I actually did not need to find every single one. I only had to find most of them. And so I went and did that, and that, I needed it anyway to help get me enough experience points to unlock the skill trees, which I had to fully unlock the tree. So that was actually the part that took the longest. But I've wrapped that up. So Far Cry Primal is uninstalled and on the shelf to give away to someone.
    12:51
    And then the third game, of course, Overwatch. They had released a PvE event, kind of like they haven't had one since the Junkenstein Revenge over the Halloween period.
    13:03
    I've played it a number of times. I haven't played it since I finally achieved what my limited goal was, which was to get through the legit event, the event where the four characters are hard-coded, on hard. I don't know how many times it took. At least eight. And I finally had a group that decided that they were not going to be stupid. And that was a tall order. Maybe I should have chatted with them more or what, but I'd get these groups and three people would know what they're doing and there was always one. There was always one, Tony. and he didn't, or she, didn't know how to play Overwatch. And they apparently thought the way you play Overwatch is you run in and get surrounded by enemies and die, which is not the strategy that I recommend. That doesn't sound like somebody who doesn't know how to play. That just sounds like somebody who spends all their time as Tracer, Genji, or Emo Lad. You know, and I would agree with you, except in terms of the losses, the majority of them were who the person was playing Torbjorn. and so you know again yeah because they couldn't be they got stuck with it I guess or Emo Lab but it could have maybe been Tracer if someone else hadn't taken Tracer anyway they've got two higher difficulties than that normal I feel is pretty easy but hardware really was hard it really was I don't think I'm going to go and go for there are achievements for winning the other two difficulty levels I don't think I even want to put up with it though so I'm probably done with this event except i might do it to farm loot crates because it is basically on normal i'm almost guaranteed to get the loot crate by the end of it which is with if i do mystery heroes or something it's very hit or miss because even if i have a competent team if we get really bad random assignments we lose so it's frustrating when you lose like that um but that's it in terms of my update yeah i've been enjoying uh that i haven't played it a ton i've had some pretty okay luck but then again I mean I'm playing on PC so and I think from everything I've heard I think you're more likely to find better randos on PC than you are on other systems that doesn't mean there's a lot of them but it just seems you have better odds of getting good ones and it definitely from a lot of the stuff I've heard the like really really hard levels are borderline impossible especially using where you only have to have the four characters they choose for you. I've heard the hardest is impossible with that, but... So have I. I've read that Tracer just doesn't work. That people have been able to win it with the team comp without cheating, because there was an exploit that's already been patched out by Blizzard, but where Tracer could zip ahead and stop the spawns while the payload was moving.
    15:53
    But people have not... Last I saw, and it's been a while since I looked, they couldn't win with Tracer. If they swap her out with a Bastion, they could do it with the rest of the regular team, but Tracer wasn't good enough.
    16:05
    Poor Tracer. She's the cavalry. She was, and apparently she's Custer's cavalry and is getting massacred. So, tragic. Tragic. But, what isn't tragic is the first of our segments, which was pinball, as usual. So let's go ahead and let's get the silver ball rolling and move away from Tracer, because we still do not have the Overwatch pinball machine that I want built. Pin, pin, pin, pin, pinball. That's right. I like your new pinball song. And you know what? The competitive scene would like it more than if anyone chooses Pinball Wizard, I'll tell you that.
    16:43
    Yeah. I have to admit, I did like the Puddles pity party version of Pinball Wizard to Folsom Prison Blues. Yes, I heard about that. I enjoyed that. But again, also, I kind of like Puddle's pity party. I've watched a lot of his videos just because they're hilarious to me.
    17:07
    Well, we're going to start with a not-so-hilarious thing on Pinball, which is a correction. We get to do corrections, and we love to do corrections. Yay, corrections. Thank you. That's right. If you guys catch us making mistakes, let us know because we are more than happy to humiliate ourselves and correct it. And so this correction comes from one of our listeners on Pennside, Handel Solar Value, who actually wrote in and asked us to talk about the P3 if we had played it at Texas, which we did. But it turns out that we had a misunderstanding about the one game neither you nor I played, which is Heads Up, the head-to-head game. Yeah. It turns out that you do not need to link the machines physically together. It's the first online physical pinball game, and it's internet-enabled. So that makes a lot of sense. And I'm glad that's the case of that, because that is going to be way more likely than somebody having two machines. Yeah, you don't have to spend $20,000 now to play one game. So if that was what was making you balk, you can merely spend the $10,000 and you're going to be A-OK now. Yeah, now I do wonder about how the matchmaking type thing on a system like that would be, how you would go about it. I don't know. Yeah, and he noted in his note to me when he was issuing the correction that they had not yet introduced online matchmaking, that that was in the works, and that there would be an ability of some form to be able to challenge others through the system. So I'm curious. I assume because so few people, I imagine, would just be sitting in a lobby waiting to play heads up, that that challenge system would be some way to perhaps ping out and let someone or perhaps a group of someones who are on their P3s that there's a party interested in playing heads up. And then you could swap in your whatever module you need. yeah and that would be cool I wonder about the ability then to use that to set up a like literal national heads up like tournament type thing where people are playing against people in some large scale tournament where you can literally play from your home to be part of the tournament I know that's what I was thinking but it brings up the thought does the system have a way to detect if the glass is off you know who knows I mean they've got some pretty savvy tech in there I would guess they probably didn't think about with the development of that cheaters and trolls maybe there's a way with an opto to know if the glass is on or off I don't know I could see people there are certain types of people out there that I have no qualms seeing intentionally playing something like that with the glass off to grab and save balls and maintain play. Sure, but you know, I mean, we see it on PC. Oh, the ball's going to the out lane. Of course, I mean, there's nothing to stop you if you're doing that, if no one's around you, from not just blocking like your out lanes anyway. So you literally can't out lane drain. I mean, there's nothing to stop that. You know, online play will always invite the ability for unscrupulous behavior. And we see it on competitive online gaming. I mean, even Overwatch, with its very zealous patrolling, has issues with aimbots and such on the PC side. Yeah, I mean, that is... It's a part and parcel of video games, and it's, I think, a part and parcel for anything that's online. Yeah, because it's just there's bad people. But if it's just for casual play, which is what I think they'll stick with, it being just for casual play, then, you know, especially if you know the people, it'll be like, you know, honor system sort of thing. Kind of like how a lot of the selfie league stuff is. because, hey, if you knew the operator at the selfie leagues, get them to pull the glass down and give yourself a good selfie score. You don't see it in the photo. You just see the back glass.
    21:06
    So anyway, correction on that. Thank you, Solar Value, for letting us know that we did not understand heads up properly.
    21:14
    Let's move to the next topic, a very optimistic topic, I think, given the response both you and I had when we got to play it at the test Oh yeah I was so happy when I heard about this So the big news is that Spooky Pinball has indicated that they will be manufacturing total annihilation What we know so far is price has not been announced. There is no limit on the run, however. They plan to make batches of 50. So I guess there will be 50 people who submit orders or some fashion of keeping track. But once there are 50 people interested, they'll do a run, and there is no limit. So it's not going to be like only 300 units or anything. There have not been any announced production level changes, but we haven't seen anything yet. Just like I did read, the artist who's going to do the art has been announced, but there is no draft art that has been shown publicly. So I probably shouldn't bother even saying this, but I will ask the question nonetheless. Tony, what do you think about Total Annihilation actually getting to be manufactured? And making it a little more interesting of a question, What do you think about it being spooky doing the build? Does anybody want to buy a kidney? I got two. I don't need them both.
    22:27
    So send me an email if you need a kidney and have, I don't know, like $100,000. And we'll see what we can do. Then I'll get a total annihilation.
    22:39
    Well, I don't know if you'll need a full $100,000. How much can you get for a kidney? I don't know. What is a kidney worth on the black market? You know, I looked it up last time we had the kidney discussion. You know what, I'm on about a million lists anyway on Google. Let's check this out. Kidney worth on black market. Oh, wow. That's actually, I typed kidney worth and it auto finished on black market. Oh, I'm sure a lot of people are probably trying to sell them for this game.
    23:04
    That's, whoa. Oh, I underbid. According to this, the going rate for a kidney in the U.S. is $262,000. so if you would like a discount kidney email well no no no i need to be able to buy gmail.com subject line discount kidney from tony that's true i mean i i am a uh hefty guy so you so you're gonna they're gonna have to cut through all the extra fat to get to do you have a rare blood type no no i have a very common blood type okay never mind so well okay well it'll still be probably be enough for total annihilation.
    23:41
    Got any guesses as to what it'll sell for? What they'll ask for? My instant guess, my instant answer, I was just going to say, you know, like $6,500 because that's kind of that spooky price range. But with no ramps and everything else, I would not be surprised to see this at a lower price point. I could see this at maybe a $5,000 table. I don't think that's what it's going to end up being, but I could, in that little fusion of hope that exists, actually see that as a possibility. I'm sure it'll probably be at least $6,000, but I can see a $5,000 table.
    24:27
    Yeah, my guess is that it will be offered at $6,000. The lowest I know of that they've been, I think Domino's is their cheapest game that they're running right now. and I believe that's 5,200. So it wouldn't be out of the question to envision that they, from a bill of material standpoint, could perhaps justify getting it all the way down to 5,000. See, I don't know because it's like, what's underneath the play field? I know there've been pictures and such. I know there's a lot of RGB LEDs.
    24:58
    I know that it's built on the P-Rock system. They, being spooky, use the Penhek board set. There likely will not be a conversion, so that means that Spooky will have to be buying the P-Rock control boards. I believe I've seen the P-Rock person go online and indicate that that price – because you can go and buy P-Rock to build your own pinball machine. And people looked at that price, and they're like, well, we've got to factor that in. And I think P-Rock went out and indicated, well, that price we list isn't for bulk purchasing. That's for if you just want to buy one. We'd do a discount if you want to buy a lot of them. so so um yeah my i think they'll sell it for six i think that's what they'll launch it at if they if they did get it to five like you could get it to your door at five at this point that would actually put it just beneath stern pro and i bet you they'd move units the the question is how many people who maybe haven't gotten a chance to play total annihilation even at five would look at it and see that it's single level without any ramps and then think 5 is still too high.
    26:04
    And I don't know. I don't know how many... But it has an LCD and it has... God, it's such a good game. It was my favorite game of DbF. It was such a good game. I could have played that game all weekend and been happy. If it's under 5, I'll consider getting one. But if it's over 5, I won't. Because that's my hard cap for even considering so but they they're not going to price it based around what dennis is going to do just how it is but yeah it was a lot of fun i really liked it it's really well i was i'm gonna send an email to spooky i'm typing it up right now dear spooky dennis will get me one well him one but i can play it so please price under five oh gosh i would feel i'd almost feel obligated they actually sold it that low I like single level playfields it's part of the charm that Firepower has that I really enjoy and that's why I've been aggressively looking I've been keeping my eyes out for one of those Gottlieb street level pins because they're all single level and the one I'm tracking for officially is Silver Slugger because I think it's got the most interesting layout it's really jam packed it's a Trudeau design, it's all single level it was just before the DMDs came out but it's got a fairly sophisticated rule set the baseball theme I think works well with its integration and I've heard good things about hoops so that's the other one I've kind of watched for I haven't ever been able to play any of the six that they made this to me is like what Gottlieb had tried to do but gotten right completely right so that's why I think it's so interesting but you know I don't know some pinball people may look at the LCD and go well it's got the LCD and the alphanumerics That justifies the amount.
    27:57
    That's the logic. That's a stream of thought that I get lost in because I know people who will look and they'll tell you, like with Star Trek, there will be people that would have said, get Star Trek Premium. The light show is worth it. And I'm like, the light show is worth another $2,000? That's just some color-changing LEDs. You notice how I make it sound really cheap and trite. Yeah. But to them, it's a beautiful spectacle and it's worth thousands of dollars. there's a disconnect between my way of thinking on a mod, essentially, and their way of thinking, and it just depends. This has a beautiful light show. I get why the color-changing LEDs are so popular. My virtual pinball that we built is full of color-changing LEDs, and they are awesome, but I also know how much they are to buy, and it's not that bad. So, yeah, no, I don't know with all the – it's the stuff under the play field that is really the question, and of course the size of the runs makes a difference because Spooky's not committing to build, say, 300. If they get enough for 50, they'll do 50. And that's it. And if they get more than that, they'll do more than that.
    29:02
    I'm glad they're going to get more than that as people play this game, provided there is not an art issue.
    29:12
    I'm trying to remember who they named as the artist. They're known for a certain style. and no one, I didn't see, in a way it doesn't matter in the sense that I agree with you, but I don't think it's going to get screwed up. No one reacted poorly to the artist who was named. So,
    29:29
    I think it speaks volumes, though, that Spooky went ahead and committed to this. It shows how well it's been received publicly. So, anyway, congratulations to Spooky, congratulations to the developer, and in the future, congratulations to the people who buy one. So, pretty exciting. Which will be hopefully me after somebody purchases a kidney. That's right. Click the Gamers Cloudcast at gmail.com. Don't forget the subject, Discount Kidney from Tony. Any other subject will get filed elsewhere. Alright, let's go to pinball topic number two. Numero two. Skit B. Again. Oh, okay. I know. Alright, here's the thing. There was a hearing for Kevin Kulik, the owner-operator of Skit B's wife, Amanda. She did not show up to this hearing. However, this was a recorded hearing. So I have a link in the show notes so you can go to SoundCloud and you can listen to this. It's less than 30 minutes long. But we're here to provide all of you all information. So here are the cliff notes. Amanda's lawyer has quit.
    30:35
    The trustee... It wasn't conveyed. Did he show up and quit? I haven't actually listened to the audio I meant to and I got busy. No. Okay, because that would be awesome if he showed up and she didn't show up and he's just like, you know what? I'm done. I'm out of here. Whatever. I don't even care anymore. That would have been hilarious. You're right. The lawyer wasn't there. It's not the same as the guy who you've heard in some of the past recordings. Her lawyer was not the same as Kevin's lawyer. I think she had a female lawyer. and the trustee indicated i guess the way he was informed of her quitting the case was in a manner that i don't know i want to say it was unprofessional but it was let's say at least blunt he didn't read what she said or anything but it comes up in the hearing so she she quit and at least conveyed her quitting or conveyed some information in a way that was kind of abrupt possibly rude.
    31:33
    Regardless, the layers out, the trustee went ahead and presented the information that he has regarding the paper trail showing that Predator Pinball money helped buy Amanda's house. So for those that do not recall, this is the case where Amanda has a house. The house is only in her name. It's not in Kevin's name.
    31:56
    Originally, though, the documentation showed that Kevin and Amanda were both on the title for the home until the very last moment, like the day they signed. They went back and pulled his name off, which is a bit of a red flag. The amount of money put down on the house for the mortgage was the same amount of money that was taken out of the Skitby bank account. And I believe the paper trail indicates that that is the amount of money that had been transferred just before out of PayPal into that account. So that's the paper trail that I'm referring to that comes up in the hearing.
    32:35
    And the sort of final cliff note element from this particular hearing was the judge went ahead and he, I guess, put out an order or was getting ready to put out an order to arrange for the house to be unable to be sold. So Amanda can't go and try and sell the house to someone else. It's now on some sort of listing that prohibits that. And he's doing that because given the paper trail that the trustee's office has laid out, the judge thinks there's a reasonable chance that the house ownership might be clawed back into Kevin's estate to pay for Kevin's creditors.
    33:10
    Yes, the judge did not do a job of the hut laugh. Oh, they should. Well, you've inserted it at the appropriate point. So that's what's going on with Skit B. um so really not a whole lot uh amanda's sort of been we we mentioned her an episode or two ago because uh she was the one where the uh she had help from a lawyer in the sense that a lawyer was referenced and signed off on her statement regarding a bunch of claims that the trustee was making and she's the one who just cited all she clearly wrote it herself and she just cited a whole bunch of non-legal things and said things like i'm not my husband and i'm not my husband's company as her excuses. There are a few other things that aren't in the high points of what I've just listed that do come out in this hearing. There's discussion about the fact that she was paid by Skitbee for work because she's a professional photographer. And so purportedly, she took pictures of the machine or the process of it being built for promotional purposes and such. But she only has handwritten receipts that don't have any dates on them saying that she was paid for those purposes, and she didn't retain any copies of her work. She doesn't have any copies of the digital photos, and Kevin through Skip B doesn't have any copies of the photos. So it's like, well, where's the work product? If you did the work, you didn't retain copies? Or he doesn't have copies? So where's the proof that you did anything? Where's your $18,000 worth of work, or however much she purportedly got paid for the photos? I don't remember, so don't hold me to the $18,000. But it was fairly sizable compared to my understanding of what she lists on her website, her photo shoots cost.
    34:55
    So anyway, because I think she does a lot of family portraits. But that's a Skippy situation. I don't know if you have anything you want to add to it. It's pretty open and shut right now. I'm keeping my eyes on that thread as best I can. Yeah, no, this doesn't surprise me. This is what I figured would happen. though I actually thought that they might show up to protect you to try might show up at the hearing to try but I figured this is what was going to happen because I thought it was pretty obvious that the house was purchased with predator funds and then hidden quote unquote hidden it's like really terrible sloppy hiding job but it was an attempt they made there was an attempt right well this is not this was not the hearing to take the house away either so she will i assume be present when it actually starts moving toward the potential loss of the family home this was really just uh or getting the order in place that she cannot try and sell a house and also i believe the judge was going to re-instruct her i believe this was already in writing so i didn't i didn't hit on it again but re-instruct her to satisfy some paper requests some some documentation that the trustee wants and as i had seen prior written i believe she was fined something like a thousand dollars to go to the trustee to pay for his time basically to pay for wasting his time reading her frivolous non-legal based excuses as to why she didn't comply with uh why that whole i'm not my husband that's not a legal answer to what the complaint was so uh the trustee office did ask basically that he get paid for all the time he was spent dealing with that nonsense and the judge agreed so i'm not my husband no no you're not but that doesn't matter no you know a thousand bucks that's a serious money to have yeah for being flippant so yeah oh well um all right well so much for that let's go on to our topic number four in pinball. We got a lot of topics, but we're really tearing through them this time. Yeah, they're going pretty quick. Yeah, we're fast now. It's not like some of them where they're on them forever. That's right. We're the Efficient Gamers podcast this week. Oh, yeah. All right. So this one is on Pinside, the most popular of the pinball discussion forums based off of volume and participants. They've adjusted their top 100 system. This is a system that we've relied on a number of times for some of our contests and also for referencing. Are these adjustments due to that really fancy-pants regression analysis like all of 12 people read about? Chances are absolutely not. But let's go through it anyway. They've reorganized it so that similar games are grouped as one entry now. It used to be, if you went to their top 100, ACDC Pro version and ACDC Premium slash LE version were listed as two separate games. that's not the case in the main list anymore. Now they list as the group ACDC. And then the highest rated version of those two iterations is where it ranks, the group ranks on the list. So like if the pro is 18th and the premium was 12th, it'll be ranked ACDC at rank 12th. And then you can expand the group and see what the ratings were from each one within the group so you know which one was the highest. And I think that is a change that is both very positive and has been needed, because that has been one of my annoyances going through the top 100 is seeing that, oh, look, there's the premium, oh, there's the LE, oh, there's the pro.
    38:50
    Stuff like that. Right. I agree. I think this was a really wise change. The list was just, especially because of Stern's three-tier model, And yeah, Pinside was grouping the Premium and LEs together because the gameplay is identical on those two versions. But it kind of begged the question, when you're rating art and stuff, and the art's different on both, should they be grouped together or not? I mean, I was glad that they were grouped together. But the bottom line is, the list was getting really cluttered with the same games and repeated slots because of this. And it wasn't just the Premiums versus the Pros. You had like Medieval Madness Remake versus regular Medieval Madness. I think the Vault editions were coming in separate from the regular editions of things like Spider-Man and Iron Man. Yeah, and I don't see where there's an argument that could be made for that at all. I can understand an argument being made for like, oh, the difference between Walking Dead Pro and Walking Dead Premium. I don't necessarily agree that the difference is big enough that they should have two different slots in the top 100, but I can see that argument. but for there to be an argument with vault editions or remakes and stuff that i don't see an argument there at all yeah uh i've seen some people try and counter on some things like going back like eight ball deluxe limited is combined with eight ball deluxe and some people say there were software changes between those or adam's family gold versus adam's family those are merged now uh i don't think it's a big enough deal and given that the games are still separately tracked it's just for the main grouping and how it's rating so to keep the list clean i think it accomplishes its goal without really sacrificing anything so i i think it's a good change um let's see another thing oh yes expired ratings they're gonna have expired ratings now or they have them now it's already in effect and those are not included when trying to rank games into the top 100 and beyond system. So the way that works is you can go onto Pinside and you can rate games you've played. I've rated, I don't know how many, 15 to 20, I suppose.
    40:58
    The ratings will now expire if you haven't logged into Pinside for one year. You don't have to post or anything, so you haven't gone in and actually been logged into the system. I better log into Pinside at some point.
    41:13
    Anyone whose ratings are expired, if you log back in, the ratings are then return so it's not like okay you just if you could you be gone for five years and you can come back and then as soon as you log back in and came back all your ratings are now back in play it's that simple oh that's not bad in addition all your expired ratings and comments while they are expired because you haven't logged in you can still other people can still go and read like your reviews and such so people can still go and access that information so if i was gone for over a year. While most of my ratings, I haven't included comments, I have done, especially on games I own, I've done more extensive write-ups. So like I have a pretty extensive write-up on Superman. I have a write-up on Skylab, for example. Games that especially, I don't feel so obligated if the game has a lot of comments. Like I don't think I've gone and posted a comment on Firepower because there are tons of them. But on, you know, games that didn't get so many comments, I have. So anyway, this is based off the idea that the ratings should really only be people who are actively using the site. It's a site rating. And there was a lot of concern that there were people who were active on Pinsight in the past and that have not been back during any of this renaissance of pinball. And so you're still having an artificial boost to a lot of the 90s games. I think that really motivated a lot of this. Yeah, that makes sense. I uh Pinsight is one of those things we talked about in the past where I I go on on occasion to read but it not something that I am super deep into Uh like I not even I can even post everywhere cause I never done anything to get the full verification which is really simple so I should probably do that at some point
    43:01
    Yeah, I don't remember when they rolled that out. The reason why I'm verified actually is because there was someone, when I sold one of my EM machines, I didn't technically sell it through Pinside directly. Someone on Pinside saw the listing and shared it with someone else, but I felt Pennside was responsible for that sale, so I paid them their royalty payment. And I guess that got me verified because I had to go through my PayPal or something. Well, that works. Yeah, I've never been, and I know I've noticed in the past that there's some threads that they hit a certain point, and you have to be verified to post in those threads for whatever reasons.
    43:41
    Not that I've, I don't know, I don't know if I've ever even posted. it might be the hot threads I think I read that's something they did to try and cut down on trolling which is the final piece to the adjustment to the top 100 troll voting is now also ignored but they did not disclose what they're doing to determine the criteria for what is a troll vote it used to be seen that a lot of people were like going in and giving a game a one that was often a red flag a one with no comment was a red flag of a troll vote. And those were, I think, often manually ignored in some way. But now they're not just limiting it that much. And someone said they knew someone who has troll voting was obviously going in and adjusting their votes after this change, trying to figure out what the lowest was they could get away with to pull down games they hated. So we'll see how well that prevents it. But you could go in and look to see all ratings and you see how many people went and gave Medieval Madness a one, which is obviously the goal was to tear it out of the number one spot. But you can, I guess, just as easily ask why it was still getting tens too. And are those tens twirl votes? Because they could be. Yeah, they could. I mean, they could very easily be. There's been plenty of things in the past where, and I've now looked and no, I've never made a single post on Pinside. I just read it. So I am A lot of people do, and we'll get to the last segment where they're taking steps to hopefully correct that. I think I have less than 200 posts. I've been trying to post more, but there are certain threads I dare not post in because I don't want to get in a fight. That's not my goal. I can understand that. It's one of those things that I found a long time ago. I used to be huge into forums, and I don't really hit forums like I used to. I find anymore I've been using stuff like Discord more often or various aggregators or stuff like that. And I read a lot of forums, but I don't post a lot, not like I used to. Yeah, I'm not as active as I used to be. I used to be pretty engaged on True Achievements. Now most of my posts are staff-related. but I probably should get into them more often because you can have a good sense of community through forums. Discord, though, has really cut into the forum market quite a bit, I think, because I'm on a couple of Discords as well. Yeah, I've been enjoying Discord since I've started using it because of just how it works and this and that. It's been pretty nice. Yeah, it is. It's pretty good software. Well, let's hit on the last pinball topic, which is also Pinside, as I already foreshadowed. Pinside has begun The Purge. We talked about the purge quite a while ago where they announced that they were going to start culling the herd of problem users to make the experience on the forum more friendly, we'll say. So the purge they announced, they formally announced that they've started their purge. The way they're doing it is any Pinside members who they have flagged as being problematic due to their behaviors in the past and or present have received private messages informing them that they are now on notice. Further violations of forum rules will thus be met with punishments. My understanding is the punishments will escalate, but that those punishments will be more aggressive than they might be against, say, someone like me who has not received a warning. so they're on the proverbial thin ice the thread where this was all being initially announced has somewhat exploded mostly with people that judging from what i've seen in other threads are probably people that if they hadn't gotten pms were going to be getting them pretty soon but i you know let us not prejudge and we are not calling out people here but there was a lot of defensiveness and There was a lot of finger pointing, people accusing other users of egging them on. Essentially, there were clarifications regarding the approach. There were more information that probably needed to be showed up in that thread. And then, of course, there were a lot of people who were real angry at people tattletailing by reporting to moderators. Because I think a lot of the people that are on the purge warning list were people that have had their posts submitted for moderation checks, which is a private process. But essentially, it is a tattletale system where you report a post as being problematic in violation of the rules. Because there are so many posts on Pennside that it is very difficult for the moderators to actually track them all unless they were to try and manually read all the threads. And they probably don't go into all the threads. There are so many that get made. Yeah, I know. I understand that. And like I've said in the past, I mean, I consider some of those threads on Pinside are pure cancer. There's nothing redeeming in some of them. At least that's how it feels as somebody who's not a deep end member of the forum who gets into the nitty gritty. There are threads where you start to read and, you know, several posts in or a page or two in. You're just like, you know what? I don't even care what's in this post. We're done. I don't even want to put up with this. So I think this is something that could be very solid for the forum. I think it's something that the forum has needed. Some of the attacks that I've seen in these threads have been, it's been a long time since I've been to a forum that would allow some of the stuff to the level that it was allowed on Penn's side before now. yeah and they've they've tightened since when i first joined onto the forum which oh gosh i guess that's probably four years ago or so um they've tightened the the noose around the rules more and more to try and keep things cleaner but uh they're it's just not been very aggressive i mean i i mostly have video game forums to go against and video game forums can be very profane but it's not the same level of toxicity that has been allowed to exist on pin side yeah and i think pin side's been in a really unique position because they are the largest sort of in spite of their atmosphere and i think the owner operator uh realizes that he probably could have even more growth if he really would clamp down on the toxic elements but it does get delicate because it's like it's like a restaurant that's going to change its theme, but they're really worried about losing the existing customers. Some of these people that I'm sure are the ones getting these messages, these warnings, are some of the most active posters. And so, you know, if you slap them hard enough, they might leave or they'll threaten to leave for sure. Some of them, I think, are already dropping hints. Now, overall, my, you know, kind of 30,000 view assessment would be that in the long run is good for the health of the site for them to go. But it can be scary, especially when this is your job and you're making money off of the site to alienate the ones that are generating most of the traffic because you haven't yet seen the lurkers, like you would classify as a lurker, come in and actually start posting instead to generate the content that they're the vacuum. What will it suck in? Or will it suck anything in? Or will it just be a deflated balloon? Those are the risks that I think they've been weighing.
    51:20
    And that's the thing is, I've thought, I mean, there's been several times where I've considered posting on stuff, and nine times out of ten, it's just like, well, I don't see where this is worth getting into it, or I don't see that this is, especially you'll see certain posters who will be posting, and it's like, well, I obviously do not want to even start posting into this, because it's just, I don't even want to get in the crosshairs of this fight. So, I tend to dodge. I'm not saying that something like this is going to definitely bring me in and make me post and this and that, but I have been starting to pay more attention to Pennside. I don't always log in, obviously, since I don't post. I don't normally log in, but I've spent a fair amount of time. I still spend a fair amount of time reading it. I normally check it out a couple of times a week just looking for highlights. Yeah, I like to stay long, even before I was doing much posting. And most of my posts are just updating the episode links. But I stay logged in because it does have really good thread tracking, so I don't have to find where I last was. And when trying to follow things like the J-pop thread, the Skip B thread, without the tracking, it would be a nightmare because those have been forced to be in the all-in-one thread. They're not allowed there to keep the forum from sprawling with all these topics. They have certain ones which are designated as sort of like, this is the thread you follow to follow Skippy's shenanigans. We'll just have to see what comes of it, if this turns out really good or if Pinsight loses a lot of the more common posters. I don't think they'll lose too. Yeah, and that's the other question is if they do lose them, is it really going to be a huge loss? Yeah, I bet in most instances I've seen where there's significant trolling in reality, it's actually a very small handful of people that are just very, very vocal. I bet you if they purged less than six, they'd clean it up. Even if more than six are getting notices, because some of them feed off of each other. So you just got to spray the Roundup on some of the weeds, and the rest of them will die off. They'll turn into regular plants. I know that isn't how Roundup works, but it does in my analogy.
    53:34
    Speaking of Roundup, I think we've round up our pin side and pinball overall topics sufficiently. So let's go ahead and let's move into video games. That's right. We got a couple of super exciting things to talk about. Actually, I got more than a couple. A number of games, some of which we've been playing. I did want to talk about one that isn't out yet. The rest of the stuff we're going to talk about is out, but I wanted to mention Middle Earth Shadows of War. This is the sequel to... It's Shadows of Wardor. I proclaim it. It's Shadows of Wardor.
    54:09
    Well, judging from the trailer I saw, you are right. It is a War Dwarf. Sequel to Shadow of Mordor. I wonder what the third one will be. Shadow of Peace, maybe? Probably not. Peace Dwarf. Shadow of Hodor. No!
    54:29
    It's a crossover. It's a Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones crossover. That would be a fighting game. Game of Thrones versus Lord of the Rings. Fighter. Okay. I bet it could be just as good as the Star Wars fighting game they had.
    54:45
    PS1 days. So anyway, Shadow of War. This is the sequel to Shadow of Mordor. Chronologically, it's to help fill in the blanks. We love those. Between the setting of The Hobbit and the start of the Lord of the Rings Fellowship. So it kind of lets you know what happened after the ring was back at Bag End and all that. the main buzz from the game perspective is they are taking a fairly big expansion on what was referred to as the nemesis system i should probably ask at this point tony did you ever play shadow of mordor oh yeah i it's i've played it a lot i haven't beaten it but i can say that about like a ton of games uh but yeah i've played it i really enjoyed it i really enjoyed the Nemesis system.
    55:34
    When I am in the mood for that kind of gameplay, that's the game I'm going to right now. I really enjoy it. I liked it a lot. I did win it. I had a lot of fun with it. Nemesis system was great. The new version of the Nemesis system, I'm struggling for a great analogy. I think the one I'm going to go with is their Borderlands unit. in borderlands you may recall that the big thing is it's kind of like a dungeon crawler there's lots of loot lots of guns that drop and they're all like it's just a bunch of randomized variables that are pieced together so you had these tens of thousands of variants of guns you could find and they'd all you know there were certain families of guns and stuff you'd see certain patterns but you know they were all very they're all unique in some way that's what the new nemesis system is so they'll be like the type of orc and then the tribe of orc and the personality of the orc and then what the orc is strong to and weak to and and all that combined so that you could play the game and i could play the game and we would both have nemeses that might be sort of similar but chances are they would not have all the same traits in both of our playthroughs because there'd just be so many possible combinations of orc that could be the nemesis that they would we'd have a unique experience both of us and i didn't really they felt pretty unique to me on the first one but this you know by borderlandsing it i mean i guess they're making thousands of iterations that you could see so that's the main change the nemesis system um i thought the nemesis system was fine the way it was i'm looking forward to trying the new version though uh but i mostly i like that you know they're they're expanding it out more less just orcs and wild beasts i've seen it confirmed that you you will fight nazgul in this the trailer has a balrog i better get to fight it.
    57:28
    And there will be towns and such. So it's not as barren and just running from orc camp to orc camp anymore, but there will actually be cityscape sort of stuff, is my understanding.
    57:38
    I'm very excited because I like the first game so much. Release date, for those curious, August 22nd is the current target release date. It will be available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One. Middle Earth, Shadow of Wardor. um let me go ahead and hop into the game i've been playing ever since wrapping up far cry primal and i was going to do x-com 2 i know i said that on the last podcast that changed my mind because i was playing a strategy game i know i i know but i've been playing battle group 2 and i was like i don't want to start another strategy game so let me go ahead and get recore out of the way recore is an armature studios title it was a budget title it launched at 40 bucks not the usual 60 you play this young woman named jewel and you are alone with your robot dog on a desert planet as near as i can tell plot wise i am one of the early settlers of the planet and the while the planet is supposed to be terraforming via these robots so that the rest of humanity which had to flee earth i believe is up in orbit around the planet waiting for the planet to be ready for human life. I'm on the planet so that I can be woken up if something goes wrong. And something has gone wrong so Jewel is awakened and she and her trusty dog, Mac, Robo-Dog, have to go out and try and fix things.
    59:00
    It is... So it's open world. I wouldn't describe it as a full-on sandbox game, though, because there aren't really any side missions or anything. There are a lot of dungeons where you go in and you gather these prismatic cores and they are the... They are the block to you advancing in the game. Like to get through certain doors, you need six cores. And then later on, you need 20 cores. So you have to keep gathering more and more. And that's kind of what they do to contain you and confine you from certain dungeons that are too high level and such.
    59:28
    So you're going around doing that. The combat is elemental based. So as you go along, you get these elemental upgrades to your gun and you color match. So if you're fighting a red enemy, you use the red element and the enemies can change colors in combat. Some of them can. So if they change from red to yellow, you need to change to yellow in order to maximize your damage against them. The robots are color-coded. You can go in with two at a time. You find more than your dog as you go along, and they have upgrades and such, and you build them armor sets and all that.
    59:58
    As a platformer, it's pretty competent. There's a lot of jumping and dashing. The combat is rudimentary, though. The color-matching thing is cool, but it's all auto-lock-on. Just hold down the trigger and spray. the combat's pretty unsatisfying I have to say I'm disappointed. I have had the game lock up on me once I've had texture loading issues you can tell it's a budget title the world feels very very big but it's so barren that you're just spending time running from dungeon to dungeon occasionally you might be trying to pick up collectibles doing your platforming stuff but there's just not a whole lot to do even though there's just so much time spent running so it's okay but i think i'm actually pretty close to winning the story and i think this one goes on the shelf as soon as i do that so i just need to farm a couple more levels i'm a little i'm about two i think i'm two levels lower than the recommended for the fight and i went in there anyway and it was the final boss guy i don't know if it's the probably it's probably not the final fight with him but my sense is i'm close so yeah and i remember hearing i mean this was a game that we talked about in our E3 episode in a game that I remember how a lot of people were excited to coming out and that seemed to just completely fall flat as soon as it hit that it just was gone, messed up, everybody hated it, or not maybe hate is a strong word, but it wasn't what people had looked for, it wasn't what they hoped for and it had a very interesting premise that people had high hopes for that it just didn't fulfill the promise on?
    61:44
    No. As a family of games, I would most compare it to wanting to be like a Far Cry game. I think it wants to be a sandbox game. They sure filled the box full of sand, but the combat isn't as satisfying as it is in, say, Far Cry Primal, because that's what it's coming off of. The collectibles, they feel less unique there are a few audio logs they're kind of cool the rest of the stuff you have to keep going back to your crawler do the upgrades and unload your inventory it's uh they're they're fast travel points but they aren't conveniently located it's just yeah i i knew it was a red flag the moment i saw they were releasing it as a budget title because that wasn't what was originally conveyed so they recognized that it wasn't going to be a fully satisfying retail game experience and given what they launched it at, I think they gauged it pretty well. It's not a horrible game, but it is a flawed game. And they've tried to build a world, a mythos, but going through the main story, it's hard to... I don't have a good grasp. The audio log's juicing to fill in a lot of the blanks, but they've made them... They're so convoluted in how they're spread out and everything.
    62:59
    Yeah, it's just... I am disappointed. I'm disappointed. I don't hate it, But I am disappointed in it. So, yeah, I had hoped for more. I mean, if it wanted to be a platformer, it should have laid itself out differently because there's a lot of time I'm running and not platforming. The dungeons are pretty cool. They're challenging. I mean, it can be very challenging, even as rudimentary as the fighting is. It's still a challenge. I still get my butt whooped all the time. But that's mostly because I'm going to fighting enemies that are probably too high of a level and just trying to pull that off. The robots are fun. I like them.
    63:35
    They're just one little component to your combat. Most of the stuff is still you just holding down the trigger and spraying with your gun.
    63:44
    Oh well. You can't win them all. That happens. It's always sad when something happens to a game like that, but it happens sometimes.
    63:54
    We had several of those last year that came out and are not anything like what was expected or hoped for for them. and we'll have them this year, and we've had them in the past. So it's just a matter of seeing what actually comes of it. So what are you trying to win?
    64:12
    Well, that's an interesting question. I got a couple questions for you Do you like XCOM Yes but obviously not enough to have chosen it over ReCore Oops Do you like Westerns Oh, yes. Do you like Satan?
    64:30
    Don't know how to answer that. We'll say sorta. I've been playing Hard West and Hard West is a isometric turn-based squad shooter So it plays a lot like XCOM It is Western And it is something that you would Qualify, a lot of people would call it The Weird West There's a lot of supernatural stuff in it Souls Get sold And powers get gained So That's kind of how You get your abilities It's not an amazing game It has flaws.
    65:17
    It is a fun game. It's got an interesting story. And it's something that I would definitely recommend people pick up for the right price. I got it for $8 when it was on sale a couple weeks ago. And it was worth $8. Its base price is $20. it's currently available on the Humble Bundle let me, Frontier yeah, the Humble Bundle, Wild Frontier Humble Bundle that's currently available and will be available for another week or so it's available along with the game I talked about last episode Renowned Explorers they're both part of that Humble Bundle but this game is it has some stuff that XCOM doesn't have that I wish it did you're able to create and modify your cover so you're in a so you're in a room i you can kick over a table and use a table for cover or you're outside and there's some boxes you can flip up a box and use the box for cover and to uh or open a lid and use the lid for a little extra cover stuff like that and there's actually a real interesting mechanic for upgrading characters because you don't get XP. Your characters don't level.
    66:39
    You get instead poker cards. And each card has a different ability, passive or active on it. And you can assign those cards to your posse.
    66:57
    And they get, like there's an ability that is, It's a passive ability that as long as you're in the shadows, you're harder to spot. You've got concealment as long as you're in a shadow.
    67:10
    There's another one where if an enemy is in the shadow, you can kill them. You can attack them and hit them for big damage that is always killed every time I've used it.
    67:24
    That's for that whole demonic soul thing. But as you build these card hands, you also get bonuses if you build a hand. So if you go, oh, I built a straight. And since I built a straight, I have all the passive and active abilities that come from the five cards that build up that straight.
    67:42
    Plus, I get a bonus ability. Or if you make a full house. There's just different bonus abilities depending upon the card hand. And that's how you modify and kind of level up your characters and give them different abilities and different stuff. And it's a fun little mechanic. It's a fun little system.
    68:04
    And the combat is, like a lot of these squad shooters, it's really brutal. One-hit kills are common. the only problem with that is typically one or two of the characters in your posse are flagged as story critical and if one of those guys dies that's it game over and you have to restart that mission unless you're playing Iron Man if you're playing Iron Man it's just game over game over so that can be kind of annoying but like I said it's got good dialogue it's got good voices the story's kind of fun but it does have some other flaws and some of these flaws are what I think trips it up and why I say wait for a sale or catch it in this humble bundle or something the way the game's story progresses is you are playing different sections of your of the main character's life and other characters lives but you play a scenario and once you've finished the scenario, you've done all the combat portions and all of the out-of-combat talking and RP-type stuff,
    69:23
    you end up with, and you finish everything, you know, you've got your posse, you're armed, you've got good guns, you've got great cards and great skills and this and that. When you start the next scenario, which takes place later in your life, it's all gone. you start out with two people with a couple basic guns a couple basic cards no nothing you're basically starting over so every single scenario starts you over from scratch which is really annoying there are things you can unlock that just make items purchasable like when you go to a gun shop or wherever where you can purchase stuff that you've had in the past but it doesn't you don't have it. It's not, I mean, it's, it's literally like if you went and, Oh, I beat the big bad guy and it's the end of, you know, it's not even like the end of a game. It'd be like at the end of like a mission of XCOM, your guys walk up and the mission ends and you're just like, I don't need this rifle anymore. And you start the next game with a basic, with a basic rifle again. Cause Oh, I don't need my plasma rifle anymore. I don't, I don't need my BFG anymore. I just, you know, so that's kind of annoying. and then it also uses a luck system.
    70:46
    So when you're in combat, if somebody shoots at you and misses you, your luck goes down because you're lucky. They missed you, but that burned some of your luck to make sure they missed. And when you actually get hit, your luck goes up. And the same thing happens to everybody you're fighting. So everybody has a luck system, which is interesting because it means if you're walking in and your guy hasn't been attacked or anything, he has high luck. He's more likely to be missed. And if he's been missed a lot, he's more likely to get hit, which will make his luck regenerate. The problem with this system is that all of the active combat stuff, so reaching through shadows to rip a guy's heart out or various combat boosts or this or that, what you spend to use those active abilities is luck.
    71:40
    So I can reach through that shadow and rip that guy's heart out, but if his buddy shoots at me because I burned a bunch of luck, he's more likely to hit me, which is kind of annoying, and it also tends to end up in the middle of a firefight or towards the end of a firefight. Even if you haven't used any of your active abilities, you probably don't have the ability to use them because if there's been enough shooting your luck's too low for you to actually use any of your abilities so but it's kind of like said the story's fun it's dark the story is seriously seriously dark which should be something you would expect from a western about selling your soul to the devil and getting powers for vengeance and this and that. So like I said, I would recommend it for a lower price as something fun and just understand the problems you will run into. Like I said, none of these are game-breaking in my opinion. They just drag things out and some of them are very annoying. the one hit kill on a required character that makes you start over because it doesn't even oh you can go back and save and start over no no you have to start that entire combat over again even if you've been playing it for an hour you have to start over again yeah I don't know about the I mean yeah the story critical character thing I'm frustrating the weapon some of the weapon reset that stage thing and this luck system where the luck is your action points, though. I don't really know why they went that direction with it. I don't know either.
    73:29
    I said it's very weird, but it's not... I don't think it utterly ruins the game. It is annoying. to the first time I found it, the very first time when I finished scenario one and went to scenario two, and it opens up, and I'm in a bar, and I've got a pistol, and all my cards are gone, and my posse's all gone, and it's just me and one other person. And I understand, it's several years later, but it's like, I have no more abilities than I had when I started the last round, the last scenario. that was deeply annoying so basically a get but only went on sale as your recommendation yeah that's my recommendation and again only if you like westerns and that type of stuff i mean it's not something that i would say you need to jump all over i mean if that's not if that type of game isn't your thing, definitely do not bother with it. I mean, if you don't like XCOM and you don't like Westerns, it's not something that you would be willing to even spend time on. But otherwise, it's got some interesting... Oh, and the most important thing.
    74:55
    No Overwatch. So you can't... If you finish a move and you don't have a second move that you want to do, you can't put your character on Overwatch. You just have to end your turn.
    75:05
    Mmm. So you better have a move ready every time. Yeah, you have to have... Yeah. There's not even like defensive... So there's no anything? No.
    75:21
    There's no... Weird. Weird choices. I mean, XCOM does it so well. That's the only thing that's surprising me is why they would not adopt some of those.
    75:32
    Yeah, I agree. that was one of those things that shocked me because I spent my very first combat, I'm sitting here, I'm going through everything and I'm like, where's the Overwatch button? Because in XCOM, that's one of the things I always do is I maneuver myself and I always intentionally leave myself Overwatch on at least some of my guys if not all of them.
    75:52
    But this time no. And it's kind of weird. We're not talking about Overwatch the video game. Overwatch is an ability in XCOM. yeah it's where if you use you have two two two actions and if you only use one action you can put your character on overwatch so if somebody moves in his line of sight he can shoot at them yes it's very useful very useful yeah especially when you accidentally trigger a whole bunch of aliens yes especially then well um let's go ahead then and hop to our last video game it's something both you and I played yesterday. We were over off at a game night, my sister and brother-in-law were hosting, and we played Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time.
    76:39
    And I think we both enjoyed it. I enjoyed it quite a lot. I mean, that's a game that came out in 2015, if I remember right. I think you're correct.
    76:49
    And it was a game I'd heard about, but I hadn't really thought that much about it. Because everything I heard is it requires multiple people to play. and at the time I was the only person I knew. I wasn't playing. I didn't have an Xbox One. I didn't have any of the modern consoles. I didn't have anything except for my computer. Nobody I knew who played played on a computer really. So I'd never gotten it, but I might end up grabbing it now because that game was a lot of fun.
    77:18
    Yeah, I may have gotten it as part of a Games with Gold on Xbox. But anyway, in terms of gameplay, genre wise it's probably categorized as some form of shmup essentially but the um the way it works is that you're in a ship but there are multiple stations and obviously you can only man one you as one person can only man one station at a time so there's a gun station on each of the cardinal directions so you got top bottom left and right gun then there's also a station to activate the death blossom gun which kind of fires wherever it's constantly rotating and it recharges once you use it and it's very powerful there's a shield station and the shield can only cover a certain portion of the ship and is 360 degree controlled by whoever's at that station and then there's the pilot to actually fly the thing and so the game i would actually compare it most to that i played recently, which is also a game that they who exposed us to this are fond of is Overcooked, which is a cooking game, but it's very much about multiple people manning various stations and having to figure out a way to get a job done when you have more stations than you do people. It's the same concept except applied to a shoot-em-up, or as I refer to it, a shmup, as we in the industry say, in the lingo.
    78:42
    And yeah, I agree with Tony. I don't think I would like this game single player. I personally, from what we experienced, would say, I think you want at least three, but four people ideally to play this. Yeah, I think, I'm thinking like you, I think three is, I'm not going to go so far as to say, I think two is probably mandatory. I think three would probably be the best balance. If you can't have four, it'd be way better than two. I mean, it's just in the middle. But I feel like you pretty much need to have, there has to be a shield person, period.
    79:26
    There has to be a pilot, and there has to be a gunner. and the only one of those that can change are, I think, the pilot can change to guns, and the gunner can change to different guns, and the shield guy is the shield guy, and that's it.
    79:46
    Yeah, from our experience, that seems... I mean, there are certain times where you can put the ship in orbit, so the pilot actually can get up and man another station. We played it four-player, so we usually had a pilot, a shield person, and two gunners. Sometimes we'd put ourselves into orbit and we would have three gunners, with one of the gunners on occasion activating the Death Blossom gun, which you do not need someone at all the time, because you just go and you fire it off when it's lined up, and it's on cooldown too much to keep someone camping it. As you go about, you find upgrades, though, and the upgrades are different. So you can expand the strength of a gun, or you can turn a gun into a mace, or you could make the shield actually be able to do damage. and so it's got a lot more flexibility than it looks like on the surface but conceptually it's very easy to understand fly ship, shoot enemies shield person does all the work and don't bump into edges yeah and when we did the put the metal power up and turn the shield into basically just a giant spiky chunk of metal we actually did a lot of damage with just the shield guy keeping the shield pointed ahead and as the pilot I just drove straight at stuff.
    81:01
    That worked really well. It worked really good. We only got to do a couple stages but I thought it was fun. I would have liked to have played a lot more. It just didn't work out. It was real late when we started. It was real late.
    81:16
    But hey, we got to experience something and here we are telling people about it. Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time. Available on console and on PC. so feel free to shop around for it. Yeah, I think it's available on pretty much everything at this point. Yeah, probably. It's probably available on the phone. Who knows? Oh, that'd be weird. That would be weird. It'd probably be wrong. We don't recommend it that way. We recommend it on normal things.
    81:41
    Well, we don't have a tabletop section this time. I actually have something that I completely forgot to add in the notes. You didn't put it in this note. It says tabletop blank. It says blank. Not only that, when we started, I didn't mention it.
    81:55
    But it popped into my head about halfway through that I'd remembered finding this the other day, and I just forgot to put it in.
    82:06
    There is a, and this kind of crosses over, for our Fallout fans, who have also thought about wanting Fallout miniatures or a tabletop miniatures game to play. there is a Fallout Wasteland Warfare game coming out that will be a tabletop miniatures game and it's being done by Modafius Modafius? Modufius? I don't know how they pronounce it it's got lines above letters and some umlauts and I'll include the links in the links for it there's not a lot of information on it yet there's not a release date or anything yet because I literally just saw it announced not that long ago so there'll probably be more of that coming forward as we get as we learn more about it because I'm going to be keeping an eye on it because the figures look really cool and who doesn't love Fallout? I don't know only losers don't like Fallout well losers I don't know if I'd call them that They're just mistaken.
    83:20
    They don't have the pure hearts that we do. They just haven't learned of what they're missing. Makes me sad. Fallout, that'd be a good pinball theme. Fallout would be an amazing pinball theme.
    83:37
    Maybe that could be your first custom pinball machine. Probably not. Sounds like a lot of work. Okay, well, do you know when that's releasing? No, they haven't announced it yet.
    83:54
    I'll include the thing. The company that's doing it, they've done some other tabletop miniature games like Infinity and Siege of the Citadel and Mutant Chronicles. The only ones of those I've played is Infinity, and it's all right. So we'll see how long it takes. but they don't have much information at all at this time. It's basically just a splash page at this time. Okay. Well, we'll just have to keep our eyes out on it. Yep. And speaking of keeping our eyes out, I see the end of our show in sight now.
    84:30
    We're there. That's right. We've made it. As a reminder, I haven't done this reminder in quite a while, but we do appreciate ratings and reviews on iTunes. Please feel free to go and visit iTunes and give us a rating and review. It helps with the search algorithms so that we pop up. We do recognize we've been talking about pinball is like three-fourths of the show now. So I've refocused the description to make that a little more clear so people aren't blindsided by our more limited tabletop section. But I think it more accurately reflects how we balance the three topics.
    85:01
    And you can always find our iTunes link at our website, which is eclecticgamers.com. You can reach out to us, though, on social media, facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. or via email as well, eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com. But we are available on a couple of other social platforms. Yes, we're available on Twitter and Instagram. In both cases, we're eclectic underscore gamers. And until we, well, I'm seeing if I get it hammered together, but I think we may have a guest host for the next episode. So I hope you all look forward to that, assuming everything holds true. Fingers crossed. Yeah, fingers crossed. But you never know, schedules change. but until then I'm going to say I'm Dennis and thanks for listening I'm Tony and we'll see you next time