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BDYETP 65: Rush Pinball Impressions, Multimorphic New Hires, Manufacturer and Game Room Updates

Bro, Do you Even Talk Pinball·podcast_episode·1h 14m·analyzed·Jan 9, 2022
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Rush pinball impressions: impressive art, aggressive pricing, Pro tier most compelling value despite LE features.

Summary

Kevin and Nick discuss their initial impressions of Stern's new Rush pinball machine, focusing on pricing increases, art design by newcomer Michael Bernard, playfield features differentiated across Pro/Premium/LE tiers, and the involvement of the Rush band and Ed Robertson in callout recording. They critique pricing strategy ($6,999 Pro, $9,000 Premium, $11,100 LE vs. Led Zeppelin's lower pricing), debate platform features like Stern Connected achievements, and express concern that Premium tier lacks expression lighting while offering limited gameplay advantages over Pro.

Key Claims

  • Rush pricing increased $700-$1,900 compared to Led Zeppelin launch pricing one year prior

    high confidence · Direct comparison of MSRP: Rush Pro $6,999 vs. Led Zeppelin Pro ~$6,200; Rush Premium $9,000 vs. Led Zeppelin Premium $7,800; Rush LE $11,100 vs. Led Zeppelin LE $9,200

  • Rush contains 16 official band tracks plus 600 individual voice callouts from band members Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, plus Ed Robertson from Bare Naked Ladies

    high confidence · Pinball News source cited; official track list provided including 2112, Bastille Day, Working Man, Subdivisions, Free Will, etc.

  • Premium tier lacks expression lighting while LE has it, making premium-to-pro value proposition weak

    high confidence · Hosts note Premium at $9,000 does not include expression lighting that LE has; Nick states this 'squarely pushed me to the Pro'

  • LE-exclusive features include expression lighting, side armor guitar-gear cutouts, mirrored backglass, foil cabinet decals, upgraded audio, shaker motor, non-glare playfield glass, certificate/autograph, sequential numbering

    high confidence · Official feature breakdown provided; only major playfield difference is moving ramp in front of time machine on LE

  • Michael Bernard is a first-time pinball artist doing original art for Rush rather than licensed artwork adaptation

    high confidence · Noted as 'his first entry into pinball' with 'custom design for the pinball machine versus something like Led Zeppelin where they took existing art'

  • Rush has limited global appeal, particularly unknown in European markets

    medium confidence · Chat comment from Neil McRae: 'they're unheard of in Europe'; speculation about demographic reach vs. Beatles/Led Zeppelin

  • Game designed by John Borg with programming by Tim Sexton (lead), Ray Davidson on software, Bob Baffey on sound

    high confidence · Official credits from Pinball News announcement

  • Supply chain, labor shortages, and wage pressure (Arby's advertising $17/hour) are significant factors in manufacturing cost increases

Notable Quotes

  • “It's not dad rock. The better term is classic rock. That's what it's categorized as... it's 2022. Happy fucking New Year.”

    Kevin (host) @ Early in episode — Establishes hosts' perspective on generational music terminology and defends band choice against online criticism

  • “I'm going to be about the premium... What is the compelling reason to get a premium from the Pro? So here's what's different on the LE.”

    Nick (host) @ Mid-episode, pricing discussion — Articulates core complaint about Premium tier value proposition; drives toward LE as only justifiable step-up

  • “This is X-Men with better rules... that alone has me thinking, huh, okay, let me pay attention to this game.”

    Neil McRae (chat comment, cited by host) @ Rules/gameplay analysis section — Third-party validation of game's design improvement over Borg's previous X-Men title

  • “You're never really going to buy a new pinball machine again... Are you ever going to buy a new pinball machine again? Maybe one in five years. It's crazy.”

    Nick (host) @ Pricing discussion — Expresses collector sentiment about pricing barrier; reflects broader market concern

  • “It's cool to have somebody like Ed who's really into pinball, who understands it... versus a game like Led Zeppelin or Beatles, where it's like, okay, here's what you get.”

    Kevin (host) @ Band involvement/callout discussion — Highlights value-add of active band participation (Ed Robertson/Rush vs. Licensed IP)

  • “The display work did not wow me but that's not really a surprise with certain games in general... it's fine it gets the job done”

    Nick (host) @ Display/gameplay impression — Tempers expectations on Stern display technology as industry-wide issue

  • “I listen to the music man and I just don't... it doesn't click whatsoever. I'm like, I can't believe how popular this band is.”

    Nick (host) @ Band appeal discussion — Honest assessment of personal disconnect with Rush despite appreciating game design

Entities

John BorgpersonTim SextonpersonRaymond DavidsonpersonMichael BernardpersonBob BaffeypersonEd RobertsonpersonGeddy LeepersonAlex LifesonpersonNeil Peartperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Inflationary environment and labor market pressures cited as justification for pricing increases; however, hosts question whether cost increases alone justify $1,200+ premium increases

    medium · Nick: 'CERN be stupid when they're looking at the pricing not to increase more than the cost of manufacturing... there's just so many layers of things right now'

  • ?

    community_signal: Band involvement extends beyond typical licensing; Ed Robertson actively participated in callout recording guidance, demonstrating fan-creator collaboration model more engaged than passive IP usage

    high · Kevin: 'Ed Robertson was kind of guiding them through, you know, what the call outs mean and why they should care... he's a huge fan of that band... he understands what fans of the band will want'

  • ?

    community_signal: Online community (Pinball Enthusiasts Facebook) generating recurring complaint patterns; hosts propose 'bingo cards' for predictable new-release reactions: 'dad rock' criticism, comparisons to other games, original theme demands

    medium · Nick: 'people like lose their shit when they try to compare it to another game... new people are in the hobby... Just put it in CAD'; discussion of need for 'onboarding process' before posting

  • ?

    competitive_signal: John Borg's design philosophy shows pattern of shot placement (straight-up-middle shots common in Metallica, Walking Dead); Rush compared favorably to X-Men as 'more flowy' variant with improved rules

    medium · Nick: 'X-Men's more of a flowy Borg game... X-Men just wasn't a good game, in my opinion, from the rules standpoint... this is like X-Men with better rules... that alone has me thinking'

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.224

0:00
Coming up on this episode of Brody Even Talk Pinball, Kevin and I have our hot take slash impression, emphasis on impression of Stern's new pinball, Rush, all that and more coming right up.
0:14
Double super jackpot! I need a wrap. I need a loop. I want targets I can hit. I need the scoop. I need a double super jet line in my life. That's right.
0:50
Hello. Hello. Hey, there we are. What's going on, everybody? Welcome to another episode of bro do you even talk pinball for january 2022 i'm kevin manny that's nick lane what's going on what is going on man um we're uh we're remote yeah things are things are things are a little hectic right now um but we got a new pinball machine to talk about so that's cool that's uh i don't know if we were gonna necessarily podcast this week but we were kind of talking about well We'll see if they reveal Rush, which it sounds like they were going to do that last week. So here we are. That's the focus of this podcast. Maybe we've got some housekeeping to tidy up first, such as partner things. Let's move to that.
1:35
Do I know how to do that still? Let's see. Yeah, there we are. Let's start by thanking our premier sponsor, Penn Stadium, PennStadium.com, to get your awesome lighting kits for your pinball machine, like the concert editions that I have on my Guns N' Roses from Jersey Jack Pinball. Use coupon code BUFFALO to save 10% at Penn Stadium. Thank you to Penn Stadium for their sponsorship.
2:00
Kamei Pinball, KameiPinball.com. They make amazing lighting for your pinball machine, so you can light up your inserts, your GI, make it look great. They do awesome kits, too. I like their kits a lot. I have one of each in my Doctor Who and my Addams Family. Big fan of those. Titan Pinball. Throw out your crappy old rubber rings and replace them with Titan competition rings, silicone rings for your pinball machine. They clean up great. They hold up great. They bounce and play like original rubber. So that's why we love them. Use Kubanko Buffalo to save 10% at Titan Pinball. Pinside, our exclusive podcast partner, pinside.com for all the discussion you could possibly want about pinball machines. tons of cool resources too. You can get the Pinside Top 100, which is objective fact about the best pinball machines of all time. We'll talk about that later when it comes to heist. Pinside, check them out. You can look up background information, all sorts of historical archival information about pinball machines. Pinball Raffle, if you want to check out pinballraffle.org for pinball edu. I'm not selling this one very well right now. It's a monthly pinball raffle for a pinball machine to benefit Pinball EDU and Spinners Pinball Arcade, their inclusive arcade in Frederick, Maryland. Visit pinballraffle.org to get in on that. You can win one or two like our friend Small Town Pinball has. And last but not least, Jersey Jack Pinball, makers of the finest pinball machines on the market, good friends of the channel. We're big fans of what they do over at Jersey Jack. Small Town Pinball is just a case of the rich getting richer. Winning that competition twice, getting two free pinball machines. Well, not three. Oh, man. I know. The trouble is he's waiting for Godzilla Premium now. So he'll be waiting a while. Here's the math behind that. People are pretty happy when you win the first time, not the second time. No one's happy for you.

medium confidence · Host speculation on broader economic factors: worker availability, wage increases, parts sourcing difficulties, assembly line turnover

  • “There's so much money flying around in the economy... CERN be stupid when they're looking at the pricing not to increase more than the cost of manufacturing.”

    Nick (host) @ Manufacturing cost discussion — Economic justification for aggressive pricing in inflationary environment

  • “I think with all this inflation, it's looking more and more attractive over time... I could get a brand new game for a couple thousand bucks. That's a freaking steal now.”

    Kevin (host) @ Alternative platforms discussion — Multimorphic P3 emerging as value alternative to $7-11K Stern pricing

  • “If you're a huge Rush fan, right, like, you know, the LEs are just, you know, good luck getting an LE, right?”

    Nick (host) @ LE availability discussion — Acknowledges FOMO/scarcity dynamic of LE production and secondary market demand

    • Rushgame
    Led Zeppelingame
    Beatlesgame
    X-Men (Uncanny X-Men)game
    Avatargame
    Guns N' Rosesgame
    Stern Pinballcompany
    Multimorphiccompany
    Buffalo Pinballorganization
    Pinball Enthusiasts (Facebook)organization
    Neil McRaeperson
    Small Town Pinballperson

    design_philosophy: Expression lighting feature exclusion from Premium tier represents deliberate value-compression strategy to push buyers toward Pro (cheapest) or LE (costliest) tiers, reducing mid-market appeal

    high · Nick: 'you could buy the expression lighting, just get that, put that on the Pro, and there you go'; 'This is one of those games where I think the compelling case is for the pro'

  • $

    market_signal: Secondary market pricing for used machines (Iron Maiden Pro at $8,000 from distributor) reflects post-launch price appreciation; hosts note difficulty accepting even used machine pricing

    medium · Kevin: 'I saw... Flippin' Out has... Iron Maiden Pro for, like, $8,000... I've not looked on Pinside... but I'm sure... it's always going to be a little bit more probably from a distributor'

  • $

    market_signal: Multimorphic P3 platform gaining competitive positioning as lower-cost alternative ($2-3K) in response to Stern's $7-11K pricing; Kevin notes 'looking more and more attractive over time'

    medium · Kevin: 'I'm really got like hyped for the next P3 release... I can get a brand new game for a couple thousand bucks... their pricing model... looking more and more attractive over time'

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Michael Bernard is first-time pinball artist on major Stern release; custom original artwork approach (vs. licensed IP adaptation) represents talent acquisition for boutique design work

    high · 'Michael Bernard of Sunbird Designs did the artwork. So this is the premium... This is his first entry into pinball... custom design for the pinball machine versus something like Led Zeppelin'

  • $

    market_signal: Rush pricing significantly increased vs. Led Zeppelin ($700-$1,900 across tiers); hosts express concern about $11,100 LE becoming standard, questioning sustainability of three-tier model

    high · Pro $6,999 (vs $6,200), Premium $9,000 (vs $7,800), LE $11,100 (vs $9,200); Nick: 'It's hard to wrap my head around trying to pay these prices for a new pinball machine'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Premium tier artificially weakened by excluding expression lighting while LE includes it; hosts note this makes Pro more compelling value despite $2,000 gap to Premium

    high · Kevin: 'you're going to take the expression lighting out and it doesn't seem like the features from the pro to the premium are that significant... for that huge increase in the premium'; Nick purchases decision driven to Pro tier

  • ?

    personnel_signal: First-time pinball artist Michael Bernard brought in for original Rush artwork; represents Stern investment in boutique design talent vs. licensed art repurposing strategy

    high · 'Michael Bernard is the artist on these. That's his first entry into pinball... It's custom design for the pinball machine versus something like Led Zeppelin where they took existing art and applied it'

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Active band participation (Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, Ed Robertson) providing custom callouts and game guidance contrasts with passive licensed IP (Beatles, Led Zeppelin); Rush benefits from enthusiast collaborator

    high · Kevin: 'The fact that the band was involved... you see all of these additional assets and things... versus a game like Led Zeppelin or Beatles... 17 songs here versus like 10 in Led Zeppelin'

    • 4:04
    If you can find the one true friend who's just excited for you when you win it the second time, there you go hold on to that person that's right that's right all right so i i guess we should talk about rush right is there's a new pinball machine in town uh so let's go over here i don't want to show that one yet i want to show this one i heard it's uh i heard it's just like iron maiden though i heard it's just a reskin yeah have you have you visited pinball enthusiasts on facebook oh god that uh tomorrow enthusiasts is i i think in the nice way it shows how many new people are in the hobby right like sure yeah we're uh i think we can be the cranky old guys at this point right like yes maybe i've always been a little cranky and maybe a cranky young guy but now it's just like you know it's groundhog day it's watching the same thing over and over again And then the two comments that I love is when somebody's like, this game looks like, you know, insert whatever other game you want. And we'll talk about it. There's always some truth to that, right? Like, how many pinball machines are there? It's also a John Borg game. And Borg has basically, like, Kevin, I knew this game was going to look like X-Men before it came out. Like, before it was released, I was like, it's going to look like X-Men. Because I was just thinking, like, what is Borg up to, like, on his kind of cycle that he's not touched for a while on his set? which anyways we'll get off to all that so that's there's always that and then people like lose their shit when they try to compare it to another game and depending on my mood that's either amusing or annoying right like now i jump on those threads and just look um i've been saying that you've had a joke on that in the show for for years because right somebody was comparing um uh pirates to black rose yeah right and they were like and they what they say somebody in Chad's just like, just put it in CAD. Yeah.
    5:53
    Whip open your CAD. Yeah, that's an inside joke for Buffalo Pinball. If you ever see me or Kevin or anybody else in Buffalo Pinball, just say, like, just put it in CAD! We're making fun of that concept. That's right. Because obviously, you know, my favorite part of Black Rose is the moving ship that fires across the play field and sinks another ship. I love that part.
    6:13
    I'm waiting for the day that a pinball machine is designed and doesn't have a similar shot to any other game. That game's going to be terrible.
    6:20
    I don't know. There's a reason why certain shots are in certain places, you know, because they work. Because they work. And, all right, we can probably get into that a little bit more. And then the other favorite thing on Pinball Enthusiasts is when, like, a theme like Rush is announced and people are like, oh, you know, dad rock, dad rock. First of all, dum-dum. Listen, this is fucking grandfather rock. I hate to break it to you, but, like, Kevin and I are in our 40s, and Kevin's a dad. I'm not. That was, like, Kevin's dad, like, or our dads would listen to Rush. So, like, what, like, dad rock today would be, what would be, like, a dad rock? It would be, like, a 90s band. Like Nirvana or something, yeah. Yeah, like, Nirvana is dad rock. I hate to, or even, like, you can even go up to, like, the early 2000s. Maybe somebody likes Fall Out Boy or something. Like, Fall Out Boy is dad rock. Like, let's just update what year it is. It's 2022. Happy fucking New Year. All right, so at least update your terms. It's not dad rock. The better term is classic rock. That's what it's categorized as. And why Stern is picking those themes is because, first of all, Rush has sold, in their promo, 40 million albums or whatever. They've been around for decades of producing music, and people today who are younger than Kevin and I are still listening to Rush and will continue to listen to Rush. So, listen, the economics make sense. And as somebody astutely pointed out, I think it's somebody I respect in my friends list or in Pimel community, was like, dude, Stern has been pumping out like fucking comic book hero games. All right. Those are like for teenage boys. I mean, it runs the gamut. Right. But literally comic book heroes. Come on. So, yeah, they're all over the board. Stop whining. And then we always get the third option, the original theme, cry. That's where I was going to go. Yeah. So there needs to be an onboarding process for new people in pinball before they're allowed to post.
    8:17
    Listen, you can post what you want, like, per the community standards. But, you know, just before you say an original theme, understand what people are going to say back to you and why there's less and less of those. Even though they're working these days because there's an ungodly amount of money going around the economy and people are just buying pinball machines like crazy. But, yeah, okay, so that's what you're going to get. Like we'll, we'll, uh, we'll see if we can get some Buffalo pinball bingo cards, maybe somebody in discord. We'll, we'll Kevin and I, you can consult with Kevin and I, and we'll make, uh, we'll make bingo cards for the next time a fucking new release comes out and we'll, we'll, we'll see who wins. Yep. Dad rock. Original themes. Yeah. Right. Uh, of course. Yeah. I mean, everyone's price is like the free space. Yeah. It just goes right in the middle.
    9:05
    Oh God. All right. should we look at some pictures here yeah let's get to some pictures all right over here all right so rush uh this comes to us from pinball news sorry about that uh says this game is designed by john board with programming by uh tim sexton he was the lead we include 16 of the band's tracks as well as custom callouts recorded by the band members alex leifson and getty lee additional callouts come from bare naked ladies frontman and fellow canadian and friend of buffalo pinball Ed Robertson making a total of 600 individual voice call-outs. 16 tracks in the game. So if you're playing along at home, here's the Rush songs you get. 21-12, Bastille Day, Big Money, Cygnus X-1, Far Cry, Fly By Night, Free Will, Headlong Flight, La Via Strangolato. I nailed that one. Fly By Night, One Little Victory, Red Barchetta, Subdivisions, and Working Man. You can't tell Kevin's a huge Rush fan. huge we're both big rush fans i know rush from like classic rock radio so i know uh fly by night i know uh worky man subdivisions um what's the other one um tom sawyer why isn't tom sawyer on this list i thought i thought there was seven i thought there were 17 songs in it yeah yeah it's weird i think they missed tom sawyer on here and that would make 17 yeah um yeah i think so uh What side are you reading from? This is pinball news. Pinball news, come on. You're fired. Oh, my God. How dare you provide free content and get something wrong? I know, come on.
    10:40
    Game uses concert footage to supplement music along with multiple custom animations from the graphics team at CERN.
    10:47
    It comes with three models. Imagine that. A pro. There's the pro. Okay, I kind of like the art on the pro.
    10:54
    It's a new artist. let me run through the rest of the design team here. So Michael Bernard is the artist on these. That's his first entry into pinball. The art looks good from like kind of just stepping back from a perspective, right? Like, you know, before you even get into like the detail and stuff, it looks pretty good. Yeah, it's nice. It's custom design for the pinball machine versus something like Led Zeppelin where they took existing art and applied it to the machine. This is all original art for the pen, which is cool.
    11:31
    Raymond Davidson was also on software. The sound was by Bob Baffey. I'm not familiar with his work. I don't know if he's new or if he's more of a, like, behind-the-scenes kind of guy.
    11:43
    Pricing. Can we talk about pricing, please? Well, let's do that. If we don't, I mean, you've got to talk. You're not talking about pricing, right? Yeah. So the Pro is $6,900. I'm going to throw the extra dollar out because it's $6,999 but $6,900 $9,000 for premium and $11,100 for the LE that seems like a lot so let's take a look back at one year ago with Led Zeppelin which launched at the same time last year that was $6,200 $7,800 and $9,200 respectively Led Zeppelin seems like a pretty good deal right now But you get the QR code scanner now, so that's obvious for all the extra money. Oh, well, you didn't say that. Come on. You get achievements. It goes ding now. It's fun for, like, two days until you, like, max out the achievements. Right. Okay, cool. No, that's, you know, I'm not bragging on achievements. But as a home collector, that's not – Stern Connected is not that great. Yeah, I do for me. For me. Yeah, it's fine. I feel like everybody was excited about the connectivity stuff for Lego Moms, and everybody's kind of over it already. Maybe that's just me. Well, I mean, it's not going to move the needle that much. Like, it's great to have. Like, it should be a standard thing in pinball now, right? Like, it's just one of those things that should be in there. Right. It's in gaming. I mean, that's achievements and stuff. That's gaming.
    13:05
    So let's jump back over to the pitches. I'm fixated on the pricing. So, I mean, the premium went up $1,200.
    13:14
    Jesus. And then the pro went up. The pro increase is not as much. Pro increase is $7. Well, dude, wasn't Led Zeppelin when it came out like 50, like a little less than that? I don't know.
    13:28
    I pulled that from the launch announcement. Oh, perfect. Then there you go. You got it. So these are MSRP, so your street price is probably a little less. Right. And then. Here it is right here. God, dude.
    13:42
    Oh, my God. Yeah, so that was that. Are you ever going to buy a new pinball machine again? Maybe one in five years. It's crazy.
    13:52
    It's hard to wrap my mind around trying to pay these prices for a new pinball machine. Is that why you're looking for a new job or position?
    14:01
    You've got to get a second job to buy a pinball machine. Jesus. You can never get ahead. You're just on this treadmill, and the treadmill starts going faster and faster, right? Right. Yeah. I mean, the good part is that I've already got money invested in pinball that I can cash out and sell a machine to get something new, because the old machines are going up in price too. Yeah, well, there you go. You're following that guy who calls a skinny guy and bald guy. You're following his investment strategy then. Was that it? I forgot. He calls pinball investments. I know you're not saying that. It's just a jab at him because he's what he's talking about. I mean, I buy pinball machines I like because I want to play them. The side benefit is that they're not worth more than they were when I bought them. So they're just keeping pace with the price of everything else going up, thankfully. Yeah, I saw, like, I messaged you the other day because Flippin' Out has, like, a bunch of pinballs. And, like, it's kind of cool that he posted all the pricing that he has, and I'm sure he'll sell all these. But, like, there's, I think I used Iron Maiden Pro for, like, $8,000. And I've not looked on Pinside for, like, what Iron Maiden Pros are going, but I'm sure, you know, it's always going to be a little bit more probably from a distributor or dealer. but I'm sure he'll sell it. Like the idea of like an Iron Maiden pro being $8,000. It's just, God, you know, prices are going to go up, but even, even like, even knowing that I have trouble wrapping my head around it still. Like, it's just like you blink and you even get used to what prices were six months or a year ago. And then they go up again. You're like, I can't, I really just can't, I can't do this. You figure it out. Honestly, it's really got me like hyped for the next P3 release. I can get a brand new game for a couple thousand bucks. I was like, that's a freaking steal now.
    15:52
    But their pricing model, if they can get, if they can start cranking out releases, you know, their, their models, you know, I think with all this inflation, it's looking more and more attractive over time. I don't know. I mean, so, I mean, Kyle, I try to look at the chat once in a while. So Kyle Bassa, long time viewer and contributor, Can we all agree that their cost of manufacturing didn't actually go up more than $200, but they figured they'd make an extra $1,000? I don't know. Like, I mean, look, there's so much money flying around in the economy.
    16:27
    And CERN be stupid when they're looking at the pricing not to increase more than the cost of manufacturing. But I'm sure cost of manufacturing has also become extremely difficult in this environment with, like, supply shortages. I mean, what is, like, the hardest thing to make, like, in this environment? Like, a pinball machine has got to be incredibly hard with sourcing all the parts and trying to get the parts. You could just be missing a few parts, and, like, your thing is going to be held up, let alone also trying to attract workers in this environment. You've got the workers getting sick. You've got workers getting basically paid to stay home.
    17:00
    This is not a high-wage job to be on the assembly line of a pinball machine. So there's just – it's, like, everything. It's just, like, not, like, one thing. It's just everything is going on right now. And I don't think we're going to be settled on this. I'm sure, Kev, a year from now we're going to have this discussion again and the prices are going to be higher. I'd put money on that. Oh, for sure. And, you know, not to mention, like, there's just so many opportunities for jobs right now. So, like, if the people working in the assembly line, it's part of the great resignation where people are just, like, up and leaving and going to whatever job they want because there's so much availability of jobs. So if there's something that's a little bit better that's nearby, they can go and make more money, you know, working at McDonald's or whatever. Um, you know, cause those line worker jobs are not super high paying, I'm sure. Um, so there's just more options for the workers. So labor costs go up and that slows down production, which increases their overall costs. So there's, there's so many layers of things right now. So what's this tell us is based on the ads he sees living in Chicago, Stern has increased their base pay. So it has not increased for the jobs.
    18:08
    All right. There you go. back to the game. So that's the pro looking good. So the back glass has the owl on there. I don't, I don't know the significance of all the symbolism from the band, but that's, that was on one of their album covers. They got shared in the Buffalo discord on the side is a, you know, a cartoon rendition of the band with Neil Peart ridiculous drum set They looking good Can I just say before I forget one more thing about pricing And this is a PSA from our unofficial sponsor Arby I saw at the rest stop this week on the thruway that they're offering $17 an hour. Isn't that insane? Like, that's all you need to know.
    18:56
    I'm so old that, like, I don't know what minimum wage was when you first started, but for me it was $4.25 an hour. Oh, shit. I started in 96, so whatever it was then. Yeah, we were probably like five bucks or something. Yeah, Arby's, $17 an hour. Boom.
    19:11
    Go do it, kids. Get that money. Get that beef. Exactly. Michael Bernard of Sunbird Designs did the artwork.
    19:22
    So this is the premium. It's got the Rush logo. It's looking very spacey and wintry on the sides. Pretty cool. Pretty cool, like purplish theme to this one. And then the LE has kind of, I would call it a steampunk vibe to it. Lots of gears. The side armor is like a cutout of a guitar with gear edges to it.
    19:46
    The back glass has more gears and, you know, random rush stuff on it. So there you go. Those are your three models. It's got the expression lighting only in the LE. That's the other thing that makes that $9,000 premium harder to swallow because I'm definitely going to be about the premium. You got the expression lighting, right?
    20:05
    Yeah, this is, that was a really bizarre choice. That's really weird to me because I don't know, man, like for that huge increase in the premium and you're going to take the expression lighting out and it doesn't seem like the features from the pro to the premium are that significant, right? For the price increase, like it's like pushing people to pro. So, yeah, that's like what squarely pushed me to the Pro. Easy.
    20:35
    Yeah. Because you could buy the expression lighting, just get that, put that on the Pro, and there you go. What is the compelling reason to get a premium from the Pro?
    20:46
    So here's what's different on the LE. So the LE has the expression lighting system, the side armor, the mirrored back glass, foil cabinet decals, upgraded audio system, shaker motor, non-glare playfield glass, certificate of authenticity by Gary Stern, designer autograph on the bottom of the apron, and sequentially numbered. So those are all the things that it has over the premium.
    21:17
    The main playfield differences are, here's a look at the playfield. There's a ramp in front of the time machine that goes up and down. so normally the ramp would just be always up it's always up on the pro yeah who gives a shit if it's down i don't know maybe maybe i mean that's just like my that's oh god kevin we didn't even preface this again hot take hot take impression not a review somebody's already written uh comment yeah it's too late even though it's on the intro we can't win because we're gonna clip this yep all right well yep there we go well you got it you got it mid uh mid mid impressions this time so what's weird about that is um if you think about mando on the premium le there's like that scooper ramp that moves up and down and when it's up it gives you a different shot but when it's down you get a little like turnaround uh shot to the ramp yeah this is kind of cool yeah so you get two different shots which is cool i miss when the ramp goes down there's nothing there it's just a dead end, like, you clunk into whatever metal is at the bottom of that. And then it comes right back at you? Right, exactly. It's like, you know, so a lot of John Borg has, like, straight up the middle shot, you know, Metallica, Walking Dead, so it'd be like hitting Sparky without the magnet and just clunking back at you? Right, right. Wow, really? That seems kind of... Are you sure? I'm not missing something? Because that doesn't seem like a feature. Let me see if there's a... Actually, I got those turnpicks over here. Let's see if there's a... Well, Neil, Neil played the premium. Neil McCray played the premium last night. So maybe Neil can let us know in chat if I'm, if I'm off base here. Obviously the impression.
    23:01
    All these pigs are with the ramp up. It's a nice looking game. I mean. Yeah, it is. For sure. They're not showing it down.
    23:13
    Neil, what's your quick, quick take? Do you think there's significant differences between the pro and the premium? If you've only played the premium, I mean, I guess maybe you wouldn't be able to give a great answer. So there's also a ball lock behind the drop targets on the left.
    23:32
    Let's see. So Neil agrees with my assessment. There you go. There you go, Chad. You know what he's talking about. The drop targets on the left here and behind there, it's got like the link lock from Avatar. I like that. So that's on the premium. It's got like a, it has a, it has a link lock behind the targets. Yep. That's cool. I like, I've always liked that feature on avatar. Yep. That's a neat thing. And then there's a vertical up kicker that returns the ball to a wire form. Yeah. That is not on the premium. It's sort of like that. As you were saying, I saw, I saw a video of the gameplay yesterday and it's sort of like the concept and Led Zeppelin with a third flipper. One's like a, one's like a, Shot to Nowhere, right, where it just comes back, and the other one is it actually returns to the flipper. Right. Okay.
    24:22
    So those are... It's still really hard to get up to the premium. I mean, the only thing is, like, the Avatar locks seem cool, but then you don't even give it expression lighting, so I don't know. I know. Yeah, and I guess this clock is not on there on the premium LE, or it's not on there on the pro, but it doesn't actually do anything. Yeah, I mean, if you're a huge Rush fan, right, Like, you know, the LEs are just, you know, good luck getting an LE, right? So the premium and then the expression lighting kit will kind of put you there and maybe do that. But this is one of those games where I think the compelling case is for the pro, especially with the pricing the way it is. Yeah, that tends to be for Borg's designs. The pros are always really solid. I feel like there's not huge gameplay features missing out of them in general. it seems like it's mostly cosmetic and style stuff yeah Neil says the clock signals time in some of the modes which is a cool toy but you know you just put that under the display right yeah right right right again it is it's I'm looking at pictures that you got up this is a nice looking game and like it's kind of cool how each model they're definitely differentiated and I think they all look good right the art looks good on all of them yeah there's a cohesive style it's uh it's a nice package overall it's it's cool to see some new uh new talent coming into the pinball art scene too you know different takes on pinball style um so let's did you did you uh get to see any gameplay of the stream or not i i have not had much time so um i watched five minutes right like i've been i've been i've been scrambling and so busy so i saw like five minutes of play i have i don't really have a good impression of this game yeah so the sound it was i mean i so if you if you watch that promo video where they did the call outs with getty lee and um the other dude sorry sorry sorry rush fans um they uh so they got they got rush in the studio they got them working on uh all the call outs and and ed Robertson was kind of guiding them through, you know, what the call outs mean and why they should care. So two things there, like, it's cool to have somebody like Ed who's really into pinball, who understands it. And also he's a huge fan of that band, right? So he understands what fans of the band will want in a pinball machine. The fact that the band was involved kind of like with Guns N' Roses, like you see all of these additional assets and things that are available for the pinball machine versus a game like Led Zeppelin or Beatles, where it's like, okay, here's what you get. And that's it.
    27:09
    You're going to get like these X number of songs. You know, we have 17 songs here versus like 10 in Led Zeppelin. And there's only a handful in Beatles.
    27:18
    So you see the benefits of going with these bands who are more into it, right? Even though they might not have the, Rush doesn't have the draw of a Beatles or a Led Zeppelin maybe because they sold, you know, not as many albums. but and I think the Beatle the Rush demographic there's folks in commenting that overseas they don't know who Rush is so I don't think they have that global reach oh really I didn't know that so Alex and Yeti sorry Alex I forgot your name so yeah I think that's a plus that makes the game more appealing especially for big fans of the band display and lighting the display work did not wow me but that's not really a surprise with certain games in general it's like okay you get what you get it's cool that they have the concert footage but the original like stern work was just kind of like eh it was like it's fine it gets the job done I would say it got the job done the thing that struck me about the gameplay was like it didn't I always have a hard time figuring out what's exactly going on from a stream, like rules wise. But it didn't seem like the game was doing a great job of directing you and showing you what to do. I don't know if that's a, like a Tim Sexton, Raymond Davidson thing, or if it's a tournament player thing. I don't know if you find that with Zeppelin, if it took you a while to figure out what was going on or if somebody had to explain what was going on to you before you really got it. Yeah. Well, you and I went to play Zeppelin, right? on location, I really didn't know what was going on. But that was like playing it on this terrible location for half an hour at best. So when I saw Raymond Davis' tutorial video on Led Zeppelin, totally got it. It made sense. It clicked.
    29:15
    I don't know. It just works. I'm never really confused by the rules on that game. I know nothing about the rules on this game, but I do like what Tim and Raymond did on Led Zeppelin. I think that those two did a really good job. So I look at this game, and I've always liked the shots on X-Men. I think that might be my favorite Borg design because it's more of a flowy. X-Men's more of a flowy Borg game, right? He's got a lot of games that are dangerous, and they have some flow shots, but there's a lot of shots that are coming back at you quickly. X-Men, you can certainly play a little bit longer, but X-Men just wasn't a good game, in my opinion, from the rules standpoint. It was kind of clunky rule-wise. So, seeing that this is like X-Men, if it has kind of those flowy elements, then it might be something that I'm interested in, right? Like, I think it was Neil in chat who said this is like X-Men with better rules. And that alone, somebody tells me that, that alone has me thinking, huh, okay, let me pay attention to this game. Maybe it's a maybe something that finds its way in my collection even though like i'm sort of neutral on rush like rush does like absolutely zero for me and i was i was asked i was talking to you the other night about this and i'm like i was asking how you feel about rush and i was like i i listen to the music man and i just don't i don't get it it's not it's not pushing any buttons or flipping any switches like i'm not like i hate this this is terrible i'm just like man just does it it doesn't click whatsoever. I'm like, I can't believe how popular this band is. But then again, Neil McRae, he's getting a lot of shout-outs. He's being very active and helpful. Thank you. He was saying they're unheard of in Europe. I don't know. And you told me that I was like, what kind of people like Rush? And you're like, nerds.
    31:08
    It's nerd music. And I know in the greater perspective of the world. I'm a nerd. I can say that. I checked some of the nerd boxes, but this one I'm only a nerd to some extent. I haven't crossed some other level where this music is really getting me going. I'll do some nerd. Give me a Weezer pin. That's like nerd rock, right? I would do that.
    31:35
    That's the dad rock game, not grandpa rock. Ball Surgeon Chat said it's like Tron. This is not Tron. This is X-Men. It's not Iron Maiden. It's not whatever other comparisons people have made this x-men it's a modified x-men layout so i mean tron was like x-men came out after tron i think it was his immediately his next game and x-men what when people could we're talking about x-men the play field they're like well he kind of mirrored tron but then added some other shots and i think it's a better i think it's a better version of tron with that so that layout He played with that layout, mirrored it, and made it a little bit different. But, yeah, so that comment that it's Tron is not a terrible comment because X-Men is kind of a mirrored version of Tron with some additional shots and I think an improved version of Tron. But this maps way more closely to X-Men. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. So if you're looking at a board game that this compares to, it's definitely X-Men. I think Slappy White's comment is the best. it's X-Men with the portal shot from Austin Powers up the middle basically you know the time machine from Austin Powers also time machine from Austin Powers and also I guess Lord of the Rings people were comparing that to how dare he use a toy from 20 years ago how dare he oh my god doesn't he know that the statute of limitations on toys is 25 years plus that's all you get you can use it once it's got to be at least 30 years old and then when it comes back it's like oh cool a very targeted it's a new game oh my god that's amazing if he Borg busted this out three years later after using that thing then okay you can start criticizing 20 plus years he's good over 10 years you're good 10 years you can recycle some stuff you gotta make these guys lives a little easier too you know yeah it's like okay that's a fun toy right as long as it's a fun toy let's uh and it applies to the theme it definitely does here yeah as far as as much as i know about time machines and rush it seems it seems to it seems to apply the time machine seemed to be a thing for them and uh that's it's a good time machine all right okay can we agree on that um rules and last ability we don't really know the the uh the gameplay looks good. I mean, from a shot perspective, it looked like a fun, fast shooting game. The one thing that I noticed was it seemed that, so that scoop, let me jump back over to the pictures here. So the scoop, there's two scoops here.
    34:25
    And one you can shoot from the side flipper and the other one you can shoot from the bottom flippers. The one you shoot from the side flippers, the bullets tend to just kind of fall in there a lot.
    34:35
    Or at least more than I was expecting. So, I don't know. That was unusual. There's a shot under the flipper back to the shooter lane. Did X-Men have that or no? So, what was the shot that you're talking about? The under flipper shot where you shoot it back to the shooter lane? No. I don't think it had that. So, that's another new shot that's on here. So, that was cool. And obviously, X-Men didn't have the lock behind the drop targets or anything like that. So, there's some different stuff. The diverter at the top. I don't know if you saw that work at all, but behind the time machine there's a ramp diverter.
    35:11
    Folks were saying that was similar to Radical. This is just like X-Game comparison, but when you shoot that ramp in the bag it can divert to the right, and when it did that, it really slowed the ball down, and it seemed to slow it down so much that you could just hold the flipper up and trap the ball because it was moving pretty slow. That was interesting. So that might make for long-term in play if people can exploit that and do a quick post-stop or just even hold the flipper up and trap the ball.
    35:46
    So is Rush going to be the new best game ever because it's the newest game? Oh, yeah. Godzilla's no longer the new best game ever. This is the best game ever. Yeah, there can't be more than one good game. There only has to be one perfect game. But it's always the newest game. Either the newest game is the best game ever or the worst game ever. Correct. Some are saying it's the best game ever. I'm sure there are other people that say it's terrible and why would you make a Rush game, but comments are like throw Guns N' Roses in the trash. This is the Guns N' Roses for Rush. Blah, blah, blah. Zeppelin wishes it was this game. You know how it goes. We've been down this road before.
    36:25
    Yeah, so I don't know, but I guess if you order Rush now, you'll get Rush. Is that the deal? And then if you wait three months, then you'll get it in 2025? Pretty much. That's why, you know, the LE sellout, because people want the game immediately so they can have the got to have it now, oh, my God, shiny new thing. Don't make me wait for the premium in 12 months or whatever that'll come out. Is this a game that you would consider for your location on route?
    36:55
    The economics of routing pinball during this time, it's just there's – I want to answer your question. But the caveat is things aren't good economically en route. Yeah. All right. But to your question I don know I mean I don think the theme alone is not good for location pinball for the average person It not
    37:24
    Unless you live in Toronto. Unless you live, right, correct. If I was operating in Canada, then sure, sure. I don't even know if like if you put it in a place in Canada where like 20 year olds go, if that would work, right? I'd rather just... Maybe Godzilla's a better theme.
    37:45
    Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, probably, even though it's kiddie. I don't know. It's just not a good... I don't think it's a good route theme. It would be good for Mr. DeChiles, maybe. Because they have a rock vibe. Right, maybe, and only because it has a rock vibe, right?
    37:59
    But even then, I mean, people going up to... Whatever, at that place, they play every game equally, pretty much. When Godzilla dropped, they were like, all right, we need one of these. I assume you didn't get contacted by them to say, oh, we need a Rush immediately. No, don't say anything because we're not in a position.
    38:17
    All right, fair. But yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, they're Japanese-themed. They have a huge Mechagodzilla on their wall. Correct. Even before the pinball machine came out. Correct. So that's a no-brainer. Yeah.
    38:31
    So there you go. That's our impression of Rush. Anything else on Rush before we move on? No, I'll just add to like new OVAD. It says the pro wasn't $5,200 anymore. Forget routing this machine. Yeah. That's the thing, man. Like that is, uh, I'm going to bang this drum. Every time you ask me or anybody asked me about routing and pinball, it's like the price has gone up on these machines twice in a year, at least. And it's probably gonna go up next year. And yet what are we supposed to charge for pinball pricing? So now you're going to ask us, you know, you increase the price by a thousand dollars, you're going to ask us to, you know, just delay our profits even more. And it's just like, it's crazy. And then with COVID less people are going out. It's just not a, it's around here. It's not a good time for operating pinball at all. Like you just get squeezed as an operator. Oh, I was supposed to talk on the podcast about operating, but kind of forgot about that. So we'll have maybe another podcast where it's like, here's a concerted time. I'll give my thoughts on operating, but I've always done that, right? Like almost every episode, every other episode, especially when I release a pinball, you ask a good question about operating and people want some insight to this.
    39:44
    So, yeah, it's tough, man. I don't know how other operators are doing, but I think you're absolutely if you're an operator, you think about operating, you're making a terrible mistake if you're not charging at least a dollar and you need to get rid of like the two for three plays like that. That's I'm just going to that's stupid. Like you're being stupid. if you're doing that. And now maybe there's some good counter example out there. I talk in kind of broad terms,
    40:13
    but who doesn't, when the cost of purchasing things, all right, that you're making money on, who doesn't pass along some of that cost to the customer?
    40:26
    Otherwise, you're just not going to do this anymore. So yeah, it's a really weird time in pinball. I mean, it's a weird time in the economy and life anyways, but I can see it front seat, like really weird time in pinball. Really weird time.
    40:43
    Yeah. I know. People want it to be 1980 and pinball machines cost $0.25 to play. It's just not possible. When you're paying prices for a pro that the LE used to be only a couple years ago. Yeah, well, we'll get the inflation calculator out and stuff, and we'll look at – Black Hole was the first game, I think, that charged $0.50, something like that. and that was like in 1980. I'm probably off by like a year or a game, but like, you know, let's just say 1980, that's close enough. Pinball went to 50 cents. And now it's only a dollar. That doesn't make sense.
    41:15
    With 40 years later, and it's only double the price to play, makes zero sense. And these games have to become more expensive. They have way more features.
    41:28
    Way more features. People are rushing out to buy a Black Hole right now. They're rushing out to buy the newest game with the lighting and all that shit. So, yeah, people just need a reality check. And my philosophy is that if somebody complains about pinball being a dollar, then they're not really interested in playing much pinball anyways.
    41:47
    And if they complain, just send them over to me and I'll talk to them. I'll just have to put out a video about the economics of pinball and location pinball and just, like, refer them to that. Just go see this. you're going to go to the bar and buy an $8 fucking beer and then complain that the pinball is a dollar on a machine that's $6,900 are you out of your mind like pinball is not for you man that's all it is go play something else go play a skeeball or whatever alright All right.
    42:29
    That's it for Rush. Looking forward to playing it, as always. New pinball machine, always fun to play. Always interesting to see the initial responses and reactions. But to be continued. All right. Other news happening in pinball. What's up? A text from Mark. $8 fucking beer is his favorite flavor. That would be a good name. No one's taken that name for a beer. Like, you know, so there you go. $8 fucking beer. Do a partnership with CBW. The can is just an $8 sign on it, and everywhere you go, it's $8 for the fucking beer.
    43:01
    It's great humor. All right, some news coming out of Multimorphic. They added two high-level tournament players to their arsenal of employees. Bowen Cairns, Colin McAlpie. Both former, like, Bowen won Papa, Colin won Pemberg. So Bowen is formerly of Spooky Pinball. He's no longer working with them. He's now consulting with Multimorphic. Colin had been working with Multimorphic a little bit, you know, casually and formally on previous titles with Multimorphic, but now this makes it official. So it's cool to see Multimorphic expanding their team.
    43:45
    This is a quote from Pinball News. They say, we asked how, given the physical distance between their homes, They would be able to collaborate effectively. He told us that our development team was already spread out across the world. We use collaboration tools to share files and edit documents. We communicate heavily by messaging and conference tools. Communicating isn't an issue. The bigger challenge is getting everybody onto the machines with early play fields so they can see how the rules are progressing and come up with changes. But we ship things out as necessary, and we also leverage live streaming and video sharing. with a pipeline of upcoming titles we asked if bone and colin would concentrate their efforts of separate games or whether they would work together on future titles jury said the company would be flexible but in general they generally they would work together so it depends on the depth we want in each game and also how many games we're developing in parallel our design process generally involves everybody on the team we all have a voice in the entire creative process but when our decisions need to be made about rules, we'll generally defer to them. Right now they're both providing input on all of the games we're developing. So there you go. That's some news out of Multimurphic. The other thing they're working on is they just launched an update for Sorcerer's Apprentice, which they added 60 more call-outs from the Sorcerer. So he's talking more trash at you as you're playing. A lot of those were community contributions in the Discord and on the inside door they were asking for call-out suggestions, and a lot of those made it in. So good to see that. In other code update news, Spooky just dropped a couple big code updates for Halloween and Ultraman. 1.05 adds new expert level modes for both games.
    45:28
    So there's a YouTube video of Bug from Spooky going through all the rules and showing how to get to those. I thought it was... They call them expert level modes, but you only had to complete two modes to get to them. It doesn't seem like much of a challenge to get there. And then once you get there, there are these very long modes with no timer, so you're kind of stuck in them, it seemed like. I still haven't played either game. I guess, to be determined on that. Do we know anybody that has that game?
    45:59
    I don't want to play another spooky game, personally. Yeah, I have very little interest in trying it. Let's just put it like, I do want to play it, but it's like, I say that and it's like at the bottom of the list, right? There's many more things I want to get to before that. Yeah. I look forward to playing it. I don't anticipate really enjoying the game based on what I've seen of it. So that lowers my excitement to play it. Either one of those. It just has to be not terrible when you step up to it and play it. Like, this is not horrible. Yeah. Hopefully the ball stays on the play field. That'd be nice. That would be nice. Don't fall into the cabinet. but I think James is getting a Halloween sometime. So we'll play it over there. Maybe our good friend James and from JJP there. It's been a quiet December from JJP, but they put out a holiday podcast. They have a Jersey Jack pinball official podcast. And you get to hear from a bunch of folks who work there and, you know, they all talk about exciting new things coming in the new year. So I think a couple of folks hinted at two games. I know they've been hitting it two games a year for like three or four years now, and it hasn't happened yet, but maybe, maybe 2022 is the year. They're going to, they're going to make it happen. So looking forward to seeing what's coming from, from JJP as always. All right. And before we wrap up our manufacturer roundup, we have one more critical, the one you've all been waiting for. Okay. It's a ball around. Let's, let's take a look at what ball around has been up to. Okay. If you're not, if you haven't been keeping up, This is a company out of Australia that's trying to take your money for a pinball machine that doesn't exist. So let's see. This was a good one.
    47:42
    They posted a video on Facebook giving an insight, I-N-C-I-T-E, into Barbara, their artistic director. Barbara's going to arts and crafts the shit out of that game. I mean, look at that room. She's ready to make pinball machines. She's going to put some felt and yarn and stuff on that plate. Looks like she robbed a Michael's. so she's going to incite a riot or something i think uh so that's barbara that's their holiday greeting this is uh what's his name the dude uh talking about ian that's right sorry sorry sorry and we nothing but oh and you pointed out his shirt selection here he's wearing a go for it he fancies he's got a leonardo da vinci shirt on which i'm sure he fancies himself as leonardo Da Vinci. He's not done anything in pinball, but why not? He's going to be the Da Vinci of pinball, yeah. Kev, we got a lot of content coming from these guys, and I just want to give them a shout-out and thank them. Keep it up! Keep it up, which they are. They're not stopping, so that's what that whole video is about. Can't stop, won't stop until they don't have any money, and then they have to stop. Okay.
    48:50
    Oh, this one. Oh, my lord. Okay, this is the good one. This is Ian saying he's out of lockdown and getting out to play pinball again. So he went to play Attack from Mars on location. Cool. That's fun.
    49:02
    Got a great score, according to him. So this was the Bally's Attack from Mars, the original from 1975. I love that. I love that version. They were way ahead of their time, let me tell you. Well, it was from 75, 76, you know, thereabouts. Thereabouts. They went from – I'm not sure if it's 75 or 76, you know. The Koreans are still arguing over – Well, it came out technically in 75 because some people were playing in 1975, but really the public got to play it in 76. So, I mean, Ian's just covering the bases there. Yeah. So I was looking at the comments on there. Nudge Magazine in the comments on Instagram says, didn't Attack from Mars come out in the 90s?
    49:46
    I was like, oh, maybe this is where he realizes his mistake, right? He doubled down. And he goes, there was a remake, but this was the original.
    49:55
    Holy. shit. Quite a simple game, really, but some novels shaking Mark. It's activated its eyes. Wow.
    50:06
    Let's just save that and we're going to put that up on the end of every podcast just as a blank screen.
    50:13
    Somebody crazy cat guy says it did. Pinballs didn't look anything like this in the 70s. The remake came out in 2017 and the original is 1995. Oh, there you go. Oh, there he finally figured it out dead right sorry i was only 20 years out yes the machine doesn't even look like the 70s swear i saw a 1976 badge near the belly tag wow dude this guy this is this is amazing this is um is this real kevin this is real this is real life i mean somebody who knows nothing about pinball if i took him to the basement i've got a couple games from the late 70s, like 1980, right? And I'd be like, go to a game like Attack of Mars, let's say. I'd show them some games like, what decade do you think this came out? I bet they could do a better job than Ian. I bet they wouldn't say the 70s. This is somebody making these claims like they're going to revolutionize pinball and bring never-before-seen things to pinball. You're going to love it. Throw your money at us. He's going to bring things that he's never seen. That's why we've gotten this wrong. We owe him an apology. Ian's never seen these things he's going to bring things into his machine that he's never seen which is very limited so i 100 believe he's going to achieve that goal definitely throw money at their kickstarter that's all that's all yeah but with with uh you can be confident doing that uh let's see if there's anything else okay that's the end of that one uh that's great i didn't know i saw the um i saw the post where he fucked up the the dates but then i didn't see the comments where he's doubling down on it, which is just like, it wasn't just a typo. That's the amazing thing. We all make mistakes, but also as a company that's asking for millions of dollars, you kind of don't want to make these mistakes, ideally. Especially when you've been criticized left and right by the pinball community. That's when you tighten things up. He's doubling down. Maybe when somebody says, didn't this come out in the 90s? Instead of just being like, nah. Maybe do a quick Google search. Nah, God, does that mean I'm DaVinci? Yeah, it's like the random pinball chat. It's like, one of the most popular games ever made. Like one of the top games of all time. It's not like some random, like, you know, pistol poker or something that they made a couple hundred of. Well, it's not like there's this, this, this thing that we have, this, this piece of technology where you can just type things on a keyboard and get an answer like in two seconds, you know, you know, that would require some research and by research. I mean, that's like the really lower in the bar to call research, putting something in Google, but it's research. uh all right so we're not done yet uh why this was good so why so serious the quotations every aspect of life has appropriate quotations made around it pinball is no exception do you have a favorite pinball quote or you could share as a comment or a life quote that's taken your fancy and anyways uh happy new year we got here they we did it we made it to 2021 okay well so let's see some pinball quotes.
    53:22
    Well, there's a line from an amazing movie from an amazing actor totally in the guru's role. That's not a quote. It's a dream monster. There's a quote.
    53:32
    Famous quote. And for the blinky thing, that's also an amazing quote. It's probably an easy fix. It says the company that hasn't built anything yet and probably will never make anything. This is my favorite one. Okay, so the quote is, every age has its storytelling form. Pinball is part of our culture.
    53:54
    Okay, that's kind of a cool quote, right? It's like, oh, well, the original quote from Andy Serkis was, and video gaming is a huge part, but we just changed it to pinball.
    54:04
    I hate to say it, but bring back Natalie. She was a little less worse. We didn't even talk about Natalie.
    54:10
    Oh, we didn't talk about that she's gone? No, that happened. Oh, shit. Natalie. Natalie Rip. Yep. They gave her the boot. She's not on the website anymore. Yeah, see? She's not here. I like to think that we helped with that. You got Andy. You got Grant. Nobody else has been debuted? You got Heidi and Barbara and Ian. Andy without the last name. Yeah. He's just like Bono. He's Andy Perry. There you go. He's Bono. This is Bono. Andy, the musician. Yeah.
    54:41
    Wait, Andy Perry. There it is. Andy Perry, yeah. He's the muso. That's right. And then, oh, they're getting a bunch of followers. That's very exciting. Oh, get rid of that, Kevin. This is the URL. There you go. How many? What's this?
    54:55
    5605. Oh, the numbers are jumping up fast. So how many followers do they have? Like 5,600. Yeah. They have more than Buffalo Pinball does. Somehow they've just skyrocketed. They've eclipsed nearly eight years of, well, even going back to 2013, almost 10 years of work. they've eclipsed it just like that as ballerama man it's amazing everybody is so excited about what they're doing god they should easily with you think coming the numbers behind it they should be able to easily sell 300 games with that many followers you know at least not easily but like you know they're gonna they're up to a good start because at this pace they're gonna be up to like 20 000 followers in a couple months or or next weekend if depending on how what their budget is how many likes on the followers post they got zero comments on that so they're talking about their Facebook following, their LinkedIn following, or their Instagram following, not so good. They only have 343 followers and they following almost 700 people So that not a good ratio usually a lot of people will get followed and they follow you back but people see ball around and they don want any part of it here Let me, let me jump over to it. I kind of want a little part of it, you know?
    56:11
    Oh God, they didn't disappoint. I didn't know if like we would have something to talk about, but they, they get, they keep on delivering. I mean, if they weren't making mistakes or saying stupid things, we'd have nothing to talk about. Yeah, they're up over 6,000 now. It's amazing. Amazing growth. Look at that growth. Almost like unbelievable growth, really. Well, Kevin, it really puts into question your role in managing our social media, your unpaid role in managing our social media. We have not seen this kind of growth from you over the years. So what's going on? Look at that engagement, though. They have 6,000 people who like the page, nine likes on this post about how many people. Two of them are Ian and Barb. they got six here uh who's encouraging them they have nine bots that are liking these posts and now they don't even have Natalie here to like it anymore they got rid of Natalie nine there's like nine on everyone even the bots don't want a part of that oh ten they got ten Barbara got ten and a heart look at that that's engagement right there I bet attack gave her the heart who gave the heart let's see Oh, I can't see because I'm not logged in right now. This is deep into the show where we just shit on Balarama.
    57:26
    It's everybody's – that's me trying to troubleshoot the audio settings earlier. So there you go. There you go. I had multiple people comment about how the Balarama segment was their favorite last month. So that's for everybody who wrote in. People did enjoy that. But, you know, the credit really goes to Balarama. You know? they're just throwing watermelons over home plate and Kevin and I are just doing the obvious right now we're Gallagher in that alright game room updates I have a big game room update and it's behind me over here right there got a new game but it's not a pinball machine it's an old video game called Dis of Tron the third of the Tron trilogy So I had the original Tron arcade cabinet that I got 10 plus years ago. I had the Tron Legacy pinball machine, and now we got Distance of Tron. So it's a, they made a couple versions of Distance of Tron for the arcade. This is an environmental version, you know, the kind that you stand in, but somebody chopped the back of it off, which was not uncommon for the, here I can, if I go big screen here, I can show it to you a little bit better. Back in the day, operators chopped the back of it off because the thing was just so massive and heavy and it took up so much space. So obviously I'd love to have the environmental version, but it's, again, it's huge. It takes up a lot of space.
    58:56
    So this is kind of like the best of both worlds because the environmental version is the one that has the sound with the speech and everything, and it's got extra lights and stuff that light up. The regular stand-up version doesn't have that, so that's pretty cool. And I brought some more stuff to show and tell.
    59:12
    So it's a bit of a project. I've got, you can see there's no T-molding on it right now. I've got T-molding for it. And I started ordering new parts. So there's a site called This Old Game who makes new parts for old video games. So this is a panel that goes above the joystick that lights up with the fluorescent bulb and glows. It looks all cool. So there's that. What else we got in here? We got a new, this will be good because there's bubble wrap by the microphone. So you guys like that? That sound good? Yeah. So that's the lenticular 3D marquee. Look at that. Looking good. So if you've seen the 3D pinball translate, that has a similar effect where you kind of have some depth to it there. I ordered a bunch more stuff from them, like new side art and the bezel and stuff like that. The control panel overlay needs to be redone. So I need to do that. But all that stuff was out of stock. So you got to wait for him to get around to running it.
    60:18
    So was the marquee expensive? It made good wall art. So it was $100 for the marquee, which that's the other thing. I was like, this is kind of a project. I'm going to have to buy some stuff. But then I totaled up all the stuff that I had to buy. And it was like 600 bucks. It was like, man, Pitbull really makes everything else like really cheap. even with like all new side art and everything for the cabinet it's only like it's like 600 dollars it's crazy freaking pinball um so there you go i've got got that um what else have we got i've been playing some video games over over break i played through all of halo infinite which was amazing highly recommended it didn't really hook me at first but when it got to the open world part of it. Really, really just sat there and played it for hours on end. And it's been a while since I played a game like that. So that was really fun. I got Guardians of the Galaxy for the PlayStation 5. So I've been playing that.
    61:18
    Fun game. It's not overly complicated or anything like that. But if you like the Guardians, you'll dig that. This is one of those new copies from GameStop where they take it out of the packaging and sell it to you as new, even though they've already opened it up. So thank you. two GameStop on that. I got Cruisin' Blast for the Switch. Remember the old Cruisin' USA games? Or Cruisin' World? This is the updated version of that. It's like the arcade version of Cruisin' Blast, but there's more to it. There's tons of unlockables and things like that, so I've been really enjoying that. And I got Super Mario World, 3D World, but I got this for Bowser's Fury because I had already played Super Mario World, 3D World on the Wii U, but I was as furious as me when you said I grabbed that. I've been doing a lot of video gaming.
    62:07
    Also been doing some reading. There's so much show and tell for you guys this month. This book was awesome. It's called Missile Commander,
    62:15
    A Journey to the Top of an Arcade Classic. This is by Tony Temple of ArcadeBlogger.com. He's also from an excellent podcast if you're into retro video games or late 70s, early 80s pinball um check it out it's called the ted dabney experience they get uh great interviews with folks from like atari and uh some of the classic game uh companies from back then um but he doesn't this book is really good i wasn't really that into missile command but i was like i'll give it a shot i really like his blog and his podcast and uh it's it's kind of a two-part book where it tells the history of missile command and the development of the game but also his personal journey with it he ended up becoming like the all-time uh high score uh he got the all-time high score on on missile command and there's have you ever heard of like mr awesome from the retro video game scene he's in here this i should have uh flagged the part where he talks about mr awesome but mr awesome like he was claiming to be the number one person in missile command and was trying to ride that to fame and like it had like pornos made it was it's crazy so like stuff you would never expect out of a video game book so i finished that one already would highly recommend and uh the other one i'm reading is once upon atari with uh from howard scott warshaw he's the guy who made yar's revenge but also made the infamous bt for the atari 2600 so uh uh he's a real creative mind and it's a very entertaining book so i'm really enjoying that so far too so there you go that's that's all my show and tell for this month from from the game room so So hopefully some good recommendations there. Definitely check it. Of all that, I think I enjoyed Missile Commander the best. So check out Missile Commander. I would highly recommend it.
    64:05
    Okay, Nick, what's up with you and your game room? So I think it's like future stuff, right? So I decided to pull the trigger on Cactus Canyon. I know we talked about it a couple months ago, and my thinking has kind of changed on it where I'm like, I kind of really want that game. I remember when I first got into pinball, that game always looked really cool to me. And I like the idea of my next pinball purchase being, you know, that world under glass feeling that, you know, Williams delivers on better than anybody else. I'm into, like, Western kind of themes in general, like low-key stuff. But the theme checks the box for me. And then, man, it's like this $8,000 game, you know, compared to all these other games that are coming out with rising pricing, Chicago, was it Coin Op? Chicago Gaming. I mean, they've been putting out, you know, their quality is up there. And then the final thing that made me decide to get that is, you know, I heard that Josh Sharp and Lyman are going to be doing their version of the rules. because you know cactus canyon is a game that was unfinished so chicago gaming my understanding is that they have a version where they kind of kind of completed it and then lyman and josh sharp are going to have their version of it which is a separate purchase now that's like the best of everything right like that's like a williams game with like the williams charm and also like some modern sensibility in terms of what we expect rules to be. And I, I, I, I like posted on that, that pin side thread about what people, I forget what my question was, but what people thought about, um, you know, Josh and Lyman work on the rules. And Josh is like, he messaged me the other day. He's like, he's like, you doubt me and Lyman. And, uh, I was like, listen, man, I was like, I just don't want to drop eight grand like that. If like somebody who, you know, looks at rules and there's a rules nerd to an extent. And at this point in, you know, pinball playing, I don't want a game. That's going to be super easy. I'll be bored with. And he's just like, he's like, look, he's like, all I can say is that this is going to be a game that Lyman and I are going to be proud to have in our basements. And I was like, that's all I need to know. All right, let's do it. Let's get that game. So that's, that's where I'm at right now. So I don't, I don't know when that's happening or when I'll get it. I'm not in a, in a hurry per se, because the other thing is I just started a new job, um, this past week and, um, my life is going to be upside down for a while. I'm going to be working out of town for like a month. Um, so you'll like my whole streaming on Fridays, which is always in flux. I don't, I don't know when that's going to come back. If, and when bro, we're actually going to be out in, so I'm working on Rochester. Um, bro is going to think what we could do, bro. So we're We're going to go out to James next Thursday and then maybe some other Rochester collectors for the next few weeks. So I'm just trying to figure things out.
    67:20
    It's all good. I'm treating myself to a pinball machine in celebration of the new gig. But, yeah, life's a little crazy. So I'm exhausted right now. Except when we talk about ball around, I seem to find a lot of energy. That's your passion. I can't help it. So I'm just trying to manage everything that's going on. so if Attack from Mars came out in 75 76 that would make Cactus Canyon like 79 right that's about when that game came out yeah I would say yeah it came out three years later but that's a normal time so I don't know what Ian's time if you like subtract or divide or I have no idea the so I was actually on an interested list for Cactus Canyon 2 and when the pricing got announced and the they weren't very clear about, like, when the Lyman code would come out and how much it would cost and when it did. So those are between – it was also, like, $8,000 for, like, a 90s game.
    68:23
    I was hoping for more, like, the Attack from Mars pricing, but obviously everything's gone up. So when the pricing came out, I was like, eh. And, you know, it could be years before you see the code, and who knows how much it's going to be when it comes out. So that's why I – You could sell the game in like if you wait, you buy for eight thousand, sell the game by the end of next year for like eleven thousand dollars. You know, like you're not it's like you're not going to get hurt on this. Right. Yeah. So that's why I pull out. You're welcome, Chicago. I just helped you sell a bunch more games. You're welcome. I was like, I was a great I will look forward to coming to your house and playing in your house. So that's right. That's the best of both worlds. It is. No, it is a thing. Like, I don't like buying the same games you have. Like, I don't mind. I mean, if the game's great, I obviously want it, but it's just like, I do take in consideration what you get. And it's like, okay, was there another game where I kind of like almost as much or whatever? And like, I'll get steered in that direction. You know, we can try to diversify a little bit. It doesn't do you and I any good to have like all the same games. Right. No winning in that. You can play my games anytime you want. Yeah, exactly. You're like, Nick, you call me up. I want to come over and like go nuts. All right. Like.
    69:30
    Yeah. And then it makes it exciting when I go over. I was like, oh man, I can play Black Knight and all these games that I don't Deadpool, you know, all these games I don't have a chance to play all the time. And not so much about that.
    69:47
    Nua Man buys all the games that I've bought. He had a Grand Lizard, he had a Space Shuttle, what else? He had a bunch of other ones.
    69:55
    If it's not the games that I've had, he's buying the games that you had because he's got a Deadpool and... Who's that? That's Small Town. I gotcha. That's why we invited him on the stream team, because he has a good taste in pitmosh. Yeah, that's true. I agree. All right. I think that's going to do it for this month. What do you say?
    70:13
    Solid podcast, right? I think it's solid. I think it's solid. I can't wait to get this up on YouTube and read the comments. It's going to be good. Especially the Ballarama part. That's all you're here for. Come on.
    70:24
    Yeah. Everyone subscribe to the Ballarama thread on Pinside. But I do have time. I'm active in that thread. we had some comments in discord saying that was the most active anybody seen you on facebook inside in a while dude I'm done I have zero tolerance for this kind of bullshit I really do and that ball around was total bullshit I mean it's also hilarious but it's a warning signal to everybody out there do not back their game it's never going to stop dude We'll be doing this podcast five years from now, and there's going to be another Balarama. There's going to be another Deep Root. When is it ever going to stop? Never, never. There's always going to be the next Balarama, Deep Root, who else? Skippy, Zidware, and on and on and on. There's enough delusional people. What's interesting about Balarama is they're delusional people without money. I'm always a little more interested in delusional people who have money because, obviously, they had to at least do some things right. Well, actually, Robert just stole and committed crime. So I guess that theory goes out the window, right? All right. He was a master manipulator, if nothing else. Yeah. Well, yeah. I guess you can steal money, you know, and you get caught. So anyways. Just let you know. Oh, yeah. She's going to jail.
    71:47
    Robert. It's going to happen, Robert. Robert's going to go to jail, too. You're going to be hanging out with Elizabeth. Yeah. You can talk about single drops of blood in ball machines. Yeah. You know what? There's, um, here's, here's a, uh, tip to somebody who wants to do pinball content. Like, look, there's a million stupid, like not stupid, but like, it's stupid how many like podcasts there are in this like niche hobby. Right. And it's just too much, like compared to the amount of people in the hobby per podcast, it's, it's kind of insane. But what would be interesting is, is, uh, documenting, um, documenting deep root, right. have a nice like consolidated 10 episode thing where like they did with like elizabeth holmes like professionally done well thought out doc document that that's a good story for pinball it's a very cautionary tale yeah oh he's great man god bless that guy he's in it he's good yeah there's a good before we wrap up there's a good comment in chat i want to just ask you about it what was up with you walking that dog oh that's my uh sisters that's my sister's dog oliver and I was like, take a picture. I'll send it to Martha or get it posted somehow.
    72:58
    Yeah, dude, her dog is just exactly why I don't have dogs. I go over to her house and the thing's jumping. It jumps in the air at her. I was like, let me take it for a walk because I wanted to go for a walk. I was coming back to Buffalo that day. That dog just starts running up ahead constantly in his leash and he's strangling himself. It's just so dumb. Then he stops and he eats like shit like from some other dog it's just like this is great i could see yeah how fun is this yeah i'll come over and walk him is he a good boy i i think my uh he's he's a cute dog man he's a cute dog he's like that kind of thing where it's like i'll go over and visit my sister and go for a walk and he's like you want to put him on the leash i'll walk him around and that's it that's it that's cool he's a good boy though there you go he's a bite or bark so uh Stay tuned next Thursday. Brody even pinball is coming back. We're going to be playing Godzilla LE with our friend James and Ben. We're really looking forward to that. And we're going to schedule some other Rochester. We're going to get Rochester pinball for the month. Rebranding for the month. And bro is off of hiatus. That's right. Hiatus is over. Yeah. It was a nice. Do you have a nice little break? I did. Yeah. Pinball. Good holiday. Chilling. Lots of video games. Lots of reading. Yeah. yeah I'm ready to get on stream and play some pinball it'll be fun to go I love going to James and playing his games again they got awesome collections out there so yeah they're good guys until next month have a good time and we will see you on the rest of the stream take it easy bye guys