Hey, what's up everybody? Cale Hernandez here from the Electric Batcast. Joining me today is Serge. Hi everyone. Hi Cale. And as you can see, this is a little something different. Usually after hours, Serge and I play pinball. And we have some great pinball discussions. You have some fantastic opinions on pinball. That's a mighty kind of you, Cale. And I think more people need to hear this. So we decided to start this podcast. This is Electric Bat Cast Presents Pin Pals. Because that's what we are. We're Pin Pals. We are Pin Pals. And you came up with that name. I can't take the credit for that one. It wasn't our original name. It wasn't. We had to table some of the original names. Some of the original names were more interesting. They were too hot to handle, though. Too hot to handle. We were worried about getting shadow banned. Plus my wife said no. And that's most importantly. Right. I didn't even know about that. That's true. Oh, where are we going to get onto? This is the, what do you call this? The premiere episode of Pimp House, the pilot. Yeah, and I'll tell you what we were thinking about it. You know, first, this is kind of a podcast inception. We're doing a podcast within a podcast. It's your podcast along with your great co-host, Rachel, the Electric Bat Arcade. but we're going to do our own sub-podcast within it because I said, Kale does not have enough exposure. I said, sure. I need to be exposed. Right. You love being exposed. I said, sure, Kale has the number one Twippy Award-winning podcast with his better half, Rachel, right? Yep, thank you. And sure, he's on the roundtable, right, with Jamie from the GBS show and Ralph. That's right. And they just released a three-hour episode that was straight fire, right? You saw that. I saw it was really good. Yeah, good, good. And Shure sometimes is a guest on the Pinball Party podcast. Holy crap. You know, as well. I do so much. Right. And Shure, along with Rachel, he helps run the greatest, largest single venue arcade league night in the whole world, not just in Arizona. Keep going. We'll keep going if you're asking. And Shure, they sell wonderful merch worn by great players all over the world and fashion models. That's right. From Milan to Rio. That's right. Such as the type we're wearing right now. That actually is true. Right. And sure, you run a Discord with several hundred members. Very popular. All the people are in it. There's so much I forget about. Right. And sure, you have all these other things going on. You're into RC cars and jujitsu and Lord knows what other hobbies, right? Here we are. Here we are. And yet there needs to be more, we said. What am I missing? What is the ingredient that I'm missing, Serge? And I'll tell you what you're missing. Tell me. It's a good segue. So this podcast, what we want to do is something different. There's a lot of podcasts out there, obviously, for pinball. If you're into pinball, you know that. There's podcasts that cover the news. There's ones that cover the collector scene. You have one that covers the operator scene, which was missing. Right. You know, there's all those sort of podcasts out there, right? Sure. Tournament player scene and everything like that. I think what we can do that maybe is a bit different is talk game theory. Ooh. The theory of what makes a good game. You know, I don't know if I know much about it. You definitely do. So you're going to have to fill me in. All right. I'll tell you what we're thinking. All right. Where do we start? All right. So what we thought about for episode one is talk about what makes for good rules and really dive deep into what would we consider good rules, why we'd consider good rules, what we'd consider bad rules, that sort of thing. Does that make sense? Absolutely. And when it comes to making rules, it's tough. I know that it's tough. It's tough to make everyone happy because there's not one end user of pinball, right? Ultimately, there's a player, right? But there's also an operator. You have to make operators happy with your code and everything else in the game, right? The theme and so forth. But when we're just talking about code alone, you have to make operators happy. You have to make the players happy. And there are different types of players. There's the novice. There's the intermediate. There's the pros, the tournament players. There's people who care about score, and then there's people who care about the journey, being immersed in the theme and playing along the modes, and they don't care about the score. And so you have all these different types. There's the home buyer, the collectors, and so forth, people who play on location. And so when you have all these different types, they all want kind of different things. They overlap, but they want different things, right? Is that fair to say? Absolutely. And so it's tough to make everyone happy. And yet, I think you can make everyone happy. You have to be able to make everyone happy. If you want to survive in business, you have to make the biggest section of the population happy. Right. You have to know your end users. You have to make them happy. And especially when games can cost $10,000, you better make them happy. 100%. And so that's what we want to go into. And, you know, in future episodes, we can talk about other things like what makes for good lighting, what makes for good tournament games, what makes for good whatever. Art. Art, for example. We can get into that. We're not going to touch on that in this one. Right. This one's about code. Yeah. We're zooming in. We're zooming in. So to be more specific, what I thought we can do with this code conversation is I want to give you my ten criteria that I think about that what makes good code. I'm going to give you ten criteria. Now, you don't have to agree with these criteria, and I'd love to know if you have others that you would include. I'm ready for it. And if you are a designer or coder of games, you also may not agree with these criteria. I don't have the hubris that tells me that these are the right criteria that you have to follow. But I'll say this, Cale. I think whatever you do in pinball or in life, if you have a goal, if you have a project, if you have a business, you better have criteria in mind. You have to. And you have to measure against that. And you have to say, did I do a good job measuring against that? And so we're going to use these criteria for today. Okay. But if there's others, I accept that. Right. And so when Ray Day listens to this and he has a – And he's coming, by the way, in about a month. We're going to hang out with him. It's his seventh anniversary tournament. And he has a question or comment, he can just get in touch with me. That's true. Not me. And then I'll let you know. Right. But I'd love to see him next month. And obviously, if you have comments or disagreements, put them in the chat. We'll respond. Yeah. Or put them in our Discord. We'll respond there as well. Absolutely. Yeah, we'll have this on YouTube, Spotify, all the regular venues. Amazing. Amazing. So I'm going to give you the 10 criteria. And then as I do, here's what I think we can do. With each criteria, we'll talk through why that's a criteria, what makes it, how do you accomplish it. And then what I thought I could do with every criteria of these 10 that we'll go through is we'll do four things. All right. Number one is we'll talk about what are really good examples of pinball that meets this criteria. Sure. Maybe what are some bad examples as number two. And then for me, the overall best code of all games, I'll tell you to show my bias, is Jurassic Park. And I'll talk about why Jurassic Park is overall best as we go through these criteria. Right. Yeah. And then the fourth thing is that I thought we could do is one of the reasons I generated this conversation is we were talking about King Kong. And we were saying, like, there's things I like about it and things I don't. And what I thought I could do is we could take a game in this episode, in the specific King Kong, and go through these criteria and say, how does it meet these criteria, yes or no? Is that fair? And give it a go. Yeah, I love it. And maybe in future episodes, if it's interesting, if this works for the chat too and for viewers at home, is that we can ask you, what game do you want to hear about? And maybe in future episodes, we can take another new game, like King Kong, and balance it against these criteria and say, does it do a good job? I guarantee, I've been podcasting long enough to guarantee that the audience is going to have their opinion, and they're going to want you to hear it. I appreciate that. I'd be excited for that. All right, so we get to it? Let's go. All right. I'm going to give you the ten criteria. Criteria number one. Now, I'm doing it for those people listening by audio, but I think you're going to put on the criteria overlaying as I'm saying it, right? Absolutely, yep. All right, so here's my ten criteria, and then we're going to go through. I'm going to name all ten, and then we'll go through them one by one. Yeah. All right, so the first one is moments, pinball moments. Yes. The next one is theme immersion. Does the code make you feel like you're in the theme? Okay. The third one is going to be breadth. How many choices do you have to start the game, or do you just have one thing to do? The next one is depth. How far can you go? What do you get for going far? The next one is going to be clarity. How clear is it to play that game and what you have to do in that code? Okay. And then we're talking number six is going to be risk and reward. Does the game give you something, dangle something in front of you? If you do something more, that's worth more, right? Right. The next one after that, number seven, is going to be fair and balanced. Does the code feel fair and balanced? Mm-hmm. Number eight will be innovation. Does it do new things that you haven't seen before? Okay. Number nine will be, I'll call it, I was so close, dot, dot, dot. And what I mean by that is pacing, basically, that, you know, whenever you play an L1 game, not to skip ahead, almost every game you always feel like, man, I was one shot away from that thing. And that's a great feeling. Yeah. It's a bad feeling inside because you were like, I was so and I was so close. Leave them wanting more. You want to leave them wanting more. Yes. And then number 10 we'll talk about is bugs. Bugs in code, right? And you can't forget about this one because if you have bugs in code, you know, you want to comment on that one? You cannot talk about code without talking about bugs because at some point there are always bugs. They have to be cleaned up. That's right. Yeah. So with that, let's get on to our first one. Let's do it. All right. Number one. Number one, moments. What do I mean by moment? and then we'll go back and forth and talk about games that are good at it. When I say moment, I mean an individual moment in the game that's often a combination of lights and sounds and mechs in the game and rules that makes you feel involved in that moment that puts the energy into you, sometimes emotion into you, sometimes excitement. It could be a lot of things, but adrenaline, a single moment that makes you feel like that. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Do you have some favorite pinball moments? Just off the top of my head while you're talking about it, Foo Fighters. Okay, tell me. I think it has some great moments. Tell me. The call-outs combined with the lights. When you know, and I can't remember, we talked about this with some people. Maybe it was on the stream. Oh, no, it was on the JBS show. We were talking about lighting and people who use ad lights for the game and how it ruins moments. So, you know, when you're playing Foo Fighters and that action button is flashing, You know when you hit it, the lights are about to go out. Okay. So you have to think about where your ball is at that time. Because for a second, I might not be able to see this ball. And to me, that's a great moment in pinball because you are interacting with that moment. I see what you're saying. Yeah. I'll tell you what I feel is a moment, there's not one way to achieve it, but they often share a few qualities. They often share a lighting that changes, a sound call that changes. It's often worth something score-wise in that moment. And often there's a pause in the gameplay. It doesn't have to be, but I'll give you an example. Like, for me, one of the best examples is Showtime, Multiball, and Adam's Cup. Oh, come on. It's that one moment. It's singular. It makes you feel something when you hit it. Right. And I think what makes it so key in that case is it's not a complex mech. It's just a scoop. It has a chair on top, but it's just a scoop. There's a light. So it's not about, like, wow. You know, it's easy to achieve moments sometimes when you have an amazing mech. Like in Pirates of the Caribbean, JJP, it has a cannon that fires from one ship to another one. That's a great moment. It's easy to achieve it when you have mechs. But I want to focus more on the rule side of achieving it. Because even when you don't have mechs, you could do it with just the rules, with sound effects, with lighting. So like in Adam's Family, not an amazing mech. It's just a scoop. But it matters. You feel something when you hit it. And it's really helped out in that case by a pause in the game, by the Raul Julia call-outs. Of course, that helps too. That's not rules, but that just helps to have call-outs like that, right? And then you know it's worth something and something big is about to happen. And you don't get it every game. You often get close to it, but you don't get it every game. You can't have it be offered to you, handed out every game. I think that takes away from a moment. You know what I mean? We'll talk about games that do that. Yeah, we will. Or companies that do that. Even entire companies. Right. And so getting more into moments, then, I want to ignore the moments that are made from great mechs, you know, like a cannon shot. Obviously, that matters, but you can't have that in every game. And even a game like Adam's Family relies on the great call-outs to get it there. TNA has great moments from the music. You know, the music changes when you blow up a reactor. The game goes off like crazy. There's music changes, and it helps to have great music. in that case, you know. But for me, back to Jurassic Park, why I think it's an overall, you know, one of the greatest, for me the greatest code out there, is you talk about the smart missile shot. In that smart missile shot, it's not a mech. It's not special sound effects or call-outs or music. It's just a target. It's just a target. That's it. That's all it is. There's a pause in the gameplay, and you have a hard shot to make. And that's a key, too. What's even more interesting, you can make a decision. Right. And you have, you're under stress. Under stress to make that decision. It amps up the stress. Right. And I think what makes that moment great to me is that, number one, there's a pause in the gameplay. There's an amp in stress level because it's giving you a choice. There is a shot that's really hard to make that you don't make all the time. And for me, when I'm playing Jurassic Park, I usually, in most games, get an opportunity to make the smart missile shot. But I usually don't get it. Right. And so I think that's what makes a moment, too, is it can't be handed out to you. Ideally, you want opportunity to get it, but you don't want it to be so reliable that you get it every time. And what's very interesting with that particular shot, you know, we talked about why that's a moment. You talked about why that's an incredible moment. Yeah. It happens. You have to make a decision. Sometimes you miss that decision because you scroll past it and you have to restart. But when you get that shot in a multiball, holy crap, it's stress on top of stress. Yep. And that, man, if that's not a moment, I don't know what is. You hear what I'm saying? Yes. And so I think I start with that first one because I think that applies to everyone. You know, when I first came up with these criteria in mind for this episode, I was thinking initially, you know, the first five criteria are more going to be for people who are the journey players who want to be emotionally involved in the game. And the last half, the last five are more for the tournament scoring type players. And there's both. But the truth is when I started doing that, I realized, you know, there's a lot of overlap there. And a lot of us are both. We care about being invested in the game, and we also care about the score. You know, the smart missile shot is a moment because the stress is amped up and you're into it. Right. But it's also a moment because it matters. He makes it one of the most higher scoring things you could do in the game. That one shot is worth a ton of points, and that matters too. You don't want it to be worth nothing, you know? I think about it sometimes like, you know, let's start calling things out. Is that okay? Can we start doing that? Sure. So, like, sometimes Dwight will code games, and he's a great coder in many respects, but sometimes he'll code games where something crazy interesting happens, like the Boba Fett mode in Star Wars, right? But it doesn't matter. Mandalorian. Mandalorian. Ambush is another one, you know, if you're talking about that one. Most players will time that out, and they won't experience the moment. And so it's not just about making the lights go off and the rules go crazy, but you have to tie it to scoring. You have to recognize how that plays into the game. It has to matter to all types of players, the journey players and the scoring players. Is that fair? Yeah. Okay. We're still on moments. And one of the things I was going to say is, you know, with every one of you, I'm going to bring in King Kong and say what I like about it, what I don't. Right. And here I'm going to be honest. Even though it's not finished. Even though it's not finished. I know. You already have a. I have a take. You have a take. I have a take. And then we'll revisit it. We'll revisit it. I'm willing to be. At one point. At one point, this could well be changed. And it might be changed because of this discussion. We'll see about that. We'll see about that. See if they care. but what I would say is, what I would say is, and I'm going to say really nice things about King Kong, but I don't think I have a great thing to say here about moments, and I'll tell you what I mean, right? Like, if you're playing the premium, I suppose you could argue, you know, you get the King Kong multiball, and the balls get locked up into the main mech, the train car, and King Kong bashes it, and you could say that's a moment. That's a moment made by the mech. It's not made by the code. You know, it's just, it's made by the mech. If you have a pro, I don't feel much when King Kong multiball happens, and I think even in a pro, you can feel things when the multiball happens. For sure. I'll give you an example, maybe like Godzilla. When you hit the house, the building main mech, the Godzilla multiball, obviously it's really cool in the premium and the mech falls down, the building falls down, it makes you feel immersed and all of that. But even in a pro, without that falling building like that, just making the shot and then the music starts, you know, makes you feel that Blue Oyster Cult, which I normally wouldn't listen to, but it works in the game. No shade to Blue Icer Gold. We love Blue Icer Gold. No, we're fans. But there in the game, it works really, really well. It brings you into it. It matters. You're making shots that bring down the building. The lights change on the building. You're immersed in it that way. And then making that shot matters. And personally, I don't know if you do. I don't feel that in King Kong. I don't feel when I get into King Kong Multiball any of the same dopamine hit that I get in some of the other examples, like Adam's Family, you know, for example. Right, for sure. Do you agree with that? I agree with that. But that may be coming. But that may be coming. We don't know. There's one moment that's kind of cool, I'd say, but it's pretty far out, and a lot of players, like, never see it, which is when you're battling the T-Rex in King Kong. And some people don't even know there is a T-Rex in there. But let's say you're battling a T-Rex. I got to the other day when I was playing with Jamie. Now, did you get to the part where the magnet traps the ball? in the T-Rex mode. The spider magnet? The spider magnet. I can't remember. That's what I'm saying. It didn't have impact is what I'm saying. You make a few shots in the T-Rex mode, and then it lights the magnet on the spider. The ball hits there, and then it asks you to hit the button really fast to pummel the T-Rex. And it's kind of a cool moment. Oh, you know what? I missed that. There you go. I was playing with Jamie, and it trapped the ball, and I was wondering, am I supposed to hit it with another ball? I didn't know what to do. And maybe that'll change in the future, but there's not a huge call out that really, you know, they could argue to put one in there, but the evidence is what you just said. Right. You don't even recognize that. I didn't know what was going on. You didn't recognize that was an opportunity for a moment. And let alone it's hard to get to that, right? So for me, I'd say, like, it doesn't have moments. Along the lines of that, with stuff that players, especially new players, are not getting, the dead shot. Do you mean the right orbit with the punch back? Well, when you're trying to hit the spider targets and it keeps feeding. Oh, the dead eye. Dead eye. Right, right, right. That you could argue is an interesting moment, too. No, it's an interesting moment. Right, that's a good call. So many people. Don't get to it. Well, they get to it, but then they go, my slippers died. Yep. They think it's a malfunction. Yeah, it's a moment that doesn't work for everyone. Right, right. You know? Yeah. That Adam Samley is a moment that works for everyone. Yeah. If you get there. You get the ball in there, you know something happened. Yeah. The balls are about to fly out, and it's a long pause in the game. You know, things go dark, says Showtime, big call-out, bigger in voice than all the other ones. Right. Oftentimes, like the T-Rex thing, it's the same volume of call-out as everything else. It's washed out, you know, in the drowned out and everything else. So to your point about the dead eye, too, I think it could be more impactful if they said clearly, you know, what you're supposed to do in that moment. Sure. And I think they do to an extent, but I think it needs to be punched up because of exactly what you're saying. Right. So that's my moment. Does that make sense? Absolutely. But can we talk about too much moments? Too many moments? Yeah, tell me about too many moments. I mean, just pick any Jersey Jack. Oh, I see what you're saying. Well, for me, I don't think a Jersey Jack has a single moment because everything is a moment. Right. A moment is only defined as unique, and it only gives you the dopamine hit when it's special. Yes. When it's not special, you don't get that. Right. I know people say this a lot. they call them slot machines. Yeah, that's true. But, I mean, they literally have people who were working in the slot machine world working there now and programming these machines. So that's, I think that's by design. Yeah, and I know this could be quite a digression into, like, lighting, for example. But, you know, there's a lot of purposes of lighting in pinball. One of them is to attract people to the game, to make it attractive. Yes. That's what slot machines are like. And that's what slot, you've been to Vegas. Oh, I sure have. I mean, that's what slot machines do. I don't play the slots, though. I don't play the slots either. I'm there to make money. I'm not going to the poker room. I'm doing the math. I don't gamble. No, you know what? Yeah, you're right. Card counting is not illegal. We'll get into that later. We'll get into that later, and I can teach you some tricks. But what I was going to say is that, yeah, like, lighting is important for attracting people, and they got that figured out. No question. The hot rails, all the colors. Doesn't matter if it's Godfather, let's get some reds and pinks and yellows and greens, and it'll be fun. Right. but lighting is also about conveying the rules to people. It's also about making a moment, you know, for example. And that's where they fail. They have all the lights on at once, even when the game is playing. And I'm the type of guy who understands rules, you know. For sure. So I get the rules. It's not like, oh, it's too complicated for me. You know, I could tell you the rules of almost every Jersey Jack game, and I still don't like it. So it seems like just one big moment. Yeah. It's just moment, moment, moment, moment. Right. Here we go. Which means you don't have a moment. Which I've argued in the past on podcasts, which it gives the player fatigue. Yeah. You have to have these highs and lows. I mean, that's just entertainment. That's what you do in an album. That's what you do in books and literature. And that's what you do in moving good cinema. Right. You know what's ironic, actually, even on slot machines, anyone who's designed slot machines knows a bit of behavioral psychology, that they're based on variable extinction, not to get too nerdy here. Yeah, yeah. Go with it. The point is that there is a reward, but it's not offered every time. It's offered once in a while, and it makes you want to play. And it's not a regular occurrence when you get that reward. Because it's variable and you don't know when it's coming, that actually is what addicts you. And ironically, the JJP has the lighting of slot machines, but they don't have the rules of slot machines down because they let you win every time or feel like you're winning. Yeah, you can't explode the score to 300 million or whatever, and you can't anyway there because a lot of their games started with 100,000 points as the max, which is weird. But even then, I would say, like, you know, you can't excite people if you give them a multiball at the beginning of the game. I know it's not a high-scoring multiball necessarily to give you. They can make an argument like that. But it gives you the feeling too much. Case in point, Beatles. You get to choose your mode at the beginning of each ball. But you don't get to choose the multiball mode until the third ball. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Fair. Yeah. So, moments. Does that cover it or anything else you wanted to add to that? No, I think you covered it. We got it? Yeah. Okay. I gave an honest assessment of the games we were talking about. Next category, theme immersion. Yes. And when I say theme immersion, you can get immersed into the theme, even a theme that you're not into, through a lot of ways. Through the music, if you're, you know, I don't love Iron Maiden, but the music's playing and I'm into it. You know, when I'm playing the pinball machine. Right. and sounds and call-outs and mechs again, like a pirate, rocking pirate ship in JJP, pirates is great for building theme immersion. But I don't want to focus on that because we're talking about rules. What can you do in rules, just rules alone, the code, to make people feel like you're into the theme? And here's where I'll start with Jurassic Park as an example. Forget about the mechs. Even on a pro, there's no moving dinosaur or anything like that. Even on a pro, there's great theme immersion. There's a green, single green dinosaur shot when you start a paddock, and it's moving around. And there's a few orange rescue shots of people. Right. And you have to get to those people before the green shot gets to the orange shot. And if you don't, it'll say an employee is in danger. And then you've lost that employee, and they get eaten by the dinosaur. You're freaking out. You're freaking out. You don't want that on your process. Well, there's a connection. You're trying to save the human beings from giant lizards. That's true. and when one goes down you're like oh crap I can't let this happen again yeah a lot of people would think like Serge you're being a little corny like people don't really need to be emotionally invested in pinball they're just playing a game they're waiting for flashing lights even to a certain extent if you buy that argument and I could see that argument I think at a subconscious level people feel it even more than they can express when they're involved in the theme and so there you know with that dinosaur in Jurassic Park so you have to save the humans Then you save some humans, and then there's some inserts that say set trap, and you have to hit that. And then you collect your dinosaur. But if it's a bigger dinosaur later on, as the modes get harder, then you have to go to the helipad to get the helicopter and lift that dinosaur up, you know, for example. There's thought. That's deep theme immersion. It's amazing. Just purely rules. Yeah. Without relying on mechs that make it easy and sounds and call-outs and all of that, which are great, even just a rule design is very thoughtful there about getting you into it. Does that make sense? Yeah, for sure. And, of course, they tie the helicopter to a horizontal spinner, That makes you really into it. Yes. Or like on Jaws, they tie the fishing reel into the horizontal spinner. What a cool spinner. What a great idea. Yeah. You know, for theme immersion. It's not a fancy mech. It's not like expensive. Right. It's not. You could get that on the Pro, you know, for example, but it matters. You know what I mean? Absolutely. I'll give you some other good theme immersion, you know, like rules stuff. You take Pulp Fiction, which really puts people into the theme despite being a single level game. Really helps to have great call outs there from the movie, of course, and really helps to have great music. But let's separate that out. I don't know if you've ever gone into it, but there's a mode in Pulp Fiction that's called The Shot, which is about the scene where Uma Thurman, you have to give her the adrenaline in her heart to get her back alive. And what they'll do is they'll turn all the lights off, and they'll just strobe lights towards one shot you have to hit with a thumping sound to keep her heart back on. That's from Team Immersion through just simple playfield rules. Yeah. You know what I mean? You know how they shot that shot in the movie? Tell me. So John Travolta, he actually did it backwards. He started with the syringe at her chest and then pulled back. And then they ran it backwards to make it look like he's really hitting her hard. Got it? That was a little trivia for you. That is trivia. You know, it lost Best Picture that year, even though it should have won probably. It should have won. Do you remember what it lost to? No. I think it lost to Forrest Gump, which is a good movie. Oh. You can check me on that chat. That's a hard argument. something like that? There's two. They should have both won. They should have both won. It's a draw. That's a draw right there. That's a draw. Yeah. I think Pulp Fiction has the lasting impact, but it's all good. Yeah. Okay. For sure. I think that's right. Check me out. All right. Theme immersion. Yeah, tell me. If we're still on that topic. We are. Berrios. B-B-B-Q. What's it called? The Barbecue Challenge? The Barbecue Challenge. Now, when they sent out those letters to distros trying to get the machine in barbecue joints around the nation. You can't. That's serious theme immersion. That's attempts at theme immersion. That's okay. We can agree there. We can certainly agree there. Okay, well, there you have it. It's attempts at marketing. I'd honestly argue, I've played it. It's an okay game, actually. It's got some nice sizzle sounds of meat going on, you know. That's true. But I'd honestly argue there's a game right behind it, actually. It's funny you should mention a diner, you know. Right. A diner is from the 80s. It's hard to get great mechs and so forth in the game, but it has pretty good theme immersion to be honest It got customers the back glass you know has like a three diner Accents Accents You know sure are they right for today Yes to me, but not to everyone else. I think you need that. That is a story. You need people from all over the world getting together, hanging out, enjoying some food. Yeah, they're having a good time enjoying food together around the world, bringing people together through hamburgers and milkshakes. Right. French fries. Coffee. Coffee, yeah. I love it. Yeah. Great theme immersion, by the way. You know, you hit the targets, they bring in the thing. That's a great example. I love it. I love it. Yeah, the light arts. Champion Pub. Champion Pub is great. It's as good theme immersion as you get. People love that game, even though, you know, it's like, it's not a licensed theme, for example. Right. It just feels like, wow, there's a lot going on here. Yeah. You know, but there they got a lot of mechs that make you feel involved. For sure. You know, the punching bag. Yeah, the training. Jump rope. I mean, that's one of the coolest mechs in pinball. Yeah, I mean, the best way to get people involved is through mechs. That's a big theme immersion. But you could do it even with code, I think. Yeah. You know, I was thinking before about, I'll tell you another example that's missing, just to go back to it because it's in my head, moments. John Wick. Do you have a moment in John Wick? Well, lights out. Yeah, I guess it's lights out, ultimately. It's the only moment I would see where you guys got to see this, you know? I was thinking before about Sparky Multiball 2. Oh, yes. In Metallica. But if there's one game that I bring a new player to who's never played pinball, and I want to give them a chance at feeling why pinball feels great, is I let them play Metallica and have them hit Sparky over and over again. I just hit that thing over and over again until something happens across three balls. Right. Yeah, and along those lines, one of the ultimate moments, Attack from Mars. Yeah. Destroying the saucer. Yeah, absolutely. Just send it right up the middle. And, you know, it's not an amazing mech. It's not like there's – people think that game is full of toys and stuff. It's a scoop. It's not. It's a scoop. Scoop behind a drop target, behind the stand-ups. Now, the stand-ups move up and down. That's the one mech. Other people say there's moving aliens, but those are just on top of the stand-ups. Right. They're not actually doing anything. They're just dancing around. There's almost no mechs in that game, in my opinion, and it's a great game. And it feels like it's loaded with mechs. It feels like it's loaded. It confuses you. And that's what great code can do. Great line in doing that on that one. But back to theme immersion, I was going to say, so, you know, we talked about good examples of theme immersion. We said, like, Jurassic Park is great for those reasons. jaws with the horizontal spinning reel kind of thing, Pulp Fiction with the shot. Let's talk about King Kong for theme immersion. Here's where I don't think it succeeds either, to be honest. I'm going to say a lot of things it's great at, you know, in the back half of this, but I don't think it's great at theme immersion. And I'll tell you, like, for me, why is, all right, so you take, like, King Kong multiball. Like, why are you hitting those drops and then the center ramp and then the right orbit other than it being random series of shots? as opposed to, like, you could take some of the other things we said, let's say Jurassic Park, for example, you hit the raptor cage, and that's a defined raptor cage, to get the raptor multiball going. It's clearly spelled chaos to cause a chaos multiball. But King Kong is just a series of shots, right? And then you think about, for me, what is the emotional connection? People might say it's silly to even ask this, but what's the emotional connection to King Kong, like, historically by people? So, you know, I don't want to answer it. To the extent that you have a connection to King Kong. For me? Yeah. I mean, as a kid, I used to watch that movie over and over again, and I have a connection with the ape. You feel the ape, right? I do, yeah. Yeah, they're trying to hurt that ape. Right. The poor ape. The poor ape. And they take him to town. He doesn't want to go downtown. He doesn't want to go there. No. He doesn't even want to, you know, he doesn't want to climb the building. Right. You know what I'm saying? He has to. He has to. He has no other choice. I would, too. You know, and it's also a love story. Yeah. You know, he loves this woman, but it's taboo. You can't have a giant eighth loving woman. It's illegal. It's illegal even in at least 48 states. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah. And he loves this woman, and she kind of loves him back eventually, you know, depending on which movie you're watching. It takes time. It takes time as all things. Just like real life. You know? I'd love to take a digression and ask you about you and Rachel, your story, but we'll do it for another time. It was a little easier than that. A little easier than climbing up a building. But, yeah, I mean, like, you know, he loves this woman. And if you think about the whole game of, like, let's say that one, that big thing that a lot of people feel connected to, like the love story about it, whatever, there's one singular mode called Save Anne. Yeah. And so there is a nod to it, right? But there's, like, flat call-outs that are blocked by everything else that are going on. And to save her, you hit a bunch of shots and hit the gong a few times, and I guess that's what happens. Right. And it's just not a focus, you know, point. Yeah. Or like the point about, you know, what you were saying, like he's taken to a place he doesn't want to be and he has to climb the building. And, yeah, there's things attacking to him, but it takes a more campy vibe, you know, to it in that game. And I don't think that the movies, the people, the connection that people have to it, especially in recent movies, were campy. You know, like Peter Jackson's King Kong, you know, wasn't campy or like Skull Island stuff. You know, like they took it seriously. You know what I mean? Yeah. Or there was like Jeff Bridges' one with the World Trade Center. I didn't see those. I saw The Skull Island. That was just an action movie. Yeah, that was just an action movie, especially because then they do Kong versus Godzilla. Yeah, that gets a little bit pure action. But I think you could have actually done that in the code. I think it sounds like I'm just saying something like, well, how are you going to do that? Well, first of all, the art could have helped. Frankly, I think the art, you might have considered black and white in some areas, at least for it, to give you that old-timey feel. You could have had it made more dedicated so when you're saving and everything else is shut down, and it makes it a moment that you have to actually save it and how sad it is or something. You know what I mean? You could have done something. Is that fair? That's my theme immersion. Great. Anything else you want to say on theme immersion? I think we covered it. Okay. Let's talk about breadth as the next thing. When I say breadth, I mean having a lot of different options right at the start. And this might be like an opportunity to give a little bit of pinball history. Is that okay? Yeah, go. We do some pinball history. Yeah, I love it. Modern games, we're not talking about classics. Modern games, if you want to break down the rules to people, usually tell them there are three M's. There's modes, there's multiballs, and there's multipliers, right? Right. And multiball, like the first multiball was firepower, and that was a cool moment just to get multiball. That was a moment back then, you know? And modes, it's a bit of an argument of when modes started. You could say, like, the first wizard mode was, like, Black Knight 2000, early, you know, 1989, and that had, like, a wizard mode. But then Lights, Camera, Action got lead later in 1989 and had, like, kind of actual modes. Probably, to me, like, the best early mode game is Adam's Family again. There's modes. They do different things. You clearly have to hit the chair to get them, and something happens. Like, modes involve people, you know. And then multipliers, that's a more difficult history because there's bonus multipliers and shot multipliers and playfield multipliers, but a lot of things that tournament players more care about, right? Those are like your three M's. Fair? Yeah. And then Lyman, to me, was the one who brought an innovation of a fourth thing, the side quest, we'll call it, right? Yeah. A fourth thing called side quest. If you look at, like, Walking Dead, for example, which he revamped the code on, right? He went back and revamped the code on. You know, there's your modes, right? You hit the drop targets, and there's five modes, and they all have different rules. And there's your multivolves. There's the well walker. There's the bloodbath. There's the prison. There's certainly your multipliers, right? The in-lane are shot multipliers, and there's a 2x, and that's fine. All standard stuff for modern games. But he introduced the side quests, and that's going to be important to this conversation of breadth. And by side quests, I mean there's walker kills. While you're doing stuff, you're killing walker kills. Just like later on, you're getting ghosts and Ghostbusters by going through certain switches, you know? And so you get these walkers, and they contribute later on to getting your last man standing, you know, if you get enough walkers. So there's like a side thing going on at the time. and there's also multi-kill in that game. If you do well in a mode or well in different things like multi-balls, it awards you this multi-kill, and if you get enough multi-kills, you get into a horde mode, which is a cool mini-wizard mode. You know what I mean? Right, yes. And those are great, and that's a great innovation from Lyman to bring in the side quest. I think Elwynn really took that and ran with it and generally perfected it, I would say, where like Iron Maiden, you have your cyborg multiball by getting ramps and spinners and targets, et cetera, right? Right. And then in Jurassic Park, you have the paddocks going on. And then in Avengers, you have your collect Avengers going on. Enough spinners gets Hulk, and enough of that shot gets Black Widow in the center round, and that sort of thing, right? And so he really took that idea and ran with it. And I say all of that as preface to say that giving players lots of different things to do at the beginning of the game matters, that there's not just one way to play the game. You know what I mean? Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So what I was thinking is that in looking at some games, like you look at Evil Dead, for example, which has, by the way, great theme immersion and great moments, lots of them that we could get into. But even in Breath, it gives you, there's different multiballs to go for. There's different modes. You even have the choice of different movies when you first start the game to choose do I want movie one or movie two to experience that, you know. There's SideQuest. You could hit the captive ball to get insanity mode and the spinner hits, and that builds up to its own thing. Or you could hit the hand on its own, separate from the mode, separate from the multiballs, and that will give you its own mini wizard mode later on called Kitchen Fight, for example. And so you can do this really, really well when you give people a lot of different options. And probably here, there's nobody better than Elwynn's games, I would say. If you look at every single Elwynn game, I wouldn't tell you there's one way to play it. If you're on King Kong, how do you play King Kong? What do you usually do when you first start? Well, just try to start a multiball. Well, of course, mode, then multiball. We're on a pro. So drop targets, lock two balls, start a mode. Do that again. Start your multiball. And that works. That's a totally fine thing. But you could do a lot of other things in that game. You could go for these map segments. You could go for King Kong letters. You could go to climb. Some people focus on climbing the building, for example, to get to the New York City event and buy plane attack. And we can get into all of that. But there's just a lot of choice in that game. And in Jurassic Park, I always want to bring that into this as a great code, is there you have your T-Rex multiball and your Raptor and your Chaos multiball, but you could also start Paddocks, or you could go for T-Rex modes on the Captive Ball, or you could go for Control Room modes, and there's no one way to play that game. You can just blow it up in lots of different ways, and it matters to give players choice, and it also matters to give them the right scoring on balancing there to make that happen. And so those are all great examples, and King Kong, I'd say, is just A-plus on that. It gives you a lot to do. No, but what about D&D? I mean, we can't talk about Breath without some D&D, right? I think we can. You're right. Let's think about it. All right. Well, here's what I'd say. I mean, how do you play that? You go, you could tell people, hey, just go for the dragon multiball or just go dungeon dwelling. Right. Or just go to a town and do a mode. Yeah, and they've updated that code a few times. but I think most tournament players would focus on the bottom right town and the bottom right like potions for Nidar and it's like three shots. Is that chasing the dog? Chasing that dog. Chasing the dog. That's what you told me to do. Right. My concern here is what I would say is breath is a combination of having different options and having those options all be viable. That's the one thing I would say, and that takes like a real smart tournament player like Keith who understands, like, scoring matters in these things. Right. You know, if you just had an easy multiball that was worth a lot, like, for example, the pit multiballs in King Kong, they are sort of easier to get than the other ones. And usually in most games... How do you get that? Just hitting those pit targets? Just hit it over and over again. That's it. That's it. Or, like, in T-Rex multiball, if you just hit the captive ball a bunch of times, most T-Rex multiballs in Jurassic Park or pit multiballs in King Kong are easier to get than the other multiballs, but they're worth less. And so that's also part of it is you want to give players, so back to D&D, I think you want to give players a reason to choose the other ones. But the nice thing I'll say about D&D is that's a great example of theme immersion through rules, for example. So they have, you know, if you hit the slingshots on a stealth mode, then the guards are alerted. That's really clever. It has enough, every game has slingshots. You know what I mean? And they're using them to make a good theme immersion feel like you're into it. Right. You know, so it definitely gets credit in a lot of ways. And it does give you credit for giving a lot of choices, that's for sure. But I do think it needs to be balanced more so that the scoring for those choices matters. That there shouldn't be like, if Travis Murray is making a video, shout out to Travis. If Travis Murray is making a video where he's telling you, do this thing at your launch tournament, you know, if that video is under like 12 minutes, then there's something about the code that needs to be fixed. Right. That's what I would say. Good point. So that's breadth. That's my breadth conversation. I think we talked about King Kong. I think it does great there. I think all Elwynn games are great there. I think he's, like, especially good at breadth. And I think it's because he really perfected the side quest part of things as well as the modes and multipliers and the modes and multiballs and multipliers and all of that. Yep. Anything else you want to say about breadth? I think that's it. That's it. We still good? Yeah, we're good. We're still live here? Yeah, we're still recording. All right. Let's go on to – that's good. That's good news. Yeah. Let's go on to my fourth one, which is depth. Okay. What I mean here is having stuff to do that is in the back half of the game that gives you a reason to keep playing. I'll take Evil Dead as a great example. In Evil Dead, in the modes, if you beat two modes, it gives you a multiball. If you beat four modes, it gives you another multiball. Then you could switch, like a special mini-wizard kind of multiball. And then if you beat those modes, you could switch to the other movie and get another four modes and also get a completely different mini wizard mode for the next two modes and a completely different mini wizard mode for the next four modes completed there. And I had no idea that was all going on until we recorded that to basics. Oh, that's right. Our stream on Eagle Dead. We went over all that. We did. We did. I didn't realize it was so deep. There's so much depth there. It really is. You're a home collector. I'm not saying people in an operator or an arcade. That's not for the operators necessarily. That's not necessarily for the location players. But the reason that game jumps in value, among other reasons, and there's so many, is there's depth there. There's breadth and there's depth. It gives you a lot to do. The multiball, if you do really well in all the multiballs, it gets you to a mini wizard mode, which John Schappel did get to on stream, the hero from the sky one, if you do really well in the multiballs. And that was itself interesting, like innovation from the code. If you hit the hand a bunch of times, it gets you to a mini wizard mode. If you hit the captive ball and the spinner a bunch of times, it builds up your insanity meter, and that's a nice mode. And then they give you multiple different insanity modes. It's just full of depth, and that's great. Elwynn also does a really great job here. And the code isn't complete for King Kong, but it already has tremendous depth. I'll give you an example. King Kong took the side quest and just went nuts with it. There's no game, I can imagine, that has more side quests than King Kong. So like Iron Maiden, it's Cyborg. And that's really it. That's the side quest. It's Cyborg. It's the pops and spinners and targets. In Jurassic Park, it's Pateks. And that's really it. But then in Avengers, it gets a little bit more complicated. and he's like, okay, get all the side characters. This is Ray Day 2. Get all the characters, you know, the Avengers, to get them together. Avengers assemble, get the soul gem. But also there's this trophy mode going on, and there's trophy mania. If you get all enough trophies, then you're like, that's crazy. That game. Come on. Right. It's a lot. There's a lot going on. There's a lot. You've tried to explain it to me, and I'm gone. That's a game I know the rules. I'm out of here. Right. It's not going to happen. Right. I can never explain that game. Even knowing the rules, I can't explain that game. Right. You know, it got a little crazy. Uh-huh. But then on to King Kong, all right, here's what you got. You've got King Kong letters that you have to spell. There's whole reasons for that, how you get those letters. If you spell those letters enough, you get to the Deadeye, the skill shot thing. If you spell them even more to the full King Kong, then you get the T-Rex. We're talking about depth here. Then there's climbing. If you climb enough, you get to the New York City event. And in the New York City event, you have a player choice of which New York City event you want. There's currently three there, for example. That's amazing. Then there is modes. And I'm sure eventually if you beat all five modes, there's going to be a mini wizard mode behind that, you know, for example. And then there is, we already said the multi-balls. Then, oh, then there's these things like only Carl knows about and the coders for the game. But there is treasure and also island treasure. There's treasure hunt and island treasure. And they each give you different things. There's island treasure that gives you super modes, and there's Treasure Hunt that gives you high scoring and other awards like double your bonus X or something or make it easier to get multipliers, it gets complicated. That part is okay. We're going to get to the next criteria in a moment where I'll say it's not okay. Okay. But in depth, you just want to have a lot. A lot you can do for doing things, for doing the modes, for doing the multiballs, for doing the side quests. Just give players stuff to do. Does that make sense? Yes. if you look at John Wick, for example, there, you know, right now there's not much depth. I could see where the depth could be. Almost in every game, if you beat the modes or play the modes, you get to something at the end of it, and I'm sure that'll eventually be coded in fine. That's kind of standard. There's also these adversary modes, but to me they're just like most people don't get to even one of them, and I'm sure they're going to have something if you beat all of the adversaries. But other than that, I don't see much going on that they can add depth to. I think the game lacks depth, basically, is what I'm saying. And I think it's also, with the code structure as is, even hard to achieve depth, in my opinion. Interesting. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay. I'll give you... That's it for my depth. Okay. Anything else? No, that's it. We're good? Let's move to the next one. All right, next one. How are we doing? We're talking too much? No, no, we're great. We're great. All right. People are going to love this, man. I'm a little obsessive, obviously. This is what it's all about. I mean, nobody's heard this stuff before. And these are the criteria. I think you need criteria. Yeah. You need to check off how are we doing on these things. Right. King Kong, not great on the first two. Really great on Breath and Death. Mm-hmm. Number five, clarity. Okay. Here's where we're getting to clarity. Now, some people hear this word clarity, and they think, oh, Serge wants a simple game. No. Clarity is not the same thing as simplicity. Correct. I love complex games. Yeah. You see what I'm all about. I love these rules. I love talking them. I love learning them. Yes. I eat it up. I can tell you all the JJP rules. That's not the issue. It's not like I don't get it. The problem is that it's not clear. It's not clear in the game while you're playing. I get it because I understand the rules, but almost no player does when they're walking up to. And I'm going to go right off the bat, hot out the gate, saying JGP is literally the worst at this, of clarity. Does that make sense? That's a popular opinion. But I'm going to give you some objective criteria here. Because otherwise it sounds like it's just a word, clarity. You know what I mean? I think you can actually measure these things. Here's how I'd measure it. Okay. I'll give you a few metrics, and I think they should actually measure these. I don't have the time to measure. I did have a little bit of time, but I don't have the time to measure all these things. But here's some metrics for you. All right, number one, how many inserts exist on the game? Which ones? Literal inserts, like light. If you take the game and you lift it up, how many holes are in that play field for lights? Which particular game? Well, you take any Jersey Jack game. Oh, just any of them. It has, yeah. Oh, it's insane. It has an insane number of inserts, right? And, again, I like complex code. That isn't the issue. But if you need hundreds of inserts, you know, to be, you know, like a Swiss cheese piece of wood, that poor piece of wood. Right. Going through that. I feel bad for that tree. For sure. You know, going through all that process and getting all those holes in it for all these lights to go into. They like it because it attracts people. Look at how bright this game is. And you know what I'm worried about? The play field warping in 30 years. That's right. Right. As an owner-operator, as yourself, that's something you don't love necessarily. Right? So number one is number of inserts. Number two is how many lights are on at one time in the game. The more lights that are on, the more problematic it is. You don't need that. One of the things I love about Dune Code is that it doesn't have a million lights going on in the game. We're going to talk about what, you know, I understand the exceptions that you might have to it, and we're going to mention them later on. But for a home player or somebody who's into the game and trying to understand what's going on, that game is perfectly clear. I think it's one of the clearest games on what you're supposed to do. You know, while you're playing it, every game is complicated. You need to learn the rules. but that game is perfectly clear through the lighting. So how many lights do you have on at one time? And JVP games obviously have the most lights on at one time, which means nothing is called out to you. Nothing is special. Nothing is special when everything is special. It's like that generation that we were all to some degree part of that gave awards for everything. Right. Not me. Not you. I wasn't part of that. Right. You had to work for it. Right. You got to work for that. Right. We're not just going to give you those things. you know back then parents didn't even watch their children you know what i mean yeah right yeah but uh but award culture that's what this is it's just lots of awards yeah and that that seems like it's a nice idea to attract people but it fails at the dopamine that the the recurrent dopamine it works the first time you're like damn look at that game yeah everyone wants to play avatar when it first comes in for sure but it doesn't last it's extinct it's extinguished there's no variable extinction in that game back to like operant conditioning but let's not get into that Right? Right. So clarity matters. I'll give you another thing. We talked about number of inserts, number of lights, number of screen transitions is what I'll give you. Not everyone's looking at the display, nor should you while a game is playing. But if you look at a game and it's changing its animation every half a second, there's something wrong there. It's not giving you time to marinate in that thing. We're players looking at that. Right. And what I think is that it doesn't mean you can't have multiple things going on, But you have to make something the primary, and everything else is going on in the background. You know, if I'm playing Iron Maiden, and we're talking about the side quest of pops and spinners and all of that, for the most part, that doesn't interrupt you while you're playing. You don't usually notice until it's, like, ready that you have achieved something along that side quest most of the time. Most players don't, and I think they code it in a way that it doesn't overlay with everything. So part of it is, you know, making sure that not everything stacks with everything else. That's an obvious one. And JBB has traditionally failed at that, and they're, like, in most games, starting off. People can say they like it. I don't buy it. I don't think that's likeable. I don't buy that. No, I'm with you on that. For 90% of people, you know. Yeah. You know, like, Stern has a very solid formula of you could start a mode and then bring in a multiball. But you can't, in most games, bring in a multiball, start a multiball and then bring in a mode. Because the mode won't matter. Right. You wouldn't even know that you got in one most of the time. For sure. Like, you play Godfather. Most people don't know they're in a mode once they're in that hundreds of multiballs kind of thing. So clarity matters. And maybe here's an example where I'll bring in King Kong, and this is going to be my hot take on this. Like I could tell you the rules of King Kong. That's not the issue. But there's no clarity in that game as it's coded currently. And maybe that will change. It's like .85, I think, something like that. But maybe that will change. I love how much there is to do in the game. But everything goes on top of each other. When you're playing that save and mode, another climb is happening, and it's going to tell you when you're hitting climb shots. And then your letters are happening, and it's going to tell you that. And also your play field multipliers and also your multiballs and also all manner of the map, the treasure hunt is going on at the same time, which other people don't even know about. And then there's the island treasure, which other people don't even know about, and that's going on. And all of that, without even knowing why it's happening, will interrupt your immersion into it, and it won't be clear to you how it achieved that. Does that make sense? Yeah. And also, I think, I haven't counted it per se, but if I'm doing it in my head now, looking at, like, in my mind, the King Kong layout, like, it has a ton of inserts. Am I crazy? Well, that's what sparked this podcast. Right. You brought me to King Kong, and you're like, look at all these inserts. You're like, what is going on here? So why do you need this many inserts? No, you don't need that many inserts. I think it has like 20 for climb. It has eight for the King Kong letters. It has another six to get to the wizard mode. You have to do six things at the beginning. Is this the first Elwynn game like this? I think it's the most. I think he's gone right to the razor's edge on prior games of being great before it hits that cliff of being way too unclear and confusing on what's going on. I think with every game, Avengers actually probably went past that cliff, in my opinion. Right. And he brought it back in. And he brought it back in. Yeah. You have, like, the soul gem. You know, you collect all the awards. But if I asked almost every player I know, even great players, tell me about where you put the gem and why it matters on every shot. Tell me about your six gems and how reality differs from soul, from mind, and where you put it in. Right. Also, tell me about level one, level two, level three for each of those things. They couldn't do that. Until Ray Day comes here. Until Ray Day comes. And then we'll get into it with him. And a lot of players can tell you, the really high-level players can tell you, like, oh, put the mind gem on center ramp. And they're right. I'm fine with that. We can talk about why that is, like strategy or whatever. Or put the reality gem on center ramp because it'll 2X and that's a very common shot. And we can get into that. But they can't tell you all the gems and where they go. They're just not going to happen. You know what I mean? Right, right. But I'm sure they have to make perfect sense to Ray Day. Oh, I'm sure he has an impressive mind. And do you think he's thinking, like, why are people having so much trouble with this? I picture, I imagine it like a beautiful mind, that scene where it's like, you know, you're connecting all the things, all the numbers. Yes. To show that somebody has figured out the formula. It's always funny. You know, for the Nash equilibrium. Right. You know what I mean? Right. It's Jennifer Connelly, Russell Crowe. Yes. And that just, you know, the guy is real in the movie, Paul Bettany. Right. Not to spoil it. Uh-huh. But all of that stuff is a 30-year-old movie. You know what I mean? It's a good movie. Go check it out. Check it out. It's a great movie. Check it out. But, yeah, I would say King Kong has way too many inserts, and if you look at the screen transitions, watch somebody play it and see how many times as they're just playing around, not a great player, just an average player walking around, see how many times the screen is changing. So it's never letting you focus on one thing and appreciate the thing. The side quests become just as much of a main quest as everything else, rather than a side quest. They should be in the background. That stuff doesn't matter, and when something happens, you should be able to do something with it. You know, I'll give you more how crazy that game goes in with the side quest because we're talking about it. You know, a lot of games have, like, secret combos you can get. Godzilla has secret combos you can get. If you do this spinner and then to that shot, it gives you a secret combo. That's all cool. Jurassic Park does that, too. They could award you, like, fossils if you make certain shots in order that are, like, secret combos. All good. I'm with that. But King Kong has two different combo systems. A lot of people don't know this. Whoa. One is called the banana combos. But how do you know this? I'm like one of these people. I'm like a crazy person. Is it just from playing it or consuming content? I'm a professional pattern recognizer. That's my... Okay. If you're going to say one thing my brain does, I recognize patterns. Okay. Like, you need me to find an IED. And that's all this is. You know driving around Baghdad I here for you Right Oh it over there Or it at least in this area That was different than it used to look like the other day I tell you what I actually one of the this isn time for like humble bragging or whatever but I'm going to tell you one thing that I might be one of the best in the world at. I'll tell you this much. Do you know Mega Touch? The bar game? Oh yes. Where you have to touch the screen. Chewie has one out there. You know, they have a photo hunt, also the erotic photo hunt version. Which one do you prefer? You know, what kind of stream is this? a family stream or not a family stream. We can make it whatever we want. You can guess. But there's different photo hunts, and you have to pick the differences in the picture. And I have the top score in every... I'm from New York. I have the top score in every dive bar in New York. All across the land. All across the land in Megatouch. Okay. That's my thing. I haven't played it in years, but we go out there in Megatouch, we're going to have a good time. Okay, let's do it. I'm seeing this. You have a GC. That's my jam. I don't know what you call that particular thing. that's what I do. Anyway, pattern recognition. Back to the, back to King Kong. It's got your banana combos, which is the secret combos that you get, shoot this shot to that shot, but it's also got the Kong combos, which is its own other thing like keeping combos going, and I get that there are different rules. The rules designer were great people, and I'm not going to shade, I'm just being honest with my feedback and hopefully polite about it, but they could say that the Kong combos are different, and they are designed to give you the power-up, which they haven't programmed in, but they're going to add that to even add more complexity. Also, Island Locks one day, adding complexity, they took it away and they're going to add it back. Like, they're going to go even crazier than it already is. Right. And I like complexity. But if you have two combo systems going on, people don't get that. Yeah. They barely get the one combo system, you know, going on. And then there's two of these treasure things going on. There's the treasure hunt and then there's the island treasure. This is crazy. Do you know that? No. Can I even tell you? I'm going to say it. Yeah, just go into it. can blank out while I'm listening to this. Right. On purpose. And that's my goal, is to get you to blank out. Grab a pillow. Grab a pillow. This is the sleeping part. But I want to show how crazy it is, you know, is what I mean. All right, so if you hit the gong two times, when there's at least one drop target up of the four drop targets, then it will light that center spinner shot for the ball to go around, go to the mini flipper, and then there's going to be one drop target lit. That's lit. If you hit that drop target, when that happens, then you will get your progress towards an island treasure. You do that. Wow. Same thing I said multiple times. This is not the pieces of the treasure map. This is totally different. It's a whole different thing. This is totally different. That's how insane it is, right? This is how insane it is. I am blown away. You should be blown away, right? You do that thing that I just said a few times, and that will unveil a stand-up target behind the drops with Gary Stern face on it, which is fun. I like that little Easter egg. and then that gets you the island treasure and then the island treasure are different super scoring modes like super spinner, for example, or super combos or all these different super modes to it. So that's its own jam. That, if you get it as a multiplier to this completely different thing called treasure hunt which we should get into now and I'm going to say it, I'm going to get into it. Keep your pillow. Keep your pillow. Go, go. Don't get rid of that pillow. There's a treasure hunt in the game that's based on map segments. You have to get enough map segments to get the treasure. Now, you could say, well, how do you get those map segments before even getting to the treasure? And no joke, there are, I believe I counted, 15 different things to get a map segment in this game. And it's very incestuous code, I'm going to use that word, where everything is layered on top of each other, so much so that even though I understand the rules, I'm not going for that thing, it's just happening, but then it interrupts me that it's happening, and then that thing's ready. And so, like, if you do well on modes, if you get to the level two modes, if you do well on the multiball, if you, you know, do well on the pit multiball versus the Kong multiball, if you get a bunch of eight banana combos, you know, for example, there are all these, like, 15 things you do that get you a math segment. And then enough, and again, keep sleeping here, Chad, and dear viewers. If you get enough math segments, that lights the right eject of the Kong cave for your treasure hunt. And then you're in the treasure hunt. And I want to reiterate that I don't mind that there's this level of complexity necessarily. But back to the clarity point. And then clarity and complexity are not mutually exclusive. You can have both. The problem with that treasure hunt, when you get to it, to the extent that people even know how to get to it, then that's a problem, is that when you're in it, everything else is running at the same time. The modes are running. The multi-modes are running. It's not its own special thing, like a cyborg, for example. like in the cyborg you get to it everything else shut off you're not playing a mode there they're not 10 other arrows lit it's that it's you're in the cyborg right it's pretty clear what you have to hit in the cyborg there's the the the different play field features you have to hit them again and that lights the jackpot on like the captive ball on a premium or stand up on a pro and then you know that's cyborg but here you're doing this thing and i watched carl scream like the other day and i'm sure they'll maybe they'll change this so in the treasure hunt they're like uh yellow arrows to represent, the gold arrows to represent the treasure. You have to hit this and there's treasure on it. And he was playing another mode at the same time that also had yellow arrows, and he could not tell where he was supposed to hit. And that's Carl D'Python Anghelo. He's like, I don't see where I'm supposed to hit right now. So he mentioned that. He mentioned that himself. And they could change that. They could fix the colors, but that wouldn't do it. We know for a fact Keith watches Carl stream. Yeah, it's a great stream. So he's aware of this. Right. Yeah. Yeah, and maybe they'll change the colors of the arrows, But for me, it's a different problem. It's a problem of not making it special that you're in it. It's not clear that you're even in it when you're in it. Most people don't know that they're in it when they're in it. Why is this happening? Is this happening because most of these games are going to the home, and they want something deep? Because I've heard of even good players, they'll put their game on 10 ball. Yep. I've even heard of people putting their game on 10 ball and then putting rubber bands on the outlanes. Right. And the glass off with the ball going. Well, I haven't heard of it that far. But just so they can experience all this. Yeah, there is the pressure. I think that's a great question. It's a 20,000-foot-view question. It is saying that as more percentage of games started going to homebuyers, you started to need to make the game more complex to make something for those homebuyers. And I love that. That's great. That's right. I think modern games should be getting complex. And that's a common argument I hear on podcasts and debate. Are games too complex? And I think what they really mean are games not clear. It's a different problem. It's a different point. I want games to be complex, but they should be clear. And, you know, back to Dune, and I'll say other things that are wrong with Dune later, but Dune has complexity. There is stuff there, but it is pretty clear when you're playing it, I think, as games go. If you played a few games on it, I think you would get what to do with the updated code. Shout out to Barrels. I think the Dune code is great, actually. other than the bugs that we can talk about later that make it not good. That's the last topic. Right, that's the last topic. But Homebuyer, this is a great game, and I think one of the greater codes out there. By the way, we'll get to some more things about it later. But anyway, clarity. That's what I say about clarity. Not mutual exclusive from complexity. You can have multiple things going on, but don't give it a million screen transitions. Don't give it a million lights at once. If you have a call-out that says, shoot everything, and I'm looking at you, JJP, If you have a call-out that says shoot everything, you are wrong. That's it. There is no other answer than you are wrong. Right. No call-out should tell you to shoot everything. You've gone crazy at that point. Okay. This is not good rules of time, you know. Something has to matter that isn't everything. That's literally like... Even for a second? No. Three seconds of shoot everything. I'm not saying you can't have a mode where like switch hits are there, like frenzy. I'll give you actually Pirates of the Caribbean, which is from JVP, which actually has a pretty amazing code. You know, 22 characters is a bit much, let's be honest. But I'm not saying that part. But there's a mode called R Frenzy in there. And in that mode, you hit switches and it just goes R, R. And that clues your brain in. Maybe I should have spinners because it's going to give me more R's, you know. And if you have Jaws, then Jaws, there's Shark. You know where it goes Shark. Shark, shark, shark. And hit, like, different things. Great. It doesn't tell you, hit all the sharks, hit everything. It doesn't do that. Right. That's a good idea, the way it's done it. But in JJT, in other games that aren't, like, the R, Frenzy, and Pirates, if you have shoot everything in, like, Willy Wonka, like, you're just wrong. You know? That's not the right call-out to tell people. You can make people feel involved with, like, R's or sharks, you know, as call-outs, without beating them over the head that every light is lit and you have to shoot everything. There's better ways to do it. So there's nothing against the mode as a rule, but it's the execution. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. Cool. We've covered five so far. Do you still have energy, Cale? I think we do. I do if you do. Let's keep moving. All right. All right, we've done clarity. Let's go to the next one. And we start to get into more of what tournament players care about, But a lot of players are both journey and, you know, along the journey and tournament players or score collectors, people who really care about that. And so the next one is risk and reward. And what I mean here to an extent, all games have a risk and reward inherently. So it's hard to say something is bad. I could try, but it's hard to say something is bad at risk and reward in that there's always another shot to hit that's worth something. But what I mean is giving the player an opportunity that something matters a lot more than other things. I was mentioning Dune earlier. In every mode in Dune, when you beat the phase one of the mode, it gives you an option. Do you want to go to phase two? And phase two is worth potentially up to 500 million points if you play it well, you know, for example, and maybe even more with the mode shots. And it's much harder, but you have an option. That's risk and reward. If you look at every Elwynn game, they are, like, just infused with risk and reward at all levels. Jurassic Park, my favorite, you know, all-time code. if you play the most common multiball people get into is you bash the T-Rex a few times and you're ready for T-Rex multiball and then there's that decision. Should I hit the left ramp to start the T-Rex multiball or should I hit all the other shots to build up the jackpot value on a hurry and then it counts down so it makes you feel amped up. And it has the 2x stand-up which is, even when it's lit, it's a 2x multiplier. It's not a 40x multiplier but it's a 2x multiplier. We get into that too because I think you go too far, frankly. but there's that 2x side stand up and if you hit it you might drain because that's a hard shot to hit and it's a hard shot to recover from but you get it to 2x it's worth a lot more in virus attacks in Jurassic Park you can hit the C shot that dead end left shot and that collects an award but you could build up millions 3 million, 4 million add 5 million to it by hitting other shots before you hit that shot so Keith does that in all his games in King Kong that's super infused into King Kong every single mode like I think of Stegosaurus mode has an easy shot that's worth points, but a hard shot if you want to hit it instead on a different path to get even more mode points. And this shot, if you hit the punch back and then hit the ramp as it's coming back, it adds value to the punch back shot you just hit, for example. Or in King Kong multiball, if you hit the green shot, then it adds 2x play field to your multiball. Let me pause there. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. That's my risk and reward. Do you like risk and reward? Who doesn't? Right? I mean, that's why we're here. No risk. Yeah, risk it for the biscuit. Well, you're taking risk. You're playing a game that costs a buck. There's your immediate risk. Because I might get three drainers. I might get three house balls. That's where the risk starts. Yeah, you're right. Well, you know what, though? I'm reminded to say one more thing about clarity because I just mentioned King Kong. King Kong multiball, this is a perfect example of poor clarity. The multiball starts, and some people don't know. You might know this. Do you know how you get jackpots, how you light jackpots and get them back in? Those tiny stand-ups. No. No? Well, this is what you have to do. You get into King Kong multiball and no jackpots are lit. Okay. Instead, you have to hit the drop targets to light the jackpots. So unless you hit all the drop targets down, there are no jackpots in that multiball, which itself I don't hate as a rule if it's clear to the player and it's not clear to the player. But by itself, it doesn't say, like, shoot the drop targets to light the jackpot or something. How do you know that? How do you know that? otherwise, right? But they do something worse on the clarity point. They do something much worse. They give you green arrows that are lit around the play field. And to anybody who's walked up to that game, people think to shoot that. They're sure that's what you have to hit. Those aren't jackpots. They're worth, like, minimal points. If you get those, it lights the center ramp for you to get 2X on your jackpots if you've got the drop targets to light the jackpots. Are you kidding me? So all the green arrows do, which are the only thing lit when you start that multiball, is set you up for 2X, so it's like a lot of focus on the risk and reward without focus on the clarity. So that's why I was thinking about it in this segment, because I get the risk and reward. Do you want to go for the green arrows, and that could get you your 2X? If you're on a premium, it'll lock the ball in the train so that you could have 2X while it's locking the ball. That's fine in theory, but it's at the expense of clarity in that game. So you're telling me in the King Kong multiball. The main multiball. I need to knock down the drops. That's right. That's what I need to worry about. Yeah, or you're not getting that. How many times? Just once. All of them. Just once and then hit these green shots? No. No, don't do that. You could ignore the green shots and hit the red. After you hit the drops, red shots will show up. Who knows this? Like, not that many people is what I mean. I'm sure there are a lot of players or people who are listening who know it. Travis Murray. Travis Murray. I get that Travis Murray knows it. That's not the issue. Tom Graff, they know this. Yeah. And Joel, if he streams it a lot, may know this. but shout out to Joe but what I mean is it's not obvious and you don't want to have two competing color arrows when you start a multiball one of which the jackpot isn't even available when you start the multiball you show this other thing that has nothing to do with the jackpots other than prepping you for 2x on those jackpots you know what I mean? for sure does that perfectly say why that game fails at clarity? that's the example And I'm back to risk and reward. It doesn't fail on risk and reward. It's great on risk and reward. Yeah. You know, I mentioned just now that concept of, oh, do you want to get the green arrows to get your 2X? But on the New York City event, which people don't necessarily know how to get to, you know, you've got to get to, you've got to climb enough. Yeah. I did it on accident. You did it on accident, right? Yeah. When you get to it, it gives you different choices of how you want to play the multiball. It's close to being confusing, but I still like it. where you can play a multi... You pick a mode. There's like one of three modes, right, that you could pick. Totally separate from that, you pick how you want to play that mode. So that's what people confuse with people and always will confuse people. So there's three different modes. There's Manhattan Rampage and window shopping. I forget. And there's three ways you could play the mode. The three ways you could play the mode are you could play it as a multiball, but if you do that, it's only worth 1x, like a 1x value. Wow. You could play it as a flip count where you only get one ball, but you have a flip count, and you could keep playing it. You could even drain, and you're okay. But as long as the flipper count doesn't go down to zero, you know, if that makes sense, like Soul Gem mode, for example, in Avengers. And that's 2X for the single ball. So once you get to that flip count, you're out of the mode. Yeah, and then it lets you play again the rest of the game. and then there's a 3x version which is a single ball timed mode but your ball save will run out soon and then if you drain there you're done so you could drain out and then you could lose that mode as opposed to like a multiball you could lose the balls and you're okay as long as you have one and the flip count you could just go down to zero and you're okay but the 3x if you want to take it there for the risk and reward you'll get 3x the value in a timed single ball mode and so like you know Elwin games always are great at risk and reward Every single mode, every multiball, everything is infused with risk and reward. I'll tell you an example where I think Evil Dead could be better is they tied their 2x, and again, if you're a Journey player, you don't care about any of this, right? Evil Dead, a great game. But they tied their 2x multiplier, the risk and reward part of multipliers in the game, to the left orbit, and you have to get lucky when you hit the left orbit. It has to bounce around to stand-ups that you cannot see. And if you get those stand-ups, you get 2X. And people don't even know that it's happened, you know, when it's happened most of the time. And so, you know, not everything has to be A+. And that is an example where I don't think they succeed at the risk and reward too much of that game. They succeed in so many other ways, but not that way. That's what I would say. So that's my risk and reward kind of topic. I don't know if you want to add anything to that. No, I think you made it very clear. Is that fair? Yeah. Yes. So, yeah, King Kong A+, risk and reward. No issue there. All right. The next category is, and we're up to number seven for you people counting, you know, at home. We'll have this all on the screen. We will. Yeah. Well, I won't, but you will. My thing is not the post process. Right, right. That's you and our wonderful producer, Rachel. Yeah. And so then number seven is fair and balanced. And I mean a few things here. When I say fair, I mean, and this is especially for people who care about scoring. When I say fair, I mean does a choice by one player affect the other players in the game? So you take Godfather. When you pick one family and it locks other people, I get why they like it. They think it's thematic immersion. You can't be the same family. Yes. But people who play tournaments don't like that, and they will not put that game in their tournament for that and many other reasons. But that is one of the reasons. You know, at our Tuesday night, league night, the one before last, we had a five-way tie for first place now on paper they're all first place right when it comes to the league yeah but uh we had to have a tiebreaker for the prize somebody gets a t-shirt yep and so since there were five i was like i was like rachel why don't we just have them play scooby-doo where you have to pick hey there's five characters you can play a five-player game in that that's right sounds like a good idea and it was because it's just for a t-shirt right just for a t-shirt It's just for a T-shirt, but you get different perks depending on which character you choose. Right, Scooby-Doo. And when we did a post and we talked about that. You seem like a shaggy guy, by the way. I like Scooby-Doo. I don't mean in the pinball. I mean in real life. Yeah, I think you're accurate. But we had a, somebody made a comment because we talked about it in a post on social media. And somebody said, well, how is that fair? Yeah. And I explained, well, it's not an IFPA points. Yeah, yeah. They all got first places just for fun. And what a fun way to win a t-shirt to play a five-player game. Right. But much like Godfather, that's a game where there's an issue. Yeah. You pick a character, somebody else can't play it. They don't feel good about that. And you'll see people on, like, tilt forums, like, blow up about it. What other games are like that? Pirates, J.J.P. Pirate. Okay. Where in J.J.P. Pirate, there are 22 characters, a little crazy, but fine, let's say. But you can't play the same character. So if you're playing one character, there are characters that are much, much better than the other ones. There's one character that makes all your multiball saves last longer, a lot longer. Oh, wow. And that game has six different multiballs. Everybody's fighting for that character. Everyone's fighting for that. That's the game where you want to go first. You pick that character, and let's say you don't know the rules of that game. You get into one multiball in that game. If you have that character, I bet before one minute is up, you're already in four other multiballs. What is that character so we know? Do you remember? I appreciate putting it out like that. I'm going to claim Barbarossa, but I'm going to give you a 60% confidence on that answer. All right. Not 100%. Well, the comments section will check. Yeah, it's like one of the villains. He was like, I think it was Jeffrey. The actor was Jeffrey Rush. I'll say that. The answer is whoever Jeffrey Rush was playing. Is that fair? Deep cut. Right. That's a deep cut. That works. Right. That's what I'm here for. Deep cuts, right? What games do this right? Like Venom, right? Yeah, Venom does it. Because anybody can pick. Yeah, Venom does it right. I don't mind picking characters, right? That's okay. And, you know, like almost every Dwight game you pick a character, right? No doubt. But make it so everyone can play the same character. Don't be insane. Now, we can't talk about Venom without one of John Schaapel's biggest gripe was Venom. You put it in competition mode. Yep. only people who have unlocked Ghost Rider by playing a game with a topper get to use it. That's nonsense, and he's right. Okay. He's right. You need fairness in games. That's obvious. It doesn't matter to a home buyer when they get that. But if you're making, like we started with this, you're making a game for everyone. You just can't do that. You don't want to cut off a segment of the population that is really into fair games for tournaments. Right. You know, like, why would you want that? Wouldn't you want your game on stream at in-disc? You know, wouldn't you want it being, you know, shown to everyone? That would be great for you. So why wouldn't you do that? It just never makes sense to me, you know, that way. Right. To make the game fair. Ultimately, don't log in. Yeah, don't log in. During a tournament. Right, right. That's true. But even, you know, back to those JJP games with characters, like, that has nothing to do with logging in. That's just the setting on the game is, like, they think that's thematic immersion, and perhaps it is, But it's thematic immersion, none of these criteria can come at the expense of other criteria. They're all important. The ranking, going through 10, I'm not saying one is more important than the other, you know, that way. But, you know, you were mentioning Venom, and we're talking about fair and balanced. And balanced is another point I could say here for balancing is, like, is scoring potential, let's say. And so do you have one shot that you have to hit all the time, for example? Or, you know, I was thinking like other Dwight games. Let's say you have Mandalorian. It's crazy to make the most valuable shot in the game the easiest shot in the game. So, for example, in Mandalorian, or some people will call it Middlorian, right, the easiest shot in the game is the middle shot, right? Right. Anyone can hit that shot. Yes. That's the way you get a multiball. Go for it. And then they'll say, well, you know, I know how we'll make it harder. We'll take more shots to get the multiball. But it's still the easiest shot in the game. More of the easier shot. More of the easier shot. Right, right. So one thing that Elwynn is one of the best at is making you use all the shots on the play field for everything. In Chaos, multiball, you have to get Chaos. You have to get that O. It's so much fun. It's so much fun. Holy crap. Right. Yeah. If you look at Dwight games and games I really like for other reasons or whatever, well, Star Wars I don't, but like as an example of Star Wars, like how often do you shoot the left orbit in Star Wars? It's been so long I don't even know. Right. You don't even know. Right. You know what? We're not here. We don't have Star Wars in this arcade, probably for a reason. So maybe I shouldn't point to that. Or hit the right orbit and try to get those pop bumpers that people don't even know are there in Star Wars. They're there, right? I know. There are shots in Star Wars that people just don't go for. Right. And you play the entire game. Most tournament games, you watch people play Star Wars, and there may be one or two hits. People who are skilled, there's one or two hits to the orbits. Yeah. Maybe. The outer orbits. That's just crazy. You don't want to make a game that's unbalanced where one shot isn't worth more than another. You know, if you think about, so you want to make, in general, the harder shots worth more, worth more in progress, worth more in score. If you look back to Jurassic Park, best overall code of all time, in my opinion, we talked about the smart missile shot, but bringing it as a moment, but bringing it back here, it's worth a lot. You could start a whole chaos, collect chaos. You could start a whole raptor. You could get your outlands lit. You could get extra ball, whatever it might be, by hitting that target plus a whole bunch of millions of points, like 30 million points, by hitting that target. And it's the hardest shot in the game, you know, to scoot by the truck and the cacti ball right on your way there. The easiest shot in the game is the left ramp. But one of the things he does that's really smart is as the game progresses and you get farther, and people don't necessarily even realize this, that left ramp is lit less and less and less as you go on. And if you get to the first paddock, the first dinosaur mode, you'll often have a rescue, for example, lit on that left ramp. And that's good. It's the easiest shot in the game. It's not a gimme, but it's the easiest shot in the game. If you get to later on dinosaurs that are harder, you don't always have it lit on that. You have it hit on the hard shots, like the side loop, for example, or the yellow shot or whatever it is or the right ramp. And so it's just you want to make the easier shots of your layout worth less to encourage people to hit all around the play field. Is that fair? Yes. Yep. Fair and balanced. Just thinking about balancing of games, if there's anything else. Yep. Let's bring up a classic that is not fair and balanced. Okay. Knight Rider. Yeah. You mean the old... Straight off the rip. You were saying the 80s classic. Yeah. Right. Yeah, more solid state. Because if you go player one, there's a deep cut to Knight Rider, is there's a double bonus that's always lit when... Straight off the rip. ...on the saucer, but it's only lit for player one on the rip. And then player two, it's going to be different depending on where it was left. And so, yeah, that's an example. And classic games often aren't balanced, and sometimes they have issues in tournaments like for lock stealing, for example, that people don't like. I give classics a pass because they're like, obviously I'm not going to complain about coding 40 years ago. I'm not a monster. You know what I mean? And games aren't also $10,000 back then. But if you're releasing a $10,000 game now, you better make it fair and balanced. Like what are you doing otherwise? Come on, Godfather. Come on, Godfather. We're looking at you. And so no issue there with King Kong bringing that in just to every one of these categories. That's an A+. To me, there are many, many ways to play that game. There's many scoring opportunities in that game. And oftentimes you want scoring opportunities that become almost exponential over time, or at least it's not exponential, like proportionally higher. And what I mean by that is, in that game, if you play it for like 10 minutes, let's say, you might get over 100 million points. But if you play it for 20 minutes, you might get like 400 million points. You know, and there's a lot of reasons for that, how they do that. When we get into treasure hunts or worth more, as you get the later ones, the super modes that I talked about with island treasures, which I know nobody knows how to get to, like the super spinner is the more valuable one, but that's on the second one, not the first one. And, like, there's a lot of real obvious thought put into the structure of the game to make it balanced that way. So, you know, that's an A+, but all L1 games are going to be an A+, on the risk and reward and the fair and balanced part of things. That's just not an issue, you know, ever going to the games. You always have to worry about those games in Dwight games, in my opinion, you know. He does a lot of other things, you know, like we were saying before on fair and balanced. people you get into an ambush mode in that game on Mandalorian where the white shots are all flashing and 9 out of 10 players if they know the game at least will trap up and just wait for it to go out of The timeout That means it's not a good mode. Boba Fett is the same as Star Wars. It's coded almost pretty much the same, where it times out. In Game of Thrones, you often have winter is coming. Sometimes some really high-level tournament players will go for it, because if you get a bunch of those, you get but a lot of other, most tournament players will time that out, too. For sure. You know, because it's just an extra shot. And then in Galactic Tank Force at Indus. Oh, there we go. Everybody was timing out. Escher times out every single, was that Escher? I think it was Escher. It was, yeah. He's timing out every, I respect why he's doing it. You're timing out every single mode because he wants to get to the wizard mode, and that's just a bad structure. You don't want a game where you're timing out modes. But if you say, Galactic Tank Force. Yeah. Right. But it comes with a lunchbox. And they're real cheap right now. Are they? Yeah. You know what? I think you can get one new in box for like seven grand. That's nice. That's a deal. You might get one. I'm not in. Okay. Although I was one of the few people that kind of enjoyed it. I did kind of enjoy it. I've said it before. I did kind of enjoy it. I think, whatever, we can get into GCS. We'll get it. Maybe that's my last thing, the bugs. Yeah, there we go. All right. So that's what I mean by fair and balanced. Is that anything else you want to add to that? No, that's it. That's it. Let's move on. All right. We're in category number eight. We're getting down to the wire piece. Yeah, let's do it. Right, we're doing it. The grand finale. All right, yes. So we're on innovation, is what I would say, for this next one. And you could innovate in code. I mentioned it earlier how Lyman, to me, came up with the side quest, you know, as an option when we're talking about Walking Dead. It's one of the things that makes Walking Dead great. There's a lot of things that make it great. He also made the targets worth different things. If you get them different targets worth different things, it's really brilliant code. Side quests were an innovation. But you could say, like, you know, are you really asking for something new and different every time? And yes, actually, I am. I think you have to actually impress people with something that they haven't seen before. And I'll give you some examples there. You know, Jurassic Park, I love to always bring it up, you know, as what I believe to be the best overall game. I think, and I might be wrong on this recollection, I think it was the first game to allow you to pick the wizard mode right from the start as an option if you hold in both flippers and move the flipper around. Yeah, wasn't that the first? And it's Escape Nublar in Alaska. And he does it with all his games now subsequently, like Jaws, for example. You could play other modes and other interesting side quest modes. Jaws might have been the first to add a completely different, not even the wizard mode, but another thing. You know, the shark that's an 8-bit shark. That's an innovation, you know, for example. So, you know, the games still have opportunity to invade. And even in Back to Jurassic Park, so that's like one innovation is just letting you play the wizard mode. But in the game itself, to get to the wizard mode, among other things, you have to follow the truck path, right? to get out, and it lets you change the path on your way out. You can move the car, which is like a passive captive ball. It's not an expensive mech, right? But it's highly immersive, and it gives the player choice of how you get to that wizard mode. Do you want to take the easy path through the side dinosaurs? Those are easier ones. Or do you want to go through your T-Rex, which means it's really going to be harder to get to the wizard mode. It's harder to defeat the T-Rex, but it gives you a lot of perks for it if you get through it, for example. So that's an innovation. If you look at Evil Dead, which to me is like loaded with innovation in that game, there's a few things that are like not specific to the game. So, for example, if you hold down the action button, it does a ball search for you. How did nobody think of that before? If you're in multiball on Stern games, you have to get somebody to trap up and then somebody has to come and relieve the ball. On Evil Dead, you hold down the action button if you're trapped up with one ball and it will knock the other ball out just by holding down the action button. That's a pretty damn smart innovation. That's really nice. In retrospect, it's like an obvious idea. The shotgun shells. Shotgun shells is another great one. That's like in-game innovation. It's the first game I could think of where to get the multiball, you have to hit the first shotgun shell, then the second one. But the innovation is that you have to hit both of them at the same time afterwards. Right. And I can't think of a single game that required you to hit two shots at the same time. It sounds like such an obvious thing, but it's also an innovation. It's also immersive, right, because you have to load both shotgun shells at the same time. So cool. Go into the basement, shoot it around. It also makes for a moment, by the way, in that game, because when you're in the multiball, it goes ready, aim, and then it gives like a call out from Bruce Campbell, you know? Yes. And it's a different call out each time. And, you know, that's your fire, and you have to press it. Right. And what I love about that, by the way, is it's not like it's worth a lot of points. That's not the thing. It's just a moment because it's on a hurry up, and it feels like you have to do something. You have to time it. It involves you in it, you know. But on the innovation side of things, and that's already innovative, but there's like when do you launch the ball. That's actually pretty smart. Right, for sure. And hitting those two stand-up targets at the same time that shot themselves, that's innovation in code. You know what I mean? Yeah, for sure. And we can't mention innovation without Stern Insider Connected, which has allowed saved progress. Saved progress is a cooperative move. I mean, that's the next move. That's it. Yeah, that's innovation. No question about it. And, you know, Gomez has said himself, like, the thing he might be best known for at the end of his career, which hopefully in many years could go more because he's a great designer and a creative thinker, but is just his Insider Connect, his link up there, because it's really involved people. It makes people more into the game than almost anything else, right? Yes. You're a fan. Yeah, huge fan. Right. And you're a fan because it brings in money. It brings in money. It works. People love these badges. Right. And the achievements. Yeah. I mean, it's a huge game changer. But it is executed so well. Yeah, executed well for the player, for the operator, you know, all of that. And then, you know, so even thinking about, let's say, we're talking about innovation in code. I'll give you King Kong has innovation in code because we have to bring King Kong into each of these. I've seen flip count modes before, you know, as an example in Avengers. If you collect all six Avengers, you get to the Soul Gem. and you have a certain amount of flips and when you get to zero, your game is done. If you drain a ball, it just might slide. Yeah, Rick and Morty, good there too. And then in King Kong, the innovation is, a very specific thing, is that when you get into your New York City event, you could choose the mode flip, which is worth like 2x value on your New York City event, fine. But they tied the flip count independently to the left and the right flippers. So you could use all your left flippers up and still have right flips. And if you can keep the ball alive, the game's not over when you're at it. So you're out of left flips versus right flips, one or the other. That's never been done before. It's a small thing. But code can still be innovated, and that's an example. There's still new ideas out there. And I think every game deserves new ideas. You know, things you just haven't seen before. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think, just thinking like Dune has some other things. Dune is a great example, actually. Oh, the pain box. The pain box. Yeah. It provides a moment. It's cool, first of all. It's immersive. Everything shuts down, and you have to put your hand on the center button. It has to be your hand. Yeah, and it can't be your gut. I know. People have tried it. Right. A lot of guts in pinball. I've seen people try to get around this. Yeah, there's a lot of big guts in pinball. Lord knows, right? But they don't go to your jiu-jitsu. No, no, no, no, no. There's some big guts in there, too. There's some big guts in there. It takes guts. It takes guts. You're right. You're darn right. And so you have to hold the button down, and then with the other hand, switch left to right. Yes. And that's very clever. Very cool. Because you have your one hand stuck in the game box. So it's a moment. It's very theme immersive. Yes. Using code. It's not the mech isn't what's amazing. It's not fancy. Right. It's not like a cannon firing or anything, which is all great. You're using what is in every game. Two flippers and an action button. That's it. Anyone could have done that, right? But they make it matter. They make it matter. So one shot is lit. It's clarity, first of all. There's clarity there because a singular shot is lit on the left orbit, I believe, and you have to hit that one shot, and it's very clear that's the one shot. Everything, it's only that is lit. The call-outs are pure. It's just talking about that. There's not 100 other things going on at the same time. It's just that, you know? And so it ticks off all the boxes, but it's also an innovation. It's just like I haven't seen a mode that does that. I've seen some interesting other modes that are like, you know, I should say here that if you notice this whole conversation, I didn't bring up the P3, which is loaded with innovation. The only reason I didn't bring it up, honestly, is I've never played one. I play a lot of games. Never? I would love to play a P3. Interesting. I'm not a hater. I don't know. They're cool. I'd be up for it. I know why it might not work for an arcade. I get that. Can you come to Expo this year? I think I can come to Expo. We would have a good time. You know, I went to Ace Goge in L.A. one time. There's no P3? They had a P3, but it was down. Oh, that's the problem. Yeah. They have issues. I don't know. I can't speak to it. That's the only reason. We were wondering, like, how come he's not mentioning the P3, which is, like, known for innovation, you know, let's say. I grant that. I just haven't played it. And I want to play it. No experience. No experience. Asterix. Asterix, yeah. Come back in a future episode. I'd love to play a P3. We will play some P3 if you come back, though. Okay. Let's do it. I'm in. Deal. Will it be down? No, no, no. There's somebody there to make sure it's running. Okay, good. Good. So that's my innovation corner. You know, it's hard to say something can be bad at innovation, but I'll go out on a limb. I'm saying some innovation. So I talked about Jurassic Park, what's innovative about it, King Kong, some good games. I think a lot of code structure, especially from, like, earlier Sterns, and especially sometimes, you know, I'm here to speak real, right, from, like, Lonnie games, you know, for example, are the same code structure over and over and over again. You know, you have a bunch of, in Aerosmith, you have a bunch of modes. If you go through the modes and just play them, you get to a multiball. In Guardians, if you go through, and there's eight modes, in Guardians, if you go through those modes, you get to a multiball, like a mini wizard mode. But if you beat the modes and do well in multiballs for Aerosmith, you get to this other thing. And if you beat the modes and you beat the multiballs and get, like, jackpots in it, in Guardians, then you get to that multiball, that wizard mode. It's, like, very similar code structures, and that's used in other games too. And to an extent, that's, like, earlier Stern games when it wasn't all in the home environment necessarily. And so I give a pass there. But at the same time, Lord of the Rings came out quite a long time ago, also in the early phase. And boy, that game has innovation and a lot of other things going on. So I can't give it too much of a pass. So that's my, there can be bad innovation or lack of innovation, I should say. Is that fair? Yeah. We good? Yeah. We good on innovation? Yeah, I think we did it. Let's do number nine. Should we move to number nine? No, should we keep going? What is number nine? I forgot. I know, but it's in here. I was so close. And what I mean by that is pacing. Another way to say that is pacing. How are the things laid out in the game? What I mean there is if a game, for example, starts you off with multiballs, you know, like right away, or one shot or two shots gets you in a multiball, that's not good pacing. That's not a good game. I get why they do that. They want to get the novices into the game. They want to attract people. What if you choose? But you don't keep the novices there. What if you choose, like, Guardians? Yeah, that's a good game to talk about. Now, Guardians is okay because you're, I'll tell you why it's not. It is and it isn't. So, Guardians, to your point, you can choose any mode you want when you start Guardians. Fine. I like the player choice. And you can choose Quill's Quest, which a lot of people do. Fine. Because that's a multiball and it gets you a feel for the shots. In theory, that's good. But if you've ever watched Z-Mac play, current number three player in the world, great guy to watch. Yeah, what does he do? I'll tell you what he does. On a tough playing Guardians, right, where it's like you're not going to blow up the game necessarily, been on a tough playing Guardians. Here's what he does. He plays Quill's Quest. He holds both balls during the ball save time. Traps both balls. Waits the 100 plus seconds for the Quill's Quest timer to go down. Then the mode is over, officially. But he still has two balls. Brilliant. I'm doing that next time. You want to do that on League Night and make everyone angry? I don't think we don't have a Guardian, but I'm going to do it somewhere. It gets worse. It gets worse. So he takes the two balls, and this is a shout-out to him. This is not shade. I think this is impressive that he does this. I love that he does this. He knows how to exploit games. Great. I'm just saying games shouldn't be exploitable. You should be able to figure out a way to patch that out. It's not balanced if it's exploitable. And so what he does, he'll trap those two balls. He'll wait for the 100 plus second to time out. Then he'll take one ball on the left flipper and repeatedly hit group to prep group multiball. Now, in the game, it does not let you start group multiball if you have the two balls. It just lets you prep it. Get one shot away. So he gets one shot away, and then he'll just do other things like hit the stand-ups or whatever to get his action button going. He'll just prep things, then he'll drain out of one of the balls, then he'll start a new mode and bring in Groot right away. Does that make sense? Absolutely brilliant. It's great. It's great. It shows an example of an exploit in the game that should have been thought through. I'll stay while I'm on Guardian. They're not going to update that game. They're not going to update that game. Like, right, Boboly Bobo. You know what I mean? But they're not going to do that. But I'll say another thing about it. Like, there's another ZMAX strat that shows back to balancing on the game. And, again, only props to the strat. So then what he'll do is he'll pick, after he's done that, he plays one of the modes, he traps up, he starts another mode. He traps the ball, and he times it out. And that game, you can't, it doesn't pause modes because there are, like, sound clips playing, and, like, they want to involve you. Sorry, they want to involve you in the game, in the movie, in the theme, and I get that, but it doesn't pause the timer. So he cashes the ball and times it out. He does that with all eight modes. He times them all out. It can take like 20 minutes of cut scenes to go through. Because if you do all eight modes according to the classic Lonnie structure or whatever, then you get to a wizard mode. Like, I think it's Save Xandar. It's not a good tournament game. Or an immolation initiative. Leave this game out of your tournaments. So that's what I'm saying. Right. If you have a high-level player like that, that's what he's going to do, and I get it. Or just a high player. Or just a high player. That's right. So that's a bit unbalancing, but back to what we were saying, I was so close. On a good example, any L1 game you've ever played, you're going to get people, and I think we said this at the beginning, you're going to get people at the end of that game, and they're going to say, man, I was so close to that one shot. And it bums them out, but it also makes them want to try better and do better and play again. Chaos multiball. Right. Oh, I had the S, and I just couldn't hit that stand-up. Right. I had it spelled chaos, but it was just that stand-up was lit. Could you believe it? Yeah. You know? Yeah. And I had one more shot, and the control room was lit, and I was almost there. Or, like, you know, I had the Raptor. It was lit, and I was just one shot away. You're always one shot away in any Elwin game. You're, like, always one or two shots away. In Godzilla, in everything, level one modes, level two modes, you're always one shot away from something. I had the Mecha Godzilla ready. I had whatever it is. And so the bridge multiball, you're always one shot away. And I think that's brilliant design, pasting people to always being close to, you know, getting something. We had a conversation about this on the roundtable with Jamie and Ralph. The moments you're talking about where you're like you have one more shot to pull something off, if they can tell they're not close to it, Jamie and Ralph do this, they reset the machine. And I say, I'd go for it. Yeah. You know, and that's what's up. Well, you have a different mentality. I do have a different mentality. People should copy. Not everybody does. Some people can't handle it. It might drive them crazy. Yeah, but that's the situation where, I mean, that just proves how important these moments are. Yep. Because, for example, I brought up Chaos Multiball. If I'm on my third ball and I still need, like, two letters and the target, those guys will reset the machine. You're still going for it. I'd go for it because that's a really great feeling. No, I'm going to pull this off with one more ball. Right. And obviously, it's really important that we knock Jamie and Ralph down a few pegs. Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully, they'll probably listen to this. Still recover. Jamie's eyes might gloss over, but... Oh, this whole conversation is going to gloss over. I get that. You know, I should start off by saying, I get that this is not interesting to everyone. Oh, I think people are going to... I'm not that crazy. You're crazy, but I'm not that crazy. You're going to blow minds. Jamie, I'm not offended that you have not listened to this podcast or did it at like 3X. I get it. We should put an Easter egg at the end that we know Jamie won't listen to. Right, I get that. That's okay. I'll add that in post. Right, absolutely. I'll add that in post. All right, so we were talking about I Was So Close or whatever. I'll give you Evil Dead being very good. So King Kong, great at that, by the way, just to finish out on like Elwynn Games. King Kong, great. You're always so close to everything. The modes, you're one shot away. There's the treasure hunt. There's the island treasure hunt. Now it's not clear. what you're close to, and that's a problem, but you are always close to something. You're close to something. You're close to something in the game. There's no denying that. Of all games that have ever been created, that might be the best that I was so close to. Still don't know what you're close to, but you're definitely close to something. I love it. I love that. And then, like, you look at Evil Dead, one of the things that I really like about it is when you play your modes, there's four modes for every movie. If you just play and complete two modes, you get to a little mini-wizard multiball, like Henrietta or Cheryl multiball, depending on which movie you pick. If you get to four modes, you get its own mini wizard mode. You know, if you get to, like, all those things, the depth that I was talking about, when you add things at the end, then you have, you want that depth to be there, but you want it paced out well. You know, I think about ACDC, for example, which I'm sure one day will get remastered like Metallica did. And ACDC, to an extent, has amazing code. It's a beloved game, especially for tournaments, and I get why. And it should be, and I love it too. and it's a lineman game and I love it too but it's very poorly paced in a sense because besides the three, the tour multiball and the jam and the album that you get if you want to beat the game the only other thing to do is play all 12 songs I believe and you have to get through the 12 song which almost nobody has ever done and I respect a wizard mode should be hard, I'm not saying don't put a wizard mode there but what I'm saying is it's pretty obvious that you should have something, and I bet you they do this in the code when they remaster it, you get a reward for playing three songs, and then another at six songs, and then another at nine songs. Right. So that you're not just focusing on, like, the way people play that game right now, they don't even change songs. They play their, let's say, Thunderstruck. No reason to. No reason to. Whatever you want to listen to. Yeah, they could claim this, whatever you're into, and, like, what the shop that's lit there, and that's what you're going for, and you play your Thunderstruck or, like, a whole lot of Rosie or whatever to get the top lanes, and then you play that, and you don't change your song. You keep on picking it. I get why it's a good game, and it's a fun game. It's a great layout. It's good early code. But past that, you don't want to go through all the songs. You would never even try to go through all the songs. Why would you? You're not going to make it through all 12 songs if you're playing the game. And so that's an example where it's poorly paced is the truth. There's so many good things about it, but it's poorly paced. Is that fair? Yeah. So that's my pacing. And if I didn't be explicit enough when I was talking about multiballs early, like Jersey Jack Gaines if you're playing let's say Godfather and or you get a multiball off the play if you do a skill shot you get a multiball on that game like you're wrong like that's wrong that's a bad idea that's not a good idea Guns and Roses there are four of these multiballs before you get into the multiball of the song multiball and you know I can tell you how you get those multiballs nobody knows or whatever most of the time but people just know they're playing the game and they're in a multiball all of a sudden and they could argue well that multiball it's not worth much or whatever. It's not. They're right. But you just get a multiple. It's just feeding persistent dopamine without extinction. Yeah. You know? And that's just a mistake. Some people love it. No. Nobody loves it. No. I don't believe it. I don't actually. There's some things I buy that are like for 90% of the people. That's for 0% of the people. Okay. That's what I believe. I don't like it. They're going to say, and those people who say they like it, then ask them if they sold their game or not. Oh. You know what I mean? You ask them if they sold that game. That's it. We don't need to bring up anybody. No. But we can. But we can. Oh, I love that game. Do you still have it? No, I got rid of it. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? I know there's people. Should we round off with the last? Let's do it. So we're at number 10. We are at number 10. We went through it. This is the grand finale. Right. Bugs. Bugs. And it's not the least, by putting it as number 10, to be clear, if you have bugs, the game will not be in arcades. You know? And you've talked about this already when we were talking about Dune. I don't want to hear a show. I love Dune. Oh, yeah. I wish Dune didn't have bugs. For sure. convince you to put it in the arcade, because I think it has theme immersion. I think it has amazing moments and mess. This is a code conversation. It checks off all the boxes. The code is there. The code is great. It's fantastic, even, except for number 10. And if you just are missing this one thing, you can't have the game in an arcade. That's just that. You have to accept that. You can't be like, well, what if? No. You can't have the game go down randomly. You can't have GTF in an arcade if it's going to have bugs. Right. And so we talk about when we say code, we often mean rules, but it's also code. You know, it's also like coding and, you know, detecting bugs and squashing them before you release it or soon after you release it. Super important. It's super important. It's going to ruin everyone's experience. Am I right? You want to say anything else about it? Because I'm sure you have a lot. Well, and bugs, well, I've said enough about bugs in those show-stopping games like the GTF or the Dune. But what about... Spooky. Early spooky. Sorry, what are you going to say? Well, um... Not Evil Dead. J.J.P. Oh, interesting. Godfather. There's a bug to this day that keeps you from getting to the wizard mode. Oh, yeah, they don't care about that. It's amazing how... They've moved on. The weirdest thing about their code releases is they do the thing that other people say that they want, other customers say that they want, which is like, hey, I want a lot of code when the game releases. I don't want to have to wait and update it all the time. Right. So they actually give you a lot when it releases. Yeah. Except for the last mile, and then they forget about the last mile for years and years and years. It's the weirdest decision, especially considering... Don't you wonder if they'll ever revisit Godfather? I'm not a pinball programmer, but I have some programming background. And I have to believe that that wizard mode, for example, is not the hardest thing to code in all of the game. Yeah. Especially because there's not 100 things competing with it when it's happening. You know, when you're coding something like King Kong with like 12 things simultaneously, that's actually hard to do. to get everything happening and what competes for priority. If you have one mode to code, like a wizard mode, it's not as hard as the other things, in my opinion. I'm not a professional coder. We can see if Ray Day disagrees. But anyway, so I agree with you. Leaving that Godfather unfinished, they left Pirates unfinished for years. And I may be mistaken. We'll find out in the comments. But from what I understand, the wizard mode is coded. That's completed. There's a bug to get there. There's a bug to get there. Yeah. Right. A lot of people are going to say also, well, you're never going to get to that wizard mode. And I'm not either. I'm not going to get to that necessarily. There's like five people complaining. But it also matters because unless you have something to reach for, it's about dreams. It's not about reality. Right. And a long ago, I had a Pirates. I bought it when it first came out or whatever, so I got the good deal. Yeah. And J.J.P. Pirates or whatever. And I don't think I was going to get that. I came like maybe four. You have to get all these like five mini wizards to get there. I got like four or whatever, and that was like a once-in-a-lifetime game, and I was into it. And I didn't get there, so it's not like I was ever right there. But you want the dream that I could get there. And if you don't give people that dream, why fight for it? Good point. Yeah, pinball is about emotions and dreams, too. It's 100%. Right. Yeah. That's what I say. What do you think? Is that a good place to wrap it up? I think that was very cool. Right. Is 16 hours enough of a podcast or whatever this was? Where are we? We're under two hours. We just did a three-hour podcast with the roundtable. Yeah. I think it worked. We didn't have ten criteria. No, we didn't have ten criteria. We were just shooting the shit. All right. So all you viewers, thanks for listening or thanks for watching if you're watching on YouTube. Leave comments. If you want to say something wrong about something we said, I'll try to respond to that. Yeah. But also give suggestions, either in the comments or Discord, ElectroBatArcade Discord, where we have hundreds of members. Yeah, please. Including a lot of the people and the manufacturers that we talked about. Absolutely. They're all there. You might hate me. Yeah. Yeah, and if you want to join, go to electricbatarcade.com. Click on the podcast tab, and you can join in there. There's a big link that just says join our Discord. That sounds good. And, Jamie, it's time to return back to your body. Right on. We're going to go get something to eat. Thank you so much for joining us. Do we know what the next episode is going to be about? We have a few ideas. We have some ideas. Yeah. Should we mention some of those ideas or just leave it? We'll figure it out ourselves. Well, let's just talk about what the ideas are, because I think we have two. Right. Well, some of them are a little, I don't know if you're going to mention them on this. One of them is controversies in pinball. Yep. Was it controversies in art or just controversies in pinball? I think you could have an episode on different ones. There's art controversies. Okay. You know, like, obviously the most recent, like, AI and Potter, but there's been controversies since, like, Fonzie on 8-Ball. Yeah. That kind of thing, and all the way in between. We'll get into that. Lots of too much raciness in the art. Yeah. A little uncomfortable stuff we can get into. So that's one thing. That's going to be fun. Like a 1950s minstrel kind of game. You know what I'm saying? It's a little dicey. We're going to get into all of it. We could talk controversies in art delicately. That's the episode where we get canceled, by the way. Right, right, right. We're trying our best. Right, we're trying our best. Then there's other controversies that we could talk about in other things. We just talked about code and pinball, playfield warping and all sorts of other things. Mechs are not working. We could talk about more rules by talking about next time I'm short a podcast, pick a newer game and say, how does it stack up against these criteria if we think these are good criteria, for example. We could talk about what makes good lighting in pinball, what makes good sounds in pinball, sound effects, call-outs versus music. I don't even like lumping them all together. I think those three are different, you know, for example. And maybe we could have some guest stars, if they're interested, to go through all those things that might be perfect for those things. That's going to be good. For example, what's the one who's doing the Dune sound effects right now? Jeff. Yeah, Jeff. From Dirty Pool Pinball. He would have some great insights into that. And on the art controversy episode. Get your boy Christopher Franchi in. We've got to get Franchi in here. Absolutely. I'd love that. A few games. That's going to be a lot of fun. Well, thank you for joining me. I think this is going to be a great series, and people are going to be really into it. I'm excited to see where it goes. It's been a pleasure. You son of a bleep. You son of a bleep. We'll see you guys next time. Thank you so much for joining us. Peace.