I look forward to going to Texas every year, and Twippies are looking pretty good this year. Oh, that was John Borg talking about the Twippies. They're going to be great this year. Everybody, welcome to Canada's Pinball Podcast. It is Sunday. We got a surprise Scooby-Doo stream Friday night. We're going to talk about that. I want to give you my first impressions of this game. 48 hours later, how do I feel about Scooby-Doo? Have I eaten my Scooby snacks? Do I think this game is going to sell out now? Do I think there's enough left to right movement in the game? We're going to talk about it. But first, I want to thank some of our newest club members. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now at 566 club members. I thought it might be really hard to get to 600 by TPF, but I think it's now in sight. I want to thank William, Paul, Manania, Nicholas, Manuel, Trent, Heather, Bretta, Armin. You guys are in the house. Doug is in the house. Thank you guys so much. All right. So here's what I want to do before I talk about spooky pinball Scooby-Doo stream. I want to talk about a rumor that I'm hearing. And that rumor, you might have got the message, is that Quentin Tarantino was shown Pulp Fiction pinball back in October. And he approved the machine. So the machine is ready for the line. So here's what we know about this game. We don't know that much other than it's a single level game. For some reason, Tarantino won it like an old school throwback Pulp Fiction machine. I don't know why because if you watch the movie and you love the movie and who doesn't love that movie the movie takes place what like in the 80s or 90s I think it takes place in the 90s so why is a Pulp Fiction machine being made to look like it's from the 60s or 70s I'm not so sure about that one and so like that's what we know about this game it's going to be a single level game and here's the thing too I think we all are at the point now where we're like we don't want another single level game. game based on a popular theme that's probably going to have a really high price tag. We just got this James Bond Elwynn pin. Please don't do the same thing to people with Pulp Fiction. Now, the question I have about Pulp Fiction is this. Who's designing it? I think the designer of this game is going to be Mark Ritchie. Okay, so Mark Ritchie designing Pulp Fiction. I think it's going to be a CGC game, Chicago Gaming Company, the worst public relations communication company in all of pinball. They're backlogged on Cactus Canyon Remake. But even so, I'm here to tell you that I think this game is going to be at TPF and it is shaping up to be one of the craziest TPFs in a long time. I think we're going to see a new game from Stern. I think we're going to have a New Jersey Jack game at TPF. We're going to have Godfather. We know we're going to have Scooby-Doo there and now I think we're going to have Pulp Fiction and I also think we're going to get another surprise game at the show. We're also going to get the American Pinball game at the show also. It's just going to be the craziest march in all of pinball and we're also going to be there to celebrate the Twippies and hopefully Kaneda will have his cargo shorts on with favorite pinball podcasts. Because every award on my shelf, we've earned it. And it's such a fun show to see what all the fans out there vote for and see everybody get up on stage and give their speeches. It's the only pinball award show in town, so I can't wait to be there. I got to book my flight down to Texas. All right, so let's talk about Scooby Scooby Doo and what we saw in this like 40 minute gameplay reveal. Now, I want to say this. I want to say thank you to Spooky Pinball for staying true to your word that you would show us gameplay in January. Now, look, Jack Danger is also going to be streaming this game very, very soon. You know, and Jack is like the master of streaming these games. He knows how to set up the rig the best, but it was great. I mean, we saw everything we needed to see. It's a little dark, the lighting. I'm watching it right now. I have the YouTube video playing. You know, it's not the most beautiful delivery of a video where you've got these sort of like orange or pumpkin colored sort of blocks that they have on the video stream, but they use that space to put words over it because they tell you what's going on in the game. So look, I actually really enjoyed watching this video. I watched it from beginning to end, from a pure piece of marketing content. You had Bug, DJ, and Luke, and there was a fourth gentleman, I think maybe it was the other spooky Luke But the whole thing is these four guys really looked like they were having a lot of fun They got a lot of passion And you know that rubs off on people You don't want to see like old man Pat Lawler tell you about how this is the most innovative thing in pinball because it's not. You want to see the youth. You want to see the energy. You want to see the enthusiasm because I think that rubs off on everybody. And it just makes you feel good about supporting this company. And I will say, we don't see this level of transparency from most pinball companies. And I want to just say to Spooky, thank you for being you. And thank you for being personal. And thank you for sharing with us your passion on this machine. I think it goes a really long way. All right, so what do I think about the game? So the biggest thing we've all been wondering is what was the code going to be like on Scooby-Doo? Was it going to be another like day one nightmare like Halloween and Ultraman? And I think everybody who saw this stream was like, my gosh, they really put a lot into this game and it already has a ton in it. And I was super impressed by how they're using the assets. I was super impressed with the design decision on the code of the game. I love the fact that you get to pick between the five different characters in the Scooby Doo world. I even more love the fact that when you select a character, the callouts for your gameplay experience are from that character. I haven't seen another game do this since I've been covering pinball. And that is why there's going to be like 4,000 custom callouts because you basically have to do the game five different ways with five different characters. And that is called giving you great bang for your buck, great variety. And I think it's super fun too that it's a five player game. You know, as I was watching them play this game and I started to see like how the game was developing, how you start mysteries and how you sort of progress through the modes. And I'm not going to go into everything in detail, but I want to cover this game in some broad strokes. I love the assets. I love we get to see so much of the cartoon on the screen. And I love the simplicity though of this game. I think that's the thing that impressed me the most is finally a pinball machine. you can walk up to and actually know what you're doing. Finally, a pinball machine that uses the lights and the arrows to tell you where you need to shoot. And the creativity in some of these modes really came through. There was one of them where you're in a museum and you have to paint the walls or something and you have to dip your paintbrush in red paint and then you have to cover the white walls. And then you see the way they use the inserts and one insert will turn red And that's you dipping your paintbrush into the red paint. And then you got to shoot the white inserts after that. Super, super smart. I think a lot of us out there have been longing for games that have this level of sort of creativity baked into it. And you don't need something to be complex to make it deep and creative, right? You can still make it hard because a pinball machine should be about having to hit a series of shots in a row. it shouldn't be hard to understand what you're doing. Hello, games like Avengers, where still to this day, most people don't even know how to play the game. It should be about designing creative ways to get through the modes. And the mode should be so inspired by what's going on with the theme itself. And I think what happens with a lot of these other pinball designers, I'm just going to say it, you get too many tournament guys designing the rule sets for the game. And what they think is creative is a creative way to get to a high score. They're not thinking about the creativity of the experience and creating pinball moments. And that's what I see with Scooby-Doo. I don't really care how to score high yet. Like what's fun about pinball should not be figuring out how to just get a high score or get multipliers. What should be fun about pinball is making your way through the modes. And when you get through the modes in a creative way, then you should have a high score. It doesn't seem like it should be that hard. Like, I almost would remove all multipliers and all of the stacking and all of that stuff and just force the designers to make the modes themselves the pathway to high scores. Okay, so let's go into the gameplay itself. It's a fan layout, and it definitely looks like Spooky's most friendly game to date. It has the monster upper playfield with Cutler with his undersea mask on, and you got to bash him, and the arms are, like, magnetic. and then it's got that really really creative upper left flipper which I can't stop talking about that level of creativity because that upper left flipper can act as a normal flipper you could actually fire the ball like slingshot it off the top of that flipper and then you can also open the flipper up to change the pathway of the ball So it acts as a diverter at the same time This thing does like three or four things, just thinking creatively about a normal pinball thing like a flipper. And that's the level of creativity I really want to see from more pinball companies as we move forward. Like you don't always have to engineer the most complex thing. You can sometimes take a simple thing and just think about it differently to insert creativity into your design. Now, that being said, I want to say like some good with the bad. The one thing missing from this game, and I'm not here to be like shill for Scooby-Doo or spooky pinball. I'm not buying the game, by the way. I can't wait to play it, but I'm still not buying one. And it's nothing against the game itself. I don't have room and I'm basically running out of money after I bought a $25,000 Batman SLE. I know I'm crazy. But the thing about this game is when you look at it, there's no major mech in the game. Like there isn't like a major toy in the game either. Like there's no Godzilla building here. There's no T-Rex that eats the ball. There's no Elvira house. And so spooky pinball, the last thing they really need to figure out is how to in-house really engineer a modern pinball toy where you could put it next to stuff at Stern or Bally Williams or JJP and you can see the real engineering ability of the company because it's still a lot of off-the-shelf parts going into these kinds of games. Now, that being said, you're getting a lot for your money in this game. You're getting this wide-body game, this huge upper play field. You're getting great theme integration. You're getting great music, great light show, by the way. I mean, this light show in this game, super, super good. The other thing I loved about the code was like the meters, right? You've got these easy-to-read meters when you go into a mode, and I love stuff like that, like your oxygen meter, your fear meter, and you've got like the countdown and the timed modes. I think that's another great way to make a machine fun is having these modes that are time, like there's some urgency to hitting the shots. Like you don't always have to make the shots hard to hit, but if you have to hit them in the right order in 30 seconds, all of a sudden you've made the game more challenging and fun without making the actual geometry frustrating. And I'm just going to say it. Shooting a game like Rick and Morty is no fun. Shooting a game like Ghostbusters, I never found that much fun. So I think this game is going to be much more fun to shoot. Now, here is the biggest question mark around this game. Is this game too easy? And there's no way around this debate. They played this game for 15 minutes and didn't have a single out lane drain. Now look, that's going to make some people really nervous because long ball times in pinball, especially on a game that's a five player game. Can you imagine if five good pinball players walk up to this machine? It feels like they might be on it for three hours. Like when Jack Danger starts playing this machine, because I noticed when the spooky crew was playing it, they weren't really nudging the machine and they still were not draining anywhere near on the outlanes. And not only that, you've got the post that pops up between the flippers, which makes it even easier. Now, some of this stuff they can make harder with the software, but I'm a little worried that you good players out there are going to have a monster ball times on this game. I mean, it's a fan layout, which means you guys are going to have no trouble hitting the shots over and over and over again. There's not much left to right action in the game. There's no pop bumpers in the game. Like there's not a lot of randomness that throws the ball into the outlanes. And I think you're going to see a lot of up to down fan layout shooting. And that's going to equal really long ball times. Now, look, there's also something that nobody really wants to talk about is that most of you probably are not that good at pinball. And a lot of pinball collectors are not that good. And they actually enjoy longer ball times. But I think for some of these personalities who stream pinball, who are really good at pinball, you're going to see some streams probably indict this machine for being way too easy. And that's just going to be an individual thing. Like, do you want a machine in your home that has long ball times? The other thing I thought when I saw this game was this is the perfect game for a family. And I really mean that. Like if you want a pinball machine that your wife can walk up to, your kid can walk up to, and everyone can enjoy the game, everybody can figure out the game, and it's really easy to see what to do, I think Scooby-Doo just wins in spades. Much more so than Toy Story 4. I don't think Toy Story 4 is the most family-friendly game. I know the theme is, but I still walk up to Toy Story and it's really confusing figuring out what's going on in that game. There's almost too much going on. You know, it's like in a weird way, like, JJP always makes their games a little bit confusing Like there needs to be like a handbook you have to study before you really understand how to play the game But this game just looks like so much easier to follow what going on with the game The other issue I saw when I was watching it was the left side, like those drop targets didn't really seem to play that much of a important role in the gameplay itself. And then the ball is up on that upper play field a lot. And the play up there is pretty slow and sluggish. So I'm just curious, right? I haven't played the game. Nobody has. I'm just curious if you have this game and you play this game like 300 times, is it going to get monotonous? Are the long ball times going to eat away at you? I don't know yet. It's still after the 40 minutes, I still feel this way. I still feel like we need to play these things. The days of buying these machines and going all in before we get a chance to flip it, I still think it's a gamble. Do I think this video is going to help them sell some of those outstanding spots? Absolutely it will. Like this is the kind of gameplay video that gets you sales, right? The passion, the enthusiasm. And if you're a Scooby-Doo fanatic, I don't know how you watch this and don't want one. You know, we're living in crazy pinball times right now. like a $10,000 spooky pinball machine seems like great value and a bargain. And it is basically in a world in which everyone else is now testing $15,000 for their collector's editions and LEs. And now we've got this sort of $20,000 James Bond. I mean, that's what's really embarrassing, is that Stern thinks that James Bond machine is worth twice as much as this Scooby-Doo. This Scooby-Doo, I will say this, after watching this stream, It's made all of the streams of James Bond seem like a snooze fest. James Bond to me has never been shown to us in a way that delivers any enthusiasm or passion whatsoever. Even when George Gomez talks about it, it's like all they can talk about is what's going to come, what they're thinking about putting in the machine and how difficult it was to work with a license holder. That's not what I want to hear. I don't want to hear that for $13,000, all of your troubles. I want you to show a game with so much stuff in it that I feel compelled to give you $13,000. And I think that's the difference between this launch and James Bond. And I think if you're in on this game, you're feeling really pumped. And I think if you're in on James Bond, you have to be a little bit nervous. Like, I don't think that game's going to get to the level people think it is. And I also think we're going to start to see more and more of these Bonds go up for sale as people become impatient waiting for this game to be done a year from now. There's much more in Scooby-Doo on day one than is in James Bond on day one. There's much more laughter happening over at Spooky Pinball than there is over at Stern Pinball. I mean, people are basically laughing at Stern with this James Bond 60th. Scooby-Doo and the Spooky Crew, they're laughing because they're having fun playing pinball. And that's my ultimate takeaway from the stream, ladies and gentlemen, is this is the point of pinball. We should get excited. We should want a game. It should be a theme that makes us smile. It should be gameplay that makes us happy. It should leave us feeling happier than when we went into the game itself. And I think there's a lot in this Scooby-Doo game that is making a lot of people smile. And I think if you're in on one, I think you're going to enjoy it. We don't know if this game yet is going to have that longevity, right? Because of those long ball times. But we're all going to get a chance to play it. And that's the other good thing. If you're not in on this game yet, you are going to have multiple opportunities to play this game over the next few months. And it's never going to be hard to get one. Remember, it's still going to take Spooky Pinball about 18 months to make all 1969 games. And trust me, not all are spoken for. Spots will open up. And there's a lot of pinball coming, right? Some people might be in on this with a deposit. Then they're going to see Venom. Then they're going to see Pulp Fiction. Then they're going to see Galactic Space Force. Then they're going to see, like, I don't know, there might be a Twilight Zone remix coming out, right? All this stuff is coming out. I mean, remake, not remix, remake. So this is all going to start happening at the same time we're heading into a global recession. So trust me, you're not going to have a hard time getting anything. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being a member of the Kaneda Club. I love doing the show. I'm going to keep doing the show. And we are growing at a pace I never thought imaginable. And it's all because of you. I'll be back with more shows this week. Kaneda out. Thank you.