welcome to the eclectic gamers podcast today is sunday october 9th this is episode 19 and in this episode we're gonna pretty much wing it because we made no notes or prep work and I spent way too long playing pinball last night. I didn't get home until like 3 a.m., and I'm like half asleep as we speak. That's right. It's been an exhausting period of over 24 hours at this point, but we are very good about keeping with our schedule. People demand it. They expect it. They need it. And so here we are to provide it. I'm Dennis, by the way. I'm Tony. Okay, Tony, let's go ahead and just kick off with our intro. So what's been going on? Why have you been playing so much pinball? Well, we attended Pinapalooza, which was a wonderful event as always in St. Joseph, Missouri. And I did terribly in the tournaments, but had tons of fun just visiting with friends and playing on so many pinball machines, including some stuff you just never, ever, ever see. orbiter one is just the big i mean playing orbiter one is like being drunk i i actually kind of wish i'd played it while i was drunk just to see what that would have done to it i think that would have been like mind-blowing that game is nuts it's i've seen video of it before and i did i did finally uh try it todd had really suggested we i get up and give it a go so i tried to sneak up during the survival tournament and get a game in. Definitely weird. Not one that would ever be on my short list to own, but it is a unique experience. So if you're at a show or anything and you happen to see one, I do recommend you give it a try because it just, I don't know exactly what they were thinking. I guess it was, let's be really unique. And in that regard, at least they succeeded. Yeah, it is definitely unique. Like I said, I don't know if it's something that I would ever want to have, in a collection or something, but I definitely think it is something that somebody should play. Yeah. It's a 1982 game by Stern. Let's see, how many were made? There were 889 of them produced, and I'd never seen one before last night. That is a pretty low production count for a pin. But for those of you who don't really know what it is, is it doesn't have the regular pinball, you know, flat play field. The play field is all curved and twisted, and there's a couple, oh, I don't know what you want to call them. They're like spinning wheel things that the ball will fall against, and it'll speed them up and throw them so it can climb out of the dips and eddies. So it's almost like dips and eddies, almost like the parts of the field are like gravity and the ball is responding, but it makes the ball act really weird. It relies on, obviously, you go and approach a game like this, and you're going to think standard pinball gravity is going to be in play. You're going to be watching for lateral ball movement while it moves vertically downwards towards the flippers. It does not behave that way because of how the play field is done. It's not wood that you're playing on, So it's sort of a deformed plastic. But since it's clear, though, it's very hard for you to actually physically see really well. It's textured beneath it, so you'll think the ball is going to go one place, but it actually won't. It does look like, though, after a little while, if you were to keep playing it, you'll probably start to adapt to the patterns of it and be able to understand where the ball would go based off of particular shots. But at least at first, it's very disconcerting. It was pretty nuts. I enjoyed it quite a lot for something that was fun to give a go to. I played it, I don't know, a half dozen times probably. Not as many times as I lost myself in the insanities that are games like Attack from Mars or Whitewater. I played a lot of Whitewater last night. I really like that game. It has a pretty big fan base, Whitewater does. I've never really been a huge fan of it myself. But a lot of people love it, and it goes for a pretty penny at this point. One of those sort of A-list Williams games that commands a lot at this point. Yeah. Yeah. And other than that, that's my big pinball. I guess last week was the 403 tournament. Yeah. And I played in that and didn't do super hot, but super hot. but it was definitely a normal tournament for me. It was a lot of fun, and we will see. I know there's another tournament next week, and then there's another tournament the week after. October is a really, really busy pinball month here in the Kansas City area. I mean, we had a fairly heavy summer with a – it felt like a fairly heavy summer. Maybe it's all just sort of blending together with launch parties and such. You know, we always expect a couple of monthlies and then we're not even in league season right now, which I don't participate in the leagues. But you expect a certain amount of volume there. But there's still a lot of, you know, weekly non-IFPA events that go on and such. So there's usually something going on. But in terms of point scoring opportunities, there's usually the two monthlies and then occasional exceptions. But it just seemed very, very saturated until last month was sort of normal. And now we're back to very ultra saturated. Of course, it is a five weekend month this October. So I guess it just worked out because there's always this desire to avoid those monthly tournament weekends for adding in other events. And so there's always a sort of push to find find openings. And so you can very quickly fill up an entire month with pinball just because certain dates are held sacrosanct. And so because they don't want to they don't want to cause conflict because then you might split your audience pool and lose out on people who will be like, I want to go to your event, but I want to go to the monthly also. Yeah, that definitely can put a crimp in things. Other than the pinball-related stuff, I have been doing work, family stuff. Wife's still getting over stuff, and it's just been busy. Well, yeah, this is my work-wise. We're entering our budget period. I actually spend the month of September working on our organization's budget. I'm at that point where I've run it by the executive director. It's ultimately his budget, so it's his recommendations. He changes what he disagrees with me about. He makes his determinations on how to bring things into balance, and then we get ready to present that to the governing board, and then they get to deal with the shock of how the new reality is or isn't going to be. This last week especially has been that period where I've been working to get everything squared away with the boss so that we're on the same page and we're in agreement on what the budget says and what we're going to present to the governing board for their perusal. Got that out of the way. But it's just time-consuming is the issue. So that aside, I haven't been playing a lot besides the aforementioned pinball tournaments that you had noted. And then yesterday, while I was getting ready to go to Pinpalooza, I tried to turn on my computer in the morning, and it would not start up. The fans would kick on, the computer would not. So the power supply finally gave out the system. It was the system I podcast record on almost always. So that was a bit of a problem. It was over eight years old, though. So I was like, OK, I'll finally go and get a new system. So I had to run out to the store, buy the new computer, and go through that process of starting to migrate all the files over. Before Penapalooza, I, of course, didn't get that all done. And since I didn't get back until after 2 a.m., I did not do it until I got up this morning. But I think I have everything transitioned, hooked up and working. Of course, I'm going to remember certain programs I forgot to reinstall as I go about it. But by and large, everything is squared away, running much better and quieter now. The system had been giving me some warnings for a while that it wasn't happy. But at that age, it's not that surprising. So aside from those things, I think the only other real intro update I'll give is I have at long last finally finished the History of Rome podcast. as longtime listeners may recall. I had to start listening to this because I mispronounced Deus Ex. It's actually not true. I did start the podcast before I did that, but that was always my rationale for hanging my hat on that. I just like history podcasts. So anyway, that was over 74 hours of content. It was ended years ago. He actually has a, that's Mike Duncan's podcast. He actually has a whole other podcast that he does now. But History of Rome was his first, and it was really interesting because I did not know but but you know what you hear through Shakespeare and stuff you go through the Julius Caesar and Augustus and then after that you typically maybe you know about Constantine and such but you don't know a lot about the other emperors or anything and this actually went all the way through to the fall of the western empire so now that I'm finally done with that back on topic I was able to add on some new pinball podcasts because while I was doing History of Rome, I refused to add more podcasts to the queue. I was just like, no, I'm going to punch through this. Anytime any of the casts I was already following would come out, I'd have to move those episodes up top because they're usually news cycle oriented. So I was, you know, every week I had new Xbox podcasts and I have new pinball podcasts and I just have to keep pushing those up ahead of Rome. I finally now all through it, I have added three new podcasts, and they are all pinball themed. So I've added Bage Night Pinball Podcast, Skillshare Pincast, and the Slam Tilt Podcast. And I'll have links to all three of them in the show notes, and you guys can check them out. I've only heard their latest episodes on all of them. Yeah, I'm so far behind on podcast listening that it's not even funny because I've been listening to audiobooks instead of podcasts. so I need to work on that but I'm on book 11 of the Wheel of Time out of 14 so I'm almost done I'm getting there other than that I've got a couple other games I've played but I'll talk about them in the video game section I think that's enough we can pop on over to what's pretty much been our intro already going into the pinballs well you did bring up Pinapalooza I thought before really saying anything else in case anyone isn't And there are probably a lot who aren't familiar. Pinapalooza, it's basically a couple times a year. There's a private collector in Missouri who invites us an invite event. There tends to be an IFPA-sanctioned tournament at it, which Tony mentioned. And it's really neat because his collection is quite impressive. And it's over 80 playable machines. So, I mean, outside of a pinball show, a lot of people just aren't able to have access to that kind of experience. And so I extend my thanks to Todd for inviting me out there yet again. A lot of the regular Kansas City players were there. We had people from Wichita, a lot of people from the Missouri side, all the way out from St. Louis and in between would come out for either doing the tournament or just to go and enjoy the free play of it. And so it's just it's a lot of really well-maintained machines. There's a lot of good camaraderie. And it's just it's really it's a really cool event. And it's something I would never be able to put on because there's just no way I could have that many pens. I don't even think I could fit that many, even if I could afford them. So it's really neat to be able to go. And it's a nice change up from just sort of the usual pattern where you go and do the nicely maintained location pens that we have. But just to go and see this variety of the, like the Orbiter 1, as you mentioned, or being to do a Cactus Canyon, or maybe playing a Mayfair or a Foursquare. I mean, he does all the eras. Anything with Flipper is a spare game. So it was a lot of fun. And anyway, it's a pretty cool event. So keep your eyes out on possibly scoring an invite for it if you're in the Kansas City area. If he knows you, he'll probably invite you. That's kind of how it goes. But anyway, it's a really unique opportunity because outside of the Texas Pinball Festival, this is easily the most pins I've ever seen in one location. Yeah, and it's a nice, very eclectic collection. See how I did that right there? Yes. Bravo. Stuff from all eras. And, I mean, games that are, I mean, from really old EMs that are addictingly fun to even some of the more modern games. I mean, nice ACDC and everything in between. It's definitely a collection to be envied. And so, anyway, I think we've spoken enough about that. so everyone can be tantalized at what they didn't get to experience. So I want to briefly move on to American Pinball. We discussed that at length on the last episode. A lot of the other pinball podcasts have been talking about American Pinball. I don't really have a lot new to say on American Pinball right now, so I'm not going to say a lot. I guess I do need to acknowledge, you know, it's come up. People have contacted me about it, that, yes, I went on Pinside. I released the business license for American Pinball. I asked the village of Streamwood to pull it for me and give me a copy of it, and they did. It's an open record. I didn't really put a lot of commentary with it because that is just sort of an evidentiary release. It's sort of a – just it's a records release that I am doing. I've been working on this as sort of a podcast-oriented research project. I'm not done yet. I am still awaiting the articles regarding incorporation for the organization. And once I get those, they're being sent. I just don't have them at the time of this recording. I will, I guess, release my findings is the sort of thing. And it'll just be an info dump. And I don't know if I'll just tack it on to the next podcast. If it comes early enough and it's too much content to do, I might try and just solo record something so that that can be standalone and people who don't care about this topic can skip it. I haven't decided yet. You're going to cheat on me? No, no. I'd have to run it by you first to figure out. Or have you come on and we do it as a tag team. I don know if you want to sit through all of it or you rather me just record it all and then we do it like an interview where you hear the audio and then we talk about it and do the commentary after that i don know how long it take to run through i tried to write up a narrative and my fingers got sore so i gave up and i wasn you know it still a little too free form because i don't have all the pieces of information that i want i have a lot of records already stored uh i'm gonna probably just google drive them all into a into a folder actually i'm already, I've already got the folder created. I just don't have it publicly shared yet. And just, this is like the last piece of the puzzle that I intend to pursue. I've seen, obviously I, I've released a little bit of that. I mean, I, I released that and I also, well, this wasn't secret. I found the video footage of the Houdini flashing, uh, from Gigabyte, which is the booth that hosted it at G2E. So I've also put that out there. Uh, and that's really all and i know it fueled a lot of discussion and i'm i'm not weighing in on that discussion in terms of do i think you should be interested in houdini or american pinball that's not my position i mean i have an opinion of it but that's not my position my position is if you're interested in truth then this is what you have to do this is truth you have to investigate you have to be bored pulling research and you got to look into things releasing press releases and speculating is not seeking truth. Research is truth. And this is my example of it. And I'm not going to do it every single time. It's too exhausting. And I like to do what the rest of us all like to do on these podcasts, which is we like to commentate. We're not journalists. I was never trained as a journalist. We are not an investigative news team. I would love for pinball to actually have a news-oriented entity that did not think it was their mission to protect pinball companies. And I think that's what's needed right now with American Pinball because there are a lot of people who are concerned. And we need to remember that in a market-based economy, the most important key to it, which very rarely is ever obtained, is that consumers have perfect information. Obviously, that's almost impossible to achieve. But the idea is you are a fully informed consumer, and that's what you use to decide based off of, you know, that's what makes the market work for when you make a determination on your purchase. You are not an informed consumer on American Pinball right now because you have questions and those questions have not been answered and they probably won't be answered at Expo. Some of them will be, but a lot of them won't. And some of them may never be answered. I got curious after I saw the business license because of the reference to J-Pop on it. And so I've kept digging over these last couple of weeks, but it's slow going. So I don't have anything to release on that here. I just want to let people know. I am, yes, I did that. I'm still going to do that. it's just it's slow so sorry but i probably won't have it before expo and the lonely voice of youth cries what is truth yeah i don't really have any uh anything new to add over my thoughts besides the fact that it's obvious this isn't a troll or anything it's all real oh yeah i don't think and from the some of the last sets of rumors i read but i haven't really read much this week in case anything new popped up. I don't think we're going to see anything flipping anywhere. I don't think it's going to be anything more than just a meet and greet, hey, we're here, and this is what we're doing. And hopefully some questions will get answered, but I don't think until after Expo we're really going to have anything to add to this topic. Yeah, that's a good point. And a couple of the primaries behind American Pinball participated in an interview with Pinball Magazine, and they released that as their first podcast, and we'll include a link to that in the show notes, because if you want to hear the corporate response to some of these questions, because Pinball Magazine did ask some good questions. Obviously, they didn't ask all the questions, and how could they? And, of course, when you ask questions, you get answers, and you have new questions. So I'm going to link that. So those of you who want more, go ahead and listen to that. I did extend an invite to their info email. to American Pinball before I released the business license to invite them onto the show. They, as of my last check today, have not responded to that email. We may be too small for them. I may have pissed them off because I put out the business license, and they may never have gotten the email. I don't know. The invite was extended. They did not accept it. I do not expect them to ever be on the show, especially now. But the information I'm releasing is nothing personal. It's completely open record stuff. it's the price of doing business. So deal with it. Dennis is making enemies for one company at a time. Yeah, this is me being nice. No, I mean, this is, okay. Again, most of my work is public sector oriented. And I come from a background of research. And most of that research is Ryan Policky research. Again, mundane stuff, just looking into the impact of potential loss, laws, all that. Is it going to be good? Is it going to be bad? Helping come up with new stuff, you know, that sort of thing. Now, on occasion, when there have been issues, then we would engage in what I would refer to as opposition research. And we usually meant me. So that would also be my task. I probably do it less than once a year. But this is kind of walking that line. The only goal in this case is to find out as much information as possible and then just release it. Opposition research style is find as much information as possible and then release all the stuff that makes the opposition look bad. So that's being mean. We're not being mean. We're just releasing the truth. It's all about the truth. We're just truth seekers, at least in this particular instance. We prefer just commentating. It's so much easier, quite frankly. And because of our commentating nature, I don't think a commentating podcast can ever really do the news. you can give news updates i mean we do are lots of these shows revolve around the news we rely on these updates after expo what is every pinball podcast going to talk about we're going to talk about expo of course we are and we're going to give our opinions on all the stuff that's announced and you know hopefully you guys are entertained and that's how we do it but because of that we'll never be impartial enough to be a trustworthy source for news news uh for investigative journalism style stuff. And the hobby may be too small to support something like that. Honestly, the best way to have an investigative sort of pinball thing would be to have someone actually covering it who didn't even like pinball. To have someone who'd be like, I don't care if Stern or JJP or any of these others survive or thrive. My sole purpose would be to release information, to dig and research and release and let people make up their own minds. That would be an investigative journalist approach. But I don't think the hobby can do that. And I think we see, you know, I'm not targeting anyone specifically, just I think we see in a lot of these sort of news, even the most news oriented of our sources, they get starstruck and they tend to just puppet the press releases. And it's not just in pinball we see this either, but I think it's really bad in this hobby because the hobby is so small and access is so critical. If you want any sort of scoop, that you end up being nice when maybe you should have been honest first and worried a little bit less about hurting some feelings. But in a way, I can't imagine that anything we're putting out is going to hurt anyone's feelings unless they feel they had something to hide that they couldn't hide on the public record. But I don't know. There may not really be anything there. I suppose the business license thing was seen by some as having something there. I'm not convinced it necessarily was anything major or not. I couldn't tell, but it just it is what it is. It's interesting, though. That's the thing. It's interesting. And in a hobby that doesn't have a lot of news, something that's even mildly interesting can feed a lot of discussion. But that's why forums like Pinside exist. It's just to feed off of that fuel. But let's pivot a little bit from American Pinball since Expo has come up several times while we were discussing it. Any thoughts on Expo? I know some of the other podcasts are doing prediction shows. I don't really have any predictions myself. I don't get a lot of kicks out of guessing what's going to happen in an event like that. But I didn't know if there was anything about Expo you wanted to talk about before it happened. I will predict that people are going to play some pinball and that companies will show games. There we go. Perfect prediction. I'm done. That's it. We're done. Drop my – Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So your prediction, by its definition of how you framed it, means you think at least one company is going to have a flippable game there. Ah, so you have a prediction within your prediction. I am reasonably confident that Batman 66 will be flippable. I am reasonably confident that there will be lots of playable pinball machines on the floor. So, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and go with that. I think your predictions are pretty reasonable. I don't disagree with any of them. Also, another prediction. Being in Chicago, somebody's going to eat some good pizza. Chicago deep dish pizza is not pizza. It's a casserole. Burn yourself. Sacrilege. Why don't I drown myself on that lake bed of marinara sauce that would be on your quote-unquote pizza? Because it tastes so good. I will stick with New York-style pizza, you know, the true pizza. Sacrilege. More of the origin than Italy itself of pizza. Your little flippy floppy pizza that you've got to bend weird to keep it upright so you can even eat it. It's just, it looks so sad. That's how you eat it. That's how pizza is supposed to be eaten. They should not have brought this up. This is not appropriate. If this was the Eclectic Pizza Podcast, we'd be able to talk about New York. We still couldn't talk about your pizza because it's not pizza. It is pizza. It's wonderful pizza. It's bread with way too much sauce. Oh, no. No, no. When you get more calories out of the crust than you do the toppings, it's not pizza. Just saying. And I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to take a full another step. I'm going to put my foot down. Geno's is my favorite Chicago pizza. I said it. It's Geno's. Sorry. I, you know, maintaining my pizza purity, do not pick sides in the casserole debate of 2016. So I don't know. maybe the listeners will react with pitchforks to your statement i have no feelings on the matter that's because you don't that's because you you refuse to accept the truth that is good pizza i don't know you're awfully you probably prefer chicago style hot dogs to new york hot dogs too and that's just as silly as well at least those are still hot dogs i'll give them that but they couldn't change yourself a hot dog man get yourself a hot dog yeah no uh they're at least of a hot dog there. Granted, they cover it in a bunch of garbage. I'm not a fan of tomatoes on hot dogs. Hot dogs need mustard. If you're really feeling fancy, relish and kraut. That's about it. I think that's pretty tolerable. It's still, I think, a little heavy. I like the dog to shine through. That's my... Mustard, definitely. I put onions, though, as well. Onions are key. Yeah, onions are good. The acid is a good contrast to it. See, I've found as I've gotten older, I've kind of become really big and enjoyable in the crowd. I really like sauerkraut. So like a good Reuben. Oh, good Reuben. We're now the Eclectic Food Podcast. Apparently. And people are like, people are probably thinking, gosh, they said they were going to wing it. And now they've become what they hated on all the other podcasts that were going off topic outside of the intro. Okay. Well, and they're right to hate and they're right. You all are right to hate us for this. It's my fault. I brought down the pain. Okay. Well, let's go with this. Since neither of us really have any big thoughts on expo, I'm going to hold any real thoughts I have until reports actually come out of expo. And since we're more than done about talking about different pinball manufacturing companies, because it's old hat and everybody's tired of it. I think it's probably time to play a game. Oh, boy. Let's play the game of what if you were a pinball manufacturer? What kind of tables would you make and what kind of rules would you set for yourself? Oh, interesting. Well, the first thing I would do is make sure that everyone I was in business with I wasn't ashamed of. Going a little more. That is true. But going more serious in spite of that. Here would be my thought. I think looking, I'd look at the market. And when I look at the current pinball market and the current pinball manufacturers, I think the key at this point is to go opposite. It's total opposite daytime. So it is not boutique, high-end, high-priced pinball. My approach would be cheap games that are operator-oriented. So here's my Envision company. I'm going to call it FPS pinball for first-person shooter pinball. All right. The competition target here is Stern. So I'm looking. What do we got? Pro models sitting inside the MSRP. They presently run new in box roughly $5,000. So for FPS pinball, I go in acknowledging that the only way to beat Stern is to beat the price. So that means my actual new inbox cost needs to be $4,000 or less. And in fact, it would be better to get it under $3,600. So that way I'm beating out the Highway Pinballs kit pricing where you can just buy the playfield and drop it into the cabinet. It's supposed to be about $3,600 to do that. So if I can undercut a full machine at the $3,600 price point, then that puts me as the best fiscal deal in the market. Now, my ideal number that I would really, really love to have is 3,000. I don't even know that's practical to obtain. But I don't know if any of this is practical to obtain because I'm not a manufacturer. But this is my world. This is my example. This is my vision. So this is where I'm going with this. So how do we do it? So FPS pinball. Obviously, the key is the games have to be cheap. They have to be cheap to manufacture, but they have to be desirable from an operator perspective. So the operators have to want to buy it, but obviously I've got to save money somewhere. So on the cheap side some of the tactics I would imagine doing is obviously limited toys And by limited I mean like one Again we seen that on some Stern Pros where like one major toy It kind of like that Just have a toy Something that helps put you into the world on the play field. But it's not going to be littered with toys. It's not a Lawler machine. Play field art. Okay. I'm going to just describe it as Spartan. Maybe a return to focus on labeling shots and such. Yes, this can mean dropping clip art, photoshopping. The whole point is that the play field will fit the theme, but it's not about it being an artistic beauty. It's not going to be a Ghostbusters play field. It's not going to be littered with hand-drawn art. The idea is to put out a play field that makes sense and is affordable to do so. Same thing for the cabinet art. Pretty basic, probably a focus on using logos so that when someone were to see the cab, they'll know what the game is. But again, it's not about impressing you with the art package because this is not targeted to the homeowner. It's targeted to an operator. Another cheap tactic would be reliance on playfield designs that can use common parts. Obviously, this is done a great deal by a lot of manufacturers already, but what I mean by this is creative use of pop bumpers, stand-up targets, things like that. Research and development on unique playfield designs would be limited. The focus is going to be taking on what worked in the past and making minor adjustments. Like maybe you look at a couple of games from the 80s. You take the left half of one, the right half of another. You're like, okay, these worked. People agreed that these shots make sense. We know we can stick them together because of how they're laid out. Go forward with that. It's going to be about using ideas that good players prioritized in the past, not about hiring long-tenured designers. FPS Pinball would not rely on bringing in any established pinball designer. They cost too much. You're going to start from scratch, and you're going to rely on what was already done and worked in order to move forward, rather than try and create whole new art, essentially. Because it's a cheap tactic, and something that I think needs to be done to meet the price point I outlined above. So, what would we do for the desire side? Why would operators want the games? Step one, all the games have to be licensed. No original concepts ever. The operators have to have games that the public will recognize. Stern already, we know, gets the biggest licenses because they're the biggest pinball manufacturer. But there's a ton of stuff that's still left on the table. More obscure licenses is fine if it's worthwhile, as in obtaining the license. The cost behind that is low enough that it makes sense to do a more obscure license. but what I think based off of the name of my pretend pinball company would be is I think you need to target video game licenses I think gamers are a natural demographic to be attracted to pinball and I think shooter games namely first person shooters though despite my company name it could be any shooter those in particular would be great themes for pinballs there should be a Halo pinball. There should be a Call of Duty, Battlefield, Overwatch pinball, Uncharted even. There are all sorts of rich licenses that would really, really work. And the public, the gamer public, which is a very broad public, is going to recognize this. Don't forget that video games, as an industry, make way more money than Hollywood does at this point. Another desire tactic, Translight Art. I've already said a de-emphasis on playfield art and cabinet art. But Translite Art would have more effort put into it than the two aforementioned art packages because it's a key point of attraction. So it needs to look good because people are going to see that and they're going to be like, oh, oh, that's Master Chief. I want to play that. LCD in the backbox. Animations here. That's why I want the LCD. Obviously, everyone's going that direction now. It makes perfect sense. Animations are the key concept because, again, it's about attraction. When you're playing this game, your friends need to be able to watch something. And while it's nice to watch the pinball and actually learn how to play the game, a lot of times people can't be hovering right over your shoulder. So they're going to be watching the screen. They need to be seeing stuff. They should be seeing Master Chief, I'm sticking with the Halo example, blasting things, blasting Covenant as you make shots. Same thing in this regard with voice work. You want at least one key voice from the license, ideally more if there are indeed more that are recognizable. And the final piece is code. There has to be a depth of code. It doesn't necessarily have to be Lord of the Rings or even modern stern deep code, but it needs to be deeper than the Bally Williams code of the 90s. I think the deeper the code, the more desire you get on the homeowner end to be interested in collecting these, even though they aren't the visual works of art that they expect from the boutique manufacturers. So that's my overall strategy, a pin that is priced to rapidly let an operator earn their investment back and actually earn it back on location, not having to factor in the future sale of the pin into their recoup. And a happy side effect, I think, is that homeowners, home collectors, I should say, who think like I do, and they aren't after rare collectibles, but they're just after fun games, would find these easier to afford. And a price has to be paid, though, to get that cost down so that they can afford these games. And so that's where I give all those sacrifices. But I think there is a lot of money being left on the table because people are priced out of being able to obtain machines. There are people who are buying these, you know, eight-year-old Stern machines because their budgets say $3,500 to $4,500, and they're priced out at $5,000, much less $7,000 or $8,000, and that's what I'm trying to exploit. So that's my broad-based idea. Well, that's not a bad idea at all. I can see a lot of hope and desire for machines like that. I know new-in-box machines in a price point like older used machines would be well-liked. my first thought on this for my own personal company is i would never do this um i have nowhere near the skills or the thoughts to try and back something like that but if i did this is the shot i would give it all right well we're how i'm gonna how my company that i would never create but if i did create would go it falls in the accessible category much like you did I would like to see lower price points. I am not personally a huge fan of the different trim levels that have gotten so popular. And one of my first rules would be that there are not going to be any trim level differences. There is one machine, and that is it. I would also go with a strategy that would be centered around, much like you, I would go for the less involved cabinet side art and stuff. I personally like the old cabinet art which was very minimalistic designs that were kind of logo-ish or paid some attention to what the game was without being the insane depths of the modern cabinet arts but at the same time I am going to shy away from the licensed product only I think there is a lot of room for unlicensed games out there, and I think a lot of people would like unlicensed games, but I know for a fact that they don't sell as well. I mean, it doesn't matter. They're just never going to sell as well. So what I would like to do is sell twin games. I would put together a system where I would have a licensed game. The licensed game would be released. and six months to a year after the release of the licensed game, I would reskin and release the same play field with minimal changes, just toy changes and this and that in an original theme at a lower price point. I don't see where that would actually help my market value, but it's something I feel for people who don't care about the theme. Like if you're not an Avengers fan, you're not going to want to buy the Avengers. But if you liked the Avengers layout and it had a theme you liked, it would be more interesting to you. And I would also aim for my licensed themes for stuff that would fall under a bit more non-mainstream. and also much like has been done with, say, Houdini and stuff, stuff that is in the public domain is always a good idea for a grab. I wouldn't mind seeing a Dunwich horror game, which would be the Sothulu mythos, of course, because everybody loves Sothulu. I would like to see another or a return to games that have more of the kind of punky feel like a ray gun gothic type designs as an original theme and if you had to do a license pen that fell into that same area and then you did a reskin into a ray gun gothic type game or a diesel punk type game or something along those lines, maybe some pens put together based upon, like, different literature, older literature stuff just for that kind of feel would be what I would aim for. I think the important things is, much like you said, I think backbox art is super important. The trans light is the most important thing. LCDs are a requirement. Code, I want code that's at least as deep as the late 90s games without necessarily going as insane over the top as some of the modern machines do. Though if you get the code deep, that's fine. There's nothing wrong with it. But that would be my overall thought on the creation of a company. you could let you put out more games the problem being of course that you're fighting yourself because you're putting out two games that are very similar but i think the difference between having a licensed game and then having one that is just an original thing is going to appeal to two completely different demographics of the pinball community and keeping the price point down. I'm not going to aim as low as you have, but I would like to keep the price point at Stern Pro pricing or below. But again, I'm not a fan of all these different trim levels. I don't, I don't, especially the trim level differences where there's gameplay differences, there should never be a gameplay difference. If I buy a $5,000 game and you buy the $8,000 version of the same game, there should be zero gameplay differences. If there's art differences, okay, but there shouldn't be this list like you have where the same game is in the top 100 in two or three different places because there's so many gameplay differences, they have to be considered a different game. And that's about how I would do my pinball company and then fail and go bankrupt. Yeah, I have no idea if my strategy is going to be viable as a concept either, but it's what I'd want to do. It's the niche that I think is not being met, I think, by the resurgence. Stern obviously is still, to some degree at least, meeting this need because they were the only ones that were still – they're the only ones that have been around long enough to remember when it was all oriented towards the operator market anyway. And I see now that there's a lot of hobbyist interest, all these things are swooping in and they're trying to attract to the home market, the home collector, because the home collector, at least in America, is the bulk of the buys at this point. I completely get that. And that's why, while I think the idea of oriented around the concept of the operator is useful for, one, not forgetting about on-location operators, but two, I think even just catering to them could target a lot of home collectors who, quite frankly, are just priced out. Pinball collecting shouldn't be a rich man's hobby. It wasn't always a rich man's hobby. And I don't think that it even has to be from market demographics. I don't think it has to be. I don't think the manufacturing costs, the BOMs and all of that are actually honestly at the point. I think it's inflated beyond what it needed to inflate at. I might be totally wrong. Don't know. But that would be my guess. That's where I would try and move in on and exploit on, not trying to be the latest in the fancy pants, stick in as many Hasbro toys as possible and say that you owe me an extra two grand because I gave you toys. Yeah, because I think that that would also make a big opening for the modding community, which is already very popular, letting people personalize games. If you haven't completely overdone anything too much and everything is very much a, it lets you take a machine and make it more personal, put in the extra toys you want or the extra interesting little things here and there to doll it up while still starting from a much lower overall start point price yeah well anyway those are our ideas what i think i'll do is after maybe a couple days after this episode is launched i'll go on to our facebook page which for those of you listening who don't know is facebook.com slash eclectic gamers podcast and i'll kind of pose this as a question to see if any of our listeners would like to give some opinions on if they were a pinball manufacturer what what sort route would they want to go? And you can always weigh in on if you guys think our ideas were really stupid or whatever. I'd be interested to see some other suggestions because I think there are probably a lot of different approaches. We still only have a handful of manufacturers and it seems like most of them are kind of doing the same thing. So I think there'd probably be a lot of room for different ideas. But here are two of them. Right. I think that gets us through pinball. So let's move on over to video games. I actually have very little in the way of video games to talk about. I know that there have been a lot of video game releases recently. The New Gears of War is out. I believe Mafia III just hit, and I don't own any of those. I did get an early birthday present of Doom. Doom, as they say. But I haven't started it yet, so it's actually installing right now. So I might next time be able to talk a little bit about Doom, but right now I really cannot So Tony video games Tell us something Anything Anything about video games Okay I been playing I did pick up a game last week from Knucklecracker who some people may know because of some of the other games they've done that are pretty popular, like they did the Creeper World games, which I have not played. But after looking into them, I'm probably going to end up picking up Creeper World 3 at some point and playing it because it looks really interesting. but what I picked up was a game they put out called Particle Fleet Emergence. With Particle Fleet Emergence, what you're doing is you are the head of a corporation who's fleeing the galactic corporate bigaboo into the unknown regions and moving towards the old origin world where people came from, and you are exploring. and what you do is you end up building up a fleet of ships and plans to make ships and there is an enemy out there and it is literally uh just like a particle physics driven swarms of little glowing dots and it's this is not a deep game this is not a a starcraft or something i was turning this into a no man's sky with particles that attack this is not no man's sky this is nothing this is a game that i played uh 12 hour 12 plus hours of over the course of the week while i was watching luke cage because it's a game that you can say that you can play while you're watching a show without having any real issues it's not so deep that you get involved in it you're like oh oh yeah i was watching a show type thing. It's just kind of a fun little strategy-ish game. It's like a physics real-time strategy fleet building thing. I don't have a really good way to explain it because it's just a little, it's interesting. But one of the nice things about it is you can build your own, you can make your own levels. You can make, you can design your own ships and you can play them in the levels that come with the game. There's a bunch of story levels that tell a story that's interesting, I guess, but it's just about basically teaching you how to play the game and trying different things. And then there is some other levels that come packaged with it that are harder, just more challenging, try-this-type levels that were built by the alpha testers and beta testers and stuff. And then you can also go online and download levels made by other people, and you can find ships made by other people and try them out. It's just an interesting little time sink. Like I said, it's not high flute and some super amazing game. It's not going to change the world. but it is a lot of fun just to burn time while you're you know watching a show or doing something else well those often come in handy any other video game stuff you want to talk about um i am almost done with mad max but i wasn't willing to play mad max while watching luke cage and i really wanted to watch Luke Cage, so I didn't really play it this last week. Well, understandable. And video game-wise, otherwise, I have not done a whole lot of stuff. That's where most of my time has been put in. I know I've been thinking, since you had to get your new computer yesterday, of what things I should start telling you to buy so you can play good games that are part of the wonderful world of PC gaming instead of your dirty, dirty console gaming. Well, you know, I'll probably keep my eye out for when the new Civ hits, for example. Of course, I was probably going to keep my eye out on it, even when I still had my eight-year-old computer. Well, yeah, that's a Civ game. I mean, Civ games are always great. I'm trying to see. I'm always a big fan of all of the Civ games. Let's see if I remember how to log into my true Steam achievements. For people who don't know, the True Achievements is for Xbox, and they also do True Steam Achievements, which is for Steam-related. And don't they have one for PlayStation? Yeah, they have True Trophies. True Trophies for PlayStation. And full disclosure, I am on volunteer staff at True Achievements. I help with the genre assignments. So if you don't like a particular genre, chances are I helped assign it. So, yeah, see, I've completed. I actually got all of the achievements on Particle Fleet Emergence, all 20 achievements over the course of this week playing it. Well, maybe that should be one that I watch for, that I consider buying, that I contemplate. The achievements are really easy. The achievements are complete every mission of the game, of the story mode. That's it. That's all 20 achievements. So they're not worth a lot of points, but it's definitely something that is out there. The other one, yeah, I'm going to pick up their other game at some point. Creeper World 3 is the most modern version of it, and it gets a lot of good reviews from what I've seen. You have to let me know how that is once you actually play it. Yeah, it's supposed to be a similar type game where it's a, you're basically holding back a flood of stuff and slowly pushing back a flood of, in this case, instead of particles, it's fluid. but you basically build a base and then push it back and push it back and push it back and push it back. I like those type of games. Those are my time waster games. I know, like, this would be my version of, like, Candy Crush, except for it's on computer. It's just something that I will play and just walk away from at times. when I'm not wanting to get something too deep, but I'm wanting to play something while doing something else. But I haven't. Like I said, otherwise, my video gaming has been very, very light this week. Okay. Well, we'll just have a light video game session for this episode. Tabletop, our final segment. Let's go ahead and transition into it. Tony, I know you've got some stuff on tabletop. I have lots of things on tabletop. Okay, I've got a few things on tabletop. I got a chance a few weeks ago to play a game called The Networks. And it is an interesting little game. It's a 60 to 90 minute game that you can play with one to five players. I don't know why you'd play it with one player because it doesn't really seem to have anything going for it then. But what you do is every player takes the point of being a network executive, and you are running a network, and your network starts with three time slots, which is your prime time time slot, your early time slot, and your late time slot. and you start off with like three really horrible things like the the the the power hour of of you know test signal power hour and and and and the dog food home shopping network type stuff and as the game goes what you're doing is you're buying new shows and all now all the show cards or not all of them, the vast majority of the show cards are basically just humorous takes off of shows that have existed in reality or very tongue-in-cheek stuff references. And each one has a number of viewers and cost, and you can put advertising with them, and you can purchase stars to work for your network who you can put in your shows. that will increase their viewer count, and ads that increase your money revenue, so you can buy better stars and better ads and better shows. And every turn is basically a season, and your shows age every season. So they all start out, oh, this is season one, and the season one, this show will earn four viewers. But when season two comes up, this show will earn you ten viewers because of popularity. and in season 3 it'll earn you like 9 viewers and then it'll start going back down or different, they're all different numbers and the whole thing is you're building up you're trying to get the highest viewer count of all of the networks it is a fun game it's not very hard it would be pretty easy to play with not young children but definitely with like say age 10 plus is where they say what they recommend on Board Game Geeks and I could see it being easily playable with this group but it's just kind of fun because you know do you go to be the sports channel or are you trying to build yourself to be an ESPN type channel or a comedy type channel or a mix of everything type channel who gets to make it all the way to the end and have the highest viewership and then you earn points off your shows being in reruns and stuff. Like I said, it's not crazy, but it is a fun little game. All I could think of was a really bad S.T.A.R.S. joke. That's basically what it is, S.T.A.R.S. Well, I was just thinking S.T.A.R.S. and buying better S.T.A.R.S. and then that made me think of, anytime I ever hear the word S.T.A.R.S., I thought of Resident Evil and S.T.A.R.S. with the Nemesis Project, which then, of course, links all the way back to the pinball segment with the Stern Electronics pinball machine, S.T.A.R.S. Oh, man, a Resident Evil pinball machine. I thought, you know, taking a S.T.A.R.S. electronics, a Stern Electronics, taking S.T.A.R.S. and actually re-theming it with Nemesis Project S.T.A.R.S. from Resident Evil could be worthwhile. Those chimes in that machine got to go, though. There's no way to make those work with that. They got to go. All right, so any other tabletop games? um not that i have played recently but i know there were still some games that interested me from all the way back at gen con oh yeah we never got a chance to talk about well they've been kind of squeezed out because we've had so many other topics to hit on i know we just keep hitting and i find it so hard to talk about a game that i've never even played it's like well i haven't played this game, but I watch some videos and it looks cool. It makes me feel kind of silly. Yeah, I get that. I find the same thing with the video game segment in particular is because I don't want to just cover, well, here's what's coming out, here's what's coming out. There are scores of video game podcasts that just do that. That's what someone's interested in. They shouldn't even be listening to us. They should listen to a video game podcast that talks about new releases and things along those lines now if we do something right after the event uh well like for example being able to but we had the hands-on experience when we did cant con see that went really well because we'd actually gone there and we could talk about our experiences but right the e3 episode worked in part because we went in with a very deliberate mindset to keep track of all the stuff and talk about what we actually saw rather than uh you know any sort of sense of gameplay it was really just more about anticipation and such. So, yeah, it's always sort of tricky if we don't have any hands-on experience. In a way, we run into that with the upcoming pinball stuff. We just don't talk about how we think they'll play. I mean, I have no idea, for example, how Aliens will play. I have no comment on it because I haven't even seen how it plays, so why would I speculate on it? So, yeah, it's just the trouble with all these things and tabletop. There's just so much stuff that gets to come out now thanks to the fundraising prowess of kickstarter and such there's just a lot of there are just a lot of games that get developed and a lot of them are probably really really good and a lot of them haven't been played by anyone we know it's yeah it's tragic and a lot of i mean there's so many i don't i i don't have all of them i don't have time to play all of them uh i i have so little time that I tend to aim what I'm going to do at very specific things. And a lot of times for me it's the tabletop gaming that drops by the wayside just because I have so few chances to do it every month compared to everything else. So I guess we've reached the end of our show for this episode. This is our failure cast because we didn't do any of our normal prep work, and I feel very bad for you listeners. I am sad. I don't. I don't feel bad for them at all. Hey, we're out on time again, as usual. Thank you very much. I am exhausted. I did not want to get up when I got up, but here I am. Oh, gosh. I didn't get to bed until by the time I got home and got laid down and stuff. It was after 3, and I woke up at 6.30, and I basically passed back out for a few more hours. and the rest of my day I've just been zombie. That's what I'm going to probably go fall asleep here while this is compiling. That's probably what I'm going to do. But anyway, that's it for this show, and we should be back within the two weeks as usual. I already mentioned earlier in the cast how you can reach us on Facebook, but if you want to email us, you can do so at eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com. We're available on Twitter at eclectic underscore gamers and Instagram at eclectic underscore gamers. And we love ratings and reviews on iTunes. It is critical to helping additional people be able to find the podcast, especially since our name does not say tabletop video or pinball in it anywhere, just gamers. So we are not usually at the top of the list when you search for those words. We are, thanks to our loyal reviewers who have given us ratings, we are showing up higher than we used to. But we always appreciate additional feedback, either through the aforementioned contact means or in the form of a rating and review. And I know a lot of you don't use iTunes. It's just it's the place where the reviews are done. Even my software, Podcast Addict, it pulls all the reviews from iTunes when you want to see the podcast ratings. I was playing with the features and actually noticed that. It was kind of cool. So that's about it. Until next time, I'm Dennis, and I'll say goodbye. I'm Tony, and I say it'll be better next time, I promise.