All get around, he's on the rebound, hear the sound of our buddy, oh lordy, it's Orby, pinball now to rejoice, he's tugging pinball, craft beer and coffee, mixed with syrup and honey, he wants to laugh with his family in a random tangent, stories of his boys, he's on the poor man's pod network, we're gonna get more listeners, for the Pinball Nerds Podcast. Coming to you from beautiful River Hibbert, Nova Scotia. Welcome back, Pinball Nerds, to episode 650 of your fifth favorite pinball podcast. My name is Orbital Albert, and on today's show, listen, I am perhaps the only pinball content creator not called a spooky show. So today I'm going to explain why I'm a spooky speculator and why I'm not a spooky show yet. Okay, so I've had a little bit of a love-hate relationship with spooky for a long time. Let's just get it out of the way and let me say the thing that I love the most about them is it feels like they have, it feels like it anyways. Maybe I've been tricked, but as a dude with a degree in marketing, it seems to me like they're doing a darn tootin' good job tricking me at it. I think they have the best customer service and the best social media. They are the best trolls in all pinball, even better than myself or possibly Cliff Albert. I'll just say that. So the big issue for years and years and years was that they made pins that not a lot of people liked. Now, I'm not just talking about America's Most Haunted, but I'm talking about almost every pin they made up to Evil Dead. That's right. Now, I know some people like Looney Tunes, a couple other people, I think even more beloved than Looney Tunes is Texas Chainsaw Massacre, so I'm willing to admit that might be their third best game. But I still think their second best game was not even designed by them, it's TNA, and most likely their best game is Evil Dead. So for most of these, today we're going to be counting down the top five reasons why I'm not a spooky show. okay so first of all i am a tournament player and as a tournament player you do not see a lot of these things on location okay so i haven't got to play as much spooky games as i would love to have played but anytime i see a spooky game no matter where i am i go over and i give it a play unfortunately or fortunately for me the only spooky game on location in the most recent the closest city to me is Moncton uh is Halloween so that's the only one I play on a regular basis and I can't stand it I think I'd rather play America's Most Haunted than than Halloween I and people know that so there's my biases first of all I don't like slasher movies that much uh second of all I think my babysitter let me watch Halloween with her and then I was so I think it was like in grade four grade five and it was so scary that I just never wanted to see that ever again like that yeah i just yeah i get freaked out about stuff like that i'm not gonna lie i'm a little bit of a scared sally when it comes to stuff like that but and i just i don't like bloody gory movies says the guy whose favorite movie all the way like as a teenager and in their 20s was kill bill one not two come on so you know i i like blood and gore more so for fun or for comedic effect as opposed to like sincere genuine type hacker slasher stuff so is spooky being a company that makes primarily spooky games other than tna total nuclear annihilation which is like a sci-fi fantasy like i dystopian i i jive with that okay i almost said i f with that but i've been trying not to swear on the show guys by the way i do apologize i dropped one f-bomb i am i humbly apologize all the f-bombs are supposed to be paywalled over there on uh orby's pinball nerds podcast patreon i want to give a big shout out though to alex l thank you so much alex Alex actually plays with me and the Funny Flippers League there in New Brunswick. So shout out to Alex. I was talking to him a little bit about my Patreon and how excited I was. And next thing I knew, I came home and right after the pinball tournament, he had added me. So thank you for that. And just a quick pinball update. Don't worry, everybody. I'm not going to talk about tournament pinball longer than 30 seconds. Just to say the Agars in my family have kept up the streak of one of the three of us, whether it be Owen or Hayden or myself, go to finals in every pinball tournament we've gone to this year, which is so cool. I started the year with a third, third, third, including in provincials, and then I've sucked ever since then. But Hayden's got, I believe, a third and now a fourth. Hayden's also got like a seventh and an eighth. So he's got to every single finals. And then in the last finals, when Hayden and I shat the bed, I think we both got to the first round of finals and immediately dropped out. Owen, little Orby Jr., he's not so little anymore. This dude's 6'2", 250 pounds. He looks like a linebacker, yet he can run like the wind. He's twice as fast as me. We even sprinted a couple weeks ago, and he still smoked me at it. But Owen did end up getting fourth place at the tournament at Flippin's Arcade. We're going to be going to the next one up there. We'll also be going to the Hub City Flipout on, I believe, December 14th, but make sure you check the Fundy Flippers page for that. So shout out to Owen for that as well. Now, let's get into these top five reasons why I'm just not a spooky show yet, okay? So number one, I had originally written down no flow, but I'm not going to say no flow. I'll just say this. Listen, I haven't shot Ultraman, but since Ultraman has the exact same layout as Halloween, I'll say Halloween has the worst flow of any pinball machine I've ever played. Now, I haven't played a home pin or a pinball adventures, okay? I just haven't. But I can't think of a machine. Literally, there is Popeye, three machines down from Halloween, and I will go put, and I can't stand Popeye, but I will put money into Popeye. I will do that long before I will ever drop a Canadian loonski or toonski into another Halloween ever again. First of all, I don't like those quick, whatever they are. I can't stand them. It's so quick. Like again, I'm a pretty decent pinball player, but I can't stand them. They're just, it's just too fricking fast because they always trip you out and they make you look up at the LCD screen and they give you a weird call out and all of a sudden, boom, the flippers right there. So So that machine had hardly any flow. I can say that there is some flow in TNA, but let's be honest, it's much more of a stop-and-go machine. I mean, even the orbits feed to the center. The stop-and-go Denisey target, if you will, the inline drops where it pauses the ball, incredible, but it's a lot of ball pausing up there. So a lot of stop-and-go, not need. Every pinball machine doesn't need to have flow, but me personally, when I'm in, and I'm not trying to do a double entendre here, but when I get into a flow state and I'm playing a pinball machine, I'm just going like, you know, again, Kong's incredible figure eight, you could call it, you know, you go off your right flipper to the left orbit, left orbit to the biplane ramp, biplane ramp back to the left flipper, then ski pass across to the right flipper, then left orbit. You know what I mean? And you can just get in this and you can even start adding in the, in the middle spinner shots to it. Wow. You just get, you almost like, you almost can't remember what you're doing. whereas every spooky I've ever played, it's like, there's just no flow. There just isn't. And why isn't there? Because their best designer to date is Scott Denisey. And I'm sorry, Bug and Luke, but it just is. Now, I will say, except Evil Dead. I'm not going to say that every freaking point I'm making here, but I do think there's a possibility. I have not played Evil Dead yet. Go ahead and make fun of me. I live in a pinball desert. I know all about it. However disappointed you are that I haven't played Evil Dead, believe me, I'm ten times more. because this is the first spooky that I even got excited about. And if you go listen to my top five rad and one bad about spooky pinball's evil dead, I'm through the roof. I don't like the theme, but I'm through the roof. It's very, very, very similar to my thoughts on Winchester, even though I think Winchester looks to have slightly more flow, even though it's a bit of a brick fest at the start until you learn the shots. But once you've learned the shots, I do suspect they don't have that floating hand that moves around. They don't have the shotgun shot that you have to load. You know, I do suspect it looks like, if I had to guess, Winchester's like a B-plus for Flow. I don't think you're getting in Jack Danger or Keith Elwin range. I don't even think you're getting in Steve Ritchie, Elton John range, okay? But I think it's up there. Now, Evil Dead, I think even the biggest proponents of Evil Dead will brag about how cool the mechs are, how beautiful the frickin' and stunning that artwork package is by Franchi. But what they're not going to tell you is, wow, it's a Flow monster. You can go this one to this one to this one to this. no, I've watched it in tournaments, okay? I have, and it's just, it's not a flow monster. It's just not. All right, let's go on to the number two reason why I'm not a spooky shill yet, and I'm trying to be constructive here. Spooky fanboys don't come at me, okay? Hey, my buddy Don is working with them. I don't know if he's working for them. I know he's working with them. I would like to say he's their pin turn, but I think he's more than that. I think he's part custodian. He also makes the beautiful cookies they have in the cafe there in the morning. He cleans the toilets. And from time to time, he drives the frickin' forklift. And if they ever needed someone to paramotor in on a Midnight Madness, Don, pull out the paramotor, dust it off, change the oil. If you don't paramotor in to the Midnight Madness spooktacular that's going to be there at spooky headquarters for the 20 lucky people that are going to get the last 20 Beetlejuices, that's an opportunity missed. Think how many hits you're going to get on that video. You could have two or three people recording and you could get some in. You'll get Retro Ralph there or the likes of someone who's really good at cinematography. And Don comes in and he's got the very first key to the very first of the 20 Beetlejuice. Okay, I've lost the point here. Let's go into number two. Number two on this list. Okay. One time at one point, I'm pretty confident I was just getting into covering pinball. my memory is a little foggy but spooky said they wouldn't ever do more tnas that it was a limited run but then they did more tnas and then they told us that they were going to sell 999 beetle juices beetle use beetle use beetle use what is the use of a beetle who knows so now we find out they're going to have 80 show games uh as reported by chris over on canada's pinball podcast so now and and i think actually he already confirmed that with spooky luke so it sounds like you know when i hear it from chris i i i'm not suggesting it's not true i like to take it with a grain of salt but when when he's reporting it's now coming directly from you know the spooky's mouth you got to believe what that jason mask is telling you all right so here's the thing it's not that stern hasn't pivoted lots of times stern has of course said we wouldn't do this topper this was exclusive or we wouldn't sell this for cheaper than this price or we won't go you know they've they've a lot of times changed they've moved the goalpost so to speak they've changed their mind but on this particular release i am wildly disappointed to hear they're doing 10 extra machines because without a word of a lie and i don't agree with chris all the time he did say it here first i i already had this idea but i just want to give credit where credit's due a little bit of credit, a tiny little tidbit of credit, okay, he did say that these might be the most valuable no Chris they are going to be the most valuable the 80 show games will probably go I not going to say they going to go for 10 or sorry two times as much I would guess there between a 30 to 50 If I had to guess if the other games like just perfectly done up are 15 these show games are going to be 20, you know, like Buttercab and everything. And if you're getting a show game, you better damn well get the Buttercab and all the accessories because I don't like to think of pinball as an investment. I like to think of pinball as a place to park my money more so than a place to make money. An investment has the expectation that you make money, and I don't have that expectation. I'm looking over here at all my records that give me joy that I actually do listen to, okay, in my record collection. And when I go to play like a limited edition album like The Beaches there that they all signed, I'm going to enjoy listening to it. But when I go to sell it, I'll also make some money on it because I was smart enough to buy it live where they all signed it for $50. the cheapest one of that album on like signed by all the beaches is $200 on eBay so would I ever just go sell it for $50? of course not if I can make some money on it great but I'm going to listen to it in the meantime and enjoy it I'm not going to keep it pristine I didn't leave the wrapper on well it was already signed so I didn't have that but the point is I absolutely love this band I absolutely love all of my pinball machines when I buy a really good record or a really good pinball machine I don't buy it as being an investment in mind. But like I told you with Derpy Dragon for Harry Potter, the same way it'll be similar to what happened with the Honus Wagner card, okay, when I explained that because they were so limited, they definitely would go up in value. So if investing is your thing, I don't think the pinball is investing. But if you do, I would try calling every distro you know today and get yourself a show game. There's 80 of them. and if you've been buying from that same distro for a long time, you should be able to say, hey, there's tons of other distros I could give my money to, but I'd rather stick with you. Or you could say, hey, this would be a good jump off point. I've been with this other distro forever. If you hook me up with a show game, you know, again, hey, if they can do tied selling to us, right, if we can be told, if you cancel your deposit for probably the ugliest, ugliest, I think it was called the trailer park game most recently on a podcast. I can't remember which one. Maybe it was Eclectic Gamers. I think it actually was Dennis Creasel who said that he thought it looked like trailer park art. I just said I hated how over-sexualized it was and why you had to make Alice a kid's book sound so raunchy and dirty and disgusting and not even beautiful. If it was beautiful, it's one thing, but it's just like, ugh. Anyways, I can't stand the art. I can't stand the gameplay. I can't stand... I'm not mad at all the pinball content creators who told you to go get it, but they were wrong, and I was right. And if you spent your money on a deposit for Alice, you're now probably really annoyed. Looking at Winchester, which is... And I don't even like the cab art on Winchester. I don't hate it. I just don't love it, I guess. I shouldn't say I don't like it. I do like it. I don't love it, especially the one side with just all the lightning and stuff. It's just a little, you know, I would like more. I want more detail than that. I don't want more than half of the area taken up by just by lightning storms. You know what I mean? And the other side of the cab is okay. I love the back glass. I love the play field art. I love the sound. I love the shots. I love the mechs. I think by far it's barrels of fun. Most fun shooter, you could say it's a barrel of fun. That was dad joke of the day, and I just lost. I lost the internet there. But I don't like what they've done now with this 80 show games. I think it is the biggest marketing mistake they've ever made. And as a new company, you could argue that Stern's made a lot of marketing mistakes. I can't think of a marketing mistake that Stern has made since not inviting me to the John Wick Media Day. No, I'm just kidding. But I cannot think of a marketing mistake this big. The biggest marketing mistake from Barrels of Fun was releasing Dune with the code only like barely there and the callout's not in the game yet and the visual's not approved and the LCD not ready to go and also at the same time as two other pins. The biggest mistake we've now ever seen from Spooky is the idea that they thought they could get away with. And when Kaneda did call a distro, I'm not going to say who it was, called a distro and asked them, have you been allocated show games? And they admitted they had been. So if distros are getting allocated show games before they've even been at the shows, it means they're going in with the intention of making extra money from the show games. That's gross. That's despicable. That is the biggest. now if you said listen one percent of the games are going to be show games we need minimum one percent of the game we're so sorry and you said it before every single distro spot was locked in and you said listen we're going to have one percent of them we're going to have 10 pins fine people will go okay there's going to be 10 and you said you know we're basically like i don't know they're going to raffle off half of them and the other half the people in the spooky fan club got the chance for them or we are going to give one to charity for project pinball and the other nine are going to go to our fan club or the other nine are going to go to our employers or the other nine are going to go to the people who have bought the most previous spooky pin something like that fine something like that where it's going to be random fine but when you're making almost a hundred when you're making 80 and then there's there might even be a couple more that we're like oh this demo but it's like no if you're making 80 tacking on top of a thousand that's like 9.25 percent you're almost at you're real close to 10 percent there and then now so those 80 will without a out be the most expensive i don't know if they'll be five grand more i don't know if they'll be 10 grand more but a decade from now if spooky gets as big and becomes this goliath in the pinball world that i think they're going to get to that you couldn't even call them boutique anymore okay i honestly believe that this you know these ones could get could get up to being twice as expensive as the non. Oh, Lordy. How's it going, Drop Target Danielle? How's it going, Drop Target Danielle? I'm good, but I'm right in the middle of a podcast. Can I call you back in a minute? Or five? Okay, bye. Love you. Drive safe. Hopefully, you had a good day at work. Bye. Okay, guys. There. Usually, she doesn't call until 10 after three, and we got to call 25 minutes early, but that's all good. I should have messaged her. I thought at lunch, fire her off a message. Just let her know you're recording so she doesn't call, but it's all good. I apologize, guys. Hey, this is a blog-style podcast. You get what you get. Many other live streams I've seen, people were interrupted by dogs and wives and other things, so it happens. Let's get back into it, though, because now here's where the deceitfulness comes in and the part that I have the problem with. I don't have a problem with them making 80 show games if, A, they admitted it before everyone got their money in. It sounds like every single dollar was tied up before these people knew that. So the people who got their money in a week ago, two weeks ago, three weeks ago, they could have for the exact same price got a show game. But only people who were in the know with the distros had the opportunity to do that. So it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. You know when you get in an elevator and someone just dropped a bomb, like happened to poor Ken over there on the Flip N Out Pinball podcast at Expo? and you get that gross taste in your mouth, I've never got a gross taste in my mouth from Spooky. Even when Stern did the 20K James Bond thing, okay? So I'm not just going to be a Stern shill here. But this is the dirtiest, grossest marketing move that I've heard in a long time. If you're going to think about it, even if they charge the distros the exact same and the distros make the same margin on it, which that's not going to happen. Not a single distro, maybe one distro, maybe one really nice distro will sell one of those machines for the same MSRP. But if they're smart, they're going to sell it for $3,000 to $5,000 more, or they're going to hold on to them if they're really smart, and they're going to put it in the vault, and they're going to watch that price skyrocket. So I kind of think that Spooky shot themselves in the foot. Now, Spooky came out originally and said, hey, before we take any – and this is the problem with the pre-pre-pre-release, okay? Pre-pre-pre-release doesn't work because in the pre-pre-pre-release, we had no details. But in the pre-pre-pre-release, if we knew that 80 of them, 10% extra allotment were going to be super LEs and worth way, way, way more money, and basically, like, nobody would have gotten mine for the other $9.99. Everybody would have been waiting, and they know that. Spooky isn't dumb. They're smart. Maybe they're not great at designing pinball machines, okay? Maybe they don't know flow from the back of their hand, head, something. But what they do know is they know marketing and they know advertising and they know FOMO. And I now feel so bad for these 999 people that lock their money in with what they thought was the most exclusive, what they thought was the best spooky game. And now they're going to be getting the one that will not hold its value. But why won't the 999 hold its value? Because there's 10% of them out there that are worth way, way more than everyone wants. do you see what i'm saying now listen whatever value they stay at and they very well could stay at their original value for six to nine months after this well they're getting built but bet i bet you all the money in my bank account which is very very very little but i bet you that without a doubt a year from now to maybe a year and a half depending on when spooky gets these all made once spooky has these all made and they're out there the only ones that have the best chance at holding their value are going to be the 80. Those ones might not just hold their value, they might continually slowly go up. But a year to a year and a half from now, just like we're seeing now with Evil Dead, just like we're going to see with Winchester in six to nine months, they're either going to be slightly above like $500 above MSRP or $500 below. At the most of my 10 years of pinball, the most I've ever seen a year and a half after a pin came out, maybe $1,500 up other than like Supreme or a couple of these other really, really, really niche pinball machines. When you've got 1,000 of these Beetlejuices out there but you have 80 exclusive ones, the 80 exclusive ones are going to be the ones that are going to go up the most. They're going to be the ones that you can flip and turn a big profit on. Now, a couple people will flip their spots for Spooky and make a tiny bit of money in the first few months as we're waiting for the pinball machine to come out for Beetlejuice. And I can't believe I'm talking this much about Beetlejuice and it hasn't even been released. and to the distro that sold out of their pre pre pre spots y'all suck that wasn't a cool move that was really bad and i just heard actually mike uh from the rock bottom pinball podcast punk rock pinball punk rock pinball facebook page go over there and check them out join it if you haven't awesome dude and i'm not just saying this because he gave me a really good shout out because before he gave me a cool shout out on the most recent show with him and his partner i'm forgetting your name i was supposed to look it up but go go check them out they're really cool um he specifically said that he made a list and the list is going around on pin side i would gather by now and just through word of mouth through messenger groups through discords through facebook groups if you're a distro that took money and pre-sold out i know flipping out didn't cheers cheers to zach and and greg and uh ken nicole everybody over there flipping out thank you for not doing that thank you for i i think that's a much more ethical way to do it that way you can let people see the pinball machine they're about to spend tens of thousands of dollars on or whatever more than 10k on anyways minimum before they pay what what a novel idea would you buy a house without seeing what it looked like inside of course not would you buy a car not knowing what it looks like You don know what engine it has You don know if it has air conditioning You only saw a glance of the outside of it. Of course you wouldn't. Then why on earth would you go spend 15K? You don't need to. You know why? Because every single pinball machine that's mass produced with hundreds of them, I'm not talking when they make like five home brews, like Little Big China, Little something, whatever that one is, Big Little. I never saw the movie. I tried to watch the – I couldn't even get through the minute and a half trailer of Big City and Little China or Big China and Little City. I don't know what it is. But it was horrible. I don't know. Maybe it was really cool in like 1982 when I was two years old, but it didn't hold up. So that's never going to become a thing. I do think Beetlejuice held up. I do think the artwork is going to be incredible on Beetlejuice. I do think some people will make money. some, I'm not going to call them scalpers or scammers, you can do you, will make money off flipping Beetlejuice very early. But there will be 10 times as many people who either break even or most likely lose money on Beetlejuice who sell it like six, nine months a year from now, a year and a half from now. And why don't you be one of the, rather than complaining that you're one of the people that may or may not be able to make 500 bucks or $1,000 extra on your ticket to Betelgeuse, why don't you just be happy that you're not going to be one of those people who is going to lose one, two, or three grand in a year from now, right? Why not just think a bit from that positive side of it? Why not go spend $1 or 50 cents and go play Betelgeuse on location when it gets there in just a few weeks to a month and see if you love it. And if you do love it by then, there'll be tons of spots open by then, not just because we're getting The Walking Dead, not just because Stern's not done with Cornerstones this year, not just because Winchester's coming out, but because of all of those things combined and what I'm telling you now with the machine, right? So anyways, let's go into number three. I touched on this earlier, but there's just no designers working over there. Now, Spooky Luke is doing as good at designing as anyone could who's never gone to an engineering school, who's never, you know, he wasn't, he's not like a Keith Elwin, where Keith Elwin was routing games for two decades, well, winning, you know, winning the biggest tournament in the world three years in a row, like he is a, like Carl, okay, Carl may not have gone to design school, but both Carl and Elwin, and yes, even Jack Danger, for years and years and years, played tournament pinball before they ever got into designing, and Spooky Luke, I love you, dude, you seem like a nice guy, You're probably a professional hunter. I don't know if you're a professional pinball player, okay? I've also seen Bug play. Pretty decent player. Not bad player. Pretty good. Probably better than Gary Stern, but he's no Ray Day, okay? He's no Keith Elwin. He's not even a Jack Danger level, right? All of these guys get to wizard modes on a daily freaking – they eat wizard modes for breakfast, and then they fart out double wizard mode for lunch. And then for a snack later on, they come up with five scoring exploits. So I love Spooky Luke. I love Bug. I think they're doing a great job. I didn't like any of it. I absolutely hated. What was that? Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle. I didn't like the look of it. I didn't like the vibe. I didn't like the color scheme. The shots looked really, really tight and obscure and really hard. The rules by Bowen seemed good, but short of the rules being decent, nothing else on that pin was forgivable. What was that Rob Zombie? That was the worst. That was the worst Spooky I've ever played. I think it's worse than Halloween maybe. I remember Rob Zombie was such a bad game that I was playing a four-player game, and the fourth person decided to head outside to get some fresh air, and they said, no, no, no, just plunge my balls. If I make it back before it's done, great. If not, whatever. Well, it just so happened when we automatically plunged the balls, somehow on his third ball he got this crazy five million skill shot, and the player four, who was the worst player of all of us, who wasn't there, and I had multiple long ball times, he ended up winning the whole game. So everyone said, you can't ever use Rob Zombie. Like, if you're on your fifth or sixth game by a company and you still can't even use it in a tournament because the skill shot's not coded well enough to be balanced, I'm sorry, I don't want to buy code from that company ever. And again, I've heard Evil Dead, they're doing slightly better with the code. But sure as shats, I'm not buying a Spooky until I play it. play before you pay this is the way to never lose a penny to never be disappointed i brought it up before i'm not going to say their name many of you know who i'm talking about another content creator bought jaws literally bought jaws the day it came out had four plays on it and hated how it played so bad knew by just the end of four plays on the machine less than an hour for my like like after setting it up, played right away, four plays, hated it, went on Pinside and sold it that same day, lost almost two grand. It cost them $500 a play. So for every one in a thousand pinball nerds that will precisely name exactly which pinball machines will make money six to nine months after they come out by selling their spot for $500 to a thousand more, there's 999 pinball nerds who lost a shat's ton of money because they bought a game before they played it. And if you just play before you pay, you'll never be disappointed. Sure, you might have to wait six months for the prices come down to something reasonable. You might even have to pay $500 more for a spot. Who cares? Wouldn't you rather one time once pay $500 more for a spot in a game that you absolutely love? And if you don't think spot, mark my words on it by Christmas. There will be Winchester spots. Yes, they might start at $1,000 more. Then they come down to $750. I've seen this. I've seen this for 30 pinball machines be released over a decade, guys. It happens every time. It doesn't matter if it's Elowens and it's limited edition to only 500. It doesn't matter what. Name a pinball machine from five years ago that costs more now than it even did five years ago, even including inflation. You can't because it doesn't exist. Again, the only one I can think of is Supreme. It's 80 grand for Supreme. It's maybe down to like 70 or 60, right? But who cares because the gameplay sucks. and as a pinball nerd, you just want a machine that you enjoy playing. And until you play it, you can only learn so much from live streams. You can only learn so much from videos. Until you get your eyes on it, see what the artwork looks like in person, and more importantly, play it, you won't know if you enjoy the code. Everybody, almost everybody that I know loves playing medieval madness. I can't stand it. You just go for castles. I can't even hit the ramps. They're too narrow. It's boring. you just hit the castle over and over and over and like monster bash some people just love that game and i'm like really i figured out the code in the first three and a half minutes that's baby's first code right it's not that fun it's not that enjoyable there's nothing to explore there's nothing to learn there's nothing different or new or exciting happening it's a great game for its time but nowadays we want more and all the spooky games i've ever played feel like they could have came out in the 90s and even their code then would have been a little bit are you telling me anyone here thinks that Looney Tunes is better than Twilight Zone? Of course not. Are you telling me that your buddy says, oh yeah, Ultraman, way, way, way better than Circus Voltaire? Give me a break. You know what I mean? Okay, Circus Voltaire is a bad example, but you know where I'm coming from. So I love Spooky. I love that they're the little guy. I love rooting on the little guy. I honestly, I was like day one when the Spooky Pinball TNA hyper color shirts came out, if you can believe it or not. I bought one. I still have it upstairs. I don't wear it anymore. The hyper color doesn't work very well. I'm not talking about reliability yet, but the reliability of the T-shirts, I maybe wore that thing 10 times. But who cares? It's a T-shirt. the point is their most reliable machine to date other than evil dead and their most their best shooter with the most flow and probably the most interesting vibrant music and callouts and everything happening is by far tna and that was like six or seven years ago okay so they're getting better but i think everyone needs to back it up back it up tara everybody needs to just say hey we're overshilling spooky and we don't need to they're sold out you don't need to pump hard you know what you know what content creators are going to pump the hardest the ones that actually still have money in in in uh beetlejuice because they're going to pump it hard because they know they might be able to sell their spot for two or three thousand especially if they have multiple spots which many of them do i'm sure and it's probably a smart thing to do and i'm not even against them doing that what i don't like is when they're pumping it up and saying that it's going to go up so to help it go up and then of course it goes up and then they make money on it kind of feels a little disingenuous sort of like spooky adding the uh extra one so i'm not going to go on too much about their design because again it appears that evil dead even though it has very little flow it does appear that they're getting better with the rules it does appear they're getting better with the code but i can say this i just watched on the stream this last whatever that last big tournament was they were playing evil dead no maybe it was two tournaments ago at the UK Open, I think, at the British Open, or whatever Neil McRae runs over there. I think it's the UK Open. And literally, there's so many code exploits. They were talking about the two or three different exploits, the one where you can just, I think Travis Murray was even doing it, where you spam the right ramp all day, and then Spooky had to fix that one, and then there was another exploit, and they had to finish that one. Like, Evil Dead's been out a long time. There shouldn't be that many scoring exploits that you can get to in 20 seconds in the game. I'm sorry. like I know that people are going to think that I am a stern shill here and I kind of am because the worst flow of any stern I've ever played still has better flow than any spooky I've ever played and I wish that weren't true it just is when you have you know so many of the top pinball designers in the world who are also so many of the top tournament players on the world they have a better understanding of flow okay and that's the same thing like if I was to go out and say I started a hunting company and I was like just designing like stuff for hunting and I was like yeah but I think I can kind of look at what the other hunting gear looks like or this duck collar no if I wanted to design a duck collar I would go to a hunter like Luke because that's his specialty but I wouldn't ever ask him to design a pinball machine do you know what I mean and the thing is I love spooky I want them to do well I want barrels of fun to do well but also at the same time I have to be the voice and reason for the first time maybe in my entire pinball career here I'm cooking with gas guys like come on people have lost their minds I think I'm the only pinball creator that's like not like just like wow I have to get 10 beetle juices five beetle juice I'm gonna make money on four of them the other three are gonna be this edition I can't wait for all that extra beetle juice money beetle juice beetle juice beetle juice and can we talk about spooky speak you know what I'm gonna save that for the patreon I'm gonna talk about spooky speak this week because I don't like that. I really, really, really don't like spooky speak. And I think it's going the wrong direction. I think, I'm going to sound like a Luddite here. I do use AI from time to time. I don't like spooky speak. I, yeah, I'm going to talk about more of that on the Patreon later this week. By the way, if you haven't joined the Patreon, you have now, what, two days before, say, Lalloween, okay? You have a grand total of two days to get on there because I'm sending out nifty-gifty on October 1st. So get over to my Patreon, take a look at the rewards and sign up soon or else you're not going to get them. And I will say this, I do apologize. Apparently there like some new tariff thing that may or may not be coming If you get nailed with a 10 tariff I will give you a tariff shout out and apologize I really sorry I can pay you back for the tariff I can try to say that the value of what I'm sending you is low. I'll try to do a small packet this time. Hopefully small packets are less likely to get hit by the tariff. But to all of you who are in the second tier of the Pimble Nerds Podcast Patreon, you will be getting a nifty gifty next month. It's just, I hope that we don't get hit with the tariffs. I apologize. There's nothing I could do about the tariffs. If there's something I could do, I would do it. But I just, you know, I got a lot of pull. I got a lot of pull up here in Nova Scotia. I don't have that much pull. All right. So let's go on to number four. The number four reason why I'm just not a shell of spooky pinball yet. Okay, number four, and we talked about this briefly before, is the code. They don't have a Ray Day. Their top most known coder, from what I understand, is the guy they just hired from American Pinball. And American Pinball, notably, doesn't have very good code, right? So like, nobody's like, wow, have you tried the code on Berrio's barbecue? Wow. No. Could the code save Star Wars from the fall of the Empire? Yes. Could the code ever save Berrios? Probably not. It's just never going to be a top 10 pimp side machine. You know that. I know that. Even at this point. Okay, no, that took it too far. Even at this point, if they brought over Ray Day to American Pinball, I don't think he could save Berrios. I'm sorry, Steven Bowden. Don't get mad at me. I love you, Berrio. I love you, Steven Bowden. I'm sorry. I just don't think it got that flow. I just don't. I don't think that it's that fun of a game. It doesn't look like it. I haven't played it yet. There's only like 10 on Earth or something, so, you know, how would I have? But the code, and I put in here backslash LCD screen. The LCD screen on, like, Halloween is honestly, like, a joke. On Halloween, Looney Tunes, it got better. It got a little bit better. TCM, it's even a little bit better. okay texas chainsaw massacre but like is that what we're going for just a little bit better when for way less price you could buy a stern pro that has like an incredible lcd and no one ever talks about this look at the lcd on star wars you can watch all five movies if we have another freaking pandemic you could just sit there and watch them on repeat and just hit the button you know it's like it has a built-in game with it okay and again i know they're the little guy i don't want to be too critical on them. I want to be kind but critical. I'm trying to say this in the nicest way possible. I'm not going to name call them, but I'm going to tell you, even if I won a million dollars tomorrow, a million dollars straight up, a million bucks American, that's like a million and a half dollars Canadian. There's zero shot I would buy a Spooky until I played it because I might hate it. There is some people out there who just can't stand TNA. They think, oh it's one level it doesn't have ramps it doesn't have a mini flipper it doesn't it doesn't have this it doesn't it does have a uh a flipper upside in that that little area up there where you get the nuclear blasters but some people just hated tna i loved it other people don't like the other star wars notably bruce nightingale bruce nightingale thinks that steve ritchie star wars is a cash grab because he thinks it's a horrible game i enjoy it i don't think it's like i don't think it's an A-tier game. I think it's a B-plus from the shots category. I think the artwork stinks. It was still a little bit of Photoshop, like you just walked into an elevator and who just left that spray in there, right, with that game for the artwork. It was almost as bad as Game of Thrones, which is maybe the worst artwork I've ever seen. So the artwork is not the problem and has not been the problem and will not be the problem with Spooky. The issues are no flow or little to any flow on any of their pins ever, and their best flow was probably Scott Danesi's TNA. Their other issue is they've done pivots multiple times where they said they weren't going to do more TNA. They did more TNA. Then they did more TNA. They said they were going to do this. They didn't do that. And for the most part, they are people of their word. But I think the thing that upset me the most and their biggest marketing flaw to date has been doing an extra 80 show games. I would have to guess they were only going to do 5 to 10 show games, in which case no one would care. If the ratio was there's five show games to 1,000 non-show games, it's 20 to 1. It's unobtainium. Probably Spooky Luke's going to keep one of them. Don's going to keep another one. Franchi's going to get another show game. Bug's going to keep another one. And Charlie will probably – you know what I mean? Like they would designate all of those to people. Those would be so rare. But once you say there's 80 and you're giving allocation of 5 to 10 for each distro and the distros are going to be fighting over it because it's basically a Super L.E. without saying it's a Super L.E. And everyone put the money in without even knowing that there was going to be a Super L.E. I'm just saying it right here. Spooky's next pin after Beetlejuice will not sell out so quickly if they are not a little bit, and they've been praised for being so open and honest. Why not be open and honest here and just say, just to let you know, yes, we are limiting it to $999 Beetlejuice, but we're going to do a 10% more show games that we're going to charge way money for, and they're probably going to be worth a lot more, but we're sorry, everybody. because everybody would have got in line for those 100 pins they're selling there instead of the other few hundred of the regular one. Am I right? I think I'm right here. I think I'm cooking. I don't know. So that LCD screen, they got to work on that. Again, it got a little bit better with Evil Dead, okay, a little bit. But, like, it's still not great. The call-outs were really good on Evil Dead. The mechs were incredible. Like, the number of mechs that interact with the ball was great. Like, Luke is, like, nailing that. Luke and Bugsy. I don't even know who to credit it to. This is the problem. All right. We've got to get through this. Number five on the list, and I'm sorry to do this. I don't want to call out Rach and Kale over there at the bat, but they multiple times have had spookies that had issues. And I know Evil Dead they haven't had any issues with, and I hope I'm not confusing it with American Pimble. I don't believe that I am. Let me know. Reach out to me, Kale, if I'm wrong. But I believe that not only – like I believe Looney Tunes, I've heard multiple times Looney Tunes has like resetting issues. Even from other distros, Looney Tunes still to this day has issues. You can't really play. It's like after the third player once in a while, a ball will just shoot out or something. Like from what I understand, Looney Tunes is just the code needs so much work still. It's basically unplayable. And we don't know if the code is any better for Beetlejuice. Like why on earth would they be working on finishing the code on Beetlejuice when they haven't fixed all the bugs yet on Evil Dead in the scoring issues or on Looney Tunes or on TCM or on Ultraman or on Halloween or on America's Most Hot? Like if they haven't finished the code and got rid of the bugs on any of the other code stuff, why would we assume that they're going to ever on Beetlejuice? Do you know what I mean? Like maybe they just said, hey, we sucked on all the other code, but now we're bringing in a real coder and we're going to code it and it's going to be incredible and there's not going to be scoring bugs and you'll be able to play it in a tournament and the power won't randomly shut off like it did on Halloween and Ultraman and everything else, right? So that was really the issue is it's not – spookies are not known to be good location games. They just aren't. I've heard people say that they've had – in fact, Seven's Pinball-O-Rama in Charlottetown put up a post. good old Prince Edward Island I think they're just on the outskirts of Charlottetown now uh shout out to Seven I think he's been having some health care issues so hopefully you're doing better now Seven um but they got 20,000 plays on Hot Wheels and they only had to like replace the rubbers on the flippers and do like a flipper rebuild and like two or three other minor things but they're up to 20,000 plays I have never in 10 years of covering pinball say someone uh say any arcade owner and i listen to almost every pinball podcast out there oh i got 20 000 plays on looney tunes and it held up great oh i got 20 000 plays on halloween and it held up great oh i got 20 000 i haven't even heard anyone say i got 20 000 plays on tna and it's still working great i just haven't heard that i've heard people say well they're kind of hard to operate they're very unreliable the code's not quite finished they don't have a lot of flow and now we're hearing people say how disappointed and upset they are that there's 80 show games including that's their mainstays these people who got the 999 they were the people who love spooky and they're in the know and now you're going to have 80 people feeling super lucky and 999 people feeling like they got a little burned now if the machine shoots even better than evil dead has even more flow than evil dead has even more mechs that interact with the ball than evil dead and they give us a really good apology about the show thing, then there's a tiny possibility that maybe, maybe, maybe they will actually have a comeback on their hands. And, you know, I think they can pivot from this. I'm not like saying I would never buy a Spooky. I'm saying even maybe, maybe even more so than a Stern, I would have to play a Spooky before I would buy it. And I can say right now, I would never buy an American pinball machine without playing it. Never. Even after playing it, I probably wouldn't buy it unless it was Cuphead. What's going on with that? Can someone just get Cuphead? And Ryan McQuaid, hire this man. Somebody out there, hire this man. He wants to work for a pinball company. Look at the design of Cuphead. It's incredible. I've even got to see more stuff from it. So I was very afraid that possibly Elowen or Draco would start barking because it's possible that Little Orby Jr. is home from school now. But listen, guys, I absolutely love Spooky. I want there to be more competition in pinball. I love barrels of fun. I think we should be able to have jokes in the industry as well. And I hope that no one from Spooky, if they listen to this, I, look, every other content creator on planet Earth has a Spooky Shill shirt. I'm assuming Bug and Luke have never even heard of me or my podcast because they've never sent me a message. They've never contacted me. Even in chat when I asked that question about the reliability, thank you, Bug, for answering that and being so honest. You guys can go back and listen to episode 641 where I specifically say to Bug, I'm hearing that finally Evil Dead's become more reliable on location. Can we expect Luna? Stop, please. Luna, stop. Stop. It's just Owen. What? Luna. Luna, Tuna, Ello, and Agar. Take it easy. All right, guys. Well, listen. I should probably let you go. I will say this. I love the trailer for Beetlejuice. I think it's innovative how spooky speak works even though I don't love it but anyways pinball nerds until next time and Walking Dead I wasn't as impressed Walking Dead I was not impressed with that trailer we didn't get to see even nearly as much as we did in the Beetlejuice one do I think that Beetlejuice is going to be better than Walking Dead well probably because it's a brand new pin that we haven't seen before but I also think the chances of it having better code than Lyman Sheets masterpiece code in the Walking Dead and those incredibly fun shots I mean the chances of that happening are zero to none in my opinion but maybe prove me wrong spooky I'd love to be proven wrong and Don honestly I know that we're kind of buds you might actually listen to this show so if you think that I'm wrong about these five things or you want to address them you're more than welcome to come on the show I'll be respectful about it it'd be nice to have a chat with Don to be honest I think I already invited Don and Jenga's on episode 666 we're only uh 15 episodes away from that that's going to be fun make sure you guys go over like and join my patreon and do it before the first if you want to get those nifty gifties coming at you and just go over there anyways because there's lots of good episodes by now we're going to be doing a w2f happen last month pretty soon and i'm really excited thank you to all my patrons thank you to alex l who just joined and remember pinball nerds play before you pay. This is the way to not have dismay. I am a poet and I didn't know it. Until next time, pinball nerds, eat, sleep, and breathe.