Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. I'm your host, Alan, co-owner of the Portland Pinball Bar Wedgehead, host of this show, joined remotely by my co-host, Alex the Waterboy. How you doing? I'm doing pretty good, Alan. What are we going to be talking about today? Oh, we're talking about throwback designs, outliers, and really we're talking about four games in particular. If you listened to our last episode... Pretty short list. Yeah, pretty short list as far as variety goes. But it's a good one. Yes. So in our last episode, we talked about modern pinball. And so we focused a lot on the Spike 2 system of sterns. And we mentioned a couple of throwback designs that they released and some other companies released that don't have ramps. They have maybe simpler rule sets. Kind of just like toss that away there. But that's kind of the defining feature of these four titles we're talking about, huh? They all don't have ramps. They all have simpler rules and they typically play a little bit shorter or a little bit more punishing, right? Yeah, they're more like solid states in pretty much every way. It's a marriage of modern pinball and like the solid state games that we talk about a lot. A couple of these are more so than the others. So we can kind of like dig in the four titles. Well, I think we got to start with the game that sort of kicked this off. It ended up being manufactured by your favorite pinball manufacturer, Spooky. Oh, yeah. It was designed originally, designed and coded and scored by Scott Denisey, and that's Total Nuclear Annihilation. He started working on this. So for those that don't know, Total Nuclear Annihilation, TNA, we're going to keep calling it because it's a mouthful otherwise, T in the letter A, not T and A. Yeah. So it started as a homebrew project by Scott in 2015 or something. He started kind of like trotting it around, taking it to different shows. Scott is just kind of a tinkerer. I think at the time he was already working for Pinball Life and he made this homebrew game kind of in the vein, a solid state, like a brutal fast playing game because that's what he seemed to enjoy. And he kind of infused it with like it's not really like cyberpunk. I don't know how to describe the aesthetic. It's just like, yeah, cyberpunk, nuclear neon kind of 80s vibe. and it's also a big key part of it is that Scott Danesi is a musician and he put his own electronic music in there and it's a very kind of like thumping house soundtrack and I think honestly the sound the first time you play a TNA the sound is what immediately hooks you and I think that was the biggest reason that this thing became such a hit in the homebrew scene it was also at a time when people weren't really making homebrews like they are now. This is 2015. They weren't as accessible. There wasn't all the tools and help online. Yeah, everyone loved it. And Spooky was very, very smart to actually make a production run of the machine. They did 500 of them starting in 2017. Yeah, I think they made 550 was the original run. And then they did like another rerun 250, something like that. Don't quote our numbers. there's less than a thousand of these out there but it has an outsized sort of reputation because all the people like us that appreciate old solid state games and the way they play and the simple rule sets we got a modern version of it right so we got stronger flippers clear-coated play field yep perfect sound system beautiful light shows yes full high quality sound effects integrated with everything scott did such a bang-up job on like the sound design on this thing i just really can't say that enough like it's sick yeah dude he just i can't say it's making me want to go play it it's a game that i've thought about buying so many times but it's like i don't want to you know don't meet your heroes and i'm always a little scared if i have one in my house maybe i'll get sick of the sound and the music and everything but i love it and it's just it's one that made an immediate it was one of the first games that i really went out of my way to hunt one down and play on location and it immediately lived up to my hype or my expectations it's so much fun you're trying to destroy reactors it's got a throwback rule set where it's like yes the first one's easy then the next one takes a couple more shots the next one takes more shots it's really hard to do all of them it really really hard unless you're was it the first pinball machine that you could just finish and beat and it drains like the flippers die i'm not sure if it's the first but it's it's definitely novel still yes i mean there still aren't very many i think that do that it's interesting in a lot of ways and it also has co-op it was it does which i mentioned in the last episode i love games with co-op yeah and scott does a really good job with the co-op in this because it keeps track of who destroyed how many reactors so your scores are combined but you'll notice like the last digit of the scoring is always how many reactors you've destroyed yeah so it kind of keeps competitive edge you can steal them megan loves it because like all set reactors up and then drain in and she gets to steal them like that or you could set your multiball up and people can steal them there's lock stealing in this game which i fucking love yep lock stealing and a playfield multiplier based on how many balls are on the playfield at once and it's like impossible to stay in multiball it works really well it's overall it's just one of those things it's like iron maiden and we talked about iron maiden excellent stern game it's one of allen's favorite modern lcd sterns and when you have these guys it also started out as a homebrew by uh keith ellen when they have the time to cook on this shit they really get some of those little like details i feel like figured out you can see the difference i love scott denisi i don't know him personally i've just spoken to him a few times and he's very nice but i told him i was like man nobody under i felt like especially when he designed this game because we're talking 2015 he was working on this game taking it to shows right i think and uh 2015 like released 2017 or something by spooky i was complaining i was like man i just don't feel like we're getting the light shows and i don't think we're getting the sound call outs like it's not like when you're in adam's family it was a fucking moment like the lights go out and you hear the lightning going when you start the multiball and then you get raul julia screaming it's show time like and it was a fucking show right and you get that with tna it's like it gives you light and sound you destroy a reactor it gives you the show you feel it like yeah it's elevating and i think like i was like it's not just like scott just like put some shots on the play field or whatever like it's like he did more than that it really did a good job of showing like how much you can do with what looks like a little and i think that was eye-opening to a lot of people who had just been like we need more max we need more ramps we need more and more and more stuff under the glass and tna does have a lot of like it has a lot of solenoids and it has a lot going on even though it's a you know pretty straightforward layout what it does with that is more pure pinball than so many other games it has everything i like about pinball in such a tight concise package it's a very good game it's scott's the fucking man like we could do a whole episode like that we should try to get him on the show in the future you also have a rick and morty which he designed another phenomenal it's like a brutal game but with ramps this time super fun and it's still i honestly i feel like tna is probably tna is more noteworthy to me it's just a very very good game and i think it was really important for me personally i kind of like credit with it's like it showed me it's like hey like mean games are fun you play that game you want to play it you like you you go up to a tna the first time it kicks your ass you want to play it again and that was like one of those games that was like it didn't feel like frustrating to lose it just felt like challenging i loved it it just kind of got me hooked on that style of gameplay it's what led to me liking solid state so much i think and it does it in such a nice like i said overall package with the light show and the sound and everything we both like brutal games i think listeners this isn't a surprise that you're gonna hear us talk about this because we talk about all the time but i do think that like if you're gonna have a brutal game it also can't be complicated right like it can't be like it has to be simple easy to understand the rule sets need to match the ball times that's why you can't just take a modern stern and set it up mean as hell and have it turn into a good game have it turn into like you know a proper short playing game it'll never be the same thing as when it was designed from the start and tna was definitely designed to match the simple rule sets with a mean layout you can learn them quick and it'll take forever to get good at it yeah i think the last thing i'll say about this and what i heard scott say right after his release of rick and morty and people were complaining about how brutal that game was and definitely how brutal tna was pretty much everyone really loved tna that was a lot of like brown swell of excitement but they're the detractors were like ate so hard yeah i remember scott said somewhere on some interview where he was just like i live off the tears of pinball players and i love that because it's like that's me like i want somebody make games like that for me like i understand that they're not going to be that's not going to be the norm but i love seeing one happen every once in a while you know yeah and that's going to be a recurring thing throughout this episode is it's like we're not expecting every game that comes out to cater specifically to us and be one of these kind of titles but we would sure like to see more of them yeah because like you're going to talk about they're awesome they're all very very fun are you ready to move on to the next one can we segue on the next one to come out chronologically right would be the beatles that's correct and that came out in uh 2018 so pretty short after the success of tna i'm not sure if it was necessarily a response to that because it's a very very different intention they were going with a throwback design they secured the Beatles license was famously at the time the most expensive license ever procured for a pinball machine it's the 1964s Beatlemania era Beatles they got I don't know how many songs eight songs or something in there they very controversially attached this license to a modified version of the 1980s stern sea witch layout yep and it's awesome like the best I don't care for 64 Beatles at all the early beetle stuff is not up my alley i love how this game plays because i like sea witch and this is like a tweaked better sea witch yeah so this game also came with i think this is the first game stern used opto spinners which they spin really fucking well you can see why that was a big deal we don need to get into the tech of it that not what i interested in doing on this episode but george gomez head of creative at stern kind of runs that whole show up there he gets to still do some certain designs and he tweaked this classic layout because around this time stern electronics games from the solid state era were getting really popular the prices are skyrocketing because they make a lot of those games and people that like solid states like us you know we're like oh man these games are so good these games are so good and so they decided to take one because there was a groundswell people like why don't they just remake these but brand new and let us buy them and so george took this and matched the best-selling band of all time to it triple a theme with this throwback layout which i think makes sense with the beatles right like to have a kind of a throwback layout it sort of makes sense yeah i think part of the idea had to be they're going for non-traditional pinball buyer market here they're going after beatles money more than pinball money and so they wanted like an approachable game that kind of looked like what a uh like baby boomer would expect a pinball machine to look like like no you know nothing too crazy over the top here so it was like kind of this weird hybrid there i love this game yeah he tweaked the geometry so the main thing is is like the upper loop on the original sea witch is famously not really um repeatable even though you know should be yeah it looks like you would be right and george made it work so he tweaked that he added a spinning disc in the middle he added a multiball you know magnet at the top yeah he added like those drops So on the bottom left, there's now a target behind them, which is sick. It feeds back into the left in lane. Very cool shot to have squeezed in there. Yeah, you already mentioned the magnet at the top. Well, I guess what we're saying is like, it sounds like he changed so much, but really it is still Sea Witch. Like we're saying that he changed so much. This is a controversial take. He made Sea Witch better. And we're solid state guys. Like I like Sea Witch a lot. And you know, like this kind of works the way Sea Witch should in my head. Yeah. I agree. I think George fucking nailed it. I love this game. I would love to see him do this with, like, other games of this era. I can't think of any off the top of my head that I would be like, oh, he really needs to tweak this. But it's like, if he took any of them that George thought were, you know, not playing the way that they should have, that needed to spend a little more time in the Whitewood phase, and he went back and massaged them a little bit, I would love to see them do that again. Because it's like, The Beatles was, it's great. So good. I also love later after the game was released. So Beatles, the one thing is it does not have the same rule set at all as Sea Witch. It has a much more modern but still straightforward rule set with like multi balls, all kinds of stuff. There's modes based off the songs. But later after release, and it was like years down the line, they snuck an update out that adds a classic mode. And it makes the game it disables all the magnets, it disables the spinning disc, there's no multi balls, it just has the rule set of Sea Witch. and I mentioned it in like the Mando episode or the sorry the previous episode with Mandalorian how the software tweaks like this when they add little like options and variable game modes like this I think it adds so much replayability to the game and it's like every time I see a Beatles on location I almost always will play a Beatles if I see one me too almost always if they have the classic play enabled will play at least one game of the classic play and one game of the modern it's to me it's like these are two different things I'm playing here me too I love this game i it's yeah i love this game i really wish it was attached to a different era of beatles but it's like this is like nitpicking now like i can't yeah you can't take every game and be like well i wish this was a different theme but i will say it's it is rough being 64 beatles it's just not the beatles i want to hear over and over again yeah i want beatles on drugs yeah yeah i want druggy beatles india first yeah it was very cool eastern do this another thing worth noting and i can't remember if we already mentioned it is that this was not a cornerstone release it was another boutique one which meant it was expensive when it first came out yeah i believe at the time it was like a stern pro would have been six grand at the time and the cheapest beatles was over 10 and so that hurt the sales obviously i assume they were paying licensing there had to be a reason they did this and they didn't milk the license they must have been using it like paying on a per unit basis versus like a time frame and it's always hard to predict it's like they never disclose that kind of stuff i'm just kind of guessing because it's like if you landed this license and you could use it unlimited for two years you would have made it a cornerstone game they limited it to 1964 like 1964 of them made of the gold edition right like and they made it's such a fun game and we're going to talk about their next game that they did which is james bond the anniversary bond 60th anniversary which is a Keith Elwin kind of throwback layout again no ramps simpler rule set they put a mechanical scoring reel in the backbox where the normal screen is but then they still put a small screen in the play field of the games on the list i like this game it's one that we're very fortunate to have multiple of them on location in the area here And I say that because it's very limited run and very, very fucking stupidly expensive. Frustratingly expensive. Stern was pushing their luck with it and it backfired to the point where these are worth almost half of what they cost new because when they were new, they were 20 grand, which is absurd. That's the thing. It's like, I mean, a lot of the time I kind of will play devil's advocate on here and $20,000 for a pinball machine, regardless of licensing, regardless of anything. is fucking stupid. I hate it. That's the kind of shit. If every game costs 20 grand, I'd be like, ah, fuck this. I'd push them all out into the driveway. Just I'm done with the hobby. That shit sucks. That's what's going to kill the hobby is trying to get 20 grand for a game. I hate it. I agree. It sucks because the game's fun. The game's super fun. Yeah. I'm not going to have some kind of like moral rejection of this game based on the price. I just want to say over and over again, that's a horrible idea. I wish it was a cornerstone. Here's the problem with these games in stern's approach and i'm not second guessing george gomez and the leadership at stern because they know what they're doing so they know their market better than i ever will i just i wish that there was a way to make a throwback game like this with a rad layout and it's not like oh there's only 500 and we're going to charge you 20k for them i like i'm like why can't this be a game that is is purchasable for like a stern pro price with a throwback layout that operators can buy and add as something that's sort of like a variation to what else we offer like a modern game with modern reliability strong snappy flippers you could make the code a little bit deeper more balanced than the average solid state would have been give me a modern solid state layout but at a reasonable price point i don't know why they have to be premium price points I don't understand that approach from Stern either, because they've seen other companies do it with success. We know that they can build lower production games at, you know, profitable prices. They do small runs of their home games. It's not like a matter of like having to get the tooling. It's one of those things, like you said, I can't sit here and question, I can't pretend I'm like the business mastermind of Stern. They know what they're doing a lot better than me. But it is frustrating to see them lock the like these cool games behind higher prices. because I really wish we would have seen like Beatles would have sold a lot more if it was priced if there was a pro if there was a pro version of it or even just a more reasonable premium version of it and then with Bond 60th it was all super le and it's the Bond it's hard for me not to pick it apart and it feels like an easy target because it's a $20,000 rich guy toy I don't mean to be negative on anyone that owns this I think it's a very cool game if I had the means I would you know if I had a big lineup I could see myself grabbing one it's just the combination of the high price and the fact it's such a half-baked half-assed overall product compared to some of the other games that we're talking about today is too much for me to ignore the art package is I understand they're held accountable by the licensor and the licensor has to sign off on everything and there's a thousand caveats on all of this but the art package is a joke it's copied and pasted movie posters thrown together with mismatched color palettes it's just frustrating it's so ugly compared to their cornerstone bond that was released earlier in the year which i think is one of their best art packages cohesively and then it's like they did decide they do score reels you know and when they announced like oh it's gonna have score rules it's like okay that's an interesting choice it's not really an em layout but you're like okay it's a novelty thing they're trying to do something to make it kind of stand out when that was announced i think that was announced prior to seeing games of the care pictures of the cabinet and so i think everybody kind of imagined it was going to be like a woe nelly pbr uh primus kind of situation where it looks like an em cabinet but it doesn't yeah and instead it's like this kind of it's almost the size of a full cabinet but it's not it doesn't still it still doesn't look right in the lineup It's got a trans light and a piece of glass where the LCD is. The whole thing feels like it was like thrown together as a prototype. And they decided to see if people would pay 20 grand for it. The fit and finish of it is they made some aesthetic choices. Art aside, which I agree, I don't like the art package, especially when they made the cornerstone game that I think is so beautiful. Looks so good. And I think the layout's sick. I mean, Keith Elwin gets to do a throwback layout. Is it any surprise that it's rad? Like, it's fucking fun. It's very fun. It got six shots. This is another one. It's super fun. That's always the biggest compliment I can give to the layouts is saying I'd play them for an hour if it was a Whitewood. And this is one that it's like, this thing was immediately fun to shoot. I think it's very, very cool. The only thing about this is, like, one, the price, which is Beatles had to a similar extent, but this got even worse. And at least the Beatles art package is really good, too. We got to say that. Yeah, Franchi did the art on Beatles, and it's, like, a very cohesive. of every the hard part it's just hard for me not to dog on this too much because i'm comparing it to everything else and it's like you look at the beatles the price started at half of what the bond game started at every game got a unique art package fully unique i believe they maybe not the playfield but the cabinet and back glass and i believe like the sides of the head are different from like the three different versions the gold and the platinum diamond or whatever it just was such a full effort that at least it's like it was a higher price but you're like i get it like it's a special it's a unique title that one i can wrap my head around the beatles or the the bond 60th i just can't wrap my head around and that's i think what frustrates me with it i'm not seeing where the money goes yeah my frustration with this is i don want them to look at it and go the only way we can do these games is to charge this premium for it and then they get blowback from the community And then they go they just throw up their hands and go well it just won work I'm like, well, you never tried to make it one of these as like a cornerstone release at cornerstone pricing. I mean, nothing would make me happier than if they took that layout from Bond 60th and just released it with any, whatever the cheapest license or just an original IP, like literally any theme with that layout released at stern pro prices it would be like i mean that that's just like the redemption story for me that would be how you save this one because right now it's just it really does if you can't tell like it is just kind of like an offensive thing to me like it's dumb i think to a lot of people in the community as well and i get it it's like when you're in the world of luxury goods which is what pinballs are when you're buying them for home use everything's kind of a flex and that's why they have le's in the first place and it's like there's no functional purpose to having powder coat on your game right when you're playing a game why'd you pay three grand more to have like the the red or yellow powder coat and you're like well it's the le i really like avengers or whatever i just wish they would have put a different cabinet on it like i wish there wasn't a screen in the playfield if you're doing a throwback design why is there an lcd screen in the playfield you're gonna do reels but the reels look fake because they put it where the screen normally goes and you have to have people come out at stern and be like no they're the reels are real they're actually mechanical reels you're like well that's a problem with your design where it's like it's not clear enough that they're actual physical reels if you're having to release a video on the day sales open showing that they are in fact physical reels which this isn't something we're exaggerating it's literally what stern did because people were confused as to if it was just an lcd display or not you know like you failed yeah like people can't even tell what your product is and this is the most expensive game you've ever made outside of i guess this elvira editions but we don't need to talk about that and it's got an action button does it need it i get that that's how they make all their new games but again it's like this is what's going to bring us into the next the last game we're going to talk about in depth on this episode which is pulp fiction by chicago gaming and pulp friction absolutely embarrasses bond 60th in terms of overall package and effort put in it's insane seeing that thing and how cohesive the whole thing like every piece of it thought was put into it's far and away the most impressive like pin new pinball machine i have seen in my time in the hobby especially when you're talking about as a fan of solid state type games yeah or is a fan of throwback games to see this come out. And not only like the backbox looks like an old Bally backbox, the coin door you can get in a throwback Valley coin door. Like the little fit and finish of this game is appropriate. It's all the things that they messed up with bond 60th, all the fit and finish stuff. They just took a spike to cabinet with bond 60th and threw this throwback game in and threw a crazy price on it. Like with, with this game from Chicago, pulp fiction they did the opposite i know that they're using like modern techniques right like it has all leds in it the cabinets they the art looks like stencils they're actually decals like they're not they're not stenciling games anymore but it looks right right like you're throwing everything looks appropriate it looks period appropriate and the game itself mark ritchie returns to pinball and it's fucking awesome it's so good david theil on sound uh they get fucking killed it quotes from the movie songs from the movie the art package is super cohesive and good and throwback it's simple and so it's like it's not just recycled assets or recycled poses it's like this new it it feels very much like a toy based on the movie and not just like oh we copied and pasted shit from the movie every piece of that game feels so thought through and then you get into the actual like the the quality of life stuff like operator level stuff and it's just even more impressive the fact that the the light bar or the so you take the back glass off and it has a swing out light door real back glass real glass reverse screen printed like they used to do real mirrored back glass not a translate and it's not like just on the le edition it's on the regular edition standard yep it's fucking good yeah everything about it i mean i think we should just continue i want to just keep talking about all the random little stuff that you've seen on it because it's like the fact that you can have a swing out door and it has a magnet installed to keep the swing out door in place which like as far as i know wasn't on any games from the factory back in the day it's something that people do as a mod occasionally to keep the door out of your way if you're servicing boards in the back yep that's the kind of shit that's like that's how you win me over as like a customer for life you're like that is the most thoughtful little touch I've ever seen on a modern pinball machine. This is the opposite of cost cutting. They're sitting there like, hey, we want a magnet. This is something that annoys me when I'm working on my games. And someone went, boom, you got it. And it's a game that costs comparable to a Stern Pro price. I can't remember off the top of my head, but it's right. It's a little bit more. It's closer to the premium. Depends on what distributor you get it from, you know, eight to eighty five hundred okay it's still straddling it's still a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars more than a stern pro but that to me is still reasonable they put a lot despite it being a throwback layout they snuck some modern ish features in there and they got lots of sculpts in there so there's like the watch there's the briefcase that moves there's the travolta head and the jewels head samuel jackson there's the cheeseburger you know the royale with cheese so and then the return to things like inline drops you know which bond 60th has also and so does tna it's something that i fucking love inline drops but this game is just and just talking about the fit and finish some more it's like when you open up the game it has a little flap that comes down that will block the ball so you don't have to normally you have to pop every single ball out of a pinball play field before you lift it up the first the first game i uh the first game i lifted a playfield on was my hobbit in jjp i don't know if they still do or if they always did or what but my hobbit had one of those flaps and so i just assumed every pinball machine would always have that because i had never seen anyone pop the balls out of a playfield before and the next pinball machine i got was lord of the rings and the first time i opened the playfield i dumped the balls all over and i was like oh my god it's just funny and it's like yeah chicago's like yeah that's gonna come on your game by the way i did check without freight they are eight grand because i I want to make sure I want to lay out like this is it's a thousand dollars I mean these are still expensive toys at the end of the day but it's a thousand bucks more than my mass-produced pro and it's got so much like care and love put into every piece of it and it's like a bespoke thing I mean there's not like a limit but they're not it's not going to sell as much as a stern it never will right yeah maybe maybe what maybe I don't know I hope it will I hope it does gangbusters the sickest game i've ever played because it really is impressive in every way to me i think it's a phenomenal game all i've talked about is just like the random little stuff on it the the ways that it's better than bond 60th basically which was not our intention with this episode was not i didn't mean to just shit on on 60th for 20 minutes but it's hard for me to reconcile these two products in my head well they came out back to back right like yeah they were announced within weeks of each other i think it was really close and there's a lot of uh a lot of excuses for one could be could have been excuses for pulp and they didn't they worked with what they had i don't think there's any you know um i don't think we got any voice lines from butch i don't think i particularly care i mean i'd love to have like a zed's dead call out it's not gonna make or break the game and that's what i'm saying it's like when you don't focus on negatives you just focus on this entirely sick package and what you do have yeah i don't know i got no complaints about this thing man it's super fun i will say that some people will complain or i've heard like yeah it's fun or it's cool that they did this but the legs right they go back to like is the rule set deep enough and i will say it's gonna be fun for years i will say that yeah Josh Sharpe roger's son head of the ipa as most people know him he did the rules design package of this game and it's very simple and clear you have multiple objectives some of them reset ball to ball like an old game would so there's always something for you to do it's clearly marked with inserts there's nothing hidden which i love about it which is why i like these throwback games i like knowing exactly what i'm doing but i had a monster game on it i've had a couple monster games on it one in particular where i played probably a 30 plus minute game on it i almost rolled it twice and i still had i still had one more mode left to start to get to flatline and i had one of the two multi balls i had to go do again and get the super jackpot to get to divine intervention because there's five main things you have to do to get to divine intervention which is the true wizard mode and it's a lot of work to do on one game so the game has a lot of depth that's not apparent to people when they first play it i don't think it would get boring like i think i think the game has a lot going on in general like i mean they said that it's i'm kind of recycling their own talking points here but it's like it's one of those games that you go up to you might be fooled if you're if you don't know pinball you might think this is a game from the 80s and then you start playing it and you realize like oh it's got physical ball locks both behind the rear i can't remember what you call the back of the playfield um the rear wall of the playfield yeah and it's got a physical ball lock in the subway underneath the pawn shop cement or whatever and it's like in like the first time i mean the first time you hit ball lock into that subway and it goes full green and it gives you like that like guitar like chord or whatever for the pawn shop you're like oh shit this thing's like it's got like a full they like they know how to do light shows too it's nuts it's just like one of those games like it really does have more going on and i think that's the case with the rules too because it's like yeah you've got your five like you're like you got five modes and then you're like yeah you also have your five multiball modes then you also have your three mini wizard modes and you got your actual wizard it's all kind of paired to the length of game you can expect to have but if you're also a newer player it doesn't feel like you're being penalized you're not just getting forced to do step one out of 50 every time you can kind of get a good variety yeah you which is what i like you can go about it in any order you want and there are some things like i said like your cast resets ball to ball so it's like well oh i'm getting close i should focus on that to get it done on this ball because i have four of them lit it changes your strategy ball to ball which i think also adds more variety it's not linear like you can go and do it however order you want you just got to get all of these five major things done in the game it's it so addictive i it really is can stop playing it and again they do this light the lighting is all rgb color just like they do on all their remake games you know jjp does stern does i think on their le and stuff only usually the rgb inserts everywhere yeah yeah it's full rgb everything's on printed boards the lighting like you'd expect for a modern game what you don't expect is that all of the lights i think have multiple levels of redundancy. I think every insert has at least two, might have seen three LEDs, which is insane. I didn't realize anyone did redundant LEDs in case one fails. Everything about it, it's like they really, it's thought out by pinball people and you can see the love that went into it. And that's part of why we wanted to do this episode was kind of just give pulp its flowers because it's like they nailed this thing, man. Everybody, I know a lot of people won't own pinball machines they might not get to see and appreciate everything kind of behind the scenes on them and i think it's just important to note like pulp is a genuinely like this is a special game i just no one else has done this the lighting that they did above the flippers which you'll see stern does now where they put lights above the flippers on their games which is very good it adds light to right where you need it right like where you interact with the ball with your flippers they cut out a piece of the apron like a thin strip and put a huge led light strip it's hidden and camouflaged but throws so much light at your flippers and it's a little thing but man you're like why doesn't everyone do this like this should be the way to do it you know yeah and so i don't know we need to just i just that's the thing we just wanted to hype up pulp fiction because it's genuinely like every piece of it i feel like was thought out every single thing has had a lot of care put into it by a lot of guys that really like pinball and they're not cost cutting it and they somehow were able to sell this at an affordable package with like an excellent hyped theme everything it's just really something it's a beautiful game i mean it raised the bar it's like that's what like that's all i can say about is it's like it really made me reconsider the slack i've cut for other people and again that's why it's so hard not to compare it to bond 60th because they were both kind of going for the same thing here and you see how the like up-and-comer chicago and was with raw thrills developed it in in chicago produced it i believe so it's not like a brand new company on either side but it is the first original game to come out of chicago and or to come from chicago i should say and with a huge license yeah to just cracked out of the ballpark like this is insane and i know it's not realistic we're not going to see a bunch of these games or a bunch of these throwback games it's not gonna we're not gonna turn back the hands of time and then we're just gonna see you know we're not even gonna see stern make one of these a year like it's not gonna happen but i i do like that we can look back over the last 10 years not even 10 years and we've gotten four of these yeah i'm grateful for that like i want to see that like i do want to see one every couple years i do love both of stern's efforts bond 60th and beatles i like beatles more but bond 60th the only complaints i really have i mean some aesthetic complaints about bond who cares it doesn't aesthetics who cares but i just wish that they would make these affordable like yeah all of my gripes i wouldn't have mentioned a single negative thing about 60th if it was sold at for 10 grand yeah and tna was affordable man when spooky made it only will tear into it because of that and it's like tna came out it was cheap as hell it came out it was cheaper than stern pro yes and i know that's not like a replicable thing but it's just it's interesting to see the different approaches these people have or these companies have in like what works and what doesn't and that's why i think it's just disappointing to see the stern approach of pricing them high and then not having great sales or whatever because the games themselves are so fucking good beatles yeah and bond 60th are very good games yeah they're just getting in the hands of the wrong people i shouldn't i not necessarily but it's just like they're not getting in the hands of the location players who i would appreciate them most i would love it but i do think to go back to like our last episode a little bit and mentioning how there's there's different you know there's different types of pinball machines and it's like these classic throwback games they're their own thing they're not competing with what is like the modern stern formula of like two ramps every shot returns to your flippers or etc everything we discussed in the last episode and i really wish more of the boutique companies would quit trying to we would quit exclusively focusing on trying to make stern competitors and would do a unique take like this because i think chicago you had a huge positive reception to this everyone's been loving the game so far it it seems to be selling very well the le's sold out obviously and they did a thousand of them so they must have done i'd be curious to know what they what they're at for numbers now but my point is to say it's like if i was someone like american pinball who we've not talked about too much on the show but american pinball always seems to kind of be going through it they put games out the community kind of takes them as a joke they're fun games i think a lot of their games are genuinely fun they've had some production problems they've had some coding problems but i do like a lot of the games americans put out that being said they're trying to beat stern stern's game chicago showed up they changed the game entirely they did something that no one else is doing they did it better than anyone else could imagine doing it and it's just like man i love to see that shit hope really is a special game i think tna is a truly special game and i think it's interesting that i mean beatles and bonder i mean they're both genuinely special games too they're both very very fun games they're very fun games i think that they you know you can say they missed the mark in some things and i think with beetles it's mainly just price for me bond it's aesthetics and price but you know the the games themselves are dope and i know stern could make especially if they just did like we mentioned earlier in the episode if they just went in there and just like tweaked some of their classic stern electronics catalog all these games that people go nuts for and just gave it to you modern brand new so it's super reliable you don't have to work on super old first generation solid state electronics from 50 years ago uh with snappy flippers and playfields that are clear coded and nice like it'd be sick i mean there's a few there's a few games that i would immediately go pay premium price for a new copy of right like i go pay 10 grand for a new stargazer if it was a brand new one i'd go pay 10 grand for a new copy of quicksilver and it's funny because i think people always say that and then they were like well did you with beatles and it's like well first of all i wasn't around beatles came out i might have and it's like with bond no with like pulp it's like there's gonna be one planted at wedgehead forever and i'm still like i kind of want to buy one again i like putting my money where my mouth is i'm like with pulp you're like oh that is i just i like i love cnn i love seeing companies make this shit i love pulp i i think it's so good it's so fucking good and tna is so good tna is another top five yeah we're not trying ball machine of all time it's just older news it's like tna is the fucking uh blueprint for yeah this like little sub-genre of pinball and beatles made see which better again we're gonna get shit for that dude i know we're gonna get shit for saying that but like hey we can say we prefer one this is like what else is new all of Like that pinball podcast history, we're saying we prefer a new game to an older one. We probably will get shit though. We will definitely get shit. Because we know two people immediately that'll give us shit. We definitely will get shit for that. But yeah, I think that was just a nice way because we kind of envisioned the previous episode about modern pinball and then talk about these sort of outlier throwback designs that are technically modern pinball, but they're made to resemble something older, something different. It is worth noting again, like I brought up in the last episode, that Sword of Rage Pro is not really a throwback. It's got a ramp on there. It's got everything a modern pinball machine kind of has. It sure plays like a throwback. And that's, I think, to me, that's like a perfect modern game. It's hard to argue against anything other than Sword of Rage. I want more games like that. I want them to be punishing, straightforward, throw all the new gimmicks in if you want, whatever you can afford. I just love it. I love having one central mech or toy that's like a showstopper too. Like the rest of that game is very barren. And that was a lot of critiques upon its release. Like where's in this game? Nothing, you know? And you're like, well, you get a pretty, very cool fucking central nightmare. So people just want big sculpts though. I mean, that's a big skulls. It's pretty big, but there's nothing else on the play field, but there's nothing else that's sculpted on the play field. So they, they wanted like, They really wanted a sculpted castle behind it, too, and him riding the horse in the back. That should have been a sculpt. To all these people, they want all this stuff, and Stern's not going to do that. It's not economically viable. Again, they know what they're doing, man. Any of our criticisms are not about that Stern doesn't know what they're doing. They're delivering high-quality products to both operators and to home collectors, and the people that are playing it, whether it's at home or it's on location, they by and large they love these fucking games so we're just talking about taking chances and doing something a little bit differently and we wanted to highlight these four games and just talk about them a little bit because yeah talk about how much they all rule basically yeah pretty fun as they do yeah it's funny it's like when we made our list that's kind of what started us when we started making our list of modern games we like last episode it's like both of us these four games are on the list yep and then we're like well they're not really modern yeah they don't really fit all of the yeah yeah and you're like oh then yeah so you see how we got here but i just want to thank the listener for tuning in once again to another episode of the podcast we appreciate y'all listening and i'll end this like i always do which is to encourage you to go find one of these games one of these throwback games on a location near you go play it even if you're the person that like you just want to play foo fighters godzilla great games great modern games we talked about in the last episode but switch it up try to play one of these see if you can't find your avenue into something a little bit different something a little bit older something where you got to fight for ball control a little bit more and just maybe it'll click with you you know maybe these modern versions of these old games maybe this will be the gateway into true solid state games that we talk about a lot on this show but always go out have some fun and until next time good luck don't suck Thank you. you