What's up ladies and gentlemen, Cale here from the Electric Bat Arcade joined by Serge. How's it going Serge? Hi everyone, hi Cale, how you doing? Welcome Pin Pal. I am, I am having a great time. I think this is the, what is this, like the fifth installment of Pin Pals? Yeah, it feels like the 80th, right? But it's the fifth installment of this crazy podcast you got me and coerced me to do. I had to do it. You know what? You have some amazing opinions and facts. Thank you very much. Well, your opinions are facts, right? But anyhow, people need to hear this. We've had great conversations at the arcades, after tournaments, and I was like, you know what? I need to document this stuff. And here we are. And you haven't, you know, you just got in touch with me. You sent out the bat signal and said, hey, I'm ready. I'm ready to record. And I don't even know what's going on. Tell the viewers what's happening today. All right, so I'll tell you what's happening today. We're here to talk about X-Men code as the main topic of the episode. Originally, our listeners in our Discord, the Electric Bat Arcade Discord, voted on what should be our next episode, and the choice was overwhelmingly John Wick and X-Men, and the idea is that those games are overgoing code overhauls. And so it's interesting to talk about them because we could say, what happened in version one of the code? What's happening in version two? How is that changing? Is it changing for the better? and why is it changing? The first episode we did earlier, just the last one, was on John Wick, and we didn't have time to do X-Men because I'm crazy and did like two hours plus on John Wick. And so X-Men needed its own episode, and that's what this is today. Does that make sense? Yeah, but, you know, people are loving it, and they want more crazy. They want the Dr. Zhivago of podcasts. They want a four-hour-long podcast, I think, about one game. You know what? Buckle up, Kale. They might get it today. Are you ready? You know what? I'm so ready, man. I have my coffee. I have a big old water. Let's do it. Okay. If you need to take a break, I'll just keep talking. But let's do it. Let's do it. Let's go. As we do in each episode, we're going to begin with comments and corrections. Because as you know, Kale, we get a lot of hot takes and deep dives on the show. And whenever you do that, you're going to invite some controversy. And boy, did we step into it with our last episode. We got many comments on our Electric Bat Discord, over text, on the YouTube video itself, and the situation to me is absolutely ridiculous. I'm left in shock that there are thousands of people that want to hear such ridiculously deep dives into the code of a single game. It's an incredible hobby we have. I love you all in the Pinpal community that are somehow into the same crazy thing I am clearly so dangerously into. So with that, let's get right into the comments. And we had a lot of really wonderful, supportive comments. We need those. We appreciate those. Those feed the empty holes in our soul that require us to do this sort of podcast to begin with. But we're not going to focus on those for this comment section. We're only going to focus on the constructive feedback or criticism. So our first comment is from Raymond D. That also might be too obvious. Let's change it to R. Davidson. We're going to change it to R. Davidson. And R. Davidson says, for background here on this comment from R. Davidson, I should say, that we have been saying in our last episode of John Wick that the game doesn't let you formally choose your own mode like Deadpool does, where you get into the battle and use your flippers to do something. Foo Fighters, Jaws, Godzilla, all of those games let you choose your own mode, stop in the action, and you get to use your flippers to pick a mode. Rather, John Wick gives you a sort of semi-choice, where the very last shot you hit before you start the mode determines what mode you're in. And if that isn't as obvious as that sounds, what I thought I could do is share my screen right here for a second. And this is going to require some background before getting to this very in-depth comment by Raymond D. or R. Davidson, if you will. So that's what I will show here. And what I'm saying with John Wick, then, is that you make a shot, let's say the left ramp. And you know what? I'll put it to a better color here. You make a shot, let's say the left ramp. And when you do, that purposely chooses the one, two, third mode from the left. And so then when you start your mode, you do have, in a sense, a choice of mode. But in another sense, you don't, because it's very hard to hit the dance club shot and then immediately hit the scoop to start the mode. And so you rarely see, for example, the first, second, third, fourth mode, which is this white one over here. And you very frequently see something like the left ramp mode, as an example, or this orbit mode. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. All right. So my claim is that most players don't know that there is a way to pick the modes. And even if they do, they tend to hit the same two to three shots over and over again because some are far more easier on the game than others, and practically they are restricted in their choice. That's why I call it like a semi-choice. So they see the same modes over and over again. And, you know, you rarely see that fourth mode, like I said. And so what's also important there is they tie perks to completing the modes. So you might think that they put the more valuable perks on the harder shots, like on the dance club shot, that's a hard mode to start, so maybe that should have the multiball extent. But instead they put it on essentially the easiest shot, the left ramp shot, which you could backhand, you could forehand, and it goes, not only that, it flows really nicely to the right flipper so you could start the mode right away. And so they put the perks on shots that don't quite make sense for the difficulty of those shots to start the mode. And so you're going to see people do the same thing over and over again. In fact, if you're curious, the dance club mode perk right here gets you 2x bonus, which is like, I'll just show you the perks here for a second. Left ramp gets you the multiball extender, and that red circle dance club shot gets you bonus multiplier starts at 2x. What a sad, boring award, you know? So even a tournament player is never going for that mode. Anyway, that's the background for the comment. Any questions, Cale, before we get to the comment? No, that's clear. So you can choose your mode, but you have to work for it. You have to work for it. You have to really hit a shot, purposely hit that shot, then hit the scoop. If the mode is lit, that is to say, on the scoop. So the comment is from R. Davidson. To be fair, the original design called for random modes, so you did see a wide variety of modes. The make a shot chooses your mode option was a way to make it competition viable. But yeah, with the non-random modes and the perks, you'll probably see the same sort of modes being played. But I disagree that this is bad, and I like the idea, if balanced properly, that maybe if you want a really cool perk or mode, you should venture out and hit a shot you normally wouldn't. Otherwise, take what the machine gives you. Allowing the player to choose every time ends up, in some cases, with players always choosing the same modes in the same order, which was the problem you were trying to avoid to begin with. So that's his comment, which I think is a very nicely put comment by R. Davidson here, and to his point, perks were added on X-Men, as we'll talk about later today in the episode, and X-Men, unlike John Wick, which also has perks, X-Men does give you the choice. You know, you hit the mode shot, and then you pick your mode, and now most players, in tournaments at least, pick the storm mode, fiery assault first, because that perk, as we'll talk about, gives you the multiball extender on Sentinel. But, you know, as R. Davidson put it, this all comes down to balancing. You want players to have difficulty picking any one particular choice. And when you balance things well, it allows that breadth of experience. So, you know, different multiple options are viable. So if we go back to WIC, for example, it all comes down to balancing. So that's why if you're going to make it so that the shot you pick selects the mode, then make the harder shots worth the harder, more impressive awards or the more valuable modes. Does that make sense? back to you, Cale. You're good? I'm with you. Okay. All right, so right now that red circle shot has the 2x bonus, and I don't see the value of it. So getting modes to have balance scoring, to me, means that harder modes, you either want them to be harder to start or ones that are harder to finish. They should give you either maybe there's a larger number of shots to make or harder individual shots to make. Those modes should give you higher finishing score or the better perks, and that allows the player choice, while still respecting the commenter's concern here, that you need to make it viable for the tournament crowd. And I think you have to make the game not just viable to home collectors, but also the tournament crowd. But I don't just want to stop there answering his very fair comment, because if somebody of R. Davidson's very deep experience is going to take the time to reach out to us pinpals with such a thoughtful comment, he deserves that we give him the same. So I'll tell you what I did, Cale. I went back to the last 15 years of Stern Games here. Let's see if I can zoom in on this. Can you see that well enough? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Or is that text way too small? Wow. It's too small, isn't it? You know, if I get right up, I have bad eyesight. I'm a bad judge of this. I can read it. I can read it. Okay, good. Okay, we'll stick with that. So, as I said, what I did is I went back to the last 15 years of mode-based Stern games, and also many other companies as well. And I divided them into different categories of how they each handled mode choice in their rule set so that we could really deep dive into the science here. And after all, the fans of this show have spoken, and they want maximum craziness. And so, by help me, we are going to deliver it. And I actually think there should be a science to this. How do you decide how much freedom to give to the player? And maybe that's already how people like R. Davidson and other coders in this hobby think about it. I'd be curious to ask him and ask him these sort of questions. But if we look at the chart here, just to explain what we're seeing, every row here is a type of choice. And it goes from the least freedom, I should say, so let's say here the least freedom in random mode choice, to the most freedom of player chooses, player makes the choice entirely. And then there's one last row at the bottom for games that don't even have traditional modes. the Switzerland, if you will, of this concept, they don't force the player to make a comment on whether they should make a choice or not, because there is no choice to make. And so just to explain what we're seeing here and the different rows. So random means that the game entirely chooses the mode for the player. An example of this would be Wizard of Oz, for example, where there's this munchkin mode, and it's just going to pick for you which one you're in. It's going to be different every time, Pirates of the Caribbean for Jersey Jack. This column is Stern, by the way. This column is Jersey Jack. And this column is other companies' games. But so J.J.P. Pirates, J.J.P. Wizard of Oz, they don't let you pick a mode, and it's totally random which mode you're in when you get into those places. Twilight Zone is another example of this. If you hit the slot machine in Twilight Zone, it will start a random mode for you. Rick and Morty is also this way. But Rick and Morty is clever because it's theme integrated. in Rick and Morty, it's going to pick the first nine modes for you. And the tenth mode is Morty's choice, because in the show, he never got to pick anything except for maybe one out of ten times. And so there, at least we can say that the concept is very well executed there. I'm not actually saying that you always need to give players choice. Initially, when I thought of this chart, I did have that bias. You know, after all, we're in America, damn it. And so I said, let's give the players choice here. But that's not always true. Like in Adam's Family, I don't want a screen that tells me, do you want, you know, raise the dead mode or do you want the thing mode? Like that would be a mistake. And so I think sometimes, some games, you want to restrict choice. In other games, you want to give players choice. So this first row are games where you don't have a choice in the matter. It's going to give you the mode it wants. Does that make sense, Cale? Yeah, that is the far end of communism. Correct, correct. And then the second row, let's call it semi-random. Semi-random means switches can change the mode, but in such a way that it's unpredictable. And so, for example, in Iron Maiden, you could hit the lower left spinner to change the mode, and it swaps through the five modes in Iron Maiden. But you don't know which mode it's going to land on when the spinner ends. And so there, it restricts your choice. It's semi-random, if that makes sense. Other games that do that, James Bond, for example, has pop bumpers that change the mode from Stern. James Bond 60th has a spinning hat. It changes the mode, but you can't predict where it's going to end when it finishes spinning. Black Knight sort of rages like that. It also changes with the spinner. Spider-Man is like that. Pop bumpers move the arrows there. And so that's semi-random. Does that make sense? And if you're curious, I have other games from other companies that do the same thing. Adam's Family, if you hit the pop bumpers, it also moves the mode. Twilight Zone is listed there twice, if you're curious, because the pop bumpers move the mode if you start it at the piano. But if you start it at the slot machine, it's random. So some games are kind of weird exceptions here. They have asterisks on here because mode choice is variable in them in different ways. Any questions on that second row, semi-random? No, that's very clear. All right, I'm getting somewhere. This is astoundingly interesting. Yeah, thank you for setting this up. You're not just saying that. By the way, I never share with Cale, if you're wondering, the listeners, I never share with Cale even what we're going to talk about on that day. He doesn't forget the charts. He doesn't even know we're going to talk about it. I'm already learning stuff. Yeah, let's go. Okay, and this is all about game theory here, like what you should choose. And I don't think there's a wrong choice. It just depends on the game. So let's talk about semi-choice, the third row here. That's over here. So semi-choice, switches do change the mode, but these are purposeful switches. So, for example, in John Wick, we just discussed, you have a choice. You just have to make a shot, and that shot very deliberately changes to a specific mode. So if you want a specific mode, you can get it. You just have to shoot something to get it. Does that make sense? Yeah. There's some other ones that I'm going to put as an example here. I won't go through all of them, but I'll say, for example, in, let's say, Jurassic Park, the T-Rex modes, the more you hit the captive ball after it's ready, after you get the T-Rex multiball, there's a bunch more T-Rex modes. And if you keep on hitting the captive ball, it can switch what T-Rex mode it's on. Batman 66, you can start a main villain. if you hit two ramps that's going to start Catwoman if you hit a bunch of orbits that's going to start Riddler, Penguin at the crane, Joker from the phone you know like those sort of things so you could actually pick it. I also list James Bond here twice because James Bond changes with the pop bumpers in a semi random way but you could also hit the gold finger target which I believe is the specter target on the middle of the game and that changes it more deliberately and so those are games that are semi choice. Does that make sense? I also have Obviously, like other games, Avatar, Wonka, Hobbit, where you can make up and other non-JJP games listed there as well in this maybe unfortunately small font. But there's a lot to put on this chart. You know what I mean, Cale? Yeah. And so that's semi-choice as a concept. Any questions there for semi-choice? No. I'm ready to learn when I am choosing my own mode. Oh, we're getting to more and more freedom. Okay. grow. We're getting more into player choice, where you choose via a shot. So different modes are started at different shots themselves. So the player just chooses what shot to go for. Think about Stranger Things, for example. There's left ramp modes, there's right ramp modes. There's left orbit modes, there's right orbit modes. You just have to hit that shot three times and it starts the mode. It's not like you have to hit that shot, like in John Wick, and then start it somewhere else. You just shoot the same shot over and over again and it starts the mode. The new Star Wars from Ray Day is quite similar to this. where there's character shots, eight different ones. So you hit some force stand-ups, and that readies the characters, and then you just shoot that character shot, and it starts a mode for that character. And so this is a bit of player choice, because you can choose what shot you want to go in to start that mode. Walking Dead is a classic example, five different modes. And we saw on our stream the other day, players just destroying Walking Dead by especially choosing the barn mode. On the left, you shoot that shot when it's lit, after you hit the drops to light it, and then now you're in the barn mode. So that's player choice via shot. Make sense? Yeah, sure. All right, the next one to tell you about is player choice via flipper. And what I mean here is there's no pause in the game action. The ball is wild. It doesn't stop. When you, let's say, have it trapped up on Lord of the Rings, what a lot of players may not know is that if you trap the ball in Lord of the Rings and you're ready to start the mode up the middle through the ring shot, What happens is you can use the flippers to change what mode is going to be hit when you get into that hole, and there's actually something on the backboard of the game that shows you a set of different mode choices. Elvira, House of Horrors, is quite similar. If you look at the house in the back of the game, there's little lights on the house, and so you can move the flippers to the house you want, usually one over to the house you want, and then shoot the flipper that you're on, because that will move it back, if that makes sense, And then you start that mode. That's actually on, like, the windows of the house, right? That's correct. Right. Elvira has windows. The house has windows. Yeah, that is one of the coolest ways. Some people, like, miss that. I mean, especially new people that start playing that game. Exactly. People may not know about it. The Simpsons is pretty similar with the TV mode. So you could use the flippers to change the mode. But just be aware that there's no stop in the action when you make that decision. So you have to do it with forethought. You have to trap the ball, move the flippers, then hit it. And so there's player choice, much more freedom than the previous things I said. But you have to have a good amount of forethought and knowledge of the game to use it. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. That's choosing by a flipper. The next one is the pure freedom, the American choice, right? And again, I'm not saying that you have to go this route. But I will point out that the most Stern games by far are in this category. That that's where Stern games usually reside. It doesn't mean it's always the right decision. For example, Adam's Family, it would be the wrong decision to give you that player choice. But most Stern games do follow this. And what I mean, pure freedom. What I mean is you start a mode and the game stops. You don't have to trap the ball. You don't have to move the flippers. You don't have to make a certain shot. You trap the ball. You start the mode. And then a screen animation comes up. and you use the flippers with all paws in the action, you could look up, not at the flippers, you could look up at the game and pick what mode you want. Does that make sense? Yep, sure does. And I won't go through all the examples here. They're listed here. Like King Kong, you pick your five modes. Foo Fighters, you have your six modes. And Star Wars, the 2017 Richie one, you could pick your modes. The new Uncanny X-Men, you could pick your modes, for example. It's a full stop in the action that lets you pick your modes. Aerosmith with the songs and Guardians with their modes. Just over and over again, that's most games like it. So if you're not sure as a programmer which one, this is usually the default option. This is the way most current games go. I'm going to save one row at the end here for games without traditional modes, and this will actually be a future episode for us. How can a game kind of have good code without traditional modes? Like Metallica Remastered is a great game. Of course, some people will argue to me, hey, actually, Surge, it does have modes. It has the 72 seasons and other things. And I'm not going to get into it for this episode on actually how do you even define a mode. but one day I will, I promise. For now, I will claim that these games listed here like Tron, Metallica, Venom, Munsters, and Iron Man, they don't have traditional modes of scoop where you pick something, for example, and a new scene comes up. So that's my claim. This is before even getting further into, okay, what do we do with this data? Any question on the data first before we talk about what do we do with the data? No, it's crystal clear. Thank you for making this. Okay. Now let's talk about what do you do with the data? And again, I want to stress, this is all in the service of answering R. Davidson's comment here, which is very thoughtful, and I appreciate it. So we're not even on to the episode yet. And so I think which of these rows you pick is quite dependent on the game. And I wanted to come up with some principles of rules design that make sense to me. I talked to a few players like John Schopple to test it out, and I feel good about the principles that I came up with. But these are just my theory, and I'm curious what are very smart and very insightful of viewers think about this as well. So let us know in the comments of the video and in the Electric Bat Discord what you think as we go into it. So there's a few principles I've landed on to consider when picking one of these options. So I would consider restricting choice whenever there are only a few modes. So for example, in Iron Maiden, there's only five modes, as an example. Whereas in the new Star Wars, there's like over 30 modes. So you don't want a player going through 30 different choices, obviously, you know, like that to do it. And I think you wisely, the more modes you have, I'm not saying any one of these criteria, that it needs to meet all of them, but it should meet a few of them. And so first, you want a game that doesn't have many modes to restrict the player choices, right? If there's very few choices, it's not as important to ask players to pick among them, right? That's one thing. Or the modes are very short in their timer. Like in Adam's family, not only are they short, but you can stack one on top of the next. You could keep on adding them as they go. And so they're timed very short, they last very short, and you could even add one on top of the other. And so when that happens, if they're short and you get the wrong mode and you don't like the mode you're in, it's not a big deal. You could play another one. If we go back to John Wick, which somewhat restricts your mode choice, I would say those modes are long. They could be like 60 seconds. And not only that, they're easy to add time to because the easiest shot in the game, the right lower scoop, at least on a pro, the easiest shot of the game, where you could just keep on hitting up there and bashing into it, very easy. It's like a bailout shot will often add time to your mode. So those modes last a long time. So if you're in the mode you don't like, let's say you didn't pick the right one, you're like stuck in it. You know what I mean? And so the longer the modes are, the more freedom I think you want to give players. That's the second principle of when you might want to restrict versus give freedom to the player. The third one, principle I want to talk about here, is that modes are only one of many strategic pathways. So let's talk about Iron Maiden, for example. In Iron Maiden, yeah, you could play a mode like Fear of the Dark or Hallowed Be Thy Name, and it's worth points. But you know what? There's a lot of other strategically viable ways to get points in that game. You could play Trooper Multiball even by itself, and that's worth a decent amount and can win you many league nights there. So it's not all about the mode in that game. One of the problems with John Wick in that sense is that the mode is very important because it gives you the perk. And the multiballs, in comparison to the modes, aren't worth as much, unlike, let's say, Iron Maiden. And so the choice of mode becomes particularly important in John Wick in a way that it's not quite as much in games that have short modes, that have few modes, and that have a lot of strategically viable pathways of scoring in them. Does that make sense to you, Cale? For sure, yeah. The fourth one is a little bit tricky to explain. Um, so the fourth one is mode scoring is deliberately imbalanced. And that sounds like I'm saying there's something wrong there, but no, I don't actually think modes need to be balanced in scoring. You can make a deliberate choice to be imbalanced. And Iron Maiden is the perfect example here. Um, and I'll bring up Iron Maiden, uh, here. Um, Iron Maiden only has five modes. Uh, typically in competition, at least the first mode is Flight of Icarus. And if you look at the modes in Iron Maiden, not just other five modes, but really there's three modes actually in Iron Maiden. Three of them are single ball, and two of them are multiball, like Ace is High and Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Iron Maiden. You get them through lighting the mode, but when they start, they're a multiball. You can't bring in another multiball in them. They're their own multiball. There's no timer on them, which often modes have. So in a sense, I think Iron Maiden almost only—and Iron Maiden's a great A-plus game, to be clear, with A-plus code. So I'm holding it as a good example of a good code, yet one that restricts choice. And I want to talk about how it gets away with that and how it's actually the right choice that it restricted player freedom here. So, first of all, there's only three real modes that are single ball. So it's very few modes. The modes are short-timed. There's lots of different strategic pathways. And the mode scoring in Iron Maiden is actually deliberately imbalanced. What I mean is when you get into Flight of Icarus, do you know Flight of Icarus mode, Kale? That's the one with the ramps lit? We're comboing the ramps. For sure, yeah. I don't go for that because I can't hit those. Man, I don't know if I can hit the ramps. Yes. Yeah. Right. And I know that one day Escher, Lefkoff, or somebody like him might watch this video, and they'll say, Serge doesn't know what he's talking about. I've gotten over $100 million on Flight of Icarus because they chain the ramps, and I don't deny that you can get $100 million. So in a certain sense, it is balanced. But most players, you and me, don't get $100 million on Flight of Icarus. if we try to even go for a Flight of Icarus, we will drain the ball and lose. We may not even try to play the mode on those. Does that make sense? Because it's really hard to train the ramps deliberately in Iron Maiden. And so Flight of Icarus is, in that sense, some people even call it Flight of Brickorus, you know, for that reason. And it's really hard to shoot the ramps on the fly. It's not designed like a Steve Ritchie Star Trek flow monster, you know, that way. And I want to be clear that that's great design. I'm not saying, wow, they should have balanced the score on that Iron Maiden game. Mode scoring can be deliberately imbalanced, but it really takes great design decisions around that choice to support it and make it fun, like Iron Maiden very much is. Because if you get stuck on Flight of Icarus and you're an average non-Esher left-claw player like you or me, Kale, you might end up saying, oh, no big deal. I'll just ignore this mode. After all, it's short-timed. I could just focus on something else like starting Mummy or Trooper, and those will be good value. So deliberately imbalanced modes makes it okay to have restricted choice. That's my claim there. Any questions on that somewhat abstract notion? No, no, that was awesome. My only question was, is, where is Harry Potter? Was that on your list? And does that have the most modes of any games? That's a good question. Yes, is the short answer. It does have the most. I'm going to go back to it. It does have the most modes of any game. And there it does restrict you in a certain sense. I'm going to put on. I'm going to show you right. No, not restrict you. I'm sorry. It's pure freedom, meaning all you have to do is get in the scoop, and then you choose what movie you want. But the modes are very unique, and I could have a whole episode on Harry Potter. What they did is you choose what movie you're in, and as they say, there are like 96 or some odd modes in that game. But in another sense, there are seven modes in that game, where you choose among seven choices. I should have even said, it's not seven choices, actually. I think it's actually six or five or six choices of the movies, and then the later movies are reserved for the wizard mode. Anyway, you pick within those choices and then the modes will play on a timer no matter what you do. If you make shots, great, it adds value to your score, but if you don't, the modes will continue onwards. So imagine it as really like five or six really, really long modes rather than what they claim of like 96 modes. I would say Star Wars has the true mode, in my opinion, true most modes, at least of any Stern game, and also maybe Hobbit also is up there. I think it has like 31 modes. But those are like ones where you actually get into a timed event that ends, as opposed to Harry Potter, which technically has a lot of modes, but it's all about how you define the mode. Does that make sense? It's a little bit in the weeds, but there you go. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that cleared it up. Okay. I have one more principle here, perhaps the most subjective of all principles. And that's, you know, are the modes fun? And obviously that's subjective. at how can I say that I find the modes of Iron Maiden more fun than, let's say, the modes of X-Men, which I do. And I agree that's subjective. The most objective way I could think of to perhaps measure this is if you polled 100 seasoned pinball players, people like John Schaupel, for example, and you asked them, for each game, what do you do in this mode? And I bet you that John could tell me exactly what you do in Iron Maiden in all of those modes, and I bet you he cannot tell me, not to call you out, John, but I bet you he cannot tell me what you do in every mode of John Wick or what you, you know, and because one has just more fun modes, they're more memorable than the other. And when modes are fun, you don't mind when you're restricted to play them. Oh, look, it's interesting. I remember. I know what to do here, you know, for example. And so that's a subjective thing, although I think you can make it objective through polling through the way I described, and I think it would prove out what I just said. But, you know, a lot of players know what to do in Iron Maiden. They know what to do in Adam's Family. They even know what to do in Black Knight Sword of Rage. They know that the sandworm moves back and forth with the yellow, for example. You know that there's other modes, like a hydra, you have to cut off their heads, for example. There's some great theme immersion in those games that make you really know what the mode is. Maybe not you, Kale, because I know you're not somebody who memorizes all modes, right? But I think for a lot of players, they do. And I think that those games that restrict mode choice, like Black Knight or Iron Maiden, get away with it. Because their modes are fun, frankly. There's a few modes and they're fun, and those other principles that I laid out here. Does that make sense? This is my theory. Yeah, certainly. And some modes that, like, stand out for me as fun and also, I mean, they're difficult, but it's just fun because they limit you. The ones that have, like, limited flips, like there's one on Rick and Morty and it's, you know. King Kong has a limited flip and Soul Jam and Avengers. I think, yes, yeah, Avengers. Yeah. To me, those are just kind of fun because you're like, you're really thinking about, you know, I need to save these flips for when I know I can control the ball and get this certain shot. I agree there, although I'm going to say that I'm going to call those mini wizard modes rather than like just plain modes. They are a late game achievement for doing something. You know, I'm talking about these like basic modes at the beginning, ball one of the game. When you get into it, do you get the player choice or not? I'm going to give one more special call-out for Iron Maiden, which is brilliant rules design. It restricts player's choice, and it goes for that semi-random option. The only way to choose your mode if you don't like the mode you're on here is to shoot that very hard lower left spinner shot. And that's going to spin the spinner, and it's going to move with every spin the mode that you're on here, as long as you haven't started the mode yet. It's going to move that choice, and you might even land on the exact same mode, and you might be really bummed about that, that you went out of your way to change this mode and you're on the same one. But if that was the end of the story, that would be a wasted shot. You could be on Flight of Icarus and you want Howl would be thy name instead, so you go for this really hard shot and you make the shot and the spinner spins, but it lands right back on Flight of Icarus. You'd be bummed and you wouldn't go for that shot again. But the brilliance of the code is that Keith added something else to that shot. If you spin it enough, it'll give you the revive outlands for ball save, which is really important in this game, you have to spin it quite a few times. But if you do, it's going to give you the revive letters. And so even if you spin all the way and it lands back on the same mode, you're not upset because it still progressed you in some way. It still mattered that you made that very hard shot. It got you towards your outlaying ball save. So even if you don't get the mode you want, you're still happy. And so that's something to consider when you're designing the rules and you're picking something for what I'll call a semi-random row. here, you know, where like pop bumpers change the mode or in James Bond, for example, the pop bumpers change the mode. But you would never do that on purpose because the pop bumpers don't do much else for you. You know, there's some pop bumper scoring, of course, but it's not much. Whereas in like Keith had the foresight to know that, OK, let me give you a way to change the mode, but let me also make it count even if you don't change the mode to the one you want. Does that make sense? So I'm advocating for making the mode randomizer shot have its own separate utility. That's the theory. Yeah, that's great. And it's always worth saying that people get excited for the next Elwood game because they know he makes banger layouts, and he does, and they're A-plus layouts, every one of them that I've played. But I get excited because he's also an S-tier rules designer. It's just, he doesn't, I mean, maybe he does to some people, but I don't think he gets the credit enough for how thoughtful his rules are when he takes over the rules of the game. I'd be curious how much of that comes from instinct, from playing for decades at really high level, or how much of it is consciously thought out like this, like tweaks like, okay, let me give the player a mode choice, let me make it random, but this still matters, because that way the player won't be bummed when they hit it. That's the kind of real forward thinking that impresses me from every one of his code rule sets that are just in many ways A+. That way Jurassic Park, like I said, is one of my favorites, and Iron Maiden is up there too. So, anyway, that concludes my response to this very singular comment from R. Davidson. Keep them coming, Pinball's listeners. We appreciate them. And if you give me a very serious comment, especially if you're from a manufacturer, I will take it very seriously like this. Any questions before we move to the second of what I'll give? I'll give three comments today. No, no, that was great. man, what a, well, probably the best thought out response to any pinball comment, any YouTube comment, period. And Cale, that's why you're the best hype man in the business. And I appreciate it. So our next comment, an anonymous commenter asks, okay, I'm watching your John Wick video where Serge has spent hours complaining about having to hit the gold coin target to light allies. And he claims that's an unmakable shot. And I'm going to pull that up here. And he claims that's an unmakeable shot. And yet, he just said he wants a special mode tied to the gold coin targets in some way. Can you explain that logic? And I appreciate that question because I did say that, and I stand by that. And it's not, I'm not being a hypocrite. So I'll start off by saying that the gold coin targets exist. I'm going to point to them. They are right here. They are hard to hit. You either hit them through a very perfect left flipper shot that skins them on its way to this right ramp, or the most common way to purposely hit them, I would argue, is through a ricochet shot off of these stand-ups that goes into them. But statistically, I would say that the most common time that players hit it is fling, fling, target. That is actually the most common way that people hit them. If you were to actually measure it, I think you'd prove that. Yeah, and just to be clear to people looking at watching this video and not being familiar with John Wick and maybe only playing it one or two times, there are two stand-ups there that are facing Keanu Reeves on the play field. You actually cannot see him from this angle. So, yeah, so just so people have an idea of where the actual targets are, the hit points. That's exactly right. And what I'm going to start by saying is that the gold coin targets exist, and therefore we must find a rules logic for them. All inserts and all shots need to actually do something. Nature abhors a vacuum. So the fact that I'm coming up with a rule for it isn't a mistake. Everything needs a rule. Every target, every insert needs a rule for it by its nature to me. And I should define here what I mean by unmakeable. Like I said, you know, all shots in pinball are makeable. I'm not saying you can't make, well, almost all shots, right? All shots in pinball are makeable. You know, that's where the classic line on Houdini was, oh, the shots are tight but findable, which is really a euphemism to say that, yeah, the shots are makeable, but usually don't make them, you know, is what I mean. And here what I mean with these targets is that if you watched a 20-minute John Wick stream from an average player, a real pinball player, but an average one, and you tallied every time you saw the gold card targets hit, you put one tally in every time you saw them hit on purpose, and one tally every time you saw them hit by accident, it's 15 to 1, you know, the accident to purpose. Is that crazy, Cale? I'm not talking about an indie stream with Jason Zahler playing, you know, I'm saying the most common average people player. Is that logic? Yeah, for sure. Next, I want to say that I want to be precise with my words here. Having a shot in a game that's usually only accidentally hit is not in itself a bad thing. Layouts can and sometimes even do and should have this. What matters is the rules behind them. Do the rules effectively use that largely accidental target or very difficult shot? Do the rules make the layout sing? And I'll give you a few examples of this, layouts that are A+, but have similarly largely accidental shots. And again, I want to stress when I say accidental, I mean shots that you, Cale, specifically, mostly hit on accident. Does that make sense? And also me, too. Okay, so let's take, for example, I'm going to point out. Godzilla, a generally universally loved game. A plus code, A plus layout. I agree, by the way. I think it's an amazing game. I have nothing bad to say about its layout at all. Beautiful artwork. Look at the beautiful artwork here. Zombie Yeti, is that right? It's beautiful. That's correct, yeah. And it's great. No comments, no complaints here. So Godzilla, near universally agreed to be one of the greatest games ever, has this reverse building shot. Let me get a better color here and make it a little thicker so you could see that so it has this reverse building shot right there does that make sense where you could hit it through that switch over there kale how many times have you purposefully made this shot compared to accidentally made it would you say um is it possible to ask you that okay before no no no i was just saying i have a godzilla at home now i love it i play it a lot so i can i can hit it on purpose but when i didn't have it on home and wasn't playing it all the time that was mostly an accidental shot. You know, one interesting thing about that shot, that was not in the original layout. Right. Tell us about it. Yeah, because, yeah, so, you know, Keith was, you know, working on the whitewood, and then I can't remember if it was Gomez or somebody else said, hey, I think there's enough room there for a shot. And, you know, Keith was like, oh, I think you're right, and he later added that. Yeah, and what I'm saying is, so you have the shot. You don't want to link the shot to something in the rules that begins a process in the game. Imagine if the shot, you needed to make it in order to start a mode. And every time you wanted to start a mode in this game, you had to hit the shot. That one decision could make people go from loving this game to hating this game. Suddenly, you would never see the modes, and you would keep on hitting. You would be forced to keep on playing in the same way, hitting that shot over and over again. So, you know, can you see that point there, Cale, about that? like, you know, how that one rule decision can change things, the rule set must exist in harmony with the layout, you know? And instead, in Godzilla, the shot is wisely not tied to the beginning of anything. Instead, it provides a nice bonus scoring. Like, it provides double super jackpot during Godzilla multiball if you're in it, or it can spot a shot during a mode. I'll give you another great layout with largely accidental shots, I would say. So you take Foo Fighters, for example. Foo Fighters has this target here, this kafoom target. It's like a kicker that shoots the ball there. There's no way to hit that on purpose, literally, right? It only accidentally goes there. But the rule set uses it. There's a lightning mode that you get with it. A lot of people don't know that, and that's okay. It's just background scoring if you get a bunch of those. So you could use it. And also, I would argue there are these in-lane targets here. And if you were really good, you absolutely can hit them on purpose. You could do what's called an alley pass or a shaft pass. and at the tip of the flipper, you kick the ball right to there, hits that, and then you hit something. Most of the time, that's not what happens to most players, though. Most time, players who hit that shot, it's usually from, like, a busted drop catch. So you try to catch the ball, but it rolls up here and hits the in-lane and comes back. Do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so in that game, like, I know on Foo Fighters, those in-lane targets provide a very short-time 2x multiplier on the next shot. And so I know somebody like Jason Zoller, they can purposely do an in-lane pass on Foo Fighters to take advantage of that. He'll wait until he's in a mode. He's made all the mode shots. He has the finishing shot lit on the Overlord. He'll have the ball trapped up here, and he'll purposely hit that shot for 2x and then try to hit that shot to collect the 2x. Sometimes they'll even do 2x and then hit it again to here for 4x, then come back and hit the shot, and then you get like a 4x collect. And so you could do that on purpose. But, you know, a lot of players aren't doing that. For 99% of pinball players, that target's largely accidental. And so, you know, the layout, it doesn't make you hit them for something. It's not like you have to hit that to qualify your mode or qualify your ally. Imagine if you had to hit those to qualify your ally. You wouldn't see much allies happening, right? And so instead, the allies are on these very hittable, something critical to the beginning of a mode, to the beginning of the game process. The allies are on these drop targets right there. So I think the code effectively uses those. Very nice layout. I wouldn't change the layout. I think it's an amazing layout. But the code is using that in a different way that isn't for the beginning of the process. It's actually sort of more towards the end of the process, you know, of playing, let's say, a mode, that sort of thing. So I'll pause there. Does that make sense on kind of the background there before getting back to John Wick? Yeah, that's crystal clear. One question, the shafts targets, the inline targets, are they capped at 4x? Yeah, 2x for this, 4x for that. but those are shot multipliers. In the game, there's a separate playfield multiplier. If you go through this right orbit, and it goes back there like that, and you do it three times, that'll start at 2x, which is listed right over here in this little tiny insert that says 2x If you do that again you get 3x which is this little tiny insert over there sort of like ACDC bell rules if people know that for playfield multiplier So there's playfield multiplier and there's shot multiplier in the game, and those could multiply each other too. Any questions on that? Zero. All right. I'm going to say back to John Wick. So we have these gold coin targets, as I mentioned before, That's why the gold coin targets don't work for allies, because that's the beginning of the process sort of thing, before you start a mode. Like Foo Fighters puts the ally shot on the drops, for example. Deadpool puts the ally shots on the shots, like Wolverine and Dazzler, for example. But John Wick, and we'll talk about Danger Room today in X-Men, Danger Room is sort of like an ally system, as we explain it later, where it preps the mode to be more valuable. And I'm saying all of those are fairly purposeful, and this is just not. So the gold coin targets don't work for allies, but they still should be used in some way. And so most of the hits to these targets are random. They're errant rather than planned. And so what happens currently in the code, separate from the allies, is when you hit these targets, it'll randomly light a gold coin shot. Like you'll see an arrow flashing gold here. And if you hit that shot, you'll collect gold. Right now that gold is just worth a little bit of points. And I actually like that setup. You hit the shot, you hit this gold coin thing, and a shot will light, let's say. That works. And so what I would do is that I would have the gold coin shots add up over the course of a three-ball game, not at the beginning of a process, but toward the end of a process. Call it, let's say, once you hit ten gold shots, that would trigger a special event mode. Not a main wizard mode, but a fun side quest, for example. Think about it like Bot Frenzy on Foo Fighters. It requires a bunch of stand-ups to qualify. You're not doing it on purpose. It's not your main goal. But if you get it, you're having a fun time. You know, you're in that mode where it's like chiptunes playing music and all of that. You know what I'm talking about? Maybe not. Yes. It's a fun mode. It's a fun mode. It's a fun mode. John Wick could be similar. So over the course of the game, you wouldn't aim for the gold coin targets on purpose, but if you notice them and you hit them, then you would notice that there's a lit gold shot on the play field, and you might purposely now go for that gold shot to progress towards that special side mode. It could also be another opportunity to create a moment by getting that gold coin mode. Maybe you use clips from the movie, and you don't even need clips from Keanu, but every time a gold coin is put down in the four John Wick movies, you show a bunch of cut scenes like that tied together, just gold coin target mode, for example. And so, like True Fighters, nobody goes for those five targets on purpose. It just creates a moment, a cool moment when you get to it. Monkey Wrench, that's what the song is, a chiptune of Monkey Wrench. Anyway, you barely know what's going on as a player, but damn it if it's not fun when you're in it. You know what I mean? Super nuanced point here, though. If you use this rule strategy, I would do something like you cannot progress more gold coin targets until you collect that gold mode shot. So that way you don't have a situation where you're in multiball and you're like accidentally hitting all these targets a bunch of times and that lights 10 shots for you around the play field. You could still make it somewhat purposeful, like you have to hit the gold coin shot before it progresses more gold coins, if that makes sense. So that's the kind of thing I would do more specifically for this. Hopefully, you see, I'm here to provide constructive feedback, not just like, I don't like this thing, and hopefully give you some method to the madness here of why I'm saying, like, here's the thing you can do and why I'm saying that might work. And I'm always curious if you listeners agree with me on this very long comment section of our X-Men episode. Does that make sense, Cale? Yeah, that was great. Okay. One more last comment. And as I said, we usually give three comments here on Pimpals. And this is related to the enemy counter discussion on John Wick. We were talking about how you have to kill a certain number of enemies to get to the big bosses in the game. But there is a lack of any inserts, you know, here for this counter, even though it was a planned feature during design. I say it was a planned feature because there's, like, clearly enemies and there's clearly adversary battles that are, like, the big moments in the game. And so it seems to me like it was really, there was forethought here that it was always going to be part of it, and yet there's no inserts for it. And so Coldman Green says, The enemy rules are still a huge missed opportunity. Counting up in pinball, like in The Walking Dead, for example, is very fun. I just wish The Walking Dead had maybe one more mode or rule tied to zombie kills. In John Wick, there are no inserts for this count. And I don't get the no progress in multiball rule, where you can't add enemies as you're killing them in multiball. In multiball, the enemies still light up, and they go out, so it doesn't make any sense. And on the same point, it's sort of a sister comment here. Mr. Furioser agrees. He says, I think it would be smart for any contemporary game to include a spot for a countdown in the playfield inserts. Every game includes, at minimum, something that counts at some time. This could be used for so many things, the mind boggles. And I personally would love to see it on the playfield somewhere. I don't want to trap up every time, every shot to read the screen. I want to flow, baby. Great topic, gents. That's what he says. So those are the comments from the Pintals listeners. And I want to say I agree with you. I think lots of games would benefit from having a TNA-style counter. You know, if we go back to here, this is the counter, the type of thing we were talking about. This is just an AI-generated image, so it wouldn't be exactly like this. But it would have a counter in the center of a play field. And other games could use this, like Walking Dead, and there's a rumor of a Walking Dead remaster. Like, that would so benefit from having a counter like that here instead of counting to 115 by adding all these numbers yourself, for example. So there are rumors that Stern's remastering there. I would put a counter to it, and I would also add, just to the point, the comment earlier, that you could tie something to the zombies. So instead of as you kill 115 zombies, that gets you this wizard mode called Last Man Standing. But if I were adding something to the code here, which is a great code, but just to add more to it, like Ray Day did with Metallica, I would tie special events to X number of zombies along the way. So if you kill 35 zombies, you get to a mini wizard mode. If you kill 75 zombies, you get to an even more special mini-wizard mode. And then when you get to 115, you get to the super-wizard mode. And all the time, you can see the counter right there, so you feel the necessity to kill those zombies or walkers or whatever they're called in the game. I'll pause there. Does that make sense, Cale? That would be very cool. Yeah, especially I love the walking dead idea. As you're progressing through that, you feel like you're doing something. Oh, you know, there's another milestone. There's 20 zombies. Yeah, that's great. Right. It helps with pacing, too, so that there's something along the way to go for. It's not just in that game necessarily about the modes. It's not just necessarily about the multiballs. Still a great, great game, but I think that's one way you could make it better. And we should probably at some point, Cale, do like a remasters episode of just if you were remaking this game, if you were making the rumored games like Walking Dead or Ghostbusters or Tron, what could you, what would you do in the code to make them even better? And those are great games, to be clear, but you could be made better. What do you think about that idea? That would be very cool. Yeah, yeah, we could, yeah, I don't know, do Tron. I don't know what the. Rumors are Tron, Ghostbusters. All those games, Ghostbusters especially would benefit from a counter. And just as a reminder, TNA does have this counter. It has it right there, you know, as an example. And another one over there where it tells you what the reactor level is at. And it's really, really useful. I get that that would add build of materials. Like Stern may not do that, frankly, because it's a very well-honed factory. But if it wasn't that expensive, and I think I may not be the only one, and people in the crowd here who've commented also feel similarly, that it really would be nice to have that. So with that, Cale, that wraps up our comments section of the episode. Cale, what do you think? This is a question just for you. Do we have time to keep going to X-Men? What do you say, Cale? I have time. What about you? Oh, 100%. We have to keep going with it. My only question to you is, if in whatever universe they actually remastered Ghostbusters, would you tighten, if you were in control, would you tighten the flipper gap? The spacing? Yeah. The answer to that is, and I'm sure they thought about it, is make the white wood and see how it shoots. The problem with doing it, the easy answer is yes, but I hesitate to just immediately say that. The easy answer is yes because that flipper gap is ridiculous, right? It's like John Trudeau always had a flipper gap in his games, but there was some supposedly, I don't know this for sure, miscalculation, and they added even more flipper gap than usual. So it's quite gappy there, right? But the game, in another sense, is designed on the sweet spots of the flippers, like the right flipper, to hit that left ramp. It's a pretty sweet spot right in the middle of the flipper to hit that. And one of the things I worry is if you change the flipper gap, would it change how the shots feel? So what I would do is make the white wood with the reduced flipper gap. And if it feels good, then the answer is definitely yes. but that's an important factor that I don't have an opinion on without having played the Whitewood myself. Is that a fair answer, Cale? Yeah, 100%. You know, and I always hear people complain about it, but I've always thought Ghostbusters is a fun shooter, and I would hate to mess up any kind of geometry there. Correct. I don't want to mess up the geometry. Yeah. But so I heard from somebody that's... Although I might make the right ramp wider, by the way. Sorry, you go, Cale. Keep going. Oh, yeah. I did hear from somebody at Stern that it was when somebody, I don't know whether it was John or what have you, did some kind of calculations in the CAD software and, like, moved the layout. Yeah, moved the layout from one file to the other. There was a slight scaling or something like that that created a slightly larger flipper gap. But who knows what the truth is? I don't know. Right. Well, if you were ready for it, Cale, and our Pin Pal's listeners, who I assume are listening at 2.5x at this point, that on our last episode, we took a ridiculously deep dive on John Wick, over two hours on real dedicated stuff and detailed stuff. And I've never done that kind of deep dive before, and frankly, I've never seen it done before on any sort of Pin Pal or any podcast within Pinball. So I asked you, Pinball's listeners, after the last episode out there, I asked you, do you want the full craziness or not? Or should I lower it down to like 20% craziness? And though there were a few supporters of the anti-crazy approach out there, most of you said, yes, Serge, we want full nonsense, insane asylum approach here. And now you asked for it, and now you're going to get it, Cale. Are you ready for it? Let's do it, ladies and gentlemen. Pin Pals 2, who flew over the cuckoo's nest. Here we go. and we're going to dive even deeper today with X-Men. On the last episode, my goal was to evaluate John Wick as a rule set, pre and post its overhaul, and by analyzing it according to the ten criteria for good code that we've used on prior episodes. In this episode, we're going to do the same thing with X-Men, but we're also going to add an entirely separate goal, a deep dive into the game strategy as well, focused on those who are going for a high score on League Night, for example. And so this episode might push me, Cale, to my final form. I don't know, but we're going to find out together. All right. So we're going to start with the game strategy first. And what should you do if you want to blow this game up? And I should say that we're basing this off of this analysis today on the most recent code update of 0.94, which came out about one to two weeks ago. So this is all part of that. And it might change, of course, as the code changes as well. So that's important to say. As far as strategy, first it really helps to understand your particular copy of Uncanny X-Men, because this is a game that plays differently depending on the copy that you have. All games do, but boy, this game really does, I would say. And so I'll show you what I mean. If I could scroll to it, there it is. And so here's the questions I want answered, okay? Does it full plunge, first of all, when it goes all the way around? Does it actually go to the plunger? or do you have to save it right off the bat because it drops down like that? Can you backhand the midtown ramp from the left flipper? Some copies you can, and that really changes the game, right, because you could just easily make that shot from both flippers, and it's like the easiest shot of the game already. The next question, though, is can you post-pass from left to right? So what I mean is people act like you can't post-pass on this game when it's on the left flipper. Let's say you're trapped up here, and let's say you're on a copy where you cannot backhand the left ramp. people feel like, oh, I have to go for those right shots, for example. And those are hard shots. They're not obvious, necessarily. And so it matters because most copies that I've played, if not all, there is a post here that you can post-pass off of. So it doesn't seem like a game you could post-pass, but you very much can, actually. And I think Nick did that on stream. I'm not quite sure who did it. Sorry if I'm calling out the wrong person. But you could post-pass, get it to the right flipper, and then make that very, very easy shot. because one of the things we'll see is that when you start a mode, there are two ways to start the mode, either this shot or this shot. And so if you have a choice, it's so much easier to go from the right flipper to that shot than it is from the left flipper to that shot. So try out post-passing on this game is my first comment so that you can get it here and then make that shot. Does that make sense, Cale? Yeah, absolutely. And as far as the full plunge goes and whether it makes it all the way around, And if you are playing in a tournament at a new location, try both a manual plunge and an auto plunge because they can vary. Auto plunge with the center button. Right. So, like, one could make it all the way around and one might not, you know. Yep. Yep. Yep. Well said. All right. Another thing about the layout, before even getting to the strategy, is is there a flipper hop on the left flipper or not? And what I mean is sometimes the ball will come through this guide wire here or this one, for example. And sometimes you could literally just hold the left flipper up, and that's it. And on some copies, you could do that, and it traps the ball. And control is always a good idea in pinball. And so if you could do that, note if you could do that because that matters. Other copies, you try to do that, and it rolls off to the right flipper. And I've seen other copies that I could show you where the ball goes and flies off and goes to the other side. and that really matters, that one particular detail. So is there, can you trap it? Is there a flipper hop when you try to trap it? All those sort of things. Like sometimes the ball will roll here, and there's a little hop, and then you lose control. Sometimes there's not, and it can just go smoothly towards the left flipper. So all of those little details of the left flipper matter. So that's just the feeds of the game before talking strategy. It feeds into the strategy to know those feeds, but any questions on that as like layout stuff? No, but just a comment Stern has released a fix For the left flipper hop So if you do have a copy Get in touch with them Their customer service to Get the little fix for that Such a good point, Cale And that's why you're good at what you do Among other things You run one of the biggest arcades in the whole world Along with Razel And I don't know if we need it, Serge For the one at the back but I'm going to grab one from Kyle when I'm in Chicago next week at Expo. That is a good idea. Yeah, how does ours play with that flipper hop? Is it there? Minimally there, I think. I should check. I don't want to say, actually. That's unfair. I'm not sure. I'm not sure I'm going to say that. All right, now let's get to strategy of the game. So we talk about the layout and things you have to be aware of. Do you mind if I interrupt you for one second? Oh, please do. Are you going to talk, there's two pretty major bugs in this code. Are you going to go over that or should we touch on that before we start? Tell me about it. You start. Okay. One bug and the guys at Stern are aware of it and they're going to release a patch. I just checked their social media and as of now they have not released a patch. But if you pick the, is it the sentinel facility mode, the one in the top middle? Yes. Right now you want to avoid that, especially in a tournament, because from what I understand it like lights the wrong shots or the ones that are lit do not give you the points or progress through the mode and the ones that aren't lit actually do. So that's a known bug. And the other bug that we actually noticed during the last tournament, you can see it happen twice in the stream. If you get an extra ball and launch it and you only need one more hit on the sentinel head to start sentinel multiball, it'll actually start the sentinel multiball. On the extra ball. That's a good point. Without hitting the head, yeah. Just the plunge. Yes. Excellent point, Cale. Honestly, you know those bugs better than I do. Okay, good. Good to go there. And so now let's talk strategy. What do you actually do in the game? First question is to danger room or not to danger room? And I still say no. But if you get there by mistake, you should check out that they did actually improve the danger room in the latest code, and we're going to talk about that as this episode progresses. So I'll show you what they did. So it used to look like this, where you had to do 30 of this and one of those and two of those, etc. Four different things you had to do in order to advance the danger room. And that was important because it helped boost your mode scoring. You had to hit 30 spinners and a certain number of targets and a certain number of ramps and a certain number of pop bumpers while you're in the danger room. and now they changed this to this. And now it's just a progress bar. So all you do is stuff in that danger room. You don't have to do any particular stuff. You just do stuff. The more stuff you do, the more that thing progresses. So they made it easier to progress that. In other words, rather than separating four different things you had to do, just do one bag of stuff and that progresses it as this meter goes. And they also upped the award for it. So the award for it, the first level, and this might be too hazy to see in the small font, but it's 2x mode bonus. So if you level it up while you're in the danger room, the next mode you play will be worth twice as much. To me, I still don't say go for the danger room. I still don't think it's the right strategy because the modes themselves are worth points, but I care a lot more about the perks and the future out of the mode than I do about the mode itself. So the fact that it's 2x modes is nice, it's good, but I still don't think it's good enough. So my opinion is you don't go for the danger room. What I am saying, though, is if you happen to be in the danger room, play it out because you can get 2x modes for it. Does that make sense as the first part of the strategy conversation? Yeah, so the way the danger room works now in progressing through those little perks, what progresses you through the perks? Is it the spinner? Is it just any hit in the danger room? All four things in the danger room. By four things, I mean the spinners, the targets, the pop bumpers, and that ramp to get out just to move it back here. so spinners and pop bumper and ramp, and then inside here there are targets as well, for example. So just do stuff. It will progress you. Whereas before, it meant you had to take multiple trips to the danger room, because you had to get, let's say, multiple ramps. And just as soon as you hit one ramp, you're done, and you're out of there. And then that meant you had to go back to get the other stuff. But now if you just do stuff and survive in there, you will progress the danger room. So it's easier to progress the danger room than it was before. Plus, they made the reward for doing so greater. So you have all the more incentive to do it. I still don't say you should do it. But I'm saying if you're there, it's now worth doing rather than getting out immediately. Okay, so as the code is right now, and we know this is going to change, if a ball flies in there, don't just try to ramp it to get it out of there. Go ahead and hit some spinner shots. Correct. That's exactly what I'm saying. I still wouldn't do it on purpose, but if I was there, I would go for the spinner shots rather than the ramp, you know, before getting out. And you could easily see your progress on your way there with this thing at the top. Make sense? Right. Yep. Okay. Back to the game. So to start a mode in the game, you have to hit multiple shots that are white arrows. But you could continuously just go make this ramp, typically. And that's the way I would start a mode. Technically, the mode start is actually on this shot or this shot, as I mentioned before. but I would ignore that shot because it's much harder and instead go for this shot to start a mode. So now you're in a mode. Now you have to pick a mode from one of these eight. So far make sense, Cale? Yep. Okay. The mode I would pick is this one very specifically right here, which is Fiery Assault. That's Storm versus Pyro. Lots of shots are lit here, but you only need six shots to finish the mode, and I don't care about the score of the mode. I care about finishing the mode in this case. And the way the mode works there, there's a bunch of shots that are lit red because pyro is red for fire. And if storm hits a shot, for example, let's say you hit this one, it'll turn the red shot to blue, then shoot the blue shot, and that turns off, you know, with your wind power as storm, you will turn off the fire. And if you do that with three shots, so turn it from red to blue, then shoot the blue shot, turn this one red to blue, then shoot that one, then let's say this one, it's not necessarily easy to finish, but it's six shots. And if you finish that, you will beat the mode in that sense. Does that make sense? Yeah, for sure. Basically hit three shots twice. Correct. Now, the reason I say pick this mode is now we talk about the perk system. And so we go back to the PowerPoint, and now we have this separate chart that has been made here. This is also edited from what was available on TIL forums. But these are all the different perks that exist in the game. There are eight modes in the game, and you see them in the bottom eight rows. This row, this row, this row, this row, this one, this one, this one. Each of them get you a perk if you beat the mode. There's also these four other sort of perks that we can get into that have nothing to do with the mode, and that usually just happens sort of accidentally, to be frank. So we're going to ignore those for now. These are the purposeful perks where you beat a mode, and if you do it well, and then get into the future, and then beat the future, then you get that perk. And I'll explain that again in a moment. But the reason I say pick Storm is if you beat Storm before starting your multiball and get that perk through the future, then the next time you start the multiball, you'll get a few things. One of the things will be a multiball extender. So when you get down to one ball, the multiball will restart. The other thing you'll get from it is just more points in the multiball because it's bonus damage to all other Sentinels during Sentinel multiball. And you don't have to know the specifics of that. It just means more points and more multiball. And that's a huge perk. Make sense, Kale? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I like this. Yeah, so in the mode, and we can talk about the other perks, too. They're not bad perks. It's just that Storm is just such a better perk. So after you beat a mode in X-Men with the newest code, it immediately goes into the future. And the future used to be really complicated. But now what you do is you just get back into the future, and then you have to hit six shots, six sentinels that are lit. I'll show you back to the play field here. So you're going to have a bunch of sentinels. I didn't mean that. You're going to have a bunch of sentinels lit. Let me change that here. Wait for it. I tell you, I'm not crazy. There it is. Okay. You're going to have a bunch of sentinels lit, and you want to hit those shots, six of them, to beat the future, get out of the future, and then collect the perk. A lot of times in certain games, you start a mode and then bring in the multiball to help you finish that mode. But that won't help you in this case because you have to beat the mode, and then after you beat the mode, even if you beat it with a multiball, after the multiball ends, that's when you get in the future, and then you would collect the perk. So the perk only happens not when you beat the mode, but when you beat the future tied to that mode. And the nuance there is that's why bringing a multiball into the mode won't help you collect the perk. You're on your own in the future, and a single ball gets six sentinel shots in order to get the perk. Does that make sense? just like real time travel I don't understand it fair, good point and so when you get into the future you want to hit the shot and what shot do you want to hit? You want to shoot this one you shoot this one because it's the easiest shot it's the most reliable shot and so the game knows that and so one of the things they did wisely is they as you hit a shot, as you hit a sentinel it unlights until you hit another shot So you can't just keep on going for this one. There will be no sentinel there after you make it the first time. And you watch somebody, I think that's a scene like Walt Wood, hit it like 50 times in a row, for example, and that's why they did that. So that's a smart change that they made. So instead what you do is you hit that shot, and as soon as you make that shot, by this point in the game, you typically have a button press lit. And so I'm going to point out this button press. The button press is a boom button. You get it by hitting this pop bumper, which is the bishop pop bumper, enough times. You're not doing that on purpose, but I can guarantee you that by the time the strategy plays out and you're in the future on storm, you will have that button lit, for example, in almost all cases, right? It's just going to happen hitting the pop-up or another. Especially if you've spent any time in the danger room. That is absolutely correct. And so what I say is when you're in the future, you make the shot. Then as it's coming back, you immediately press this button, which spots you a shot and relights this shot again, which you could then hit again. Does that make sense? So what I'm saying is make the shot, press the button, then make the shot again, and that's three out of your six sentinels down on the easiest shot in the game. So button press. The thing I want to say about the button press is it used to be more complicated. It used to be a thing where you had to hold it, and then the shot would strobe, and then you let go when it was at the right place, and that just wasn't working. It was too complicated for people. So they made it a lot simpler. Now you just press it. And we were doing a stream of X-Men the other night, and I still saw people holding the button. It shows you what old code can do to people. They get into a habit about it, you know, and it takes a while to break them out of it. So you can just literally just tap the button. Don't have to hold it. Make sense? Yeah, but so how does it work now? You tap it, and which shot does it spot? Just a random shot? I believe it spots the most valuable shot on the play field, like a boom button, and it also has a preference, I think, from left to right. of shots for what it's worth. You could check me on that, but I think that's the case. Okay. And so then you're out of the future, and now you've collected the storm perk, which, as a reminder, is giving you the sentinel multivolt. Now I want you to start another mode. You start another mode, if you've done that. You shoot the shot a whole bunch of times, like I'm saying, to start a mode. And there it doesn't unlight. You can shoot that shot a whole bunch of times. And so you get the next mode. And the next mode you pick, I'm more agnostic about. You could pick a bunch of things. You could pick Professor X versus Juggernaut. That gives you a ball save in the Danger Room. For example, you could pick Wolverine versus Sabretooth. That gives you a ball save in general when you're in single ball play. Like, for example, when you get into the future and you're like, oh, how am I going to hit these six Sentinel shots? It gives you a very long ball save during the future, so that's good, too. Rescue the Innocent is, will I find it? Sorry, there it is. it's the bishop mode and and so if you beat that you get fewer pop-upper hits will like the action button so you're going to have a lot of boom buttons in other words in that one so there's actually it's pretty well balanced on the perks other than i think the first one that i mentioned storm the storm one is really important but the other ones are pretty well balanced and generally there's some harder modes in the game and easier modes in the game the harder modes are this one and this one and this one and this one. They take more shots to do. So on the second mode, I advocate for an easy one because it's easier to get your perk, and there are some good perks there. And so that's why I would pick those other ones on your second mode. And then when you're in your second mode, that's when you bring in your Sentinel multiball, and then you will blow up the game because you're going to beat the mode, you're going to be in your Sentinel, you're going to get bonus damage on your Sentinels from having the Storm perk, you're going to get a multiball extender after you are out of that mode, And usually you're going to win the game at that point. I'll pause there. I have one last thing to say about strategy, but any questions on that? No, not at all. My favorite mode, just because I get to see the blob, is that bottom mode. Colossus versus the blob. Yeah. Right here. What's my perk for that? So that one is also an important ball save in multiball. So multiball ball saves are extended. And if you really can match your mode right before starting Sentinel, that's a good one, because that one requires you to hit stand-up targets at times. And so you want something that can hit those balls flying while you're playing the mode. So you could do that as well. It's just a harder mode to complete, that's all. That's why I didn't mention it, even though it's a very good perk, having multiple ball states. There's no question about it. So everything I said is like early game and mid game, what I just said. The early game being Beatstorm, the mid-game meaning play another mode and bring in Sentinel, and then we could talk about later game. Later game are the other two multiballs, which are Save the City and, to me, my X-Men. And the thing I would say about it is one of them is found in the user interface and one of them is not. So this is in your user interface. That is the Save the City multiball. And what that does is it shows you your progress. And that particular multiball, which can be worth like 200 million points if you play it well, So it's really, really valuable. In order to get that, you have to make three shots on each of the six varied shots around the play field. So it balances the game because it makes you use the rest of the play field. And if you notice, when I was saying in the beginning of the strategy talk, you know, ignore this. If you're on the left flipper, post pass. I stand by that. Because most games, you don't need Save the City to win. It's different if you're playing at in-disc. I get that. But in most league nights, you've won even before you get to Save the City. You know, if you're getting to save the city, you really, really have won. And so I'm saying that I wouldn't purposely go for save the city early on. Like, I wouldn't say, oh, you have to hit that shot three times, and you have to hit that shot three times, so maybe if you're on the left flipper, you should do that. I would ignore that, and I would save it for later on down the line in the game. Most of the time, you don't need it to win, so that's why I'm purposely not mentioning that, even though it is a high-scoring strategy. Like, if you make three shots here, three shots there, three there, three there, three there, and three there, you will have save the city ready. and it will be worth 200 million points. I'm just claiming that's a hard thing to do. That's all. Does that make sense? Wow. Yeah. I'm going to try for that, not in a tournament. Right. I mean, if you can make 18 shots that are hard, then you will win and ignore everything I said. That is an alternate strategy. I'm just claiming that's a hard strategy to do. I think it has a low success rate for people trying it, so that's why I'm not saying it. And so that's my goal one of this episode after we've done our comment section, which is talk strategy of X-Men. Did I explain it well enough? Do you have any questions before we get to the meat of the episode, Kel? And, yes, we haven't gotten to the meat of the episode yet. Can you tell me how Gambit works, or are you going to get into that? I'll do it right now because you're asking me, Kel. There's no reason I can't go out of order. So this pop bumper is for the action button. A bunch of pop bumper hits, and you get your action button lit down there for a boom button. This pop bumper is a shot multiplier. There are three cards in front of Gambit, I guarantee. And so when you hit those shots, if you get three of them, the third shot you get means the pop bumper Gambit is now activated, and the next shot you hit will be 2x. So it's a shot multiplier. A 2x shot multiplier is the simple answer. there is a perk where if you beat the gambit mode uh which is around here then the next then then from then on it's actually worth 3x shot multiplier instead of 2x but the thing about the shot multiplier that i don't love is that i'm calling it accidental again you're never most likely going to be aiming for the pop bumper i would say you're getting it but it's accidental so recognizing you have the shot multiplier lit. It's more about just noticing, oh, three cards are lit here, and I have the ball trapped. Let me go for a valuable shot, and you're already going for a valuable shot. So in my opinion, it's not practically used that much. It does add to score, but I don't consider it such a critical part of strategy. Two thousand years later. Okay. Hey, everyone. We had a slight editing snafu, but we're back now, and now we can get into the heart of the episode. We talked about strategy. We're going to talk about the uncanny X-Men code itself, and we're going to walk through each of our 10 criteria for good pinball code, like we've done in past episodes. And with each criteria, we're going to say, how did the game fare with the first attempt at code before MXV and the team got involved with adjusting the rule sets? How does the code fare, hopefully for the better, now post-MXV? And then we can add our own thoughts on how we might make the games better for each criteria. And I also want to give some of the same caveats I did in the last episode when we discussed John Wick. We should recognize that pinball code, it's not made by just one person. It's done by a whole team. And MXB is often the face of this, Mike Minicore, but I want to credit the entire work of Stern when I dissect code like this because, you know, it's everyone together. And sometimes I'll say MXB, but I really mean the whole Stern team. And I also want to recognize that the code isn't done yet, and any criticism we have might be fixed later on. And that might even always be the plan, having nothing to do with us commenting on this sort of thing. And that's totally fine. This is a .94 code is the latest release, and that's what we'll be talking about here. So there's quite a few more releases to go. And with that said, Cale, let's give our ten criteria for good pinball code. We're still early in our podcast history, so it's worth giving the ten criteria again. Moments, theme immersion, breadth, depth, clarity, risk and reward, fair and balanced, innovation, pacing, and bugs. Those are our ten criteria. And so as we get into the code itself, we have to address the elephant in the room here. When designing code for this game, it's really important to know that the layout is completely different from all other modern games ever made. Sure, there are inspirations from older games in the layout, like in this lower left area. You can see a little bit of Gold Wings, some Spy Hunter in there, but no modern game looks like this. And so it's not really a game that can have such similar code to modern games because great code is one that exists in harmony with the layout. I don't mean that in like a woo-woo kind of way. I just mean about like if you think about the code and the comment I addressed earlier when we were talking about John Wick and we were talking about the gold coin targets, the gold coin targets exist. And so they're hard to hit purposely, but we need to come up with a rule for them. It's not a bad or good design choice that there are these gold coin targets or that X-Men has such things like that too. I'm not judging the layout. That's not the purpose of this podcast. But what it does mean is that for the code to really make the game sing, the code really needs to factor that into consideration. And so all the shots and targets on a play field, they must be used for something, in some rule, in some interesting way. Now, on those John Wick layout point, on those targets, that shot is more likely to be hit accidentally, and that's fine, but it just means you have to design the rules with that aspect in mind. Does that make sense, Cale? Yep, totally. And so back to X-Men, the game has five very particular design peculiarities that require a deep breath and thinking through each of them and how they affect the code. So in this section of our episode today, we're going to go deep into the play field and not judge it as a layout. By the way, I think it's an A-plus layout. I think it's amazing. I love it. But we're going to talk about how the peculiarities of that layout mean that there are some coding challenges that come with it because the design is just so funky. And then after that, we'll go through each of our ten criteria for the good code and say how the game stacks up against it. So starting with peculiarity number one, the most obvious one, and I touched on it already, is the danger room. And the relevance here, as we talk about the code, is that area, because it's so dangerous and so risky, it must be tied to the highest points in the game if you want to encourage people to actually want to play in that area. And I mean to say for scoring-focused people in a tournament, in a league, people who care about scoring, maybe less about the journey, You want them to want to be there. And so when the game came out with version one, that really wasn't the case. The area was used to boost mode values, which is good, but that juice wasn't worth the squeeze. The risk was too high and the reward was too low. And so people in tournaments and scoring-focused players, they avoided that area. And version two has significantly improved on that concept, and we'll get to the details of that later. but it's a perfect example of how much of a challenge it can be to do risk and reward in a game and how the layout affects that. The danger room is very, well, dangerous, right? And so you need the code to reward that in some significant way. Does that make sense, Cale, as the first peculiarity here? Yeah. Oh, that is the most peculiar thing in this whole game. Correct. Now the second peculiarity is the lower two flippers are offset towards the right. and that changes the geometry so that some shots are easier than others. In most games with modern Italian bottom flippers, two flippers on the bottom, games have a sweet spot, the flippers have a sweet spot, where some shots are easier to hit than others. And so, for example, if we talk about Jurassic Park, and I'll pull that up over here, not there, I mean to say there. So if we look at Jurassic Park, for example, a standard, at least at the bottom, two-flipper game. And so there, if you're on the right flipper, there are two shots that are pretty easy to make. One is the center spinner, which is a little bit off to the left of the playfield, and the other is that left ramp. Those are traditionally, I'm not saying you'll get them every time, but I'm saying you're much likely to hit that than if you're going for the O-shot, you know, for example, in Jurassic Park. And so the game is sort of designed with those two easy shots in mind. Back to X-Men, because those flippers are offset, as we're seeing here, it means that the shots from the right flipper are also offset a little to the right. So instead of this ramp becoming the easy shot, like it might have become so in Jurassic Park, the two easy shots in this game are moved to the right, and they are the beast target, which is this thing, and they're the midtown ramp, which is that thing. And so what that means is you have to account for that in the code. The beast target, you don't have to worry about as much because when you hit it, it goes out of control. And so you don't have to worry about, should I make that valuable or not? It's still in danger. The Midtown Ramp, though, is a problem because you hit that shot very easily from the right flipper, and it returns back to the right flipper. And so if you're a reasonable enough player, you can hit that shot repeatedly over and over and over again. And so the code has to account for that. And in version one of the code, it didn't. When you started playing this game, and let's say you picked, and this was the meta for version one of the code, you would pick the sentinel mode against rogue because you could repeatedly hit that shot over and over and over again and defeat it. And so that made the game sort of imbalanced. You were focusing on one shot at the expense of others. Whereas in version two of the code, they smartly dealt with this. So for example, when you're in the future mode and you're trying to go through that shot, it unlights as you hit it. And so that's why I said, oh, press the action button because it can spot you a shot and then relight here. And so otherwise, if you don't have an action button, you hit that shot, and then it doesn't matter if you hit it again. You have to, and you're convinced to, go somewhere else and get the ball out of the control. And so that's important to consider when designing for this game, is what are the makeable shots? What shots can be made over and over and over again? And how do you account for that in the rules so that players don't have a boring time making the same shot? Make sense? Yeah, totally. And as the code is right now, you do not want to pick that sentinel mode. Right, and I think you mentioned this earlier when you were talking about bugs. I'll give you the third peculiarity, is the game has multiple accidental shots. And we talked about this on John Wick just earlier with the gold coin targets. But this game is designed not just with, I shouldn't even say accidental, I should say unmakeable. And not like maybe unmakeable, I mean literally unmakeable shots, right? So, for example, there's this kiddie pride lane. And there's a lane right there, and the ball will come out in a place you can't see and come out towards the flippers. You cannot make that shot on purpose. It has to fall in there accidentally. And that's not a bad design choice. In fact, I think it's really good theme immersion, you know, not to be too nerdy here, although obviously I am, is that, you know, with the X-Men, one of the X-Men is Kitty Pryde, and she walks through walls. And so this shot is the Kitty Pryde shot, and she goes through the wall. Great. Another unmakeable shot is this stand-up over here. I'll zoom in for players who don't know that it's there. and there is a stand-up target right below this little tiny flipper in the danger room. This is not a shot that you can make on purpose. The only way you get it is as the ball is draining, it hits a post, and then you can bounce it into that, for example, and the ball will still drain. That won't go away. But maybe you can nudge it into there. The point being that those shots aren't bad at all, but it just means that you don't want to tie something to those shots in the code that's sort of necessary, a gating mechanism in the game. you don't want the modes being tied to it you don't want the allies being tied to it you don't want it to be necessary to make a multiball happen for example and so instead you want to tie it to something else a nice bonus score so for example that stand up target it a bonus hold in the game it holds your bonus for the next ball which is nice It an extra scoring opportunity If you draining and you just happen to nudge the ball into there and get a skillful nudge it gives you a reward for doing it, and I think that's a clever idea, and it's one that takes into account the un-makeability of certain shots. So that's my third peculiarity. I'll give you the fourth peculiarity, is that all shots in this game are ramps, and there are no orbits. So from the main flippers here, every shot returns the ball to some sort of flipper. So, for example, there and there and there and there and there and there, all of those shots return the ball to a flipper. There is no orbit in this game. Technically, there's this one shot here, a spinner shot, that's not a ramp, but generally, at least from the main flippers, they are all ramps. I don't mean pop bumpers and I don't mean the sentinel head. I mean shots. There's no orbits, and yes, there are ramps. And so you have to consider that. And the important point there is that whenever you have all ramps, if a good player is playing this, the ball will continuously go to the flipper and you can make more shots. In other words, it's a combo dream, right? You can really combo this game. And so the rules have to take advantage of that. And, in fact, the inserts on the play field are there. There's a combo insert for every shot. There's one right there. Maybe people don't notice them all the time, but they are there, much like the X targets in Deadpool. there is a combo insert for every major shot. And so you want code to take advantage of this. In version 1.0 of the code, it didn't. There was no real value to the combos. And in version 2.0, in multiple ways, it does. If you get six combos, it will light Sentinel Attack, which are two shots lit here and here for $10 and $20 million, respectively. If you make those shots and get the next Sentinel Attack, that will be $15 and $30 million. So it gets progressively more valuable. And then the sentinel attacks kill sentinels, and sentinels add up, and then eventually they're going to have a side quest in this game where enough sentinel kills get you to a special event, so I've heard. And that's a great idea. And so they're going to take advantage of the combo system, in other words. And so that's my number four peculiarity. All ramps, no orbits means do something with combos, in other words. Makes sense, Cale, before I go to the five and kind of most abstract peculiarity of the game? Yeah. But I've made this set so far, right? Yeah, absolutely. All right, so the fifth peculiarity of this game is not actually something in the layout, but it is something physical. It's about the inserts and the art. So the inserts on this game are physically smaller than most other games Stern has made. Take a look at this arrow, for example. This would be lit for a mode shot, as an example. I want to point out that one. And then I want to show you John Wick. So John Wick has an arrow here. Do you see the difference in size between them? For sure, yeah. Yeah, Wick has his big, chunky arrows. Right. So when you're playing Wick, you're not going to miss that a mode shot is lit. Oh, I have to hit that arrow. But on X-Men, you might because the inserts are physically smaller. And I combine that with the other point about this peculiarity, which is the art. The art is excellent. I mean, of course, all art is subjective. But to me, it's an A+. I think Zombie Yeti knocked it out of the park. I think it makes it come alive in comic books feel, and that's great. but the objective thing we could say about the art is that it's busy and colorful that's not a bad thing i happen to love it to be very clear i would give it an a plus but it is very busy and it's very colorful and so that means that it makes it that much harder to notice when things are lit for a lot of players um and and that uh that can make it challenging to give the call outs the right call outs or the right nudge to the player on what they're supposed to do compared to a game let's say, like John Wick, which its art is not as busy and it's not as colorful. So when there's a big flashing green arrow or blue arrow here, you know it. Does that make sense, Cale? Yep. I don't know if you find subjectively if you found this to be the case when you were playing X-Men. I don't want to plant ideas in your head that you don't agree with. But do you think it also has that problem where you may not notice what the heck's going on in the game sometimes? Oh, certainly. Well, for me, that's any game. Fair enough. I accept that. there's a third parameter here that makes it tricky, again, about the inserts and the art, which is that all the shots are named for areas of the city, uptown and downtown. And, you know, let's say you have to make, as I said, you have to make all the shots, right? As I said for, sorry, let me get that going. You have to make all the, like, three shots each on each of these major shots in order to get Save the City multiball. And that's the situation. and they have a nice user interface for that. As I could show you here, it tells you what you have to hit, for example, and that's great. But, Cale, let's say I tell you, hit the subway shot. All right, Cale, your job, you look at the user interface, and you're a good pinball player, right? You did very well at the league night the other night, by the way. Thank you. League finals, which is on our ElectroFat Arcade Twitch stream. But, Cale, hit the subway shot. What are you hitting? I'm guessing it's the left shot. Nope. That one is, I believe, the downtown. Okay. Or did you mean this one? Yeah, that one. Nope, that's the XJ. Okay. Try again. I'll only ask you one more time, and then I'll leave you alone, I promise. I'm not here to make your life hard. The left? Not to the left of the Sentinel, but the one next to the Beast. Oh, this one? Yes. Nope, that's the uptown shot. And now you get my point. Do you get my point? Yeah, yeah. The point being that, and you're an owner-operator of an arcade, and not just a guy who puts games there. You play these games. You play League Nights. You're a regular pinball player, as regular as pinball players get. Right. So the problem is, yeah, it's a good idea for a multiball. Yeah, it's a good idea that it makes you use the whole play field. Yeah, it's great that they have a user interface that tells you what you have to hit. All that I support. But the nature of the shots is that you cannot remember them, because this is a fictional game with fictional names that you have no resonance to whatsoever. So when you have to hit the subway, it's like, oh, wait, where do I hit again? And even I say that. Where the heck is the highway shot? Where the heck is the subway shot? And there's a few ways to solve this problem. As usual, I'm not here to just give criticism. I'm going to explain some theory behind this. The problem being complex code that requires you to learn the names of a bunch of shots. The easiest way to solve this problem is not to map shots to locations, but to map shots to characters in the artwork that can give you call-outs as you hit the shot to reinforce the name of that shot. So, for example, in Deadpool, there's a Dazzler left orbit, and when you hit that Dazzler shot, Dazzler gets a call-out. And your brain learns, you know, maybe some players more than others, but you learn that's the Dazzler shot, the Wolverine shot. You learn when he says some Wolverine things in Deadpool, when he gets his claws out or whatever, and every time you make that shot. You can't do that with a location. When you make the highway shot here, which is this ramp, it can't have a call-out that says, I'm the highway, you made me. That won't make any sense, right? And so you're more restricted in the ability to train the player of what they're supposed to hit when you focus on locations, especially when those locations are inherently fictional and have no thematic resonance to the player. And so one way to do it is to tie it to characters. If you think classic example here is 2025 versus 2017 Star Wars, 2025 Star Wars, all the shots are named after characters. You're not going to know them right away, but when you play that game a bunch of times at a subconscious level, you're going to know where the Luke shot is because Luke has call-outs when you hit the Luke shot, and that matters to your brain as tying the audio and the visual together. in the 2017 Star Wars it's named after Hoth and Tatooine and Endor and all these planets that people can't remember the name of even though they do remember the name of Luke so the second solution to how to solve this problem is if you're like I don't care Surge, I want to put locations for everything, I want six locations or whatever another thought is just make fewer location shots, so Star Wars 2017 only has a bunch of shots, has a left orbit, has a right orbit, but they don't get a name. The only four shots get a name for a location in that game, the Endor, the Hoth, Death Star, and Tatooine, and the right ramp has no name, the left orbit has no name, the right orbit has no name, so at least it doesn't force you to learn a whole bunch of names that way. So I tend to favor choosing characters. I tend to not favor choosing locations, but if you do choose locations, if you give me six locations, there's very few people that are going to memorize those six locations. That's what I say. Does that make sense? That's clear. So, like, am I saying that you shouldn't have six shots named for locations, especially made-up ones that have no inherent thematic resonance, you know, where the game asks you to repeatedly make those shots on your own, you know, rather than memorizing them on your own? Yes, I am saying that. But that combination of location shots with small inserts with very nice but busy and colorful art means it's just you're discombobulated when you get to the game. You know, you can't, like, really know what you're supposed to do all the time, unless you're a very high-level player, of course, but that's what I say for the peculiarities of the game. That is my section covering how to code for the peculiarities of the game. I'll pause there before I go on. What do you say, Cale? Yeah, man, that is very interesting. I did not think that deeply into it. And I did. And is anything I said so crazy, Cale? No, no. So I am crazy. Yeah, it's perfectly clear. All right. Now we can go into our traditional section of Pimpals where we go through the ten criteria and talk about how does the game stack up with those. So, first one is moments. And let's talk about X-Men and moments. And I think there are three okay moments in the game. Not great, but okay. And so it's not terrible. Before I say my moments, you played X-Men, Kale. I don't want to bias you. Do you have moments in the game that stick out at you and say, like, oh, that was cool when that happened? Well, I mean, of course, the Sentinel multiball. Correct. That's my number one as well. That's what I would start with. And Sentinel multiball is largely a moment because, well, on the premium, which I'm not showing, I'm focusing on the pro here. We could talk about the premium, which has the Sentinel head that raises up and down. It has the hands that they sort of take it away because they kind of don't open up as much unless you're in multiball. But that's the premium. I actually think the premium is cool. I think those mechs are cool. I think it's thematic immersion and all of that. But let's focus on the pro. And so in the pro, you hit the sentinel head. And the sentinels moment, because forgetting about the raising up and down, on the pro it doesn't do that. But even on the pro, it's pretty cool. There's a mouth that opens. You have to hit him in the mouth. There's a magnet with Magneto that will fling the ball around there. And so it's a cool multiball start. I'm not going to say it's like the top ten multiball starts. I'd say it's better than any multiball start in John Wick, which doesn't have something cool like a magnet and a sentinel mouth that you have to hit. Is that fair, Cale? Yeah, sure. If I were giving you, like, other great multiball starts, I would say, like, Adam's Family is the big one that I like to reference. Metallica, when you hit Sparky and the chair is moving. It's not an amazing mech, you know, on Metallica. It's just like some stand-up and a non... It's not even... We call it a bash toy, but it's not. It's just a stand-up with a chair that's moving around on a spring, you know, behind it or whatever, on top of it. And then Godzilla with the main multiball where the building falls down. Assuming you agree those are good multiball starts, I will point out with all of those big moment multiball starts that all of them have a pause in the gameplay. And I sometimes stress that moments are often enhanced when you have a pause in the gameplay. And so to the extent you could do that in games and you program it to work as a moment, those are good moments. So I'm saying Sentinel, pretty good. Not amazing, not bad, but I would say certainly better than John Wick multiballs. Any argument there on that one? No, not at all. But I can think of one multiball that doesn't have a pause. Tell me. That is really... That is an event, and that's Dragon Multiball in D&D. Totally agree there. And do you know how they get away with that as the event, too? In a sense, instead of a pause, they replace it with a long ball save and a flip count kind of thing. Not a flip, I should say a drain count kind of thing. so that in a sense, although the action never pauses, you get to soak in what's happening because you don't have to immediately trap up. In fact, you're not supposed to. In that game, you're supposed to fly out and hit the dragon, and I think that does work, and so there are ways around this. It's not just that you have a pause. There are some clever ways around that, and I actually would say that is a clever way around it in that game, and I agree that's a great moment in that multiball start. Love that point, Kale. well thank you fair enough second moment even a blind squirrel you know that's right no you're you're good second moment i'll give you is the future and the future is an opportunity to use purely coding to make a moment it's not about the mech it's not about a sentinel head it's just about you're in the future and so um the version one of that failed and i'll be blunt about it and I'll show you why with a single slide that should really settle this. So here's my one second. Of course, now I'm... Yeah, there's my single slide for you. You get into the future, this is version one, and you see this, this wall of text, because everyone's thinking, yay, pinball time, let's read Ulysses by James Joyce. You know what I mean? Yeah. Any game that forces you to read more than a sentence or two has failed at communication direction to the player. Some things I say, you know, that I say I know are subjective, like, oh, here's what I think mode should be like, for example. But there's some things, and that's just what I feel, but there's other things that I really believe are just universally true. Like, one, never have a call-out that says shoot everything. You've done something wrong. If you have a call-out that says shoot everything. I believe that to my core. I don't think that's subjective. Two is, anytime you have a code that stacks everything on everything else, Nothing matters because it's all just blending into one. And I would say three, don't make a player read this much. I'm not saying pinball players don't read. I know you and Rachel are avid readers, Cale. And, in fact, I think we each go to the yearly big book sale here in Phoenix, Arizona that happens. Oh, it's amazing. It's amazing, and I highly recommend it. BSNA, right? Or BNSA. BNSA. And, boy, that's great. But pinball is not about that, in my opinion. So you want to just play pinball and not read. So version two made this better. It literally got rid of all text in the future. And they got rid of this a while back ago. But I want to point it out because it's like an interesting design choice. So now future, you just hit a bunch of lift shots and the event ends. It's no confusing. They used to also tie an action button here where you could choose to return to the past or remain in the future if you got to the end of this wall of text and figure that out. It's so confusing. Even the wording is confusing. Oh, yeah. You tap the action button to remain in the future, but tap it again to return to the past. So do I tap twice to return to the past? And if that's true, why don't you just say it? I'm with you, my pen pal. I agree. This never made sense. I'm going to take it off the screen. First time I saw it, I laughed out loud. I genuinely laughed out loud when I saw this, and I was like, you've got to be kidding me with something like this. Anyway, they got rid of it, and they made the future better. And the future, what makes it a moment is that the lighting changes. It becomes like a cool blue lighting throughout. And they have really great sentinel callouts. I think the callouts are good in this game, having the sentinels say, like, two X-Men remaining, or whatever it says, you know, like that. It's like a deep baritone voice, or bass voice, I should say. And that works, I think, really well for a callout. So it puts you in the place of being in a dystopian future where you're trying to escape. There's one thing I'd say that weakens the moment. is that the coding works to get you into the future every single time you beat a mode. And so unlike, let's say, a Jurassic Park, where you sometimes get into the smart missile and you rarely make the smart missile shot, here you're like oftentimes in the future in this game. I don't know if you noticed that, but with every mode you beat, you still have to beat a mode. I'm not saying it's terrible. I still think I get the design decision. I think they went in the right direction. But it does weaken it just a bit because you see it a lot. You're in the future a lot. So it decreases the impact of it sometimes. But with that said, future still counts as a moment. I'd say it's fine. I think the game has some moments is what I mean. I'll give you one last moment if you're ready for it, Cale. Yeah, go with it. Which is Fastball Special. Oh, I love that. There we go. So let's see if I have that. Fastball Special. I'm going to show the video of it here. I'm going to give a shout-out to Mark at Backhand Pinball. See the strobing? Yes. And then you have to hit the sentinel head? And he backhanded the sentinel head. So now let's talk about that again and what we saw there, and then I'll break it down. So in the fastball special, you have to get into this right alley, that right in lane, and then it lights. It says fastball special. Look how he looked up because something happened. So it pauses your gameplay again. And this is Timber, by the way, one of the greatest players in the world from Belgium. And this is, again, I just want to make sure I catch it. This is a backhand pinball. Shout out to Mark. Hopefully you're okay with me showing this. Mark, right? That's what it is, right, Kel? Mark. And fan of the pinpals, as I understand it even. So he looks up because there's a moment happening. Suddenly the ball is trapped and there's a strobing light. And there's a lot of games where this is used as a moment, this concept. We talked about Jurassic Park. Smart missile shot. Three, two, one. You have to hit it. Avengers has the Hawkeye shot. Drops from the tower. Three, two, one, and you have to make the shot. Cactus Canyon is, like, famous for this. Stops the ball. Drop target is going to come up. There's a whole show about it. All it is is a drop target, but it looks and feels so cool because you're at a shootout, and you have to guess which one's coming up. And so X-Men has a two, and it's always a good idea for a mode. I think it's okay in this one, but I don't think it's as good as the other examples. I want to explain why is, first, how you get it. So do you know how to get the fastball special? I would assume no. I don't know how to get it, but I get it a lot. You get it. Exactly, exactly. So how you get it, Cale, is random stand-ups. Hitting enough stand-ups will activate the fastball special. So it's not a reward for good play. It's essentially a reward for bad play. and whereas in let's say the smart missile in jurassic park you get that because you rescued enough humans from the terrorizing dinosaurs that could have killed them here instead you just hit a bunch of stand-ups and i guess the fastball special is lit so the how you get to the moment matters and it's not as important in this game how you get to it that's that now the moment itself in this moment you have to hit the left ramp i suppose that's fine and then you have to hit the sentinel But the game is not built. It's not designed well for this purpose. I'll tell you what I mean. Maybe they thought they designed it for this purpose, but I don't think they did. Because we touched on this earlier, but when the ball comes out of the left side here, it's different on every copy of X-Men. On some copies of X-Men, it falls nicely to the left flipper. On other copies, it flies off. So I want to point out, what does it do in this case? After he makes this shot, how does it feed so that you can hit that sentinel shot on the fly? and so that's what I'm going to show here. And so he's going to nail this left ramp because he's great at pinball, and then look at it here. Flies off. It doesn't even touch the left flipper, for example. Did you see that, Cale? Yep. And he still made the shot, by the way, because he's very, very good, and the ball skipped past the left flipper, went to the right flipper, and then he nailed the shot. So the problem with the fastball special, though, is that for many players, It's like I'm close to unmakeable, depending on how the game is set up and whether it's feeding in that way. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. Now the final thing to say about it is what it rewards. So any moment should reward you something big. Jurassic Park, you can get Raptor multivolts just from that one shot, for example. Even Avengers, which is not as good as Jurassic Park in this regard, it gives you a portal lock, which is a little sad, but that's okay. It's something, at least. Fine. Cactus Canyon is super fun. So you just hit the bad guy and you feel like you've shot somebody. That's huge, right? But on this game, it gives you two things. It gives you three million points. Actually, the first shot, the shot that people sometimes can make up that left ramp, gives you only half a million points, which is like nothing in this game. And then if you somehow can hit the Sentinel on a good copy of X-Men right away, it gives you another two and a half million points, which is not much in the grand scheme of X-Men. So the points are there. The other thing it does is it advances a segment along your way to the sentinel and multiball. It doesn't give you sentinel and multiball. It advances you a segment towards it. So let's say you don't have the mouth up, the mouth down, I should say, in sentinel. If you made that fastball, the mouth would drop down. So it just moves you slightly up towards getting sentinel. And I just find that's just not enough for the difficulty of making that and also to make it feel like you did something important. Imagine a multiball started when you did that, for example. That would be more of a moment. You know what I mean? Yeah, even like a little two-ball, multiball. Just give me something. Right, give me something. So that's what I would do differently. Number one is either if you're going to stick with that, make that shot, and then make that one to the sentinel, make the left ramp, then make the sentinel shot, which is really hard to do. Give them something for the two-ball, multiball. Give you something for it that feels like it. The other thing I do is accept that that shot is unmakeable on some X-Men copies. You know, it's going to fly past the left flipper, and you might get a lucky flying backhand from the right flipper, which isn't the intention, but that can happen if you're good. Make it a different shot. Make it like the X-Jet shot, to show you what that shot is here, for example. So the ball is crept up here, and instead you have to make this much cooler shot, for example, over here, which can go that way, for example. And imagine it says, like, 3-2-1, and it gives you a call-out, like X-Men, get to the jet. And this is the jet, by the way, for what it's worth, because they're naming it that way. And so like X-Men, get to the jet. You have to get, you know, they've reached the mansion or something. There's your call out. Then you have to get back to the danger room here. If you make that shot, it gives you something big. It gives you 20 million points, let's say. And then you're in the danger room. And then if you do something in the danger room while you're in there after that shot, let's say you have to make a time shot to the left ramp, then maybe that gives you a new mode, a danger room mode, for example. Like, you have successfully made that shot. You're not going to make it a lot, but at least it's the same setup every single time. It's not like, you know, flying off the left flipper that way. And then if you make that shot and you consummate it, you get some special multiball, you get some special award, the danger room mode, you could call it. It has a callout tied to it that makes sense. Fastball special, it is also thematic with Wolverine and Colossus. That's a whole thing, but whatever. That's my claim. Either give the player a two-ball multiball and keep the rules as is, or do something completely different in a completely different direction. That's what I would say. So that's my moments and a little bit of constructive feedback on it. Anything I said that's crazy there, Kel? No, no, it totally makes sense. I think one interesting thing about this game is, you know, on Foo Fighters, Jack played a role. I mean, he saw this thing all the way through and played a role in, like, the rules design. In this game, he didn't. He didn't have time to. You know, this game was rushed. It's no secret. Everybody has heard that, you know, by now. So he completed it and then had to immediately move on to another game. And, you know, when we were playing the prototypes, that Stern even told me, he's like, I have to go work on another game. This is all in Wason's hands. So that's why, you know, I might have like a little different feel. like Jack didn't play a big role in kind of directing the rules on this thing. Yeah, fair enough. And it's good inside info there. Should we go to our next criteria? Absolutely. All right, theme immersion. And again, I'm talking about not the theme immersion of the layout. The layout is actually super immersive. There's a danger room just like the X-Men have when they train. There's that kiddie pride lane I mentioned. There's a sentinel head coming out through the play field with if you're on the premium arms over there and arms over there. I mean, the layout is like super immersive that way. So I'm not talking about that. The mechs are immersive there. The art is immersive. This is like, again, to me, A plus art with like making the comic come alive. So that all works. This is a code-focused podcast, though, so the question is, is the code immersive? And here I give it an average score. Not terrible, but not great. And, again, I'll be specific as we go through. If you take the 2012 X-Men that Stern made, which had its flaws, good layout, but had its flaws. It actually had some pretty good theme immersion. So, for example, if you... And I'm just talking about the code, not even the Nightcrawler mechs that popped out and the Iceman ramp that moved, which was all pretty cool. But if you look at just the code, in that game, you could start a hero mode, and one of the hero modes is Professor X. And when you get into that Professor X mode, what would happen is he would flash a silhouette on the DMD without any pixel, without any color to it. He would just flash a silhouette because, you know, Professor X has a lot in his mind, and he's thinking of a mutant that is represented by some shot around the play field. And if you hit that shot, you instantly beat the mode. And you just have to know what that silhouette, oh, is that Gambit's silhouette? Let me hit the Gambit shot or the Cyclops shot or the Wolverine. You know what I mean? And I thought that's like perfect theme immersion through code. For example, there's a lot of problems I could have with that game, and I do in other ways in the code. It can be a lot of wood chopping, right? But it's a clever rules-based immersion, you know? And so back to the current Uncanny X-Men code. Again, notice that the characters here are named after locations. The shots are named after locations instead of characters, and we got into that already. But in general, I favor characters because it can give you that thematic immersion on themes where it's a character-based theme. So I'm not saying all games need to have character-based shots. I don't need a Jeff Goldblum shot in Jurassic Park, you know, for example. That's totally unnecessary. The fact that the shots have dinosaurs moving around is perfect for that. And even in John Wick, I've watched all four John Wick movies, and even the Ballerina movie with Ana de Armas. It's a good movie, I think. And I can't tell you any of the characters' names in that except for John Wick. And I've seen the five movies of that. There's even a TV show, I think, about it. So I've seen the stuff. No shade to Lance Reddick, rest in peace. But I don't remember what his character's name is, So I don't need those shots named after characters. But there's other themes that are heavily character theme based. This is one of them. X-Men, people know the X-Men, or at least if you're getting the theme, you might. And Star Wars is another one. It's one that obviously lends itself to character based shots, right? You could take this concept too far. And I'll give you my example as Harry Potter. I think you mentioned Harry Potter earlier. And I will show you how you can sometimes take this concept way too far. So, for example, this is Harry Potter. and Harry Potter, they have, it's an A-plus layout, by the way, for what it's worth. I think that is one of the best layouts I've played in a long, long time. I love the layout of this game. And they have a ton of assets to their credit. But they decided in the artwork and in the code to make every single shot a character. And they used all the characters, like across eight movies and seven books. Harry Potter has like 100 characters in it. And I've seen and read the books. I don't mind admitting that to you, Cale, right here on our podcast. I've seen the movies and I've read the books. It's on par with a Thomas Pynchon novel. That's what we're talking about. We're talking about Gravity's Rainbow situation territory here. Right. And so in this game, they have all these characters that I don't even know who they are, and they're represented by a character shot. And the main villain across the seven books, thousands and thousands of pages, and eight movies, do you happen to know who the villain is on that one? I know you're probably not into Harry Potter. But I just want to test you out. No, I only saw the original movie, and I don't know how many years ago. That's my only connection with Harry Potter. Well, I will tell you that the entire big bad of that entire series, the he who should not be mentioned, I can say it here because I'm not afraid of fake curses, but Voldemort, the entire main character, Ralph Fiennes, in the movies, is relegated to a single outland right over here because they took the 30-plus characters, many of which don't matter in the themes of Harry Potter. Like, people don't care about it, but they do care about fighting Voldemort, right? That's, like, the thing that the whole thing is based on. And there, that character is just a tiny little write-out lane, so, for example. So you could take this concept too far, to be clear, and this, to be clear, takes it too far. But tying characters to shots where characters are matter in that theme helps with the theme immersion, is what I want to say. So, back to X-Men. It named shots after Uptown and Downtown, and we already went over that. We talked about that earlier. But my point there is that now, if you're playing, like, version one of the code, and you're playing modes, and each mode is typically X-Men versus one of the villains, that's cool, but they're generally shoot-the-lick-shots modes. And, you know, I want to stress here, they've said, I think, that they're changing the modes to make them more special. So in the future, this won't be applicable. But it is a chance to talk about why version one of the code doesn't work. So it's just hitting lit shots. So if you just take one mode, for example, the Professor X versus the Juggernaut mode, that's one of the modes here. And, you know, we've said before how you could have made Professor X more immersive, like they did in the 2012 X-Men, and how that was great theme immersion through code. But also let's take the Juggernaut part. That was also in a prior game. That's in Deadpool, for example. and then in Deadpool, it had great theme immersion in the code. You know, he had this magical helmet that made him invincible. Again, I'm going to nerd out on you, Cale. And that magical helmet made him invincible. And so in Deadpool, you have to hit these stand-ups on the pro or the drop targets on the premium to knock his helmet off, which would light shots, and then you could defeat him. And so that's a great theme immersion through code. And I reference those to say, why not do the same thing here? So you have Professor X and you have Juggernaut. Combine both ideas. The Professor X idea is that at the start of the battle, in the animation, Professor X flashes one particular named area with his mind on the playfield that can hurt Juggernaut. For example, get to the X-Jet or whatever call it. It's a random call at each time. And if you hit that shot, then it will knock off his helmet, and it will cause a huge deal of damage to him. At the same other time, then there's other shots around the playfield that you could also use to beat the mode where you have to hit stand-up targets, maybe, to knock his helmet off, and then the shot's lit, for example. So it's a way to combine the theme of X-Men, which some people care about if they're buying an X-Men game, and use the code to immerse people in that theme. That's just, like, one example. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. Okay. Version 2 of the code, still working on the modes, so that's not there yet. I'm not going to critique it there. But it gives you perks for completing the modes, and doing so collects a mutant, and we covered that already, but I'll show you what I want to say about it again, is that do the perks, are they thematically immersive? So I'll tell you, for example, let's look at the Magneto mode. You get the Magneto perk by completing this mode called Genosha Under Siege, and you escape the future, fine. Now, the Magneto mode has a very obvious theme immersion that they could have given you in a perk, and it has to do with the magnets. You know, like Magneto deals with magnets. the perk they give you are all game timers are extended by plus 10 seconds. Man, that's real inside baseball stuff, you know, plus game timer, 10 seconds. I get that that could work on a balancing side of things, maybe. Maybe. And I'm not even sure there. But let's say that gets across on the balancing side. There's nothing immersive about that theme. You think about the new Star Wars game, Fall of the Empire, which I think Electrobat is getting this week. But on the premium version, they have a ball save, where you hit the magnet and it activates the force magnet and pulls the ball out. Imagine if, back to this layout, this magnet was activated by that button. And it may not be possible to do this in the game at this point. Maybe it's made already and you can't even do that if you wanted to. But let's say you could have, right? You press that button when the ball is flying over here, just randomly. You press the button on the action button and you could hit the sentinel. and if you hit the sentinel using that perk, you immediately get a multiball or something like that, for example. The Magneto perk lets you use the magnet in an interesting magnetic way, for example. That would be so cool. That would be cool, and it would also be a moment behind that. At least maybe they could make the perk now. If you can't do that cool magnet effect because the game isn't designed for that, the action button has no way to control this, maybe, then you could at least do a thing. well, every time the magnet is activated, you have a ball save, and you won't lose the ball when the magnet is activated. The problem there is they don't actually use the magnet that much. They use it mainly for, like, the Sentinel. They don't use it for a lot of the modes, for example. But I would use the magnet more and then make that perk, magnet ball save, as a second option to what I really like, which is activate player-controlled magnet, hit the Sentinel, good things happen. That also would be quite unique because, you know, there's magnet ball saves on the bottom of the play field quite often, like in Star Wars, but there's nothing that activates the magnet way up on the play field, for example. There's like Twilight Zone magnets, but those are like flipper magnets, for example. So this would be kind of new, like the ball of this happens to be moving and you notice that and so you knock it into the Sentinel, something like that. I will leave this point alone on theme immersion. That's my theme immersion, what it gets right, what it gets wrong in the game. And you know, Looney Tunes does an interesting thing with a magnet like that. A hundred percent. It swings it into that little door. Correct. It does exactly what I'm saying, and it is cool when it works. And sometimes it doesn't work, but it is cool when it works that way. And so that's it for theme immersion. Are you ready for breath, Cale? Absolutely. I've actually been waiting for breath. Okay. Now, breath is usually where we go even deeper into the code than we already have. That's true, Cale. Believe it. We're going to go even deeper where we talk about the four M's of pinball, modes, multiballs, multipliers and missions or side quests in the game. Things that are running in the background across three vaults. So modes first. There's only a single mode pathway in this game. You start the mode over and over again, usually by this shot, technically by that shot too, but you start the mode over and over again and get there and then do something and you pick among eight modes. And it's good that there are eight modes. That's a benefit. I tend to like when there's more than one mode pathway, at least when we're talking about breadth, so that like in the new Star Wars, there's character modes and Java events and Darth Vader events and lights, and there's Millennium Falcon modes up the center. That's like a lot of mode paths. James Bond has a ton of mode paths. The henchmen, the main villains. These are not only different modes, but there are different pathways to even start the mode, you know, for example. So this has won, and that is a point against it to me for breadth because it can make it feel monotonous. You're always getting in that mode, especially if modes are the main way to score in the game or to get in the future and get the perk at least. And so you're often in a mode and doing that. So you can feel a bit trapped sometimes in a certain sequence over and over again. You get a mode, you beat a mode, you go into the future. That's okay. That's an okay moment. But then you have to do that again eight times. Get a mode, beat a mode, go into the future. And especially if they haven't yet coded those modes to feel unique and interesting and thematically immersive, it can feel like you're missing the breath there. Does that make sense? That's my mode comment. For sure, yeah. Plus, the future is always the same. The modes, even one day when they make them different, the future won't be. And so you're going to play a mode, and whatever differences the mode have, you're going to be in the same future, and you're going to do that over and over again through this one pathway. Now let's talk about the multiballs. There are three multiballs in the game, and that's a good number for breath, and especially a good number because they pace them well. There's the early multiball of Sentinel. There's the second one called, to me, my X-Men. We'll talk about that. And then there's the third one called Save the City for making all the shots. And the problem in this game, though, is that two of those multiballs, I will tell you are purposeful, and one of them is semi-accidental. And I'll tell you what I mean through an analogy. In Jurassic Park, there are three multiballs, three main multiballs, quite similarly to this game. And one of them, the easy one, is the T-Rex. If you want the T-Rex, you hit that very purposeful shot up there, and then you hit the left ramp when it's ready. The second multiball, you could argue, is the Raptor. To get that, you make many purposeful shots to the Raptor, and then you're ready to go. The third one is super purposeful. You have to spell C, then H, then A, in that order, then O, then S for chaos, then hit that target to start. Nobody's accidentally starting chaos, in other words. You know what I mean? Right, yeah. You're getting that every single time on purpose to the extent you get it at all. Now back to X-Men. All right, there are three multiballs on X-Men, so let's talk about that. The first one is Sentinel. Super purposeful. You hit it, although sometimes it triggers even without you meeting, Like you talked about that bug where you just plunge the ball in an extra ball and it can start if you're close, right? But generally speaking, you have to hit the Sentinel. Sometimes it's a little temperamental and it's accidental a little bit, but generally it's purposeful that you're hitting the Sentinel and that starts. Makes sense to me. And I also like that they give the energy bar for the Sentinel right there on the user interface. So here it is, for example, there and there. It tells you how much power the Sentinel has before you can start it. And that's great. That gives you that much more purposeful behavior because then you could see, oh, I'm really close to the Sentinel. A lot of people don't notice it. I get that. But it's there in the user interface. That makes sense. Any question on the Sentinel multiball and why it works is what I would say. Okay. Next multiball. I'm going to skip the second one. I'm going to go to the third one, which is Save the City. Also very, very purposeful. It's got a user interface for it as well. It has six different shots, and each shot needs to be hit three times in order to start it. And so nobody is making, generally speaking, when I figure out this, there it is, nobody is making this exeget shot and that right ramp shot on accident. That's a steep ramp. You don't make it unless you're purposely going for it. And even then, you'll probably miss it. But if you're getting it, it's because you need it. And so players who are paying attention to this will purposely get Save the City, multiball, get a ton of points. As I mentioned, it could be worth 150, 200 million points. And that's a late-stage multiball. It takes a while to get there. It's like more of a ball three kind of multiball, typically very high value. Scoring makes sense. And there's a user interface for it. Make sense for that one? Yeah, certainly. So on that Save the City multiball, you're doing 18 shots? In order to get it, and a 19th to start it, by the way. But 18 shots. How do you start it? So once you get everything green in the user interface that I pointed out there, then it's this shot lit to start it, the easy shot. Gotcha. And then it starts, and it's worth a ton of points. And by the way, they made it really good where they used the super jackpot as on the Danger Room spinner, and you could get spinner millions doing that, as I recall. And so you could get many, many, many millions of points if you get to the super jackpot phase. And that's great. So they're using the Danger Room crate there. And that multiball's great. Nothing to say about it. But there's the second multiball, the middle child of the pack multiball, the unloved middle stepchild. Sorry to those out there who are listening who fit that description. But this is the unloved middle child of X-Men multiballs. It is the To Me, My X-Men, which also has a pretty sad name, I would say. Like, I just got into the To Me, My X-Men multiball. It just doesn't flow right, but whatever. That's a little nitpicky, I get. But how do you get to that one? It's the least purposeful thing. You hit a bunch of stand-ups. And after you hit a bunch of stand-ups, you will know that the game is ready for you because certain lights are lit. And I'm going to point out those lights to you, Kale. There's no user interface for it, by the way. There's nothing, and maybe that'll change one day, but there's nothing on the user interface that tells you you're progressing to it. You hit a bunch of stand-ups, and then three things light. One of them is this tiny insert right here. Another one is this billboard insert that you'll never notice, that's lit blue right here. And another one is that billboard insert. And you make one of those shots when they're lit, after you get a bunch of stand-ups, and that'll get you a Cerebro. And I say semi-accidental because you're not purposefully hitting the stand-ups. You might purposefully hit one of these shots when you see they're lit, if you at all see that they're lit, and there's no user interface to really tell you that on the screen all the time. They have some cut-out animations, but nothing more than that. And so, you know, most of the time, 90% of the time when I've seen people play this game, to me, my X-Men multiball is totally accidental. Here's this pro with the lights off, by the way, if you're curious. I will show it to you, Kale, on a video, which I have collected here. Okay. All right, C-Cerebro ready? Yeah. And there's a ramp, and he hit it right there, and it goes, To me, my X-Men, I'll point it out again. Two more. Here, I'll pause it. So, to me, my X-Men. Let's do it right over there. Two more for, to me, my X-Men multiball. but then nothing on the back to the user interface that tells you that. There's nothing there that's going to show you any progress and to get it in the first place it's a bunch of stand-ups so you just not paying attention Now do you notice on this game that it ready to go with this light and that light and this little tiny light over here I bet you don Well, I always notice it on that upper right billboard. I do like that. That's a good point. And I appreciate it if you don't agree with me, too. But that's why I say I don't think it gets a lot of love in there. And so when I bring it up in breadth, it's because you don't usually go for it. You just make a shot, make the right ramp because you notice that it's lit, but you're not actually going for it. It's not an option, really. It's something that happens. So I don't consider it part of breadth because it's not purposeful, not really. Like Jurassic Park, you could play all three multiballs very purposefully in Jurassic Park, and it's much harder to do it on this one. And so I think most players get into it accidentally. I don't like pat-you-on-the-head multiballs. I'm going to use a strong word, condescending multiballs. If you look at John Wick, for example, what it used to be like, they changed this. But the John Wick used to be you had to hit, for the ex-Communicado multiball here, you had to hit stand-ups, three of them, all three, three times, and then the shot would light. And that's a real pat you on the head multiball. You played the game poorly. You hit the stand-ups a lot throughout the game. But don't worry, here's a nice multiball for you, you know, kind of thing. And so they changed that in John Wick. They made it so the dance club is the only shot to hit to get it, and you have to purposely hit it and then raise the power. And as I said in the last one, that works. That's a good idea. I don't like pat you on the head, Monkey Balls. Is that fair, Cale? Is that too aggressive of me to say? No. No, not at all. I want it to be earned. I'm going to give you one more digression. There's literally one exception I know of to my theory about this, and that is the Big Lebowski. And in the Big Lebowski, they have the Nihilists, you know, And the Nihilist, Kale, they believe in nothing, you know? And so the Nihilist showdown to get that multiball, you have to hit the stand-ups in that one, and that's the joke of it. Because you hit stand-ups, how sad it is to hit these pathetic stand-ups, and then you are in a surprisingly low-scoring Nihilist multiball, and it totally works for that game because it's peak thematic immersion, you know? Nihilist. That's great. It's great, isn't it? Right. Yeah. So, you know, there are exceptions to this rule if you have a really clever idea there, and they did. So that's it for multiballs and under the concept of breath. Any questions there? No, not at all. Then there's multipliers in the game. And as we get into multipliers in the game, I'll show this thing. I'll say the gambit is one of those multipliers, but I don't find it to be too purposeful. It's not like Aerosmith where you have to hit a shot and that lets it be a shot multiplier for that whole ball. You have to hit all the mystery targets, let's say. or in Guardians of the Galaxy you have to get all the inlanes and you're purposely moving your inlanes and then you choose a shot which one to hit and that's your shot multiplier. These are errant shots to the pop bumper that light it and then you take advantage of that kind of opportunistically when it's lit. So that's okay, but it's not part of your strategy is what I mean. There's in the moment tactical strategy if you notice it's lit, but it's not actually part of your game strategy to light it, if that makes sense. So that's why I don't consider it part of the breadth. There's also no playfield multiplier, which is interesting to this game, to my knowledge. There's no playfield multiplier. I might have done that wrong. I don't think so. There's things you could do to boost modes and scoring. So, for example, the danger room can multiply your mode by 2x, and so there is that, and that works. So that is at least some breadth. But they have to make it a little bit more valuable for you to want to do that on purpose and to actually aim when you start the game, oh, I need to get in the X jet so I could get in there so that I could go here and do something, rather than, hey, I'm accidentally there. Let me use this opportunity now. And so for Breath, I want to make them confused about what they should do, not because they don't know the rules, but because they're all good options. Does that make sense? Yep. All right, last one, missions, side quests. Well, right now there's nothing, so it's easy to say that there's nothing here for Breath. But I know that they're working on it, and one of the things they're working on is some mini wizard mode will happen when you get a certain number of sentinel kills. So if you notice in the user interface, they added this thing right there. How many Sentinels have you killed? And it doesn't do anything much right now. As you kill more Sentinels, it will eventually trigger a mini wizard mode. Think about like the mech suit multiball in Deadpool from getting 45 combos. Whatever number they pick, they'll pick a number, and I think that mode will work. It'll give you something to do, something to go for that actually matters, separate from the modes, separate from the multiballs. And that's key to the game. That's not in there now, but it will get in there. Something similar like Lyman started with games like Walking Dead and Killing Walkers, and Metallica got it even better with Crank It Up and collecting items. And then Elwynn perfected, I would say, with Cyborg Multiball, with Soul Gem and Avengers from collecting Avengers, with New York City events from climbing in King Kong. So all those games are great examples of side modes, side missions that really mattered, and I think they will add it to this game. So I'm not ready to say that's bad yet. I'm just saying it's not there now. So I give it a fault as saying it has no breadth right now in that sense, or very little. I shouldn't say no. So that's why I'm, like, off on breadth. Does that make sense? Yeah. Next one will be really quick, depth. There is no depth in the game. There is no wizard mode in the game. right now like John Wick it hasn't been programmed with death and sure it will be in subsequent code versions but nothing happens when you play all of these modes nothing happens when you play all the multiballs, like all three multiballs nothing happens when you kill enough sentinels nothing happens when you rescue enough mutants and collect their perks in the future nothing happens when you get into enough futures, for example so the death simply isn't there it's literally zero, I would say But I recognize, again, the code's still being worked on. I fully assume that there could be up to at least four depth achievements from those things I just listed. So for now it gets an F, but it will be better. Does that make sense? Yeah. It's a little sad for how long the game has been out, but, you know, who am I to say that? That's for the owners. I don't own it. Yeah. All right. So that's it for depth, pretty quick. Now let's talk about clarity. Clarity started off bad, but it's gotten a lot better. I could explain this again with a single slide I have shown already. So let's do, I showed it already before. Let's see if I could find it. That thing. That's all you have to know of is this game clear or not. No. No. If you see that, it's not clear. First time, like I said, I saw this, I genuinely laughed out loud. And I'm the kind of guy who reads readme files, Cale. I read the readme files. And I don't want to read this. You know, if you're not winning me over with that, no. But they fixed it, so no complaint there. on that point. The other clarity point, I would say, is to me, my X-Men multiball. I mentioned it earlier. There's nothing on the user interface that tells you your progress towards it. And so, and to get it isn't clear to begin with. It'd be one thing, like the Sentinel, ironically, is something, I'm glad they have the user interface for it, but you don't need it. Like, you know, you hit it a bunch of times, I get the message. I'm going to start my Sentinel multiball. I'm glad it's there, the user interface, to be clear, but it's not critical. Whereas something like, hit a bunch of stand-ups and then hit one of these ramps and then do that three times, that's like very deep into I have to progress something territory. And yet there's no user interface for it. And it by itself is sort of confusing to get to. It's sort of sad to get to it through stand-ups. And so I would change that as well, just like they did on John Wick, where they used to have to hit stand-ups to get the multiball, and that wasn't clear. And there was no progress meter for that one either. Now they changed it to the dance club, where there's a progress meter on the inserts that tell you it. So that's my second thing on, to me, my X-Men multiball. My third point of clarity, third and final point of clarity, is the addable feature. Are you ready for this to explain how to get an addable in X-Men? Yes, please, because I need to know. Okay, and you may not know at the end of this. That's going to be the trick of it. By may not, I mean you will not. You will not know. And let me explain it. One-third of Stern games are easy to explain the addable. They just like the mystery. Whatever likes the mystery is the same thing as the addable. So, for example, in Guardians, hit the mystery, light it, and you light it with the Guardian stand-up, add a ball. Rush, get the bottom lanes, lights the mystery. If you're in a multiball, gives you the add-a-ball. Beetle, same thing. Deadpool, the same thing. You know, all of that is pretty standard one-third of Stern games. Another one-third of Stern games are also simple to explain. They're not the mystery, but they're just hit a single shot over and over again. So, for example, think Jaws, and you have to hit the cap the ball three times, and, oh, there's your add-a-ball. Just hit the capital ball three times. Pretty easy to remember. Gong shot in King Kong for the main King Kong multiball. Hit the gong shot two times. Black Knight, you hit the left spinner a bunch during the multiball, that left orbit shot, and that's the multiball. Or Star Wars, the new one, the Java spinning cup. You just hit that. Maybe you have to do it a few times. Maybe you have to get spinning cups, but it's the same shot over and over again. Pretty simple stuff to explain. That's two-thirds of Stern games. Make sense so far? Yeah. one-third of Scarn games get much, much more complicated. And I'd love to talk to the programmers about when and why they decide to go that more complicated direction for Adaball. I don't really understand it when they do. And to be clear, I'm not saying that's wrong if they get more complicated. You know, for example, I love the Adaball in Metallica. In Metallica, it's in this one-third category, this last one-third. You have to hit all the pick targets in Metallica and then hit the snake. And it's really important because the snake gives you not just an Adaball and not just the ball save, but a 2x playfield multiplier for a while. And so it becomes really important, and you feel the pressure to hit all those pick targets and get into the snake. And it's different. It's not a mystery. There's a separate mystery in that game. And it's not a hit one shot repeatedly, but it works. It works very well. Because the multiballs aren't so easily achieved. It provides a great stressful moment. Are you going to hit that snake? Are you going to make it? And I like innovation in code when it does something new, a new type of addable like that one with the pick targets. So that's that one. But then recently they've gotten strangely more complicated. So John Wick, for example, is the only way to get an add-a-ball. You cannot get it during your multiball. That's already an unusual thing. With all the games I've described so far, Metallica or anything where you have to bash things or get a mystery, you can get it during multiball. But in John Wick, you cannot get an add-a-ball during your multiball, despite it being a very hard game. The only way to get an add-a-ball is you have to hit this right ramp, ski pass over, start a mode, after you've hit that right ramp representing this red insert here, this orange insert, I should say, and then you start that mode. Then you beat the mode, Kale. You get the last shot in the left scoop to get the perk, and now you have add a ball. And then, when you get into your next multiball, then your button will be lit by add a ball. Pretty complicated stuff, right? Wow, yeah. But it's going to get even more complicated. I'm going to get progressively more complicated in my add a ball breakdown. John Wick. So I went from Mystery to just hit the same shot, to then Metallica pick targets, which I like, by the way, to then John Wick, which I don't like because it's way too complicated to do, then to Venom. Venom is the next level. Are you ready for Venom Adaball? Let's go. Venom Adaball is another game where you cannot Adaball during the multiball. You have had to have unlocked the perk before you even started the multiball to get the opportunity to Adaball during the multiball. So that's already pretty complicated. But if you're ready for it, Kale, I'm going to show you how to get an Adaball in. Let's see if this is the one. Nope, not that one. Not the Nihilists. Oh, let me skip past that. Okay, here we go. So in Venom Adaball, the way you get it is you either pick, as your very first character on Ball 1, Flash Thompson character. And if you see here, it says Ball 1 Sleeper Unlocked. So only if, not later on in the game, not if you change characters, but only if you pick Flash Thompson to begin with, it will give you this thing called Sleeper, which is Action Button Addable. So that's one way to know it. Did you know that, Cale? I had no idea. Okay, good. So that's one way to know it. You may not want to pick Flash Thompson for other reasons. You might want to pick Eddie Brock because it gives you Lock, Slit, Right to Begin With, and Flash Thompson may not do that, but at least it gives you the Addable. The other way to get Addable is much, much, much, much more complicated. All right? So how I'm going to explain this is with another shout-out to Mark at Backhand Pinball. Thank you, Mark. I hope you're okay with me showing this. There's a bunch of targets around the play field. Here's one. This is lit red. Do you see that one that's lit red right here? There's another one. There's another one. There's another one, for example. And so as you hit a target, it lights on a timer. If you hit that target again when it's on a timer, you will get what's called an infected. If you get 10 infected, you will get your sleeper edible to be used on the next time you have an edible. Did that make any sense? I said it exactly right, but it may not be anything you'll remember. I grant. Yeah. This is the part where Jamie's asleep, by the way. Hit the lit targets. Hit the lit targets. Okay, so I'm going to show you how he does it just to show you. So I want you to, I put it on mute, but I want you to watch. Look at these, look right here for this red target right there. See how it's flashing red? If he hits it, he'll get an infected, but he misses it. Then he hits it again, and then, sorry, it cut out, but I'm going to show it right here. Let's see if I could show it right there. Ten infected, defeated, sleeper unlocked. Do you see that? Yes. Because he has killed, and it's here on the user interface, ten infected. It shows you how many infected you've killed. So when you get to ten infected, which you get by hitting a stand-up and then on a timer hit it again, that counts as one infected, you do that ten times, you get your add-a-ball. only something that you could bring into a multiball, not something that you could get before, you know, during. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. And I've said that all to give you a progression of from least complicated to most complicated. And now we enter Uncanny X-Men. Are you ready for it? Oh, here we go. And I want to stress again. This is what I've been waiting for. In every episode, I fully expect, Kel, we get to a point, if we're not there already, where I start saying something, and I say it correctly, But I put everyone to sleep. Straight ASMR-type video at this point. Because this stuff gets really complicated. And we've hit a new level. I'll tell you what this level is, Cale. The new level here, you know me as somebody who likes to learn everything I can about a game like that. I might be wrong sometimes, but damn it, I like to learn, right? But I admit that even I, Cale, could not figure this out of all out. I read all the readme files. I read Tilt Forums. I read the Kineticist website, which all have different versions of what you're supposed to do, by the way. And as another just random aside, I don't understand why Stern doesn't put out rule books of its games. You know, they put out readme files. I get it. But, like, I piece this together by watching games played. What's the harm in actually telling people what the rules are to a game? You know, the best you could find is, like, Tilt Forums, but it's sort of like a wiki page in a sense, and people, like, update it. But it's never updated to, like, the newest code updates. Like, there are people who actually want to learn the rules to games. I can't be alone in that. And why don't they make it easier for you? But I don't know. That's a digression. Is that rant okay? Totally. All right. So I've read all that. And I know, because I've read all that, I know, Cale, already, just like people who know the rules know this, that the add-a-ball specifically is, let's see if I can, one day I'm going to figure out how to do this right. The add-a-ball specifically is the beast target, which is your mystery. And that makes sense. So you're like, Serge, this is back to the mystery. So it's just one of the first there. But no, it's more complicated than that. it's only the mystery when you're at level two, beast level. Then you could say, how do you get to level two? In Tilt Forums, they say, well, you get it through the left ramp and this ramp. But I actually think it's due to combos. Combos are what elevate your beast level. And then you could collect it at level two. And this is going to get complicated. Like I said, I'm going to need you to fall asleep in a moment here. I want to show you the user interface. There is a user interface here where it says beast lab level two. And there's another user interface there on this example, Beast Lab Level 2, and now it has more power. Does that make sense? Yeah. So you need it to be at Level 2 when you hit that target. Then the question becomes, how do you get it to Level 2? How do you get it past Level 1? How do you make sure you don't get it to Level 3 accidentally, like Level 2, Beast Lab, right? And so I asked our, you know, we've invested heavily in the show, Kale, as you know. There's just thousands of dollars that makes the studios that we have here. And so we hired our own reporter, a local investigator and man on the street, John Schaupel. He took off the glass, and he figured it out for us, okay? And I'm going to show you what he figured out. All right. He texted me. All right. I'm going to show you the text. And I'm showing you these texts because I still don't understand it. That's my point here. I still don't understand it. But I'm going to show maybe the fans watching this episode will understand it. And then they can explain it to me in the comments, which I would appreciate. So, first one. I'm testing beef. Thank you, John, by the way, with the glass off. Hey, can I hit pause for one second? Yes, please do. What you're about to go through, is this something that was in the original Wason code? It actually was. Okay. Yes. It's always been there. So John is pointing out the Kinetis' website. Shout out to the Kinetis'. But he's pointing out that it doesn't think it's quite right. He thinks you need to collect combo shots. And we talk about these combos. These are these inserts for combos that I mentioned earlier. and how the game should use the combo system. So he's saying it takes five combo shots to reach the level two, but let's keep going. Five of these shots that are lit for an active combo. Then wait. You need to fill 11 bars on the Beast Lab progress bar to award the Beast Lab award. The first four bars are red, the next four are yellow, and the last two are green. There's not an 11th one because the award is collected and the progress bar resets when you get to the next level. And that I didn't know. That's interesting. The insert in front of the Beast Lab will be red, yellow, green to correspond to the progress bar. And so what I mean here is here it's on green. That means you're on the green level right now of the green bars of whatever, but not the level, actually. It's just the green bars. Then on level one, each hit on Beast Lab will advance four bars. So you only need three hits to collect the award. But on level two, you need six hits to collect the award to the Beast Lab thing. On level three, you need 11 hits because it only advances one bar. And that all assumes you're starting from zero progress. But he went back because he's an excellent reporter. He's the best in the business. And he went back for more testing. And he said you could advance the progress bar to eight bars with two hits on level one, then five combos and move to level two, and you still have eight bars left. And then you have to go to the Beast Lab twice to collect the level two award, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Cale, read the rest, and I'll add some more. He's the best in the business. Do you get it, Cale? What was somebody thinking to do this? You get the insanity now, right? So this was a waste and thing. Look, I'm not here to name names. That's not my point, is what I'm saying. I'm just saying I don't like this idea. That's what I'm saying. I can't figure it out, and I still can't figure it out. In fact, you know what I'm going to do for us, Cal? I'm going to do a one-time only thing. Once in a while, we're going to call in a phony friend on this podcast. And it won't work because you won't be able to talk to him, but I'm going to take my phone and I'm going to call a reporter and I'm going to ask him if he could explain this to me and you listening. Let's see if he answers, and this may not work if he doesn't answer. Are you ready for it? Let's do it. Come on. Okay, we're doing it. Okay. Can you hear the speaker ringing? Yeah. Okay, perfect. By the way, he doesn't know I'm calling him. Okay. This is not planned. Hi, Serge. Hey, John. How are you doing? Good. John, I appreciate your text messages so much. They are incredible. I've read through them, and I only sort of understand it. Can you do me the biggest favor and try to explain how you get the Beast Lab Level 2 Adaball in X-Men? Well, you have that. Are you looking at the pictures I sent? I am. I have them up right now. Okay, the second one that shows the display, the lower right, it says beast lab. I see it. And it shows level three. Yes. So to get the add-on, he needs that to be at level two. And I'll explain how you do that. And then there's that progress bar. There's four red bars, four yellow, and then two green. Right, I see that. And that's like the maximum it can be. Any hit to B-slab stand-up will award you the award. So you need to get the award. You need it to be at level two and then finish that progress bar. during multiball. Got it. So level two, and to get to the levels, that's the combos. Yes. So it appears that changing the level or leveling up is purely based on combos and is completely independent of that progress bar towards your next award. Got it. Got it. So it's like two different things to consider when you're trying to get this mystery or thing one is get a bunch of combos. That will advance it to level two. But then you have to continuously hit the beast target several times. It's fewer times for level one. Well, sorry, you have to continuously hit the beast target once you're at level two to charge it up and then collect the award. Right. So I believe you can't get combos during multiple, so you have to go in at level two. That's a good point, too. So you're saying you can't do it in multiball. You have to bring the level two into that multiball with you. Right. That's an interesting twist. If certain things, like in the future, like when you're in the future mode, B-slab you cannot use, so it'll say level one on the display. I mean, it'll say level zero, and it won't show the progress bar. Like, it has no effect. Got it. I think you've actually explained this to me. Sorry, you keep going. Although the level three first award is extra ball, or light extra ball, I can't remember. And then it resets to level one. And then if you get to level three again and get the award for level three, it allows you to use Beast Lab in the future. Got it. All right, that makes a lot of sense. John, you've explained it so well if I use your explanation on the podcast would that be okay? Sure And if I told you that I happen to have been recording right now while I called you would I be able to use this very conversation on the podcast? Sure I'm wearing What are you wearing? I have retainers in so maybe I don't sound like I normally do You sound incredible You sound perfect I love it yeah and I think I is there anything else you don't understand about it I'm not sure if the premium is any different than the pro I know it's like a cat's ball good point too we'll stick with the pro for now you've explained it for me I actually know how to get it from now on and I'm going to test it out now in an actual game now that you've actually explained it to me you're the first person to explain it and I could not have done it without you and I appreciate it Okay. Yeah, and I was going to maybe edit the Tilt Forums. I would appreciate that, too. I was just talking about that, how, like, I wish that the coders for this game would feel the necessity to tell people when things are wrong. Right. Because that's, like, the main way in Tilt Forums that people find the code, if they're really that deep into it, like you and I are. So, like, I mean, they work on this game for, like, months and sometimes years to, like, put it out there, you know? They're probably so exhausted, they don't want to talk about it anymore. You're a very thoughtful man to consider that point. You're the best in the business, John, for a reason. I didn't know how to, thank you, I didn't know how to, I don't know how to explain the words. Like, there's the ten bars on the progress bar, and then anything over that awards you the award at that level. I get it now I get it now you just have to hit it a bunch of times to collect that you get four bars for each hit and then you get another you know and so you get four then eight and then the third hit gets you above ten so then it gives you the award and it resets well that's how you get bars in this game but John you spit bars better than any of them and I appreciate that I do what? nothing no worries it's just a it's a rap reference but you're great thank you so much John And so it sounds like a busy year. You've got to go. Well, we'll catch you up. I'm going to finish this podcast and then give you the gratefulness that you deserve for coming up with this. In the middle of a podcast? Correct. Oh, okay. And the one weird thing is one of the first level perks is double damage on the next shot. And if you immediately hit the beast, you get four bars and then four more bars. Oh, that's another level of detail. So I didn't look at all the particular awards you get for level one or level two because it's not up to date on the teleforms either. Yeah. Incredible. Incredible explanation. Thank you. I'll let you go. All right. I'll call you later, John. Thank you so much. Okay. I look forward to your podcast. Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. That was nice of you to say. All right, bye. Cale, that was our man on the street interview, a surprise interview. What do you say? Okay, so that's amazing. So all this to get an edible. You got it. I think we figured it out, though. Do you agree with that? I think we figured it out. Combos make the level two, then hits the stand-up. So this is the first time. This is an exclusive. Correct. Like, Tilt Forum's had it wrong. I was watching the UK Open, and Laser Los, who's amazing and has a great stream, shout out carlos um was commenting and he wasn't sure about the edible and he's like an elite player to give you an example this is this is some complicated stuff we're dealing with right yeah this is real quantum physics situation here i i would tell you this is like black hole stuff you know there's hawking radiation coming out of this thing that's what i'm trying to tell you um all right are we good on all of that kale was in the service of clarity and hopefully you see why we were focusing on clarity at that point. Any questions on that? There are a lot of people that will be extremely interested to hear all this. Yeah, there are a lot of people that are extremely interested and a lot of people who will not be interested at all in what we said. But we'll find out when we post this. Is that fair, Kel? Yeah. And I'll leave it to you if you want to edit any parts of that conversation out. No, that was great. That was great. That was great, I thought. And he's great. He's really great. is a pillar of the community, if I can give him a shout out. Man on the scene. Man on the scene, John Shoff, but we pay him very little for this role, but he is the best in the business at what he does. That's for sure. All right. We're almost done. We have to go to risk and reward. We're on the back half of the criteria, Cale, but this won't be a lot, I promise. We've talked about a lot of it. Risk and reward, there's no play field multiplier on the game. There is a shot multiplier, but it's not used on purpose, in my opinion. But the biggest thing to talk about for risk and reward is this, Danger Room. And that is a risk and reward. And it's very risky, and so you need the reward to be there. And they have upped in version 2 the reward. But I want to focus on this one a little bit more to say what could be done better, for example. In my opinion, the danger room is still not quite there. You'll know it's there, and you'll know it's there, Kale, when you watch the next big pinball stream and you watch players purposely go there until that point where players do not purposely go there, where you're actually watching and it's a viable strategy that they're purposely focused on. And maybe it will. This is a new code, and so I'm curious to see if this is something good players, Escher, people like that will actually purposely go for. If you get in there and do it and purposely do it, then I'll know that the risk matches the reward, in my opinion. And especially if a player like yourself might purposely go in there. It's really dangerous. It's called the Danger Room, and that's a fun idea for a layout. But the rules design challenge here is can you convince players to go there, that they should be going there. So to do that, you have to think about risk and reward, and you have to do two things to make it valuable. You have to lower the risk, and you have to raise the reward. So that's how you make that interesting. It's like a supply-demand curve, right? You want those two to meet. So let's talk about how you can lower the risk, and then let's talk about how you can raise the reward. The lowering the risk front, they made it easier to level up. I mentioned this earlier way back in the beginning of the podcast, but it used to look like this, and now it looks like that. So at least you know that if you get in there, it's going to be easier to do it. You used to have to hit one thing individually. I have to hit the spinners. I have to hit the targets. I have to hit the pop-up bears. I have to hit the ramp. But now you don't. Now you just have to hit the stuff. Hit the spinner, hit a bunch of stuff in there, and it'll progress. So that's lowering the risk. Does that make sense? It does. So just like with the original, there are the three diamonds, right? Correct. There's level one, level two, and level three danger rooms. The first one, progress, gets you level one. Then you can keep on progressing it to level two and keep on progressing it to level three. Do you know what each of those give you? Of course I do, Cale. Let's get into it. I focused first, though, lowering risk. You lower risk because you don't have to do as much in there to get out, to accomplish something. So that's lowering the risk. Another way to lower the risk is they made the Professor X perk to be ball save. So I think it's not, I'll put it up here. where the Professor X perk here is a ball save when you get into the danger room. That's an example of lowering the risk of the danger room. Now you might be more convinced to do that. Does that make sense? Yes. Great idea. Great idea there. So lowering the risk, and the direction is correct in where they're going. So lowering the risk works. What I might do is have a ball save, and I don't know if they've programmed this already, but ball save as soon as you get in there, like the very first time that you get in there, and no more after that. I might consider that. But then now on the raising the reward front. So the danger room gives you stuff, and it depends on what the game state is when you're in there. If you get in there before a mode starts, you're in single-ball play, and you get in there before the mode starts, then level one, level two, level three each do something different. So you asked me about it. Level one is a 2x mode bonus. Mode score, I shouldn't say mode bonus. I mean to say all shots during the next mission that you start, the next mode, I should say, are doubled. Does that make sense? Yes. The second level, and that's a good idea. I think it should be even more than two times, but that's a good idea. There's level two. If you get into the level two, all that does is if you are to beat the mode and then you get into the future and you need to kill six sentinels to get out of the future, now you only need to kill five sentinels. So that entire level two progress, all the danger of going through the spinners of the danger room and making it out of there through the ramp of the danger room, in level 2 and getting to level 2 all gives you one single fewer shot in the future. And I don't buy that. It gives you a less shot in all futures, I believe. I think so. But at the very least, one fewer shot is not worth it. I could easily hit a ramp much more than I could progress through a danger room. Does that make sense? Level 2, it's not there. That's what I'm saying. Level 3 will double the Sentinels killed and their corresponding awards in the future. So I think that does help you much more in the future. And that's okay. Sentinels can be quite valuable in the future. And plus, we also care about, in one day, we're going to care about the number of sentinels that you kill in the future because it's going to give you a side quest advance there. And so it might not be there yet, but maybe the levels are there if you consider, well, they're also going to have this side quest where you want to kill a lot of sentinels. so maybe that will want you to make you want to go into the danger room and make you will want to get to level three. Does that make sense? Yeah. And then there's even a secret level four, which is it awards you Cyclops if you get to level four, the Cyclops perk. And the Cyclops perk increases the combo timers so that when you make a left ramp and then you're making a right ramp, you have more time to make it if you miss it, for example, so then combos play into it. And so that's interesting. That's the danger room. But until the code convinces players to go there on purpose, I don't find it to be, and maybe it'll be there when they add the Sentinel mode, to be fair. I don't find it to be risk meeting reward just yet. Does that make sense? Any question on risk and reward? No, not at all. Hey, I have a great idea for the danger room. What do you think about this? Okay, I'm listening. You get in there. It's probably going to be an accident, right? Okay, good. So you're in there. you have to keep ripping the spinner to get to get to get a shot bonus up so you're like you keep ripping the spinner kind of kind of like in ghostbusters when you hit the left ramp and that feeds your your right flipper well okay they've already done it and let me tell you how they died i was holding back detail maybe i should have been i feel guilty now holding that detail from you kale i said that the danger room if you're not in a mode what does it do and that's what it does, right? What it does is it builds up your mode value, your future value. If you are in a mode and you get into the danger room, then you can no longer level it up. And instead, stuff you do in here, including hitting the spinner, will add to something called the danger room bonus. And that's added as a value on top of your mode. In any mode, in the final shot of any mode or future mode, it will add the value. It specifically gives you, so it adds to the value of your mode, and it also gives you an end of ball bonus as well. So if you're in a mode and you're ripping the spinner, it could really jack up your bonus, to be specific. Oh, nice. Yeah, I think it's 10% of the total danger room bonus value is applied to bonus. The rest of it is applied to your final shot of the mode, but 10% of it is applied to your bonus. And so that rule does exist, what you're suggesting, to their credit, which is great. I'm glad they put it in there. Yeah, so I want to be clear. They've gone very much in the right direction with this code, very much. It's getting much, much better, and it will get even better based on what they've talked about. I'm just sharing why I think it could be even a bit better on making the danger room more valuable, but they did that. I'll even say, just because I don't want to hold anything back from you, Cale, I talked about what the danger room does when you're not in a mode. It levels up your mode. What the danger room does when you're in a mode, it levels up your danger room bonus value. That's a finishing shot on the mode and also in your bonus. You could also get into the danger room during multiballs, and it increases the value there too. So, for example, in the sentinel multiball, if you're in the danger room and you hit this ramp, it will relight all of your sentinel jackpots and at higher value. So it makes them, you might want to get into that place and hit the ramp. Or in the save the city multiball, that is your super jackpot, is your spinner shot, and you could light it for super jackpot millions. It's probably the biggest scoring potential of the game in the shortest amount of time. So they've done a lot there. I'm giving it a plus. I'm just not giving it, like, two pluses. That's all I'm saying. Does that make sense? Yep. Okay. Next criteria after risk and reward is fair and balanced. And here it works pretty well, I think. The Save the City multiball literally, in terms of balance, it literally requires you to hit every shot three times. So it's making you use the playfield. And that's why they did it, because otherwise you might just focus on hitting this shot repeatedly. Version 1, very poorly balanced. You would hit that shot repeatedly. You would pick the Rogue versus Sentinels mode, and you would just hit that shot nonstop. But here, you're going to balance it out by hitting most of the shots around the playfield. And you still also want to convince the players to go into there. This is one more area to consider focusing on. And they have to an extent, and so I think it's better there too. And I would call the game now pretty good on fair and balanced. I'd give it a plus on that, too. Any questions on that point? No. All right. Innovation. There's a ton of innovation in this game in the layout, of course. This layout is very, very unique and a lot of credit there. In the code, a little bit of innovation. You can argue that the beast, confusing thing as it is, is innovative. I don't understand it, but it's innovative. I do understand it now, though, actually, for what it's worth. but I especially think if you're going to have innovation like that, you really should spell it out in your rules somewhere. I don't see it anywhere in the rules until John explained it. The other innovation I would say is the future. It's sort of an interesting thing that some games in their modes, they have the same finishing mode shot. So, for example, in John Wick, all seven modes end with a shot at the left scoop, and that's one way to play it. in X-Men, all modes end with you in the future where you have to make like six sentinel kills in there. So it's like an extension of the mode that's always the same at the end of the mode for every player. And it also means that you can't get the perk until, not just that you beat the mode, but that you beat the future. And it's an interesting thing to do. And I think it has pluses and minuses, but it's innovative. I'll say that. I don't know of a game like that where every mode ends in a sequence of the same shots that you have to make to collect the perk of that mode. Does that make sense? Yeah. My miss innovation, it was something like the Magneto Magnet Control, where you could fling the ball with the magnet into the sentinel. I think that would have been nice. It's possible, like I said, the layout doesn't allow it underneath. I don't know that. But those are some things we could think about, and how to use Magneto better would be like an innovation. Ninth category of criteria, the pacing category, or what I call I was so close, in quotes. like that feeling on an L-Win game, and I'll always define it that way, because almost all L-Win games, if not all actually, make you feel like you're almost at something if you just made one or two more shots. Right, and that's the part operators love. Correct. That's what makes quarters drop. Correct, it makes the quarters drop. And so on the plus side for pacing here, there's good multiball spacing. You have these three multi-balls where traditionally you get into the sentinel ball one, maybe you get into the save the city ball two, and maybe you get into, sorry, I meant to say to me my X-Men Ball 2, and then maybe number three you get into the final Save the City multiball, which is worth a whole lot, and that's there, and that's good. I still don't like that multiball two is the middle child one and sort of just like random how you get into that without a user interface to know if you're even progressing there to make you feel the pacing, but it's there, there I would say, you know, just to be clear, there. It's there, but on the negative side, right now there's no depth to the game at all. There's no wizard mode for anything. There's no MIDI wizard mode for really anything. There's nothing that happens after you kill the sentinels enough, so the pacing to the people who have this game feels monotonous because you are getting a mode, beating the mode, going to the future, getting a perk, doing it again, over and over again. Nothing happens. So again, to be fair, though, they're going to change that in the future, and I think they're going to change that. And if they do, I will say something different here. But that's why it doesn't feel like it's a good, well-paced game right now. Does that make sense? Yeah. I'll give you a reference to make the comparison clear. If you want to look at Ultimate Pacing, you can look at literally any L1 game, as I said, but take King Kong, and I have my issues with the game in other ways, but Pacing's just not one of them. And if you watch our last Electric Bat Arcade Twitch stream, where I got to commentate with world champion Colin MacAlpine, shout out to Colin, we were streaming King Kong, and the players were always almost at something. And John Schaupel was playing that, by the way, and he was right next to the Deadeye skillshot mode, like the thing from Congo, for example. Oh, he gets a treasure hunt if he hits the cave. Or there's the New York City event. You know, just look at the biplane attack. He's close to the island treasure. It's a symphony of pacing, you know, in that game. And you just don't have that here. So that's really it for pacing. And then the last thing you basically covered, bugs. Stern doesn't have too many bugs in their game, but you did mention a few at the outset. And I don't know them as well, but I always give credit to Stern for generally not having games that reset on you. Elvira sometimes does. But otherwise, a lot of certain games just don't reset on you and problems like that. And they should get credit for it. And I always want to end there because it's something that is overlooked but matters. They just don't have that many bugs in their games except the ones you mentioned. Does that make sense, Cale? Yep. And with that, I think we have covered everything, Cale. Do you feel that way? We left no stone unturned. Correct. Very good job, Serge. Thank you, Cale. Let's see if when the people ask for craziness, they really mean it. I'm not sure they do. I challenge them. to see if they really want this level of craziness. I bet they don't. That's what I bet. I bet you can go deeper. You think so? Yeah. Well, Cale, you're the best hype man, pin pal in the business, and I appreciate talking to you always, and good talking to you this time. Let's talk again. Have a good time at Expo. Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, we'll be there next week. It's going to be an absolute blast. All right. Cheers, dude. Right on. Thank you so much, Serge. Peace out. And that concludes another episode of Pin Pals. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.