it's time now for another pinball profile i'm your host jeff teolis you can find our group on facebook we're also on twitter at pinball profile email us pinball profile at gmail.com and please subscribe on either itunes stitcher or google play my next guest is somebody i haven't had the pleasure of meeting yet we have been on the same podcast before he is also a podcaster But funny enough, he has never been on Pinball Profile, and I have never been on his, the Eclectic Gamers podcast. Although we were on a podcast together, Slam Tilt Podcast for the Clusterbuck. Dennis Creasel joins us now. Hi, Dennis. How are you, buddy? Hey, Jeff. I'm doing good. How are you? I've been better. You know, you and I both have been better. I mean, we're recording this because we want to talk. I have spent the last day, and I hope you're not eating right now, so put the food down. I've thrown up seven times. And then you, of course, everybody saw online, you had that horrible break-in and some crooks took your stuff. Yeah, I came back from work early for that one. It was a midday break-in, wasn't it? A morning to midday, yeah. I learned of the break-in a little after 11 a.m. and I had left for the office at about 7. So, yeah, sometime in that little four-hour range. Man, I guess it takes all kinds or whatever. Do you wonder if they were scouting out the place or was it just kids saw an opportunity? Oh, you know, so much. Everyone has their own theory in terms of, you know, I post online. I get all this. There's all this speculation. Well, maybe they were stalking you for months. I'm like, I don't think I'm interesting enough to really stalk for months. Maybe they watched for like a week, maybe not at all. It may have been just a crime of opportunity going through the neighborhood. One of the items they took was the laptop I used to stream with. And for a while, it was getting turned back on. So it would tell me where the laptop was generally, wherever it last got on the Internet. So I know that the laptop very quickly ended up about 60 miles west of here. Did you call the police? Yeah, yeah. I've sent them the screenshots of where I couldn't get a good IP lock on it because it was never on when I actually did the scan. It would just say this is the general place that it last connected. So, yeah, I've supplied all of that to the police. But it made me wonder, either they sold the laptop really quickly to someone, you know, like out of the back of a trunk sort of thing, or maybe they were out from the Topeka area, which somewhat ironically is actually where I work, and then just come over to this area, this county, which tends to have a higher valuation than the rest of the state, and thought, well, he doesn't have any cameras on the outside of the house. It looked like they tried to get in the garage first. Actually, I saw the door was lifted a bit, but it was locked. And then I think they just went around back and decided to break the window. That's brutal. It's never fun. I've had cars broken into, and we have a security system at home just for... I had somebody years ago, this is like 30 years ago, walk into our front door. This is when I was living in Toronto. And they were just high as a kite, right? So whether they were lost, running from somebody, whatever the case may be, but it still was frightening late at night. This person was hysterical, but it wasn't a robbery by any means. and then the vehicles. I mean, I had my car broken into. I was downtown London, Ontario, and I was parked for not even 20 minutes. A radio station vehicle smashed the windows, took whatever was inside. Unfortunately, my laptop was in the backseat. They got that. It's never fun, you know, and I know you've been going through that. So hopefully you got everything back that was of value. And I always wonder what they didn't take because with me, they didn't take my wallet, which was in the backseat. Well, that's – yeah. The criminal element isn't always the smartest element out there. Everyone likes to think of the Lex Luthor. But most of the time, they're pretty simple or they're going really quickly. So yeah, in terms of what they targeted, it was the easy-to-remove, high-end – I'm using that in air quotes – electronics. So I ran a room out to someone. So my housemate, they stole his PlayStation 4 and they stole his Xbox One, but they didn't touch his prior-generation gaming consoles. in the living room. That's where mine was set up. They stole my Xbox One. They left my Xbox 360 alone. They left the stereo alone. Why don't they want the 8-track player, Jeff? What's the matter? I'd be all over that. That's my first go-to. Well, I made that up. I don't have one. I just wanted you to feel like you were still accepted. So, yeah, they did that. They got in my room. They got, of course, it's America, so I had guns. So they took those. I had a case locked up. One of them was from my grandfather. That's probably the only sort of... Most of the stuff I lost was gifts, But he was a hunting guide, and so he had a number of firearms, and he gave me one of them. So they took the case with those. Left my lockboxes. They tossed one on the bed, but they couldn't get them open. They didn't find the keys. They actually had the container with the keys, but they couldn't open it, which was good because I had a grand in cash in that box. That's my buy-a-use pinball project fund. So they left my cash. They stole my piggy banks. So they took all my loose – it wasn't quarters because I take all the quarters to play pinball. But they took all my dimes, man, my dimes. Piggy banks are huge in Canada because we have loonies and toonies. That's big bucks. Yeah, I had a couple of these. They look like AA batteries, but it's just like a bank version. I got them years ago, so I just dropped the loose change in them because I don't like to carry loose change in the wallet. Yeah, it was about 30 items that were missing. Now, some of those are really small things. They grabbed my laptop bag. I had all my laptop stuff in one bag, very convenient for them since I always put it away after I stream. So there were a lot of USB cables and hubs and external hard drives. They took stuff like that. Didn't take any TVs, didn't take any monitors, didn't touch the pinball machines. A couple of them were covered in glass because they smashed the room where the pinball machines are to get in. So I vacuumed that room three times. I still am finding shards of plate glass. Not fun. There's got to be an easier way to get into the news than having your house broken into or, in the case of Christopher Franchi, having a flood. I mean, you do enough. You don't need to be a victim to get into the news, because as we talked about, you've got the Eclectic Gamers podcast. You're frequently on This Week in Pinball, a great podcast with Zach. And even on the website, too, you've contributed more than once, too. Is that a lot of fun for you? Yeah, I like writing. I actually started in November of 2017 with Pinball News. I had researched a piece on the premier street-level series of games for the podcast, for the Eclectic Gamers podcast. And then I thought, this would make a lot more sense written down. No one wants to go and listen to an audio podcast to do research. It's too tedious. So while I enjoyed putting together the segment, afterwards I thought I should write this up so that anyone who wants to learn about them later doesn't have to listen to my voice droning on trying to find the timestamps. It would be hard to search for it anyway. So I compiled that and gave it to Martin over at Pinball News, and he liked it, and he ran it. And then it just kind of snowballed from there. I had another podcast episode where we had Nick Schell on, who's with the Roanoke Pinball Museum now. And he was doing his tour around America, giving lessons on how to fix EM games. And so that kind of led to a thing about Harry Williams and how he had some games over with Bally, which I didn't know until we were talking about that segment and when I was putting together my research so I don't look like an idiot when I have the guest on. And then Jeff with This Week in Pinball reached out and won an article on competitive pinball, or excuse me, the growth of pinball. And I looked at it from the competitive growth aspect and also what I could try and piece together on the collector side. And he said it went over well, and he had some guides he wanted. So I did a guide on manufacturers, and then I suggested a guide on design. So anyway, I think I had like eight articles last year, including the ones I co-wrote. I've been so busy lately, I haven't actually made much progress on the next one I've been toiling away at. But yeah, I like doing that sort of stuff. That's my interest in the hobby, is I like to learn about the history of the games and understand why those decisions were made that they were. I like to play too, of course, but I'm not going to ever be a big-time collector. I'm not going to ever be a big-time competitive player. So that's sort of where I like to participate in the hobby. Well, let's talk about that first article, the growth of pinball, whether it's collections or competition. Here we are in 2019. We've seen the number of players in competitions on IFPA continue to grow. Sure. But obviously, as we see game manufacturers make different editions, limited editions, collector's editions, are pinball machines being purchased more by collectors or more by competitors? What do you think? I think more by collectors. I think the purchase level is mostly on the home market at this point, at least in the United States. But I think worldwide it's mostly the case. I do believe that there has been, because of the growth and competitive pinball, a surge of people willing to operate games. Now, a lot of those are more hobby operators that maybe have an arrangement with one bar or a restaurant or something, and maybe in their mind they're doing it to make a little bit of money or have a place to sort of station their games so they can actually own more games, even though they don't have the space in their house for it. And the numbers from the IFPA don't lie. There's clearly a large amount of growth on the competitive pinball scene, but it's very easy to get in on the competitive pinball side of things without investing enough money that, think about if you had 10 people, it would be my example. So 10 people, and you go out and you're going to play on location once a month in a tournament. And that's going to be, let's say that when you do that, you generate $10 worth of coin drop. And so you're talking $120 per person per year. Even if you brought in 10 new people, that ain't going to even buy you one half of one new machine. So I don't know that in most of the markets that the competitive growth is enough to fuel the game purchases that we're seeing. So while that's going up, it's maybe more of a, what's the cause and the effect, or what's the chicken and the egg? I think that the competitive of pinball, seeing more games on location has sort of increased the ability for people to go, oh, I can play now. And oh, look, they have leagues or they have tournaments. Let's go do that. That will be so fun. And then when that growth happens and people are like, well, look, we can operate these things again. So I think it does feed itself. But I think most of the new sales are still going to the collector side. I know in our area, a lot of the games that are operated are older games, not real old, usually DMD and beyond. But we'll see those just they're just sending those back out. They're not having to make those fresh investments. When new games come out, we hear a lot of people talk about the code. And let's just assume the code is almost done. Let's not talk about when it first comes out. Let's just say nearly completed code. Are they spending timeless amounts of time, the people like Lyman and Dwight and Lonnie and Kiefer, are they spending endless amounts of time for the collector or for the competitor? Probably depends on the coder, on how their mind works. My general impression from interviews with Lyman Sheets and Kiefer, well, let's start with Lyman first. I think he very much, because he's a high-level competitive player, he seems to be really big into balancing and having these rules with all these particular stacks. And you get this multiplier going for this one shot. I'm kind of thinking Walking Dead right now. and it just seems it jives really well with the competitive mindset at least the high-end competitive mindset and i know a lot of competitive players if you ask them name your favorite coder a lot of them will say lyman sheets but you take someone like dwight sullivan and you hear i know zach minnie with uh this week in pinball straight down the middle will often say well he he codes moments about these you know the light show going off during game of thrones and this is really big build up and and the sounds and how it all integrates together and the feeling you get when you play Ghostbusters And that sort of approach might be seen as something that's more for the casual player, which I think Dwight still wants it to be competitively viable, but I don't think that might be the first foremost type of player in his mind. And you've got Kiefer over with the Jersey Jack, who very good competitive player, thinking about balance and stuff as well, but it seems to me that most of the games that he's working on with Jersey Jack are these really deep journey pins, and I'm assuming that's because when you're asking for over $9,000 for a game, it better last more than two weeks. That's definitely the case with the new Pirates of the Caribbean. I know some people that have just purchased it, and good friend of pinball from IE Pinball, Carl D'Python Anghelo, just rants and raves about how much fun that game is. And again, even locally here, people I know who've purchased to just go on and on. Ryan C. can't get enough of it from head-to-head pinball podcast because he says it's just so fun to play in multiplayers and the plundering and everything else. So, you know, I feel bad for Jersey Jack, the delay to get that game out, but that is a massive, massive sleeper hit game. Yeah, and we've seen that depth from them before with Hobbit. We saw it with Wizard of Oz, and those were Kiefer-coded games. And Lord of the Rings, that's the whole thing. I mean, if you really want to have the challenge and journey of trying to get to Valinor, very, very difficult. And most of the journey pins seem to be oriented that way. Now, you can have another game, like I'm thinking the ultimate do or die in Iron Man, where the code itself is not particularly deep, but getting through what is there is very challenging. So there are sort of two angles you can go at it. I know with the new Munsters game, one of the things I've seen some highly skilled players complain about who have acquired the game or put a lot of time on the game is that it's got that rule set that reminds them of Iron Man, but getting through it isn't as hard as Iron Man. And that's frustrating to people that if their ultimate goal is to basically get all the way through and they're sort of done with the game, there's a collector type that's like that. It's like, I want to see the wizard mode, and then once I've seen the wizard mode, I've quote-unquote won the game and I'm done with it. What did you think of the theme of the monsters? I've played it a few times, not many, although I have to get up to speed for the Stern Pro Circuit Finals. It was one of the games announced. Beautiful game, great shots. Yeah, the code's not the deepest in the world, but I thought the integration with the video was spectacular, the sounds, the art. I really like the game, and again, to me, any game, if it shoots well, I know code will catch up, and I'm excited by that. Yeah, I think it looks to me, I still have not played Munsters. We have one on location, but the Carl Weathers has been atrocious out here, and I've not gotten a chance to get up north and play it. That said, from what I have seen on the streams, I agree with you. I think that the theme works really well. I actually like the simpler rule set styles. Iron Man's one of my favorite games to come out of Stern. And so when I heard that that was the approach Dwight was taking with Munsters, I thought that's really going to appeal a lot to me. As to the theme selection itself, I think that was a miss. I don't think Munsters was a good theme. It might not associate with younger people for sure, although you look at it and you go, well, that's a Frankenstein, even though we know it's Herman. So the black and white video, yeah, that might not be something to a younger person. But again, for somebody older, I think it's, if you're looking for the collectors, we'll see how that one goes. But again, Stern doesn't release their numbers. They're a private company. They do not have to. I'm just curious how that one will do. I know a lot of people that have purchased them. I was at one of the dealerships, and this guy I was talking to, I think I mentioned this earlier, he bought 20 pins in the last eight months. And that's all he's ever bought. So he's just like really into it. He was buying the monsters. He was quite excited by it. although he was flipping a coin between that and the new Monster Bash. And he asked me, and I said, they're both great. It depends what your fancy is. Wow, you were a huge help with that. Okay, if it's me and money's not an issue, I'm actually buying Monster Bash, and only because I already know what I'm getting with that. I don't know what I'm getting with monsters, although I love it. I mean, if money was an issue, I'd have them both. So Monster Bash for 20-plus years has been one of my favorite games, So I guess I got to lean that way. And all the new toys that they've done with it, it looks pretty good. But he also asked me the week it came in, right? Let me get more time on monsters. I might flip a coin on that. I might switch. Tough to say, right? I think of Star Wars. I played Star Wars last night. And we're now a year and a half into Star Wars, correct? Yeah, I think so. I'm just starting to understand the game. I'm just... You've mastered the action button. Yeah. Smack, smack. Yeah, that's fine and dandy. It's more about the multipliers in the right spots. It's more about the hurry-ups. It's more about which character, getting into the multiballs. I hear you can just lock the multipliers on anything you want and go for any multiballs you want. You can just do whatever you want. Josh says he doesn't move it. Now, as your multipliers go up, instead of it being three multipliers, it reduces to two and then one. So you better make sure you're on the money shot. So if you're in Han, make sure it's on video mode or make sure it's on the hurry up for the Death Star, those kind of things. So there's a little bit of maneuvering going around, but it's a different game for me. You know, I don't think of it as a Steve Ritchie game, and I know he did it. Well, whose game do you think it is if it's not a Steve Ritchie game? Does it remind you of anyone? The left ramp reminds me of Steve Ritchie. The going around the Hoth or Death Star reminds me of Steve Ritchie because of no fear. I don't know. You know what? Sure, the layout is very Steve Ritchie. the rules are so different that it, I don't know, I feel like it, I'm also sick, so who knows. Yeah, okay, well, I mean, when I see it, I see a Steve Ritchie, but the reason I see it that way is it has the tropes I associate with him, so it's a high flow game, he always uses the same Italian bottom layout, like, exactly, he likes to keep the shots on the same spots on the flippers from game to game, he's confirmed he likes to do that, so you've got two ramp shots, as usual, They're both backhandable, which is another feature that he likes to do that a lot of other designers are willing to deviate from. I mean, the horseshoe shot feels a little different compared to a lot of his more contemporary games, but it's just a minor point. And it's got that brutality. That's the other thing. Yeah, he's high flow. Everyone knows he's the king of flow, but he really likes a lot of brutality. So there's usually shots relatively close to the flippers that can be very dangerous. And that's a game that can be dangerous on the plunge. if you full plunge, goes into those drops, and those drops aren't always very cooperative, and you know the rest of the story. So when I see that, I definitely see Steve Ritchie. What I think is an issue for a lot of people, and maybe you're one of those people, and maybe you're not, is you don't really like the direction that Dwight went with the code on the game. Well, it's unique, that's for sure. And I'm actually a big fan of Dwight, believe it or not. It just took me a little longer to get behind it. And, you know, I see a lot of people do the same path. There are two paths I've only seen people do when they play Star Wars. When it comes to Game of Thrones, I've only seen two different paths. It's funny, we were playing some what we call loony throwdowns last night, and we were picking different houses in Game of Thrones just to try them out, just to see what they are. And it made it different, but from a strategy point of view, it's not something we would do. And so then you kind of go back to the old faithfuls. Well, sure. And that's where you're competitive, you're a high-level competitive player, your mindset's always going to be you're you know you are you're not you're not a scrub like me see i will go on location i will play land i will choose to play lannister you don't have to give me no loonies to do it i'll do it because then i know i have a chance to get on the leaderboard and then people will see it and think i'm a badass even though i'm terrible and that's just to trick the casuals so that's why i would ever play something like lannister but as a common mindset for high level tournament players you're going to look and when i'm playing competitively I try and look at it the same way. I'm just not as good at it. And say, what is the best, easiest, aka the safest way to blow this game up? And so, of course, I'm going to say, oh, okay, well, let's do Martel because I want to have the add-a-ball option. And then if I get in my multiball, it gives me some flexibility. And that makes sense. And it's the same thing with Star Wars. And it's like, okay, well, maybe if I don't want to move the multipliers around, you want to do, what is it, R2-D2 and keep things a little bit broader or whatnot. Or now that more code came out And people were saying, do Leia, because there are advantages to doing Leia. And you just sort of remember all of that. And it's been on it. Even the games that aren't Lyman games have always had those sort of things. Like up until that latest update, what was it with ACDC? Hell's Bells, do Hell's Bells. And then new code comes out, and it's like, okay, well, now don't do Hell's Bells. Do something else. What are we going to do? Well, not all songs are created equal. You don't see everyone doing Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be or something. So that sort of thing is almost inevitable. It's going to be inevitable with pirates. You add 20 plus characters, they're not all going to be equitably balanced. It's impossible. They'd either have abilities that are so weak to the general gameplay that they'd be meaningless, kind of like choosing cities in Kiss, or they're going to be a few capabilities and you're going to be like, okay, well, because I can get locked out of a character, I'm going to pick four characters. What are the four best characters to play in pirates? And those are the four that are going to get played by everyone. I think it's inevitable. But that's the challenge of not only the competitive person looking and saying, what's the easiest way to maximize points or not necessarily, you know, because it gets a little weird because, again, Game of Thrones, Greyjoy, for example, if you want to blow the game up, that's the way you go. But in a tournament setting, you don't want to take those risks. So there are better, safer strategies that probably will win you your tournament but would never win you grand champion. So you have got all that stuff in the mix. And some of that exists now more than it used to because the code is so much deeper, because they're trying to appease the collector's market. When you've got something as deep as pirates and everyone is like, oh, well, we got to just have a different experience every time. It can't all be equal. It's too much work, especially as small as the programming teams are for pinball machines. This isn't like Red Dead Redemption 2. We've got hundreds of people programming it. That is one thing that you hear a lot about on the Eclectic Gamers podcast, the different video games. and there's a perfect example of something that sold millions and millions of dollars. Are pinball machines ever going to get to that level? I mean, video games now are bigger than major motion pictures as far as revenue being brought in and the time that is put into it, the actors, the voice characters. I wonder if pinball will ever get there, and if so, how? I heard Josh talk about it would be great to kind of have some of that big buck hunter competitions that are so successful with that game, with Raw Thrills, is there a way to tie that into pinball? George Gomez has talked about there's got to be some way to connect to other machines. How are we going to do that in pinball, I wonder? The growth potential exists to see more and more improvements. And we've been seeing improvements for years on the pinball side. So let's be optimistic about that. But it will never be remotely near what video games are. And the biggest issue is the barrier of entry to pinball is a lot more steep. and that's on two fronts. Obviously, given the price of these machines, you cannot expect people to go out and buy them. They are too expensive, and they're just getting worse. When they're giving Fortnite away for free, and then you just pay for the downloadable content, I mean, that is brilliant. It is, and that's the thing. That's the difference from when pinball had its past heyday, like you're thinking late 70s or the renaissance that happened in the 90s, and even the renaissance that's happening now. But the big difference between the renaissance now in those past experiences, especially the pre-90s experiences, is the home video game market wasn really a big thing before then It wasn until the Atari 2600 came out people started getting those things There was the video game crash of 1983 It devastated devastated the home gaming market There were video game manufacturers who thought that home console gaming would never be a thing. It tanked so hard. Nintendo Entertainment System comes along. All of a sudden, you've got a whole culture of people, people like me, who grew up on that stuff. And pinball, it can't compete in the same sense because I would come home from school, and I put in Legend of Zelda and I could play that. I couldn't do that with pinball. I didn't have a pinball game in my house. And you think about it today, you've got all these games that can even be played on the phone, like Fortnite, for free. So low barrier of entry. And pinball requires you to travel somewhere. Depending on where you live, you probably aren't within walking distance to an arcade. You would even be allowed to go by yourself anyway, depending on your age. So those barriers are the main things. It's too expensive to really expect most people to put one in their home. especially if they've never really tried it before. It's not like you could just go out and go, gosh, Pinball's kind of curious. Maybe I should buy Pirates. No one does that. It's too expensive. True. We're hearing a lot of people, when you do your podcast, when I do mine, say, oh, Pinball still exists? I mean, we still get that to this day. It's exciting to see what Zach Sharp and his marketing mind at Stern Pinball has done, where he's going to be bringing Pinball in the form of the Stern Pro Circuit to ESPN. on the Ocho, which will be great. So they're going to film this big event that I'm very, very fortunate to be a part of in Chicago at Bottom Lounge. And there, I assume we're going to take the finals, maybe put that into some sort of package. I don't know how they're going to do it for TV because we who watch streaming on pinball, the better you are at pinball, the longer the game goes. Do you think of the poker and how many hands they edit when they show that on television? Think of darts. These guys are hitting 180, 180, 180. so the game goes faster. Ellen gets on a game or another great player, Raymond Davidson, take your pick. You could have a half an hour game before the first person even plays their first ball. How is that going to relay on TV? Oh, terribly. It is. Watching pinball sucks. Are you kidding? I play pinball and I hate watching it for long stretches. And it's not just that. There are a whole host of reasons that make pinball very difficult for the television market. I bet they show the final ball. I bet that's what it's going to come down to, right? Well, I mean, you've got a mix of factors. I mean, think about any stream that you watch or if you've ever put on a stream. What's the first thing that you probably notice? Have you ever noticed how TVs are oriented horizontally and the pinball machines oriented vertically? Yes. It doesn't really work very well. You take up a third of the screen. You've got this whole huge play field, and you're only showing a third of a screen because, you know what? The homeowner isn't going to go and turn their TV on its head at a 90-degree angle to be able to watch pinball. Yeah, they have pivoting monitors and all that, and people talk about them on the pinball forums. The common man isn't going to go out and buy that crap, people. It's almost unwatchable. You've shrunk it so much. Even on a 60-inch TV, now all of a sudden it's like I'm in 1984 again watching on a tube. Dennis, I blame you for this, and I will explain why, Dennis. So much hate. Because of your hatred, whether it's on Twip or Eclectic Gamers Podcast, your hatred for wide bodies, which would be better to see on those screens as opposed to the standard bodies. Wide bodies look a little nicer, but because you bash them every single week, every opportunity, even here on Pinball Profile, you, sir, are to blame for the lack of growth for streaming. Of course, I'm joking. Of course you are. I was actually very restrained. I even mentioned Hobbit and used it in a totally neutral light. I thought you would have been very proud of me, but here you are baiting me into my renowned shtick. Yes, my oft-lamented complaints about Widebody. Yeah, imagine Widebody is on stream. Okay, I'll give you this. They'd fill up a little bit more of the screen. You were already complaining about slow games, and here you are chucking a Widebody. Hey, look, let's watch the ball move side to side to side. Okay, some of them aren't as floaty. There are definitely floaty games. Look at Demolition Man. That doesn't play like a lot. Demolition Man is a standard body game with a left-hand side that isn't even used. So, yes, it's a great wide body. It's the best wide body that was ever made. Congratulations. That's one. What else? Full throttle also, because of all the ramps it has, actually shoots pretty well because it keeps its speed going because as long as you've made those ramps, there's no side-to-side action. The ball is coming back into play. It's the side to side that cause. Look, there's a whole mathematical thing I could explain about why wide bodies don't work as well. I know you're a fan of wide bodies. I'm also a fan of math. You are you? I went to university for honors math. Really? Wow. And then you ended up in radio. Did some stand up comedy, did some radio. And I use it's funny because, yes, I talk on this podcast. I use math every single day. I'm in sales and radio. So numbers, that's all I see. OK, well. Just give a quick summary. I've actually, Jeff Patterson with This Week in Pinball has asked me if I would ever be willing to write up an article explaining my arguments on wide bodies. I'm like, no, that's just going to create drama. Transcribe this, Jeff. Go ahead. Maybe at some point. I actually was going to get out a tape measure and start doing it while I still had Superman because I did own a wide body. Yeah, the issue. Here's the way I would just initially think about it. When people feel like wide bodies are slow because it takes longer for the ball, generally speaking, to get back, here's the first thing I would start with. Think about the lower section of that play field. All Italian bottoms now. That's what all these pinball machines have. And you think about that it's just as wide at the bottom as it is at the top because we're not tapering. Flippers are the same size as they are on a standard body. So you've got segments, especially in the lower portion of the play field, where you can't really interact with the ball. You're just waiting for the ball to get back to the flipper. And because the width is more, the inevitable outcome is you must wait longer before you get to be interacting with the ball again. The solutions are either expand the outlanes a la Paragon, you know, beast lair death zone, or you do a hobbit where you stick a whole bunch of inlanes in and the game's super safe. But you're still waiting in that whole section for the ball to get back to the flipper, and you can't shoot down there. The flippers can't reach those shots. The only way you could have shots off to the sides in the lower section would be to add additional flippers on the side. But the designers know that how would you ever feed those flippers cleanly and actually have an enjoyable shooting experience? You can't. You could have wide bodies that were fun that weren't like Demolition Man, but you'd have to do things like either taper to a standard width at the bottom and then get bigger at the back so that you fan out those shots. That would be a solution. Change the flipper sizes from the three inches. That would be a solution. But pinball people don't like change, so we don't get to have fun wide bodies. What do you mean pinball people don't like change? I'm joking. Pinball people don't like change. That's why we have to have Italian bottoms all the time. We can't have middle pop pinball anymore. We can't have our fun, Jeff. We can't have my fun. Well, you love high flow games. I'm right there with you. I do. I do. So I love Italian bottoms. I'm as much a hypocrite as anyone. You love middle pop pins. Yes. You don't see those anymore. I think Sega of Tokyo made the last one I'm aware of, the only one that was a solid state. I've never played that one. But, yeah, Freedom Prototype is a pretty popular one if you ever get a chance to experience it. Or Fantastic or Spanish Eyes is probably the one most people know. I like that style. Spanish Eyes is pretty cool, yeah. But, I mean, the only thing about that is all you're doing is hitting that, I call it the silver ball mania shot, that arc. Yeah, I would like to see someone do a middle pop with our new knowledge, our more advanced knowledge of rules design and layout, where the pop could actually be worth a lot. You're using it as a passing tool, kind of like how center posts, Kirk posts used to be. Use it like that, maybe really incorporate it in a game. It moves you away from the standard bottom, the Italian bottom, and also changes up this trap all day. I know everyone likes to complain about Premiere and their end-of-stroke huge flippers as a bone busters for letting you trap up easy, But trapping today is really easy with these Italian bottoms compared to what it could be. And I wouldn't mind to see a little more challenge like that. But a lot of people feel very comfortable just sticking with that consistent bottom. There's a reason why everyone does it. Game of Thrones is one of the easiest games to trap long. Sure. Trap all day and then die on the and then die on the battering ram. But hey, there's always a price. Steve will punish you eventually. Just make sure you're in multiball when you're battering that thing. Yes. You love hurry ups as well, too. Oh, yeah. One of my favorite Premiere games is Hoops, and that's a game that's driven entirely by hurry-ups. I like that the pressure it gives you. The sound usually gets faster. It's like, hit that shot, hit that shot, hit that shot. I don't know. I tend to drain more often when it's going on, but it's a rule that's easy to understand for people. It's one shot. Can you make it before it counts down to a minimum value or counts down and goes away? And so I just find that exhilarating in a way that I don't really feel with multiball anymore. Well, hurry-ups are a big part of a game we already mentioned. Star Wars, and that is one of the most exciting things about that game. I mean, that's going to make or break you. Some people might say, well, there's a scoring imbalance, but it's the same for everyone else. It's taken me a while to come around on that game. I'm still not huge on that, but I go out of my way to play it now to, again, learn it and to try different things. And I was in Han the other day. And what is the green mode? Endor? I think so. Sure. So I accidentally started that, which is stupid. You should be going video modes. And then I'm like, I am in jail until I complete this. And I think there were eight shots and I was like, okay, it took me until ball three to get rid of it. Now, if you play R2D2 playing Endor stacked with other things is very, very beneficial. Now that is something you don't like about pinball. You cannot stand stackable multiballs. Yeah, and I should clarify that. I can tolerate them, but I don't enjoy them. And I had someone ask me about this recently. Why do I not like that? Because I like bringing a multiball into a mode, like you do with Star Trek, for example, where you're just like, you don't want to start a multiball without a mode going. You can't start a mode once you're in the multiball. Guardians? Yeah, another great, and I really like Guardians. I love Guardians. I like that. I like bringing in the multiball with a mode. and sort of stacking that. But if you're talking like ACDC or Hobbit, where it just seems to be like multiball on top of multiball, Batman Dark Knight was an example game that always stood out to me where, you know, you go into Scarecrow multiball, but you also wanted to have Joker multiball. And I was always like, I don't know. I always felt like I wasn't really, maybe it's that I'm just, I'm very simple and I get confused, like which multiballs are running, keeping track of them, keeping track of those. I mean, I'm still just shooting the lit shots, but I find it completely flat. It never excites me to stack multi-balls. I will do it on a game like ACDC, especially now, because I know that's how to win, but I don't love it. I'd rather play a mode. I'm curious. Some of these games we've talked about are going to be at that Stern Pro Circuit in Chicago at Bottom Lounge. There's something else that's been added. We talked about ESPN now filming it, but as it has recently come out, you can bet on the players. There's some offshore betting that you can pick any of the 40 people and I'm one of them and I don't know how I feel about that I can tell you right now I'm not betting I'll tell you that right now because I just don know how I feel about that you know if if I bet on somebody else and I should make the finals with them and the money would be bigger than the prize I could win don't lie to me and tell me there wouldn't be a temptation to just lay down. Right? No, no. This is... I'm not saying I would. That's why I'm not betting. I'm not betting. It's not healthy. Let's just put it that way. I'm not going to say it's unhealthy, but it's not healthy. I get the fun part of it. I think that's kind of cool. And, hey, last year at Pimberg, there was this fun. It didn't cost anything. A bunch of us, I think there were 60 people. It was on an Excel spreadsheet. I don't know if you were on it, Dennis, or not, but we picked five people we thought would do well, and you got maximum points for if they finished first. So if they finished first, 840. I don't even think we allowed Keith Elwin to be in it, actually. But you know what I mean? So if you came in last, you get one point, and then the top five scores. It was fun. There was $0 in it. I was cool with that, and I have nothing against gambling. Trust me, I'm going to be in Vegas at the end of March. You want to see me? Check a poker room or a craps table. That's probably where you'll find me. So I'm not nose up in the air to gambling by any means. And I'm also there for March Madness. Bet, bet, bet, bet, bet. I'm going to be like Fred Flintstone on that old episode. This is interesting because it's real people, and I wonder how they come up with the odds. Could there be collusion? I guess there could be with anything. I mean, Floyd Mayweather, when he fights, he puts money on himself. Didn't Pete Rose get banned from baseball? Well, and that's the thing. Pete Rose is what's coming to my mind. That's what's coming to mind. Never to be in the Hall of Fame. And why? Because he bet on games that he was involved with. And that potential obviously exists here. You've pointed it out. And it's permissible because this hobby, this sport, if you want to call it a sport, of competitive pinball has now grown with so many people and is starting to get more attention. And even with the challenges of televising and streaming and all of that stuff, it's still attracting more eyes than it had five years ago, 10 years ago. And so things like this are cropping up now. But we have no governance on any of it. We have no sanctioning body. We have nothing that comes out and says, you can't bet on yourself or you can bet on yourself. It's all just silent. And so, yeah, what if someone wanted to bet that someone else would win and they were in the tournament and they sandbagged to help ensure that person would perform, for an example? Or what if, you know, I'm like, hey, I'm with the mob. This is my Italian accent, so you just have to deal with it. Well done. Thank you. You're voicing the mafia? That's really well done. Hey, Jeff, I got an offer for you. I just, man, I just, I need you. I need you to lose in the semifinals, man. Here's $10,000. Yeah, well, first of all, I'd have to make the semifinals. I'm usually a one and done guy. I believe in you, Jeff. We believe in you. You know what? I just, I also don't want that on my mind as I'm actually playing, you know, because I know it's exciting for some people and all power to you. I'm not here to judge. I certainly know I gamble on other things. I took a bath on the Rams losing at the Super Bowl, but I think I got to separate myself from this. Yeah. I mean, I'm not, I'm not a big gambling sort of person myself. If people weren't talking about this, I probably wouldn't put much thought into it at all, honestly. And maybe, maybe I should do a better job given I do podcasting as well, but it just wouldn't have stood out to me as a thing because I don't think much about it. But as I've been in more groups watching people who are more competitive than me talking about these sort of things, I'm always amazed at what stands out to people in terms of what they find interesting or exciting, exhilarating. The thing for me in this regard is I just, I remember, not because I was there, but because of my own research on the past of pinball, the damage that the gambling side of pin gaming had on what we call novelty pinball was so significant. You think about Roger Sharp and the shop that saved pinball and all the gambling was a real thing that was happening with all the ballet for years was just pushing bingo machines. They didn't have novelty pinballs until they brought Ted Zale back in under their auspices and said, here, we need to have a novelty pinball division because too many laws are being passed to stop us from taking kids lunch money. And you can like those games. You can like pin gambling. You can like dollar games. But I would just caution, don't forget that pinball was a shameful thing for a lot of people for a long time because of those gambling elements and the reports that the mafia was involved. and there were these small-time criminal rings that used it as a way to make cash or to launder money or whatever. It doesn't matter. Now, I don't think we'll ever see a repeat of that. Society's morality has evolved since that time and gambling is not seen in the same light as it was. But I would still be cautious. I mean, you still see the same sentiments come up with things like you mentioned Fortnite earlier, microtransactions, loot crates in video games. there are countries, European countries in particular, that are looking at passing laws that say you cannot sell someone the chance to win a particular item in a video game. And the big push on that is because kids don't know any better, and they're spending all of this money on it. And this touches on, it could be a touchstone on it. That's why I'd be cautious. I believe, and I hope I'm not incorrect, but I thought IFP 14 in Denmark, there were no cash prizes, kind of for that same reason. I know Raymond, when he won it, I'm sure he got a machine. He's gotten a few in his days, but I don't recall there being cash prizes. Now again, let's back up a little bit. This is an offshore site. This has nothing to do with Stern, has nothing to do with IFPA or PAPA. It's done by whatever the bookie site is. So it's just interesting that that has shown up. And you know what? I know what's really big in the news right now, but it was out there over a year ago too. I know you could bet on the IFPA 14 in Denmark. So probably the same site. Yeah, I'm going to take a pass. Okay. What I do want to ask you, we were talking about podcasting and you've been doing this for a little while right now. I've been doing this for a little while. You and I in our little private discussions have talked about the burnout factor of podcasting and you've noticed it kind of happens around the two, two and a half year mark. Is that safe to say? Yeah, I think so. I think we've had enough examples to see the pattern at this stage, but I've not scientifically measured it. Why burnout? Just life changes? You're running out of things to say? Yeah, I think it's a mix of things. Actually, it's easier to talk now than it used to be, depending on what you want to talk about in the hobby. when you think about there's more news than there used to be. Of course, some of that's helped by people like Jeff Patterson and This Week in Pinball being able to consolidate a lot of that information. I would always just sort of watch the hot threads on Pinside to know my news stuff, and I still tend to do that. Part of the reason Tony and I went to an every-other-week schedule from the get-go was, I remember his argument was, I don't think there's enough news for us to do a podcast every week. And in the last year or so, you probably could, for most weeks, get away with doing a weekly and actually having enough to just be driven by the news itself. But touching on, there's still, especially in pinball, there's not that much news. When you think about how many, all right, well, now Munsters came out. And then what's the next week? Oh, well, there's a code update for Munsters. Oh, and look, here's some new high-resolution picks of the premium. So you're still kind of talking about the same thing. And a lot of stuff is driven more by rumor. But how often do you want to talk about Willy Wonka and Toy Story? I mean, I don't know. I don't really care too much to talk about rumors very much. I find them boring until I see the product. It's just, it's hard for me to get excited. So you've got those. That's not my thing either. Yeah. And then pinball. And this is probably true with other hobbies as well, like video games and all that, but it's always seems a little drama prone and it doesn't seem to take. Yeah. You know, I know, I know I'm shocking you, Jeff, but it doesn't seem to take a lot of work for a podcaster to kind of step in it and start getting criticized. And it's hard. When you want to talk about the news, but you don't want to be the news, if that makes sense. And that can really burn out a lot of podcasters. I communicate with a lot of them on the pinball side. And some of the stuff that you might think looking publicly was fairly minor, some of them can take it pretty hard. And just say like, oh, I really didn't like it. There was all this blow up. I didn't mean anything by whatever happened. Everyone overreacted or it was a joke and they didn't think it was a joke, all that stuff. And it just gets tedious. And it can be a grind. I know you're a big supporter of not following a release schedule, and I am a big supporter of following a release schedule, but you are fair in saying that one of the challenges with following the release schedule is you can start to regret the schedule. You can start to be embittered to the schedule because you feel obligated to stick with it, and that can really burn out too. And it seems like those who are the most consistent tend to be the ones that follow that two- to two-and-a-half-year burnout. I couldn't do it on a regular basis. Just life happens. Things happen. Travel, work, family. I do it where I see fit. And also considering that every show I have, I have a guest on. It has to fit their schedule, too. So there's no burden for me to edit these. I think I have after this six or seven that I have to edit. Jeff, so much work. Just go to the every other week schedule. Look at me. I'm still limping along. You know what? One thing. This isn't even a podcast. Let's be honest. It's an interview show. I'm hardly talking about the news or the rumors or anything like that. Very small snippets of that. We talk a lot of competition because I'm obviously somebody who likes to compare. You're a top-tier player, Jeff. One of the best. Always bet on red. No. I like to talk to people from all walks of life and learn about them and their stories, whether in pinball or outside of pinball. That fascinates me. and as far as opinions we all have them i don't expect anybody to agree with everything i feel or believe you shouldn't you would be a stalker if you did you know what i mean like i may say something i'm on this podcast we just talked about so there may be difference of opinions but that's fine you're allowed to have that the thing that burns me the most is when people imply what i'm saying when that is not necessarily the case and that that that's the thing that ticks me off the most. Sure. And that overreacting happens a lot. You have all sorts of people. I just within the hobby and people I've interacted with, people who have written in, I don't I don't like do a what would you call it, like a mailbag segment regularly on the show. People will write in and I usually just respond privately or Tony, my co-host, responds privately. But one of those things that that will come up is there will be people and they will complain about something or take issue with something. And sometimes it's valid and sometimes it's what I would term an overreaction, but some people are really sensitive to stuff and they take things personally or they misinterpret or they hear something and then they think you meant more than what you really did mean. It happens, but because it starts to play out on forums, on other podcasts, that can really contribute, I think, to a lot of the burnout stuff. You see, the secret, I got all sorts of secret stuff. So then another secret is if your podcast isn't very popular, like Tony and my podcast isn't, then you get far less blowback because no one's listening. Works great. I get hardly any blowback. I'm trying to remember the biggest I ever got. I think I had someone get upset that they felt I was overly critical of Spooky and not Stern on the Godzilla thing. I think that was the one. And it wasn't super negative. They just said, I really think Stern did the wrong thing here. And my response was, I think it was just this is business and I don't think it's a big deal. and that was just the difference of opinion but