Warning, the following episode contains adult language and screaming goats. Listener discretion is advised. The Pinball Network is online. Launching The Pinball Show. On episode 95 of The Pinball Show, we talk about being back from the Texas Pinball Festival. We hear from a correspondent. it we talk about weird al at tpf we talk about Mirco madness and the tale of tales we cover presdretti's plans to expand 2.0 offerings we discuss the cactus canyon remake code expansion being a kit we cover numerous american pinball updates we discuss the 2021 twiffy award ceremony and of course pinball market trends all this and more on episode 95 of the pinball show Pinball is a game of skill. For some, it's a passion and a lifestyle. It's time for the Pinball Show. It's pinball with personality. Hey everybody, welcome to episode 95 of the Pinball Show. I am your host, Dennis Creasel, fresh off my sojourn to Texas. It was too late last night for me to want to record, so I'm doing it in the morning. I do plan to get the episode out on the same day as it typically comes out, so if you are hearing this on Monday, it means I succeeded, though it will definitely be later than the normal morning time we go for. All that said, I have no guest host. I'm doing this solo. There are a lot of people to meet at TPF. A lot of them were willing to come on the show, but as is often the case when I go and travel, I was way too tired to pull out a recorder. So given all of that, I just want to say it was really refreshing to be back at another show, sort of as we reach the tail end, we hope, of the COVID-19 pandemic. Obviously, the first show many of us, myself included, were back at was Pinball Expo late last year. However, I was once again reminded just how much better Texas Pinball Festival, or TPF as we'll commonly call it, is versus Expo. I was actually surprised at the number of people, I shouldn't be surprised, but I was a little surprised, at the number of people who came up to me at TPF who had never been to a show other than the latest Expo and said, paraphrased, whoa, Dennis, you're right, TPF is way better than Expo. Like, I know I'm prone to hyperbole, but I was being really legitimate. It is a way better show on a variety of fronts. I won't go in all those today. I will say I know one of the organizers around Expo was at TPF. Let's just say I hope they took some notes. So given all of that, let's get going with the correspondence, or I should say a correspondent, because it looks like we only have an update from Stern Pinball. It's time for TPN Industry News. Hello and welcome to the Pinball Show Stern News Update. I'm Craig Bobby. Well, if you're feeling that horrible taste of FOMO bubbling up in your throat this past weekend, you wouldn't be alone. No, it's not your partner's homemade spaghetti that's giving you heartburn. It's because you weren't at the annual Texas Pinball Festival in beautiful downtown Frisco, Texas this past weekend. But with no real news on the horizon over at Stern, all eyes are still on quality control as Rush Scoopgate continues, this time with Stern's third attempt at a solution for that failing scoop protector. We call this one the Blue Airbag Solution. So in honor of this latest attempt, let's go over a quick recap of what Stern has done to date thus far to shore up this quality control issue on that scoop they are having with this latest Rush title. Hot off the Stern assembly line back in early 2022, we have revision zero, no protection. Moving on quickly, we have Revision 1, a thin tin protector with ears down into the hole. It's at this point that the Rush owners group runs up a flag and wonders, could there be a problem? But let's chalk it up to poor materials from their vendor. Quickly out of the gate from that disaster, we have Revision 2, stronger metal, no ears, forks into the screws. It's at this point that the Rush owners group on Facebook put their collective hands in front of their faces and whispered, John Borg, hold me now, but to no avail. And finally we have revision three, the aforementioned blue airbag solution consisting of two hideous looking blue foam pads that sit on either side of the scoop to protect against side or lateral ball shots. Say what? Now this has to be one of the most head-scratching solutions that Stern has come up with with one of their games. Surely Stern can come up with a stronger piece of metal that can protect the edge of this hole and withstand the rigors of the silver ball like generations of pinball manufacturers have before them. Now understandably, this latest fix is being met with outcry from Rush owners' groups as Stern continues to fly by night on this to come up with a good long-term solution. But, you guessed it, we shall have to wait and see. And speaking of problems, just when you thought the number one reviewed pinball machine of all time and king of all monsters, Godzilla, was immune to QC problems, we get a Facebook post on the Stern Pinball Enthusiast page from Joe Abate showing his magnet mech on Mechagodzilla that has failed and fallen out after repeated ball hits. Now, there's no telling yet how prevalent this issue is with other Godzilla owners. However, similar to his ingenious moving Grogu mod on the Mandalorian, Joe does everyone in the Godzilla community a huge favor by posting his fix in very good detail, complete with a Mechagodzilla mech diagram showing exactly how it's put together and can be fixed. Way to go again, Joe! And in the last two weeks since our last show, we've had a bunch of code updates. We've had Led Zeppelin, code V1.15. A nice update to Godzilla, code V.93. and new Rush Code V.91 for the Pro, Premium, and Limited Edition models. All these codes contain numerous game enhancements, additional polish, game adjustments, and bug fixes. Well, that's all for this week for the Pinball Show. I'm Craig Bobby. Catch you on the flip side. Thank you, Craig, for that incredible coverage about everything involving Stern, and by everything I mean the details of ScoopGate. I will say I did actually play one of the Rush games, I think it was a pro model, at TPF, and I saw the new Scoop Protector, and I was very confused by it. When I saw it, actually, my first initial reaction was, oh, they've decided to make this harder, and actually put in, sort of like, for those that are familiar with tournaments, sometimes they'll take games, and if there's a really easy shot, there are tricks you can do to make it more difficult, such as putting on thicker rubbers to actually reduce the size of the opening of a ramp, for example. That's what this looked like. They were trying to reduce the size of the opening of the scoop with these foam things. But it was the Marco Specialty's booth. I don't think they were trying to make the games harder for anyone, and I was like, oh, this must be the new scoop protector. But anyway, it's pretty interesting, but you just heard all of that. I won't reiterate it. So let's go ahead and move on to what was seen as the one new game that took its show debut at TPF, and that would be Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity. We've discussed that game, as have many podcasts, since it was revealed some time ago, and this was the first major show where people would have an opportunity to play it. Now, at TPF, there were two games on the floor. One had the LE kit installed, and one was the more standard edition. I did actually have an opportunity to play both iterations of the game, and watch some others, especially those I was playing with, perform on the module. So I'm not going to give a full breakdown review because I do not yet have enough time to properly review the game. Here are my general takeaways that I have. This is a winner, as I think a lot of people felt from the trailer and the reveal and the license. But actually getting to play it, it plays pretty well. Do I think it plays better than Heist? I currently think Heist is more my type of game, but that's probably more a personality thing. But what I can say is with what limited time I have on Weird Al and having now seen more live in-person gameplay, I think the game's definitely a winner. I think the layout is fun. In terms of the toys, the item that stood out to me the most in person was the hamster wheel, not the camera, which was what sort of caught my eye in the moving trailer. It wasn't really the lift ramp either. It was just for whatever reason. When you see that ball go in the hamster wheel, it seems so simple. But this is really neat. This is a really neat visual effect. and I enjoyed it. The shots, you know, some of them were more challenging than others. So I think it had a mix of easy and hard shots, which again is something that I do look for in pinball games that I am interested in. Flipper feel, I'm not a good one to assess on this. I talked with some people who were still uncomfortable with how the flippers felt. I actually never felt uncomfortable with the original version of the Multimorphics P3 platform flippers. So to me, they still feel the same and that was that they feel fine. I, like a lot of people, I sort of put Stern flippers at the top of my list in terms of how snappy they are. But these, I think they're pretty good. I enjoy these flippers more than I enjoy Jersey Jack flippers as a counterpoint. The game modes were really well executed in terms of how they tie into the songs, how much I enjoyed a particular mode. And again, I only played maybe two or three modes, but I watched other people play some modes. And I think it was pretty clear, by and large, to know what to do. my biggest struggle was if the information's on the screen and not say a lit insert towards the module I struggled more in identifying what to shoot and I know at least one other player in one of the groups I was playing with ran into the same thing and I started to think about why that might be and I think it's just a factor of when you have an insert it's so much brighter than the surrounding wood and art of the play field whereas if it's a display on the screen it's basically the brightness is the same as the rest of the display. And I think that's why maybe some of us struggle to recognize and identify it. But once you know to look for it, I thought it was pretty straightforward to know exactly what you need to do because it's often literally spelled out on the screen. The overall look of the game was great. I thought the play was fun. And I think no matter where it might shake out between Heist and Weird Al for me, both of them are, at least in terms of games that come with the modules. I've not tried all the third-party games, but games that come with the modules, those two are the top two. You know, overall, I still think that the crane just blows my mind. So I'm a huge heist fan over Weird Al for mostly the mechanics and the engineering, just how cool that toy is. But overall, I think it's definitely a winner. If you saw the size of the lines waiting for Weird Al, I mean, overall, I think this was a very good showing for the module. I talked with a number of people about it, those I played with, those who I would run into later, and they would often bring it up. Again, it was the new game of the show, and it got a lot of attention for those reasons. And the response was very positive. I know a number of people who still had issues with the platform, like they didn't enjoy the platform. And the biggest ones that I often heard were related to some people saying, as I noted, that they still didn't really care for how the flippers flip. There were some people that don't like the button layout on the sides of the cabinet. And that's pretty much it. And again, those aren't Weird Al things. Those are P3 platform things. I think that's why it's important for people to go ahead and play some games on the P3, even if it isn't Weird Al, and just get a feel for the platform and decide is it something you enjoy or is it something that just feels too often you don't think you're gonna get down and it's gonna be case by case for folks. There were a number of people that were concerned about having to flip the upper flippers with different buttons, but I did hear on the floor and I would share this information as well whenever I had people talk to me about that. You can go into the system settings, I've been told. I've never done it myself because I don't own a P3, but you can go and configure it so that a single button will work all of the flippers. And that was getting shared really widely just by a variety of people. So the information from Multimorphic about that option seems to really be getting out there to alleviate those issues. I actually, while I did struggle with moving my hand from one button to another because I can't really rest it, I can't rest the fingers I want to flip on all the buttons I want, and some people have different strategies for how to do that, I felt I adapted okay to that pretty quick, you know, getting used to using another button. It takes some rewiring of the brain, but I don't think it's overly challenging for people if they give it a chance. No, my problem was more so actually those upper flippers, not the fifth, not the little flipper, the stealth flipper, the top flipper, but the two upper flippers on the sides because they're sort of recessed in. And I believe I may be incorrect, but I believe that's done so that you can leave those flippers in and they're not causing any geometry problems with other games. So you don't always have to take the flippers out. My problem I ran into, though, was I can't see the flippers in my normal standing position when I play, and that is how I time when to flip on a flipper is based off of the ball's placement on the flipper rubber on the flipper itself. Now, I did have someone at the show tell me they saw some markings on the play field that allowed them to easily identify where some portion of the flipper was, and that's what they used to base their shots off of, and they found success with that. I did not try that method. I would just lean my head to the side to clearly see the flipper, but I don't like to play like that. So it was awkward for me but that was my I guess that my number one takeaway that and again that more of just a placement and how the platform works It doesn really have anything directly to do with the Weird Al module itself and how enjoyable that was to shoot So overall, I say congratulations to all of Multimorphic and those that worked on the game. I think they definitely got a hit on their hands. I did not have anyone, not a single person I can think of, who said that they hated it. And you know, sometimes games are really polarizing. This one does not seem to be. There are going to be people that aren't going to get on board with the platform. But that being said, the game itself and how it's been designed seems to be widely embraced anecdotally based off the feedback of this very well attended show. So good job. Now, in terms of a less good job, let's go ahead and transition to one of the discussions of the seminars that came out at TPF. Now, full disclosure, I did not attend any seminars at TPF. I would either catch part of them online or I'd go and read up on them. And that's what I encourage you all to do because it's too late to go and attend the seminar. So if you want to, you can always go and try and find the recordings. Alternatively, I will suggest if you want to go to NAP Arcade, which is www.naparcade.org. NAP has summarized a lot of these seminars that had information. So you can read up on what was going on. And it's a great place to go and get more details. And I think in many of those, if not all of those instances, there are links to the actual video. So you can go and find them. But I want to go ahead and start with Merko because they were there officially to present their Williams Tales of the Arabian Nights, The Forgotten Tales, or a.k.a. the Totan 2.0 kit. And that did happen. And so the presentation was such that Merko went through. They had some slides. They explained a few things. And those few things, for those that are curious about it, is you've got some new video modes. You've got another wizard mode. There are five new multiballs to the game. They added additional tails. And hardware-wise, there's a new speaker panel. You've got an RGB DMD, so you get a colorized version of the screen. It's got some new speakers set up. It's got some new inserts for new tails up in the speaker panel, not in the play field, obviously. And some new artwork has been employed. The game has a subwoofer. It's got some new call-outs, and they used the original voice actress, which I thought was pretty interesting. It's got stereo sound, new music's included. There are status displays for some diagnostic stuff, and there's more through-hole parts, so it's easy to repair this stuff if it goes down. And some other feature stuff is there's a ball save now, and it has a new auto-launcher. So, I mean, there's a lot to this sort of kit. and it involves a lot of new equipment. So you would think that a lot of the questions would be driven about what's going on or some more clarification on Totan 2.0, but that is not apparently what happened. And those of you that are familiar with Mirco know that there's been a bit of a controversy lately because the understanding is Mirco supplies the playfields to Jersey Jack Pinball. And while multiple manufacturers have struggled with playfield chipping or pooling or other playfield-related issues throughout their 10 years making games, Jersey Jack Pinball is sort of seen as the current poster child of long-running, frustrating issues with playfields, and resolution has often been unsatisfactory to buyers. Now, I could not understand what the questions were. There were no microphones that were feeding to the Twitch feed, because while I was not in the room, I did go back and try and listen to this presentation or the portion where the Q&A was going on. But most of the questions were regarding the playfields, and the problem was Merko didn't really say anything. And some of this might be a language barrier, or just it came across to me like being unprepared in the sense that there were a lot of comments going on in a pin-side thread about Totan 2.0 being revealed, discussed, you know, covered in the seminar at the upcoming TPF. Mirco had someone who posted about this in that thread. So the thread had comments about the playfields, a lot of comments about the playfield concerns. There's no legitimate reason that a representative from Mirco going to talk about Totan 2.0 should not have been aware of and had some talking points regarding what to do or what's going on with the playfields. Now, I do sympathize to a degree with Merko in the sense that, and they did get this out during the seminar, during the Q&A, and I've discussed this before. I'm not sure I did it on this podcast, but I've done it over on Eclectic Gamers Podcast, and that is the contract between the game buyer is with the manufacturer or through their distributor, not with Merko. So if you're having problems with your Jersey Jack pinball play field, you need to be talking with your distributor if you used one and or Jersey Jack pinball. They made the game. And my analogy is, if there's an airbag issue in my Ford, I do not contact whoever built the airbag and complain to them about whatever's wrong with the airbag, even if it is their fault. Ford needs to deal with that. That's who I got the vehicle from. And that's how I see this, that ultimately I completely understand the frustration of buyers. We've had, while I do not own any JJP games. We have had JJP games on location that have had these problems, and they're very evident. And I can easily see why it is so frustrating for a collector, a homeowner, who sees that sort of stuff, especially after such few plays, and be rightly quite frustrated. But that really needs to be resolved through JJP. There's not really a way to work around it. All that said, because it's so well known about Mirko providing the playfields and there were so many comments online. Mirko should have been ready for those questions and not come across as I felt it came across as extremely dismissive. Some of the statements made it sound like that there just is no problem and that while it kind of got out that if there is a problem, they'll work it out with JJP. It just came across as extremely cold and almost head in the sand. You know, My recommendation would have been, okay, you get these sort of questions, you need to say, thank you for stating this. If you've purchased a game, such as a Jersey Jack game like Guns N' Roses, and it's having a play field issue, you need to go through your distributor or through Jersey Jack Pinball, whoever you bought it through, and they are to work with us if it's something on our end and we work out a resolution that way. That's the proper process and maybe have some information about how to go about doing that, such as being ready to share JJP's support number or support email, things along those lines. Likewise, though, if people had issues with any directly purchased Mirco playfields, because they do reproduction playfields, and again, I couldn't hear the questions clearly, because I thought maybe there was someone who was asking about that, but I'm not sure. Obviously, that's with Mirco, and they should have been ready to address those as well. I get it. They came in, and they just were sort of like, well, this is the seminar on Totan 2.0, so we're only going to talk about Totan 2.0. That ain't how the world works. We don't always get to only talk about the things we want to talk about. Trust me, I do a podcast. I have to cover subjects I don't want to talk about all the time. It just was, to me, I want to say shocking, but I guess not, given that there was no feedback in the, in the pin side thread from them on the play field stuff either. or I guess I'm not really surprised at sort of the head in the sand thing, but it just wasn't a good look, and, you know, it could have gone way better, but it didn't, so that's what we're talking about. Moving on, let's talk a little bit about Pedretti. I mean, we're on the subject of 2.0 kits, so now let's go and talk about 2.0 kits without having to deviate into the realm of playfield issues. So for those that don't know, Pedretti is the company that is producing the Funhaus 2.0 kit, The Rudy's Nightmare, which was at the show, I believe, but I never got a chance to play it, unfortunately. What they have indicated is now that they're shipping The Rudy's Nightmare games, they are going to be doing more 2.0 titles. They've got a deal with Planetary Pinball Supply PPS to go ahead and do more, and they said that they have started on the next 2.0 kit. It's going to be using the Fast Retro platform, which I believe is a System 11 style board set, and they will be incorporating some extensions that that platform supports. So Shaker Motor, you can do mods, you can have a topper. I don't know how many kits total they're doing. I don't think they said. At least I don't see a summary on an account that was shared at Nap Arcade. And I'm mentioning that because I recall that we did get a count out of Haggis in terms of remakes that they could potentially do. They had an account that they shared. Obviously, there seems to be a sense, at least from some of these manufacturers and from PPS, that there is demand for more and more 2.0 kits. And given the number that we've been discussing lately out and about, either in development as homebrews or actually being executed as commercial projects, I agree. It seems like there's a market here. I'm not surprised. There was a lot of really positive feedback years ago when Dutch Pinball did the Bride of Pinball 2.0. That's what, in my view, really put them on the map. and got them a lot of the credence that they used to go ahead and launch the Big Lebowski project. But we've been kind of dormant since then without really anything. And it feels a little weird that they're all landing here at the same time. I don't know if that's because there's an enhanced push through PPS to share licensing on this stuff. I think it's probably more looking at the success of remakes, like what we see out of CGC, which involves PPS-controlled licenses, and what we've seen now out of Haggis involving Fathom Revisited. And I think people are like, okay, well, what if we don't want to build a full game because pinball is so hard? Let's see about doing a kit. And, hey, you have a finite market, obviously, because there are only so many of these games out there. But many of these games had thousands upon thousands of units produced. So I do think there's a good market opportunity for people to make some money and possibly really make some improvements to some older games. So it could be seen as a win-win. We'll just have to see how these things go and assuming all these projects hold up and are able to produce and we don't see kind of a deep root situation, then I think the momentum will continue to be sustained for these sort of 2.0 efforts as we move forward with the hobby. Speaking of remakes, you notice my transitions are all on point without Zach here. It's working really well. We've got Cactus Canyon remakes. So let's talk a little bit about that and specifically the updated code that Lyman Sheets and Josh Sharpe were working on. and Josh Sharpe is continuing to work on for those that are interested in purchasing a new rule set for the Cactus Canyon game. There was a seminar at TPF where they talked about the completion of Cactus Canyon, and feedback of the seminar itself was very, very positive. I think a lot of people were bearing in mind just how sloppy, I'll say, the Expo seminar was for Cactus Canyon Remake's announcement. And so at this though, I've heard it was extremely professional, a really well-polished seminar, and a lot of people were really excited to go and attend it. So the interesting piece of information that I heard coming out of the seminar though, which I didn't know about, was that this is not just going to be a download software install, but rather there is going to be some sort of kit that includes a hardware component or multiple components that will be involved. Now, my understanding is the seminar did not go into any details about that. If I were to guess, unless they're adding something feature-wise, physically feature-wise, which I'm currently not guessing, obviously, is that there's going to be some sort of almost DRM control to ensure people don't just share this code around. And so there's going to be maybe a chip or some add-in so that you have a physical item that confirms you actually are allowed to have the legitimate expanded code option. That's all I'm guessing currently that this is, is that this kit is going to be like a chip. Don't know, maybe totally wrong, blind shot in the dark guess. But one of the things that I know I've discussed with other podcasters is, okay, well, once this code comes what's going to stop someone from burning ROMs and sharing it and saving people money, especially given how expensive the expanded code is. And the thought would be, okay, well, you need some sort of DRM, that's digital rights management, but I'm thinking something akin to that to sort of make sure that you are allowed to have it. And I think something like that was employed on the Medieval Madness remakes. I'm not sure. I don't, it's so far back. I can't remember, but I thought something like that was in play. So anyway, it would be a relatively straightforward way to solve the problem of code sharing, which I do think CGC is going to be very sensitive of given the limited market size that exists for the code and wanting to make sure that people aren't working around the ability for them to sell it. Speaking of pinball, all right, the transitions have now sort of fallen into the gutter, but what can I do? We've got American pinball. Now, American Pinball also had a seminar at TPF, because hey, if you're at TPF, you have seminars. And they had a bunch of updates that they went ahead and shared with the community. So, let's go ahead and start with Legends of Valhalla. So, they have created an inner art blades, those side blades, for the game. And anyone who purchased the deluxe edition and has registered it with American Pinball is supposed to be able to get those blades shipped to them for free. And if you didn't buy the deluxe edition, that meant you went with, I believe it's the classic edition, you will have an option to be able to go on and buy these if you are interested in them. So speaking of art, let's talk about Christopher Franchi, very well-known pinball artist. I think a lot of people have been eagerly anticipating his next pinball package that he will apply art to Well I don know if it will be the first one to come out or not because I heard he been working on multiple projects but David Fix with American Pinball did announce that their company next pinball machine will have Christopher Franchi's art on it. So expect to see it at least on the very next American Pinball title that comes out. Shifting back to Legends of Valhalla, there is some code testing going on regarding a March update. It's in beta. And so they did have that at their booth at the Texas Pinball Festival. I did stop by the booth. I spoke with Steven Bowden, actually, when I was at TPF over at the American Pinball booth. And he said he was monitoring those Legends of Valhalla to see how they were performing in this good stress test environment on the beta. So he's also contributed to this newest version of the rules. So I don't know enough about Legends of Valhalla. I did play it at Expo in terms of what the rules were. And so I don't have nearly enough time on it to have any sense of being able to explain what all has changed in the beta or not. I did not play the game myself at TPF. And because it's in beta, it's not like there's a code release explaining all the changes at this time. So if you are a Legends of Valhalla owner or you're on the fence about possibly buying one, you may want to go ahead and check and see once that update comes out to explain what some of those changes could be. And if you're in the market for a Legends of Valhalla, American Pinball is still in the process of building. So actually, they did give some production information. One is that they've got two lines for those that aren't familiar with how American Pinball is set up, though they are planning to start up a third production line shortly. So their main line is right now finishing up all those deluxe edition Valhalla machines. After they're done with that, they're going to start producing the classic editions on their main line. Their secondary line is actually building Hot Wheels right now. But soon they're planning to switch that over, they said possibly in May, to Oktoberfest. And then the plan will be to go ahead and do that. and then they're going to run some Houdinis, and they think that will probably start in the July or August time frame. And then after the Houdinis are done, they're going to go ahead and put Hot Wheels back on the secondary line. The Legends of Valhalla builds is going to be continuing through 2022 and into most of 2023. I don't know if the plan is to move that or their more classic games over to the third production line. And it wasn't clear to me what the strategy is. And really, as a consumer or even as a podcaster, it doesn't really matter to me which line does what. But obviously, a lot of people are really excited to see when American Pinball is going to go ahead and announce their new game and start building it. Incidentally, when they do start building the classic editions of Legends of Valhalla, they did indicate they still have not determined what the pricing will be for the non-deluxe edition of that game. And those of you who were Houdini fans, the very first game of American Pinball, they did share some information regarding that game that I thought I'd go ahead and provide here as well. One is that they've been having some discussions about possibly, possibly selling a stripped down version of Houdini. Their thought is mostly to target operators, but possibly consumers as well, obviously, who might want to get the gameplay without having to pay the current price point for it. And so the thought would be if they were to do that, some of the mechs, and I believe the example was the ball-launching milk can, would actually be removed so that they could save you money on that sort of purchase. In addition, Houdini has seen upgraded coil systems, the power system, and a subwoofer has been upgraded as well from what the original games have had. However, none of the gameplay is any different from the original versions of Houdini. But separate from all those ongoing items on American Pinball, to me the most interesting piece of news was, even though Barry Elsler had only been employed by American Pinball, I believe, approximately two weeks before he passed away, they have announced that they are going to be releasing his last game. I don't know which game it's going to be. I think a lot of people are somewhat hoping that it's Food Truck after seeing some of the Whitewood images in the Deep Root auctions. It seemed to me online that there was some buzz about people being pretty positive on what the start of that layout looked like. However, Barry Osler had been designing for such a long time, he may have had other designs in his back pocket, so to speak, that American Pinball is privy to that were separate from what we saw at Deep Root. Regardless, there are a lot of people who are big fans of Barry's designs and were really hoping to see something come out, and it sounds like American Pinball has every intention of making that happen. They did note that Steven Bowden would be responsible for developing the rules for this game. And other than that, there's not a lot of information. I don't know when it's going to come out. Who knows how far out it will be. But that is currently the company's intention. The final element of the Texas Pinball Festival that I want to talk about, and the one seminar room item I did attend, was the 2021 Twippy Awards Ceremony. It was nice to finally have the Twippies back in person. That's something the Twippies have been doing for quite a while, or trying to do for quite a while. But due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the last couple had to go virtual. And so here was the excitement of finally getting to have it back again at this major show. The line to get in was massive. Absolutely. It was longer than a Weird Al line. That's how big it was. It was huge. And unfortunately, that line length was the highlight of the awards ceremony. I want to say congratulations to all the winners. I'm not going to go and recap all of the winners and all of the decisions. Let's just say Godzilla cleaned up as I think everyone knew it would. And I'll leave it at that for now. There'll be other shows. Maybe Zack, if he comes back next week, like purportedly he's going to, he might want to go more in depth in terms of what the awards were. But I want to talk about the event itself, much like I have some of these other seminars that happened. And I've heard some people have sent me messages regarding their experience with the online version because the ceremony was streamed. And my understanding is there were some technical issues with that element, but I didn't watch that part. I didn't go back and watch the recording either. So I'm not going to opine on that, but I will tell you my experiences as an attendee. For positional purposes, so you can get an understanding, I'm sitting not in the back row, but I am towards the back of the room. I'm not all that far away from one of the speakers that's installed so that the microphones can get sound back towards the back of the room. As I noted from the line, the room itself initially was extremely well attended. It was not standing room only. There were open seats, but there were a lot of people who did not want to push past people to get those seats and were standing up in the room. To give you kind of a context of just how full it was, it was pretty full. And so you had a lot of people. There was a lot of excitement. People were pretty happy, as near as I could tell. And unfortunately, once the ceremony got underway, it really just, in my view, went downhill. And I think it was just a mix of things. And it's just, it was a series of unfortunate events, if I may poach a line from Lemedy Snicket. And I'd say the number one issue that I had as a live attendee was the sound. The entire ceremony was plagued with sound issues. It was coming out garbled or not at all from the speakers. We knew the speakers worked. We could hear, sometimes it was fine and sometimes it was not fine. For example, one of TPF's major guests was Sylvester McCoy. He is an actor who played the Seventh Doctor in Doctor Who. And for me, although I didn't recognize him without all the costuming and makeup on until Emoto mentioned it, was that he also played Radagast the Brown in the Hobbit movies, which I more know because I've never actually watched Doctor Who. Anyway, he had a very extended presentation bit, which looked to me like it was really good and really funny. but I only picked up maybe 20% of what was being said. It was, it was a mess. And since I was in the back, I mean, he was going down and he was interacting with a prop and I just, I, people around him seem to really like it. And I'm just really confused in the back because I can't really hear anything. And again, I'm like, okay, well, you know, it's a, it's a bit, he's, he's going off the stage. I get it. But then I realized as things were going along, the sound, it just, it never got better. It's like no one tried to fix it either was the impression I got. It just was sort of a, well, we just got to keep going. We just got to keep going. And so, and well, by and large, I could hear Emoto and Jack talking. And I think that was because they figured out exactly how to position the mics as they went along because they had to do the most speaking. Beyond that, it was a mess. I think I maybe could understand about 40% of the people reading acceptance speeches and maybe half of the people coming up to be presenters. But that had its issues too, because there seemed to be sort of a walk-on music thing that they were doing. And I could always hear the walk-on music for these presenters, but when the presenters would get up there, they would start talking and the walk-on music was still going. And I don't know if this was being manually controlled walk-on music and they just weren't fading it out in time when the person would get up there to speak, or if it was set timed and the presenters weren't informed, hey, wait for the walk-on music to stop before you start talking. Otherwise, there's no way anyone will be able to hear you. Or I don't know. Maybe it's something else that I'm not thinking of. But it just, that, it was throughout. It was not, like, there was no, there was no modification. There's no, there were no changes. It was kind of like you hit the go live button and then all of a sudden it was a series of dominoes and no one was allowed to pull one of the future dominoes out and stop the cascade from happening. There were issues revolving around the order of the awards, which as an attendee, I don't care what order the awards are in. I don't. But you would have the presenters come up and they would speak and they'd say they were introducing something like rules. And then up on the video screen to show you the top two or three nominees were art. Which was which is irrelevant. If you go and watch the video, this will obviously be true for those who didn't see it live as those who were in the room, but it was not a one-off. It kept happening. Now, when the first occurrence of this happened, there was an attempt to sort out the issue. There was a delay. I couldn't really hear what was being said, but they noticed there was an issue, and they tried to sort of figure out what was going on. But after that, when the issue kept cropping up sporadically, it just sort of, again, it always caused a bit of a pause because obviously there's confusion. Is the card that the presenter's opening about what was on the video, or was it what they thought their topic was? There was one instance where someone had to explain to me. I don't think it really mattered because, in this case, thankfully, since Godzilla basically won everything, most of the time the answer was going to be Godzilla, so it didn't necessarily matter if you were talking about art or code or layout or whatever. But I remember there was one point where the presenter said one award type. The video said another award type. And then one of the two MCs said, I guess, which award was being given. But because I couldn't hear very well, I was completely confused. And I thought they were giving the award for what the video said. And then someone sitting by me said, no, they gave the award for what the presenter said. And I'm like, I don't know what's going on. And apparently a lot of the audience didn't either. and the show just started to bleed attendees. Now, I don't know if it was all driven by the technical issues. I could tell a lot of people were really getting restless with how long the ceremony went. And this is not anything unique to the Twippies. We know award ceremonies in all sorts of industries run way too long for many people. And I think you could tell there were some clear efforts to deal with that because I know the Twippies are well aware they get a lot of awards out because the videos themselves, the video clips were pretty short. And I think when I saw that, I was like, oh, this is smart. They're really thinking about just how long it's going to take to get through all these awards. But there are just other pieces that didn't seem very structured that I think just added onto the time. Obviously, with the technical issues you have, and it is what it is sort of scenario, what could they do? They didn't expect it. They didn't expect it to happen. And so delays driven by those pieces were understandable. But there were other items as well. like some of the presenters would just basically come up and say who they are and say, here's the awards. And it would be like a 15 second thing. And then other presenters had more like bits or skits and they would go on longer. I couldn't tell whether or not there were time constraints on the presenters. I don't think they really ran overly long. So I, my guess would be they got some sort of guidance. None of the presenters to me felt like they ran overly long. Except in speeches and anyone who's ever seen an Academy Award knows about this happening on award shows, but the acceptance speeches were all over the place. Some were extremely short and brief, and it felt like they were getting shorter and briefer as we went along, as people realized this was running really long, but some of them were very long. And I got to tell you, when you're sitting there and you can't even hear them and they're going on really long, it gets frustrating. People started talking, and then, of course, you've got this sort of disrespectful thing going on where the audience is talking, but the show is still trying to go on. And it was just, it was painful. I mean, it was, it was a series again, as I said, of unfortunate events. And I don't know, I don't want to suggest like what fixes would be best because so many different things happened that I don't know what would be, I mean, if those, all that stuff happened to me, I'm trying to think what I would do. I've, I've had to plan conventions before where, yet one little technical issue can really disrupt your game. I had a scenario on an event I planned where the power went out and the upcoming presenter had a presentation that relied on playing video. And it was like you had no more projector You had no more internet for them to stream the videos from and you no sound system So even if you could somehow do all of that no one could hear it anyway I mean there are things like that that will happen and you will freak out and feel like you have just failed everything and it's just beyond your control. And then there are other things where it's just like logistical things that could have improved. My biggest takeaway is It seemed like given the sort of errors we saw with the sound system, with the out of order video versus presentations was it seemed to me like there wasn't a dry run that went through to verify that everything was working, that the sound was working fully in the hall, that the videos were aligned with the list order of the presentations and then corrections be made. And I think given that sort of stuff, had it been addressed, it had been a lot smoother. I mean, that's about all I can tell from being on the outside of the fishbowl looking into it. But regardless, it was really unfortunate. And then afterwards, they had a big after-party planned. I don't know how well it was attended. I went in briefly. It's just that sort of thing is too loud for me. But I went into the room to check on something, and I don't remember how long it had already been going. For a little while, but I don't think it had been an hour yet. And there weren't a lot of people in there anymore. And when I saw that, I think they thought there would be a lot more just hanging around than there were. But I mean, by the end of the ceremony, I don't know. Again, I had a pretty good view because I was in the back. It seemed like, this is a guess. I could be totally wrong. It seemed to me that at least a third of the people who were there at the start were gone while there were still, I think one of the emcees said there were four awards left. I mean, they could tell. They must have seen people were pouring out of that room because they were saying, okay, there's four, there are four awards left or there are two awards left. And it's like, but people were done. They were just done. And it was, anyway, it was, it was interesting. I'll say that. It was interesting. All right, everybody, you know what time it is. It's a time for us to take the market dynamics that is pinball, cloaked in a black shroud of mystery and doubt, and shine a brilliant light of truth, mathematics, logic, and trust upon it. It is time for Pinball Market Trends. Trending up this week is Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity. Is it trending up due to the tremendous lines waiting to play it at TPF? Is it trending up because of the positive buzz about the game? Is it trending up because of the license? In a way, it's moot. It doesn't matter. The bottom line is, the game's a success. The feedback was incredibly positive. People were excited to play the game. I saw people who weren't even planning to buy a P3 who were more than happy to stand in those long lines and play it again. Numbers don't lie. I can only report the facts. These are the mandates that Zach gives me. And the bottom line is Weird Al was the hit of the show, and it deserves to be. That's just how it is. Now, obviously, and this is something I would brag on Zach about, how can we, with a game that's not out or is just out in pricing and all that, how is it really going to affect the market? Well, in the pricing on the used side, we don't know yet, obviously. But I'm allowed to take liberties because Zach takes liberties. So here's what I think. I think the demand, based off of how well this game was received at TPF, will be strong. I think a lot of people will try and circumvent waiting for Multimorphic to be able to get them a game by trying to buy it used. The part that confounds me is whether or not there will be very many available used. And this comes down to two factors. One will be the speed at which Multimorphic puts out the game module and the platform itself. If the volume is high, then the potential is there for people who have bought, say, Weird Al only and a P3 system might say, hey, I can go ahead and sell the second hand and make a few thousand dollars. Let's go ahead and do it. And then either maybe get back in line if they really want one or take that money and, I don't know, go on a vacation or do whatever they want to do with money. The other option, of course, is there are a number of P3s that are already out there from people who bought prior modules. Now, if they were relatively early on the list to get a Weird Al module, they would be in a good position, possibly before a lot of the newer people, and by that I mean people newer to the P3 platform, to sell their game and their platform to a new buyer, secondhand, and make some money. The trick there, though, is that complicates it is this is not like any normal pinball manufacturer. If you give up your P3, you're giving up the ability to play all the other modules you bought. So you could hold on to them, especially if the potential buyer only wants Weird Al, or you could try and sell the whole thing. And it's not that I don't think they could sell the whole thing. It's that I don't know how many people who have committed that much to the full platform would want to give up all of their games to try and make some money on a Weird Al. So that's the part that confounds where I think the market will go. Based off of the projected build times I've seen people share regarding their weird owls, I don't think that we're going to see a flood of production, just like we are out of most of the manufacturers because of supply chain issues. So it's just going to take some time. So I think the demand is going to be there. I don't think the used games are, though. And so in a way, we might not see a lot of activity on the secondhand market because I'm not sure very many P3 owners are going to want to give up the system. But that's just something we will have to wait and see about. Trending now this week is using legal threats to silence those things you don't like. Now, as a podcaster, you might think I'm going to actually be using a podcast example. And while there have been cases of instances where people get upset with podcasters or writers or whoever and will suggest vaguely that they're going to go ahead and turn to the legal system to get something they don't like removed, I'm actually thinking a lot more specifically about cease and desist orders or CNDs. For those that aren't familiar, Planetary Pinball Supply, or PPS, purportedly sent a CND or cease and desist order to the individual who had been working for years on a Whirlwind project. Basically, think a 2.0 kit for Whirlwind. I totally understand that those that control licenses need to protect those licenses, trademarks, whatever, lest they be unable to protect them in the future. But when someone is doing a homebrew project who is just doing a one-off, at least for that time being, I do not think you win any goodwill, protect your license, or accomplish anything positive by sending someone a C&D order as your first step. I think many of us know that when you see instances like this, you don't get the impression that this is done to truly protect any sort of particular license, but rather for one purpose and one purpose alone, and that is to provide a chilling effect. And a chilling effect it does have. When people get CND orders, it causes them to become extremely concerned. They worry about legal fees. They worry about getting in trouble legally. They worry about costs. It costs people sleep. It costs people their time. And it causes unnecessary stress. This applies, in fact, to threatening legal action in general just because and freaking people out. I personally think CNDs tend to be the more egregious item because they're so easy to do in the realm of licensing. and let me go ahead and insert the disclaimer here that I am not an attorney and nothing I am saying on this podcast or have ever said on this podcast should be construed as legal advice. But other sorts of legal threats often don't get beyond the third party individual making a threat. And perhaps they go to a lawyer and the lawyer says, you don't really have a case here. C&D orders, though, with licenses are pretty easy to dole those out. But the chilling effect is still there. In this instance, I think it's nice to see that the person working on the homebrew has not let that chilling effect stop them from working on their project. Instead, they have publicly and transparently declared all of the elements that are original to their design and thus do not tie to the license that the C&D was sent on. And while there were a couple of elements that were tied to the license, and again, not an attorney, but in homebrew scenarios, if you're doing something for yourself, you have a great deal of flexibility with what you can often do, is my understanding. But regardless, they have noted they have removed those elements to show that regardless of the legal effectiveness of the CND, and by that I mean can PPS actually escalate it and have a real legitimate legal claim, they have shown that they've taken all of the steps that they felt would be necessary to remove any licensing, let's say, conflict with PPS. So now Whirlwind 2.0 is called Storm Blasters, which, hey, you did what you needed to do to hopefully avoid this. But this is not a good look. I don't think PPS has had a good look in general in this hobby when it comes to licensing. I think a lot of people think they just kind of dole it out to whoever. And looking, though, at this and the impression I think a lot of people get is here's a company that holds a license. It saw a homebrew or heard about a homebrew at a show and decided, hey, let's send this and scare them. You know, pinball is a pretty small hobby. And when you start going the legal route against people, generally the person who's initiating it ends up looking really bad because it looks like you're trying to silence something. Instead, if PPS did have concerns, you don't have to open with the CND, you know. I think everyone knows this, right? We're human beings, right? You could have done something like sending an email saying, hey, we saw your game and it looks really good. You know, we're the license holders for Whirlwind. If you're interested in pursuing something along the lines of commercial production, go ahead and reply and we can talk about working something out. You know, if that's the concern that this is going to come in and make money off your license, open with a polite, non-legal sounding letter saying, hey, you know, we do have the license if you didn't know because it's possible that they don't know. and we'd love to work with you on something. But let's say you don't want to work with them on something. Let's say you already have another company working on a Whirlwind 2.0. You could still send a non-CND email saying, hey, we saw your game. We're the license holders for Whirlwind. We just wanted to let you know that we're not looking to license this out to anyone else commercially at this time. Good luck with your project. And then if you see steps that would actually undermine the license and try and make money off of the license, you can do your CND then and pursue legal steps. But there is no reason to open with such a hostile action. And regardless of your intent, I think it's pretty safe to say most people find a C&D pretty hostile. And trending up this week is the Texas Pinball Festival for 2022. There have been a number of shows over the last few months that have been able to occur in person. But I think for a lot of people, TPF was the first one that really, truly felt like both a return to normal and a fun event. there were so many people who were just having such a good time and the tpf team did such a good job from the professional registration system to seminars that you don't have to pay extra money to go into and see to having the support of a community that is both in texas and beyond bringing good games that almost all of which were turned on it was just such a good experience and while I actually probably played less pinball games at TPF this year than I did at Expo a few months ago, I had a far better time. I got to meet a lot of people that I had never met before. We had some good discussions. I got to finally meet people in person that I have been working with on a variety of things, both in the pinball network or just having discussions online, who write into one of the podcasts I do, or we just engage on a pinball topic in a pinball forum on something, and I think a lot of people felt the same way. Yes, there were hiccups. Yes, not everything was perfect, but by and large, I think a lot of people had a really good time, so my hat is off. I don't usually wear a hat, and it is not on right now, but if it was on, I would take it off to everyone who worked so hard to put the Texas Pinball Festival on. I think it was an incredibly successful event. I don't believe I'm the only person who thinks that way. That show definitely is trending up. I think they came back with a bang, knocked it out of the park, colors pop, home run, whatever pinball cliche you want to use, go ahead and just pile it all on. I had an excellent time. And to me, at this point, TPF remains the number one pinball show in the world. Thanks, everybody. This has been your Pinball Market Trends. All right, so let's close out the show. For those of you who want to reach out to me, I also host the Eclectic Gamers Podcast and emailing eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com. It's a lot easier to get a hold of me through that mechanism because I check that email far more regularly than any other that I have access to. But you can also email into the pinballnetwork at gmail.com. If you want to reach out to Zach Minney, even though he's not hosting this, let me go ahead and give him a plug for Flip N Out Pinball. You can reach him via Zach at flip, the letter N, outpinball.com. What's in the Flip N Out Pinball Showcase? I have absolutely no idea. contact Zach and ask him if you're looking for something that you want to buy from him. I think that covers pretty much everything I wanted to discuss. My understanding is Zach Minney will be back next week to do the pinball show. It will be April at that point. His month-long March hiatus is over. Will he be back? Will the show be dead? Will it languish in this weird zone where I sometimes do it and sometimes have a guest and sometimes don't? In the words of Craig Bobby, the only correspondent who bothered to send me a single segment this time, we'll just have to wait and see. Take care, everybody. So, let's go ahead and move on to the one new game. So, let's go ahead and move on. I need to start taking notes. Play some games on a P3. That's where I think it's important for people to go ahead and pay. That you can reprogram. Well, that was always why I thought you couldn't do a safe originally. Well, no, let me take that back. Now, I could not hear what the questions were being and so that it was a sort of done with. Well, that all sounds terrible. I'm still not happy with this. Let's try it again.