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Williams Pinball Volume 6 Reveal

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 21m·held·Aug 7, 2020
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.032

TL;DR

Williams Volume 6 announced with Dr. Dude, Funhaus, Space Station; Zen eyes Asia expansion.

Summary

BlahCade A A Pinball Podcast discusses the California Extreme 2020 digital event and reveals Williams Pinball Volume 6 for Zen Pinball, which will include Dr. Dude, Funhaus, and Space Station (a new-to-digital title). The hosts analyze gameplay mechanics, design challenges, and community reception to these tables, while also covering Zen's 10-year expansion strategy into Asian markets requiring anime and pop-culture IP licensing.

Key Claims

  • Space Station is brand new to the digital pinball world (not in Pinball Arcade, though available in Visual Pinball 10)

    high confidence · Chris Friebus describing California Extreme 2020 reveal

  • Dr. Dude in Zen has removed most of the railroads that were present in TPA's version, making it significantly more difficult

    high confidence · Chris Friebus discussing beta gameplay differences

  • Funhaus in Zen is 'brutally difficult' compared to TPA's version, particularly with the mid-flipper shot timing to the cellar

    high confidence · Chris Friebus and Jared Morgan discussing beta gameplay experience

  • Space Station lacks Italian bottom (return lanes), making it unusual and difficult to control compared to modern pinball conventions

    high confidence · Chris Friebus describing Space Station gameplay mechanics

  • Williams Volume 6 tables were accidentally leaked via a YouTube video that briefly appeared in Zen's playlist

    high confidence · Chris Friebus discussing the leak timing and community reactions

  • Zen's 10-year plan focuses on expanding into Asian markets, which will require anime and Japanese/Korean pop-culture IP licensing

    high confidence · Mel Kirk statement during Jack Danger interview at California Extreme 2020

  • The Dr. Dude Dude meter is a ROM-persistent progressive state that carries over across different players, making it difficult for individual players to complete in one session

    high confidence · Chris Friebus discussing gameplay design and beta issues

  • Zen's alphanumeric displays in these tables (particularly Dr. Dude) will be stacked vertically within the DMD area rather than displayed horizontally as in the original machines

    medium confidence · Chris Friebus speculating on Zen's technical solution for alphanumeric display integration

Notable Quotes

  • “It's good. That is good. That's a good thing... Space Station coming... Which has definitely been something that everybody's been begging for.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~12:00 — Community sentiment on new-to-digital content; addresses long-standing player desire for non-Pinball Arcade titles

  • “Zen has knocked this one out of the park. It is probably the highlight of the package for me. The theme is so well integrated and the visual extras they've added to this table actually enhance the gameplay.”

    Chris Friebus @ ~35:00 — Strong endorsement of Dr. Dude implementation; indicates successful design execution in beta

  • “Once the table is challenging, it becomes so much more fun. Otherwise, without the challenge, it was just wash and repeat, wash and repeat, wash and repeat.”

    Chris Friebus @ ~38:00 — Design philosophy on difficulty balancing; explains improvement over TPA version

  • “IPs and pinball are intrinsically linked. And if you're going to go into a new market, then you need to have licensing that makes sense for that market.”

    Mel Kirk (Zen) @ ~65:00 — Strategic business insight on Zen's Asia expansion and IP licensing priorities

  • “I don't nudge much anyway... for some reason when I'm playing Zen, I tend not to nudge unless I can really see the balls in peril.”

    Chris Friebus @ ~5:00 — Gameplay behavior difference between digital and physical pinball; illustrates player adaptation to digital physics

  • “It's hard to trap, but it's possible to trap... The slingshots just playing havoc with me all the time because even with doing a dead pass...”

    Chris Friebus @ ~20:00 — Mechanical difficulty discussion; player learning curve on non-standard flipper layouts

  • “You just don't like Party Zone that much. And TPA's Dr. Dude was ridiculously easy. And it was also rather horribly presented as well.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~33:00 — Historical context on previous digital implementations; motivation for Zen redesign

Entities

Chris FriebuspersonJared MorganpersonJack DangerpersonBrian EddypersonMike VinikourpersonMel KirkpersonAkospersonZen PinballcompanyStern Pinballcompany

Signals

  • ?

    announcement: Williams Pinball Volume 6 officially announced at California Extreme 2020 with three tables: Dr. Dude, Funhaus, Space Station

    high · Direct announcement at official event; hosts discuss reveal in detail with specific gameplay mechanics and design implementations

  • ?

    leak_detection: Volume 6 tables were accidentally leaked via YouTube playlist before official reveal; video briefly accessible to subscribers

    high · Chris Freebus: 'these tables had all gotten leaked last week, thanks to an errant video that popped up momentarily on Zen's YouTube channel. It made it into a playlist'

  • ?

    product_concern: Funhaus plunger calibration issues in beta; 'if you breathed wrong it was too strong' in classic arcade/tournament modes; difficult mid-flipper shot timing

    high · Chris Freebus discusses beta testing results: plunger worked in regular Zen mode but was problematic in other modes; difficult skill shot requiring practice

  • ?

    product_concern: Dr. Dude's ROM-persistent Dude meter progression design makes it nearly impossible for single players to complete state in one session; acknowledged by hosts as issue requiring solution

    high · Chris: 'filling that dude chart is difficult. Very difficult. And it's one of those ROM states that carry it over from game to game'; noted they gave feedback on this issue 'long time ago'

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Dr. Dude significantly more difficult in Zen vs TPA; removal of railroads increases ball wildness and challenge; described as positive design improvement

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.243

0:00
blockade pinball podcast hey this is the blockade pinball podcast i'm your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world jared morgan well hello there everybody thanks for joining us India Bill thumbs up in it alright yeah hey for those that weren't aware because I wasn't even aware until I was watching the California Extreme 2020 stream which is pretty much going to be the gist of our entire show here but it turns out it's National Pinball Day so happy Pinball Day everybody very good yeah that means we have to play pinball right or talk about pinball or do something so we're meeting the requirements of the day already just by being here. Exactly.
0:59
I have been playing Zen's tournament that they were doing which was one ball on Tales of Arabian Nights no upgrades.
1:18
Which is one ball is kind of hard on that. One ball is brutal and there's a score of 2 billion up there for that? Something like that, yeah. So my whole goal was just to try and get into the top 10, and I've only gotten to 22nd place. 22nd? What score did you have to get to get to 22nd? I'm at like 42 million, something like that. Jeez, it's 6 billion now. Is it Rebeloke? Far out. Yeah, it's freaking ridiculous. I mean, because I know what it is. It's just all you, because all I was doing was spamming the harem multiple. That's all you do. It's harem multiple, is it? All right. Yeah. So it's just shoot up into the bumpers, keep on raising the harem multi-ball jackpot until you get harem multi-ball, and then keep that going as long as you possibly can. Wash and repeat. I don't even bother trying to collect jewels. Right. It's just harem multi-ball all day, every day. And basically all I'm doing is sticking to my outer loop shots because those are the safe ones. As soon as you start shooting in the middle and you start hitting the spinner, then your ball goes all over the place and you're going to drain. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that lamp is lucrative for bonus points, but it's a deathtrap.

  • “ROM carryover state was one of those little fringe [issues] because that's not really a thing that is an issue in DMD machines.”

    Chris Friebus @ ~45:00 — Technical design note for emulating 1980s EM/early digital games; player feedback on design oversight

    • [name withheld pending review]
    product
    Dr. Dudegame
    Funhousegame
    Space Stationgame
    Stranger Thingsgame
    California Extreme 2020event
    Pinball Arcadeproduct
    Pat Lawlorperson
    Tales of Arabian Nightsgame
    Attack from Marsgame
    Safe Crackergame
    BlahCade Pinball Podcastorganization
    DeadFliporganization
    National Pinball Dayevent

    high · Chris: 'There were so many railroads in TPA's version, and those are all gone... Once the table is challenging, it becomes so much more fun'

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Space Station's lack of Italian bottom (return lanes) and flipper positioning near slingshots creates non-standard control challenge; requires player adaptation but trapping is still possible

    high · Detailed discussion of Space Station mechanics: 'no Italian bottom on the playfield', 'flippers butt up right against the slingshot', 'hard to trap, but it's possible to trap'

  • $

    market_signal: Community has been requesting new-to-digital tables; Space Station fills this gap with strong positive sentiment; addresses 'I'm not buying any more Zen until there's something new' criticism

    high · Jared Morgan: 'Which has definitely been something that everybody's been begging for'; Chris: 'Well, there's now something new, folks. It's now something new. So go and buy it'

  • ?

    business_signal: Zen's 10-year plan focuses on Asian market expansion requiring anime and Asian pop-culture IP licensing; IPs intrinsically linked to market entry strategy

    high · Mel Kirk statement: 'IPs and pinball are intrinsically linked. And if you're going to go into a new market, then you need to have licensing that makes sense for that market'; expect anime, Japanese, Korean pop culture licensing

  • ?

    content_signal: California Extreme 2020 held digitally due to COVID-19 with panel discussions and reveals; demonstrates shift from in-person to remote event format

    high · Chris: 'this was going to be canceled outright. They knew that they couldn't do it in person. It's a type of event that you kind of really do need to be there in person for because it's all about playing games'

  • ?

    design_innovation: Zen implementing alphanumeric displays by stacking them vertically within DMD area rather than horizontal; universal DMD constraint requires layout compromise

    medium · Chris Freebus speculation: 'I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I'm guessing that that's exactly what Zen's going to do also because of the fact that they only have a limited window because it's universal DMD'

  • ?

    community_signal: Hosts and community discussing player experience design tradeoffs: visual enhancement immersion vs. difficulty balance; Space Station's flipper control challenges create meaningful engagement

    medium · Extended discussion of Space Station learning curve, Funhaus difficulty, and Dr. Dude challenge as positive design features; emphasis on 'once challenging, becomes fun'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Zen pursuing anime and Asian pop-culture IP licensing to support market expansion; Hello Kitty mentioned as example; represents shift from traditional Western IP focus

    medium · Jack Danger mentioned wanting 'Hello Kitty table'; Mel Kirk discussion of market-specific IP strategy; hosts speculate on anime/Korean pop culture licensing implications

    • 2:32
    That's no fun with one ball. Right, right. I managed to do in... I think I talked about it last week, Coaster Wizard doing his tournament that follows David Six's tournament on Reddit,
    2:47
    but we've done Tales of Arabian Nights, and I chose my wizard power, Rewind, and I was able to get massive score because of being able to rewind any time it drained. I think I had my... God, I want to say that I had the harem jackpot up to a million per hit. Wow. I think, yeah.
    3:14
    So, I mean, that's how you're getting a six billion score. It's obviously somebody knows how to keep the ball alive. My problem was I was playing with the old cabinet there, and for some reason the accelerometer wasn't registering nudging, and I didn't feel like pausing to do it. So I was doing getting my score without nudge, which I don't nudge much anyway.
    3:35
    It's funny. I don't really tend to nudge that much either. I sort of just... It's weird. I would do it all the time on a real pinball machine, but for some reason when I'm playing Zen, I tend not to nudge unless I can really see the balls in peril. Otherwise, I just let the physics play out. Right, right. Or the other thing is that if I know that it's a situation where...
    3:59
    Not that there's railroads in Zen, but there are definitely precarious situations where you're like, I'd better nudge, otherwise it's a 50-50 shot of if it's going to go in the out lane or not. Yeah. I found a really bad one the other day on Attack for Mars in classic arcade physics. If you're shooting up into the saucer, it's literally every single time it'll come back down and drain on you.
    4:28
    And I haven't worked out how to recover from it. There was a point at which I was trying to do, I think it was a challenge or something like that, and I just had to avoid the saucer because it was just unrecoverable drains. I don't know whether it's just me or whether it's something I'm doing. No, it's not you. I don't shoot the saucer unless I'm in multi-ball, because otherwise it's too risky. It's really odd. Yeah, it's really bad. It's not really realistic either, because the thing that I'm finding odd in... This is a bit of a tangent, but we're good at those.
    5:00
    The thing that I'm finding odd in some of these games, like Attack from Mars, is the action of the drop targets. Have you noticed that they don't snap down? They're sort of like, almost like motorized down when you hit them. On what table? I haven't noticed this. So on Attack from Mars, there's a drop target at the back of the saucer that you hit, of course.
    5:22
    And you can see it. And it's sort of like, rather than going, when you hit it, it doesn't go drop. It sort of goes drop like that. And particularly if you're playing something like Safecracker, I really noticed it when I got that big score the other day. the drop targets in there also it's almost like the drop targets are sticking on the way down, like they're being lubricated with oil and the oil's all clagged up and the drop targets are like sticking down and they drop so I was wondering if it was the old Williams drop targets where it wasn't the typical and they drop, there wasn't an actual mechanical effect that lowered them no, it is they drop just as fast as gotta leave drop target or any other drop targets i mean they're drop targets they're it's like the zen the way zen's implemented them is they're almost it's like they're almost driven drop targets like there's the motor behind them yeah to quickly drop them down yeah and i've noticed this in the zen originals as well i think it's just the the way they've programmed the drop targets to work it'd be really nice if they didn't work like that because it every time i see it i it breaks the illusion for me. I just go, nah, it's not right. I'm wondering if it's an animation thing where they want to show it actually dropping, not just being there one second and gone the next, and maybe that little bit of animation that they're showing is ruining the illusion for you. Well, when you're hitting, I know because I've played plenty of times on Attack from Mars, and when you hit that red drop target in the saucer area, it snaps down and up so fast because it's designed to register hits to the saucer and it does rattle around in there a fair bit. So it's really obvious to me up there. Like next time, if anyone's online and watching and playing that, just take a look at it next time and you can't unsee it once you've seen it. And yes, it's a really small trivial problem and it doesn't affect gameplay at all. Like the ball still behaves correctly around the drop targets, but it's the animation that's just irking me a little bit again.
    7:24
    First world problems for me. Right? It's really not that important, If you're listening, don't drop everything and go and fix it, which I'm sure you won't anyhow.
    7:34
    Okay, so let's talk about – now, Jared lacks commitment because he didn't feel like waking up at 4 in the morning to watch the California stream. Well, it's funny you mentioned that because with the amount of times I was up and down last night with Sienna's diabetes, I probably could have actually tuned in at 4.30 to actually do it because I was up at about 4.15 at one point, giving it like the third or fourth glucose treatment for a low so i probably could have just put on some headphones and shoot in live honestly so so that being said i'm going to be doing uh describing for his sake what went down but it's basically all information that we already knew um and when i say we already knew not that you the general public but information that me and jared already knew we're privy to yeah we you know if if if you've wondered why we kind of skirt around certain topics, it's because we have to. Yeah, for like the last six months.
    8:31
    It's been really hard, guys. But, you know, it's the problem you get when you're under the disclosure curtain.
    8:41
    It's not the worst problem in the world. It's certainly not, again, first world problems. Exactly. So anyway, let's just jump right in. I'll describe other parts of the show, but let's just go right into the meat and potatoes. and that is the announcement of the three tables that are going to be in Williams Volume 6, those being Dr. Dude, Funhaus, Space Station. Space Station being brand new to those of us in the digital world, unless you played on Visual Pinball 10, but was not in Pinball Arcade. So we finally have a machine that was not in Pinball Arcade coming into Xen. It's good. That is good. That's a good thing.
    9:29
    I initially, when I heard the... saw what we were going to be getting, I kind of was like, I mean, look, I'm all for Funhaus. Believe me.
    9:39
    Me being a Pat Lawler fan, of course I'm down for Funhaus. And Dr. Dude, I just kind of was like, did I really remember? Did I enjoy that? Or was I kind of like... You know. And then Space Station, I have zero experience with in real life. Or if I have, I barely remembered it. I played it once, and cheekily, I admitted that I played it once in response to a Zen tweet a while back.
    10:07
    Fully knowing that it was actually in the collection. Just as a bit of a cheeky plug, which obviously I didn't pick up. But yes, I had played it at the time that they released the beta. Probably about six months earlier. Up at a pub. up the coast from where I live. And it was the first time I'd ever seen the thing. And I tell you what, it really caught me by surprise. It was a very interesting table and also quite difficult because of the positioning. There's no Italian bottom on the playfield, which is return lanes. Which is something I don't like.
    10:46
    It's weird. It takes a bit of getting used to. Particularly the slingshot positions will throw you when you first played it if you haven't played it before.
    10:58
    That's one of the things I don't like about early EMs. Combination of the two-inch flipper and then weird non-out-lane kind of layouts, or non-in-lane, excuse me. I like in-lane pinball. That's just me. That's what I'm programmed for. You like the Italian bottom. Yeah. I can't get behind that, sorry.
    11:21
    It's true. It's what it's called. Just other things go through my mind. Yeah. I know. And, yes, so, but, now, yes, we've had this in beta.
    11:35
    Duh. Yeah. Unfortunately, we've only had one beta build. So, I don't know how much has changed since the beta that we've gotten versus what Zen is going to be putting out. as usual, Zen's betas are virtually release ready they're definitely as release ready as anything Farsight ever put out at release so I know they're going to be close for us the main thing that was going on was what happens with the alphanumeric display works perfectly fine in view 8 but in any other view they still hadn't worked out how it's going to fit into the DMD because that's, I believe, what's going to be happening is it's going to all fit within where the DMD typically would have been, which leads me to the question of, and I don't have the answer for, which is what happens on Dr. Dude where it's a strip of alphanumerics rather than stacked on top of each other. Farsight's solution was obviously to stack them. To stack them, yeah. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I'm guessing that that's exactly what Zen's going to do also because of the fact that they only have a limited window because it's universal DMD. Whatever size your DMD is, that's what it is across every single other table. And you can't all of a sudden have this one table move and reshape the DMD without them doing some complete redesign of how that functions in the game. And it wouldn't port over to mobile either because they have limited screen real estate on mobile. Exactly. representation, so there's no way they can do it. I just have to take a break away seeing as Ripped Out of Her Insulin site.
    13:20
    I will happily talk. Just keep talking. I'll just mute myself for now. You got it. Okay, so here's what I want to talk about then. Why we should be excited, actually, about these tables. I'm going to start with Space Station.
    13:35
    It's brutally different, like we're saying, just because it has the different feel of not having an inline, but just having the outlanes and having the flippers butt up right against the slingshot.
    13:48
    And it's also difficult because it is a table that requires aiming, and trapping the ball when you've got a slingshot right there is a pretty brutal feat to try and do. Beyond that, though, the lighting on Space Station is pretty awesome. There's moments where the entire thing just goes green, and it looks gorgeous when it does that.
    14:18
    I thought that it was just kind of my initial reaction. I thought it was just an update of Space Shuttle, which is not a table that I've ever been really grooving on to begin with.
    14:29
    But instead, it's a little deeper, has a little more action to it, a little more strategy than I think what Space Shuttle has. So I think it's actually a good improvement there.
    14:47
    Yeah, I like Space Shuttle quite a bit more than... Sorry, Space Station quite a bit more than Space Shuttle. It's just got more going on.
    14:55
    It's got a three-ball multi-ball instead of a two, which is a vast improvement. The way you lock balls in it, if you have never played it before, will surprise you. it's got a few interesting paths that you use to lock balls so there's that to it as well so yeah there's a lot going for this game once you get over the flipper area I won't say the other one it makes Chris a little bit cagey but yeah that area down the bottom there where the flippers are it will throw you at first you can still trap up though there is an area that allows you to trap up So you can still do that and control the ball, but... It's just much more difficult to get that control, yeah. Very hard, yeah. It's hard to trap, but it's possible to trap. I found myself just the slingshots just playing havoc with me all the time because even with doing a dead pass, I'm like, oh yeah, just let dead pass... Oh crap, it dead passed right into the slingshot.
    15:55
    Exactly right. Yeah, it's very odd. Yeah. The slingshots are definitely designed to activate more than a normal slingshot's position because the ball will hit on it with more force always.
    16:07
    And yeah, it will definitely trigger more and throw the ball everywhere. What's also hard to see in the brief video, the announcement video that was shown, was getting an idea for what the enhancements are that Zen did. Basically, you've got an astronaut doing a spacewalk in one of those jetpack chairs. He's kind of floating around. You've got asteroids or meteorites floating around on the table. It's kind of an actually cool...
    16:38
    It's well-themed. It is very well-themed. The space shuttles, when I originally played it in certain views, they actually obscure the inlanes at the top. So it might be a little bit challenging for you to get some of the roll-over inlane multipliers at the top. But when you're playing this in portrait view, if you are able to do that. The perspective is great. Like you've got really good view of the entire play field and the space shuttles are almost like positioned correctly. So yeah, it's actually really good.
    17:18
    Yeah, so no, and again, really interesting lighting package, good sound package. I think it's a nice addition there. uh funhouse well what can't you like about funhouse i will say this though exactly it's brutal in comparison to tpas and tpas wasn't exactly a walk in the park either no it was not easy on tpa but this thing is hard really hard which is my experience with the arcade every single time yeah i mean because the replay value on it in the arcade is i want to say it's 7 million and that's it sounds like a nice low score it's nuts trying to get that it's hard and and getting the timing right of that mid flipper to shoot not rudy but shoot the uh what is it the seller yeah because it's it's it's just a slightly longer delay but it puts it that much closer to the edge of the tip that's so easy to miss and if you think that you're gonna just like you know in tpa you can kind of get the rhythm in a whack four of them in a row good luck yeah it's yeah you're going to be having a real hard time getting that done i mean i was never really that good at um making that shot even in tpa but it's it's very difficult you're going to want to select um you're going to want to experiment with the views so you get a good top down view of that flipper so you can actually work out the timing points on it um i think in in views you If you're playing in portrait, like the V1 and V1 wide will give you a pretty good overarching view. But if you're playing a landscape, like on a console, I'm not totally sure what one you would want to choose there. Yeah, I do think it's not quite as brutal as No Good Gophers with how they have that set up. Because No Good Gophers, it seems like the ball just, because of everything obscuring, it just appears. Yeah, it's so hard to... So this one, you're actually going to be able to see the ball moving and be able to attack it that way. But I know that when I play Funhaus for real, and I know the ball is coming there and I need to flip, I angle myself really low on the table just to give myself a fighting chance. Yeah. And it's just as tough here with what they've done. I think that one would be you know, if it ever makes it to VR, would be a very good addition because you could then look over the top and check it out but all those ones are like that I find myself doing that all the time on Willy Wonka as well, in the arcade there's a really obscured flipper in the top right that you almost need to lean over all the way to the left to be able to get the timing right on, or at least for me it hard you really do sometimes benefit from being able to move around the table Yeah Trying to think what else Again this was probably the table that I wanted more beta testing versions on because I know that a lot of notes got given regarding it.
    20:30
    So because, like, for us, the eject coming out was really strong, making it really hard to gain control of the ball which that hasn't been my experience.
    20:47
    And there were a couple of little other issues. The plunger, if you're playing in just regular Zen mode the plunger worked great. If you're playing in classic arcade or tournament the plunger was like, if you breathed wrong it was too strong.
    21:06
    Yeah, you couldn't make that skill shot at all. No, no. So, again, I'm not going to comment necessarily on that stuff as a critique, because that was just purely in beta. So we'll see where it goes from there.
    21:18
    Visuals on Funhaus, they do have an animated Rudy who climbs into his little bed. And there's balloons that pop up. There's all sorts of stuff. There's some stuff that I'm not quite sure works as well, theming-wise, because it almost makes the top of the play feel a little clunky. again we'll see if any of that gets uh gets changed from from what we've last seen it with i i don't think it will like usually when they set the theme for the game um it's very rare for um it to be changed in a lot of detail after they've actually set the theme so i think we're stuck with that area i think there's plenty of other things they could have done on that table I think they could have taken cues that they did from Circus Voltaire and animated Rudy a little bit more beyond the solenoid-driven eyes and motor-driven mouth, actually animated the head a bit more.
    22:20
    But, you know, that's probably the only big thing that I think they could probably tweak on it. Everything else, it's all right. I mean, I can almost say safely that that's one of those that I'm going to play without the enhancements on. Yeah, you probably don't really need it. Yeah.
    22:39
    And then moving over to Dr. Dude, which once I started playing it, I realized it's, oh, yeah, you just don't like Party Zone that much. And TPA's Dr. Dude was ridiculously easy. And it was also rather horribly presented as well. Oh, God, yeah, it was a visual kind of nightmare. It really was. and dropped polygons everywhere on the table. Stuff that, when you see it in Xen, when you actually start playing, you go, wow, that's actually in the game? I had no idea. And I can safely say, Xen has knocked this one out of the park. It is probably the highlight of the package for me.
    23:19
    The theme is so well integrated and the visual extras they've added to this table actually enhance the gameplay. Absolutely. This is one that I will play with visual enhancements all the time. Yeah, all the time. Yeah. It's very, very good. And I found in my beta testing, I almost always started with Dr. Dude and almost always finished with Dr. Dude. Yeah.
    23:42
    Let's just start with the gameplay itself. The ball is so much more wild. Yeah, it is. There were so many railroads in TPA's version, and those are all gone. And so it just really makes this table that much more difficult. Yeah. And there it is. It's the challenge of the table. Once the table is challenging, it becomes so much more fun. Otherwise, without the challenge, it was just wash and repeat, wash and repeat, wash and repeat. It's just ramp, ramp, ramp. Get the, yeah. Yeah. Become a dude. But getting dudes in this is hard. Oh, yeah. Watching the physics of the ball in the, what do they call it? It's not the spinner, but... The Mixmaster. That's what I'm looking for. watching it and you can see all the animations that are going on in there with the ball hitting the stand-ups and everything there is a lot of extra going on there that doesn't necessarily need to be there um no but it is yeah because it needs to be yeah yeah uh when you do enhancements all of a sudden there's electrical pulses going down all the wiring um and looks so good yeah All sorts of various things happening on the play field itself. And then you ultimately, though, you have the dude on the side of the table. And as you increase up the dude meter, his outfit changes and he gets different accessories to ultimately become the party dude. Super dude.
    25:09
    Again, now, here's where we go into what we were dealing with in the beta. And who knows if this gets improved. And I hope, hope that they did something about this. But filling that dude chart is difficult. Very difficult. And it's one of those ROM states that carry it over from game to game. So if you didn't, whoever played it before you, that's the state that you start at. That's right. It's progressive jackpot sort of stuff that you see in a lot of that era of games. Yes. And it's necessary because there's almost no way that you're going to, you know, the average player is going to sit there on three balls and go through the entire progression. is just not a reality. It's really hard to do. Yeah, you've got to do a lot of Mixmaster shots and a lot of three elements to actually get the Mixmaster lit. It takes a fair bit of a while, so it's designed to be progressive, and it's sort of like part of the fun of the game when you walk up to it and you go, oh, it's nearly about to go off as Super Dude. I might drop a couple of bucks into this. It's also part of the game where if you're playing multiplayer with four other people, that it becomes that. You can build up that score. Well, and it becomes you stealing it from somebody else. Yeah. You know, so... That's an interesting point. I've never actually tried full player on it, and maybe that's a way to actually see what SuperDude actually does, because I've never actually hit it before. Yeah, no, I've done that in real life with these kinds of progressive tables, and that's the fun. It becomes part of your strategy. If you're playing and you're not having the best of success,
    26:40
    and you can easily do a ball lock or do something that progresses it to the next, you kind of go wait do i set the next guy up for that or do i not do it do some other things in the meantime i'm going to lose my ball and let them be the ones that progress it um yeah it becomes kind of a different strategy that goes along with it uh so i'm hoping exactly the same as the five volt letters and safecracker which also i've never got on zen because it's kind of impossible so and frustrating believe me really like that it's a note that we have given them and we gave them a long time ago. We keep giving it to them. We keep giving them. Hopefully they're aware and they were able to find the solution to it. Because, and this is kind of a general note about this era of table.
    27:31
    There are certain things that Zen, because they're focused so much on what they do and we the players kind of notice and have our things that we like to see. but it's hard when you've got all these factors that you're trying to work in to notice the little fringe items. And so ROM carryover state was one of those little fringe because that's not really a thing that is an issue in DMV machines. Yeah, that's right.
    28:00
    So that's one of those things that we definitely gave a note on. So fingers crossed, folks, that that actually happened. I've got to go and change the pump site. Keep talking. Okay. I'll listen and try and talk in as well. All right, no worries. But you just said a new pump site. No worries.
    28:19
    So, yeah, those are the three tables. Now, I then immediately after the announcement, I went and, you know, went to the various forums that I visit, pinball related, kind of seeing people's reactions and stuff. And, unfortunately, these tables had all gotten leaked last week, thanks to an errant video that popped up momentarily on Zen's YouTube channel. So it's hard to... It made it into a playlist, and if you subscribe to the channel, you would have seen it come up in the playlist, and for a few fleeting seconds, gain access to it. Yeah. So it's hard to gauge what people's reactions were. I know a lot of people are excited definitely for Funhaus, and they're thrilled to see Space Station coming. Something new. Yeah, exactly. Which has definitely been something that everybody's been begging for. I mean, I've seen many comments where they're like, I'm not buying any more Zen until there's something new. Well, there's now something new, folks. It's now something new. So go and buy it, all right? Right.
    29:19
    We're going to touch upon, though, kind of what the reactions to all of Zen's announcements were. But first, we've got to talk about actually what happened today in this California Extreme Expo 2020 event that Zen basically hosted. Because this was going to be canceled outright. They knew that they couldn't do it in person.
    29:40
    It's a type of event that you kind of really do need to be there in person for because it's all about playing games. Yes. So basically this is what they instead did. They always have panels with people doing talks. And so basically that's what's being broadcast, is what was going to be doing there. So they started off with having a panel with Stern about Stranger Things, and it was with Brian Eddy and Mike Vinikar.
    30:09
    And it was kind of interesting. They walked through basically the creation of Stranger Things. Brian started with, look, when I start any pinball design, it starts with this, and it was just on his computer screen, a blank play field with flippers and slingshots, and that was it. And then he says that he kind of sketches it out and builds up from there and it becomes a foam core model. And then it seems like there must be a bin of just random... I imagine it's like a Lego wall, but it's a wall of ramp parts and stuff. And they just kind of start assembling. And he kind of went basically through the whole design process, which was really quite interesting to see, or at least from my point. I don't know.
    31:00
    And from there, after they got done doing their talk it moved into Jack Danger who his channel Deadflip Pinball Jack had decided to build his own pinball machine which seems absolutely absurd to me especially given the time frame that he was saying that he was doing it in he said he designed it in 24 hours and basically called in all sorts of favors to help him get it up and running considering how much my microcab cost with next to nothing parts-wise. I can't imagine what it costs to build a full physical pinball machine. So he went over that whole deal, and then it switched over to the interview with Zen that Jack hosted, and he was talking to Akos and Mel Kirk. a lot of the info was stuff that we actually talked with mel previously about however hats off to jack for cramming that all into 15 minutes he's much more efficient than me and no doubt about that um and within that what new information could possibly gleam gleamed out of it uh mel talked once more about their focus on the future uh it's this this 10-year plan they've kind of been uh touting and regarding the main thing being moving into new markets and we keep on reiterating this but it's basically meaning asia and as he mentioned that IPs and pinball are intrinsically linked. And if you're going to go into a new market, then you need to have licensing that makes sense for that market. And if you start extrapolating any of that, that means we're probably going to see a lot of anime,
    33:12
    Japan heavily influenced pop culture, Korean pop culture, kind of things. I think those are the intellectual properties that are going to be starting to be licensed.
    33:28
    And that's stuff that we haven't necessarily seen. Jacqueline said that he just wants a Sanrio Hello Kitty table, which was kind of amusing. I can, God, my God, the pink and white, that would be... That would be a sight for eyes, huh? It's just like fluffy unicorn table or something.
    33:47
    So there was that. Mel went into and I want to clear up some of the comments that I was reading weren't clear because people were hoping that he was mentioning new physics and putting physics into, obviously everybody's thinking oh we're going to get the new Williams physics backtracked onto those first three volumes that didn't have them what Mel was talking about was that each pinball machine that they have they tune the game to that physical machine that they have on site. They don't, and we've said this many a time, one pinball machine does not play like the next pinball machine, even though they're the exact same title. So that's what he was talking about. Yeah, that's what he was talking about physics-wise. It's not new physics for each and every table or whatever. No, it's that the physics of that table is for what they have there in front of them. that's what they're modeling after and that's the only thing they can judge the physics on because how are they going to cater for a machine that they don't have that allegedly does something when something hits something they can only do physics modeling on the physical table that they have so that's what you get well and I see people all the time going well I was watching the pop-up video it's like for god's sake don't judge off the pop-up video yeah the stuff they do on pop-up they remove they actually remove entire sets a protective poster. There's nothing there. And they put super bands on them and they put everything to make it so brutal because they know the quality of player is exceptional. And then on top of that, the player that's doing the tutorial has mad skills and makes it all look so easy. So you're expecting that you're going to be able to do this awesome flipper trick because it looks so easy. And it's like, no, you don't understand the combination of factors that this person is calculating on the fly to make that happen yeah so they are able to adapt to pretty much any machine and they are able to work out oh okay so i just need to like adjust that time by a couple milliseconds so i should get the result on me because they're that good yeah you know yeah so so that was that was let's clear that up um about what what was being mentioned about physics and then mel mentioned and i i i can't remember exactly what my ears heard he said i want to say he said vr but he also said ar uh which is what kind of perk jack's ears up uh i don't know exactly how that's gonna play in um shoot i can imagine if the ar was you know it's seeing the room that you're in and having the digital pinball machine there as your plan i don't know it'd be kind of interesting to see but anyway they're it that's the kind of tech forward that they're that they're talking about basically that was kind of the only new that came from that conversation I would say yeah augmented reality I almost think it was a bit of a gaffe I think he might have meant the I don't think augmented reality would actually add much to being able to play pinball the only thing it would do is project the table into your own environment so you could sort of like walk up to it and play it in your room but even then like i wouldn't want that i'd actually want to the table to be completely zoomed in and i could care less about the room like you could take all the environmentals away for me and it wouldn't actually detract from the play field or anything play experience yeah for me in vr of course yes the environments are kind of cool in that but like if it was just ar um in regular zen mode without vr nah not interested yeah um but uh beyond that that was about the extent of everything they talked about uh in terms of release date for these three tables uh and and here aj just so you know what the reveal was because he just popped into i miss things uh so when will we be seeing funhouse dr dude in space station uh they didn't put a release date and i think part of that is because this is all pre-recorded but the typical cycle has been whenever they do an announcement it's two to three weeks that all of a sudden it gets released so it's going to be pretty dang soon i can gotta believe um yeah usually after announcement they usually do it like it's a month and typically so you could probably put a month on it and probably be pretty much right i think oh yeah it's definitely i'm gonna go two to three weeks i think it's honestly gonna to be two weeks from now, but we'll see.
    38:38
    And then after the Zen presentation, 1UP had a small presentation. It was basically just Jason Maddern talking. There was no visuals.
    38:50
    He made mention of basically talking about how Arcade 1UP got into wanting to make one of these physical machines.
    39:00
    Obviously, you're going to get one that's a Star Wars, one that's Marvel pinball, and one that is Williams pinball. but the new information, this was information that we've been trying to get,
    39:11
    and nobody's been able to answer, but he was able to just spit it out, was not only is there going to be a solenoid or haptic feedback. I don't think he actually said solenoid, but he was talking about haptic feedback. But haptic feedback on the flippers, so there's one for each flipper, and then he said there is two midfield, and I'm guessing that they're probably stacked higher and then mid, and the interesting thing, because I just figured it would be from hot bumpers, but he's saying that you can actually feel ball roll, which is a very, very interesting aspect of real pinball.
    39:50
    So this is an interesting development because if that's the case, then solenoids aren't probably what they're using in there. And there's a number of reasons why that makes a great deal of sense. Number one, solenoids are prone to breaking, We know this in pinball. Every solenoid breaks eventually.
    40:08
    But what doesn't break is a transducer. So if you don't know what a transducer is, it's a type of speaker that translates not to sound but to vibration. You'll see them in a lot of arcade games to give you that rumble feel when you're in a game. I think a lot of the Sega games like that truck driving game that used to be in the arcades used transducers to give you that sort of big engine feel in the game And it can often replace a vibrator motor as well. So what these things do is they, you don't need a big speaker either to do it, but what they do is they have sub-frequencies that you can't hear with the human ear, but they translate into vibrations through the cabinet. so that's how they're going to be able to do um ball roll vibrations and stuff and from a maintenance perspective all they need is a separate amplifier to drive them not an entire like bridge rectifier system and you know trans uh transistors and all that sort of stuff it's just it's just an amplifier sure amplifiers have transistors in them too but they're far less prone to actually breaking um so that makes a lot of sense you might even find that the flipper ones are actually not solenoids either. They may actually be transducers as well. So it's going to be interesting to see what the final thing is with that.
    41:38
    Yeah. I mean, hopefully it's not obnoxious feeling. It will be. If you do it well. So to give you an idea of what transducers are, you may have already experienced these if you go to LaserTag and you wear one of those vests. and whenever you get hit, you get like a punch in the chest with a vest. Those things are transducers that are in there.
    42:02
    There's actually a headphone system out there at the moment where you get the headphones and there's sort of a strap that goes over you with just one of these little transducers on it. Oh, for sub or for feel? Yeah, and it feels like people who use it say it feels like I'm actually in a club because you get that sort of resonant vibration through your body with the transducers. So, done right, and you can pretty much guarantee with the pedigree that Arcade1Up has, and Zen has, it will be done right. The way that they can use transducers in this could be really, really interesting. And also, too, they could probably fire the transducers in subtly different ways to actually sort of almost stereoscopically push the vibration where it needs to be. So, you know, you'll have flippers and slingshots down the bottom, and then you'll have pop-ups and stuff up the top. But depending on what's going on in the game, like, say, in the case of Circus Voltaire, if you hit the ring bus, there is a certain degree of mechanical feedback you feel when you do that in the game. So the chances are you'll feel this little sort of a touch in the cabinet when you're actually doing that. So I almost think that transducers in this particular respect are going to be better than solenoid feedback. it might actually pave the way for people who set up these pincaps at home to actually consider them as a viable alternative to solenoids I'm just wondering in the case of with what Xen is doing with Arcade 1-Up obviously it has to be coded into the game itself to work properly and so I'm wondering what happens with the inevitable person that mods their cabinet and uh puts just a puts in a steam version so they can have all the tables if then the transducers will work even at all yeah it's all right well actually in the steam comments dave vp confirms that transducers are freaking amazing in pinball calves he actually had he comments that he actually removed the two contactors he had um which is what they refer to as the things that like hit elements of the cabinet to transfer vibration so he's got what they call two exciters and a base transducer in the pin cab he says it's it's amazing so there you go good move on zen and arcade one-ups part and maintenance free basically which is a great obviously something you need to consider when you're doing these exactly yeah exactly so uh yeah that was the uh the other information uh confirmed eight inch dmd and accelerometer um no date for release other than sometime in the fall uh for the three cabs so which which is not really news, but we sort of we kind of figured it.
    45:00
    Yeah. We're getting corrected on Farsight stacking the alphanumerics in the belly not in landscape mode, but in portrait mode. Yeah. So again, that's what you were saying, Jared, when playing on mobile.
    45:15
    You've got to understand that I didn't play Pinball Arcade on Steam. It was only on mobile so that's my own experience so yeah it was stacked for me all the time pimble whiz and it's been so long since i've booted it up that i couldn't remember good to know that they actually did that because you know if you got the real estate you could just make the component that you're using to render that um responsive and just display the things either in like a linear mode or stacked i mean that's if i was doing it so i'd code it like i said i just i hope that I don't see beyond them completely redesigning how their DMD displays.
    45:55
    Because me in cabinet mode, once I set my DMD on my second screen and sized it, it's permanent. It doesn't alter at all, which was kind of a bummer because some of the artwork had slightly smaller DMD or the DMD was slightly moved, and I just kind of had to pick a centralized location and sometimes the D&D went over the edges, sometimes the underside you can see. So I made it so that you kind of just have to pick a universal option and I don't see them doing, like I said, eliminating the D&D entirely and putting a strip down the bottom for one table. No. Well, you know, there are more tables in that era of pinball that have those lineal displays. Right, and it was essentially paved the way for them to do that. But speaking to the whole cabinet mode thing, again, this would come down to making that element of the Zen Pinball experience a responsive component. So when in cabinet mode, they flip it to stacked. When the screen has real estate, they flip it to lineal.
    47:06
    This sort of stuff is not... It sort of solves problems when you're actually designing interfaces like this. So if they can do it, they will. And as Pimblebiz says, there's prior art with what Farsight did. So chances are they'll probably do it anyhow. So let's talk for a second about the other thing that nobody's really mentioning.
    47:24
    Alphanumerics, folks, they're now a thing. This is a thing, right? And it's a thing in a big way. Like all three tables are alphanumerics here.
    47:35
    So yeah, that's huge. We'll also say this. If you're wondering about the delays or whatever, you're dealing with computer chips that run slower than today's modern computer. And emulating the alphanumerics is completely different than emulating DMDs. And I think there's a lot of hiccups that need to get worked out between everything talking nicely to each other. The good news is that they've obviously figured it out. Yeah, they're willing to release it now. Yeah, now they have it figured out for these, doing the next batch of tables that has alphanumerics is going to be that much easier because the kinks have been worked out. Well, I shouldn't say, I don't know how much the kinks have been worked out, but there's now a workflow.
    48:25
    We certainly did see some stuff in the early betas that were clearly emulation issues. And those things, I think, are the things that would have taken the hardest time. You know, it's one of those things when you're doing software development, sometimes it's those 10% left over that are the hardest things to fix. And I really do think that this, like managing the ROM state and doing all that sort of fine tuning and also performance as well, considering that this is going to be on very different platforms with very different system requirements, is something that when you're developing across platforms like this would really start to become quite challenging for doing that sort of performance benchmarking and getting it right. So I kind of get why they've held it over. Admittedly, it's frustrating, of course, because they had to. But we saw what happens when you don't hold things over with Pimble Arcade. And I certainly wouldn't want that to happen again. Yeah, I'd much rather have a delay that gets things right than have an early release that then requires a whole bunch of patches, which who knows if they'll actually happen, because as we know with software development, hey, man, once you get people buying the product, why do you need to go back and fix it? That's right. I mean, unless the game broke, but that's kind of just the reality of what it is. I know that we kind of expect game companies now, because now game companies are so intent on meeting a release date that day one there's a 15-game patch. Day zero matches, exactly right.
    50:04
    But I don't think that Zen necessarily wants to go that route, and so I will happily accept a delay if that means not having to have... And again, this just harkens back to us wanting the new Williams physics on those first three volumes.
    50:23
    There's not a big priority to do it. yes zen wants to do it and conversely because they want to go back to that now we've got them on board doing it across the board for even the originals but it's just a question of when is that going to get implemented that's right this is a big job it is a big job and they don't want to i think it's going to be that they want to do just a one day patch not okay here's part one of the patch and we'll do part two of the patch later and and because it helps them build up excitement and hype to be able to say, hey, guess what? Everything is done. And people then get excited about it rather than doing what feels like a bug fix. Yeah, essentially iterations, like multiple iterations every month or so with each new release. I mean, there's two schools of thought. Like if you're thinking about agile software development, what Farsight was doing technically was right. But the problem is that they didn't follow through in a lot of cases, and they didn't actually do the polish that they needed to which is what zen is doing now so for me i'd be happy if you know i you know could see a change log that zen released to say hey look yeah we've got um williams physics on these three tables and then you go and play those tables and enjoy them in a new way um you know but sort of doing like a massive tuning run throughout all the tables is something that it would take months to do. And I'm not sure if from a realizing value and being a delighter of customers, if that's really the right way to go.
    52:02
    Also too, releasing it regularly means that they can collect feedback and see and measure whether releasing those fixes to those tables sees an increase in downloads or purchases, which would then validate investing more time into it and more development costs into it in the future. So Mel's all about that sort of stuff, and Zen builds their business on metrics and data, as we well know, Chris. So I think probably they would end up doing incremental fixes rather than one big, massive patch. Okay.
    52:33
    It's kind of interesting, too, because in the Stranger Things talk with Stern, they were mentioning about patches,
    52:41
    you know, to code, that they haven't quite come up with the 1.0 code for Stranger Things. And they kind of were mentioning that a lot of it is basing it off of feedback of play. And basically letting everybody out there with a physical machine be the beta testers and giving them response while they work out some of the deeper modes and what's working. I mean, we saw that pattern really heavily used in Batman 66. like they released a game that was basically bare bones code and they iterated on it for about two years to get it to the point where it is now where it if you were patient and you held on to the game you're rewarded with what is an incredibly deep game and an incredibly great game if you know the rules the other thing that's really neat about that is as you start to see the rules coming in it actually lets you learn them so you can actually build up your knowledge of the rules rather than have to learn it all in one hit, which in a game like Batman 66 is very, very difficult. But if you suck with it, you can trickle-feed these rules and get them into your muscle memory, so then you can actually explore the game more. And that Batman 66 game really was targeted at home use. So if you apply that same logic to what Xen are doing here, it sort of makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah, sort of. um yo great just lost a train of thought thanks oh I know right I know what I was going to say back to the idea of alphanumerics now that those are a thing you folks realize how many more pinball tables now are potentially can be done and there are tons that were never put into Pinball Arcade either.
    54:41
    I mean, I think about the System 11 tables alone, I think half of them didn't get put in. Yeah. If I'm not mistaken. Now, realistically, how far back are we going to go? And I would guess you're looking at 1980. And I say 1980 because that's when Firepower, 8-Ball Deluxe,
    55:05
    Centaur. that's about i if you go back any farther you're talking about bally wide bodies like future spa space invaders i don't think they're going to do those i i really don't think they're going to go there and if you go them before those now you're into essentially ems or ems that got converted and yeah that's way too far back for zen and i don't think they need to go back that far because again we're talking about easily 40 to 60 tables within this era that people are going to want to see that's right and you know you know pinball whiz rightly says it was around 1986 when you started to see the first real introduction of alpinumerics up until then it was just numerics and i just think for the zen audience it was fine for pinball okay because they had a very different mission that they're trying to do which is preserve pinball and some of those titles before 1986 were important titles from a historical perspective but really for the fun side of things when you start to get into alphanumerics you start to get things more stabilized like multi-balls and modes like basic modes and stuff like that so for the zen audience that's probably more appropriate yeah i think that's where the the majority of them will come from but i really god i want to see centaur in pinball effects i really want to see centaur would be a nice exception wouldn't it yeah so i think imagine what they could do with the visuals on that because it needs it it needs visuals yeah they do uh reprints or redos of playfields and they're you know clear-coded beautiful beautiful beautiful they did a run of centaur that's colorized i don't like it it's I don't like it. It looks like somebody, you know, took a little kid, took their colored pencils and started using it as a coloring book.
    57:03
    But it's an interesting, if you ever want to know what it looks like, just go to their website and take a gander. It's kind of, if you've ever thought, oh, I wonder what this would look like with color. There you go. I think the insert light colors are enough on that one. but yeah I know I think that there's a couple pre 86 between that 1980 and 86 that would make for good additions into the Zen family I don't think you need certainly all of them by any stretch of the imagination but it's very good like it's you know setting the pace for the next 10 years or so but there's also all those oddball bally tables that they can do now I forget they're not considered System 11 they're like the 80s System 8 no not System 8 it wasn't System at all because Bally wasn't part of Williams at that point yeah Blackwater that's a really good one to put in there that's a very unique game that would be quite interesting to experience with Bonsai Run or actually that was technically a System 11 I think it's System 9 and System 11 that's when they first started introducing the concept of systems so yeah the ones that I guess commonly referred to as system 11s aren't really system 11s there's a technicality I think it's chip speed that differentiates them so anyway that's what we're saying though really nerdy I'll let you get nerdy in a moment yeah 11b that's right just the potential of tables that are out there though that we can look forward to I know people are like, oh, I want these license tables. And I know people are like, ah, when are we getting Stern? This is why I don't believe we're seeing Stern anytime soon. Because Zen is going to... The patent is full. Yeah, well, I mean, Zen wants to get the most bang for their buck in the shortest period of time. And that's how you do it. You pay a large sum of money for a license. And then you exploit the living out of it. For a short... It's kind of like what I see with car restorations. where the quicker you can do the restoration means the lower the labor cost. If the labor cost is low, then the cost of your initial investment returns stronger. But if you take months and months to churn somebody else's vehicle out, well, now you're doing storage, you're doing labor, it's all these other factors that just raise everything up. So I think that Zen is going to approach this with, let's just bang out as many Williams and Bally tables as possible before going over to Stern. And because Stern is, I mean, other than a very few tables, is every single table is licensed. Yeah. I can only imagine that you get a licensed table and then, wait for it, Zen Original tables, which people have been clamoring for now. They're like, we want, bring back the Zen Originals. Well, yeah, there you go. Now you get some Zen originals bridging the gap between what you would get for license table-wise. But I think we'll see once...
    60:17
    We've had our first pack of licenses with the monster pack. Once we see a few more, I think we'll understand what Zen's approach to the licensed world of Williams is. And then you're going to apply all that knowledge towards the inevitable getting of Stern. Yeah. Because it's going to happen. It's just a matter of when. I very confident to predict that Stern will happen And that probably part of the next 10 plan And I keep on saying this deal with Arcade 1 because once you start seeing the potential market because there's a big difference between paying $500 to $600 for an Arcade 1-Up machine versus paying $8,000 for a pinball machine. but we all know how the addiction is once you get your foot in the door you start looking to get your arm in the door and then next thing you know you're going full body and next thing you know you've got a whole room full of pinballs and I think that Stern's eyes will open up that much more seeing these cabinets go in and that it's not competing with their product but instead actually making larger the base potential customer. Like we said very early, even with Farsight, Stern's partnership with Farsight when it was in its early days was basically a marketing vehicle for them. People are still going to want to walk up to the thing in the arcade and play the real thing because I can tell you that playing Stranger Things Premium in the arcade is an incredible experience that you cannot replicate on a home console. you just you can't it is just incredible like the thing i don't know if you played it or had an opportunity i haven't i have not seen it in person man this thing is incredible it's got like a pico projector in the apron that like projects onto white surfaces onto the um playfield objects and it's very well integrated but not only that it's got a completely black lit playfield mask over it that when you go into the upside down the entire playfield changes yeah it is just incredible to see the first time my jaw dropped and that sort of thing it you can do it in digital sure with the right effects and everything but you see that thing in life like in front of the machine do it it's like nothing else so jared you're gonna really want to go watch that uh twitch stream of their about stranger things yeah because they go into all that it's so good yeah yeah it's uh it's an amazing pin but at the same time so here you are you've played it It's amazing.
    63:08
    You know it's amazing. But do you got the money to put one in your house? No way. I don't have the space either. But if I can get it digitally and learn the rules and then go and translate those rules into, have a clue of how to play it in the arcade, well, that would make me play it in the arcade more. Honestly, it would. Right. Because I know how to play it. I know how to have fun on it. Because that's the hardest part. Of course, you got the flip side of that from an earnings perspective. like you know if you know how to play it really well the idea is to kind of learn how to play it really well yeah but that's that's the operator's problem not that is the operator's problem yeah that's not ours no yeah no um so that's why i'm saying i think stern just needs some convincing but they're going to see the light of day and by the time they see the light of day I think that Zen will be ready for them. Oh, yeah.
    64:02
    Because, again, it's just a timing issue right now. And Zen stated that a while back with they were offered the Williams license at a time when they were doing Portal and Walking Day and they already had a full plate and they were like, we can't take it on. We can't do it justice if we take it on right now. It doesn't make sense for us to take it on right now. Come back. Yeah. so I want to because I found this highly amusing I guess you know what Jared we're going to talk about this will give us we tend to want to cram as much as possible into one podcast and sometimes you just need to spread it out we're going to talk about the reaction the online reaction to the announcements because it's kind of been mixed bag some of you were very disappointed that you didn't get the world offered to you after waiting seven months um but what i did find amusing was uh over on digital pinball fans i don't even know what thread it was but uh the mention of no it was the zen the zen um general thread thread i think yeah but there was a basically a discussion about is it linux or linux i always thought it was linux linux um linux implementation that zen has not done that and And Jared popped in and just kind of gave a brief logical answer. And then the person that he gave that to jumped down his throat. So I wanted to let Jared a chance to respond. It's a real shame because I haven't even read the response. Oh, no!
    65:38
    Sorry, I should probably bring it up. You should because it literally went from zero to 100 like that. I knew it would. I had a feeling. You're giving a nice logical business answer as to why it wouldn't necessarily make sense. This guy went into the whole cabal of Microsoft being this monopoly that has swallowed up everybody and is making us all practically laid so that we don't.
    66:03
    Oh, I thought you had actually read this, Jared. No, no. See, the thing is that I only consume digital pinball fans through what is the Tap a Talk app. And, you know, sometimes it tells me about stuff and sometimes it doesn't really tell me that much about stuff. So, like, I'll check in occasionally, and, you know, it was really just something I responded to late at night, so I wasn't really thinking it would be, you know, particularly upsetting, but it seems to have done so. Well, tell you what, Jared. I'm going to let you look at it, and we'll throw this into the talk next time so that you can properly digest everything that's said because it's quite hilarious.
    66:51
    Oh, yeah, I'm sure. It sounds like it's a big read. That's what I'm saying. This isn't something that you can just briefly look at. I had thought that you had already read it and had a good chuckle. So the rest of you, if you want to have a good chuckle. Jared, what thread is it exactly?
    67:07
    I'm looking. I can't even find it. I'm using the web interface. It's basically like Alien to me because it's so different to Deppertalk. but it'll be in I think it's general game discussions in studios looks like Pinball Wiz just posted a link thank you Pinball Wiz for helping us out here because it was a bit brutal oh yeah, oh here we go almost oh yeah right, okay so it's the Williams Collection Volume 6 Guesses thread on Digital Pinball Fans and it's near the end of that whole thread if you want to give it a read for yourself. I'll let Jared respond next week about that too. Yeah.
    67:55
    Oh, look, I don't really think it's his response. Anyhow, it's just somebody, you know. Maybe Jared will have to just respond on the thread and you all can pay attention that way and enjoy it. I don't know. I just get a kick out of somebody losing their minds over something that literally 99.999% of us could care less about and then making it the number one priority in life. So that's... Two pin fans points that he originally posed, like getting past the fact that he's frustrated that he can't play it on Linux and Steam does have a way technically of playing games on Linux with a little bit of messing around, not too much, but a little bit of messing around. And it seems like Steam are definitely investing in the idea of it, which is great to see. And the point in the video that when you look at the software that actually allows you to do it,
    68:56
    it seems like they've got the right idea. But it is Linux. And I've worked for Red Hat for six years, right? It's one of the largest commercial open source software companies. And I've used Red Hat Linux and I've used Enterprise Linux and I've used Fedora, which are all distros. And I know the problem that these things have with doing anything relating to media. Like trying to get a video card to work. And yes, NVIDIA is investing very nicely in open source and stuff like that. It's great. but you know getting things like controllers to work getting things like your headset even stuff like getting your headset to work that's usb that stuff is surprisingly difficult and if you've got like one of those gaming headsets that's you know specific to windows yeah unfortunately that's probably not going to be working too well so you know there's going to be frustrations out there which, yeah, sure, give it a go. And you can boot these solutions from a USB stick. It works. You can try it out. So do try it out if you want to have a go. But from a commercial perspective, it's like, sure, it's another market, but is the market viable? And that's what it comes down to. Like you can – the pin fans' response is very much about, oh, it should be – Everything should be available and Proton allows you to do it, but do they need to do it? That's the real question. Is Linux the market that they want to target?
    70:37
    It just comes down to that. And that's where it comes down to how much money are you spending on R&D to do this and problem solve it?
    70:48
    It becomes a spreadsheet, and it becomes real obvious real quickly that it just isn't worth look do you want them to spend the time doing that or do you want them spending time working on new physics and working on better visuals and working on uh better you know maybe doing head-to-head at some point you know there's all these other factors that are way more important to way more of the community than this little, little, itty-bitty, tiny subset. I mean, I got to imagine, if VR isn't getting the attention that they want right now, that community is probably massively larger than the Linux community that wants this.
    71:29
    The closing line really is, it basically is the catchphrase of pretty much any Linux stalwart, which is, I suggest you all give the M-dollar OS a second thought. after reading a bit about its disgraceful history. It's worth ditching it alone for the new exciting things you can learn with Linux and being part of the community. Yeah, Linux is great until you have to actually do anything with it. And I'm telling you this because I've used it, trying to use it as a daily driver in a replacement for a desktop environment like Windows or Mac. And I can tell you what, when I was able to migrate over from Linux to a Mac in one of my jobs, it was like, hang on. So I get all the benefits of a Linux operating system with Unix and command line and all the ability to run all the tools and stuff. But it sucks way less and I can do stuff with it. Like, okay, sign me up for that because I don't have time to stuff about. My time's important and my time's actually really expensive. And look, if you want to tinker around with stuff, you knock yourself out. But I've got stuff to do and it's not configuring a Linux system. Yeah. So that's my closing point to that. And yes, AJ, at the end of the day, everything does reduce to money, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. And I don't know if that's what you were – I don't think that you were stating it as that, but that's just – that's life. That's fact. It really is. Time is money, basically. You know, I just spent – because I have time, and I – my wife laughs at me when I do this, and I did it for the second week in a row. But last week, I decided that I was sick and tired of how our shower door looked, and it was time to really, really do a cleaning on it, which meant taking the thing off the hinges and taking it outside and seeing what I could do. Right, right. I wound up spending five hours trying to scrape it and clean it. And here's the thing. When I started it, it was like I saw immediate results. I went, oh, I can do this. but then as you get into it it becomes progressively more difficult and then it becomes well you really should have gone to the store and gotten some you know calcium lime remover and you really should have be using this but it's oh but look how far i've gotten so far i don't need any of that and then an hour later you're like okay i really could have used it but well i'm too far past now i'm just gonna like i said five hours later and one of my neighbors was like you should have just gone to the store and bought a new door. And he's right in terms of time versus money. Right now I've got all the time in the world. I don't have all the money in the world, so I'm going to spend the time. But there becomes a certain point where you don't have all the time in the world and you do have some money, maybe not a lot, but it becomes, hey, is it better to spend the money and have it function properly and work great or spend the time trying to tinker and do it? if it's a hobby that is fun to you then the time is worth it if it's not a hobby and not fun at all then the money becomes worth it and any of these things that go on with game development of course it comes down to sales they're not doing this out of the generosity of their heart they're doing it to be profitable to be able to exist many years down the line and to Farsight's credit there is a game studio that's been around 20 plus years that's difficult that's a long time that's a very long time they found a method that works for them unfortunately it doesn't work that well for the game player um yeah that's right zen i think is trying to find what works great for them and can potentially accelerate them to the next level these are tactics that Blizzard, EA, Activision name your giant studio at one point or another they were a tiny studio that's right and how did they get big? by making smart choices that might seem monopolistic or very greedy but it's what ensures that they're around for the long haul Like as Dave VP says in chat, Linux users on Steam are 0.88% of the total user base. So that's a figure that they'll be looking at probably, pinfan7.
    75:59
    And like you said, Jared, we know that Mel is all about the data. It's about them. That data is king when they make decisions, and so it should be. That's the truth. Data does not lie. So, yeah. So I think for right now folks revel in the fact that you're going to Yeah, we're done. Revel in the fact that you're getting you finally know the three tables. Me and Jared can finally talk again. Yay! This is good.
    76:27
    We can go back into speculating about tables without giving a what, you know we even talked about it and we're like should we do some table speculation about it? And I was like well people are going to extrapolate the fact that if we don't mention X, Y, and Z table,
    76:43
    that people are going, wait, especially if we don't mention something like Funhaus. You'd be like, well, why aren't they talking about that? Hmm. Yeah, so it's just better that we don't talk about it at all. Yeah. I'm just very thankful that we had, like,
    76:57
    home-use pinball cabinet news to talk about in those six months. Otherwise, I don't know what we would have done.
    77:03
    So, yeah, enjoy discussing. I pay attention to the Discord, PinballFX3 Discord channel. I pay attention to the PinballFX3 Reddit channel. For which both of those, I think it's going to be closed now, but they were looking, Jenna was looking for moderators on those. Yeah. If you want to get involved in that respect. And then, of course, I always pay attention to digital pinball fans. So let your reactions be known about these there. Feel free to hop onto YouTube, comments on our podcast, let us know your reaction there we feed off all of it we do it's great to see it actually we love it so do it I even had somebody commenting on a podcast that was like a year ago honestly they're a new user and put it in comment I'm happy to jump back in and throw down replies to whatever they're commenting about so yeah do it and let us know what you think of this volume six pack.
    78:10
    Alright. We're probably maybe not going to be here next week. Probably not. Just to give you guys a long time to digest and then potentially hopefully they'll be more out of zen for you guys to actually physically see for yourselves. And then we'll be able to jump on that. So real quick, just looking over the comments, did Zen Studio release a date for the new tables? No.
    78:41
    Jared's saying, I'm saying assume two weeks, three weeks max. That's my guess is based off their release history, but that's not official by any stretch of the imagination. No.
    78:55
    Chances are you're playing pretty soon. Yeah. And again, the arcade one-up will just be sometime in the fall. That's what they had to announce. yeah go folks go to the twitch channel for California extreme watch the things yourself make sure head over to this week in pinball and check out all the goodness because he I'm telling you there's two posts a week that are chock full of pinball news and it's good stuff not to mention and I can't tell how many times I've now been telling linking to that site because of all the licensing stuff. I wrote an entire article, the likes of which we had much confirmation after the fact. Head over there, over into the guest articles.
    79:40
    I wrote one. Actually, I've written two, but the important one was about the speculation about the Williams license, because it's still valid and still informative today, and I'm still finding that when I, especially on Reddit, people being wildly misinformed, like I had to respond to a post where they said, well, after they lost the Williams license, they picked up Stern and Gottlieb. no no no no no no no that's what they were left with yeah yep so uh yeah so again head over head over to uh thisweekinpinball.com and uh you'll get all sorts of real table news um but there's also that whole section of all the various podcasters and uh twitch streamers uh just the pinball community in general that you can check out and uh hook up that way because we'd like everybody to be communicating and make this a large community. As large as possible. Alright.
    80:38
    Jared, you know what to say. Next week, or next fortnight, or whenever we do this next, it's most likely going to be about stuff and things. Not stuffing things. Stuff and things. Stuff and things.
    80:55
    Just want to clarify. Alright folks, until next time. bye bye