Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. Today is Sunday, June 5th. This is Episode 10. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're going to talk about pinball and video games and tabletop. We've got a slightly heavier-than-normal dose of pinball today. But before we get to that, Dennis, what have we been up to? I guess I should acknowledge what people have already heard. We finally have intro music for the podcast. We're big boys now. I had actually heard about Fiverr. Yeah, yes. We've been discussing it for a while, and I did try and piece something together. It was not very good because I don't really know how to use the software. It physically hurt. It hurt. I knew it was bad when Tony said, well, let's think about hiring that out. So anyway, I was listening to the Coinbox Pinball podcast, which incidentally, if anyone is ever interested in an operator's perspective on pinball, that is the podcast I would recommend. And I will have a link in the show notes for you all to be able to tune into. But they mentioned a service called Fiverr, which does a lot of sort of gig arrangements, many of which have a baseline price of about $5. So we were able to go and find someone to be able to just throw together some intro music who actually knew what they were doing. So that is why there's the new music. We're going to be running with that for a while so people in listening to multiple podcasts will know which one is actually starting to play right at the get-go. Outside of that, let's see. In the video game front, I have been working on Witcher 3 a bit. I had done some side quests. I've really only been playing it on weekends, just because I've been doing some other things instead. So I'm not very far into the game. I did actually get, I guess, through sort of that first act, which sort of felt like the tutorial act. And so in terms of achievements, I finally have an achievement. So I've officially started the game from my perspective. And I knew with Witcher that it took several hours before you would actually earn one. So that was anticipated. And that's really it on video games that I've done much on. I worked a little bit on Pinball Arcade. I've been trying to get through the standard table goals for Seasons 1 and 2, and there's just a few of those machines, like all Gottliebs, that are hanging me up. So I'm still struggling with that. I start and finished a book, a David Balbacci book called The Guilty. Balbacci's one of those mystery and thriller authors that historically I've read. That's actually the genre I've read the most of, if I were to consider all the books I've ever read just for recreation. I've not read in this series before, and it is the latest. It's sort of interesting because I got the book for Christmas, but I only just now started and finished it because I had another book, and it was just terrible, but I insisted that I was going to finish it, and I finally made myself do it this last week. So yay me for accomplishing that, if you can consider such a thing an accomplishment. Yeah, I don't know about forcing yourself through a book. I mean, if it's bad enough that I don't want to finish it, I'll typically just put it away. There's no point in forcing it. Yeah, I think I need to. That's probably something for me to work on me about. I don't know why. And it's not like it was one of those. I do Amazon Prime, so every month I get to pick from usually four or six books and get one for free. It was one of those. I didn't even pay any money for it. but I don't even remember the title. I can tell you what the plot was about a woman who is working for an architecture firm, and she is basically tracing out an old bank, and it's jumping back and forth in time from the 70s to the 90s, which is the bank was doing some sort of fraud, and so it was supposed to be a mystery, but it just, it wasn't, it started okay, but it just wasn't written very well. The characters weren't compelling, and it was very repetitive. I don't remember the name of it. Yeah, I found that most of those books that they give you for free, if there's one that's actually interesting enough that I'm willing to pick up, because I'm a Prime member as well, half the time they're bad. I mean, they're bad. I think I've had one or two that I've picked up that I've really enjoyed. I read one that was from a few months ago that was a sword-and-sandal type fantasy. So it was like your standard fantasy type novel, but the era was more Greek than medieval, so that was really interesting. But most of those Prime available free books just tend to be crap. Yeah, and I get that they're supposed to be like some sort of editor's pick, so I thought they were supposed to rise to a certain standard. I haven't grabbed very many of the fantasy ones, and the main reason is because I've been interested in trying them, but most of those I see from the titles are in a series, And so I prefer to grab the standalones because then I guess in a way I don't feel like I'm missing anything or any of the book is decent, then I might just look at the author later. But I don't want to necessarily get stuck onto a series that might be just kind of good, and I think maybe I want to give it a shot, but maybe I don't know. I just generally I don't know if I'm getting in on the ground floor either. Another thing I kind of noticed about a lot of those as I started to, at least of the ones I've grabbed, It seems like a lot of the authors are foreign and the books were not written originally in English. They've been translated. And I've wondered if that's part of it. That could be. I mean, depending upon the translation, it could be a really rough read. Right. If it's literal, then you've lost all the prose structure to it that actually, you know, it flows strangely. And I had another one, which I also forced myself through, that I knew was originally written in German. and just some of the turns of phrase when you were reading it, it was really awkward. It wasn't how a native English speaker would ever have written something, and it just didn't work very well. But that one was easier to get through because the story was actually decent. So I did get through two books, basically. Oh, this was actually in the last week. On the TV front, I started watching Ash vs. Evil Dead, which is based off of the Evil Dead Army of Darkness trilogy. It's a TV show. It's greenlit for a second season. Season one is ten episodes. I'm over halfway through. I'm either ready for episode seven or eight. I don't recall. It really does capture that Evil Dead 2 Army of Darkness feel. It's extremely gory and extremely campy. Stars is what it originally aired on, so it does have profanity. It doesn't have any limits on being able to do a lot of the gore effects. Many of the effects are practical. So lots of actual sort of practical blood effects, which is good because they do also, especially for, you know, like bullets and such, they do a lot of CG as well. And the CG is atrocious. It may be deliberately atrocious for camp value. I'm not clear. But I much prefer the campy over-the-top practical blood effects to when they are using the CG because the CG budget was not expansive. I'm just looking at kind of one of the old school CG, like the really bad CG you'd see back during Hercules and Xena days. And that kind of thing. Or are we talking the fake fire? I can't remember what show. I remember there was a show once that did fire that was so terribly fake. It looked like they just superimposed video from one of those Christmas burning log fireplace tapes for your thing over the guy who was running down the street. The problem is I did not regularly watch Xena or Hercules, so I can't recall what the CG there was like. the analogy I would probably try and run with in terms of the quality of the CG is, in terms of like the blood effects, it would be like the Expendables movies use the, or like Expendables 2 used the fake blood, and it's really, really obvious, but it's not at that level of quality. For a TV show, I'd probably compare it to some of the CG, if you ever saw Spartacus, the three seasons of Spartacus. It's kind of like on that level of CG. You knew instantly it was CG, but it wasn't so terrible that your laughter couldn't, you couldn't hear what was going on because you were laughing so hard? Right, no. I mean, generally whenever it's being done, something ridiculous is also happening on screen anyway, hence why I'm not entirely queer. But, for example, you can tell that there's not a lot of post-editing involving trying to make the CG look better, either because they don't want to because of the camp or because they think it would be funnier. But, for example, if the person's moving a little bit, they've done some other CG objects and stuff, and they're not keeping... Like if something's supposed to have landed on Ash, for example, like a bug or something, and the bug's not actually staying in the exact same spot because he's still kind of moving his arm in the shot, but they didn't move the CG with it sort of thing. So, yeah, so anytime there's, like, the CG blood, it is instantly recognizable, instantly, because they use so much practical blood for most of the shots, because it's exceedingly gory. And most of those are, you know, see an axe swing or something and then cut to a person who then apparently just had a whole bucket of fake blood thrown on them. That is the normal style. They really only seem to do the CG when they need to, like, do the – They need the shot where it would, I guess, be too obvious, so they were throwing something from off-camera onto a person. And so for those sort of wide-angle shots, they've gone with the CG. I wish they didn't. I would rather, even though it can't be as kind of funny to see that, I would have rather just seen practical effects. But it is what it is. If you're a fan of Army of Darkness or Evil Dead 2, it's worth seeing because it is very much in the vein of those. You definitely get the spirit of that. Well, those are always good movies. Yes. I enjoyed all three. It's been a long time, actually, since I've seen any of them. And then the only other thing recently, of course, is pinball play. So we were both at 403 Club for the monthly tournament yesterday, and I rapidly lost, like usual, so not much to report there. The other thing I thought would be sort of interesting is one of the players, one of the area players has started up a summer selfie league. And I've been reading about this for quite a while. Actually, for a while, I was a member of the sort of Chicago area Selfie League Facebook page. I was trying to find out more information. They offered to let me join on to that just so I could watch and see how they do it. So for those that aren't familiar, the way this kind of works is pinball leagues normally have people get together. A lot of times it's weekly, and they'll play these games over a series of weeks, and that's sort of a qualifier. and then they have, based off of who qualifies, those finalists go and play in a tournament. The problem for someone like me is while we have two leagues at this point running in the Kansas City area, I can't make either of them. They start too late and they run too long for me to be able to justify going the distance that it would take to get to them. So I've always decided to decline participating in the leagues, even though I definitely could use the practice, and I really would like to do, I like the idea of doing the leaks. It's just I can't be that tired going to work the next day because I stayed up too late. So this, though, the way it will work is you go on your own time during the qualifying period, and the qualifying period is a month, and you just play the games on your own, and you take a picture of yourself with the score in the frame, and then you submit that into software, the picture, along with typing in the score. it gets validated. And then based off of that, it determines the rankings of who qualifies for finals and who does not. And then they still have the in-person final tournament, which also is conveniently structured to be on the same day as one of the existing monthly tournaments. So I really like this idea, but we're going to see how this goes. June is the, it's scheduled to do three. So I'm sure all three will go forward, but obviously we'll, we'll probably learn a lot from how June goes. Not a lot of people have so far submitted scores. I think there, last I looked, there were eight people signed up into the system. I'm hoping we'll see more growth on that. But obviously, it's all brand new. Word's still getting out. But I'm excited because it finally gives a, I want to see if there's a, how the social aspect can maybe be enhanced as time goes by. But I've gone into the software and looked at people's photos and submissions and seen like how they've done because, I mean, honestly, a lot of these people have put up some incredible scores already. It's been fun so far, and I would imagine the operators must like it because I spent $20 more than normal going and doing games this last week, whereas normally I would just go downstairs and play my own games. Instead, I thought, okay, I've got an hour. I can go out for lunch, and I can drop a roll of quarters into these machines and see what I can do. Yeah, I'm signed up on that one too, and we'll see how it goes. I'm not expecting myself to do very well because I don't normally do very well. But, hey, occasionally it just takes one ball. I've got four of them done, but we'll see. I'm planning next week on going and getting a bunch more knocked out. I've been watching Archer. I've been playing this little unknown game that just came out called Overwatch. Never heard of it. Yeah, and it's a neat little TF2 clone. There's nothing special about it. Yes, I've heard one person say that. A lot of people, I think, would acknowledge that it definitely has a Team Fortress 2 feel to it. Yes, and it's much, much better than Team Fortress 2, and I like Team Fortress 2. And much more popular. Yeah, and I like Team Fortress 2 a lot. Now, between that and I've been working, I've been going through some of my stuff, stuff, doing some organizing and getting rid of stuff. Basically doing spring cleaning now that spring's pretty much over. And that's really all I've been doing lately. Our intro is long enough for folks. I'm sure they want us to get into the meat of our discussions. You mean they're not here just to hear what we do during the week and then go away? I don't think they were here to hear about my really apparently weird reading habits and how I force myself, punish myself through books. Oh, yeah. You're a voracious reader. You always have been. Certainly you've read something. I think I might have mentioned it last episode, but I've begun my reread of The Wheel of Time, which is going to take me the next month. I mean, I'm a fast reader, but having read it before and having been busy, I'm reading slow anyway. But, I mean, just the main story is 14 books, and it's millions upon millions of words. So that's basically what I'm going to be slogging through reading-wise here for the next long time. I've never read it. I've heard good things about it. It's good. It's good. It's not my necessarily favorite series, but it's a good enough series that I'm willing to read it, even in its length, a second time. I can't tell you how many times I've read, like, The Dark Tower now. I've read all of The Dark Tower at least three or four times now, but The Dark Tower is also a lot shorter. So that makes it easier to get through. Definitely. But that's about it for my stuff. All right. Well, then we will move into pinball. And we have, as you noted at the top of it, we have a pinball-heavy episode. I think a lot of people would say we're always pinball-heavy, but we're very pinball-heavy this time. Yes. We are always more than happy to talk a whole lot about pinball because here at Eclectic Gamers Podcast, we talk about whatever we want as long as it's within those three topics or in our intro. Basically, we do what we want, I suppose. So we got a couple interviews, but before getting into that, I will go ahead and run us through the 1980s Pinball Machine Mania Tournament because it's time to kick off round three. But before we do that, we need to quickly summarize what happened in round two. Voting was good. We had more than twice the participation in round two that we had in round one. And I go over the numbers and everything. It wasn't anything ridiculous like hundreds of people in excess of the podcast listening base in terms of people botting it or whatnot because we're not requiring any registration or anything. And Google surveys will allow you to do that, but I didn't see the point in mandating everyone have a Gmail account. I mean, I know Google's everywhere, but even I have to draw a line at some point. So nothing looks untoward. But as always, when going over the results, we do see some interesting aspects. And so in terms of round two, we're going to go through the regions. The Williams region, we had two upsets. So the high speed, which was the seven seed title, beat the second seed title, Black Knight 2000, with 61.5% of the vote. Yeah, that's kind of shocking. I mean, I enjoy high speed a lot, but I don't know if I like it better than Black Knight 2000. Yeah, I voted for Black Knight 2000 in this one. I had to think about it a little bit. I don't have a lot of time on high speed. I've played it a bit virtually. I've played it in reality a couple of times, and I always feel a little awkward when I don't have a ton of experience on a game actually casting a vote. And I did skip votes on games I wasn't familiar with. But I went in and I thought, well, with the music and everything, I thought Black Knight 2000 was better. But a really strong majority of people apparently disagree with that assessment and like High Speed a lot. You see, if it had been with the getaway, it would have been an easy choice. I would have chosen the getaway. Well, yeah, obviously. That wouldn't have been fair in a 90s DMD era game. to be in this matchup anyway. So, you know, some of it in the Apple Store in just comparison. The other upset in the Williams region was the five-seed Pinbot did beat the four-seed Banzai Run. It was decisive at 57.7%, but not as decisive as High Speed's victory. That's not too much of a surprise. Pinbot's a really popular game. Yeah, I mean, those were side-by-side seeds. So it was conceivable that it would be a close vote. And I did back Pinbot on that one. That was an easy choice for me. I just enjoy shooting it more. So then the rest of the matchups were not upset. So Earthshaker did beat Space Station and Taxi beat Cyclone. Expected. So moving on to the Gottlieb region, there was one upset, and it was the 14-seed Genesis and the 6-seed Devil's Dare actually tied. As any good pinball tournament would do, I did a coin toss. Devil's Dare got to be heads because it was the top seed, and Genesis got to be tails because it was the bottom seed, and it was tails. So Genesis wins the toss and gets to move on. It's going to be an interesting bit of how it turns out. You know, as low as Genesis was seeded, I was surprised, and I mentioned it on the last episode, that it got out of the first round. I did actually go back and play it virtually because I was thinking, I remember I did kind of a Bride of Pinbot comparison. And I should probably elaborate a bit for those that aren't familiar with Genesis. It doesn't shoot like Bride of Pinbot. It's not like you're just feeding into this face over and over. It's the idea that you're kind of assembling a robotic woman. That's the tie-in to it. It does have a variety of shots. It's like it's kind of a chopping wood approach. So, like, doing the brain is one shot, and then doing the legs is a certain shot, and you do it over and over, and you spell it out. But I, you know, I don't get it. The black glass is weird. It's really weird, and I wonder if that's what's carrying it, because you would think, as low-seeded as it is, it might be one of the better Premier Gottlieb games from the 80s, but we'll see if it gets through round three, but I wouldn't think so. I don't know. So the rest of the matchups were non-upsets. So Haunted House beat Arena, Black Hole beat RoboWar, and TX Sector, which just, I believe, has come out, or at least was announced to come out for Pinball Arcade, beat Spirit. Valley Region, there were no upsets in the Valley Region. Elvira and the Party Monsters beat Medusa. Surprise. Fathom beat Skateball. Centaur beat Flash Gordon. And 8-Ball Deluxe did beat 8-Ball Deluxe Limited Edition, but there was one person who voted for the Limited Edition. I didn't see any emails explaining it. Did someone contact you, Tony? No, I haven't seen anything unless I missed something in the Twitter, I didn't see anything. Well, then it sounds like they're a coward and couldn't defend their selection. Oh, well. I guess we'll just have to let that one slide. They might have had a good reason, but the world will never know. They clicked the wrong one? Yeah, it could be. They didn't even know they did it? There was a back button. They just saw 8-ball and clicked it? Yeah, maybe depending on what their font settings were, maybe it scrolled and they didn't see the LE. It dropped down a lot. Yeah. Now, who knows? Who knows? We're trying to be merciful and give them a legitimate excuse, but there really is no excuse. Taste for taste. I guess they could probably point to Genesis and say, what is going on? But no, not really. If you chose the LE version, you didn't get to say anything. And then our other region, our final region, there were two upsets here. The six-seed, nine-ball, stern title beat the three-seed, Andromeda, which is made by Game Plan. And it did so with 56% of the vote. and then the 13 seed Robocop, which is a Data East game, beat the five seed Farfalla, which is from Zacharia, with 66.7% of the vote. So these upsets eliminated those two manufacturers that I would say broadly are the lesser known, and they only each, Zacharia and Gameplan, only had these one games in the tournament. So those are out. And then the rest of the matchups were Steam Witch, excuse me, Steam Witch, Sea Witch beats Quicksilver. Those are both Stern games. And Stargazer beat Catacomb. Those are also Stern games. Steam Witch. That sounds like that could be an interesting little cyberpunk-looking game. Or not cyberpunk, but a steampunk-looking game. You know, a steampunk-themed pinball game, I think, could have a lot of potential. They have lots of gears and this and that on it. Yeah. Well, maybe at least virtually. I don't know how many hardcore pinball collector sorts would want to buy Steampunk. Probably zero. But on the video game side, we see Steampunk as popular. So round three matchups. We're down to our 16 finalists. So there are only four games per region, two matchups per region. So in the Williams region, the number one seed Earthshaker is going to go up against the number three seed Taxi. And the number seven seed High Speed will go against the number five seed Pinbot. Then in the Gottlieb region, the number one seed Haunted House will go against the number 14 seed Genesis. And the number two seed Black Hole will go against the number four seed TX Sector. In the Bally region, the number one seed Elvira and the Party Monsters will be against the number three seed Fathom. And the number two seed Centaur will go against the number four seed Eight Ball Deluxe. And finally, in the other region, the number one seed Sea Witch will go against the number six seed Nine Ball. and the number two seed Stargazer will go against the number 13 seed Robocop. And as noted earlier, other than Robocop, which is the Data East game, those are all sterns. So that's it. We will have the link to round three in the show notes and on the main page, and we'll put it out on the social media. And we encourage you to go and cast your vote. And when we do the next podcast, we will go over those results and get ready for the final regional breakouts in round four. and then we'll be actually moving forward to region versus region play. I'm not expecting any real upsets in here other than, no, I don't really expect any upsets here. Well, maybe Penbot. I think Penbot might pull out ahead. Or I'm sorry, I read that backwards. Penbot is the higher seed. Never mind, I'm not expecting any upsets. Yes, I think you're right that there's not very much likelihood, at least, to see any upsets here in round three. I could envision two. I wouldn't be surprised with the popularity of the table from Pinball Arcade in particular, that Taxi might overtake Earthshaker, because I know a lot of people have been exposed to Taxi. And then I could also envision an upset in the Bally region. Fathom. There's a lot of love for Fathom amongst players and collectors. So I could actually see Fathom taking out Elvira and the Party Monsters. I don't know if it will. I haven't decided how I'm going to vote on that one yet, because Fathom, I think, is a frustrating game that Elvira and the Party Monsters has some unbalanced scoring. Yeah, but it's still a super popular game, but all the Elvira games are really just hyper popular. Right, right. And again, it comes down to who's doing the voting. So, yeah, a lot of people who are collectors of pinball remember Elvira. I barely remember Elvira from when I was a kid and my mom and dad would let me stay up with them and watch the horror specials. So I got to see her when she was actually working. To today's generation, though, you know, if we have any teens who are listening and want to vote or even people in their 20s, they might not really have much of a clue of who she is. So and I don't know how much of I mean, scared stiff is a it's a good table in a lot of ways. It's not just that Elvira's on it, but Elvira and the Party Monsters. I think a lot of people would argue that it's not, it maybe isn't as good as a lot of other games and that it just sort of rides on her coattails. But I don't know. We're going to see how it turns out. So with that said, let's go ahead and transition into the first of our two pinball interviews. I sat down and had a discussion with Project Pinball Charity. And for those that aren't familiar, Project Pinball is a charity that puts pinball machines into children's hospitals. So I got to speak with Daniel Spoilar and Amber Streif with the charity. So let's go ahead and run that tape, and then we'll talk about it. Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce Amber Streif, executive assistant, and Daniel Spoiler, senior director and founder of the Project Pinball Charity. Amber and Daniel, thank you so much for joining the Eclectic Gamers podcast. Well, thank you so much for having us on. We really appreciate the opportunity to say things about our charity. Well, I've been aware of Project Pinball for a while, but a lot of our listeners, because as our podcast name would suggest, they're not just pinball players. We also appeal to tabletop and video gamers who aren't so much into pinball. So if you could both go into exactly what Project Pinball does as a charitable entity, I think it'll help lay some groundwork. Well, what we found out back in 2011 that projects, well, the pinball machine could serve to be a therapeutic device in the right setting. So what we did was we found a pinball machine that was broken down. We renovated this thing kind of back into service to serve that hospital. and we started getting all these great stories of how one machine could be so dynamic in that setting for the patients, for the siblings, for the parents, for, you know, just grown-ups in general, doctors, nurses, what have you. So we really took a hard look at, you know, what we could do for our surrounding communities here in Florida. But we started talking to other people out in the pinball communities and other communities out there, and they showed interest as well. So what we did was we came up with a charity that caters to putting pinball machines in family rooms in the children's hospitals across the United States. So our goal is to pretty much help the child life specialists and the doctors to help treat these small patients there by giving them a great release. instead of them being trapped in hospitals being patients, they can, you know, walk up to a pinball machine and just have fun as kids because that setting could be quite grueling on, you know, not only the patients but the parents as well. So that is our main goal to provide pinball machines for these children's hospitals across our great nation. And in terms of number of hospitals you helped in terms of acquiring pinball machines and placing pinball machines Do you have any numbers you could share with us Well right now we actually placed in 18 different hospitals and we're going to be talking soon about a July campaign that we're doing that we're going to be placing up to eight more. So hopefully by the end of the year we'll be in about 25 different hospitals. Wow, that's quite a bit of expansion. And so speaking of that, let's go ahead and transition on over to that. What ongoing activities is Project Pinball Charity engaged with? And I guess let's hear more also about this upcoming campaign that's ambitiously expanding quite a few more hospitals to that roster you've already outlined. Well, last year it started with our July campaign, which we affectionately call Love Across America, because that's exactly what we do. We travel out of our state of Florida, and we head up the east coast to Boston. and then we head from Boston all the way over to the West Coast, arriving in San Francisco. Then we head right back across the United States, and we end up in Pittsburgh for a show there, Replay FX, and then we tend to journey back home. This all takes us through 26 different states, over 10,000 miles in a course of five weeks. We hit three major shows. We do meet and greets along the way, but more importantly, we do dedications as well. This campaign allows us to, you know, raise awareness in these different communities across the United States while giving back by, you know, providing hospital dedications. We did five machines last year, and our goal was to do a second annual tour that's going to kick off July 1st this year. and we're working. Our goal was five, but we're actually shooting for eight. So it's a lot of moving parts, but we're hopeful. So the campaign is quite interesting because there's a lot of people that share in it. They look forward to us arriving in their home state or even their town or city, wherever they are, and they come out to meet us with these meet and greets or these small fundraisers. And, you know, they make it their own. So we try to share it everywhere that we can, bring awareness to what we're doing, because it's a great endeavor. It really helps out with what we do. Could you walk through an example of, like, what a typical meet and greet style would be able to be like? It does sound like these are all pretty unique, so each location probably varies to some degree in terms of what they do for a fundraiser or whatnot. But in case anyone's been thinking about or sees on the campaign chart that you're going to be in one of their areas, they might be kind of curious in terms of how they can actually engage in that sort of process to be a part of this campaign. Yeah, definitely. You know, like you said, it's very dynamic based on the area that we're in and based on the other events that are going on as well. You know, when we visit Pittsburgh, for example, there's a big expo that's going on. So usually what we'll do is we'll go out to dinner with some people who would be interested, you know, and just hang out and really have a good time. And then, you know, when we would go to different cities like Omaha, there would be people there who have in the past helped us raise money for the children's hospitals. And they would hold a fundraiser or, you know, just kind of like a dinner or a little pinball tournament, just something something light and relaxing that people can just have a good time and really be a part of the charity. and know what it's like to kind of give back. You know, even if they can't be there at the dedications, they can be there to support. Let me add also in the different communities, I'm not going to say the pinball community because the arcade community has helped us in the past as well. But they could organize tournaments and everything like that, you know, because there's tournaments across the United States that you hold for fun or, you know, like competition, what have you. What they do is they approach us and say, hey, we would like to give back to you guys or do something for our community. So they might hold a, let's call it a pinball tournament in this case, where they just have people come over and they compete. And any kind of proceeds go to help the charity do what we do. And, you know, it always helps spreads awareness. So, you know, it's always a win-win to talk about the charity because there's a lot of people out there that align themselves with our goals, and they make it a common goal. They make it their goal. All right. Well, in terms of participation and outside of these localized events relating to the July campaign, what other ways can people participate or contribute to Project Pinball? We have a huge list of ideas that people can bring to us. We love our volunteers. They really help bring the charity all across the nation. You know, we're based in Florida, so our pinball machines that are out in California and Omaha, they still need to be maintained. So we have a lot of people who volunteer to maintain the machines. They go out, you know, every other month and clean it up, change the rubbers out, make sure that it's tip-top shape for the, you know, the children's hospitals. We also look for volunteers to kind of bridge those connections with the children's hospitals. It's always a lot easier if we have somebody as kind of the middleman who can introduce us to the children's hospital, who believes in what we're doing, to make the connection easier so we can bring the pinball machines to the children's hospitals. And plus, they could always reach out and contact us for any ideas that they think that could help us. I mean, there's a lot of ways to hold fundraisers and everything like that and to volunteer. We make it really easy for people to contact us. They could contact us through email. Project Pinball Charity at gmail.com is the main one. And, you know, we have a lot of people just reaching out to us. Like Amber was saying, we have people in, you know, different cities across the United States that said, hey, I could do this to help you guys. So, you know, we put everybody in a database. That way when the need arises maybe for that community, we have plenty of names that we can pull from and we can contact them when we're ready on this end. So it all works out pretty good. Excellent, excellent. And we'll include a link in our show notes for people that want to find out more information to your website, which I have as projectpinball.org. Are there any other, like, presence on social media that you use to communicate with people outside of the database system that you maintain? We're very prevalent on Facebook right now. Really, if you message us on there, we can get in touch. We're also on FinSide. We have a really active thread on there. And we created a GoFundMe account specifically for the July campaign to give back to our donors and our volunteers. On there, there's a bunch of different options that you can donate, and you get prizes for the different amounts that you donate. because we really wanted to make people feel like they were a part of the July campaign. You know, if you can't come out, if you can't, you know, if we're not going to your city, it would be awesome for you to still feel included and feel like you're part of the Project Pinball team. Well, I want to include a great story with that. Last year I was on the road and we were doing a social media campaign through Instagram and Facebook, Twitter, all of that. And people were actually following what we were doing every single day. They would, you know, respond in kind and, you know, just show words of support. People were taking photographs of our vehicle as it traveled across the United States. And it was probably about three weeks in. And I took two days off. And what I did was it was sort of like a, you know, I came from California extreme and then I took a day off. And it was coming out of a social media blitz, and all of a sudden there was silence. I had people reaching out to me by email and, you know, Facebook saying, are you okay? They were actually concerned because they were so in tuned in our daily mission that all of a sudden I didn't really, you know, consider it. But I just fell off the face of the planet. And they were really concerned for my well-being. and it really opened my eyes up to how, you know, in tuned the community can be. You know, they really showed concern, and they were following pretty much what we were doing across the United States while we were doing good things. And like I said, people choose different ways to, you know, plug themselves in, and I think that's fantastic. We always need that for the charity. It shows support, and we just love that. Wow, that really, I think, shows quite a success that you've had with social outreach to be able to see that much impact when you just go silent for a short period of time. Amazing, really, to me. I actually heard about Project Pinball a few years ago when I was – I didn't really get into pinball until 2012. And one of the things that I did, I think, in 2014 is I added Project Pinball as my charity at Amazon. So for those that aren't familiar, you can do Amazon Smile. They give eligible purchases, which are most of the prime purchases, to a charity of your choosing. I had done the – no offense to the American Cancer Society, but I'd done the American Cancer Society for a long time. And then I went ahead and I transitioned over to you guys. So that is an option for people, incidentally. They're big Amazon shoppers, which I am, to participate. I know you can take direct donations on your website. One of the things I wanted to ask about is pinball machines, though. If people had old pinball machines, do you guys do anything with those? Or I imagine you want newer units in at the hospitals. Well, we do take donations of pinball machines all the time. It's amazing how people find us. And even in different states, we, you know, pick them up, what have you. We have connections across the United States. And if it's in a different state, usually that's not a problem. So we're taking pretty much any pinball machine out there because, you know, we had a donation of a Mexico, which I believe was a flipperless bingo or early flipper game back in the 50s. And we weren't sure, you know, what the value was. I talked to Tim Arnold at the Pinball Hall of Fame to kind of, you know, see what the worth was. And so what we did was we decided that there was someone that was close, willing to pick it up, and we just offered it back to the pinball community. Even though we couldn't put a machine like that in a hospital setting, we were able to save that machine from a junk pile or, you know, being torn apart as trash and put it back into the pinball community. And the person that received the machine actually wrote a check for, you know, whatever he thought the machine was worth. So, you know, it was a win-win for us. We didn't have that money that he donated before that person that offered that machine in that case. You know, that money did not exist. We received some newer machines, brand-new machines that we're using in Children's Hospital where they just contacted us and say, we just had a gentleman offer us a Ghostbusters. He wants to buy it. He wanted to see if we would be able to do our magic in his area. So we're actively, you know, looking to, you know, see how we could do this smoothly. And so there's a different range. We picked up machines, you know, that we use for fundraising. When we go out to maybe into the public, maybe to an expo, a couple of these machines that were donated to us were cleaned up, where we could offer them back to people to play when we're at the expo. I'm trying to think of the one, Royal Flush. We're working on that right now. It's a great, you know, Gottlieb game, and we're getting that cleaned up, and we can't wait to take that to the next show with us. I think a lot of people will enjoy it. And those machines found us, so it's a great way for people to, you know, give back also. They might not have, you know, the money to do so, but they might have a game that's lurking in their basement that's not being played, what have you. We can make use of that definitely. I wanted to go on Amazon Smile. That really caught us by surprise. It was actually one of our supporters that called us up and said, do you know about this program? And honestly, we didn't because it was a new program by Amazon. So I went into Amazon or on Amazon to check it out, And I could not believe how easy it was to find us and to actually use us as, you know, the charity of select. And that's one thing that you have to do one time the first time. And every time that you shop from that point, you know, even without conscious, there will be a percentage that is given by Amazon, not by the buyer, but by Amazon. So it's a win-win for the charity. and it's a great program, and we definitely have seen the benefits that we receive from your actions and other people that choose to support us through Amazon Smile. So that's a great program. We love it. Yeah, and that's a good thing to note, and I should have mentioned that when you do, they have a separate front end for Amazon Smile. If people Google Amazon Smile, you'll get to the proper front end. It just precedes the domain by a smile.amazon.com sort of thing. And the prices are identical. Amazon pays the percentage to the charities. It is not on the end consumer. So it's very effortless once you go in and choose that charity. And it takes all of 90 seconds to get set up. So I do encourage people to find a charity and their Amazon shoppers to use that because there's really no reason not to at this point. Yeah, for all you shoppers out there, hey, you can help out a charity while you're doing your thing online. So that's a win-win for us. Well, we ran through all the questions that I had for you. Do either of you have any questions for me or anything you want to point out to our listeners that we can get out there for you to help you out? Well, we want to extend our hand out to the community because we are a Florida-based charity, but we are actually a local charity to wherever our community engages us because we have machines in San Francisco and, you know, Baltimore and Boston because people in those communities reached out to us and, you know, really started with the fundraising. You know, what we do is any fundraiser that is in a target community, we're looking at Albuquerque right now. They did such a huge campaign last year with fundraising that they put themselves on our maps. So we're trying to see what we can do for that community. And the nice thing that we do is we dedicate their dedication right back to them. Because if the money is raised in a certain community, we like to hold that money aside for that community. So their efforts are being paid back to their own community. That's how Boston happened. Those guys bent over backwards to help us succeed with funding in different other ways as well. So what we did was we kept all that money aside, and we directed it right back at their community when the time arose for us to do so. So that's a way that our charity could be a local charity across the United States. Plus, we've got another great program, which is the pinball machine sweepstakes. I'm not sure if a lot of people out there are aware of this. We push it on Pinside and Facebook. But we have a means for a donor, and usually it's a $25 or $75 donation. They can win a brand-new pinball machine, still in the box, shipped to their door for that donation. And I say there's a 25 and a 75. The $25 donation is limited to 400 entrants. And once we reach 400, we cut it off. That's it. So the odds are very, very good that you could win a pinball machine for a $25, you know, donation. And, again, that will get you, in this case, a Stern Pro machine that is worth over $5,000. So for $25, you could win a $5,000 machine. And we've done this, I'm trying to remember, like 14 times at this point. Oh, so it's been pretty successful. 20 times. Yeah, this will be our 20th. Once we finish this pro and premium, it'll be the 20th sweepstakes that we've held so far. So maybe we'll do something special for the next one for a cool animal. So the $75 entries are for the premium models, I take it? Yes, it is. That's exactly right. 75 is a little bit more than 25 because so are the machines. The pro model goes to 5,000, and then the premiums approach in 8,000. So we had to, you know, up it up. But what's really nice for the 75, the actual entry number is limited to 200. So your odds are even better with the $75 donation because it's limited 200 entries only. And like I said, once we reach it, we shut it down. You know, we can't receive any more entries. And we hold the drawing as soon as we can after we verify all the information to be correct and true. So it's very rewarding. Once we sell it out, we draw a happy winner's name and we contact them. They give them the great news that they just won a brand-new pinball machine. So we have people in the community that always wanted the machine, and it was their first one, and they became the hit of their town, so they were saying, I think it's fantastic. Wow. Well, that's pretty awesome. Well, thank you, Amber and Daniel, for coming on to the Eclectic Gamers podcast and talking to us about the Project Pinball Charity. I wish you all the best and lots of success with your July campaign. Thank you for having us, Dennis. We really appreciate it. This was a lot of fun. I really appreciate you having us on and where we could share what we do with the charity. And if anybody needs to contact us, like you were saying earlier, projectpinball.org is our website. Please check it out. We work hard. We just are launching the new site. We're really working hard. I think it looks good. So we could use some feedback on that. But they can email us directly also. projectpinballcharity at gmail.com. So we, like I said, we love questions. We love people interacting with us and engaging us in conversation. So it's all good. Thank you very much, Dennis, for having us on. You bet. And that was my interview. I once again thank Daniel and Amber for taking the time to sit down and give me a lot of details about the Project Pinball Charity. I think just in terms of our brief discussion about what went on in the interview, The main thing that really surprised me is I hadn't realized how many pinball machines Project Pinball has gotten into the hospitals. It was a lot more than I thought. That was a real surprise for me, too. I knew they'd done a fair amount, but I hadn't realized there was that many or that they were that widespread. I didn't think they were that spread out across the country, either. Yeah, and I know they have a map showing what hospitals may have upcoming machines going to be put in there, and people can get this from their website. Our show notes are going to be laden with all sorts of fun Project Pinball elements. So for anyone who wants to, we're going to have links to Project Pinball Charities page itself, their actual domain on the web. We're going to have a link to their GoFundMe for Project Pinball's July campaign that they talked about in the interview. And we'll also have a link up to the Project Pinball Charities sweepstakes. So if you're interested in trying to win one of their pro machines or one of the premium machines that they talked about that they do to help raise money for their efforts, follow that link and go ahead and buy some raffle tickets to participate in that. Yeah, there's a pretty good chance with the raffles. Like, the premium is only having a couple hundred tickets sold. That's not terrible odds. Yeah, and I think I read that for their next pro machine, they're going to double the ticket price and cut the number of entries in half, that they're going to take that back down to 200. I guess the attempt with doing 400 was new, but it looks like the tickets just aren't selling fast enough to warrant that or the participation levels aren't really different enough that it makes more sense for them to do it at a higher dollar value, which wouldn't surprise me because in terms of charitable contributions, the ticket levels aren't excessively high. It's not like when I get a call from one of my universities and they always open up with, well, let me tell you about the school, and then afterwards they go, how would you like to give $350? It's like, well, I would love to give you $350, but you apparently didn't look at what my occupation is because it isn't CEO of a Fortune 500 company. I can't just be giving $350 every time you call, and they call a lot now. So things like this I think are very, very approachable. You and I actually participated in a raffle akin to this. It wasn't a Project Pinball raffle. I think it was for a veterans group at the Texas Pinball Festival. Yeah, that was. I don't remember the name of the group off the top of my head. Let me see. It was the Pinball for Patriots group that the raffle was for. Yeah, that's right. I couldn't remember either. So anyway, I think it's a good way to generate, as they pointed out, a lot of people, because pinball machines are so expensive, it gives you a reasonable chance to try and win one. But the main purpose, obviously, is to drive donations to help for a charitable cause. And so I think it's an excellent way to try and generate interest. And hopefully some of the listeners will be intrigued enough to follow those links and see about participating. Another thing that they brought up that I thought would be really cool to see here in the Kansas City area would be that they do allow targeted fundraising where those local communities are able to work together and actually try and get the funding assembled to put a machine in an area hospital. And so I'd love to see something like, well, a few months ago, I know we participated in Flip Off Hunger. We in the Kansas City area participated in Flip Off Hunger. And it raised, you know, I don't remember exactly how much. It was over $600, I know, in terms of just one day, just one tournament. And so I could definitely see something like that going on, you know, in the area and trying to install. Because we have a number of hospitals in the area. Of course, Children's Mercy is a very famous children's hospital in the Kansas City area. So I could see something like that trying to move forward in the Kansas City area at some point. because I'm not, you know, we do a number of, a few charity events during the year. I think at least two that come to my mind, Flip of Hunger, and then there's like the Flippin' with the Greats, which I believe also does charitable cause raising. I don't remember for which group, though. Other than that, with Ditka's group. Yes, yeah, thank you. But other than that, I'm not really aware of anything regularly that goes on, so I'd kind of like to see something like this. Yeah, it would be interesting. I mean, I think there's room for another one. I know my Amazon Smile account is actually directed at Children's Mercy and has been since I signed up for Smile who knows how long ago. Right. And one of the things that we did point out in the interview is I have for a couple years now had Project Pinball as my Smile designee. So if anyone's looking and wants to pick a charity that you want to support, I don't want to feel like I'm shoving people into a particular direction, but it is a good cause. And if you're not doing anything at all, I do ask people, please, if you do shop through Amazon, go ahead and do Amazon Smile. It doesn't increase the cost on anything that you buy. They just take a portion. I believe it's 0.5% of eligible purchases, which doesn't sound like much from a percentage standpoint because it's not. But it does add up to be quite a bit, especially if you're spending a lot of money. And it does get assembled with people like me who buys almost all of my Christmas gifts through Amazon. So I do drop quite a bit of money through them, and every little bit helps with their endeavors. So if you don't have a charity currently, go ahead and put them in. It takes like all of two minutes or less to do. Yeah, it's a good system. Yes. And so speaking of good, let us go to another good interview that both you and I participated in. Yeah, this was an interview that was an actual live in-person interview at a venue and everything. It made me feel really, really, it felt more real that it was actually around a table talking to people. Yes, yes. It's a good point because, as I think the listeners know, you and I, we've actually never recorded a podcast in person. This is the first time you and I actually were at the same location at the same time talking, much less having an actual interviewee to interact with as well. And for those that don't know, doing it remotely like we're doing, it can be very challenging because there's no body language to read. So you have these weird delays and you talk over each other in a way that's less conversational. So it was really neat. So we actually did it yesterday. The interview was yesterday. And we sat down with Carrie Wing. And for those that don't know Carrie, she recently won a Papa Circuit event, which is a competitive pinball event. It was Cactus Jack Silver Ball Showdown. And winning one of those circuit events is a pretty big deal in competitive pinball because the caliber of players that are in attendance is very high. But what's extra interesting in the case of Carrie is she just so happened to be the very first woman to ever win a Papa Circuit event in the history of the Professional and Amateur's Pinball Association. So she gets an extra claim to fame besides just having happened to win one of the most challenging circuit events that exists. So let's go ahead and play that interview, and then we will have a discussion of it. Hello, boys and girls. I'm Dennis, sitting here with Tony and Kerry Wing, recent champion of the Cactus Jack Silver Ball Showdown and Papa Circuit First Female Victor ever. So, Kerry, welcome to the Eclectic Blowing Podcast. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. All right. Well, let's talk about your big feat, because it is quite an accomplishment. First off, while we've covered competitive pinball on this podcast before, very little, very little, minutely. So we've referenced the IFPA, but we've never actually talked about the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association. Right. So could you explain a little bit about what a Papa Circuit event is? Well, I'm kind of new to it as well. This is my first Papa Circuit event. But essentially, you know, it's kind of connected with IFPA. You still get IFPA points. But certain tournaments have to fit certain criteria to be a Papa event. And I imagine it involves the number of games they have, the quality of players and the number of players. and then they basically apply to be on the circuit and then people vote. So, for example, I came across a vote for what was going to be on the PAPA circuit event and one option was Buffalo Billiards where I used to play in Austin. So I voted for that one because I was familiar with it and that's something I'm thinking about going to in a couple weeks here. But yeah, it's basically a selection of big IFPA tournaments and you get points within PAPA as well as IFPA. so it's 100 points for first and then if you get a certain amount of points you qualify for the circuit final which is in the spring Is that at Pinburg? I believe it's at the Papa headquarters which I think is in Pittsburgh I haven't been there before I've heard of it, I've not been there Okay, so the votes are for actually the locations or standing tournaments that can be designated to be Papa Circuit And then how do those tournaments flow in terms of, is it a, do they have their own approach, is it just straight up match play you know one on one sort of things Um this one was what they call Pinberg style So they put you in a group of four players you play a bank of four machines and for each game, you play four player games. Whoever gets first, you get three points. Second is two points, third is one point, and fourth is zero. So you don't necessarily have to be winning every game, you just want to be getting, you know, hopefully as many firsts or sevenths as you can to accumulate points. And then if you get about seven points per round, so that's a pretty good place to be. More is great. You know, if you get four, it's kind of like, you know. But so then, so you do a set of four games with those four people, and then they reassign you to a new group of four people, and you play another set of four games. And it's basically random. So we did four sets of four games on Friday, another four sets of four games Friday evening, so morning and evening. and then Saturday it was, you know, eight more games or eight more sets of games and then Sunday it was finals so it was the top 16 players and then they knocked it down to the top 8 and it was the top 4. So that's a lot of games in a very short period of time. It's a lot of games. How big was the bank? Well, Texas Jack has over 15 and they're mostly A-list titles, very nice conditions, a lot of 90s Bally Williams, a lot of new sterns, new boutique games, some solid states, and then they brought in some EMs and solid states that were owned by local people. So they had another couple rows in the center of the room that aren't normally there, and another row of seven games in another room that aren't normally there. Now, I didn't see any of it live. I did watch some highlights, videos that were up on Twitch available after the fact because rumor had it and I guess it's not really a rumor because it's confirmed by video that you had some pretty good, pretty solid performances. So I want to say that I recall there was a sea witch where you had over a million on one ball. Is that right? That seems atypically high. I mean you are a highly skilled professional player and I've lost you many times. However That seemed to stand out quite a bit. Actually, another podcast was talking about the event themselves, and given I heard Bowen Kerins express shock at this year, this year just soul-crushing to your opponents, that must have been, was just impressive, very impressive. So you had a very good Sea Witch. I think Bram Stoker's Dracula was in your, I guess it was, I don't know if this was the final, this wasn't the final final, but I guess it was the final four. It was the final four. Final four, okay. So you had that, and I know your final game was on ACDC. Yes. Now, I actually want to talk to you a little bit about that, because I played ACDC, but I've only ever played the Lucy edition. Right. Here at 4.3. That's the one I am most familiar with as well. So when I've done ACDC Lucy, I have always done Hell's Bells, because I'm lame, and I don't know what else to do. Now, you did not do Hell's Bells on the pro version. Yes. You have different strategies. Is it different on the pro? Is it not good to do Hell's Cuts? I guess I should ask. If I want to encounter a pro in the wild and I need to win, it's going to be hard. So I need all the help I can get. I'm in a similar boat to you as far as I've played the Lucy more than anything, because that's what was at the 403 club for a while. No. And I've only played the pro maybe a couple times before then. So I was happy that on the Boat Friends podcast, it looked like I really knew what I was doing. They made it sound like you had an entire structural strategy. I just did the strategy that I always do. Now, they were like, oh, yes, that's the strategy you want to go with on the pro versus the premium, but you would definitely do something else. And I was like, oh, just kidding. It was like the, I mean, okay, so it wasn't the case like that you and Zach Sharp had sat down together and had written a manual on how to, okay. I thought maybe it was. There were a lot of nice people that were giving some tips. I think there were some people that really wanted me to win because they were getting tired of the same people who were getting tired of these tournaments. And I was kind of a newer face in that arena. And once they saw that I had a chance, they were like, we want to see your, you know, dollars. And, you know, everybody's nice. Adam McKinney was one of the finalists. I played and lost against him several times. Yeah, me too. He's very nice. He normally beats me all the time. But we help each other out. he gives me strategies. I was able to help him with one game that he didn't know. And I was like, wow, that's a game. Was it Sleewitch? It was Full House, actually. It was my dad's game. But anyway, what we were talking about, ACDC. Yeah. You did Thunderstruck? Thunderstruck and Rock and Roll Train, which apparently was the right way to do it. And I just simply did that because that's what I did on Lucy. And that's the way, actually, my brother, that's kind of his strategy. And he was the one that told me about that. and I like Thunderstruck. I understand what to do. So that's the way, that's the direction I went. And fortunately it worked out. It worked out great. It worked out well, yeah. Oof. We did a random select to pick ACDC and when that came up I was like, oh, that's not one of my best, strongest games. But all I had to do was get more than Adam. Unfortunately, I got a little bit more than Adam. one of those where you just kind of in the groove for the day, things just kind of settled in, or was it more of a bit of a panic I can do this what's going on, you sure let's do that, yeah well, over the course of the weekend I felt like Friday was pretty strong, with this format sometimes it's hard to really see where you stand amongst the 53 people because your sets, you're randomized every time, it's kind of like, well I think I'm doing okay, but not really sure until you start to talk to other people and they're like, oh, yeah, you know, you have four points or whatever. And I was able to get some of the hard players out of the way early, like Colin MacAlpine from Austin. He was in my first group and I was like, oh, great, this is a good start. And he kind of started slow and then picked up the pace later. So I was able to get ahead of him early on and that helped a little bit. But I basically had a good day on Friday. The first half of Saturday was good, and then the second half of Saturday was just terrible. I was getting tired. I wasn't playing well. But I went from third in the standings to 16th, and just barely hung on to finals, because you had to be in the top two for any finals. So I made it by half a point. It was close. I thought I was going to get knocked out. I was like, after all that, you know. Fight that hard, you get so close. But then on Saturday, I was able to play strongly throughout the finals, fortunately, once again. I was able to get a lead. Because for me, if I'm ahead, then I'm more relaxed. But if I get behind by a lot, I start to panic. So I was able to win the first two games in a lot of my sets, and then the others were the ones panicking. Yes. And then I was able to last through. And that's kind of what happened in the final four. The first game was Dracula. Unfortunately, I was able to put up a billion on my second ball. And then they were like, uh-oh. We're able to layer the multi-balls together and get the 30 million jackpots going and the rats and bats bonuses. Yeah, the Tilt-Through podcast talked a bit about that. Your BSD performance resulted in a lot of shock in terms of just the sheer dominance of that score. I wasn't able to see what was happening behind me. The game was in the corner and everyone was behind me. And I was just trying to zone in of what I was doing. And I was like, I know these people are capable of beating me. I better not let up I just have to play the best I can and then the next game was Sea Witch where I got a million on the first one once again they were just like oh no cheers so it was it was a combination of just having good games at the right time and a little bit of luck here and there and knowing the games you know I had a general idea of what to do at least now of course one of the interesting elements besides the fact that you and Tony and I have all played each other and we lose to you all the time. So we're actually knowing a great victor in this case. But did you know when you won that it had been the first time that a woman had actually won a Papa Circuit event? There were some rumors flying around before the final game happened that it might be and then somebody looked it up somewhere and then they kind of announced it that I was the first to win a Papa Circuit event. Which is, I mean, obviously it's interesting. I don't know. I've only been to Texas in terms of festivals where there was, in terms of the group of people, for the attendance there was quite a mix of young, old men and women. But on the tournament side, it is very male-dominated. So I guess I just never really thought, because we know there are a lot of strong female players. You know, we hear about Seattle all the time. They have a really good homegrown community. I get you here all the time. Well, yeah, for us, it's not. I mean, obviously, we know. There are certain names that when we draw them, as we will here in a few minutes, that we're afraid. Yeah. So that's why I try and get new people so that there can be victims for me. Right. Instead of always being the victim. It doesn't work out as regularly as I would hope. But anyway, congratulations. It was very impressive from what footage I was able to see. And so I guess given that you've won, you're, I imagine, pretty much a shoo-in then to actually go to the PAPA final event. That's what I've heard. I don't know if it's because of the points total or because I won an event, but from what I've heard, that's basically it. Right, and I went to their site to try and see. Because I know about, like, the 100 points for the victory, and that's so much. I've suspected that's it, but I didn't know if they do. I've watched a lot of fighting game tournaments online. A lot of them are structured in ways where they do circuits, and the victors are always guaranteed first. And everyone else needs to rely on points to get in. So I guess it could be either. I should have done better. Maybe I'll try and see if I can figure it out before we record this interview and before we record the podcast, perhaps we'll be able to go in and get that in. Seen as your final win was on ACDC, and we're going to, this is a question me and Dennis have actually answered already in a previous thing. If you didn't have to worry about licensing or popularity or anything, what artist would you pick for the perfect music pick? music thing. I don't know because I have a weird taste in music that probably wouldn't go over well with the general population. I'm a classical saxophonist. So I listen to classical saxophones and symphony orchestras and jazz bands and I'm trying to figure out how that would work into a pinball machine. Homebrew. Maybe you have a homebrew. The homebrew Shostakovich Symphony number five Oh I like that one Not a great saxophone Symphony No But One of my favorites Yeah I always have to think about that As far as the music thing That's kind of a tough question True Because everyone just assumes Rock But there are a lot of other genres I cheated I picked Queen So that was That's actually a good one I like Queen So Yeah That's a good idea I felt like cheating When I picked that one It seemed a little too to someone. All right. Well, thank you very much for joining us, Kerry. Good luck to you in your future circuit endeavors. Yeah. And so that was our interview with Kerry Wing. Apologies to the listeners for the background noise. We were at the 403 Club and actually recorded outside to minimize the noise because you never would have heard us of all those pinball machines they have going off in there. But, of course, the birds were chirping. People were outside having their own discussions and there was just stuff getting moved around. So you just got to deal with it. But I think the interview was worth it. I do, too. It was a good interview. It was a good time. And it was a really beautiful day to be outside, actually. What did get that we all mentioned a couple of times, so I want to go ahead and plug them during the interview, is the name of the podcast that talked about the Cactus Jack circuit event is called Tilt Through. and the episode that discusses Cactus Jack's Silver Ball Showdown is specifically episode five, titled The Lady Stuff. So there will be a link to that in our show notes, and I would like to suggest if you are interested in competitive pinball, that is the podcast you want to listen to. With that said, let's go ahead and have our discussion about what we learned during the interview that we couldn't talk about at that time. I did say during the discussion, so I did my homework, I was good, and I checked up on how Papa handles the circuit events because it wasn't clear. We weren't sure who gets to compete in what's called the Papa Circuit Final. And the Papa Circuit Final is not the same as the Papa World Championship. It's held the day before the Papa World Championship. It's a separate competition. It's invite only. And the way the circuit final is, the top 40 players in the circuit standings are invited to the finals. It's entirely points derived. So Carrie doesn't get an automatic berth for winning the circuit event. Instead, players get to add up their 10 best Papa Circuit event performances. So I'm not, I wasn't from their site. I couldn't really tell how many events there are. It looked like there were 20, but maybe that's for next year because on the spreadsheet I only saw 18. So I guess it's somewhere between 18 and 20 events. Your 10 best are what count? Yeah, I think they were adding a couple new events for next year, I believe. That would be my guess. It gets strange because it's like they're currently competing, I believe, for the 2016-17 circuit event, circuit final. So, you know, when you do the dual-year thing, look, Matt, I didn't major in math, guys and gals. I didn't. So I'm doing the best I can here. So, okay, so it looks like 18 for this year, according to the spreadsheet at least. And so even though it's on automatic berth, Carrie's in a really good position because winning is so valuable in the circuit system. Her win at Cactus Jacks gets her 100 points. And for comparison purposes, second place is 75 points. So it's quite a drop-off there. Yeah, that is quite a drop-off. I mean, most of the things I've been at, second place gets like 90 points on this style of play. But 75, that's such a huge drop-off. that really pushes the first place finish really high in how good it does and how much it helps you. A single first place finish can be amazing. Yes. And so, and everyone who competes, it's not like IFPA points where if you're in the event, you're going to get something. You know, you might be minuscule, like what our performances at the 403 Club yesterday are going to get us, minuscule amounts of points, but we will get points. We earned them. We earned them. We earned them four. Yes. Yes. So in the case of a Papa Circuit event for these Papa Circuit points, the top 24 people are the only ones who get points. Number 24 getting the least, obviously, which is five points. Another interesting thing is the circuit events are spread all over the place. So it's not like the there are hundreds of them being held all the time in every major pinball location in the nation. So the only way someone can get more points than Carrie is to actually place in the top 24 in more than one tournament. Because even if they win a tournament, all they can do is tire. So they have to not only go and play in multiple circuit events, they have to place well enough in all of those tournaments that it can add up to being more than 100 points. And those are the only people that can actually push her further down the list. and they have to push her down quite a bit because it's the top 40 people who would get to go to the finals. So for again, let's do another comparison. Currently, there are five circuit events that are being tracked on the Papa spreadsheet as of the time of this recording. Carrie is in a three-way tie for fourth place. So there are three people who have over 100 points. All of them, obviously, because they have more than 100 points, have done more than one circuit event. In fact, they've all done two, but only one of them, the second place player, who's Zach Sharp, who we mentioned in the interview, he's a top world ranked pinball player. He did not win either circuit event that he participated in. He took second at one of them, which got him 75 points, and he took fifth at another one, which got him another 45 points. So added together, that's more than the 100 points that Carrie has, which is why he's ranked second and she's ranked fourth. So long story short, Winning at Cactus Jacks will not automatically birth a slot to carry, but it will be very challenging for people to actually assemble over 100 points and enough of them to do it to actually push her out of the top 40 seems extremely steep. But given the number of events, I can imagine it's mathematically possible to have happen. It just seems very unlikely. And that all, of course, assumes that she doesn't generate any additional points herself because if she doesn't go to any other events or doesn't place high enough in those events to gather more points. And at the current time with these events that are in existence, the five circuit events, those that are in the top 40 are people with 30 and more points. So obviously she's got quite a bit more than 30. Very interesting. Well, good luck to Carrie, and congratulations on her win at Texas Jacks. And I think that about wraps it up for pinball. Yes, yes. We have fully saturated the ground with our pinball water, our pinball rain. So let's make it rain into topic number two, which is video games. And I know you had one that I've been seeing a lot of news about as well that you wanted to lead us off with regarding No Man's Sky. Yeah, No Man's Sky has been delayed. No Man's Sky is an interesting game that has been in the hype very strongly since 2013. It is a procedurally generated universe where you fly a ship and you get out and you explore planets, and every planet's going to be unique or unique-ish, and it's going to be a giant universe and this and that. There's a lot of hype and a lot of people have been really looking forward to it. And it has been pushed from its original June 21st launch date right after E3, because E3 is just about upon us, all the way back to August 9th, which, I mean, that's a push in video games. That's not much of a push, though. Yeah, that's not much of a push at all. But the thing that really gets me on this is the outrage that has come out about it. I mean, game delays in video games are nothing new. I mean, it's ancient news. I mean, a game not being delayed at some point is more of a surprise than a game being delayed. But for some reason, the vitriol on this game's delay has been insane. It was originally broken. The news report was originally broken by a writer for Kotaku. The day he released his report and in the couple days leading up to it, after it, until the game developers acknowledged that it was true, he was getting death threats because nobody could believe that, oh, no, you're just making it up to get clicks and this and that. Wow. I mean, obviously, you know, and I will say Kotaku does have some headlines that are obviously very oriented towards being clickbait. But the idea that they aren't actually, you know, they would make up a story in and of itself. That's that's a pretty big stretch, but not as big of a stretch as people reacting to saying, oh, well, and we're going to death threat over the perceived inappropriateness of the article. It just seems it all seems so weird to me. Yeah, it's so far outside my wheelhouse. I have problems understanding it. And the fact that once the developers confirmed it, that they started getting death threats as well. I mean, the game director got death threats about it. And I just, I know that a lot of this comes from with our new interconnected age, and it's so easy to be anonymous on the Internet and to be, you know, just as horrible as you want to be because you're anonymous and nobody knows who Big John 43 is so you can say anything you want. But it really makes me wonder about these people that this is just their initial go-to thing on something that seems so incredibly minor that their answer is just going to be, I'm going to kill you. I'm going to hunt you down and kill you. and I don't understand it. I'm sure this is something that people have probably thought and felt this way in the past, but maybe now that with the anonymity of the Internet, they're more willing to actually go out there and say it. And even if they don't mean it, if that's just your gut reaction to any time you're disappointed by something, what's next? I mean, it's just insane. And it's not just video games this happens in. It happens in everything anymore. And somebody will send out a tweet that is a bad joke, and then they're getting death threats and this and that. Or somebody will send out something. It's crazy. I don't understand it. I really don't understand it. Well, I don't know if the – let me restart on how I want to phrase this. I don't know if this is happening in other delayed video games or not. If it's a case of that the Kotaku author chose to go public with the death, the threat to the journalist seemed odd. The threat to the developer seems highly inappropriate, but I guess I can envision that happening more. You know, not shoot the messenger, but you get mad at who delivered the message, and you shoot, you know, figuratively shoot them instead sort of thing. And so I can understand people being mad at the developer for the delay, but I'm wondering, does this happen with other? I mean, I'm thinking like Mighty No. 9, Star Citizen. These are highly anticipated titles that are way behind, more behind than No Man's Sky. Are they getting death threats and they're just not coming public with them? And I don't know. And see, the thing is, I know Star Citizen has some super rabid, defensive, protective people. When any story comes out about it having problems and it being delayed and it being this and it being that, their fanboys rise up legion in defense of that game. And I admit, that's a game I've backed. I'm a backer of Star Citizen. but I'm not it is currently on my list of taken for a ride things that if something ever comes of it okay and if not well I got screwed on it but I just wonder if this whole if we haven't just the way things have gone lately progressed to the point where threatening to kill somebody is how people have gotten to where they just, that's how they put out that they're disappointed about something. They can't just say, well, I'm sad, or that upsets me. And it has to go straight, if it's just the most, because it's the most sensational thing you can say. If it's not just how people are going anymore, it's all about the maximum sensation, maximum drama, and stuff like that. I mean, I'm looking forward to New Man's Sky. I've been looking forward to No Man's Sky for a long time, but the sound of its delay, it just, I didn't think anything about it. I'm like, oh, okay. I thought it was closer to done, but hey, if they stopped it to do, because it wasn't quite ready, that's cool. And when all these other news reports started coming out, that's when I just, it was kind of a surprise. I mean, I originally wasn't even going to talk about it in this episode because it was such a small deal, I didn't think it was worth even mentioning until it kind of went over the top like this. Right, and that's why I agree with your analysis that it has to do with the anonymity in terms of the sort of viciousness behind the level of disappointment that gets translated into death threat because that's what they feel they can get away with. And that's why I'm curious, though, is if that's the case, then I would envision that this must – I would think it would happen on all sorts of anticipated delay titles. like so you know one of the examples i mentioned was mighty number nine mighty number nine is so frustrating because it's been repeatedly delayed is delay and then it's like here's your new time and then it's delayed again here's your new time and so there's i've read i've read online a lot of frustration with my number nine a lot of people just joke about it at this point that it's vapor wear in uh in delay form and that it's just not they don't understand why it's not out yet now maybe in the case of No Man's Sky, just in terms of the broad population, it's far more anticipated than Star Citizen and Mighty No. 9 are, and so maybe they don't get death threats, because even though there are some really rabid supporters that really want to see those games, No Man's Sky is on a whole other tier. I think it was, and, you know, maybe in the case of No Man's Sky, maybe they did generate the buzz too soon. You know, I want to think I heard about it for the last two E3s. It's been a big thing for the last several E3s. Which, for an indie game, that is an awful lot of lead time. And it looked really neat. I mean, my interest, my tracking of it has lessened when I learned that it was a PS4 PC exclusive, since I didn't think I was going to get it on my PC. And since I only game on the Xbox One for console, it's not going to be available to me. But I always thought the concept, the procedural-generated concept, was really cool. And that's what I think a lot of people were turning towards. I just don't understand why apparently there's a number of people that just can't seem to deal with a delay like this. It's not a long delay, and lots of titles have the delays. So here's my advice to the people that are frustrated. Because, you know, I don't want to just give problems. I like to give solutions. Here's my solution. Go and play Overwatch. And shut up. That is my solution. Also, don't preorder games. I mean, seriously, there's no reason in the world to pre-order games. And especially, don't pre-order pinball machines. Ever. Ever. Yeah. You know, we've delved into that a few times, and maybe sometime we can go do a deep dive on pre-ordering and a broadscape, because we've talked about it a lot when Kickstarters come up on the tabletop section as well. So basically, I guess the moral of the Eclectics Gamers podcast is pre-ordering usually isn't worth it. Yeah, I don't pre-order anymore. I used to, but it got to the point where there's no reason. The pre-order bonuses are almost never worth it. And a lot of the times the games might look cool, and then you find out once they actually come out, they're not really as good as you'd hoped. So I don't pre-order anymore. That said, yeah, I still do back stuff on Kickstarter because I'm still a sucker for certain things. Will always get me. I got a notice about my physical rewards for the backing of my Battletech Kickstarter that will be coming in the next couple or three months. And I was super excited. So, yeah, I'm still – I preach the don't preorder, and I don't preorder preorder, but I do back Kickstarter. I know it's terrible, but – Well, Kickstarter isn't the same as preordering. True. The concept is different. And listeners know that, well, maybe they don't, but I'm sure I mentioned it before in the past. I don't, I've never backed anything on Kickstarter because I do oppose the model on what they're doing conceptually. I get why startups want to do it and will rely on it and that fine That their right to do But I don like that as a cash model so I just I don I just I choose not to participate But that doesn't stop me from liking the things that are coming out of it and wanting to talk about the things that come out of it. And in terms of – Segway. Thank you. Yes, right. It was as smooth as an actual Segway driven by someone who doesn't know how to drive a Segway. That didn't make much sense. I've seen a lot of the videos of those people with those little hoverboards, and any time I see a video start up, I just know the person's going to fall, and they always have. Yeah, did you see the one with Mike Tyson? That was hilarious. No, I have not. I'll have to look that one up. Oh, man, Mike Tyson. Oh, it was hilarious. So going back to our actual Q segue, what I want to talk about is a game called Fable Fortune, which is not a game I'm interested in, but it is a game I think is interesting to talk about because we talked about, on a couple episodes actually, the fate of Lionhead Studios. And for those that aren't familiar or don't want to go back and listen to the old episodes, even though you should because they're super awesome, Lionhead Studios was the gaming company behind the Fable series. And Fable is mostly known as an RPG. There have been spinoffs, and this is one of them. So when we last left our listeners, Lionhead had been shut down, and that's still the case. However, some of the employees have formed a new development studio called Flaming Foul Studios, and Microsoft has granted them the rights to be able to try and finish a free-to-play collectible card game called Fable Fortune. So it's a one-time license thing. They, Flaming Fowl does not have the rights to do the Fable games. Microsoft has kept possession of that. But they can try and finish what my understanding is a very close to completion game. But I'm skeptical that this is going to work. Because the way that they're trying to do it is they are using a Kickstarter, and they want over $365,000 to do it. Yeah, that's kind of crazy. crazy, and I'm looking at it right now, and they haven't even hit 60,000 yet. Yeah, and it was, you know, after the first two or three days, it was in the 20s. That's not good. Generally speaking, my understanding, and you being someone who tracks Kickstarters more readily than I do, is I think normally it's the first couple days where you're supposed to see most of the productivity out of the Kickstarter, and then maybe the final day also sees a surge. Well, normally there's a large surge in the first several days, but most Kickstarters then settle into a nice average continuous growth where they get about the same amount every day. There's kind of a plateau as you build up. They get just a nice steady growth towards their goal, and then within the last 48 hours it normally spikes again is how most of them happen. And there's a good site that I don't remember the name. I don't have the link off the top of my head that is all about tracking Kickstarter stuff and how they're doing and projecting out how they're looking to go. And it's like at their current rate of daily growth, are they going to hit their goal or this or that? But my big thought on this is simply is, I mean, is Fable worth it? And do we need another CCG on the computer? I mean, we have Hearthstone, and I believe the RuneScape CCG just launched, and it's been getting really good buzz because it's so different from Hearthstone. And is Fable actually going to be able to do it? And my other question is, who's Flaming Foul Studios? Have they done anything in the past, or is this a new build? They're brand new. They are a portion of Lionhead Studios. They've just, they reformed, it's not all the Lionhead employees. So Lionhead got shut down in Britain, and some of them went to Microsoft and said, hey, we want to finish Fable Fortune. We'll form up Flaming Fowl Studios to be a development studio to do it. I'm not clear whether or not Flaming Fowl plans to have a future, or if it's really just solely to get Fable Fortune out under a developer name and then disband, because it could be that, because they don't have anything else. even if Flaming Fowl Studios is able to get Fable Fortune made and sold, that is in no way clear that they would be allowed by Microsoft to do anything else in Fable. So I could imagine them just start to maybe create a new IP, maybe doing similar game mechanics. But you already hit the, to use a cliche, nail on the head when you asked about whether or not Fable was worth this. And I would say this is not Fable, and that's the whole problem with it and why I don't think its Kickstarter is even remotely close to meeting its goal. Fable is a whimsical RPG. That's the Fable that people want to play. That's the Fable that's always sold and sold well. That's the Fable that people remember that Molyneux goes out and overpromises things on. And then when you get the game, it doesn't live up to what he said, but it's still a really good RPG. At least the two I played, I enjoyed. It says, I mean, really. Right. And he'd already left Lionhead, so he hasn't been involved in these projects. But, see, Lionhead experimented with other formats. I mentioned on a previous podcast that I played the one which was like a beat-em-up, a little side-scroll-y. It looked like you were like little wooden puppets. They also did a version where they were using the Kinect motion tracking device on the Xbox 360. I think it was the 360, might have been the Xbox One. And they had like an on-rails, in the Fable universe sort of thing. And my understanding is those games were okay, but they never sold well because they're not RPGs. They're not Fable. They're not what people want when they think Fable. And so while this collectible card game might feel like the Fable world, the gameplay is so different from the core market that I think the core market's alienated. I don't think that's going to do great because you might win. Some people are like, oh, gosh, I really love the whimsy of Fable. But you also need them to say, and I really like Hearthstone, which my understanding is is basically Hearthstone clone. And that might be unfair, but that's what my understanding is. I don't get it. I get why it's not doing well. It's because I look at this and I go, this isn't Fable. Why are you even doing this? especially if you're asking to be able to finish making it and you're going to turn to the public and say they need to give you over a quarter of a million dollars to get it done. How close is it? I don't know. Yeah, looking at the Kickstarter, it's less like Hearthstone and more like the Pathfinder Adventure card game where you actually build up a character and do some stuff like that. But if that's the case, that's what the RuneScape card game is. and it's free to play and it's live now and it's getting really good reviews. Yeah, it just doesn't seem like a market where you want to go in and be derivative and without offering something really unique. I just don't think the Fable brand is strong enough to sell it. And I see why Microsoft's okay with them moving forward like this because it's quite a different type of game. It's not going to appeal the same grouping. I mean, they killed off Fable Legends, which was in beta. Well, see, Fable Legends sounded – I heard a lot about Fable Legends, and it sounded really interesting. In terms of as a concept, I think it made a lot of sense. But the thing that I'd always heard, again, and I don't know how broadly true or not it was, but it seems to be what Microsoft's concern was, is when Fable Legends got brought up, the general reaction from the public has been, meh, to who cares. It's not, I mean, this isn't like the Star Wars franchise where you can have Rogue One, and even though it's not mainline Star Wars, people are still going to go to it because they love Star Wars. This was like, why isn't this Fable 5 or Fable 4, whichever the next one was supposed to be? It's just, it was some, you know, it was different. But I heard people who were playing the beta enjoyed the beta, but again, apparently there wasn't much love for it. And unfortunately, when you've got a world full of Bethesdas and Biowares who are making stellar RPGs, being okay is just not okay, if that makes sense. Yeah, and trying to launch a collectible card game in the post-Hearthstone world seems, with something that's pretty weak and thrown together from the remains of a team, also seems kind of a stretch. I mean, let's face it, Blizzard is the gorilla in the room, the Winston in the room. They don't innovate that much, but once they pick something, when they set in and put it together, that becomes the new bar you need to get above. And I just don't know if this group would be possible of getting above the bar Hearthstone presents. Yeah, I think it's a very high jump to try and make, and I don't think they're going to get over the bar, much less stick the landing. We'll keep an eye on it, and we'll see what happens. But anyway, I guess good luck to them. But, you know, these early numbers look terrible. I just don't see it happening. I don't see it. But we could be surprised. We'll see. Maybe they'll get some good reviews and this and that. Yeah, I did hear that part of the issue may have been that the initial launch of the Kickstarter was not well announced, that they didn't do a very good PR job. I have seen that a lot of news media outlets have started to pick it up, though, because the numbers were under 30,000 when I first saw. And so they, I mean, they have improved. It's just they want so much. Yeah, if they flub the launch, that'll hurt. Because I know a lot of board game Kickstarters on the board game forums, you'll start seeing advertising for the Kickstarter a month or more before the Kickstarter launches. They start building up. Oh, we're launching on June 7th, and we're this and that. Come to our website. Check us out. We've already got stuff in play. And, I mean, that's the kind of, if you want that good, big, solid first hit, that's the kind of advertising you need to get out there. And that is an excellent segue in and of itself to transition into the tabletop section. In the tabletop section, we're going to play with whimsy this time because I have been cleaning out my stuff and doing some organizing and going through my old GM notes that I put together. and one of the things I found was an RPG that I purchased several years ago. I think I purchased this in 2012 or 2013, and I've never actually played it, but I picked it up because this game is so rule of cool that it's not even funny. I mean, it goes beyond funny. It just relies completely on the awesome. The game is called Strike Legion, and it's available on drivethroughrpg.com, which is a great little website where you can purchase PDFs of all sorts of different RPG games, most of them very cheap. Strike Legion is $3, and you can get it as part of a bundle pack with a lot of other games for like $15. and I'll have a link we'll have a link to the drive-thru RPG page for it in the show notes but this game is very it uses pretty much every trope you can imagine for the sci-fi genre your player characters are part of the valiant Star Republic fighting for its life against an evil Imperium and the evil Imperium is exactly what you would expect for an evil Imperium. Lots of mooks, lots of little light units that die very easy. But, hey, they've got quantity. What's a mook? A mook is just anything. It's like a minion. It's somebody who they have not enough hit points to matter. TIE fighters are mooks. They're cheap. They're light. It's a quantity over quality type thing. and so that's how they try to win their fights. They fight in large units because, oh, we lost 100 guys, but it doesn't matter because we brought 15,000 guys type. It's the old quantity has a quality all of its own. Right. Zerg rush. It's zerg rush. And they also have some elite units, but, I mean, it's all about this game is all about just the over-the-top insanity. The Star Republic has elite units of super soldiers. I mean, I'm talking these are the guys that naked, dripping wet, would rip Master Chief apart and not even have noticed he was there. I mean, these guys are nuts insane. in the character creation they flat out say that a baseline human would basically have like one point and when they say baseline I mean that's like that's like peak physical condition Olympian level human would have like one point and you open up with like a hundred wow it's a pretty nuts game it is set up to one guy If you run into like, oh, I ran into an army unit that's like 50 guys, and you're in your armor and stuff, it's like, okay, it's 50 guys on one. All right, I'll take them, whatever. It's not even worth rolling half the time. Where this game goes into sheer insanity is they steal, blatantly steal from everywhere. I mean, do you want to be an anthropomorphic bunny rabbit who is a Jedi master with a lightsaber in a Gundam carrying hand grenades that can destroy planets? Because that's a pretty normal character. That's nothing crazy. That's just a normal guy. Really? I would have thought that the planet grenade would push that over the edge. I mean, we've got to have some law here. Oh, yeah, no, and I mean, these guys have handguns that are more powerful than anything that we have in the world. They've got handguns that make nukes look like nothing. And I'm just going to go through here and cherry pick a couple of the more interesting things out of this book just to kind of give you a feel for it. Because it's just so insane that anything you can pick is there. Or you'll find something interesting to it. or if you've played a game that has or seen a movie that has some characters in it, you can probably find something inside this game that will put it. Show us the madness. Show us. There is a race in the Star Republic. And here's the thing is the Imperium is the classic Imperium that doesn't like genetically modified and it doesn't like any aliens or anything that's not a pure human type thing, even though they use genetically modified insurance entities as their own weapons. But it's like they have, there's a race called the Draken, and they are genetically engineered to resemble dragons. So they have, you know, snouts, sharp teeth, covered in scales, this and that, and they have, you know, wings and everything. They've got big battle fleets, and they're engineered to be very combat-oriented, pinnacles of speed and strength type people. And they pilot what they call battle frames, which are basically Gundams or even bigger insane stuff. They've got, like, high agilities. And they've got, there's a race that looks like mice. They're humanoid mice and the humanoid rabbits. They've got orc-like creatures. They've got elf-like creatures. They've got humans and metahumans who are like superhumans with a bunch of different bonuses and stuff. And, I mean, just tons and tons of races that you can put about anything you want from. So it's, well, not to be too much of a pun, but it sounds extremely eclectic. It is extremely eclectic. And, I mean, because it does, it pretty much all the races and everything is basically just a collection of stuff from something else that they've covered enough that it doesn't show up as, that it's not too overly blatant. Like, their Jedis aren't called Jedis. It's not the Force. Right, right. It's the Mastery. We've got copyrights to respect here. Right, right. It's the mastery, and it basically lets them be reality warpers and Jedi Knight type stuff. And for the whole level of just insane overkill, let's look at a couple of the random weapons they've got. The Reaper Pistol. This handheld mass driver fires a round at near the speed of light from an electromagnetic linear accelerator. Even though the round weighs less than a gram, it produces enough kinetic energy on impact to shred through the thickest armor. In an atmosphere, it produces a concussive blast and a visible turbulence trail in the wake of its projectile. That's a pistol. That's like a hideaway weapon. That's your backup. Oh. Yeah. I mean, they've got lots of weapons that shoot stuff at near the speed of light and has massive knockdown. And, I mean, when you've got a handheld weapon that's used to punch through, that you can punch through mountains and has a turbulence trail that can be seen from kilometers away, and it's a rifle. It's not like it's a big super cannon or something on the tank. It's a rifle that your guy carries. Well, I guess that's why the Imperium must be so afraid. Yeah. Well, they've got insanity stuff, too. Oh, do they? Oh, yeah. They've got super weapons, and they've got genetically engineered, like, horror stuff and biomechanical monsters, and there are freaking demons, and it's anything. Anything you can expect. I mean, I'm not even touching anything normal. It's like, oh, that's a normal rifle. Oh, that's a laser. Okay, it's a laser. Oh, here's a reflex cannon. It tears apart reality in any object in its path with a massive gravitational field. It tears apart the very pattern of the target and creates a path of destruction that can be used to annihilate heavy targets and large troop formations. And that's a man-portable weapon. I mean, it's a heavy weapon, but it's man-portable. Right, right. You don't need to mount it on any vehicle. Yeah. It can be left on for a long duration to destroy small mountains. Just small mountains, though. We have standards. Yeah, just nothing crazy here. And then you go through all these super weapons in here. Oh, there's a bow. Just like a normal bow. That's normal. That's normal. It's just a normal bow. Yeah. That's it. Yeah, they've got a crossbow. And they've got a net gun that shoots a net that's tiny. Tiny net's a death sentence. Tiny net is a death sentence. Let me see. Here's that grenade. It's a singularity grenade. This grenade has a containment field holding a micro-singularity that can be unleashed near an opponent. The small point of mass creates a massive gravitational field that will tear apart everything within the affected area of the grenade. The event horizon destroys everything near it, so it can only be used safely detonated with a timer or remote control. The device can be so powerful that it can destroy a small planet or a large moon. I'm glad that they did note the need to use a timer for safety. Well, yeah, that's, of course. Okay, I didn't realize that the grenade was going to be a singularity. I assumed it was just a conventional explosive. So it makes much more sense now. Yeah. The Event Horizon, obviously, is going to be an energy. It's going to just destroy everything. Yeah. And, I mean, they have a lightsaber that it's called an energy blade, but its description is it's a lightsaber. They have an energy staff, which is a double-bladed lightsaber. Any weapons that you've seen in, like, Warhammer 40K, you want a chainsword? They've got a chainsword. You want power axes? They've got power axes and everything else. Garots, monolight, little freaking magnetic wire things, It steals everything from everywhere, and it's designed for pure over-the-top insanity. And, I mean, that's just the personal weapons. That doesn't include ships or fleets or the insane power armor and the robots. And, yeah, this game is nuts. Well, I see why you got it then, because when it comes to role-playing, Subtle is not really the word I associate with your play style. No, no, I don't do subtle at all. I much prefer the big and in-your-face, and that is exactly what this game is, is big and in-your-face. So, yeah, it's one of those things, like I said, I've not had a chance to play it yet. I would like to at some point. It's got, I mean, you've got giant starships and small starships and fighters and Gundams and Power Armor and everything. It is definitely a game that has just a bit of insanity. And at $3, which is what it cost when I got it and is what it still costs now, it's a cheap pickup. You just get it in a PDF form and print it up and figure out how to play or use it as an example to get ideas from. And that's what I've been doing with it is because I know I had some GM notes I put together on some ideas back when I first got this game that I've been kind of pulling apart and putting into trying to find anything decent I can use for my upcoming, any upcoming sci-fi games I've got. and I started going back through this one. It's one of those things I felt the need to share it because it embraces everything that's over-the-top and awesome about sci-fi. I mean, it does. It just cranks everything to 11. It does indeed. And it sounds like you're going to have to try and see if you can put together some sort of game night or something so that Strike Legion can be played. Yeah, I'm in the process. I've actually finished putting together a general outline for a very small one-off, maybe two-off threadbare game that I haven't totally filled out yet. But I have finished up the general layout information and my general little story hooks that I'm going to put together. and I'm getting ready to start looking for a couple players so I can run it. And I'm also putting together bigger hooks for a Planet Mercenary game, which is the Kickstarter-backed RPG that's based in the Schlock Mercenary universe from the Schlock Mercenary comics. Yeah. But, yeah, no, it's time for me to – I'm feeling the itch real bad, And I know I'm going to the Can't Con, which is where I normally scratch the itch in July, but I think I'm looking to put together something special and actually GMing something that I haven't done in, oh, geez, 15 years. But has it been 15 years? Well, if you haven't done it since when we were doing our AD&D, like, version two days, then, yeah, about that long. Well, we played a bunch of 3rd Edition, but that was right before our other player moved. Oh, okay. Was that on 3rd? I couldn't remember. Yeah. It wasn't 3.5. It was 3rd. But, yeah, 3rd was new when we were doing that because that was pre-9-11, actually. So, yeah, 15-plus years ago. Then, yeah. Yeah. I've done a lot of stuff where I've been a player, but I haven't GMed since then. But yeah, I'm working on it. I know some people I'm going to start throwing some messages out to try and find some local people to play with and see what we can't do. Yeah, and you've already asked me about this, and I'm interested in participating in it, because I actually have not played a tabletop RPG style like that since then either. back in those days, where I've done some other, I've done other tabletop games, like the card games and stuff. I haven't actually done RPG, actually done role-playing, so it's been a long time. And I GM'd back in the day, too, but I'm so rusty. Well, that's all right. We're going to, and see, the thing is, is I'm aiming for something, we always did fantasy stuff, and I'm, everything I'm putting together is either sci-fi or, like, Threadbare, which is the post-apocalyptic insanity of Threadbare. Right. And I like that. I'd like to do a different setting. Yeah. Just for variety. Yeah, and that's what I'm going to end up looking at. I need to sit down and go through and start planning out my CanCon visit. Yeah, I still need to look at the – because I want to try and go Saturday. Yeah. So I need to look at what's going on so we can see what games we want to do. What we want to get signed up for. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, I haven't looked. When I first looked, there had only been a few games listed so far, so I hadn't gone through and done any sign-ups or anything. But, yeah, that's something I'm going to work towards over the next couple weeks. We will see what we can figure out. And like I said, I'm going to see what I can get together if I can. Because I don't want to put together like a massive campaign like we used to do, but I'd rather put together little one-off and two-off games. that we can play a game for a session or two just to see how we like it and then move on to something else. Or if we want to keep playing that game or if somebody decides they're not really that interested in playing, we can find other people or whatever. Just something, another little out-of-the-house, actual in-person doing stuff type thing. Exactly, exactly. Well, I think we've just covered our entire show. I believe so. All right. Well, listeners, as I often say at the end, please rate and review us at either iTunes or Stitcher. It helps other people who are interested in these sort of topics find the podcast, and we greatly appreciate it. You can also reach out to us. Email is eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com. And you can also find us on Facebook, which would be facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. And we're also on the Twitters at eclectic underscore gamers. I was planning when we were going into our interview yesterday to take pictures and put them on the Twitter and take pictures of the tournament and put them on the Twitter. And I got there and I did none of it. So I really need to get better at keeping up the Twitter, but I'm working on it. Well, we're new at all of this. And hopefully the shows are improving as we go along. We're always paying attention to feedback. We've never actually read any of our, I guess, quote-unquote mailbag on the episodes. I've thought about doing that. maybe just not including people's last names because I don't want to throw someone's stuff out there if they don't actually want to be called out sort of thing. But we do listen. We do try and respond at least privately to any queries. So if you're interested in more information on anything or you want to ask us something, feel free to hit us up. And we are really good about getting back with people. So anyway, we are on our same usual schedule. And I expect we will be for Episode 11, which would mean in a couple more weeks we'll come out with some more content for everyone. Until then, I'm Dennis, and I will say goodnight, everyone, or goodbye, depending on when you're listening. I'm Tony, and have a great day.