All right, welcome back, guys, to another episode of a pinball podcast. I appreciate you guys being here. And today we're just going to talk about general thoughts and everything. I don't really have any playing tips to give today, although I will here in future videos and future podcasts. Right now, to give a little bit of an update, because I know I've been asked this question a few times now. And I assume if you're listening to this on a podcatcher right now, it means I've already done it. But as of this recording, I have yet to take the audio over to any of those apps. I promise I am pretty soon. My goal is basically just to wait until I got several episodes in the can produced, ready to go. That way I can release them all at the same time. For me, it would make a lot more sense. That way I can just get them all out there, and then we can just go from there. So that's the general plan. That's the general idea with YouTube and everything I have going on there. I am going to start producing other videos again pretty soon. I'm just waiting on a couple of things to get sorted out with my computer and my cameras right now. But everything, I have a bunch of stuff filmed, so it'll all be coming out really soon. I would say expect me in about a week to a week and a half to have a full review of Hot Wheels and probably Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles LE shortly thereafter, maybe even a comparison video. We'll see. But getting into everything right now, it's funny because, you know, I keep hearing over and over again that there's no news to speak of. And, you know, that could be true, might not be true. I don't know. I feel like there's always something to talk about, at least if it's pinball. You don't necessarily need news to talk about something because I know for a fact, just looking at my notion right here, which is a kick-ass app, by the way, if you don't have it, I would check into it. But looking at it, just all the videos I have projected out, ideas and everything, I've got about 65, legitimately 65 different topics to talk about. And it's just, it's generally things that I don't hear anybody else talk about. It's things that I would be interested in if somebody did talk about it. I figured why not? I might as well do the research and talk about it myself. So that's kind of where I'm going. At least, I would say at least 90% of it, I haven't seen anybody else talk about it before. But we'll keep developing that. So I'd look for other videos to start coming out pretty soon. Just getting into general thoughts right now. You know, one of the big things that people have been talking about a lot recently is the build quality of Sterns. I know we've had a lot of different issues and I've mentioned it a little bit on this stream as well or on this podcast. And even on my YouTube channel, one of my top videos is literally labeled, It Stuck. And it's just a quick video that I just did explaining the diverter problems to people that might not know about it because I don't want them to run into the same issues that I ran into immediately out of box. And I got to admit, while the LE is nice, and we're talking about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles LE, it's really nice. It's beautiful. I mean, it's a great art package and everything. And my impression of the gameplay, it's a lot of fun. Very positive about that. But I've had a lot of issues with it as well. And as of today, it's August 17th as of this recording. And it's been less than a week since I finally got it working 100%. And that's when a new glider, if you're watching on YouTube right now, I got the old glider out right here. And that's the whole entire mech that I had to remove and fix. So what's a little frustrating about it is, is I got this game in on July 2nd. And legitimately for over a month, it had only been at 100% work capacity or working 100%, only less than 48 hours. And that's insanely, I can't tell you guys how frustrating that is, especially when you're shelling out the type of money that it costs to get an LE. Now, of course, I know that there's people out there that are listening that, you know, they think it's the biggest con job, dumbass decision, whatever words you want to use about what you might think about LE buyers. And I do agree to a certain extent. My thing is, is I typically like getting LEs if the theme just hits me right. And I've only done that twice. And you see two of them behind me. It's an Iron Maiden and a Ninja Turtles. There's a very select few themes that I will go ahead and reach out and get an LE on. Very few. The only ones remaining that are even in existence right now is going to be Matrix and Infinity War. Those are basically the only two I would even remotely consider getting an LE on. So, you know, circling back to this, it got me to really think what all is going on with Ninja Turtles. how is this happening why is this happening and you know it's funny one of the other big issues that i've had with it and i don't think too many people are really talking about this but i dug in a little bit more into this issue it's the i don't know if you want to call it a rail or a ball guide that leads into the layer shot now mine and i have a bunch of images i could bring up if i want to roll out some b-roll i guess we'll go ahead and do that on my video right now so if you're watching on video, you'll see this, that the ball guide slash lane I'm talking about basically is a metal piece that is right on top of or above the layer target. And it's ideally supposed to be lined up right along the black line that's on the play field, right? So on promo videos and everything, of course it's lined up. Great, you know, everything. But now, okay, I want to take that photo down. Now, let me find mine. This is a picture of mine. As you can tell, that is not lined up right now. So if you're just listening to this, basically, imagine that you're supposed to have this metal guide that's even with the play field in terms of where the black line is. Mine hangs completely over it. And what's resulted of this, and I'll go ahead and take these down now that you guys have seen them. What's resulted in this is that I have a lot of deflections off that area Now I actually had to replace probably about five or six different pinballs already from getting damaged just from hitting that Now of course a natural thing that I can do is just bend it back myself But I wanted to check a little bit more into this issue, and it turns out that I have yet to find one LE that is aligned like the promo videos showed. So even games that were put on basically in different videos once they were in production, and these videos were showing up on Stern's own Facebook page, I noticed that the alignment was off on some of those as well. I think if you check back on the video in which they say something on their Facebook page like TMNT is in full production, If you go to about 28 seconds into that video, you'll see a clear view of exactly what I'm talking about and how it's misaligned. And that's a little bit concerning. And, you know, I've talked to, I've watched actually several other LE videos on YouTube from various amounts of people. And all those little guides or that little rel, it's offline also on all of them across the board. I know a few people personally that got LEs. Asked them to send pictures. Turns out it's not aligned properly on there either. So, you know, it's really frustrating because the pros tend to be some of them are lined up, others aren't as well. And I've seen pictures of that, and I've even seen it in person to where it's either lined up or not lined up. and the only conclusion I can really draw off that because, you know, you have to consider that there's 250 LEs that were released here in North America or I guess the U.S. We'll just call it North America. There's at least 250, correct? Well, the amount of video and the amount of people that I've talked to in which it's not aligned as expected far exceeds over, you know, the 8% to 12% threshold, somewhere around there, maybe even 10% of the total pins that are out there right now in this region. So that right there lends itself that this is not an isolated incident. And I don't know whether that means that Stern is aware of it and they just okayed it because it's within the threshold of, I guess, margin of error or whatever terminology you want to use that you know they just decided okay that can go out i don't know it's it's very confusing to me though because i put together several playfields just putting them back together again whenever i'm doing a restoration or shop job whatever it could be and one of the things that i'm a huge stickler of is making sure things are aligned properly such as that because i can easily control that it doesn't take much effort to do so. And when I'm thinking about it in terms of how are they doing this at the actual factory, you know, I think of several different ways of why this is happening. And I know a lot of times people want to harp on the build quality of Stern. Trust me, I've been there. I've had numerous issues on various amounts of things. I've, I mean, I've had a bunch of easy complaints that I can make. And at the same time, I've played other Sterns such as, you know, Avengers, Walking Dead, just for whatever reason, absolute tanks. Don't know why that is. Even Avengers had it for like four years now or something like that. Bought it off somebody. Only one issue this whole time, and that happened two weeks ago, and it was an easy fix, just a little bored. So I go back and forth thinking about how this should be, what are my expectations, and whether or not that it's even possible to meet these expectations. and truth be told i fully expect that there there's always something dealing with pinball that has to be slightly dialed in like that's just the nature of it and i don't expect every mech to work perfect out of the box because the human element and shipping and all that i mean sometimes something breaks you got to fix it happens the board goes out it happens but i think of the things that should easily be controlled. And one of the things that I believe should easily be controlled is things such as alignment and getting those types of things properly put incorrect. And for whatever reason, it obviously we're talking about that layer area. It doesn't happen. And it's disappointing because, you know, I try to figure out reasons why that could be. And what I harp back on is that, you know, whenever an issue happens, we're quick to blame Stern as a whole. But if we really got to isolate how this is happening and why this is happening, you know, we could go several different directions with it. And one of the things that I was thinking of is, well, does this mean it could go down to just the line workers themselves? You know, does it mean that they're not trained correctly? See this. does it mean that they're just not being held to a certain standard? Or does it, I mean, the human element's there too. Quite possibly it could be that whoever is in that area at that particular time might not be passionate about their job. They might not care that much. And that's a realistic possibility. There's a lot of us that work jobs in which we're not exactly excited to go to work. You know, it's the day-to-day rigors. and looking at human nature like that, I mean, it's quite possible that somebody's just not taking pride in their work itself. So if we take it another step, you know, another step beyond that and I look at the quality control portions of it and I don't know what Stern's quality control is. All I know is they got a new quality assurance person last fall, which is a little bit different than what quality control is. But, you know, I don't know what it is and I don't even know exactly how their manufacturing is done. I don't know if their manufacturing is done in sequential order, which basically just means one thing leads to the next, then the next, then the next. I don't know if it's reciprocal, which means something could be done in one station, go to another station, and then come back to the previous station. Like, I don't know. And I have to assume it's done in some sequential order, just based off the videos and the general tours that they've shown. So that leads me to believe, or it leads me to wonder within their workflow do they have the proper quality control measures within that workflow And how it generally works from what I seen before and what I experienced before is that typically if you're adding in any type of quality control into your workflow, like actually inline quality control, you're basically going to make it to where your workflow will slow down a little bit and it'll be more expensive. So these are two things that generally happen. And I don't know how Stern does it. I don't know if they, I don't know how anybody really does it to be honest with you, like any companies, but I would think if they had inline quality control, a lot of these things would be caught such as something being misaligned over and over and over again, because obviously it's not an isolated incident. If it's over 10% of the pins that we know about, that's here, you know, talking from an LE perspective, that's here in this region. So keeping that in mind, does that mean that they don't have that type of quality control? Does that mean that if they do have that type of quality control, are they looking for that? Does that mean that they see it and then they assume that it is, or not assume, but they decide that it's within their tolerance to go ahead and send through? I don't know. Another thing is the playfields. People have been talking about the playfields a little bit, about how the general artwork on it is faded out or grainy. We've seen plenty of pictures on it, and if you haven't seen it before, I think there might be some up on Pinside. I know I've seen a lot of them on Facebook. And that's another thing. From what I understand, that those are brought in by third party. Again, I don't know. That's just what I've heard. But even if it is brought in by third party, you still have inbound quality control to where you've got to decide anything you're outsourcing and you're bringing back in for your own personal manufacturing, you're going to decide whether that passes the tolerance of what's acceptable. You know, I've seen that before, and I've been a part of different investments that's had to deal with that when dealing with products from overseas and getting samples. I mean, it's a whole ordeal, and there's a lot of moving parts to this. So I tend to wonder about that, about, you know, and circling back around, I wonder about do they have quality control that's in line when we talk about keeping things, you know, measured correctly, keeping things in alignment correctly, especially with ball guides, and do they have quality control for incoming parts? You know, my guess is, is that they do. There's just no way that you can have this big of a facility, this many working parts that you don't, which leads me to believe, well, you know, after final inspection, that they have to be deciding that this is within the tolerance. That's my guess, which, you know, I don't know what to think about that. And again, I'm just jumping to that conclusion. I have not talked to anybody that has anything to do with the manufacturing at Stern. I have no idea. This is just me talking as a consumer, and I'm a consumer that obviously has spent, you can look behind me, you know, not even a flex. We've all been there. If we're all in the pinball hobby, we know that this is not a cheap hobby. and I know that my wife and I have spent plenty of money, of hard-earned money, in order to have something that's fun. And we just, the slightest expectation or smallest expectation you can have as a consumer that the product works as properly as possible out of box. And thus, in order for that to happen, your quality control has to be on point. Again, human nature, you're going to miss stuff. That's part of it. You're going to miss stuff. But when it's the same thing on multiple pins, that's an issue. And I feel like it's an issue that needs to be addressed at some point because it's not fair. You know, and I'm not saying it's not fair to us, the consumers, because, of course, it's not fair to us as the consumers. But I think it's not fair to the designers. Like the fact that there's issues going on right now with Ninja Turtles, that's not fair to John Borg, who designed this. And it obviously passed all the testing they needed to do in the whiteboard stage. Like he put in blood, sweat, and tears into making this. So the least that things could be done is that other people have some sort of passion to put it together properly. Artwork, you know, people, Zombie Yeti worked his ass off with the artwork. The last thing that needs to be done is that it comes out grainy due to somebody else just making that decision. And then somebody else making the decision that that's fine. It's just, it defies logic for me. And, you know, just to give a little antidote about this, about having some sort of passion within and how it just negatively reflects on everybody. When there's just one small cog that decides that they're not as passionate and they're not willing to go the extra road. It doesn't mean they got to love what they do. It just means that you have enough pride in your work that you're willing to do what's necessary in order to produce the best product that you can. And that starts from the very bottom to the very top. It goes back and forth. You need the whole thing to come together. And, you know, just to tell a little bit of an anecdote real quick, back when I was in college, you know, my wife, she was in college for engineering. And we decided that we were going to pay for everything. We didn't want to take out loans. We wanted to avoid it, you know, and all that. So I ended up getting a job at the Eskimo Joe's Print Shop, which is a restaurant that's in Stillwater, Oklahoma. and I got a job basically with their clothing manufacturer because they sent clothes out all over the world. And my job was in finishing. Well, what does finishing really mean? It just meant that I took a bunch of shirts, bunch of sweaters, a bunch of clothing articles, and I had to fold them and put them in a box and label it and get it off to ship. But by putting the items in the box, they had to be ready for whoever received that box to take out that product and set it directly on the shelf, which meant I needed to fold it a certain way and it needed to be aligned properly. Now, keep in mind, I'm in college. You're not getting paid a ton of money to fold clothes but damn it I didn like the job I hated it actually but I gave my 100 every single day I 36 years old right now it years later and i can honestly say i gave a hundred percent during my short time there that i had to do to get us over the hump especially paying for everything i i gave it a hundred percent and i made sure that if something wasn't lined up properly i fixed it i let my boss know if i screwed up. I wanted to be held accountable. And those are things just for me on personal pride. And that doesn't make me special. I guarantee there's millions of other people out there that are the exact same way that have that type of pride in their work. You listening, you might be one of those people as well. I hope you are. I think it's a great mindset to have. But when you see issues like we've seen on these playfields, somewhere along the line, somewhere along the line, the standard or below standard expectation was set. And it was said that this is going to be okay. And that's, I don't know, that's concerning for me. Because just in my point of view, I think even if you need to move the line along, I think it's just inexcusable to have stuff that's not aligned properly. I think it's inexcusable to have anything that you can fix immediately or you can identify immediately to fix. Because this isn't something that just messed up in transit. This isn't something that's just failing. This is something that somebody is just putting it together on a line, and either somebody's just not checking it or somebody that is checking it, they're just deciding that, you know, that's the tolerance of it. And I don't know if that's their decision. I don't know if that's upper management's decision. I don't know. But I would like to see a better effort for sure moving forward because it's just that one little thing. it's so tough and it's not something that you're just like okay burn the whole company down it's not that it's not that at all we're all passionate about pinball if you're listening to this podcast you know that you're passionate about pinball I know I am and I like to see the way that I see these pins I see people that have worked hard to put it together I've seen whether it's people that are soldering it whether it's the junior engineers whether it's junior coders interns, the main coder, you know, anybody that's conceptualized it, anybody that's play tested it, all these things had to come together. And you want to see it come to fruition in the best way possible. And you want everybody that has decided that that product is worth getting, that that product is worth paying for, that they get the best experience possible. That's the main thing. And so, you know, moving forward, I got, I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to buy an LE anymore. I don't know. Probably not. If it's Infinity War, I might be a sucker. But even then, I don't know. Even if Elwin himself was doing Infinity War, I don't know if I'd get an LE right now. I just, my confidence level is so low on it and has nothing to do other than I just, I want to see the standard rise, comparatively speaking. Now, what I can say, I got a Hot Wheels off to the side over here, and I can honestly tell you right now, because I have enough games on there, I've looked at that pin enough, I can honestly tell you I think that the build quality on American Pinball's Hot Wheels is better than Stern's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Limited Edition. It's the honest truth, and that's the only American Pinball in here that I've ever owned, ever had, and they're not telling me to say that. Obviously, if you guys look back, I did a video that's probably one of my most downvoted videos on here questioning why they would do what they did in terms of marketing this pin. But I can honestly say the build quality is pretty excellent on there. Now, I've had one minor issue in terms of the actual build quality, which all it was was a target was just screwed in. One of the card targets just a little bit further than what it should be. So it just made it to where I stuck the switch stack up in there. and the contacts would automatically hit together and just keep registering over and over and over again. It's an easy fix, but other than that, I can't complain about anything else with that build quality. Whereas on Ninja Turtles, you know, we've got ramps that got ate up by a diverter that was obviously put in wrong because there's no way it was doing that in the testing stage. And then you got ball guides, you know, or rails that are obviously way, way off. So, you know, I don't know. I hope something changes. So eventually, this is something that obviously has been talked about for years at a time. And, you know, I don't know. I would think that if I'm a designer, if I'm doing, if I'm coding, whatever, of course, you don't want people to criticize your baby. But for me, if I was designing a pinball machine, I wouldn't be too happy with people not putting in as much effort as they possibly could. because the last thing you want to do, these are all passion projects for these people. I truly believe the people that designed and put these together from the ground up, it's passion projects for them. And you don't want to see somebody basically just shit on that project during the manufacturing of it. Especially when it's not like 10,000 of these are going out. We're talking about 500 LEDs. We're talking about 250 here. I would think you would want to get that perfect. and I think even the pros you'd want to get perfect and I know that you can't take you can't see everything human nature is going to happen but you cannot miss the simple things the fundamentals you have to get down because without the fundamentals without any of that you don't have anything that's the truth alright guys that's about it rant over I appreciate you guys sticking around If you guys have any questions, comments, whatever, you guys can contact me at apenballpodcasts.gmail.com, or you can make a comment down below. If you agree, disagree, whatever it could be. At the end of the day, I'm still happy with my purchase overall. I just want to see better. That's the bottom line, guys. Just want to see better. All right, you guys take care. Later, guys.