Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. This is Sunday, March 12th, Episode 30. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're going to talk to you about pinball and video games and maybe just a smidge of tabletop. Just a smidge. Just a scoop. A dollar. Just a tiny little bit. A dollar of dairy. The big things going on lately is this is our episode immediately prior to TPF. Our next episode will be dropping like a day late because we'll be in Texas when we'd normally be recording. Yeah, it's good that you're giving them the heads up. We normally record on Sundays, as Tony noted here. That is yet another Sunday. And I actually usually get done with the editing that day. But we're going to be driving back. So we're not going to do a recording in the vehicle. The sound quality would just be too awful. So we'll do the recording on Monday. And I do plan. I'm not working Monday. So I do plan to get the edits done and get it up Monday. But it will be about 24 hours late because of that. So consider yourselves forewarned. Yeah, I'm off on Monday also because, well, after what happened last year with the drive back, I wasn't going to go. Let's hope it's not quite that egregious, but it could be. Yeah, we didn't get back until about, what, one? Yeah, no drive from Dallas to Kansas City should take that long. No, no, we just hit three major construction areas on the interstate. It was just a mess. I mean, we even got off on the third one because we were so frustrated. It wasn't until we passed Oklahoma City that we ever got up to the speed limit. Yeah, it was terrible. Oh, man, it was so terrible. Yeah. But, hey, we got to finish the audiobooks. Oh, yes, that's true. Because we were worried that it was going to run long, but we got caught in traffic, so we got to finish it. As some people who follow me on Facebook or this or that might have noticed, but I won an auction. Woo-hoo! I went on to a local government auction, and I bet a dollar on a computer desk that turns out to be enormous. I mean, it's like a huge corner executive desk, and I got a bunch of other things. I drive a full-size van. It's not even just a normal full-size van. It is an extended of a full-size van. And somehow, it still took me two trips of having that van fully loaded to haul everything I won from this auction. I bid a dollar. That is a lot of desk for one dollar. Yeah, it's rather enormous. I'm going to have to sit down and I've had to completely redo my setup. I've had to completely, I haven't even started organizing stuff. I've got so many drawers that I've never had before that I'm going to try and figure out what goes where. Yeah, it's insane. Yeah, you could basically single man operate the Death Star from that desk. Yes, I could. That's my, yeah. Yeah, it's definitely an insane amount of desks. you can pretty much have like, I could have three people working at this desk at one time, and we wouldn't really get in each other's way. So my wife's real happy about the complete amount of room it takes up in the middle of the room over here that I've got it in. Yes, I'm sure she is thrilled. But just admire all the surface area. I know. Right now it's mostly covered in stuff because I haven't put everything away yet, but I'm working on it slowly. So I've also upgraded my computer just the tiniest fraction. I had realized that my speakers for my computer are the same speakers I got with my original computer in 1997. the one that I got as a graduation present from my parents. I've changed, I mean, I'm on my third computer since then, third or fourth computer since then, but I had the exact same original speakers that came with that computer. And after looking at those yellowed, faded, really terrible-looking speakers against this super nice new desk, I decided I needed to upgrade so I picked up a real cheap Logitech speaker set that came with like a tiny little sub I mean it's tiny, it's like the size of a toaster and a couple little speakers and you know, it's like oh okay, it's a $30 speaker set it's not going to be anything amazing yeah, no, actually compared to what I've been listening to It's amazing. Yeah, I imagine it would make a huge difference. Though, you know, it sounds worse if you say that you paid 30 times as much for your speakers than you did your desk. Yeah, I know, but I cannot. There's no way around it. There is no way around that problem because that's what happened. I paid 30 times as much for these little speakers as I did for the desk. Well, I guess we know what your priorities are. Hey, if I could get as lucky as I did to get this desk with everything else, I would be a super happy person. And the lady who was there when I was picking the desk up, because I got it from the IT section at one of the local cities, is changing buildings. So they're getting rid of a ton of desks and stuff. They've got a whole bunch more stuff that they're going to be listing. Yeah, let me know if you see any nice executive-looking chairs because I could use one. There have been no really good chairs. One of the auctions did include a grand total of 60-some-odd chairs. It was like 64 chairs that they auctioned off because the guy was there loading them up when my dad helped me load up my second load into the van. But yeah, it was like 41 really cruddy little conference chairs. and then like 20 other assorted chairs, but none of them were like nice looking executive chairs. So what have you been up to while I've been mining the gold mine that was an auction? Well, I bought a book, an actual physical, not Kindle version book. What's a book? Yes. Well, of course, you as a prolific reader know all about books, but I don't really have a coffee table, So I don't really look into coffee table books too much, but I'd seen an announce that there was a book called Art of Atari, which actually had the foreword written by the author of Ready Player One, which you were just talking about from our last Texas trip. And so I got it because it was about 21 bucks from Amazon. It's 350 pages and it just it features all of the artwork that Atari did for their coin op and their console divisions while they were in existence. and because back then the graphics were so poor that they were they really focused on trying to bring people into the worlds with the art on the boxes and the art on the cartridges so that you had something that you could kind of imagine because everything was so blocky so anyway it's just it was like oh okay well it's a good price and i thought you know the art was really cool on those atari games it's actually put me in the mood to try and play my atari i've been hooking it up actually today because I had it in the garage. I needed to get some new adapters and such to work with the more modern televisions. So I've been doing that. Oh yes, before I go on, I do need to note that I have one correction from the last episode. One of our listeners, Eric, contacted me and he wanted to note that during the Kevin Kulik Skit Bee Predator court stuff. I kept saying ATM machines, and he took issue with this because ATM stands for automated teller machine. So me adding the word machine after that was redundant, and it bothered him. So I am noting the correction. If you do say ATM, you do not need to say machine after you say it. Or a hot water heater, or... Yes. It's the office of redundancy department. Yes. Irregardless. that's one of my favorites but um oh another thing to note is you and i we do not own a nintendo switch and that's what practically everyone is talking about now and we also don't have a wii u so we aren't playing the new zelda game on either platform so i just wanted to quickly throw in a note that um one of our former guest hosts don he recently retired from the podcast we knew him from the pinball podcast but he is on another podcast that i listen to called the link cable podcast and their 15th episode is a review of the new zelda game and also on on the switch as a console so if you want to hear don or you want to hear uh just opinions on those two products we've got a link in the show notes to episode 15 so you can go and check them out uh back in terms of my activities. Let's see. You and I, we were at a game night last weekend where we played lots and lots and lots of Cards Against Humanity. I did not win. I've never won Cards Against Humanity. I believe you and I and a third person tied for second place, one card short of winning. And that's just my fate. But we learned the important thing. My wife will actually play Cards Against Humanity if she drinks enough wine. Yes. And I might have to just start bringing some to ensure that happens. Because I think cards is always a lot more fun the more players we get involved. I agree. Yes, yes. So that's my little tabletop update. On the video game front, there was a title update to a game I talked about in the past called Gems of War. It's kind of a sequel successor to Puzzle Quest. So I had to spend a couple of days getting all the new goals out of the way on that. And mostly, though, lately I've been playing Final Fantasy XV. I got that for Christmas. I've gone back. I've been trying to focus on the main story, though I'm having to do some side quests so I don't slip too far behind on level in order to keep pushing. And it's just I think I need to clear another game off of my plate before I can really justify starting something else, because I still have Dishonored 2, Far Cry Primal, and ReCore on my stack, and I need to get going on them, but I need to wipe something else off the plate first, and that's the one I'm going to try and do. And then the only other thing I wanted to note in the pinball category would basically be about a project Space Gambler I had been working on. A few episodes ago, I mentioned that my dad and I were working on a gaming project, but I couldn't go into any additional details, and that was because it was this 1978 Playmatic pinball machine called Space Gambler for my brother-in-law's birthday, which was Friday. So we dropped that off Friday. So I finally was able to post all the pictures I've been saving while working on it. And I do have a link in the show notes to about a six-minute video of gameplay that I took before I turned it over. No commentary. It's just me trying to make shots. But it's a little bit of a story. So I thought I'd go ahead and go into it. For those that have never seen Space Gambler, Playmatic is a Spanish pinball manufacturer, and there were several that were in operation. I think there is a company currently based out of Spain, but there's not a lot of detail that I know of. the it's most likely space gambler was probably the first solid state game they did though i couldn't find a confirmation that it was i don't know who designed it uh the most noteworthy thing i would say to americans is the back glass has blatant ripoffs of r2d2 c3po and tie fighters oh yeah it's it's real blatant yeah it's very blatant and also incidentally there's a woman with kind of a weird space helmet on. And that's basically a ripoff of a game back glass called Target Alpha. It was a Gottlieb 1976 pinball machine. So they stole all sorts of stuff for that back glass. And anyway, so this game, what had happened was my dad contacted me. He sent me an email. He said, your mom wants to get your brother-in-law a pinball machine for his birthday. And my dad was thinking, okay, well i i think we should get something that your niece and she's four years old would recognize so he he started telling me themes that she would she was familiar with so he's saying things like shrek star wars batman and so i i'm sitting here and i'm writing a response and i'm going okay well do you know how much mom is wanting to spend because most of these things are not going to be cheap i mean it's like okay so shrek well we're gonna have to assume maybe 4500 dollars for that you know about the only thing i thought we might be able to find under two grand would be batman and i i've never seen a daddy east batman in the area so i was like okay well uh you know you need to get me a price range so i know what what we have to work with here and it was not that it was sub it was like under a thousand dollars it needs to be a few hundred dollars it couldn't be a thousand and i was like okay well we can get a project for just a few hundred dollars uh and my dad agreed you know it's like let's get a project and it's like okay but you're probably have to give up on a lot of these theme ideas except i remembered that one of our local players and he operates a few of the machines at the 403 club a few of them are theirs and you know him tony nick he had listed a while back this space gambler project that he didn't really have enough time to tackle because he was working on a number of other projects getting them ready for the texas pinball festival and i thought you know what that was a playmatic i bet he had trouble selling it because there are a lot of people that are very uncomfortable taking on games that don't have a ready a ready supply of replacement parts and since it's a spanish company it can be a little more challenging to find some of the parts. So I contacted Nick, and he said, yeah, I still have it. And I said, okay, let me check, and I told my dad about it. And he's like, okay, he thought the ripoff Star Wars things would be enough for my niece that she would think it's a Star Wars game. So he wanted to check it out, so he went up there. Because there was only one aspect to the project that he was concerned with. One of the displays was kind of wonky, and he wanted to take a look at it Because the displays were one of those items where we would have a lot of trouble finding a replacement. And it had to do with, I don't want to go into all the details, it had to do with not all the displays are the same on the game. And this was the one that was, I don't want to call it unobtainium, but it would have just been more challenging. So anyway, it was just a loose wire. So he found that out while we were there. We checked it all out. Nick ran through all the problems that he knew existed with it. And it was fine. So we, my dad paid him and we put it in my garage and then he would come over about once a week and he would work on things. And then during the week I would work on these other aspects of it because that was their gift to him. But it's like, I went ahead and I LED it out and, uh, you know, re-rubbered it. And then we ordered a bunch of new parts and such. And so it went, it went pretty well. And so we finally turned it in and he gets to have, uh, his first pinball machine. So anyway, it was an interesting project. Those Spanish games, I think the European manufacturers in general, actually, they did something with the playfield art. I've read again. It's so the information's challenging and inconsistent. I've read that it could either be the art was put on a plastic overlay on top of wood to they use some sort of resin on the surface of the playfield. But the art is incredible because whatever they did to it really prevented wear. so you don't have all that wear down to the wood like you did on the american machines it's it looks like it was clear-coated basically so the so in terms of the quality of looking at the art looks really really good the plastics were in great shape the back glass is in great shape very little flaking so from a visual standpoint it was uh it was an excellent specimen and in terms of replacement parts i think uh obviously the leds were the most expensive thing that i needed to get uh but i think the most expensive single part was because they decided to we checked with my sister and and she had a had my brother-in-law clear out a space upstairs ostensibly for a future machine he might choose to get down in texas and since it was going to be upstairs and not hidden in the basement my dad wanted to get new legs so you know we that was the most money spent was on the legs. Yeah, I was wondering about the whole, how there was a spot cleared so quickly because I knew about this project for a while, but I also kind of, I like the side art. I just like the old school side art that's just, you know, the couple of colors and this and that. I think it looks pretty nice. Yeah, the sides, a little bit of scratching, but it doesn't look like it was kept in the sun. It doesn't look faded. So, and that stuff can be pretty easily touched up if one wants to go in and color match because so few colors were used. But yeah, no, my sister had, they had their own little computer nook area. And she was saying that she was really frustrated with all the stuff and was tripping. She made her excuses. And so, and you were the only one who knew what the project was outside of the family. And we didn't even let her know until it was pretty much done. So then we just, you know, had to figure out where they wanted it positioned and stuff. And so we moved it over on Friday. and it is free of me, and so my garage finally has more space. So now when we're in Texas, you can get another project machine. I'll look. I'll take a few looks at the swap meet and see what I can find. Yeah, we didn't do the swap meet last year, but this year, I was planning on it this year. Yeah, I want to take a look. I also need to try. I want to find some new switches. I need some of them white octagon switch, leaf switch stand-up targets for Superman. And they're hard to find. So I'm hoping maybe someone has them there. I got a few things to watch for. But yeah, I'll keep my eyes out on it for something else. But yeah, it was interesting. So just a word. It was the first time I did a pin project that wasn't just for me. So, but yeah, it went pretty well. A few little things that probably need to be worked out. We found out some more wires that probably need some re-soldering just to have better connection and such. But yeah, it was really clean. And, yeah, first time I worked on a European pen, so it offered a lot of interesting dynamics, especially given it was right on that cusp of that EM to solid state, so it still used a lot of Jones plugs, and a lot of the setup looks very EM. It looks real nice from the pictures I've seen. I definitely like the look of it. So with my new desk and stuff, I might have destroyed my chances of picking up a project in Texas because I don't have any room anymore. That was the wife's first comment is there's nowhere to put it now. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. But you're creative. You can always find a way to restructure. The girls can share a bedroom. See, I'm problem solving for you. Yeah, that works real well. Well, let's go ahead and formally jump into the pinball segment. Now, I think I laid enough of a groundwork to transition into it smoothly, but I think we need to go ahead and prep ourselves for the final round of the 2017 Modern Widebody Tournament. Yes, we do. All right. Well, that, of course, means we need to go over the round four results first, and there were only two matchups, and they were pretty easy to explain. Twilight Zone took out Wizard of Oz with 57. No, it was not. We were both predicting it would. 57.7% of the vote. So it was not a 10-point margin. I don't remember what we guessed. I know you thought it would be more destroyed than I did, but I think I may have said a five-point spread, in which case I wasn't right. Yeah, I was thinking upwards of 60%. So I think if you split the difference between what both of us thought, we're pretty darn good. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. And the other one actually went, was a flip based off of, I mean, they were neck and neck on the seeds. But Star Trek The Next Generation did actually defeat Indiana Jones The Pinball Adventure. And it also won with 57.7% of the vote. So of the people who went and voted, it looks like it was exactly the same number of, I think. I'd have to go back and check to see if both categories had the same number of votes because they don't always. But I think they did. It was exactly the same number of people supported Twilight Zone as supported Star Trek. So that means the final matchup, round five, which we will have a link to in the show notes, of course, is the number one seed, Twilight Zone, against the number three seed, Star Trek. Well, I think we know how this is going to go. Star Trek's obviously going to crush the imposter that is. Yeah, I can't even finish the comment. Yeah, I don't see any way Twilight Zone loses this fight. That's interesting. Why do you think Twilight Zone is better than Star Trek? I don't. I just don't think it'll lose this fight. Allow me to rephrase myself. Why do you think that the masses, the unwashed masses, will choose Twilight Zone over Star Trek? The toys and the fact that many, many, many people consider it Lawler's greatest pen. I think its popularity is just so much that it will crush. And I've thought since the beginning, I've always thought that Twilight Zone was going to be the ultimate winner in the end. For me, the question was, what was it going to have to fight? Okay. Well, those are good arguments. And from Penn's side, it is the number one seed. It is their highest rated wide body in the solid state category. So you would, I think, predict that it would win. I agree with you. I do think it will end up winning. I think it will be close, though. I'm going to say that I think it won't win with... I'll be surprised if it has more than 55%. I think it'll be close. You think it'll be that close? I should maybe say surprise, but that's going to be my prediction. I think it's going to be within five points. Interesting. um i and uh i mean the reason for it is that i think well twilight zone has a lot of there's a you've named all the reasons why it's got a lot of love thing is star trek is pretty well respected as well i think the advantages that star trek brings to the table are it is it shoots better it got a much better call package um you could argue that the music probably about on par One is the theme and one is the awesome golden earring song Twilight Zone but doesn really have a whole lot to do necessarily with the show They both flawed of course I don't care for the video mode in Star Trek. I think that Star Trek, the slings are death. They just throw things into the outlanes. But on the flip side, on Twilight Zone, the pop bumper section is death. It just was basically throw away down the left outlane sort of thing. my problem the reason why i won't be voting for for twilight zone is i think it's a three-shot game i think you just do the same three shots over and over and over and i don't think you can say the same for star trek i just think it makes you play more of the game even with its flaws about being able to get through certain modes and try and set up your multiball uh just based off the ball launches and such um they both have they both have problems uh yeah twilight zone has a lot of neat toys, but it's got Fight the Power and the Powerball. Outside of that, hitting the clock and stuff, I don't know how we count each one of the... I agree it has more toys. The little cannon shots that you do from the little shuttle bay pod things in Star Trek is a pretty cool feature, and it's used quite a bit. Competitively, I think Star Trek's a better game. I think a lot of people who play, especially if they play it in tournaments, will say Twilight Zone is unfair with how the Powerball works, you might end up getting it randomly, basically. So it's just not an ideal game from that perspective. So my guess is more competitive players will side with Star Trek as just being a better game to play competitively. I know I enjoy Star Trek more. I don't do anything really competitive. I mean, I compete, but I'm not exactly competitive. But home collectors might favor Twilight Zone because I think there's a lot more that you feel you can do in terms of mods. And I think Star Trek, at least in terms of regular, well, I'll call regular wide bodies is the heaviest game ever made. So they probably have back pain from ever moving it and are done with it. So, you know, I see arguments on both ends. I think Star Trek shoots better and that's why I'll vote for it ultimately. But yeah, it's just, yeah. I agree that I think Twilight Zone wins this because I just think it was Lawler's carte blanche. He did whatever he wanted with it. And, you know, now at the time, that would have been interesting because, see, at the time when it came out, Twilight Zone was not a particularly successful game, as I understand it, and Star Trek was. So views on it have changed as time has gone by. but you know i think it's a little more flash than the substance but no offense to the game flash also Steve Ritchie game but anyway that'll be our last matchup and we'll uh cover those results when we get back from texas so yay let's talk about uh something a little more current and now and that would be alien pinball we got to see some gameplay footage from dead flip they had featured it on their twitch feed and you and i saw that uh post uh on uh on youtube after after the event had happened so i did spend some time with it uh watching a number of people try and make shots and go through and do some of the modes and such so let's go ahead and have a little discussion about alien pinball i guess i'll just open with the the broadest question of all and that is Tony, what did you think watching the gameplay of it? It wasn't as great as I hoped, but it wasn't as terrible as I feared. It doesn't look like it didn't grab me like watching the Aerosmith play. It didn't grab me like that did. But it didn't look horrible. I thought some of the video stuff actually worked really well. Some of the modes were kind of cool. I liked the When they had the motion tracker When they popped up And when they were doing the sentry gun stuff For the multiball, that was kind of cool Some of the shots seemed Real, real difficult I don't know I still love the LCD In the playfield And I said that about Full throttle And I think that is a wonderful little addition. But all in all, it's not, I don't think it's going to be a terrible game, but it didn't really, really grab me. And again, maybe I could have missed something. It was like a three-hour stream, and I only watched a couple hours of it. but it seems like a very serviceable game but it didn't seem to be to the same level as what we've seen out of like Aerosmith, It Just Now or the clips I've seen from Dialed In. Yeah I um and I didn't I did not get in a full hour worth of watching so I watched less than you but I did try and watch a number of different players and i skipped around in the video feed to try and go to different modes and features to make sure i i got a good taste of it all uh overall i yeah my my view is is pretty much similar uh in in regards to my my take on it which is i thought it looked uh i'd say it's a decent game i think it looks like a decent game that's not a game that i would be compelled to own. I like the idea of doing the two movies as a concept where you make your commitment under which movie tree of missions you're going to progress through. I thought that made a lot of sense. I really liked the idea that they seem to be doing, at least in some of the modes, where you were to hit certain shots and avoid other shots, that those shots punished you. And they would do all this little color coding for it. I think I've played some Pinball FX2 games that have followed that sort of set of rules, but it's not something I've seen a lot in physical pinball and I think it's a really good idea because I like the notion of punishing people who are just flailing and so it actually says no you need to actually make some particular shots otherwise you know the mode will end early if you hit three bad shots or something yeah that I completely forgot to that was on my mind when I saw that last night when they when I was watching it when I was re-watching chunks of it last night when the mode flops up, hit the green shots, not the blue shots. It's like, well, that's kind of awesome because that gives you some serious, that's consequences for not making the shot as opposed to just, oh, I just didn't hit the shot I needed to hit. It's like, oh, no, you hit the wrong shot. You know what, we're done. We're done here. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting because you don't, one of the things that people learned, especially since the 90s, was the frustration of people just timing out modes. and so one of the things is you could do a thing like uh well like stern star trek where as long as switches are being hit the time progresses but another thing you could do is say no no you're going to have to either make these certain number of shots or you'll eventually hit the wrong shots and then the mission will end you know there are a lot of different or you can mix it in with time there are a lot of different ways i just think the idea of these are bad shots bad and it's not that you don't get, I mean, it wasn't taking points away, which definitely would have been interesting, but you know, the, yeah, the notion of just terminating the mission without you getting what you needed to get without you being rewarded. Uh, I thought that was really cool. So I liked that feature, uh, like you, I, I liked that screen in the, in the center of the play field. I, I, I did with full throttle. I think it's one of the high points of highway pinball in their design i i think it's smart i know a lot of people whine about it uh i i disagree with those complaints but yeah it's my favorite part about highway machines it was it's it's neat and uh you know i i i'd still say innovative i get it it's just a smaller screen but the placement is so useful for actually trying to keep track of your progress without having to look up and down and i know for a lot of players it's intuitive but for a lot of people it is not and you can actually use your peripheral vision and watch that screen and still keep track of the ball. And there's a lot of value in that. The video stuff, yeah, I liked it. At first I was a little concerned because I wasn't seeing much in the way of characters, but that's when I started really going through a lot more of the footage, and I did see, okay, they've got missions where you're actually seeing actors in the movie. You're not just seeing the xenomorphs or atmospheric shots. the drop ship I mean on the screen it plays out like the entire drop ship scene while you're doing that specific mode that was pretty cool I don't know if you saw that part or not I did I think I actually watched two different times two different people playing the drop ship mission and yeah I know I thought overall I thought the immersion especially the sound effects I thought were really good for the for the concept of film immersion. They were, they, they, they did come off really well. The, um, so I thought that looked really good. Of course it is. I don't, I don't care for the play field art. I, I color wise, I think it fits the theme fine. But when I look at the play field, I don't feel the movies. I feel I'm looking at generic alien play field. Uh, in fact, I, I'll, I, I, yeah, I hate to do another Stern Star Trek comparison, but it kind of reminds me of the Stern Star Trek play field, which I wouldn't say quite that generic because there's at least a xenomorph on this, but I just, I get the little ships and shut and such on the shots. I just, you can't really, you can't really notice them from the angle that we had with the, with the view. It's just too far up. So in person is probably looks, you could probably get more of the movie vibe from it. It's just, I didn't, I didn't quite see that. I just saw kind of a dark field and that's fine with me. I'm not a, I'm not big, you know, you don't play the art. So, my main concern wasn't obviously because of my limited caring on playfield art. It wasn't that. It was that I don't know the best word. I'm going to say that I thought the game looked clunky. And I don't mean that in the full sense of the term, I suppose. But I guess maybe another way to say it is I don't think it looks like it plays as smooth as Full Throttle plays. you noted an issue with those shots. The shots look tight, really tight. Yeah, some of the shots look really, really tight. And I assume that's on purpose. In fact, what it most reminded me of, though it's not a wide body, is Stern's X-Men, which I think has a lot of shots on it, and they are almost all tight, really tight. And it's still a fun game to play, even though it's got those really difficult shots. yeah it's just also a game that makes me swear at it which is something that's bad because the local ones at a pizza place and there's always kids around yeah we try and protect the children yeah it's just so so i i mean i that's that's fine it's just i noticed a lot of people breaking shots uh players seem to even struggle with the full orbit shots and actually getting the ball to go all the way around i don't know if the orbits are also tight hard to hit shots or what but they weren't getting hit clean. And so it made me wonder, are the orbit shots too? Normally, I don't associate an orbit shot with it being a particularly tight shot. But obviously, how big the opening is will determine that. But it just seemed like a lot of the balls couldn't make it all the way around, even when they'd start to go up the orbit, which can be frustrating. So I don't know, but it was a little concerning to me. Most of the successful shots do end up feeding back to a flipper. There were a few that seemed to say feed into the pops, which isn't atypical either. But the thing that I noticed is full throttle is really fast. I think it's like the fastest wide body I've ever seen in terms of how that ball just keeps whipping around and such. On alien pinball, the speed seems slower. The speed of the ball returns were slower. I noticed that the ramps that are feeding back to the flippers, they have turns at the end that seem deliberately designed to kill the ball speed. I assume to make it easier to trap up and shoot. And again, that's fine. That's just a stylistic difference. I didn't notice a whole lot of slow side-to-side action. That's the, that's, I think that when we criticize wide bodies, or let's be more honest, when I criticize wide bodies and say that they're slow, that is the aspect that most frustrates me is you spend a lot of time watching the ball moving side-to-side instead of going up and down. I didn't see a whole lot of excessive side-to-side with Alien, so I don't think it's slow in the traditional wide-body sense of, oh, it's got way too much side-to-side action. It seems deliberately designed to slow the ball down, though, versus Full Throttle, which was constantly just using those ramps and whipping that ball around as fast as it could go. So I think that the game is more moderately paced, and it's designed that way. It's designed not to let that ball get to high speeds, but rather to be a trap-and-shoot style game. I can see that. Based upon the way that people were playing it and how it looked, I can definitely get that vibe off of it that it's more about trapping and making the specific shots than just letting it go, which means I'll probably just let it keep going anyway because that's what I do. Yeah, I mean, as long as you get the time, it varies. I think it makes the most sense to trap up and shoot on games. I try and get better about that. But if I don't need to stop the ball, if I figured out where I can let the ball roll on a flipper and fire, I hate trapping then. I just want to keep flowing it. And that's the thing is the layout overall looks – I mean I'd say especially for a wide body, it's fairly flowy, but it's just not full throttle flowy. And so I actually really like a lot about the layout of full throttle. I just – I don't like this layout as much, but I think it's a decent layout. I think people will have a lot of fun with it, and I expect that this will sell a lot better than Full Throttle did because Sigourney Weaver not being included is frustrating. But aside from that, it looks like the movies. It looks more like the movies than I thought it would. Yeah, for being a widebody, it doesn't really feel widebody-ish. It's not like Hobbit where it felt like the ball was always in float. It felt like it didn't feel that way from watching it play. I mean, maybe if I was actually playing it, I'd feel that it was, but it doesn't give me that same vibe that some wide bodies do. Yeah, no, even though they didn't have a whole lot of front-loaded objects to interact with, Hobbit is such a fan layout. I mean, yeah, it's got that third flipper, but what's the point of it? Sort of, you know, and the reason I note that is normally I think in a pure fan layout, you only have two flippers. But you don't need that third flipper in Hobbit either. Speaking of flippers, there are four flippers on Aliens. I really like the positioning of the upper right flipper. The way it's not really against anything, it just kind of hangs out at the end of the field and lets you make certain shots while at the same time acting as kind of a part of the layout of the field. I liked the look. I didn't even realize it was a flipper until the first time I noticed somebody actually flip with it. I really liked the look. I really liked that look, and I liked how it fed and how it was used. yeah um i mean that i think that's the that's the value when you are when you are doing a wide body with that extra real estate is it really justifies the inclusion of a lot of interesting flippers if you want to when i first saw the play field for the video i was originally taking my notes and i first put down a fanish sort of layout and then i fully noticed the other flippers and i erased my line i was like no that's it's too different from a fan i was just noticing all the feed returns to the flippers and it was and everything was in the back half of the game you know there's no upfront bash toy there's no iron monger that pops up but after looking at some of the other flipper layouts i was like no i don't even think i don't even call it fan ish it's just it's it's too different it's too different to be considered a fan layout and uh that would have been an inaccurate judgment on it so yeah it had some it has some interesting shot uh designs i think a lot of higher uh skill players could have a lot of fun with this given how tight the shots are if they love to have to be perfect on shots this uh you know this this will please them if they're more of the you know to borrow from overwatch if they're more of a diva and wanting to be is this easy mode then it was probably not easy mode and so that could be very frustrating for some people but um yeah just overall i not there wasn't an element about it that blew me away but i think as a package, it looks pretty good. And I think it'll do really well for them. Yeah, with all the issues they were having, I was starting to get worried about it. I was really starting to get worried. I do want to try it in Texas. I do too. Even though it's going to mean we're going to have to stand in a line. I know. You can find us in the line, though. You can find us in the line. Talk to us. Oh yeah, Tony and I will have, we have some podcast magnets that we got whipped up just a few weeks ago. We'll bring some magnets. They're just little thin fridge magnets. We got them strong enough so that they will at least be able to hold a schematic. So they aren't just decorative. They do have the strength to hold a whole three sheets of paper or something. Very, very powerful. Okay, well, that's all I had to say on Alien. Do you want to go to our final pinball topic? Yeah, let's head that way. Okay, the final one is just what I've titled Pinside Ranking Regression Analysis. I shouldn't call it that. I should have said Pinside rating regression analysis in my notes here. But OK, this one was just a little weird one that I did just a few days ago. But I contacted Robin, who is the owner operator of Pinside, the main pinball forum online that we've Tony and I've referenced a number of times because it could be usually fairly negatively in terms of trolling. But it's also a major resource. And as long-time listeners of this show know, we have relied heavily on Pinside's rating and or ranking system in order to do our tournaments, because I have to seed usually with something. Otherwise, we do random seeding. So what I did is I contacted Robin, and I asked him if he could provide me a data set from their database of games for solid state titles, because I wanted to do some regression analysis to see if a game's rating on Pinside had anything to do with objective factors. So for those that aren't familiar with regression, I'm not going to spell it all out. It's a statistical analysis tool. And basically what I needed to do is I needed to take an independent variable, which in this case would be a rating. And on Pennside, games are rated by the community on a scale of 1 to 10. And that rating is actually across a variety of categories. And all the individuals get to weight the categories based off of their preferences. So like I downplay play field art. It doesn't factor into my rating much. I still always rate it. It's not a major component for me to know if a game is good or not. But someone else might prioritize that, like a J-pop fan. They might think art is more important than everything. Ouch. I can't think of anything else he's known for. I do think play field art is important to me. I would be less happy playing just like a whitewood table that had no art on it at all than something that has art I enjoy. Oh, sure. No, I totally get the perspective. And that's why what I like is Pinside does let you customize how much those weightings are for you. So then when you give your overall, you rate all these categories like sound and art and gameplay and fun factor. And based off of what you prioritize, it calculates the overall game rating for you with your weighting balances applied. So it's pretty neat. So anyway, so I just but I just took the overall game rating that each person has thusly assigned. And then I could look at a set of what are called independent variables to try and see if they, in fact, influence the rating. So you have to pick, though, a probability. Like what's the you know, at what level do we consider independent variable having an impact on a dependent variable? And so for this purpose, I use 99 percent. I'd say, as a rule of thumb, the lowest you would go is 95%, and that's seen as pretty acceptable. I wanted to do 99. I've seen people go as high as 99.9, but I view that as more science, the hard science stuff. So anyway, so all I did is I took 16 independent variables, which is the maximum I could run in Excel. And there are noise issues at those levels anyway, so it's already probably too many. But I just need to go and see, do these, the 16 categories that I did, did they have an impact or not as a collective? And they did. We are 99% sure that at least some of those variables actually statistically tied to the rating. And in terms of what did I use, these were the ones I looked at. I looked at what year the game was made. I looked at whether or not it was a Williams game. I looked at whether or not it used a licensed theme. I looked at if it was a wide body game or not. I looked at if it had a kickback feature, a physical kickback like firepower on the left. I looked at whether or not it had a multi-level play field. Did it have spinners? Did it come with a shaker motor? How many flippers did it have? What was the maximum number of balls in a multiball? How many drop targets did it have? How many bumpers did it have? How many ramps did it have? how many captive balls did it have how many cannons did it use and how many magnets did it use so those were the 16 things I looked at I did a few other runs with some other ones as well but that was my primary one and I made a post on Pinside because it was their data and I have a link to that thread in the show notes don't worry last I looked there were not even 10 posts because you have to really care about regression to want to read this so there's no trolling in it so there's that well that means it's something not totally terrible on pin side yeah because no one posted in it because no one cares and here i am talking about it uh i i'm being mean there are some there there is stuff on pin side that's not that's not terrible it's just certain threads hit a certain point maybe and they become bad but there's a lot of really good stuff there sure sure but you know this was a as an experiment it was an interesting case in point because well there were a few people I saw the little upvotes or whatever that my first post got. There's some people that read it. It's just they're not – it didn't drive really – and I didn't expect it to, but it didn't really drive any discussion. People would rather go on there and argue about their opinions on the play field art of Alien than they would to actually talk about what truly goes into someone rating of a game and the fact that we can actually measure certain things statistically that, yeah, the ratings or opinions are subjective, but there are certain things that are so strong that we could tie them, we could mathematically say, this stuff predicts it. And that's what I was curious about. And as I've indicated, it did. They actually did. So the overall set of 16 variables did impact the rating and how much they impacted. It was about it explained about somewhere between about a third, about a third of the rating. So so it's like 31 percent, 32 percent. So what that means is about of these of anything that could go into a rating of a pinball machine on that site. These 16 explained about a third of it. and the other two-thirds of it were whatever, subjective, cost, who knows, something I didn't look at. Now, knowing that the whole set had a high probability of being related, that told me I could look at the individual variables and see, did any of those actually meet my 99% chance? And there were five that did. So the five that did were the year of manufacture, the newer the game, the higher the rating. I don't think that's particularly surprising. No, I think that's to be expected because the newer stuff, people just see it more and they get more chances to play it. So that's just an obvious condition. Right. And some of these independent variables may actually have some dependence on each other. Because I did do some runs without year involved. And then you saw some of these other ones move up in probability even above the 99% threshold. It's interesting. But another thing was the Williams question. If a game, this was like an on-off thing. If a game was a Williams game, it got a better rating just for being Williams. Hmm. Well, there's reasons for that. Yeah. Williams was still, I mean, most people's probably favorite games are probably a Williams. They had the reputation for being the best in the business. And some people would still claim that their games from the 90s in particular are still better than games that are made today. So they have a very good reputation. I did initially try and do – I couldn't do more than 16 variables at once because of the limitations of Excel. So I did actually all the major manufacturers on a first preliminary run. and I saw the same effect with Williams with Bally as well, though not as extreme. Being a Bally game meant you had a better rating, but not nearly as much of a bump as you got if you were a Williams game. The other companies that I ran had no statistical relationship. There wasn't a high enough probability that being a Stern or being a Gottlieb made a difference on your rating or a Capcom or whatever, any of the major club categories. So Data East, Sega, I had no statistical probability to be able to say that they tied in. But Bally and Williams did. And then the others were some of the game components. If you had more bumpers, like pop bumpers, which it's almost exclusively pop bumpers, I believe. Your rating went up the more bumpers you had. Your rating went up the more ramps your game had. And the rating went up the more magnets your game was using. so those were all i i'm 99 certain those actually make a difference in improving your rating so anyway uh you can go to the link and read up on that i posted a secondary analysis someone asked for me to do by era i'm not going to go over that here but i basically i pulled out year and i pulled out some of the other variables that weren't at the 99 threshold and i stuck in games by categorized by era like early solid state, late solid state, DMD. So you can look at that stuff too. But anyway, my thanks to Robin for letting me have access to the data. I thought it was interesting, even if no one else did, so y'all just had to listen to me prattle on about it. But now we're going to prattle on to our second segment, which is video games. And we got a bunch to talk about this time. Oh yeah, we do. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening video games, including in our favorite game at this time currently, Overwatch. That's right. Big announcements lately. Huge announcements. A few weeks ago, the Bastion changes went from the PTR to live, and thus everybody hates Bastion. At the same time, they announced Orisa, the new hero. who they've been teasing for a week or two building up to it, but I thought they did a much better job than they did with the Sombra thing to build up to the release. I didn't think Sombra pulled off very well, but I thought the Orisa buildup was really good. And there's a bunch of changes on the PTR that they're working on, and some they've already rolled back. Yeah, it's been interesting. Now, the one thing I didn't see in the initial notes, Have they already nerfed the armor on Bastion from his initial modification? I don't know for sure if it's been. I know it was something that was talked about. I don't know if it's actually happened. I think it may have at this point because I didn't see it in any of the lists of what's being actually tested on the PTR. For those that don't know, Bastion is a defensive character. he turns into a giant gun turret and he was not getting played very much uh particularly at the high level because he was too easy to destroy so what ended up happening is blizzard turned him into a god robot and no one could kill him anymore yeah it was i i've seen video of characters actually sitting there just wailing away on bastion and bastion's just standing there not doing anything and he's not dying. Right. There were some characters who literally could not kill him. Yes. So what they've ended up doing is they had announced that they were just going to reduce his arm. They gave him a bunch of armor and they were just going to reduce the amount of that. So most of his changes weren't going to be removed. But they were going to make him easier to kill when he was in his tank and turret mode. So, and I think that may already be in effect. If it's not, it's not, but it's not listed in the – it's not part of the stuff they were planning to test on PTR. They were pretty immediate. Season four launched, and they were like, okay, this is what we're doing to fix this because it's just too hard to kill Bastion. So in terms of characters that are in the list, I guess we can just sort of go down them. I'll start with Anna because she's a character that I play quite a bit, basically out of need because she was the best healer to pick for just about ever since she came out, honestly. The initial PTR changes were that the damage of her gun was going to go down from 80 to 60. And then they also announced that they were changing her biotic grenade. And it's a grenade she throws. It does damage and reduces healing on enemies within its radius, and it instantly heals and then enhances the healing boost on allies that are in its radius. Now, they've already nerfed this grenade before so that the duration of the healing boost and healing reduction on the enemies wasn't as significant as it used to be. They've been making a lot of changes to Anna because they feel she's used too much. what they did this time was they were going to reduce the damage the grenade could do in half from 60 to 30 and the instant healing from 100 points to 50 points those grenade changes have already been undone on the ptr because the nerf was so hard no one was playing her all the players are saying she's unplayable she's the worst healer now i mean and i honestly i have supported every Ana nerf they have done until this one. And when they announced those grenade ones, and I read what the impact was, I couldn't fathom why anyone would play her anymore. And apparently the PTR demonstrated that that was the case. On console, it's so hard to aim with the rapid-moving characters with a gun like Ana's that sometimes, if it's like a tracer or something, the only way I have a good chance of healing them is with that grenade. And to just take away half of its ability to heal is devastating so i i'm glad they've already announced that the grenade changes are undone but it was it was a scary time for i mean i'll just play another healer i don't and it's not my favorite but i was like uh when i first heard the list i think i actually exclaimed why don't they just take her back out of the game well that's That would have basically done. I mean, that nerf would have completely destroyed Ana. Yeah. I mean, I get it. Her kit is frustrating. Some of this, I swear, is driven by the fact that Blizzard doesn't know how to make Mercy awesome. And so they're just trying to nerf all the other healing down so that you have to play her. I don't know. I really don't know. Anyway, so those are the Ana changes. So far, it's just her damage reduction on her gun. I have no problem with that nerf. and it may accomplish what they're hoping. See, some of this is, not some of this, most of this is driven by the high-level play, and it's just Anna turned out as a healer. She was, for a lot of people, the best damage-dealing healer there is. So, you know, that should help correct for that, by reducing that by, what, a fourth? So, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's about a fourth thereabouts. Who else is having tests on the PTR? Well, first of all, the absolute best character in the game has no changes coming because Lucio is already perfect. The second best character in the game is on the PTR. Junkrat, they're looking to take away his ability to hurt himself with his own explosions, which means Junkrat will then become the best character in the game, once again supplanting Lucio. Hmm, interesting. um i agree with this change i uh most characters do not hurt themselves i think with this change the only one that comes to mind will be farah with her rise but uh yeah i think i think this is a good change for junkrat i think it my my problem with it has been because almost all junk rat players are trolls that they won't ever fight on the point and part of it had to be that they need to stay a safe distance away from their own explosions yeah you know they need to operate at a distance and ideally junk rat does operate at a distance this isn't going to change that but what i think it does is it means when it comes to fighting for the point and stuff he's not his own liability where he blows himself up and then you kill myself more times on the point is junk rat then i've probably been killed by other people on the point is junk rat just because you're trying to get in there. And the thing that makes this up is, since he's not hurting himself, Junkrat is now going to be a really, really deadly point-blank fighter because he can just, oh, I'm touching you, bam. That's it. You don't have to worry about it anymore. Yep, yep. Anyway, I like this change. I think it's good. Yep, I do too. Another PTR change. There are a couple that they're putting in test on Orisa. Arisa isn't out yet. We haven't actually talked about Arisa, so we should probably talk about her kit a little bit. Let's talk about her kit before we talk about the changes. Let me talk about Sombra instead then. Sombra, they have made a modification on the initial PTR testing to her stealth so that the sound effects and the distance where you can hear her voice when she goes into and out of stealth has been reduced. It's now down to 15 meters, which is good because it would always and that's actually the distance of her hack. So if she can't hack someone, she can the player can test this while they're playing. Then she knows if she comes out of stealth there, they won't hear her come out of stealth because as fun as it is that she has a little pithy remark when she pops out of stealth. You're not being very stealthy when you yell that into an opponent's ear. and so so but so they've got it so that she'll actually be able to get closer than she has been able to to be able to go in and out of stealth which will increase her uh flexibility on that um they also had made a change to her trans locator she's got a little teleporting device the cooldown on that was six seconds they've reduced that to four seconds so she'll be able to use that more it often currently is used as like a get out of jail free card but she might actually use it for travel to move around the field more now with a lower cool down would be my guess and then this wasn't in the initial list but when they went and they fixed the nerfs to anna's biotic grenade they also added in for sombra the ability for all her allies to see through the walls to where the friendly health packs that are hacked are which should be useful to actually be able to go and get those because they respawn much faster when they're hacked so that'll be very useful so i i like these changes for sombra i think they all make sense Yeah, no, they're fine I mean, it's Sombra, she's not gonna I've seen her used effectively on occasion, but it's not like it's going to really change anything that drastically, it's just Sombra No, the moment I see someone choose Sombra in game, I think we're gonna lose, but sometimes I'm surprised I've been surprised a few times, and well I also Pele a lot of random hero, because random hero is my favorite thing, but Yeah, I do a lot of that mode too what else who else is getting changed Winston this is Winston exactly Winston is getting minor tweak to his barrier projector very useful tweak they are going to start the cooldown when the barrier is placed instead of when the barrier ends which means you're going to save a fair amount of time that's going to save a fairly good chunk of time on his cooldown. Yeah. Winston's my least favorite tank. I think he's the most worthless tank in the game. I think Winston has his uses in certain places. I agree. I think he is very much a tank that is designed for specific points. Or not designed for, but he works best. There are specific maps and specific points where Winston is very, very good and if you're not on one of those maps at one of those points on the map he is not as useful as any of the other tanks yeah that's that's a fair assessment of him he's not he's not worthless he's not worthless but he's so he's so situational and the player needs to know him i mean to me uh strategic placements aside and being like the hard counter to symmetra aside winston's value is in what is called a dive comp which is designed to jump in and attack the back row of team and you need coordination to do that and i just don't see it in pickup groups so winston just generally is not a good point because even if you've got a good winston you have to have healers who know how to take care of him because he just gets chopped down so fast but anyway uh so yeah but this cooldown uh for his barrier which is his way to protect himself uh will be useful uh and then before we go into orisa there's only one other character i know of that has ptr changes to discuss, and that is one of the other healers, Zenyatta. A lot of healer changes. Yeah, I'm not too surprised, although I hadn't thought too much on Zenyatta. One of the changes is his alternate fire. He can hold down his alternate fire and he charges up an attack shot. Once he fires it, though, he has a recovery period, and that has been one second, but they're actually going to drop that to 0.6 seconds, which is, obviously, that's almost a 50% speed boost to him on that move. So that will encourage him to try and snipe more people, because that's what that attack is used for. And he is a solid sniper for not being a sniper, but I use him, I know when I play him, I operate at long range a lot, and I know normally when I see people fighting with him, it's at long range. There's nothing like ducking around a corner, fully charging up his shot, and slipping around the corner just in time to wipe out a Bastion or a Turret or somebody who's not paying attention and not moving enough. Yes. And when they went back on their update to the PTR changes where they put in the friendly health pack thing for Sombra and took away the grenade nerfs on Ana, they also added in for his orbs either the alt fire or the regular left click fire. No more spread. He never had a huge spread on his shots, but they weren't completely precise. But they've completely removed that now. They are rocket fire straight. They are perfect. So he can headshot whenever he's lined up with a head now. The other change that they initially put on the PTR and then took back when they took back the Anunerfs was a big buff to him where his Orb of Discord, which enhances damage on a character from anyone who attacks as long as the orb is in place. He was able to apply those on enemies through barriers like Dixie Reinhardt's Shield, and they have undone that boost. I understand undoing that boost I mean I would love that that would be an amazing change but I can see where that could be overpowering I do too my logic and I assume it was their initial logic was well he can get the orb on people but it doesn't take long when you break line of sight for the orb to go away and you still can't hurt them because the barriers still protect the people they're just discorded So, and I just get so frustrated because everyone will hide behind the Dixie Reinhardt shield and I can't get discord on anyone until that shield is broken. But I imagine it just turned out that, nope, actually breaking the shield is not that hard. People were just dying way too fast. So I was looking forward to that one because I do enjoy playing Zenyatta, but I do understand the decision not to employ that. how about you explain to our listeners what Arisa is because you're right we've never talked about her Arisa is a quadrupedic robot which is something completely new Arisa they when they launched Arisa they gave her an interesting little backstory where they had a super genius young girl from Numbani who was going to go and accept an award. It had her first time flying on an airplane. And the airport was attacked by Doomfist. And they dropped all sorts of hints leading up to it about it. And everybody thought it was Doomfist coming, Doomfist coming, Doomfist coming. And then they announced Arisa. And she has an amazing kit for a tank. her kit as a tank is a little bit of every, all the tanks we'll see how this works out in the end but I'm going to go ahead and just start going down the line her weapon is called the Fusion Driver it's a sustained fire big cannon but her movement is slowed down while she's shooting it it seems to be not terrible I don't have the exact numbers on the spread it seems to be not terrible but it seems to be a halfway decent gun overall about what you would expect from a tank then she has another ability it's called fortify when she fires fortify her she gets temporary damage reduction and perhaps the most important part about it is she cannot be affected by action impairing events so she gets to ignore things that would stop her, like Junkrat's Trap or Dixie Reinhardt's Ultimate. That stuff just bounces off of her. It's not an issue. And I'm pretty certain that would also count for getting to ignore Zarya's Gravity Wave. I'm not 100% on that one yet. I haven't gotten on the PTR, so I'm not positive. I don't know. Have you heard anything about it? I bet I have, and I don't remember. So I don't want to commit if she's Ovaltine immune or not. She has an alt fire on her gun, which is amazing. It is a graviton charge. What she does is she launches out this glowing ball and she can choose when to detonate it. When it detonates it, it slows nearby enemies and pulls them towards the explosion. It's like a low rent version of the graviton surge. it doesn't hold them there it just yanks them there and it is going to be amazing for changing positions and messing with people trying to hide around corners and this and that everything about it looks awesome and then because she's a tank she has a barrier her barrier looks a lot like Dixie Reinhardt's barrier or anybody else's barrier but hers is stationary she throws it out It hits the ground and it deploys as a big wall, kind of like how Winston's deploys into a big bubble, but this deploys into a large wall. And her last thing is her ultimate, which is the supercharger, which is another device she deploys. And enemies within her line of sight get increased damage. So, yeah, she has a little touch of everybody. all the tanks and some pretty solid abilities from elsewhere. What do you think about her? Well, I'm pretty excited. I like the idea of a new tank. I think her kit looks pretty good. The PTR changes that they have announced on her so far have been to reduce the magazine size of her primary weapon, which makes me think that they felt she was just mowing things a little too long before needing to reload. It's still at 150, though, so that's quite a bit. and her supercharger ultimate, a cost increase of 15%. So they decided to make it charge a little bit slower. I'd say the part you're most excited about is also the part that most existing higher-end players are probably concerned about, and that's her little mini Graviton and whether or not that's going to be game-breaking or not. I don't know. I like the idea of it. I like the idea of her being able to pull a Bastion out of position who's maybe mounted on a payload or get it, so maybe Dixie Reinhardt's going to try and block Justice reigning from above from Pharah, and you throw him to the side, so all of a sudden his shield's not in the right position anymore. I like the look of it. I like the look of it. Yeah, I think it's got a lot of usability. I can think of a couple maps where I can see an environmental kill ability with it where you're going to detonate it just off the side, and you going to be ripping two and three people off of a point straight into a pit I can see that very easily It going to be I think it definitely something that will have the possibility of causing major changes to the meta overall Yeah, yeah. I also think she'd probably be the best distance fighter in the tank class because her weapon, well, obviously it's like a hitscan style. So she's going to work like soldier in that regard. Obviously, she's a tank. her priority is going to be taking damage but none of the other tanks really are very good at distance the best one's zarya and her her lob shot is slow and um everyone else is just for up close i mean diva's awful at range in her mech and out of her mech she's not tank anymore everyone else is basically at point blank it's just it yeah i i think she introduces a new dynamic if people were hoping for a tank that was going to mean you wouldn't have to rely so much on Dixie Reinhardt, this is not the tank you're looking for. This does not eliminate the need for Dixie Reinhardt. And I think it's interesting because you see Blizzard taking steps to try and get people to play other healers other than Ana or trying to get Bastion involved more often or Sombra involved more. They're basically trying to get the love spread around. It doesn't seem like they feel that way about Dixie Reinhardt, though. It seems like they are just absolutely fine with Dixie Reinhardt being in every single game. Though Arisa does seem to be kind of a counter to Dixie Reinhardt. Yes, I agree. With her ability to ignore his ultimate, with her ability to pull him off point and pull him out of choke points and maneuver him into ways that will let you... She seems to be like I said, not trying to get somebody to use instead of Dixie Reinhardt, but use somebody solid to counter Dixie Reinhardt other than just being forced to blow through the shield. They're giving you ways to step around it. Yes, I can see her definitely having a big influence on that, especially on battles over choke points. But the way I imagine that playing out is instead of you having teams that are going to run with, I mean, we're basically back to a two tank meta now. So I think instead of seeing things where people are going to do the Dixie Reinhardt Roadhog or Dixie Reinhardt-Zarya combo, you're probably going to see a lot more Dixie Reinhardt-Orisa combos. Yeah. Maybe on defense. It gets weird because wherever there's a choke, the defense can also choke out the point with a Dixie Reinhardt. So, yeah, I think she's a good addition. I like that she seems to be a decent counter to Dixie Reinhardt. But I don't see people probably going necessarily with, okay, there's an Orisa on the other team. We can't use a Dixie Reinhardt anymore. I'm not sure she's breaking enough to shut him down where a Pharah, if there's a good Soldier on the other side, might be like, okay, I just can't play Pharah. Soldier's just too hard of a counter. I'm not sure Orisa's a hard enough counter to eliminate that, and I don't think that's Blizzard's intention. I would agree with that. So I think Dixie Reinhardt fans are going to be fine, and I think people who hate Dixie Reinhardt are going to be stuck hating him still. I do think that I should say I wonder how her ultimate is going to work synergistically with like Anna's ultimate because between if Anna nano boosts somebody and then you get yet another damage increase with some characters you're looking at some serious serious firepower all of a sudden I wanted to believe I read somewhere that Blizzard had and I guess maybe they had not initially programmed it that way but that they had always meant to cap out a total maximum damage boost that a person could have or or uh or a defensive boosting all boosting that there would be a hard cap a ceiling on all that stuff if i'm remembering right so that's what i think they'll do is uh i'm not sure because anise doesn't last all that long i you might just have a little god mode for a while but nano boost alone already is pretty good you know they nerfed that a while ago so it didn't convey the speed boost it used to give that thing used to be scary i used to shoot that thing on Dixie Reinhardt so they could run and contest the point in overtime oh yeah it was insane before and now i mean i've seen nano boost i've seen nano boost hit the wrong target and turn uh uh turn mercies into killing machines i mean it's just that's what it does so this is what that feels like one of the greatest lines in that game yeah okay so anyway that's our overwatch update um i think we're going to next bounce over to gdc 2017 which is the game developers conference i i don't follow gdc super close but just tons of news video game news comes out when gdc is going on so it's just a sort of inevitable that it has an impact. I don't watch it like I watch E3, but there's a lot of game information that comes out of it. I didn't know if there was anything specific-wise that came out of GDC that you wanted to hit on. No, nothing really. I didn't pay much attention to it. I'm like you. Most of the stuff I go to is, or that I pay attention to is like E3 and the big whatever they call them now, where just the individual companies do their special things. There's always a few interesting things out of GDC, but like I said, it's not something I'm all about. Yeah. Okay. That's fine. I only really gathered it all up after the fact, anyway. There's so much game information. There's a few things I thought I would hit on for the listeners in case they were curious about some things that are going on that I thought sounded interesting, even though they're not necessarily my cup of tea. But one thing was in terms of Nintendo Switch, There was a lot of support in terms of the way, well, I guess you kind of think of it as third-party game announcements that were going on. So Twitch fans might want to do some searching if they're curious about non-Nintendo mainline stuff coming out for that new console. VR, virtual reality, had a huge presence at GDC. I'm not in on the VR scene, but a lot of people really love it. A couple items that caught my eye was there was a game called Sprint Vector, which is a first-person platformer. which was getting a lot of praise for not making you motion sick. So I thought, wow, really? Well, I would put that to the test if I actually owned the device. But anyway, it was getting a lot of positive buzz. Another one that sounds extremely ambitious is Rock Band VR. Tony and I played Rock Band a lot back in the day when it was really popular. Yeah. And anyway, it would be like you put on the stuff and you can look down, like your instruments, you'll see them in the virtual world, You can be able to identify which ones you have plugged in and such and see the guitars. So it sounds pretty ambitious, but it might just be what that genre needs. It and Guitar Hero, they just put out so many versions that I feel they kind of video game crashed themselves and that genre sort of died. Yeah, that genre was huge there for a while. And I know the last several outings by both Rock Band and Guitar Hero have not exactly been met with the most acclaim. Yeah, essentially has been confined to fad status at this point, but fads come back. So we'll see if that can motivate it. On the Xbox front, there was a new Netflix-esque subscription service to access games. So you pay a monthly subscription and you gain access to, I think, 100 to 200 games. And the catalog will change over time. Sony already had something along these lines in place for PlayStation. The big difference between the two that I think is noteworthy is Sony's is a streaming service. And Xbox service actually has you download the game when you're ready to play it. So if you have bandwidth issues that prevent you from exploiting Sony's service, If you have access to an Xbox One, you might prefer doing this service instead because you'll download the game and then be able to play it and there won't be any bandwidth lag issue. And then, of course, there are a lot of games that were discussed and there was a huge presence for indie games. GDC seems to really be pushing to let indie games have a major sort of platform during its conference. And so there were a few of those titles that I thought were sort of interesting sounding. So I just want to touch on about, oh, I think five of them. One was a game called Rogue Process. It's a procedurally generated 2D stealth platformer. I've played a little bit of games in this sort of vein, but they seem to be really catching on more lately. That's expected out later this year on Steam. It's also going to be available for Macs and Linux systems, so PC gamers, take note. another game called absolver it's a martial arts centric action rpg uh and people the write-up i read on it indicated that they thought the combat would be very appealing to fighting game fans but in reality it's still an rpg you have four main fighting styles and then within those styles you get to customize your abilities and your stances and that's supposed to be out this year later. I don't know on what platforms. I didn't see. Third game, Perception. You play as a blind detective exploring an abandoned mansion. It's an indie title, but I think it's noteworthy because the developers who are working on it are people who worked on Dead Space and Bioshock, so they have quite a pedigree. And the reports are that even though this is an indie game, it has a lot of AAA to its look. So visually, it's pretty impressive. Not sure when that one is going to be actually released, though. Fourth game is Ooblets. It is probably best described as Animal Crossing meets Harvest Moon meets Pokemon. Wow. I don't really play any of those games, but I know a lot of people who do. I can't let my daughter find this game. Well, she'll have to wait a while because Ooblets is not supposed to release until 2018 anyway. if they stay on schedule. As an indie title, did they say where that was going to be? Is that a PC-only indie title? Is that one of those ones going for Xbox or something also? I didn't see it on a summary that it was exclusive. So I don't dare presume what it will come out on. It wasn't indicated in what I read. I'm going to pretend that game doesn't exist and just hope my daughter never sees it. Well, currently it doesn't. So just keep on assuming reality moving forward. And the final one I saw on the indie side that got some good buzz was a game called Songbringer. It was described as a cross between Zelda and a game called Proteus, which I'm not familiar with Proteus. But it's got procedurally generated dungeons, upgrades, and music, which I thought was pretty odd. But I guess it can work. Procedurally generated music? I guess it can work. Art Styles Pixelated. And that one's supposed to come out this summer, and it will be PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. So anyway, those were the games of note, I thought, on GDC. And I know you have a game that you affectionately like to describe as Spreadsheets in Space. It is Spreadsheets in Space. I'm not going to go deep into this game because it will make people fall asleep. You already have. And it's terrible. I know. I know. I know, you told me not to even talk about it. If it's terrible, then why is it in these notes to talk about? Because it's only terrible for certain types of people. Those types of people are 99% of humanity. This game is actually called Aurora 4X. I touched on it very lightly last episode. I was talking about how I was watching some Let's Plays for it and this and that. This is a space-based 4X game. And a 4X game is the explore, expand, exploit, exterminate type games like Civilization, like Master of Orion. But this one is more like Master of Orion. It's space-based. But it gives you complete control over pretty much everything in the game. I spent yesterday. And when I say yesterday, I mean I spent all day yesterday sitting down, double-checking over tutorials and videos I'd seen, sitting down and sitting here with my pad, my legal pad, writing out everything I was planning and needing for my fleet. and then I sat down and I spent hours designing my fleet. Because when you design a ship, you don't just go, oh, I want a laser. You have to design the laser itself. It's like, okay, I can design a 15-centimeter laser, and then you go through and you decide how much power it has, how good its accuracy is, all this stuff. You take all those parts, you mix and match it. Same thing with every missile. You don't just get to go, I'm going to put in a missile launcher. You need to choose the size of the missile launcher. You have to design the missile launcher. You have to design the missiles to do the exact thing you want. I design super fast, short-range missiles with huge warheads, and I design medium-range missiles that are fairly quick, and long-range missiles. I mean, you have to design every single thing. And the design system works really well once you get a feel for it. This game does not have a learning curve. This game has a learning wall. You slam into it. Like I said, this is the type of game that I love. I love the controllability. I love the ability to customize so much of my fleets and play through the game and design so many things. But like I said, this is not a game for most of the people in the world. Certain people that like this game will love this game. and everybody else will bounce off of this game hard. But I've actually been caught by this game hard enough that I wanted to be sure and take a chance to talk about it. It is free. It is a project of love that is made by a single person that he has done all of this because he had a game that he wanted to be. He wanted a game that hit what he wanted to do, so he put it together and built it himself. Is Excel required to be able to play the game? No, Excel is not required to be able to play the game. I said I use, I've got a couple of sheets from a legal pad sitting here that I was scrolling numbers on, and I might have a spreadsheet or two that I have used, but they're not required. You don't have to have them. I just use them for ease of organization. Okay, it sounds pretty required, but I guess OpenOffice is an option for people. Yeah, like I said, I will include a link in this that has a link for anybody who wants to try it, or I will also include a link to a Let's Play. I know there's several very good Let's Plays out there. Um, that way people can kind of get a feel for it before they bounce off of it hard. Well, since it's free, it's not, you know, it's not the worst thing in the world that they ended up hating it and trying it. Right. Yeah. It's not terrible. It's a, it's just a very specific thing. Cause just because you enjoy like civilization or master of Orion, isn't mean that you're going to enjoy this. On the other hand, if you liked the deep metagame sections of EVE Online and the stuff that involved organization and planning out operations and stuff, this could very well be something that you would be all about. EVE Online is one of those games that I love, but don't really play anymore, primarily due to the fact that it is an online pay service. And when I did play it, I played constantly and I was running three accounts and I won't go back to that game unless I'm willing to pay for all three of my accounts and run all three of my accounts because I feel like that is what is required for me to do what I feel I need to do in that game. That's what winners do. Yeah. So I just steer away from it. But It is definitely An amazing game And it's a game Like I said for those people With their specific Feeling and desire It is the exact Thing that they will Love And for the other 99% of humanity You don't need to worry about it So I'm going to go ahead and just leave it there Follow the link this is one of those games I could talk about for a while but I'm trying not to because I know most people will just be like uh yeah no thanks if you see Tony at TPF you can ask him about Spreadsheets in Space and he will be more than happy to go into far more depth than he has here oh yeah definitely I mean I'll go full into it I mean like I said I spent all day yesterday designing missiles and ships and laying out plans and how my fleets are going to be put together and how my fleets are going to work and what exactly I need ships to do. And I mean, this isn't like the games where it's like, well, I unlocked the tech so I can build a battleship, so I'll build a battleship now. So yeah, it's just, it's a game that is very enjoyable to me. But I mean, like I said, I've gone all out in, you know, I need these ships, my fleet's going to be organized this way, I'm going to use this type of combat ship and building them. and when you build ships it's not like oh I designed a battleship I researched battleships so I can build battleships now you can build a ship as big as your shipyards can handle and you can it's really easy to upgrade your shipyards so I mean I'm designing ships that have 3000 ton space frames or you can design a ship that has a 10,000 ton space frame or I've got a few 60,000 ton ships that are commercial ships because commercial ships you can make larger than you can naval ships. And it's just, they do jobs that they're supposed to do. And I build them to do their exact job exactly how I want them to do it. And it's not just slapping parts on or like it is in a lot of other games. And it's not just pre-built stuff. There is nothing pre-built. You have to do it all. So you have to make a plan on how your stuff works and to make everything work together. So, yeah, it's insane. And I enjoy it, and I know a lot of people won't. So if you want to try it, you can try it. Too much. I already sat and spent, what, five minutes earlier going over the R-squared for a bunch of pinball ratings. So I don't think I get to criticize spreadsheet games. Yeah, yeah, that's your enjoyment from there, and I get my enjoyment from elsewhere. it's all everybody is different different yet in a circular way the same because it was all about spreadsheets speaking of sheets let us go ahead and hop over to tabletop because don't we have some sort of special day coming up here yes we do uh just like last year uh this year international tabletop day will fall in april uh last year it was very early in april it's at the end of april this year. It is April 29th. And for those who don't know about International Tabletop Day, International Tabletop Day is a day that is put together and a lot of places like local game shops or local gaming groups hold big, open to the public gaming events. And we will include a link to the website and on the website, you can go to the website, you can put in your zip code where you're sitting and it will tell you all the big local events. I know there's a huge local event running very close to us. There always is. It is an event that I will attempt to attend this year. I did not get to last year for reasons. Let me see, 29th. Yes, I'm not on call that weekend. I might actually be able to attend it. But they are a good place Especially if you like tabletop gaming But you don't get a chance to It's a good time to meet locals Who enjoy tabletop gaming And play lots of new fun games Like I said, I know my local event Last year they started at 10am And they were still running at 3am So hopefully it will be just as big And just as interesting this year Alright, well So, yeah, go follow that link. We'll have it in the show notes. And speaking of the show, I think we've reached the end of it. We have. Yeah. Oh, boy. We actually had all three topics this time. I know. We've been real bad about tabletop lately. Well, yeah. We just haven't really done anything. Excessive pinball news as well was eating up a lot of the time, and this time we didn't have to do that. So that was nice. but as a reminder if you want to complain about how much or how little tabletop we had in this you can always email us eclectic gamers podcast at gmail.com or reach out to us on facebook that would be at facebook.com slash eclectic gamers podcast we're also available on twitter at eclectic underscore gamers and on instagram at the same and we are also available on uh twitch at the exact same, though I have not had a chance to get anything going because of real life issues and rearranging and this and that. Also, the game that I was planning on playing, the beta of Battletech has been pushed back due to some issues that they had to do some stuff on the engine, and they have not re-announced the new date for the beta start. So that beta will not be starting on the 15th like it was originally planned. that's yes that is right also in addition we noted at the beginning of the show i'll note it here again we will well we will be back in two weeks it will be two weeks and a day because of texas pinball festival we will not be recording on our usual sunday time we will record on monday instead and then we'll be back to the sunday schedule as is typical so until that episode i will say once again my name is Dennis and I bid you all adieu I am Tony and if you're at Texas and you see us at least one of the days of the weekend one or not if not both of us will have bright blue Collect a Gamer t-shirts on so we should be pretty easy to find at least one day over the course of the weekend yeah I can't wear this shirt more than once that'd be stinky yeah that that'd be kind of stinky so but hopefully we will get to see you there and if not We will talk to you next episode.