BlahCade Pinball Podcast this is the BlahCade Pinball Podcast i'm your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world is jared morgan hey everyone how's it going all right so uh we have something different to do today and rather than me flying solo and doing it because I'm not... I've never done one of these before. I figured, hey, why don't we bring in Jared to also do this with me because I'm sure he'll have questions that I wouldn't have thought of. Maybe. Maybe. Who knows? Yeah, so the old AtGames 4K pinball, I am going to be getting one of those cabinets. And since at the same time as they were doing the pre-sales, they were offering up special deals as Ant Games is wont to do, I was like, well, I might as well purchase some things that I know I'm going to be wanting in this, and that way I can get them at a discount, and I'm not having to wait. So I went ahead and... Yeah, it's a good thing. You know, when you're offering things at half off, that's hard to ignore. That's... Let's just buy it, right? That's basically free, really. Well, I wouldn't call it that, but... so i ordered up the uh surround sound feedback kit that is going to be designed specifically for the 4k pinball cabinet um this is a i don't like doing blind purchases of that nature that haven't been tested or shown when there's third party ones that are doing exactly what i would want it to do mainly that it will work with the what's called otg is that what they're calling it the on the go on the go that's what that stands for yeah when you're playing your mobile pc because apparently the previous feedback of the app games in their legends hd didn't function with the pc rig right this is supposed to function with your pc this is what i've heard i think you're correct because the the the brand new board that they're using in 4k the one you can actually upgrade your old at games no you can't anymore they are not selling it oh they're taking it off right so you've got to buy the new one so there was there was a time when pretty much the hardware that you're going to get in the 4k was an upgradable board but yeah they've gone no well that would mean you wouldn't to buy a new cabinet so yeah let's get rid of that option all right well the old one they they did some improvements to on the go um and it did work apparently but you're right you you will need this thing um and you know it's sort of like you could buy the third party one but if there's a first party one and it's just it'll just work tm um that's that's worth the money i reckon like well avoid the stuff you're in. Yeah, and the third-party one involved their own cable system disconnecting the AtGames feedback that was in there in replacement of, and then I figured also there's no way that Xen is not going to make it be compatible. So, it felt like a safe way. Anyway, so I bought that, but that's not going to show up until the cabinet shows up somewhere between December 25th and January 25th. Christmas, please. Yeah, that'd be nice. Right? The other thing that I ordered, though, is readily available because it's not any different than what they were already selling, and that would be the arcade control stick that mounts on top and goes in place of the apron because, by all reports, the D-pad that comes on the standard machine is utter trash. I've heard that as well. In fact, I heard that a lot of people just rip it out and put a control stick in because the wires allow you to do that pretty much. Right. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to unbox this thing. Ooh. Yeah. Let me tilt my camera over yonder direction. There it is. Okay, cool. We get to see a little bit more of Chris's house. the guitars that I don't know how to play. Purely ornamental and decorative. Yes. All right, here, let me real quick switch to more. Closing up. Here we go, razor blade out. So this arrived probably seven days after I ordered it. Seven days, okay. Yeah, nice and timely. That's pretty good. Didn't mind that at all. And I even appreciate that it's, you know, labeled on the outside actually. Yeah, it's nicely branded, eh? Like they've put a bit of thought into the sort of experience you get with it. Right. Oh, look, I can see a protruding knob. Right, a protruding knob. Take some foam out of here. Oh, wow, that looks like really well packaged. All right, so we've got our, hey, tools required, and here's how you're going to connect it instructions, which this will be good to know when time comes. Oh, they look pretty detailed. You want to hold them up to the camera? That's pretty well laid out. That's good. Backside is in Espanol, I believe. So yeah, that's decent instructions with lots of text. It's not just a couple of random generic drawings. You've got to figure out for your own. Just the instructions say, just simply take the top of the pinball machine apart and then put this on. It's easy. All right. Yeah. So, taking out of the foam here. And, yeah, we're all wrapped up. See, that's a lot of wires underneath there. That's a lot of what? A lot of wires underneath that thing. Like, there's a fair bit going on. Alright, now, on the other side here, this is all just a plastic piece that you're obviously going to take off, but protecting everything, I imagine, unless maybe you, I don't know, there's no way you would leave this on, right? No, you leave it on. It's a shield. Do you? Oh. Yep. Okay. Yeah, you'd leave that on, I'm sure of it. So, USB port. It's screwed. Right there, here's your connection wire, obviously, to plug in. Yep. Alright, well that's, I like that, that it's all, it's all, it's all, it's all, it's all Shielded then, not just loose wires. Yeah. That's good. It's good because just in case something drops off, it's only going to drop off into the sort of plastic case. Right. Oh, wow, you've got a trackpad and everything there. So, yeah, let's... Oh, hey, that actually feels pretty good. Hmm. All right. Yeah, right. Golden sea, here we come. Oh, no. you have an 8 point joystick like that well that sounds nice and clicky clicky, got some spring to it nice how do the buttons feel? standard buttons standard buttons, flip it over and let's have a look at the guts of it again closely the buttons are not well, you can see there's a slight concave ah yeah it's not like a deep indent Yeah, it's not like the standard sort of MCA controls buttons that you would see on like 90s and early 2000 cabinets. I can tell you right now, this top fingerprints like nobody's business already. Yeah, but it's glossy and it looks nice. So it's a showroom panel. Yeah. But it's a good point. You can see why they made a whole lot of these things not glossy in the arcade because they didn't want to have fingerprints everywhere. Yeah. I'm curious to know I'm assuming people have swapped out the buttons Well let's flip it over And have a look Flip it over and have a look Because if you hold it horizontally So we can actually see the buttons underneath It's a bit hard because of the reflection But yeah you can take those off They're just standard Buttons The only thing you might find is If you swap them out you might have to lose the shield Well the shield unscrews Yeah, so you can just take it off if you want. If you want to, like, you know, essentially... I'd say probably taking off the shield. If something happened with it, probably void your warranty. That being said, I don't necessarily want glowy buttons. Oh, no, I wouldn't want glowy buttons. That'd actually be distracting. In fact, you know, there's something to be said about the fact that they've got just black everything on the top. It's very inconspicuous. So it sort of blends in. So when you're actually playing the pinball game, it's not jumping out at you. Yeah. Yeah, and I know that one of the things that people were also saying why this is a must-have is for navigation purposes. Right. Because you can joy-key these and therefore be able to navigate through your various programs without having to have an external keyboard also to function with. I'm assuming the joy-pad would then act as a mouse. That would be nice. You could mouse over to something in the panel. and then go A, select. I reckon that's exactly what that's for, eh? Yeah. Because if the way that On The Go works has been improved in the 4K, having that as an option for mouse, that would be so good. Yes. Because then you don't have to worry about it. And then it would just be like one of the buttons would be the left and right mouse button, right? So that's great. I'm kind of impressed. It feels solid. It doesn't feel chintzy. Now, has that got the... That's actually got the light force feedback speakers built into it? It does have force back feedback. Force back feedback, yes. Words, words, words, words, words. So difficult. The funny thing is, though, because, I mean, if you have a look at all the stuff that's on that. Yeah. Like, there's not much room left in that little space to put things. Like, they're jam-packed, everything in there. Yeah. Yeah, and the wood looks thick. Like, it looks properly thick. Yeah, that's a proper quarter inch. Actually, probably half inch. It's a half inch. Right, yeah. That's beefy. Yeah, you can slap that thing around and not have any problems at all. Yeah. So anyway, that's the unboxing. How did we do? It wasn't a multi-camera feed, but hey, look, we got to see it, which is pretty cool. I can live vicariously through you because down here in Australia, we're not sitting in those. Here's the deal. I've seen enough of Adam Savage's tested to know that you only need one camera. Yeah. Now, he's got his really nice bendy arm and he can bend it any which way. But, yeah. Fancy schmancy. We'll still be able to see everything. I'll just say it now, when the pinball cabinet does come out, no, I'm not going to be live building it. I don't have the setup for that, but I will be recording it. Maybe we'll have something to do with that way. I don't know. Jared, how's your editing skills? i'm just going to send you a whole bunch of uh video files like here make it work right so we're going to have like you know multiple camera feeds you need what you need is one of those here's a funny thing you need one of those rigs that you see in pinball events where they're doing live streaming or cable coverage i have one of those things that you can slide over right a digital pinball machine with digital feeds you think you'd be able to take feeds out of that and put it into a computer and just rip them directly. But anyhow, that sounds like a step too far. Also, there's no way that I'm going to wait for us to have a podcast to crack open the thing. No, I'll be, as soon as that thing arrives on my porch, I'm cracking into it. It's going to be tools and stuff everywhere. It's going to be crazy. Anyway, there you go. That's the unboxing of the Legends Pinball Arcade Control from AtGames. and now I've just got to wait to be able to try it out. Yeah. Until then, you can just take it out of the box and go... And that's your entertainment. Seconds of fun. Okay. So, now we have that out of the way. Hello, Chris. Hi. Hi. Yeah. we're probably going to parse that into its own little thing so I wanted to get that out of the way first on this show I know normally we do our banter I just did 10 days in a row of work that wasn't fun that doesn't sound like fun at all you know it's what happens when they go okay you're going to work Tuesday through Saturday and then they go hey next week's schedule you're working Sunday through Thursday You go, wait a second. Hang on a minute. That ain't right. I was actually supposed to only work eight days in a row, but then they were like, hey, can we swap your Wednesday off for Friday off, and then you can have two days off? I'm like, yes, please. So, yeah. But the fun thing with the laws here, and I'm sure they're the same in your neck of the woods, that's two different weeks. you're still only working five days so no extra ot which bothers me that's interesting because it's right okay probably i don't know if it works like that here but i think it's labor laws in the u.s are weird if you were if if we were getting paid at two week increments it would be then that would be different then it would show up as that but since we're only getting paid at one-week increments, it doesn't show up that way. You can tell they did that for a reason, Chris. I know. It's not their first rodeo. The mouse knows how things work. So I was a bit exhausted on that front, and since we last got together, all sorts of... That was the last time we got together was when they... Geez. their last content drop, was it? Oh no, it was Pinball M News. Yeah, it was just Pinball M News. Yeah, that was it. Since then, though, we've actually got the Pinball M demo. Yeah, I mean, that came out of nowhere. Right, and we've got the South Park now is available in Pinball FX. So we're going to be taking a look at South Park coming up here. But let's talk about Pinball M a little bit. Yeah. It's interesting. I'm liking what I'm seeing, but as me and Jared have been saying, this is a testbed if there ever was one. Oh, heck yeah. There's some testbed stuff happening. In fact, there's so much stuff in there that this is really like, you can almost, like I'm looking at this going, this is the alpha channel now for all new things that they're going to be testing about in Pimble M. and then seeing what works. So with that in mind, make sure you give them feedback about what you like and what you don't because, I mean, they'll have the data, but data is one thing. It's like the actual people's feedback on it is the most important. If you like things that you see in Pinball M and you want to see them in Pinball FX, then be vocal about it because that's exactly what they're doing here for sure. So let's talk about first impressions. Now, again, this is just the demo, which means there's a lot of grayed-out areas, and there's some functionality that I'm clicking but I don't think is working. Let's talk about the UI a little bit. At the moment, my feeling is it's kind of clunky. There's a lot of, oh, you push the button here, but you push the trigger for this, and, oh, you need your mouse in order to select that. um kind of thing i haven't i haven't found an instance where i've needed the mouse yet but okay i i've i found that the once you understand that the the bumper buttons on your controller do one thing and the trigger buttons do another then you get to understand how you move around the game but and the i must admit the um the onboarding tutorial for this is is actually pretty good If you follow that through all the way, it explains everything about what you need to do in the game. So I think they actually really did a good job with that. But yeah, what areas in the game did you find that you felt needed a mouse? Okay, so I was going into the challenges. Oh yeah And it was selecting your passive power There was no way of depadding over into them to select them And then even once I selected one, it didn't show up in slot one or slot two. So I don't even know if it's functioning at the moment or if it's merely like more of a placeholder right now. That was where I was having – I had to use the mouse. in order to get into that and be able to click on what power-up, passive power-up I was going to want to use. But like I said, it doesn't seem to be functioning right now either, so I don't entirely know. I was able to select power-ups for, obviously, Elder Gods. Yes. And I observed that it's a little bit, it is clunky, that part, because they're really struggling. They're running out of inputs that you can use to select things. But it was a button press like Y or something like that, that when you're on the Challenger screen, if you press Y, then you can go into configuring your power-ups, your different modifiers. So it's a little bit the same as like FX when you're in the arcade mode and you want to adjust your powers. you go Y on the controller, and then it focuses that area where you can change things. So I didn't have any problems changing things around. I literally could not scroll, you know, on the left-hand column, it had your challenges or whatever, and the power-ups box was there in the middle of the screen, and I had no way of getting over into it. That's what I had to use the mouse for. and then once I selected my power up I expected I push and it would go slot 1 and I push another one and it would go slot 2 never showed up in either slot it just told me what that power up was ok there must be maybe there's something going on there and they're going to be patching it or maybe I got onto it after they patched that I don't know or maybe I'm just hallucinating and I haven't actually played with powers I liked what I saw so therefore I just stuck with what I had well and I definitely had no way of activating the active power up for that matter I don't think I'd actually earned one yet I haven't, Jared you actually earned everything that you could earn correct? yeah I think so well I'm at the maximum rank which is 5 in the demo and I've gone and unlocked most of the stuff that I can unlock with the tokens so we should probably talk about the tokens thing because I saw on Twitter when they said, oh, look, we have these, you know, there was another one. Actually, it wasn't related to pinball. It was the new thing that we're going to be discussing shortly. But, yeah, the tokens in the game, they're non-purchasable. You've got to earn them. They're basically like the unlocks in the Williams pinball app. Yeah. But you don't have to pay. You just earn them in game. the more you play so it's it's i guess it's just a way of trickle feeding um the unlocks that you would normally have access to in pimple effects well it's different so that you come back and play yeah it's different from doing achievements um yeah and obviously it allows you that customer customization where you're selecting what you want to unlock and how you want to use it you Do you want to use it to decorate your corner, or did you want to put new flippers in the machine, or what is it that you want to do, basically? All right, so there's the other clunky aspect, the corners. Sometimes I just wanted to get back to the corner. When we say corner, so you think about your pinball machines in your room, right? And there's basically a two-wall corner that is decorated accordingly to the theme of that table. And you can, with these tokens, you can get different lighting, different skins for the machine, all sorts of different atmosphere that's around your machine. I know people got excited about lighting. No, that's lighting your room, that machine. It's not changing the lighting of the table itself when you're playing. but sometimes I just want to get back to that and instead it would kick me back to the main scroll of the various tables then I'd have to click it again to get into that and then be able to do this is where I'm saying the UI I felt like I was fighting it a lot I will say that yes it wasn't doing natural progressions or regressions I should actually say it is very easy to jump out of the corner and then back to the table carousel um so uh yeah that is that is a clunky aspect of it um but i think the the the two ribbon thing is the cause of the problem there like it's it's really like getting it to go backwards and forwards with your two shoulder buttons like that is is the the real sort of mechanic that's that's overloading the interface i think at the moment but there's no there's no other way of them doing that unless they actually have a sub ribbon menu so you're going to the table and then the top ribbon then becomes the main ribbon so it's sort of like snaps into view for the top and then you're navigating with that sort of ribbon at the top um instead of having two ribbons that you're dealing with and then there's like a jump back out one level if you want to get to the the main menu level sort of thing a little bit like in how pimple effects is when you're navigating to your table you select your table and then you have the options for like all the different modes it presented in like a box out next to your table what they've done is they're experimenting with a different way of doing that box out and accessing the special modes so that's because they're adding extra modes into it like the the the table decorate not the table decoration the the corner decoration mode and there's lots of extra challenge modes that are pinball m specific they've thought i think their thought process as well let's see if we can just give people more ready access to select that without having to go into another menu the thing that's going to be interesting here and it will come to pass whether we work out they're going to have a cabinet version available for this is this requires the shoulder buttons right the shoulder buttons and the triggers so they are backing themselves into a bit of a tight corner here if they are going down the path of hey let's not actually have shoulder buttons that are separate from the trigger buttons here. So let's hope that Pinball M, A, gets a cabinet mode, because I think it would look really cool in cabinet, but B, also prompts them to separate the triggers and the bumpers and finally get us back to parity with what Pinball FX has. Sorry, FX3 has, because they had it there. Oh, no, hang on. They didn't have an FX3. No, you're thinking Pinball Arcade. I am thinking of people like, hey, yes, that's right. So that's what we need, right? Yeah. All right, so there's kind of brief thoughts about just the UI in general. What do you think about the idea of having these different rooms that are thematically related to the table? I really like that. I like how the rooms feel different when you're in them. And yeah, I love that aspect. I think that's really great. I do think it's a good way of separating them out from the next table over kind of thing. I also think that it will be good for if you're in cabinet mode, that when you're just doing the menu select, you get that sense of atmosphere it's going to be. But then when you get into cabinet mode, all that stuff that's usually on the side of the table is not there for cabinet. So you're not getting any of that ambience. So it's a good way of actually having that ambience present in some form. Again, we go back to Star Wars VR and everything that we liked about that. This is what this feels like to me. Yeah. Yep, absolutely. it has got I think you're right your comments about how this would work in cabinet mode feels right like they would actually you'd have the atmosphere while you're in table select mode and then when you're in the actual table experience itself it's just devoid of any sort of environment so that would work quite well I think so I think the the overall sort of theming of Pimble M is good. I like the way they've done it. I think that they might have to rethink, they'll need to rethink the navigation, the controller navigation if they decide to do cabinet mode. Although at the moment you could pretty much assume that given the fact that you need triggers, there isn't going to be cabinet mode for this. That's sort of the impression I'm getting about Pinball M at the moment. Which is going to be interesting to see what the community think about that. Because I think they'll want cabinet mode for this if they've got a cabinet. But at the moment, the control scheme, you would need to use an Xbox controller to actually navigate at the moment. Which I don't think pinball cabinet owners want. No. But hey, I've got this oh yeah that's right so you know you've got all you need problem solved that's right that's right and yeah that is a good point right yeah let's talk a little bit about the fully playable demo which is Wrath of the Elder Gods you can play that to your heart's content full game all the content available doesn't time out on you uh so it's your best way of actually uh getting a true sense of what they were going for here and i gotta say i i went back and forth between the two versions pinball m and the fx uh version of wrath of the elder gods and a lot of those complaints that we had are just like gone with pinball m the main one being that just ridiculous music it's not You can hear it try and start up right at the beginning, and then you don't hear it at all after that. Yep. And it's like when I say you hear it start up, like you can hear the first couple of notes and then it's gone. Yeah. It's just like, nope, they've changed the radio station. It's great. I love not having to hear that music. Yeah. um and then the theming all around uh it just it definitely i at first i thought oh they're just slapping a couple coats of paint on here you know in terms of you know the blood or or whatever but it makes so much more sense now you just even you know what the slingshots now their skulls on top instead of uh investigatory items or whatever and um you know the the maw when it's spinning and eats your pinball and starts spraying blood it makes sense um yeah absolutely i think there's there's blood and gore in that table not just for shock value or the fact oh it's m we have to put blood in it there's actually like a reason for the blood and reason for you know when you shoot the ramps is like pus flies out of the the thing you know when the ball goes through it and stuff like that you know that's it's kind of what you expect that's it when you shoot the ball up the ramp and it goes into the big beastie up on top and it goes into the beastie a little bit of a when you play it without that it's kind of like where'd my ball go yeah it's um it's subtle and it makes me wonder what came first did they go full tilt and then we're told okay we got to back off and so then they backed it off or is it that they were like hey this would be a good table to slap something on in a lot of ways i feel like they backed off for the fx version um that'll be a question we're going to have to ask. That would be an interesting one to ask. How they... Did they have to sacrifice up front, or did they take feedback and go forth with it? Yeah. I don't know. But all I can say is, if I'm going to play Wrath of the Elder Gods, this is the version I'm going to play. Yeah, that's right. I'm not touching the other one anymore. It's, like, dead to me, really. Now, they did drop the playable demos of some other tables. So now you can actually play Duke Nukem and Child's Play and Dead by Daylight. Am I missing anything? No, it's just those, right? Yeah, those are the three. Chucky was added not long ago. Yeah. Of those, the one that has me excited is actually Chucky. and the reason why I say that because they put in full motion video from the movies in the DMD and I was like that's the closest we've seen them come to doing what Stern and Jersey Jack have been doing and it's up there and it looks flawless and looks exactly like what you would expect a modern pin to do so I think that's fantastic and then Chucky was also the first one that as I was playing it I went oh F-bombs yeah exactly it's like oh okay you don't frack with the Chuck no so that confirmed what we suspected was going to be happening yeah so that was kind of interesting it's look it's impossible for me to judge gameplay off of a two minute demo yeah i can barely have time to start a mode i got into the marbles mode that was fun the which mode um the marbles mode where you get like a whole lot of marbles coming onto the table it's like a multiball yeah um yeah that's fun to sort of play around with okay um so yeah i mean it i think that one is the newest table and i think obviously this is a demo you can expect things to be weird definitely when those marbles came onto the play field there was a noticeable frame drop when it happened and then it sort of stabilized a bit so clearly they're still working on performance with that it's to be expected it's a demo no problems they'll they'll fix it by the time it comes out properly uh and then there's duke nukem which that one has very much a retro vibe to it it does um it's so on theme like the even the midi sounding music from the from the actual game is in there it is like basically playing a pinball version of duke nukem back in the 90s it's great yeah the uh the the voiceover artist that they have sounds a lot like the guy that does the um what's the channel that does the uh the the trailer reviews i don't know he sounds like the duke in the game though well yeah i mean definitely that but i don't know there was something about it that just made me uh made me laugh um about the voice because it very much matches up with on youtube there's a there's a site that does they review the trailers basically or review the movies in six minutes it's really kind of fun um all right slam the movie or repraise the movie it's either or um but it kind of has the same kind of voice but anyway uh there's an interesting mode that i did activate and i have no clue how i did it but where the whole screen turns into a duke nukem shooter yeah it's like a bingo mode yeah yeah um some terrible aiming going on but yeah you got to get used to how that works it's it's a bit of a well it's the weirdest thing it's you swing your you know you're like also an enemy will pop up you swing by using the flipper you swing your gun over to them and it looks like it's lined up and you fire and it misses and so then i tapped away and moved and then i would hit or you just tap a second time on the trigger and then it'll hit him i'm like wait so you're always wasting one bullet okay interesting oh i didn't find that's what i found on mine okay maybe there's there's different shooting modes too so there a lot of the modes in the game have this sort of like pseudo video mode um type of experience in it um and it it and the thing is it looks like part of the game it not like a oh we doing a video mode now it actually feels like the theme of the table is carried through to the actual scene that you're in yeah um so it's from that perspective it's well integrated yeah um but i think i don't know maybe my i don't know why my experience was different to yours but i found that oh yeah the thing that i did find though is that there's enemies off screen that will shoot you and you don't know they're there because the viewport is too narrow and you don't see the entire scene so you sort of have to be sort of like looking around basically left and right to see if you can find the enemy which is a bit of a an interesting mechanic that i'll have to get used to but yeah um and then there was dead by daylight a game i have no clue about. You do select a character at the beginning and that basically is what is, call it a passive power-up. Because that does affect what happens within the story of the game. But again, I didn't really mess with that much because it just didn't grab me right off the bat, not in those two minutes. No, I played the red mode. So the Pursuer, or whatever it's called. And just that's the weakest out of all the tables. Based on the demo, it's the weakest out of all the tables. I think it's a toss-up between Duke and Chucky for me. I don't really have an affinity with Chucky because that's not really a horror series that I paid much attention to. Yeah. But Duke, I definitely did. Like, I played that. So that has more appeal to me because I sort of know some of the subject matter a bit. um not i mean saying that i think chucky is probably the better table out of the two yeah i agree i think the shot selection is more interesting on on chucky than it is on duke yeah that's right i just don't really understand much of the theme and the the nods to the game like what is the marbles thing where you break the marble glass and stuff like that you know don't know what that means but obviously that's important in the movie um so you know uh maybe I'm going to have to go and watch a bit of Chucky and have a look at some of those. Like, truth be told, I think I've only ever seen the first one. I don't think I've seen anything beyond it. Right. How many movies are there, do you know? Lots. Well, I know that there was a Child's Play 2, and then I know that there was Bride of Chucky, and I think that there was a Chucky after that, and then they tried doing a reboot with a hideous-looking doll that everybody just went, no, two. Nope. Nope. Do not want. Yeah. So what is interesting, though, with Pinball M, I think now that we know that language is not an issue, now that we've seen full motion video be able to be in this, them trying out various, you know, like the tokens, ways of earning. Yeah. That goes beyond just achievements. I'm very curious to see what else they wind up throwing in here. yeah i don't know what else they could fit in there but because it would be a shame to isolate something like elvira into this they won't because elvira is an original and they've confirmed it's only as an originals going into here like uh sorry elvira is a like a recreation or yep a recreation so it's only as an original license is going into this but on the other hand if you ever got a table and I'm just throwing this out there if they went with Stern and if they had a Metallica then I want the option to be able to listen to the alternate audio and this would be where I would hope they would dump it into that would be the only place at the moment that they could put that in I think they could probably get away with Elvira even Scared Stiff in Pinball FX because it's innuendo but it's actually not swearing. And we argued this a very long time ago. It's no worse than medieval madness, and it's in you anyway. No way. No. No, it's fine. I mean, the only thing that could be that they had to do in Pimbala Cade was spider web the boobs. But I think their rating in this would allow them just to have everything as is. so that should be fine anyway Pinball M the demo it's out now free for download so if you haven't yet please go download it check it out give it a whirl it's worth checking out by all means I don't think it's not it's not half baked from what I can tell it's looking like no it's a pretty solid demo yeah alright moving on to the other thing that you can go and play right now. So, hooray! South Park has made its triumphal return back into Pinball FX. Last time it was available in Pinball FX 2, now we're skipped Pinball FX 3 and now here we are back in Pinball FX. The big question, what has changed? And I'm going to tell you right now, nothing major. It's subtleties. But, in terms of physics, the ball no longer feels like it's on ice. Lead. Yeah. Not only is it not on ice, which is like moving at the speed of light sometimes, but the lead ball. Now it has proper bounce for what it should be. I was going back and forth between the two and comparing, seeing what I noticed, and it just feels better in pinball effects. there's no two ways about it as far as i'm concerned um so i'm i'm very happy about that because if it was just a straight up port that would suck that would be that's right totally the why did you waste your money on it kind of thing um that's right but no there's there's differences did you notice the difference in the the like the attract mode audio like the the music I didn't pay attention, no. Should I have? Maybe I'm just hallucinating here because it's been a long time since I've watched this. It sounds like they have updated the music. Wouldn't it surprise me? Yeah, so there's new music. Is it the actual South Park music? Yeah, or it's a version of it. I think they might have actually re-composed it. Well, because music is fun. Let's talk licensing, folks. our favorite subject um i know that for tv shows they're constantly like every couple years they actually have to redo their theme songs um oh they have to it's kind of uh it's kind of in the contract oh really because of because of copyright issues or whatever um music publishing rights they they update them so south park has up if you watch season one and listen to what the theme song sounds then compared to now they're wildly different um and that's what i've noticed in this game like yeah i know the original one the original primus um sort of theme song which is you know uh i think that's even features in the stern south path yes um but yeah this this has the new because i watched the uh what was it the streaming wars south park movie and it had this new audio and i went oh okay when i heard it i went yeah that's they've changed it yeah and even if you look at the the copyrights uh when it comes up to play in fx2 it's copyright 2017 this one's copyright 2023 so copyrights have been updated and i imagine that the music licensing they went with the current music license um yep probably would have been part of the deal and they were renegotiating it yeah because they would have said well we want current current we'll just basically put a little bit of spit and polish on it well i don't even know if it would necessarily be zen saying we want it current more than this is what the current music license is this is how much this costs if you really want to go back and try and hammer out a deal for the old one it might actually cost you more yeah so here it is take it or don't take what we currently have lawyers for um yeah you know and honestly it's it's better like it actually it's when i heard I went, oh, it's like a slight modernization for the table. It's like I've got the new music. I'm okay with it. So I did go and do some screen comparison, and we're going to take a look at those right now. So I think there's some interesting things to point out on this. Oh, I do want to point out this too. When you boot the table up, cabinet art is just the generic pinball effects, except I just saw a post that apparently on Switch they have full cabinet art so I guess we can expect that to be coming yeah it's weird that this is the weirdness about you know the Switch releases, the console releases, the Steam releases, there's very they're all different and you can expect the Switch release to be wildly different because it's got to be like toned down for the ancient Tegra chip that's in the Nintendo Switch but as far as the art and stuff goes why are they different like i don't know they're obviously running in a different like if you had a look at the gantt chart for the way they're releasing everything they'd be like conflicting lines like this basically as they're going down the list for when they're releasing stuff and what point they need to get the game to so it will meet submission and stuff so i pretty much guarantee you that there's like i would not like to see their gantt chart at the moment before they're releasing these things it will be pretty busy okay so let's take a look at there we go we're going to take a look at south park first get that ready to go there we go um okay so here we go with uh south park that is in uh pinball effects um so this is the latest This is the latest version. Yeah. I really wish my menu of pictures would dip away, but oh well. You can't really see anything. Yeah. One of the things that I'm going to point out, check out the Habitrail by Chef. You can see Shadow from underneath there. Oh, yeah. Same thing by ManBearPig. Yep. Also, check out all the characters below the flipper and below the in-lane. Looks like they have glowing eyes, which I think is kind of weird. Yeah, they do. I'm not sure what the deal with that is, if that's supposed to be lights or not, or if that's just what it is. And then check out up by the skill shot toilet the red flasher light that's on that by the organ. Yeah. Okay, take a look at that also. And then I'm going to switch here to the FX2 version. Whoa. That's dark. So the FX2 version is a little bit darker. Obviously, we can see that. Check out the lighting down in the inlanes. So the GI lighting from underneath the slingshots as opposed to here. So it's kind of like, ah, lighting. And here it's a little more subtle, a little more integrated. But I do find... though, on the text that's below the outline, it's blue on that one. It's green on that. Oh, the green? That's the new South Park copyright. Oh, right. Okay. That's the copyright logos and stuff like that. Look, I go back here. Now the kids' eyes aren't glowing that are below the apron. Obviously, that flasher is not as good looking. There's not really any shadow that you can see from the the habit trails um but the characters here the skin tones are correct and they look good here they're a little bit blown out the whole table looks like it's it's a little blown out overhead spotlight on it like it looks like there's like a really really strong light over the top yeah and then look at the school bus this is again we're looking at fx version right now and then there's FX2. Truth be told, I like the school bus better in the FX2. That looks like a three-dimensional thing. It's got light and it's got shadow to it and it's got dimension to it. Here it's just kind of... It just looks like a big yellow blob. Again, it almost feels like the lighting is too much, too bright here. And if you take a look at the left slingshot, the left slingshot lighting, Because it's so much brighter, it looks baked in. It doesn't look dynamic. Just from that screenshot. It doesn't have that natural feel to it. It looks like that's actually being painted on. Yeah, because you look at the panda, and there the panda looks great. Yeah. Or Clyde Frog. Clyde Frog looks a lot better there. I find the FX2 version actually somewhat looks better. Weirdly enough. I wish this was the FX3 in terms of lighting, but I do appreciate the shadow that's on this one. I think the shadows are a little bit better. I also will say that in motion and play with the lighting going on, this is easier on the eyes than this one. This one, everything felt digital in terms of it's on, it's off, it's on, it's off. this FX version feels like it's got the fade more. Yeah, that's true. The lighting's way better in this. I guess you'd say the lighting effects are better, the actual lighting of the table. I prefer the FX2 version. Again, it just feels like this is washed out. The FX version feels like it's a little bit too washed out. They've got to just they gotta change their brightness or the white balance I'm not sure what but anyway now we're looking at the South Park table can we agree that this is the worst of the two as far as just the presentation gameplay game itself oh it's a spell-o-rama I hate it it is a hard spell-o-rama it's Spell-O-Rama there is no mission hole it's just a lot of different storylines happening at the same time kind of thing it's like really you're hearing things about Man-Bear-Pig and then all of a sudden you like Stan and he wants a kiss and you're like I don't know what to do everything is just blinking yeah it's like because that's the thing with the Spell-O-Rama right like every time you shoot one of the holes it unravels a little bit more of the dialogue yeah that's in the game so it's almost like if you want to not have it like a chaotic mess, you really just need to tug one hole at a time and get it done. Yeah. And if I hear cheesy poops one more time, I'll tell you what. That thing is like... In other words, does it make cheesy poops? They are lame. So I also tried, I hope you noticed, that I tried to light an in-lane or some of those lanes to see what the lights look like just to compare to here. There's really not much difference. It doesn't have that... It doesn't have that something's glowing from underneath look. It has instead that... Okay, we have the off version, and here's just the letter on top. That's right. We've colored in the letter. It's not glowing. It doesn't have any... A lot of the lights from the other tables, they have a bloom to it. There's no bloom in this. They are very much, almost like the lights and everything, they are very much in the same vein as the cartoon in that there's no extra sort of effects on them. Something else I wish they had taken an opportunity to do, all these characters on the table, I shouldn't say all of them, but most of them have a mode. And I wish that they had done a little bit of Monster Bash here and that all the characters would be, you can light them. So you have a sense of progression through the table. Yeah, that would be good. It would also help with the visual distractions. And I'm thinking kind of like, I mean, 8-Ball Deluxe, it's a whole bunch of pool balls that would light. All these heads are basically pool balls. Just light the heads, you know? Yeah, or something. I'm kind of disappointed that there was nothing altered in that respect, because I think that's a missed opportunity. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to the better table. Bothers That me This is the Pinball FX2 version of Butters Yeah. And this is the FX3 version of Butters. So this one, the FX3 version, is darker. It's darker than the FX2. Right. Which is what I expected all along of South Park. But it kind of went the opposite direction. Alright, so things to point out that are different. Again, the shadows are all there on this one. Notice the spotlights above Butters on the left-hand side? There ain't no spotlights on this one. Yeah, true. Also, it looks like in the spinner room there's a little bit of almost the stand-up targets they do light up. This one has a little bit of shine on it. This one, no. So the chrome in general on this is dull. Yeah. Now, clearly they had to model new things, but if you look up at the top of the play field for the drop inlanes, here they clearly did different modeling because here they have like screws on the top of them. This, I'm not sure what is on the top of them. Yeah, right. Look at that spring thing. This is FX that we're looking at right now. The spring on the launch lane. And then look at the FX2 version. It's just kind of like a weird tube. Yeah, like a muddy mess sort of thing. Yeah. So that's kind of interesting. You can see some of the fidelity gets better. It's been bumped. Yeah, it gets bumped. Butters does exactly what I was asking that South Park does with the modes. Look, I lit up margarine. There, who knows what you've lit up. There's with all five of them lit. But that's a visual tell that lets you know how you're progressing. That's right. Butters is a standard. Shoot the sinkhole, then shoot the spinner. Light the spinner 50 times, then shoot the middle hole. That starts a mode. You can go through your modes. It's a much more straightforward pinball. I think it has a... Yeah, this is definitely the better out of the two. Yeah. I think a lot of people on the forums are saying that, like, this is the one they've been most excited to come back. Yeah. The actual South Park table, not so much. But this one, everyone's really happy to see this back, I think. Yeah. I'm curious. Is that supposed to be Casa Bonita in the upper left corner with the balcony? and I know it's for the Deja Mexican mode, but I don't know. I was kind of curious if anybody knows. It's for sure supposed to be Casa Bonita, especially now that Trey and Matt actually own it. Okay, look at the pinballs down at the apron. So this is what I'm talking about, the chrome. This is FX. There's FX2. FX2, I think it now, granted, I think it's a baked-in look on their pinballs, but the chrome really does look better in fx2 unfortunately yeah i think it's well yeah there's more i guess there's more sort of shadows and environment reflected in the like symbols but i think i feel this is being engine rendered this isn't yeah that well that's the thing yeah and the thing is the balls because the balls are sitting in that tray and there's nothing really around them then yeah they're going to look pretty boring but the ones that actually on the play field there's actually there is stuff reflecting in them real time yeah um so they're going to look more realistic i think it's it's funny it's like baked in looks more realistic because it's got stuff on it that's really visible but but the actual real-time rendering when you're in game it actually feels more convincing yeah but as a screenshot it doesn't look convincing um also look at the pop bumpers with the foil. Again, this is FX. FX2. There, FX looks way better. You can just tell, again, the fatality. Yeah, they look textured. They look like crumpled foil. There, it just kind of looks like a muddy lump. Yep. Of who knows what. Yeah, that's right. And then look at the saucer hole. This is FX2, the saucer hole up in the middle of the playfield. Yep. And then here, That's a more nuanced look. And I actually, again, see, Butters, I prefer the whole look of this in FX compared to FX2. South Park, the opposite. So it's really kind of weird that there was a miss going on there. It is odd. Yeah, it really is. The gameplay where the physics really play a part in this one, hitting the very target, which is on the very far right of the table, much easier in, I shouldn't say much easier your aim goes where you think it should whereas in the FX2 version it was basically learning where off the flipper it's going to go but it didn't, your brain doesn't necessarily go, yeah that makes sense it was unnatural to shoot it, yeah, I found that it's pretty important, you get extra ball off that thing if you get the spinner because the spinner is the thing that selects what award you get when you push the very target back so yeah it's a valuable shot to make and yeah it feels much better in pinball effects than it did in FX3 it felt pretty luck based in FX3 so anyway there's our look at those two tables I'm very happy to have South Park back I mean I have FX2 it's available to me but I so rarely open up FX2 it just feels like oh yeah South Park do I want to go in there because if I go in there I wind up playing other things yeah that's right so it's nice to be scrolling down and all of a sudden it was like I got that nostalgia hit which is years ago when we first started talking about Zen, one of our complaints was that there's just no nostalgia. We didn't grow up with these tables. They don't have any kind of impact on us. But when you consider how long ago South Park came out, again, 2017, so six years ago, in that time, all of a sudden here it's back, and I got the little nostalgia hit when I booted up, and I was like, oh, yeah, I remember. This is fun. Oh, yes, this is why I like this one. You know, so. Yeah, that's right. I'm glad it's back. I'm definitely glad it's back. Yeah, it's good to see them both back in. Definitely Butters is the stronger of the two. But look, you get both when you buy them. So, you know, South Park, nice inclusion. I reckon if they did another lighting pass over it and made it not so blown out, it'd actually be all right. It wouldn't change the gameplay, which is Spell or Armor of Doom. But it would at least look a bit more like... It would look in line with the other South Park table, which is Butters. Yeah. and both of these are miles better than the Sega South Park table yes that thing is as much as I critique the South Park table being a speller armor the Stern South Park was absolutely a speller armor as well like you had to shoot each shot three times to light it and it was basically a speller armor without the letters and it was boring boring one shot table and incredibly repetitive call-outs. Like, really repetitive. Yeah. So, this one at least, there's a good variety of them. Like I said, I think my only change that I would want to make would be at least on easy change would be on South Park to make the kids light up so you actually know what on the table you have completed. because once you've completed now I don't know if that's what the South Park letters that's what those light up for maybe, I don't know I've long forgotten how those light up or why I think that's when we actually might need to read the rules on to re-familiarize ourselves where the shots are because it's been a while I'm going to have to do it but visually it makes so much more sense if each of the kids got lit up for when you finished their style-o-rama of them that would be handy that you know what to go for yeah yeah yeah all right um enough of that let's talk about the one last bit of news we don't really have a lot of information uh regarding this but zen went and announced yet another collection of tables that they're going to be coming out with another partner i believe it's called game night volume one uh which would lead you to believe There might be Volume 2 coming soon, too. That's what they confirmed. Did they confirm it? There's going to be multiple volumes of this coming out, so you're going to see a lot underneath that category. Okay. So this is an interesting thing here. I don't have any of the information in front of me. Jared, I hope you do. What is this a pairing of? Okay, so you've got the Gloomhaven table, which if you've watched the recent Pimblebytes episode, you'll see a developer diary from uh deep on that not deep actually thomas crofts yeah thomas crofts so he's the guy behind that one um which i'm already looking forward to let's be let's be frank um the so the other one is exploding kittens which is a was a board game that was kick-started it features the art of the oatmeal so if you're aware of the oatmeal I actually just bought the game recently actually the actual card game, it's a card game based board game and it's it's got I'm going to be really excited for that one to see what they pull out as far as art goes because the oatmeal's got some really great art assets and they could really do some fun things in 3D with these uh the third one is terraforming mars not a not a board game i'm familiar with i mean gloomhaven's not one i'm familiar with either terraforming mars uh is uh the third one that they've announced these tables are going to be out um in 2024 so they've announced them now okay but they're coming out in 2024 so these are all based on board games um were these board games all coming from the same kind of company do we know if they're embracer group stuff what do we know um i'm not sure uh uh but they i think they are all from the same game company no um they're like i think they're a large game producer these guys um makes me wish so if they're going for unique art style or weird gameplay or whatever. I know that we did a Kickstarter for a game called Muffin Time, which was from the AS... ASDM movie? Is that what it is? I don't know. They're very... You know, they did Mind Turtle and everybody do the flop and like these really absurdist things. And the game is completely absurdist. And once you started mentioning that about Exploding Kittens, I was like, ooh, that would actually be really fun is a pinball machine with, in terms of audio drops, it's got a ton that you could use from songs and stuff like that. So that'd be kind of interesting to see where that goes. And then my thought went, ooh, maybe we'll get a Warhammer table. Or a proper Dungeons & Dragons table. I don't know. So the company behind it is Asmodee. They're actually a French publisher of board games. They've been around since 1995. apparently so um they they they have their own range of games but they also do smaller um game dip as well which is why i think exploding kittens might have been picked up by them because it was a kick-started um game okay um but as modi also have as modi digital as well um so they've got a digital arm um to them as well from what i can see um and as modi digital well as the name would suggest is that's where you see Gloomhaven and there's other ones on there too so Terraforming Mars is one there's also Lord of the Rings adventure card game they're also the ones that do Catan as well and Game of Thrones as well so they've got those are the properties so this is interesting the whole Lord of the Rings thing right because I know Lord of the Rings got bought by Embracer for yeah not the movies so that might be how we see Lord of the Rings come to pinball effects so yeah this is the very interesting thing but yeah Asmodee as a as a company you've got so many titles. Yeah. Um, a lot of them, they, they have, they also have titles for, uh, all ages as well. So their, their IPs, uh, there's a lot. So, um, some of them seem to be, um, uh, yeah, they've, they've got Ticket to Ride, Catan, um, and, uh, they've also got Arkham Horror, which I've not heard of before. Um, but those are the ones that are really they've got a lot of IPs so you know I think makes sense for that kind of partnership then yeah absolutely um so yeah I think partnering with these guys unlocks a bunch of different possibilities for the studio like it's massive but the fact that they've actually got like a dedicated digital arm you could from my prediction right here and now would be that we're going to see those digital properties come into the app. Probably first as well. Yeah, because they already have digital assets that they can just send over to Zen that would eliminate so much of the work. It would speed up the development process for it. Yeah. So that's my call. So the good news there then is that we've got all sorts of pinball coming down the pike, folks. Really interesting properties, too. Yeah, the drought that we had suffered so long ago does not seem to be being an issue anymore. I think 2024 is going to be a big year. Like, there's going to be a fire hose of content coming towards us from Zen in 2024, because they've got, you know, they've got all the ducks in a row now, right? They've got their development team has cut a few tables now, so they've got the whole from concept to execution thing down for their table producers. So now we're going to see the pace pick up, I think, and we're going to see much more content coming out. I mean, we kind of said the same thing was going to happen for this year based off of Mel saying that we were going to get 24 tables in 2023. And they did deliver that. I think they're just about to get it in fact I think someone on the forum was saying there might be one more than 24 at the moment so it's like yeah they've got there and obviously this was also all while launching on the consoles pinball effects which is non-trivial now that you have the launches done it can just be game game drops Game drops and further optimizations To take advantage of the platforms Like we got NVIDIA A new NVIDIA specific Performance enhancement release NVIDIA Reflex I think it is So for the RTX series cards You can take advantage of that now And it actually improves performance In pinball effects So that's now certified For pinball effects now which is great so you know we're starting to see these things coming into the platform now they're looking at performance they're looking at ways of optimizing and rendering so stay tuned I reckon stay tuned indeed we'll be back again real soon obviously maybe next time we'll do some actual gameplay of these tables hopefully maybe pinball effects or pinball M will have officially dropped that we can power through some of those. I don't know. We'll see. But we never know what's going to be coming down because that would eliminate what Jared loves to talk about. Stuff and things. The things we love. Until next time, folks. Bye-bye. See you later.