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BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 1m·analyzed·Jan 28, 2018
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.028

TL;DR

Hosts discuss virtual pinball tournament design and accessible game creation tools.

Summary

Chris and Jared discuss their recent YouTube rabbit holes, MoviePass subscription services, and pinball/gaming news. They focus extensively on virtual pinball tournament design, comparing TPA's limitations to Zen Pinball FX 3's superior tournament creation tools. They also reflect on early computer games (Orion tank coding game, The Incredible Machine) and explore accessible game design principles, advocating for drag-and-drop pinball editors rather than complex scripting systems.

Key Claims

  • Sorcerer table from Pinball Arcade will be released next week

    high confidence · Chris mentions expected release and Twitch stream already occurred

  • Zen Pinball FX 3 hosts approximately 30-35 players weekly in tournaments

    high confidence · Chris reports from running weekly Zen tournaments under 'Shut Your Trap' username

  • Zen Pinball released five tables in 2.5 months

    medium confidence · Jared mentions rapid release cycle; timing not explicitly specified

  • TPA would require 300-400 ROM sets to support custom tournament modes like Zen offers

    medium confidence · Chris explains technical barrier; specific number not independently verified in episode

  • Data Wing is a free mobile game with no in-app purchases by former Halfbrick Studios developer

    high confidence · Jared describes game in detail and recommends it

Notable Quotes

  • “The YouTube rabbit hole is real, man. It's real.”

    Chris Freebus @ early — Opening theme about internet distraction

  • “They're just covering their butts... it's just kind of rather amusing seeing what people get themselves worked up over”

    Chris Freebus @ mid-early — Commentary on MoviePass consumer anxiety

  • “Which, if you ever head over to the Pinball Arcade fans' website, you quite often see much ado about nothing.”

    Chris Freebus @ mid — Critique of Pinball Arcade fan forum behavior

  • “I don't like doing survival tournaments because I don't—it doesn't let you learn the table... next to no strategy involved”

    Chris Freebus @ mid — Commentary on virtual pinball tournament format preferences

  • “You let your users figure it out, and they just go and have their own fun.”

    Jared Morgan @ mid-late — Discussion of user-generated tournament content vs. developer-curated events

  • “I sound like—a Pinball Construction Kit. It sounds like it could be fun, but you have to design it in a way that is fun to use.”

    Chris Freebus @ late — Core critique of accessibility in pinball game design tools

  • “Everything was drag and drop... there was enough variation on it to make it fun, but it wasn't so much variation to make it impossible and frustrating”

    Chris Freebus @ late — Ideal model for accessible pinball editor design

Entities

Chris FreebuspersonJared MorganpersonPinball ArcadeproductZen Pinball FX 3productFarSight StudioscompanyNormanpersonData WingproductOrionproductThe Incredible Machine / The Impossible MachineproductVisual Pinballproduct

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Chris hosting weekly Zen Pinball tournaments attracting 30-35 regular competitors, indicating strong community interest in structured competitive play

    high · Chris reports 'we've been getting roughly about 30 to 35 players a week' with 'a lot of regulars coming back'

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinball Arcade fan forum demonstrates pattern of repetitive questions and rants despite previous clarifications from developers

    high · Chris notes 'Despite having Norman on two podcasts ago, there are still people on the forum going, So is there going to be a season eight?'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Hosts advocate for drag-and-drop accessible game design over complex scripting; criticize Visual Pinball's steep learning curve as barrier to entry

    high · Chris proposes 'You know, oh, you want a ramp? Well, here's 20 different styles of ramps that you could use. Just drag and drop'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Sorcerer table confirmed for Pinball Arcade release next week; following table newsletter announcement anticipated

    high · Chris states 'I was thinking that we were going to get Sorcerer this week. We didn't. It's going to be coming out next week. They did do the Twitch stream of it.'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Hosts express preference for Zen Pinball's tournament infrastructure over TPA, suggesting potential user migration driven by feature superiority

    medium · Chris states 'I would absolutely recommend you get on that' and 'I really do wish that this tournament mode was in TPA'

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.185

0:00
this is a blockade podcast with your hosts chris and jared you are listening to the blockade pinball podcast i am your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world jared morgan hello chris so it's been a week it has been a week yeah and uh and uh i don't know if you've ever come across this problem i'm sure many people have but i usually come across it as we're getting ready to set up the podcast or immediately after because i happen to have youtube open yes and i don't normally i mean unless i'm looking for something specific i don't normally just hang out on youtube right but inevitably the splash page pops up and it goes you might be interested in this video and odds are there's something that catches my eye. I'm like, oh, okay, yeah. So I click on that. And then the deep dive happens. Oh, it takes you down the rabbit hole. The Easter rabbit hole is real, man. It's real. It's that sidebar of videos that as you're watching one video, you look and you go, oh, there's two others there that I'm kind of interested in. And then you click on that one, on one of those, and there's two more. And next thing you know, you've got this giant branching tree and it's been three hours. Oh, I just did it before. Well, honestly, I went in and clicked on a – because I get my daily or my weekly digest from YouTube delivered to email to say, hey, look, these are not videos that you are subscribing to and you may like, and it sort of filters them to the top. I went, oh, cool. Well, while I'm waiting for Chris to set up the podcast, I'll just listen to this one, which was a rudimental, a new clip from Rudimental, which is a drum and bass act. I went, cool. And then I went, oh, in the sidebar they had a video that I'd watched before from a group called Sophie Tucker. And Sophie Tucker, the group that did the, I guess, the song for the first iPhone 10 commercial.
2:02
And it just it has this appeal to me. And I went, oh, yeah, I'll watch that again, too. and then just as you were starting up the podcast I went down the rabbit hole to another video I watched previously which was a really good metal cover of Toto's Africa that sounds amazing and then I had to stop because you posted a link I thought oh no I better not go any deeper yeah it's a slippery slope my dive and this kind of ties into what's going on with the website and everything that we've got set up now my dive happened with because I flipped it open and there was something about MoviePass which is that card that I just have now activated and used this week and it was comparing between a MoviePass and some other similar monthly subscription base for seeing movies which was Cinemia or something like that I can't remember I've never heard of it and I was like oh I didn't know there was another card. So I'm kind of watching this, and the guy's saying the pros and cons of whatever. And the quick overview, just to catch everybody up, with MoviePass, it's $9.99 a month, and you can see one movie per day. No 2D, no premium format. So it's just basically your regular format movies. Then the guy said with Cinemia that it was any format movie. So you can go IMAX, you can go 3D, you can go RPX, whatever. And you can go to virtually, he said he hasn't found a theater yet, and he lives in LA, so he would really know. He hasn't found any of the big theaters yet that deny the card. No. But it was $30 a month for two tickets, but you could only go to three movies in a given month.
P-Rockproduct
MoviePassproduct
Nimblyperson
Hereticperson
Halfbrick Studioscompany
  • ?

    technology_signal: TPA's ROM-set architecture creates technical barrier to implementing custom tournament modes, limiting competitive platform evolution

    medium · Chris explains 'they'd have to make a ROM set for each one of those types... 300 or 400 different ROM sets that they'd need to maintain'

    • 3:56
    Right. Which is one of those things where it's like, well, okay, again, depending on how much you're going to the movies and if you're really adamant. When I say he lives near L.A., he really lives near L.A. proper, where Groundlands Chinese Theater and the Arclight and these big giant premiere theaters. There's a theater on every corner, essentially. Is that common? Well, no, it's not that they're on every corner, but these are the ones that they have movie premieres at. These are the top-notch, mega-expensive, you're talking about some of these movies will cost you 24 bucks a ticket. For a regular movie?
    4:34
    Well, no, for the 3D version. 3D and IMAX, and we're talking gigantic screen, the best projection, all that. So again, if you live near something like that, then that kind of card would make sense. For me, I don't have any of those theaters within 30 miles of me, so I'm not going to those. I think allows you, I think you definitely the car you've got sounds like the right choice for you because it allows you pretty much access to as much movies as you could possibly handle. Like one movie a day, 365 movies a year if you really want to get hardcore with it. That is a mission in itself and there's not actually that many movies released a year.
    5:17
    Well, you can find. There actually is that many movies that are released but they're limited release.
    5:25
    No, they'll be in cinemas. But we're talking about, we're talking about art house cinemas, you know what I mean? Yeah. Right. So, you know, where it's been released on three screens across the country, you know what I mean? You know, that kind of thing. Yeah. So for your major releases, you're only ever getting usually two to three major releases per week, if even that.
    5:44
    So, yeah, but, uh, so anyway, where the, the deep dive started coming up and I've been seeing articles lately was on the side. People are, is it a scam?
    5:54
    And I'm like, well, I just used mine for the first time this week and it worked perfectly fine. So no, it's not a scam, but they're starting. People are like, well, it's an unsustainable business model. I'm like, who cares? I already have mine.
    6:07
    It's not up to me to sustain their business model. It's just up to me to use it while it's available. Um, correct. Yeah. And, and then it was, uh, well, if you read the, the fine print of the agreement, you know, the user agreement, I'm like, they're just covering their butts. You know, it's, it's like, you're looking for absolute horrible reasons, you know, kind of thing. And it's just kind of, it's rather, rather amusing seeing what people get themselves worked up over so that they, I don't know if they're trying to talk people out of it or, or what. They just know better about themselves. I guess. I don't know. And then I'm like, wait, maybe you work for the movie theaters. I don't know.
    6:45
    Well, you know, and, and one of the things that, because it is technically, it's an unsustainable business model because they are paying the theater. when you say, I'm going to go see this particular movie, you select it on the app, they put the funds in to pay the full ticket price to the movie theater.
    7:04
    Already this month, I've seen three movies. Therefore, they're already out $20. From the initial $9 that I forked over, right? What they're hoping for, and I get this, is A, people are going to buy it and then, like a gym membership, not use it. Why would you do that? That's crazy business. I mean, certainly a gym membership, who cares about that? But we're talking about movies here. Yeah, but no, but I mean, a gym membership, you go ahead, typically you're putting down a giant deposit. You're also paying for your first month last month, and then you have your monthly fee for the gym membership. So right off the bat, you're plunking down a layout of cash that is all theirs. And if you never show up again, they could care less. You know, so I get that there's a little bit of that. What they've also talked about that they're probably going to be doing is selling user data. In other words, what movies are seeing what, you know, how often are they going to which I kind of go, you know what? What do you think Netflix does? What do you think? You know, anything you think your satellite.
    8:16
    Exactly. What do you think your satellite company does? Yeah, it's going to look at your viewing habits. And everybody freaks out about that, and I'm like, but you're not freaking out about every time you go on Facebook? Yeah. Right, Google?
    8:30
    They're much worse. And I'm just kind of like, and hey, if it makes it so that they put out more movies that I'm interested in, isn't that better?
    8:40
    Seems fine, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It's kind of one of those things where I just laugh at people getting worked up over things. Yeah, much ado about nothing, really. Which, if you ever head over to the Pinball Arcade fans' website, you quite often see much ado about nothing. Oh, yes. Boy, do you ever.
    9:04
    Yes, it's pretty much what the forum's fueled on, really. Yeah, despite having Norman on two podcasts ago, there are still people on the forum going, so is there going to be a season eight? well norman pretty much expressly said there will be more tables after season seven so you know folks it's not that um i don't know how you could misconstrue that but anyhow keep on you know going down the path right then you had a uh there's been some really and i always laugh that people use the forum as if they're speaking directly to farsight yes um it's It really is a fan forum. It says it in the title. This is not a website support forum. So there's been a couple of recent rants that new users have posted, to which I automatically go, wait a second, this is your first post, and you're going off on a 10-paragraph rant against the company?
    10:07
    Way to warm yourself up into the forum here. And then I also sit there and go, and if you had have read any of the threads that have gone on over the past five years that the website has been around, maybe you would have come across some of the very answers that you're complaining about. No, because searching is really hard, Chris. It is. It's much easier to just write a tirade in your web editor than it is to actually do some searching and research. Really, it's much easier. Yeah, I guess so.
    10:41
    So there hasn't really been a lot of... Pinball news. Pinball news, if you will, yeah. I was thinking that we were going to get Sorcerer this week. We didn't. It's going to be coming out next week. They did do the Twitch stream of it. I didn't happen to watch, but I know that's right around the corner for us to see.
    11:03
    And then, of course, when that comes out, then we'll get the newsletter, which I already know what the next table is myself. So I was thinking, oh, we could talk about that today, but fail because the newsletter and tertiary didn't come out. So we don't get to talk about that. So that'll be all next week. Yeah. It'll probably come out tomorrow. Like, so, you know, we'll be, we'll be well and truly. Yeah. Well, at least it'll be in the next week that we talk about it, but it'll be the later half of the week that it was. Exactly. Whatever you're going to do.
    11:35
    And then it's, uh, you know, obviously Zen hasn't had anything. Um, I mean, they... Which is to be expected, I guess, because they've just sort of done a big release. Well, I mean, yeah, because they hit us with five tables in the span of two and a half months. So they kind of... They really kind of blow the load, essentially. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's time for... I reckon probably it's going to happen around maybe March, I reckon. We might see a trickle of another table through. Maybe, yeah. I'm thinking. I need more tables to play so these weekly zen tournaments that we've been hosting and if you want to join in on any of the zen pinball tournaments you just go into pinball effects 3 and go into tournaments and do a search under search put shut your traps and one of my the tournament that I'm running that week should pop up and we've been getting roughly about 30-35 players a week. So it's fun that way. And seeing a lot of regulars coming back, so there is a little bit of certainly a little bit of competition that's brewing.
    12:56
    That's what we saw. Yeah. That's what we saw when we were running it ourselves and doing the whole table of the week. Like, they were regular players.
    13:05
    Yeah. So this week, this past week, we were playing Alien Isolation one ball with user choice for passive awards and the rewind was locked in for the wizard goal or not the goal, the wizard bonus activation, however you want to call it.
    13:28
    And I felt very possessive as I was like, no, nobody's going to beat me on this table. I like this table. So no. I can run this like a track meet. No one's going to have this. I can't run it like a track meet, but I'm like, I'm not going to let anybody else run it on me. And so I gave it a good go and real early on in the week I posted a decent score and that held for quite a while. And then all of a sudden there's one user, Nimbly, who is always right there up at the top. He poached my score by I don't know, maybe 40 million. And I was like, no. Not going to let that sit. so I hammered into this thing and wound up able to pass him by a nice solid 35 million points and I did that as the tournament ended so there was no hope of anybody beating me so I sniped that score out but what I was kind of I don't like doing survival tournament because I don't it doesn't let you learn the table. It doesn't, basically all you're doing is just flipping for your life and hoping to get a score. There's like next to no, uh, strategy involved as far as I'm concerned. Uh, I mean, there is a little bit, but it becomes frustrating really quick.
    14:50
    So I don't tend to do those, but I know some people like them. So what my thought process is, is maybe pick a table that do a, like, a one-day tournament with it in survival mode, and then the next day do a one-day tournament in five-minute mode, and then maybe do, following that, a three-day tournament in one-ball mode, and then a, yeah, I don't know, just play it for two weeks, basically, the same table but have a whole bunch of mini on it So you setting a theme and you within that theme you creating a set of different play modes within the theme of the table Yeah. And then see if anybody can run the table, if you will, on all the tournaments, uh, regarding it. Uh, you know, I just have like a, essentially a, a table Olympics where you have to go through all this. Who's good at the marathon?
    15:55
    I'm kind of debating on whether to do that or not, and then it becomes an issue of, well, which table do you pick?
    16:02
    It's got to be a table that you don't mind spending that much time on, but it's also got to be a table that offers up challenges within each of those modes.
    16:15
    I don't know. I'm debating. Star Wars tables come to mind here because they're accessible and you can really get into them. You can really get into them, but they don't really lend themselves well to, say, survival mode. Okay. You know what I mean? I don't know. It's things where I'm just trying to figure out what to pick. Or do you go with something like you pick Moon Knight, which nobody knows what the heck is going on with Moon Knight, and really deep dive that thing, you know? That's true.
    16:45
    That might be the approach that you need to take. It might be I just need to pick a really strange table that I think doesn't actually work well. And then I might find that, you know what, it actually does work quite well for this format. Yeah, I don't know.
    16:59
    Yeah. You might have to actually do something that doesn't feel right to actually make it feel right.
    17:07
    If you know what I mean. Yeah. I tell you what, though, man, I really do wish that this tournament mode was in. Create your own tournament was in TBA. because I would love to dive back into some of the tables and compete against people. It would just be fun. Even if it was make your own challenge, even if they adapted the challenge menu, which I never go into anymore. Well, I never really went into the start with, to be perfectly honest with you, like go through the manufacturer tables. Oh, that's a slog. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, well, that would be fun if you just said, all right, so set it to one ball, and then, you know, have a score challenge if you want or, you know, some other thing that you could do easily without having to regenerate ROM code, which is the barrier at the moment.
    17:59
    So, you know, for them to do like the sort of modes that are on Xen, they'd have to make a ROM set for each one of those types. So, you know, for each table in the game, that would be close to 300 or 400 different ROM sets that they'd need to maintain at the moment. That would be a punishment for them.
    18:23
    Honestly, I would be just happy with you are able to set up your own tournament, just like you can in Xen, so that people can come and play. As long as they know what the tournament is, they can come in and play with it. That tournament generates its own leaderboards only for as long as the tournament is running, as soon as the tournament is over. Everybody gets their... Basically what happens with Xen, because I know you don't know this with how it sets up, is when you go into the tournaments tab, it'll all of a sudden pop up, hey, this tournament is finished, and it'll show you what the final leaderboard is. As soon as you click OK, poof, it's gone. You can go actually back and find tournaments you've played in and reread all the leaderboards, but more or less, it's there and then it's gone. You know what I mean? But to do that so that then... it's quick and easy. There's no hassle. You're not using the current leaderboards, which would be a nightmare to try and invite people in and then try and figure out who's playing. No, that ain't going to happen. And the other way was what we were doing in the past, where it was like, okay, everybody, you're going to have to post your score on the website, and then I'm going to have to compare the scores and see who came out on top.
    19:33
    Now you're dealing with the honor system. if you will. Yeah. And Zen has completely eliminated all of that. And then the fact that they're able to put in these parameters, which I know you're right, it would be virtually impossible using the ROM sets that a TDA is limited by. Uh, but you're correct. It would be kind of cool to maybe you could still do a five minute tournament. There's no doubt about that. And you can do a one ball.
    20:04
    I think anything will be fine. Yeah, they could, they could just intercept. I know that they can do it because that's what they currently have set up as an option in the current head-to-head.
    20:18
    You can pick one ball. I know you can do one ball and you can do a five-minute tournament. Honestly, I think that would be... Probably enough. That'd be enough. One ball, a regular, three ball, and a timed tournament. Yes. Let us run. I think you could iterate from there as you work out what things, what formats are more popular. that you could add extra options in. Yeah. Because it's just... It brings... It makes the users responsible for content, if you will. Yeah, that's right. Instead of TPA or Farsight having to be the ones that come up with, okay, what kind of tournament are we going to run this week? No, you let your users figure it out, and they just go and have their own fun. You know, Zen is still putting out a tournament a week, or actually two at least a week, and running those at all times. but then you go through the list and there is just a bazillion tournaments going on. Go ahead and pick your own.
    21:15
    So I don't know. It's one of those things I think would be cool. It would get me back into chomping at the bit whenever there is a new table coming out, whenever we're looking through all the old tables. I'm back to having a whole collection of tables that I barely cracked the wizard goals on.
    21:33
    Yeah, that's right. It's one of those things. It would be cool. I'd like it. Yeah, I'm very much at the moment with TPA. I'm very much sort of, I do the beta. I have a look for things in the beta. And honestly, I just haven't touched the other tables very much at all. After that, I'm really just there for the beta, doing the testing. And then I usually don't open the app very much.
    22:03
    It's bad, but it just seems to be the way it is at the moment. And I'm actually looking at different games at the moment. And I found this very interesting one that's not even pinball related that's really capturing my attention at the moment. It's a very – it's a bit like as the physics of and the inertia of asteroids, but you're actually around these racetracks.
    22:36
    And the thing that's different about this game is that you can actually get more power if you go really close to the walls. You can actually propel off the walls and speed up. So it's basically this drifting game around the theme of data packets. So it's, I forget the name of it, but I'll just go quickly to my phone now and look it up. Because I think it's on all mobile platforms. and it's called I don't think it was called Voxel Run but it's called Data Wing it's by one of the guys who was from Halfbrick Studios here in Brisbane and he set up this game, it's free completely free, no IAP no nothing, it's just a side project of his that he was really passionate about and he just made it because he wanted to and it's a really good game for free cool so i would absolutely recommend you get on that because it's it's fun and it takes a bit of while to get used to the the controls which are basically just rotate left rotate right and break that that's it with the whole game but if you're a bit of a computer nerd i think probably heretic would actually really quite like this one if he's listening. It actually gets you to unlock certain levels by doing binary puzzles.
    24:05
    So you have to get the bits right in the binary code to actually unlock the level. So he'd totally lose his mind over that.
    24:13
    So if you're listening here, I think it's right up your alley, mate. You should give it a go. There was a game that... Okay, we're going to go way back in the time machine here. So back in 1990, actually it would be 90, yeah, 1991, right around there, I was entering college and I bought my first computer, which was a Mac SE.
    24:38
    So this is one of those all-in-one white boxes with the 90s screen. You know, floppy drive built right in. Nothing you could change on this thing.
    24:48
    No internet whatsoever because the internet wasn't invented. Well, to the public, it wasn't available yet.
    24:54
    and so I got that and I was like, I want to play a game so I asked my buddy who, he was the person I always went over to his house to play games at, I said, what should I get? and he was like, oh you've got to get this game called, I think it was called Orion and I was like, okay, what's this? and he's like, it's a tank game I'm like, okay, and he's like you build, you code your own tank and then you put it on the battlefield field and it follows all of your code and shooting this thing. I'm like, okay, sounds great.
    25:32
    This bloody game. And then the reason why this popped up into my head is because I actually found I still have the printout of the code with me. Yeah, I'll say my piece. You can fill some time and I'll find it real quick and I'll show it to those that see the video so they can see. But it winds up being you literally coding the tank and typing in if-then statements.
    26:01
    And if you come across this object, then you need to turn this degree. And it was so not the game for me. Yeah, absolutely. And I think even my most basic of tanks was like four pages worth of code, right? And my buddy had one that was something like 70-some pages. his could like somehow go underground and I don't know he was just bonkers and so that's why when anybody mentions coding or if I ever had any interest in coding I pretty much can resolutely say nope never had even the slightest inkling and I proved it by when trying to do it even in a game format and I couldn't have cared less it just was frustration to me so okay Jared fill some time I'm going to find it. It'll take me just a moment. Okay, no worries. Well, while Chris is off hunting around for a piece of paper, I did actually find, you might remember in the last episode, I hinted at doing more pinball on Google Play. And I thought, well, okay, I'll go and do a search for pinball on Google Play and I'll see what is out there. and there's actually some titles now that that kind of don't suck um which is kind of in some ways disappointing because the sucky ones were the fodder for pinball on google play for sure um oh i mean he comes uh he comes a wild chris he's back again with a a big sheet of paper and uh we will go and listen to him okay i'm back all right so i have in front of me uh in lovely dot matrix printing the the sheet here and when i fold it out so this gets output from the game yeah yes so you print this out uh from the game and it's all your coding that uh that you're able to do and so i mean it's things like uh start do tank search to attack tank branch to start. And then under tank search, uh, DD flip DIR scan for enemy tank. If enemy tank was found, then tank found rotate scanner left one detect obstruction at take direction. If movement is obstructed, then change direction, move forward one branch to tank search.
    28:33
    Jeez. Yeah. And so, you know, so it was all the, you know, whatever that word was, then you had to define that word. And what, uh, what is, you know, so let's say, you went to clear path. So clear path, you scan down here and says, okay, if obstacle type equals six, then path block. If obstacle type equals two, then, uh, path. I don't know what fire weapon at obstruction.
    28:58
    Wow. Yeah. The driest game I think I've ever heard. Oh my gosh. Is it? Yeah. Right. I mean, yeah, it's like, it's, it's essentially, Hey, we've got this really great game idea. Code it for us. And that's the game. yeah that's the game it's like that's the joke yeah and i think about this every single time uh farsight brought up the pinball editor if you will oh yeah a pinball construction kit and it's one of those things where it's like it sounds like it could be fun but you have to design it in a way that is fun to use and i don't trust people to do that. And that comes down to the whole visual pinball aspect of things, where it becomes this massive amount of coding instead of just... Think of it like what Norman was talking about with that... What was it? P3? Pinball system he was talking about? Yeah, P-Rock.
    30:07
    We're essentially just dropping toys, dropping items down, and it automatically understands where these things are and you can get a pinball new pinball machine up and running relatively quickly it's not we're not talking days it's maybe not even talking hours i don't know it might be an hour adventure of plugging it in and making sure it does all those checksums and then boom it's good to go and play right yeah as opposed to something like visual pinball where you're going to be on this thing for weeks before you have any... Yeah. Scripting, placing all your objects. And like working on these ball troughs and all that. I remember going to edit mode on Visual Pinball and just seeing all the things I had to do to get things like ball troughs working and stage balls I had to write custom code to actually put stage balls in the ball trough Like, it's just like, Oh, no way, man. It's just too much. And what I would rather it be. And again, Oh man, I'm just, I'm dating myself here, Jared. So there, there used to be a game system called the 3DO.
    31:14
    3DO. I remember the 3DO. Right. 3DO is pretty trick. I liked it. Especially its controller, which is, if I remember correctly, it's kind of where PlayStation got their controller from initially.
    31:27
    But 3DO had a game on it, and I want to say it was called The Incredible Machine or The Impossible Machine. I can't remember what it was.
    31:36
    But it was always, you need to get this ball from point A to point B, and there would be some walling or obstructions in the way. and then you had over on the side menu all these different objects that you could use and they were fun objects it was like trampoline and a vacuum cleaner and it was a 2D based game that you put these you dragged and dropped these objects onto the play field and then you push run and it would drop the ball and then the ball would bounce and it would go through all these kind of Rube Goldbergian methods to get to the end and it was so fun because it was everything was drag and drop And you can just drag and slightly, you know, and even the slightest movement would change the trajectory of these things.
    32:19
    But it wasn't. So there was enough variation on it to make it fun, but it wasn't so much variation to make it impossible and frustrating.
    32:29
    You know, and so we really struck this fine balance. And that's what I would want with a pinball editor is something that is, you know, oh, you want a ramp? Well, here's 20 different style of ramps that you could use. Just drag and drop, put them in, now push launch and watch the ball go. you know exactly it would need to be they would need to basically go through their library of scanned objects that they have all the all the different tables they've digitized and just take all the art off them and you know just basically sanitize and see didn't know which tables they were from and then allow you to just like you say drag and drop as an object onto the playfield and And no concept of stretching the ramp or shortening the ramp or whatever. It's just here's the object that you're going to use. Put it on and see how you go. Yeah, and then if you put another object near it, it would somehow automatically link together and combine so that the physics of it would work without you having to go, oh, no, I'm slightly off the map. I need to mix that. The ball is going the wrong direction. And, you know, yeah, you want to be able to be just like boom, boom, boom. And then say once you've got all your ramps or all your lanes, then you're like, okay, well, I need a sinkhole.
    33:41
    Put my little X here, sinkhole here, boom. Yep, and then it has all the guts. Right, it puts the poop, it puts the popper, you know, whatever, yeah. Yeah, it does all that. It really does need to be like that. And you think about this. I was just, while you were away, I was talking about the whole looking around on Google Play for pinball games. It's been released since I last did pinball on Google Play. and it goes back to what we were talking about last episode where it will be very easy for people who have never thought about pinball design before to get very frustrated with this very quickly like the whole you know you look at all the titles on on google play that have angles everywhere you know yeah like right 90 degree angles in a table and you know there'll be so many of those tables being designed out there you almost need like a right so this is your first table let's walk you through a street level design and how you can actually you know get that working and then the next level after that in the in the tutorial is right all right let's introduce some elevation to your play field and put on some ramps and maybe you know an extra um uh wire form that allows your ball to travel up and then you know we're looking at mini play fields and then all this sort of stuff as well so you know you could actually train yourself if they did it right and it will be hard to do this because it will be very costly to do this from a development perspective. But walking you through something from, hey, here is basically two flippers, two slingshots, and three pop bumpers. There's your pinball table. To, oh, look, here's something that looks a little bit like, you know, let's go with something really basically like taxi, for example. You know, and going to that level of game. you know getting to that point and actually then working out well how then do you um introduce scoring and and the like how do we even work out so this thing like say it's a pop bumper you could select okay well i drag and drop this pop bumper on and then it will score one of three options and when you drop it ago how much would you like this thing to score would you like it to score 10 points, 100 or 1,000. And you could select the score based on a drop-down list. And then that would actually help you build out a basic rule set for the game. So every time that pop-up was activated, you would get 1,000 points. There you go.
    36:11
    And you're essentially making an alphanumeric game. Yes. Not a DMD, deep-dive, wizard goal, all that other kind of stuff. You make it an alphanumeric at the top level and where the fun goes from that. And then you could have things like, you could lock balls. You could say, so with this saucer, what do you want it to do? Do you want it to keep a ball locked or do you want to spit it back out? And then if you have more than like two saucers or two traps on the table, do you want to link this trap with that trap so that those two traps together, when you shoot another one, will then spit out the ball into multiple? You could do basic multiples like that. So basically you could build up what is essentially an if-then-else statement just using drop-down menus and like. The problem is that people want to immediately, the first thing they want to do is build the most complicated thing that they can. Yeah, I want to build a taxi. Right, well, you already have a taxi. So if you have, there's no need to recreate what is here. so you need to go the opposite tact which is just make it fun to screw around and make these things basically experiment with it so you can make a total nuclear annihilation you know and just screw around with table design until you find something hey this feels really good I like this because there was the game Little Big Planet that Playstation had that essentially lets you create all your own levels and everything and even that it had so many options and while it was relatively easy to build and construct with you did have to have a certain ability to do level design in order to make anything that anybody actually wanted to play.
    38:03
    You'd go through the communities and see what people made and you could real quickly find out, hey, this person knows what the heck they're doing versus 99% of everybody else that didn't know what the heck they were doing. now compare that with my son has a game for the the wii u that is mario maker and it's designed on mario uh levels and they did a very interesting thing which was they let you basically choose between doing an original like 8-bit mario or maybe it's probably 16-bit but 8-bit mario um to doing the 32-bit Super Mario, basically, and then to the more modern look that they have of the Mario games today. But it was still all side-scrolling. There was no 3D. It was just side-scrolling. But they also, when they first introduced the game, there was a limited set of tools that you were able to use.
    39:01
    And then slowly over the months, they would introduce, they would unlock the next batch of tools. And so people were able to learn it and punch through and punch through and punch through. And my son did his fair share of that.
    39:20
    And his first levels were, he would have me come and play him and I would just be like, dude, this thing's impossible because you've given me no visual clues or you've purposely made it so that it is precision jumping only to be able to get through this. He would just throw everything in the kitchen sink and then eventually he started kind of learning level design and through watching other videos and people doing stuff, but eventually he got pretty good at it.
    39:52
    The thing is, it still is very limited in terms of you can't do a full-blown Mario level like what they do today.
    40:01
    You're still... But I think that restraint is what allows people to achieve better success. If you want the full-blown experience, go buy a Mario game.
    40:14
    But hey, how about working within the limitations that they're giving you instead and see what you can do? And it's amazing how creative people have gotten.
    40:22
    Oh, yeah. So that's what I would think. It's kind of the difference between if you were to play... say, you know,
    40:35
    whatever this year's Madden football game is, where it's you know, oh, do you need to change the person's cleats to make them have better grit? I mean, you're getting to just insane levels of detail to play the game, as opposed to if you just did a very basic football game that anybody can pop into and have a blast playing, which those games are few and far between now. Whereas back in the day, they used to be very common.
    41:00
    So, I think the same thing would need to be applied with pinball. We already have the full-blown arcade experiences, whether it be Xen, whether it be TPA. We don't need that. Make it something, an editor that is just intuitive and fun to use.
    41:14
    Yeah, I'd be down with having a go at that. Like, even if it was just limited to just single-level play fields, right? Like, you could go back and have a look at some tables that you enjoy playing at a single level and then just sort of use those as sort of like a canvas, an experiment. from there if you're really interested in working out the feel getting a feel of the table and understanding what design is all about and it would be it would be good because you might end up with a design that sort of well let's be serious most pinball tables and pinball designers did exactly that in the the olden days of pinball like they just took a game and just made minor tweaks to it and there's some debate out there at the moment that stern are doing that exact same thing right now with some of their recent releases that there's a an accusation of copy paste design going on at stern so you know this is not an unusual thing so you translate that into someone just like a home enthusiast doing it and there's potential there to actually have a lot of fun I'm already thinking, you know, you could make basically, you could actually replicate something like a bingo machine just by putting a whole lot of sources on the table and just making like a matrix like that and then linking the game in. Like there's so many different things you could do. Yeah, I mean, I do think that you would have to go a little bit beyond a single level EM style table because for me, I'm a ramp person. I like ramps and I like habit trails, and I would want to have those all over the place. so I think that there's but maybe you make it so that you have to successfully in terms of making it a game if you will, that you have to successfully design a playfield that meets certain parameters before you unlock the next thing which now you're able to add in this, this and this so that you can actually learn you would need to be it would need to be walked through otherwise the potential for frustration would be huge and in essence that is what LittleBigPlanet did do that in terms of as you played each level when you finished the level that would unlock the toys from that level for you to then use in your building you didn't just get total access to everything you had to go through each level and play it before you were allowed access to that tool so that you would somewhat understand it and how to interact with it. So I think that would be a fair thing to do. That would work pretty well.
    44:02
    I don't know. Well, I love how we're completely speculating about what you should do for a pinball editing game that Farsight could make when there's absolutely no intention of anybody actually doing this. Yeah.
    44:16
    You know, I think, yeah, it's a lovely pipe dream, but because of its technical complexity and to make it something that's really good, you would need someone like Farsight with the asset library that they have to do it. But the chances are that this would make very little money at all because unless you had the concept of including, say, five tables with the package that are completely done so that someone could just pick it up and play it and maybe that would be it for them, that would be the only thing you would do. You could actually sell it on. And then the editor is almost like, so we'll get you started with these five tables. You can use these as a template to adapt if you want.
    45:07
    But you would really need to think about the economics of it because it wouldn't be an easy sell to do it well and make money off it. It's almost like...
    45:19
    Well, unfortunately, it could be a DLC-rich... Oh, yeah. Oh, would you like to unlock pop bumpers? That'll be $1.99. Oh, man. just imagine the nickel and diamond you could do oh you want star targets you want star rollovers oh well that'll be 99 cents absolutely oh you want spinners classic stern style well that's going to be $8 I was going to say thank you for doing a massive price jump on that yeah exactly so oh yeah you could totally make this a horrible experience for gamers if you wanted to but it's It is fun to explore the idea because, you know, really it comes down to this, though. Like, there are people who enjoy pinball, and then there's a minute subset of those people who would actually want to go, you know what? I want to have a go at building a table. So there the 5 of the market who like pinball and then there the 0 of the market that would like to build a table using an editor Well you think about just even the real pinball world with collectors There are those that enjoy restoring machines, and the second they have it restored, sell it. They can then restore another machine. There are others that want no part of maintenance and just want to play the things. And then there's the other. right and then there's everybody in between you know kind of thing where it's you know they enjoy variations of all aspects so yeah I mean it's kind of bonkers what could be what can be out there oh definitely so hey let's uh yeah okay go ahead I was going to say I have a quick machine update so I decided to just have a week off work this week and And it was because Kim was starting a new job and it was the start of school. And I thought, well, I could try working from home during that week, but I already feel like it would be disrupted being the first week back at school. And so I thought, well, no, I'll take a week off. It was a short week because it was Australia Day yesterday. Well, sorry, on Friday. So I thought, cool, I'm just going to spend this week. my goal for this week is to get everything painted and to the point where I could stand it up on its legs and the long and short of it is I nearly got there um the only thing that I need to do is turn the machine on its head and paint the back before I can put the legs on because of course I could just paint the back with the legs on but then I have these voids of unpainted fog basically and that look gross so i want to just turn the thing on its head paint the back and then i am ready to put this thing up on its legs um a few little i've been i decided this week during the process to actually make short videos um of uh the restoration process and the little tricks that i use to get the table to where it is now um this week so if you want to check those out you can go to my YouTube channel and they're about two or three minutes each and I put them into a playlist. So you can just go and watch the playlist and you'll see where I started and where I got to at the end. So it's an interesting journey that I went on this week and I'll probably actually continue to do that as I go through and move through the different restoration stages of the table. Kind of kicking myself I didn't do it earlier and do it when I was making gussets and like bulking up the whole table and doing the really nasty work on this thing to make it look like it is the other thing i learned too is that uh i i repainted the cabinet and it's went straight over the decals not the decals the stencils um because it would have been impossible to actually cut into them um but i've found out that i used the wrong type of paint and i used basically a wall paint just like you would paint your house with and um apparently that wasn't the right choice according to the bloke of bunnings um that i spoke to i should have used like a full-on enamel paint and it was an acrylic water base i used i should use like enamel and should have been this particular type and i went whatever it's done now so i said so what can i do but it's done i'm not stripping off the paint so what can i do now to actually make it a bit stronger he goes oh well you just put this this essentially lacquer over the top of it and that'll actually give the paint a bit of strength and I've got to say it's it's kind of real nice it looks very shiny quite gloss um and it's toughened up the surface because before like when I was moving the the head box around and stuff like that I turned the head box inside and then when I pulled it back up again I noticed there was a bit scuffing on the paint I went well that's not a good sign um but I haven't done that since with the with the varnish on the top but I think it'll be a lot more hard wearing now. So it's good. Yeah, making progress. Cool.
    50:18
    I'm just looking forward to getting the playfield back in and then starting to work on that. Right. And making the call whether I go down and get a spray can of clear coat and go down the rabbit hole with that. I'm kind of thinking about that I might. I don't know. I'll just have to wait and see. I'm sure it will reveal itself as it did for you when you start to get down to the nuts and bolts of it. Yeah, just don't do what I did and then spend four years thinking about it.
    50:47
    Yeah. That might be happening. Other business to take care of before we wrap up the show. If you have not checked out our new site, why don't you do so? All you have to do is type in blockadepinball.com forward slash episodes. That'll get you straight to where the site is, and from there you can navigate to whatever you want to look at.
    51:11
    With the site, I've just started posting reviews also of the things I go and see so you'll be seeing a lot more of those and Jared is thinking of starting up the, like he mentioned earlier starting up the YugoPlay pinball adventures that he seeks out and doing little mini reviews of those I've already got a number of games queued up for that little venture Great Yeah so there's some surprises around the corner there that you guys can look forward to so there's that make sure you follow the show at blockade on twitter or follow me and Jared I am at shut your traps he is at Jared Morgz you can also fire off an email to us if you have any questions suggestions comments what have you we love seeing them blah blah blockade at gmail.com do that wizard amusement.com the site to visit for custom pinball shooter easy to install totally unique mention blockade podcast for 10 off your order with remusement.com sales restoration customization don't forget to leave a review on itunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that blockade is delivered to we can't improve unless you tell us how now stop listening and play some pinball okay my last little bit uh because it's one of these things that i see it all the time and this particular one kind of sent me over the edge. But you come across those clickbait things on Facebook where it's an article and you go, I know better than to click on this because I know it's clickbait, but darn it, I want to see what they have to say. And then you click it and you kick yourself for even doing this because either it's one of those things where the image that they showed you that got you interested in the first place is nowhere to be found in the 20 pages that It had you click through or you get some of the sloppiest ill written material you've ever come across. Yeah. So usually the latter, usually the latter. So the one that I just came across, it was, uh, something regarding why you should think twice about buying a Tesla as if I can buy a Tesla, but I still really enjoy the idea of a Tesla and would love to own one.
    53:36
    Well, this person, And it was literally each point was a paragraph long, and then you had to click next to go to the next page because that's why they call it clickbait. Because then they're able to say, hey, I've gotten so many clicks on my site. Well, the person started off with the things that just drive me stupid with when people complain about electric, specifically a Tesla, which is, you know, you got to charge it. And if you run out of charge, you can't just call AAA and have them give you some gas. It's like, yeah, no, duh. And the whole point of this car is that it has 250 plus miles of travel. And so the guy sitting there saying, you know, if you're traveling long distances, well, if you're doing a normal commute, I doubt that you're traveling more than 100 miles in round trip, let alone one way. And even if you are, you're still fine. if you're going on a long vacation drive then you're probably going to be planning out your route anyway you're not just going to be randomly driving so yeah and then if the guy had and he goes because the charging stations are hard to find well if you had done any even remote research you would know that the cars are built in with a little thing that tells you where the next charging station is and how far it is and specifically if you're running low on charge that you might want to think about pulling in. It'll reroute you to... You'll go, you're low on charge. You need to go here now so you can actually keep driving.
    55:15
    And in terms of... And this is all related to... This article was written for people here in the United States. So forgive me if it's different for Europe. But the guy was saying that there was a lack of charging stations. Well, the mere fact that you can drive anywhere in the United States all the way across the United States and find charging stations the entire way... pretty much tells you the story. Oh, right. Okay, so this is not just limited to the big build-up areas of the U.S. You can go coast-to-coast in a Tesla. Yes. Right. Yes. And not just east-west. Elon Musk won't just go. And not just east-to-west. You can go north and south, east-west, whatever direction you want to go in. So there was that. then the guy then the guy uh states and he goes he goes you're gonna go through the tire or you don't get much life on the tires i'm like oh okay this is interesting well the first thing he points out oh the first thing he pointed out was there's no spare tire okay a lot of cars don't have spare tires my mini cooper didn't have a spare tire now my mini cooper ran on run flats so there was that and he said that these cars don't run on run flats.
    56:27
    Okay, fine. There is that threat of having a blowout, and then you're screwed. But after driving my Cooper for nine years, I think I only had one blowout, and it was easily resolved.
    56:44
    I would think that if you own a Tesla, they have roadside assist anyhow, don't they? Yes, they do. And again, this guy is not very well informed. It was really easy to tell. But so then he goes, oh, and you're going to burn through tires fast. He goes, because, you know, if you're stomping on those zero to 60 in an electric car, well, what do you think happens if you do that in your Dodge Hellcat? Yeah, you're going to burn a lot of rubber. I'm sorry. You're going to go through it. OK, you're going to smoke. If you're the idiot that's constantly smoking tires, I don't care what tire you have on there. You're going to go through them fast. But then he goes, you're going to maybe only get 40,000 to 50,000 miles on a tire. That seems fine. That's standard. That's fine. Yeah.
    57:30
    And then he says, oh, and they're really difficult to drive in the snow. Well, it's not a snow car. It's not a four-wheel drive. Everybody has problems driving in the snow. And his whole thing was, because that's going to cost you another $2,000 to get snow tires.
    57:52
    Again, anybody that lives in the snow has their winter tires. They're going to have to pay for it. Just drives me bonkers. When mouth breathing idiots ran. So then the one that I, I unfortunately, I only got about eight pages into this 25 page clickbait thing.
    58:12
    The, it's, it's a, hopefully, well, cause it said 25 points. And so I only got to like eight, but when he said he goes part of the snow driving thing, it was like, cause you might get the, the snow might send you sideways and then you're, you might roll the car.
    58:27
    Here's the thing about a Tesla. When they put it through the testing factory, you know, for a safety testing, they could not roll the car because the center of gravity is so low because of all the weight of the battery, which is down at the bottom of the pan. They had to falsify the manner with which to roll the car.
    58:48
    Like they had to put out an absolute, an actual obstacle for it to slam up against and then something to propel it upwards so that it would roll. Right. To actually do the roll test. Yes. They could not make it roll in the standard fashion that they would be able to do any other vehicle.
    59:07
    Clearly, this guy had no clue what he was talking about. That was when I was like, I'm done. I hate the way these people... Who is paying? I don't know. Can I get that job? Because clearly you don't have to be writing absolute drivel remotely any thing of a writer so what happens if you get somebody that actually has aspirations of doing good writing i don't know well then they're not a clickbait writer because they're not a clickbait writer yeah that's exactly because they actually make sense and um they do their research which is not what a clickbait writer is about i think by writer is sensationalistic writing so that you go onto their website and they get the ad imprints that's what a clickbait route is all about.
    59:52
    So you're in the wrong game. I hate it because like I said, I'll be going through and it's as we started the show with the YouTube rabbit hole, I feel it's the same kind of rabbit hole, but I'm able to avoid it for the most part. But now and then I'll come across one of these where I'm like, I'm going to hate myself for clicking this, but I'm curious. I'm going to hate myself. And sometimes it's actually been a normal article and I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm shocked. I'm glad I clicked on it. But nine times out of ten, man, you click on it and you're just going, oh, god damn it.
    60:21
    I've just given this joker eight pages of ad imprints. Right. And pure hatred. And then, of course, because you clicked it the next time you go onto Facebook, it goes, oh, you like these, don't you? It's like, no, I don't. And it gives you more. You're like, no, go away. I'm sorry. There should be an apology button instead of a like button. An apology button. You go, I'm sorry for clicking that. please never make me click on those again.
    60:48
    Please, please stop it. No, like there should be, this was a mistake. Mistake. Mulligan. Yeah, it's all right. Could I have a do over on this link, please? Because this was not really meant to be.
    61:03
    Yeah. So anyway, uh, okay, gang. So as you can tell, we didn't have a, well, we actually milked out some pinball there with a little, yeah, and we got some, see, we managed to do it somehow, folks, but next week promise to the Billy actually there actually be something to talk about as like I said Sorcerer's will be coming out and we'll have the newsletter and we can talk about what the next table that will be coming out is going to be and who knows I might even have the pinball up on late and you might we'll see alright so that's the show for this week folks thanks for listening and we'll catch you all again next time on the Blockade Pinball Podcast bye bye
    61:45
    you