BlahCade Pinball Podcast you are listening to the BlahCade Pinball Podcast i'm your host chris freebus aka shut your trap joining me as always halfway across the world jared morgan well hi there everybody how y'all going my god we actually got this thing to work it's working it is actually working and we will go into the reasons why won't we because it turns out that if you're doing um stuff with obs you both need to be using the same version of skype which happens to be the creator version of skype yeah i discovered that the creator version works so much better than the Windows Store version. Yeah. Well, yes. And it was only just a... It's thanks to Chris, actually, because we were talking about it and working through it. He goes, oh, yeah, I'm using the creative version. And I went, oh, I'll just use the version from the Windows 10 Store. You know? And it was like, oh. And we both went, oh. Yeah, yeah. After bashing our heads against the wall for, you know, days on end, going, why doesn't this work? It worked the other week when we tested it. And Jared, you know, ripping apart his his router and yeah i literally restarted everything it was just like a oh i'm restarting the internet it got to that point you know when you restart the internet you know that things are getting serious yes so eventually i was just like here's a thought jared why don't you try deleting whatever version of skype came pre-loaded google search the wind the skype for creators and use that and and it works and it works really well as you can see i've got the blurred background if you're watching the video and um it's like a i'm getting my little preview window in the top here everything's working real nice and i can see the thing that was preventing me doing it before is at the moment i'm monitoring the live chat so there's anyone watching live it's me talking back to you in the live chat um so um you know if i was switching between windows that the whole session would lock up and it was just a pile of rubbish so yeah i'm very glad that we got to the bottom of it because it means that number one i can say okay skype's not as bad as i really thought because surely like it had been a number of years since i used skype and i was going surely they should have fixed a lot of the stuff that originally was causing all the problems with it and if they have you just don't use the windows 10 version because it's rubbish and so basically now we just need to communicate with like mel whenever he uh next time we have him on no you create a version or nothing creator version otherwise it's not gonna work like the the thing that's different and if you you'll probably never notice this as a user of skype unless you notice it because you have to is that the the windows 10 version has the sort of metro style menus that are common in all of the windows apps but the skype creators version has the old style sort of gray with thin text menus that you you see in a lot of the apps so there's something has gone awry when they've actually gone and converted this into a windows 10 proper app yeah it's running behind it's called microsoft piling all their gack on junk exactly and for the record it wasn't actually bundled with the computer because my computer didn't come bundled with anything. It wasn't a Surface Book or anything, so you don't get a lot of the Microsoft-included apps. I had to install this deliberately from the store initially when I got it. Oh, because when I installed Windows 10, it was one of the apps that was pre-installed. And when I started with it, mine was a custom-built computer. So it was the second that I installed Windows 10, that just happened to be one of the apps that was in there. It's kind of like how you got the Microsoft Edge, which I pretty much deleted as soon as I got chrome yeah install as everybody does it's like oh okay that's nice why is it microsoft edge is just a bootloader for chrome that's all it is you use it that one time to get chrome and then that's the last really it's the funny thing about that you know we're going off topic here but you should be used to that by now folks but um the thing about you know um edge is that they really they really try and get you to keep with them go you know what it's so much faster on windows 10 You know, it's power efficient. You'll get so much more battery life out of it. And I thought, you know what? I'll take the challenge. I'll actually use Microsoft Edge for as long as I possibly can until I hit something that stops me from actually using Edge. Have a guess how long it took until I hit something that stopped me from doing stuff that I needed to do. Oh, I'm going to guess within 10 minutes. No, it was longer than that. It was nearly six hours. Wow. Nearly six hours. It got to the point where I was trying to use Edge at work, and I had this little pop-up modal thing that I needed to copy text from, and it would just select the entire modals text. Not just the text I wanted to copy, but the entire modals text I needed to copy and paste. And I went, that's it. I found it. That's the thing that's going to stop me from using this browser. It's dead. But the thing is now, you've got to realize, too, that Microsoft have given up, basically, and they're using a Chromium build now to do Windows Edge browser. So they've actually switched to Chromium as the back end for their browser. So you're kind of going to be using Chrome anyhow. It's kind of funny. A good friend of mine, we're on different political spectrums, but we're really good friends. And so he likes to call up and have these conversations sometimes that I just kind of go, oh, God, we have to have one of these again. And so he was going off on a rant about how, or not a rant, but I guess Google had gotten in trouble because they were filtering Google searches from right-wing party platforms, not in the same manner that they filter left-wing. and it was basically making it tougher to do searches for conservative topics than if you were looking for liberal topics. And there were these behind-the-scenes emails and things of that nature that were coming out and, ooh, doesn't Google look bad? And I just went, well, so use Bing. Or DuckDuckGo. I'm like if you really don't like Google just go use Bing you got a choice come on use it and it was like but no I don't know about that that's taking it a bit too far you can't no no no that's just that's just mean that's not right either I had to kind of laugh at that nature of things so anyway yay we're up and running go figure so let's put it to good use because we've got some stuff to talk about we've not done it a couple of weeks and we got a we got a backlog of items yes and and folks all uh preface this also i i if i have a coughing fit i've had the flu all week uh which i haven't had this kind of illness since i was a little kid where you're just running a fever for days on end and no reason why um but i'm mostly better that's good yeah i'm choosing to pretend like i'm 100 and hopefully the cough doesn't interrupt. But if it does, I unfortunately have not figured out how to do the mute button yet on OBS. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah. That's all right. We'll deal with it. Yeah. Oh, and you'll also notice, you know, yeah, so Jared's got the cool blurred out background and I don't because OBS doesn't do that. You have to do a third-party app. Oh, right. Okay. There you go. Yeah. So, hey, you know. That's all right. You've got cool stuff in your background. You've got the pin cab and you've got a shelf with bits and pieces on it. Yeah, I've got a little Ms. Pac-Man cabinet up there and Bob and Doug McKenzie from the Great White North. I'm going to fix it. I've got some posters that are coming up for the Brisbane Pinball Festival at the exhibition, and I'm going to get those laminated and put them in shot where the boxes and stuff are that are blurred out at the moment. So you'll get some pinball-related decorations in the feed in the coming weeks. All right. Well, why don't we jump right into things, and let's talk about, my favorite topic as of late, the Williams Pinball app. There's been some tweaks and changes, and lo and behold, they're for the better. They're actually improvements. They're actual improvements. Yeah, folks, Zen listens and actually does things. And I know it's weird. you might have these rose-colored glasses on about all the wonderful things that Farsight did with the Pinball Arcade and how quick they were to fix things. Let's start with it. So I posted a tweet that it was like, hey, you created this timed event with the Volume 4 release that was really fantastic because it let you collect up to Level 2 enough parts to upgrade to level 2 for all three of the new tables within a week. I mean, that was fantastic. But then it's like, wait, are we going to just have that little stopwatch symbol sit there until the next volume? No, don't do that, for God's sakes. No, there's so much cool that you can do with it. And one of the suggestions that I had was if there's a special event that runs a few days, make it so that you earn a buttload of parts or tickets or coins or something something yeah yeah you know something that makes it so that you want to along with everybody else jump in and play on the app right then and there and so what do you know they did it for you're in the states july 4th you know that's the day we blew up yes we blow up lots of things in the air um and so aliens yeah aliens yes uh well in that movie they blew us up but there you go um so they put attack from mars for basically four days of play uh actually excuse me i think it was six days of play but two challenges each day and you were earning a just i think i earned 16 coins in one day and i don't know how many tickets over the course of four days I basically hauled in 60 coins. Wow. I mean, that's not too shabby considering it normally you would earn a max of three coins per day for playing all four challenges. That's a good haul in that case. Yeah. And I have some other suggestions of fun things that they could do whether they did the pin golf. I think we mentioned it last time. some other ideas but anyway yeah we did then clearly listened uh or was thinking on the same page i'm just sort of like vocalized what they were thinking yes i'm gonna pretend that it was all us though and why wouldn't i right um the other thing that they instituted uh and i think this actually happened a while but i was finally able to confirm it for myself since i was now back collecting parts there is a hard cap on parts once again so once you reach the 170 parts needed for any given table you will stop earning those parts and only earn for whatever is remaining now i can't confirm if this was a change or not but i found with my own experience all my tables were like if one table started getting a lot of parts within the next day or two the other two tables would kind of catch up so there's kind of a slingshot effect happening so that was kind of nice too in terms of you know a balanced approach to to get your tables all leveled yeah and once you have those tables leveled regardless of if you do the upgrade or not you start earning coins instead of parts. Nice. Right. So again, that helps. Basically, I kind of did the math, and I know this sounds insane to some people, but if you played the three challenges, ignore the premium that you have to pay 200 coins for, if you just played the basic, advanced, and pro challenge once per day, so that's nine times of playing in the course of a day, and defeating all of those challenges. If you do that for four months, even if you were a noob, starting out brand new, after four months of doing that seven days a week, that's the part that people are going to go, oh, God. Yes, it's a full-time job with no breaks. But seriously, you're basically going to be playing for about an hour a day doing that. You will upgrade all your tables fully without ever spending a single dime. A cent. Yeah. Now, if you got a little more aggressive and paid the 20 and 30 tickets to recycle the basic and advanced challenge, and recycled them twice, played it, recycled it again, played it, so basically playing those three times a day, within 30 to 40 days, you'll have everything. Okay, okay. that's for free pretty good that's fast yeah i mean and the the problem is is people get this feeling that they're not moving anywhere and that's because the curve is really flat for a while but once you hit start collecting things you can just skyrockets you know that's really true because i as an aside that that i could corroborate that for sure because i'm playing a completely different game at the moment where i had exactly that same feeling and now this is a game that i played before heaps of mobile and it's sky force right but i got on steam because it was a steam summer sale right it was cheap like i got both games for eight bucks like and i went well shut up and take my money this is awesome yeah um so you know you start off with with the very underpowered ship it's basically like this little pew pew pew thing shooting out the front of it you basically can't shoot anything it's like the old days of space invaders where you could only fire one shot until it hit the target and then you could fire another shot? No, it will give you a continuous stream of shots, but it's like a pea shooter, really, when you first start, particularly if you've come from the mobile game where you've maxed out everything and then you go back to just nothing. Oh, yeah, that's painful. You know, and of course, mobile, Steam, there's no way you're going to synchronize those changes over. So you've got to start from scratch, but there's actually something fun about that. Anyhow, you start with the pea shooter, and of course it still has a stars mechanic where you use the stars to actually upgrade your ship over time and live rain stars in this game it's very generous so you know you start off with a pea shooter and then you slowly upgrade your main weapon then you show slowly get access to like the other weapons like the wing weapons and the missiles and stuff like that you start to get you know a little bit more a little bit more and then when you get up to the like um the insane levels where you're getting like a three times star multiplier it's raining stars and you start to just upgrade things really, really, really quickly. But it's that initial ramp up where you go, wow, this is like chopping wood. And it's a bit like that in the app, isn't it? Yeah, it's totally like that. I mean, when I first started collecting parts for Hurricane and Roadshow and Whitewater, look, that first one-star upgrade, it only takes five parts. Boom, all of a sudden you're getting ready to collect for your next one. It takes a little longer to get up to two stars. and then suddenly you're faced with, oh man, now I need 50 parts in order to get to a three-star. And they just seem to come so slow. And as you're going, like I said, because the target just seems so far away. But once you start getting close to the target, then all of a sudden it seems like they're clicking up again. this is where my tracking the data daily and seeing that the numbers were consistent and being able to actually go hey by this date i'll have it done it you know you gave me the light at the end of the tunnel if you will yeah and that's what you need when you're playing like a freemium title you don't know if you're new to it where it's going to end really and in some cases there are games that where it literally never ends and you've played those games as well and We've covered those in podcast past. And, you know, there's a certain type of person that doesn't mind about that. But there's some people who go, oh, no, I'm giving up. Because I don't know the end goal here. It's like an infinite sort of play. Like Candy Crush is a classic example of that. They just keep adding levels. There is no finish. Yeah, that's pretty much why I stopped playing Candy Crush. Because it was like, I can't catch up. No, I'm done. It was just stupid. And I knew somebody that actually was obsessed with it and caught up with it to where Oh really Yeah they actually caught up and were waiting on levels to drop To the 8 levels Mm-hmm. Wow. And I was like, how often do you play? And they were like, oh, it's just nonsense. My life. It's my life. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, other things. Other fixes that Zen has been working on with the app. one of the problems that people were complaining about was if you accidentally pushed purchase 5,000 coins, or not 5,000 coins but you know that's not an accidental push upgrade the table with 250 coins upgrade the table to 2 stars if you accidentally pushed it it immediately extracted the 250 coins if you had them there was no are you sure you want to do this screen so a couple of people have had that happen they had a contact zen said hey I didn't really mean to push that and now i'm penalized and zen was kind enough to refund them but zen also has now stated that they're working on uh adding that one little so important yeah the human error button of the are you really sure that you wanted to do that um because it's mobile like you it's so easy to botch a like you know get your fat finger out and you know whack a button you didn't mean to whack or pretend you were wanting to scroll the list and then accidentally tap the button. I could do it all the time. Or you're thinking, oh, if I tap this, it'll tell me what it's going to give me because there's no hover the mouse over it kind of thing. It's essentially a menu, not a purchase. Right, right. So they're doing that. And then also one of the similar things, like I said, it was upgrade the table to two stars for 250 coins. Well, the problem was even if you had already upgraded the table to two stars, that option was still there. And so people were like, well, is that upgrading me? Is that giving me the other two stars to now upgrade me to four? And so that was causing confusion. So Zen now is going to... Basically, they need to write the code in. And I think they already did this one. This one might have already been implicated. Where again, much like the parts caps, It recognizes what you've already achieved and therefore eliminates menu options based off of that. That's good. So they're essentially reading what you've got. And that's how it should be too. Everything should be conditional, basically. Yeah. Very nice. Very nice. That's excellent. Just wanted to highlight those fixes that are going on with the Williams app. And, you know, for those of you that really, really are angry that you can't purchase the tables outright, well, do me a favor and go ahead and just read my thread about data collection and how you too can get these tables for free. And then you can spend – Just by playing it. Right. And then you can send the $10 that you were planning on spending on Zen to us via PayPal, and we'll just be appreciative of that. Yeah, that's right. Just redirect your funds. Don't give it to Zen. Oh, no, do give it to Zen because they're nice people. But if you're going to just take our advice, then yeah, throw us a Benjamin or two. Okay, let's move on to another topic that I saw. This whole episode is just questions. so there was a thread that was basically asking hey is repurchasing the zen williams tables really worth it compared to if you already have them on in tpa and my answer is a resounding yes but uh yeah i mean it's like duh but uh no but i mean you may not you may not think that based off of whatever platform you currently have. That's true. I mean, if you're a mobile player, you'll have a very different opinion about what these tables are actually playing like compared to if you're a Steam player. Precisely. So here's my advice. If you're a Steam player, just download FX3. It's free. The platform is. And guess what? Within the Williams app, you get fishtails for free. For free. Yeah. And you can go ahead and try out the new physics. The pro physics. The pro physics. They're labeled under... There's single player, and then there's classic single player. You want to play classic single player, select arcade mode, and play that. As soon as you're done playing that, then go ahead and load up the TPA version. Yeah. If you can deign to. If the visuals alone don't convince you, then the physics will for sure convince you that it's totally worth repurchasing. So that's if you're a Steam player. I believe, I mean, the same thing is for PlayStation 4 and for Xbox One and for the Switch. Those are all, Fishtails is free on all of them. yeah well that's it is as mel said his dream because he loves fish tails and he loves the fact that everyone gets it for free now i should say on the switch well there is no repurchasing because you unless you were one of those people that bought it for the six hours that was up on the store uh you never were able to you can't experience the uh the pinball arcade version of it no yeah no and and then you also won't have to deal with the fact that for some reason pinball arcade makes you flip the switch the exact opposite direction of every other app when you go into portrait mode reverse portrait lovely yeah um so there's that i saw that they are um i saw that actually doing a switch light they've got a switch light out now um that uh has no removable controllers and no docking capabilities it's essentially like a psp and it's got all the controls and everything built in. So in other words, it's basically going to be replacing their 3DS. Maybe, or complementary to. I read an article on it which is really well put and it's the fact that they can see that there's some hardcore Switch users that love the fact they can plug it into the TV and love the fact they can use Nintendo Labo and stuff like that. But there's a lot of people out there that just want portability and don't want to have to carry a bag just to carry all the junk in it that they need to play the Switch with. Right, they're using it purely as a mobile gaming platform. That's right, yeah. And, you know, it still has. I think they've given it a slight processor bump and a couple of other minor fixes. Maybe, I think they might have actually slightly increased the battery or perhaps by putting the better system on a chip in, they've slightly improved the battery life because that was a big problem with the Switch. You didn't get a lot of mobile gameplay out of it because, really, it lasted for about three hours, I think, maximum. Yeah, that sounds about right. My son plays predominantly in the mobile manner and is constantly then throwing it back on the dock to charge it. It's funny, you know, because it uses the same processor that I had in my Shield tablet, which is an absolute beast. My Android tablet, which is the Tegra K1. and it had the same problem. It just gobbled the battery because it was like a PC-grade processor, and it needs it. The Switch has got an amazing graphics pipeline on it, and it needs that power to actually do it, but it's actually aging quite a bit now, like the Tegra chipset, so I think a big refresh of the Switch is probably well overdue, I think. But yeah, anyhow, that's an aside. I just thought that's really cool that they actually have a lower-priced entry-level model because there's lots of good stuff on the Switch. There's surprisingly a large amount of shoot-'em-ups and a lot of good pinball games coming in there now. Yeah. Yeah, Tangents, a specialty of our podcast. We do it, and we do it well. So those of you that are, though, purely in the mobile, in the tablet world, if you're only playing games on Android or iOS, the decision of is it worth it becomes a little trickier except for again when you look at the graphics alone and Fishtails is not quite as obvious as some of the other tables but Pinball Arcade did this weird thing depending on what year it was and when they were doing how much of the screen the pinball table itself would fill a lot of times there's a lot of real estate up at the top uh to the sides it whereas zenz does a really good job of filling up everything some of the like if you look at uh party zone i think the flippers look like they're practically like not 90 degrees straight down but more like 70 degrees they're really steeply steeply down and it messes with your head in terms of how you want to shoot i think that's also one or there was a different one that i was kind of sampling between where the the table almost had like a fisheye curve you know oh yeah going for it um but then i would look at other tables and they were nicely filling out everything to the sides but they're like you look at roadshow there is one where it filled nicely to the sides but they lower the whole screen and then they put the dmd up there and so there's actually less real estate for what you're seeing as opposed to what zen has done yeah now that's going to be that's going to be tricky to compare if you don't have access to the tables to play because you're brand new to the game and you know trying to mess with it but in the long run there's no comparison I'm planning on doing a side-by-side comparison video just to kind of show what the difference is and this is playing with just the standard Zen physics and at first you might not think that the standard Zen physics are really that much of an improvement but you can visually see the difference in what happens with the ball and one of the main things that drove me nuts as I was switching between the two is the ball is next to impossible to see in the pinball arcade version on mobile. Oh yeah, it's got no shadow, it's got no definition, it's just this thing floating around the playfield. Well, not only that, but their playfields are so bright and the ball is so silver, it just, unless you're playing with the glow ball, good luck. This plane disappears on you. You're like, whoa, where did it go? and i was for a long time on all tables when the global came in i was definitely playing with that because it was it was weird because again the global changed the illusion of the ball's size a bit as well and which made it hard to play and hard to line up shots but geez you could at least track it it's essentially like having ball trails well and that's the other thing depending on depending on what color the play field is uh sometimes the ball looks like it's the proper size and other times the ball looks like it's way too small because the shadowing of the ball is blending into the play field and so all you're seeing is the highlights the highlights are obviously smaller a perfect example is if you played the victory table and this even is the if a problem on uh steam version of the game if you play victory you're gonna sit there and go what's wrong with the ball why does it look like i'm playing with a bb instead of a pinball um it does have a very small feel to it. I remember playing that even on mobile and it felt subtly strange. Yeah. But you know, it's water under the bridge now, really. We don't know anything about what's happening with Pinball Arcade. And there's the final thing. Do you want to hold on to an app that pretty much is getting no support? Yeah, it's zero. And it's not going to get any more support, even though they stated that they would still be supporting the app um clearly those of us who have been with the platform for a long time know that that's just a flat-out lie well they'll support it if the app up and crashes and then they'll go and fix the crash and make it function again but improving enough people complain that's the thing that they won't fix it if it crashes and no one complains so yeah um or do you want to go with the version of the app where, as I said, it's being constantly updated and fixed as we speak? Yep. It has a very, very bright future. A very bright future across all platforms. Particularly mobile, actually. I think probably mobile is going to be the killer for Zen moving forward with its integration into its cabinets. Oh, right, yeah. That's going to be like the hook, basically. excuse me um anyway that's that so that was just my little uh moment of let's address that yes it's worth repurchasing um especially right now they're on sale on the switch and i can't remember what other console they're on sale for season or excuse me volumes one two and three i think are 50% off right now and Volume 4 is 25% off. So you compare that to the way Pimble Arcade ran discounts and it was like there was no way you would ever get a discount off the latest season within even a year of it releasing. They were really tight with it. And then it would be 25% off max. Yeah. I think the best sale that they were running was like 30% it for a long time and and then all of a sudden season one would be like okay we'll give season one pro yeah yeah pro with basically half of it not working anyhow so you know far out and yeah hey look i'm i'm having a chat with um friend of the show pinball whiz and um he's asking um what about volume five not much what about it happening there hey yeah what about it not much happening right you tell us yeah i honestly i honestly don't expect volume 5 to drop until mid august and the reason why i'm saying this mid august i think all the time scales have gotten shifted uh to line up with zen releasing star wars on the switch in september so basically you You would have Volume 5 drop mid-August, mid-September. You'd get Star Wars on the Switch, which, believe me, Zen is going to be pushing the ever-living crap out of. Oh, yeah. Jeez. They're rather proud of the fact that they're going to be the first Star Wars title on the Switch, period. Which is a big deal. That is a big deal, yeah. So they're going to be putting a lot of promotion behind that. and then there's the rumored uh idea of us getting a license table finally from williams uh in time for halloween which then so now we've really delayed volume six beyond what it should have been and so then i would say volume six would drop sometime like late november early december yeah i think that seems about right i think they were you know trying to get them out every two or so months i think that's what mel had recently said every six to eight weeks but i think more towards the eight week mark and then it's also as mel says game development happens yeah exactly so you know it will be variable volume four would have come out earlier except for deep got the bright idea to make the Philippra physics even better. So, you know, you hold a game back for that. Yeah, I don't think anybody's going to hold it against them for that reason. I actually don't mind the extended time with the tables, and I'll tell you why. So, when we got Volume 4 and I played it in the beta, I was kind of just lackluster on it. I felt the same. I don't like Hurricane, and I really don't like Hurricane now but I didn't like it. I never liked Hurricane to begin with. And Whitewater was always one of those tables where I know it's a good table but I've just never put the time in to figure it out. And Roadshow, hey, it's a lawler and I love lawler but it's also just one of those tables that there's so much on it you never get to see because you never get beyond the Midwest or not even the Midwest. You never – it's like if you can get to past New Orleans for a city – You're doing pretty well. Yeah. You know, I mean, my God, how many times has anybody ever actually reached the West Coast? I think I did it once and it was only because I was playing on zenphysics Right And it was touch and go You used to do it all the time on Pimble Arcade, right? It used to be, oh, yeah, I'm at California. Oh, how'd that happen? Oh, so I was just flipping around. Right. But it's a battle to get to it on zen. It's a real challenge, as it should be, right? Right. So as I'm playing the daily challenges, though, I'm starting to see little nuances and doing little tricks, and I'm actually now much more appreciative of Whitewater and Roadshow because of the fact that there isn't another table just looming a mere few weeks away like it always was the case in Pinball Arcade. That's right. I mean, with Pinball Arcade, there's a reason why I know I played Gladiator a few times, but to me it was like, oh, it's just a godly, meh. It's another cutly premiere. Right. And then I can't even tell you what the name of the skiing one is, because I literally never touched it. Wipeouts. Yeah, Wipeout. So, I mean, that's how disposable it was to me, where it was just like, yeah, I want the whole collection, but I'm not going to play this. I'll just wait for it so I just want to I want to I want to have them sitting on my shelf to look at exactly but I don't really intend on touching any of the got leaves no no yeah this is this release schedule is actually forcing me to spend more time with the tables and then with the challenges and again this is why I love the challenges on mobile is it keeps on cycling in the older tables, right? So it's kind of that random button, but it's not making me random into a three-ball game that's going to last 45 minutes. Exactly. And that is the thing. It's well-balanced. Right. The most time I'm going to spend with a table is five minutes. And that's fine. And that is the beautiful thing about those challenges on mobile. And Steam has that option, too. You get the five-minute challenges, etc. They just give you that burst of pinball that you can just fit into your day. And you can just go, oh, I'm just going to do that now. And then, hey, I've done my pinball. If that's all you can do in a day, you can find five minutes. That's less than a coffee break. Yeah. Yeah. And that's exactly what Zen want. Pretty much. Pretty much. So anyway, there's that. I've been, as an aside, and again, our trademark. Tangents. Tangents. As an aside, I've been going through Steam a little bit, looking into good shoot-'em-ups or shmups, as they're known. And I found a couple that had come on sale from my wish list, and one of them is called Star Paul Mazur DSP. And it's a game that's produced with... There's an indie game app that allows you to do what looks like retro games, and I think it's called Game Maker. and it sort of gives it that 8 or 16-bit aesthetic. So think of the 16-bit shoot-'em-ups that were pretty much seminal on platforms like the Genesis and the Super Nintendo or Super Thumb-a-Con. I'm trying to think of one that would look like R-Type. Yeah, R-Type, that sort of thing. So this game is sort of in that vein, but it's what they call a roguelike shoot-'em-up. So what that means is you've got – what you do is you play through the first game. It starts up just with no power-ups whatsoever. You just play through until you die, and you get what they call score, S-K-O-R-E. And score is essentially like your dollars in the game. So after you finish your first round, you go through and you essentially break open – you get to choose from one of three what almost looks like trading card packs. You rip open the trading card pack based on how much money you got or score you got in the game. And then you can buy your own fleet of pilots that have different weapons, different characteristics, and different sort of chances of staying alive if they get hit. So there's like this hit meter that scrolls back and forth like a radar. And if you get hit and the meter, the little indicator lands in a square that's highlighted, you'll actually stay alive and you won't die. But if you get the meter landing in a bit that's not highlighted, you'll just explode. So it gives you this chance of survival if you get hit by bullets. It's a really interesting mechanic, and the game itself is just full of enemies. And it's got that classic mechanic, too, of shoot-'em-ups, where you've got things to collect in the game, which I love. You know, stars. Give me the stars. And this thing has got these... They call them carbamite in the game, and it's essentially these gems that power up your ship, but you can let them multiply and join together to get massive scores in the game. So you basically sort of have to, the other mechanic is you have to not only shoot the enemies, but you have to sort of avoid these things that you're supposed to collect in the game to let them join together to make really, really big score combos. And it's just there's something about the game mechanic that just really appeals to me. It's a great game. And it's in early access at the moment. So they're just updating it sort of pretty much every week or so. And yeah, it's fantastic. I would recommend it if you like shoot-em-ups. you know how when I talk about movies you sometimes just kind of go I gotta trust you on that because I don't know that was me just then yeah yeah I'm like uh huh schmups again last time I played one was like R-Type on the Genesis that was years and years and years ago so okay Jared we trust you do yourself a favor and get that one it's not that expensive on Steam and it's worth every cent as far as I'm concerned Hey, let's talk about another question that got posed on the Digital Pinball Fans forum. This was by the user HighFive. His thread is titled, Satisfied with price of digital pinballs? Willing to pay more or less? And, God, how often do we cover this topic, Jared? Well, you know what, Chris? I'd like to say for the fact that I'd prefer to play not $7 a table, but I'd prefer to pay at least $45 a table. I love to pay more. I swear we have covered something of this nature at least two or three other times in the podcast, but it pops up now and then. People, you know, I think they get anxious at, when are we going to get one of the good license tables? there's got to be a money thing and they start worrying about the finances of the game studio and it's like why are you worried about what worried about your own finances and paying for the you know the game when it comes out not them making a profit so exactly the the the point of this particular thread though came back to the ever popular notion of hey i'm mostly happy with the pricing that zen has been doing it seems fair and everything and i and i agree i think the zen has found a really perfect sweet spot. With the pricing, yeah. And you've got to understand, like, why Zen doesn't sell their tables individually anymore and they only sell them in packs is what allows them to sell them for the price they do. It's kind of like, you know, Disney, when they go to the cable company, the cable company goes, we just want ESPN. And Disney goes, yeah, but we've got these nine other channels also. and they go yeah but our consumer okay fine our consumer wants maybe the disney channel and maybe national geographic but those other seven we have no clue what those channels even are and we don't want them yeah that's right well guess who does want them disney stockholders because they want to justify why the heck those other channels exist right so exactly right so it's it's like yes, ESPN is costing, say, $10 in carrier rights that gets transferred to you, the customer, and Disney Channel costs another $4. So now you're at $14. Here's the thing, Disney goes, but we'll let you have all nine channels for $12. Oh. Right? Right. And so the cable company, of course, goes, well, yeah, sure, that's great. But you, the consumer, go, but no, I don't even want ESPN. I just want Disney Channel for $4. Give it to me for $4. Well, that's the whole point. It's basically they're taking the spikes and the lows and compressing it into a nice – And just normalizing. Normalizing everything, and it's safety in numbers, if you will. And that's kind of what Zen is doing with selling everything in a pack. Because they don't want to develop a table, for example, like Hurricane. Let's use that as an example. And people go, oh, Hurricane. I don't want to buy that one now, right? Yuck. Or whatever. Right. And no one spends any money on it, so they're left holding the can for this thing. Whereas if they bundle it with two other pretty good games, it's a no-brainer. It just amortizing. Yeah. It minimizes the cost. Yeah. Yeah. And that's smart business. Yeah. So that's why they kind of done that, and it's why we're able to have the prices that we are. But then the people go, well, what if I wanted, and the high five basically said, he goes, look, I'd pay $3 for CSI, but I'd pay $20 for the new Black Knight. I'm like, okay, fine. I understand what you're saying. But let's really look at this. And here's what I'm going to put it to. So, Form Slangers has their Pinball Wicked game. It's the only pinball game that they have. It's a good pinball game. It looks beautiful. It plays rather fun. The physics are not Zen standard, but they're pretty good all the same. they're what Farsight should have done with the Stern pinball app using the Unreal Engine but anyways it's $10 for pinball wicket it used to be a lot more it used to be $30 no it was never $30 I think it was $15 at the max it was never $30 maybe I'm thinking Aussie prices Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, sometimes I forget which country you're in, Jared. Go figure. Yeah. It's low value. But so you think, okay, $10. No, that's pretty good. You know, I understand that's independent company putting out one table. $10 seems like a fair enough price. Fine. It's still a little bit much for me. You know, I'd wait for Steam to sell it half off and pick it up for $5. But there you go, right? Yeah. Okay, so now let me ask you this. What if FormSlingers said, hey, we've got a pinball platform, kind of like what FX3 is, right? We've got 50 tables on this. Ooh, 50 tables, right? Ooh, shiny. Right. Oh, it costs $500. No. But you were cool paying $10 for one table. 50 tables, that's 500 bucks. Buy it now. Why are you suddenly balking at this? And this, folks, is not seeing the forest for the trees. Yeah, it's true. As a one-time purchase, that's fine. But this is not how digital pinball is working out. It's downloadable content constantly. Yeah, it is. And I think in some cases, people at the end of the Pimble Arcade sales cycle, when they were losing their license and everything, they were faced with that dilemma. Oh, yeah. Going, hey, all tables. It was near what? I think we worked out to be nearly. 130 bucks. Oh. Well, no, because people were purchasing the Arcuda pack. Yes. And that was 150 bucks. Yeah. And basically, I mean, I even faced it when I switched from PlayStation 3 over to Steam at the end of Season 2 of Pinball Arcade. And, you know, I'd made Zen purchases on my PS3, and I had the two seasons. And suddenly I come over to Steam, and I'm going, oh, well, I want all these tables on the PC. Oh, jeez. yeah you look at what the lump sum price is and you go okay so maybe i need to be picky and choosy yeah that's right you know it puts you into a predicament right so what what farsight kind of did and i and i've seen so many similarities between the two they kind of followed the model that rock band did except for rock band came out with a disc that had you know 70 80 songs on it that they were charging a full price of $60, so less than a buck a song, basically. Yeah. Of which only a third of them you probably even wanted to be in with. Want to play. Right. Sure you wound up loving a lot of them later. Again, the block pack purchasing aspect of it, because you start liking something that you didn't think that you would like originally. That's right. You know, or that you were ashamed to admit that you liked. so Fireside skipped that and went straight to the DLC part so what's the DLC part? well Rock Band then started coming out with a song I can't remember if they were doing it packs every week or if it was every month but it was packs of songs it was like anywhere from two bucks to five bucks a pack for these things and you go sure I want those songs let me just buy those sure as they come you're like oh sure whatever but then you realize one day there's over 5 000 songs that were available for download 5 000 is that true yeah no i'm not kidding there were over 5 000 songs available for download and there were people that had bought every single one of them at full price wow that's a lot of money that's like that's the most expensive video game ever right it's ten thousand dollars they're bats if not yeah no i mean it's insane so again are you still happy about thinking that ten dollars is worth it um yeah and i'll even put it that the reason why zen is able to keep their prices consistent and why they should is, again, look at Star Wars on the Switch. I guarantee you, they had to come up with a new licensing agreement with Star Wars or with Disney to be able to put it onto that console. And I point that out because who ran into an issue put it on our site when they tried to sneak stuff onto the Switch? Nope, that violates your contract. So they had to come up with a new contract. Now, Jared, do you think that the price they originally paid for the Star Wars license is the same that they had to renegotiate for and pay for the Switch? I'd say it might be... A little bit more? Oh, yes, maybe. A little bit more. I'm going to say it's going to be a little bit more. More movies. More intellectual property has been released since they would have originally negotiated it, right? Absolutely. Plus the Disney brand is now firmly attached behind it and disney believes that their branding alone is worth x dollars dollars right because it's going to bring you that many more eyeballs so zen's point of view is yeah it's going to bring us it basically acts as a lost leader so zen might be taking a hit on putting this out but and we go back to that video that we mentioned when they were at the star wars celebration of the two girls that hopped onto the pinball cab. For the first time. Yeah, exactly. For the first time, not pinball people at all, just Star Wars fans. And they were noticing all the cool Star Wars stuff in the pinball, and then they actually took notice of the pinball. That's right. And started going, hey, this is kind of cool. It's franchise first. Franchise first. Game later. Right. But once they have a taste for the game, they're going to go into the e-store and be like, so what other pinball is out there? Things we got here. And look what Zen has. They've got a whole host of other pinball tables. It like oh look they got Bethesda stuff Oh look they got Portal I remember playing that you know et cetera So like I say it acts as a loss leader Now because the price is exactly the same psychologically, the person goes, cool. Oh, show up and take my money. Cool. Yeah, fine. This is fine. It's not like it's that different. It's like maybe a couple of bucks different in some cases. And, you know, going back through Zen's back catalog, you get some pretty tasty bulk deals if you want to like go and get the marble packs and stuff. There's steep discounts applied to those already, even if they're outside of the sale. Yeah, except the Marvel tables aren't on the Switch yet. True, true. I'm sure it's going to happen at some point. They're going to get them on there. But basically what it comes down to is think about movies. When you go to see a movie, it doesn't matter if the movie had a $1 million budget or a $200 million budget. The ticket price you pay is the same. It's the same, yeah. When that movie comes out on DVD, it doesn't matter what the budget was. It doesn't matter if the thing tanked at the box office. The DVD price on release weekend is going to be relatively the same within a couple of bucks of other releases, at least upon release. So why is it? Why does that make sense? It's because all the – People budget their lives around things like that, right? Well, no. It has nothing to do with – I'm thinking in the business sense. It has to do with how you do negotiations. So you're negotiating with directors and actors and producers. You're negotiating wages with unions for what the crews are paid. You're negotiating distribution rights. You're negotiating with the theaters. By making everything the same, all the risk gets put onto the producers, basically, of what to spend the money on. And none of it gets put onto the audience. the audience then winds up dictating if it's a hit or not because they're going into the movies with the same perception so let's say you went into that's true you went into the last avengers movie which cost north of probably 250 million dollars to make right and the ticket price was 45 a ticket to help compensate for the licensing fees and the budget of the film right yeah so you go in and you're you're now thinking well sky for 45 bucks this thing better be spectacular right better be good yeah right then you go and you go see john wick and you only get charged 15 bucks because its budget was only 65 million or so right you come out of that going wow wow that was awesome but when you went and stepped in was your thought kind of like well this obviously isn't going to have as many explosions. It possibly is not going to be as good. Because of the price point. Is that whole... Look, are you kidding me? I think about women's handbags. My wife will sometimes show me pictures and she'll be like, look at this one. How much do you think this thing's worth? And I'll be like, I don't know. $3,500. $3,500. I'm like, $3,500? Just stupid. And then you realize that that thing is being manufactured probably in the exact same factory as its low-budget cousin by the exact same people using the exact same kind of materials. The only difference is somebody slapped a higher price tag on it. Yeah, because it's got a Prada logo on it. Right. It's now. But because it's so obscenely priced, everybody immediately thinks, oh, it's luxury. It must be better, right? Well, that would be the same effect with the movies. if they're charging $45, it must be way better than the movie that I'm only going to have to pay $10 to go see, right? Yeah. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. Because then there's also plenty of movies that are really good, but the audience just didn't turn out for whatever reason, and so the thing bombs. And everybody goes, oh, it must be terrible because nobody went and saw it. Yeah, or it bombed at the box office. Well, yeah. Then it comes out on cable. People pick it up. All of a sudden, it gains this grain following. Everybody goes, well, why the heck? That was a really good movie. Why didn't it do better? Is it because nobody went to see it? Right. But you had that perception when you went to finally go see it going, oh, this probably sucks, but I'm going to watch it. No, whatever. I've got nothing else to do. Right. So there's this perception. So this is where it comes back to Zen. if they're going to charge the exact same price whether it's an original table a licensed original table a williams table a williams licensed uh table a stern table a whatever table if they always are going to price it the exact same when they go and make these negotiations with the ip holders every license is being held equal it's not like you know that way when they when they go and approach whatever licensed company, they're going, well, wait a second. How come you're offering ours for significantly less than you offered theirs? That's not fair. You almost started thinking of that favored nations thing that happened with Christopher Lloyd and Raul Julia on Adam's Family, which is why we didn't get Christopher Lloyd in it. Exactly. You know, where it was like, there was that, well, no, no, no. my star status is of equal or higher value. No, if you make everybody the same, then you leave it up to the consumer to determine if it's going to be a hit or not. Exactly. I think you're right. So that's why I'm saying, let's keep the prices nice and low. Let's let all the Zen tables be priced exactly the same across the board. Let Zen worry about if it financially makes sense or not. and let's keep our pocketbooks going, hey, no, this is the sweet spot. Don't go beyond it, please. Or go plus minus 10% either way if you need to. Right. They will find a way to make it work because they'll know that there's an audience for it. And again, there's plenty of instances of business where they use things as a loss leader. They know they're going to sell it for a loss, but they're going to make the profit up elsewhere. Elsewhere, yeah. And, you know, all the Zen licenses and Zen platforms, they are, from the very initial design, they are an ecosystem. So they will complement each other. Yes. And, you know, that is the reason why in this particular case you don't need to worry about variable pricing. Because they are essentially just another SKU in the universe of Zen pinball. and you know two years from now are you suddenly going to say boy that black night table is worth the ten dollars i paid or you may because you might be playing it every day but at the same time you'd be saying the same thing if it was four dollars right you know exactly so again if you really want to throw money stupid money around throw it at us we'll put it together yeah Yeah, spend your $4.99 on your table pack or whatever it is in the U.S. and then, yeah, siphon off the rest to us. We'll gladly accept your generosity with your money. All right. Hey, Jared, why don't we finish up here in a moment? Yeah, it seems like a good place to finish. No, I'm not done yet. Jumping on me like that. How dare you? Well, you know, we have been yakking on for like a good hour now. That's because of your tangents. we're going to play with a little game of I don't think so Tim we're going to play a little game of would you rather but first we're going to go hit the normal things that we've got to hit like the socials, hey did you notice this corner right here yeah look at that, look at that socials, but for those of you listening that doesn't help so follow me at ShutYourTraps follow Jared at JaredMorgz follow the show at Blockade and we'll leave it at that. That's enough of those socials. Okay. You know where we are. Yeah, you know where we are. Jared, would you rather own eight restored pre-1975 EMs or one modern stern? Space not being an issue. Space not being an issue? Correct. Not being an issue. Because you said EMs, one modern stern, please. That was my response. I was like, I don't care if you have 20 EMs. They all eventually feel the same. And they will all die. Yeah. Okay. Jared, would you rather have Zen get the Gottlieb license but only produce the Premiere tables, because those are the ones that have DMDs, or Magic Pixel gets it and only makes EM and early solid state tables of Gottlieb? Or give it to Magic Pixel. I agree. Give it to Magic Pixel. I think they would do, well, partly because I hate the premier tables, but also I think Magic Pixel would knock the hell out of some EM and early Salt State golems. Okay, this one's a little bit different here for you, Jared, a little hypothetical. Would you rather live in a world where Williams didn't give up on pinball, but only made pinball table, pinball 2000 tables, or Stern doing what they did only to go belly up like they almost did. Or I think I would like Stern to live and belly to die. That's a big call to make. But what I'm saying is Stern would go belly up because they almost did in 2005 or something like that. So in this case, Stern actually would shutter. They'd close down, right? And Williams would continue to remain. Except for here's where the twist is. No, because Williams would have gone belly up too because Pinball 2000 sucks. Yeah. So, yeah, that's true. That's a trick question, that one. Yeah, that was a trick question. Okay, would you rather own Austin Powers or Transformers, two of Stern's worst applications of toys? Give me Transformers every day. I don't want to hear Mike Myers spurting out his bollocks to me every second call out. Yeah, I honestly find the Austin table. I actually played Transformers the other day at Netherworld. It's actually not bad. I'll go out on a limb and say it's... Put it this way, I'd much rather play it than stupid Austin Powers. Austin Powers is just plain annoying. It is an annoying pinball machine. Okay. Yeah. Would you rather see Zen do Indiana Jones but not be able to do any other licensed table or see them do the Stern version along with any other licensed table that they do will have already been done in TPA. Oh, I don't think I'd like to sacrifice the entire collection for just one table. I think I'll go with the Stern Indy as much as a... It'll just be a trophy cabinet piece because I won't play it probably. But, you know. Yeah. Option two, please. Okay. I agree. Option two. Would you rather we re-watch the Lord of the Rings trilogy for nine hours straight or play Lord of the Rings pinball for nine hours straight? I think I'd rather watch the trilogy, thanks. I'm going to go with watching the trilogy, too. I think my arms would fall off. Now that's an army. okay would you rather play a perfectly restored table you hate or a beat to hell table you love oh you need to put some parameters around beat to hell like the slippers work and everything mechanical works but the playfields is trashed yes i'm going yeah it's not you're like you don't have a dead flipper um all right but maybe the flippers you know sometimes are a little underpowered like it's spotty so if you're saying would you like to play a perfectly restored Popeye Saves the Earth or an absolute player's condition in the adjustments. But it's very dirty and sometimes the ball just gets stuck because of gunk. Oh, that's a really tough call. I'm all about gameplay experience, so I'll probably have to play Popeye Saves the Earth. I kind of agree because I'm going to get too frustrated over the mispronunciation of the other. Yeah. At least it'll be working well. It'll be a crappy game working well. And who knows? I might grow to like it. Okay. Would you rather have Zen acquire the Data East license and be able to make Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Simpsons, and Robocop, or acquire the IP license to each and make original versions? Yeah. originals because there's nothing really outstanding about those old dutter east like early um uh tables they're all very formulaic and they were basically in the day my operator friend who i used to work for when i was 15 said oh yeah that's a classic dutter east two poppers a spinner and a ramp that's literally it and yeah yeah get the license do something amazing with them because i know that they would do something amazing okay um would you rather live a five minute walk from a place with two brand new machines like just released machines or a 30 minute drive to a place with 10 classics uh well that's my scenario right now so yeah give me netherworld thanks so you'd rather drive for the 10 classics than be able to just walk five minutes and play two brand new yeah i think so okay i think i'm kind of on the i'd rather be able to walk for five minutes. That just might be me. I don't know. I don't have the option, so it's hard for me to say. Well, I'm leaving the option. So, you know, I think there is actually a place in North Lakes. It's one of those brew your own beer places that actually has a couple of machines that have sited there. And I've been trying to work out where it is and go and check them out. But I don't actually know where this place is because it's not on Pinfinder or anything like that. No one's actually listed them there. So I almost like need to go to all the brewing places of which there are a few in North Lakes and do some poking around. um yeah because i think that that if i had a place where like right now if they had willy wonka and black knight and then you know a month from now or if you're a month prior they had had monsters and iron maiden i think i'd actually prefer that than driving to the place that's 30 minutes away that always has the same 10 classic tables that i played to death oh that's a bit of a different that's a bit of a different scenario like you didn't say anything about cycling tables in so yeah option one in that case if there's a constantly moving cycle of two games which are like brand new they're there for three months and they're cycled out with other new games yeah shut up and take my money five minutes thanks yeah okay last one and this one's not kind would you rather see a pinball machine get put through a wood chipper or see your favorite car put into a car crusher? Sorry, say again? Would you rather see a pinball machine get put through a wood chipper or see your favorite car lying like one of those 64 Cobras get put through a car crusher? Oh, shred that pinball machine. Number one, value alone. There's a lot less. Chip it. yeah I think I'd go for the chip too because man whenever I watch a movie that I see one of those cars destroyed it breaks my heart although I've seen a couple of movies where there's like a fight scene and somebody smashes into the pinball machine and my immediate thought is so I wonder what happened to that pinball machine afterwards did anybody put it into the dumpster did somebody go yeah I'll take that oh it's fine we'll just buff that out you're right alright so with that we're going to call it a day. Yeah, this is great. We actually got it working for once after all this time. Yeah. Apparently there's still a few issues, a little audio delay happening on Jared with his voice not matching his lips. Yeah, Jan Peter in the chat was saying something about that. We'll have to check it out, but I think there's nothing that we can do about it. I think it's just one of those things. Yeah. Hey, at least it's better than the static image of Jared last time we did it, where he was just like... Go like this. Let me redo that image from last week. Yeah, do it, do it, do it. There you go. Yeah, that was the only episode last week. Something like that. Yeah. Okay. All right, so, folks, again, we appreciate you listening. Make sure you go ahead and poke the little like thing, because that does wonders for us. And most importantly would be actually subscribe to the channel, because that does wonders for us also. So, all right, until next week, we will see you all again. Bye-bye. See you, see ya.