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BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 33m·analyzed·Jan 21, 2015
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.025

TL;DR

BlahCade hosts discuss holidays, board games, and 2014 movies with minimal pinball focus.

Summary

BlahCade Podcast episode featuring hosts Chris Friebus, Jared Morgan, and Jeff Strong discussing Christmas, holiday traditions, board games (Galaxy Trucker), mobile gaming (Hearthstone, Zen Pinball), and Chris's top movies of 2014. Minimal pinball discussion; largely off-topic holiday banter with a technical disconnection midway through. The hosts mention upcoming merchandise (T-shirt feasibility) and tangentially reference Color Monkey's new pinball collection for iOS.

Key Claims

  • Color Monkey has released a new pinball collection to iOS with two tables: Revenge of the Robo Bot and a Mexican-themed table, scheduled for release after the new year

    medium confidence · Jared Morgan discussing Color Monkey app releases; delayed to January due to App Store volume

  • Jared is experiencing a bug on Nexus 9 and Shield Tab devices (K1 processor) with Color Monkey's version 1 app on Android, likely related to OpenGL shaders

    high confidence · Jared Morgan detailing technical debugging experience with beta testing

  • Hearthstone has been released on Android and is highlighted as a model for balanced in-app purchasing (IAP) by Google developers

    high confidence · Jared Morgan discussing Hearthstone on Android with positive reception

  • The hosts have not touched pinball much in December and have been focused on other gaming and board games instead

    high confidence · Jared Morgan directly stating 'I haven't touched pinball much in December at all'

  • Plants vs. Zombies table exists on Zen Pinball but may have licensing issues preventing release on mobile platforms

    medium confidence · Jared Morgan noting licensing constraints for Plants vs. Zombies on Android/iOS

Notable Quotes

  • “It's the Festivus edition of the BlahCade Podcast. Wait until we start the airing of Grievances, and I think we'll give Jeff 60 seconds on that, too.”

    Chris Friebus @ early in episode — Humorous meta-commentary on the show's off-topic holiday focus

  • “I haven't really touched pinball much in December at all. So it's more the BlahCade Podcast podcast really it's not really the pinball side of things that much.”

    Jared Morgan @ mid-episode — Direct acknowledgment of podcast drift away from pinball content

  • “A win's a win. I'll take it.”

    Jeff Strong @ discussing Hearthstone — Casual humor about free wins in Hearthstone from disconnections

  • “We actually do the recording first. It's the start of a new year, and so therefore this podcast will be at the beginning of the month, more or less. and then it just kind of slides gently until by the end of the year you get your podcast at the end of the month and we have to skip December altogether.”

    Chris Friebus @ mid-episode — Meta-joke explaining their unusual release cadence

  • “If we're buying shirts from a foreigner's perspective, the U.S. sites are actually really good... We don't. We got good cotton... But it's like here, we get clothes made in China... Unless you're buying decent quality stuff, it's crap.”

    Jared Morgan @ merchandise discussion — International perspective on apparel quality from Australia

Entities

Chris FriebuspersonJared MorganpersonJeff StrongpersonBlahCade PodcastorganizationWizard AmusementcompanyColor MonkeycompanyZen PinballproductHearthstoneproductGalaxy TruckerproductPlants vs. Zombiesproduct

Signals

  • ?

    content_signal: BlahCade episode heavily focused on holiday, Christmas trees, board games, movies, and merchandise rather than pinball content; hosts explicitly acknowledge minimal pinball discussion

    high · Jared: 'I haven't really touched pinball much in December at all. So it's more the Hearthstone Cade podcast really it's not really the pinball side of things that much.'

  • ?

    product_signal: Color Monkey releasing new pinball table collection for iOS; delayed to post-New Year due to App Store saturation

    medium · Jared discussing Color Monkey's iOS release with two-table pack (Revenge of the Robo Bot, Mexican-themed table) held back until January

  • ?

    technology_signal: OpenGL shader compatibility issues identified on Nexus 9 and Shield Tab devices (K1 processor) affecting Color Monkey's Android pinball app; Jared volunteering for beta testing

    high · Jared detailing specific device compatibility and processor-related graphics issue requiring OpenGL shader fix

  • ?

    licensing_signal: Plants vs. Zombies pinball table may be experiencing licensing issues preventing release on mobile platforms (Android/iOS), though available on Steam and PS3

    medium · Jared: 'I would love to actually have a go at that table, but they haven't, I think they're having some licensing issues or something, getting it to mobile platforms.'

  • ?

    community_signal: BlahCade hosts exploring T-shirt merchandise for podcast; seeking community demand feedback; investigating print-on-demand vendors; concerns about quality vs. cost trade-offs

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.282

0:00
Let the tales begin. Your wish is my command. Svanning the Globe, this is the Blockade Podcast. Joining us today is Jared Morgs. Hello everyone, I'm eating toast.
0:23
And Jeff Strong. Happy New Year. The treasure is now before you. A gift from me to you. Ooh, you're powerful. I am your host, Chris Frevis, a.k.a. Shut Your Trap. And yes, Happy New Year indeed.
0:41
I trust everybody had a wonderful holiday? Yeah, it was pretty good. It was pretty wonderful. So, Jared, I have to ask, since you're in the midst of summer, which is about the complete opposite of what people think of as Christmas, does it make your enjoyment of holiday movies and the such seem rather odd when you see tons of snow and people all bundled up and you're sweating your butt off well yeah I think we just have to live vicariously through the northern hemisphere folks and sort of think cold thoughts when we watch the movies have your snow globe going off to the side there that's right turn the air conditioning down really really cold and have hot chocolate, sorry, hot cocoa, and, you know, mulled wine and all those sort of nice things you can have when it's freezing cold outside.
1:35
There you go. Do people, because out here people get their Christmas trees flocked, which is where they put the fake snow on.
1:44
Do you guys put the fake snow on your Christmas trees out there? We, well, no. Normally we've got some. I know that one of the you guys often have like real pine trees or spruce trees and you actually put them inside well because of the climate here we really don't have access to that really what?

medium · Chris: 'If you people really, really want T-shirts, you need to let us know... We wouldn't be doing it for a money-making exercise... We would need to be at least breaking even'

  • ?

    community_signal: BlahCade running Twitter giveaway for custom Wizard Amusement shooter rod pole; winner selected Nightcrawler X-Men design; future contests planned through forum rather than Twitter

    high · Chris discussing Twitter contest winner and pivot to forum-based contests due to platform dissatisfaction

  • ?

    content_signal: Technical disconnection/audio loss during recording approximately 20 minutes in; hosts re-establish connection and resume conversation from similar point

    high · Chris: 'Did we lose Jared? Are you guys still there?' followed by reconnection sequence and content restart

  • $

    market_signal: Hosts noting shift from pinball gaming to digital gaming (Hearthstone, board games) during holiday season; implications for pinball engagement

    medium · Multiple references to playing Hearthstone, Galaxy Trucker, and Plants vs. Zombies instead of physical pinball in December

    • 2:06
    who would have thought right I could have sworn I saw tons of pine trees in every movie that's ever been set in Australia exactly we have actually seen down the the gold coast which is one of our main you most people know where the gold coast is um in australia it's like the tourist capital of of um australia well down the gold coast some of the council down there have done something pretty cool we do have pine trees but we don't have pine trees to the scale that you can just go and get one right um like you would a festivus pole for example yes um so um we uh the the council down in the gold coast have done something pretty cool. They've actually decorated the pine tree like a massive Christmas tree. They put a big sort of light up on the top of the tree for the star and then they've actually put lights all the way around each of the branches and tinsel and everything. So it looks like this massive natural Christmas tree. It looks really cool. But generally speaking, most of us just have plastic trees. And we, very realistic looking plastic trees, but yeah, it's just easier. They don't shed. because imagine them in the heat here in a pond.
    3:17
    You'd have no needles left on them by day two. It's okay. We've gone the plastic tree route to quite a few years ago. It was the first year me and my wife ever got a tree.
    3:30
    We paid maybe $25 or so for the tree. And then the next year it was about the same. And then the next year, I don't know what the heck happened, but the price of the tree just skyrocketed. So we're kind of like, oh, that kind of sucks. well then we moved into our house and we have a vaulted ceiling in the living room where we would put the tree and so a little 5 foot tree looked just sad and so we were like ok we need to get a 6 foot plus tree and it was going to be like 80 bucks or so we were just like you know what why don't we just get a giant plastic tree that can last year after year and it will be paid off after about 3 uses yeah that's yeah Well, pretty much, yeah. That's what we've done too. We're lucky enough to have a house that has pretty high ceilings, so we've got a pretty big tree as well. And it's sort of just... We actually got it when we were in an apartment, and the thing, we couldn't even put the star on the tree because it was just too tall. Yeah. It was touching the ceiling in an apartment, so yeah. It's sort of... We bought it future-proofing the tree, because it was... Yeah, they're not cheap. A good quality tree is not cheap, so you've got to sort of think to the future or how you might use it. And, yeah, it's a good tree. Believe it or not, I used to work on a Christmas tree farm when I lived in Michigan back in the day. And a lot of the Christmas trees, like, we would harvest the trees, you know, in early December, actually right after Thanksgiving. And then we would load the trucks up and then go down to, like, Chicago, Milwaukee, all around the Midwest, really, and then sell the trees in those cities. So if you live in any of those cities, well, your tree might have come from the farm I worked at. So just a little tidbit for you. It's Jeffy Jeff Jeff's tree farm. I didn't actually own the farm, but I worked there. No, we call it your farm. For the purposes of the podcast, it's your farm. I'll take claim of it. Yeah, yeah. It's just one of my many enterprises in my syndicate. I can see it now. I can see it now, Jeff. All the trees, just free roaming around the paddocks there and grazing on the nice grasses. Free roam trees are the best. Free roam trees, yeah. Yeah, it's definitely a big business in Michigan, you know, just with there's really not a whole lot else going on up in northern Michigan besides, you know, deer hunting and Christmas tree farming. So in case you're checking your listening device and going, what the hell is this? Is this not the blockade? This is the blockade.
    5:58
    It's the holiday version. You know, what can we say? We skipped all of December for a podcast, and we thought the last thing in the world they want to hear is anything pinball related. Let's cock Christmas trees! That's right. It's the Festivus edition of the Arcade Podcast. Wait until we start the airing of Grievances, and I think we'll give Jeff 60 seconds on that, too.
    6:20
    And Feats of Strength, although I don't know how that's going to translate through the podcast. Virtual Feats of Strength? Virtual Feats of Strength, yes. My rage might be on vacation, too, though, so I don't know. Oh, no. But that was so popular. and it works so well on this podcast such a success boys will be boys this amuses me that's wonderful and while we're breaking the momentum here just to let you know our friends over at Wizard Amusement go check them out get yourself a custom shooter rod pole if you were signed up on our twitter you would have seen what our winner won which was, he picked was it Nightcrawler from X-Men? I think that's Yeah, I think that's what it was. It looked pretty cool either way. Yeah, it was pretty cool.
    7:19
    He says that we will be able to run a contest again. Just let him know. We'll let you guys know but apparently I won't be doing it over Twitter since nobody likes that.
    7:31
    Yeah, I don't know how we're going to run it next time. We might have to just do it through the forum or something. Yeah, I don't know. But if you're feeling randy, just look us up at Blockade or at ShutYourTraps or at JaredMorgs. Those are our Twitter handles and we do respond, so there you go. Yeah, we do.
    7:54
    That brings up another interesting thing though. Last time we debuted our logo and we got some good positive feedback on that and then And, of course, people got wind of the idea of T-shirts. Now, if you people really, really want T-shirts, you need to let us know. You need to hound us. And you need to let us know what the breaking point of cost would be because, obviously, cost depends on how many people would want the things. And I'll start looking into it and see what it would go for. So I know that, Chris, some of the other podcasts have looked into doing T-shirts. and they've openly admitted that there's not much money in T-shirts. We wouldn't be doing it for a money-making exercise, I would think. We would need to be at least breaking even, though.
    8:45
    I'm not going into the hole for this. It would be strictly a matter of if you want to show your support and you want a T-shirt and we can come out of it clean, then we'd go forward with it. Haven't you guys ever heard of the cafe press and stuff like that where you don't actually have to order any, they just make them as the orders come in, Yeah, I was going to mention Cafe Press. Yeah, that works pretty well. Yeah, that model works really well, like a print-on-demand type of thing. I wouldn't use Cafe Press, though.
    9:15
    I've said a number of reports, first-hand reports for me, because I've got some stuff from them about, well, albeit about two or three years ago now, and they're just not good quality. We wouldn't want to inflict that on our readers. No, definitely not good quality. And the latest round of stuff that one of, like, some of my geek friends at Red Hat got was also of dubious quality as well. Ah, that's good to know. So the print, yeah, the print rubs off them and stuff like that. They're just not really great. That's why they're so cheap.
    9:45
    Well, that's right. That's why they are so cheap. I mean, there are other services out there which we'd need to investigate, and I think probably price would have some bearing on that. But I think when it comes to apparel and that sort of thing, though, I sort of think it's better to pay a bit more money and then have the product last longer. So I've got some, you know, that's my thought. You're buying a shirt. It's not something you throw away. Like, it's something you want to wear a fair bit. So I think if the cost is a little bit higher than what it normally would be, then that's probably okay for a one-off. Mm-hmm. For sure, man. You get what you pay for, you know? it's funny because I think about some of the t-shirts that I have in my closet and I realize how long ago I actually got them and I go wow you know some of these things actually last a good long time it's amazing yeah they do and I've got some shirts that I've just worn to death a lot of these the geek shirts I've got them from think geek like comedy related shirts and stuff like that I just flog to death because I always need coffee and it's a really cool shirt It was an awesome shirt. It's one that I wish I had another one of. It's my favorite shirt where it's got a, because I'm a technical writer in my day job, it's a picture shirt and it's got a coffee, a disposable coffee cup with like a red empty line in it and then a warning sign and then a little arrow to like a little coffee, like a drip filter coffee pot and then the arrow goes over to the right and it has like an exclamation mark or like a power bolt, like a thunderbolt sort of thing saying power up when you fill up the coffee cup. It's very cool. It's very geeky and it's very cool and I like it a lot. I wanted another one of those.
    11:35
    Hand, hand. Oh, I did well on Christmas. I am pretty happy with the loot. How'd you guys go? well i was uh i was in aust or not in australia i'm thinking you in australia no i was not in australia i was in new orleans in uh and uh pretty much right up until i think i got home on like the 18th or something like that so my wife and i kind of said you know what let's not worry about us we can worry about us after christmas and uh and uh just worry about the kid but she did get me a t-shirt that has every uh controller pretty much that you know picture of every controller from all the systems all the way back to Atari. Oh, sweet. And at the bottom of it says Control Freak, so I kind of like that.
    12:24
    That's pretty cool. That's a pretty cool shit. Yeah, she was showing me a whole bunch of T-shirts from I'm not sure which website, but that she was looking at. And one of them that I just maybe crack up, it was a picture of Han Solo holding a guitar.
    12:40
    And it just said Solo. I thought that was pretty rad. And then there was another one that looked like the Jurassic Park logo, but it was an alien, and it just said LV-426, and I thought that was pretty rad, too.
    12:55
    I did pretty well. I did get some shirts as well, and I got one of the vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shirts, like the old, the good cartoon series back in the early 90s. Not the current iteration that doesn't look anything like a Mutant Ninja Turtle? Well, yeah. Yeah, pretty much.
    13:15
    And so I got one of those, which is pretty sweet. And I also got a sort of like a neon wire form of SpongeBob SquarePants, which I'm sure I'll be able to rock as well. It looks pretty cool. It doesn't look like, you know, your normal SpongeBob shirt with, you know, the lurid yellow sponge on it. It's just like this neon sort of thing. It looks pretty cool. Maybe I'll have to take some pictures and put them up on the Twitters so people can see.
    13:38
    But, yeah, that's good. On the apparel side of things, that's what I got. But El Jefe, how did you make out? I did pretty well.
    13:47
    If you remember last year, I was pretty stoked to get a... Oh, you got a membership, didn't you? Well, I got that, but the main thing I got for my wife was a new board game. It was a pirate-themed board game. Okay. And I just love pirates, and I love board games, so it was like the perfect mix for me. But this year, we kind of continued the tradition of a board game, and I got a new one called Galaxy Trucker, which is a sci-fi themed one. Okay, Galaxy Trucker, that sounds interesting. Yeah, it's really fun, man. It's unlike any other game that I've ever played. I'll give you the basic premise real quick. It's just like you start out with this little grid in front of you that has all these little squares. Each player has this, and then there's like all these tiles in the middle that are face down, just this big pile of tiles that are just randomized. And you start the timer. It's just like a Yahtzee or a Scrabble timer or whatever, you know, with the little sand ticking down or whatever. And then each player has to grab a tile, and these are parts of your spaceship that you're actually building in front of you on this grid. And so you take, like, different pieces. Like, one will be, like, an engine. One will be, like, a rocket launcher or a laser or, like, a cargo hold. Because that's what truckers need. Yeah. Yeah, the whole point of the game is to build your ship, and then take it out into the galaxy on these adventures. And then whoever comes back in one piece, you know, you go through meteor showers and smugglers try to raid your ship. It kind of sounds like Faster Than Light in a way. Yeah, it almost has kind of a Firefly feel to it too. I don't know if you've ever seen that show. It's got kind of a good sense of humor and it's, you know, pretty lighthearted. But, yeah, it's real good fun, man. Like I said, it's really unique. It's one of a kind. There's actually a mobile version of it, too, that's really fun, too, that I tried. Yeah, I saw. I'm actually having a look at the – I had a look on boardgamegeek.com, and I'm having a look at the images of the board game. It looks pretty cool. Yeah, it's very well regarded, too, among the board game geeks, so it's a really highly recommended game. But, yeah, it's just real – it's a blast to play. Like, we were just going to play one quick rundown of it on Christmas, and then we ended up, like, man, this is so fun. We ended up playing it, like, three or four times. So if my wife wanted revenge on me, too, because last time we played, I just kind of – because at first you're like, oh, man, this is, like, building your ship in time. It's really tricky. You know, you end up, like, having this, you know, kind of lopsided-looking ship with all these weird pieces, and then by the time you get good at it, you can kind of get, like, a pretty decent ship. But, yeah, it's a blast, man. Oh, wow. Okay, so on Android, you can get it for $2.99 until January the 3rd. I'm happy to get the Galaxy Trucker on the galaxytrucker.com website.
    16:46
    That's a good deal because I think it's like $8 on iOS. Yeah, it is. This podcast will be out by then.
    16:54
    Jeff, Jeff, I'll see what I can do. We purposely are saying Happy New Year, even though it's before the New Year. Just because. Just because they know me so well and I know myself so well. I think what we do is we tend to run on an unofficial FastSight release cadence. So we actually do the recording first.
    17:22
    It's the start of a new year, and so therefore this podcast will be at the beginning of the month, more or less. and then it just kind of slides gently until by the end of the year you get your podcast at the end of the month and we have to skip December altogether. I mean, you know. That's right. We have a leap month. I don't see why it's so hard to follow what our release schedule is. I mean, come on.
    17:46
    Makes perfect sense to me. Exactly right. So I was handed a note to the site that I was looking at. It was bustedtees.com.
    17:57
    Bustedtees. All right. It looked very much like ThinkGeek, though, in terms of the kind of T-shirts that they carry. Oh, yeah, cool. Yeah, I like sites like that. And I find that, generally speaking, if you're buying shirts from a foreigner's perspective, the U.S. sites are actually really good. Like, you guys got really good quality apparel over there. We don't. We got good cotton. Yeah, a lot of your clothes are made in Mexico.
    18:21
    They got good cotton, too. They do have good cotton. Yeah. But it's like here, we get clothes made in China. That's our main sort of port where our clothes come from. And unless you're buying decent quality stuff, it's crap. Our clothes are crap. Their cotton's not so good. No, their cotton's not good. Whenever I look up to buy cloth that is safe for rubbing on a lens or whatever, it's always avoid at all costs anything from China. yeah exactly hey guys speaking of um board games uh yeah hearthstone has been released on android now uh for those who um are following it and i have to say we're taunting it we're taunting it your way last time and uh now you've been able to play it yeah and i've got to say i agree with you totally the onboarding experience in that game is just amazing it's so well done and they actually had on a couple of the um the android um google plus pages that i follow where they follow news and stuff like that they actually called out hearthstone as the model that developers should be using for iap and balanced iap because there's iap and then there's balanced iap yes and the in-app purchasing model of hearthstone is is really nice like i've i've started to get okay at it, and that means I've had some wins. Sometimes I like the wins where you start a game and then someone just drops out and... Free wins! I like to think that they were intimidated by the all four cards that I'd laid down, and I realized that... Scared them away. Yeah, I scared them away with my massive prowess of a two-hit.
    20:16
    And then you just realize, oh, they probably Their connection probably timed out. It's instant disqualification. A win's a win. I'll take it. Yeah, I'll take it too. But, yeah, I'm having fun with it. I'm finding I'm playing it a fair bit, just because it's an interesting... I've never really played sort of Magic the Gathering-style card games like that before, and it's something different. I've got to be honest, I really haven't touched pinball much in December at all. So it's more the Hearthstone Cade.
    20:48
    podcast really it's not really the uh the pinball side of things that much although i on the subject of pinball um color monkey have uh released their new pinball collection to ios now so they've got a um a two table pack with the uh revenge of the robo bot um two table and um a mexican theme table in there as well, so that should be out. Actually, no, they're holding it back for release until the new year because of just the amount of apps in the App Store on Apple at the moment. So, yeah, it will be coming out. It's not quite out yet. But I had some trouble with the version 1 app on Android, and I was invited to a beta test channel to do that, so I have to do that sometime today for the guys to see if they've fixed the issue. It seems to be only affecting Nexus 9 and Shield Tab devices, which both use the K1 processor. So my beta testing knowledge would suggest that it's got something to do with the OpenGL shaders that those two tablets use, because they've got some new shiny ones, so they're compatible with PC game streaming stuff, and I reckon that's what's causing the problem with the game. So I'll check that out and help them out, do some testing on that, and get it working, hopefully. Because it's a cool table. It's a good standalone table Robobot on Android.
    22:15
    Yeah, I've been playing... Well, my boy currently is obsessed with Plants vs. Zombies, and that would be both on the mobile version, and then he's playing Garden Warfare on the PS3.
    22:29
    So I've been watching him do that, and so I have Plants vs. Zombies in Xen, and that table made zero sense to me when I tried playing it, so I booted it up, started playing with it, And it was like, oh, now I kind of understand what the heck is going on. Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of, unless you know, like, what it's all about, I don't think the table, I would love to actually have a go at that table, but they haven't, I think they're having some licensing issues or something, getting it to mobile platforms. So we haven't seen it yet. Oh, on the, for Android?
    23:03
    For Android and iOS. I don't think it's on iOS either. Oh, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, because I'm playing it on Steam, so I don't know if it, Yeah. I know, because I know it's on PS3.
    23:13
    That's when I first played it, and I couldn't make heads or tails of it, and then I got it on Xen and I was playing it and again I do a side note here I know that people have love relationships with Xen I don love them I don hate them I think they can be fun some of their tables and some of their tables can be outright frustrating But I do know one of my complaints that has always been with them is they don't give clear instruction as to what to do. Things just kind of blink and flash, and there's no real sense of how to progress in a table. But what I have found, and I discovered this with the marble tables, was if I was somewhat familiar with the story that they were trying to portray, then I was able to actually advance farther in the game. So I don't know if that's just me or if other people have experienced that, but I can attest that once I saw my boy playing Plants vs. Zombies, my score on the actual pinball table in Zen went up.
    24:14
    Did we lose Jared? Are you guys still there? I'm still here. Might have lost the Mr. Morgan. Oh, no. Aww. We're experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Oh.
    24:33
    Let's see. Maybe I'll just try calling both of you back. Yeah, he calls back. He shows them online. All right, cool.
    24:40
    Spanning the globe. This always can be hard. Here we go again. Remember everything you said and say it again. Yeah. Start from scratch. hope you have a good memory because we were in it for 20 minutes there we go so in case somebody's sentence just got cut off there we had a little technical difficulty and we are back Jared we were talking Hearthstone did you have more to contribute well no not really ok next topic was that word you used it sounded like a combination of continue and contribute that was cool contribute is that a real word it is now of our 12 Twitter followers let's get that trending contribute so I do this every year and I thought what the hell might as well because this is the new year podcast and I've never done it on a podcast because you know it was brand spanking new last year I like to do my list of the best and worst movies that I've seen in 2014. Now, that does not mean that these movies came out in 2014. It just means I saw them for the first time in 2014. So, with that in mind, you guys may contribute and throw in commentary as will, but we'll start with these movies that I liked the best of 2014.
    26:15
    Or at least that's what I saw them in. Have I beaten that Daniel Polk yet? Do you guys get where I'm coming from, right? It's clear, correct? Yeah. It couldn't be any clearer if you hit us upside the head with a 2x4. Okay, because I just want to make sure that everybody knows these movies that I saw. Okay, anyway.
    26:32
    So in no particular order, here's the flicks that I liked. Let's start off with Her, which was that Spike Jonze flick with Joaquin Phoenix falling in love with his phone. who is Scarlet right? yes Scarlet and it wasn't as weird as I thought it would be and that's just kind of the world that they created with it just kind of was accepted and he wasn't the first one that had fallen in love with his phone or his operating system and nobody batted an eye about it so it was kind of strange on that front but I thought it was a very interesting movie and it almost seemed believable It's like something that could actually happen in the future. I know, huh? Scary, but true. The sequel to my favorite movie of last year, The Raid 2. That movie. Oh, baby. Now we're talking.
    27:25
    That flick, whereas The Raid was just nonstop action, this one decided to throw in story. And with story, it went for like godfather level of intrigue and what's not, as well as having a good, healthy amount of ass-kicking going on, too.
    27:45
    So I highly recommend that movie. But it is a different beast, so don't go in expecting... Because I think that actually diminished my enjoyment the first time I watched it because I was so expecting to see just more of the same. And the actual story threw me off. I was like, wait a second, I have to pay attention? What?
    28:02
    That wasn't violence? Exactly. And it wasn't until the second time that I watched it that I was like, okay, this is genius. X-Men Days of Future Past I really enjoyed that especially since it corrected all the wrongs of X-Men The Last Stand Guardians of the Galaxy which I would say kind of squeaked onto this list because I enjoyed it but not nearly as much as everybody else but I do think that it was a very solid movie it reminded me a lot of Fifth Element in terms of that kind of sci-fi which I totally dig and yeah that's there Gone Girl which is just a jacked up movie and I liked it haven't seen it yet that's one of those that yeah just go into it knowing as little as you possibly can and you'll thoroughly be surprised and you know it makes it more of a fun rollercoaster to be on in terms of the emotional journeys that they take the characters and the audience on.
    29:14
    Do we lose Jared again? No, I'm here. He's there. I'm here. I just don't have much to contribute. Because Jared doesn't get to go to the movies. I don't get much at all. Yeah. Birdman, which is Michael Keaton being the former star of Birdman a la Batman and trying to reclaim his glory. it's a fantastic flick the best part well I shouldn't say the best part but one of the really awesome things that they do in this movie is they try and make it look like the camera never cuts so it is now you can tell where the cuts actually were like all of a sudden a door will open and anytime you do a sweep like that you can edit that really easily with a cut but it's never cut in the middle of a scene so the entire scene will play out just with the camera floating around the actors and sometimes they use mirrors a lot so you can get both reactions of the actors at the same time it's a very very clever movie how they did that sounds cool John Wick which was Keanu busting heads I would basically say that John Wick was what I expected the Raid 2 to be oh man I gotta see this So, yeah, it's, and my absolute favorite part about that is, you could be a drinking game, but you'd be thoroughly, sloppily drunk really fast. I don't believe there's a single person he doesn't kill without shooting him in the head.
    30:53
    To the point that there's even one guy where he shoots, the guy goes down, he takes care of a couple of other bad guys, comes back to him, and shoots him in the head.
    31:02
    To the head, yeah, they did. Exactly. I also really like this movie called The Way Way Back oh yeah that was a good movie which was Steve Carroll and the water park movie right yeah it took place at a water park over the summer and this kid basically doesn't like the Steve Carroll who's going to be his stepdad more or less yeah he's a real douche bag in that movie so he goes and finds solace at this water park and Sam Rockwell is a I guess he's the owner of the water park. He's kind of a man child. Yeah, he's funny.
    31:43
    Kind of takes the kid under his wing and considering I worked at a water park when I was in high school it was a nice nostalgia trip and I just thought it was really well done and quite interesting and it wasn't saccharine sweet or anything.
    32:04
    But on the same hand, it does kind of make you feel good. I don't know. Yeah, I agree. I enjoyed it.
    32:11
    Edge of Tomorrow, which was Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in mech warrior outfits shooting the bejesus out of aliens. Yeah, I enjoyed that. As they died. It's sort of like Groundhog Day as a sci-fi theme. Exactly. It was good. I really enjoyed that too. Yeah, I thought it was pretty cool. And that's another one that I thought, that had it been, let's say, a better year of movies that I saw, that's another one that I think would have been bumped off to my just better than average list.
    32:41
    But as it stands, it made it onto it. So there you go. And I never go, oh, do I have to have ten? Some years I've had six movies and that's it. Now, did you see Interstellar? I did see Interstellar. That winds up on just my better than average list. Yeah. It was really hyped up. but it wasn't quite as good as I was anticipating. It was a different movie than I was expecting. Yeah. And I like where it went. I like some of the discussions that it had. But on the other hand, it was also just kind of like, okay, can we, come on, let's move it forward.
    33:16
    So. I have seen the, what's it called, Catching Fire. Oh, the half a movie? Yeah, the half a movie, yeah. Yeah, that was all right. I have to admit, it was a nice sort of popcorn flick. Like, it was, yeah. I haven't actually read the books, so I can't make a comparison with the books, but I did actually really enjoy it. I thought it was pretty cool, and I'm looking forward to the next one. So it's whet my appetite for the final installment, definitely. See, that was the problem. I've read the books, and I knew where they were going to cut it off, and it was just like, oh, great, so all we get is the setup, and we don't get any payoff whatsoever, because the next movie is going to be brilliant because that's all it is, is payoff. It's going to be non-stop. That's going to be awesome. The next movie will be awesome. This movie I just kind of went, okay, you didn't learn your lesson from Peter Jackson on how to break a movie or a book up into satisfying chunks, did you? Speaking of which... Yeah, snap. So the New Hobbit didn't make your list there, Chris? New Hobbit goes down as better than average I did like it but it didn't blow me away and I actually think I enjoyed the second one better I don't know it was one of those I'm going to go see it again but I want to see it in 3D 48 frames just to give that a try I didn't do it with the other two movies I'd like to see what that's all about and see if it's horrible or what not But it doesn't, look, it has the giant battle, but it was no Battle of Helm's Deep. And if I'm going to spend 45 minutes watching a battle, it's got to be watching the Battle of Helm's Deep. So, you know, on that reason, it didn't quite level up.
    35:11
    But I'll go with the last movie that made my most light is not a movie at all. It's the movie trailer for Mad Max Fury Road, both the first trailer and the second trailer that's come out. That was awesome! For a second there, I thought you were going to say the trailer to Ambience.
    35:29
    Forgot about Ambience. What are we up to now? Is it the seven-week version of it? That should be at the top of your list, though, I'm sure, right?
    35:40
    No, I got to see the newest trailer for Mad Max up on the big screen, and I'd already watched it probably five or six times on my phone or computer,
    35:48
    and then seeing it on the big screen, I was just like, holy crap, that's better than so many things that I've watched the entire movie of in a nice two-and-a-half-minute package.
    35:58
    I've never put a trailer on there before, but that had to go on. I'm telling you, I can already put that at the top of my list next year. Man, that's pretty awesome when a trailer makes your top list, man. I know, I know. The other movies that were just kind of better than average that I put down were The Lego Movie, Godzilla, Interstellar, Hobbit. Wolf of Wall Street, a movie called... Oh, that was good. I enjoyed that. Yeah. I remember seeing that. That was pretty cool. I gotta say... It was pretty good. There's so much debauchery I can take, though.
    36:34
    Yeah, there was a lot of debauchery in that. It was great. I gotta say, I was a bit disappointed with Godzilla. I might have said this on the forum, but it just seemed like every time that there was action getting ready to happen, they would cut away to something else, you know, like, they would, you know, cut away to the storyline elsewhere and stuff like that. It just seemed like there needed to be more carnage and rampaging going on for my Godzilla taste. I don't know. I went in thinking it wasn't going to be that good, just kind of like really having no expectations. Yeah, so... What impressed me about it was it got the sense of scale and just how much damage something that large and that heavy would do by merely just standing on a building, you know? I really dug that and there was no happier moment for me I'm kind of going oh this Godzilla apparently doesn't breathe fire well that sucks and then all of a sudden his tail starts glowing blue and it goes up his spines I'm like oh are you kidding me and he spit the fire and it was just so satisfying seeing that so it had a lot of those kind of moments where I just felt a wave of satisfaction but on a whole I thought it was good but it wasn't great but it also wasn't forgettable and that's kind of like for movies that I put on this level it means movies that stuck with me that I can still recall specific things about them as opposed to just going yeah I saw that my list is not scientific let's put it that way anyway I just saw a movie called About Time which was, now I love time travel movies but this is a time travel movie He wrapped up in a, I wouldn't call it a romantic comedy, but like a chick flick, basically.
    38:22
    But it's this guy, the males in his family have the ability to travel time backwards. And all they have to do is find a dark place, clench their fists, think really hard about where they want to go. And it has to have been taking place in their lifetime.
    38:38
    And they have to have had the experience, you might say. So they can't just randomly go halfway across the world to someplace they've never been. and they actually have to have vivid memories of it.
    38:50
    And this guy determines that there's a certain girl that he wants to date, and so he just keeps on going back in time, making sure that he can make these moments happen.
    39:03
    But then at the same time, he sees other instances of his friends where things all of a sudden go wrong for them, so he'll go back and try and fix that, and then realize that he just screwed up his ability to be with this girl that he likes. So it was pretty interesting how they bounced back and forth and the little rules that they set up for time travel did it in a way that I hadn't thought about before.
    39:26
    And then the last movie that I put on my better than average list is a movie called In a World, which if you know that phrase, it's the phrase that was put in front of movie trailers by this famous movie trailer voice guy, Don De La Fontaine. He'd always do it in a super deep voice. In a world. I miss that. Yeah. He's a late-time guy. So this movie stars and directed by this gal named Blake Bell, who if you watch Children's Hospital, she's on that.
    39:56
    She plays the daughter of Don's rival. You might say Don passed away, so that's what they're using that in the movie, that Don has passed away. And so nobody's been able to use the in-a-world phrase, because that was his phrase. and so her dad is one of these voice artists. She's trying to be a voice artist too, but she's a girl. Nobody uses female voices and so she's trying to get her life together and it suddenly comes out that they're going to resurrect this in a world phrase for some new epic quadrilogy and so everybody's trying to get up for the role. Anyway, it's one of those quirky little tiny movies, but it happened to be quirky about a subject that I kind of liked, which is movies and trailers.
    40:48
    One of those that if you catch it in passing, it's well worth a watch. I'll have to check it out. Now let's move on to the movies that I hated. Here we go. We're going to start with 300, Rise of an Empire.
    41:04
    Completely pointless movie. No need to have made it. It takes place at the same time as 300. It's basically like, oh, well, while the Spartans are going and doing this thing, we're over on this side fighting these people.
    41:24
    And it's just kind of this weird mishmash. It just completely fell flat and was completely pointless. not as pointless as watching Pompeii was horrible because let's see we all know Pompeii you know it got swallowed up by Mount Vesuvius end of story nobody survives and it was pretty much like volcano exploded everybody dies I mean like within a you know like everybody got flash frozen pretty instantaneous so the fact that they tried to milk this for 90 minutes and made it about a gladiator who falls in love with you know the a wealthy Roman and it was just like beyond ridiculous so how long does the actual explosion go on for? they milked it for probably a good 20 minutes oh jeez you know first Well, first it starts to explode, and that causes an earthquake, and collapses the coliseum where the gladiator's fighting. And then it explodes and sends hurling rocks everywhere, and that kills some people. And then the ash starts coming, and that swallows up everybody. And then because of the earthquake, it causes a tsunami, and that washes everybody away. And then... Oh, spoiler alert. Um, I don't know, after my description, they might be, you know, they might be like, hey, that's a good, bad movie night. Um, and then, uh, and then the lava comes. I mean, it's just like wave after wave of just silliness. Um, and the fact that this gladiator who finally has a, you know, hey, his chains are broken. He can be running free, and now he's like, no, I've gotta go save the girl. You're like, what? Dude.
    43:29
    As if. Do they both end up dying anyway, probably? Of course, they do. But together together. And they are kissing, no less. And they get turned into one of those ash statues that they wound up finding from Pompeii. So basically he gets cock-blocked by the lava?
    43:47
    Something like that. Sean's not here to embarrass, I guess. I know, huh? While Pompeii was bad movie night bad, then there's this bad bad, which was G.I. Joe Retaliation.
    44:03
    I don't know why I continued to watch this one. Like, I think I was trying to figure out how bad it could get.
    44:12
    And thankfully, most of it has been erased from my memory. So I just remember really, really hating myself for sitting through it the entire time.
    44:22
    So that made it on here. Identity Thief. Here's a movie that could have been over in five minutes. because he gets his ID stolen. He realizes that bad credit charges are being charged to him.
    44:39
    All he has to do is call the credit card company and cancel and give him a new card. Boom. End of story. Yeah. Job done. Instead, he goes through this whole rigmarole and he's trying to track down the gal that did this to him and then winds up on a road trip with her, and it's just like, what? Way awful.
    45:02
    Why does Melissa McCarthy play the same character in all these stupid movies? It might have been sort of funny the first time, but she needs to come up with some new bits, new roles for her. It's kind of like why I never got into Chris Farley. Like the exact same thing. That's a good comparison. At least he was, you know, somewhat funny.
    45:26
    Then we get, let's see, we go I, Frankenstein. I failed to finish watching this movie. Anything with I in the front of it should just be banned from cinemas. It was so, so terrible. I literally looked at my watch and went, you're kidding me. Only 20 minutes have passed and I turned the thing off. I just couldn't believe that I wasn't already done with the movie.
    45:54
    There is not a redeeming factor about it at all. Just terrible. And then I got two more. One of them is called Beast of the Southern Wild, which the little girl actress in that got nominated for an Academy Award last year. Yeah, I was going to say, this was kind of a critically acclaimed movie, wasn't it? Yeah, critics are smoking crack. I don't know what they were watching.
    46:22
    It doesn't have a story. It's just watching these people muck around in post-Katrina, post-apocalyptic, you might say, environments of New Orleans.
    46:37
    That's delightful. Oh, yeah, and they love their little life being on these islands that basically are because everything got flooded, and they don't want to be swallowed up by society again. And I go oh my God I just seriously it had no point whatsoever It looked like crap and there was no scenes and it just it reminded me of Tree of Life which the previous year I railed upon as being a completely pointless movie, too. So, yeah, it's just completely pointless. Not only pointless, but very, like, random and confusing and just, yeah, just dumb. I mean, and you can tell it's critic bait. I mean, it's the kind of thing that people like to say, oh, no, it was so good, though, and you're like, really? Yeah, did you go out and buy that on DVD? I doubt it.
    47:32
    You're using that as a status symbol more than anything else. Same thing goes for, and last year it won Best Picture at the Oscars, 12 Years a Slave. Hey, spoiler alert, he was a slave for 12 years.
    47:50
    and we're done I mean I get having human uplift stories but this goes nowhere there's no sense of justice there's nothing uplifting about it you don't see him go through some you know oh but I was better for it in the end it's more just like oh my god I miss my kids grow up you know and it was just horrible so immediately after watching that I had to watch Django Unchained just to make myself better to see some justice right to see some justice now i do have a um a couple of uh of quick categories here uh i also do so it's movies i knew would suck but i watched anyway that'd be judge of retaliation movie i thought would suck but didn't that'd be we're the millers i actually thought it was enjoyable not great but it was enjoyable um movie i regret paying for Money Python Live.
    48:48
    Now, I love Python, and I would have loved to have gone and seen the live show, but this is one of those fathom events in the movie theater thing, and it was just hollow. They didn't have the sound turned up, and it wasn't that great of picture quality, and I would have so rather enjoyed watching this on DVD than paying to go see it in the movie theater with a bunch of other people who strangely, like during the show, they're like, come on, everybody sing along. and the people would start singing in the audience. I'm like, they can't hear you.
    49:21
    Or the people would start clapping to try and encourage them to do something. It's like, they can't hear you clapping. Yes, they're performing live, but they're performing live in England. So, stop.
    49:34
    Anyway. The Curse You Shaky Cam Award. That gets to go to Captain Phillips and Beasts of the Southern Wild. the Maybe I Just Don't Get It award. I finally watched Young Frankenstein. Yeah, I don't get what all the deal is about that. I really didn't laugh once.
    49:54
    Haven't seen it. Just saying. Don't think it's a classic in the least. Movie I'm glad I turned off 30 minutes into, that'd be I, Frankenstein. Movie I realized I didn't want to watch within five minutes, that was Much Ado About Nothing,
    50:06
    which Joss Whedon directed, and I literally got through the title sequence and they started talking in Shakespearean manner and I just went, yeah, this ain't Baz Luhrmann doing this. Now I'm turning it off.
    50:21
    Movie I wish I turned off but didn't, that'd be Beasts of the Southern Wild. Movie I could have immediately watched a second time, that would be John Wick. The Why Did They Remake That award goes to Robocop and Brick Mansions. Brick Mansions is a remake of District B-13, which was a French movie.
    50:37
    I'd watch that instead. and then the well that was depressing award goes to 12 Years a Slave and a movie called Prisoners which was Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal and god was that depressing sounds like it and there we are that about does it for my movies of 2014 did I mention that I saw but did not come out in 2014 necessarily we're clear right? yeah Yeah, pretty good.
    51:09
    Maybe we need to add a disclaimer to the podcast description. Check the fine print, you know. Come on, people.
    51:16
    Now, Jeff, I hear you might have a list or two. Yeah, I do. I thought I'd continue with the negative vibe.
    51:25
    Wait, wait, wait. Do we need to? Is it time for? No? Okay, we'll hold off. Okay, go ahead. Well, this is probably as negative as I'm probably going to get. so we could go ahead, I guess. I don't know if I could squeeze it into 60 seconds. But I was going to do the most disappointing moments of 2014 in terms of, I guess, video games, media, television, any kind of media, I guess. Hit it. Yeah, I was going to... Well, these aren't in any particular order, really, but just my personal most disappointing moments that I could think of.
    52:02
    Number one would be the season finale of Homeland. I don't know if you guys watched that at all. No, spoil it.
    52:09
    Well, it was a fairly good season overall. Is it season three you're talking about? I believe it's season three, whatever the current season is. Okay, yeah. Yeah, season three, I believe. It had lots of good action, which is pretty much what you watch Homeland for, is the suspense and action and whatnot.
    52:26
    They decided to do the finale with absolutely zero action. it was, I don't know it just seemed like okay, when's a car going to blow up or when's somebody going to get sniped here or what's going to happen and nothing and it was just a total let down and they said they did it on purpose just to show that the series doesn't need to have the action to maintain the enjoyability or whatever and it just, I don't know It didn't work for anybody that I talked to that watches the show. It was all like, what the hell, man? So that definitely is near the top for me.
    53:09
    Number two would be a tie between Black Sails and Crossbones, which are two pirate shows that debuted this year. One, I believe, is on Starz. And I think you mentioned you like pirates. Yes. So this was something I was really anticipating, both of these. And both of them just really kind of fell flat for me, especially Black Sails because, well, it's actually made by Michael Bay. So, I mean, I don't know if I was expecting too much really, but I was expecting some high production value, which it had, but I don't know. I was trying to go for like kind of a Game of Thrones. You know, they would try to squeeze as many boobs as they could into each episode just for the sake of having boobs, and it was just like, come on, man. This has nothing to do with the story. It's like I could enjoy a good set of boobs here and there, if it ties in with the episode. But it's just like, come on. They're just obviously trying to pull some fans who just want some shock value and stuff like that. Yeah, exactly. So it's just disappointing to me. Not enough pirate action.
    54:11
    Number three would be Destiny, the video game, which was really hyped up. It's supposed to be the new Halo, basically. It's made by the actual Bungie guys who left Bungie. I don't know, it's good but it just wasn't good enough for what it should have been and so I already traded that in It's funny because I don't know if you guys read Penny Arcade but one of the guys there basically, as much as he hates Destiny, he says he can't stop playing it Yeah, the people who like it really like it Well, he's saying he doesn't even like it but he can't stop playing it either so I thought that was kind of an interesting commentary out number four would be Boardwalk Empire coming to an end I love that show it's just sad to see it go okay so you're just sad that it ended not that yeah not that it ended badly just disappointing you know okay just disappointing moments the ending was actually pretty eh I won't spoil anything but everybody died number five would be the Chicago Bears just terrible this year so kind of ruined my football season number 6 would be Titanfall supposed to be the Call of Duty killer but it really wasn't it was fun kind of like Destiny it was fun but one of those games that's like man I really paid 60 bucks for this you know and unfortunately I bought it on PC so I couldn't trade it in so I didn't have an Xbox One so number 7 would be both PSN and Xbox Live being down over Christmas come on man all these people getting their new consoles and can't even play them that's the hack and solve did you I don't know if you saw Scott I don't know if you saw Scott Umble raging about that on Twitter Scott is the Android developer he was going the hell are you doing PSN one of the good tips I saw on Google Plus actually was to say if you're a parent, do the smart thing. Take the console out of the box the night before Christmas, update it and then put it back in the box for Christmas Day because you don't want to be caught in the update console crush on Christmas Day.
    56:34
    Yeah, that's actually good advice because I mean it's pretty much pointless if you can't go online because you have to install the updates. I don't even think you can basically do anything until you activate everything. So, yeah, that was rather disappointing. But as Chris said, I think it was mainly the hackers, right? Yeah, they flooded the systems with... They have some way of flooding the system as if they're looking for an update. So it's not like they hacked into the system. They just have a way of flooding it.
    57:06
    And they did it just for laughs, which I think is a pretty thick move. They did a DDoS.
    57:15
    It denies service. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, because, you know, that's... Because we can and we will, so, you know, because we're elite hacktors. Yeah. So it wasn't the Koreans this time, though, getting back at Sony or anything? No.
    57:33
    Damn, I was even going to suggest that we did our entire episode about North Korea. Oh, man, we might get some nasty hacks or something, you know? Hey, at least we get some Twitter followers. Yeah.
    57:45
    I would... That would be bots. Yeah, really? I would put the interview on my list, but I don't know if it was worth seeing anyway, so it really wasn't a disappointment.
    57:57
    I heard that too. It was all much ado about nothing from what I understand. Yeah, I heard there were a few good laughs here and there, but it was probably just a waste of the rental money.
    58:11
    And last but not least would be the Pinball Arcade on PC. lack of new features wait wait wait special and now it's time for 60 seconds of rage with Jeff go pinball arcade on PC lack of features all I can do is laugh at this point I don't think I can really get rage man because really it is a bit of a laugh I've heard the PC platform is it's just it's the forgotten you know red haired twin of pinball arcade isn't it really I guess the good thing is that... Did they give you guys... Sorry, I was going to say, did they give you guys tournaments? No, no tournaments. No tournaments. It's like, come on, man. I don't understand why that is. No, I don't either. Apparently it's something to do with Steam. I don't know, but that doesn't sound right, because if I'm not mistaken, Zen runs tournaments.
    59:09
    Yeah. And why we don't have DX11 yet is beyond me. I don't understand why that's such a complicated thing to do and why it's being – I mean, again, I don't know what the numbers are versus PS4 and Xbox One, but I got to tend to believe that the PC has some pretty strong numbers. Well, yeah, they told us that the initial sales were favorable and, you know, so it's like why didn't they take some of those initial sales funds, put them back into PC development? And if PC is the platform that you're developing on, I don't, again, it kind of doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but at this point it's also one of those things where it's like, oh well.
    59:56
    Things that make you go, hmm. Well, I even emailed Bobby. I was like, you know, what's the status of DX11? And he's like, well, we're still trying to free up time for our engine guy, so it doesn't sound like it's even really started development. and tournaments they're like well we wanted to get a tournament because I was like I see you guys just announced a new tournament for the 12 days of Christmas and I was like where's the PC oh we wanted to but couldn't get it done in time so yeah the 12 days of Christmas isn't it just maybe I'm naive but isn't it just setting flags like we want these tables in and they will be included in the tournament set I'd love to know if a Farsight employee is listening here and I know you do listen to this in the office, what is involved in setting up a tournament because I don't think we as players know, is it difficult is it something that requires a lot of curation I wouldn't think so, it would just be hey these tables, let's put them in there would be I'm sure some sort of menu system that you can just sort of choose and just deploy them. I don't know. Let us know, guys. If you want to have a chat on the podcast about how it works, that'd be great. We'd love to have you on. So yeah, this is an open invitation to come on and talk about it or other things as well, if you want. Yeah, we are due to have them to have somebody on here again.
    61:33
    As we're sitting there going, by the way, we're going to put your feet to the coals. Yeah, I'm sure they'd love to Norman wants to come on. Maybe Norman wants to come on again. Although, he's stopped returning my emails. Granted, he's a busy guy, but he's not returning my emails anymore. He's a little bit scared that the stuff he tells me is going to end up public, but of course that's not the case, because, you know, everyone here signed NDAs. We can't reveal public information, or, like, private information. So he's got no problems with that happening. Yeah, I think the stuff Bobby told me was okay to pass on, because it's kind of common knowledge anyway. I mean, we all know DX11 isn't going to happen tomorrow or anything. But as far as the 12 days of Christmas go, I mean, it was cool that they did the flash sales and stuff. Hey, you know what? They did a better job this year than last year. Yeah, well, I don't think there was any promises made this year. That's what I was going to say. Yeah, they learned their lesson there. Don't announce any things that we're going to have to back ourselves up on. and they gave away a bunch of tables.
    62:40
    I think that it was a much better 12 Days of Christmas than in the past. Good job, guys. You did learn something. I found there was definitely good engagement this year. I like the fact that they heavily discounted the season passes for those platforms that support it. That's good for new players coming in, or maybe players who are disgruntled by one platform want to switch platforms. It's an easy way to get back up to speed. Because I have the first two seasons on PS3, and then I have the three and four on PC, and I'm probably going to pick those up on the PC and officially be done with playing on the PS3.
    63:24
    And that's more from a standpoint of I'm sick and tired of waiting. It's not so much waiting for the tables, but it's the fact that on the forums I'm three months behind on the conversation I can't contribute to the conversation I can't be a part of the conversation by the time I get my table all the excitement has been worn out I've already seen all the bug lists I've already seen all the video play on Twitch there's just no surprise left at all so yeah I think this those being put on sale will be what pushes me firmly into the Steam platform and no longer playing on PS3. I've got to say, that is one nice thing about PC. You do get the updates instantaneously. You get the new tables. You get the new bug fixes. Well, on top of that, I'm not going to have to worry about any platform switching going on either and not being able to transfer over my files and all that. It'll be boom, done. I don't have DX11 lighting on the PS3, so that's why it doesn't affect me that much when I play the PC. It kind of basically looks the same. more or less. I actually do prefer the PS3's look, because the PC's is based off the Xbox look, and the Xbox look kind of has a nuked-out look to it. I always thought the PS3 looked better as well compared to the Xbox. But it's not like severe, massive change, different or whatever. So I'm okay waiting for DX11 just so long as it comes.
    64:52
    Yes. It just got raised again on the forums, and somebody threw a video of Circus Voltaire in dark mode, and although I would never play dark mode if I was going for a high score, it certainly looks awesome, and it certainly shows off the light show that goes into these tables.
    65:16
    And it is a classic way of experiencing pinball, so I can't wait for that to actually be thrown in and get to use it. Speaking of other, well, speaking of game that we know and love, the Android version has, after a lot of waiting, has received Google Play Games or Google Play Services integration.
    65:42
    So that's a little bit like Game Center on iOS. Okay, you've pushed for that. Oh, yeah, I've been pushing for that, like, geez, ever since it was released as an option for developers back in 2013 or 2014.
    66:01
    So Android players now have the option to save and load games. So that's save and load achievements and local high scores between devices without having to root their Android phones, which is something that should have really been there. The big problem with that in the past before we got this was that the database for the game was actually in a protected part of the Android operating system, and you needed to have a super user, or what they commonly call root, to access that table file and transfer it between devices. Now you don't have to do that, because you can do it all through Google Play Games.
    66:41
    So we've got online achievements. we've got a goal for each of the five standard and wizard goals. So basically there's three achievements per table. You've got one achievement for standard, one achievement for wizard, and then a get your name on the local high score table achievement. So they wanted to do it flat, so you could actually achieve each thing without having to wait for the wizard goal to be unlocked. But there's a limit on how many achievements you can have for a game. I think it's something like 300 achievements, and we're up at 52. So we'll be talking, at the moment, 520 achievements that they have to code in. And it's just not possible to do it with the current system. So they had to group them. One thing that's pending at the moment is the display of the achievements doesn't actually give you a working total, so you don't have an idea within Google Play Games how many achievements in a certain game, like, say, for example, Space Shuttle, you might have four out of the five standard goals unlocked, but it doesn't actually show you that progress in the tile, So an open request of the owner is to have that incrementally shown on the tile.
    68:14
    The game still actually uses the database, like the game's local database, to detect goals and that sort of thing. So it's still required, but it uploads them when the local database says, right, those standard goals are done. and they'll then award you the goal. So some people have reported some issues with it. Some people are getting some force closers with the system. I know that in the beta testing round, we really, really smashed it as far as test net goes. There was a lot of different folks just trying to break it. And we did find some showstoppers in there, which got quickly fixed.
    68:59
    But I think there are still some lingering bugs. So I'd expect that you can actually turn it off at the moment if it's just causing you too much trouble, because Scott did anticipate that some folks might have a few issues with it on Android. But for the most part, it works okay, and it's going to be refined in future releases once Scott's back from his break. So I want to thank Scott publicly for working this, because it's been a long time coming, and it's great to finally see it in Android and finally be able to back up your data and transfer it to another device. So that's really awesome. You know what I'd be curious about?
    69:44
    There was discussion about when the new UI would be coming out. One of the things that I think we... I know that we requested, those of us that were pitching in ideas was that you'd be able to display, as you select a table, how many of the wizard goals, standard goals, you know, kind of thing that you've completed. And I'm kind of curious,
    70:09
    does it have to be tied into, you know, Xbox achievements or PlayStation trophies? Because obviously they've hit their limit on, I don't know if they've hit their limit on achievements in Xbox, but I know they've hit their limit on trophies. or can it be put in game So you can still you know yeah no it doesn give you any more trophies within the PlayStation Network but in terms of playing the game itself you're still earning achievements. There's still things to go for and that it can keep track of. I'm just curious to know if that's something that can be added, you know, through a patch just after the fact. Even there's a thread on the Pinball Arcade forums about... Some people have come up with some very creative challenges for after the wizard goals and things to do.
    71:02
    There's a whole laundry list. I can't even go into them, but they're rather interesting and they're kind of quirky. They're less about gameplay and more about yes, I've hit this hole 5,000 times.
    71:13
    Similar to what a lot of your typical things are. I would love to see that just gets thrown in, not as a trophy or an achievement, but just in-game, again, something to entice you to go back and play the tables more, to try and achieve more. I know certainly that within Google Play Games, they have a thing called Quests. So the developer using... It's quite actually simple to set up, and Scott's really looking forward to doing this for Android, where you can specify... You basically set up a whole lot of metadata for the game, and you link in, you hook in certain goals within the game and you can combine these goals together to form a quest. So in a shoot-em-up game like Skyforge, they've done this already and it's like destroy 20 towers. Exactly, get 200 headshots, blow up with one grenade 10 people, that kind of thing. Like I said, you would never purposely do it for scoring in the game, but you would do it for the, you know, in pinball would be something of the nature of, you know, knock down all the drop targets in order without making any mistakes, you know, that kind of thing, where it's a really extreme challenge. I think what you could do is with the tournaments, because in the case of Google Play Games, again, this is all handled through the framework, but with the tournaments, you could start doing things like rather than having a standard time game, you could actually do things like pin golf. Have you guys heard of that? Yes. Where you shoot for a particular score or a particular mission or something like that, and the shortest time to get to that particular goal gets the highest points. Well, you could do that sort of thing really easily in a tournament setting if you could actually, if you've got the right metadata set in the app and you can hook into it. That sort of stuff would actually, that would interest me more because I'm a bit burned out by tournaments. I really don't play them anymore. Yeah, I'm not playing them anymore either. But if I was doing something different, it was different. Like, it was something like a completely different tournament format. Yeah. I think the race for points would go away, and you'd actually start to have the pinball, like, you know, player technicians that were really good, they would actually start to shine more than the point, like the slog for points. Right. So I think that would be really cool to actually think about doing, and I'm sure that the guys are probably trying to look at doing that now. But, yeah, that sort of thing, again, like you say, Chris, it's all about keeping the platform fresh. Yeah.
    73:49
    So, yeah, I think it would be a good thing to do. And if they can do it in-game, put it this way, with all these frameworks like Google Play services and stuff, they still need to analyze the game and work out those achievements based on the various things that the pinball IK uses. So sometimes in the possible sound calls, but they have the ability to interpret dot matrix and off-numeric display states as well. That's another way that they detect goals. They also detect goals using on-off states of lamps on the play field. So extra ball is commonly linked to the extra ball light or the shooting light being on solidly for a certain amount of time. So they have the ability to link in certain states into the game, and I would imagine that it would be pretty... It would be doable, I would think, to actually do what you're suggesting without having to use any sort of framework. It would take a bit of extra code on the back end for them to do it, but I don't see any technical barrier for them to be able to do the same stuff in Google Play Games and all the other sort of Game Center-style things in-game in UE. in the UI, not Yui. Yeah, so...
    75:07
    It's funny because Yui here in Australia is actually an insurance company. It's Y-O-U-I, Yui. Whenever I say that, I always think of the insurance company.
    75:20
    So yeah, that would be my take on that. Did anybody have any comments on the poll? The pre-1980s current poll? Yes, I have comments. I just read your post actually it's like A. get over it it's a poll, it's not a bracket system it's a poll to gauge people's interest it's not a who's the ultimate winner thing so get over it the fact that it's ok fine so Xenon technically is from 1980 instead of 1979 and whatever too bad they set up the poll. Again, it's just a popularity thing, and nobody said that the winner of the poll is going to be the game that gets made as witnessed by QBallWizard and 8BallDeluxe.
    76:12
    I remember seeing 8BallDeluxe ever, or QBallWizard ever in a poll, and 8BallDeluxe took second place, and yet we got QBallWizard. So, other people are freaking out over the fact that it's like, well, but Xenon's not an EM. Yeah, well, neither is Paragon. Those are solid state machines. But on the other hand, maybe Farsight's using this poll as a two-fold. Gaging, because they said that they were going to do an EM for this season. So of the EMS that they selected, which one's leading that poll? So hey, we might get Fireball after all. I'm sure that Mike Lindsay, the community manager, is just using it to do exactly what you said, Chris. Just find out what people are thinking. It's people, you know, because we're passionate about the game and all that sort of stuff, and a lot of folks are really passionate about pinball in general. We do tend to get lost sometimes in these sort of discussions, and I think we just need to take a step back and go, hey, you know what? This is just a poll. It's not the end of the world. What I would like, I think we've reached the saturation part in that particular thread, And it's, okay, you've all vented, you've all had your piece to say, and why Xenon sucks and why Paragon is awesome, and anybody that thinks differently is just out of their mind.
    77:40
    Look, it's time to turn that into, hey, Farsight, you see how passionate we are about each of these different tables? This is why you need to do this table. You know, Paragon is a wide body. was Future Spa.
    77:56
    Doing Xenon, because it's just got this gorgeous artwork, and it's of a playfield that many people like that style, me included. Fireball, because it's got zipper flippers, and even though I hate those little tiny short flippers, when I finally got a chance to play Fireball this past year, the fact that they zipped in and locked, it completely changed how you played that table. I agree. It was a show of fun.
    78:21
    That game really surprised me when I went over to San Fran this year and got to play it at Pacific Pinball Museum.
    78:31
    Unfortunately, that game, the flippers were so weak you could hardly even get it halfway up the playfield, but that whole zipper-flipper concept is just... It's crazy. It's awesome. And yes, that needs to be... It screws so many people up because they're not used to being able to let the ball just bounce and come to a rest on the flipper without touching the flipper itself. you know the button um you know you got games like joker poker where it's like hey there's a true em as made by gottlieb who knew what the hell they were doing with an em as opposed to my opinion they don't know what the hell they did with you know with solid state or dmd um and it's like yeah i don't want to see williams em except for fireball but that's bally um technically even Joko Poker is solid state, though. I mean, the layout... Oh, yeah, that's true. And that's the interesting thing. I would wonder which... Because I noticed that with all of the EMs, except for, I think, Centigrade's 37, there was a solid state version available of all of them. Because that was the transitional period there. A solid state version... Actually, it was a solid state version with chimes, because the Elliot and Williams and Gottlieb at the time were really concerned that operators would shun the games for electronic sounds. And they actually put a chime plus a very crude digital speaker in there, so operators could switch between the two if there was a big kickback from the public. So yeah, a lot of these early solid states, yeah, they had both systems. It's funny that Joker Poker as an EM only sold 820, but as a solid state it sold almost 10,000. is joker poker the one with the roto target the big target that spins around no it's mainly just drop targets but it's a really cool layout but yeah the drop targets are offset they're not because I think if I'm recalling correctly royal flush is very symmetrical yeah it's just got that one long bank and yeah I didn't care for that I was like I want there to be some like it's one of my it's why I don't like say big shot because it's just, it's the exact same shot where they're shooting left flipper, right flipper and it's just this row. It's not very interesting to me.
    80:54
    And there's the same goes with Spirit of 76. It's just, I don't like that symmetrical layout. I like things to be off kilter.
    81:03
    Yeah, what I reckon they've got to do if they do another EM and they need to do this back on Big Shot as well.
    81:12
    Norman needs to go and record the EM flipper noise because it is a very distinct noise. Very distinct. They also need to dial down the strength considerably. The amount of strength that's on Big Shot is solid state strength. And those of us who've actually gone and played Woodies and the early EMs know that those flippers don't behave like that and it would change the way you play Big Shot. It would make it a completely different game. Well, they're much slower tables. The slingshots aren't that strong. No. They sound strong. They sound really strong, and then Bulge Guy goes, When you do it. Oh, yeah, it sounds like a freaking tank bouncing around. Right.
    82:02
    But they're weak as any. They're all noise, no action. And that's what they need to do. But that's my encouragement in general in the forum, and it pops up in various threads now and then where it's like, hey, you know what? It's all fun and games for us to slam another person's opinions and everything. But after a while, we need to get into, look, there's a reason why we're being this way. It's because we're passionate about these games.
    82:28
    And regardless of if you hate a table strictly because it's beating your table in a poll, you would still probably be happy with that table if it was clumped with a different group of tables. You know what I mean? And let's expound the reasons why some of these need to be put in.
    82:52
    It's not a this-or-nothing mentality, but it's a, hey, how about this and this and this, because these are why we need it. How about all of them? Well, yeah, all of them, though, that is so wide-encompassing. But, you know, no, if we're trying to help Farsight focus in on something and have a good reason to focus in on it, then I think this is, you know, it's a good reason. And watch, I'm going to do this right now because I've been planning this for a little while and I just never knew when to throw it in here.
    83:22
    So one of my most wanted tables that I thought for sure no way in hell would ever show up in TPA is NBA Fast Break. strictly because of a conversation that I had with Bobby regarding dealing with licensing especially for all of those it's for former players and for the teams and everything well then I looked at the table recently again and I looked at it on the play field there is nothing licensed except for the NBA trophy and the logo that's it on the back glass, you do have NBA stars of the time, of which I wasn't able to identify any of them.
    84:09
    I had to actually look up their jersey, their number, then compare photos of them and go, is that really the guy? Yeah, I guess it is, which made me believe, hey, based off of what they're doing with Adam's family and adjusting Fester, you could just change the color of the logo of the team, because a lot of them didn't even have the team name on it. So, eliminate the team name, change the color of the team, change the face up a little bit, boom. You're home free. You don't have to deal with that licensing. The only licensing you're having to deal with is the NBA logo.
    84:40
    The announcer in the game is not a voice actor. He's not part of the NBA. Yes, they shout out people's names,
    84:50
    but again, the images are so good luck identifying that as the actual person. If it wasn't for the fact that they said who the person's name is when they show the image. Who knows? I'm just saying I would very much like to encourage Firesight to seek and not just wipe this table off the plot because you don't think that it's possible, but to actually investigate looking into if it's one of these tables that doesn't need a Kickstarter but could be done a la Dracula and Elvira and any of those other licensed tables that have been put through. Because I don't know, maybe the license wouldn't be as bad as they expect. And the other reason why I highly want, why I really want this game in here is because it has such a unique scoring aspect to it. There is no other pinball that scores like it. Unless you go back to an EM, back to the EM days on something like the bowling games. But yeah, you're only scoring baskets. You're only scoring those points. It's not like World Cup soccer where you're scoring goals and scoring regular pinball scores. That's right. And it would be the perfect game if they ever instituted head-to-head pinball play, because then both players could be playing against each other at the same time because that's what this game did in real life. They put two of these machines together, linked them, and if the other person was on a scoring run, that was the score you were trying to beat. Yeah, it's pretty cool how they do that. It was just a little interface board, and it worked really well in arcades. The other thing that is worth bearing in mind, which might be the only reason why they have a problem with it, is on the DMD when you're selecting your team, I'm pretty sure it has the team livery on the DMD Yes, that would be covered under the NBA license. Oh, would it? Okay. Yes, the NBA owns all the team names. I discovered this after Sterling losing the Clippers. Ah, I see. Okay. So the NBA owns all of the names.
    86:56
    Therefore, if you scored a deal with the NBA, you would be getting all this inclusive. That would be the only barrier I would see. The play field is nondescript. Yeah, the play field is nondescript.
    87:10
    And they could easily do a minor touch-up on the back glass and still not lose the theme of the game. Exactly. It's not like it has Jordan or anything on it. No, it has nobody. I think the only player I recognize is maybe Clyde Drexler. I think Drexler's on there and I think did someone say Jason Kidd is on there? I think Jason Kidd is on there. Oh yeah, there's a Laker Yeah, but a lot of the other guys I looked up the Laker and I followed the Lakers I had no clue who it was and it turned out it was Nick Van Exel which you hear his name a lot in the game which is comical to me Yeah, a lot of these guys are probably supposed to be these big prospect rookies that kind of didn't pan out and they weren't Anyway, that's my wish I know it would not happen this season but hey Farsight, how about looking into it maybe next year, say around NBA Finals time, which will be in June. So that gives you a year and a half to work this out. You could for once time a pinball to be released at the height of people being excited about something. You know, I'm just putting it out there.
    88:13
    That would be good to sit on and release at that time. That would be a great bit of mind share to get on board with. It would, and it would be a great addition to Season 5. and like I said, there's no other pinball table out there like it.
    88:27
    It's completely unique in terms of how it scores, how it plays. It's got a great playfield layout. A lot of fun.
    88:35
    It'd be cool. Anyway, I just don't want the door shut on... The door shut, the door shut, the door shut! Oh, sorry, Sean.
    88:44
    Had to squeeze that in somewhere. I did, you know. It's got to be in here somewhere. Just wouldn't be the same without it. No. Yeah, that would be cool. I think the game I'm most looking forward to, from my perspective, everyone who follows me on the forum will know this, it'll be Safecracker.
    89:04
    That one would be pretty cool. And I know they can probably do, from a technical perspective, they can do the back glass now that they did basically one massive alpha pane for Scared Stiff Spider Assembly. That's just one massive alpha pane in the game, so they could do exactly the same thing with the game board on the back box. the only thing they're going to have to get right, and this is critical to that game being successful, is the token popping out of the back glass and sliding down. Damn straight. You've got to let us collect all of them. If they don't get that animation right, like, I've seen some vPinMame tables try and do it, and it looks just terrible.
    89:42
    But if they get it right, it will just be cool. Very, very cool. Like I said, I just want to be able to collect each and every single one of the tokens. Yeah. And that means, hey, if I get three of the same token spit out at me at one time, that's fine too because that lets me put the token in and enter that weird multiball mode. The vault. That's very cool. Right? That's very cool. So, you know, I'm just saying it's one of those games that it's going to need a little extra effort to make it be what it should be. I have every confidence that they can do it, I hope. Yeah, I reckon they can. I think if it's going to be included in a season, they'll need to probably give it a fair bit of lead time to actually work out the tech, because there are some very unique pieces of tech for that game that they would need to work out some code for.
    90:38
    And Jerry, did you say that you actually own all the tokens? Not all of them. I've got a fairly big collection of them, though. You've got a fairly big collection of them. Yeah, including the silver one. I've put up the photos on Google Plus if you want to see. I'm just saying, you know, if they needed scans, they're available. Yeah, they could contact me. I'm sure that, is it Steve Bocci or whatever his name is, that has a really awesome pinball collection. He's actually got a safecracker with like a mint tube of tokens, I think. So he's got a really, really nice safecracker that they could probably, if they asked him nicely, maybe get digital scans of.
    91:22
    Yeah, but I've got some, and I'm sure that if they put the call out in the forum, they'll probably get some other ones coming up too.
    91:32
    Well, gentlemen, I think that our holiday episode, we did squeeze in some pinball. I didn't know if it would happen, but we did. So there we go. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year to you all, you bastards. I did see some cake avatars pop up in the forum, shall we change up the avatar once again I think so this time in honor of the Xbox and Sony blackout and wanting to have a dark mode on the PC with the X11 I think a solid black avatar is in order Black is beautiful Blackout Avatar which means for us gentlemen I think we'll be busting out the white on black logo yeah we're going to have to do that we're going to have to go in Sean already put that up on his yeah did he make that himself or did you give him that image I didn't give him the official image he stole it from one of the images that I sent him prior just inverted it maybe we could get a copy of him because I don't have the skills. Okay, you send it. I'll send it. If anybody else, well, never mind.
    92:48
    No, you can't use ours. Only we get to rock that logo, damn it. Yeah, that's right. The privilege of the podcasters.
    92:56
    Oh, yeah. So be sure to check us out on Twitter at Blockade, at ShutYourTraps, at JaredMorgz. We also have an email that I sometimes check. that's at blahblahblockadepodcast at gmail.com uh there's google plus oh yes the google plus page jared maintains that beyond that make sure you check out our friends at wizard amusement give them a hello tell them that you listen to the podcast you can get 10% off your order and I think with that we shall be done happy 2015 we will see you all again in February go out and play some pinball support your local arcades do they still have arcades? apparently hmm I'd like to see them or your local fish and chip shop there you go if you can break the snow in northern hemispheres and if you're down here in Australia well you've got no excuse so go and do it you're just going to sweat your balls off in Australia that's right