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Episode 14 - 80s Pinball, Nintendo, and KantCon 2016

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 26m·held·Aug 18, 2016
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Eclectic Gamers Podcast 14: PinBot wins 80s tournament; hosts debate Pinside top 50; Nintendo financials discussed.

Summary

In this July 2016 Eclectic Gamers Podcast episode, hosts Tony and Dennis discuss the conclusion of their 1980s Pinball Machine Mania tournament (won by PinBot over Eight Ball Deluxe), preview an upcoming developer-focused tournament, and respond to listener questions about Pinside's top 50 games. They also cover Nintendo's poor financial performance, weak Wii U sales, and the limited impact of Pokémon GO on Nintendo's bottom line.

Key Claims

  • PinBot won the 1980s Pinball Machine Mania tournament with 59.6% of votes (roughly 60-40 split) over Eight Ball Deluxe

    high confidence · Dennis, describing tournament results from their podcast's voting system, received over 100 votes in the finals

  • PinBot is ranked #83 on Pinside's current top solid-state list, while Elvira and the Party Monsters (the highest-ranked 1980s game) is #42

    high confidence · Dennis verified this on Pinside rankings on Friday before the episode; he notes these rankings change regularly as new Stern titles release

  • PinBot is primarily a right-flipper game with limited meaningful shots from the left flipper

    high confidence · Both Dennis and Tony agree on this design characteristic after playing the game multiple times in tournament and location settings

  • Lord of the Rings pinball machines sell for more than new Stern Pro models, which bothers Dennis from a value perspective despite wanting to own it

    medium confidence · Dennis discussing secondary market pricing as a barrier to ownership, though exact prices not specified

  • Nintendo reported 31.3% decrease in net sales with an operating income loss of 5.1 billion yen (~$48.1M USD) in Q1 2016

    high confidence · Tony citing Nintendo's official quarterly earnings report released that week

  • Wii U sales dropped 53% year-on-year during the reporting period

    high confidence · Tony referencing the hardware sales data, noting this was not in Nintendo's official report but from external analysis

  • Star Fox Zero sold only 320,000 units, the worst sales performance of any Star Fox game

    high confidence · Tony citing Nintendo's official earnings report; the game was the biggest release of the reporting period

  • Nintendo only owns a minority stake (approximately 30%) in The Pokémon Company and has no ownership stake in Niantic

    medium confidence · Dennis and Tony discussing Pokémon GO revenue structure and Nintendo's limited financial benefit from the game's success

Notable Quotes

  • “I was actually mentally preparing my list of things I like about 8-Ball Deluxe...And I saw, oh, no, never mind. I get to write up about Pinbot instead.”

    Dennis @ early in pinball segment — Humorous acknowledgment that Dennis expected 8-Ball Deluxe to win based on Reddit sentiment but was pleasantly surprised by PinBot's victory

  • “I've had a number of tournament games where the victory was entirely determined by who hit the skill shots.”

    Dennis @ PinBot discussion — Underscores the importance of PinBot's skill shot mechanic in competitive play, distinguishing it from modern games where skill shots matter less

  • “The only other thing you can do is send it down the middle with the left flipper but that's not a safe shot in its own respect and the fact that there's nothing else to even aim for just puts a real hurt on your gameplay”

    Tony @ PinBot gameplay analysis — Key critique of PinBot's playfield layout limiting left-flipper engagement, a significant design flaw acknowledged by both hosts

  • “I just try and try and try, and I just can't do it. Anytime it comes up in a tournament draw, I just accept it. It's an instant loss.”

    Tony @ overrated games discussion — Tony's personal frustration with Indy 500 despite acknowledging it's 'not actually a bad game,' demonstrating subjective vs. objective game evaluation

  • “I think Theater of Magic is carried almost entirely by its art. I think the game has good flow, but not any better flow than a myriad of other games that one could choose from.”

    Dennis @ overrated games discussion — Core argument for why Dennis considers Theater of Magic overrated at #13 ranking—aesthetics outweigh gameplay depth

  • “I think the challenge is entirely neutered by how that game can be approached. I think the skill shot is stupid, if you can even call it a skill shot.”

    Dennis @ Theater of Magic critique — Dennis's harshest criticism of Theater of Magic—the ability to timeout modes and the weak skill shot mechanics undermine competitive depth

Entities

DennispersonTonypersonPinBotgameEight Ball DeluxegameAttack from MarsgameLord of the RingsgameTheatre of Magicgame

Signals

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: PinBot's skill shot mechanic with progressive multiplier was outcome-determining in multiple tournament games, distinguishing it from modern games where skill shots are less critical

    high · Dennis: 'I've had a number of tournament games where the victory was entirely determined by who hit the skill shots.' Both hosts emphasize missing skill shots creates significant disadvantage unlike most modern games.

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: PinBot has severe right-flipper bias with minimal meaningful left-flipper shots, creating gameplay imbalance

    high · Tony: 'every shot you want you're going to take off the right flipper' and 'the fact that there's nothing else to even aim for just puts a real hurt on your gameplay.' Dennis agrees completely.

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Theater of Magic can be defeated by timing out modes and cradling the ball, eliminating challenge; skill shot is trivial; wizard mode is anticlimactic

    high · Dennis: 'You can time out all of the modes...you can rinse and repeat and cheese your way through it' and 'The wizard mode...is a total joke. I didn't even realize I had played the wizard mode at first because it is so anticlimactic.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Listener engagement in Eclectic Gamers' tournament increased across rounds, with finals receiving 100+ votes—highest participation yet

    medium · Dennis: 'either more and more listeners started to come along and play with it, or it just started to spread beyond the show in and of itself, because I know we've advertised it in a variety of venues.'

  • ?

    community_signal: Reddit pinball community strongly favored Eight Ball Deluxe in tournament finals, yet Pinside voters preferred PinBot—demonstrates split preferences between casual Reddit users and Pinside raters

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.259

0:00
Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. It's Sunday, July 31st. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're going to have a discussion today about pinball and video games and tabletop gaming. But first, what have you been up to, Dennis? Oh, not a whole lot. I went and saw Star Trek Beyond. Pretty good film, I would say. I could easily see a lot of people thinking it might be the best of the three new ones, simply because it's more of a throwback in style to the TV show, be it the original series or Next Generation. So I do recommend people seeing it if they're Star Trek fans. And beyond that, I've started up a couple of video games. Dying Light, which was the last of the series of Xbox One games I received, either on my birthday or Christmas. It's not going that great. The story is very pedestrian, but the big issue is it is inducing motion sickness in me, which was a problem I've had in first-person shooters. We're talking like 90s first-person shooters. So it's just the way some of the context will flow. I can take Dramamine if I want to play for an extended period, but you have to remember to do that ahead of time, and I don't like to do that. So normally I only get in maybe 30 to 60 minutes. The other game I started up yesterday is called Gems of War. It's sort of a puzzle quest clone, so it's like a mix of Bejeweled, but you're kind of role-playing at the same time. So that's kind of cool. It's a free-to-play game, but it seems to be fully accessible without having to actually invest money. But that's really all I've been up to. Tony, what's been going on with you? I've been doing a whole lot of nothing. I've still been reading and listening to a bunch of audio books. Most of my time has been spent prepping for my certification test, so I've just been doing a lot of studying and stuff with the kids, nothing really fancy. No gaming other than I've been getting in maybe one or two rounds of Overwatch every other day or so, and that's about it. I guess there's not much going on with us, but luckily we have a full show worth of content that'll be exciting for everyone to make up for the lack of excitement in our own lives. So let's go ahead and we'll kick it off with the pinball segment. And I'll go ahead and start with the big finale to our 1980s Pinball Machine Mania tournament. So for those who have been listening along, we have been having a series of games built between 1980 and 1989, duking it out to see who is indeed the one worthy to reign supreme. and the finals were between uh williams's uh pin bot which came in in our metrics at the five seed which is based off of where they were uh on the pin side rankings when i first developed the list and eight ball deluxe which is uh came in as the four seed from over on the bally side so with over a hundred votes that were cast in the finals which were far and away well i shouldn't say far and away it seemed like every round we got more and more votes i think there may have been one exception. So either more and more listeners started to come along and play with it, or it just started to spread beyond the show in and of itself, because I know we've advertised it in a variety of venues. But the result was Pinbot actually won, and won pretty significantly. It had 59.6% of the vote. So basically a 60-40 split between Pinbot and Apold Deluxe. That's a pretty convincing win right there. I mean, almost 10%. Yeah, I was surprised. And then no small, I should say that pinball was my pick. Might as well. So I wasn't disappointed with the result, but I know in one of the locations you'd listed the finals was on Reddit, in the pinball section on Reddit, and every single comment that I saw in there was in favor of 8-Ball Deluxe if they said anything. That was because I didn't look at the results while they were coming in. That was my only clue as to what way I thought things were going. And I thought, oh, 8-Ball Deluxe will probably win. Also, it was a mildly higher seed. And it is a very good game. So all of that just made me think, okay, well, I was actually mentally preparing my list of things I like about 8-Ball Deluxe. So I could say why I thought the game won before on Friday when I closed the vote out. And I saw, oh, no, never mind. I get to write up about Pinbot. instead. And for those that don't know, and I did go back and check, and it's still the case on the Pennside rankings, because they do change from time to time, particularly when new Stern titles and such come out. But Pennside has and had Elvira and the Party Monsters was the top-rated 1980s game, and that fell a couple of rounds ago in our contest. And so as of Friday, Elvira is rated at number 42 on their top solid state list. PinBot's at number 83. So as is unsurprising, our results are far more accurate, thereby proving that Pinside's evaluations are incredibly off. But we're not here to judge Pinside. We're a humble podcast. So what I thought is it was probably good for us to give some thoughts on the winner. So I guess kind of what are your thoughts about PinBot? Because you and I both have played it. I'd say we've probably played it fairly significantly, despite it being a game that neither of us really, well, we don't own. I don't have any friends who own it. But it was on location in the Kansas City area for quite a while. So I actually got a number of games on it and played it in tournaments several times. Yeah, I did, too. And it was always a favorite to play.

“Small enough, though, that Nintendo said that they weren't going to adjust their forecasts. That's pretty small.”

Tony @ Nintendo/Pokémon GO discussion — Illustrates the surprisingly minimal financial impact of Pokémon GO's massive cultural success on Nintendo's actual earnings

  • “They were the third largest manufacturer at the time, only against Bally and Williams. It's just they're not well-known in the U.S. because they're Italian.”

    Tony @ Zachariah virtual pinball mention — Historical context on Zachariah's role in pinball history and why the company faded from U.S. market consciousness

  • “Theater of Magic and a lot of the John Papadiuk stuff is an excellent on-location pinball, especially for people that aren't very familiar with pinball. But I just don't see it standing up against a lot of more modern games that are way lower on the list.”

    Dennis @ Theater of Magic analysis — Clarifies that Theater of Magic's weakness is relative to other top-ranked games, not as an absolute game—good for casual play but overrated for enthusiasts

    • Pinside
    organization
    Eclectic Gamers Podcastorganization
    Pizza Westvenue
    John Papadiukperson
    Nintendocompany
    Wii Uproduct
    [name withheld pending review]product
    [name withheld pending review]product
    Zaccariacompany
    Nianticcompany
    Elvira and the Party Monstersgame
    Cirqus Voltairegame
    Tales of the Arabian Nightsgame
    Indianapolis 500game
    Splatoonproduct
    Mario Makerproduct

    medium · Dennis: 'in one of the locations you'd listed the finals was on Reddit, in the pinball section on Reddit, and every single comment that I saw in there was in favor of 8-Ball Deluxe...I thought, oh, 8-Ball Deluxe will probably win' but Pinbot won with 59.6%

  • ?

    business_signal: Nintendo Wii U hardware sales collapsed 53% year-on-year during Q1 2016, indicating severe console decline

    high · Tony citing Wii U sales data from earnings period; Dennis attributes some decline to Nintendo NX anticipation

  • ?

    business_signal: Nintendo reported 31.3% net sales decrease and 5.1 billion yen (~$48M USD) operating income loss in Q1 2016

    high · Tony citing Nintendo's official quarterly earnings report; Dennis notes some loss due to yen appreciation but confirms performance issues

  • ?

    business_signal: Despite Pokémon GO's massive cultural success, Nintendo's financial benefit is minimal due to minority ownership stake (~30%) in Pokémon Company and zero stake in Niantic

    high · Dennis: 'Small enough, though, that Nintendo said that they weren't going to adjust their forecasts. That's pretty small.' and 'They've got no stake whatsoever in Niantic.'

  • ?

    product_concern: Star Fox Zero sold only 320,000 units—worst sales performance of any Star Fox game—suggesting the title and/or Wii U platform failed to resonate

    high · Tony: 'Star Fox Zero, which was the biggest release during the reporting period. It only sold 320,000 units, which incidentally is the worst sales performance ever of a Star Fox game.'

  • $

    market_signal: Lord of the Rings pinball machines command prices exceeding new Stern Pro models, creating collector/enthusiast premium

    medium · Dennis: 'they sell for more than new Stern Pros sell for, even though it's just a little bit' but this premium bothers him enough to prevent purchase despite strong desire to own

  • ?

    design_philosophy: John Papadiuk's art-focused games (Theater of Magic, Circus Voltaire, Tales of Arabian Nights) excel at casual location play but lack depth for home ownership and competitive play

    medium · Dennis: 'Theater of Magic and a lot of the John Papadiuk stuff is an excellent on-location pinball, especially for people that aren't very familiar with pinball. But I just don't see it standing up against a lot of more modern games.'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Nintendo Wii U sales decline partially driven by anticipated Nintendo NX launch, creating hardware transition headwinds

    medium · Dennis speculating: 'a lot of that may be driven by the fact that it's been known that the Nintendo NX is going to be upcoming' and Tony agreeing end-of-generation falloff is predictable

    • 5:50
    I always enjoyed it. It was really nice, the one that was on location. once you figured out the exact sweet spot you could hit that skill shot pretty much every time that helped a lot in tournament play i think the uh skill shot is i mean the skill shot really is important to the overall flow of the game but overall it's a a genuinely fun game to play even if it has the horribleness of being able to steal multi balls from the other person and yeah that's one of those older game things that exist that it's like oh this is a fun game i've got every oh i failed to activate the multi-ball and there the other guy got it i did half the work yeah yeah and i and i took advantage of that or tried to on on a few of my tournament games um and so yeah that's a good point i would i think that in terms of what i like about pinbot i like the sounds it's very 80s i like the light show i think for an 80s game with the the colored stand-up targets and everything it's just it's it's a lot more colorful than most of the games of the era in my view were uh i like that the multi-ball wasn't overly hard like i think fire powers multi-ball is just really really hard to activate and but it's not a gimme multi-ball either, like how the try balls were on all the Data East games, where it's like if you got to ball three and you hadn't earned the multi-ball, you could have it for free sort of thing. So it's sort of in that, to me, it was in between. It wasn't a gimme multi-ball, but it wasn't overly hard. But opening the visor required pretty risky shots because those were sort of straight up the middle shots, and pinball can be a bit of a drain monster. I liked, as you noted, the skill shot, definitely that 100,000 point and the multiplier that starts to go into effect on the skill shot as you go on from ball to ball makes it really important and can be a difference in tight games. I've had a number of tournament games where the victory was entirely determined by who hit the skill shots. I've had that a couple of times too. Unlike a lot of the games, especially the more modern games, with pen bots, the skill shot felt like if you miss the skill shot, you were hurting bad. Yeah, just because you would have to put in a lot of work to be able to earn that many points just actually playing the field. And with a game without ball save, there are a lot of risks to being able to play that long on it anyway, even if you have the center post in between the flippers, which the one we played did. The other thing is that sort of secondary skill shot that was akin to attack from Mars if you do the super skill and can hit the center and drop that bank so you can immediately start attacking the UFO. Pinbot has the same thing. I only ever pulled it off competitively once, but when you go from launch, you can choose. And actually, if you hit the lit stand-up target, you instantly open the visor so you don't have to light the entire sequence. It's very hard. It's hard, but that is a massively useful trick. Yeah, and so I respected that because it rewarded being able to choose when you were going to shoot that, get that skill going, and save you from a lot of risky shots to open up for the multi-ball. The idea of being able to steal the locked balls and the solar value, you could steal the solar values as well, could be fun from a casual play perspective. I liked how the extra ball worked where you could control which lane. it was you know you move the lit light and so the ball was going to drain out of an outline you could if you had the light going you could actually go and make it give you an extra ball and that the idea the to advance the planets those were not those were difficult shots as well because you had two ways to do it but they were both on the extreme edges of the table so there are a lot of things i really like about pinbot it's definitely a game i would like to own uh but there are things that you know as as we would expect as with anything really there are a number of uh elements that aren't so great. And so I'd say sort of the detriments I see to Pinbot are, as we noted for tournament purposes, the theft of the multiball, the theft of the solar value, not really seen as a, you know, it's okay. And there are times where tournaments will do that. And definitely in local tournaments, I didn't think it was a big deal, but obviously there are better games from a balance perspective than allowing that. I'd say the big thing that always sort of stuck with me, though, was there's not much to shoot for on the left flipper. it's like the right side of that play field is consumed by that upper play field where the ball will kind of drain down and then you've got that planet advance shot over there but it's really hard uh and i'd say it's a riskier shot than shooting for the drop targets on the left which also gave you points so it was like there was really only one thing to shoot for from the left flipper and it wasn't that great of a thing to shoot for so that was probably i think the biggest problem with pin bot is it's very much a right flipper game oh yeah i agree completely the way it's laid out every shot you want you're going to take off the right flipper i mean the only other thing you can do is is send it down the middle with the left flipper but that's not a safe shot in its own respect and the fact that there's nothing else to even aim for just puts a real hurt on your gameplay yeah and i'm not sure when it was designed with what the thinking was maybe it was thought that with the number of stand-up targets to open the visor, that you'd feel like you were using the left flipper a lot because you could make all those shots from that flipper. Same with being able to lock the two multi-balls. You could do them from either flipper. But just by and large, where the ramp is, where the drop targets are, all of that's what you use the right flipper for. But overall, I think it's a fun game.
    11:42
    Obviously, it was successful. It spawned a series of Bride of Pinbot and Jackbot in sequence to kind of celebrate that IP. And I am pretty pleased that it ended up winning. So that was nice. And the tournament is over. So we get a break from all this and then we will start up something new. I've been, and Tony and I will have to talk about it, but I've been leaning towards Tony's idea, which we mentioned on a prior episode way, way back, which was maybe doing something where we take the, instead of top games from an era, take the top developers, probably use Pensight again, see who's the top developer based off of where the games are ranked, and then do kind of a, not just four developers, but maybe do eight or 16, and let them fight their way through and see which developer making which game is the best. Yeah, I like that idea, because there's just so many iconic game designers that are the bread and butter of pinball, even today. So many of them are from the old era, the 80s and such. Yeah, and also there are a lot that had some very successful titles that didn't go on and develop 16 actual tables. So we definitely need to do something where, obviously, when it came to manufacture, it was pretty easy. I almost just said easy outright, but I even struggled in that, what we had to do that other bracket, it because I didn't have enough 80s Stern electronics to fill out 16 slots. So that's where I ended up having to do Data East and Game Plan and Zacharia just to fill it out. Yeah. Hey, there's a, incidentally, as an aside there, apparently through Steam is a Zacharia game now, virtual pinball. I think it's got 30 tables. I've downloaded it. It's got one free, one that comes along with it. I've only played it once for about five minutes.
    13:41
    Graphically, it was too intensive. I was turning down the settings for my computer, and I kind of got it playable, but then it was time to move on, so I don't have anything else to say other than check it out if you guys are curious about it. They were the third largest manufacturer at the time, only against Bally and Williams. It's just they're not well-known in the U.S. because they're Italian. I heard an awesome thing about the game, the virtual pinball game, but I haven't actually gotten it or tried it out. Yeah, I don't have a good enough field to give a review for it, so we're not going to talk about it in the video game section at this time, at least. But just figured might as well let people be aware of it since we've just brought up the company yet again.
    14:24
    We really only have one other pinball topic, which we can go ahead and transition into now. It was an anonymous question, which, incidentally, if anyone wants to ask us or have us discuss something and you don't want your name used, you don't have to make a fake email account. You can just email and say, please don't use my name or please have this be anonymous and we will be more than happy to comply. But it was sort of a two-parter question, but I think it's a lot of fun. It was, out of the Pennside top 50, now I'm assuming they mean solid state games, because there's a top 100 and they actually do a 200 and 300 as well, and then they also do it on the EM side. But anyway, My question is, out of the Pennside top 50, what game do you most wish you owned? And also, what top 50 game do you think is the most overrated? So I guess let's tackle them one by one. Tony, out of the list of 50, and I, again, when I was looking and doing my ratings, I looked on Friday. So I don't know when they changed the ratings. They update it weekly. But based off of that, I have my pick. But which one do you wish you owned? I guess money, no object, just which one would you like to have for play purposes? Attack from Mars. I love Attack from Mars. It's a fun game. The call-outs crack me up every time. I like that it's got the wide-open middle with how all the shots are arrayed, but it's a game we have on location, and it is the game that on location I play the most, not in tournament play. I will go to Pizza West, and for every game I play on another machine, I tend to play a game on Attack from Mars because I love Attack from Mars so much.
    16:11
    It's a really good pick. Actually, when we're talking of developers, his famous four, that Attack from Mars is my favorite. I think it's better than Medieval Madness. It is just, I love that game so much. When it comes to like Pinball Arcade, on Pinball Arcade, I play it almost, if I just want to play a quick couple games on Pinball Arcade, it's always Attack from Mars. That's the one I go to. It's the one I like the most. So, yeah, that's my most wanted game is Attack from Mars on that list. Well, I think most people would agree that you've picked a very good one. Mine is also a top. And where was Attack from Mars ranked? Number five. Money would essentially be no object as long as I actually could put the money together to acquire it. And my issue with Lord of the Rings is I could put together the money to acquire it, but given that they sell for more than new Stern Pros sell for, even though it's just a little bit, that just bothers me a little too much to actually commit to it. But in terms of what one do I most want, and I didn't have that as a factor, it would easily be Lord of the Rings. I love the theme. I love the call-outs as they're used in the table. I think the layout is enjoyable. I love that it has a super deep rule set. And I suppose the most interesting thing is I've never actually played a physical Lord of the Rings. I've only ever played it virtually. It was one of the first tables I put into my virtual cab, and it's probably the one that I play the most when I set aside playing games to learn the rules for tournaments that I know are going to be on location in the area. So for me, it's an easy pick, but that's just because I love the IP so much. And it happened to turn out as a really, really good pinball machine. I think, and I'd say the Pinside ratings would agree with this, the best of the White Star era from Stern. So given those are what we like, let's go ahead and shift on over to the overrated. So, Tony, what did you think of this? I found this one to be a lot harder than saying which game I liked the most. But we have two questions, and so we must tackle it. Yeah, I think the most overrated games are a lot tougher choice. There's a lot of games in the top 50 that I think are worse than some of the games that are in the top 100 and could easily be swapped around. That said, I decided to go with Indy 500. Indy 500 is not actually a bad game as far as I can tell. I am just horrible at it and absolutely nothing I do, no practice I get in on it, either virtually or on real on-location tables, no tips or tricks that I find out and learn and practice on. Nothing I seem to do makes me any better on that table. I just try and try and try, and I just can't do it. Anytime it comes up in a tournament draw, I just accept it. It's an instant loss. Every time I've been in tournament play with somebody against me on Indy 500, they will normally score more on their first ball than I do on all three balls put together and I will sit down and I mean I've sat and watched them and seen exactly what they've done and I can't do it I do not know why but for some reason that game just I can't ever score any points on it and because of that I don't really enjoy playing the game when it comes up I play it because it's up in tournament, but I just don't. I feel like no matter what I do, even following all the tricks I've read online and what videos I've watched, I still feel like I don't know what's going on on that game and I don't seem to ever score any points. So that's the game I would drop down to my most overrated. I've actually never played that in tournament yet. I've tried it a few times on location. So I don't have a good feel yet. I wasn't surprised, though, because I've heard you express frustration with it before. And I was actually a bit surprised to see that it was in the top 50 on Penn State. It's barely in the top 50, but it's in the top 50. And it's just a game that it hates me. I think that's what it is, is that game just hates me. And I just cannot figure it out for the life of me. I mean, I've watched people who just go insane on that table. I've watched them closely, and none of the stuff that they did that made huge points ever seems to do anything for me. So I don't know. I'm just bad at it. Well, I went with an approach on these to say, what would I identify as a game that I'd just derank the most, I think, rather than necessarily hate the game or anything. But also I wanted to qualify mine in that I wanted to find something that I also push out of the top 50 in the process of the deranking Because I could easily say like Medieval Madness shouldn be it was number two when I looked on Friday and I would put it down to like you know 30 or something No, no, I need to be more extreme than that. So I'm going with Theater of Magic, which is currently ranked number 13. I think that Theater of Magic is carried almost entirely by its art. I think the game has good flow, but not any better flow than a myriad of other games that one could choose from. I think the dots look good, but also we have tons of games with really good dots. So this is a game that I think probably would have rated really high when it came out. But as time has gone by, I really question it staying as high up as it has. The moving trunk gimmick, again, 30 years ago, cool, but it's 2016. I don't think it's that impressive. My main issue, though, why I would derank the game, and I'm kind of keeping this all in the context with the first question of home ownership is, I think Theater of Magic is way too easy of a game. You can time out all of the modes. The fact that starting each of the next modes, it doesn't get progressively harder. It doesn't do an attack from Mars or medieval madness where you need more and more shots to take down that flying saucer or to break through that castle. You just hit that trunk the three times, spins around, feed the ball. there you go, there's the next mode, catch the ball, and you can rinse and repeat and cheese your way through it. I think the challenge is entirely neutered by how that game can be approached. I think the skill shot is stupid, if you can even call it a skill shot. I think that the wizard mode, which I've gotten to on the virtual version on Pinball Arcade, is a total joke. I didn't even realize I had played the wizard mode at first because it is so anticlimactic. So while it's a decent game in a lot of ways, I think Theater of Magic probably should be ranked at around, oh, I don't know, 100. Do you think that Theater of Magic is weaker than Circus Voltaire? You know, I thought about – actually, I sat there and I weighed that, and I think Circus Voltaire is around 18 or so when I looked. And so broadly, it's ranked less. The problem is I've played Theater of Magic a lot more than Circus Voltaire. And so I think a lot of that, my bias against Theater of Magic stems from the fact that it was one of the ten titles I had to play a lot in the five-minute virtual tournament that I mentioned with Summer Games Done Quick. And so I put a ton of time in virtually on Theater of Magic. I've played it in actuality as well. and it's just personally i think all three of papa duke's big artistically oriented games so tales of the arabian nights theater of magic and circus voltaire i think they're all too easy for so in terms of being i just don't understand why their top 20 games that easy of a of game to play from a homeowning perspective i think they would look great but i would get so bored because i could get through the modes relatively easily i just think i don't know enough on circus voltaire's modes to say if they're easier or not. I think Theater of Magic is easier to complete and get to the wizard mode than Tales, though. And so I would rate Theater lower than Tales. And I just think there are so many other games that offer a lot more depth of play that I'm just not impressed. Yeah, those three games, I think... Now, I think that their ranking, if I recall looking at it correctly, in the top 100 is Tales, Theater, and Circle of Terror. and I think that's how I would rank those three particular games against each other. But that's just because I'm not a real big fan of Circus Voltaire and I think that Tales is a really fun game, but I haven't played it enough to... I'm like you, I've played Theater of Magic a lot. I've played a fairly large amount of Circus Voltaire, but I haven't really played all that much of Tales.
    25:29
    Yeah, and again, most of my experience on that one is also virtual. It is my favorite of those three. I think that some of the stuff like the little balloon pop-up on Circus Voltaire, I think there are elements to that table that make it harder. And everything isn't all about being totally drain-happy, monster, terrible game. I mean, Lord of the Rings is notorious for having really long ball times unless you set it up to be super hard. However, it makes up for that by having a very, very deep code that's difficult to get all the way through. and I just think Theater of Magic it could have if someone were to reprogram it now give it a like a Chad H treatment like he did with Tales of the Crypt from the Crypt or Jurassic Park or something there's a lot of potential there because it's got a really good layout and it looks awesome it's just the ability to just get through those modes in such an easy cheese fashion that happened when Star Trek the Stern Star Trek came out is you could time out all the modes and people complained because it's like, well, you just sail right through them all. And so they made it so that you had to keep hitting switches for those timers to progress. And it makes a big difference because the game all of a sudden requires a challenge. It mandates skill for you to be able to advance through all those modes. It also has a lot more modes. And the shots to activate those are challenging. I see, to me, Theater of Magic and a lot of the Papa Duke stuff is an excellent on-location pinball, especially for people that aren't very familiar with pinball. But I just don't see it standing up against a lot of more modern games that are way lower on the list than this is that I think offer those elements that I'm looking for that this game lacks. I can understand that. That's something that I can see where having that kind of code update would be nice for it. The whole timing out thing, the ability to just cradle the ball and wait out of mode is definitely game-breaking in its own way. So, no, I can see it. It seems like a solid choice to me. Well, the world may disagree. We'll find out.
    27:35
    Well, that's enough about pinball. Let's go ahead and transition on over into video games. And we really only have one main video game topic to talk about, but it's kind of a two-parter in and of itself. So I think that it's really one that's getting a lot of attention in the news lately, and that would be Nintendo. Now, we discussed Nintendo last episode, mostly in the context of Pokemon Go. And so the first thing I thought we should probably talk about is Nintendo's financials, because apparently Nintendo is not having a very good time financially. In the news this past week was a summary from the first quarter earnings report. And I just want to go over some highlights to give some context. They reported a 31.3% decrease in net sales with an operating income loss of 5.1 billion yen, which equates to about $48.1 million U.S. Nintendo noted that some of the loss is due to the yen appreciating in value, but that there were also performance issues. Wii U sales are, and this was not in their report, but I would use the word pathetic, it was a 53% decrease on a year-on-year basis. Yeah, that's a small loss.
    28:48
    Yeah. And, you know, I could see that a lot of that may be driven by the fact that it's been known that the Nintendo NX is going to be upcoming. And so, you know, end of generation fall off may be a portion of that. Maybe. Yeah, I don't know. Here's one that we talked about in one of our previous episodes, Star Fox Zero, which was the biggest release during the reporting period. It only sold 320,000 units, which incidentally is the worst sales performance ever of a Star Fox game. Well, that game had some inherent issues. And combined with the Wii U's already small user base, that's definitely not promising. No. Despite that poor performance, software sales did actually increase in the period by 3%. But that was essentially carried by Splatoon and Mario Maker, which isn't surprising. and I've heard very good things about both. Yeah, they're both supposed to be really excellent. And I've seen a lot of Mario Maker. I've watched it on Twitch because it's fascinating, but I'm not as familiar with Splatoon. I've seen a little bit of it.
    29:53
    Let's see. And then their handheld market, 3DS, the hardware sales on that were down 7%, but software sales for the device were up 7%. Not in this report because it came out after this quarterly period, but worth noting because of our discussion last week. and, of course, that is on the cultural consciousness at this point, Pokemon Go, it being a runaway excess, well, you could say excess, but runaway success was announced by Nintendo as not being very helpful to their bottom line. So while Nintendo's stock price was shooting up through the roof when Pokemon Go appeared on everyone's iPhone and Android device, it then plummeted back down once it was announced by Nintendo and figure it out by everyone else that their share of the profits is really, really small because they only have a limited stake in the involved companies that put the product out. Yeah, they've got no stake whatsoever in Niantic. Niantic was a Google company that spun off on its own originally, and they've only got a small, like 30-some-odd percent stake in the Pokemon company, which is the primary Pokemon imprint. Right, right. And since they only have a minority share in one of the companies that wasn't the lead company on the product, I mean, they will make money off of it. But how small? I don't know. Small enough, though, that Nintendo said that they weren't going to adjust their forecasts. That's pretty small. Yeah. So let's go ahead and shift back over to the Wii U performance. And I noted my speculation that some of it could be because of the Nintendo NX coming out. That sort of segues into our second side of the Nintendo, but let's go ahead and get it all lumped in so we can have our discussion. And that is there were leaked specs available now for the Nintendo NX. And some of the key specifics that I took note of were that the console will be 100% portable. It will have a sort of docking station to allow you to plug it into a TV when you are not mobile. It will shift back into using cartridges, and the capacity of those cartridges is expected to be 32 gig. And because of that shift to cartridges, it probably will not be backwards compatible. It is also not expected to achieve graphical parity with the current models of the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Well, even if it could achieve graphical parity, I don't see how you could do it on a mobile platform because your battery would last like 14 seconds. And I saw that as a question that a lot of people have had were, how long is this battery going to last? I did not see anything leaked about what the battery performance is expected to be or what its capacity is expected to be. But obviously, that's begging a pretty big question, I guess. So just opening up into our overall discussion on Nintendo, and I can all seg back to the financial thing briefly here. The Wii U is a failure. It is a failure console. Yep, it's a ball. It's a big old ball. As you know, we spent a lot of time, mostly because I own an Xbox device, paying attention to how Xbox does sort of vis-a-vis the PlayStation 4, which essentially, without having hard numbers for Microsoft, the sense is that the PlayStation is outselling the Xbox 2 to 1. But the Xbox One is still outperforming the Xbox 360 in its current place on the lifecycle. So while the gap is bigger between Sony and Microsoft than it was last generation, Microsoft is not doing bad with their console. They're actually doing pretty well. They just wish they had a bigger share of the market. The Wii U, though, has been a total disaster. I think it's a mix because I think the name confused everyone. The name was a terrible mistake. And that might be the biggest thing. But the other thing is that the whole motion-controlled gimmick is dead. And casuals that bought the Wiis didn't go and buy the Wii Us. No, and that was what drove, I mean, no matter what you say, the Wii itself, the original Wii was a massive success. Yes, the biggest successful console of the last generation. People forget that, but it was. Yeah, and it was completely because of the motion control and especially because of the casuals, the people who aren't gamers per se who wanted it and played it a fair amount. But most people I know with Wiis who went out and bought them, still they are packed away. I've got a Wii, and it's packed away. It's been packed away since I moved. That's been six years ago now, and I still haven't unpacked it.
    34:25
    The problem I had conceptually with the Wii and the Wii U both, and so more focusing on the latter because that's what we're currently discussing, but they don't get the same third-party support. And that's where the graphical parity thing kind of comes into play for me, is currently if you were to decide you wanted to be a PC gamer or you wanted to be a PlayStation 4 gamer or you wanted to be an Xbox One gamer, when it comes to AAA high-dollar releases, you're going to have access to 90% of them on any of those devices. Yes. Like Ubisoft, EA, Activision, they're going to give it to you. You're going to get your Call of Duty. You're going to get your Madden. You're going to get all that stuff, but not on Nintendo. So if you've decided to go Wii U, then your options are you've chosen a sole source gaming system essentially to only play first-party proprietary Nintendo stuff or you're going to have to have a secondary console or gaming PC to be able to do everything else that your Nintendo exclusive choice prohibits you from experiencing. That's a pretty big, I mean, for people that are planning on a budget, that is a pretty big ask to say you actually have to commit to two systems if you want to play what all your friends are playing. It is. I think the big thing is Nintendo's first-party games and first-party stuff is the primary draw between Nintendo as is. I mean, Mario and Legend of Zelda and all of those things, those are what draw people to getting Nintendo systems. And those are the primary draws they have. And I think they're the most valuable thing Nintendo actually has. And what I think is happening is I think Nintendo is going to end up leaving the hardware economy entirely. They're going to become another software company just like Sega did or like Atari did when they came out of the console market. And I think probably the biggest thing and what we'll see the largest rise we've probably seen in years in Nintendo stock will be the day that they stop going as a hardware creator. And the first time you see them announce, you know, Legend of Zelda available on a game system that people actually own and play. I think everything will go nuts at that point because I think their primary as a first party developer is good enough that they can handle the loss of the hardware side of the company. And I think that's what's going to end up happening before too long.
    37:03
    I think I think broadly, I agree with you that that would be best for Nintendo. And I think long term, that's sort of what I see happening to the company. But I don't think that's Nintendo's intention at this time. No, I think Nintendo's intention at this time is to shift to the market that they control, which is the mobile market. But they're rapidly losing control of that to phones and tablets and smart devices that people have with them every day of the week, everywhere they go. Right. I've wondered, you know, as those as the proliferation of smartphones has increased, how well the what has been historically speaking, going all the way back to the Game Boy, Nintendo is very strong control on mobile gaming. And that kind of gets back to where we were bringing in Pokemon Go, even though it didn't have to do with this first quarter financial report. It showed to the world just how popular the phone tablet market would embrace these first-party Nintendo properties or even other – maybe not even necessarily first-party, but just items associated with Nintendo. Ingress was not the runaway smash that Pokemon Go is. Pokemon Go is a smash because it's Pokemon. Yeah. It's not. I mean, it's just like when we talk pinball and we talk about licensed IP versus non-licensed IP. Licensed IP does better, and that's what Pokemon is. And so Nintendo has this opportunity, but in my mind, I don't know if the company is capable at this time of making that turn. I think they're too stubborn about it. It's like how Microsoft was before they brought back in Phil Spencer to run their Xbox division, And the previous leadership was pushing Windows Phone and all the Microsoft stuff would only be available on the Microsoft products, whereas now Microsoft's new approach has been to get their software on anything, even if they don't make it themselves. They want their software wherever it can be, and that's how they're going to make their money is on their software side. They'll still do hardware where it makes sense, but they don't want to be a hardware company like they were trying to be. They were trying to be an everything company, and it just wasn't working. And I can see Nintendo going the same route or even going just, as I said earlier, going to just controlling and trying to control the mobile market. And I think Nintendo makes a lot of good games, and some of their best games they've made anymore are on the 3DS and are on the purely mobile market. and there are games that have a lot of stuff that require a controller to do, not something you can do with just a phone. And I think that's where we're going to start seeing the weirdness is because there's a lot of fun games out there that you can't go with just a touchscreen and how phones and tablets are designed. So unless there's a huge takeoff in Bluetooth controllers for the people carry around in their pocket to play games on their phone and tablet, I still think there's going to be a slot for the mobile gaming device. It's just how big of a slice of the pie is it going to take? Right. I think you're correct. I'm confused, and this gets to where these NX specs come out. I'm confused at what Nintendo's strategy is here. I mean, 7% sales going down on the hardware side of the 3DS, which has been out a while, notwithstanding, their mobile market has still been doing, it's always been doing well. I don't understand this announcement about a mobile console. To me, this sounds like, let's say what we've already mentioned, like the battery issues and all that, which really question just how truly portable it's going to be in terms of the ability to play it for very long while you're out and about. I'm wondering, is this going to cannibalize their 3DS market? Because is this not two different handhelds, essentially? It's going to depend upon the format, I guess. I mean, it's going to depend upon how big it is. I mean, part of the issue with the 3DS, and why I know a lot of people don't carry 3DSs with them anymore, is that the 3DS has a fairly large footprint. It's a lot bigger than your phone. it's even in its folded up size it's the size of a lot of the mid-range or lower it not mid-range but mid-sized tablets i mean it's a it's about the same size folded up as a five or seven inch tablet i don't know how big is the nx going to be how powerful is it going to be and the 32 gig on cartridges for a modern game seems silly yeah i want i wondered at first if that was going to have a huge impact. It's just thinking about current immediate games, but I heard elsewhere that on average, most of the higher end, again, we'll say AAA games, are running about 35 to 40. So 32 would be a problem. Again, all that sort of stuff to me says that you're disincentivizing third party people from coming onto the NX and saying, okay, well, we will have a Nintendo NX version of Call of Duty. No, not with a 32 gigabyte limit, you're not. Well, I can't, in my mind, even wrap the idea around Nintendo going with anything that could have the visual fidelity to do a game like that. It just is not the type of thing Nintendo seems to go for. At least not now, but they used to be known for graphical relevancy at this point. I mean, I get that Mario can look cartoony and he doesn't need photorealistic rendering, but the shutting out of the ability for third-party developers to be able to exploit that fascinates me. I mean, unless this is going to – I mean, the NX is going to have to be more money than the 3DS. I don know how much it going to be but I just yeah the size thing you brought up is a really good point I guess it going to have the capability of detachable which is an unusual controllers two controller ports or something But still I just trying to imagine hauling this thing around and it doesn make any sense to me It's like, why not just make a special docking station for the 3DS and say, okay, well, the 3DS is going to have a docking station, and you'll be able to use Wii U controllers on it, and we're just making that our console now. It's almost like the opposite day of that. We're going to make your PlayStation 4, but you'll be able to carry it around. Granted, it's going to be the size of a brick, and you're going to be able to do it for 35 minutes, and then you're going to have to plug it in, and it won't fit in any pocket unless cargo shorts come back into fashion. Wait, wait, wait. Cargo shorts have never left fashion. I wear cargo shorts all the time. Yes, yes. I'm sure that that has set the fashion standard. I stand corrected.
    44:07
    Your decision has righted years of wrong. And so at least now, everyone who was just for a moment panicked at my judgment there will be at peace. So don't worry. And the giant baggy jeans are okay still, too. I don't worry about those. I don't worry about that. Oh, so you go with those super slim jeans. No. I wear jeans, whatever jeans work provides. That's all I wear. I don't own a pair of jeans that hasn't been provided by work because I just wear shorts or slacks. I don't know much about jean fashion other than apparently what I hear. And that Levi's at some point fell out of fashion because that's all I have. And it's like, no, those aren't the cool jeans anymore. It's like, when I was a kid, they were the cool jeans. Oh, well. Okay. Okay, so poor Nintendo will have to stay tuned and learn more as time goes on, but I am not optimistic with both the finance. I'm not surprised at the financial report. I'm concerned about what they're indicating regarding the NX specs, and I'm also concerned about what statements they've made in the wake of the success of Pokemon Go, which seem to suggest that they are not planning on putting more things out on phone right now. Which makes no sense, but... No, it doesn't. since when has Nintendo done stuff that has really made sense? It seems like they're a company that has trapped a decade in the past, and they're trying to keep everything like it was more than a decade, 20 years in the past. It's a good point, and it may be a corporate culture thing. That's the only thing I can really think of is something internal to Nintendo that makes them behave that way. But, well, we'll see if they can survive or evolve. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, they wouldn't be the first big company to be knocked out of the hardware market. No, they wouldn't. Yeah, we'll have to see. I mean, in some ways, personally, I would kind of like them to see them go the way of Sega in that regard. I would like to see a lot of their first-party titles on more capable devices. Yeah, the only thing is I don't want them – I kind of feel like Sega has stumbled on their software side as well, and I would like Nintendo to maintain their high-quality standard that we see in most of their first-party. Yeah, but I never thought Sega had that strong of a first-party lineup compared to like – Nor did I, but – I know there are those die-hard Sonic guys out there, but – Yeah, well – I never liked Sonic. It was all right. I think a lot of that is just that's what they had to latch on to because they got stuck with the Segas and they didn't get to play Mario. And so that was sort of jealousy. It could have been worse. At least they didn't have the TurboGrafx and was Bonk's Adventure or something like that was the big thing that lost for TurboGrafx. But since going software only, Segas had some Sonic games that even Sonic fans acknowledge are just awful pieces of trash. So that's my concern. We don't want Paper Mario to become Paper in the Waste Basket Mario.
    47:16
    But speaking of baskets, let's go to the third basket of this podcast, our tabletop section, which is going to be all about CantCon. Both of us attended CantCon last weekend. I attended for two days, and Dennis attended for one day. So I'll go ahead and start things off. I attended on last Friday. I had two games, two four-hour games. that stretched with no break in between because I timed them very poorly, so I had no chance for lunch. My first game of the day was Dungeons & Dragons 5E Adventures League game because I wanted to get a taste for some 5E because I haven't played it at all. I haven't played any Dungeons & Dragons since 3 or 3.5.
    48:00
    So the game I played was the very first in the Adventure League setting. It was the mists of something that I cannot remember now. It was fun. I played the classic Dorf Paladin. I had a lot of fun RPing because most of the party was very neutral and very mercenary, and I was very lawful good, so I was constantly trying to get the rest of the party to, you know, not take everything as reward or, you know, oh, we got your gems. You had a treasure chest of 300 gems that was stolen, and we got back your treasure chest of 100 gems.
    48:48
    So that was a lot of fun. The actual adventure itself, it was fun. It was kind of what it was was there were some gypsy. There was a gypsy-like family that had shown up recently and stuff had started getting stolen and some gems and a magic wand and a trailer full of weapons. And I never got a good answer why there was a wagon full of weapons just sitting in town for anybody to pick up and walk away with. But – and we were finding the people taking them and returning them. And, you know, it turned out there was a big story to it. And they weren't stealing it because they wanted to steal it. They were stealing it for quote-unquote good reasons and all that. But it was pretty enjoyable. I had a good, solid group. There were six of us, which I think is high but very workable for a game. And unlike some con games I've had in the past, everybody meshed really well and had a lot of fun. There was a lot of good RP in the group. My issue was I rolled terribly. I mean I think I had two successful attack rolls the entire four hour game and it wasn't that we weren't fighting it's just I could not roll I went through every single D20 I had and all of them rolled terribly and I had the second highest armor class in the group I had an armor class 18 but everything penetrated my armor though Everything. My armor only turned one attack the entire game. I mean, our guys who were AC-14 and AC-12 were dodging stuff, and every time the DM rolled against my AC, it was like, 23. Okay, yeah, oh, natural 20. Yeah, okay, all right. so me and every other healing capable person in the game basically spent their entire uh every bit of healing they had keeping me alive as i just soaked all the damage with hit points like i was like a barbarian designed to soak with hit points even though i wasn't because my armor was useless but it was fun it was a lot of fun it was a the actual the actual adventure was a longer adventure we barely got through it in our four hours and we got started almost immediately so it was a good run we kind of skipped an encounter we just kind of, the DM just had, oh yeah, this happened and you guys successfully fought off this and figured out the trick and continued so we could get to the final big fight and even then we were running so short on time that instead of having the huge final fight that was designed to have, we kind of played with it because we were out to rescue a guy, and there were like three guards, but you could hear a lot of stuff in, there were some barracks. So what we ended up doing was using a combination of magic and rope and tricks and this and that to tie the barracks doors shut long enough for us to take out the other guards, rescue the guy, and run away before we could get chased down. That's how we finished it out.
    52:10
    So it was very much a whole runaway. Sometimes retreat is the best offense. Yeah, it was. And we managed to finish it within our four hours. It was, like I said, it wasn't perfect, but it was a lot of fun. I played with a bunch of people that I've played with in years past at CanCon,
    52:31
    and it was really good all around. awesome yeah and i'll keep my my thoughts on 5e for after for after a while um the second game of the day is uh i played a planet mercenary game it was a demo game for planet mercenary and i've talked about that on this show before because i'm a kickstarter backer of the game and all but one of the people who joined up to play with us were kickstarter backers and the uh the gm what had actually played in a game with the developers of the game at Gen Con last year.
    53:11
    So he had some good ideas on how everything was supposed to progress, and I think it was probably my funnest game of the entire weekend.
    53:23
    It hit every single point I was hoping for that game to hit, and it was insane in its own way because the way it is, it uses a 3D6 system and the requirement is that two of your D6s are the same color and one of the D6s is a different color and you roll them and anytime you succeed in a roll that you're doing, so anytime you succeed in a skill check, but the highest number showing on a dice is the off-color dice, you draw a mayhem card. And mayhem cards can be really good, kind of good, kind of bad, or really bad. And it made the game to be really insane because sometimes it would be like, okay, wow, that turned out awesome. And other times it would be like, oh, no, that was bad. To the point that we had the GM has the ability to, he can buy back because the game has, they call them RIP tokens. They're basically for like good role play or this or that that you can spend on. It's like, oh, I want to re-roll that. I'll spend a rip token, or like you've got a fire squad with you, and if there's a bunch of damage coming in and you don't want to soak the damage, you can spend a rip token, and one of your fire squad guys gets up and takes the shot for you, basically.
    54:42
    And what's fun with that is that how you do it is when you start the game, you sit down, and before you start, you take several index cards. We were doing three index cards because we each had a fire team of three. and on each index card you write a name the race of the guy like if he was a human or an aspirin or a or whatever one any of the other sci-fi races are and then you had to write three things about him like his hobbies his interests their you know you know do they have family stuff like that and then what what happened is when you spent a rib token you would uh hand one of them to the GM, and the GM would sit there, and he'd read it out to everybody, so everybody got to know this character. It's like, oh, this is Bob. He likes soap operas and listening to classical music and eating TV dinners alone while he cries.
    55:43
    And then what he'd do is he would flip a coin. Heads, Bob survived. And if Bob survived, he got a little thing written on him. He got plus 20. If Bob died, Bob got ripped in half and thrown away. Poor Bob. And in all honesty, in this game, that's how you level up, is you risk a guy, and you risk a guy, and you keep risking guys. And when you finally die, you pick one of your surviving fireteam members, and you become him. You become that surviving fireteam member. So if I've risked Bob and Bob survived four attacks, Bob's character creation, he's got the standard character creation start points plus 80. So he's got even more points to pour into his character creation. I see. I see. So that mechanic was fun, but that's one of the things you can spend a rip token on. One of the people who played with us, he lost his entire fire team. He lost all three of them. He didn't win a single flip. He got tails on all his entire fire team. They all died.
    56:57
    And then we had one of the guys who kept putting the same fire team guy up, wanting him to die, and he just kept living. So he kept getting bonuses.
    57:09
    But it was, but the, you can get, for good RP, the GM will give you a token if he thinks you earned it through good RP or that. that but he can buy back a a mayhem card if he thinks it will break the game like we had happen because we were trying to we we had a mayhem card pop up with we had a guy who was hacking the computer of the space station we ran and it was the mayhem card caused the absolute like worst possible thing to happen type critical terribleness that could happen on the skill check so he basically destroyed the space station we were all in.
    57:51
    That sounds like everyone got ripped in half there. So the GM bought back the card, and we all got an extra rip token, and we just kept playing. Probably good. Unless the game had almost been over. No, this was less than five minutes into the game. This is when the very first thing happened. That would have been a pretty short session. Yeah, it would have. It's a nice thing, but it was I'm super excited for this game. It is even more interesting than I thought it was going to be, and I had high hopes for it. I like the mayhem. I like what it does because it's good or bad. You can have, like, there's one card in the mayhem deck that is, when you did something so awesomely that another member of one of the other PCs is basically in awe of you, so they have a bonus to helping you out now because they want to help you or you can do stuff that you can have stuff roll up where people are it's like wow he did that and he survived but we don't know how so people are more like your fire team will get negatives because they don't want to be on your fire team because you get your fire team killed a lot and stuff like that so you can play with the game and how the game goes out really well but I enjoyed it quite a lot we had uh everybody rp'd really well really well the guy who our gm did amazing voice work and the guy who played our captain did even better voice work i don't know how he kept his voice up every time he was in character because while i can do the voice he was doing it hurts my throat i mean it hurts to do it and he did it for the whole session so i don't know how he did it but it was awesome very cool sounds i i kind of wish i'd played this now instead of what i did play yeah it was it was it was an amazing game i really enjoyed it it was my favorite game of the weekend very cool very cool all right so let's move on to uh cant con on saturday when i finally showed up we arrived and went to see uh our seating for the league of extraordinary heroes which was the one i most wanted to play and then you found out that it had been canceled because the GM was sick. So we had to find a new campaign. And we ended up doing a D&D 5e Adventurer's League, which you had noted just a bit ago, had done on Friday. And I was leaning towards other stuff before we went, because I had, like you, experience under the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition system. But it was like, okay, well, what's available? And there were tons of D&D 5e, and a lot of them were still looking for players. So the campaign, we made sure we didn't do the same campaign you had already done we ended up in a campaign called the executioner which for those interested the plot in and of itself was there was a local village where an age-old relic shows up it's a farming village uh and they're really concerned that it's causing problems so we and our merry band of adventurers were to go in and help quell this unrest so our gm was a man named John Fulmer. John, I think, did a great job. Agreed. He mentioned before and after that the campaign he felt had a lot of problems, and so he'd rewritten portions of it because he didn't think there was adequate motivation to actually get the characters to take action. I could not tell that it was a flawed campaign. So whatever rewrites he did, he did them really well. I also like how he role-played all the NPCs. So he had his Russian accents working in full force, and I think he just really helped make it a lot of fun. And he knew that I was totally green. I hadn't RPG'd in years.
    61:37
    So anyway, of the two RPGs that I played on Saturday, this was my favorite. Everyone in the group role-played. I believe we were a group of six like you had on the previous day. Yep, six. And everyone was in character. Some of us, like myself, were a lot quieter than others in terms of trying to just sort of figure out how to fit in. And my main issue was that my character, I drew a wood elf light cleric because I took a pre-generated character because I didn't have one ready to go. And my problem was my character's descriptor. I wanted to role play it, but he was obsessed with the land, like I guess like nature, the land. But I kept trying to get that across, but I don't think anyone understood what I was doing because I just kept saying, OK, I will investigate this. for the land. I think everyone was like, what is wrong with him? They probably just assumed that I had been hit in the head with a rock, and that was what my motivation was, is I had brain damage. Anyway, so saying that aside, mechanically, the game format played out a lot like I remember D&D playing out. So I was pretty comfortable overall with it. It didn't take me long once we were in our first combat situation. We didn't have a whole lot of combat. I think I remember essentially four encounters, 3.5 in a way, because of one of them ended up being two encounters because of a decision Tony and I made. But overall, I think... Good character, man. Yeah, and we can hit in on that. Because overall, I just want to say it was a really good group, I thought, especially given the fact that we just sort of fell into it. And so falling into such a solid session for my very first experience at Can't Calm was a really big positive, and I had a lot of fun with it yeah so i guess we should probably you uh you did win best player i voted for you you easily i thought had it i had it between two of you but but you were far and away because of your commitment to the role-playing performance and i just think that that commitment there were there were at least two other people who were pretty good at you know voicing their character and staying in role but your commitment to the ethos of your character just i think pushed it over and clearly everyone agreed that it just pushed it over so tell us a little bit about that character tone tell us your motivation my motivation well i uh had decided not to continue my character from the previous day and i decided seeing as the previous day my armor wasn't really being all that helpful but i still kind of wanted to be a melee character and kind of tanky i went with a barbarian and you know just tank with my health and as i was reading through the pre-generated character that i picked up there were several uh things in his motivations and his background and stuff that jumped out at me uh one of them was that he was an alcoholic and the other was that he was he he viewed his friends like something that needed to be protected like pups and he was literally raised by wolves yes and it was that latter aspect that I think most strongly manifested itself You did a pretty good job trying to get across that you were an alcoholic. I don't think people picked up on it. Probably not, because while we were raiding places and everyone else was stealing stuff, I was just stealing all the booze and drinking.
    65:06
    Yes, and I think, and everyone noted it, I just think they thought, oh, barbarian, kind of. Yeah, but but you got it across better than my other my kind of negative trait was supposed to be that I secretly wanted to be a tyrant ruling over the land so I could keep the land safe. I never found a place where I was able to work it in. I've been better skilled. I would have. But I don't know how you would have played that in in the first place. I mean, that's kind of you told me about that that day. And I was trying. I still haven't thought of a good way to try and play something like that. And it's like, oh, by the way, I would like to rule you all. Yeah, the only thing I could think of is maybe if I had tried to usurp the Burgermeister's role and take him out in a coup d'etat on a village I've never lived in. I couldn't – mentally, I just couldn't – it's like, well, the people would never support that. But I don't care about the people. I care about land. No, it's just I couldn't make it work. That seemed like something that would show up better in a long-term campaign compared to a – I've got the hiccups all of a sudden. Sorry about that. Compared to a short-term campaign. But, yeah, no, I went with my barbarian with his aid intelligence who was actually raised by wolves, and I went as over the top with him as I could. And it was awesome. It was very awesome when one of the main antagonists, as it turned out, in the campaign was wearing a fur hat. It was a wolf's head hat. Yeah, I freaked out. Yes. Because he was wearing my brother. Yes. And so Tony, in character, just starts exclaiming, brother! And zany antics thus ensued, going so far as to split the party, which is – Even I, as a total neophyte to this, knew it was a terrible idea. I knew it was a terrible idea, but the way I played the character, there was no way that I would not have split the party at that point. Right. The only difference is I did not expect anybody to stay with me. Yes, I did stay, and the reason was one of my other character traits was once committed to an action, my character didn't like to deviate. So because we had already gone to confront this guy, running back to save a bunch of villagers, my character was sort of a pure neutral type. So he didn't, you know, that was not a motivation to save the town. He needed to deal with the conflict that he thought was responsible because he'd committed to that course of action. We did end up having to run away because we just couldn't take him. Yeah, it ended up being a white who I physically couldn't damage, which made for what I think might have been one of the most epic scenes of the entire weekend. Because I raged into barbarian rage to get me all my big bonuses plus all my other bonuses. And I attacked him, and I rolled a natural 20. It was awesome. And I rolled 33 points of crit damage onto him. It was even more awesome. And he collapsed to the floor. And then he smiled and stood up and laughed at me. And I told Dennis to run. Yes. That was the not awesome part.
    68:19
    And so run we did. Run like scared little wolf pups. But that, I mean, it really, it was a lot of fun. The role playing was great. The team was great. John did a great job GMing it. It was a blast. So I really liked it. We forgot my first and probably the funniest thing that happened in that entire session. I tried to intimidate a bunch of guards at the very beginning. Yes, I can't believe I forgot about that. And I rolled a natural one. So we basically played it that as I start yelling at these guards, are you strong? Are you strong? Snow fell off of the roof of the house and landed on my head because that's the only way I could have failed an intimidation check. that horribly badly i still you know every everyone has their own style and it has been even longer since i played that i gm'd but i would have had your voice crack like you were a pubescent dwarf and it had been are you strong that's what i would have done but it was not my decision to make ultimately the snow was very funny though yeah that was that was that was good because that was part of my other character's thing is he he has very much a matter of uh might makes right and the strong being strong is more important than anything else yes and and you got that across for you got a lot of things it's like you've done this before you you got a lot of things across that it's amazing didn't need to be spelled out to anyone else it was all very very clear uh the executioner was actually a two-hour campaign that the gm chose deliberately because this was a four-hour block and he wants he doesn't like the games to feel rushed and so he figured you know you do a shorter campaign but you allow people to go off on their weird rpg tangents and it was it was a good decision we went over three hours doing this two-hour campaign because of the not just the split where tony and i went to face brother killer uh but just everything else like when we were in the burgermeister's house and all the exploring and the interaction with the townspeople, all that stuff was really drawn out. And it was nice because we didn't feel rushed because the GM from the get-go goes, it's a two-hour campaign. Don't worry. We're going to get through it in four hours. So I think everyone relaxed.
    70:45
    So anyway, that one was really, really good. So then we went. We did have enough time for a break. So we went and got lunch, and then we came back, and our second game had not been canceled. So that was Dark Tide, which was a playtest of the ultimate hero system by Paragon Notion. and we'll include a link to their Facebook in the show notes. The GMs were Paul Nelson and Jason O'Kane, who, as I understand, are the creators of the game. We were there for basically a four-hour playtest session. It's a superhero game. Yes, yes. It's very different than D&D. It's not a straight sci-fi or a D&D type. Yeah, it was a superhero game, so it was very much in that vein. In terms of sort of the setting, it was respond to a distress call on Mars. So that's kind of the motivation, so to speak. Again, it was another, I believe, six person. Was it six or seven? It was seven. It was seven. And we're going to comment on that because that was an issue in terms of what we played. My character, my superhero is Achilles. He was a melee based character that had what I would describe as shadow powers. super old guy back from the Oliver Cromwell era of Britain saw the Declaration of Independence be signed so he had an interesting backstory and I did try and emphasize that I thought relatively well throughout my role playing but that was really the only characteristics besides the combat oriented stuff that I felt I had to work with and that was fine for me I thought that was enough to be able to try and you know who doesn't have a time where you have to tell the young whippersnappers that well you know When I was with the New Model Army and we had Charles pinned and we were on the way to London, what could he do? I didn't actually use that one. I should have, though, because I'd be even brushed up. When I saw that, I immediately brushed up on my British Civil War as quickly as I could. Unfortunately, I think most people weren't familiar with it, so it kind of went nowhere. Well, I knew about the New Model Army. Well, you were a big fan of history, though. Yeah. My character in this game was a gray, like an alien gray, who had telekinesis and the ability to create things out of air and create air flows and stuff like that, who was very small and very short. So I spent the entire game using my telekinesis to hold myself about three foot off the ground so that my actual height was 6'6 instead of 3'6. which kind of saved me a couple of times but it was the exact opposite i mean pretty much as opposite as you could get of my thugosh that was the name of my barbarian character was thugosh yeah is that um i played her as pacifist and that didn't last but that's what i was originally going for but she was a healer and i did try to work as primarily a support yeah actually uh this seemed very different from what I normally associate you in terms of character type selection. Yeah, it's far off my norm because I normally either go for, you know, a big bruiser or a wizard or something. I very rarely go healer or anything that would be more supporty considered. So in terms of how the game itself went, I think what I'd like to note is that the GMs, they tried really, really hard. But this was rough. this was a rough one for me um and i don't i don't think it was the campaign i think the campaign was an excellent idea they had all sorts of cool stuff from the one gm i think it was jason putting on his sheriff mustache to the recordings uh that's audio recordings that we could be able to listen to to get involved with the we were doing a very investigative sort of i call it a scooby-doo mystery style uh campaign which i really liked that in terms of a setting it was it was it It was a nice setting. I liked the system. I liked the 2D6. It seems very flexible and interesting. And I've gone through the book a couple of times just glancing. I haven't spent much time on it. But I can see where it could be a very flexible and fun system. Yes. I want to say that I also thought that the system itself, which is what we were playtesting, the 2D6 approach I thought was really good. back when we were doing the dnd game i found myself getting confused uh like which die i needed to grab when i'm constantly referencing the chart because i had three different attacks they all used a different die type plus i needed my 20-sided die for most of the checks which again it gets a little weird because i was familiar with a lot of that from my old dnd days but had i not known that i definitely would have found the 2d6 a lot easier because no matter what i needed to pick up two six-sided die i that's all you used and you always use two for everything so yeah that i thought was uh was a really good uh i thought their character choices were cool i thought they all felt really distinct the the heroes you could choose from they did and their art i really enjoyed the art they had the art they have in the book the art they had on the character sheets was all really nice and as i noted i thought that the thought that they put into the construction of the campaign was excellent. We actually had the choice of three different campaigns at the start that you choose sort of in character. And the one we ended up choosing was their original campaign. They added a couple other variants that we could have ended up doing. You know, I don't know if those were as well developed or not. It doesn't really matter. Their core one that they used originally was, I think, really, really good. Here were the problems that we ran into. You know, Without naming names, I'd say, though, of the seven people playing, there were three players that essentially refused to actually role play. One of those, I thought, was disengaged from the game, at least for the first hour and a half. And then two of the others seemed only interested in doing the combat mechanics, but not actually role playing in the game. So I found that a little frustrating. I think it made it awkward in a way because everyone wasn't interacting in the way that I had just experienced an hour before in the D&D session. The game did not start for 45 minutes. A lot of that time was spent explaining how the system worked so we would be familiar with it. But the whole time I'm glancing at my watch because I'm wondering, are we actually going to be able to get through the campaign? And newsflash, we didn't. A couple other things that I ran into was one was in no way anyone's fault, but I just had trouble hearing some people.
    77:24
    We were in a bad place. The table was in a real bad place. There was a lot of stuff going on around us. I had a lot. Yeah, we were like in a high traffic area. Yeah, it was hard to hear. Yeah. And so that was really unfortunate. So it made things difficult. It added to that roughness I mentioned earlier. And the combat just took way too long. some of that is I'm sure due to the fact that we had seven players but I was just shocked at how long each combat round was taking versus what we saw with the six players in the D&D session earlier right and I think some of that is that some of the people were kept getting up and leaving the table and some of it was the fact that I mean I don't think any of our combats lasted more than two rounds it's just the rounds took forever and I think that's I think that might have been something that if everybody had more of a solid grasp on the system, it might have been faster. But I just think seven people is a bit big. And I think that's a con game problem that I've ran into in the past, where there's just so many people that half the group is pretty much disconnected because you spend so much time waiting. It was happening with me as well. In fact, one point a person to my left, he saw I was checking something out on Craigslist looking at pinball prices for pinball machines on Craigslist. And then we started talking about pinball because we were still waiting for other people to execute their turn. So there was nothing else to do. In addition to the number of players, which I think was probably the big thing, I'd say the only other difference I could really point to versus the D&D system that could be responsible was under this system, everyone basically got two attacks or two moves in their turn. So that would naturally add length to it. But I think you're right, Tony. I think a lot of it was driven just by unfamiliarity with what the powers did and such. Overall, I think the system was pretty good. I think I would probably say cap this out with four players, though, not seven. Yeah, I think a lot of the holdback here was the player count. It was that, and like I said, I had a lot of problems hearing. I enjoyed the system. I enjoyed the flexibility that my character's power set had, especially for being support and this and that. I mean, at one point I used my control of air to create an air dome with a vacuum gap when I was doing some medical work on some bodies just to make sure there was no chance of having contamination with anybody else. I was doing I was creating hardened air as shields to protect non-combatants and I mean I was doing lots of fun stuff I tried to hold up a collapsing wall with air rolled a critical failure and yes this is the point where we should note that Tony once again won best player and that's how he got the book for the game system actually that was the prize this one was harder for me because as i noted before there were some challenges there were in some ways it was easier because there were three people that i was not going to vote for because i didn't think they role played but there were still other players there were three others that i would because i wouldn't consider myself uh there were three others though that i thought were worth consideration but the thing that stood out and again i think it stood out for everyone was it wasn't until that moment in our first combat scenario where tony rolled his critical fail and crushed one of our own allies into the ceiling and then, without a care in the world, cut off his air support and dropped him to the floor, that people finally loosened up. Up until then, I think it felt really clunky and awkward. Not the campaign, not the mechanics, just the interaction with the group. And the group never got to the D&D group that we had in terms of the interaction with everyone. But that was like the breaking point where it went from really awkward to functional. and uh and so then the other the other player's like hey what's going on and then he you know sort of like i'm pointing all my attacks at tony to make sure that if i critically fail he which ultimately did end up happening and so that i i just it was uh it was a good breath of fresh air we had already been going for about 90 minutes at that point not 90 minutes of play 90 minutes since the thing started so we actually had only been in game for about 45 minutes but i think it was a big deal just in terms of finally it seemed a lot of people loosened up and it was just going it was going better at that point yeah i think like you said i don't think that group ever gelled completely i think the three or four of us gelled together real well the rest just never really settled in i think that had a lot to do with the overall feel of everything yeah and we Yeah, I mean, there were people waiting when it was getting close to time to stop. So we really just had to kind of cut it off at the end of the combat we were at. So we didn't get to, you know, finish the my sense was the way things were going. We probably had one more major combat encounter. I think we were relatively close to the end. We were close. We were we were pretty close. He said there was only one bit of thing left. OK, but it was unfortunate that we were we were unable to. But it was just it was taking so long. I mean, the investigation stuff took a while at first in the game. I really liked that. But, yeah, those combat rounds were just so long that, unfortunately, given we didn't start until it was 45 minutes in before we actually got on our spaceship to go to Mars, the odds were stacked against us getting through a campaign that had that much depth to it. Yeah. But I think the system has a lot of potential. I sure wouldn't mind playing in the system again. Yeah. Like I said, I've actually already got an idea, yet another one of my ideas for a game that I'm looking at. I have general ideas, and I need to look through the book and see if I can actually create some of the stuff I've been thinking about. I don't see why I couldn't, based upon the flexibility of the system. Yes, it is very flexible. Yeah, I enjoyed it quite a lot. And I can say that while that was probably my least favorite of the games I've played, it's far from the worst con game I've ever played. It could have been better, and I don't blame the game itself or the GMs or anything. I think that was all solid. I think just the fact that the group never mashed and so many people didn't really RP, I think that's the only thing that hurt it. Yeah, I don't. I mean, the only thing I could really think of that the GMs could have done would have been to use a lower cap on the player count. Yeah. Just give it or because the only other thing would be to take another a shorter campaign. That's about the you could do it either way. I would have rather just been fewer players. But that's easy for me to say because I felt it didn't mesh with several of them. So. Right. And I mean, I've had that issue in games before. and I've had games before that were just so insanely terrible that when it was over, you're just like, oh, finally, I can leave.
    84:36
    And I don't think this game was that bad because I actually, in this case, I enjoyed the system and I enjoyed the setting, so that was fine. But I think it was a pretty successful weekend all in all.
    84:52
    I played, last year I went to three games. I played three games Friday, three, three, four hour games Friday, three, four hour games on Saturday. And that was a lot. And I did not do that this year. And I'm kind of, I'm kind of glad that I didn't play so many games this year. But at the same time, I still kind of wanted to play more games. It was just one of those things. It's like, okay, I am tired. So I don't know. Maybe, maybe I'll consider going on a Sunday next year. Normally I stay home on Sundays. I'll do Friday and Saturday. Then I'll stay home Sunday to have time with the family. But we'll see. That's next year's a year away. Yeah, you got time to evaluate it. Okay, well, that gets us through the entire episode of content. So, everyone, thank you again for listening. If you want to reach out to us here at the Eclectic Gamers Podcast, you can email us. The email address is eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com. We also have a pretty active Facebook page, which can be found at facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. We have a not-so-active Twitter account, it's at eclectic underscore gamers, and a more active Instagram account that's the same, it's eclectic underscore gamers. I find that I use the Instagram to keep things updated more often than the Twitter. And that's fine. We like you just the way you are. So everything should be continuing on schedule as we tend to stick. So I imagine we will be back around on or just a day before or after August 14th to give you the next episode. But until then, have fun. Bye.