This is the Blockade Podcast with your hosts, Chris and Jared. The podcast you are about to listen to is known as the Blockade Podcast. I'm doing a different intro because my wife hates the one that I normally do every week. That man laughing, he's Jared Morgz. He's my co-host. It's me. Who am I? I'm Shut Your Trap, a.k.a. Chris Frebus. There you go. It's different. There we go. Different. 53 episodes. It's different. before i started she was like can you please do something different could you just think of something different yeah i actually got told on the subjects of intros by xenia that um it sounded like the intro that i do with every other on the post-produced podcast sounds like an introduction to bible studies which i found incredibly hilarious he did add to it that he And he goes, it sounds like it's an introduction to Bible studies with Chris and Jared, but I love that. So keep it up. So thanks for that, Ray. Any feedbacks? Good feedback? I guess. You guess? Yeah, right. Hey, we should say happy Mother's Day because that's when we're recording. Yes. Yes. Well, in the future, we're recording in Mother's Day. Well, you're recording on Mother's Day. I'm recording on the day before Mother's Day. and by the time this podcast gets released, it'll be after Mother's Day. That's right. It's a time anomaly. I'm recovering from a rather large amount of waffles this morning, which I cooked for the mum in question, my wife. And you were so kind as to send me a photo of said waffles. I appreciate the photo. I'd rather be eating them. What needs to happen is we need to invent a way of sending food electronically. I think that would be really handy. I could trade you an In-N-Out burger for waffles. Is that how that would work? Yeah, that sounds about right. I'd be down with that. That would be great. Now, can we all agree that waffles are better than pancakes? They certainly are. They take a lot more work. These ones require me to actually whip egg whites and make sort of like an uncooked meringue with them and then stir them into the batter mix to make them super fluffy and stuff like that. There's a technique involved in making good ones, and they were very fluffy and very good. I saw a t-shirt that said waffles are just pancakes with abs. Sounds about right. These ones had abs. They were pretty special. Okay, so if waffles beat pancakes, where does French toast fall in? French toast is pretty strong. Yeah, it's a good contender. It has all the things you want. It has bread. It has, like, milky batter. And you can put whatever you like on the top. So, like, ice cream. Sometimes people bake it with cinnamon inside. That makes it kind of cinnamon roll style. I don't know. It's dicey. The thing when we go to IHOP, the International House of Pancakes. Right. That's what it's called. That is what it's called. I don't know if you have IHOP in Australia. We don't have IHOP. Not so international. Anyway, the IHOP, the problem is if you order the waffle, you don't typically get an egg with it, which is very disappointing. You have to order the eggs on the side. But if you order the French toast or the pancakes, you usually get eggs with that and bacon. It becomes this debate of, do I just want the waffle and that's yumminess and not have the other stuff, or do I want all the other stuff and then just kind of go, I'm getting pancakes as a bonus. Waffles at the IHOP are considered like a toast essentially. So you have your egg and everything on there and they're essentially like a carrier for the egg and stuff. I guess with the pancake option it is because you get eggs and bacon and stuff. See, when we usually have waffles, they are a standalone dish. They're left to shine in all their abbyness. So we don't usually mix in with egg down here. down here, these parts. Down there, those parts. You just put your eggs on your burger right where they belong, damn it. Exactly, with a pineapple. I'm thinking about the comment that we got last week when I went on about my printer for nine minutes. Oh, yeah. One of our listeners kind of complained, laughed about it, and now he's just going to give us a ripping about us talking about food when we have other important things to talk about. But you know what? We'll get to those eventually too. This is our warm-up. This is part of our charter. Again, our motto is exactly, pinball, snacks, movies. But mostly pinball. And we'll get to that. We will. This almost did not happen, I should say too. So yesterday our internet went out. And at about it was probably about 2pm. And we did not get it again until this morning. at about 11 a.m. And you would have thought the world ended, according to my son, at least. He was basically rolling around on the floor, groaning, and he was mortally wounded because he had nothing to do. Yeah, exactly. It's like, wow, what are we going to do? Maybe go outside and get some vitamin D. We're like, there's books, there's Lego, there's video games. Oh, but the games I want to play use the internet. It's like, well, build a bridge and get over it, mate. It's all right. Now, it wasn't just isolated to him either, though, because then my wife had a whole bunch of videos that she was going to watch later in the evening. That's kind of how she winds down sometimes, and she couldn't do that either. So it did really screw with her. Everybody had a bad internet day. Exactly. And I was like, oh, no, not going to be able to do the podcast. But, hey, it popped up. So back into the running. But yes, now we've been telling our son, you know, this is what it was like in the Dark Ages. Yes, before the Internet. We had to actually think for ourselves and do things ourselves and play games outside and stuff like that. You know, we'd have to look things up in this thing called an encyclopedia. Yeah, exactly. Oh, while I'm talking here, I'm having a look through some of the threads that have happened this week and I'm sure we're going to talk about one of these ones I wonder if we should launch into it I think we might as well launch into it so uh we used to do this podcast monthly and what would happen is by the time we get to the podcast and then put it out all sorts of things had happened uh in the pinball world of or especially the digital world that we concentrate on and so it was always old hat old news and usually it had been discussed and dissected in one of the Pimble Arcade fans forum threads. Yeah. Sort of wrapping up the commentary on it, really. Exactly. So we decided, hey, if we went weekly, we could be on top of these things, right? Yes. So we do our podcast last week on Saturday and then on Monday it hits, hey, look at that! Farsight's doing a Kickstarter and has dropped a whole bunch of info about their pinball app. Yeah. Our podcast drops on Tuesday, and people are like, oh, so you can talk about printers, but you don't have anything else to talk about? People. We were not aware. This was happening. This was about to go down. We don't get told everything, even though we do have rather strenuous NDAs. We don't get told everything. Well, I was going to say, we don't get told everything, and then when it comes to the Stern pinball app, we get told pretty much next to nothing because there's a very large gag order apparently that even the Farsight employees are under. Yeah. So yeah, so on Monday, last Monday, it was announced that Kickstarter for the ACDC table. But within that Kickstarter announcement was also some information about the Stern Pinball app, which we've dying to get any information at all about. Absolutely. They've been giving us nothing about it. It's been so frustrating. But hey, look, we have it now. It sounds pretty good. Yeah, so let's talk about, here's what they actually announced. I'll just read exactly what was written. It says, with the release of the Stern Pinball Arcade, we will be implementing Farsight Pinball Physics 4.0, which will be even more realistic. Without the overhead of ROM emulation, we can implement better lighting effects onto more devices and add more complex shaders reflections and shadows onto the current generation of platforms so let's get into that before we get into the kickstarter itself uh so emulation so we know that there is a certain cost involved in trying to run a sub program within a program which is when we say cost we mean processing cost not monetary that's right that's right that's right there is a performance cost so it takes a lot of grunt to actually run a framework that runs a lesser framework inside of it so this is a lot of the reason why um even though the the technology and the pinball machines that fast site have emulated up to date really don't have fast processes at all i think they mostly go about 100 megahertz which we're talking gigahertz in today's speed so some of these processes are really low what they call clock speeds and to and to sort of dial everything back enough so it doesn't run too fast or too slow it's a lot of tuning and a lot of technical finesse involved in doing that but as chris was saying there in the press release there's because the modern sterns use modern processor architectures and modern clock speeds which is the processing speeds they don't really need to try and downscale that much. They can pretty much run it one for one. And most devices out there that have been released within the last year, maybe year and a half, would be capable of running Stern platform games, no worries at all. Now, I thought this was more, though, a case of, for instance, Zen and their machines, obviously, they don't have emulation going on. What my understanding was was with Pimble Arcade, you've got both the emulation happening and then the actual drawing of all the graphics, and so it's like double the processor needed or whatever. So that's kind of why Zen is able to do things in a manner with less lag or whatever than Pimble Arcade has been able to do. I didn't realize that it was, though, an issue of modern processor speeds with the pinball because if they... I thought this was more a case of getting the unlocked code as you will, without having to run it through an emulator. Because if they were to do any of the older Stern machines, let's say go all the way back to Ripley's because Ripley's winds out is going to be one of the launch tables for the pinball app. Along with Frankenstein as well, I think, isn't it? Frankenstein is going to be the free table. basically Frankenstein is going to be the tales of the Arabian nights, if you will. Yes. Um, that's the table you download for free and you get that. Uh, it's going to be Ripley's starship troopers. Um, and Star Trek and Star Trek. Those are going to be the, those three are going to be basically what you pay for, for your first take. Um, but if you go all the way back to Ripley's now, Ripley's obviously is running at a slower processor, you know, their boards than what modern day is. But my understanding was because you're not having to run that emulation, you're just getting the code straight. I was thinking that that's what makes it be able to process perfectly, you know, faster, you might say. So getting access to the code directly from Stern rather than having to try and run it as an emulation framework. Right. Way back when, when Time Lord used to podcast with us. He mentioned that with the Williams tables, there was an unlock that would then require that you get direct ROM access without having to run an emulator. That's right. He mentioned that the way it works is when a real pinball machine loads it looks at what called a checksum and it looks at the security checksum on the ROM versus the checksum on the board itself And if they match, then it unlocks the ROM code and allows it to be stored into RAM, basically. So interstate is what they call that. Now, without those matching keys, when the game boots up, it doesn't allow you to actually run the code natively. So if that framework, because Stern's now involved directly, and they're changing their emulation engine to essentially be a direct emulation of SAM, which is what replis would have been, onwards, so SAM then now Spike, then that might be the reason why they're able to do away with some of the extra emulation but there's still a factor of making the the clock speeds of those games behave in the way that they were when the game was running so if we put that same code on a modern processor today and streamed it without any sort of governor or any sort of like i guess you could call it like a rate limiter but it's not even really that, like a speed limiter. It's essentially like, you know, in the old 4, 8, 6 days of PC, you press a turbo button, everything started working faster, like everything started to run quicker and everything. It's a bit like that, except multiplied, well, 100 times more. So if you're running it like for like, you would actually have everything running so fast that the game wouldn't make any sense, like as far as all the dot matrix animations and all the sound and everything like that. it just would all be so out of step and out of sync that it wouldn't make for a good gameplay experience. So you have to actually wind it back and throttle it back to the processing speed that it was at to make it make sense. We saw this weird thing happen with some of, if you played Pin Mame before on some of the Data Race tables that they were trying to emulate when I was playing Pin Mame, is that all the DMD animations were running at three times the speed because they hadn't quite worked out how to throttle the process to speak quite right on Data East. So if they're doing that on this app, I would suggest that it's probably going to be the same sort of thing. So I think there might be something a little bit more in there that we're just not quite aware of about emulation. It sounds interesting though, doesn't it? Because emulation and direct execution of code are two very different things. And I think they're going to have to kind of support both if they're going to offer the older tables like Ripley's and stuff like that, eh? yeah i'll be very curious to know what the what it actually is because what to me this is obviously adding uh or freeing up processing power and that's why they're saying they can add better lighting effects and what they're you know they're talking about onto current generation of platforms they didn't say on pc they're talking this generation of platforms which means being able to implement this stuff onto your cell phones onto the consoles um with a similar sort of quality than we've seen in some of the recent apps like Ask Homework's offerings on iOS and Android with amazing lighting and stuff like that. Because again, we've always gone back to why is it that you can look at a Call of Duty game or any of these games that are on, say, even the PS3 where there's these amazing lighting effects happening and here you have this simple pinball machine that you don't think, well, what is so complicated about any of this other than it happening in real time. But there's plenty of stuff that was going on on these other video games. Why is this so much more complicated? And always seemed to be the answer was, because we have to run the emulation at the same time as running the graphics and it's sucking up so much. So if we eliminate that one component, now it seems like they'll be able to throw all this other stuff into it. That's right. So the interesting thing is that a lot of the work at the moment with running TPA at a reliable speed that gives you a good user experience. A lot of it's actually offloaded to the GPU or the graphics processing unit rather than the CPU. Now, the CPU, certainly on mobile, doesn't do a lot of work at all. It's really just there running the emulation framework and stuff like that. But it's the GPU that's keeping the frame rate up to 60 frames per second, which is the required level for Farsight's physics mapping software, as well as also doing the graphics work as well. And this is why on some mobiles with different GPU architectures, you get a really poor experience and you can't run it with high detail and stuff like that because it just doesn't have enough processing cycles to work. Now, with the new Stern Pimple app, I'd say they would have decoupled that quite a bit. So they would have probably offloaded quite a bit more onto the CPU rather than the GPUs and allowed a bit of a better balancing between those two types of processes because that would be the way that they could actually start to improve graphics on those systems. The other option is they can use different frameworks as well. Because I think in the press release, and do correct me if I'm wrong here, they said that they would be tuning the games for each platform, basically. I think that's what Jay said in the video, wasn't it? You know what? I didn't actually watch the video because I like to read rather than watch sometimes. Well, he did, I'm pretty sure. And forum members listening or people listening, correct me if I'm wrong, send me a tweet or whatever. But I'm pretty sure he was saying that, yeah, for each platform, we will actually be tweaking the, I guess, the displaying presentation. So the graphics for each platform's limitations or abilities. Which to that I say, hallelujah. We've been asking that they did that all along rather than build it for one and try and port it to everything else where it was like, well, that doesn't make sense. You're not using what it's built for, what it can actually achieve best. Exactly. So this is going to mean things on mobile. So on Android, you'll be able to, I would suggest, they're probably going to be using a framework like OpenGL ES3, which seems to be the sort of latest supported ones across most devices. I'd say, now this wasn't confirmed in the video. I'm not sure if this is what's going to happen. I would suggest, though, that they're going to look at limiting the minimum device requirements for this app. I think probably if they're going to go down VR path, which I think was also announced around Christmas time. Well, and even in this announcement, they pretty much announced virtually every platform that they're on right now. And then I think they also threw in Oculus, and I can swear that it's an Oculus and VR. So I don't know. I think that's basically leaving it open for if they do the mobile VR or if they wind up doing Sony's VR for the PlayStation. I think they're kind of leaving themselves open. that's that's right so oculus being the kleenex of vr experiences oculus is yeah it's like uh yeah it's very much but uh everybody understands what you mean by it there's actually more and more vr tech emerging month to month it's kind of crazy yeah it'd be a little hard to see oh it's particular and this is how it's going to be for the like you know as an aside the next year or two as the technology finds its feet. Everyone's going to try their own thing. There's going to be six or seven different, potentially six or seven different formats of it, and then two will be winners, or maybe one will be a winner. One for PC and one for mobile or something like that. Anyhow, I forgot where I was going with this, but it was something to do with platforms. You were talking about having to have a benchmark for what your platform can do. minimal that's right thank you i'm glad you're listening so for if they're going to go down the path of vr there's on mobile there's a couple of things that need to be said so google has this thing called google cardboard and it is vr but it has frames per second limitations at the moment so it wouldn't be able to do games on there reliably it can do videos and things like that or like you know rendered sort of fly-throughs of space and stuff like that but i don't think it's really up to the frame rate clip required to do gaming at the moment but then you usher in samsung's solution which is gear vr which is partnered with oculus themselves so if they were to go down that path and use gear vr then that would mean it would be i would think a minimum requirement of marshmallow which is android 6 which is the current version of Android at the moment. So that would be a good thing if that was the case. It would mean that, number one, people would unfortunately need to upgrade their hardware, which can be hard for some people to do, which is granted. I mean, I've just spent a lot of money on a Nexus 6P, which isn't technically compatible with the Gear VR. So I would probably be sitting on the fence maybe a little bit because of that. but the good thing about doing it is because it's a minimum benchmark. So there'll be minimum processor speeds, minimum Android OS, and all those other things that need to be done that we've been, like, going, this has to be done to allow the graphics to actually improve in the platform. So I think that would be a good thing to do. I'm pretty sure, like, any Android developer with a store would consider doing that, sending a line in the sand like that and not looking for backwards compatibility, backwards compatibility back to throw you, which some people are still using on Android, you know, not to get bogged down in the, the mud of VR. Cause I know we can get stuck in that for a long time. Oh yes. But it is kind of with me. Right. That's why I'm kind of pulling us out right now, but I do want to just kind of one thing. Apple doesn't have any, do they? I don't think they do. No, that's an interesting point I wonder if they're kind of sitting back and waiting like you said to see what shakes out before they do anything they probably will what they'll do is they'll sit back wait a couple years and then release the same thing themselves and call it revolutionary and amazing and a game changer let's shift out of kind of what we've been talking about and talk about this one thing that says pinball physics 4.0 now currently we are dealing with flipper physics 3.0 yeah not pinball physics not pinball physics so this sounds like it's a new engine entirely it does doesn't it like i didn't actually notice the the the difference there the subtle difference but pinball physics would suggest that it's different to flipper physics. Good spotting. Which I hope is not, like I said, not just flipper action. And I know that they've been trying to work on it, but God, if they can get some ball spin in there. That would be amazing. And improve the way balls behave on things like ramps and things like that, like entries to ramps. It needs to be more randomized. I know that they have to do that at the moment. make it look like a vacuum ramp as we've called it on the forums because otherwise the balls will just fly off the table because they have to essentially make an invisible path for the ball to travel around up the ramp. If they don't have that there's no other way for them to do it. So perhaps pinball physics 4 will do away with that limitation and allow them to be a lot more dynamic in the way balls behave up and down ramps. Imagine if a ball was actually up and down the ramp and jiggling as it was going up and down. Actually pinballing up the ramp. You know what I mean? That would be kind of cool. It'd be kind of cool, but like I said, for me, it's all about the ball spin because that is what truly gives you the randomness. That's the ball as well right there. If you can get that implemented, I think that would improve the game substantially. And also, you know, with that as well, make it tunable by the user. Yeah, let's shoot for the stars here. Let's make it so if you wanted to in the pro menu or whatever the menu is that we would get in these games, actually allow us to tune subtly things like physics. So have it like a newly waxed play field versus an old dirty play field and stuff like that. And just throw in a bit of variance there for those hardcore users that want to really test themselves with physics. So that's basically what the press release statement that was involved with the Kickstarter insinuated. It gave us new information about what's going on with the Stern Pinball app. So again our launch tables being you get Frankenstein for free and then there be Ripley and Starship Troopers and then the big one which is Star Trek as your launch tables Other information that has leaked out has been that modern Stern tables, or contemporary, I think was the word that was being used. Contemporary, yeah. they're going to be $10 per table, whereas the older tables are going to be $5. Now, no delineation has been made. When they say older, are they talking about tables that have been previously released on Pinball Arcade, or is there an actual date cutoff that they're saying these are going to be $5, and then everything new is going to be $10? Don't know. Don't know. Very curious about that. I'm fine with that price point, like $10. That's honestly five plays down here in Australia. I mean, it certainly could have been worse. There's no doubt about it. Yeah. Shut up and take my money for $10. Absolutely. Go back. I don't know when that podcast was, but we did a whole podcast where we talked about pricing of this very thing. $30 would be palatable per game. I was going, I'd pay that because that's 15 games for me. But $10. I said that was on the pricey side that $15 would be pushing it, but 10 is to me, that's fantastic. That's a great price point for, for these. Um, also the, with the app, the tables are not going to be released monthly. Um, which basically whenever they're ready. And I, well, I hope that it's basically whenever they're ready. That's what I, that would be ideal. Please, please, please take a note from Zen, you know, fine tune these things until they're absolutely ready. And most importantly, if you do it this way, you can maybe time the drop so that every single platform gets it on the same day, just like Zen does. That would be pretty amazing to actually have a worldwide coincided release on all platforms. That would make for such a huge buzz for consumers. Oh, huge. And it would eliminate all the negativity, and then all of a sudden nobody is picking platforms they play on based off of when something is released, but more off of what is their actual preference. Okay. The other then part, the negative part of the whole thing was this was all wrapped up in yet another Kickstarter. Now, we knew that ACDC was going to be expensive. Yes, but geez, $100,000? $108,000, and that was because $16,000 had been given over because of Doctor Who. The extension of that. Geez, far out, man. the announcement of the kickstarter pretty much kicked all the joy of us learning any information right in the nuts um yeah there was an immediate backlash for me especially boy i was not a happy camper when i saw that because what it read like if you only watched the video and didn't read the the kickstarter explanation so when they announced it i was going oh hang on So this Stern Pinball thing, it's going to be really complex because we have to develop for all different platforms separately. And here's the Kickstarter, $108,000. So hang on, are we actually going to have to pay for the development and the Kickstarter as well? I thought this was already underway and going and the Stern Pinball app was under development itself. but you're telling me that this is the first time you're actually asking us to pay money for this app and actually theoretically start developing it. Like what the actual F guys, that's what I was thinking. And that's what's funny. It was such a confused message between people that only watched the video and then people like me that only read the text. Cause when I read the text, it was like, Oh, it's clear as a bell. This is, you know, the app is happening no matter what. And this is just, we want to put a CDC as a launch table and we need to fund a CDC. but then you read through the comments and i was reading through both comments while i was reading comments on the kickstarter page i was reading comments on facebook where they announced it i was reading kicks uh comments on twitter and i mean yeah you had people that were just like going what the hell eclectic over this going wait a second what i so we may not get the app at all it was like no no no did you not read or listen i don't know what you know but anyway it confused the issue greatly and yeah this is almost like a textbook example of how not to communicate like when you when you are communicating a message you need to send the same message across all media that you're using so in the video you need to have the same facts as text and this is not what happened here it's very bad better yet how about making an announcement about your game and then make a different announcement about the Kickstarter. Yeah, let's process the information that we want to process that's going to get everybody excited and then maybe throw in this other information a little bit later and not throw it all in at the same time and just cause mass confusion about what is actually going to be happening. Well, I don't know. Maybe release the app first, let us see what it looks like, and then ask us for money for Kickstarter. There's a good idea too, right. Of course, that would mean that a lot of people were saying. Right. I mean, that would mean that then the table's not a launch table, which is what they were wanting. They want a big bang, basically. Right. But what's wrong with Star Trek? That's a pretty big bang table to actually put in. It is a pretty big bang table. And a lot of people were going, they were asking, they were starting to ask, well, okay, Star Trek is basically, we're not paying for a Kickstarter because we know that Stern and their contract started writing in the digital licensing contract portion of things. the big question was then, well, is Metallica, was that before that or after that? And nobody quite knows where does Metallica table fall into that. And my thing was, well... I don't know where this digital licensing thing goes. It's really hard to work out. I do believe that it is included because if you looked at the initial announcement of them doing the pinball app, there was imagery of Metallica. Yeah. I got to believe that it is, but here's the thing. If you did Metallica as a launch table, and then you needed to fund ACDC, so many people would be like, eh, I already got the rock table that I wanted, so I don't care about ACDC. But if you start with ACDC, that makes people fork over the money for the rock table. They're like, ooh, we get a music table finally. And then a couple months later, they release Metallica that you don't have to pay for. Well, you've effectively gotten your cake and eaten it too. If you're Farsight. Yeah. Yeah, that's actually a valid point, isn't it? Because you wouldn't want to sort of essentially throw away the driver for people to actually purchase the table. Exactly. You'd want to actually have that there. In hindsight, that's actually a smart move, I think. No, I think it is. It is a smart move because, again, people were asking, well, how come you don't launch with Metallica? I'm telling you that's the reason, folks. That is very much the reason why you don't. The other thing is when you looked at the actual Kickstarter, okay, so the first entry level is what has been on all the other Kickstarters, which is $10, that gets you the table. The table, yeah. Now, in the past, it's always been, well, guy, but it only costs $5 to buy the table. But then the news kind of rolled out that it was going to be $10 a table. So essentially, this was going to wind up being a preorder. now here's error number here's error number two with with this whole press release is well if you could have at least mentioned how much the tables were i mean i don't even know where we found this information out uh i think it was on facebook somebody asked farsight that information got after the campaign right and it's like guys if you lead with that then people look at it as a pre-order and not a Kickstarter. Essentially, the tier is pre-order table, not $10 backer. Exactly. It's pre-order table. It's all about the message, right? It's all about the way we communicate. Right. Yeah. So again, better communication would be for better Kickstarter. Doing a Kickstarter, not at the same time as all the good info would be better. There's all sorts of stages that could have gone forward with this that would make it better. But yeah, there was pretty immediate backlash to the point that I'll say on the Pimple Arcade fan forum, all of a sudden we saw certain individuals pop up commenting that we have not seen those individuals pop up in some time. For months. For months. One of those individuals being Sean. Right? Yeah, Sean Don Carlos, former podcast host. All of a sudden, what, ACDC? Here, let me talk. I know all about this. all of a sudden I saw Jeff pop up which I mean I see him here and there I'll see a post but it was like a couple of posts regarding this I was like oh yeah if there's somebody that does not like a Kickstarter it's Jeff it's pretty much one of those things that stopped him from playing TPA anymore was he mixed about it or not I forget what his comments were there was just so many comments He was happy that ACDC was there, but it was once again, come on, guys. What's with the Kickstarter business? Do we really need this again? But then there was other individuals that, you know, they're not quite trolls in our forum, but they are people that have had to have various warnings given to them. It's the very kind of people that we have not had in our forum in quite a while that's made our forum such a wonderful place now. Then all of a sudden they're rearing their ugly heads saying those things that just basically incite the mob. Yeah, basically. And you're sitting there going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Chill. Read the statement. Bring it down a little bit. Yeah, exactly. So basically we had two, I think three days. The Kickstarter started on Monday. I think on Wednesday they were already up to 16,000, 18,000. Yeah. It was making progress. There was already a couple of articles written about it, which I was like, obviously this is Stern's influence. Yes. Of big interest. Like the word is getting around. Right. Word's getting around. Much faster than it was when Farsight were handling it, the regular Kickstarter. So that's good. And that's all good. And all of a sudden, Kickstarter's canceled. It's like, what? Bye. Huh? What happened? I said, okay i came into work from the morning i went um cancelled i got tweets about it from some people who are actually following the podcast going dude have you seen the news i went no i've just like woken up essentially and and like what's going on again it's being cancelled i went uh-huh that's unusual did somebody click a button or something wrong yeah so i mean obviously this got me and Jared into wild speculation mode of what the heck could have possibly happened. We love a bit of good wild speculation. Somebody mentioned that Stern had actually pulled all their tweets regarding the Kickstarter the day before. And we went, okay. This happened on Thursday. Stern apparently had pulled them on either Tuesday or Wednesday. So it was like, ooh. Obviously, this was not good. this was kind of what the heck happened and my first impression was maybe Stern never saw any of the previous Kickstarter campaigns and wasn't pleased with all the negativity and kind of went let's just yank the plug on this I'm going to let you finish and just let you go and do that over here while we're over here doing all the pinball business that we're doing right Right. And then it got into people wondering what exactly is going on. Basically, nobody had any clue. And of course, there was zero press regarding that. There's not even no announcement in the Kickstarter campaign for those who have backed it or anything. It was like a black hole of communication. And what happens when you get a black hole of communication, Chris? We go and start trying to get rumors. We kick into overdrive. Everyone starts to think the worst is what happens. That's what happens when you don't provide any information. Everyone thinks the worst. Suddenly the entire app is cancelled. Fastlight's closing. The world's imploding. It's crazy to see all the comments that were happening. But it's fair enough because if you don't know what's going on and you're passionate about something, of course you're going to think the worst has happened. You know, you jump to conclusions is what the human brain does. So, and we were doing that, all of us. So, uh, Like lots of things, weren't they? Oh yeah. I mean like I said you you name it people were thinking it I was thinking it too I was you know that was what our whole podcast was going to be about today actually was me and Jared just going to watch a speculation of what could possibly be going on Right. So then, on Friday, a new announcement gets sent. And this was sent to all the Kickstarter backers and then eventually posted to Facebook. And it was this. Thanks to the amazing reception that Stern Pinball Arcade has received, We've been able to enter into a new partnership that will allow us to fully fund this license without contributions from our loyal backer community. Development on the table can therefore start immediately, which will allow us to bring you this great table even sooner than we'd planned. We will release more information about this exciting development soon. Stay tuned. Thank you so much for backing us. Without you, adding tables with premium licenses like this one would normally not be possible. We appreciate your loyalty to our product and your dedication to the art of pinball. so i had to read that twice i had to read that twice because my first time when i read through it was that it was we've entered into a new partnership that will allow us to fully fund licenses like this not this license because i got all excited and thought no kids murders ever again not quite that good chris Why is that good? But still pretty good. Yes. So, obviously, we have a third party involved now. A new partnership is being brought into this. We have no idea who, what, what. Well, we have no idea yet who it is. Yes. Maybe we will be on the track. I don't know. You would think that we would? You would think. I mean, it would only make sense. Whoever this third party is, surely they would want to get some mileage out of it. Because that's a fair chunk of change to lay down, right? Right. I sit there and I go, so what would inspire them to pay for this whole thing? We've never, I mean, this was the sixth Kickstarter. Am I correct on that? Fifth or sixth? Yeah. One of those. Anyway. But why suddenly now for the most expensive one out there? Either somebody really, really, really, really, really likes ACDC, really, really, really likes pinball and only because of Stern is now aware of this game itself and was like, hey, let's kick in. You know, we don't... Is it a single individual? Who knows? Don't know. I know. It's all a mystery to us. You know, did somebody finally win the lottery and do what they said they were always going to do and just, you know, pay for all the tables to get put into Pinball Arcade now? Well, if they did, thanks very much. Yeah, exactly, right? My hat tips to you. So basically, let's just say, hooray, no Kickstarter. Let's get rid of all the negativity about the Kickstarter. This now means that ACDC, which we do know that Farsight apparently has been working on for some time. I believe they actually, in anticipation, have been working on this for a while. A little while. Yeah. Um, and, uh, yeah, so now this is presumably going to be a launch table. Um, this brings into the question, when the heck is this going to be launching? Because the other table that was announced was Ghostbusters. And under the Ghostbusters table, it said fall. Which is fall US time. Fall US time, which is October, November, December, thereabout. Basically October, November. but when they announced that they were going to be doing acdc they said the idea would be that it would be released november but if they wanted acdc to be a launch table wouldn't you say that means that it's launching in november i don't know or is it the case of well it's a launch table in terms of when you buy the the first table pack it's going to be here's these tables when we have ACDC available, it will be part of your pack. It'll just get added in later. That's what I got to believe it was. It'll be like launch pack including a ball icon for ACDC with coming soon, like they do on Zen, right? It'll be mentioned as, yes, this is coming in the app, as in like a, you know, kind of like what Zen do when they're about to release the table pack. That's my thinking of it. That's how I would have thought it would have gone down. Yeah, but it wouldn't have been a separate price. I think it was going to be part of the launch table pack. Oh, right. Okay. So you basically download the app and it'll be like, geez, $30? Because if you buy the launch pack, you've got to pay for replace. Frankenstein is a freebie, so you're not on that one. And then it will be ACDC. And ACDC, which is $40. Right. So that will be $40. I don't think, no, because Ripley's and Starship would be $5 each. So that would be $10 for those. And then $20 for the other two tables. So that would be $30 at the max. You've got to believe they're launching the table pack. That first table pack is going to be a little bit less expensive, I would imagine. Yeah. Unless there's something to mention too. As far as pricing and stuff goes, there are no season packs in this, of course. Yes. No season. There are no concept of seasons. It's basically whenever the table is released. I was going to talk about this earlier, but it's probably a good time to bring it up now, is that with... Let's look at the ones we know now. Like, Star Trek is out. Now, when was Star Trek released in relation to ACDC? It was a fair few tables behind ACDC, wasn't it, right? I'm just trying to think of, like, the timings, because where I'm going with this is how long will the tables be out in the real world before they're digitized and available in an app? Because this is the thing that we were discussing and debating when we first heard of the Stern app, how excellent it would be as a marketing vehicle for Stern to get players in front of virtual tables so that they would then go and pump money into it in the arcades and tournaments. So I'm wondering how the spacing works. We've seen that Ghostbusters is coming full 2016. 16 or 17? 16. which will be only a few months after it's actually, I mean it's just now starting to roll, being shipped out to arcades and stuff people are getting public launch parties of it so six months let's call it six months after a table hits the streets, it looks like that's the timing at the moment I don't know if that's timing at all I don't know if that's even necessarily the case it might be a case of, because right now okay, Ghostbusters Pro is what's hitting going out there. They still don't have the LE 100% locked in. That might be actually the case. You're going to have to wait until the LE version or the premium version is locked before because that's what Farsight's releasing. They're releasing the premium versions of the tables. They're not releasing the pro version right now. That's what we've heard. That's right. Maybe that's why they're having to wait. That's what I'm thinking. They could launch with Game of Thrones, but it's also one of those things where, why don't we get the hot thing right now? We've already been selling Game of Thrones. It's already out there. Let's actually, here's the app, and hey, look at this brand new table that's still out, just fresh. Most people haven't gotten their hands on it, and that'll help generate interest in the app again. Yep. Yeah, I think it's pretty good. It's going to be interesting as it goes along, what the the delay is hopefully it will be one to one so hopefully when the table gets released maybe a month afterwards we get the app with the table in it and even better because they're not actually emulating the code they can actually probably test out the rom code directly on the stern app rather than the tables on the street or they could do both like this is the this is the option they have now with native code essentially they can do it they can essentially virtually plug in the usb drive into the main board of the thing and upgrade it. Just like that. Well, I certainly hope that that's what winds up happening then too, is that, you know, because I mean, I know like with KISS, they were just announcing that a new code, you know, a new update had just come out for that. So I would hope that with this app, it's the same situation where all of a sudden, hey, the new update is in, it's now on your thing, on your device. And who knows, maybe they would even let you do the ability to pick which version you play then. yeah maybe yeah you might the physics of the table the physics and the toys they're not changing it's purely the game code so there should be no reason why they can't be updated yeah that's pretty interesting so man that actually has a whole subset of stuff you could do with that but we won't go into that quite now because we're already running pretty long Yeah, we're running a little bit long here. We promised Pinball Talk, we gave you Pinball Talk. You got Pinball Talk. With waffles. Pinball and waffles. I do want to mention, and I don't know how new or old this game is, but I saw it recently, it's called Inks. And it's on the Apple Store. It is essentially... It's awesome. It's a virtual pinball playfield. but what you're trying to do is splat your ball into certain sections. Targets. Targets then splatter ink on the table. And of course that gives you really cool draw patterns and artwork you might say. And there are just a it's kind of a puzzle game in that you're aiming for specific targets and you don't clear the table until you've hit all the targets. I don't know if there's a timer or anything else like that. Think of it like a cross between a little bit like a cross between Breakout and Flippers, but it's a pinball game. It's very strange. It's a union of a couple of different game types, really. I would love to see it on Android. Bring it over to Android. Yeah, I haven't purchased it myself yet. It's $1.50, I believe, for the first three levels, and then it's $0.99 for the other two levels that they currently have. I've been reading mixed reviews on it, actually. Some people saying it's really awesome the whole way through, and other people saying I was bored within a half an hour. So, you know, who knows? I don't know, but it's definitely worth checking out. It looks interesting and pretty, and it might be that kind of game where it's just one of those things that you just play to mellow out to. Like I said, it's called Inks, I-N-K-S. Look it up on the Apple App Store. Yeah. Looks real good. Hey, so all of you that listened to our show that had pledged to contribute to the Kickstarter, you know what you can do with your money now. You can buy a t-shirt. Oh, yeah. Totally. So go to represent.com backslash blockade dash shirt. You can pony up your money and actually get something physical, a wonderful blockade t-shirt in the color of your choosing. That's right. and represent. That's right. Absolutely. Go ahead and follow us and yell at us and mock us at Blockade on Twitter or you can attack us directly at Jared Brian Morris or at Shut Your Traps. Feel free to drop us an email at blahblahblockade at gmail.com That's probably it. I believe those are all the things. Yes. who knows what's going to happen next week what transpires maybe we'll finally find out the mystery benefactor maybe we'll find out nothing at all and we can talk more about breakfast foods until then maybe it will probably happen on Tuesday just when this podcast we don't get to talk about it alright until then gang thanks for listening we'll talk to you all again next week in the blockade See you later. sales, restoration, customization. Don't forget to leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that BlackPay is delivered to. We can't approve unless you tell us how. Now stop listening and place it in goal.