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Episode 8 – 80s Pinball, Homebrew, CoD/Battlefield, RPGs Galore

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 25m·analyzed·Aug 18, 2016
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.028

TL;DR

Eclectic Gamers announces 80s pinball bracket tournament and explores homebrew Batman retheme concept.

Summary

In this May 2016 episode of Eclectic Gamers Podcast, hosts Tony and Dennis discuss their recent activities including attending Pinappalooza No. 3 (a private 80+ machine collector event in Missouri) and participating in a monthly pinball tournament. They announce a new 1980s Pinball Machine Mania Tournament bracket (64 machines across four manufacturer regions: Williams, Bally, Gottlieb, and Other) with March Madness-style voting. The episode then pivots to detailed homebrew retheme concepts, with Dennis proposing a College Humor 'Bad Batman' themed rework of Stern's Batman: The Dark Knight pinball, featuring custom dialogue, mode redesigns, and playfield art changes.

Key Claims

  • Pinappalooza No. 3 featured a private collector with 80+ pinball machines, mostly vintage (90s Williams, 80s Bally, EMs) with only two modern Stern machines

    high confidence · Host Tony describing the event; both hosts attended and verified the collection composition

  • Elvira and the Party Monsters is the highest-rated 1980s pinball game on Pinside's rankings

    high confidence · Tony explicitly states this when explaining the bracket tournament premise

  • The side tournament at Pinappalooza ran until after 3 a.m.

    high confidence · Dennis recalls tournament duration from personal attendance

  • Most machines in Pinside's top 300 rankings are from the 1990s and beyond, not the 1980s

    high confidence · Tony explains difficulty finding enough 1980s games to fill 16-machine slots for all four regions

  • 8-Ball Deluxe Limited Edition is ranked lower on Pinside primarily because of backbox issues rather than gameplay quality

    medium confidence · Tony's interpretation of Pinside rankings; subjective opinion about rating methodology

Notable Quotes

  • “I really like going and doing that. I wish I'd done better in the main tournament... I went four and out. It was a strikeout type.”

    Tony @ ~15:00 — Personal reflection on tournament performance at Pinappalooza

  • “It was kind of a mix of let's play a bunch of these cool machines and a mix of, hey, this is a pinball social event. Let's talk to a lot of people.”

    Tony @ ~18:00 — Describes the atmosphere and dual nature of Pinappalooza as both competitive and social

  • “For me, I downplay on the art, whereas people who may be very concerned about aesthetics in a home collection might max those sort of figures out”

    Tony @ ~30:00 — Explains the subjectivity of Pinside rating system and personal weighting preferences

  • “These are fights. Some of these have fights that should be, you know, towards the end, not right at the very first round.”

    Dennis @ ~32:00 — Comments on unseeded bracket matchups creating unfair first-round confrontations

  • “What I would propose doing is I would take Stern's 2008 Batman the Dark Knight table... and I would change it so instead it would be themed based off of College Humor's Batman skits.”

    Dennis @ ~85:00 — Introduces his homebrew retheme concept with specific source material reference

  • “I took it very directly as a homebrew concept. So I wasn't trying to think of a machine that I would redesign that would sell or have mass market appeal.”

    Dennis @ ~80:00 — Clarifies the homebrew philosophy as personal passion project rather than commercial product

Entities

TonypersonDennispersonPinappalooza No. 3eventEclectic Gamers Podcastorganization1980s Pinball Machine Mania TournamenteventPinsideorganizationBatman: The Dark KnightgameCollege HumororganizationOverwatchproduct

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Podcast driving community participation through bracket voting tournament; hosts planning series expansion (designer brackets, additional decades)

    high · Tony announces public survey voting, plans multi-month rollout, discusses future bracket concepts including designer regions and vintage decades

  • ?

    event_signal: 1980s Pinball Machine Mania Tournament announced with 64-machine bracket, March Madness format, manufacturer-based regions, multi-week voting cycle

    high · Tony provides detailed bracket structure, all 64 machines listed with seeds and matchups; survey to launch with podcast publication

  • ?

    event_signal: Pinappalooza No. 3 successfully executed as private collector event with 60+ attendees, 80+ machines, dual tournaments (main and side), smooth operations

    high · Both hosts attended; detailed descriptions of venue operations, tournament structure, machine composition, and attendee count

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Homebrew retheme approach emphasizes personal passion projects over commercial viability; deep rule complexity and thematic coherence prioritized

    high · Dennis explicitly states homebrew philosophy is for personal enjoyment, not mass market appeal; both hosts developing complex rule redesigns

  • ?

    technology_signal: Homebrew pinball community exploring digital/hybrid solutions for rethemes (e.g., laptop screen replacing dot matrix display for video content)

    medium · Dennis mentions considering laptop screen to display College Humor video clips instead of traditional dot matrix animation

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.256

0:00
And welcome to the Collected Gamers Podcast. Today is Saturday, May 7th, 2016, and this is episode number 8. We are coming earlier than normal due to life and Mother's Day and everything else. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And we're going to be talking, as always, about pinball, video games, and some tabletop today. But let's start out with what we've been doing lately. How about you, Dennis? What have you been up to? Well, I just rushed back as fast as I could from the monthly pinball tournament at the 403 Club. lasted a little longer than I normally do because I actually won the first match before going and losing my two typicals and being sent home. So that's been today's main thing, at least occupying most of the evening up until this point. And then let's see, I've been playing a lot of Far Cry 4. I know I've been saying that on a number of episodes now because I've just been dragging it out. I hadn't put in much time over the prior two weeks, but as of this last week. I have done a lot. I'm over 40% through, and I think that counts like side quests and everything. So in terms of campaign, I get the sense that I'm more at the halfway point. Watched We Were Soldiers. I hadn't seen that in a while. I forgot that Clark Gregg, who plays Coulson in all the Marvel movies and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., he's more on TV now than before, forgot that he was even in that movie. But other than that, I haven't watched a lot of films. Yeah, I watched We Were Soldiers this weekend as well without even knowing you were dead until I brought up with you earlier wondering whatever happened to Barry Pepper. I mean, that was just a kind of one of those humorous things that we both watched the same movie without thinking about it, especially for an older movie. Yeah, it was when I'm in a mood for a war movie, there are always a certain set of them that I run through. And so, for example, I don't rewatch Saving Private Ryan. It never calls to me to do that. But I do really like We Were Soldiers. It's my favorite film that's set in the Vietnam era. Yeah, We Were Soldiers and Band of Brothers are my go-to war filmy type things, though Band of Brothers being the miniseries and huge long eats a lot more time. But those are definitely my go-tos for something like that. And I'd say the last thing I was going to go ahead and mention in terms of doing was something that you and I also both did, though in this case we both knew we were going, and that was to Pinappalooza No. 3. We were invited. For those that aren't aware of it, and there are probably a lot that are not, it's a private pinball collector in northwest Missouri. And so he does an invite event where he allows people to come, and they do tournaments and stuff. And he's got a collection of, I believe, over 80 pinball machines, and most of them are very focused on older era. I think there were only two of the modern Stern machines in that collection. So a lot of 90s Williams, a lot of 80s Bally, and a lot of the really popular EMs. And so we spent last Saturday all day there from about 1 p.m. till we got out of there a quarter after 11. And so that was a lot of fun. I really liked going and doing that. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. He has an amazing collection. I was super happy with it. I wish I'd done better in the main tournament. I know you did much, much better than me in the main tournament. I went four and out. It was a strikeout type. It was a four strikeout type tournament. I did better in the side tournament. I enjoyed the side tournament until I embarrassed myself on Indy 500, but it was still a lot of fun. I was at the halfway point on the main tournament. So I believe I had three wins and then I had my four strikes. So yeah, I was pleased with how I did on that. I didn't do very well in the side tournament. I think I was probably the fifth person eliminated, if I remember, fifth or sixth. But it was still a lot of fun. And it was just because there were so many machines involved with that. My understanding, though, is that one ended up, the side tournament, ended up running until after 3 a.m. So in a way, I'm glad. I would have been so tired that I don't think I would have performed well eventually at some point anyway. But otherwise, it was, you know, just they kept it running really smooth. And with so many machines, even though there were a lot of people there, I think there were over 60, it still wasn't hard to get on machines and constantly find machines to play. A lot of the people who were there visiting weren't always in the game room. They were up and talking and socializing. So it wasn't like Texas when there were just queues for all these machines because everyone's there just to play the machines. This is kind of a mix of let's play a bunch of these cool machines and a mix of, hey, this is a pinball social event. Let's talk to a lot of people. Yeah, I had a really good time. It was pretty fun. Lots of fun machines. Some machines I'd never played before. Some machines I'd never even seen before. But it was definitely a day well spent. So what else have you been up to, Tony? Other than that, well, my youngest had the influenza. So she was down for about a week, and I spent a lot of that. So I took a bunch of time off work staying home with her, and I watched a bunch of movies. I plowed through Kill Bill, Volume 1 and 2, because I haven't watched those since they originally were in the theaters. And that movie is good. I mean, really good. It might be one of my favorite Tarantino films. uh both of them put together i also watched armageddon seeing as i'd watched deep impact not that long ago i figured well we'll watch armageddon which has terrible terrible science but is freaking hilarious and definitely a lot more fun and i think more watchable now that i've seen it at a remove i think they're it's more rewatchable than deep impact is uh i watched big trouble in little china which is always a great movie it's a perfect palate cleanser movie and And then I made the mistake. I fell. I watched Over the Top.
Elvira and the Party Monsters
game
Far Cry 4product
Captain America: Civil Warproduct
We Were Soldiersproduct
Haunted Housegame
Sea Witchgame
F-14 Tomcatgame
5:39
I don't know what I was thinking. The Stallone movie? Yeah. Where he's an arm wrestler? Yes. Oh, wow. I haven't seen that since before I was a teenager. Yeah, it was on Netflix, and I was flipping through stuff on Netflix, and I was just looking up actors just to see what movies they had on Netflix. And I looked Stallone up, and I'm like, oh, look, Over the Top. I haven't seen Over the Top since I was, like, in middle school. So I fired it up. and 15 minutes in, I'm like, I should stop this. But it was like watching a train wreck. I mean, it just kept going and going and going. And it was terrible. I mean, I don't know why I watched it, but I did. I watched the whole thing. And it's not something I have to worry about watching again, unless I forget how bad it is at some point.
6:27
Yeah, no, I didn't remember it was bad. I remember I saw it once, and that's about all I remember of it. So I never think about it when I think of Stallone's career. Yeah, I really don't either. But I played a lot of Battlefield League Gothic until the open beta for Overwatch. And since that opened on the 4th, all I've done is play Overwatch. All my game time has been Overwatch. I've spent some time watching, well, yesterday. I spent probably an hour or two somewhere in there watching Twitch feeds of that beta. It's not been a game that I've been inclined to get, but it's interesting to watch. Yeah, I'm not a good shooter. I'm not in games like this. I'm not the guy who will see a couple pixels moving through a window as somebody jumps and take a shot and headshot them and this and that. I can't do that. I'm a terrible shot. and the nice thing I like about Overwatch is there's a lot of characters that you know what, if you're a bad shot, well they've got plenty of other things you can do and you can be very helpful and useful to the team and still get without having to be some perfect soldier all the time who hits every shot. So I've really enjoyed it, but I also like Team Fortress 2 a lot and that's what this feels like is Team Fortress 2 on crack. Oh, okay. Well, it has been interesting to witness and so I think this game is going to do very well. All the buzz, even before the open beta hit from people who had experience with it, was quite positive. I'm not aware of negatives being stated about Overwatch. Yeah, there's nothing major. I mean, there's negatives about everything, but for, yeah, this is going to definitely make Blizzard some money. And the last thing is I slipped into an extremely late showing of Captain America Thursday night because I'm on call, so I wouldn't be able to see it this whole week, I decided to try and get in and see it. And I liked it a lot. I don't think it was as good as Winter Soldier, but it was better than Age of Ultron. Okay, so it's a very strong movie then. Yeah, it's a strong movie. It's definitely up there. I don't think it had the same – I mean, it's got some great impact. It's got some great emotion. I mean, it's just like Winter Soldier in the way it plays with you. It's not just like a straight action flick. There's a lot of good emotion and stuff in it. I just think it had a couple points when they were setting stuff up that was a little bit slower, where Winter Soldier, even the slow parts in Winter Soldier felt like they were just cranking along. So I think Winter Soldier is the better film. I still think Winter Soldier is the best Captain America film. But I have to say this Civil War moves Captain America, the first Avenger, down. So the first Avenger is the worst of the Captain America movies. All three are still in my top five Marvel movies. Yeah, it's not moved down much. No, no, no. I mean, Winter Soldier for me is the best Marvel movie. I agree. It's my favorite Marvel movie. Winter Soldier is my favorite. My number two is Guardians.
9:36
And then it goes, number three would be the original Avengers. And then Civil War. than Captain America the First Avenger than Iron Man. This is the top six. All right. Well, now that we are caught up with our introductions for all of our listeners, let's go ahead and get cracking here with our three main topics. And so first, we will move into our pinball segment. And I guess I will go ahead and start because I have been planning since the last podcast a contest of sorts. I call it the 1980s Pinball Machine Mania Tournament. And so in terms of what that is, I went in and I was thinking about, I was looking over the Pinside ratings, well, more the rankings, actually, of all these various games. And I thought, you know, I don't know how accurate that is. It obviously, it factors in a lot of variables. For those that aren't familiar with Pinside, the way the rating system works to give a rank to a machine, the individual goes and like assesses what they think like like on the scale of one to ten what's the back glass what's the quality of that what's the quality of the sound effects what's what's the gameplay but they also get to determine what percentage those things are weighted for their own evaluation so for example when i rate a machine i do not rate the art very high in terms of a factor of whether or not i'd want to own a machine or play a machine or anything with a machine. So for me, I downplay on the art, whereas people who may be very concerned about aesthetics in a home collection might max those sort of figures out in terms of how important that is to them when they get a machine. So anyway, the way that this is going to work is I've got a survey that will ask a series of March Madness NCAA style questions, and people will be able to go and vote and they'll be able to vote on whatever criteria they want. And the way I've done it is we've got 64 machines and the regions, you know, kind of the regions from basketball are the manufacturers. So I've got a Williams region, a Bally region, a Gottlieb region, and then to get the count. So I could have 16 highly, you know, highly rated machines. I have an other region and that other region consists of data East, Stern, Zacharia and game plan. And so I just went through and started searching the Pennside top 300 solid state games. Anything from 1980 to 1989 was considered. And then whatever was the number one rated machine for each region or each company, each manufacturer gets to be seated at number one in their respective region and so on and so forth until I had 16 in each of them. And so what we're going to do is in between every podcast, we will run the survey. I'll close it off probably the Friday around noon central time before the Friday before we normally record. So just under two weeks, I'll get those tallies up and then we'll move on to the next bracket and we'll keep running this until we have a winner and we'll be able to crown the 1980s pinball machine champion. Because if you look at Pinside, the winner is supposed to be Elvira and the Party Monsters because it's the highest rated game from the 80s on that list. And maybe it will win, but I don't know. But I wanted to make it interesting in a competitive way against manufacturers. So in terms of the seeding, I just want to go ahead and let's walk through what we've got here because it won't take too long. Yeah, there's some evil seeds in this. I mean, there are some things that are just wrong. I mean, these are fights. Some of these have fights that should be, you know, towards the end, not right at the very first round. yeah and you know it reminds me of a movie fight sort of scenarios where they do these sort of brackets and you end up with those unfortunate because of the however the seating's based critic review or whatever you get these confrontations where maybe you as a player are like oh those should not be meeting yet those are an elite eight those are a final four yeah it's just it is it is what it is and on some of these i you know i'll probably have to skip on voting some of them because i don't think there's some of these machines i've never played so and it's set up that way so you'll be able to you just pick one of the two and you just go down the list i haven't broken it up by the manufacturer so it'll be it should be pretty easy for people to vote and we'll have a link on the on the page uh the where we put the podcast up on our website we'll also put a link up on facebook so people will be able to access that uh so starting with the williams bracket uh first round competitions are going to be number one seed earth shaker versus number 16 seed Grand Lizard. And we've got the number eight seed F-14 Tomcat is going to face off against the number nine seed Space Station. That's a tough one. Yeah, I'll probably go with Space Station on that. See, I'm going the other way. Okay. Well, F-14 frustrates me because it's so fast. But number three seed is Taxi, and that's facing off against the number 14 seed Space Shuttle. We've got the number six seed, Cyclone, facing the number 11 seed, Joust. Here's an unfortunate one, but I think it'll be pretty decisive. The number two seed, Black Knight 2000 versus the number 15 seed, Black Knight. Yeah, that's a harsh one too. Yeah, yeah. The number seven seed is High Speed, and it will face the number 10 seed, Sorcerer. I could see Sorcerer pulling that one. It's very popular. It is. Number four seed is Banzai Run versus the number 13 seed, Swords of Fury. I've never played that game, but Banzai Run is an amazing game. I've played both, and I expect Banzai to take that one. And then the number five seed Pinbot versus the number 12 seed Firepower. That is the most wrong one. Those are two of my favorite games ever. Yeah, that one. I'm still thinking on that one because I agree. I really enjoy both of those machines. So that's the Williams bracket. And so the region for Bally looks like this. The number one seed, as I mentioned before, Elvira and the Party Monsters, is going to face the number 16 seed, Strange Science. The number eight seed, Mousin' Around, will face the number nine seed, Medusa. That's a pretty harsh matchup right off the beginning, too. I know Mousin' Around is super popular, but I like Medusa. That's a good table. I like Medusa a lot as well. My guess, you know, I'm going to speculate. My guess will be Mousin' Around will win that one out. There's a lot of love for System 11 games. But we'll just have to see how many sort of hardcore pinball people vote. That'll affect a lot of it. Medusa, hands down, has the better art package. Yeah.
16:15
Number three seed is Fathom, and that will face the number 14 seed Fireball 2. The number six seed Embryon will face the number 11 seed Skateball. The number two seed Centaur will face the number 15 seed Frontier. The number seven seed Flash Gordon will face the number 10 seed Centaur 2. The number four seed, 8-Ball Deluxe, will face the number 13 seed, Fireball Classic. Fireball is all over that list. Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess because they made a second one. It was so popular the first go-around. And then finally for Bally, the number five seed is Xenon, and that will face the number 12 seed, 8-Ball Deluxe Limited Edition. Now that's a harsh matchup too. Yeah, I think 8-Ball Deluxe LE is so low-seeded on Pennside solely because of the horrible back box, the back glass that sits on the weird little leftover back box thing that they were doing in that era. Otherwise, it's the exact same gameplay as 8-Ball Deluxe. I'm voting 8-Ball Deluxe LE on that because I think 8-Ball Deluxe is a better layout than Xenon. But for me, that's a simple one. Yeah, but Xenon's got some amazing art. I really like the art on Xenon. It does. And I think Xenon on art would beat any version of 8-Ball Deluxe. So it just comes down to what people prefer what they want to evaluate when they consider the whole package. It's entirely up to them how they want to weight it. I'm not going to give any guidance on that. That's solely up to each voter.
17:41
So let's move to the third region, Gottlieb. Number one seed is Haunted House. That faces the 16-seed Volcano. The number eight seed is The Amazing Spider-Man. It faces the number nine seed, Arena. The number three seed is Big House. It faces the number 14 seed, Genesis. The number six seed is Devil's Dare. and it will face off against the number 11 seed, Bonebusters Incorporated. The number two seed is Black Hole, and that faces the number 15 seed, Bounty Hunter. The number seven seed is Robo War, and that faces the number 10 seed, Bad Girls. The number four seed is TX Sector. I don't know if that's how it's said, but that's how I always say it. And it faces the number 13 seed, Lights, Camera, Action. And finally, the number five seed is Spirit, and that faces the number 12 seed, Mars, God of War. Going through that list, I was surprised at just how few of those Gottliebs I'd actually played. I thought I played a lot more Gottliebs from the 80s than that, but apparently not. No, I'm – yeah, when I was going through on this, and actually on the Pinside rankings, it takes quite a long time before you hit Haunted House in the list of seeding. And I have very little experience on a lot of these Gottliebs. I'm probably going to have to leave a number of these blank. Unless I want to try and research them. But without being able to play them even virtually, yeah, I'll probably just have to see what the listeners think, if they've got any hands-on experience. I've played less than half of these. Yeah, I've played less than half of them. But, you know, Black Hole's a really good game in my book. I liked it. But, yeah, no, Black Hole, I'm not surprised that it comes in at the number two seed. We'll see how that one fares. It's definitely my weakest region on knowledge. And then the final region's the other region. And it's just, as I noted before, I just couldn't get 16 games in the top. I barely got through and found 16 for each of these manufacturers in the top 300 on Pennside, because most of those machines in the top 300 are 90s and beyond, not the 80s. So we've got number one seed is Stern's Sea Witch, and it will face Stern's Galaxy, which is the 16 seed title. The number eight seed is Quicksilver. That's a Stern machine. It will face the number nine seed Torpedo Alley, which is by Data East. The number three seed is a game called Andromeda is by Game Plan. It will face the number 14 seed Flight 2000, which is a Stern title. The number six seed is Nineball. That's by Stern. And it faces another Stern, the number 11 seed Big Game. The number two seed is Stern's Stargazer. And it will face Stern's Lightning at the 15th seed. Number seven seed is Laser War. That's a Data East game, and it will face the number 10 seed Catacomb, which is a Stern title. The number four seed is Data East. It's called Time Machine, and it faces another Data East game, the 13th seed Robocop. The number five seed is Farfalla. That's from a company called Zaccaria, and that will face Data East Monday Night Football at the 12th seed. So that's the current bracket of 64 titles. and we'll get that voting up once I get the podcast up actually. And then we'll see where everyone thinks and falls on that. And we'll be running that for quite a while. It'll take us a few months to get through it since we're going to close it off for each podcast period. But I think it'll be a lot of fun and I'm hoping that it gets a good response. And if it does, I've been, you know, we can do things like this with other ideas. Obviously we could do another generation, another decade if we wanted to. Another idea that you and I had discussed is maybe doing something with pinball designers and maybe putting them as the regions and seeing just that gets challenging too because you have to have if we do it as big as this you know we have to make sure they have enough games under their belt yeah we might have to par that down to a starting at a smaller level but it would definitely be worth it because having each designer eliminate down to their best game and then having their best game go up against other designers best games i think that one could be a lot of fun. So that's it about the pinball bracket tournament. So let's go to our other pinball topic that we have today. And that is homebrew retheming. Now we've played some rethemes when we were in Texas and this and that, and we've talked to some people about them. And this is something that was running ideas in my head, particularly. I came up with one. I'm not actually going to talk about it today because it was so major change-wise that I'm only about halfway through thinking what I would do to it, and I'm not willing to finish until I have everything ironed out in my head. But what we did is we both picked a theme and a game, and we came up with our own little fantasy re-theme of it. And would you like to start, Dennis? Sure, I will. And I should say going into this, I took it very directly as a homebrew concept. So I wasn't trying to think of a machine that I would redesign that would sell or have mass market appeal. It was just something that if I were to do it and I would want something that would just be fun for me and I would think would be a great idea, what would I do? And so that's what my concept is. And what I would propose doing is I would take Stern's 2008 Batman the Dark Knight table, that I would change it. So instead it would be themed based off of College Humor's Batman skits. And for those that aren't familiar, you can search YouTube for Batman and you'll get a whole playlist of them. But basically College Humor went and they took the concept of the Nolan Bale Batman series. and what but what if batman was you know stupid what if he wasn't incompetent what if he was terrible at everything he does and so and i just think with a concept like that it lends itself to taking a batman machine and i'm most familiar with batman the dark knight and given that batman the dark knight is indeed the movie or one of the the movie franchise that batman is based off of it just lends itself really well so in terms of what i would what i would do to have fun with this is uh the key changes one of the shots on that table is there's a scarecrow multi-ball off on the right hand side i would keep the scarecrow scarecrow multi-ball and keep its activation the same but i change change it so that the jackpots when you're when you do the jackpot shots it would be to explore bad man's fears each time you complete a relevant shot the bad man character will say one of the college humor call outs for him when he gets hit by the scarecrows gas so he'll be you know they'll be you get gas and he'll be like roomless and then you'd be like what and then run through that where it'd just be his lines but it'd be how how does it know where to go if you don't push it or girl scouts ukuleles sleeveless t-shirts then it will run through all of them and then once the way i see it is once you've done all of his all of his fears Then it goes into super jackpots basically and just be super jackpot call out. But I think it'd be funny. I like that a lot. The audio part of that whole skit is the fun part of it. So I just think it works really well as one of their more clever Batman shorts that they did.
25:05
Another change I would do is Joker multiball. I want to change that to Harvey Dent multiball. because one of the things that constantly happens in the bad man series is batman will come up and say harvey dent can we trust him so i want that to be the speech prep whenever you're locking the balls for the multi-ball so that will be you know that'll be a throwback to the to the shorts and then when the mode starts bad man's going to try and convince harvey dent to work against two-face this falls back on one of the other skits for those that aren't familiar with it where Batman doesn't know that Two-Face and Harvey Dent are separate people. So whenever one face is turned to him, he thinks, Harvey Dent, put down the gun. Actually, that would be the Two-Face one. When he sees Harvey Dent, he's like, Harvey, when you see Two-Face, try and disarm him. We've got to stop him, sort of thing. So you'll be doing that. So when the jackpots are going, it's going to be either the Dent side or the Two-Face side, and the call-outs are going to be relevant to that as you start to score the points, and it will just basically walk you through the skit. So that's my second major change. My third change is the Dark Knight table has a Batmobile ramp. I don't want it to have anything to do with the Batmobile anymore. Instead, I want it to be based off of Batman finding his voice. In terms of that, what will happen is you will just shoot the ramp over and over. Each successive shot is going to work through Batman trying to get down the Batman voice. and so in the skit it'll be like when it would start and it's the it's the scene from the from batman begins where he's got the the corrupt cop upside down he wants to know where the where are the other drugs going through the skit he's saying it wrong so he'll be he holds them upside down he's like where are the other drugs going and so that's the first voice and then he starts he starts doing more and more different weird accents and then once you've hit the ramp enough times and it will be every single one of those iterations that was done in the skit finally his voice is hoarse and he'll be where are the other drugs going and so that you get a major score bonus for achieving the final true voice so those are the three main elements that i would do the rest of it would just be the the game uh the dark knight pinball machine has a left orbit mode select and so it's just the modes will be different so you'll have a riddler mode where bad man is trying to solve his riddle and bad man's bad at riddles even when the riddler is basically telling him the answer so it'll go through that uh there'll be one for the skit where he goes in to interrogate the joker like in the dark knight but it's the wrong clown so he's interrogating the wrong joker there'll be a mode for where bad man has met with met with pink and captured penguin and penguins explain that bad man is actually killing people but he thinks they're just falling asleep. There'll be one dealing with the Superman team up. There'll be one where Batman is blowing his cover and everyone knows that he's Bruce Wayne. And then there'll be the mode where Batman needs to say goodbye before he goes and saves the city in the final movie, but the goodbye just doesn't ever end. So that would replace all of the existing modes that exist on the current table. By and large, the toys that come with the table could stay as is. I would throw off the Batmobile, as I said before. There's no reason for it to be there because I'm not doing anything involving the vehicle. But the play field and the back glass art would need to be re-skinned to be entirely like the college humor version and new dots. You'd have to program new dots to be playing up on all of that or honestly, just take a little laptop screen, plop it in where the dot matrix is and instead actually show scenes from the clips themselves. But that's my idea.
28:46
So that would be my home brewery theme. If I had infinite resources and infinite patience, that would be the first one I would want to do. That's pretty impressive, and I love those skits. So that actually, I really like that.
28:58
My homebrew retheme is actually not the one I would do if I had infinite money and infinite resources, because if I had that, I'd still not done, because the one I chose has such deep rules and has such deep everything that even in my head, I'm starting to lay things out on paper, and I still don't have enough down that I wasn't comfortable going ahead with it. So I went with my second idea that I had. And it's not nearly as involved of a switch-up as yours is, because I'm going to start with an F-14 Tomcat Williams from 87, and I'm going to convert it into a new Battlestar Galactica pen featuring primarily the Vipers and Viper pilots and stuff. the big main changes are the going to be completely changing all of the art so that all the F-14s and everything are pulled out we're going to have to go reskin to match Battlestar Galactica motif with the Battlestar Galactica symbols and stuff, I want to replace the landing strips with the launch pods but I want to do it in such a way so the right landing strip is Galactica's left launch pod, since Galactica's right launch pod was offline throughout the entire show so you'll just see the launch pod and a little bit of galactica as it disappears off the play field and then the left ramp will be pegasus right launch pod and then pegasus disappears off the play field on that side and then all the migs and everything i would change into silon raiders now the big things uh otherwise are going to be the uh in the game you know you spell tomcat and all that stuff we're going to change all that to where it says vipers and and just make it match the motif and the big thing is changing the uh call outs because that's this one of the hardest parts for me is because the call outs in f14 are fun and and yakov's call outs are awesome but there's no really no good silon call outs especially for the kind of theme I'm aiming for overall. So what I would mainly do would be go for the call-outs of the pilots and Galactica talking to each other during combat and the pilots snarking on each other and Starbuck being herself and to kind of fill in the comedy and the fun and to give the atmosphere.
31:23
And then the kill Yakov sign, and we get changed to kill Scar from the episode Scar. That's one of my favorite episodes of New Battlestar Galactica, when they're hunting down the one Cylon Raider who's like a super ace and this and that. And those are going to be the major changes. I mean, all the shots are going to remain the same. They'll just have renames and this and that, and everything is going to primarily be the same. It's just going to be this one is pretty much just re-arted and different call-outs. and it's not like i mean it doesn't have the full dmd of course so i don't have to worry about new dots or any of the fancy stuff now the theme i was originally working with i'm still working on it's just so much of a change i hope to be able to talk about it next time we talk about something like this because i'm just i couldn't get it done i just kept working on it working on and working on i just kept finding new things to add i'm just i was just running out of time yeah yeah well we We can work it in even if I don't have another idea. I'm sure people would love to hear another concept, especially as one as elaborate as I know. You've given me some indications already, and I won't leak anything to anyone, but it is pretty significant. Yeah, it's pretty major. Like I said, that's the one I was working on for this, and then I just kept adding stuff and coming up with different ideas and things. I was just sitting down at times looking at pictures of the play field, redesigning it in my head, and it's just there's too much. There's too much. I'm not happy with where it is. I'm happy with where it's going. I'm just not ready for it yet. Well, let's go ahead and transition now over to our second segment of the evening, which is video games. We do have a number of them to talk about. And the first one I'd like us to go ahead and start with is Dawn of War 3. Now, we've mentioned Dawn of War 2, or I mentioned it briefly when we were talking about another game that was coming out from Relic on prior episode. But this has been a big announcement for PC gaming that an announcement trailer hit for Dawn of War 3. It didn't have any gameplay. But from what I've seen and more specifically read, my understanding is you will play as three different races in the campaign. It will have large armies. It will have bases. There will be some form of a new cover system. and you will collect and level up elite units. So that's not a lot to go on, but let's talk about it anyway. Tony, your thoughts about Dawn of War 3? In the grim future of video games, there is only Warhammer 40K. That's what it seems like lately. There's a lot of Warhammer 40K games out here. I mean, we were just talking about Battlefleet Gothic last episode and now Dawn of War 3. Well, people love the lore, I guess. I love the lore. I mean, I can understand why. It's just there's so many hitting all at once in this short span, and not just the 40K. There's also the fantasy stuff that's hit pretty hard lately, too. I mean, Vermintide came out right at the start of the year and has been really popular. It's just I think they've done a good job of packing all their stuff in, so they've got enough different people working on it. I like Dawn of War. I prefer Dawn of War 1 because I like the larger armies, but Dawn of War 2 was a lot of fun. So I like if they can keep the fun of Donovan, some of the fun of it and have the larger armies. And one of the things they were talking about that I really like is I like it when your troops gain experience at level and get better. It makes me feel more attached to the troops when they actually are somebody who's been around and it's just not, oh, rifleman group number, whatever, go out there and die and I will bring up another one to replace you. When the other people who've actually been fighting with you for a while, they mean more. That's a good point. And I think that it seems like Relic's direction has been to go more towards Dawn of War 1. So I'm guessing that's what the feedback told them to do. I did not play the first Dawn of War. I did play and I enjoyed Dawn of War 2. But almost everything that has been highlighted were key differences that have reverted to Dawn of War 1 in favor rather than sticking with what Dawn of War 2 did. So the three races in the campaign. Dawn of War 2 you only played as the marine guys. At least until the DLCs brought others in, I thought. I didn't play the DLC. The DLCs had campaigns for other races. So the main campaign for the original for Dawn of War 2 was just the space marines and then now multiplayer you could do all the various races. It also didn't do big armies. It was like you were a little squad. It's like little three-man squads primarily, if I remember correctly. Yeah, it was small unit tactics.
36:11
Campaign never had you build bases. That wasn't part of it. You were going in and you would have a base, but a lot of times it would be when you hit certain checkpoints or reach certain criteria, you'd be dropped in new units or new supplies or something along those lines. So those are all things that – well, other than the I don't know how many races you played in the Dawn of War I campaign. But otherwise, these are changes back towards Dawn of War one versus what was done in Dawn of War two.
36:40
And so my guess is looking at all of this, the decision and the feedback was go more traditional real time strategy. I thought Dawn of War two when I played it while I enjoyed it, it felt quite a bit different than most real time strategy games. Like not building the bases was a huge deviation. yeah it was felt it was definitely more of a squad shooter type thing i mean it was almost not not a turn-based squad shooter but it had the same feel as a small unit tactics type thing because the lack of base control and the lack of a lot of things really it threw me off when i first started playing it yeah i actually i really that was probably my favorite uh difference from a normal real-time strategy was not having to construct the base i which is weird because That's one of my things that, historically speaking, I probably spent more time building the bases than worrying about building the proper army balances and stuff. But I really liked that change. The limited units was awkward for me, though. That was quite a bit different. So anyway, Dawn of War 3, more news will come out as time advances. There's not a lot to go off of right now, but if you are a real-time strategy fan and or a Warhammer 40k fan, keep your eyes peeled for more news. Let's go to our second video game we want to talk about, which is Call of Duty Infinite Warfare. Trailer dropped earlier in the week. There's been a lot of buzz about it. Tony, got any preliminary thoughts?
38:07
Yeah, I knew the way Call of Duty had been moving forward ever since its humble beginnings of being the perfect first-person shooter and moving away from that and getting more and more modern. I knew they were going forward in time. I was surprised to see that they're jumping all the way up to space combat and going to different worlds and stuff. I mean, in the trailer, you're going through and it's like, well, they're in space and they're here and there. And then also there's a scene where you just see a giant ringed planet in the background. It's like, yeah, they've taken Call of Duty all the way to space. I mean, space. Space. But Call of Duty – Portal 2 voice.
38:52
I do find it humorous that Call of Duty now has more space combat action in it than Star Wars Battlefront. I don't necessarily think that that's a good thing. That's a good point, though. That is a good point. I mean, I loved the – I started playing Call of Duty early. I played all the first four Call of Duties up through Modern Warfare. I played them all pretty religiously. and I've played some of the Call of Duty since Modern Warfare, but I don't think any of them have been as good as Modern Warfare. And speaking of Modern Warfare, the most interesting part of the trailer was the remastered Modern Warfare that they were talking about being released with it if you get the $80 edition of the game.
39:35
But I don't know if we need to spend $80 to get an extra game to go with the remastered Modern Warfare. That's what I would really want. I mean, I don't know. It could be a really good game. Until we give it a try, we're not really going to know. But something about it just feels a little off to me. And I need to note as well, I am not a Call of Duty player. I don't play other than a local, like almost LAN party-esque multiplayer. Call of Duty was not something I did a lot of online multiplayer with. I did a little bit in 3, very little bit. And that was it in terms of online. I played localized versions of multiplayer with Modern Warfare and World at War.
40:22
And the last campaign I played through was Modern Warfare, so Call of Duty 4. I played the first four, though. I have played all those campaigns, and I enjoyed them. I'd say overall I thought that Infinite Warfare looked pretty. but to me the trailer made the game look like it was a cross between halo and titanfall and yeah it did have that feeling now that you say it that makes a lot of sense and it's just like and i can't i can't help but wonder and i i want to think this surely isn't true but this is an infinity ward uh iteration activision i believe has three companies that rotate through and do Call of Duty at this point. So for years, it was Infinity Ward and then Treyarch and then Infinity Ward, and they just were cyclic like that. And I think there's a third in the mix now. The thing is, Infinity Ward isn't the same Infinity Ward as it once was. And of course, there's always turnover. But a lot of the old heads of Infinity Ward, they went out and they formed Respawn Entertainment. And Respawn Entertainment is the company that did Titanfall. so to me i just i looked at this and i thought are you guys really like trying to send a message to respawn and make your game look like titanfall are you going to try now titanfall titanfall because titanfall had a lot of flaws but uh mechanically it's very sound uh and then i thought well maybe that then likewise is like what's this with the ships and flying the planets in the background this feels very halo why are you trying to be modern halo i i don't know i It didn't get me excited. But historically speaking, the stories that have been told in the Call of Duty universe, at least on the campaigns, have been by and large, I believe, pretty good. And so but, you know, I'm saying this without having played the more recent ones. But from what I've read and we'll get into a little bit more here when we transition the battlefield. But but it's something that they might be able to execute really, really well in terms of the story. If I were to get Call of Duty, it's only going to be for the campaign. It's the same sort of thing that Overwatch ran into for me. I do very little dedicated multiplayer what I call bro time And so I pretty picky about what games I willing to bother to learn well enough to do well at. And Titanfall wasn't one I was even ever going to do, except it was on tremendous sale. And I do Titanfall from time to time, but the one I put the most hours in is Battlefield. And so Battlefield already has me on the multiplayer standpoint.
43:03
Call of Duty is not going to get me for that. But they can win me over with campaigns, But not $80 to replay Call of Duty 4, even though it's my favorite Call of Duty. Yeah, it's my favorite Call of Duty campaign as well. And also, just another thing out there, Infinite Warfare is a terrible title. I mean, the first thing I thought of when I heard Infinite Warfare was an old sci-fi book called The Forever War, which is a massively depressing – I mean, it's a really, really amazing book, but it's really depressing because it involves a lot of time lag and wars that last forever because, you know, it takes forever to get between solar systems. So, hey, look, my family died 4,000 years ago because we're still fighting the same war we started. And I've only aged, you know, 50 years because of how long it takes to travel from place to place and how everything just ends up terrible. and everything's changed by the time the war's over and you get to go home. Everything's so different that it's like you're the aliens coming back. It was a depressing book as much as I enjoyed it. And Infinite Warfare just sounds like, this is Call of Duty. The war never ends. You'll fight until you die, then you'll fight more. I hate the title. I hate it. Well, it doesn't make any sense. I assume that they're trying to say, well, space is infinite, so it's you know so that infinite warfare means we're in space but no it's on the surface of it i see the subtitle and i'm like infinite warfare so you're saying that the it's an endless war the war never ends do the troop do the soldiers keep coming are we going back to respawn closets where they just keep pouring out until you actually get to the next checkpoint which was a annoyance that was in the older call of duties and you wondered why you could never kill all the enemies because they just kept coming infinitely unless you moved on uh i don't know i you know i think it's trying to sound spacey and instead it sounds lamey to me that whatever yeah it's just it's one of those things and i think what hurts it is that uh battlefield did such a better job with the release just a couple days later i mean the title is kind of a throwback battlefield one and the game's a throwback. I mean, it's World War I. Call of Duty left its roots, kept going forward, forward, forward, up into space, and Battlefield decided it was time to jump back. And I really like that trailer a lot. The trailer looked good. I just saw it actually a few minutes ago. And I am excited. I'm cautiously excited. I've on occasion probably mentioned, I can't remember to whom, that I've wondered why there have never really been a lot of gaming companies that have been really willing to take on World War I just as a setting. And I've seen more lately, but not shooters. Like Valiant Hearts, for example, is sort of a puzzle game where you're in World War I. But it was the first modern war. So I think in a lot of ways it could work because you do have air vehicles. You do have land vehicles. And obviously you have the infantry involvement and you can even go into naval stuff if you want to. So it offers up all those sort of elements.
46:26
But the nature of war in World War I was very static other than at the early part of the war. And so I've often assumed maybe part of the issue is in terms of – I want to know – I'm kind of rambling on it. I guess what I want to say is I'm concerned about the campaign. I'm concerned for a couple of reasons. The trailer looked great, so I have hope. But I've seen decent trailers out of DICE on their Battlefield games before, and they have had some really bad campaigns. I hate saying it because I love Battlefield's multiplayer, but Battlefield 3 had the worst single-player shooter campaign I have ever played on any system, ever. and battlefield 4 was not that bad but it wasn't memorable and so the last good campaign i played was battlefield bad company 2 and it wasn't as funny as bad company 1 was but at least the story was entertaining uh and so you know i want them in a way you know i'm not i i don't want to say i'm a war fan because war is bad but from a historic standpoint world war one has always been the one that interested me the most. Everyone was always writing books about World War II. I had grandparents in World War II. I didn't want to hear any more about World War II. I wanted to learn about World War I. I always thought that one was the one that was interesting.
47:51
And so I would love to see something told in that. This trailer hints at some pretty epic elements, like there's a part where it seems the protagonist, perhaps, or some other soldier looks like he may be breaking under the shelling. It makes me wonder, are they actually going to do verdun because that would be a really epic scene if they can do it justice uh so i think the multiplayer dice knows what they're doing on multiplayer i'm sure battlefield one is going to feel and play awesome on multiplayer but i do worry that they're not going to tell a competent story on on the campaign and i will personally be really annoyed if they muck around and as the first major shooter to take on world war one and they screw it up with their terrible storytelling like they've been doing the last two major battlefields. Yeah, I don't recall ever playing a battlefields campaign. I think I've played Battlefield multiplayer at a friend's place at some point in the past, but I've never played the campaign at all on any of them. But we can hope. I mean, there's a lot of stuff to pull from, and they've got a lot of stuff to work with. I just don't know like you said if it's something that they can actually pull off because some of the stuff that there's things that happened in World War I that never happened in any other war things were just a little different played out a little different even though it's the first modern war they were just putting their toes in the water I've been saying for a while I've been kind of wanting these style of games to get back to their roots I wanted to see another World War II game and a World War I game is just as good to me we'll just have to see how it turns out and then this to me this seems like a big genre defining battle between these two they've always kind of duked it out but for them to one jump far to the future and one to go so far back it's going to be a very interesting release season when they come out yeah uh i think battlefield still got a pretty up big uphill climb uh call of duty routinely does significantly better than battlefield in terms of sales battlefield still i mean it is it is a major it is a major player it is ea's big shooter and so they're gonna they're gonna invest a lot of a lot of resources behind it and you can see that in the trailer also uh in a way i think it may though they could do this with call of duty as well the the main thing about multiplayer in the battlefield series is it's very squad based and that's part of the reason why i like it you were talking back when you were in the intro about overwatch and how you like to be able to play the characters that didn't have to rely on the twitch shooting and in battlefield you have characters obviously it's it's more you have support characters and such as well they're not quite as team fortress 2 oriented per se but like you know you want to be the sniper type that is really accurate shooter that's an option for you if you want to be the person with the med packs and that's an option if you want to be the person that uses the explosives like rpgs and such that's an option And the best sort of squad is one that actually has a mix of those things because they have benefits and they play off each other really well. So it's always been far more tactical than Call of Duty was, which was respawn, run forward, shoot people, die, respawn. And so that's what I like about Battlefield. And in the nature of trench warfare and all of that, having little squads moving around and accomplishing things is the only practical thing they can do. Unless you were to try and pretend that you could reinvent World War I and say, well, this massive army is just going to be rolling on into each other and stuff. It was really static front. So you have to do things on that more squad-based level. And that lends itself really well to how Battlefield just approaches things in general. But it looks fun. I'm looking forward to it. I haven't been playing Star Wars Battlefront, so I haven't really touched a Battlefield game since Battlefield 4. So it's been a couple years now. and I would like to get my hooks into this one because it looks neat. It does look neat. Yeah, I'll be looking forward to see how it turns out. I like the squad-based aspect. That's what I've been liking in Overwatch, that, hey, this guy, we're having problems over here, we need a healer, or we need a tank over here, somebody who's a meat sponge while we try and break their hold on the line, stuff like that. I like that teamwork working together. and so it's not like the setting on halo going on legendary mode and just going okay you stay long enough that when i respond i can get up and throw a grenade and then and then i'll hold it while your dead body runs back so you can throw a grenade we'll just blow our way forward type stuff yeah yeah it's uh yeah the squad thing is the main thing that really uh resonates with me with battlefield and it was uh interesting how i ever got into the game but uh that is a story for another time. We have another video game topic instead that I'd like to transition to, which relates again to something that we've both been playing, but this is a new version, if you will, and that is Pinball Arcade. Farsight Studios is coming out with Stern Pinball Arcade. And this partnership between Farsight and Stern was announced quite a while ago. I want to think it was October 2015. And there hasn't really been any news on it until this week. And now, there has been news. So I guess in terms of starting it off, let me just summarize what I know is the case. This game, Stern Pinball Arcade, is supposed to have better physics when compared to the Pinball Arcade. When the game launches, it will come with ACDC,
53:33
Star Trek, and then three games that are also available on the Pinball Arcade already, which are Starship Troopers, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Ripley's Believe It or Not. In addition to those launch titles, Ghostbusters is slated for some fall release this year, but it won't actually be when the game comes out, though my understanding is Stern Penball Arcade is coming out in the early fall, so I guess it'll be sometime before December would be my guess. Yeah, I wonder if it's going to be the Ghostbusters Pro table, or is it going to be a premium and LE table? Are they going to have the physics in place to try and do the Magna Sling type setup? Or I wonder how that is. I think we'll probably find out later, but it's just a curious question. Yeah, you know, I was going to initially say premium because I had read Farsight respond to someone indicating that they were doing the premiums for ACDC and Star Trek. So my sense was their plan was it was going to be premium tables for everything. But obviously that's a bit presumptuous because we don't really know. I can imagine that they could do the Magna slings given that they have Magna saves and such already on the machines that incorporate those. Granted, the slings are far more intricate than a mere Magna save is.
54:53
So no, I don't know for sure. But so far, all indications that I have seen have been that they will do stern premiums when there are premiums and pros.
55:03
So we were actually going to talk about the Kickstarter was the big plan when I put down this in our notes to what we're going to do for the show, because ACDC was going to require a Kickstarter and they were doing it for over one hundred and eight thousand dollars, which is huge. is a huge sum of money for a single table, far more, I believe, than they've ever had to raise before. And I think it was off to a decent start. But on the 5th, they pulled the Kickstarter. They canceled it, but they didn't post an announcement. But then they emailed information to anyone who backed it. And I believe they've posted this on Farsight's news section of their website at this point. I'm not going to read the whole statement, but long story short, that due to the response that the Stern Pinball Arcade has been receiving. They were able to enter into some form of new partnership that allowed them to fully fund the ACDC license without having to use the Kickstarter. So the Kickstarter was canceled because they don't need the $108,000 anymore. Some other deal was arranged.
56:05
Well, that's wonderful. I mean, because that was a huge Kickstarter pull. And while I had no doubt they could have gotten it, it really hurt the thought of it. But launching without ACDC would have also been subpar. I mean, ACDC is one of the better pens they've kicked out that's in the new lineup, and it's going to make this game a lot better. Yeah, my sense, I wasn't too surprised that they did initially call for a Kickstarter on ACDC. Obviously, we've seen them have to Kickstarter several other games, especially if they're based off of popular franchises that maybe you have to get actors rights for and those actors command a large premium so you know we yeah because they had a kickstarter doctor who just not that long ago yep uh the they had to do terminator 2 and i my understanding was that was mostly uh to get arnold uh you know to cover that license uh they had to do adam's family and i think the you know there were issues because they had to go to all those various uh actors who were on the backlash and such because the movie contracts at the time My understanding, again, was that those didn't include rights for each cast member. So and we've seen that crop up, like with the discussion about Highway Pinball's Alien and why the play field art didn't have any of the movie cast, because the movie cast couldn't couldn't be secured with the movie itself, other than perhaps being able to play clips to actually use the likeness of Sigourney Weaver from a movie that old. You have to get her permission specifically. So anyway, the sense has been that probably as of around Star Trek, which is still in production by Stern, it's in its third year of production now, I believe. It seems that Stern has been securing the rights to digital versions, at least as of that point moving forward. But ACDC slightly predates this, so it looked like that was what was going to have to go on. But perhaps – I have no idea what the new partnership is. of the partnership is between Stern and Farsight. It's more likely an arrangement, I would think, between ACDC and Farsight. And I have no idea the details of it. But I'm really glad that this went away because the thing that I'm more annoyed by, again, not surprised, but I'm more annoyed by is Farsight has indicated the new Stern tables are going to be $10 each. That's pretty high for pinball, virtual pinball table. I mean, here I am complaining about that when I have to think about what dollars I talk about when I'm talking about changing my collection around of actual pinball machines. But Zen Pinball, which does pinball effects too, they generally do a pack of three for $10.
58:54
And my understanding is the games, the tables that are on the pinball arcade that are coming over like Starship Troopers, those will be five. But things that are just in the stern, like Star Trek and ACDC and Ghostbusters, will be ten apiece.
59:09
So it's a bit – I mean, when you think about it, six pinball tables gets you the price of a standard retail release. That's unusual. Normally, you don't – you're not talking those dollar amounts and thinking that far past going and buying Battlefield 1 is the equivalent of six pinball tables virtually. Yeah, that's kind of – that's definitely a little high. I mean, I'm willing to pay it. People are going to be willing to pay it.
59:36
But I don't think it'll be something where I'm going to grab every machine. I'm not going to spend $10 to get me a WWE.
59:43
But there's several of them that I can definitely see I would spend the money to get the machines. Those new machines are a lot of fun, and there's so many places you can go play them still that being able to practice at home and go is going to make a difference. I think they'll do okay. I just – I'm with you. I wish the tables were a little cheaper each. Well, the thing is they haven't – I saw someone ask them about it. Farsight indicated they haven't decided yet whether or not they're going to do seasons, which is what they did with the Pinball Arcade, where, yeah, the tables are maybe $5 a piece on the Pinball Arcade, but you could buy a season pack and you get a discount. And it's not clear that they're going to do that for Stern Pinball Arcade. I mean, again, if you're just wanting a table and it's like, eh, it's $10, it's $10, whatever. I'll probably pick up tables when they're on sales. That's been what I've done with the Pinball Arcade. It's what I've done for most of my Zen Pinball tables. That's the sort of – they're not – if they do it like the Pinball Arcade, they're not really super stingy with their sales in terms of I think at least on Steam, there's usually a sale a year on the Pinball Arcade. so it's not the most frequent thing that constantly goes on sale but um i see i think zend is a little more active in doing discounts on for specific packs and stuff like for um you know uh may the fourth be with you they had star wars packs on sale uh so and there will probably be some ways to get it down a bit if you're willing to wait but otherwise no it's not it's not exorbitant but it is exorbitant for virtual pinball yeah it's not insane but compared to some what's out there it's just a little higher than most people are used to i mean speaking throwing going back to overwatch overwatch is 60 bucks and it's something i'm in debate if i'm going to do or not and the thing to get six tables is 60 bucks is a i mean some of the tables yeah i'd play them a bunch but when i play them as much as i'd likely play overwatch uh i don't know it's going to be an interesting bit to see i'm sure they'll do well though i mean i'm looking forward to it i admit I'm looking forward to it. I've been playing a lot of Zen stuff on my tablet. I really like, I've got a big tablet. I've got one of the big 12-inch tablets, and I think it's pretty much the perfect thing for playing virtual pinball, and so I play a lot of it on there. So that's probably where I'm going to end up getting this when it comes out, is I'm going to get it on my tablet. Well, that concludes our video game segment, so let's go to the third and final segment, but do not let me forget, we did miss a pinball topic, so we will go back and touch on that after we get through segment number three, and segment three is tabletop games. So, Tony, you are our resident tabletop expert. What should we talk about? Well, I think we should open up with some Kickstarter updates that have come out recently. Noisy Person Cards that we talked about last week had not hit its goal at that time. It has now hit its goal. It actually hit it this afternoon. So it is got 11 days left to go. It's hit its primary goal, so that game will be coming out. So if you have any interest in it and you haven't backed it yet, you can now be guaranteed that it's going to be coming your way if you do back it. Yeah, they must have done it fairly late in the day. I actually watched I think I checked just before I left to go to the 403 pinball tournament and it still, it was, oh, it was real close but it was still, I think it was $200 short or so. Yeah, it crossed at like 5.30 or 6 o'clock this afternoon evening or something like that i i looked at it this morning or earlier today and it was like they were like 82 short so i decided to check it again an hour or two later and they crossed it the other thing the other kickstarter update actually predates this podcast i've talked about it in the past that i backed the planet mercenary rpg game which is based on the schlock mercenary comic strips and it looks like that they're uh starting to uh,
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close things down before their move to production. So they're still looking at having it shipped out by fall, but no exact dates yet, but I looking forward to it because I actually had an idea come into my head that it would be a good for a sci game and i don actually own any sci rpgs other than uh i i own one that i talk about at a later date because it just so insane we'd have to go deep into it but it wouldn't work for this idea so i've actually started sketching out an idea for a campaign once i get this game in my hands and then i'll just have to do the hard part which is finding players yeah that's always the big challenge with with those sort of things. We don't, while we do with group get-togethers, we do tend to play a number of tabletop things from time to time. RPGs are not one of them. No, RPGs are something that we'll have to set up and do at another, they'd have to do something standalone compared to our normal thing. I have been covering my itch, as it were, my RPG itch, typically, for the last couple years by going to CantCon here in Kansas City. And I'll go and spend a day or two playing nothing but RPG games. And I will be attending again this year. This year it runs July 22nd through July 24th. I will be there on the 22nd and the 23rd, all day, both days. I haven't decided which games I'm going to sign up for because there's still a lot of games that haven't been announced yet. but I plan on spending most of my time getting my little RPGs scratched.
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Oh, yes. I'm thinking I may be able to make one of those days. My calendar looks clear for those dates. I haven't looked yet to see what day might most appeal to me to go and do. I don't know if I'd do two days, though. Yeah, well, I've gotten to the point where I started out the first year I went. I just did one day, and I played one or two RPGs and a whole lot of board games. and then the second year i went i went hardcore i was there just after open on both days and i played rpg i played rpgs the whole day i mean all day long i and i had a blast last year i played some insane games that were just completely nuts yeah i remember you telling me about about a number of them and that's the part that i want i want to do the most and then we'll actually get to talk about some rpgs for once which um even though we you know we've always focused a lot on these sort of more approachable easier to bring people in tabletop formats that obviously i'm using that very loosely because last episode we was about the mini figure tabletop games which is pretty complicated but rpgs are probably my biggest roots back um you know to the old AD&D days. And so while I don't do RPGing much anymore, I do have a historic tie to it. And I think it might be time once more to break out those skills and see if I can still actually do it. Yeah, I found actually, because I started playing RPGs back in the mid-90s, I played a lot of the Battletech RPG, and I played a lot of the old West End Games Star Wars RPG.
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And those were actually my starts. My starts in RPGs were sci-fi, and then I went to D&D. And, I mean, I recall at one point in time, much later than that, we had a pretty long-running D&D 3rd Edition, not even 3.5, 3rd Edition game that we ran for quite a long time. Yeah, that was one that we did until one of our players moved away. So, yeah, but it was – I remember I'd make up some maps and stuff when I – I think we rotated who would DM. Yeah, we were rotating DMs. I think that was part of the issues. There was only three of us, so we rotated DMs, and we ran NPC heavy.
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But it was a lot of fun. It was also fun because we kept doing weird things. Yeah, yeah. We got – we'll use the word creative. We got pretty creative with those rules. yeah i mean when there's only when there's only three of you playing you play with it a little bit it was a lot of fun that was the best part though i mean i i recall having my door hold a door partially shut while everybody shot through the crack to kill all the mummies that were coming at him yeah i also just remember the uh the our third player when i would dm i swear he went out of his way to try and break break my uh encounters just that i don't know it just seemed like he was I was just determined to find and exploit some flaw that I wouldn't have thought up.
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It was ever so frustrating to try and build around that. And ultimately, I think I always failed because he would just never give up until he came up with some new weird way to get past some elaborately constructed encounter that I worked ever so hard to do. I also remember completely and utterly miscounting distance and having my sorcerer detonate a fireball with him still within radius of it. I remember that.
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And I remember fighting a Medusa and deciding to go full ham on it. I think the third player was the DM, and I decided to go full ham on it, even though it was obviously set up as one of those things we couldn't win, we were supposed to run. and I just went full ham on it and it failed as badly as you would think it would. It was not the crowning glory of, oh, well, you managed to do it and it was amazing. No, no, I died. I died bad. Yep, no respawns there.
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I miss RPGs a lot. That's why I've been going to CantCon. And we'll have links to CantCon for those of you in the Kansas City area who have any interest in going. and they do board games as well and they've got all the information on their website and they've got a link so you can go and look at they do have an online sign-up sheet so that you have a description of rpgs that are going on and you can sign up for them this one's that interest you the most so it's definitely going to be a good time it was a good time last year in the year before so i'm looking forward to it so speaking of rpgs let's talk a little bit about threadbear Now, Threadbare is an interesting thing that I found on, well, I was actually reading up on Kickstarter. Threadbare uses, it's on Kickstarter, we'll have the link. It uses a modified version of the Apocalypse World, which I don't know if you've played Apocalypse World. I have played Apocalypse World. I have not. Okay. Apocalypse World is a very simple game system. It's built around 2D6, so you're not running everything. everything's off of a 2d6 roll you do a 2d6 and then you modify it based upon your stats but it's a good system and it's designed around being a more narrative game than something that's real crunchy like dnd or shadowrun uh which lets you play with it a lot more but uh threadbear their opening line on their kickstarter is plushio plastic mate in threadbear rpg you play jury-rigged toy in a broken, stitched-together world. And the second I read that, the very first thing that popped into my head is, this is post-apocalyptic Toy Story.
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Toy Story 4, apocalypse now! I mean, the game is based around, it's a standard RPG, but when you get injured or damaged, you have to be sewn up or patched up or other parts put in, and some of the stuff they have listed is like, oh, your arm got ripped off, but it's okay. There's a Barbie arm over here that kind of fits, so we'll go ahead and glue this Barbie arm on so you've got your arm back. But that Barbie has some of the personality of Barbie, so now you've got another personality changing who you are and changing your character and fighting for control of your mind while you continue playing. or you're a teddy bear who's all sewn together and patched together from three or four different bears and all sorts of stuff. It seems like a simple and fun game that could go from being something that's super cute to just full on wrong.
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And it sounds amazing. They have passed their goal. They're about to hit their first stretch goal. And this is a pretty long-run Kickstarter. As of today, they have 32 days to run because it ends on June 8th of 2016.
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If you do sign up for this particular Kickstarter, you can get a beta test version of the rules to print out and test because they're having their Kickstarter people help them beta test it and the money and stuff because the game is pretty much ready. They're just doing beta testing and then art stuff is most of it. But I just, it just seems like such a great idea. I just, I don't know if you've ever seen, there's a picture, somebody out on the internet, of Woody smoking a cigarette, holding a revolver and a bottle of whiskey. No. And I just have a vision of that or of Buzz Lightyear all dolled up with his armor all cracked and tore up like the Space Marines from Warhammer or the Space Marines from Starcraft and this and that. And, you know, Stoat, you chomped at his – again, as he's walking around, the armor's all tore up, hauling around pieces of people they've taken – I don't know. It seems, I mean, it could be completely different than I'm thinking, but in my head, that's the first thing that came in. And I just, with the way it sounds, I like the sounds of the rules and the stitching up and using different parts from different toys. Yeah, that's the most interesting aspect. Yeah, because I know on their webpage, they've got a little, like a short story. I wouldn't even call it a short story. It's like three paragraphs, and it's a nurse or a doctor stuffed animal that's sewing up another stuffed animal.
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And in the waiting room is a bulldozer that has lost a wheel but has a Barbie head or a baby doll head that it's going to use to replace the wheel because it couldn't find a real wheel.
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And they're kind of talking back and forth, and it goes into their heads, and it just sounds like a cute little game that can go from being, Oh, this is so cute. We love each other. We're making this wonderful thing to die. Yeah. To infinity and beyond is Buzz's new statement. Oh, infinity and beyond. Infinity warfare. Oh, it all comes together. We pulled it all together. We brought everything back around. That's right. It's amazing. Infinite warfare. That's the infinity. Circle is now complete.
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So speaking of circling, let us do a – because I'm far too lazy to edit the podcast and drop it in to make it seem completely seamless. Let's circle back to Pinball because we completely neglected to mention that we both watched the dead flip live stream of the Ghostbusters limited edition gameplay, which was a first for people to experience. So, Tony, what were your thoughts? Watching John Trudeau lose a ball to the Trudeau gap was one of the greatest things that happened to me this week. That was pretty funny, especially because at 403, they have the Ghostbusters Pro. And how did I lose my very first ball? I just let it just, you know, I thought I was going to be okay. And it's like, oh, wait, no, that gap's too big. Yeah, that was the second that happened. I was just arms up in my chair like, yeah.
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But it was interesting. At first, I actually thought that the Magna slings were pretty good. I thought maybe they'd be a lot more. They weren't as crazy as I was afraid. I was afraid they were just going to be like stupid, insane. That was my big fear with Magna slings. But it looks like they act pretty normal for the most part until the slings are lit up. And then when the ball gets in there, that's when it does weird stuff. Otherwise, it acts pretty normal. Yeah, I misunderstood from the – when we saw the test footage of the slings, and I guess it's probably because of how they had it set in test mode where I guess the magnets were always active. It seems that they only actually trigger when the leaf switch is closed, when the slings hit. So they are not wider in effect than a normal sling like a sling on the Pro. In fact, I think in the chat commentary on Twitch, some people were noting or concerned that it seemed like they weren't firing very much. And it looked like, I guess, for those that were zooming in or asking questions, that there was only one switch on each sling. On a normal sling, there's actually two, one at the top and one at the bottom, so that if the switch is closed, then it kicks the band back out to push the ball away. So with only needing one switch and that switch had to close to tell the magnet to do whatever it wants to do meant that the ball doesn't just roll near the sling and all of a sudden the magnet starts screwing with it, which is what I thought was – because that was what was happening in the test. So that's why I thought, oh, okay, I could see why professional players are not going to want to play on an LER premium because all of a sudden the slings aren't just the slings. They're actually like an inch wider than normal slings, but that's not actually the case. Yeah, because I was thinking the same way from watching the same video that you had, that that was going to be how things go. And like you said, no, that's definitely – I thought it looked really good. I thought Jack had the most amazing ball I think I've ever seen in my life, especially for a machine that's barely – that he hadn't played until then. I mean, that whole – that score, that ball and everything was awesome. Yeah, well, he is a professional. That's awesome. He's a professional scorer. He's a professional player at this point. Well, we've fully elevated him to demigod status on the play. In fact, I think he posted a link somewhere. It might have been on Penn State. It might have been on Facebook. I don't recall where it actually jumps to that time stamp where he's being awesome. Well, yeah. I mean, if I had something like that, I would, too. I'd be like, look at me. I mean, it was a great ball. Oh, yeah. It was epic. There's nothing. I'm not saying anything bad. It was truly amazing. an amazing ball. I was really glad he had it because it let us see so much of what the game had to offer on a play and how a lot of concerns that have been coming up from people who have been playing the pros on location is that the game may be too hard and may turn people off. But what some people have said is it is a hard game. It can be seen as a drainy game, but it is a game that always has the potential to open up really big for people. And while Jack's skills are very, very good, it's not like he put in a whole ton of time on the LE before the stream or anything. So it just showed how someone can adapt and actually learn these modes, learn how to control the ball. And maybe you only have one good game out of ten, but that one is one you're going to want to share. Yeah, that was definitely. And the other thing is it was a lot harder to see, but the Ecto goggles looked pretty cool. There was a lot of glare when they tried to put the camera on it, so you couldn't really see it very well. But what little bit you could make out, I think it'll work out pretty good all in all. I was real happy with seeing how well that LE played overall. I think the premium is going to probably end up being the go-to game for Ghostbusters. I don't know yet in terms of overall how people will respond. I think that my take was the slings, seeing them actually on the LE probably comforted a lot of people that were getting nervous about it. I think, to me, the slings are the only major element that, in terms of if I were to buy, that's the thing that makes me want a premium are the slings. I liked – in the past, I expressed a lot of interest in the holo thing. I thought it looked cool. I saw some separate stuff outside of the stream that gave me a better view of it. but it's so minimalist. It's not enough to make me think, oh, I'd really regret not having that. Of course, the light show is great on the LE because the light shows are always better on the premium than LEs. But the Magna Slings, I just think that cleverness is what is so compelling to going with the premium model. And I think it'll do very well. I think people that were concerned about the Magna Slings being awful are probably by and large satisfied after seeing this sort of footage now whether or not they think it's an interesting enough gimmick if they actually want to own it remains to be seen but i think for anyone who's still upset about the magnus slings for whatever reason you know there can be plenty of reasons why they may not like the idea that the pro doesn't do it and the pros already available and a lot of people are buying the pros we got we got two of them on location there's a pro at 403 club and it turned out pizza west got a pro here in the kansas city area which i haven't had a chance to go and play his yet but um well and in addition to those i think there's at least one more pro on at power play i think power play has a pro as well you're right they do they do and i believe the 403 clubs uh pro will be changing to a premium once the premium arrives. So it's temporarily a pro. So we'll actually get a chance to experience the Magna Slings once that's in place, which is exciting. But that won't be for some time yet because it's not an LE order. I believe it's a premium order and those aren't on the line. So we'll have to wait a while for that. Yeah, that's definitely something I'm looking forward to. And I'm looking forward to getting some more game time in on Ghostbusters, obviously, because of real life intruding with me being on call and everything. I wasn't able to go to 403, and I haven't been able to play Ghostbusters either, the locations that I commonly go to since they got there. But I'm definitely going to get it as soon as I can. Well, I'm sure they will be sitting around on location for quite a while because those things were sucking up quarters, just like Game of Thrones, where we've got a couple Game of Thrones out on location. It's just Stern's had a couple of pretty big successes as near as I can tell from our own local area. And when I look to see what are people playing when there's downtime, what do they most gravitate towards? Obviously, Ghostbusters now and Game of Thrones has been doing very well. Yeah, it's definitely a good time to be into pinball.
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And we'll see how the rest of the year goes. That's right. And if you all listening are into pinball or video games or tabletop games, you need to remember to go to iTunes or Stitcher or both. and please give us a rating and review. We are trying to expand the podcast's listener base and apparently their algorithms factor something like that in. So anyway, please go and do that even if you don't regularly listen through those means. If you're like me, you download podcasts with podcast software to your phone and listen that way. But I guess maybe iPhones use the iPhone setup for that. I don't know. I've got an Android. But please go and do that. As a reminder, you can reach out to us If you want to email us, our email address is eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com. We also have a Facebook page, which is facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast. I think, let's see, what else? Oh, yeah, we have a Twitter, don't we, Tony? Yes, we've got a Twitter. We're at eclectic underscore gamers. I haven't updated it very well this week. I've just been so busy, and I need to get better at getting into that every day. But you can reach us through any of those venues, and we will be glad to hear from you. We also are available now through Google Play Music. They finally launched that. I've known it's been in the works for a while. I do actually see it when I load Google Play Music, not Google Play, but Google Play Music on my Android phone. You can go to it on the website as well. No rating review system there to my knowledge, but I have no idea if anyone is actually using that to listen to podcasts. Since it's so new, I imagine it's just something that Google's trying to grow. But we are listed there as well. So that is a method you like to get your music and podcasts by. You can get us through it at this point. I have checked, and they all seem to be working just fine. So we're everywhere. We're just, we're everywhere. In the grim, dark future of Pixar, there is only post-apocalyptic horror. That's right. And one podcaster's arm has been replaced by a Barbie arm. It's a teeny T-Rex Barbie arm. And now I need to say goodbye to everyone and go back to my Malibu dream house and remind everyone that we will, assuming the apocalypse doesn't take us all, be back in probably two weeks, most likely back on our regular recording schedule rather than being a day early. But until then, I'm Dennis, and I will say goodbye, everyone. And I'm Tony, and I'll say goodbye, everyone. Bye, Ken.