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Episode 28 - A Triforce of Segments

Eclectic Gamers Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 36m·analyzed·Feb 13, 2017
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Kansas championship recap, widebody tournament Round 2/3, and a deep dive into games with great layouts but poor rule design.

Summary

Dennis and Tony discuss the Kansas State Pinball Championship (Dennis placed 11th), ongoing 2017 Solid State Widebody Tournament results (Round 2 upsets: Black Hole beat Hobbit, Embryon beat Guns N' Roses), and debate game design philosophy—specifically games with great layouts but poor rule code (Dennis picks Starship Troopers, Tony picks Lost World Jurassic Park). They explore how code updates like Chad H's work could elevate underrated titles.

Key Claims

  • David Ziegler won the Kansas State Pinball Championship with 16 competitors

    high confidence · Dennis states this as a factual result from the event held at 403 Club in Kansas City, Kansas

  • The Nationals tournament happens in Texas in March, the week before Texas Pinball Festival

    high confidence · Dennis mentions this as context for state championship winners qualifying

  • Black Hole vs Hobbit tied at 50-50, resolved by coin toss (tails to lower seed), with 70+ votes participated

    high confidence · Dennis explicitly describes the tie-breaking process and vote participation

  • Embryon beat Guns N' Roses with 50.7% of the vote (essentially one vote margin)

    high confidence · Dennis notes this as the second upset in Round 2

  • Lost World Jurassic Park is ranked #340 in PinSide rankings while Attack from Mars is #4, despite nearly identical layout

    high confidence · Dennis provides specific ranking numbers to illustrate his point about code quality impact

  • The Lost World Jurassic Park multiball and GPS scoring are the primary sources of points, with repetitive mode design

    high confidence · Dennis describes the game's scoring imbalance based on player reviews and his research

  • Sega has only one game in the top 100 PinSide rankings: Batman

    high confidence · Dennis checks the rankings during the discussion

  • Chad H has done code updates for Data East games including Jurassic Park, Star Wars Data East, and Tales from the Crypt

    high confidence · Tony confirms familiarity with Chad H's work on these specific titles

Notable Quotes

  • “That little third flipper is actually kind of fun and can let you do some interesting things but it suffers from what was you know, it was a standard Sega machine for the time.”

    Tony @ ~31:00 — Tony's explanation of why Starship Troopers has good layout but poor rule implementation—captures the core theme of the segment

  • “The layout is practically identical. The ball lock is in the same position. The scoop is in the same position. They just put an egg on it.”

    Dennis @ ~26:30 — Illustrates how Lost World Jurassic Park copied Attack from Mars' design but failed due to code/rules, not layout

  • “It's notorious for all the points come from multiball and the GPS scoring... There's no value really in playing the regular modes.”

    Dennis @ ~28:00 — Core diagnosis of Lost World's failure: scoring imbalance makes normal play futile

  • “You shoot the scoop with the egg on it enough times. There's a repetitive wood chopping shot. And then when you do do it enough, you get a mode and that mode is shoot that scoop more.”

    Dennis @ ~29:30 — Specific example of Lost World's repetitive mode design flaw

  • “150, we're not, I'm not asking for a lot here. I'm not asking for a lot.”

    Dennis @ ~34:00 — Casual but emphatic claim that a Chad H-style code update could push Lost World into top 150

  • “Well, you do, it's very obvious that you are sick when you can hear it. You have none of your oomph, none of your passion. I basically had to carry everything.”

    Dennis @ ~2:00 — Describes Tony's illness impact on the previous episode

  • “It's more just going for the multiball... Judge Dredd, I think has better code.”

    Dennis @ ~20:00 — Shows how code quality becomes a deciding factor in matchup preferences, not just layout or art

Entities

[name withheld pending review]personTonypersonDavid ZieglerpersonDonpersonCoreypersonMikepersonChad Hperson[name withheld pending review]personEclectic Gamers Podcastorganization403 Clubvenue

Signals

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Kansas State Pinball Championship completed with 16 competitors; David Ziegler won; Dennis placed 11th as 15th seed

    high · Dennis attended tournament at 403 Club, competed from noon to 4:15 PM, detailed his tournament run and placement

  • ?

    community_signal: Community member (Corey) raised concerns about bracket seeding creating uneven early-round matchups (e.g., 1 vs 16), suggesting Twilight Zone and Paragon might have met in finals instead

    high · Email from Corey provided feedback; Dennis and Tony discuss tournament structure trade-offs, acknowledge no perfect solution exists

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Extended discussion about how rule code quality can dramatically affect game ranking and playability regardless of excellent playfield layout

    high · Dennis and Tony use Lost World Jurassic Park vs Attack from Mars as primary example—identical layout, 336-point PinSide ranking gap due to code imbalance

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Sega pinball games predominantly suffer from scoring imbalance and poor rule implementation; only Batman ranks in top 100, with most Sega titles ranked 100-200+

    high · Dennis reviews PinSide rankings: Batman #1 of Sega games, GoldenEye #122, Starship Troopers #150, Baywatch #129, Lost World #340 (technically outside top manufacturers)

  • ?

    technology_signal: Third-party code updates (Chad H model) can significantly improve game quality; Lost World Jurassic Park with similar code rework could jump from #340 to potentially top 150

    medium · Dennis speculates code update would elevate Lost World; Tony confirms Chad H's work on Data East games (Jurassic Park, Star Wars) has proven effective

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.289

0:00
Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. This is episode 28. It is Sunday, February 12th. I'm Tony and I'm not sick. I'm Dennis and I'm still not sick. Welcome everyone and welcome back to full strength, Tony. Oh, yeah. I feel so much better. Last time, I was so wiped out. I don't even really remember recording the podcast. And I went back to sleep pretty much immediately and slept the rest of that day. So it kind of just happened. I'm not sure. I haven't listened to it yet either, so I don't know how horrible I was. But I'm sure it was bad because, like I said, I don't even remember it. Well, I mean, we reached our typical time length. But you do, it's very obvious that you are sick when you can hear it. You have none of your oomph, none of your passion. I basically had to carry everything, but that's okay. Well, that's why you're a carry. That's what you do. So what have you been up to in the last couple of weeks? Oh, not too much. I've been playing a lot of Overwatch because the year of the rooster celebration has been going on, and that ends tomorrow. So most of my down video game time has actually been spent on that. I've done a little bit of Gears of War 4 as well, but I'm still not quite through that campaign.
1:34
And other than that, the only thing I was going to go ahead and note is we did actually have some people reach out to the podcast. Some of that I'm going to cover a little bit later, but some I think I just need to stick in the intro. so once again there were corrections both on my part from Mike our past guest host who loves to correct us apparently all the time or at least me so this is regarding the fighting game segment that we had last time when we were talking about Evo I had said Skullgirls 2 Encore was one of the games that was going to be played and what I should have said was Skullgirls 2 Encore so the way I presented it due to my notes I just wrote down the name wrong is that there was a skull girls 2 and there is no sequel to skull girls so it's just sort of like a different iteration of the original skull girls so that was a mistake and the other mistake was involving the other anime game we discussed guilty gear apparently it's called guilty gear xrd and I said it was Guilty Gear XRD. And I, not ever having played the game before, I just assumed it would be an initialism because there were no vowels. And I think Xrd sounds stupid. So I just assumed it had to be smart sounding, but I apparently was wrong. So anyway, it's actually said as a word and I probably still not saying it quite right, but it's not just an initialism.
IFPA
organization
PinSideorganization
Twilight Zonegame
Paragongame
Red & Ted's Road Showgame
Indiana Jones: The Pinball Adventuregame
Judge Dreddgame
Star Trek: The Next Generationgame
Black Holegame
Embryongame
Attack from Marsgame
Lost World Jurassic Parkgame
Starship Troopersgame
Jurassic Parkgame
  • $

    market_signal: Collector/player strategies favor lesser-known, underpriced machines with good layouts over expensive popular games, expecting code improvements

    medium · Dennis mentions researching obscure and underrated pins because popular/good machines are outside his price comfort zone; Lost World Jurassic Park is 'not expensive' compared to Attack from Mars

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Lost World Jurassic Park plagued by multiball-dominant scoring, making regular modes valueless; repetitive shot sequences (egg scoop, wood chopping) with minimal strategic variation

    high · Dennis details: 'all the points come from multiball and GPS scoring... no value in playing regular modes... you shoot the scoop enough times... you get a mode and that mode is shoot that scoop more'

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Indiana Jones criticisms: unbalanced toward multiball strategy; Star Trek Next Gen has weak code and exploitable video mode maze; both affect player preferences in tournament voting

    high · Dennis on Indiana Jones: 'it's so unbalanced... you just go for multivol'; on STNG: 'I don't think Indiana Jones... its coding is pretty weak... exploits like the memorizable maze'

  • ?

    community_signal: Listeners actively participate in tournament voting and send feedback emails; Round 2 had 70+ votes (>2x participation than Round 1); community corrections sent to hosts

    high · Corey emailed tournament critique; Don emailed praise; Mike sent corrections on gaming terminology; voting participation nearly doubled between rounds

  • ?

    event_signal: Kansas State Pinball Championship required early venue opening (11 AM for practice), tournament start at 1 PM, with 30-minute travel time from venue; dense single-day competition schedule

    high · Dennis arrived around noon, played until 4:15 PM with continuous matches; venue opened early for practice per standard state championship format

  • ?

    design_innovation: Starship Troopers' third flipper is a functional design element that adds gameplay depth and interesting shot options, despite overall game quality issues

    medium · Tony specifically praises the third flipper: 'That little third flipper is actually kind of fun and can let you do some interesting things'

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Round 2 produced two upsets: Black Hole (12 seed) beat Hobbit (5 seed) via coin toss from 50-50 tie; Embryon (11 seed) beat Guns N' Roses (6 seed) with 50.7% in extremely close vote

    high · Dennis documents both upsets; Black Hole tie required coin toss with 70+ votes; Embryon victory was single-vote margin (50.7%)

    • 3:05
    And let's see, we did have a couple emails. One I'm going to hit on when we get to the wide body tournament. But one was from Don, who is one of the co-hosts of the Pinball Podcast. And he wrote and said, just wanted to say that Dennis did a fantastic job boiling down the legal aspects of the Kevin Kulik fiasco. The way Dennis explained everything made a lot of sense to me, a layman, and was interesting and informative. I like Tony, too, but home run Dennis. That was in all caps. So I did not write that for him. It came in. So, anyway, I'm glad that it was helpful, Don. And, of course, we appreciate it very much. And Tony was trying the best that his sickly little heart could handle. But he doesn't remember that segment. Yeah, I don't remember nothing. So that's really it for me. What's been going on with you?
    3:54
    Oh, I've been playing a fair amount of Overwatch as well. and I finished a correspondence course I was taking for work prep last week, so I finally got some more downtime to play more games. And other than that, I've just been work, family life, nothing hugely spectacular. Okay, well, if that's it for our Bigly updates, I guess we'll move into the main meat of the podcast, which would be our three segments. And that would mean, as usual, we're going to go ahead and start off with pinball. We actually have not a whole slew of news. The last two episodes were just laden with pinball news. Thankfully, there have been no major announcements really going on. I mean, I guess if you care about color, DMD, Walking Dead's available. So that's been announced, at least. I'm not sure if it's actually available at this point or not, but it's been announced. So I guess if you are into that mod, that's some news. So you can be excited about that. But I don't have that game and I don't have that mod. So I think what we'll go ahead and quickly start off with will be the Kansas State Pinball Championship, because that wrapped up yesterday. All the state pinball championships were going on. And this is to determine who would get to compete in the Nationals tournament, which happens in Texas in March, I believe, the week before the Texas Pinball Festival. and so in Kansas David Ziegler won so congratulations to David there were 16 competitors as there were with any other state and the Kansas City Kansas location the 403 club which Tony and I mention all the time it was the host location for the event everything went really really well they kept the machines going everyone was super friendly I was I went in at the 15th seat I believe I mentioned at the last episode, and I did not do well, as expected, because I was up against the number two seed for a best of seven matchup, which went 4-1 in his favor. And so then it was a competition in what I would call the loser's bracket to see who would get ninth through 16th place. And I won a couple of matches and lost a match in that. So I did end up taking 11th. So I placed better than my seed would have placed me. So I was pleased about that overall. But it took a while there was a lot i got to play a lot of pinball so that was nice until i actually met up with tony later for what we're going to cover in the tabletop section so it was a busy day uh but it was a fun event and i'm skeptical i'll be qualifying in 2017 so i'm glad i went ahead and competed for the 2016 since i did have the opportunity uh and that's pretty much all i have to say about the state pinball championship i don't know if you wanted to chime in with anything on that or if we should move to what we would normally start with which would be the wide body tournament yeah i don't have anything to add to that as i didn't attend because i was getting things ready here for you and everybody else to come over and visit for game night and then passing out once everybody left i can't even imagine how long your day was and considering how long mine was yeah um they the uh the 403 club opened early for people in case they wanted to practice so they opened up at 11 a.m the tournament started at one i probably got there around noon and so i did an hour of warm-up and then i was playing till about 4 15 that's when i had my i won it was a lot it was a win-loss win once i was in losers so it's just kind of you know because there were no ties. Everything was to put us exactly in our proper placement.
    7:39
    So as soon as it was done, it's like, do I have any more matches? They're like, no. And I'm like, what's my place? 11th? I'm like, great, thanks, bye. I have to get out of here because it's about 30 minutes just for me to get back to my house from Kansas City, Kansas. So let's go ahead and hop on over to our 2017 Solid State Widebody Tournament. And this is basically the round two results and the round three matchups. But before I get into those, I wanted to note we had another email to the podcast from Corey. So thank you very much, Corey, for writing in. And Corey wrote, first off, like the show and the brackets are fun to vote on, but I think if the brackets were set up differently, Twilight Zone and Paragon might well have faced each other in the finals, not one versus 16 in round two. Just a thought. So I thought this was a good email to bring up at this point. And I responded privately to Corey, but I figured it would be a good discussion about just sort of how the tournament is structured and what we've been seeing before we even get to these round two results. But my general take is that I agree. The pin side seeding has resulted in some matchups that early on are what I would describe as rough. but what I think is the bigger issue is and I've had someone in person to me I think when I was at the 403 club actually not yesterday but a few weeks ago suggest to me is that it would have been more interesting perhaps to just have taken say the early solid state wide bodies and let them go at it because there's so many of them from the 80s and given that we did a modern time frame that was defined as anything that's the solid state era and beyond that it's hard to envision that anything, no matter how good it was as an early machine, is going to survive against the DMD era.
    9:34
    But, you know, it's something that we could consider for some sort of competition in the future. But anyway, you didn't get a chance to weigh in because I'd already responded to the email. So I didn't know what your thoughts are in terms of just sort of how we structured this particular tournament.
    9:49
    I don't really have any problems with it. I mean, the only issue that could come up, I think, really is since we're using, like, the Pennside rankings for seeding, things can get kind of weird. But we saw when we did a pure random seed, things got weird. I don't think there's a really, really good way to do it short of going in and hand seeding the entire list from the beginning. and I feel like that is stacking the deck for certain machines anyway because then you're deciding what they play.
    10:28
    Yes, and that's a point I did express in the email. Paragon, if you wanted to give a really good shot for Paragon, in my opinion, to make it to the finals, you would have to position it. I mean, you had to think about the rest of the list. So it's like, what was the number two seed? Indiana Jones. Well, I don't think Paragon was going to survive in an early round matchup against Indiana. So you'd have to avoid that. Then I think the third seed might have been Star Trek Next Generation. So it's the same problem. And then the fourth was, what, Wizard of Oz? I mean, none of them looked great from a matchup perspective. You'd have to have cultivated, like, an entire regional seed that was just the early solid state. And then Paragon would probably win all of that. But then, yeah, so there's ways you could do it, but you'd have to have gone in like with the deliberate mind that you want Paragon to have a chance to get to the finals and try and sculpt it an easy path to do that. And then that raises the question about whether or not we meddled too much into the initial seeding and let things survive longer than they really deserved. So there's really no way you win on it, I think, is the issue. But it is a fair point. On retrospect, I kind of wish, just personally, I kind of wish I had said, if you were DMD, maybe do that as a separate tournament and just have left them off. But I didn't lean to that initially because our very first tournament was a 1980s pinball tournament. So we'd already done one from the early solid state era. I wasn't really keen on repeating it. Yeah, but there does, I mean, it does, I do think the modern stuff has a advantage in this run at the same time because of it. Because A, they get played more and they get seen more. But at the same time, I mean, even with its recent surge in popularity, I don't think most of these games, I don't think Paragon would have beaten most of these games. No, I don't either, but we'll just have to see. Though, we won't have to see long because Paragon's gone. Spoiler alert.
    12:38
    Let's go ahead and hop right to that in terms of the round two results. There were two upsets, but everything else was what you would describe as unsurprising, which would be the higher seed beat the lower seed. So let me run through those real quick. Twilight Zone did overcome Paragon with 78.9% of the vote. Roadshow beat Future Spa with 73.9% of the vote. Wizard of Oz beat Genie with 71.4% of the vote. Indiana Jones the Pinball Adventure beat Devil's Dare with 91.2% of the vote. This incidentally was the widest margin of any matchup that we had. Judge Dredd beat Demolition Man to my great heartache with 57.1%. As it should have. I disagree, but the people have spoken. 57.1% of the vote, so pretty handily won. But it was obviously, actually of the higher seed beating the lower seed, it was the closest matchup of all of them. I credit myself in my excellent effort to try and rally the supporters of the Demolition Man. and finally star trek the next generation beat haunted house with 81.4 percent of the vote so all of these were extremely lopsided wins other than dread versus demolition man which was less than a 10 uh which was no it was still over a 10 point spread uh it just wasn't a 20 so okay so no it wasn't it wasn't a complete blowout it was right right yeah it was just a it was just a regular shellacking yeah like an unleaded version so uh two upsets uh one upset was black hole which was the 12th seed beating hobbit which was the five seed but that was actually i couldn't believe this because we had like 70 plus votes participate in this round we had more than double than we did in round one of people coming and voting and it was a 50 50 tie between Black Hole and Hobbit, so I had to do a coin toss, like I did in round one for a set.
    14:42
    And, you know, Tails goes to the, my rule, Tails goes to the lower seed, and so Black Hole won because Tails came up. So that's how it works, folks. So Black Hole gets to move on.
    14:56
    Well, Black Hole is the better game. But I did vote for Black Hole over Hobbit, having played both. I didn't think it was a hard decision. And I peeked in as the votes were coming in from time to time. And this one was bounce, as you would expect with an in 50-50. This one was bouncing back and forth. I think Black Hole was leading for the first half of week one. And then I think after Reddit got involved, Hobbit pulled ahead. And then at some point, Black Hole must have equalized with it. So that one was neck and it was always close. It was always close. and the second upset was the number 11 seed embryon beat the number six seed guns and roses with 50.7 percent of the vote and this one i didn't vote on because i haven't played either of these games yeah i didn't vote on that one either but outside of a tie with a coin toss obviously 50.7 that's like one vote so that was really tight so remember every vote matters every vote.
    15:59
    So, given all of that, here will be our round three matchups. The number one seed Twilight Zone will be against the number eight seed Roadshow. Well, we all know how that's going to end. Well, but how are you going to vote on it? Oh, I'll vote for Roadshow. Okay, I will not. Well, yeah, no kidding. So we kind of cancel each other out. Yes. Well, it's what you get for undermining Demolition man i haven't let that go quite yet i didn't undermine it i just voted for the better game yo you didn't vote for now we can't this is this was this was you don't remember our discussion from the last episode so i'm not going to rehash it maybe there wasn't maybe i don't remember i don't care okay uh next up uh the number four seed wizard of oz is going to be up against the 12th seed black hole are you voting on this one i've played them both okay i don't know i I don't know. I'm going to have to think about that one because I've played them both and I don't have really strong opinions on either of them. I see.
    17:05
    For full disclosure purposes, I am planning to vote for Black Hole on this one. I don't love either of these games, but I have enjoyed my time on Black Hole more. I can't say by a lot, but by a bit. I think they're both very brutal games. Obviously, The Wizard of Oz has quite a depth of code that will probably appeal to people. Anyway, the third matchup is going to be the number two seed, Indiana Jones, The Pinball Adventure, versus the number seven seed, Judge Dredd. I would say Judge Dredd, but man, Indiana Jones isn't a bad game at all.
    17:44
    I haven't fully decided on this, because as I had noted with the matchup back with Demolition Man, I don't have a lot of time on Judge Dredd. I have some, actually most of my familiarity with both of these titles is virtual.
    17:58
    But I lean Judge Dredd as well in this case. And I think for me, the issue is Judge Dredd. I think Indiana Jones looks great. I don't think Indiana Jones, I don't, it's so unbalanced. It's like you just go for multivol.
    18:16
    And Judge Dredd, I think has better code. But I mean, do you, do I hold it? do I hold the code so much against Indiana Jones? Because that's something, that'll be a fun discussion to have on a different episode at some point, was to talk about the value of code or how we treat it. Because there are some games which I know aren't very well balanced, but I still like to play them, like Firepower. And then there are other games where I get really annoyed if I think the code is kind of crummy. And with Indiana Jones, it's like you can play the modes, but I don't think that's a smart strategy. It's more just going for the multiball. but um anyway i lean towards judge right because i think it's more of the full package but i don't expect it as the seeding would tell you i don't expect it to survive very well yeah and then the final matchup will be star trek the next generation which is the three seed against the 11th seed embryon which is the only early solid state game left other than black hole so i guess it's not the only one because i just look back and say wait a moment black holes like 1980. Why am I saying that?
    19:20
    Anyway, another one with an early one that's moved on. Personally, I don't think Star Trek Next Gen is as good as Stern Track. I think it suffers a lot for being a widebody, and I think its coding is pretty weak.
    19:35
    I think there are a few exploits, like the memorizable maze that you go through in the video mode. I still think it's a fun game, and I lean towards it over Embryon, but... Yeah, I would agree with you there. I think it definitely has an edge.
    19:53
    So anyway, those are the four matchups. Link to the competition for the vote is in the show notes. As with the other two rounds, you will require a Google account to be able to go and cast the votes to prevent the dreaded Reddit vote stuffing. And that is that. So let's move to the third pinball segment. Yes, I'm very excited. It's getting so quick to get through these tournaments now. We actually can talk a little bit about the games because there aren't 30 of them.
    20:21
    This is one I just sort of threw in before we get to our sort of Texas Pinball Festival talk that we've put off for a while wanting to do. But I was just thinking because of doing all this tournament stuff, and this obviously relates to a degree to my comments about Star Trek Next Generation. But I thought it would be fun to name a game, just one, that you think has a nice layout, but it sucks because of the rules. The rules are the code. They're basically one and the same. But I kept it that broad in case you just didn't like how the values were on, say, an EM because you could even just complain, well, this is a great shop. It's not worth anything sort of thing. So I just wondered if you just sort of any sort of game that you thought, you know what, this is a fun table to shoot. but it just something about it something about the rules in it makes it meh and if they would only have fixed that or if someone from the outside comes in and fixes that it could really elevate the game quite a bit see this is really hard for me because I think the obvious ones people are doing exactly that because when I first heard this my very first thought was Cactus Canyon but somebody's already doing new code for that so other than that I had a real hard time coming up with games because I was thinking about most of the games that pop into my mind need more than just a code update they need you know like a total rebuild or perhaps even a re-theme but I think I would settle on Starship Troopers.
    22:05
    I like the game. Its shots aren't horrible. That little third flipper is actually kind of fun and can let you do some interesting things but it suffers from what was you know, it was a standard Sega machine for the time. So it suffers scoring and lots of it with multi-ball plays and this and that. I think just with some code tightening and some adjustments, something to give you some bit more things to shoot at or a bit more modes to shoot for, I should say, it would work out pretty well.
    22:50
    Well, that's funny because I also picked a Sega. and um and i went with this one i don't have a lot of experience on uh but i i definitely think it's a it's a great a great example of one that deserves something and that would be the lost world jurassic park and i have not played that not even one time i think i have virtually but i've looked over the layout before because i mean uh in some sometimes when i when i have time when I'm not having to do legal research about failure of pinball companies. I like to do research on pins to try and make a short list of things that I might be interested in trying to find to maybe own for a little while. Or in my case, I tend to own them for a long while and then get rid of them. But I am often looking at the more obscure things because anything that's popular and good, it usually is outside of a price range I'm comfortable with. So I'm always looking at the lesser decks, older decks and lesser decks. And so this one has crossed me a few times and I found out more about it because then when my niece was really young, she was very, very into dinosaurs. So I looked into all the dinosaur pins just to see which ones even existed because I didn know how common the theme was With an obvious fondness for the Jurassic Park table which with the Chad H code I think is really good Without the Chad H code, it's okay. But it was still okay balanced and such. It's just you saw the same mode for the first play and the multiball was too easy and all that. But with the Chad H code, I think Jurassic Park is a really fun game. It might still be the poor man's Addams Family, but at least it's a lot closer to Addams Family than what it started as.
    24:35
    So in the case of The Lost World Jurassic Park, this was, whereas Jurassic Park 1 was Data East's attempt to steal the Addams Family game, this was Sega's attempt to steal the Attack from Mars game. And so it's always been on my thought list because I know, especially for you, how much you love Attack from Mars. But Attack from Mars is expensive. You know what it is? Lost World Jurassic Park is not expensive. The layout is practically identical. The ball lock is in the same position. The scoop is in the same position. They just put an egg on it. The main difference is instead of the drop bank, which protects the UFO, and then there's that scoop after you attack the UFO, the drop target goes away and you feed the ball in and it destroys the UFO. Instead of doing that, they just put in another ramp. So they have a center shot ramp instead. and they have a little drop target in front of their ball lock in its place, so to speak. But basically it's the same layout. It's a fan layout. So it's like, okay, well, when you look at this pin and you look at the layout, you would think if you like fan layouts, especially if you like Attack from Mars fan layout, you'd probably like the Lost World Jurassic Park. But why is it that Attack from Mars is number four in the Pidside rankings and the Lost World Jurassic Park is number 340, which is a bit lower, but just a bit.
    26:01
    And the reason is that the code is bad. The game, it's notorious for all the points come from multiball and the GPS scoring. You can see in our show notes, not in our show notes that you all get to see, but in the notes that Tony and I see when we do the episode. I've included a picture of the upper play field so he could get a sense of the layout. But it's got it. So it's scoring's imbalance. There's no value really in playing the regular modes. It's got a lot of time based repetitive shots and the modes themselves are repetitive. So like a case in point, I remember seeing in someone's review was to you shoot the scoop with the egg on it enough times. There's a repetitive wood chopping shot. And then when you do do it enough, you get a mode and that mode is shoot that scoop more. so very repetitive not very exciting rule set so i think if you if you were to change just the rules balance the scoring out and and go with a rule set where instead of being repetitive shots it would say you know if you shot the egg maybe it says now you know shoot the left orbit and then the right orbit and then the center shot uh you know maybe that would be that would make it more fun that's not going to solve everything it'll always be ranked lower than attack for mars their complaints about the poor sound quality the ball lock is is a toy it's called the snagger and it's very very slow especially compared to attack from mars ball lock system you have to wait for the snagger to like grab the ball so it's never going to have the same flow but i bet you if you had a chad h style code update to the sega pin it would move to the top 150 at least Do you think it would go that high? I don't have a huge ton of experience outside of Jurassic Park with what Chad H. has done. He's always done Data East games, but he redid Star Wars Data East, and he redid – and I've played that with his code. And he's redone Tales from the Crypt, which I do not have experience with his code on. But, yeah, I think it's the code. I mean, a super slow ball lock, which looks cool the first half dozen times you see it, and then you're sitting there waiting for the ball to lock. That's going to always kind of stink, but I don't think people will say that the game instantly becomes a turd because the ball lock kind of kills the flow. Because that's really the only thing on the table that kills the flow. It's not like Street Fighter 2 where there is no flow. Everything just holds the ball forever on that game. So, I mean, I'd still say it probably has more flow than many of the Lawler pens do with a lot of, or things where you can't skip the modes and you're constantly, you know, just having to wait. There are lots of games that kind of kill the flow, that kind of keep them lower on the list, but they're still in the top. I mean, 150, we're not, I'm not asking for a lot here. I'm not asking for a lot. It doesn't have, there are, I need to, I'd have to pull the list up to be able to tell you of things that are worse than that, that are in that range that you would probably be like, oh, wow. Yeah, I bet that would make it better than that. I don't know. Well, let's see. Let's see. Does Sega have... Sega's got one game in the top 100.
    29:10
    That's it. All they've got in the top 100 is Batman. Okay. Yeah, I have heard some positive things about that. And then GoldenEye's $122, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is $123,
    29:26
    Baywatch is $129, Starship Troopers is $150. Exactly. wouldn't you like it if a dinosaur joined the rank the ranks of starship troopers apollo 13 is 160 yeah all it's got is that gimmick I don't know I've never liked playing apollo 13 I would like to get the 13 ball multi ball though I've never actually earned it godzilla is 190 not a lot of those out there so I don't know how many people have honestly been I've only ever seen one, but I couldn't play it because it was broken when I saw it. So it was down. Yeah, that's unfortunate. I've heard it's over. Again, I think it suffers, though, from the scoring rules. I wonder if Lost World also suffers because they based it off of a terrible movie.
    30:19
    Yeah, but... We can't fix that under the scenario I concocted. I mean, that's like everything Sega did was based off something, and half the time it was... I mean, they did what? Let's see, Baywatch, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Independence Day, Twister, Space Jam.
    30:40
    I mean, yeah. They're not all winners. Definitely could have done some. And, of course, one of your personal favorites, Viper Night Driving. I actually thought about doing Viper Knight driving but the more I thought about it the more I was like this needs half the field torn out and replaced yeah I don't know if there's anything you could do that would make it not play too easy I'm being a little facetious I'm sure there's something turning off the 30 second ball save that it came with would be a code thing and would go a long way to maybe making that game not be a gimme. Like, here, if you didn't get multiball in Viper Night Driving, you knew something was just wrong with you.
    31:38
    We've had people go and experience Viper Night Driving when it was on location here who had next to no pinball experience, and they felt like they accomplished something. No, you're not supposed to feel that. Yeah.
    31:49
    You're supposed to be pulled down and crushed. Yeah. Well, or at least, you know, not like you earned something, but it would just be like, oh, no. I mean, well, the glow balls were a neat gimmick, I suppose, as a concept. Better executed than any other glow-in-the-dark concept that I'm aware of with pinball, so I guess it gets credit for that.
    32:10
    Yeah, I don't know if that's enough for anything, really. No, probably not. Yeah, I don't know. I think it was wise that you didn't name that one to fix. but anyway i just thought there's some concept if anyone wants to suggest any uh you know feel free to hit us up on facebook or email in a suggestion i'll be more than happy to mention more games if anyone has any thoughts on something that could actually jump up quite a bit in people's eyes with just a rules change rules and code we're not talking new dots we're not talking any new sound effects and we're not re-theming that's like hard work we're talking oh i have a A lot of games that would just call out changes could be made better.
    32:52
    Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. No, maybe sometime we'll do an episode on that where we maybe name some of our favorite call outs and least favorite. I've heard other podcasts do that, so I've never wanted to immediately get on the coattails of it. But it's some low-hanging fruit, that's for sure.
    33:07
    But let's go ahead, I'd say, and just jump over to the Texas Pinball Festival. That works for me. We'll have a link to the Texas Pinball Festival's website in the show notes so people can go and check it out because that's going to happen towards the end of March. And as Tony and I have both noted, we are going down there again. We did it in 2016. We're going to do it in 2017. And we've been meaning to actually kind of cover what's been going on with Texas, but there's just been so much pinball news that by the time we're done covering it, it's like we've talked so much about pinball in this episode. we need to push this off. And it's been to our advantage as well, because Texas has continued to announce more and more things. So I thought, go ahead and let you kick us off here in terms of what's sort of, what do you want to talk about with the Texas Pinball Festival? Because there's a lot that's going on. There is a ton going on. And besides the obviousness that you will have the ability to meet us if you want to, and you haven't already met us because we're going to be there and you can find us.
    34:15
    I find I'm looking forward to the fact that a lot of the big announced games and stuff are going to be down there and supposedly in playable forms. So I'm looking forward to getting chances to see and play Dialed In and Batman 66 and the any other games that happen to show up. Like Dutch pinball is supposed to be there and I know Spooky is making big announcements and stuff and they should have some playable stuff there so that's my big interest and as always they'll be the designers that you would expect. It seems like Texas is really getting to be one of the big shows for stuff like this with their how many games they have and how many people they have showing up and I know they recently filled up the tournament we are not taking part in the tournament this year because we just had too many other things on our plates that we decided not to enter it so if you run into us and want to play against us you'll just have to play against us outside of a tournament play no we would probably not make it through the qualifying anyway no we never do but yeah I think they're only advancing top 16 still so that's going to be a really steep competition given the quantity of players that are entered. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the games. In addition to the ones you mentioned that will be there, my understanding is Multimorphic will be there with some new P3 games.
    35:52
    And when you mentioned Spooky, I don't know of the game number three, which is supposed to be their official game number three, which will be announced there. I do not know whether or not they're going to have a playable prototype there. But Domino's is supposed to be there, and I believe Jetsons is supposed to be there also. I'm sure Game 3 is just going to be an announcement would be my guess. That was my thought as well. And American Pinball is going to be there with the redesigned Houdini. My understanding is not for play, but in terms of they'll have something for show there. Joe Balser is one of the designers who's going to be there, and he's going to be the one to talk about that. As you noted, a number of designers, Steve Richie and Mark Richie are confirmed, as is George Gomez, John Trudeau, and Dennis Nordman. So quite a lineup of pedigree in regards to that. Some other pinball-related people that I've seen confirmed were Greg Ferreres, who's the art director for Stern Pinball. Apologies if I didn't say the last name correctly. He also worked a lot with Dennis Nordman in the past on the Avira Games, and I believe he and Dennis are going to be doing a presentation sort of talking about the good old days when they were doing that sort of stuff. Uh, Christopher, uh, Franchi, he did the art for Batman 66. So he's going to be there. They're going to have the, yep. Um, it's great. I really liked the look of Batman 66, the world premiere of the documentary things that go bump in the night. The spooky pinball story is going to happen at the Texas pinball festival. So if you're interested in that, you know, sort of seen as a very successful boutique startup that a lot of people are really interested in, there's been a whole movie put together on it. So that will be that. And then I think they're doing they're going to do I think they're doing a premiere and an encore showing of it over the course of the weekend.
    37:50
    They're I think they're showing it twice. Yeah, they're showing it. They're showing it on Saturday night and Sunday morning. I'll have to see if one of those times works well for me Because I'm kind of curious about it But it may be easier for me to buy it and watch it Last year we didn't do any of those At least I didn't do anything in any of the seminar rooms or anything All I did was play in the tournament and then play games for the entire weekend So I didn't really go to any of the event things that they were showing And I know they're doing a lot of them this year So I'm going to, I'm planning on going to several of them because I know, let's see, Friday, I'm looking at their events page right now. And on Friday, they've got Dennis Nordman's talking.
    38:41
    The American pinball thing is Friday evening at like eight. And of course, we have not mentioned yet. They have Sam J. Jones, Flash Gordon from Flash Gordon is going to be there. and Cassandra Peterson is going to be there, most well known for being Elvira. And I know they both have Q&As and signing sessions going all weekend at different times.
    39:08
    As always, they're going to have the big swap meet on Saturday morning, which we didn't go to last year, but we're going to this year.
    39:16
    And let's see, what other ones? Then there's Cassandra Peterson's stuff is on Saturday. There's a talk with Mark and Steve Ritchie both Saturday during the day in the seminar room. And a whole bunch of other things going throughout the days on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. So I'm going to try and actually attend some of those this time instead of just randomly wandering around and playing games until it feels like I am hitting the flippers when I'm sitting in the car on the way home.
    39:50
    Yeah. Yeah, I'm hoping to. That's part of the reason why we dropped doing the tournament is because that kind of, I don't want it to sound ultra negative, but it kind of shot our Friday last time. Because, well, they had electronic queuing, which was great. You still couldn't go all that far away, especially on like the EMs and stuff. On the plus side, it moved relatively quick to get through. but I didn't get a lot of gameplay in because I had to hang around the tournament area and so that's part of the reason why I didn't want to compete this time is so I could just do fun stuff on Friday Also, I suck so I didn't want to waste my time on a tournament that I knew that it would take a miracle for me to get in the top 125 well I mean given the number of qualifying tries I probably would have been okay wasting my time I wasn't okay wasting my time and wasting my money and a $60 buy in I'm just not all that keen on donating that much money to someone else when there was really no path for me winning anything so it factors in if it's a $5 monthly tournament no problem but when we start getting into real money You know, it's something that I always evaluate. And we're also going down a day earlier this year than we did last year because, well, the stuff doesn't start up until the evening of Friday. We want to hit that video game museum and we'll we'll talk about that when we're when we're done, because obviously that ties in well with our second segment that we do on this podcast. So but my brother in law, who's coming down with us, he showed us a YouTube video of that museum once it opened up and it looks really cool. And I wanted a chance to see it. I didn't want to compete with the festival. And it was just was like, oh, well, we'll just we can do it Friday. We're down Friday. We can do that all day until like 5 p.m. So that that was really cool to work that in as well, because I'd like to get some more video. They have some video games at Texas, and we played them last year. But it'll be – I just – the idea – I like museums, man. The idea of being able to go and see the history of it all in one really, really cool, laid-out place like that, yeah, I'm pretty excited to see that too. So I am very looking forward to this. This is like my one real vacation of the year. I hadn't been taking real vacations for a long time, and this is like the one I am wedging in now. I mean, like, no, it is time. Dennis is going to have fun. This is what we're doing. That's what we are doing now. I don't have to just work and sit at home. I can actually go out and do something. Yeah, most of my – when I take quote-unquote vacation, they joke about it at the office. They're like, Dennis, are you on vacation next week? I'm like, yep. They're like, are you actually doing a vacation? Nope. What are you doing? I'm staying in the deck. What are you doing now? I'm cleaning the garage. I'm just doing really lame things. Anyway. I'm topped out, so I have to burn my vacation time so I can earn more vacation time. Too much. Not the worst problem to have, but anyway, so that'll be cool.
    43:06
    So since I kind of bridged it with the mentioning of the museum, I'd say let's go ahead and move on into our video game segment. We have a number of topics this time, actually, to hit on in video games. Pretty exciting. Yeah, we do. Which we've been kind of light on video game news the last couple episodes, which is just as well because we had so much to talk about on Pinball. But let's go ahead and open with Oculus. We don't normally talk VR on this podcast, and we're really not going to here other than to note that there was almost two weeks ago, but there was a the company ZeniMax received $500 million in a verdict. Jury awarded that amount in a lawsuit involving the Oculus VR.
    43:51
    And I guess just to give some background on this, what happened is ZeniMax sued and wanted $6 billion.
    43:59
    And this lawsuit was essentially between ZeniMax and Facebook because Facebook owns Oculus. What happened, though, is the $500 million award was due to the some of the people who were involved in the creation of Oculus were found guilty of violating several things. So like nondisclosure agreements were found to be violated. There was a false designation and there was some copyright infringement. That's what the $500 million verdict is about. The big deal kind of in Facebook's favor is that they were found not guilty of stealing trade secrets. So at the time, was it going to be appealed? No one knows. There was a lot of speculation that at $500 million, Facebook would probably just pay this and be done with it. And since there were no trade secrets found being stolen, it means that Oculus production can still continue. There's no obligation for Facebook to cease. It's not like they said, this is not ZeniMax tech. Yes, there was wrongdoing that happened involving information sharing that shouldn't have happened, but you didn't actually take the tech of ZeniMax, steal it, and then repackage it as Oculus.
    45:16
    Yeah, and that's a big thing for Oculus because, well, it would have destroyed the company if they've been forced to shut down and not produce anymore.
    45:27
    I mean, and it would have cost Facebook a lot of money. I mean, like, actual money for Facebook, a lot of money. So it's good for them. It's one of those things where it's technically a win for Facebook and Oculus,
    45:44
    even though it still cost them $500 million. dollars but uh from what i've read and the bits of the stuff i've seen is it basically amounted to yeah one person uh did some things that were not fully on the up and up and that caused pretty much all of the issues right there were i think when i read the details of the verdicts two individuals were specifically cited for various things the amounts they were penalized were different. So one was more egregious than the other. And I believe Facebook is actually on the hook for all of that. But as you noted, yeah, it's not stolen trade secrets. That's what ZeniMax wanted, was it to be said that their trade secrets were stolen. Because then that would have been a huge deal. That's what most of their case was. So even though there were a lot of verdicts, essentially, where it was guilty, guilty, guilty, they were like the piddly stuff.
    46:42
    So my guess will be Facebook will just pay this. I think so. I don't think they're going to continue to litigate it and try and get any of that overturned. I think they're probably breathing a sigh of relief. It's just $500 million. What's that to them? I know from some of the stuff I read, ZeniMax was trying to put together something to get an injunction put in place after it went, but I don't think it was something that ever really had a chance to go through. Do you think ZeniMax was doing this because it was now owned by Facebook and they saw kind of like when people buy the rights to things and they're just deliberately trying to intimidate people into paying them, that this was more of just a ploy to get a quick cash grab and that while they wanted a huge sum of money, that they'll ultimately be happy with just taking $500 million?
    47:36
    Yeah, honestly, I think they probably would be. I mean, I don't think this is something that is going to be all, oh, we have to do this. It's stolen. Everything would be better. I mean, they should just accept their payday and walk away from it is what I would expect.
    47:57
    Yeah. I mean, that's what I think is going to happen. To me, it is a little odd. ZeniMax isn't like a fly-by-night company. They are known in the industry. I know of ZeniMax They own a lot of stuff So it not it not just like what you might think of as like a vulture company that is taking other people work and then just owning the intellectual rights to it Yeah, no. I mean, ZeniMax is – because ZeniMax, I mean, they've got – I mean, their subsidiaries are like Bethesda and id Software and companies like that. I mean, it is not small people. Uh, Arkham Studios is Zenimax.
    48:41
    Um, Machine Games is Zenimax. I mean, these are not small companies that are part of their, uh, empire as it was.
    48:56
    I mean, Bethesda obviously is huge. id software well known because of i mean wolfenstein commander king doom quake all the early id software games yeah a lot of the younger generation might not well until you know seeing things like doom around again a lot of the younger generation might not be all that familiar with id but i believe there's a lot of patent uh technology that actually is still in play that was developed by them so they're they're a pretty big deal but yeah bethesda is a huge cash cow for Zenimax. Everyone knows who Bethesda is. The Fallout series is massive.
    49:35
    And I'm just thinking, because Fallout 4 being so recent, there's a lot that goes into it. So yeah, these were both very major players. And anyway, a decision was made. I think, I'm with you, Tony. I think Zenimax is probably the less happy of the two parties, despite the amount would probably make a lay person think that Facebook would be the less happy of the two. but I think everyone kind of won and everyone kind of lost. So we'll see if everyone thus just moves on, you know, pays up and moves on, but I don't know yet. Yeah, we'll see how it, we'll see how it shakes out. So let's turn to a possibly happier video game topic. And that's E3, which is the, I don't see how this is a happier topic. Look, if you wanted to go to E3, you might be happy now because now, Now they have decided to allow the public to attend. And I'm sure the no longer achievable price of $150 was initially announced for, I don't even remember what the counts were. The regular rate's $250, though. And so that's probably what you would experience at this point if you were to try and get it. I think they're planning to let in around 15,000 people was the count I heard. But this is a big change. E3 historically has been an industry event. It's kind of morphed over time in that there have been a lot of almost, I guess I'd call them like super fans, people who aren't really media, but maybe they YouTube or blog about games, who have been allowed to participate as time has gone by. And also E3 has been having an issue with keeping industry participation at the event. There have been more and more notable what I would describe as third-party companies that have pulled back from it, but also companies like Nintendo, which have sort of pulled out of E3. And a lot of those companies do adjacent events nearby location-wise so that the media can still access them, but they haven't actually been doing it within the halls of E3 itself. So your initial comment makes me think you're somewhat skeptical of this decision. So let's talk a little bit about E3, Tony. What do you think about it? It is the impetus of our longest ever podcast episode. It is.
    51:57
    That is very true. But the truth of the matter is this is E3 attempting to survive because it is to the point, and with most of the major companies doing directs and doing their own things, E3 is dying. They've never been huge with the indie scene The indie scene is heavy at Like the PAX's and this and that And even though it's been increasing at E3 It's just something that they're not up to anymore They used to be the big one The big thing that everything was important And anymore they're not They're not the big pop of the video game scene I mean, nothing big is announced there. Everything's known beforehand. Most of the companies hold their big announcements for their own directs where they get 100% of the media coverage at the time. And then they just use E3 to show more stuff. I think when the E3 started last year with the little thing set up outside for people who weren't in to come and do some stuff, I think it was just a step on the way to opening them fully up to the public to try and maintain their relevance in the modern gaming journalism world. Do you think that opening it up to the public will be successful at that?
    53:36
    It'll depend upon how well they do it. I think if they open it up to the public and keep it exactly like they have done it and just letting the public in in addition to the journalist, I don't think it will. I think they'll have to change some things to let them be more aimed at, or maybe not aimed at, but more like a fan-style convention instead of an industry-style convention if they want it to actually help them survive.
    54:17
    I think that's a good point. I was listening to another video game podcast, which is done by journalists in the industry. and they yeah they had a similar concern i think what they you know obviously their speculation they they agreed with you this is you know this is a survival tactic they thought perhaps it would be a smarter maneuver if they were to reshape how e3 functions where maybe i mean this is basically a three-day event which and you know we were just talking about the texas pinball festival from an attendee perspective this is twice as much for what i'm not quite sure what your big experience is supposed to be versus like if you were to go to a pax or go to a texas pinball festival where you can play a whole lot of stuff um i their their suggestion was that maybe if e3 were to do something where it moved itself to say a five to six day event and you you had your latter three days be open to the public and geared towards letting people actually get hands on time with games, alpha builds and such, but the prior two or three days be oriented towards the industry and specific for journalists, journalists only sort of thing, and have that sort of keep the traditional focus. But they were operating from an assumption that this is in part to try and shore up revenues by getting more just individual bite-size rates to make up for the loss of these companies, but also the theory that maybe if there was more public involvement, then it starts to look to an EA or a Nintendo that this is sort of like a PAX event now, and maybe they come back.
    55:59
    Maybe. I mean, I can see them attempting to do it, but even if they do, I don't think it's going to be.
    56:06
    The heyday of E3 is over, and I think anything they are going to do, Any changes they're going to make are going to simply let them survive. But I don't think they're the big thing, and I don't think they're going to be the big thing that they used to be. Not anymore. I think it's over.
    56:28
    Yeah, I lean that way as well. I just – I still feel that it has a – stigma is not the right word because it's a positive thing. It still has the prestige of being seen as the announcement event, even if it's not true. It's still seen as the big announcement event. Everyone gets more excited about E3 than they do for expecting announcements out of PAX, even if PAX is giving just as many announcements. True. And I know Directs are very big also. I mean, lots of companies, that's what they do. I mean, Nintendo didn't wait for E3 or some other event to do their Switch announce. They did their Switch announce at their own thing. EA does the same thing. They do all their big announces at their own things.
    57:16
    Yeah, I think perhaps part of the, and I haven't looked at the industry pricing, this rate for attendees seems high. I've heard part of the reason why E3 had a problem with the more independent scene was the cost to get into the hall was too high.
    57:33
    And I think, you know, I don't know how much they need. I don't know how much they make off of it. I think it's their big money-making event. They honestly may need to consider lowering those rates. It's really difficult for me in terms of where I work. We hold an annual conference every year. It's always a big challenge because hotel costs and such are really, really high. But in our case, most of our costs that we sustain isn't from the space. That goes up every year, but it's not. The food is our problem. It's buying meals. And if you're not buying meals, it's not nearly as bad. So there's not, if they've been gouging, especially as they've lost more and more entities, you know, they may have priced themselves out of being competitive. It's a lot cheaper to show up to PAX than to actually be there at space in E3 itself. I mean, there's a reason why I think why companies are just setting up outside of it and competing with it almost. Yeah. No, I mean, there's no reason at those costs. I mean, now those costs are pretty normal costs for what would be an industry event. But fan events don't run that. I mean, they just don't. You get a much lower return on investment because you don't get, there's not as many fans. I mean, a company is going to go, oh, $150 to send our guy there. Okay, whatever. That's fine. We don't care. but for little Jimmy to go $150 is quite a different thing yes I agree it is what it is so I guess we'll hear or we'll see if anything shakes out differently after this E3 happens but we'll keep everyone apprised because we will still pay attention to E3 because at the very least even if a lot of the announcements are pre-announced it's a good time to sort of compile the announcements and go over them all for podcast purposes at least so that's a convenience and we don't have to pay to do it i am not going i am not paying 150 to go yeah i'm not going so so i think now it's time for us to be the eclectic overwatch podcast once more we have put this off for so long we have we have almost gone out of our way to avoid talking about Overwatch because we know we talk about it too much. We do. We're coming up on a year of Overwatch and it's still the game I put more time into every week than anything else. Well, you know, it was cleaning up on awards and there's a reason for it. Check it out if you haven't played it yet. They do free weekends all the time on consoles so you can always watch for that. I wouldn't be surprised if they were doing it on PC as well. Oh yeah, they do. So anyway, a game is competitive and it is a major esport game now, that means balance has to be respected, just like in a fighting game. And so we are often made aware of changes that are on the test servers, the PTR changes that are being experimented with to find out what is actually going to roll into the main game. And so these things that get announced, a lot of times they can be tweaked a little bit, but usually as soon as they hit the PTR, There's a general sense that something along those lines is going to actually roll into the main game, and then they'll repatch as they have to rebalance things.
    60:52
    So there have been a number of changes that are incoming, but the big ones to talk about, I think, are Mercy and Bastion, especially Bastion.
    61:03
    Oh, yeah, definitely. So let's go ahead and just get Mercy out of the way first. So what they're looking at doing with Mercy is her big – one of her big problems is when she ults, her ultimate is resurrection. So everyone within range of her who is dead comes back to life. Pretty clear cut. And she dies. Yes. The problem is that she dies, and most of the time they tend to die as well because they just get right back up where they died at. The other team is still there. Like if you're fighting on a point and they still have ults of their own, death blossom, they're all dead again. It's very messy. So what they're testing out on the PTR is when Mercy is doing her ultimate, she is temporarily invulnerable. But the allies being revived are also temporarily invulnerable. I am going to say I think this will definitely help with the viability of the ultimate. I can't imagine how it wouldn't help. I don't know if it helps enough to make Mercy picked over, say, Ana or Zenyatta, because they have certain functionality outside of their ultimate state, which makes them attractive choices. But I think this is a good change for her. I think Mercy needed something with the ultimate to make it a little – at high level play, Mercy's ultimate was the worst of the healers. It was just the worst. yeah no it definitely like you said I don't think it's going to put her into the primary meta but I do think that it will make her played a little more and will make her better when she sees play in other game modes. Indeed. Do you want to start walking us through Bastion? There's a lot to cover. Oh, man. Well, first they decided that Bastion is way too weak when it comes to taking out shields. So they are redoing his sentry configuration, which is his gun configuration. They are reducing his deployment time from 1.5 seconds to 1 second. They are increasing his bullet spread by 50%. The bullet spread is always at maximum, so just burst firing is going to help you keep down your spread. They did add 100 rounds to his magazine size, so he can shoot longer.
    63:37
    He can no longer get headshots, and he can no longer do criticals while he is in sentry mode. With all of that said, I don't think the increase in the bullet spread is a huge deal.
    63:54
    The dropping of headshots and the dropping of criticals is. It will reduce his effectiveness against single targets somewhat, though I think he's still going to do a fairly large amount of damage. And he's still going to do what he's always been really good at, is destroying shields. he is bastion destroyer of shields and you opened with that and i think when i read this list it seems to me that they want bastion as sentry mode to be the hard reinhardt counter even he always i would say was for taking down shields i always thought he was the best at it but i think they're trying to make it so much more i guess op at it so that he's actually chosen yeah and i think that's what it is. I think all of these changes are designed around getting him into the meta.
    64:45
    So, I'm slightly undecided. I think this could be like with Symmetra where it may go too far once we talk about the other changes.
    65:00
    But, we'll just have to see. Right. Next element to Bastion is the recon configuration. That's when he's walking around. That got a couple of changes. In that case, they reduced the bullet spread by 25%. That's a pretty significant tightening of his shots. And his magazine size here has also been increased by five rounds. So it went from 20 to 25. so this seems to be in my mind the hey look when Bastion's not able to be in a sentry mode he can actually kind of work like soldier that seems to me what they want him to be like a little bit lesser soldier or as reports coming from the PTR say a slightly better soldier yeah the and from there their his ultimate his tank configuration They pulled one thing off of it. It no longer grants bonus armor, but they destroyed that for the very fact that they gave him a new passive called Ironclad.
    66:08
    With Ironclad, Bastion takes 35% less damage while in sentry or tank configurations. So in sentry or tank mode, he's much harder to kill. and some of the reports I've seen and heard coming out of the PTR is in some cases he might be almost unkillable in certain situations. It will be interesting to see how that works out. Right. Yeah, so I can see the value in saying when he goes into the tank mode with his ult he no longer gets that almost health surge which was his armor surge. But the reporting on the ironclad ability is that is making him extremely strong, especially with interestingly enough, a Mercy tether. And I'm wondering if Blizzard is thinking, yeah, we're going to also try and make Mercy played more by letting her not only do the pharmacy where you piggyback her with Pharah, which used to be meta and now isn't favored that much, but you still sort of see it at sub-platinum levels as a popular tactic, but also doing this as a viability option. uh but this is not it there is now one more thing for bastion and that is his self self-repair ability now as it currently stands bastion has a mode where he can move his little arm and he can repair himself he can self-heal but he had to be stationary while he did it so that's the big change is now he can actually do it while he's on the move they bound it to a second to the secondary fire button no one cares about that you could always rebind even on console you can rebind these commands on these characters so that's not a big deal but uh another big deal almost as big as the moving and doing it is it won't be interrupted when you take damage which is currently the case if you get hit he can't he has to restart the repair sequence and they added a resource meter uh that will deplete when his self-repair is active and so it has to recharge so he can't just hold it down indefinitely if he's under fire. It actually gets consumed. I imagine it like D.Va's defense matrix that has a resource meter that gets consumed, and then it slowly recharges back up. So that's kind of what they're trying to do to control from basically him just holding down the repair button and doing whatever, running wherever he wants. Yeah, that's going to be huge. Yeah, and that's the summary of the Bastion changes. So I guess overall, what are your thoughts on it, Tony? I mean, I'm not a high-level player, so I already still on occasion see Bastions. I don't see them as much as I did when I first started playing towards the end of Season 1 or the start of Season 2. But I know it's very much almost a gimmick pick at the high level. On certain maps, some people might start with a Bastion just to surprise the other team because no one in their right mind picks him because he's such an easy target to kill. yeah and I think he's still going to be a niche pick I just think he's going to be more common I think he's going to slide more into the kind of Symmetra-ish zone where he is picked on certain maps because he has because he deals real strong in the map I think the fact that he's basically in recon mode is basically a second soldier means that you might see him more often because having two people who are basically putting out the same amount and the same style of damage as a soldier does is something that will be in certain metas and configurations, something I think people will be playing and will be liked. the self-heal and moving stuff is going to be, oh man, it's going to make him a lot more survivable. Between that and Ironclad, I think you're going to have to concentrate to take him out. and that could if it makes him tanky enough then we could see him taking a fairly large role in the meta honestly it's all going to be about survivability and how useful he still is in sentry mode and just how good recon mode is yes I'm curious if they're going to do additional tweaks on these based off of the PTR performance it wouldn't be surprising to me if they get a little concerned that you turn him a little too godlike if he's got a mercy tether or you say well no there are ways to counter that you just have to kill mercy you know uh it always seems to me that blizzard leans more towards allowing the change to be a little disruptive to the meta and then fixing it later than just sort of you know but they they are responsive when they find things not working as intended on the ptr i just don't know whether or not this is as intended or not because obviously you are committing two characters under those scenarios where people were being very frustrated with trying to shoot him through his ironclad plus the healing stream but uh i i definitely think bastion needs work to i mean i get annoyed when people choose him and i that because i don't think it's a good choice so i don't and i don't like that i want him to be a reasonable choice but well yeah we'll just have to see but i i definitely think that blizzard is trying to get him back into the meta and this list of stuff tells me that they're serious about trying to get him in there yeah it's definitely seems to be a serious attempt to move him into the meta all right well that's all we actually had for overwatch so we do have one more video game topic topic and that's battle tech yeah this This is an update they just released another Kickstarter update and as everybody knows I back them because I am a complete Battletech nerd and this one was a update was a big enough update and important enough that I felt that people should be informed because it's going to make me do things that I wasn't originally going to do they have announced that they are targeting March 15th as their backer beta launch date. And that's for backers at the $50 level and above will be able to do some beta testing. They still have the ability to get in as a backer at this time. They've got a late reinforcements website, which I will put a link in the show notes for. But the digital reward prices will be going up by $10 starting on the 15th of February. The beta backer, Yeah, the backer beta. The beta backer. It's a beta blocker. The beta backer is going to last for at least two months is their current plan. They have not said which mechs will be included yet or which maps, but they're not going to include all of them. The beta is only going to be 1v1 multiplayer and single player skirmish modes. None of the campaign or the mercenary management stuff. that's also, at least at the beginning, not going to include one of the most important bits for Battletech, the ability to modify your mech loadouts. They are hoping to add that towards the end of the beta, but they can't commit to it because they're still working on it. So that's going to be interesting. And I've said in the past that I don't do betas, and I don't do when I back stuff like this typically because I feel like it. I've had too many times where either a beta or an early access has made me dislike a game enough that I had a hard time trying it again later, and it actually turned out to be really good.
    74:18
    But in this case, because I like Harebrained Studios and everything they're doing and putting out to the fans makes me think that they're doing a good job, I'm going to go ahead and do it. I'm going to try the beta. And as part of that, with their beta, they are not doing an NDA. They want you to post screenshots. They want you to talk about it. They want you to post videos online. They want you to live stream the game.
    74:50
    And I'm going to do just that. I am in the process of setting up stuff. so I can do videos of games and do live streaming. I had hoped to be up before now, but between being sick and some issues trying to make it so it doesn't look terrible, I'm not quite there yet. But, yeah, I will be live streaming this game. I will be doing some videos of the game and talking about this game and putting it on our YouTube page, and it will be up on our Twitch because we do have a Twitch channel that I have created and it has had one practice or one careful stream that lasted like 15 minutes just checking stuff out and I plan on starting to do more stuff on that Twitch stream.
    75:48
    We will be using it for more than just Battletech, obviously. We're going to be playing all sorts of stuff and we're going to be trying to just learn and do more because this is entering a whole new section of the entertainment universe for us. All right. Well, that sounds great. And speaking of great, we are ready for the third segment of the podcast and we have stuff for it, the tabletop section.
    76:14
    And so we have three games to talk about because you hosted a game night last night and we actually got to play three very different tabletop games. and I'd say let's go ahead and do them in the order in which we played them and that would mean we need to start with Potion Explosion.
    76:31
    Yeah, Potion Explosion we've talked about on this podcast several times in the past. A, when it was first seen and we talked about it from Gen Con.
    76:43
    Also, shortly after that episode I got a chance to play it or watch it played, I should say, at one of the board game nights that I attend on occasion. And now we got a chance to play it ourselves.
    77:04
    And for those of you who don't remember or weren't here back then, Potion Explosion is a pretty simple little game that is designed around creating potions using ingredients. In this case, the ingredients are represented by marbles, and they're in a box so that the marbles are laid out in rows. And as you pick a marble up, so you pick an ingredient up, the marbles roll down to fill in. And if two marbles of the same color click together because you pulled one out between them, you get to pick those marbles up also. And that's how you fill in your potions. and we got to sit down and play it last night and I rather enjoyed it. It was quite a lot of fun. It's a simple game. It's kind of, I don't want to say bejeweled-ish, but it's kind of got that kind of feel to it because of the marbles and them clicking together and you're picking the right one.
    78:06
    And it's got some nice little strategy stuff to it. yeah it well it plays obviously quite a bit differently than bejeweled it's still at its core is a puzzle game so you're trying to make these decisions about how to best fill out your potions you're selecting potions to fill they're worth different amounts of points depending on how many marbles are involved the potions themselves have powers so uh you know how to employ those to best advance yourself is a big question and some of those even interfere with what the other player has been doing, like the ability to poach marbles from them that they've been saving to use. So there's quite a bit that goes into it. I would say it was fun. It was my least favorite of the three games, but that's probably because we played a four-person game and I was so awful at it that I actually didn't even have half the next lowest score.
    79:01
    And so I have to live with that shame. But it was... It's pretty, it makes a lot of sense. It's pretty intuitive. I would say the thing that I noticed the most that I wish they had done differently would have been for the use of the potions, try and if they, because of the potions, there are only a few that in terms of abilities, but some of the cards are worth more points than others because they have more holes in them to hold your marbles. I wondered if that was why they didn't print how to use, what each potion did on each card, but I sure wish they'd actually printed a little summary card that would be in front of every player rather than having to pass the rule book around to know what your potions did. That one kind of stood out to me as a flaw. Yeah, that would be nice. The only thing that stood out was just weak. I do know that on BoardGameGeek, somebody has created some cheat cards for those that you can print out and laminate. Yeah, out of the box. That was just the only thing that I thought, oh, that would have been convenient. Definitely would have been to have a cheat card on how to use your – if the potions themselves aren't going to say what they do on the card and they didn't. And I figured that was because of the holes. They have holes punched out to slut your marbles in. So I figured they, even if they laid it out for a three point card to be able to display the rule, it might've, it would've been harder when it was a six hole card. So for the same potion. Yeah. That definitely would have made things more difficult, but it was fun. How long do you think it took us to play through one game? No, it wasn't too long. No, it was, It was under an hour.
    80:37
    Maybe not a whole lot under an hour because we were walking through the things and we kept getting sidetracked and a couple of us kept having to get up and go take care of kids or this or that, or we'd start talking about something random while we were playing. But, no, it wasn't too horrible. I'd definitely say it was an hour or less. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, it definitely will go faster the next time. But yeah, it was a lot of fun, so I did like it. It had been a while since I'd done a tabletop puzzle game.
    81:11
    Yeah, and it's very much a, that's exactly what it is. And unlike the time I watched it played before, at no point did we get locked into the little trapped thing where one person spends so long trying to figure out what move they're going to make that it drags everything out. We never had that. We kind of, even I think our longest waits for stuff like that were still pretty darn short. Yeah, no, there wasn't any what I call long deliberative play. But other than, usually if there was, anything that was like that was usually due to rules, like being confused as to what would happen if we pulled a color that was the same out and the rest of them clicked together, having to check on things like that. Standard stuff for first-time play.
    82:08
    Yeah, I think it went pretty well otherwise. I definitely look forward to playing that one again. Yes, it was fun, but not as fun as the second game. Noisy person cards. I like that one much more you also won that one by a lot I mean so much so that if the rest of us had put all of our wins together you still would have won that one it look that one was also we did with four players we definitely need to get more people playing that one because science mandates it yeah I think it would be better with a larger group of people than what we had, but it was still pretty good.
    82:56
    And Noisy Person Cards was a Kickstarter that I backed last year, and I talked about it on the podcast as well. It is a kind of, it plays kind of like Cards Against Humanity, except for in this case, The judge is drawing a card that has a person on it, like a school kid or a dragon or a gnoll or something like that. And everybody else has to, they've got cards in their hand that have lines on them. and they have to read the line in a voice to match whatever was drawn. And the judge has modifiers that they can put in play based upon the cards in their hand. So you could change your dragon to a sarcastic dragon or a boorish elf or whatever you want to change it to to make things easier or harder. and then you laugh as everybody tries to do voices and you pick which one was the best. The cards thematically are, and this would probably be overall, I'd say a weakness of the game. The cards are all thematically Dungeons & Dragons style. So they're all sort of that high fantasy in terms of what your character types are. And I get it because it was developed to help people kind of master doing voices for role-playing and such. But I think some people may have been more comfortable had it been a little more real-world oriented in terms of what the characters were, because some of the stuff would probably be... Like, if you don't play RPGs, you might be like, what does an elf even sound like? And I'd be like, you need to watch Lord of the Rings and then just figure it out. But maybe you didn't ever see it. So I'm sure that would be a bit of a challenge. I also thought that the modifications were a little... Generally, most of the time, the modification, other really than the first round, the modification, like making it a sarcastic dragon, was only done by the person who got to judge the voicing. And I thought that worked pretty well, but there were rules for people to skip their turn and further modify. But some of these modifications, they almost seem like they're more for pantomiming than they are for voicing. Yeah, I've got that feel too. And a lot of it, I mean, that's why a couple times I stood up and I added a lot of body language to it because it felt like it really needed body language. Tony just needed to act. He was like, acting, and he would just get up and perform. Acting. I refused to stand. Others should just kneel.
    85:46
    Well, it worked out pretty well for you because you won big. Nah, it was, oh, it was just, it was, it was, that one was the one where there was this one, I felt bad. I was not the first person to read a card, and the first person just could not start. We just sat there for five minutes while they, now granted, it was a triple modified card so yeah it was pretty it was pretty harsh and it is sometimes it can be really hard because you're just sitting there and it's like what what exactly would a a new york cat person sound like yeah yeah that would push some boots from new york that was yeah That was one I made. And I don't know. It was whatever you all did. I just had to pick one because I was like, okay. Everyone had their own interpretation, which was interesting. And then you get that whole Cards Against Humanity thing where you try and read into what the other person's personality is like and come up with the voice that they are going to pick as the winner. Are they going to want authenticity? Are they going to want funny? Are they going to want something that's sort of in between where it's humorous, but the emphasis is on trying to actually capture every element? I mean, one of the players on two back-to-back, two different occasions, won by flat-out ignoring the modifier card and just doubling down on what the primary character was supposed to be. And it worked. It worked. It worked for the two different judges. It worked. So, yeah, it was interesting. I like the concept a lot. And it definitely is really easy to under, it's probably of the three games we played. It is the easiest to understand what you're supposed to do, but, um, it does require, uh, I'd say a degree of commitment to not minding looking like a fool or more accurately sounding like a fool because you will, that's just how it works. But if you can get past that, it can be a lot of fun. Alcohol may or may not help.
    87:50
    Yeah. That might've helped. Uh, I can almost yeah it probably would have definitely helped yeah I'm pretty sure at least though those that that were consuming enjoyed listening far more than those that were trying to perform all of whom were sober so yeah how did that turn out how was it that everybody who was drinking wasn't the ones playing I don't I don't know they didn't drink enough liquid courage to up their constitution levels.
    88:22
    They had too much self-esteem to make themselves look silly in front of everybody else. I suppose. Or not enough self-esteem. Dun, dun, dun. But we were more successful with the third and final tabletop game. We played Codenames, which we actually played with a group of six. Yeah, now Codenames is a game that's very popular as a party game. And when we first started into it, I was kind of concerned as I was reading the rules to everybody because it's like, well, this seems kind of hard to understand. But the second we started playing, everything just clicked.
    89:03
    Yes, definitely. Yeah, I was getting scared when you were reading these rules. I was like, oh, my God, we're all way too tired. Yeah, I was getting worried about it. When I was reading the rules, I'm like, oh, man, this is going to be bad. But it's one of those games where even if you're maybe not necessarily a visual learner, once everything's laid out, it makes so much more sense, so much more sense. So, yeah. And of the three games, this actually was my favorite of the night. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I definitely would put it at the top of my play again list. And it's a decent-sized group game. and it seems a heck of a lot easier when you're on one side of the table. But basically the game, you'd split into two teams. Each team chooses a spymaster that sits opposite of the rest of their team. So the two spymasters sit together and all the teams sit elsewhere. and the spymasters give a one-word clue based upon a five-by-five grid of cards that are laid out that are codenames for spies. And they have to give a one-word clue and then a number that is how many clues or how many agents are out there that that clue can apply to so that they can. And then everybody else on your team has to try and pick the ones they are. So, like, I did one where I had agents that had code names of table, board, drill, and something else that I don't remember right now. So I gave the, my phrase was wood four. Because there were four of them and they all could be related to wood. Yeah. Man, it's a lot harder than it sounds. Right. As a spy master. Right. So as a spy, yeah. And everyone had a chance to be this. We played three games. So we were on two teams of three. So everyone got a chance to be the spy master. And yeah, the challenge there is obviously you have to look at how you're – because the cards, the five by five, were laid out randomly. So your assigned words for your team to get, the clue you might want. might also be a clue that would give a point to the other team and and if they guess wrong i mean they guess the other teams won even if the clue is perfectly legitimate it goes to them or there are certain uh cards that are they're innocent bystanders they just in the turn they're out of play and then of course the big concern which we never had happen was if someone inadvertently guesses who the assassin is that team auto loses for making that big of a mistake but yeah we we We went hard on dodging the chance of hitting the assassin. Yeah, overall we played very cautious. When I did the Spymaster, my very first round was probably my chanciest thing, where I used the description burning, because my team had three cards I thought were applicable, where I had ring, heart, and fire. But there was also a phoenix on the table. and I was like okay well chances are I thought the odds were 90 percent that someone fire would be the first pick so I was pretty sure that people would guess that very first but they would probably pick Phoenix because obviously the reincarnation of the Phoenix is a famous story and it would be an obvious one but I went ahead and did it anyway because that one didn't belong to the other team and it wasn't the assassin so I thought okay they'll probably blow it on that one but they'll remember that I said burning three and they'll go, there's still two more out there after they got that one wrong later on. And I gave clues that weren't related to that anymore to the, to the burning ones anymore. Cause they always had that in the back of their mind. So, but you know, it was, there were other instances where I'd be like, Oh, here's a great one to use. No, that gives it to the other team also. And theirs is more obvious and you're trying to come up with something safe. And sometimes you don't completely overlook one. Like I gave a clue in my, same go where that ring, no one was thinking of Johnny Cash, I don't understand.
    93:29
    I thought of Johnny Cash but I wasn't on your team. Okay, well later on I used Fantasy to try and get the ring out of the way so I said Fantasy 2 because there was also a Dorf card and the Dorf went right away just like I assumed and I thought okay, well people are going to remember the one ring and they're going to choose it and once again I was wrong because I didn't even think about that comic some people might think of comic when I saw the word comic I thought stand up comic but they saw comic and they thought comic book and they thought fantasy and that was another one we needed but had I contemplated that I would have said fantasy 3 but I didn't I like this game a lot because my team won every time yeah it was close a couple of times it was actually I don't think any of them were total blowouts. I suppose when I was spy master, maybe at the end we kind of pulled ahead by two cards. But when you think about it, two cards, isn't that big of a pull ahead? No, not really. And see that. And the thing is, is like, like on the one where I was spy master, I was the obvious, one of my ones, one of my last ones that had to go the, uh, all the obvious hints for it, uh, were hints that could also have been taken for the one that was the assassin. So I was really having to try and work that one in. I never successfully got that one in. But they didn't pick the assassin, so we didn't lose that way. No, they were always very cautious about that, which was probably – well, definitely was good. I thought at the end when I was spy mastering, I almost thought – I thought strategically at this point, I was in such a position where I could just do one-word clues that were highly specific to win. at least two turns out and ideally, and maybe if everyone hadn't been so tired, they'd have realized mathematically their only hope to win would be to guess at that point, randomly guess. Yeah. And see, the Spymaster's not really allowed to talk to their team. Nope. So I just let it feed right in. I take my victories and roll in them like stink.
    95:40
    But anyway, it was a very successful game night, I thought. It was. Multi-hour session of tabletop gaming. yeah I had a lot of fun it was three games all three of them were pretty solid I was real happy with them and so I think that reaches us to the end of our show so if you all out there are really happy with us feel free to reach out to us on facebook.com slash eclectic gamers podcast or you can email the show eclectic gamers podcast at gmail.com we're available on twitter and instagram as eclectic underscore gamers. And until another two weeks, I'll say I'm Dennis and so long everyone. I'm Tony and have fun.