Oh, it's time once again for a show from the road. It's Thanksgiving weekend. Everybody's got full bellies, and I got a full brain sack of pinball content to get to. Let's sit and let's chill. Let's enjoy the end of the year and celebrate some pinball together. oh man back here i'm on the road i'm in the main i'm in the northern most part of maine As far north as you can possibly get here on the road, recording some good information for everybody. Let's kickback here. It's been a crazy couple of weeks of some work. I dropped into that Patreon live stream the other day. Go check it out, patreon.com backslash don's pinball podcast for all the people that subscribe to that. We got the Sunday live coming up tomorrow morning, but tonight it's Saturday night. Thanksgiving has come and gone. I worked clear through the holiday, clear through Black Friday, Small Business Saturday is here. Thanks for ordering Kong Rods. You guys can slow down any minute now. Jeez, they're flying off the shelves. And I was listening to a multitude of podcasts, so I did what any self-respecting solo podcaster would do, and I poached an idea from my good friends over at the Loser Kid Pinball Podcast. They went and entertained me for hours, breaking down their top five choices of the pinball machines from this year. Go give it a listen. it was fantastic i want to do a little take on that i had this idea kicking around we always celebrate like the top five the top three the top finisher the twippy award winner whatever it is we're and we're always ranking you know godzilla's back in number one but will medieval madness knock it out well this is going to be a battle for eternity going back and forth and that's fine i get they're both great games you know i would i would give the nod to godzilla for sure but you know we don't need to argue about that what nobody really does is talking about the worst five or the bottom three or like what was the least interesting game that came out in the prior year so i want to do that i'll go count down the top five but let's also count down the bottom five too uh just for fun so i you know it's not just a steal their idea or anything but i was listening and i was really hit with the concept that was kind of the through line of their whole episode and that is that we're having like a banger year of new pinball machines that came out in 2025 now that we're at the end now there's no more surprises you know we're going to go into december and then we're going to reset and do this whole thing over again for 26 but this was a banger year for pinball machines i mean just just running the list i think this is in chronological order um but you got evil dead there up at the top now they're doing the rules of it had to have shipped during the year right so beetlejuice isn't on this list because it's not shipping till next year that'll be on next year's top 10 bottom five list or whatever yeah but we had actually more than 10 games there was 12 games here evil dead right uh dungeons and dragons from stern pinball a banger i've got that one portal game of the show at tpf am i right we got merlin's arcade dune from barrels of fun the best sand-based planet pinball machine i think ever created of all time uh we've got uh king kong right from our friend uh uh the uh the illustrious elwynn right from stern uh we've got medieval madness merlin's edition they threw this one in there i'm gonna go ahead and allow it just for funsies because it'll be fun to see how everything ranks based on merlin's madness or medieval madness right the merlin black potion edition whatever they're going to call it um you know because if it's better than that game or if it's worse than that game it gives you like a good uh a good kind of standard you know like medieval madness is a good game if a game ranks higher than it it's fantastic if it ranks lower than it it's less than fantastic kind of like how i use papa john's to measure pizza papa john's isn't good pizza papa john's isn't terrible pizza papa john's is just like pizza like on a 10 scale it's a 5.0 man it's right there so if it's better than papa johns it tends to be on the good scale if it's worse than papa john's then it's on the bad scale and i think dominoes and pizza hunter both worse than papa john's i put little caesars above papa john's so papa john's is just like right there so not to say that medieval madness is the papa john's of pinball but according to everything released in the year i think we may engage there let's go to my list though later and see where it actually ended up what else do we have on here predator harry potter the jaws 50th again i think this is kind of cheating but i'm gonna go ahead and allow it heck it's my list and again if you disagree with this that's totally fine man make your own list this is you know this isn't going down in stone or nothing just simply off the top of my head uh fall of the empire the star wars game the was the third game that we've had so far of like strictly just the trilogy um data east still seems to be the best one i don't know is that a hot take i will say that fall of the empire has fallen in the rankings we'll get to it uh and finally finally winchester's mystery house the game that none of us saw coming we knew barrels was cooking on something i kind of think this launch was just jutted out there just to compete with everything else that's going on but man we were ready for it man this was like timing the market perfectly i don't even know if it was on purpose uh but man this game came out and quickly sold the heck out and now we're all we're all waiting for this game to come out i don't think it's a brick shooter but i want to play it some more i'm excited to have brad Brad Albright featured again brad Brad Albright's on this list twice man he's on here for portal he's on here for winchester's mystery house i think it's the better of the two let's get to the list i think what i'll do since there's whether 12 machines here i've got a top five i've got a bottom five and then we got a middle two so let's do the papa john's games which games papa john this year uh when this came about now before we get started again a lot of asides here if your game that you created is at the bottom of this list it's in great company none of these games are bad all right but but if we're just just talking about the games that shipped this year and portal has shipped so it's on here um you know if it's in the bottom don't take it too bad this was a banger year for pinball man um i don't think we got any homebid releases this year uh we didn't get any galactic tank forces there were definitely no barbecues in the bunch i would put every one of these games better than barbecue uh for sure so don't be sad be glad tell your dad let's get into this uh buy a game from mad corbin at madpinball.com jeff and madpinball.com holler at your boys okay so what do we got let's do the papa john's games all right so coming in at number six and number seven six seven i got predator and dune yeah right in the middle of the pack the way i made this list i looked at everything that was on there and was like you know kind of ignoring price ignoring value if i just wanted to grab a game and put it in front of me and play it and want it to be the best version of pinball i could get for 2025 what game would it be i took that game put it on the list of number one then i looked at what was remaining and what would i pick next and then what would i pick and i went all the way down the list with that and in the 6-7 position i can see all the the the middle schoolers doing the 6-7 right now unless they moved on to 6-1 uh predator and then the predator's counterpart the dusty planet of dune i put predator just above dune because i like the license a lot more and the game's a wide body i feel like it had a lot more mechanisms and fun interesting things to shoot and play around with um dune i think is really coming up with the code but as far as just a layout when it came to the two of them like i would snatch predator over snatching dune but then there's five games that i would snatch these two ahead of if that makes sense so congratulations predator congratulations dune you didn't totally disappoint you're right in the middle of the pack and it's a heck of a good pack so to come right in that mid-range i dig it i dig it let's save the top five and let's go to the bottom five we'll count these down as fifth from the bottom fourth from the bottom three two one let's go at number five what did i put oh it's gonna cause some controversy this is gonna cause some controversy um the fifth worst game release shipped in 2025 uh was elwyn's king kong oh my god i know you're yelling at me already i can hear it I can hear it. But listen, this was my list. You could do your list, all right? My list is based on when I got down to these games that were left, I would pick Dune over Kong. I would pick Predator over Kong And then Kong where Kong is Now I sure the fact that I owned the game powder the hell out of it played the crap out of it is playing into this too Like I already got a lot of gameplay on Kong It's got some great shots. It's got a great layout. It's fun to pass the ball back and forth. But when it came to, like, ease of making the shots for me, I was able to do that on Predator. I was able to do that on Dune a lot easier than I was able to do it on Kong. That biplane ramp on Kong is amazing. it's smooth it's fast it's steep as heck and you just can't get it up there every time or at least i can you know time it as best as i can i can get the ball up into orbit we'll have it punch back and then i'm just i'm just i'm missing it i'm hitting the post so much when it goes up there it's buttery smooth it's very fun but like it's just not not enough and i feel like when i play predator when i play dune i'm able to hit the shots i want to hit a little bit more consistently so that's why i grabbed those two over it kong's a great layout of a game i wish it had the asset part of it i think that would push it over the top but it can't compare to like like like a jaws or godzilla come on so kong number five the bottom five number four on the bottom five was the uh medieval madness merlin's remake um i've played this game the code is shallow the mechanisms are great when i got into pinball and i was playing the pinball arcade on my playstation 3 um medieval madness was one of the games like i glommed on to i never really played this in the 90s my local arcades that i frequented just didn't have this that i frequented like three you know so it's not i'm sure it was out there it just wasn't out there for me or maybe it came a little bit later and i was already kind of aging out of the arcade and i was in high school moving around I just didn't have the juxtaposition of my location and an arcade that had it. The game is fun. Okay, for sure. The game is $12,000, 1,000 of them sold out. Boom. Who cares what you think, Don? People have been on the list for years. They finally got one. And then there's going to be another 1,000 after that. And then another 1,000 after that. And then the Green Goblin 1,000 after that probably. So this game is everywhere. I've played it. It doesn't have that depth of modern code that I like. So that's why it ended up fourth from the bottom in a great pack and a banner year of pinball. Number three, my homie, Chris Turner, buddy. I love you, guy. Merlin's Arcade took the spot just under here. So it was not last of the year. Two games. It beat out. I do enjoy playing. I feel like this is like, you know, tell us what you're thankful for when it comes to games. This is the 12 games of Thanksgiving that we're doing. um merlin's arcade is a fun game it is offensive to absolutely nobody it's fitting its niche right uh it was a design that i think was pre-existed that turner had and then decided to put this out as his follow-up to uh ninja eclipse when he explains the rationale behind it i totally get it it's just like you look at kong and you look at predator and you see wire forms galore and all these fun mechanisms and things and then when you get to merlin you have a simple arcade game that's got some cool sound it's got one of the best built cabinets in the biz um but it just doesn't have that much excitement there's one ramp in the game there's a physical ball lock that drops balls into a subway you can't see them stack anywhere there's no couch to put them on there's no tram car you know there's no uh what does tcm have balls on meat hooks right it doesn't have that bit so it gets lost in the competition a little bit uh the mechanisms are fun i like the little feather flippers or whatever he called that uh you know that was fun to play around with so it's a fun game that i like playing it's just when i look at the cost of the game and ordering it i got like several things in front of it that i would just like to have a little bit more turner we're gonna get there you're gonna make a banger game i know it please bring something cool to tpf and we'll all party, man. I can't wait to celebrate. I want him to have a banger game that just sells out all 700 units and then Turner pinball is everywhere. But at the number three from the bottom, I'm going to go with Merlin's Arcade. I love the stand-up targets. I wish they were drop targets, but I do like the billiards ball sound that it makes when you hit them. That's one of my favorite parts of it, just that chalky billiards sound. It sounds exactly like you're hitting a billiards ball, a pool ball. I dig it that clank man I love that clank all right second from the bottom second from the bottom is the game of the show from tpf it is portal this will serve as your multi-morphic moment um of this episode yeah so it's it's portal man and I've said this before man all congratulations to multi-morphic for grabbing excellent themes weird owl as a theme is fantastic I loved the movie The Princess Bride growing up. Like, my family would put that on all the damn time. I am intimately familiar with that show, with the beats, with the hits. I just wish the game, and I keep saying this, I just wish there was a version of it in just a standalone cabinet that I could have and put in my lineup. And that I could have, that I could potentially put out on location and not have to worry about it. Like, I wish that existed. It doesn't. I'm not going to lose sleep over it. But I really wish – but Portal, cool theme, man. Cool niche theme that would come out and would sell 300 to 500 games if it came in a regular cabinet. It's not going to do 5,000. It's not Harry Potter. But I think there's enough people that love the quichiness of Portal. I played through the game when it came out back in antiquity. And so I get the theme. I get the concepts. I think there's clever mechanisms in it. but when you stack it against the other 11 games that we're doing for the 12 games of thanksgiving it's just it fell to second for the bottom it fell to second from the bottom there is one game that i would step over to grab myself a portal and that is the number one i don't want to call it the worst it's still a good list these are still fun games hell i think i've owned 10 of these 12 games uh but uh i'm gonna put fall of the empire was was was dead last and when i looked at everything that came out this year and if it was all sitting in front of me and i didn't have to think about you know resale and and and what was going to be in this and like servicing this and getting parts i just wanted to grab a game that i thought was just the most fun i think i would have grabbed each one of these over fall of the empire i think there's only so much you can do with it i have the game at home you know i've played a ton of the modes i've hit all the shots I've done all the things and just nothing like brings me back. There's no castle from medieval madness. That thing's fun to bash. Uh, you can plunge your ball straight through the wall and start locking balls. You can bash the poor color skate and it drops down and then you're smashing and you're blowing up castles and the call outs are great and all this stuff. And it just works. It just works really well. Maybe follow the empire come together with some code, but it's still just those same seven to eight shots. The Pez head dispensers, uh, the, the, the shooter lane mech from cactus Canyon and then the funnel from diner are underneath job of the hut for some reason. And I don't really know why. And when I try to nudge the game to keep the ball going around, I don't feel like I'm really getting anywhere other than closer to a tilt. So like I, you know, disable the tilt when the ball is in the funnel so I can sit there and just manhandle the game and get it spinning around and then make it mean something, make it build up to a multiball or something. Maybe that'll come with code, but you know, I, I start getting it going around. I'm like, this is kind of fun. And then, boom, I tilt. Like, what the heck, dude? You're going to put that funnel in there? Let me have fun with the funnel, man. Turn the tilt off for like 30 seconds so I can just make the ball swirl around like it's a dryer sheet floating around the laundromat, you know? So Fall of the Empire got my pick for the bottom of the 12 games that were here. Has Walking Dead shipped yet? Should we have thrown that in here? I didn't throw that in here yet. it is at iapa but i don't know if it's actually gone to customers yet i know they're making them maybe we'll have to do an addendum for like the 13 days of 13 pins of christmas or something we'll do something silly with them maybe we'll talk about what the best mechanism was and we'll rank them all then or something all right so those are the papa john's games those are the bottom five let's get to the top this is our game recognized game every one of these games in the top five is a banger it's worth owning and just looking at it one two uh three four five if i'm stretching a little bit i i think i own or i'm going to own all five of these games that's how good they are we'll count from the bottom up let's start with number five number five and this will be this is where we'll probably differ a little bit some of you people would have put this lower but me at the number five spot i'm putting stern pinballs dungeons and dragons yes i did yes i did fifth best game I would step over all these other ones to grab this I have a D&D LE I got it new in box I got it bolted to my carpet I I like this game so much I don even know what it going for in a secondary market D LE might be 8 500 for all i know i just don look at it because i just having fun with this i put some fun mods in there i've got another one to release soon i made a little arctic scene uh with some epoxy water uh that and an altar that lights up with the flasher dome over on the right side that replaces just the thin little strip plastic that was there i totally dig it i'm having fun with this game this is tabletop gaming meets pinball it's got that code that i love from venom but like leveled up even more i get to choose characters and the characters that i choose make a difference i can unlock characters this is all i like this is all the things i love in pinball in modern pinball when i can log in keep track of what i'm doing get experience points find loot um you know get things that change the gameplay my character that i'm playing right now the barbarian instead of holding the button and going through the little blue shots as it cycles back and forth he just rages and hits them all just like hulk did in venom which i really liked like this is i love this gameplay i think it shoots just fine i think it shoots as fine as stranger things does i like the plastic ramps i can find the shots the dragon i wish the dragon did more i would not not not mechanistically he needs to do more but like participate in the game dude you're taking up you know 20 of the entire play field and the only time it's ever used right now is during the dragon multiball when i'm in modes when i'm killing orcs when i'm battling jellies uh when i'm when i'm killing rats in a basement it's he's silent man there's no talking going on it's like the dragon doesn't even exist he moves his head around he's not blocking shots i don't need to like cheese him and get him out of the way so i can hit something nothing you hit the dragon target start a multiball he does his thing goes back to sleep i want him participating in the game with me i'm fighting other dragons in the game why isn't he talking crap to the other dragons or talking crap to me or that's what i want man the the topper on black knight sword of rage is hurling insults the entire time and i love it i want an adversary that follows me throughout the entire game gives me little quips um you know uh recognizes when i do well you know reluctantly or something like let him do something else um you know have him when a ball drains like have him just vomit out another ball real quick instead of doing the traditional ball save you know here's your ball boom and he just like spits it at you like give me that give me that please give me that please i shouldn't have to ask for that that should have been hard baked in here but dungeons of dragons man i love the gameplay i love leveling up i love getting items i love unlocking characters i love all that stuff i'm already my my wallet is worried about the topper when it comes out because if there's like exclusive modes tied to it or another character i mean you know it's i'm gonna pick up an extra shift man i don't know i know it's just gonna be a pile of plastic but like i love that game that's my number fifth game number five 2025 stern pinball dnd thank you Brian Eddy thank you dwight thanks uh elizabeth i love this game i love this game so much number four number four it had to be in here somewhere and i think owning this game probably ranked it a little bit lower for me just because i have so much plays on it but it's damn good it's a damn good game every one of these games anyone could have been number one i mean it was pretty close uh but i put harry potter here at number four you're a wizard harry you're a wizard harry great freaking game uh very busy how are they going to get all seven films content in one game well this is how they do it it's everything all at once going on um you know plus a death eater that you can battle harry potter is absolutely like as strong of a license as it ever was and this is like a love letter to the that whole franchise man um it's got nods to the book with the art on the c on the collector's edition and then it's got every clip from the movie is in there like everything you would want it's just just go play harry potter it doesn't matter what you're doing maybe you want to go play quidditch for a while maybe you want to fight a death eater maybe you want to go womp that willow i don't care it's just it's everything everything is going on all at once um some people see that as a detraction because it's not you know i'm playing and like let me stay in one movie let me pick one movie let me play through it instead of just like everything everywhere all at once but damn tell me it ain't fun tell me that game ain't fun tell me it ain't a spectacle yes i wish the topper on the ce was more robust than just plastics um i wish it was 3d sculpts wish it did something better i wish it had more uh projection effects i mean elton john had fantastic projections and then harry potter has like one little light i think we could do better than that i wanted to turn my room into a magical realm of mystery and that's probably why it's at number four and not number one for me all right so what else we got we got number three this beat out harry potter i can't believe it but like i was going down from the top what did i like the best what i like second best boom boom boom jaws 50th jaws 50th win here now maybe the jaws og version would have been number four and potter would have beat it out but i'm a sucker for some sparkle in my clear coat did you see this some enterprising homeowner out there has themselves a jaws le went ahead and bought the jaws 50th and then took the play field from jaws 50th dumped it in his le took the le play field put in jaws 50th and put the whole mess up on pin side like here's a jaws 50th come and get it by the way it's got an le play field in it i took the good one bravo to you sir for making like a franken game i love that this guy's got like the best version of the le with the best parts of the 50th anniversary edition in there but still has like the mirrored back glass of the le that is absolutely something i would do i condone this wholeheartedly you know And someone's going to get a deal on Jaws 50 if it doesn't have the Sparkle play field. But my God, man. Yeah, that's a hell of a version right there. So good on you for stepping up and having a concept and following through with it. Why is this game so good? I had this game. I played it 500 times, and I still love it. Every little detail that's in there, this is what King Kong could have been if it had a compelling theme, a movie theme behind it. Jaws is everything I would want. I love the audio clips. I love how the modes work. I love all the wire forms. I love the upper play field. I love bashing the shark. Yes, I put the ball-eating shark in my premium, and boom, it was amazing. Go play it at the 1-Up Lounge. It's there right now. I love Jaws. I love the theme. I love the movie. I love what it represents in the history of cinema from the 80s. It was one of Spielberg's first movies. It almost broke him, and then it turned out to be, like, this huge hit that he's still catapulting off of. And like when you put in a high score And every now and then Keith Elwin just walks behind the window Like they just put him in there That kind of stuff man I love that kind of stuff Like that's what's missing from some of these other games Look at Fall of the Empire And look at Jaws Like what are we doing here What are we doing here man Jaws firmly at number three I love it Alright we're down to one and two We're down to one and two and there's only like two games left So which one's going to take the top spot When I reveal the second one you're going to know what the top one is but uh you know here we go number two number two winchester's mystery house i loved this concept as soon as it launched i was drawn right to brad Brad Albright's like nice turquoise accents that he put on this game and uh i remember i was i just got off of work uh night shift i was trying to rest up i'm getting text messages i roll over look at it they're like i think jenga is texting me he's like what's this haunted house girls game or who was sterling or something you know what's this what's this girls haunted house game what the hell is this and i'm like what are you talking about dude because we weren't prepped for any of this we didn't know this game was gonna drop i didn't know a new game did drop so i'm like scrolling through with fuzzy eyes like what the hell is this dude winchester mystery am i reading this correctly somebody made a game out of the freaking winchester mystery house it's barrels of fun oh i get it now i get what's going on here because I know David David Van Es. We're theme park homies. We understand things at a completely different level than the GP, general public does, and to an obsessive degree. I know the designers and architects from the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland when it was built. 1969 is when it opened. The mansion was built years before that. It took forever to figure out the concept of how to get everything to work. Do you know why there's a stretch room in the line for the Haunted Mansion? It's because they didn't have enough room to build the ride inside the park. They had to go outside of the berm, the berm of earth that surrounds Disneyland that the train goes on. They're like, we don't have enough room in the park to build this concept of a ride. So they had to put it on the other side of the train tracks, which is a much lower grade than the park is. And they're like, how are we going to get guests from the park, transport them to the other side of the railroad tracks into the old part of the parking lot and backstage area and then get them back? And Imagineering said we going to make an elevator that looks like the room is stretching And so at Disneyland it actually an elevator that takes you below ground and then you walk out and board the ride And then at the end you come up a long speed ramp kind of like the end of Pirates of the Caribbean at the Magic Kingdom, to get back to grade at Disneyland. It's a super cool effect. And then when they built the Haunted Mansion in Florida, they didn't have to worry about space. So they didn't really need to have an elevator, but they still wanted a stretching room. So in Florida, the stretching room, the ceiling goes up. The floor does not go down because they still wanted that show scene of the stretch room, but they didn't need to put an elevator. So if you've only ridden the Walt Disney World version, which is most people in the U.S., you haven't done the good Haunted Mansion yet, man. Go ride the good one. The good one's out at Disneyland. It gets made over every October through January to a Nightmare Before Christmas ride. That's the only park that's doing that. I think Tokyo does as well. But, like, go check. Go ride the real one. And then go ride the real Pirates of the Caribbean. And if you've only ridden the Florida version, you've only been on like the budget version of it. Regardless, people in the community with theme parks and pinball have been wanting to do the Haunted Mansion as a theme forever. It's got all the beats. That ride is great. You could just do mode after mode after mode, seance room, stretch room, long hallway, stairways to nowhere, little Leota, the attic scene, the graveyard scene, the ballroom scene. Like every one of those is a mode. A ghost will follow you home. There's 999 happy hunts. There's room for 1,000. Any volunteers? Bring your death certificate when you come. Like, it writes itself, man. A fun, spooky game. Forget the movies. Do the ride. The ride is perfect. The ride is also not license available. Nobody's interested. The license holders of the Haunted Mansion are not interested in turning it into a pinball machine at all at this point. Things may change. Change in the regime running the show over there. And then maybe it can happen. But for right now, it can't happen. And that's sad because this game designs its freaking self. So what do you do? You design a Haunted Mansion pinball machine. And then you go and find a license that's willing to work with you. And over there, Palo Alto, California, or Santa Clara, is Winchester Mystery House. Is there a Winchester? Really spooky, full of spirits, seances. Here it is. So I think this concept works because of that. It came at a time where we were really desperate for something new, something interesting to come out, something that wasn't seven shots in a fan layout again with like, you know, boring code, $13,000, just not impressing us. And then, boom, here's this. This is special. This is limited. You can get this and have something that people will want to come over to your house and play once they hear you have it. It's not going to be at every dime store counter like a Stern Star Wars pinball machine. This will be something super special. Also, it's got a great pedigree from a new designer that everybody knows and didn't know he was designing games. Well, guess what? Here he is. It's how Elwin became like the best designer in pinball. And then we got Carl over here who is also like a phenomenally God-given talent pinball player. And he's doing design and rules. Brad Brad Albright's on the art. It's all coming together. Perfect. The only thing I can say is it doesn't quite have the theme grabbing that number one did. and what are you going to use to beat out winchester mystery house i've probably gushed about you know the design the layout the theme the concept how this is the closest we're going to get to a haunted mansion pinball machine with something changes at disney and that's evil dead so they went for broke with evil dead um i don't i don't even want to ask them what the build of materials was but to keep a game sub ten thousand dollars make it a wide body and fill it with as much that's in this game there's not a square inch this game doesn't have something phenomenal this the lower play field is super fun like when you're done with it you like you feel like you want to spend a little bit more time down there that's the side of a good upper play field and a lower play field there's a giant hand on a conveyor that goes back and forth as a bash toy this thing is loaded with sculpts loaded with ramps it's it's a spiritual successor to medieval madness it's a fan-ish layout but doesn't really feel like it it hides it well it's got things hiding around every nick and corner and that's just the layout once you add in bruce campbell himself partial license holder to evil dead and he was involved in this game like probably more than slash was involved in guns and roses you're gonna have something special uh the call outs the quips the insults the double entendre uh that he brings to that it's just like theme dripping florida ceiling even talk about the topper even talk about the modes the fact that two movies are in here there were two separate licenses these guys had to go get raggle both licenses plus the star of the movie and have him record custom call outs for the entire game and deliver that entire package wrapped in franchise art for under ten thousand dollars you are gonna get a game of the year from me dude so i know it's hard like how do you put evil dead against harry potter you know personal tastes you know somebody's gonna put one above the other um you know someone would put winchester above evil dead you know if you are not into the horror theme you didn't know evil dead you can't have at your house you're gonna pick something different but this is a damn banger list of 12 games that came out in 2025 that shipped that are like i i either own or i would own every single one of these there's not a scratch and dent on here um just that i don't have a 300 pound p3 cabinet throw a portal into uh because the extended version i guess is playing even better now they got the jank out of there that was in the prototype cabinet i can't wait hopefully to be able to go up and play one of these new portals and see like how everything's going on there um it's a it's been a great year for pinball everybody we've got a couple weeks left of the year we got another major holiday coming up and then it's going to be new years i'm working way too much but i'm forecasting myself in 2026 i'm manifesting that i'll be out there and i'll be you know living down down benton way i'm gonna have more time at home i got some big ideas i think we're actually going to implement in 2026 it's amazing man and um i sold off a couple of games so i'm down to only 15 or something and so now i get to build it back up and with some of the rumors that i'm hearing about next year some of the licenses we're gonna see uh you can swing a cat and i think you'll hit a great game i don't think there's a loser game in the bunch and i Can't wait to see what comes out. I just hope they really bring it. I think every company is really kind of maturing now. You know, Turner is going to have his third release here pretty soon. And, you know, that's usually where you surge ahead and have something awesome. And, you know, look around at the boutique market right now. There's like nothing but just like great games coming out. And I can say for between the rumors and what I know, there's nothing but great games coming out from these people in 2026. And so I'm glad there's a little bit of heat from the fan community on companies like Stern because they have the power to turn around and really wow us by like bringing in some magic, getting rid of some of the plastics, bringing in some more mechanisms, bringing in some more sculpts, really, you know, redesigning, taking the concept of a topper, go back to the workshop and come up with something impressively interesting that we can't wait to get. And I'm here for it, man. This is so great. If it wasn't for Wizard of Oz and their gigantic screen that they brought out, I don't think we would have got the leap from the DMD to the LCD screen from Stern. So I think the creativity and the bangers that are coming out from all these other companies will force Stern to level up the experience for all of us. And then we all win. We all win in this world. So I'm very excited about that. Thanks for hanging out with me. I hope I made your commute a little bit better. I have my travel caster here. I don't even know what songs I have pre-programmed here. I want to talk like a robot again. Hello, go buy John Wick. It's $4,500 on Amazon. Thank you, robot. That's a very great concept there. I heard that all of those Amazon games actually didn't go through and got canceled. The $4,500 John Wick is not real. Whoa, hey, hey there. What the hell just happened? All right, let me find a song here. We'll play us on the way out, and I'll record more as soon as I can. I'm going to try to get up early, and we'll do a Sunday Live tomorrow. Thanks for listening, everybody. Email me at DonSpinballPodcast at gmail.com. More content always comes through the Patreon. I really appreciate the support over there from everybody. I got people streaming in there now. I feel like I'm unworthy, but I need to step it up and really reinforce the value for all of you guys. That's Patreon.com backslash DonSpinballPodcast. We gave away four Translites from the Midnight Madness release party with Beetlejuice, like the special ones with the logo on there. I don't think those will ever exist again. and you got them for free just for being a patreon member you were entered in that giveaway so congratulations to everybody there if you've ordered stuff from me it's coming to your door i'm coming back to your eardrums as soon as we have some more some more pin stuff to talk about talk about i'm so exhausted uh be good everybody i'll talk to you later you're a wizard harry