This episode of the Eclectic Gamers podcast is brought to you by the Roanoke Pinball Museum in Roanoke, Virginia. The Roanoke Pinball Museum is an interactive museum dedicated to the science and history of pinball. Their mission is to cultivate curiosity in science, art, and history through pinball while preserving and honoring its role in American culture. The museum is open every day except Monday and houses over 65 machines, with models ranging from 1932 to 2018. Sadly, no Cylon models have survived. Roto-Pimple Museum, by your command. So much to talk about. No, it's December. Nothing's announced in December. Nothing happens in December. December is a slow month, and it's always such a pain to find topics because nothing happens in December. Except this year, because 2020 doesn't play by any rules but its own. Ain't that the truth. Yeah, it is the truth. So, I know you have Cyberpunk. I ended up with Cyberpunk. Apparently, it was pre-ordered for my birthday, and it's been delayed so long, surprise. So, it just came back at my door. And so, we're going to talk about that in the video game section. Yep, that seems like a really good spot for that. What have you been up to? Not a lot of work. It turned out I'm doing a lot of year-end wrap-up stuff and prepping for 2021, and then there was a new grant project I was approached about, which possibly was greenlit this last week. I think it will be greenlit, but they didn't tell me that it was. But I was so busy, I didn't follow up on it. I ain't got no time for that. I got other stuff I got to do. I'm already working on another project that I'm trying to ram in as much as possible before the end of the year. But in gaming and pinball news, I did finish my birthday present from you. I finished the story of Grand Theft Auto V. So I wasn't sure what I was going to go to next. I was thinking Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which has also been sitting since my birthday. But Cyberpunk arrived So it's Cyberpunk instead So it's Cyberpunk instead Well I was just thinking You know what it's a really really rare time Where we both get a game Essentially at release And we're both playing it I mean that almost never happens Yeah it really almost never happens And I just thought it was humorous Because when we were having that Our little IM's the other day Where you mentioned it had arrived I just thought it was funny because I'd literally just started the download like five minutes before. And I'm glad I contacted Consolidated, my ISP, and my prior deal discount. I always get a discount deal, and it had expired. So they put me automatically on a new one, but the new one was $5 more money a month than what I was paying. So I called them, and they're like, well, if you agree to a two-year deal, we'll double you to the 100 megabits per second down and up. And it was at the old price of what I was paying for 50. which is like, I pay like $46 a month for that speed. Yeah. Yeah, we've got $100. We pay more than that. We pay $70-something. That's because I've got Google Fiber competing with them as well as whatever, I don't know if it's Comcast or who the third cable provider is in Olathe, plus the AT&T I think even offers Gigabit at this point up to. Yeah, and here where I live, there is nobody else. My choices are Spectrum, Spectrum, Spectrum, Spectrum. Or there is one other company that offers it, but the fastest they get is 15. It's basically offered. It's a phone group that basically it's offered for people who need a little bit of Internet. It's basically for the people who would have had dial-up if dial-up was still a thing. Grandma needs email. That's exactly what it is. Because that's sure not going to cut it in my household of four. No, no. Especially with the multitasking that me and my children do. When I first got this house, and for those that don't know, Tony was one of my housemates at the time. I'm trying to remember. We had really slow DSL, I mean, comparatively now. It was like five down or something in the early 2000s. But back in the early 2000s, that was also not terrible. Yeah, that was enough for World of Warcraft. It worked fine. It worked fine. But I can't imagine trying to do that right now, considering between me playing games online, my wife plays games online, both children play games online, everybody watching whatever streaming service they're watching, be it Disney+, or YouTube, or Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or whatever, normally while playing a game online. plus download. Yeah. But you don't have any caps. I don't have any caps, and we don't have any caps, and we don't. I don't even think we have a point where we get throttled. Yeah. Or if we do, it's high enough that we barely notice it. I don't think it's very viable in this area. I mean, because your pricing, while it's higher than where there are more franchises specifically, everyone's living close enough that in theory they could move so just by comparison where my old office well my new office is in Topeka as well but we used to have internet through Cox Communications out there and that was 25 down 25 up $120 a month wow and yes it was with a fixed IP for the VoIP phones but I think the fixed IP only was $5 of that or something So, yeah, no, it's like, no, we got it pretty good. Or I like to rephrase it as we got it at least how it should be. Right. Some other countries have it really good. But we are not here to complain about that or make people who are stuck out where they're throttled and capped and or capped and or pay more money feel bad. That's not what we do here on a Collective Gamers podcast. Instead, we talk about pinball and we talk about video games. And we're going to start with a pinball segment. I got four topics. There were more than four topics to talk about, but I can only talk about so much, and some of the stuff I just don't care about. So if we don't mention something that you care about, Dennis doesn't care about it. Possibly. Or I forgot, and I forget a lot. I actually had to start these notes early because I'm like, oh, I'm going to forget some of this stuff. It's just like there's not enough. What's newsworthy enough? I don't know, but I'll tell you what. When you don't cover something and people think it's newsworthy, they write in and tell you about it. I know which companies have all the biggest fanboys because they don't let you forget about it when you leave off their nothing thing. But all of our topics this time are somethings, so we don't have to worry about that. But, like, I think there's some news about JJP shipping games. We're not going into that. I'm not going into code. I very rarely cover code updates. I don't think it matters. Yeah, I don't think code updates matters. Well, how much of the audience owns the given game? I don't know. Let's just assume none. So it makes my life easier. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, and here's the thing. They should, if they own the game, they shouldn't be relying on our podcast to tell them that there's a code update out there. Yeah, I think I read on Facebook, TNA has a code update. Don't know what's in it. Don't know if it's already out or if it's just an upcoming code update. Surprise? I don't know. But there you go. There's a little code update surprise. Now, here's something that not everyone can take advantage of. But it is a new game. It's a new mini game, so I do want to cover it. and that is on the P3, Multimorphic's platform system, they have a game called Shoot and Scoot that just came out. And so it's $169. It works with all the play field modules. And my understanding is Multimorphic has rolled out a way now for the mini games that want to, to be able to transition so that they don't just work on one play field, they work on all of them. That's interesting. I really like the idea. Well, I mean, it's going to make the multi... I was going to say multiplayer, and that's not the right word. It's going to make those who make the minigames, I think, have the potential to get more sales. I don't know. I think that a high percentage of the P3 owners own all of the Playfield modules. I would assume so. But I don't know that. Because the fan base is so small and the number of games out there are so small and most of them are so rabidly into it, I would be surprised if they didn't buy everything they could get their hands on. But as time goes by, that can shift. If it gets more popular, that can shift. And, of course, those that got in really early might not always get every mod I could see. In their instance, they might be like, I'm not playing pinball as much as I was five years ago. I'm not going to pick up ice or whatever. So, I mean, I know Nick Valdredge, who did Ranger in the Ruins, I believe he's looking at modifying his software so that it will run on more than just a cosmic kart racing. But, you know, you have to factor in what is this new. I mean, it is, in a way, you have to be cautious because it's like, these are entirely new layouts at this point. Does your game work the same way at that stage? It depends on the complexity of the minigame and what the goals are. But anyway, so Scoot and Shoot, I would describe it as an endless runner. That's the video game genre it seems to fall under. It's a precision and ball control focus where you're trying to dodge obstacles and such as your character is moving on the digital play field. So, I mean, I like endless runner games. I don't play them very much, but I have gotten a few of them, and I'll sometimes, especially if I don't want to think about a lot of stuff and just do something sort of reflex-based, I'll play them. the only thing I would critique because I can because I'm on a podcast is scoot and shoot is descriptive but maybe it's just me that all I think of is like a dog scooting its butt on the floor and I don't need to describe to you what's shooting out of where it's rubbing but that's what I think of when I see shoot and scoot that's actually not what I think of but that comes more from my tabletop gaming background. Because in that situation, shoot and scoot is more one of those things. It's like where you shoot, or you take, if you're in a game that allows you to choose your, like if you're doing your shooting round first or your movement round first, most places let you do movement round first, but normally you can get, there are options out there, or certain characters who have the ability to do their shooting first and then they can move, or they can move after the shooting. So you can have them in place, you can shoot, and then you can move them into cover. Hey, that's like XCOM. Yeah, you can do this thing. Yeah, XCOM is one of the things that is a video game that has similar. That's my thought. But I think that's interesting. It sounds like another one of those mini games that feels very much like a high-level pinball training aid, because some of your others have felt that way, where it's very much about extreme precision and making, like, very specific shots. And I always thought they felt like it'd be a really good game to do just, like, hey, I want to work on this type of ball control type thing. Yeah, I like the idea. Like the one where you sink the ships. Right, yeah. Was that Cannon Lagoon? Cannon Lagoon or something. Then there's Barnyard where you're hitting the animals as they move across. And that's just because you're into animal abuse, yeah. Yeah. But now you make me think that maybe that minigame's not very popular with PETA. I don't know. Should we bring it to their... No. what's popular with PETA? I don't know. I wouldn't know what would be. I remember when I was in college and they had the ad campaign to try and encourage people to drink beer, not milk. I thought it was one of the dumbest campaigns I ever saw. But it was really popular on the college campus. Sure. Anything that tried to say alcoholism was fine was literally embraced. It was very pro-alcoholism. Yeah, that was my problem with it. It was like, there's already plenty. It was always like, it's college. There are plenty of people with plenty of beer already. Do we really need to encourage everyone to drink more? It just seemed a little misguided, but a lot of their strategies weren't really focused on health concerns or anything. It was just focused on getting people not to do things to animals, which is their mission, so I get it. Right, so I mean, that's a success. Mm-hmm, yeah. Well, you know what else is a success? No, I have no idea. Led Zeppelin. It's one of the most successful rock bands of all time. The Fathers of Metal, or is it the Grandfathers? I don't know, but there's some sort of parental chain, and they're involved in the development of heavy metal, or so it is said. I bring up Led Zeppelin not because I am a fan, though I do like a number of their songs. I was going to say, are you a fan? I would assume so, but I assume everybody's a fan of music I like. That's tricky because there are some Led Zeppelin songs I really like, and there are some I do not like at all. But I think that's every band. Is there any band where you like every song? I can literally tell you there is one album in the entire world that I've listened to, and I am perfectly happy to listen to every song on that album. And that's it. I can only think of one album. And now you will tell us. No, I'll make people think It's Fizzy Fuzzy Big and Buzzy By The Refreshments There's not a bad song on that album Well, in terms of albums Obviously, the more I heard the album The more often I'd be like Nah, I'm not in the mood for that particular song But in terms of the one I would eyesight as The most, I guess the most It's not a perfect album The most perfect album I've heard Would be Daft Punk's Discovery album I think every song That is a good album Every song on that is good And I think that's why it works so well in the animated version they made with all of them. Right. It tells an entire story. That's one of my, that is my top album. That is a really good album. So that's the one I cite. But sadly. I don't normally, Daft Punk's not in my normal listening queue. I've got a few of their songs in my playlist, but not very many. Yeah. And I've removed more and more as I've heard them enough. I'm like, I don't need it in the rotation anymore. It doesn't fit with anything. I shake up the lineup as I see fit. But I actually own that album. I have, I'm the guy who has, I've got one playlist that has every song I like of any genre in it, which is always fun on car rides when we'll be sitting there and it'll jump from Eminem to George Strait and then some Beethoven. Yeah. Makes for real interesting conversations in the car. I don't tend to do structured playlists. Mine's usually, it's just, it's everything. And so it's a mix. I've got, like, the orchestral theme to A View to a Kill. I've got OutKast. That's so good. I've got Daft Punk. I've got Led Zeppelin on there. Or maybe not currently. They don't have anything through the Amazon Prime app. You know, things like that. Fleetwood Mac. It's all sorts of, just a weird mix. But you know what? Practically none of them have pinball machines. But that's going to change for Led Zeppelin's seamless transitions. what I do. Beautifully. Back on topic. Back on topic. So, earlier, well, now last week, Led Zeppelin's Facebook page announced that they will be having something coming soon from Stern Pinball, and it was a teaser trailer, showed you nothing of the game, but obviously Stern Pinball is going to be a pinball machine. Stern has shared that as well now at this point, and my understanding is at the time of this recording, the dealers have not had their dealer meeting yet with Stern, so they don't know much. This one's been controlled fairly well. I have not yet seen any leaked photos. So, I guess they've kept it relatively well under... That's, you know, that was similar, too, with, you know, the leaks on Avengers were only right before the announcement, so there wasn't much there. I think they were doing a lot better job containing that sort of stuff. So, spoilers, Led Zeppelin is coming, and I guess, given that this has been pushed out by Led Zeppelin, the ability to order will be in December. I was thinking they would probably hold until January on that, and I was wrong yet again on when games are coming out. But close. I'm within a month. Yeah, I'm pretty impressed, because I didn't really know if they would do it or not. Well, I mean, what are your thoughts? My initial thought is, I think what many people who are pinheads are going to think, it's going to be as soon as the images and the footage comes out, it's going to be compared to J.J.P.'s Guns N' Roses immediately, and I just cannot fathom that visually it will live up. I will, honestly, you're probably right. I have a hard time, if there's one thing that J.J.P. always gets right over Stern, is that their games always look better. They have better integration, they have better light shows, and they tend to have really good art that goes with the theme, good theme integration. Now, the art could be awesome. I should have clarified. I'm thinking like, yeah, that integration, that theme integration. You know, GNR looks like a stage show. It looks like you're at a rock concert. I just, I don't think Led Zeppelin's going to go for that at all, which is probably for the best, because if it did try and look like a rock show, I don't think they can do it with their bill of materials. No, I think the thing, I don't think they can cover it nearly as well. But, but, but, but, but, nine times out of ten, I honestly think Stern's play better. Yes. And the rumor mill is this is Steve Ritchie. Oh, yeah. If this is Steve Ritchie, I mean, that's, yeah. It'll definitely play better. So people are thinking high flow game. Rumor is Tim Sexton will be on code. He was on code for Black Knight Sword of Rage. I mean, without seeing it, there's not a whole lot we can really say. I mean, what's going for it is we know Steve's a known entity. His more recent games have been somewhat polarizing. It seems like he gets stuck with expensive licenses a lot, and so there tends to be less on the play field. And so I think it will look barren, perhaps compared even to Turtles and Avengers. Definitely will compare. I mean, there's just no way it's not going to look more barren than GNR. That's just a given. At least the higher-end models. but that being said what was the last really high flow game we got? Was it his? Was it Star Wars? Star Wars' code doesn't lend itself to flow. You have to trap up a lot in my opinion and really those modes and those rules have you stop a lot so I never thought it really played to the layout in the way I would have expected it to but that's just my opinion I know some people love Star Wars It's okay I need more time on it to know I might like the game overall I just don't think the code played to the flow if that makes sense like there's a lot of the code wants you to stop and think about things other than the plunge the plunge is terrible on Star I hate that plunge into the standups and then into the left outling that's my second least favorite plunge of all time my least favorite is of course any plunge that doesn't actually get the ball onto the play field. And I've seen that a lot at shows. It happens. It happens. I would say, if I was going to make some guesses, we've already made a few, but I would say yeah, this game's going to be popular. I mean, they would have to mess up so bad to not have this be a huge game. We can delve more into this, and it's going to sound strange for me to say it this way, but we can delve more into this on the video game section, But I'm pretty curious how they're going to reveal this with all the DMCA stuff going on with Twitch. Yeah. Because a music pin, without you being able to experience the songs, well, it's like going to a rock concert with earplugs and sound-canceling headphones on top of them. What's the point? And this might be a situation where a Twitch reveal might not be their best option. Or this might be a time, if they're thinking ahead enough, since they've obviously worked with the band and have contacts, at least in the business area section of it, to work on setting something up so it can be pre-approved as an okay usage. That's a lot of work that they've never had to do before. Do you think they'll go that route? I don't think they'll do it. No, I don't. I just think it's the route they should go if they are wanting to do this properly. It's the route that they should go. And we'll talk about this more in the video game segment, but with some of the things that are being looked at on the way Twitch handles the whole DMCA thing, if everything goes forward the way it's looking going forward, I can almost guarantee you that modern pinball is dead on streaming. To be fair, it's a very small niche market on streaming, and I don't think anybody's really too concerned about protecting it compared to most streaming and most streamers, but I have a very hard time seeing it survive in what looks like it's coming. Yet I announced on the Pinball Network Discord, which is for all the creators, to the streamers, my recommendation is every single one of them get an older game if they want to keep streaming. You know, get like a System 11 or before, or you can go with pretty much anything that isn't licensed, but that mostly means turning older. And if you want to keep streaming, I would recommend having something. You know, you can do steps to not let people hear the music and such, But the easiest way is to say, okay, we're going to be streaming high speed and firepower now. Just have at least one game in your repertoire that you know you can do safely. Because, you know, there's also a, and we don't know if this will go through or not, but as is often the case with legislative bodies, when there's emergency bills or rushed bills that have to happen, such as the funding bill through the U.S. Congress, legislators like to slip things in without going through the normal, proper committee process. And there is a proposal to make DMCA violations on Twitch a felony. Cool. You know, we talked about last time, or I did on, I'm sorry, I did last week on the Pinball Show, over on the Pinball Network, I was talking with Zach, and he mentioned that there was an interview with Gary Stern on the Super Awesome Pinball Show, and Gary had talked about IP violations being felonies. That confused me at first, and I had to look it up. And Gary was right. They are. And he was talking about mods, people selling, using licensed assets in mods that they didn't have permission for. But Twitch counts as a public performance. So IP violations, copyright violations, I should say, regarding streaming on Twitch currently at worst is a misdemeanor. So the penalties are a lot less severe. You're not a convicted felon if you get convicted of doing something. You know, usually you do a takedown thing and you don't get legally punished at all. But with that sort of change, then this sort of airing and the legislator claims, oh, I just don't want people to rebroadcast, like, sporting events and rock concerts on these services. But it would apply to, I mean, the way it's written, it will apply to video games with real music in them, licensed music, it will apply to pinball machines, it will apply to all sorts of stuff. And so that is a big, there's a big difference where you might be going, ah, the worst thing that's going to happen is Twitch is going to cancel my account, which to a lot of streamers, y'all, that's the end of their livelihood. Right. It's time to go get a job. Yeah. It's time to go get a real job is what you meant to say. No, I do consider having done streaming, you've done streaming, I've done streaming. I mean, I can understand, especially for the people who put a lot of time and it is there where they stream every day with everything on the back end and all the prep work. It is a job. There is a lot of stuff that goes to it. But it's not just, if you want to be very successful at it, it's not just sitting down in front of your computer or your console and firing up the stream and just sitting there and BSing with a couple of people watching your stream. There's a lot more to it for the very successful people. But we'll go more into that later in the show because we have a whole segment on DMCA and Twitch coming up. So, spoiler alert. Another spoiler alert in the realm of pinball, Alien Pinball. You remember that white-body game from Highway. It's come back. Sometimes they come back. If you don't nuke the site from orbit, they can come back. And so, this time, there's a new veneer to it all. This is Pinball Brothers. They've been teasing for a while on their social media that there was going to be a return of Alien Pinball. And so I've included in our internal notes a copy of their announcement. I'm not going to read the whole thing. I'm going to touch on a couple of elements that I wanted us to discuss. First is in addressing why are they relaunching Alien at this point in time. They claim that there's so much effort that was put into the game. It hasn't been appreciated by the fans enough. And they've taken steps to overhaul its electronics and make changes. There have been changes to it. So it will be, in some ways, a different version. And so they're saying this time around they're not going to take pre-orders, they're not going to ask for any prepayment, and you order through distributors. Now, for those that know about the Highway Pinball Saga, the nutshell summary is while in the process of making and shipping and selling Alien Pinball Highway went out of business Not everyone who bought and paid fully for their games got their games They didn't make enough before they went under. They did what is essentially a bankruptcy process. They were based in the United Kingdom. It's different. It's called something different. And functionally, it's not quite the same as U.S. bankruptcy. so in regards to those individuals that got burned on their attempt to get what highway or excuse me what what pinball brothers is referring to as first generation alien they're offering vouchers that will be worth at least 50 of the loss but they're not guaranteeing that it will be worth more than that so that's for any private customer that prepaid for alien and was not delivered and those that are interested they you can email them you have to give them proof of payment proof that you didn't get your money back, and then that this is voluntary. Pinball Brothers can decide who's eligible and who's not. They have a disclaimer saying you can't enforce the voucher claim via legal action. So if they change their mind on you, they're claiming you have no recourse. And that the request process is open until the last day of February 2021, and then they're going to do the reviews. And then if you are issued a voucher, the expiration date is set to be used by the end of 2023. so you get a discount essentially a coupon to buy a new version of Alien I paid $10,000 and then I get a coupon that's for half off of another machine so I've got to pay another $5,000 or more whoever, who knows I haven't heard a price I don't know a price I don't know everything that's changing on this I heard some rumors that it was going to be a standard width instead of a wide width I've heard the designer I've heard someone tell me the designer, I hear this direct from the designer, but the layout designer said no, it's still a wide body. I've heard that the screen in the play field is gone. That one is... That will save on BOM. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know who's building it. I don't know if Pinball Brothers has a fact. I don't know if they're commissioning this or contracting with some... I don't know. I don't know. Well, I mean, that's the question, because Pinball Brothers, as I recall, is the group that they, how do I want to say this? Assets were transferred from Highway before they filed for their, whatever their version of bankruptcy is, so that assets would not go to auction to highest bidder. They were taken and protected by the Pinball Brothers, brothers for cut rate prices because what felt might not have actually been, but kind of felt like the hiding of assets to protect it for a future attempt to reenter the pinball industry. I'm going to go with that. That's my personal opinion, and it could be wrong, but that's how it felt in the news releases originally. That is a very good summary. I think the thing to point out is the process, as I understand it, that Pinball Brothers did is completely legal. It is 100% legal. So I want to note that. We're not making an accusation. No. What they did was 100% legal. You just have to remember that just because something is legal doesn't always make it moral. Right. And one of the questions, I guess a rhetorical question that I had was, how forgiving will the pinball hobby be to pinball brothers for the tactics that they used to try and get as much back in terms of as a creditor as possible and the fact that so many people got burned in not receiving their machines from highway pinball. And I say it rhetorically because this is pinball. Pinheads have continuously disappointed me when it has come to having any sort of moral integrity, quite frankly. Yeah. At this point, I've come to the realization that thanks to evolution, pinball fanatics have naturally evolved knee pads for pinball companies. Hmm. That's an interesting way to put it. The way I would place it is that the way I think of it is a lot of people, their whole concern is just about getting something that they want to play. And they're willing to look past an awful lot in order to do that. I mean, this is, and I've, in all honesty, with a lot of these pinball companies and pinheads, and I've said it in the past, it feels like an abusive relationship. and it still does. Yeah. I mean, now, the question is, you know, it's all a matter of degree as well. I mean, there's obviously practically every pinball company does stuff that does not resonate well all the time with everyone. And so that's where examples like the voucher that Pinball Brothers is doing is an attempt, I feel, to sort of mitigate some of that. And for a lot of people, maybe that's sufficient. They're like, okay, they're not legally obligated to give you a free game. They're not legally obligated to give you anything. So they're giving you a discount. That's more than they, you know, it reminds me of Deep Root and the decision to do the Zidware deals with people. You know, that was a, okay, yeah, we've hired J-Pop. We're not legally obligated to do anything regarding what he was doing with Zidware. But we know a lot of people have a morality objection to the fact that we have come in and hired this person that has tried to get out of having to fulfill obligations that he had. So we're going to try and do something. It's not going to be a complete everything, but we're going to try and do something to sort of smooth that over and let you hopefully not hate us as a company. And you'd be willing to buy from us because we've taken these steps. That's what I see with the voucher. That's what I think the voucher is trying to do. But that's an interesting comment because that's slightly different. That is a company trying to cover themselves because they hired a designer that, for whatever reason, they felt it was in their best interest to hire. whereas now we're talking about a company that legally shifted assets that could have been sold to have allowed these people who were left in the lurch to have actually received 100% of their money back instead of receiving nothing back. So this company, in a way, directly stabbed all of those people in the back and now is coming back to him and going, oh, you, it's okay. It's okay. You're just a little hurt. You felt better. Here, here, here's some cookies, and we're friends again, and here's the game you originally wanted, and you only have to pay, you know, even more than you've already paid, but not as much as somebody else who might want to buy it. And look, all it took was a knife in the back. I just was a little stabbing between friends. and so yeah what i so again getting back to highway uh when it was when it was going to be shut down when they uh it was liquid the company was liquidated so the uh and i think i can't remember the the term of what what they call it in the uk what they were what they were doing but the but the process ultimately ended up with a with a liquidation and so the challenge would normally be, well, that you do. I mean, it's a frustrating process with liquidation because you sell the assets as you know, you auction them off or whatnot. And then the creditors get partial payment back to their owed debt, ideally. A lot of times, not every creditor gets money. And there's an order in terms of which creditors are deserving first. Here in the U.S., for example, employee wages are a priority. People who are working and get their paychecks, that's a priority creditor. And then certain other people are priority creditors to pay and have things structured. And this is a line from an article in Pinball News about Highway Pinball Faces Liquidation was the name of the article. This is from April 26, 2018. I want to read a short paragraph about that was discussing this process. Curiously, the Pinball Brothers Company was formed when the new directors took control of Highway Pinball, and it seems to have been the business through which parts and equipment was purchased. The company listing describes if that is the case, then those and other assets may already have been reclaimed and won't form part of any liquidation of Highway Pinball. If the licenses were also a part of that arrangement, it would allow Pinball Brothers to use those parts and equipment to manufacture Alien or future licensed titles for which designs already exist, such as Queen, Live, or Playboy elsewhere under the brand. And I'm ending my quote now. So that's where I get into about the, here's my take. when they sort of seized control or took control. I don't know if they seized it. When they took control from Andrew Highway to run Highway Pinball, they shifted some assets over to this newly formed Pinball Brothers. And you can transfer assets between companies. Once enough time has passed under the UK system, I had looked it up at one point. I remember it was six months or what. That no longer is seen as you sheltering, like you did it to avoid having to pay them out in a liquidation or anything, but rather it was just a normal transfer. So, but my take, this is my personal opinion, was that Pinball Brothers, when they did all this and they knew the books and they saw how much was owed to creditors, and they even after all of this were the biggest creditor to Highway, they were like, I feel like they knew this company was not going to last. And so they took steps to shield as much as they could so that they could reopen a new company at some stage, or go back into the pinball game at some stage. And I think this is the fruition of that. I'm surprised it took this long, but in a way that might not be bad because there was a lot, there would have been a lot of enmity to Pinball Brothers if they had come out like two months later saying we're selling Alien, and everyone is just out of luck who bought the old one. But I mean, that is still what's being said now. They're offering this voucher to kind of be a balm, a salve on those wounds. But this was what You know, I feel that they knew that Highway could not actually build and deliver at the rate their debt load was. They did it, you know, they did it for a little while to do what they could. It didn't work out. And here they are with, I mean, they still lost. They still lost funds. Yeah. They were still a creditor, but they kept all the important stuff. And I remember seeing that list of liabilities and the list of assets that Highway had. And Highway had, like, nothing left. and that was because Pinball Brothers has all the good stuff. That was my take. And so I'm not interested in this because, I mean, I'd only really be interested in it. I love the theme. You know I love the theme. I know you do. If it was a standard body, I would probably reevaluate it because while I think the software was really cool with Alien and I liked the look, I didn't love how it played. It's not a bad game, but it's just not. I wouldn't have paid what they were even asking for back in the day. No. This strategy that Pinball Brothers did, I don't approve of it. I don't care that it's legal. I don't approve of it. And so I won't support them. Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right in my personal opinion. I don't think what happened was moral or should be supported. But it is, like you said, legal. As we say in our video games, live by the sword, die by the sword. And by that I mean it was all in with Highway. You should have either tried to make it work or you should have failed and then all the creditors should have been treated equally. Did what you did to try and be able to restart into pinball. And I'm at the stage now where when companies fail at pinball, they need to just stay out of it. They just need to go away. And, like, I mean, I've heard rumors that maybe Dutch Pinball is the one that's going to build these games. Oh, God. And my full hats off to Dutch Pinball. They have endured far longer than I ever said they would. They are getting games to the pre-orderers. It's still a failure, though. They took so long to do it. In my opinion, they should fulfill those, sell whatever Lebowski's they can to additional people, and then close up shop and be done with pinball. I don't disagree with you. I would be, if that's what they did, it would be really impressive. Yeah. Well, I mean, if there's a market for it, okay. I'll let the market decide. I mean, it will determine based off of what people want to buy, what they'll be willing to support. So, okay. But I'm not buying from them either. No. Nope. And Lebowski is a theme that I personally love, like you love aliens. I remember you really were tempted to get a trans light at one of the Texas Pinball Festival shows. I was. And I really considered it. It's a game that was very high on my interest list. But when everything else fell into place, it was like, I don't want to get caught in this trap. Yeah. Well, a company I would be willing to consider buying from, because I do not disagree with the strategy that they've done, like regarding J-Pop, is Deep Root. the only thing is that I haven't seen a game yet that I want to buy. But like conceptually, like that, the deal, you know, that it's not, they didn't take over Zidware, the full kind of package arrangement they tried to do for Litigants. They took good steps. They've also made a lot of missteps regarding the launch of their company. Right, but that's not, I don't think they made missteps when it came to how they handled the J-Pop thing. It didn't cost people money, is the thing. It didn't cost pre-orderers their hard-earned money. That's my problem. I don't like people giving money for things and either never getting their item, which is the worst, or making people wait over half a decade. That's a problem, too. I mean, that's a failure. At some point, you've gone from a delay to being ridiculous. And I don't like ridiculous in pinball. I like ridiculous in my comedy routines. And so we have news from Deep Root. Their website is live. And there have been interviews. So they have put out a wave of new communications to the public. There's a link to the website in our show notes, so people can go and check it out, including going to the order page for Raza, Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland, their first pinball machine. There are also a couple of interviews that I have linked. There's an interview over with Pinball Profile, hosted by Jeff Teolis, and then Martin and Jonathan with Pinball News and Pinball Magazine, respectively, host a monthly, normally monthly, Pinball News and Pinball Magazine podcast, but they have a special episode, which is over two hours long. Which show you should listen to depends on what you want to know about. The Pinball Profile interview is a panel. So it's not just Robert Mueller, who's the principal of Deep Roots, also Steven Bowden, who's done the rules, and then there's Quinn, I can't remember his last name, I apologize, who I think is the storyboarder, who does the story work for the game. Anyway, so it's a three-person panel that Jeff Teolas is speaking to about Raza. It's not a particularly long episode. It doesn't really delve into a lot of the struggles of the company either. It's really fairly narrowly focused on Raza. The Pinball News and Pinball Magazine interview is just with Robert Mueller. They ask a number of – it's not a hard-hitting interview, but they ask the harder questions about – they're willing to go into the elements of why was this delay? Why was this – why did you do it this way? how'd you feel about this screw-up sort of stuff. But granted, it's two hours long, so they had a lot more time to go into stuff. And it really focuses overall on the company, not Raza specifically. So I'd say if you want to know about Raza, you want to listen to Pinball Profile. If you want to know about Deep Root, you want to listen to Pinball News and Pinball Magazine. So I link both because it depends what you want. It was also announced that the Deep Six or the six people who went down to a few months ago now, I don't remember exactly which month, to do the, you know, examination of all the stuff. And initially it was going to be kind of this launch thing. They are now all released from their nondisclosure agreements. This is good. Yeah. So, yeah, I was just going to say, you know, there's no, I don't want to go and tear into the website and say, yeah, there's, I mean, there's stuff there. The pricing's higher than what we saw on that. When we talked about the purported staging site, the pricing is much higher than it was, you know, several hundred higher. The arcade edition of Razanah, $5,000 gain. I think it's more around $5,800. So there are differences like that. But they're saying they're, I mean, they're taking the orders. They're going to ship in 2021, early 2021. So it requires a deposit. There are a few things from the interview. I don't know if you heard the interviews. They're very long. No, I did not. So when you add them all together, I mean, you're getting close to like three hours of interview. There are a few pieces. Here's one I thought I'd get your thoughts on. I believe this was in the Pinball News, Pinball Magazine interview. There's a question about now you need to do a deposit on Raza. I think it's $1,000 if you want the arcade edition, and then it's $2,000 if you want the extra edition. And Robert pushed back when the interviewers suggested that he was doing pre-orders. And he had initially promised that there would be no pre-orders. And he disagreed with them and said that this is not the same as a pre-order. A deposit is exactly the same as a pre-order. His argument as to why... Isn't it fully refundable? I don't know if it's fully refundable. That wasn't his argument. his argument was it's fully protected. That money is in a separate account for when the game is to be shipped. He views a pre-order, Robert, views a pre-order as you have to pay this money because I need this money to buy the parts to make your game. That's not how pre-order, that's not what pre-order is, that's not what a pre-order anywhere else is. If you pre-order a video game, you're not pre-ordering the video game so that they can... finish designing the video game. Okay. I thought you would disagree, but anyway, that was the... Like Spooky taking the deposits on Rick and Morty. Go to pre-orders. It would be pre-orders, right. It's not paid in full pre-orders. It's a deposit. Just like where people go to a distributor and are like, hey, here's blank amount of money. I want to use this as a deposit on the next... on the LE for the next announced Stern game, even though I don't know what it is yet, that's a pre-order. You might have put a deposit down, but they are functionally the same thing. It is a pre-order on a game. You're saying, hold my position on this game. I am paying you to pre-order a game in my name. yeah I thought this was a little odd to try and make a semantic argument on this Robert did also acknowledge that a lot of stuff he said really early in Deep Roots Foundation had to evolve as they learned and went along with the process if he'd gone with that and said I was wrong we can't do that these are pre-orders I would have been fine with it it's the attempt to claim that this is not a pre-order system. You know, I'm going to split the difference on this. I think it was silly to try and argue that there's a difference between this type of deposit and another type of deposit meeting the definition of pre-order. But I do think it's okay to denote we're not doing, like, what Wizard of Oz had to do, where we needed your money, and you wanted to spell that out, and that they're doing, like, a secure account. It's fine. Yeah, it's fine. But, I mean, secure account, what does that mean? Is it an escrow account? Probably not. So it's not being held by a third party. So that's kind of like what Cointaker does with people who buy big Lebowskis is they take the money and they hold it, basically, in escrow until the game is done. And then they give it over to Dutch. Right. That's more secure to the end user. But, yeah, I mean, deposits are relatively common as well. Now, I think most of the listeners know that I don't support deposits that are held by the manufacturer. So that's why I won't pay a deposit to Spooky. I don't care that they're established. When I bought TNA, I waited until it was ready, and then I paid them the full amount, and they shipped me the game. I didn't give them a deposit and stand in line. I choose not to do that. A lot of people are comfortable with that, with a company that has been around as long as Spooky. Some of that population might be comfortable with it in this case, and others will say Deep Root's too new, and they need to wait a while before they'd be willing to do that. But it's a model that does work, I mean, because we see it functioning with Spooky Pinball. Yeah. Oh, I mean, I understand that as a model it works. My problem isn't that this is the model they're embracing. My problem is trying to claim it's not a preorder. Based off of some of the feedback, Robert did note that they made a number of changes based off of the feedback of the Deep Six. And one of those items is, you remember when we talked about the Deep Six information that was revealed on This Week in Pinball that was cleared from the NDA to go out, they are going to have three models, but it has been reduced to just two models. That's a change. And that was based off of the feedback about the issue, as Robert explained it, if I'm recounting it correctly, was the middle model was basically the arcade edition, the pro model, as we would think of it in stern speak. Except it had the floating kind of levitating pillar backbox style that the extra edition had. And otherwise, it was the arcade edition, and they decided that it didn't really work to do three models when that was your one change-up was just the backbox. So now they're just doing two. So what are your thoughts on that? I'm fine with that. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I don't have – I mean, yeah, it just makes sense. I don't have any issues with that. I mean, they're just balancing to the realities. Remember the photos of Raza that leaked out right after the Deep Six went there And then that seemed to force the hand And then Twip had the whole Deep Dive article that came out And we had that weird awkward period where I think I was on I did like three different podcasts on three different days And every single time I had to change my messaging Because it was like, first the Deep Six can't tell us anything And then there was a leak And then the third thing was, oh now the Deep Six are allowed to talk about anything that appeared in the Twip article, which has now been greenlit because of the leak. Robert did specify that the leak, at least, I don't know if this is factual or it's just an opinion, but he indicated that someone of the deep six leaked those photos, illegally leaked those photos. And you could tell he was pretty upset still that that happened. So, which in a way, I understand because, you know, it's a violation of the NDA they agreed to. Totally understandable. It's totally right to be upset about it. I think it's in a way interesting, though, because I think Twip doing the article was the best thing for them based off of. Here's something that I did not hear answered on either interview that I wish. And I don't think I don't think Jeff or Martin or Jonathan asked this. I really wanted to know why he had the Deep Six come down when it became apparent that they weren't going to be ready. I mean, he talked about why they weren't ready. That, you know, coronavirus, there were parts that didn't come in in time. There were parts that arrived that weren't actually right. Like, they weren't to spec. They couldn't use them. I just, I don't understand why you bring them in and turn it into a beta event when that is not what you build it as. I would have, I would have thought you just can't. So I'd like to know what the logic there was, because the community very much had expectations, and those expectations were not redefined. You just all of a sudden had this really cold, bland statement after they got there and were done, saying, we can't tell you anything. And it's like, what? This will end a promotional event. What are you talking about? Right. And it was further hurt by the sheer amount of effort that they put into the initial buildup and the countdown and the, quite frankly, let's go with sassy kind of stuff they were tossing out on their Facebook and social medias. And that all hurt them more. Yeah, I mean, the attitude thing has been one that's been talked to death in the community. and, you know, it's been a, there are a lot of people that are like, they just wish they'd be more humble. They wish Deep Root would be more humble and that they'd have been, but, you know, it's like, I mean, sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't. It is what it is at this stage. I mean, in a way, you can't put the genie back in the bottle on that. Speaking of bottles, a new bottle that we've talked about that's been opened up in the pinball world recently by more than just Deep Root is the discussion of DLC. I mean, we know Stern's been doing it with Hoppers, and And we talked about the staging site, the purported staging site, and what looked like the DLC package for Deep Root. Towards the end of the Pinball News, Pinball Magazine interview, Robert talked a little bit about the DLC when he was questioning about it. And I'm not going to paraphrase this the best way, but the way he described it was, like, long-term, it doesn't sound like they have a plan. I think they have some thoughts. They indicate they didn't have anything written out basically beyond a year, like what's going to happen with DLC and the accessibility and stuff. And to me, that's weird. Like, most video games usually go in not only with a plan on how much DLC there will be. They're actually really public with it. And Odebrook's been really public with, like, a lot of their upcoming licenses and stuff. So I just wondered, do you find that strange, like the DLC strategy is not well outlined? Because I think it's not well outlined publicly at the very least. And it sounded like to me that Robert was indicating that they really haven't thought beyond the midterm about what they're going to do with that. I think because of how new the concept is, that most of what this is is feelers being thrown out to see what people are willing to bite on. and I just think that they're not to a point where they can really know what will work, how well it will work what they willing to if they make enough sales on a specific machine to be willing to keep spending more time and effort into it and see how much I just think there too many unknowns right now With DLC, especially modern DLC, and that's the problem, is we're talking about something that is 25 years in the making in video games and is just now appearing in pinball. modern video game DLC is so different than what the DLC was in the 90s and the early 2000s, where a lot of times what DLC was was them going, well, people really like this game, and, you know, we can add a new storyline with some new maps to it for almost nothing and sell it cheap while the majority of our work is on some other more major game release. They were kind of side things that weren't as heavily planned out. And in the beginning, in a lot of cases, were probably just thrown together initially with, hey, this game was super popular. It's good. Why don't we take advantage of the popularity of this game and we'll put out this package that won't require nearly as much time because the engine and the background and everything is put together. All we need to do is put together a new story and a few new art assets. and put it out there. Where nowadays, because that has evolved to a point where they're planning, like when I'll take one of my favorite games of the last several years, Battletech, for example, because I'm a Battletech fanboy, very early on, I mean, I kick-started the main game, and very early on they made the announcement that it's like, hey, here are what the DLCs will be. There will be three DLCs. here's the basic plan for each of the DLCs because they're all adding stuff that isn't covered in our initial game plan, and it's just going to be adding to it. And once those three DLCs are done, that's it. We're not planning anymore. This is a pre-planned, laid-out thing. But, again, that's been 20 years after DLCs started becoming normal. And you see that a lot of times, especially in the all-digital releases now, because a lot of places offer the season passes, which basically is you pay a certain amount of money and you get all the upcoming DLCs for a game for a certain thing. And I think it's something that we might see more planning and more of a layout and more of a route forward in the future if pinball DLC takes off and becomes something that would be considered the acceptable or even the norm. I just think it's early days is what it is. Yeah, that's a good point. And over on the Pinball Profile interview, and this is the last thing I'll mention on the Deep Root interviews, Steven Bowden talked a little bit about the rules development and how it could work with DLC. And he mentioned, like, what if he took Raza and then decided to create a whole different rule set, or another rules guy came in and made a whole other rule set that you could then download and play. And I see the potential with it. I see the angle with that. But the statement actually scared me. Well, not scared, but concerned me. And the reason is, it's like, so I'm thinking about all these other pinball companies that we know about. You see things like Lyman Sheets spending over a year on Batman 66 code, and you see how long it takes for the lead rules guys like Dwight Sullivan or Keith P. Johnson to, you know, do what they do with a pinball machine. And I'm hearing these examples of, like, making new rules for Raza, and I'm like, what about all the other games they're going to be building? Like, do you guys have enough rules, people? It seems like it's just steep right now. How are you going to do all of this? How many programmers do you have around that can just sit there and keep churning out entirely new code packages for an already used layout. So, like, I see where it's cool, but I also see where it doesn't seem to play well with a, well, but we've got to get on to Alice in Wonderland and Goonies and Food Truck. We've got other stuff we have to develop. How long do you want to spend making new rule sets for games that you're not going to sell any more of or not many more of just because rule set B is better than rule set A? Now, here's an interesting idea. I can see this as the way that you train and test new rules, guys. Okay. You have a known entity out there. You have a game that's already out with solid rules. And instead of just modifying those rules with little tweaks and stuff, instead of just tweaking and cleaning them up, If you want to start, you know, we'll say Bob Jenkins is a guy who's been doing some rules work and he's got some ideas and you want to give him a try out. You sit down. It's like, here's the game. Make a new rule set. Here's the old rule set. Don't just copy and paste the old rule set. Make a new rule set for the game. And it gives you an option to try new people out. People that you might not normally, because it's a big risk to drop a big title with a completely new rules designer. Where if you're just dropping a new rule set for an old game that's testable, that's hot swappable, if you get to choose the rule set with your magic little pin bar before you start the game, it actually makes to me a lot of sense for trying out new rule designers and letting you put in, or not put in, but basically train the next generation of rules guys. I see the strategy, but I'm struggling more on the bankroll side, like employing these people to sit around and do rules. Like, they're not going to sell enough new games with the new rule set, So, well, that's the thing is when it comes to continuity of your positions and stuff, you have to start training new people. You can't just, I mean, your old people are going to retire or quit or leave. This lets you, it's one of those things where you're not planning on their work on this specific thing to be what bankrolls their entire existence. This is helping to defray costs, and I'm sure that you'd be having them doing assistant work on other stuff, but this lets you take, like, say, for example, you've got your rules designer and you've got two assistants. a DLC concept lets you give both assistants an attempt to make their own DLC, and you can actually, lets you have a direct feel for something that will at least be able to put out in public and get some real world feedback from people compared to just saying what you like in-house and then picking one of them to lead a game that was obviously not going to be like your next big, big AAA super title, but to give them their shot. And at $50 a month, do you think the community wants these trainees to package it? Like, that's like a good deal? Oh, I think $50 a month is insane, and I don't think anybody should ever, ever pay or accept that for pinball. I think that's just nuts. Well, it's a hobby with $1,000 toppers. Which I also think is just insane. Granted, you can resell those, so there's that. I mean, that's the thing is I have a problem paying $50 a month for stuff that I use a lot, let alone for something that, let's face it, even if I was insanely rich, didn't have to work, spent all my time at home, I still wouldn't play enough pinball to make it worth $50 a month. I mean... Right. Even if I had a dozen machines at home, because I wouldn't just be playing Deep Root machines, even if, I mean, there's just no way. Right. It's just such an insane concept to me. I mean, I feel bad occasionally with what I pay for, like, Netflix. because it's like, do we really use Netflix enough to be worthwhile? And it's a question, especially with their recent raise in price, we're having serious conversations about getting rid of it, because at this point I actually spend most of my time on, like, Amazon Prime or Disney Plus watching stuff. So it's the thing, that whole streaming, I have a hard time with it. I mean, it's, and a lot of it is price point. Like, there are groups that, like, say, I read a lot of webcomics. They're, like, a lot of streamers and YouTubers anymore. A lot of them have big, like, Patreons and stuff. And there's one thing to have a Patreon where you give somebody a dollar a month, and it's like, eh, it's a dollar. I mean, that's not even a cup of coffee at this point, versus $50 a month. and most of the webcomics that I actually support put out seven days a week. So, yeah, I don't know. I think that, yeah, I'm not comfortable with it. Yeah, well, as you know, they're putting out feelers in a lot of ways, so we'll see how it does to know what the future holds with all of that. Let's go ahead and go into video games because I think we've spent enough time in pinball and I think as we noted DMCA and Twitch that's what we wanted to lead with right the big stuff I mean there's lots of big stuff going on there's still the ongoing reverberations from the removals and the bans it seems like there's new announcements of bans including some pretty big names happening fairly often over these still People are still getting the notices But It came out in an interview Not with a member of Twitch But with someone outside That I forgot to write down their name That it was a Twitch is working with a firm On developing functionality That will allow their algorithm To detect copyrighted material in live stream And just shut the stream down Now, I mean, this isn't a surprise as where they would be going, especially considering the hits that they've been taking over how lightly they've treated DMCA over the years. And I honestly think all of these issues are because of how fast and loose Twitch has played with the whole DMCA over the years. they've not really paid much attention to it at all. They've not worried about it. They've not built around it. And they've basically gone, eh, it doesn't affect us. And now the price is paid. Yeah. And they are being forced to backpedal hard and do things to protect the company at the detriment of the streamers and what they've allowed to this point and what streamers are used to. So we will see where this goes going forward. I think this whole live takedown is just to be expected. Yeah, it was coming. I think the obvious answer to all of these real problems is to do like some other streaming services have done, and they just need to negotiate deals to pay on the back end to not get stuff shut down. I don't know what it costs. I'm sure it's a lot. but if there's enough income coming in, it could be better than something that is going to basically destroy the company. Yeah. Because that's what this is going to do. Yeah. I've wondered if, and I don't know how feasible it is with live content, but I know that you can go to YouTube, for example, and you can look up and see which songs can be used, and they get to monetize. Like, they get the money from the ads, and you can't monetize at all, or maybe they will allow you to monetize, or nope, you can't use the song at all, they won't allow it. And you can pre-check all of that stuff. And so there was maybe something like that. That raises some interesting questions, too, because if Twitch doesn't want to, I mean, I'm sure the streamers are like, come on, Twitch, you make so much off of us, you should take the hit here. But on the flip side, Twitch might be like, well, whatever we're going to do, it's going to impact the streamers' income. We're not going to pay for this stuff. So, I mean, imagine if you saw those little ads at the start of Twitch and when you go to someone's channel, instead of saying this money goes to support the streamers, this money goes to support Nirvana. Yeah, and that'll have issues. I mean, that will definitely. I wonder if it ends up like, do we get to it? Does that, do streamers take advantage, other than like the occasional casual streamer, you know, so people don't get in trouble for Guns N' Roses playing in the background of the bar that they're just chatting at. I see where that will solve that issue, but anyone who's truly trying to monetize and make money still is in the same place under that situation. They just can't have that sort of stuff in their stream because all the money is going to go to the audio artist. But we know this is doable because streamers on YouTube and streamers on Facebook, they're not having these issues because they know to avoid that kind of thing. I think a lot of this comes from the, how do I want to say it, the environment that Twitch has been. Oh, sure. Where a lot of streamers are, hey, I'm going to fire up a Spotify list, which, you know, Spotify has its own problems out there right now. But I'm going to fire up a Spotify list and have it playing in the background while I play my games and chat with my people. hey there have been well I very much sympathize with the frustrations that streamers are going to face with all of this they're not I mean some of it was them exploiting some of this stuff too in my view I've gone into streams where they fire up the Spotify list and then they let the audience pick the songs when they give money yeah no it's full on I fully agree that this is not something that this isn't just Twitch being hey, you're doing so-and-so. I know a lot of people want the DMCA updated, and that's totally fine. Currently, these things are, in most cases, pretty clear DMCA violations. There are exceptions, like people who are the ones who own the rights to the song having their own music taken down on their screen. But ultimately, that it happened automatically is annoying and shouldn't happen. But they can get that fixed. They can't actually be legally punished for playing their own stuff. Right. Most of the time, though, it's a true violation. Correct. And now there is some issues coming up with there's a lot of games that license actual music for use in the games. They could create an ongoing issue. Yep. and the only good way around that is to either, A, not use licensed music, or B, utilize licensed music, but like some games have come out with a streamer mode that changes certain things and doesn't automatically fire up a lot of licensed stuff. Yep, there's that. I mean, Cyberpunk does that. Another option that a lot of games do have is the ability to turn off the music. Well, and here's the thing. I very rarely play a video game with music on because it's an immersion thing to me. And my real life doesn't have this ongoing soundtrack. I'm not driving down the highway and I can tell because of the music change that I'm about to get rear-ended. I mean that's not how it works but the truth of the matter is I like to multitask like while I play a game especially a game that's not as story heavy or doesn't have sections that are story heavy I will watch videos or TV shows or something and I don't play with music in pretty much any of my video games unless it is it environmentally makes sense. So, like, if I'm, like, in Cyberpunk or Saints Row or GTA, if I get in a car, it makes sense for there to be music, or if I'm near a radio, it makes sense for there to be music, but it doesn't make sense for there to be music while you're, like, on a sneak mission slipping through a factory somewhere. Right. But that's just a personal thing. And I'm 100% honest. A lot of this comes and how I handle music and video games comes because originally, when I first started playing a lot of video games, the only way I could make a lot of games work on the computers back in the day was to kill most of the music assets because my computer wasn't fast enough. So I got used to playing games without music. So when I started adding music to it, I didn't like it because I didn't like how it interrupted my enjoyment of the game. Ah, I see. So for me, the loss of music is not as big of a deal. But I know for a lot of people, it's really important to them. That said, there's some games whose soundtracks are so amazing. The new Doom games, for example Have soundtracks That are just Pure awesome And fit in with the feel of the game very well But For the most part, yeah No, I'm not a huge music and game person So I don't have an issue with that stuff getting shut off I don't know how this is going to work Going forward Yeah, we'll just have to watch I mean, who knows Yeah, there are a lot of people that are fighting back, but we noted about the possible legislative change that would make things even more penalizing. We just don't know if that's going to slip through or not. I mean, there are a lot of groups that are very pro, a lot of recording groups and music studios in particular, music publishers, I should say, are very pro-existing DMCA. And there are a lot of online groups that are concerned about the implications of this that are fighting back. It's going to be kind of a lobbyist battle. in a way. I don't know that yet there's really enough pressure, really, to, I see a lot of streamers, quite frankly, whining about this, but I don't know that they're actually putting their money where their mouths are and, you know, really trying to change it. Going on Facebook and complaining about DMCA is not going to change anything. I'm sorry, it just will not. No. Well, and it, you know, kind of ties into conversations we've had in the past, is I've been going through my personal streamer list just out of curiosity. And while I don't know for all of them, the truth of the matter is, is I've only found one or two who've actually had any strikes put against them at all because most of the people I listen to don't use, or I watch, don't tend to do the whole background music. Right. And that seems to be where a lot of the issue is. Yeah, I think. background music, or, of course, I mean, music-based games. And now this could be the death knell for things like music-based games, just like music-based pens, but also for people who play like Beat Saber or any of the music-based games, the rock band style stuff, because it all, that's just every single part of it is a DMCA issue. Yeah. But it always was It was always there Right And the big difference Because I mean if you want to be technical There's issues with people streaming the games at all Yes But with the music They don't have the kind of protections Because for the most part Not including Nintendo Most game companies Recognize that if a game is popular on streaming of theirs, their sales go through the roof. It just goes insane. I mean, that's like, I mean, and not just the big games. I mean, like Fall Guys went from a tiny game to huge. Among Us went from a tiny game that came out years ago, and the creators were actively working on a new game when Among Us suddenly blew up and turned into the streaming du jour that lasted even longer than Fall Guys did as the streaming du jour. It turned into this whole thing where they completely dropped their project to go back to start doing modifications to the old game just because it was better for their bottom dollar. Sure. And that's the way it is with anything. Any game that streams well and becomes popular with streamers, their sales just go up. So it makes no sense for the video game side to fight streamers, because streamers are better than any advertising they could pay for. Right. It's free advertising. But, you know, the big difference between video games and music in the realm of streaming is you can essentially get the entire enjoyment experience of music free through the stream. whereas you can't, watching a stream doesn't let you play the game. Right. And that's where I think you see that, like, if you want to play Among Us and you want to play Cyberpunk, you've got to get a copy of the game, ultimately. It's the only way to do it. You can try and live vicariously as much as you want, you're still just a passive watcher. But music's meant to be consumed passively. So, you know, I see where they're like, no, you didn't buy our album. You know this guy streams the song every hour. You're just going to come in and listen to him. And I'm like, radio, he's not paying us. I'll be 100% honest I have bought one album in more than a decade and the reason I bought the album was 100% to support the creator because he's a small creator and I really like his work I actually pay for a YouTube account which gives me access to YouTube music so that's where I get my that's where I listen to music Right, and those production companies have made arrangements with those, because that's the way that most stuff's shifting. Right, right. Just like you said, you do your stuff through Amazon Prime Music. Yeah, usually, yeah. Usually. Yeah, and I've done it there, too. It's just everything works better for me through the YouTube music now that Google Play Music is gone because of everything I have tied in through Google's infrastructure. Because, I mean, I am a Google guy. I'm deeply involved in their infrastructure. I mean, we've got their phone plant. That's where our cell phones are. It's through Google. How are you enjoying Stadia? I've not bought into that because I disagree with streaming games. Maybe disagree is the wrong word. I'm not comfortable with it yet. it might become the future, but I'm not there yet. I'm a little too old school to do that whole streaming game thing. So far. But I can see the reasoning for it. I can see why some people would like it. But as long as we're in a situation, especially like we talked about last episode, where so many people are dealing with bandwidth caps and data usage caps where it's not going to take off until that situation is repaired. Right. Well, I thought we'd move and we'd finish off with a talk, like you said originally, about something that we're actually both playing and that isn't years and years old. Because, like you said, it's a rarity for us to both be playing a new game at the exact same time. So, I thought we'd finish up by talking about some Cyberpunk Alright, well, I think probably the first thing would be Let's get through kind of the public, or the critics, or whatnot You know, the facts, and then we'll go into our thoughts Yep, that works for me How's it doing? You know, it's done okay The, uh It's interesting because CD Projekt Red and its parent company, CD Projekt, are a publicly traded company, and they're publicly traded in Poland, so they have to abide by the Polish rules for a publicly traded company. So while most publicly traded companies, they put out big information dumps at annual or semi-annual or quarterly group meetings, Apparently, from what I've read in Poland, if there's anything major that could affect prices or anything major that could affect information, it has to be released pretty quickly. Not just wait for the next annual meeting or whatever. So, they actually put out a memo on Friday. And according to that memo they announced that revenue from the digital pre sales alone exceeded all of the production marketing and promotional costs for Cyberpunk 2077 for the calendar year of 2020 So just the digital pre sales not the physical copies have made back every dime they've spent on that game in 2020. That covers all the overtime because of crunches, all of the various issues, the pushbacks, not to mention the fact that they've done three marketing blitzes entire year because their marketing was spinning up when they announced the delays. They've made it all back. That's good. Their total sales on Steam, so just Steam digital sales, PlayStation digital sales, nowhere else. Not GOG or any of the other places offering it. Just Steam digital pre-orders. crossed $50 million two weeks before the release. Mmm. So, when I read that article, I was pretty sure I could hear Avengers keening in the background as months after release, Facebook haven't made up their production cost, let alone their marketing cost. And their DLC launched, and yeah it didn't really help them in any way shape or form so while there has been a lot of talk about bugs and talk about crashes and issues of the like they're sitting pretty good on actual sales Yes. So. It's a AAA that's being consumed like a AAA expects itself to be. Right. You would think, except their share price hasn't reflected that optimism. No, their actual share price dropped like 29% at launch because of the initial reports of bugs and a variety of issues. Yeah. I read at one point also that the shareholders at the time, the Metacritic score was 93, and they were disappointed in that. They had expected it to be higher. I mean, that is lower than The Witcher 3's Metacritic, so I see that. But still, by 93. I have a suggestion that has slid to 90. But yeah, 90 and above is a great game. But though, I know internally they must be concerned, because I also read another article, they have restructured the bonus payout plan to not be dependent on the review scores anymore. Because apparently, if it falls below 90, the developers take a pretty big hit in their bonuses. And now that it's at 90, it's definitely at risk. because not all the reviews are in yet. Right. Well, and what's interesting to me is, like a lot of games, there are bugs and issues that will be gone in a couple of, you know, six months. where the where the they will just once that stuff gets fixed people who start the game not immediately which is one of the reasons I rarely get in on a game when it launches because you don't have those issues in six months to a year because they'll have all been fixed so it'll be interesting to see where it sets in a year now in terms of your experience you haven't had too many issues have you I've had no crashes and I've had two bugs and the bugs were so minor I've had a I'll call it a persistent graphical bug which is just where occasionally people will just like walk straight through a car instead of walking around it. I've had that I've seen it a few times. The only other bug I've had actually worked out in my favor very very early in the game I was fighting a a we'll call it an elite mob I don't want to call it a boss or anything but one of those solo fights where this person's a lot tougher than all the mooks you just killed and I tossed a grenade at him and when the grenade exploded, it threw him and he kind of pseudo-clipped through a cabinet on the wall and got stuck. So I was able to walk below him or walk beside him and all I could see sticking out of the cabinet were his legs waving while he yelled at me, but he couldn't shoot me. So I was able to just sit there and shoot his feet. Oh, okay. That's it. Those are the only books. I haven't crashed yet. I'm not, I'm sure you're farther in the game than I am. I'm only, let's see. I'm in Act 2. I don't even know if I'm in Act 1. No, I'm in Act 1. But, because I'm in the city, but no, I haven't moved to Act 2. I'm only not quite six hours into the game. but I'm also in games like this really terrible about going, ooh, shiny. Like I had one of the early things where it was supposed to be, hey, go over here and talk to dude, and it's like, okay, and that 45-second walk took me almost a half an hour because I kept going and like, oh, look, I can go down this hallway, and I went down that hallway. So I'm just – open world games and me have issues. Well, what do you think of the game overall? I've been enjoying it. I really like the hacking when I can get it to pull off correctly because it can be hilarious. and the gun play doesn't feel as smooth as I would have liked. But it's not terrible. I don't mind the melee combat at all, but I haven't done very much of it because that's not the kind of style I play for. But when it comes to setting and lore, oh, Jiminy Christmas, the lore and the background stuff. I mean, as someone who normally will read all of the background information here, I've gotten to the point where most of it I'm just putting aside with a plan to go back and read a bunch of all the shards and stuff. I'll go read those at some point. But I had one point where I read like six of them in three rooms. And I was like, ooh, this is going to take forever. I can just store these and read them later. Like, the first time I got to my apartment, and between, you know, just figuring stuff out and playing with things and trying different things and, like, going into the stash and finding all the stuff that I had and playing make-who-make-who dress-up and all that stuff, I burned a bunch of time there, too. It was, that's just, that's the thing is, and I know we had a conversation on IM the other day where it was like, this is going to be one of those games where you have to make the decision between having your person look really stupid, have really good high, you know, armor points and stat boosts and stuff, but nothing that matches or being lower to do everything that matches. Yeah. Yeah. And so, like, in my last series, I look like a fool because in my last series of fights, I just kept picking up stuff that had really high armor. So I just kept putting it on as I was walking through, as I was doing the fight. I picked something up and I'm like, oh, that's got ten more armor than what I'm currently wearing. Put that on. So I literally look like a four-year-old who walked into Mommy's closet and just put on a little of everything and walked out. Yeah, I know. That's how it is for me in most of these games. Yeah. Which is funny because when I walked in, my character looked badass because I had loaded my character up. It's like, okay, I don't have anything that's really fancy armor-wise or stuff, but here, this looks cool. I walked in looking cool, and now I look like a hot mess, but I've got really good armor. Now that my last big mission is done that I just finished and I'm about to start doing some other side stuff for a little bit, I'll probably go through and play with it so I can at least not look like a total moron. Yeah, I mean, my thoughts are relatively similar. I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying the game. Story-wise, I think the main story is really good. They've built a lot of lore, but a lot of it is What they call shards is a lot of Reading to the lore rather than it being Explained to you And so it's so tedious, I don't know When I'll get back to, I'm not reading the shards Live anymore because this takes too long I put this Below Fallout for sure, however One of the things I've really Noticed is this game seems to suffer From the, you know, I've been doing a number of Side quests to make money and Stall from the main story And it's like There's an extra no plot on a lot of them. It's like, you know, in Fallout with Bethesda, you know, you might walk in, travel somewhere, you might encounter a little band of bandits. But when it came to side missions, they all are stories. They all have something going on. And in this, they'll just be like, here's yet another, oh, yeah, they're doing bad things, and we, the cops, need you to help. You know, it's generic. It's a generic side quest. So I don't know that I'm actually going to do all the side quests if they're going to stay like that, because, you know, where's the story to it? This person used to be one of us And she went rogue and we wanted to take her alive Because we're doing experiments on those that go crazy From the implants I get the overall implant story But each mission is vanilla Go get me 12 wolf fangs Not that bad Go get me 12 wolf fangs I think there is some gathering stuff But most of them aren't like that It's just like Car mechanics are Tepid at best I'm not impressed with the driving in the game. No, the driving is not. Now, luckily for me, I'm playing on PC, obviously. You're playing, I'm assuming, on Xbox. Yes. I had to, well, it was already hooked up, because previous to this, I'd just beaten Project Wingman, which is an indie Ace Combat-style game. I already had my controller hooked up. I have to go from keyboard and mouse to controller for car driving. Because otherwise, driving a car feels like riding with some of the high schoolers I knew. Where your only choice is zero accelerator or 100% accelerator. and there's no gentle, oh, I need to curve a little to left. It was left. Yeah. So. I played Grand Theft Auto 3 on keyboard and it was like, okay, that's different. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was exactly like that. So I've got my controller sitting beside me. So every time I get into a car, I switch to controller for the car. and then I go back to mouse and keyboard for walking but otherwise yeah I agree with you on the hacking hacking is probably the coolest thing I agree with you on the gunplay it feels a little weird it's alright it just doesn't feel great yeah I don't really love the menu system I've noticed sometimes I don't think it's a bug but like if you go in and want to choose a slot and then equip it works fine but if I'm highlighting items like if I highlight a weapon, it compares to another weapon, but it doesn't always compare to the same class of weapon. And so I've noticed if I equipped from the backpack, it replaces the first weapon even if it was comparing to the second weapon. It's just like weird little things like that. Yeah. I don't understand. Really in-depth character stats and stuff that you can have a lot of fun with in trees, sort of overwhelming, but that's fine for a game like this. Right. But it allows you to do some really insane specialization, I believe, going forward. I'm not far enough in to have done it. But it also gives you stuff that's not bad if you are going to be a more jack-of-all-trades balanced character. Well, and I think as you level all of the skills, as you use the skills, so they get you abilities and stuff as that goes along. Sometimes that's just an additional perk point. Sometimes it might be more accuracy or maybe you find more ammo. I forget what they all are because most of my stats aren't very leveled. Now, that's one thing that I've – it started out actually pseudo-accidentally, and I've actually now started kind of actively doing it, is when you level and you get your level points and your perk points and stuff, I'm not spending them right away because since you can bring up the menu that lets you spend that stuff whenever, even in the middle of a conversation I found out I had a conversation that popped up a thing that gave me a an extra option if I had tech at 6 well my tech was at 5 but I had like 3 points saved up because I'd leveled several times and I'd not done any of them because I was in the middle of the mission. So I actually went over to my character sheet and I just bounced my tech up so I could use that conversation point in the middle. So I've kind of done that. I kind of held off on spending those points unless I know for a fact I'm right after something. I'm still trying to get perk points figured out about what's exactly how I'm going to make my play style, but it's so early in the game that, for me at least, that I'm kind of flip-flopping between how I'm going to play it. Yeah. I will say the gunplay is better than Fallout 3's gunplay. Yeah, but you had VATS as a good crutch in Fallout 3. Right. Where I think it's not as good as Fallout 4's non-VATS gunplay. Yeah, I think that's a fair comparison. Melee combat does seem to be pretty well. It's not my normal play style, but there are some side missions and stuff that mandate non-lethal, so you have to use melee. Yeah. And so you get experience with it. Yeah, and I'm like you. Not normally a melee player. Normally when I do a melee, it's like a second or third run through a game where I will do a melee run. The only melee I ever really did was in Borderlands. I played a melee character in one of those. It was interesting. It was different. I did a Fallout New Vegas run where I literally played the big dumb guy. I took his entire stats down to one, which is hilarious in the Fallout games because when you take stats down that low, people make comments about how low your stat is on something. Yeah. Like if your charisma is real low or whatever is real low, people will make comments about it. And at least with Fallout New Vegas, if you made your intelligence a one, your conversation choices were completely different because you were just too dumb. Right. But it was hilarious. I played him as he was primarily melee, or if he wasn't melee, he had a heavy weapon. But it was hilariously fun. I don't know if Cyberpunk will have it like that. Well, I didn't think you could drop any stat below three. I didn't try. I don't think you can. But I don't know. I don't know if they'll have that kind of replayability. Right. But even not all Fallout games have that kind of replayability. New Vegas was special. It may be more like Mass Effect where, yeah, you can play the different combat styles, but the character choice isn't really very diverse. Right. Because from everything I've read, like when you start your character, you choose your background, you know, Corpo or Nomad or whatever the other one is. Street, but your actual starting point and skills and abilities are all identical. Yeah. The only thing that's different is your background, and it gives you, like, extra conversational choices. Mm-hmm. Which is fine. I like that. Yeah. It's fine. I mean, it's not trying to be Fallout, so. Right. So. So, the, now, bugs and crashes, I've actually had a lot, I've had five hard crashes since I started playing. Oh, you're up to five. Last I heard it was four. I had one this morning. So, where these have hung enough where the game has crashed. Sometimes in the driving in particular, it will hang and then resolve. Like, it's either trying to load something or it's auto-saving and struggling with it. I don't know. It's very strange. Bugs. I mean, none of the bugs have been significant enough to cause a problem. I've had some odd ones. So I had an area once where there was a character in the T-pose. You know, his arms are out and he's standing there in between two cars. And I was going to report that online. And then there was another one doing the same, but not all the MPHCs were. And I almost wondered if this was so I wouldn't walk between the cars. They were standing there like robots. And I thought, this is a really dumb and lazy way to do that, but maybe. I wasn't sure, but I'm pretty sure it's a bug. I had a situation where I was talking, and in the background I saw someone's legs weren't moving anymore, and they were just floating across the floor. So I had that. I had one, like you reported, where I had one of the main NPCs walk through me. Actually, I had a number of people walk through me. It's like they never path. Which is weird, because if you walk even close to somebody, they, like, get in your face for having walked in. Yeah, yeah. But if they're walking, they just walk through me. They walk through my car. so I've had that happen my favorite bug so far has been I stealth took down a person and then I moved his body and when I set his body down it exploded into paste so I guess he was dead at that stage I don't know I put that one up on my personal Facebook because I was like this is really weird I swear you can see it highlight that I did take him alive he was breathing when I picked him up but then he's just goo as soon as I put the I actually reloaded that one later and tried it again, and he didn't do, but it looked like a spike had gone through his heart, and he just started spraying blood everywhere. And I was like, what is this? I'm sitting him down gently on a marble floor. So there's that. And then in the inventory screen, there have been a number of people showing instances where penises are hanging out of clothes. I had an instance where I had to put clothes on, and when I put on the pants, all it did, the pants didn't appear. It kindled me and stripped my genitals away, but I was still naked. and the same thing happened with the shoes. Though, in that case, I kept my toes. But the shoes were on, but it showed me barefoot. But only the lower torso stuff, when I put the shirt and vest and hat and sunglasses, those all worked. So it looked like I was doing halfsies. You were Porky Pigging. Yeah, I was doing the Porky. And it's like, except that I had no junk anymore. Just like Porky Pig. Yeah, just like Porky. And so I was just like, so all the bugs have been kind of funny. I mean, they haven't been – I haven't had anything advantageous or disadvantageous. It's just – well, unless I really wanted, like, to get a no-kill credit. I'm assuming the guy whose face became dead the moment that happened. He was not on the map anymore. Yeah. But, yeah, it's just – I don't know. And I've heard – you know, we were talking online with Travis, who hosts a pinball podcast, and I know he and some others he reported on the PC side were having issues with the graphic driver thing. on that. Yeah, see, by the time I installed and the installation was done and I got to play, the game-ready graphic driver was out and installed. So, I never had any of those, I read about them, but I never had any of those issues, because I'd actually updated the driver before I had played the game. So, anyway, I'm enjoying it, but yeah, it's definitely Cyberbug 2077 for me. Yeah Well, again, there's I mean, anybody who's played a game by Bethesda At launch Yeah, New Vegas was I mean, this was now top New Vegas Which was kind of my buggiest RPG I can mention Having played Yeah At launch And yeah, it had some I mean, I had game-breaking bugs with Vegas But I didn't have as many bugs as I'm seeing here Just really goofy stuff So I'm sure that Like I said, given time Those will be worked out And, again, this is why I don't normally play games immediately at launch. But we'll see. I've been enjoying it so far. I was surprised. I'm going to go with surprised. With the character creation, while it has a lot of stuff that is, I'll go with non-standard for character creation, also wasn't nearly as deep as I thought it would be. Yeah. I mean, yes, I got to choose if my character was circumcised or not and what my junk looked like. But at the same time, I've played a lot of games that were not nearly as big of a game as this where I could go through and pick, like, the exact sharpness of my cheekbones and do a much, much more involved character creation. Yeah. No, the facial tweaking tools were surprisingly shallow, I thought. Yeah. I don't care too much, especially when I realize how seldom you see your own face in the game. Right. Oh, there is a bug. I completely forgot about it. My third bug, when you look in a mirror, it gives you options to, like, smile or sneer or stare or do whatever. My face looks the exact same no matter what I do. Your expressions are all the same You've truly mastered the Entries Apparently yeah Nothing changes when I do any of that So I just completely I forgot because it's Kind of a minor-ish thing but I don't know It could be it could have to do with like The tattoo set I chose I wonder It's probably just a bug Yeah, well, because I like, when I was doing the character creation, I chose a tattoo set that has a lot of facial tattoo set. And it made some other things, like I couldn't really do visible cyberware because my entire head was basically tattooed. Right, yeah. So I didn't know if maybe it was an issue with that, but it's probably a bug. Yeah. I mean, again, the tattoo choices were fixed. You didn't get to customize, so they should have taken all of those into account. Right. Because there was literally like eight tattoo choices. Yeah. Again, really limited. Yeah, it was like from no tattoos to a lot of random tattoos to lots and lots of kind of random tattoos, which was, yeah, more limited than I expected. I would assume a game that lets me choose my schlong would let me choose whether what exactly what tattoo I have wear. And it doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess the only thing was I thought there was a decent quantity of haircuts. But again, those weren't very diverse either. Right. I don't know. It doesn't matter. Well, we made it. We're done. Stay tuned for more cyberpunk news. our next episode in two weeks will probably be our year-end review, unless there's yet again so much news that somehow we can't really do a year-end review. Yeah, I would assume that we're done with the news, but I mean... I mean, we'll probably have a few more specs on Led Zeppelin. Surely they're going to do the distributor information and photos within two weeks now that they're sharing the teaser. Right. I mean, that's pretty much a guarantee. But that's all I expect. Yeah, I don't expect to see, like, gameplay reveals or anything. No, no more gaming news. But we could be wrong. This has been weird this whole week because, like, Disney did all their TV show and movie announcements this week that was, like, insane and all these sudden pinball announcements. And it's been a weird December because normally nothing happens in December. Yep. But we take what we get And we give it to all of you listening Which we appreciate And if you want to express your appreciation to us You can email us at eclecticgamerspodcast.gmail.com Or you can reach out to us at facebook.com Slash eclecticgamerspodcast We're available on Twitch, Twitter, and Instagram As eclectic underscore gamers And we'll talk to you all again in two weeks And until then I will just say see ya Bye