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Episode 83 – Straw Hat

Slam Tilt Podcast·podcast_episode·analyzed·Mar 22, 2018
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

Slam Tilt hosts discuss Texas Pinball Festival tournament format and results with Pinberg champion.

Summary

Ron Hallett and Bruce Nightingale host Slam Tilt Podcast 83 with guest Mike (Pinberg 2017 champion) and Colin McAlpine, discussing the Texas Pinball Festival tournament format, their tournament performances, and Colin's success at the event. The hosts detail the limited-entry tournament structure designed to balance competitive play with allowing attendees to enjoy the broader show, contrast tournament strategies, and celebrate various finalists across divisions.

Key Claims

  • Texas Pinball Festival uses a limited-entry tournament format (unlike unlimited herb-style tournaments) to allow more players on the same number of pins without requiring additional floor space, people, or scorekeepers.

    high confidence · Colin McAlpine explaining the tournament format design philosophy at TPF

  • The Wizards Tournament at TPF requires that 2 out of 8 qualifying games must come from each of three eras (modern, solid state, EM) to ensure winners demonstrate skill across all eras.

    high confidence · Colin McAlpine detailing tournament rules and constraints

  • Colin McAlpine finished tied for fifth at the Texas Pinball Festival tournament, getting knocked out in the semifinals round.

    high confidence · Colin McAlpine describing his tournament performance

  • Robert Byers won the TPF Wizards Tournament, scoring 420,000 on Space Mission in the semifinals and performing well on Paragon in the finals.

    high confidence · Colin McAlpine describing the tournament winner and final results

  • The Classics division at TPF was added due to demand exceeding the 160 available slots in the main Wizards Tournament, with 6 pins running best-of-6 format.

    high confidence · Colin McAlpine explaining the Classics tournament addition

  • Slam Tilt Podcast is moving off Podcast Garden to a new podcast hosting platform due to limitations with RSS feed modification.

    high confidence · Ron Hallett announcing podcast infrastructure changes

  • Colin McAlpine won the Pinberg Championship in 2017 and is ranked #20 overall after Pinberg and Vegas tournament performances.

    high confidence · Colin McAlpine discussing his current WPPR ranking after recent tournament wins

  • Ed Van Der Heen, who runs Texas Pinball Festival, granted a red wristband (VIP level) to Dr. John in exchange for a koala bear keychain when Christopher Franchi requested the upgrade.

    medium confidence · Ron Hallett describing anecdote from TPF about wristband bribery/trading

Notable Quotes

  • “we intentionally designed it because we want the players to actually enjoy the show...we want you to play in the tournament, but we want you to go enjoy the show.”

    Colin McAlpine @ ~06:30 — Explains the core philosophy behind limited-entry tournament format innovation

  • “I'm starting to think my strategy is poor, in that I'm relying too much on EMs and solid states to try to get in. I mean, I didn't even play Walking Dead. And I really should be playing more of the modern games.”

    Ron Hallett @ ~25:00 — Self-critical tournament strategy analysis revealing potential mechanical skill gaps

  • “It's the slam-tilt effect. That's like herpes, right?”

    Ron Hallett @ ~37:00 — Humorous reference to perceived Slam Tilt Podcast appearance boost for competitors

  • “The key to running a good tournament is surrounding yourself with good people and people that are better at you at doing those things.”

    Colin McAlpine @ ~47:00 — Leadership principle from tournament organizer reflecting on successful event execution

  • “You've got to love a podcast where one of the hosts basically kicks everyone off the bar.”

    Ron Hallett @ ~62:00 — Meta-commentary on Bruce restarting the bar router during live recording

Entities

Colin McAlpinepersonRon HallettpersonBruce NightingalepersonMikepersonRobert ByerspersonTexas Pinball FestivaleventTrent AugensteinpersonPython Angheloperson

Signals

  • ?

    event_signal: Texas Pinball Festival implements successful limited-entry tournament format with era-based game restrictions (2+ games from modern, solid state, and EM each) that improves player experience and fairness compared to traditional unlimited-entry tournaments.

    high · Colin McAlpine detailed design of format, positive feedback from tournament participants, and explanation that limited entry allows players to enjoy the broader show while still competing

  • ?

    community_signal: TPF Classics division added due to overwhelming demand for classic game competition, with 6-pin setup quickly developing 10-15 person queues sustained over 15 hours, indicating strong community interest in era-specific competitive play.

    high · Colin explained demand exceeded 160-slot main tournament capacity; queues grew to 10-15 deep immediately after start and sustained throughout

  • ?

    competitive_signal: Robert Byers' performance at TPF Wizards Tournament (420K on Space Mission, strong Paragon play) demonstrates mastery of both modern EM-era and solid-state design, winning against tournament-tested field including Colin McAlpine (tied 5th) and other strong competitors.

    high · Colin described Robert's finals performance, Space Mission score details, and acknowledged Robert's skill level

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Walking Dead's Riot stack mechanic (inner loop feeding pop bumpers, stacked with Bloodbath and another multiball) can generate massive scores (200M+ demonstrated) when switch-hits are maximized through ball save loops, representing high-risk/high-reward shot sequence.

    high · Colin detailed specific Walking Dead rule stack and demonstrated 200M+ score from Riot stack combination in single ball with ball saves

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.362

0:00
And that is why we're also beginning a grassroots campaign to change the spelling of the word woman to W-O-M-Y-N. We're not just men plus two little letters anymore.
0:18
But isn't that sign spelled wrong? Cool. Stupid chicks really put out. Welcome to the Highland Society for Women. Would you like to sign our mailing list? Hey, did you know your sign is spelled wrong?
0:50
Coming to you from beautiful upstate New York, this is the Slam Sill Podcast, the show about all things pinball. I'm your host, Ron Hallett, here with my co-host, Bruce Nightingale. I am at the bar. You're at the bar again. Yes. You're always at the bar. Again. I'm always at the bar now since, you know, it's my gig now. It's your gig. But we're not alone this week. We have a guest. We have a big guest. Big guest. He is the champion of Pinberg of 2017. Come on the count, Mike. Welcome, sir. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much. Quite a bit here.
1:31
And when he was in the... So... No, go ahead. No, you can go first. I'll let you go first this time. Well, I was saying, like, when he was in the Pinmasters final, it was three Pinberg winners and Josh Sharp. Yes. I think I already said that line. You did. Yeah. Damn it. I'm sorry, Josh. Please forgive me. Three Pinberg winners and the deuce. The deuce. Oh.
1:57
Is that his new nickname, the deuce? Oh, Jeff Jules is going to love this. Oh, somebody comes in, what the deuce? What the deuce?
Brad Holiday
person
Ed Van Der Heenperson
Christopher Franchiperson
Dr. Johnperson
Ryan Seedperson
Josh Sharpeperson
Greg Pavarelliperson
Jeff Riveraperson
Jeff Teolisperson
Never Drain Softwarecompany
Pinbergevent
Slam Tilt Podcastorganization
?

venue_signal: Slam Tilt Podcast migrating from Podcast Garden hosting due to RSS feed limitations (inability to redirect or modify feeds), planning concurrent operation on both platforms for 4-6 weeks to allow listener transition and resubscription.

high · Ron Hallett announced platform move, explained technical limitations preventing redirect, and outlined transition plan with resubscription requirement

  • ?

    content_signal: Slam Tilt Podcast gaining visibility as successful interview platform (Tim Sexton hired by Stern, Raymond Davidson won world championship after appearances), creating perceived 'Slam Tilt effect' in competitive pinball community.

    medium · Ron joked about podcast appearance correlation with contestant success; mentioned Tim Sexton Stern hire and Raymond Davidson's championship wins

  • ?

    community_signal: Community inside jokes and informal dynamics evident in podcast (koala keychain bribery for wristbands, discussion of parent-child competition eligibility, kangaroo jerky from Australian attendees), reflecting tight-knit pinball scene with shared references.

    medium · Multiple anecdotes about TPF interactions, banter between hosts about tournament strategy, references to inside community dynamics

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Colin McAlpine successfully coordinated TPF Wizards and Classics tournaments with support team (unnamed tech 'Scott'), demonstrating effective delegation of technical tournament management while maintaining format integrity.

    high · Colin discussed importance of surrounding himself with capable people, mentioned Scott as technical support during tournament

  • $

    market_signal: TPF Classics division generated sustained high-demand play (10-15 person queues for 15 hours on 6 pins with best-of-6 format), suggesting strong player interest in classic game competitive formats at major shows.

    high · Colin described queue dynamics and player engagement levels during Classics division qualifying and noted scheduling to accommodate demand

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Ron Hallett's TPF tournament performance limited by over-reliance on EM/solid-state games (played 300 excessively, skipped Walking Dead) while under-playing modern titles that provide more scoring consistency, indicating skill imbalance across eras.

    high · Ron's self-analysis of tournament strategy, detailed game selections, and acknowledgment of poor 300 strategy

    • 2:06
    Oh, man. So, Bruce, what were you doing last weekend? Working at the bar on St. Patrick's Day. So you weren't having all the fun me and Colin were having. No, I opened up at 10, and I was here until 2.45 in the morning.
    2:22
    Wow. Yeah. Wow. Damn. And then the next day, I had a tournament at the bar, a match play three strikes tournament, and I at least won that, so I feel powerful of my 2.64 points. Yes. Congratulations. I'm so proud of you, Bruce. And the points came out for the Stomp West. You picked up a nice healthy amount, sir. Oh, I did? 11.6. Damn it. My ranking is going to get too high. Yes. I cannot have that happening. Yep. You're going to be way too high. I'm stuck in A like I was in Texas. Are you feeling that tightening around your throat, Ron, the restriction? Yep, exactly. In all honesty, I haven't played in B in a long time, other than Papa. Papa's the only place I ever played in B. So your ranking is now 249, Mr. Hallett. All right, that's okay. As long as I'm not in the hundreds, I'm happy. What's your ranking, Colin? What are you at right now? What does the Pinberg Championship get you for your ranking points? It jumped me up quite a bit into the top 25 momentarily, and then because I did well in the Vegas tournaments, I jumped up to number 20. Wow. I was telling Colin at Texas, I got a problem with that. See, Colin, he's like one of us. He's like the common man who won Pinnberg, you know, the guy you didn't expect to win. But then he ended up doing good at the Masters. Now this is going to be a trend. See, now you're becoming elite. You're no longer the common man. So he failed.
    3:56
    You got 51 points for Pinmasters. Wow. Well, me and Colin were at the Texas Pinball Festival, the greatest pinball show on the planet.
    4:08
    Actually, that's not entirely fair to say. That would mean I'd have to be at every show to really make that claim. But I will say it's the best pinball show I have ever attended. Same here. And Colin was in charge of the tournament.
    4:21
    I was. So why don't you explain to our listeners the tournament format, which is a format I love, which is limited entry. Woo-hoo! Yeah. I think the amount of feedback I've gotten has been overwhelmingly positive about using limited entry. So for anybody not familiar, although I'd say there are a lot of people who are familiar with the different tournament formats because there are people who actually do like tournaments and like talking about tournament pinball. So it's unlimited entry or the normal herb style is where you can play as many times as you want as long as you have enough money in your pocket and enough time to put in entries. And so with the Texas Pinball Festival format, we have a limited entry, which means we intentionally do that because that way you can have a larger number of players participate on the same number of pins and not have to have, you know, adding more pins, which requires more floor space, which requires more people to contribute pins, and requires more scorekeepers. Everything is just a lot easier if you're limited. But more importantly, for the players, we intentionally designed it because we want the players to actually enjoy the show. Because, like you said, it is, in my opinion, the best show out there. And it would be a shame for people to show up and only be in the tournament area, unlike the people who run the tournament, because we have to do that. But for those of you who are just playing in the tournament, we want you to play in the tournament, but we want you to go enjoy the show.
    5:53
    And this year you had a Classics division that was Unlimited Entry. We did. So we decided to balance that out. We had gotten enough feedback from other people who wanted, they said they would like to have, you know, an additional competitive pinball offering. And, you know, we also have a lot more demand than the 160 slots that are available for the main tournament, which is called the Wizards Tournament. So we added the classic side tournament. And you know what? People really like classics. Oh, my gosh. I saw the cues. They really liked classics. Yeah. Is it the reason why? Because it was limited on the other one and these guys can keep on playing it? I think that was part of it. I think it's, you know, so some people I know at the beginning, especially during, you know, part of the day on Friday, there were some pins in the main tournament that had nobody on them. for, you know, periods of time. Although I will admit that the pen that seemed the loneliest was S.T.A.R.S. because games went really fast.
    6:55
    Yeah. S.T.A.R.S. was being S.T.A.R.S. That's a good thing. S.T.A.R.S. was being S.T.A.R.S. But no, so we had it the first time, and so we weren't sure exactly how many people would play in it. And, you know, the game, they're classic games, so some of them play fairly fast. You know, some of them play a little bit longer than others. but we didn't know exactly how many people would be interested in playing it. And I think a similar problem that's encountered by many other tournaments, I know, you know, Papa for one, because that's another big unlimited herb entry, and they've had to make different changes over the years at Papa Classics to accommodate all the glut of people that like playing classics and like competing in classics. So we only had six pins because that's all we could fit in the space that we were allotted from the TPF organizers for the amount of space that we had. and we decided to do best four out of six. And like Ron said, they were, you know, except for like the first hour on Friday because we only had one day qualifying from 9 a.m. till midnight. And then the finals were held on Saturday morning the next day. And outside of the very first hour when Classics first started up, the queues quickly became 10 to 15 people deep on every single one of them for the entire 15 hours. Oh my. And this tournament was also streamed.
    8:13
    It had a bunch of cameras. Like, how many, was the classic streamed, or was it just the Wizards tournament? It was just the Wizards. But the Wizards, like, as you know, and I can continue to explain dozens, all of a fair amount of classics pinned. So it was not just moderns being streamed. Yeah, and this is the, what is this, the third year of this format? It is, yeah. It's the third year of this format where the idea is, so besides being limited entry, which, like I said, one of the main purposes is to get people to go enjoy the rest of the show. It's also to make a level playing field, so that way everybody has the same number, everybody pays the same amount. The other aspect of it that makes it nice is that, you know, limited entry I think is a better simulation of your skill when it comes down to the, you know, finals time because typically in finals you typically play more conservatively, trying to put up at least a decent score as opposed to trying to take huge risks to blow it up because you know you can just get back in line and try again. So having limited entry makes it more like a finals. And we also constrain people in that we have three different eras. We have modern, we have solid state, and we have EMs. And we require that two out of your eight best games that count have to come from each era. So you have to have at least two from the moderns, at least two from the solid states, and at least two from the EMs. So the idea there is that we wanted the person who qualifies high and who wins the Texas Pinball Festival to demonstrate skill across all eras and not just be the most amazing modern player or not just be the most amazing EM player.
    9:57
    Yes, and I'll say from the previous formats, when you talk about the ideas to be able to enjoy the show, even if you're in the tournament. One of the reasons I didn't play in the tournament before the last three years was I felt there was no way I was going to be able to see anything in the show because I remember specifically seeing someone I knew who was in the finals. I left, came back the next morning, and they were still there playing. That was insane. Like, wow, I am glad I did not play in the tournament because that would have seriously sucked. That was me one year. So you got to experience that too. Yeah. I can't say if I've ever played that late. I've played late in a tournament where he finished like at 1 or 2 in the morning and I drove three and a half hours home, which was stupid. But that was younger, dumber on. Yeah, that is stupid. So, Bruce or Ron, you can place wagers on how early in the morning you think that I was playing one year in the TPF finals before we changed the format. 3.45. No, no, no, no, no. See, he's good. And when I came back, the show restarted at 10 a.m. Well, no, that show had already started back up again. But I actually did get to go to my hotel room for a brief period of time. So Trent and I finished playing. It was a head-to-head finals, double elimination, because they had like four different tournaments running at the same time. And so the fourth one, or the third one, actually, we finally wrapped up at 7 o'clock in the morning. Ouch. And had to be back for the main finals, which was the aggregate of all your performance across all four of these tournaments. We had to be back the next morning at 9 o'clock in the morning. So, yes, essentially the head hit the pillow and then immediately had to get back up. So that was your training for the 24-hour tournament. And that also helped me understand that I never, ever, ever want to play in the 24-hour tournament.
    12:00
    I loved it, but I'm sick like that, I guess. I finished seventh in the night. I still don't know how that happened. It's something about the stank them.
    12:09
    Whenever they have a tournament and they bring their games out, I do good. I think it's because they don't have many newer games. It's because of Viper. Oh, God, Viper. Hey, I don't hate it anymore. And there's a game that I played at Texas that I actually like now, and Bruce will probably get on my case for it, but Old Chicago.
    12:29
    You going to get on my case for that, Bruce? No, I don't mind Old Chicago. You always said you liked it, and I said I hated it, so I figured if I did a 180, you'd get on my case. No, no, no. You've seen the good, then. You've seen the light. Come to the light, son. I've seen the light in a gorgeous old Chicago with, like, a clear coat of NOS play field. Man, that thing played good. Nick's, right? Yes. Which I'll give a shout-out to him right now. Nick Schell. I thanked him at the show. He's the reason I have my cheetah.
    12:58
    He looks a lot like Geddy Lee from Rush. Doesn't he? that's what it's like, it's Kenny Lee from Rush, cool so yeah, there's like a section of the Texas show that usually has like his games, or his what is it called? he has like an organization, like they all they restore, they build stuff it's a section where I like to go through it's got like EMs, older games they'll have like a custom video game, it's got a lot of interesting stuff in there but let's just talk about the tournament, I'm going to go over my pain first. We'll go over the bad stuff first, and then we'll get to Colin, because he went further than I did, because he actually made the finals, not like me. You know, I'm starting to think my strategy is poor, in that I'm relying too much on EMs and solid states to try to get in. I mean, I didn't even play Walking Dead. And I really should be playing more of the modern games that at least give me a little more of a chance. I played way too much 300. And 300 played me, pretty much. and I have a distinction. I noticed when I was looking at the – oh, and by the way, Never Drain Software, Carl D'Angelo, kicking ass once again. That's what the tournament was run on. And Carl was there. He was. With Johnny Monica. And I'm like, they're both from California. There was a show called Arcade Expo that was also going on the same weekend. It's like, why are you guys here?
    14:25
    They didn't know where to go. Yeah, that's how good Texas is, that they basically said, we're going to Texas. yeah I was happy to have them there Carl did very well I have the lowest total nuclear annihilation score that was recorded 27,000? no 16,300 wow oh yeah that was terrible I played it once and it didn't go well and the top two scores are who you would think it would be Bowen number one and Carl D'Angelo number two Yeah. The two masters of TNA. But guess who was third?
    15:05
    Colin was third. Nice. But, like, Carl had 4.1 million, Colin had 1.8. Bowen had 5.9. Which is, yeah, ridiculous.
    15:17
    So we know a game he'll pick in every tournament if it's ever there. Yeah, for sure. I did not qualify once again. Same deal. I really needed to up a couple games. I had entries at the end, but could not do it. Kind of put my eggs in the 300 basket, and that did not turn out well for me.
    15:41
    Sorry. Thank you. I toured the mansion on Adam's Family. I had a good game on Metallica. Stargate sucked. I never played Walking Dead. TNA sucked. Stars, after playing it way too many times, finally had a decent game. That ate up a bunch of chunk of entries. That was probably a strategic mistake.
    15:59
    Solar Ride, I think I played once. I have a thing here that says Space. Which game was that? That'd be Space Mission. Space Mission, I never played either. I never liked that game. See Solar City, which is that same play field layout they used 30 zillion times. I didn't play that either. Yeah, Target Alpha, Canada Drive. Yeah. Bow and Arrow, which I like. I played that. I only played that once, and I got like 100K, so that worked out. And 300, I played way too much. Yeah, I should have just learned my lesson on that game, but I did not.
    16:32
    So I failed again. I didn't play in Classics at all, so I was out pretty early. But the good thing is I got to enjoy the show. I will advise if you play in this tournament, a great strategy. If you get there early enough Friday, man, you can get all your entries in. Or if you want, you can do a bunch of them and leave, like, I don't know, five or so at the end and then do them later. When you see how you stand, you can do that. Our own Greg Pavarelli, our Tim Sexton replacement, he made the finals. He made the playoffs. He did. Yep. He performed much better than the roster.
    17:06
    So how did you do, Colin? I did very well. I ended up being tied for fifth, so I got knocked out in the semifinals round. and I actually had a chance in game three to go through on a tie break, even though I hadn't really been playing all that well. So that was kind of just how things shook out in terms of the scores.
    17:33
    Robert Byers ended up winning it with the NYC Finals group, and he had taken two fours in the first two games, so he was already guaranteed to go through. And the way it was setting up was almost a three-way tie. But Brad Holiday, who was also in the group, ended up passing Robert's score, so he didn't take a zero and got a one. So I was knocked out. And I played decently on Space Mission during that semifinals round, but Robert just blew it up. He put up 420,000 on Space Mission. So rolling the reels four times, no extra balls. It's ridiculous. He's good. yeah he was he managed to you know the the spinner was lit and he ripped it and it stayed lit for him unlike most people on planet earth and i was able to keep uh keep ripping it and so yeah he he was on fire he was playing well and i mean he obviously continued to ride that on fire train on a game of paragon i don't know if you had a chance to watch that in the finals the final four yeah i I saw why I think he's a big fan of our podcast, because he gave the D-Generation X suck it.
    18:47
    It's like, okay, I can see why he's a fan of the Slam Tilt podcast. He fits right in there. We've got to get him on pronto. Of course, Jeff Teolis beat us. He did. Man, Jeff Teolis doesn't waste any time. No, he doesn't. He was on Pinball Profile already. Check it out, Robert Byers. But I think you guys need to claim, like, you know, get rid of this whole pinball profile karma thing. This is definitely a slam-fill karma thing. Because, you know, Robert's been plugged in, like, you know, time-lapsing slam-fill for much longer than he had a pinball profile. I agree. Totally agree. I agree completely. I mean, Tim Sexton's on here. Boom, he's hired by Stern. You know, Raymond Davidson, he's on here. Boom, world champ. Boom, wins again. Just keeps winning. It's the slam-tilt effect. That's like herpes, right? Oh, God.
    19:39
    So what's the next major you're in, Colin, that you're going to win now because you've been on our show? Oh, yeah. If I get to win another one, the next one, well, the next one is going to be Pinberg. So that way I can claim for another year to be the winner of the largest tournament on the planet. Repeat. There you go. Yeah. I like it. Yeah, but the rest of the tournament was very, it was kind of weird for me. my strategy going into this was to try to, you know, I would play a game, and then if I didn't play particularly well on it, I would try, I would get back in the queue immediately while it was still, you know, fresh in terms of the timing and try to play it again. And so that's what I did for a few of the games. I had to do that for three or four of them. And then I was fortunate enough on another three or four to just have really good games straight out of the gate, you know. And so I was, yeah, you said you should have played The Walking Dead. Yeah, I think so. I mean, The Walking Dead can treat you poorly, too, and it did the first two balls, but it's a one-ball game. If you can do the thing, as some of those, hey, Steve, like to say. You know, I did that on The Walking Dead. I got the Riot stack on ball three and blew it up for over $200 million, even though I only had, I think, $4 or $5 million going into ball three. All right. What's the Riot stack? The Riot stack. So you know there's a mode called Riot. Mm-hmm. Which shot is that? Oh, God. That's the little inner loop thing that feeds the pop bumpers. It's between the prison and the left ramp. Okay. It's probably clearly marked right, I'm assuming. It is. When it's lit, yes. Yes, when it's lit. Although you may miss it otherwise. It's also the same shot you shoot to start 2X scoring. Yeah, that's about it. You can also do a tricky bank shot off the well walker from the left flipper, but I typically don't try to do that. So anyway, the thing to do on that game to blow it up is you want to have Riot running while you have Bloodbath going and then also stack in another multi-ball that you can take to pick, whether Prison or Wellwalker. And that way it gives you a whole bunch of ball save and a whole bunch of balls on the table because the value of the Riot shot is switch-hit based. So the more switches you get, which you get a lot of those because you keep getting auto-plunged, Every time you drain a ball during ball saves, it keeps auto-plunging into the pops. And so you get tons of switch hits. And then if you can dial in and get some riot shots during that multi-ball, you can have massive riot scores. So what you're saying is when I won the Project Pinball sweepstakes, I really should have picked Walking Dead and not Ghostbusters. Yep. That's what I'm hearing. Okay. I'm never going to. You're never going to do that. No, I'm not. Well. Here's the one I told you. Your brother told you, didn't he? I'm sorry. You were right.
    22:33
    Oh, my God. I'm coming, Lord. Quit that. So the top four, Robert Byers, Trent Augenstein, Carl D'Angelo, and Brad Holiday. And let's not forget the B-finals, because B-players are players, too, damn it. I'm a B-player. I'm definitely a B-player. Okay, I'm going to Chad Lauer. Am I saying that right? That's correct. Okay, Donnie White, Colin Faust, and Jeff Rivera.
    23:09
    Wait a minute, Jeff Rivera from the Pitball Podcast? It is. Oh. So he would be the top podcast finisher, I would assume.
    23:19
    Because I sure as hell didn't finish anything. Actually, Greg would be. Well, he's been on our podcast. Greg is now. Well, does that really count? It always counts. I guess it counts. He's the Timmy replacement, so he counts. He was the highest dammit. Then we had the novice finals because everyone needs to start somewhere.
    23:35
    So I want to give a shout out to everyone here. So let's see. Shauna Teal, first place. Matt Seiblum. I hope I'm saying these right. Nick Gall and Jeb Locke. His last name is Locke. So you can literally say Locke is lit. That should be, like, his catchphrase. Then we got women's finals.
    24:00
    And, oh, man, they had a playoff. I love playoffs. Playoffs? Carrie Wang, that sounds familiar. She was in the women's nationals, wasn't she? I know I've heard that name. She was. Yeah, the women's world champion. And she won Cactus Jacks a couple years ago. Kelly Monkla, looks like. Tracy Abrams and Elizabeth Drone.
    24:29
    Yep. Okay. So those are your winners. Whenever they have the parent-child competition, I always ask my father, like, we should get in that.
    24:42
    Why not? It's parent-child, right? Is there an age limit? You have the maturity of a 12-year-old, Ron. Exactly. Thank you. I must be seven then. God. Yeah, you, yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right now I'm doing fart noises with my freaking underarm. Oh, I'm sure you are. So, oh, man. So that was the tournament.
    25:03
    So congratulations, Colin, on a successful tournament, being one of the tournament directors. I'm sure it must be very wearing.
    25:14
    I know when we did stop, which was, what, 43 people, whatever it was? and that was very stressful, especially when the machines kept breaking down. Oh, yes. You know, you think your machines are all this bulletproof because you're the only one to play in them, and then they start getting pounded on and they start going down. Luckily, you had a pretty good tech there. Yeah, I was pretty good. Yeah. Oh, yes. You're right, you're right, you're right. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Bruce. Scott was there too. I'm sorry. Yes, he was. The key to running a good tournament is surrounding yourself with good people and people that are better at you at doing those things. And so that's what I did. Oh, yeah. I surround myself with people smarter than me and Bruce.
    26:02
    Dead air. I love it. He's on mute. No? No, I'm not. He's severely hurt. He's just pissed, man. He's hearing all these Texas stories. It's like...
    26:16
    Yep. And you're going to hear more, Bruce, because it was an awesome show. Awesome sauce. I have notes up the wazoo here. How are we going to get to wazoo? Before we get to the rest of that, I just want to say a little housekeeping. Podcast Garden sucks, as we know. And for me to just keep saying that and not doing anything about it, you know, that I'm a problem at that point. So I've been in discussions with a certain other podcast about what they're doing. and we're going to be making some changes soon. We're going to be moving off of Podcast Garden. I didn't get the union memo. I didn't get any of these memos. What the fuck? You know what's going on, Bruce. You know who it is. You know who it is, Mike. You know who I'm going to talk to when I was at Texas. Right? Right. So we're going to be... Roy and C.
    27:09
    Roy and C and Dr. John. I was hanging out with them like the whole show. So you were drunk like that, right? Posse's rule. Yeah, well, right. He wasn't really drinking. Dr. John, he was drinking. John, I love Dr. John. Dr. John is awesome. You know, the Aussies, I got a Roussac.
    27:27
    You got mine too, right? No. No, he was one short, so we had to give yours away to someone else. Sorry. So that then only makes one of us who doesn't have a Roussac that's on this podcast today. Wow. My mother's fucking hanging up right now. You Roussac-less. so and and then he also he he's eating this jerky and he's here on you know try this you gotta try this it's almost gone like what is it it's kangaroo jerky i'm like really is okay i'll try one little piece so i had i have one little piece and you know what i ate the rest of it i like kangaroo good day good day mate not kidding it was pretty damn good I do want to bring up one thing before I know it's on the podcast garden thing so you will have to resubscribe to us sometime in the future unfortunately because podcast garden as awesome as it is doesn't let you put a redirect in the RSS feed they don't let you modify the RSS feed at all as far as I know if someone knows a way to do it please let me know please email slamtailpodcast.gmail.com if you know a way we're going to have a new RSS feed so unfortunately you will have to resubscribe but what I'm probably going to do is run both concurrently for at least a month or six weeks because I know a lot of people don't they don't listen to them immediately so I want to make sure people have a advance notice now that's out of the way when I was at the show they gave you like a green wristband to get in so let me ask Colin, what color was your wristband? My wristband was red. Yes. Colin's was red because the VIPs, the exhibitors, the higher-ups, they got the red wristbands. Wait a sec. Now, hold on. I have a question, Colin. Did you have press passes?
    29:25
    No. Okay. Press passes. So, I'm hanging out with Ryan Seed, and guess what color wristband he has? Far-O-Red. Yeah. Did he get a red? it's like, what the hell, man? You know, what's going on? So Dr. John, he had a green one. Then he leaves for a couple minutes, comes back, he's got a red one.
    29:48
    Like, what happened? How'd you get that? So I went up to the front desk, and I talked to, I assume, Ed. Ed Van Der Heen, who's the guy who runs the show. And basically said, first he name dropped. He said Christopher Franchi asked me to come up here and he said do you give me a red wristband And he said no like uh okay I came all the way from Australia He said nope He said well I have this koala bear keychain I can give you Yeah, okay. So he took the keychain and gave him the red wristband.
    30:19
    So bribery worked, too. You could have traded in your Rue nutsack. My Rue nutsack. No, I can't do that. But I'm figuring next year, man, if I play in a tournament, Colin, I want a red wristband. Come on. You can make it happen. You have the power.
    30:35
    You're in with the organizers. I want a red wristband, damn it. I didn't want to leave at midnight. I had to leave at midnight.
    30:43
    What was that, Bruce? You're breaking up. Bubbly, bubbly. Bubbly, bubbly, bow.
    30:57
    Bruce, you might want to check your internet again because you're cracking up big time. So while you're checking your internet, I'm going to go look through my little notes here. And actually, we do need Bruce for this, though. Hey, Bruce, how's your internet?
    31:11
    I think he's got like 70 people in his bar that are on the wireless again. All right, so let me make one final comment then about the tournaments. So the one other thing about the error restriction is we also run a modified finals in that you can build your own bank like in a pop-up style, but you must pick, you know, each of the three pins have to come from different arrows. So besides just qualifying on different pins, you have to also advance in finals on different arrows too. So it's kind of like Pinberg, except you don't have a lot, you know, set banks. You get to build your own bank. Gotcha. Yeah, that's another thing I like. I'm never crazy about some of, like, the discernment format that Expo always had, which is all new sterns. Not that I have anything against new sterns, but. No, no, I don't know. Bruce dropped off.
    32:02
    Bruce has failed. Failed. So we're going to see if he rejoins, hopefully, because I don't want to – if I have to start chopping up these files, I'm going to get pissed.
    32:13
    You know, or if I start losing people out of the recording. I'm back. He's back. So, Bruce, so you need to make plans now. It's not a kitchen pass anymore for you, but now it's a bar pass. You need to get the bar pass reserved now for next year's TPS.
    32:34
    That was Bruce again. Oh, Bruce, did he drop again? I don't hear him. Hello. Hello, Bruce. You know how you piss off your customers in your bar? You restart the router on everyone. Good. Good job. Wow, you do sound better now. Tell them not to get on. I picked everyone off. And I thought the way you did that was mixed wheat drinks. No. You've got to love a podcast where one of the hosts basically kicks everyone off the bar.
    33:07
    I'm doing a podcast, asshole. I walked upstairs. They're all looking at me. I'm like, hey, guys. I want to turn on the router. Hit the turn off the router. Girl's like, I'm downloading something. I'm like, you were downloading something. I walked back downstairs. There you go. That's why. Unfortunately, if it comes back up, they'll probably just connect and download again and kill it again. No, no, no, no, no, because I took the power cord with me. Oh.
    33:31
    So how are you connected then? I have two. Remember, I have two routers there. Okay. All right, hold on. I've got to check this again to make sure we're all on. Everyone say hello, hello, hello, Three Sujas style. Hello.
    33:45
    Hello. Hey, Mo. Yep, we're on. All right. After being eliminated from the tournament, I got to experience the rest of the show, which I wrote a bunch of notes here about things I, little tidbits I heard, or little things I've seen throughout the show, which were interesting.
    34:12
    Hello. You're back again? I am. I had to move. I had to go out of the office. You had to move? So give me two seconds. I have to walk out of the office. Hold on. Jesus.
    34:23
    I might leave all this in. This is comic gold. Okay, I'm back. Yeah, we just talked about the next five Stern games. Good, excellent.
    34:35
    Quite the pipeline. All right, where was I? Okay. I can't wait to listen to this episode. I'm going to miss so much of it, I can, like, you know, try to catch up. Yeah, when Ron's up to four in the morning editing this, he'll love it. No problem. I'm in the actual dining room of the place. Okay. I'm at the big table. All right. So we learned about the Beatles, which was already rumored that Stern had a license, but Barry Osler pretty much said that during his seminar at Deep Root.
    35:10
    Deep Root wanted to do the Beatles, but Stern already had a license. Did you talk to Barry Osler at all? Uh, maybe. Oh, maybe. What would you have talked about with Barry about? I don't know. What may have I talked about? Bananas? I don't know. Oh, bananas. Yeah, I might have talked about bananas.
    35:29
    And? Do you really want me to go into it? Do you want to feel good, Bruce? Do you want to feel good? You can take away my victory and give yourself a victory. Fuck yeah. Which means if Scott Charles is right and he actually said what he said on TopCast, he obviously has a bad memory because I asked him that because I'm ready to film him saying that and I'm going to play it on the podcast. And he's there, oh, to my knowledge, they all have banana flippers.
    35:57
    Like, oh, fail. Ron has been deep-rooted by a banana. Oh, I think there's a title there, deep-rooted by a banana. Okay. Yes. Eric, Eric Russell, number three, change that spreadsheet. Change the spreadsheet. I'm a loss. And I learned from Barry that it's deep-root funding is the name of the company. that's funding all this, who's in Texas, which I didn't realize he's in San Antonio. So they just took the funding off and now it's Deep Root. And it looks like they're promising next year to have the five days of Deep Root or whatever it's called.
    36:40
    There's going to be a lot of sore women and men around. Oh, men and women, okay. See, at least I'm equal opportunity. Yes, you are an equal opportunity offender. oh it's just not the same without you bruce yes it is the thing oh god did you see did you see ryan see his t-shirt oh which one he had oh yeah he had a deep root one i'm trying to remember what it said what what did it say it had like it had like hand signals it's just deep reading it's just such a bad name it's just such a bad name uh uh another cool story i'm walking down the hallway and here comes Steve Ritchie walking right at me. And then he's looking at me because he probably recognizes me from the, you know, 30 shows that we've been to.
    37:27
    And he like fist bumps me. He just puts his fist down like, hey man, and I just fist bump him back. Boom, there you go. That's fucking funny. That's cool. Play better. Yeah. Play better. You're friends with Tim Balls. Oh, yeah, Tim Balls. Well, we'll get into that. I'm doing my miscellaneous notes here. Okay. Great news for Spooky.
    37:50
    I heard from a reliable source, i.e. the owner, that there is an operator who is operating a TNA who in six weeks he has made over $3,000.
    38:02
    I wish I could do that. Hey, send it to me. I'll see if those numbers are right. Just send the game. Don't buy it. No, I'll buy it. Oh, you'll buy it. Okay. I want to jump the line, and I'll see if that's true with the $3,000 thing in six weeks. There you go. Yeah, I was trying to jump the line, too. I was asking Charlie if any show deals had fallen through that I could swoop in and write him a check and take it off his hands, but no dice. Oh, you really wanted to jump the line. Okay. What you could tell him is, like, I'm doing a Texas pinball show, and I'd really like to bring a TNA there. So I was wondering if I could. Too bad there was already five there. Oh, yeah, there was a ton of TNAs there. I mean, and the thing you learn about total nuclear annihilation, TNA, is that when the sound is on, it overpowers anything in its vicinity.
    38:57
    Yikes. I think the whole reason I played 300 is because it was next to TNA. Mm. As crazy as that sounds. TNAs are like bug zappers. They attract the bugs, and it's like you can't help yourself. It's that good of a sound package. just that good of a game. We're bugs versus... We're all bugs. No, we're big bugs. We're big bugs.
    39:20
    Bug, bug, bug. That better. Let's see. I'm going to get to this. Yeah, Roozvac, I did that. Kangaroo Jerky, the Wristbands. Yep, Deep Root Funding.
    39:34
    Incompletely unrelated news. Pinball Expo. The name belongs to Rob Burke, so he has the name. Yes, he has the name. God, he changes the name of Pinball Palooza because that's terrible. Yes. That name is horrible. I have yet to find a person who thinks that's a good name.
    39:52
    I agree. Yeah. So he has it. So my Paysack show will be called, I don't know. He should do The Prince Route, the show formerly known as Pinball Expo. There you go. So was he renaming it then just to, like, be nice about it or something? I think he was just trying to change the whole image. I wonder if Mike could call it Pinball Exposition because either a little known or a well-known fact, I don't know which, but back in the day when Pacific Pinball used to have their Pacific Pinball Expo, which was a killer show. I always enjoyed going there. Bruce was there one year. Yep.
    40:30
    The actual name of the show was Pacific Pinball Exposition because Expo wouldn't let them use the name Expo. Mm-hmm. A little trivia for you there. So now maybe they can block Pinball Exposition now because they can block it. Yeah, that would be funny if they want to be called Pinball Exposition. And Pacific Pinball says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That would be kind of funny. That would be a perfect irony. That would be perfect. A perfect irony? Yeah. Is that a Bruce-ism? That actually sounds right. That is right. That actually sounds legit. Damn it. Because I love that Bruce-isms, they make great titles for the episodes. They do. Did I mention this is Godzilla vs. Monster Zero? I don't think I did. Oh, yeah, we didn't do that yet. Yeah. Episode 83, Godzilla vs. Monster Zero. What the fuck is Monster Zero? He's a monster. Like an airplane? Like a Japanese zero airplane? Well, it has another name. I think that's the American name for the movie. Oh, please give us the Japanese name, please. No, well, it's in English, but it's like something of the something or something like that. And before I go on anything else, I just want to make sure we're here again.
    41:42
    I'm here. Yeah, because I didn't check the thing after your last drop. What is that, drop number three or drop number four? Five days of dropping. Five days of deep root dropping.
    41:56
    Okay, we're here. All right. So the two seminars I went to, I went to the Spooky Seminar. Well, before the Spooky Seminar, they did a TNA attempted nine reactor seminar with Bo and Karen, attempting to destroy all nine reactors, which he did. Spoiler alert. But he did it in five balls.
    42:21
    Boo. It was almost like, you know those old serials where, like, the hero would get knocked out, He's, like, in a car, and the car goes off a cliff and blows up. But then, like, the next episode, all of a sudden they show him, like, revive and get out of the car before it goes down and blows up. And you're like, no, you didn't show that before.
    42:43
    That's kind of what happened because it was like he had the two extra balls. So it was, and his fifth ball, he drains, and everyone's just like, oh.
    42:51
    And it's like, we're on five ball, just to let you know. Like, oh. So he got it. So he got it in seven balls, I guess you would say. But still, way better than I'll ever do. And it was very entertaining. It was a very good seminar. And that led into the Alice Cooper reveal, which before they did any of that, Charlie came out in Alice Cooper makeup with the top hat and the black eye makeup. Nice. I think the first announcement he made is that Bo and Karen's is working for Spooky. Mm-hmm. Where he's going to be doing rules. Now, is he working, is it like a consultant basis type of thing? I think it's a consultant basis just because there's no way he's doing that full time because he's got the math gig. I mean, if I remember what he does specifically is his company works for, they come up with math curriculums, and then he travels around and teaches the curriculum to teachers. Oh, okay. That's his main gig. Then he also has, he works with the game show stuff, has a math guy for game shows. So he does that. So this is on top of all that. And I don't think he's, I think he'd be crazy to give up those other gigs for just this. And the other thing that Charlie of Spooky said he would probably be working on Alice Cooper. The thing is, when I spoke to some of the other Spooky people, It sounded like they have the rules for Alice Cooper pretty much all down exactly how they're going to do it. So I don't know what he's going to do on that game, other than maybe make sure some of the point totals are not crazy out of whack or something.
    44:32
    I don't know. Because I'll get more into Alice Cooper now. They brought it out under the tarp or, you know, the curtain, blanket, whatever, over it. So you can see part of the side art but nothing else. and they brought it out, they introduced it, boom, they took it off. Everyone runs up to the top of the stage. That wasn't really a stage. They just run up to look at it. Everyone's taking pictures. And then they almost immediately took it and rolled it into the hall so people could play it. So we all got in line to play it.
    45:06
    And I'll say it's got a ton of shots, very tight shots. The ramp shots are very tight. It's got the little mini play field. Charlie loves his mini play fields. So it's got a little mini play field on top. It's got, the artwork is killer.
    45:22
    So it's got a working guillotine. It's got a working, like, I think, Frankenstein thing, which I didn't get to see because nobody, at least no one I saw was able to get him to pop up. Me and Ryan C., we were speaking to one of the spooky guys about the rules, and basically it is like you are in the castle, and you use the shots to traverse the castle. There's, like, a little map, and the shots move you around the castle. And you go to different rooms. You can pick up different objects in the rooms. And then every so many rooms, there's, like, on the map, you'll see an M. For one of the rooms, that means there's a monster in there. So you go at the monster when you get to that room.
    46:00
    And from what they said, like, it's the LCD animations were excellent. They're all, like, comic book style, like, really nice artwork. And from what we were told. Yeah, they're very good. Yeah, well, from what we were told, they're pretty much done, the actual, like, all the animations and stuff. That's pretty much done. The code is still alpha, but they have the framework of exactly what they want to do with the rules.
    46:22
    So they're just working towards the completion. Tons of Alice call-outs. I was able to confirm there is a We're Not Worthy in there somewhere. We're Not Worthy! Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was fun to shoot. I got to play it twice. I got to play it once at the after party when there was virtually no lines. That was nice. and I had one of the guys from Spooky, I forget his name, so I apologize to whomever helped me out and kind of coached me through or walked me through the different shots and what to do. Because it was an alpha code, you couldn't really tell what to shoot for because you didn't have all the coordination with the lights in the play field to actually show you that, hey, if you shoot the left ramp, that will lock a ball. But indeed, it locks a ball and has a physical lock where you can see the ball in the castle when you lock it, and that was cool. it was very difficult to get the little upper flipper in the mini play field to then lock the next ball off of this little ramp from the upper mini play field after you hit this single drop target three times so that was but that was cool it was a neat way of doing things and it has it had upper lanes like two lanes coming off the upper play field that would then either drop down to, I think they went to the subway, and the other lane was a wire form that fed back to your left-in lane. So, definitely unique aspects to it, and I had fun shooting it. Question for both of you. Would you buy that? Me? I'd have to play it more. Okay, but say if you thought the rules were going to be good, as they should be, would you buy it?
    48:03
    You would have to knock me out once it's done. I mean, if I was a horror fan or an Alice Cooper fan, yes, you would buy this. Okay. Yeah. Colin? Yeah, me too. Okay. Yeah, I'm not a huge Alice Cooper fan. I'm not a fanboy of that or of horror. I mean, there's also, to me, there's other, like, if I were going to buy a spooky game right now, it would be a TNA. Yes. And it's also because I find myself continuing to evolve away from being a fan of all the modern games to being a fan of more of the classic early solid state types of games. And I think TNA is just that perfect marriage of that fun, in-your-face, shorter ball times, more fun-to-play-dollar-games-on style. whereas Spooky, the Alice Cooper is more along the lines of a new modern game which is great and that's fine but that's not necessarily what I want to spend my money on right now I have a tear in my eye Me too, I'm actually going to say thank you Colin because way back you were on I think the Flippin' Podcast and you mentioned me saying I like the way Bruce is doing all classic games and he has a great classic collection and I was like yes somebody notices I own classics I take care of them, goddammit. We diverted another person. Yes, yes. The other thing I didn't mention about the game is, I guess they had issues with the Benhek board system, getting certain things working, so they switched to P-Rock, which is what TNA runs on. So the price went up a little bit. It's like, what is it, $64.55 now, or $64.95 or something. Went up a couple hundred bucks from what it was originally. Yeah, I think it was a few hundred bucks from where it was before. Yeah, I think it was like $200 and went up. I didn't realize that was what it was. But that's good news because, I mean, the P-Rock board system is solid. Yes, it's very solid. Yep. And they came around and said that. That's like one of the first things they said. I actually preferred a P-Rock board system over the original. Yeah, they plugged it in because it has all the full RGB lighting. You can do anything you want with it, you know, a little more robust in certain areas. display better too and everything else so I really like the LCD animations that's one of the things that stuck out with me I like that the comic book style it looked really good on the LCD yeah the other thing that stuck out for me was the amount of plastic molding to create the world or the environment the skull, the castle yep it's all about atmosphere that was their seminar. And I went to the Stern seminar.
    50:48
    So the Stern seminar was George Gomez. At first they showed one of their making of videos. They showed making of Guardians of the Galaxy. Okay. Then he showed something that I've never seen before. Most of us have never seen before. When you go on the Stern Factory tour, you see the floor where they're actually building everything. What you don't see is the office area where all the designers actually are and the programmers and all the whitewoods and everything are. And that's what he showed. He showed pictures of the actual area. So, in other words, he showed pictures of Timmy's workspace. Oh, Timballs. It was like the inner sanctum. The inner sanctum of Stern. Yes. The inner sanctum of Stern. There were some funny pictures in there. There's a picture of Tim and Steve Ritchie, and they're looking at a WWE, and Steve looks pissed. I do, too.
    51:50
    They showed, and the other big news is during this, they showed Keith's team, Keith Elman's team, in his game, which is going to be called Titanium Man. Wow. That's what he called it. we better know it as Iron Maiden, but they were calling it Titanium Man. So they pretty much acknowledged it. And then they showed, like, you know, maybe a half an inch of the play field. And then they showed, like, I guess one of their working whitewoods is in, like, a kiss cabinet. So they show the guy playing it, but you can't see the play field, just the cabinet.
    52:26
    You know, a lot of teasers. And then he made it known that they're hiring a lot of new, younger guys. because, as he said, well, instead of just saying what George Gomez said, I'm actually going to play what he said. This is from the seminar.
    52:44
    What you can't really hear is when Tim Sexton's name is mentioned, there was actual audible cheering in the crowd.
    52:52
    Wow. Yeah. So hopefully Tim doesn't get a big head. Big head. Yeah, big head. But you'll hear Gomez actually acknowledge the reaction. So here we go. We've got this whole new cadre of young guys that I've been trying to bring into the business because, let's face it, all of us, even though you know us and love us, we're all getting a little bit long in the tooth. And so we need a new generation of guys that are just as talented as we were to come in behind us and work. And so Harrison and Rick and Keith are part of that effort. Tim Sexton up there, he's been in the company a short while. So, yeah. That little yelp, that was acknowledging the audience reaction.
    53:38
    So, Timmy's over. He's a bigwig. Guess what? George, you need to be taking your job. Sorry, George.
    53:47
    He's taking George Gomez's job. I don't think so. Oh, yeah. Oh, God. Hell, yeah. He's there in the office where they have, like, the Iron, I'm sorry, the Titanium Man team. and not coincidentally, he's sitting right next to Keith Elwin. I noticed that. Close to the one is a good thing. Yep. On his right side, literally his right-hand man.
    54:07
    Oh, my. Jesus. So congratulations, Tim Balls. That means he's on the Titanium Man team. Nice. The other thing, Titanium Man is going to be released in probably two weeks, or at least something about it will be released in two weeks. That was the information is from Keith Elwin himself, but in his usual Keith Elwin way, where on Facebook he posted a picture of a woman that was in Total Recall. If you remember Total Recall, when Arnold Schwarzenegger goes to Mars, he goes in disguise as a woman. Yep. And when they ask him, how long are you going to be here? She says two weeks.
    54:55
    So as soon as you posted that, everyone caught on. It started two weeks, two weeks, two weeks, two weeks, two weeks. So it's going to be in two weeks.
    55:02
    And one of the questions someone asked George Gomez is, when is Titanium Man going to be released? And he said probably April.
    55:11
    So that jives with that. Did anything else happen in George's seminar? Yeah, you know, sitting in my role was the gold standard. No. Nate was there? No, no, no. Kaneda was there. He was sitting right next to Ryan Steele.
    55:29
    Ryan Steele? He was right next to him. Yes, that's right. And, um, there was a question asked, actually not by Kaneda, about, um, what was the question? Oh, they were asking if after he finishes Batman 66, is Lyman Sheets retiring?
    55:49
    Oh, God. We said No, a long time ago. Which Gomez kind of went off on a certain gold standard. No. Yeah, yeah. And Ryan C. was sitting right next to him the whole time, and he's just got his head down in his hands at some point. He's like, oh, God. Oh, God. Because he's like me. Get uncomfortable when conflict arises. No. You would have loved it. I was uncomfortable. Yeah, because, you know, you're Bruce. Instead of trying to explain this, why don't we actually just play it? Okie dokie. So remember, well, you'll hear the question, but the question is basically, is Lyman Sheets retiring? So here we go.
    56:34
    So speaking about Batman, this isn't Lyman's last game before he retires, is it? No, no, it's not. But, no, that's funny. You know, I don't know where this stuff comes from, but, yeah.
    56:49
    Yeah, my buddy over there from New York. I'll tell you this. He needs to be provocative. That's the business he's in.
    57:03
    The business he's in also requires that you deliver a lot of bullshit in order to be provocative. And so, you know, I mean, come on, that's the game. And we know the game, right? I mean, if you know the game, then so.
    57:18
    So I guess he won't be getting any more interviews with me. That's right. Yeah. Well, I forgot that George was actually on his show at one point. Yes. Yeah. So that was, just seeing Ryan C's reaction was awesome.
    57:34
    I told you. I wish I was there. I would have been laughing my ass off. So getting back to the Stern Seminar, they talked about the Supreme game. Mm-hmm. And the fact that Stern doesn't know what the price is going to be. They're not setting the price Supreme is. So whatever Supreme is going to be charging for them. The Star Wars topper that everyone's waiting for, it's being delayed for the reason that you would think.
    57:57
    Programming. No. Programming, it's done. It's completely done. They're waiting for approval. Okay. From Lucasfilm slash Disney.
    58:07
    Then the announcement that made Bruce's day. Yes. they have hired Brian Eddy. I'll show you how pathetic I am. He puts a picture up on the screen. It shows Attack from Mars and Medieval Madness.
    58:22
    And he's there, you know, what do both these games have in common? And literally the first thought in my mind was they've hired Brian Eddy.
    58:31
    I'm not kidding. That was literally the first thing I thought of. And sure enough, yep, they hired Brian Eddy. His first game will be out obviously next year. It's going to take at least a year. But he is starting his third as a senior designer. Nice. So you got your wish, Bruce. Brian Eddy is back in the saddle again. So what's he been doing all this time? They went over that, and I knew some of it. He went after Medieval Madness, he went to Midway, which was the video game arm of Williams, and did video games. and then eventually he ended up different companies basically doing video games. I think the last company he was with, they were making games for Facebook or something. Yeah. He said, yeah. That's what he's been doing the whole time. And Brian C. was upset because he didn't mention Shadow.
    59:24
    He did Shadow too. It's like, that's a good... And he said they made more of those than they did the other two. I'm like, yeah, you're right. He's right. Good point. And Shadow's a great game. You know what? I didn't want to mention Shadow because then everyone will have the expectations of having all the toys of Shadow in a Stern game, and that won't happen. No doubt. You won't get that little play field in the little, no? Little play field magnets and pervas. If they put pervas in there, I will eat a freaking straw hat. So there you go. I will eat a straw hat. What does that mean? I'll eat my hat but it'll be straw I don't want a regular hat I think we have our title I'll eat my straw hat that was definitely some Bruce's yeah Bruce that was that was a Bruce um let see what else else Titanium Man went over that Tim Balls yeah Oh after the seminar we were speaking with is it Jarrett Is that his name? The marketing guy, first turn? Yeah, Jarrett Gines from Confucian Movement Dallas, yeah. And he pretty much just said, like, Steve Ritchie's next game is a non-licensed game.
    60:38
    You can do it. Yeah, yeah. And pretty much, yeah, the rumors are it's Black Knight 3000. Yeah. According to some people Ryan C. talked to, it's Black Knight 3000. Yeah, baby. Do we think if they do that, between the three of us here, do we think it'll actually be a dual-level play field?
    60:57
    Yes, has to be. Yeah, for sure. Wow, everyone is saying that, too. Everyone's like, it has to be. Like, really? The first two were. Yeah, but Stern's never done that.
    61:08
    Well, yes, they have. No, no, no. Modern Stern. Game of Thrones. Yes, they have. Yeah, you're right. Game of Thrones. Yeah, but that's WWE. But they're way smaller than what you would expect. Like, Black Knight, it's like the entire... But WWE had two ramps going to it. Look at it that way. WWE had two ramps going to it. One in each side that fed it all.
    61:27
    Fed it all. My. It fed the whole upper play field. So it wasn't like... You got the power. You got the might. Get ready for battle. Beat the Black Knight. Ah.
    61:42
    It better have the greatest multi-ball intro since Black Knight 2000 if it wants to. And light show. Well, it should be able to do that. But no freaking powerful LEDs that blind you and make you burn your morning. Winter is coming, Bruce. Winter is coming. Fuck no. Wow, same reaction. Damn. See? That needs to stop.
    62:04
    Running out. We're getting ready for face-off here. What about the facing-off? We don't even have a year. We do. Me and Colin were talking about this behind your back. We have this one. So I see it's all been biased to you, I see. Yes, he already knows he's going to give me the championship here. But I may have made a TNA, a total nuclear annihilation rule contribution, possibly. Ooh. How to lose really bad at 16,000 points. Shut up. Fail with an exclamation point? Well, it does have to do with that. Well, first, Ryan C. made a suggestion about, like, when you would get a double jackpot, triple jackpot, all that, it would just keep saying jackpot. And he said, you should have it say, you know, like, Lord of the Rings does, double, triple. But instead, Scott Denise, he put in there, like, 2X jackpot, 3X jackpot, 4X jackpot. And Ryan C. was like, hey, he took my idea.
    63:00
    My contribution would be, they were testing co-op mode. They had the games in co-op mode, which means you play a four-player game, and your reactors, you're trying to destroy nine reactors, it's cumulative.
    63:15
    So if I get, like, two reactors, the next player has two reactors down, and they're working on the third. Cool concept. The problem is, like, in TNA, when the game ends, if you don't destroy nine reactors, it says, game over, you fail. Well, it said the same thing in co-op mode. And I'm like, that's wrong. It should say, like, game over, you all failed. Or all of you failed. Yeah.
    63:42
    And I thought, I mean, Scott's, we're over by the spooky booth. Scott Denise is right there. And he's like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Might put that in there. So if anyone sees that in there in some future update, it was me. Just remember that. That's my contribution to Tome of the Clare and Eilish. The PPF version would be y'all failed. Y'all failed. Y'all come back now, you hear? You failed. Y'all failed, man.
    64:13
    Oh, man, we need the Hank Hill game. Perfect, Texas. What the hell, man? What's this TNA? Damn it. Y'all failed, boy. Yeah. The game runs on propane, you know that? Propane, propane accessories.
    64:26
    The milk in the fridge is about to go bad. And there it goes. Oh, okay. Finishing up here. Space Invaders Challenge. I did not accept the Space Invaders Challenge. I'm sorry. Why not? I apologize to Jim. I was intimidated. Ooh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I did not do that. What else? Had several people come up to me, like, love the show, man. and they all asked, like, are you the one with the bar?
    65:05
    It's like, no, no, Bruce is the one with the bar. So your bar is famous, Bruce. I heard there was a T-shirt there. Somebody was wearing one of my T-shirts. Yeah, someone had a silver ball saloon T-shirt. I could have had it on, too, but I had my sweater on this the whole time, as usual, so no one would have seen it. What else? It was cold in there. Oh, poor baby. Yeah. So you had another exhibit they had. Marco had a huge booth with a crap ton of Stern games. A lot of them running new code. I know Batman 66 was running new code. Guardians of the Galaxy was running new code. They have anything else running new code? I mean, they had Lucy's there, Lucy ACDC. They had Ghostbusters.
    65:48
    They also just impressive because they had a huge, they had a really nice amount of space a lot to them. Yeah, they did. So they did a really good job of they clustered like four games together with the backs of the game up against each other. And so it just felt really good. It didn't feel like your usual thing where you just have this lineup of pins and you're all kind of bumping up against each other and it feels too clustered and all in line cues together. So it really felt more kind of cool and social the way they had it laid out. Very well done. Yeah, I agree. Excellent display. They had Jack Danger was there streaming. So I'm on one of the streams playing something. I don't even remember. Yeah, buddy. I think it was Batman 66 playing with, like, Ryan C., like, Dr. John, Jack Danger. That was fun. Kingpin is still awesome, Bruce. I told you. Everyone now sees the goodness. Everyone sees the one we've been telling them for years, that Kingpin is awesome. Steve Bowden believes it. The hype is real.
    66:51
    The hype is real. By the way, before the show, guess who bought a limited edition Translate? I don't know. Who did, Bruce? Me.
    67:01
    Very good, Bruce. So what does that mean? You're getting a kingpin? I'm going to try. So supposedly, if they build them, I think they said somewhere around $7,500. Yeah. Was it going to be the price? Yeah. I'll sell my soul. Because Mr. Bowden was getting near the end of the game, and then the right ramp stopped registering. So he couldn't, like, defeat it. Yeah, finish the boss. All the bosses coming after him, and they just kept saying, hit right ramp, hit right ramp, hit right ramp. Like, damn it. And there was a bug with the game where he got the – he played the sudden death, the power, where the flippers slowly die. And then me and Ryan C were the next players, and our flippers were dead. Like, you hit it and the flipper would go up, like, super slow because it was dead.
    67:52
    So we got screwed. Oops. Whoops. Yep. I'm in line now. I don't know my number yet, but I will be in line. And what happens in Texas stays in Texas.
    68:05
    As there was this story Ryan C. told me about a certain well-known designer and a certain well-known programmer who may have been somewhat intoxicated. Going around the hotel doing ACDC call-outs.
    68:19
    So, use your imagination there. Very cool. I will say no more. What happens in Texas? You will say no more. Yes.
    68:28
    So, let's see. I think that's it. So, Texas is better than Vegas then. Oh, hell yeah. Texas is way better than Vegas. The games are in better shape. I mentioned the old Chicago. I want to give a shout out to that. Oh, I want to mention, I played Joust, which, if you've been to as many shows as me and Bruce have, you've probably played more joust than most people have. Mm-hmm. This was the nicest joust I've ever played. Nice. By far. Well, the play fields are being reproduced now. They're in the line. Ah. I mean, this thing was literally look brand new. Guess how much the play fields are going to be from CPR for a joust. Oh, God. Is it just one or is it two? How does that even work? Two. There's two, right? Okay. I don't know. How much, Bruce? $1,400. Wow.
    69:16
    Damn. Yes. I guess if you have a joust, though, it's worth it. Oh, definitely. If your play field's, like, blown out. But, man, that was so fun. I played Ryan C in that. Dr. John is the joust champion. Oh, really? Yeah, he kicked both our asses. Dr. John is Mr. Joust. Can I say something about CPR? They're trying to get Meteor ready. Oh. So that would be a good play field for everyone who's thinking about it to jump on that list. See? You know what I'm calling it? Ooh. Meteor, baby. Like Homer Simpson. Ooh. And also there's one more good classic coming out, a little newer, but it's better. It's a good classic that you see most of the time are blown out. Sorcerer. We know you love your Sorcerer, Bruce. I do, but I mean, like most of them you see are blown out in the middle, you know. Raised inserts or just, you know, just cracked or beat up as all heck. definitely if you're thinking about it. I wonder what Colin thinks of Sorcerer. He got to play a lot of that in Vegas.
    70:16
    Ha ha ha. He did very well. It's an okay game. It's fun. The atmosphere of the artwork is good. The eyes in the back and all that. How the graphics on the plastics actually match up with what's on the play field. I always thought that was pretty damn cool. Me too. The artwork is excellent. but it does get a little like you know ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp ramp you know what you do after you hit the ramp then you hit the ramp and then you hit the ramp I learned something I'm in Vegas and that I always thought that after you got into multi-ball then the goal was to spell sorcerer so you could light your spinners and then you rip spinners but if you just keep hitting the ramp it's worth a ridiculous amount of points It is. It increases the playfield multiplier. Well, yeah. So your base value is 30,000. So you get to 5X, then you get 150,000 ramp. That's a lot safer than trying to spell sorcerer. That it is.
    71:19
    Who's your guy, your friend of yours that does the modified ROM? That would be Scott. So Scott needs to do a ROM where you have to do something else in the playfield to requalify your lock.
    71:33
    I like that. Like maybe doing a loop, like get up top. Yeah, finish the top lanes. Like finish the top lanes. You know, so four shots up top, and then you can re-qualify your locks. Make it happen, Scott. Make it happen. Of course, we would have to test it. We need a sorcerer. So, Bruce, you'll have to get a sorcerer to test this for us. I can do that. Okay. So I'm on this week in pinball. We pretty much covered most of the news because most of it was the Texas Pinball Festival.
    72:02
    Hi, Jeff. Yep. Alice Cooper's Nightmare Castle, Kingpin Revealed. Yep. Oh, they mentioned the strength seminar. They mentioned Elvira 3. The play field is well underway, but they don't have anyone in the software yet, I believe is what they said. Then we have Titanium Man slash Iron Maiden.
    72:23
    Trying to see if there's any other news other than Texas. Texas was the center of the pinball world. That is definitely for sure. How did it feel to you in terms of crowds this year, Ron?
    72:34
    It was pretty crowded. Yeah, I felt it was much more crowded than previous years. So it's definitely the number of people that are there and how much they're trying to cram into that exposition hall. Yeah, the first two years ago it felt like there was a lot of room in there, and now it doesn't. Yeah, that's what happened. I mean, me and Bruce used to go to California Extreme, and we got to experience that. Overcrowding. Where it went from okay to completely, like, I can't physically get from one end of the hall to the other. Without bumping this 50 people. Yeah, that's when it got like, oh, my God, this is insane.
    73:07
    One last note from TPF. Friday, I took a little break from gaming, relaxing in the hotel for a while. Then I came back for a night session. I go up in the security or the check-in person. They're, oh, hi, Ron. I look, and it's Andy Cushman, you know, Syracuse's own Andy Cushman, former guest. Mr. Butthead himself. I'm like, what the hell are you doing here? My God, it is a small world. It is a small little hobby we have. It is. It's like, holy shit. It was working the door.
    73:40
    But now it's time. The news is done. Everything is done. We're time for Face Off. And this is Face Off, Texas Pinball Festival edition. And this is what we're going to do, folks. We have decided. What? I don't know anything about this. You know more than I do. This is very unfair. Very unfair. I think you're trying to win.
    73:59
    Well, of course I'm trying to win. But what we decided to do, since we didn't pick a year of manufacturers or anything last week, we're going to use the lineup from the Texas Pinball Festival Wizards Tournament because it has a good mix of modern, solid state, and EMs. And since we usually pick three games, that's what we're going to do. We're going to have to pick one modern, one solid state, and one EM. And we have a very qualified judge here because I'm sure he's played all of these within the past week. Do we have a list of these games? Because I don't have this list. I will give you the list right now.
    74:40
    One question for you. You want to use the banks as they were in qualifying or what I had to sub one in during finals? That's a good question. I didn't ask you. What happened to tag team? It did what premieres do from that era and finally, you know, crapped the bed.
    74:59
    No. Stop. Well, in honor of Bruce, since he hates Scott Leaves, we'll use the replacement game, which was Paragon.
    75:09
    So for those at home, in the EM category, oh, these aren't in the, okay. So in the EMs, we had 300, bow and arrow, solar city, and space mission?
    75:25
    300, bow and arrow, solar city, space mission, yes. Modern is the Atoms family, Metallica, Stargate, and the Walking Dead. Solid state is solar ride, stars, paragon, and total nuclear annihilation. So we each get two? No, we're each picking from these categories. Well, yes, I guess I get one and you get one. We're picking, yes. So we're picking from each different category.
    75:49
    And since you lost last time, you get the first pick of which category? Since I lost, you get the first pick of the game. No, usually the loser picks the first game. No, usually because I picked the first because you were picking against me. Oh. See, Bruce gets the rules to his own game. Okay, well, I will go solid state. So you're going to start solid state. Okay. And I'm going right to the best game on there. Oh. Stars. Okay.
    76:16
    We're going for ultimate brutal game as it is. One of the few rule sets that Scott has not changed is on this game, which is Stars.
    76:28
    You have two sets of drop targets with three drop targets on each. You have double bonus. You have triple bonus. You have two spinners, classic spinners, which never go wrong. you have five targets around there with each stars. When you get a star, you add up, you know, it actually increases your right spinner more with the more stars you have. If you get all five stars, special lights. And it depends on how you have your game set up. But if you hit the special once, you get 100,000 points. If you hit it more than once, if you have your game set up, you can keep on getting 100,000 or just get nothing. Ah, if you have it set up for none. You have double bonus and triple bonus. After that, you can hit the triple bonus all six targets down again, and you get $100,000 every time. That is a rule you cannot change. Plus, the left spinner can go, if you get certain targets with certain orders, you can get it up to $400,000, you can get it up to $600,000, or you can get it up to $1,000 per spin on the left spinner also.
    77:33
    Plus, if you get the two outer drop targets and leave the middle one, You get 7,000 more points for your bonus, for your regular score, when you take that third target down in the middle, if that's the last one. Artwork, great. Mr. Kirk rocks. Best game, brutal game. It is Stern Stars.
    77:55
    I yield the floor. Okay. I'm going to select the best game there, solid state, and that would be Paragon. Yes, Paragon. When tag teams hit the bed, they knew what game to put in to replace it. Paragon. Great wide body. The best of the Bally wide bodies.
    78:19
    Just incredible play field. It's got the pop bumper, the beast layer right there just to scare the crap out of you. It's just sitting there ready to drain you. It's got inline drop targets. Who doesn't love inline drop targets? They even made it so the first one is worthless. so you have to get that one down to get to the ones that actually mean something. I mean, that's just great rules right there. It's got the golden cliffs. You've got the waterfall on the right side. You've got the three drop targets there. It goes down to waterfalls. Just great, great shots. It's got the two saucers up top. Great use of the wide body play field. Using every square inch to make it more and more awesome. and the artwork, just probably some of the best artwork that has ever been on a pinball machine. Incredible back lasts. Great rule set with the great DiBali super bonus. Get it up to 20, 30, 40. Get a full 49K bonus 5X multiply bonus meltdown on Paragon. One of the greatest things you will ever do in pinball. I give you Paragon. I yield a four.
    79:29
    Wow. Are you doing your rebuttal soon? He's in shock. No, no. I'm doing it right now. Stars is a way better game because, don't forget, one of our own listeners said that Space Invaders is the best wide body. And no one's ever gone against Stars saying that's the second place. But one of our listeners took down Stars. I took down Paragon, sorry. I took down Paragon in his rules thing, and it actually was pretty impressive how he did his rules. But stars, you cannot be beat. You cannot beat two ripping spinners. Spinners all day, every day, I yield the floor.
    80:16
    I'm in shock. I'm so thoroughly confused about what you said in the one section. I totally lost my train of thought. I have no idea what you just said. Let's see. Stars, wide open. and there's just nothing on that play field, just barren. Only one pop bumper, really? Only one? Come on. Come on, that's just so lame. A good artwork, the artwork is fair at best. Back glass, just total piece of crap stern back glasses. Show me a good star's back glass. They all just completely disintegrate. Cheap stern parts, cheap cabinet.
    80:52
    I yield the floor. Wow. Wow, so that's a tough one to choose between this particular battle. I think you got screwed.
    81:05
    Man, because Paragon has long been one of my favorite solid stakes. It's actually one of the games that kind of got me hooked on classics. I had to play that and pop a classics, and then I didn't know how to play it, so I went out to one of the copies that they had out in the free play area, or, you know, coin drop area and played that thing for at least an hour, maybe more learning how to tap pass. But, you know, stars also can tap pass and is a good reason to tap pass because you have maybe one side of the spinner, one side spinner is lit, but the other one isn't.
    81:44
    Wow. The only downside with Paragon is that with Paragon, I'm pretty much going to play Paragon the same way every time.
    81:56
    I'm always going to be going for those inline drops and, you know, redirecting, dead bouncing over to left, tap passing, going for the inline drops. Whereas with Stars, I'm going to vary how I play based upon which particular drops I end up hitting, where I might actually choose to start ripping that left spinner if I happen to nail the center drop only. And that's a really cool rule.
    82:23
    Man, I'm also not as familiar with stars, but I am after this weekend. And I also got to say from just a sheer brutality perspective that I've got to go with the center post and stars and the different ways to play it.
    82:44
    Excellent. So stars wins. You know what the irony of this is? What? I own a Stars and Bruce owns a Paragon. I own both. Well, don't say that, Bruce. You ruined my... Just ruin everything. I did because I love ruining it when you're wrong. Snap!
    83:01
    That's why I couldn't wait. If you notice, I didn't go against Paragon. I didn't say one thing bad about Paragon.
    83:08
    So let's see. Wow. GMs are modern. You know, when the judge, the first thing he says is how he loves Paragon, but still judges against you. So that's not a good start. No, it's not.
    83:22
    Let's go with an EM. Okay. I knew that was going to be the next pick. Oh, okay. Let's go with a – no.
    83:31
    What are you going to pick? Bow and arrow. Got it. Bow and arrow. Great, great – it's Williams, right? Williams EM. It's got spinners. Who doesn't love spinners? Spinners and a collect hole. That's all you need with EMs, man. And this EM isn't one of those horribly brutal ones where you have no chance. No, it gives you a little bit of a chance. It gives you a little bit of a chance. It's just got sweet spinners you can crush. It's got that collect hole. And if you get that going, you can collect it just over and over. You know what EM Bowen Cairns played the most of during the tournament? Bowen Arrow because he knows Bowen Arrow is awesome. Officially endorsed by Bowen Cairns. Bowen Arrow. Great theme, great art, great play field, great overall EM. If you want to see some great bow and arrow action, you can look at the finals of the, what was it, Pintastic. Go to Tim Ball's stream. Yes, also advertised, timballswitch.tv. Yes, Tim Ball's, and you can see the finals involving bow and arrow. See some of the most exciting bow and arrow action you'll ever see. I give you bow and arrow. I yield the floor.
    84:45
    Okay. since I have to go and trump his EM with another better EM. I am picking the EM that he said earlier in the podcast that he had to go to because it was the best one he played at, and that is 300.
    85:02
    300, classic Gottlieb. They didn't even make a four-player. They even made a two-player version of this game with top score.
    85:12
    It has the waterfalls on the sides. It's the only bad thing about this game. But you have a kick-ass spinner with great shots. An off-center spinner, too, so it's a little harder.
    85:23
    Two gobble holes, we'll call them, the kick-out holes. Really good game. Fun game, artwork with an animated back box.
    85:32
    You get to see your shots when you get your spins up so much. You get an out-of-ball, and you get that bonus ball at the end of the game. Great, great little gimmick. This is a good shooting godly, because it's an EM. Not a solid state. I give you 300. I yield the floor.
    85:49
    What's an off-center spinner? What does that mean? It's actually not in the, like, you know, it's a little crooked. If you look at the shot, it is a little to the left. Okay.
    86:00
    Hence the problem. This spinner is so early on the right flipper, it's not even worth going for. It's like a left flipper to the spinner only. It has the horrible waterfalls on the right that, like Bruce said, where it comes down and you just pray it takes the in lane out the out lane. Then if it takes the out lane, you pray you can somehow jiggle the thing out and save it without tilting.
    86:23
    Artwork subpar. I yield the floor. Who wants Indians on your back glass? Not me. No. That was a bad period in the time of the United States. We don't want to go through that again, guys. Let's just forget this history and forget this game and go with 300. I yield the floor.
    86:46
    That's pretty lame, Bruce. That's like one of my artwork is offensive defenses, but okay. I try. Come on.
    86:56
    So bow and arrow is, you know, it has two spinners, but actually to me the spinners are not as satisfying because it's not actually, you know, to me the best part about a spinner is, you know, having the score reels go crazy when that 1,000 reel goes crazy. But 300 doesn't do that either. So they actually both do the same thing with their spinners in that after a certain number of spins, the bonus advances. So it's not nearly as satisfying as most other spinners. You know, Bruce chose poorly because he could have countered with Space Mission, which does have a 1,000 reel rip to spinner. So the bow and arrow is interesting because I did learn, you know, I originally thought that game was boring until I listened to Levy commentate bow and arrow at Syntastic.
    87:51
    300 is nice. I actually think the waterfall feature is kind of a neat feature, although not necessarily the best on 300. I think it's better on a game like Gottlieb's Atlantis. But it's still an interesting game. You can actually play it a couple different ways. You don't necessarily have to go for the spinner. If you can't hit the spinner very well because it definitely is not in the right spot on the flipper, you might actually be better off hitting the lit advanced bonus instead of going for the spinner. But the thing that kills it for 300 for me is that it is too luck box-ish in terms of whether you're going to be able to collect your bonus. And also, when you go up into the mystery bonus hole, you can either get one ball or up to three balls, and that can be a big difference, especially in ball five with a double bonus. Bow and arrow has a really nice feature for you can keep going after bonus and decide when you want to start going after bonus or you can continue building. And when you are building that bonus, the ball is out of control. and as long as you have a bow and arrow that is not an easily controllable feat from the collect bonus, it's a very fun game, which at TPF the collect all was difficult to control. So I am going with bow and arrow in a landslide. It wasn't even close. It would have been close with Space Mission, but no, not against 300. Bow and arrow kicks its butt. Woo-hoo!
    89:19
    Truth be told, I actually like 300. I play that at... Except after... Well, no, yeah. The funny thing is, the other one I play, which is at Howard's place, one of the Orange County guys, it plays exactly the same way. Like the right flipper, it's super early to hit the spinner. It plays exactly the same. I still suck at it.
    89:39
    Okay, Bruce. Okay, Father. Take it home. I'm going for it. We're tied 1-1, folks. This is the tiebreaker. The Walking Dead.
    89:48
    The newest classic. the newest classic stern this is actually have to say one of the best sterns that's come out in a long time and the rules by lineman made this game the shots are okay you know the shots are fun you know it's appealing but the rules made this game lineman it should not be a john borg design game this should be a Lyman rules game with John Borg help Because without Lyman this rules sucked on this game Now he made it so tournament players enjoy it people who just walk up to it a first time enjoy it. It is so smooth and so enjoyable that it's just great. You get the house in the middle where you kind of hit it all the time. You get the, you know, the well walker. He's great. Drop targets on the left-hand side. If you have a premium or an LE, you get the crossbow. You get the movable up and down ramp, which I actually prefer the pro better because I like the ramp just being a little less steep. Great game. Great theme.
    91:09
    I don't think I can say anything more except for just, winner! I yield the floor. Okay. For my game, I'm picking... I mean, 19,000 plus sales cannot be wrong. I give you the Addams Family. One of the largest selling pinball games of all time. A classic in every sense of the word. Everyone knows Addams Family. It's probably been used in Pampa Finals more than any other game by far. just an all-time classic Pat Waller design. You got the bookcase, spell greed, lock ball, start multi-ball. You can do that, or you can go for mansion awards, hit a ramp, hit the chair, get your mansion awards. Just great playing game, great shots. Did I mention Thing? One of the greatest toys. The Thing hand comes up, grabs your ball, brings it back down. I mean, who doesn't love that? It's a great effect. And did I mention the thing flips where the flipper flips itself? And unlike a lot of these gimmicks, once it actually learns the shot, it hits it most of the time, which is pretty damn impressive. The artwork is good artwork, just an all-time classic, great Larry DeMar rule set. You can't go wrong. You might have Lyman. I have Larry DeMar. I'll take Larry DeMar. I give you the Adams family.
    92:42
    I yield the floor. I will definitely take Lyman over Larry DeMar easily because his problem with Adam's family, and we all know it, it's hit the ramp, hit the scoop. Hit the ramp, hit the scoop. Every tournament player, that is their goal. It is nothing else than a hit the ramp, hit the scoop. And if I get, if I ball bounces around there, you know, once in a while, I'll get control of it and hit the scoop again. Or hit the ramp again. That's all I'm doing. There's no, it's a one-dimensional game. As Josh will tell you, most games are one-dimensional. Walking Dead, you've got to do a lot more things to get your, you know, teach you in the game. The rules are outdated compared to Walking Dead. Walking Dead all the way. I yield the floor. So you're saying the deuce doesn't like it? Maybe. Maybe not. Okay. Well, Walking Dead, we have an annoying well walker thing, and it just blocks shots, just takes up space. Another bash toy just to be a bash toy. We have the prison, which the head works so infrequently that in tournaments, half the time they disable the doors, so you just hit the doors over and over, so it's so non-functional. You have the pro, which no one even wants to play because you don't have the action button, so you can't get your walker bombs, and the artwork just flat-out sucks.
    94:12
    I yield the floor. Oh, boy. Here we go. Wow. Two very different games that have very different appeals, almost depending upon the mood you're in.
    94:28
    So there is no doubt that from a rules perspective and from the satisfaction of trying to strategize how to set up your score to then blow up your score that the line and sheets Walking Dead is a masterpiece.
    94:51
    And you can, in any given mode on that, most of them, you can pretty much blow things up, except for Arena. Arena sucks. and there's different modes you can play different times. It actually utilizes the bank of drop targets on a modern machine. It makes them valuable and important in terms of how you hit them, especially with the premium or the LE.
    95:18
    The one thing it suffers from, as what Bruce already identified, is from just a playfield layout and design, and it's your typical modern pin. And it's not quite as bad as just a generic family app because it's got some neat, you know, offset, you know, ramps as far as where they go. I don't mind the fact that it doesn't have the flow that people like.
    95:42
    And the fact that Lyman keeps putting out even more and more updates on it. So comparing that to Adam's family. So Adam's family, you know, can be in some cases very linear, although you do get to – you can, you know, change up your next mode. the thing that Bruce misses out on is that actually the way to play in tournament for Adam's family changes dramatically depending upon how the pin is set up whereas the Walking Dead pretty much won't change if you're playing Walking Dead in tournament you're going to probably start off maybe if you're trying to lay down a base score you're going to play some barn and then when you want to go for the blow-up score, you're going to try to do the riot stack with Bloodbath and Wellwalker.
    96:33
    Adam's Family, on the other hand, there are other strategies to it. You can grind points and get some massive points from hitting the side ramp over and over again, getting the millions plus. That's a very satisfying shot. The other thing that Adam's Family has going for it, besides the thing slips, which is a unique feature, is that it requires a lot different, you know, flipper skill sets and making choices of what you're going to do with the flippers. Are you going to use that mini flipper to take a shot, or are you going to hold it up to try to divert it to your flipper to set up your lower flipper shot? Are you going to risk the forehand to the chair, or are you going to do a post-transfer skill to get it over? there's just to me the the other aspect of adam's family that i think is is is you know spans beyond just tournament play is the appeal to your general you know pinball public and somebody that's new they're going to be immediately attracted to the adam's family because the first time that that thing hand pops out and grabs the ball with the magnet uh they won't forget it there's nothing really all that monumental of any of the toys on The Walking Dead. I also learned this past weekend that watching people in a, if you have a very active pop bumpers nest and rebuilt pops with good switches and good coils, the amount of points you can score from a 5X Swamp is ridiculous. People were scoring like close to 20 million for a 5X Swamp, which suddenly you start, you know, changing your strategy just based off that. So, all that being said, as much as I actually would rather, I think I would rather own a Walking Dead, but I'm going to give this one to the Addams Family. Woo-hoo! Da-da-da-da, I win. Da-da-da-da, you lose. Hey, you finally won one again. Da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da, I win. You finally won one. Congratulations. Thank you. I'm so happy. That was hard. That was a hard one. That was, yeah. That's a problem when typically you put good games in a tournament, so we actually have good games to choose from. It's not like, you know, some Godly system one thing that you made. I could pick Adam's family because I despise the game. I really do.
    98:53
    I would be a bad conscience. Next time you play at Papa, Bruce, if you're playing on Adam's family that you don't know very well, in particular if you're playing at Papa, because at Papa they usually install those two rubbers on the chair make it death 75% of the time. Yep. If you want to, instead, you can play the safer, put up a decent score, grind out strategy by shooting the mini ramp, feeding hyper flipper, shooting the side ramp, million plus. Yep. And you will probably. We had a game local that was like that way. They made it harder than hell, and I had to play it that way. Or every time I would hit the chair, it would never go in, and I just get so frustrated I'd screw up, so I had to play it a different way. it's okay, I know what you're saying grinding out is it's a lot of work in that game to grind out a lot of points it is almost like, it is actually a chore yeah, but it's fun to, I don't know I find that slighter, but the thing that Ron forgot to use in the rebuttal, is that he forgot to mention, super jackpot you know, stupid voice actor on Walking Dead versus Gomez Showtime I mean, Adam's family has taken it to school on the call-outs. Oh, yeah. Nothing's been, honestly, besides that, Indiana Jones. Those are the two best call-outs. Except, well, no, let's say Lord of the Rings. No, Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings guy. And Adam's family are the top three. Don't forget NBA.
    100:22
    I do every day. Come on. It's got the NBA Jam guy. It's got Tim Kudrow in it. That means it's got great call-outs. I don't know. You might hate the game, but you can't say his call-outs aren't awesome. Wow. Everyone hates NBA, but me and Tom McCullough, we're the only two people in the world who like NBA.
    100:42
    I'm convinced. I do not like it. Exactly. All right. Another one. I admit I don't like the spinning disc. You've got to turn that off. That's stupid. It really serves no purpose, in my opinion. Speaking of spinning disc, have you guys played the new Pirates yet, Jersey Jacks? Yep. I played it.
    101:01
    What do you think? I mean, I like the interloop shot. I have no idea what I'm doing, which probably won't change at any point. The spinning disc stuff is cool. I just don't know how it will not wear at some point, although they seem pretty sure that they've done stuff where, you know, we've ran this in tests for hours and days and it doesn't wear. Like, okay, I'm just thinking of every game I've ever seen with a spinning disc, from Fireball to Whirlwind to No Good Gophers. Every one of them chips. I've never seen one that was 100% damage-free. If they can do that, they'll be the first ones. And kudos to them if they can do that. Yeah, I got to play for the first time at TPF. And I did, yeah, after watching a little bit of the stream that Eric and Kiefer were doing, I did feel like I needed to get a PhD in rules to try to even understand it. But I played with my wife, and I had a lot more fun than I expected I was going to have. It was really fun to play. I was really surprised. And the spinning disc was, although maybe it was on early code or something, I thought the spinning disc was actually active too often for my particular taste. But the spinning disc ran me twice, I think, on my three balls. But the thing I didn't like about the inner loop, unlike other inner loop shots, I felt like you couldn't see the inner loop. You couldn't see what you were shooting at.
    102:30
    I got you. So it was almost like a guessing game to try to figure out where is that shot, because if you can't see where you're shooting at, I don't know, it makes it more difficult. But anyway, I was actually really pleasantly surprised, because I was worried it was going to be, you know, like some kind of wide-body Hobbit experience. Yes, and I was pleasantly surprised. Spare the Hobbit. I'll tell you that. Love that rocking little play field there, back and forth.
    103:01
    That'll be a mechanical nightmare to maintain, too. Oh, no. He said right in the seminar, that's a piece of cake. Easy to operate. That's what they said.
    103:11
    The only question I have is, the pricing they have on their games, is it really for an operator? Are operators spending almost $10,000 on new machines? or are they getting like, you know, $5,000 Stern games?
    103:26
    Yeah, it takes somebody who's an operator who's just essentially passionate about the hobby and not looking at ROI. Yeah. Basically, yeah, basically like the bigger markets. Like I'm sure New York City will get one somewhere.
    103:39
    You know, certain markets will get one. I'm sure like in the Northwest where they have like 3 zillion different pinball machines, they'll get one somewhere.
    103:48
    I will not be getting one anywhere in my area, I'm sure. I don't think Rock Fantasy is going to be getting a Pirates of the Caribbean.
    103:56
    I know what game he will be getting. He will be getting Titanium Man. There is no doubt about it. He might get an LE for that.
    104:06
    That's cool. Yeah. So, let me see. What else do I have here? I figured we'll go to... List of lists. Yeah. Well, I figured we'd just do the mail and then wrap it up because we've kept poor Colin here so long. with all our technical difficulties. We had, we, it'll sound great to you listeners, but it's been hell on our side.
    104:30
    First, we had Colin on his new headset and he sounded great, but his internet seemed to have issues, so he kept dropping. So we went to the phone. Then Bruce, he went out because his laptop decided to do, what, 20 minutes of Windows updates. Oh, God, did it. Then he got back on and then his internet sucked, So he had to boot everyone off at the bar of the Internet so he could use it. Hell, yeah.
    104:54
    So this is a pretty small mailbag here. I'm sorry. Sorry. The slam ball bag, I have to say, right? We patented that, man.
    105:05
    Jim Burrell was actually – he sent me his phone number. This is from at the show. Like, I'm waiting for your challenge.
    105:12
    You know, thanks for reading my Space Invaders email. I was writing to Texas Novel Festival. I was riding the Texas Pinball Festival with Space Invaders in the van behind me when I heard it. You guys are the best, Jim.
    105:24
    Thank you, Jim. Then we have the immortal, the immortal crotch-chop man himself, Robert Byers. Yes. See, you read all my binge-listening emails over the past several weeks, and I win TPF and get fourth in the classics. Yep, that's the reason that happened is because we read your emails. That is the reason. Sorry I didn't get a chance to say hi, Ron. I was looking for you, but I was in Classics and Maine Finals most of the day on Saturday. Thanks, Robert Byers, player 164. Maybe we need to get Robert on. Yeah, we got to get Robert on. The thing is, I saw him when he was in the middle of the Paragon game and having his finals experience. That was actually right around 12 when I was heading out, and I'm there. Do I want to say anything, or do I? I don't want to jinx him. Have some kind of bad mojo come off there, like, you know, I'll look for him tomorrow. And then he had actually left, unfortunately. Then we have Jim Burrell again.
    106:19
    He says, TPF, Bruce was there in spirit. Yes. Ron, having enjoyed Slam Tilt Podcast Episode 81 of my ride to Texas Pinball Festival, I was hoping to say hi to you there. And indeed, you and Episode 81 guest Steve Bowden sat in the row of seats ahead of me at the Stern of the Union Seminar. Yes, we did. Bruce, as I watched the video presentation with Steve and Ron in seats in front of me, it was as if you were there, too, in the seat to Ron's right. That's true. It was empty.
    106:47
    Let's see. I give this spell to invoke the spirit of Bruce. To prepare to receive Bruce, watch 30 episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Let's see. Listen to 81 episodes of the Slamtail Podcast with your hosts Ron Howland and Bruce Nightingale.
    107:03
    View the Stern of the Union video, including Lonnie Ropp commenting on pinball software. I swear after Lonnie's comment, I heard Bruce say, oh, God. You know what? I had the exact one. There was a section of it where they have Lonnie on there, and he's talking, and I'm there like, oh, man, if Bruce was here. I'd be laughing. Yeah, you'd be laughing at least.
    107:25
    By the way, with driving to and from Texas Pinball Festival, four days including setup, I caught up completely on slam-tilt episodes, and Sunday placed a rerun of Coast to Coast Pinball from 2016, or played, sorry. But now I see that episode 82 was uploaded before TPF. How did I miss it? Podcast Garden. That's how you miss it. They suck. Never mind. I'll enjoy it this week. Jim Burrell. And thanks for asking. You did pronounce it correctly, like squirrel.
    107:51
    Jim Burrell. Cool. So thank you, Jim. That's pretty much it. I have two here from Head to Head Pinball, which I'm assuming is Ryan C. They just say, like, split dick flip. Yeah, what was that about? I heard about that a little bit. Maybe he's just reminding us. Who did I play? I think it was either him or John, Dr. John. We played a game of, I'm trying to remember what game it was. No Fear or something? No, it wasn't No Fear. But, yeah, we played Split Flipper, but we played Split Dick Flipper or whatever you want to call it. What did you call it, Colin? You had a much more PC name for it.
    108:30
    Yeah, we did this once a late night after a few drinks. We called it Peen Ball. So we played some Peen Ball, me on one side, I mean, I can't remember, was Ryan on the other side? But it was fun. It was fun. It was easier than you think.
    108:50
    Wow. Yeah. And I heard you lost badly at No Fear. We got our ass kicked by Chris Franchi. He was a cool guy. You know, he reminded me a lot of Scott. That's cool. He even looks like Scott.
    109:04
    So, yeah, he was very entertaining, I have to say. then we have pin stadium just an email from head to head pinball with a subject line that says pin stadium no attachments so pin stadium yeah so it was fun hanging out with Dr. John and Ryan C you guys rule I think I got Ryan C we played some alien star yeah I heard that and I explained the rules to him and he liked it now was there a sea witch there Uh, yes. And did you show him that it works better? It was not working when we were walking around the floor. It was working later after he was gone. Ah, for the love of God. So, no. But we played Alien Star. I explained the rules to him. He's a big rules guy. And once he got that down and trying to do the thing, he got addicted. He asked me later. It's like, you know, how much do alien stars usually go for? Like, ah, I got you. You're going to get an alien star, aren't you? Yeah, too bad. Trying to find one in Australia. Good luck with that. It's hard to find one here. They had a beautiful one there. It had, oh, you won't, cover your ears, Bruce. It had common LEDs in it.
    110:26
    It looked good. I mean, even past the Ron test. He said, you know, these are LEDs, but they look really good. And Ryan C. said, of course, they're common LEDs.
    110:36
    So there you go. Just get over it. Come on. They're not all bad. I had two pop out on my Spider-Man. And guess what brand those are?
    110:49
    What brand? Comet. You didn't put them in properly. They're 47s. Okay, okay. Wait a minute. Bayonet sockets? How the hell do they fall out? I couldn't tell you, but I had just two days ago, Sunday, Somebody comes up to me and goes, there's a problem with Spider-Man. I'm like, what's going on? The bulb fell out.
    111:12
    I look at it. It's a bayonet. I'm like, really? So another person comes over. Hey, we got a problem with Spider-Man. I'm like, well, I was just in that thing. Another bayonet fell out. Like, really?
    111:24
    I don't know what to say, Bruce. I'm speechless. Yeah, they're drunk. I'm not speechless to say thanks to Colin for putting up with us and our technical difficulties. We suck. No, my pleasure. No, it was fun to – I always like talking pinball and cracking jokes and making fun of people. We all do. Love that. We didn't go through our usual introductory period because you've been on so many podcasts. You've said this story over and over again, and probably everyone knows your story by now. So we figured we'd just hang out and talk some pinball, talk some Texas Pinball Festival. And I assume you will still be running the tournament next year? That's the plan, yeah. Any juicy tidbits or still getting feedback from this year?
    112:09
    Yeah, still getting feedback. The biggest thing that I'm concerned about is how to make the classics better, but I don't know how to. I mean, from a perspective, Papa uses, I think, somewhere upwards of like 16 classic pins per classic tournament, and that's for 160 people playing. We had 130 people playing and only had six. I don't think I'm going to get the space to put anywhere near what I probably need to make those cues shorter. But I think it's great. I love having a classic side tournament. I wish I could have played in it, but I understand everybody's frustration as far as having long lines, and I don't have a good solution for it yet. Yeah, I mean, there's no room. Not much. I mean, unless they do the deal where, like, the games are outside the hall or something, like Expo does. but yeah I don't want to do that I like I think that's really cool feature of TPF and that the tournament area is right there when you walk in the door and so it's featured I love having the big screen there we had you know a few dozen people watching competitive pinball on a big screen past midnight and that was fantastic yep and a big screen had the stream you knew it was the stream when Steve Bowden was there in commentary so you can call him over as because they because he's the man he's the ambassador of pinball commentary. Yep.
    113:37
    And they had, what else was I going to say here? They did a thing where, like, the show doesn't start until late. Like, the tournament starts before the show, but they do this thing, like, when you get your badge, there's, like, the tournament badge, and then there's the show badge. So you can't get in unless you have the tournament badge. I always thought that was cool. I feel like a VIP or something. But you're going to make me a VIP next year, right? Yeah, we're going to get press passes. You're going to give me the red band?
    114:05
    Yeah, next year it'll be. Koala bottle opener, right? Koala bottle. Next year it'll be green. Right, Ron? The VIP pass. Yeah, it'll be green. It'll be the honest bitch.
    114:14
    I think my father or someone said, like, just get a marker and color it. Don't do that. Yeah. Don't do that. Yeah. Somebody tried doing that. Somebody tried doing that and got in big trouble. Okay. Bye. I actually saved my band from Texas. I save my band from any show that actually has the name of the show on the band because I figure that's cool. It's like a memento, so I'll usually save it. Yeah, so anything you'd like to plug, Colin? Oh, my.
    114:45
    No, just, you know, Texas Pinball Festival. Yeah, anybody who's – obviously, I think most people in the pinball world know about it now. But if you haven't been to it, you need to come check it out. You know, if you're looking for more competitive pinball in Texas, you know, come to the Bat City Open in Austin. Downtown Austin is a great place to visit. Or you can check out the Houston Expo. A lot of good stuff here in Texas. It's far apart. You know, we have a big, huge state, so we don't have quite as many of the concentration of pinball collectors and players like the East does where, you know, a lot of major cities that are a lot closer driving distance. But, yeah, Texas is a great place for pinball. A lot of good stuff happening. Everything's bigger in Texas. And also deeper. And deeper. Deeper. I want to go deeper. Let's go deeper. I want to go deeper. Okay. You know, it's not Target in Texas. It's Super Target. Yes, it is. Target. I'm not kidding. We're walking into the Target. I mean, it's the Target store, but it says Super Target. Yes, it's my Texas store. No, but it's happening in New Jersey also. Oh. Bruce, you just ruined my whole... I love ruining your business. You suck. Terrible. We are the Slam Tilt Podcast. This is episode 83, Godzilla vs. Monster Zero. Give a shout-out to all our podcast brethren. Let's see. What are they? The Pinball Podcast. This Flippin' Podcast. Bro, Do You Even Talk Pinball? Pinball Profile. The Pinball Players Podcast. The Eclectic Gamers Podcast. The Canadian Pinball Podcast. Did I get them all? Head to head. Geez, how could I forget them? I hung out with them all show. Ryan C. Oh. Head-to-head podcast. Don't forget www.thesilverballsaloon.com, where I'm at right now, broadcasting from. Check us out. We have 23 pinball machines, plus a 1962 ball bowler. And shitty internet. And a great internet I can block on you.
    116:53
    And don't forget your pinball lifter. Yes, pinballlifter.com. Check us out. I'm hoping to be at Allentown this year. We don't know yet. Still trying to figure out all the facts and if I have even free time. But if not, you can order from us online at www.pinballlifter.com. Use your brain, not your back. And also our other friends of the show, we have pinball star Joe Newhart. contact him for all your spooky Chicago gaming Jersey Jack American pinball needs we also have Mike Pupo of Flipper Fidelity best sound systems for your pinball machine he is also a Stern distributor give him a look see we are the Slam Tilt Podcast we can be contacted at our email address which is slamtelpodcast at gmail.com. That's slamtelpodcast at gmail.com. Like I said, hi, Zach. Fun with bonus. Hi, Steve. Oh, I almost forgot. This Saturday, the 24th, is the Stern slash Papa Pro Circuit Finals. It will be in Chicago.
    118:08
    I believe our very own, well, formerly very own Tim Balls will be participating, I think. It will be streamed on Papa TV's YouTube channel, so you'll have to just search for Papa TV on YouTube. Anything else do we miss? I'm sure we're missing something. Search for us out on the Internet. We have our Twitch channel. We are on YouTube. We are on Facebook, all under the Slam Tilt Podcast moniker. Are you going to be broadcasting soon from your house again? I'm going to be broadcasting soon. I will be broadcasting the Cheetah sometime in the near future. Ooh. See the fruits of my labor. See the greatest Y-body ever made. There, I said it. Damn, Skippy. Ever play a Cheetah, Colin?
    118:59
    I have. It's a great game. I don't think it's the greatest Y-body ever made. Sorry. Paragon, I'm thinking. No, I'm probably thinking like Demoman. Paragon.
    119:12
    Okay, what is the greatest wide body ever made then? Yeah, for me, I'd have to go Paragon. See? Okay. I know Colin. All right. I can't. I have no arguments here. We will not argue with the guest. The guest is always right. Nope. Plus, I have one at the bar, so what does that tell you? So we are the Slam Joe Podcast. Thank you, everyone. See you next week. Say goodbye, Bruce. Goodbye, Jeffrey Becker.
    119:42
    Can you boogie? Can you fly? Oh my, my. You can boogie if you fly. Oh my, my. Guaranteed to keep you alive.
    120:09
    Oh my. Oh, my.