Hey, what's happening ladies and gentlemen? Welcome to the third installment of the Electric Batcast Presents Pin Pals. My name is Cale. And I'm Serge. And we are here to talk about some pinball. Serge called an emergency podcast. This is the Serge Pin Pals emergency broadcasting station. There's been a lot of talk about fan layouts. Are they easy? Are they harder? Are they more approachable? Are they less approachable? And we're going to clear all that up. Serge, let me know what you're thinking. Yes, you're exactly right, Kel. Yet another emergency episode of the Pin Pals was needed. Before we get to that, I want to give one error correction because that's what we do. We're truth tellers on this Pin Pals to the extent that we're able to. in a previous episode i said that mxb mike minicore redid the code for bond he reached out and corrected me he did not redo the code that code was planned from the beginning with him and lonnie it just took a long while to get there that's all and for the record i really like the bond code for what it's worth so good work with mike and lonnie and i apologize if my word choice took away any credit for the thoughtful approach that mike and lonnie had planned from the beginning for that game and it's a very good code approach and maybe we'll talk about that in a later episode too. But I'm really glad I had the opportunity to make that correction on my word choice, because in a sense, that's what this particular episode is all about. Cale and I want to talk about, in the shorter episode of Pin Pals today, word choice when it comes to fan layouts. And he talked about that there. There's been a lot of hot takes on the layout design of Star Wars. Many people out there were calling the game easy or safe. And Cale and I both came to the same realization that there is a mass delusion out there that's grabbed hold of the pinball hobby, and we want to break that psychosis. And so this is really a what's grinding our gears kind of episode. So many people were calling the new Star Wars layout easy or safe because it was a fan layout, and I thought I would dive into those word choices. Does that make sense to you too, Cale? Absolutely. All right, so first let's define the term fan layout. What do we mean? Really, a fan layout has three criteria. The first is a two-flipper game. So any three-flipper game is immediately not a fan layout. The shots are laid out in an arc as the second criteria. And some would say the third criteria is it should go further and say that not only are they laid out in an arc, but that that arc is towards the top half of the game. And while every pinball game by its nature is to a degree a fan layout, every game has flippers that try to send the ball up in that sense. Many pinball games break that pattern by adding those secondary flippers that could break up the shot mix. And so all three Flippler games, like I said, are not fan layouts. Two flipper games can be fan layouts, but they don't have to be. So, for example, Deadpool has a cross play field shot through the katana ramp, and that's not a fan layout, for example. We good on the – Cale, you and I good on the agree definition of fan layout there? Absolutely. But can we get some more examples of definitively what – like fan layouts? Let's talk modern sterns. yeah and maybe with that that's a good transition to talk about the first word choice that i want to tackle here when you call it a fan layout easy or safe a typical stern fan layout would be something like iron man it's two flippers there are a bunch of shots they are towards the back half of the game stranger things john wick elvira monsters venom metallica is probably those are all pretty common fan layouts. They all play a little different, but I would say those are fan layouts. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Now, what about a Black Knight sort of rage? That is a debatable point, and that's why that third criteria is sort of tricky. When I said not only two-flipper game with the shots in an arc pattern, but that those shots tend to be at the back half of the playfield. Black Knight is unusual in that it is a fan layout and it is an arc but the game the the shots quite a few of them are really in the front half like the shield shot for example or the central stand-up you know for example so you can make an argument that's depending on how how strong you want to go on that third criteria of a fan layout what do you think do you consider it a fan layout um no wrong i don't know i was on the i was on the fence right and maybe that's why you were on the fence right yeah just but you know i i think of this as like a novice looking at it it's a it's a two flipper game and all the shots seem to be radiating from the center and going out sort of like a fan uh but after you you know uh dive a little deeper into it i'm with you fair enough so back to the words now of easy a lot of people are giving that take that this is an easy or safe layout so when somebody says a game has an easy layout to me easy me And you're speaking of Star Wars. Yes, I should say. The new Star Wars, Fall of the Empire. Fall of the Empire. Yeah. Fa'i, if you will, of Stern Star Wars, Fall of the Empire. And easy to mean is that the layout is so friendly that you could play it longer relative to other games. And really that's what prompted this podcast episode. You know, you and I, Cale, we both know in our bones that that's simply not true. We know from playing in our weekly tournaments that fan layouts actually play much faster than non-fan layouts. And what I thought we could do is we actually brought the receipts on this, Cale. Our incredible producer, Rachel, has shared the data with us. And here's what we found. So what we did is we took five Stern fan layouts. Sorry, you were going to say? Yeah, and let me stop you there. Not only do we have this data, but I know when we are prepping games for the tournaments and turning up the difficulty on the games, they're never the fan layouts. I have to make adjustments to Jaws, James Bond. And these are just like physical adjustments, not like, you know, software stuff. What kind of physical adjustments? On Jaws, we just take the rubbers off the outlanes, and that lowers the time. We found if we keep the rubbers on the outlanes, the game, the guys can just play forever, guys and girls. on Godzilla I have to actually take the rubbers off the outlanes and I put 4 inch leg levelers on the back of the machine and crank it up to I'm guessing like 9, 9.5 degrees it's still fun to play but it keeps the game from going on for an hour and the games still play long even then right yeah but they're reasonable So with that, should we get into the data? At 100%. All right. So I'm going to share my screen in a moment. We took five Stern fan layouts, five Stern non-fan layouts, and looked at the game time for each. So what we did is we looked at average play time, and I'm going to share that now. And so what you're seeing here is the five fan layouts we chose at the back. And honestly, there's more than this. Some of them I mentioned earlier when you asked me to name some fan layouts, like Metallica, for example. But we have Iron Man, Stranger Things, John Wick, Elvira, House of Horrors, Monsters. Those are our five fan layouts. Our non-fan layouts were Foo Fighters, Avengers, Jurassic Park, King Kong, Godzilla. I didn't want you to think that I was only giving an Elwynn bias, so I threw in a Foo Fighters as well. The other four out of five happen to be Elwynns. And I want to say that before getting into the numbers here, that this is not a judgment on how fun the layout is. All these non-fan layouts, I think, are A-plus layouts. They're fun. They're fun to play. That's not the issue. But the argument we want to make is that non layouts are actually the easier game They the games that take longer to go through really consistently across the board And so we looked at the average time Specifically this average time is over approximately 25 four games You could think about that as 100 games that were played. So a typical four-player game on Iron Man takes 15 minutes and 49 seconds. Compare that to Foo Fighters, which takes 22 minutes, for example. or take Stranger Things, which takes 18 minutes on average, versus Avengers, 24 minutes, or John Wick, which some people are like fan layouts are easy, but then other people are like, whoa, John Wick is too hard and I can't play that. And there's a bit of cognitive dissonance for me, you know, because John Wick is hard, actually. It is a hard layout. It is fast. And so John Wick is 23 minutes, Jurassic Park 25 minutes, or Elvira is 24 minutes and King Kong 26, and Munsters is 27 and Godzilla is a bit even over that at 27 and a half. Together, just looking at the average of these five, we have 21 minutes and 48 seconds for fan games and 25 minutes and 19 seconds for non-fan games. And if I was calculating it now and beep, boop, beep, beep, boop, boop, boop, it would be 16% longer. The non-fan layouts take 16% longer playtime than fan layouts. Does that surprise you, Kale? No, because this is what I do for a living. And like I said, I know I have to make adjustments to the non-fan layouts. That's exactly right. And so looking at those average times, and we could get those average times because we're fortunate to have this data. Electric Bat Arcade hosts the single largest venue pinball league tournament in the whole wide world. Isn't that right, Cale? That's correct. and over 120 players each week with games that play perfectly. And what I thought I could do now that I've shared the data is hopefully to explain why, now that we've proven that fan layouts are faster or longer, take longer to play. I'm sorry, I said that opposite. That fan layouts are faster to play than non-fan layouts. Maybe I want to dive into some reason why. And so I wanted to share two different layouts. One, King Kong. And then the other, we'll talk about Star Wars again. And one of the reasons King Kong, like a lot of non-fan layouts, play longer is because there's a lot of return lanes to the flippers. So I'll show you what I mean. And essentially in King Kong, there's four returns to the flippers that are safe and five if you count the upper flipper even. but what that what that really means is if you could get a handle on what to do with each one of those four returns then you could really play that game for a long long long time and i'm going to go through this uh in my way but if you wanted to see somebody do it on stream you could watch z mac at the papa world championship that was just held about two weeks ago and you'll see him play this game get a billion points play it for like an hour and repeatedly over and over and over We're getting multiple rounds. Right. Regardless of what you think, go watch that because it is just amazing. Yeah. If you don't believe me, just check it out. It's amazing. So let's talk about it. And you know what? This will also provide not just a point about the fan versus non-fan layout, but it will also be an opportunity to talk pinball playing and how to get control and that sort of thing. So as I said, there's four feeds, and I want to talk about those four feeds. The first one I want to talk about is this one from the river. so a ball often comes through here or it could come through there as an example and it feeds this area a lot of people are hitting with the upper flipper there but you don't have to even if the diverter blocks the ball you could trap up wait for the diverter to go away and then the ball will go back down and the the reason you might want to do that as valuable as these drops are is control. Because when the ball comes back there, what you should do goes through here, and it's coming at enough speed, because it's coming that far away, that you could ski pass. And what a ski pass is, is you hold up the left flipper before the ball gets there. And then the ball will jump over to the right flipper, and then you just trap up with the right flipper. And you get control. And control means more accurate shots. It also means pauses in the gameplay. and when i compare it to a fan layout it just fan layouts have far fewer pauses you you don't get to cradle the ball as much so here's a way to get very safe control over and over again do you use the ski pass off the left river return cal i i 100 do because when we first got king kong you told me to fair enough all right well then i set myself up there for that that's right and another point that will go to making this an easier game when I was at Stern and they revealed this machine. Keith Elwin went over the whole thing, and he mentioned he had to add that river plastic that makes the ball go back and forth that's right under that log jam, right below that log jam, to slow the ball down. To time it. When it wasn't there, yeah, when it wasn't there, it was entirely too fast, maybe almost like Jaws, that return on Jaws. Yeah, I know what you mean. Keep going. Sorry. Yeah. So he was tailoring that to make it what I guess some could say is an easier game, but which gave you more time to think and give you control of the ball. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And I think actually, if I remember, he got the inspiration for the I wish I could remember the game, but it has it's a game where the has that kind of curve at the middle towards the top of the game. I think it's a ballet game from like the 70s. I'll get back to that another time. But but absolutely, it's a brilliant way to slow the ball down as it's coming through. And that allows other shots to be made while that's happening. If you're in multiball, for example. And so so that's one return. And what I thought I could do, let's go to the other returns as well. I want to point to the right side first before getting to this one. So on the right side, I want to point out that there's two separate returns for balls. One is from the side ramp. And the side ramp goes there. It goes in the helix and comes back at the top of the inlane. But the more common feed is this one. And you get that feed from two places. You get that from this gong shot, and you also get it from the concave mystery. both of those shots will feed this in lane. The really important nuance here is that the feed from these shots is much lower on the in lane. So when it feeds here, the ball is coming pretty fast because it's building up speed. But when the ball is coming here, it's not coming as fast. And so on a lot of King Kong copies, you can just hold up the right flipper, and the ball will slowly come to here and then roll back down as a trap. On some King Kong copies, it's still a little fast for that. And so what you do is you shimmy the ball. You shake the game as it's on its way down. And that slows it right here. You start shaking the game. Not tilting it, just a little bit side-to-side shake, a shimmy, if you will. And also still hold up the flipper while you're shaking. And if you do that, usually it'll come to a stop. Try that at home if you've never tried that before. And you'll see why this game plays long once you get a hold of that move. Make sense to you too, Cale? Absolutely. And we were trying that last night, and it totally worked. Yeah, and I mean, it's so critical. Control is critical in pinball because, you know, a lot of people are just shooting on the fly, and you're liable to miss. But if you control the ball, you can time your shots better. You know where the timing is for each shot if the ball starts from a cradle. And then also it allows you to do things like backhand the gong shot if you need to hit that shot for example if you in a save mode And so so far there are two feeds that we talked about that are highly controllable This one from a ski pass this one from a shimmy and hold up the flipper The other two shots are harder to explain, but, and a little bit more risky, but still controllable. So the next one is, let's say you make the center ramp and the ball is returning to the left in lane. It's not going fast enough to offer the same ski pass because it's not coming from here. So it doesn't have a chance to build up that speed. And instead, what you typically should do is make a bailout shot. And what I mean by a bailout shot is the ball is coming on the fly, and you don't like the speed of it. And so instead, you try to hit something. And there's one shot that when you're making a bailout, the idea of a bailout is to hit a shot that is highly reliable, even on the fly. And so typically for this game, you want to look for a shot in the perfect center of this flipper. And for that one, as it's coming down, it's the spinner. So what you do is when the ball's returning from here is you make this spinner shot. It goes this way. You let it come back through the river and then you ski pass. So it does end up getting you control anyway. And the final shot to talk about is the hardest to control. And that is the side ramp. And the side ramp is a hard one to make anyway, but it's a great shot. And by the way, I love this layout, but it's a super controllable layout. So the ball feeds the right in lane, and now it's coming fast. You can't do the trick I talked about where you shimmy and stop the ball, but what you can do is make a bailout shot with this flipper. And so the bailout shot from here is the center ramp. So what you do is you hit the center ramp, it feeds down the left in lane, you do the exact same thing I mentioned before, you hit the center spinner, it feeds down the river, and then you ski pass. And yes, that sounds complicated and crazy, but of all the choices you have, it is the least risky. And like I said, watch ZMAC do this and you'll see him do it with 100% of the time, essentially, you know, on feeds. Now, sometimes you have to hit other shots. You might say, well, Serge, what if I have to hit the right orbit to start the multiball or whatever it is? Of course. But it's still under control. So you always want to trap the ball. Let's say I have the ball. I went through the river and I'm like, oh, I see that orbit is lit. Let me hit it on the fly. No, Instead, you ski pass, trap the ball here. Now it's trapped. Then you post pass, trap the ball here, and then you shoot the right orbit. So I'm not saying you have to only hit those shots that I mentioned. I'm just saying you have to hit those shots in order to get into control, and then you could decide what you want to hit rather than go on the fly, which you often have to do in fan layouts. I'll pause. Make sense? It's absolutely crystal clear, Serge. All right. Next thing I want to talk about. I talked about this is the non-fan layouts. All of them, in my experience and also with the data, take longer to play than fan layouts. Now let's talk about fan layouts and why they're faster. And if anything, harder, I would use the word, because they're just not easy. You're going to have shorter ball times, and this game in particular will have shorter ball times, because what it does is it has these shots, but there are not as many feeds to the flipper. So if you notice, there's this one and there's this one. This one only comes from the right ramp. And I guarantee you that this right ramp is the least made shot in the game. If you were going to break down all the many shots in the game, and you were just going to see how often does each shot happen, that shot is the least common shot in the game. It's a hard shot to hit. It's too far to backhand, so you probably have to hit it there. And it's sort of like the Jurassic Park ramp in position. it's just it's it's a good shot but it's just not an easy shot to hit it doesn't look that particularly wide i would say um and so i i say that that shot is is returns to the right end lane and you're not going to even experience that much if you're playing it then the other two shots that return to the left end lane are this shot into a buck that returns to the left end lane and this loop on a pro loopable on a premium it's not loopable because it's a ramp that goes up and down. But when the ramp is up or on a pro, you're going to see it return to the left-in lane here. And that's going to be going fast, too. I don't know that you could necessarily ski pass like I could on King Kong, because on King Kong, that ball starts over here. But on this game, it starts over here. And I bet you there's nothing particularly safe there, that you can't do like a ski pass and pass it over. And so I find this game to be less controllable than King Kong. And I bet you that it's going to play faster. Add to that that you have these pop-upers here and here, which are going to cause more chaos. And like I said, I think this game is going to play, you know, hella fast is what I'd say. So I'll pause there. That's my why fan layouts are actually harder than non-fan layouts in defense of fan layouts. What do you say, Cale? I think you're very successful so far. All right, good, good. All right. There are other words that have been used to describe fan layouts. And maybe let's talk about each of them. One word is typical. And in that sense, there are a lot more fan layouts than non-fan layouts, right? There are, you know, dating back to Medieval Madness and Attack from Mars and Cactus Canyon and Johnny Mnemonic, which some people would say is like the fastest game next to John Wick, you know, both Keanu Reeves games. And Johnny Mnemonic plays really fast, and that's a fan layout. and so fan layouts exist and so the shots are typical and in a different sense though not this layout isn't all typical necessarily it's got pop bumpers in weird places it's got a drop target blocking that shot it's got a loopable ramp with a jump ramp right there and that's not all fan layouts i mean you could argue stranger things has a jump ramp in the center to get into the Demogorgon, for example. But jump ramps are cool. And so in some ways, it's typical. In some ways, it's not. I think another term people might use is simple, like it's a simple layout. And I'm not sure I agree with that, too. It really depends on what you mean by simple. But one thing you could do is just count the shots. And so there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine shots in, I would say, in this F.O.T.E. Star Wars Fall of the Empire game. But actually, ten on a premium, right? Because that center shot changes. Yeah, I just meant places on the flipper extendable. If you think about it that way. But your point is valid there, too. And if you look at King Kong, which initially looks, wow, that's a lot more complex and the other game is simple. And if I were counting from the flippers like shots, I would say one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. I would say both of them have nine shots. You could, depending on how you mean this, you could add, well, should I count the pit as maybe a tenth shot? Maybe. Should I count the drop targets? I don't know. I mean, if I'm counting those drop targets, then I should count the pop bumpers on Star Wars, you know. It's not that different. You know, whether you think it's nine or ten, depending on how you count it. I mean, they both have a pretty similar number of complex shots, I would say. You know, it's not like there's three shots around the play field. And so I don't know if simple is the right word. I think the word that ultimately I would agree with is approachable. And people have used that term, too. And I think that's a more valid term. And the reason I'll say what I think about the word approachable and then let's see what you think about it, too. Approachable to me means are these shots familiar? Have I seen them before? Do I know roughly? And when I'm looking at King Kong, they're not familiar. I don't know when I hit this U-turn shot here, where's the ball going to go? And I don't know when I hit this cliff ramp shot, where's the ball going to go? And that's cool. That is interesting. And if you're used to hundreds of pinball layouts, it's fun to see something new. And so I would say that the layout is more approachable in Star Wars because when I look at it I have a basic sense of where the shots are Have I seen them before Yeah Can I predict where the ball path will go when I make the shot afterwards And I would say, yeah. I mean, if you look at the side ramp, it's got like this helix going on, and that looks like crazy. It looks like something might happen, and you get used to it after a while, like all games. But it's true. You're not predicting as easily where the ball might go after that. Back to Star Wars, most of the shots, as I mentioned here, don't feed the flipper. Like if I hit the spinner, that's going to come screaming around the right orbit, and you better try to get control. You can't trap it up. You can't do a ski pass or a shimmy or anything there to get control of that ball really well. Similarly, for the right orbit, it'll come back around screaming again, just like Iron Man sometimes does, for example. And then I could say similarly, the Death Star shot can come right back down if it's up, and even if it's open, then it feeds the balls. But it's just not as controllable. Overall, there's a drop target here that gets in your way before you get up there. Even when you get up to the Jabba event, the ball will come back out in a non-safe way for you. So it's just got a lot of non-safe feeds. But is it more approachable? I would say yes. Is it easier or safer? I would say no, definitively. That's my take on it. What do you say, Cale? Yeah, I agree. When I hear approachable, I think going up to a brand-new game you've never seen before and having a good understanding of what's going on. Like the shots look familiar and you can kind of just by a glance, you can kind of tell what the feed's going to be like. And I think that that describes this Star Wars layout. Besides the, you know, on the other hand, you have these like unpredictable pop bumpers in very interesting positions. And I'm not sure, is it in the code where you want to hit these pop bumpers? Yeah, the way, what happens when you hit the pop bumpers, either one, you build up your ion cannon, and that means nine pop bumper hits will light all of these circles around the play field, and then so forth and so forth and so forth. And the next shot you make will cause that shot for the rest of the ball to be worth two times as much. So for those people who are playing for score in a tournament, you do want to use those pop bumpers. You can make an entire shot worth two times as much. And once you learn the multiballs and you learn, oh, here's where the super jackpot is, you know, for example, on a multiball, let's say, or a double jackpot and the half multiball is this shot, then you might put it on that shot to cause it to be worth two times as much. So when you get to the super jackpot, it'll be worth more. Interestingly, I heard Ray Day on the show. I love that. yeah well i love that because uh you know i can see you know not even playing in a tournament just challenging a friend and they're having a great great game and then they you know they accidentally or on purpose hit one of these pop bumpers the ball's just going to go crazy yeah you're going to get tremendous side to side action and then sometimes you'll get a ball that goes like that right to the out lane and you have to like really quickly save it in a sense this game has four slingshots, one here, one here, one here, one here, that's another way to think about it. It's just going to add a lot of chaos to this game. And I can guarantee you, Cale, and I know you're predicting it too, that when this game is at the bat, this will be amongst the fastest players there. These are not going to be Godzilla, King Kong, Foo Fighters length games where you know there's always that. We have like how many games playing at once because you have 120 plus players, you have over 30 games playing at one time. And we could see Everyone finishes the game, and then they look at the screen. What's the game that you're waiting on? And then you stand around and watch the people play it, and you clap for them when they get a really great score afterwards. And you know what games they are even before we looked at the data definitively. Fair? Right, right. Yeah, the longest players had been, funny enough, the ones that held the top three spots were Toy Story 4. There was an almost hour-long game on that. Non-fan layout, by the way. Yep, Avengers. Non-fan layout. And Godzilla. Non-fan layout. Yeah, those games, we've seen those games go. We talked about the average here, but we've seen those games go an hour. You know, no question. And I always show up late to tournament night, which always works for me, because I always hope the Godzilla game takes an hour, and then I only miss one round. You know, that's the dream, Cal. That's the perfect night for me. Maybe the last thing I'll say is shout out to Enzo on Gonzo's Flipperamo. did a great interview with Ray Day and John Borg about the game. And Ray Day talked about how he saw our last video, which is really cool, by the way. I'd love to ask him some questions, diving deep into the rules here. But one of the things it sounded like was right about that we talked about our last podcast is you asked me, is there a playfield multiplier? And from everything I heard so far, I do not think that there is a playfield multiplier. There's lots of individual shot multipliers. One of the ways I just mentioned here, by getting the pop bumpers, there's other ways. If you beat character modes, for example, but if you beat character modes, it can add to you. Here, there's like eight lights right there, and those eight lights represent the eight shots right there. And let's say you beat a mode, then you'll have a solidly lit shot right there. If you qualify a mode, but you don't beat it, and you just play it, but you don't beat it, then it might be flashing for example and flashing means like 2x shot values and beating a mode means 3x shot values and so there's going to be a lot of shot multipliers in the game but i did not see or hear any play film multipliers and i don't see any inserts that would suggest to me that there are play film which is fine by the way because there's certainly a lot of risk and reward built in to everything we said and frankly yes i think that they're actually listening to the community who did not want 40x multipliers by and large like the last star wars right sorry you go kale yeah Serge, did you watch the stream from Stern that MXV and Ray Day did? I did, but you know what's crazy, Cale, is I did watch it, but we had started working on that video, if you could believe it, before they released the stream, actually. I based it on a very quick footage from VicVP. Shout out to him, who has a YouTube channel, and he got some promotional footage of the game before they even streamed it. Okay, cool. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that sums up what we came here to talk about, right, Kel? The fan layout in defense of it. You may or may not like certain types of layouts. Yeah, you may be used to it, but it's not easy. It's not safe. We could say that. Yeah. No, I think you pulled this off excellently. Once again, you're going to change the zeitgeist of the online pinball world. Oh, you're too kind. From A to Zeitgeist. That's what we're here for. All right, pen pal, Kel, it's been a pleasure. Yeah, you know what, Serge, it has been an absolute slice. And thank you for calling this another emergency episode of the pen pals. Rachel and I, you know, last night was her birthday. So we're going to celebrate for the next two days at one of our favorite resorts here in Phoenix, Arizona. We can't go too far, you know, just in case something happens at the arcade. We have to be there to take care of things. But we're going to enjoy a couple days off. You deserve it. Happy birthday to Rachel, and I hope you have a nice time by the pool. Right on. Thank you, Serge. I hope you have an amazing rest of your day, and I'll talk to you soon. Peace out.