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Let's kick this shit. What are you waiting for? All right, guys, before we start the video, we've got two cool, cool announcements. The number one announcement, we've got a new sponsor, man. Not just any sponsor, the best pinball parts manufacturer in the world. Marco's Specialties. Yeah, Marco's Specialties is where I go to get most all of my pinball parts. You know why? Because I can actually understand a website. I go on there, I type in my game, and pages of all of the parts I need for that specific machine. Well, they carry a lot of Sega stuff. I'm there because if it's a target I can't find, I know I can go to Marco's and I can find that target. It's easy. They sell pinball machines. They sell mods, authorized mods from people. And every hard-to-find, if you need a hard-to-find part, Marco's going to have it. Their customer service is just crazy good. I agree. So, Marco, specialties, the team there, thank you for joining the SDTM group. We love you already, so it was a no-brainer for us when you reached out, right? Yes. So, go to marcospec.com, order your parts now. I know there's a machine that you've got right now that's got a little frowny on it. He's got a little frowny because he's like, my snag won't work. My snag won't work. Greg need to order from Marco's specialty, right? Get it up and running. That's right. So, don't neglect that machine. fix it now with Marco's specialties. And our second big announcement, we have a new t-shirt coming out. Oh my gosh. And again, not just any t-shirt, Greg. We reached out because we're a big fan of his work. We reached out to Christopher Franchi. Pinball art guy. What do you think about us commissioning you out? Yes, to do us commissioning you out. A fresh logo. New polished logo. Not to take place of our logo. No, no. Just a logo shirt. A special edition logo shirt. Something fresh and clean but very unique. We gave the people the Kraken LE that we produced ourselves. Yes. You guys want to see it? We're so proud of this thing. Take a look. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. So pretty. Man. Now we gave him pretty much, we commissioned him out. We gave him full creative authority on it. We said, dude, just make us something that looks cool and says SDTM on it. Yeah, something smooth. Very polished, refined. And I think you nailed it. Yeah, we're going to keep those shirts blue, too, aren't we? It's an SDTM plastic. I know, and it's a real functioning one. It's so awesome. Help us out. Help us out. We're going to do pre-orders on this, right? Yes. But it just helps us gauge sizes a little better and gauge quantity and everything. And again, you know, it makes the possible, like, you know, like going up to American Pinball. That's right. It helps us out with new equipment. We actually bought some new lighting. We did. So for all you guys that support us and give us donations as well, reach out to us and give us private donations. Thank you so much. It's what keeps us going. But another thing you can do just to wear some SDT and swag. Oh, Gregory Bone, Gregory Bone. We get to review another pinball machine, buddy. Hey, how's it going, guys? We're doing Houdini today. We are. So Greg and I went up to American Pinball, the new manufacturers of Houdini. Yes. And we took a road trip, didn't we? It was quite a road trip. No. This guy right here hung out with me for six hours in the car. He loved every minute of it. Yes. And I was terrified. Every minute of it. He was so worried, you guys. He was so worried. Every little truck that would come close, he's like, just watch the road, man. It's not just every truck. So Zach's like, let's film an episode on the way up. And I was like. No, let's stream. Well, yeah, let's film. Yeah, let's film first. And I was like, oh, yeah. You know, I'm kind of a way of the pros and cons of hazardous conditions. And, you know, it's kind of slick out there from snow and everything. And so, you know, I'm kind of terrified about Zach wanting to do that anyways. I've never really ridden with Zach. You guys, Paul, he's got a bubble. His bubble ventures out about 10 miles from his home. That's where he pretty much goes to the grocery. He goes, eats dinner. He goes to work. It's all within that 10-mile vicinity. The farther you get out of that, the more pissy and cranky and scared and neurotic he gets. So continue. And this is very true. I can't deny any of it. But so, you know, like we met off of 65 because it was closest for us to be able to meet because we live such a weird distance away. Yeah. And so, of all places, Lowe's, who carries tons of salt, parking lot has never been plowed, never been salted. It's just all ice and snow. I'm sitting there waiting on Zach. You know I'm already terrified about waiting with, you know, riding with Zach. With his scarf on. Got my scarf on. I'm all sitting there, toasty warm. And I see Zach pull in. I'm like, oh, okay, he's here. Next thing I know, I see a gigantic black suburban coming at me. Woo! Fish tailing all over the parking lot, just smiling. That's right. And I'm just a shaker. I'm just a shaker. That is when he took his Zanex, and the rest of the trip was pretty good. So we went up to American Pinball. Those guys invited us up there. Very brave of them, too, because they said, why don't you come up here? We'd love to show you around. You can pick up your machine while you're here because I was buying a Houdini. And you can review the game. And we said, well, slow your roll, American Pinball. That's awfully brave, first off. because you guys should know we don't hold back. We don't bullshit. And we were pretty adamant. We said, you know. I said, we might pay in this thing. And they were like, well, they were smart. They were like, number one, you're buying one. So I know you're going to like it enough to buy it. Number two, Greg might shit on it, but we're going to take that risk. We think we're going to stand behind our product here. Yeah. Again, it was very ballsy of them and everything to do. But, you know, we told them, we said, we don't really want to review it here because we want more time on it. Yeah. We're not going to bring you guys a review with no time on it. No, no. So, yeah, we were like, yeah, we'll hold off on that as cool as that sounds, but we wanted to put more time on it. God help race. That's ballsy. It was ballsy, yeah. But, again, you know, we were up front. So whatever turns out today. And we're not going to go up there and sugarcoat anything either. No, that's for damn sure. We didn't. No. Because we were even talking about it on the way up, or we were like, what if we go up there and we think the operation is junk and we think the machine sucks. How do we present that in the nicest possible way but still tell the truth? Still tell the truth. We just be us and we just tell them how it is. It's a rough thing. All right. So we're going to get into this, but we did something a little bit different, something a little bit unique that I'm really excited about. Yeah. And I think – We upped the ante a little bit. Yeah. We're going to call this – this is a traditional review, but we've added a deluxe overview. Yes. And rules explanation by who? by none other than the designer himself, Joe Balcer. He gives us an overview here in a minute. And Josh Kugler. He's the software guy and the coder. So he's going to go over the entirety of the rules. So step back, relax. You're going to learn everything you need to know about Houdini. Then you're going to come back to Greg and I, and we're going to individually rate each section, including art, shots and layout, rules, toys, innovation, music call-outs, theme, enjoyability, and an overall rating. I can't believe after all this time you still got to read what the categories are. Go ahead. No, go ahead. We'll see you back in a minute. All right, guys, what's up? This is Zach from straight down the middle of Pinball Show. You guys know this guy, don't you? This is Joe Bolster. Hello. Designer extraordinaire. This is some of our favorite machines ever made. South Park. You did South Park. I love South Park. Wizard of Oz. Half of you guys own a Wizard of Oz right now. Apollo 13. Right. Simpson's Pinball Party. Pinball Party. I could keep going on and on. Are those some of your favorites? Yes, they are. Very nice. And now the newest game that he designed, the design extraordinaire of American Pinball Houdini. Wow. Very nice. So what Joe is kind enough to do, he's going to walk us through. Well, usually you guys know, I usually go through the shots and layup, the different toys, mechs, and stuff like that. But I thought, you know what? I'm kind of a dipshit. Why not go to the expert here himself, Joe Balcer? He's going to walk us through it. So, Joe, how's it going, man? Nice to meet you. We met a little bit at Expo. Yes. Right? You were busy. You were super busy at Expo. Talking with Larry. Talking with Larry. Yeah, talking with Larry. So, walk us through this, man. If we are looking at this machine, all right, I'm seeing a lot of stuff going on. Let's start from left to right in typical SDTM fashion. First off, the orbits on this, man, A+. A+. These are reminiscent to me of our boy Greg here is a big Sega man. He loves those Sega games. And it reminds me of those wide open, nice, smooth orbits on a lot of your Sega games. So the orbit itself, what made you go the way it did? What made you put the spinner on this side? Tell us a little bit. Do you love spinners? Tell us a little bit about the orbits of this game. Well, layout-wise, we were kind of behind the eight ball back in November of last year. So we had to get out a computer and come up with a layout that was going to work for the Houdini theme. Sure. A couple of things that I like to have in a game. I do like to have a long loop shot. Yeah, well, okay. It's going to fit in the layout. You know, you're limited to, you know, 46-inch play field. We cut off 20 inches of it at our standard. Okay. So this all stays, you know, this area, you can only do so much with it. the longest shot on a pinball is going to be the loop shot. So the ball is going to travel the furthest. Yeah. Give you the kind of most satisfaction just watching the long loop shot. It does. It's very smooth. You know, the opening shot to just come across in the targets, it's been done hundreds of times. You know, I use it kind of when I don't want to come up into the shooter lane. Okay. I don't have top lanes on the game. to shoot from. That's a good point. That is a good point that a lot of people forget about. There's not those top rollovers. There's no top rollovers in this game. What does that enable for you, though? If you get rid of those top rollovers? Well, you get that chunk of real estate back. Okay, so that's your centerpiece. Where this guy's sitting would be pretty much an area of rollovers. So would you guys rather have rollovers, or would you guys rather have an awesome theater? Yeah, that's what we want. Gotcha. You know, the crossover shot's been used before. When you have something like this, you can run into it. Oh, my goodness. Geometry works where you can get a little kickback. How early on did you think about this? This was done, I probably did this one or two times in the past. I think this was even on South Park. Oh, I forget it. Okay. It was a shot that went up to this area. And it's just nice to. It makes it a three lane there. So that center lane is your drain, but if you can get it into the side lane. It doesn't have a very open, but when it does, you know, it's a plus. Well, it's adjustable, too, so that's really nice. Yeah, you can open this up to be what used to be called a liberal. Oh, is that right? It's actually the opposite of what it is. I didn't know that. So, okay, as we're going from left to right, those are the orders. What are our alleys here? Well, I like, on certain layouts, I like to shoot through the pop-up. You know, you'll see that on different designers and different guys do it different ways or whatever. But just shoot through the pops. Kind of, there's a lot more skill involved through there. And on this particular game, the way the layout was working, you know, you have a shot through the pops to this target here. Oh, so satisfying. So satisfying. In the key lane. But then you have a crossover shot that, through the stage alley, you know, crossover, go through the pop bumpers in this angle into the stage. So it's the first time I've ever been able to, you know, manipulate the shots. Two pass through with a crisscross. Yeah, I like that. And, you know, they work. You've got to hit the shot right. It's not 100%. I mean, you're going to come in at different angles and catch the pop bumper. It'll stop it. But, you know, as a certain person I know always said, the ball is wild. But when you make the shot, it feels good. And once you figure out that there is a crossover shot into the stage, it makes that more of a feel-good shot. These pass-throughs right here just feel very signature to this game, and I think we'll go down this part right here. Everybody's going to know that's Houdini right there. Those two pass-throughs I find. I don't know how many layouts over the years I don't think shouldn't do the pops from two directions. It's been done. I don't know. No, it's supposed to be the curve through the pops, too. That's very neat. There's thousands of pinballs out there for many, many years. That's true. It's hard to say. That hasn't been done before. So let's transition from the pop area, and we're going to talk about the toys here in a minute. But let's transition to this main stage here. Right. Tell us what the people behind you are. Well, when we talked about Houdini, we said, you know, most of his illusions, well, I would probably say most of it. He spent a lot of time on stage. So we wanted to come up with an interactive stage. We had a couple different ideas at first. and it kind of evolved. I hired in a mechanical guy that I've worked with before, gave him some real estate to work with. It wasn't enough. It never is enough real estate for mechanisms, but we fit it in there. It's done with servos. You bang it on the front of the stage, it opens. You shoot into the stage. There's a hidden ball in there where we can do a, We could show a ball, close the stage, open the stage, the ball's gone. We can close the stage, open it again, the ball's there. And the other thing, it's kind of a central spot for getting into modes. It's really integral to the game, and it ties this into what we did with the back glass. Yeah. So this all came together because of the idea of pulling the display up higher. and building it into the back glass. So it kind of makes this guy come alive. It's nice to see the curtains open and close. It very much feels like a stage, especially when it swings. It's not a square. So when it swings open, it's on that arch. It feels like a curtain, and like you said, the bowl is gone. And now I take it it goes through a subway. Right. There's a subway that drops down starting out here at the trunk. It goes underneath. it'll pick up the ball coming out of the stage and also pick up the ball coming out of the magic shot. The magic shot, it's a hidden shot. It's not hidden visually because you can see it. But you can, you know, it's not a direct shot. But from the player's aspect, he can take this left shot, come off of this rubber and go right into it. Yeah, that's what Josh said. That's what I love about that shot in particular. It's real random in here, but you'll get it. You'll get it. You see that in the 90s. A lot of the 90s games kind of had that. And it's the same thing with the escape. So the AP and E of escape, they're not shot from the flipper, but you're going to pick them up off of the pops. Okay. The pops became random. We had a poster or two in here to keep the ball more into the pops. Okay. But then we realized, let's pull this and see how it works. And we went to a show. I think that was a good idea, yeah. And it opened up everything. And then I changed some angles in here. saw a shot off the stage, opened up and fell into this hole more often. So we got to make this hole more interactive with the player, even though you can't physically shoot right there. Well, I think it adds to the theme, too, because the theme is magic. And sometimes things happen magically, whether it's the magnets that are magically forcing the ball to go. That's what's very cool about this, because you can drop it in here, left side, a ball can come out this side. Josh can load both sides as a three-ball mech. under the play field in the trough at a three-ball back here. A lot of staging. Yeah, you can stage. You can shoot into the right side and come out the left side or vice versa, or you might shoot into this side and a ball will kick into play from the trough. And until Josh gets a handle on where balls are, he can start playing where he's releasing them from during gameplay. Now let's move even further right. We've got the ramp. Everybody loves ramps and pinball. What made you think, let's go this ramp, let's give it an exit here, but we need to go in wire form right here. It needs to wave around rather than just hugging this side. The geometry of this game, I kind of flipped. You know, you're kind of flipping where a ramp normally is. That's right. That's exactly right. Which takes up this smaller lane. We came through at first this was all plastic. I remember playing that one, yeah. But then, you know, after a lot of input and just, you know, we take input from people. Some things we could work with, some things we kind of table it for another game or another time. But it was easy enough just to hack it here and put another wire ramp in, and it just opened up this area more. Well, symmetrically, from an art perspective, too, having two wire forms with those flippers, just how it looks and feels. And you know your stuff when these things start to yellow and they get old. You have flame polish and everything. You've got this going on here. They call American pinball, buy another ramp. Right, right, right. So, as we're moving from left to right, we've got the shot that everyone talks about. The pinball community talks about this shot all the time. And I've got to tell you, man, I think they're kind of full of crap. This shot is harder to me sometimes than that shot. That's fine. Because that's more of a sweet spot. That's right where I'm accustomed to. It's small, but it's not unmakeable. And once you start to hit that spot, you can make this all day. I love. I opened it up a little bit. We tweaked it from show to show. We got to watch people play, watch some frustration, but then watch another guy come up next and shoot it three times in a row. And the guy that missed it 15 times is shaking his head. Well, there's got to be a payoff, too, because you're getting a theatrical moment there. It's going into this. Then it's jumping up the buck and it's going over to the milk can. Then it's got the catapult. So I think it's got to be a payoff. I like how tight. You don't want to hit that dang thing 20 times a game. And it's a good feed shot, like you said, to start everything moving for the catapult shot. And you get it around because we've got a pin up here that stops or lets the ball through. Oh, I forgot that, yeah. So you have a three-ball right here. You load your motion, yeah. So you're locking and loading this guy, this three-ball, or you're shooting it into the puck, which is just an accident. Now before, then we can go down to the scoop here. What's the scoop responsible for? What are we doing there? Are we starting seance there? Right. I mean, the scoop is the end of the subway or the undertrop. That's where it feeds to. It feeds to a super buck here and fires out. Okay. It starts your seance mode. It starts your, what else starts up in here? Your extra balls there. Your missions are all done through here. So it's a crucial scoop, and it's not just a scoop that sits right here. I mean, that's, like you said, the exit through Subway. Yeah. I really like that. And it's a sweet spot once you get to it. It's not on the end of the flipper. It's not too far out. And once you get past that, you can make it all day. Okay. Now, before we go down to this region here, talk to us about the first ever in pinball, these little, thin, stand-up targets. How did that come about? Whose idea was that? The first ever in pinball. But all we did was take the half-inch targets and mill them down at the 16th on the side. Uh-huh. that came to be when this shot at shows, and actually this shot too, these two shots, where people thought they were tighter than they need to be, and it's only a sixteenth of an inch more. Yeah. But like on a shot like this, I pick up an eighth of an inch on the width. That's right. You can add a shot, man. I pick up an eighth of an inch on this width just because this is a sixteenth shorter on both sides. And all we did was take the target. we had a mill down to the size of the blade. Okay. You can't go any smaller. The blade's the range of the knife. So, I mean, that's all we did with this. And then the target was retooled, and, you know, we accomplished what we needed to accomplish. Will I ever go back to the half-inch targets? Probably not. Oh, really? That's interesting. Why, when I can get away with this, and it's not. It serves the same purpose. And you know what I like about these better than anything else? They're better in a post. The post doesn't give you any points. It doesn't give you anything. A lot of people told me that you like implementation of targets more than you do posts. I don't like shooting at posts. Nobody does. Nobody does. I mean, if you look at this particular game, you know, this layout, you have one, two. I got two posts I can shoot at. Yeah. Two does. You know, there's a lot of layouts. And anything else is your own fault, right? Yeah. I mean, anything else, you're going to catch a target. Yeah. That's why we're going towards seance. Yeah, it is kind of why we made seance, which is more of the easiest multiball to get to. The novice comes up, yeah. They get the excitement of magnets and everything. Let's talk about the magnets. Did you help decide, hey, we need magnets in this game, we need three magnets, we need to position them? We talked about putting magnets in, and then when Jeff had, I think we worked with Jeff, to once we put the magnets in off of these targets, the magic targets, we put them out in front. That's what Jeff was doing, yeah. developing the art. We talked about putting the hands together. So it all kind of drew itself together. We were looking at hit a target and activate your magnets. And that's what we're doing now and kind of perfected the way that's working. Especially in this game. Working with magnets, you hit it, you pulse it, and you don't know what it's going to do. There are, if you do a certain thing in code, you can catch a ball, let it drop, and shoot it up into a lane. It's been done. We've seen it. The shadow knows. Yeah, this is new. It's just random, but it does some crazy stuff that, you know, makes you think. Well, what I like about this is instead of just – a lot of times we'll see magnets implemented during multiballs. It's been done, Adam's been done. But what we've got here is we've got targets that actually hit. I like that. Yeah, you'll see it spin around and shoot up into this. Oh, nice. You can see it spin around and make an instant milk can multiplier shot. It does some crazy things that you can't even duplicate. But when it happens, you know, did you see that? And it's over unless you've got an instant replay going. You're not going to see it again. What about the milk can shot? Now, this is an interesting shot. This one is the one that makes me mad, Joe. I'm not going to lie. This is the one that crawls me up a little bit. It is a tough shot, but what I do like about it is it's smooth. A lot of these little orbits here, the little wraparounds, they're clunky. This one is so smooth that once I notice it's in there, it's already at the flipper. I like that. I like that. What made you want to implement that? I wanted to put something there, yeah, without just having targets there. That's what the alarm was for. Or another buck or whatever. So, you know, we made that shot work. It's a short little shot, but it feeds this. Yeah, the goal is to hit time. and if you do shoot this and it somehow bounces around and drops in the out lane, we are gracious enough to give you the ball back. Oh, so you give a couple seconds with the ball save there. You know, we know that that's what just happened, so we'll get you a ball save on that. My pinball partner, Greg, appreciates that because he needs all the ball saves he can get. All the ball saves he can get. All right, so I do like that inner orbit. So everybody wants to know, this is the catapult shot. Yeah, correct. Let's talk about this catapult. What's the size of this thing? What's it throw? It was like 22 inches. 22 inches. We're not tossing it, are we? No. No. The inside lane here feeds the buck. The buck will shoot it up into what we're calling the catapult. Okay. The catapult then creates the spectacle where you're going to see the spotlight go off, and it's shaking. And all of a sudden, in the blink of an eye, the crate opens up. The catapult chucks the ball 22 inches midair without hitting the glass, the glass without hitting anything else and it goes perfectly into the trunk yes it does hot damn where did that come from what the hell is that well you know i've said it before with the layout that i did with using the catapults um we had a a couple of or like a white wood that was out there early on with a catapult on it and um it wasn't it was not in a layout that was going to work for anything. Yeah. But I fired it up and was just letting it fire. And I noticed that, you know, it was hitting within half an inch. Oh, not bad. Three quarters of an inch, except that the power went weird or whatever. But it looked like it was close enough that we could capture that. You thought, we can work with this. When I did Space Jam, there was a jump ramp that went to the basket back there. Oh, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, I do. And it was pretty much 100% because you shot that ramp at least with the right velocity, and the magnet would catch it and drive it to the basket every time. The problem with that is you beat to death this back panel. I was trying to put in plastic pieces, all kinds of things to protect it. But if you get to a space jam that's still out there playing, that basket is beat to death no matter what. So that was not an option. I didn't want to do that. Okay. Even though I know it worked, there's no way to cushion that shot. Us collectors appreciate that. You take a pinball and smash it up against something a couple thousand times, you're going to break it to death. So when we came up with the idea, we thought about having certain elements in Houdini. One of them was a steamer trunk. You can pick it up in the back glass network. This was all talked about for that era that he was in, the steampunk tie that we did to it and kind of made it our own. I just laid it in there. And, you know, we put the whitewood together, and there was no backup plan, to tell you the truth. and I went with this catapult here and then I thought, why not? Let's throw another one here and throw it across the front of the trunk into another ramp and it just worked out in the layout. It geometrically worked out and I'm only working on a 2D AutoCAD but I was able to do a trajectory of what I thought would work. So you're breaking the glass? No, and we kind of rolled the dice. We worked a couple of really long days putting together a game to work and test this. And I was out of the office. It was late. I was out of the office, and Josh and Jim and a couple of other guys, whatever, were here. Finally got that to fire and sent me a video, and it wasn't working at all. And, you know, this ramp had this type of a lip, you know, all the way around, kind of standard. And the ball was smacking into the wall. and it was not making it. They showed me this video and I'm like, oh boy, we have no backup plan. Let's get in there and see what we've got to do. We started to trim this away and started to watch the trajectory. Once we got this ramp trimmed, it hit. It was messing with Paul's and the first one went in and it was like we just won the World Series. I guarantee you, that's a winning shot right there. Once the timing was right and this popped open and that was through the air, it was making it, and now we're at 95% plus. Hopefully that gets better. Once it's set. Regardless, it's hard to find a mech that's that consistent. This is pinball. This is coils. This is all kinds of random firing. So that's good. Even just simple geometry and physics says if you want to go 22 inches on something, you've got to have a hell of an arch on it. You don't have no arch because you've got glass. I just really thought about how big the shot would be. You know, everything, we were all focused on what the stage mechanism was. That's right. And this is just a simple one-coil mech that just opens and closes a box. Yeah. And putting it together. Kind of trying to shadow the main stage there. Yeah, and it shocks people when it happens, and that's all I want to talk about. I've seen it at least 50 times, and it still shocks me. I love it. Yeah. I love it. It's a bullet. I'll play the game and go, okay, is it going to be all right? You got it again. You got it again. Very nice. And, you know, there's a lot of variables that have to be right to make that happen. Well, you said we talked about, you were telling me, as I set it up in the home, different power sources and stuff, new owners or new locations. Might need to adjust that a little bit, but once properly adjusted, pretty accurate. Yeah. Very, very accurate. I like that. So if we're looking at toys, now, so that's the basic layout, you guys. But as we're looking at toys, man, where do we begin? Let's start with these. I love these. You've got the chains. You've got the custom-molded gears on top of the pop bumpers there. You've got not just any lock. You guys could have formed just a generic lock. These are three unique, nice locks with chains. So who did some of the toys on this? Right. This all has to do with Matt Reister. Oh, yeah. We like Matt's work from Bat Galley Creations. Yeah, with Bat Galley. Yeah. I've been working with Matt for several years now, and when we sat down and talked about this. On Oz, right? Yeah, Wizard of Oz, he did all the sculpting on there. Hobbit? Hobbit, he did all the sculpting for Hobbit. And that's when I got to know Matt and got to be friends with him and understand. He understands what I'm doing. I understand what he does. And we kind of work together well on what we see for this thing. We were just in a meeting throwing stuff around, and, you know, it came up with we were working with the locks and the artwork. Okay. So it's time to take those locks and put them on a game somewhere. And where else to do it? This is the best place to do it. Oh, yeah. You know, pop-upers are on a game, you have three movements. Yep. Either this is solid and the ring pops up and down or the whole thing pops up and down. Yeah. So once, and then it just kind of evolved between the art that was coming from Jeff and what he was doing down here with the locks. And if you notice, these three locks are three locks that are on a game down here. That's what's cool, yeah. It's that immigration again. And the steampunk aspect of it is where all the gearing comes in, because steampunk is all about gauges and gearing and chains. War out kind of industrial feel. Yeah, all kinds of industrial feel. Yeah. And then the chains were just, you know, in the middle of the night, I was just perusing the net and looking for plastic chains. Ran into a place that had a couple different sizes, ordered some, brought them in, and they popped right on. You know, we had some chrome chain that I had in early on. The thing I remember is one of the shows. Yeah, they were on the earlier shows. Okay. And then we just found that, you know, the Matzki art butter, the solid chrome that was more like our wire ramps, really didn't, you know, took away from the aged look to this. What I like about this, a lot of people think, as the game is playing, that these are metal chains because of the sound implementation when Josh has got in there. But, no, they're durable. They're not going to get... Yeah, they're classic. But they look so good. I have a little open space here, so we can throw another piece up next time. Oh, details among this game are just insane. So we've got free-moving pop bumpers. I like that. This mech we kind of talked about. Tell me a little bit about the... So we talked about the stage, but what made you say, you know what, stage alone, we want a screen right here? Right, and early on we had this screen turn 90 degrees going up and down. I remember that, yeah. Which I was fine with that, too, but this so much. It was kind of through expediency. We had that small window to get it out. And you know there a couple of things behind it why we turned it 90 degrees to start out with I won get into those details right now but this is the way it should have been because being a marquee, it works best for this being a theater. Yeah. So, you know, some of the old banners that were out, you'll see they're long in this direction. And that was working for us, but once we made this change and everybody bought into the change, it was kind of the way to go, you know, to put the running marquee lights in the monitor and just make it come alive that way. It just worked best, and we were able to fit better things up in here. Very cool. The other toys we have is just the sculpted milk can here. We've got these sculpted, what is it, Ouija cards? This is actually a laser-cut wood. I know. It's actually wood. Yeah, it feels great. Yeah, it's a laser-cut planchette. Planchette. There's the word. I hear her saying that all the time. The planchette. Okay, what does this indicate? What are we doing with the spirit? Well, it all works with the seance letters. So all the seance letters are the planchettes, and you're shooting those, and this will come alive for you to shoot this shot. Very good. And then you guys thought, we need some spotlights to light up this game. Why don't we just do those reflective cones in there? No, no. We need to make this look very Houdini-esque. So you sculpt the theater lights. Those look like they fit in the game, like they're supposed to be there. If you look at the art, these actually, the 3D of this lamp came from what was in the art. Oh, cool, the plastic back there, yeah. If you look, once you guys get to the game, and you buy one, and you play it. That's right. It's in the art here. So Matt, again, I said, Matt, let's turn this into theater lights for the game. We had four areas that we thought were a little dark. Obviously, in front of here, we wanted to pop more light back here in this whole area. We changed the arc to lighten up the background and everything with Houdini here, but it needed more light. Okay. I had four of these on the game, but these are kind of big, and once you put that on here, it just got big. I kind of like how discreet that is. Yeah, you didn't see it. And here, you know, you're under a ramp and everything. So we just took the standard lamps. Well, you still even colored them, too. It's that fine detail in Houdini that I can really appreciate, and the reason that I bought this very one right here. Last thing before we go. A screen. Now, this would be your third screen, LCD screen that you've worked on in pinball? Yeah, because we, you know, at JJP when we did Wizard of Oz, that was one of the game changers we wanted to make was to go to the LED screen. And I was able to fit a standard backbox with a 28 or 27 monitor in there and it takes up most of your backbox but when you use it right, and I do believe they use it right, you can fill that up with some beautiful stuff. Okay. But coming here, I didn't want to go with that size I wanted to go smaller. This is a 15.6. You'll see this size down lower in a panel. But that kind of takes up once you move this down and make a panel then your art area is a lot smaller too. So to slide it up and make it part of a stage was just the absolute way to go. What I love about this is I can confidently say this is one of the and there's beautiful back glasses in pinball, and it's an LCD monitor integration. That's hard to say. Anytime you put an LCD screen in there, like you said, it takes away so much of the art, but this incorporates the art into screen space. Yeah, we had some fun doing it. You know, this is a bunch of people there, here. Oh, and they come up and over. Yeah, you kind of make it look like you're looking up from an audience. Now, the head's funky. Yeah. The head is funky. Oh, we had a bunch of speakers in here. Yeah, all your sound is in the head. We don't have a bass speaker in the cabinet. Oh, okay. I kind of felt that, you know, you're losing a lot of that. So we wanted to pop everything up here and throw it at the player. All right. The reason for the shape on the sides, I mean, you can go back into the 80s and the 90s, and we messed around with the side panels a lot. And then to get more into a saving, money-saving thing, then you just square it off as they can send it. It stayed that way for a long time. The thing that I was interested in doing here is we found these chase lights that go into a T-mobile. I read the interview on This Week in Pinball. Yeah, and we tried it here, and I really liked the look of it. You know, if I put 100 pinball machines out on the street and lit them all up, this one would pop because it would have this. So that was kind of our initial idea to do it. We didn't want to pop all kinds of colors like you're seeing here. It will be more, you know, my idea was more for kind of taste like marquees. That is just kind of always running. And then you could use color schemes. And if you've got a shot on the right, you might be able to control this right and get interactive with it. You know, we had a small window to work with, and it just didn't get in there. And for the cost of doing it, will we do it someday? You know, I hope to say that we would or maybe not. It's still a possibility. It's nothing you're pushing right now. You're trying to get machines out. But I wanted to do something as a startup that was different, that people would recognize it as a different look. Boy, boy, does this not stand out. I mean, everything's premium on this. One last thing before we leave it, I've got to ask. strangest thing in the world. I was supposed to ask about this because I asked, there's this monkey here, so strange, and it's got a bandage right on his, well, his crotch. What the hell is that? Well, I don't want to get into details. I'm going to give you guys something to do. You don't want to get into details? The monkey crotch is today. Go ahead and Google that. Google what? What are you getting me into, Joe? Monkey balls. Okay, we're going to monkey balls. Houdini monkey balls. You don't get an answer. Houdini monkey balls from Joe Ball. WWW. And then you're going to be put on the list. But, yeah, there's a reason behind it. There's a reason behind it. There's a reason that Houdini is tied to this. Okay. He finds his way over here, too. Yeah, he's there. His monkey's pushing the ball into the catapult, too. You might see him. We have blades for the game, also. I will be one of the first buyers of those. I will be, yeah. Our blades. He's just kind of become our little mascot for the game. I love it. Anything else that I missed that you think would be important for us to know about American Pinball's Houdini? It's, you know, a lot of people put a lot of effort into this in a short amount of time. Yes, they did. You know, when you let people work and you're not restrained and people know what they need to do and how they need to get there, that's what made this happen. That's cool. You know, you can sit around, any other company at that point, you could sit around and we could change and tweak the old word of the pinball industry and tweak this thing for another year before we were going to release it. And nobody would get machines. But, you know, we got lucky. I spent extra time. I don't know if it's extra time or just really focused on the layout. but there isn't a lot of changes from the original pencil, or not pencil, but the original line and circle drawing. It hasn't changed. The flat rail is the same flat rail from day one, and most of these are, you know, this area I opened up a little bit, so we may have lost the flat rail and put a ball guide in and opened it up. Which is normal, personally. Well, mechanically, this is just, we haven't had, we didn't do a lot of changes. And there weren't parts of it that we said, that's not working. We've got to fix that. And then you add another month or another two months or whatever. And then you don't know how well it's going to shoot because we really don't have a lab to even build another whitewood at the time. That's right. And as a matter of fact, I don't know if Josh brought it up or whatever, but we skipped the whitewood. We didn't even build a white one. And that's just insane to think about. We had a white one. Every pinball development had a white one. Yeah, and we had a white one, and all we did was use it for form and fit. Yeah. Make sure the ball guides fit, the flat rails fit, the plastics were right, whatever. But it never got built, wired, and played. So I can say that's a first for me in a bunch of games. You just did not build a white one. We said, let's just skip it. We don't have time. We've got to get to Texas. And, you know, we printed, and we went, and it worked. Okay. So, you know, and it's hard, you know, getting that experience and guys with enough experience to pull this off that weren't hired and working full time for the other guys. I don't know how we got there. Not only did you get there, you got there in the most excellent way, in my opinion, possible, which is why I am the new happy owner of this. So this is Joe Bolzer. He calls it luck. I call it a lot of experience and some damn good skill. This is Straight Down the Middle of Pinball Sale with Zach and Joe Balcer. Thanks again, Joe. Thank you. Appreciate it, man. Enjoy your game. Hey, what's going on, guys? This is Zach from Straight Down the Middle of Pinball Show. This is Josh Kugler. We're here at American Pinball, and what he's going to do, he's such a nice guy. He's the coder, I guess, coder is what you would call yourself, of Houdini? Sure. Coder. Software design, coder. Sure, all those are good words. All those are good. So he's going to go through kind of basic codes and gameplay on this. If you went through the entire rule set, I think we'd be here for a long time. That's one of the things that makes this game so distinct and so unique, beautiful, and we'll talk about it later. Greg and I will review the code. But for now, what I'm looking for, Josh, if somebody's walking up to Houdini. So if we're doing like a Houdini 101, what do people need to look for? What do they need to be shooting for? What modes do they need? Talk a little bit about what they're looking for. Basic code set on Houdini. Okay, great. So Houdini is a mode-oriented game. Okay. Sort of, in many ways, it's a 90s-style game where it's kind of mode-driven. I love it, yeah, yeah. With a couple of multiballs that sort of run in parallel to that. And then some of the modes have a multiball element as well. Cool. And there's two sets of modes. They're what we call stage modes. And those take place here at the stage. Okay, so we've got stage modes. And those are based on Houdini's escapes. Oh, yeah. So there's ten of those there, and as the display goes by, you're able to see which one is currently selected. It has to do with when you open it, that's the one you get. There's a handsome coming on that down the road. And there's one screen that will show you kind of your status on the ten. If you actually hit that one, then you kind of get a random selection. Then there's five modes based on his movie, so perfect timing. Okay. So five modes based on the film. The film. So if we think it was a movie star. one of the earliest movie stars in silent film. He has a walk on a star on the Hollywood Wall of Fame based on not being for a magician, but for his movie career. Film work. Which is crazy. And so I've watched all five movies. I do not recommend them whatsoever. What's the running time? The Grimm game is pretty good. Most of them are like only an hour, hour and 15. So they're not real long. They're all silent movies. So the big downside there was when I was watching them, I actually had to watch them. It's not like I could be working on something, I could kind of be listening. And I actually watched something twice, because I watched the first few weeks I started on the project to get familiar, but then months later when I actually went to go work on those modes, I'm like, what happened in that movie? So I sort of skimmed through them again. So five, five, five modes. So those get triggered from here, which is actually off this interloop shot. Okay. So that's how those get triggered, and you can see we have, you know, here a little movie reel. So the reel. Okay, signifies that. Right. And you start, I guess, so you get, you light those by spelling film here at the lanes. Makes sense to me. Right. There is a setting if you want to have that lit at the start. Okay. We've done it a couple of the shows so people have a chance to get to that. Oh. And then opening the stage, as we talked about, there's a couple of different ways to open the stage. You can just pound it. Bash it again. You know, bash it all day. You can shoot this shot here. I love this shot, yeah. That we call a stage alley. Okay. and it'll be referred to that way in the game. Right through the pop. And if you hit it through there, it'll immediately open the first time you hit it. This red target here, we call this the key stand-up target. If you hit a straight shot right through the pops, it'll immediately open. If it's not an immediate shot that plays off the pops, it takes like three hits to open. That's a tough shot. That is not. I love it. Very satisfying. And that was the original intent when I first started and Joe had the layout. he basically had three thoughts in mind one was okay we have this stage where he performs this act and he goes you collect keys to do the act and we sort of moved away from that but that was his initial concept with that and we had the trunk so originally okay it was that and I'm like yeah we're never going to get this open and I said plus the natural inclination is to bang it so we changed it to make it into more of a bang to it and then over time we said oh we should make this shot more valuable so we added in there. It's the best of both worlds. So we evolved it a little bit to make sure you can get the mode started. It's actually pretty easy. So that's your centerpiece. You're starting modes through that. You can either start them by banging on the curtain a number of times or you can go through the stage pass is what you call it? Stage alley. This one key lane, this one stage alley. Key lane, stage alley. It just helps a little bit. If you say left orbit, right orbit, people know what that is. They know what those are. We sort of felt like we needed to name it. I think it's a great idea. We were going to name it The Ramp, and then we couldn't come to an agreement. I said, okay, we're just leaving it as The Ramp. Ramp, listen. The Ramp. So we've got ten modes. We've got five film modes. Right. There's more. There's more. There's more. So, well, ultimately, your goal is to spell Houdini. So there's actually seven different sets of objectives you can pursue in the game. Okay. So the stage modes is one. All right. And you earn a Houdini letter by completing all ten. Oh, jeez. Or in the settings, you can change it to be anywhere from five to ten. and you can potentially earn two Houdini letters there, which might be a good thing. We'll do that setting for Greg. Greg needs that kind of script. So we put in a lot of settings because it is a very deep game and a very wide game. And, you know, you want people to be able to get to the end. That's true. You know, I made one shot from that one. I haven't gotten the shot. It went. The ball did a bounce. I never got to hit the flip or anything. How did you react to that? Well, I was depressed and shocked. You didn't play. You touched the game for like three months. Oh, I guarantee you. Because I didn't even get to touch the ball. I hit the shire. It bounced out and went straight down the middle. That's right. I was just like standing there in disbelief. I'm not even going to close it. Right there. So you want people to be able to get there. So we added in the settings, there's a lot of ways to kind of. So seven tasks to spell the dean. Right. Where's that ledger? So the stage is the first. If you ultimately spell seven, you get to the master magician mode. Wow, I love that. So there's three mini magician modes, and I'll touch on those as we get to those components. and then the master magician mode. So the stage will get you a Houdini letter. Completing all five movies will get you a Houdini letter and also gets you to a mini magician mode called the Houdini movie binge. So it's a mode that incorporates all the five movies. And the points are heavily driven by how you did when you did the five movies. So you don't have to successfully complete them, but based on how the points you accumulated there is sort of what funnels into the mini magician mode. So if you did well, then the vote becomes worth a lot more. The third item is seance multiball. So there's two multiballs. Seance multiball you get by spelling seance, which is these thin targets. So when Joe first put the play field up and we were looking at it, he's a big fan of not just having posts. There's practically no posts in this game. You're getting some value out of it. And the reality is if you're not hitting the shots, you're going to hit them. So the thought was, okay, let's tie that into a multiball because people who aren't particularly good at pinball, they're going to hit those targets, so let's give them some reward for doing that. That's really smart. I like that. And at one point he actually made a tweak because I needed one more target to be able to spell seance. So he made a slight adjustment someplace so I could have my six targets. He does his six. He was very accommodating on that one. Sometimes I ask Gil for things, he says, that's not happening. Sometimes I ask Gil for things, he's like, no problem. We didn't read him the answer. So you spell seance there, and then it gets started here at the scoop. And the nice thing, again, if you don't have the skills to hit this, invariably just off the slingshot, you'll get it. That's a three-ball multiball, and that's when the magnets become active. So there's three magnets in the game. There's one under each hand, and then there's one below the eyes. Well, actually, the art was done, too, after we placed the magnets. So we came up, Joe and I were looking at the – we knew we needed to put magnets in the game. We had the blueprint up on a wall or the CAD diagram, where to put it. We said, well, let's put them near these targets, which we now call the magic stand-up targets, and I'll talk more about that in a minute, so we could kind of trigger the magnets off of that. And then we got with the artist. We said, okay, could we do, you know, put his hands there. Because you've got two big circles here and a big circle kind of there. Right, because we were playing around with different art, you know, obviously for the back glasses for this, and we kind of described that, and he did a great job of making it work. That's perfect. The chain link concept came in at that time as well. We talked about if we do the chains, we can put inserts in there to do some tracking on that. So that all came together nicely. So Seance Multiball, so again, for the novice, you're going to probably start it without skills. Boom. Magnets Multiball. Great. Very satisfying. Yeah. The second Multiball, which also, so a couple of jackpots during Seance will earn you a Houdini letter. Okay. and there is a progress screen if you hold both flippers in once we start up again you can see that that will show you that progress of each of these different areas towards your your runners so the other multiball that's running in parallel is trunk multiball okay so this is the tight inner loop shot love that Scott that's not as tough as people nope I'm having a hard time hitting the ramp Scott this is clearly a psychological thing for people they look at it they take it short and by the way off the backhand I can hit that by 90% just cradle it that backhand I'm not there yet that just it feels nice once you get the feel for that it's really consistent and it is and that feeds it's sort of like a little bit of a Rube Goldberg thing the shot to here that goes to the buck that goes to the cat it's a presentation it'll put it in here and then you've got your next step it's the money shot so you sort of want to have that build up to it that's one of the things we kept doing how do we bring more attention to it which is one of the reasons we added a spotlight here to really bring that to attention. So if the lock is lit, that locks it. Three-git to a multiball. It's the stage alley shot will relight the lock. Gotcha. So again, very typical of your 90s kind of light lock, lock, lock. Enable, yeah. And again, there is a setting to determine if it's lit at the start of the game, which is the default. The first time you get that shot, you better get the cat. That's right. If you're real dumb, you hit the tough shot, you don't get the countable, you don't know what's going on. Definitely want that. So you lock three bolts through that to start your trunk multiball. Right. And the both multiball seance and trunk can be stacked with stage modes and movie modes. Perfect. You do have to start those modes first. Of course, then you open the box. Yeah. But you can then stack, so get one of the best stacks. So you can stack the stage mode and a film mode? No. Those run independent of each other. So you can use one of them to use, and then open them all, and they'll stack up. Exactly. Perfect. So, like, you know, needles, which is the trick where he puts needles in thread, and pulls it out, which is sort of like your frenzy. Every switch is, you know, valuable. I mean, that sound, too. Right. Yeah, I love that. So I think it was at Texas. The volume on that was a little loud. You could hear it across the room. Ding! And for those of us standing, like, right next to the game all day, it was like that night. Okay, go with the volume on that. Make that lower. Joe's like, make that lower. got it I will do that so movies stage seance trunk multiball alright next up are secret missions Houdini was a spy for the government now not everybody believes that it's never been proven my attitude is well if he was a spy it's not like he was telling people you wouldn't know about it so we're going with it we decided we would go with that and so the secret missions are a set of five combo shots you actually I remember these You can actually start one, and only one is active at a time. So you have to complete the first combo before you can move to the next. And naturally, they get tougher and tougher, and the values increase. Complete all five, earn a Houdini letter, and there's also a mini magician mode for that as well. Oh, geez. That is probably the hardest thing to do on the game. Yeah, the thing. And you can lower the number you need to earn the Houdini letter, and like I said, you can earn two Houdini letters at the stage and also at the magic shop. So let's say you open up one of the secret rooms, right, and it requires combos. How many combos do you have to complete to complete that one secret? All right. So each mission is one combo shot. So, for example, the first one. Okay, that's doable. The first mission is ramp and back to the scoop. That's doable. Not too easy. And what's nice about that, then it immediately is going to start in your next one. The second one, okay. And the next one. You get that milk can, and that's what screws me up. This milk can. Well, that one comes a bunch later. So there's no combo shot. Okay, thank you. I think the last one uses the bill can. I think the second combo shot is then ramp, orbit, scoop. Oh, that's three. Right. So it moves to a three-shot combo. Then there's a couple of threes. Eventually you get to like a five-shot. Oh, yeah. And that's what I'm saying. You know, getting to that last one is going to be required. That's only going to set it lower. Man, that's when you're on location. That's what's so fun. You keep putting quarters in. Just try to get that one combo. much less the 15 modes or the five secret modes and you're at home and you're up late at night and you're trying to just get that one five for that five point combo. I love that stuff. Every once in a while when I play, it's like, you know what, I'm just going to focus on combos. Can I get through all five? I have yet to do it. I've gotten through four. I've yet to be able to get all five. You're the coder can't get through his own. I'm a good player, but I'm not a great player. I'm not a tournament player. I'm not one of those kind of guys. Yeah, Greg and I are no good at symbol, generally speaking. But that's one of the things I wanted to do in the game, was have that kind of breadth. That there's different things going on. And if you've got this at home, you can step up one time and say, I'm going to focus on trying to do that, or trying to do all five movie modes. Getting through all the stage modes, getting through all the movie modes, very attainable if you're having a pretty good game. It's not that hard to start. So you can play multiple games and have different tasks. Right, you can go after it in different ways. And if you complete one, then you can start another task to try to spell that Houdini, to get to that master wizard mode or the three sub wizard mode. Right. And obviously, you know, the key is over time you start to learn, oh, if this is the combo active and if I start this stage mode, those are going to play nice together. Oh, nice. Well, okay, I can focus on the combo right now because if I get it, I'm going to get the mode. That's where you get the richness of the code. So you get those, and again, that's where those, you know, you have the novices that we have stay on to multiball for. And then the other extreme is things like that for those serious strategy guys who are going to study it and then say, oh, I want to stack this with this. Those varying degrees. We'll come to milk can multiplier in a minute. That's going to tie to a D-layer. So next item is, oh, jail escapes. Jail escapes. Spelling escape. Lights the jail escape. I'm staying up target. Just here. It does require a typical little action off the pops to get it. These are shootable from here off the pops. Kind of get some registrations and stuff, yeah. And those are a set of five hurry-ups. What Houdini would do is when he arrived in a new city, he'd go to the local police station and have them throw himself into jail. And then he'd break out of jail and the newspapers would cover it. And he'd get all this press and people would come to marry him. He was a brilliant marketer. We did take one liberty. One of the hurry-ups is based on London. And he actually never did that in London. When he arrived in London and went to the police and wanted to do it, they were like, no way. They had already heard about other police departments being embarrassed. And so we incorporate that so it's based on five cities. You can either have it configured to go easy to hard or just randomly where it picks up. But the value is based on how many difficult. Perfect. So one is just hitting the ramp shot. There's also a setting as to how hard it is. So if you have it on easy, just getting it partly up the ramp or more of it. versus if you have it on normal, you actually have to complete the ramp shot. I guess that's the same for the opto and different things. Right. And so one of the shots is hitting the key target, but if you're on easy, as long as you hit it through here, you'll get it. So we wanted to make sure that it wasn't impossible to use. Especially the milk can shot. So in the case of the milk can, hitting the target will award you the hurry up as well as making the milk can. Oh, the actual little loop, okay. So the other shot that takes place here besides the jail escape is the magic shot. that's sort of your traditional mystery award you open the magic shot through the spinner the number of spins gets a little more difficult at each level as you work off and it's a random award and there's some really nice easter eggs and I love that shot too because that's not a direct shot you can hit it requires pinball and what's interesting about it is there's multiple ways you can get it in there, one is off the pops actually this shot here through stage alley if it's a little bit of a softer shot it'll go right in or even if it's a harder shot you'll get the bounce off so if you shoot that stage alley enough you're going to hit it you're going to get it there and you can actually just off the right flipper bank it right off of the left and off of here so you actually there's lots of different ways it goes in it was actually a concern I had early on we didn't have a shooting game you know the whole time I was writing the code before Texas and it was one of those it's like okay I'm basing two different things on here Is the ball going to get there? And we found that, yeah, you get some great action. Ideally, it seems good, but are we going to get it in there? Right, it'll get in there. Now, there are eight different awards at the Magic Shop. You can earn a Houdini letter at eight, or you can configure it down to five. So even the mystery shots, you can get that Houdini letter. Yes, I like that. You have to visit there a couple times. It gives you more than just the mystery award. Because sometimes you hit a mystery shot and you think, okay, I got $10,000. Great. But you get closer to a crucial letter. I love that. So the key is it means you've got to hit that spinner enough to open it enough and get there enough. So, yeah, that's more something they might not have to work too hard at, but it means your game has to be long enough. And you need to be conscious of it when it's lit. Hey, I want to get that. If you're both lit, Jail Escape and Magic Shop, obviously it will give you both. You'll get your gift, and then it will start the hurry up. Let's see. what did we not cover yet so like the light show so the milk can the light shows in this game are really terrible they're terrible right now are they they're basically a handful I threw at his placeholders over the next six weeks how horrible is that all that RGD now what you will find with the light shows some of the ones in the tractor just because I was testing them there but they were they were great so one of the things you can change is code exactly well I talk about that with people Once the game shifts, if there's some issue, Joe can't fix a play field design problem or something like that. There's issues with the code, and there'll be some bugs in there, no doubt. Yeah, I can fix that pretty easily and continue to enhance things. Well, what's really interesting about the RGB and the light it shows is everything in the game is color-coded. There's no point having RGB if you're not really using that to help the player. So, for example, escape is green. The targets are green. Okay, very nice. When you're in a hurry up, the shot you need will be flashing green. I got that. When you complete it, you'll get a quick light show that screens. So once you know it's green, now I know I have the hurry up. Movies are blue. It's a dark blue. So when you're in a movie mode, the shots you need are dark blue. You'll get a light show when you complete film. You'll notice that the film inserts are blue. So everything is color-coded around that. Things associated with the stage are red. So if you had a stage mode running, the hours will be red, the red curtain. It's also the most visible color you can pick up. The secret missions are pink. It's sort of like a hot pink. You cannot miss it. And so what will happen with the secret missions, if that shot is the ramp, that will be flashing. And as soon as you make that shot or even just the first part of that shot, it will start to flash the next shot in the sequence. if you hit the wrong thing then it immediately goes back to the beginning of the sequence once you miss a shot it goes back now you don't see pink that color used very often in a game they're not afraid you guys aren't afraid of this thing you're looking at all the different colors you want them to differentiate I'm going to use pink I got to use purple I got to use orange teal and turquoise are other colors so the seance is this teal color I love that I was talking to Greg. You don't see teal stand-up targets. I don't think any other machines do. No, those are custom-made. I like those. Both the super thinness of these. Yeah, yeah. We had to do custom, and then we did those custom. We were able to get the color done custom. There was some large cost to that, but I kind of pushed hard. We really wanted that coloring to work consistently through. So what else do you need to do to get those Houdini letters? We've got three handfuls. I think we've hit on them. So there was stage. Okay. movie, magic shop, secret mission, jail escapes, and the two multi-balls. Perfect. So what do you have to do to complete the multi-balls? You get that letter, you start up seance multiball, what do you have to do to actually get the... Two jackpots. Two jackpots. So the jackpots and seances, you need to complete the six seance targets, so you'd have to go through that sequence twice. There's also a super jackpot, which some people say it's not possible, but I've done it, which is you have to spell it in order. Now I will say it's a lot easier to do it on the second jackpot. It's very centaur inspired. So yeah, you're not doing that unless you're going to cradle a ball. So basically once you get to two balls, you cradle one. Then it's very doable. Very hard to do it on the first one because the balls are coming into play. If the ball comes out of here, it's going to bounce here and immediately hit one of the seance targets. But again, another test that somebody can really get in deep to this thing. Right, and again, those top players, because it's worth a lot of money, the Super, a lot of points, I wish it was money, for the Super jackpot. It is for some of these tournament players, if they can hit these things properly, it's worth a lot of money. And scoring balance is something I spent quite a bit of time on, and over time we'll meet things if we have to, but I really tried to make sure that nothing was outrageously valuable. My first guess would be you have to stay away from seance, multiball being worth so much. And it's not. It's actually almost not worth enough. Okay. I recently bumped it up because I'm like, you know, I'm not sure you're getting enough out of that multiball. So a few tweaks there. So tell us a little bit about the you talked about the minor magician modes versus that major magician mode. Right. So there's the three mini magician modes. One is after all the movies. One is after the secret missions. Okay. And one is after the hurry ups. So if you get those those you get your letter but you also go right into that. Right, so you earn the letter first before you do the mini magician mode. So you don't have to do that to get the letter. Yeah. Although, you know, it's kind of a lot of the points. Of course, yeah. Big points in the mini magician modes. Those are not implemented in the game yet. Two of them are basically done. I need sound calls from our sound engineer, Matt Kern. Not that I've given him the list of sound calls for that yet because I've literally been coding the mini magician modes the last week or two. Very cool. The secret mission one. So I expect that those will be in place later this month. Okay. I have temporary sound calls to get it done. And then the master magician mode, I've designed it. It hasn't been coded yet. Really? So I'm not going to tell you anything about it yet. Okay. But my goal is that... Can you tell us how to get to it? Well, once you spell Houdini, you'll be able to start it from a couple of different places. So if you spell Houdini, it'll be lit. You'll be able to start it. I can tell you the size or whatever. What's the art about that? I'm looking forward to be able to get to it by the end of the year. That's like the ultimate completion. But at the same time, it's not everybody's going to get to, especially on location. It's not also where I'm going to say, ooh, I'm going to spend 20% of my development time on it. Oh, of course. You want it to be there, but the arrival is as much the thing as the first thing. One thing, give the SDT and viewers, can you complete the master? Yes. You can complete it. Yes, it is complete. It is a go-ahead. and it's not just hit jackpots until you're dead no no it's a series of things tied back to the seven areas okay so those are sort of incorporated in there both from a scoring standpoint and an objective standpoint so ultimately you trying to work through those things to successfully become a master magician And if I know Josh he going to make it a spectacle that you beat that thing Well, it would be nice. You know, I'd like to be able to do, like, TNA-style light shows. You know, I'll do the best I can with that. But you certainly want it to feel like you've beaten the game. And right now my anticipation is if you do that, your game's going to end. is not like, okay, you start going to do everything you have to do. Some games, like, you have to keep out of that jump. It's just like, take a breath. Right. Take a breath. I'm thinking the game explodes even. Our second game will now start, you know, the adventure tour. It might be. But you know what, that's what I love about the depth of this code in particular and many games like it is a lot of these guys, they get to the wizard mode. I'm kind of like this, I'm not going to lie. Get to the wizard mode and you just rock the socks off of that thing and it gets kind of boring. It gets kind of stale. with this it's going to take you a long time to get there and if you haven't got there a lot of guys like myself it's hard for me to get rid of a game if I haven't been if I haven't seen everything in it it's hard to get that's why there's a lot of Lord of the Rings still sitting in that game room because Valinor is hard to get to that's such a great game you know it just has the right mix of very deep rule but great theme integration and that's incredibly some games you know you look at it and it's like yeah you just slap the name on there the game It has nothing to do with the theme. Some games do a great job of really tying them together. And there's a bunch of things that make that game work. Well, man, I love your passion about this. You gave the viewers a really good overview, and especially just what to look for one-on-one-wise, but also the depth of where the code's going to go. Where would you say, before we end this, where would you say percentage-wise is we're shipping games now? Are we calling it 100? Are we calling it 80? Are we calling it 110? I don't know if you ever get to 100. Because that implies that you've run out of ideas and things you could potentially do to improve it. Now, what I joked about is, although the game is done, I am so sick and tired of it that I don't want to work on it anymore. But right now, everything is implemented in the game with the exception of the mini magician and the master magician mode. As I said, the two of them in the magician modes are basically 80% done and will be done by the end of this month. So it depends on what kind of number you want to put. I would feel like they're full. We're in the 90% house. I feel like that's full, yeah. What's really outstanding is some additional polish to the game, a few more light shows, a little cleanup there. We're still dropping in some sound effects, some more voice calls. There are a few voice calls I'm not happy with, some things like that. some improvements to some of the animations. Our artist was here today. I was going through some things. So there's things that I'm just not happy with yet that we want to get there. But my goal is to start working on game two on March 1st. It's probably a rule standpoint, a coding standpoint. So my goal is to have this game at that 99%, 98%. You can go back any time. I'll just kind of tinker with it. Right. You know, I've got some things, you know, new ideas that have come up in the last month I want to implement. There's a different skill shot on the horizon. Oh, cool. It just brings a little more value to it with a couple other little features to it to enhance things. So, you know, when I play the game, when I watch other people play the game, you know, new ideas, you know, that's mine. You know, tequila really helps come up with new ideas. That's first, you know, somebody once asked how I came up with the reverse inverted flippers. and I said, I assure you it was tequila. Somebody's got to be drinking after that. The real question is, is this going in your game room? Is this going in my game room? Absolutely. Absolutely. First of all, I probably won't get to the Master Magician mode legitimately until it's in my game room. Yeah. Because it'll take a while to get to that. Very good. I think it's a game that will do well in people's homes again because of the breadth and the depth, the fact that people who don't know anything about pinball can step up and typically get some pinball. and for those who really feel they need to be the game. That's why I've been beating down American Pinball's door to get this thing. Josh, I want to thank you again. And from all the hobbyists out there, I know you guys feel the same way. Buddy, the communication you have to us hobbyists, sometimes this hobby is just pushed towards barcades or sometimes it's just pushed towards hobbyists. But you listen to everybody and you take the feedback, you change things. So for that, we appreciate it. We thank you so much. This is Josh Coogler on the code set and the rules of Houdini. Yeah, Greg, so that was a fun trip. It is fun. I am so glad that Josh went over those rules because could you imagine us trying to explain those rules? The complexity of it? I'm glad. It's like Chuck Wirtz, like Game of Thrones tutorial, you know, that was done there. We'll talk about it more in code, but one of the things I love about Coogler and Balser, I call him J. Coog, and I call him Joey B. Joey B and J2. The reason I like them, they're freaking passionate. That was the best. That was special. It was. That was the best thing about going up there was to see the passion. They really want this. Out of everybody up there. They really want this back. Yeah, it was. I can appreciate it. I felt that. And it wasn't like a pushy type thing. It was literally just the joy, just like when you talk to your friends about pinball. Yeah. And the joy and how you just end up talking over each other and you're just all excited. That's what we do every day. That's the way that they were. And, you know, especially Josh. Josh was just like that. Joe Balcer was just a fun, kick-ass guy. Joe took a little bit to warm up. Like when we first met him, I was like. He was like, can I drink a beer with these guys? Yeah, yeah. He was just kind of standoffish, like I don't know these assholes. But by the end of it. Oh, by the end of it, like I love the guy. I could have hung out with him all night long. He was even jabbing on me like I would do. And I was like, okay. It was getting old. The time to go. Once he warmed up to us a little bit and got to know us, man, dude, he's like one of the coolest guys I've ever met. So let's get into the categories. We're going to start out with art. Yes. Okay. So is Houdini a striking machine when you walk up to it? It is. I think so. It is. I think that with the unique head, with the translight, just even the – it's a very cohesive machine. Yeah. The whole package is very cohesive. Nothing stands out. It's not in your face, but it's just elegant and gorgeous. That's the one thing that has always struck me about this machine is I feel that you could live in a million-dollar home and set this somewhere in it. It would look like a game room. It's going to look like a piece of furniture. It would look like it's supposed to be in there. And it would almost look unique like a non-production piece. Like, wow, that is – who did you have make that? Yes. Who did you commission out to do that? Exactly. Yeah. It looks like a one-off. Wow. I like it. All right. So art for me, you're going to hear us say steampunk a lot, industrial a lot, and beauty a lot. Yeah. Can something be industrial and beautiful at the same time? Yes. I think so. There's a lot of that. And that's what Houdini's all about. Houdini has a lot of color, but it still feels like it belongs in the factory. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, very much so. I love, when I walk up to it, I love seeing that back glass. Yes. Like, man. And that's what, I gave it a B plus. And I'm at an A minus. I would have, I like it. I like the Houdini in the middle a lot. But something's a little bit off for me. That's why I couldn't rate it higher. But the Translight, if I was to just go on that Translight. Hold up, hold up. Is it a Translight? Oh, it's a back glass. So it's not a Translight, it's a back glass. Thank you. My bad. Thank you. But the colors on it are so rich. Rich. Like, I don't even understand how they even produce it. It's literally just LEDs back there. It is the crispiest back glass I've ever seen. And the art is fantastic around it. What Kugler said was, typically whenever people screen print back glasses, it's like a white coating on the back. Yes. So I guess the light saturates it better. It diffuses almost. Yeah. Like a frosted bowl. Yes. But what they did was they pulled it. So it is literally the art printed on that piece of glass. All behind it. And when you light it up, the contrast really pops. It looks really good. And you can tell. I mean, I don't know if they can see it in there, but man. It is gorgeous. Oh, it's so special. One of the prettiest back glasses in all of pinball. I'm talking 70s, 80s, 90s. I agree. I want to agree. It is true. When you do LCD screens and back glasses, you've got to be careful because you take away the art. I think Jersey Jack will be the first to even tell you he's got an awesome 27-inch screen, but that little marquee is never going to be stunning. Yes. All right? Stern, same thing. They've got a little bit bigger artwork, but nothing surrounding it. This surrounds it and makes it part of the story as the theater. Yeah, because it incorporates the screen as a part of the back glass. It's not just the screen. That's right. Because the curtains, the way the heads are in front of it, the way that it was just cut out, it gives it just a 3D effect that you're really watching something on a stage. The cabinet itself is unique with that head. So that is a piece of art. Yeah. I think they make a statement with that. Yeah. Now, at first I didn't like it. Whenever I saw the shows. Yeah, when I saw the shows, I thought, yes, no. I just wanted to line up just like my other machines. But then when I saw it in person, I thought, well, this is kind of cool. And then I heard Joe Balcer talking about the design of it and how every machine going forward is going to have that head. I really like that. And it's grown on me. And I've heard a lot of people on the forum say, that head's kind of grown on me. Yeah, I like it. And like they said, you know, they said that since they put them out on location, they've seen them in lineups. And it doesn't look off against turns or anything else. It looks fine here. Yeah, it does. It's not – because that was my chief complaint about Alien was the head. Oh, that head. That's him. Any little thing. It never fits in a lineup. It looks odd. It needs to just sit in a corner by itself. And I like that game a lot. But the head just does not look right. Whereas this is different, but it fits in a lot. And then the side of the cab here is really cool because it has that Victorian, greenish, rich feel. Yes. But then it's got mechanisms and parts that are very steampunk-ish. Yes. Oh, I love it. Gauges. It's got a handle. It's cohesive. The play field, the trans... Everything pulls together. The powder coat. But that's part of the art. They chose that to be an artistic design. Yes. So that's like a, it's like a rusty green and textured. And even the T-molding. The T-molding has. A leather. It's a leather T-molding. It's a texture. It's not just a shiny plastic T-molding. The Bravo, the last thing I want to make art was, there's so many Easter eggs. Oh, yes. There are so many Easter eggs. For me, I couldn't go below an A at all because of that back glass. It deserves an A. And because of all of the little Easter eggs in there. The tributes to Houdini. There really is. The studying, the research, the details of that. I very much appreciate it. Just like, for example, I'll give you guys one. If you guys look at the safe up there, the safe says, Reklev and Relgut Company. It's the safe company, right? But really what that is, is Kugler and Balser backwards. Yeah. I love that. And just because I'm an odd, quirky person, and I felt like a lot of people at American Pinball were too, I love the monkey everywhere. Oh, yeah. The monkey has a story. Yeah, we talked about that upcoming. Yeah, they didn't tell us. Or we just talked about that. Yeah, they didn't really tell us. They said, just look it up. Just look it up. So, we've got to tell you guys the same thing. So, there's a cute little monkey that has a bandage on his junk, right? And he pops up a little bit everywhere. Yeah, you've got to look. It's kind of a fun. It's like, where's Waldo, but where's the nut in the nut? I love it. Oh, he came part of it. Well, I mean, he's just there. I mean, it's just, he's got a bandage on. All right, so you're at a B+. I'm at an A-. Last thing I'll say is those hands. Just that sinister look on Houdini's face whenever. Yeah. And then the magnets. The magnets are great. Curtains for me. Let's move on to shots and layout. This is a Joe Balcer design. Joe Balcer, one of the things I like about him is that when you look at his games, There's nothing, like if you look at a Steve Ritchie game, it's a Steve Ritchie. Yeah. When you look at a John Borg game, you're like, that's a Borg design. With Joey B, because I'm going to call him Joey B again. With Joey B, he probably hates it. Knowing him, he probably hates it. It's a little pretty to kick him in the face, too. That's right. With Balser designs, he takes risks. They're all a little bit different. And he took risks with this layout as well, without a whitewood, I might add. Yeah. Yeah, that was what was impressive to me. There was very little mock-up, the time frame. Joe just kind of had to go with what he knew. He had to trust his experience. Yes, and say that this shot's going to work, and we're putting the damn thing on there, and we're going to pray. If you think about the shots, the orbits I love. The orbits are nice. They're buttery smooth. And they're kind of, they feel. They're long, too. They're wider, longer orbits. Yeah, they use the whole board. Don't they feel wider? They use the whole play zone. So it's kind of. There's no stop post to stop your way. No, it is just. You're cruising through them. Fast. And like you said, it's long. So it's a very weird feeling to orbit in a great way. I like the alley shots. Oh, yeah. That is special. I've not seen that in pinball. So the alley shots where you can hit them through the pops in two directions. Yes. And that doesn't sound like fun. Who wants to hit through pops all the time? But I've got to tell you, I like it because it's smooth when you do hit it. It hits that stage to open it up and banks it under the gobble hole. Well, that shot is one of the most amazing shots that I've seen in a long time, especially with originality because you'll see it. Like I said, you can go straight up to the pops and hit the target. There's a target back there. Or just to the left of it, you hit, and it does like a little veer, like a 45. The stage, yeah. Yeah, into the stage. And that is a unique odd shot because when you first play it, you don't really understand what that shot's doing. You think it's going to kind of throw you into the pops again or something. Mm-hmm. But it's just, when it goes all the way to that stage and hits it or goes into it. Yeah. It feels amazing. Yeah, you're like, wow, that was cool. Yes, it is. That was cool. It was like a highway. Yeah. It went right to it. Because I like unexpected shots in pinball. This is Houdini. Yes, it is. There were some indirect shots in Houdini that you cannot hit by a fan layout. Yeah. You have to bank. You have to hit. You have to hope for pop action. And I do like that. That's reminiscent more to that 90s. 80s, 90s kind of stuff. Which they explained it that way. They said they kind of built it to have that 90s feel, which obviously I'm a huge fan of. Oh, yes, you love that stuff. With my Segas and stuff. I'm just glad you don't like Gollups. You do like them. But I'm glad that you really push Segas over Gollups. I do have some taste. This friendship would be over. But yeah, like you said about that gobble hole, like the nice thing about that is that Under the ramp. Yeah, it's under the ramp, so it's hidden. You can't hit it. But it's not hidden. Correctly. Because the clear ramp, you can see it. So it's actually kind of magical seeing it hit because it kind of bangs around the ramp and then drops. And it's cool to see that because most people would just hide that behind a decal or a sticker on the ramp or something. You wouldn't see it. You'd never see it. It's just the shots there. But this actually is more magical to see the shots. It really works. Because it goes down like a toilet bowl or something. Yeah, yeah. It's so freaking neat. Let's talk about that stage. You hit that stage enough, the curtains will open of the stage. Yes. We're not talking about just a scoop in the middle of your play field. Yeah. It opens up. Yeah, it's a little half moon. Yeah. You put it into the stage, the stage curtains close. Yes. And when they open again, the ball is gone. Da, da, da. Yeah. So that's cool because there's a subway. Yes. So that goes with shots and layout. It kind of toys and innovation, but shots and layout. But it's a feel-good kind of shot. What about the ramp? That's the hardest shot for me to hit besides the milk can. Yeah, the ramp's pretty tough. It's on a weird spot on your... It is. It's not your normal ramp position. Yep. Which I can appreciate. I can too. Yeah, I like changing it up a little bit. It's tight. Like, that is... Everybody says this game is too tight, Greg. Is it too tight? The shots, they're too tight. Yes and no. this is my thought process and my feeling upon this is yes the shots are all tight especially if you look at them they all look like the same width they're just like tiny the orbits are pretty wide open yeah the orbits are obviously your easiest shot your alleys and your range very similar and very tight and when you first throw a game or two on there you're like damn this is they're stand up targets yeah they're stand up targets and you brick The bricks don't feel bad like some other games. Like, I'm a big fan of Johnny Mnemonic. You brick a lot on Johnny because Johnny's got some tight shots. Yeah. But it feels very brick and kind of frustrating. This, when you get a rejected shot, it doesn't feel horrible. Something's actually kind of smooth about him. Does that make sense? Yeah. Like, it doesn't, not bad. It helps that it's brand new. Yeah. But once you get a feeling for the shots, like Demoman. Like, I bought Demoman. And as wide open as those shots are, I was like, this bastard ain't got any flow. I can't hit a single damn shot like my first couple games when I first got it. And now watching you. Now, yeah, I can tear it. Unless you're streaming. Yeah. And then you suck. Then it sucks. But normally, yes, you can throw down some great flow on it. And that's the way this game is. Now, it doesn't have flow per se. Yeah. But I'm saying of learning the shots, they're very doable and they're very satisfying. It's just learning them. And it's actually more impressive because they look so tight, and the fact that you can hit them gives me a little bit better feeling. Yeah, absolutely. I love, I think for Houdini, everybody out there says it's too tight. We've got to stop talking about that. There's tighter machines out there that have been released in the last year. We're done with the whole too tight, because they're not too tight. The ramp is on a different spot on the flipper, so it's kind of tough to hit, but when you hit it, it's repeatable. It is repeatable. You can backhand. Everybody complains about that speed left of the right orbit that loads your catapult. Yes. Everybody complains about that. I hit that thing more times than I do probably any other shot. Yeah. That's not. You can backhand it for God's sake. Anytime you can backhand a shot, it's not tight, in my opinion. So we're done with the tightness thing there. The alley passes, once you've got those down, they're not tight. Yeah. You know what is tight? That damn milk can shot. Milk can shot. But it's supposed to be tough because it's in charge of your multipliers. Yeah. Like Josh Kugler said, he said, you know, multipliers are going to be for more experienced players. So he's going to make it tough. Yeah. So Bolster made that tough. It's not tight. It's very satisfying. I'm at an A- for shots. And I'm at a B+, and I would have went higher, but I do think the shots are a bit too tight. Kugler's perfect. I think the shots are a bit too tight. But I haven't had – I don't see it. I've had time on it, but not a ton of time. and maybe with just a little bit more time, it wouldn't affect me at all. But it affects me just a little bit to why that I couldn't go into the A and I had to stay at a B+. Okay. You were getting frustrated with once that stage opens, it's not a direct shot. No, it's not. It seems like you would think. You can get it up there and you might rim in and out like a basketball hoop. Yes. Yeah. I particularly enjoy that. I think that is a cool element. I'm okay with that because I can get it up there. It's just maybe I'm looking for more flow. It's more of a stop and go. It is a very good. I've told people. It's a shooter's pin. It's a mode-based stop and go. Just like your, I mean, it's the Joe Balcer. We've got Wizard of Oz. We've got Simpsons Pinball Party. Yeah, both of them. Very similar. But this has more flow than Simpsons. Yes. A lot more flow than Simpsons. Yes. And, dare I say, a lot more flow than Wizard of Oz. I honestly don't see how you could like either one of those games and not like this. yeah because this feels I always tell myself it's kind of like a mini Waz it's like a mini Waz but it doesn't feel as tight as Waz and it's a standard and Waz is a wide body yeah you guys have to play this and put just some games on it because you first get up to this thing and start shooting and clunking around on it because you don't have those shots down you're going to think it's tight but you know what it could fall into the same thing of just like having to stick a dollar in like the same reason that I wouldn't play Waz like I had a tough playing Waz because To learn Waz, yeah, it's a fantastic pin, but to be in dollars to get accustomed to it is a little frustrating. I think this thing deserves $5 on location. I agree. Yeah, I pick this up and I feel better a lot quicker on this than what I did Waz. Okay. I don't feel like I'm trying to understand what you're doing. But this here, again, five to ten games, I'm feeling the shock. Like it'll hit an in lane or the milk cans of the in lane. You're like, ooh, that was fast. Yeah, and I can play the game after that. Like I feel comfortable that I can do something with it. It's a very smooth game once you get it rolling. Very smooth. I like it. Okay, let's move on to rules. I'm going to A- on rules. A- in agreement. That's good. That's good. And you know why that's good? Because the one thing I will say about this, the structure and the foundation of the rules, you guys, you will see if you're watching this early 2018, this will be a contender in the award show next year. The rules are freaking superb. The layout is superb of those rules, the foundation. I cannot give it an A or an A+, because it's got bugs. It does have bugs. And granted, I was one of the first ones in the world with this. I expected that. I was fine with that. The good thing is what we've got is Josh Kugler, who communicates better as an industry professional in pinball than anybody. Yeah. So you've got somebody that's going to work this thing out. We've just got some bugs here. And what did Josh say to us? I can't remember if it was in that overview or not. When Josh says, like we asked him, you asked him, where was the code at right now? Is it at a .80? He says never at 100%. No, he said you can't base a game like that. It'll never be 100%. It's 100% when he gets too tired. When he gets too tired to mess with it anymore. And I like that response because that is an honest. Oh, yeah. You can't rate. I don't think you can rate games. He's not close to being tired of that thing. No, no. He wants to talk about that thing. He's like the guy that will talk and talk and talk and like, okay, I love it as much as you do. Yeah. I'm with you, buddy. You don't have to commit to me. He loves it. It's not walking dead code for me, but it is deep. It has a lot of complexity, but it's easily learnable because all your shots, I feel, when you're in a mode or something, are easily distinguishable. All color-coded. All color-coded. You hit the flashing shots. And you've got a status that kind of clearly tells you where to go. Yeah, so in some of the other things, multipliers and things, you've got to just kind of pay attention to them. You learn like normal. Yeah. But as of in modes and everything, they're very simple in the understanding of them. They'll tell you. Because they know. Who gets a call house? It'll tell you what to do. And I like having that, what seems like simplicity mixed with depth. Again, that 90s kind of feel. That's what he was going for. The 90s feel on steroids. Yes. It feels like a 90s DMV on steroids. It's like somebody would have released this freaking phenomenally coded amazing game in the 90s. Yeah, they would have died over this. You know what I'm saying? It's true. It's still pretty marvelous now. Yeah. It's set up for novices, intermediate players. Yeah. and for experts. That is very good. It is, to me, a very across-the-board. Everybody can have fun on it. Novices are going to hit those stand-up targets enough to start, say, on multiball with magnets. Okay, that's a win. Intermediate players like us understand there's ten main modes, there's five film modes, there's five jail hurry-ups. Okay, if I can complete some of those, I like Houdini's letters. If I hit the ramp enough time, I get some letters. If I get the magic shop enough time, I get letters. Okay. But then the expert will say, okay, I need to stack. Yeah. I need to stack a mode. I'll start my seance, but then I'll get that secret mission combo mode going. I'll get those multipliers, get my two, three, four times X, and then I'll utilize it. So it's got a little bit for everybody. It does. Yeah, it's fun. And I would love to see how long it's going to take for somebody to legitimately, no bullshit rules where you make everything easy, but to get to that master magician mode where you have to light all Houdini letters. Yeah, it's tough. Again, it's that length and complexity to it that is nice. And it's not what everybody's complaining about. I don't want to compare here. But what people complain about, say, something like Guardians, which I love too. Guardians is a very much, here's your ten modes. Open them up. You get to a mini wizard. Complete them. You get to a master wizard mode. Okay. That bugs people. That really bugs people. What people love, like myself, like when I see the shadow, when I see America's the Most Haunted did a good job of that. Lord of the Rings does a spectacular job. They say, here's your mode. That's fine. Get through those. We're only going to give you one part of that wizard mode. You've got to get that. You've got to get this. You've got to get this one. And together, you have to get all of it to get to that master wizard. So it's like Walking Dead where you don't have to just go for modes. You can go for your combos to get that letter or that weapon. You can go for anything. So it feels a little bit like Walking Dead. I agree with you. But with a 90s little basic flair. I agree. Let's move on. Hold up. Is there anything else before we move on in rules that I really like? Man, it's just a solid one. I know what's coming. Yep. We'll talk about it later. Toys and... You know what? The video is sad. Like, I love making these videos. I really do. And I somewhat enjoy you coming over. He lies. He begs for me to come over. Oh, yeah. Please, Greg. Please. But right now, I'd rather play that. I really would. I'm not going to lie to you. I really would. It's Toys and Innovation. It's an A+. I've got to keep this thing. What did you give it? Oh, I gave it an A+. Yeah. We've got to move on to Toys and Innovation because we can literally. They speak for themselves. They're unbelievable. There are more toys and gimmicks in this than Stornelli's, than Jersey Jacks. I mean, it's up there with Jersey Jacks, though. And these magnets during your normal play are not. It's not just multiple. It's not erratic magnets that are going to just screw you over. They're a nice. They're magic. They're very. They're a very. It's almost like a magician's hand. It's quite a hand, yeah. Of where it's very. The magnets aren't angry. No. They're not angry magnets. They're ballet magnets. I love that. They give you a little twirl and a little toss. It's enough to take you by surprise, but enough where you just want to reach in and rip them out. I want to get a shirt that says, they're not angry magnets. They're ballet magnets. They're ballet magnets. They're magic magnets. That's a good point, though. You're not just going to see the magnets during multiball. If you hit those magic targets, that's part of the rule. It'll spot you. If you're in a mode, it'll spot your shot. Yeah. And it'll... Yeah. Kind of like your... And it's fluid. Kind of like your theater of magic. It's very much... Is it kind of drone-like and dialed in? Yeah. But no, drone kind of whips them. Yeah, it's kind of whip. This isn't a whip. It's not like a... It's a whirly. Yeah. It's not thirsting. It's whirly. I like it. All right, so Toys and Innovation. Greg, we have a catapult that throws the ball up the entire play field into a trunk. Yeah. And mine hasn't missed yet. No. And I've heard that from a lot of people. Once it's dialed in, you're good to go. There isn't. Now, for all those Houdini owners that you're going to buy Houdini after this review, for all those people, Joe Balter did say, whenever you get into your home, every voltage is different. It will affect it just a little bit. So he said, once you dial it in, it's really easy. The setup's all visual, and it's just a coil you go up or down. But he said, move it up one or down one based on if it's going too hard or too soft. Dial it in, you're good to go. Yeah. And that's truly. I had to up mine, I think, two for each catapult. There's two catapults, right? Yeah. The first catapult's cool because it makes a spectacle. You hit it, a buck then hits it like a Rube Goldberg, and then it goes, and the flashers flash on the trunk, and it goes, and it throws it. I like it all. And then it can go either into the second catapult to go into a wire form, or it can trap door, can drop it into a subway and it comes out. And most wouldn't consider the pops to be a toy. They are. I consider them a toy. When Back Alley Creation molds them by hand, they are. It's fantastic. To me, it's kind of the star of the pen, like in a sense. The catapult's cool when it works, but your main focus is the toys and everything. The theater, the stage, the whole area. There's so much cool shit. Yeah, that whole area up there is some of the most fantastic stuff I've seen in a pinball machine. It's so neat the way that that's designed and laid out up there. It's all integrated very well. Very much so. The pop bumpers are cool because you could, they could have copped out like some people and just did a flat art plastic and the middle moves. It would have killed it. That's pinball. It would have killed it. But this is individual. All of them shift up and down and they have chains on the locks. You can just put locks but then you put chains so those rattle around. It's three different locks. It's not the same thing. It's three different molded locks. And again, integration. The play field. Yeah. Integration down at the bottom. You'll see locks. Those are the same locks that are physically on. And that's what they kind of pulled it from and said, this is what we need to do. So, I mean, there was a lot of thought. Again, that's one of those things, and maybe it's because we don't get to see a lot of behind the scenes on some of these. But the enthusiasm and the thought and the revisions and the work that went in such a short amount of time. So, what else with Toys and Innovation? We got the catapult. We got the other catapult. We got the screen on. look, we've got a big screen up there. What do you think about the size of that screen? We talked about it a little bit before. In the trans light? In the back light. Stop. It's a trans light. Back glass. I paid good money to get a back glass. No, again, I think it's fantastic. It looks like curtains. Beautiful. And they put the art over the LCD. Sort of like what we talked about with art. It's all fantastic, man. We could be driver of Twizzle Innovation. But you guys call it yourself. So I'm an A+, A+. This is one of the Most loaded machines in pinball. I agree. What? Well, we're coming up on the most controversial area of the pin. Music and call-outs. Music and call-outs. Okay, so music and call-outs. What are the complaints we're hearing? I'm hearing it's verbose. Yeah. This pin talks to you a lot. Yes. But it's not just hit the shot. It's listened to what they tell you to do. And that was at Expo in Chicago. So, that was the very first time I really got to play it. That was my chief complaint. It was like, son of a bitch. I've got to set through listening to this? I just want to play this pinball machine. That's right. Why? That's right. Why with the long-winded draw now? I love the main guy. Oh, yeah, I do too. Yeah. But like Josh said, because that was one of the – you skip it. Just like any other long-winded thing. Two buttons, you're good. You skip it, and you're on the playing. Now, right now, I will say right now, the film modes, when you start those up, it does teach you about Houdini, so you can't skip through those. Yeah. But all the main modes and stuff like that, you skip right through it. Yes, yes. And you can change them in settings. Settings, if it's too wordy for you, you can tone it down. Yeah, in settings. Done, guys. Yeah, so that – Again, no more complaining about that. No, that to me is not a problem. Yeah. Now you can – and I guess we should have went with maybe art and stuff in this, but we'll throw out music and call-outs. And we might, with the new DMDs, or with the new LCDs and stuff, we might have to add a new category of animations. Yeah, because you know one cool fact? Whenever you start Seance Multiball, you guys probably don't know this. You've got this ghoul up on the screen. Yeah. And I called it a ghoul, and Josh said, you know what? It's actually Houdini's mother. How cool is that? He said, go ahead and Google Houdini's mother. He said, look at her face. That's the same thing. So mean. But how cool is that, that they did their homework enough to have Houdini? God rest that poor woman's soul. I don't want Houdini's mom haunting me. Houdini's going to haunt you. He's magical. There's a lot of times in this that it is a creepy, eerie-sounding thing. It is. Even the vocals. It went for that old-school stage. They were lit with lamps and stuff. It was a really dark, weird time. And I think that they captured that, the animations being very weird. Oh, and they're eerie because they're choppy. Like if the Trolloc was done with the mouse. And I don't know because the complaint seems to be like that they just didn't have the technology and didn't understand what they were doing. But to me, and maybe I'm just freaking wrong, but to me, that's the feel. That's perfect. Yeah, that's what they went for. Like, obviously they went for that. You can't mess animations up to that. Yeah, that's true. I wasn't trying to defend it. There was a guy on Pinside that was like, oh, it's choppy and stuff. And I said, think about this theme. Think about Houdini and some of the content of this. What would you do different? Yeah. And you know what response he gave me? He didn't. No, because you can't. Because you don't want anything all flowy and cartoony. You don't want something like dialed in with these. No, not with Houdini back in the night. I'm not even going to. Yeah, you can't have that fluid, beautiful, fun thing. Because even film was just choppy. Yeah. And everything. It's cool. It is. In the call-outs, like his whole announcing voice, even of Houdini. Yes. It's like he's ranting and doing it. And then he mocks you. Yeah. He's like, no, it's a skill shot. Yeah. I love that. I watched The Prestige the other night because I was in the mood for it I watch this thing on Tesla and stuff I was like what the hell are we going to watch right now is a prestige And I got the same sense because it was sort of around that era when magic was big and we had some great magicians And it encompassed that same feel. Oh, it does. That that filmed it. That's that steampunk industrial, like mechanics under your sleeve kind of thing. And the presentation and everything. It gave me that feel. Because you know what? Back then, People really thought it was sorcery. They really believed in this magic stuff. They thought, I don't trust this. Yeah. That's what this game holds. I just don't think they got it wrong. I can understand where people were coming from with it. And I give it a B-. I'd score it a little low. I'd score it a little low because it is quirky. But I don't think that they did wrong. It's just maybe not my taste. But like you said when you said something to that guy, I can't tell you what I would have done different. Like I can't at all. The more that I look at it, the better I feel. The ghoulish giggles? Yeah. I love that. I love that. And I think that it's just – I think that it's very good, but you overlook it because you're concentrating on the game. You like the countdown call-outs? A lot of people complaining about that. No, I don't think it's terrible. Five, four, like a load of – No, I like it because then I'm pumped. It does make me – I need to go. It actually kind of screws you up, which is a genius. Yeah, it does. It's psychological. A lot of psychological little tricks. Staging on this game, psychological. They'll put the ball in one spot, but they've already got one loaded. So it'll be boom, boom. Oh, yeah. Wait, wait, wait. Where's that going? I'm at an A-minus, and I'll tell you why. Because the main guy's voice. Who, Jeannie? Because when I turned on this game, Greg, the first time, unboxed it, turned it on, He says, Houdini's in the house. Yeah. I mean, come on. I think it's good. It teases itself. It is lighthearted. It's fun, but it's still odd and quirky. And, dare I say this, music. It's like a techno scene. The more that you listen to it and you pay attention to it, the better it feels and the better it is. It's actually a lot more going on sound-wise than what you think. because I think some of it's overshadowed by the countdown. Different things that really stand out, there's just things that don't stand out. People are going to kill me for this. I'm going to get some hate. But the main theme and score of this, for me, Oh, my God, don't even say that. For me, Greg, it's right there with TNA's main theme. I'm telling you, man. I will say. Hate mail can be addressed. No, man. I just love the feel of that score. But I will say TNA's better. It is. Okay. No hate needed there. Because Denise's work on TNA is just, I was listening to it in the car the other day. I wasn't even playing pinball. Have you been to Scott on Facebook or anything? Yeah. He won't be any longer. So he's going to be friends. I'm listening to his music in my car. That's silly. I'm listening to pinball music in my car. But he'd rather listen to Houdini's soundtrack if he had that. No. I said it was not as good as TNA, but I'm saying the musical score is not forgettable. It is not forgettable. It is not forgettable. It is awesome. Okay, and I'm busting Zach's balls. What he said is completely ludicrous. But at the same time, I sort of agree with what you're saying. If you really listen to that score again, I think it's overshadowed. It's pumping. Yeah, it's awesome. It's pretty cool. I just picture hydraulic pumps, and I picture people banging hammers on stuff, but it's a beat. Oh, man. That's neat. It really is nice. No, you know what? That person right there is going to agree with me. And they're going to say, that's one of the main reasons I bought Houdini. Because I love that score. I think it's nice. I wouldn't go that far. Theme! So, magic. Does magic and pinball go well together? Yeah. It sure does. I think it's really good. When you think of magic, what do you think of? You probably think of David Copperfield. No, Lance Burton. I'm sorry all the Lance Burton fans out there I went to his Vegas show the shittiest show I've ever seen in my entire life he's kind of like a local guy he's a Kentucky fella I'm sorry Lance Burton this guy had the shittiest show ever great it felt 20 years this is my mini review it felt 20 years old it looked like he was so sick and tired of doing this it was hokey it was corny I almost saw a forklift lift the car out I mean, come on. It was horrible. Magic has really progressed into such a... It felt like a Vegas 80s. And his stuff is very much the David Copperfield kind of feel and everything. Worst show in Vegas. Oh, man. Sorry, Lance. So when we're thinking about Vegas shows, I'm thinking about Penn and Teller. But in general, Magic... Magic goes great with pinball. It does. Well, and Magic's still... Magic's not the forefront that it was years ago. It still has a very large following. It's dated around the same time as Pinball. It very much is. That is very true. You don't see the Magic specials anymore, really. They're very... The Illusions 5, Greatest Illusionist, and all that. But unlike Pinball, I don't think Magic is making a comeback. I think it could. With CGI and stuff. It's not right now. With CGI and stuff, people don't trust it now. People know that you can make anything look like anything. Yeah, but if you see it live. Look at the Vine guy. But if you see it live. Look at the Vine guy with the. If you see it live. Yeah, if you see it live. I mean, yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's the majority of your magic. So, I mean, you know, did anybody believe about the freaking movement of the elephant and everything to begin with? And that there wasn't, you know. Yeah, some of the David Blaine shit and everything. Whatever. Theme-wise, and regardless of whether you like magic or not, it's Houdini. It's historic. It's this neat thing. We've got some cool, we have some cool 70s pinball machines. I think Abracadabra. There's Hocus Pocus. There's some cool, magical, very classical themes. We've got Theater of Magic. Fantastic. The Tron. Not deep, but fantastic. Fantastic game. We've got Pinball Magic. Very gimmicky. Yes. Not the deepest code, very gimmicky. Are there any other magic games? I have no idea. Is this the best magic pinball machine? I think it could be. Easily. What's better than it right now? I think... Watch this. I'm going to prove a point. I'm laying the groundwork right now. Hang in here, guys. I can't really name it. I love the look of Theater of Magic. Do you love the look of it? I love it. When you really do that and you get it looking nice, I like the Theater of Magical. I like the little gimmicks. One of the ugliest Translight and Pinball. Yeah, but I like the gimmicks in there and everything. I can't say that it beats it. I like the code. Yeah. But it's not very deep. But I can't say it beats this. You can't. You can't. What else? No. Anything else? No. What would you rather have right now, this or Theater of Magic? Take this easily. I'm trying to get on top of my car today. This is, in my opinion, the best magic-themed pinball machine, not only because it is the best done. Is it better than Theater of Magic? It is. I do think so. It's better than Theater of Magic, guys. I do think so. I like Theater of Magic. I know so. What I was going to say is not only is it the best one, But it encapsulates the guy that you know with magic, Houdini. Bolster was like, why didn't anybody ever do this? If you're making a magic pin, why not the number one central character in magic, Houdini? Very true. Maybe they just didn't know what to do with it and how to convey it. But, like, all the seance stuff. That's the thing, too. He was into that shit. Historically, yeah. What Houdini did was he called out these fake psychics. That's right. That was one of his main missions. He hated that. That's right. They were pulling tricks on people for money, but making them believe and change their lives around for that. The historical value that they put into this is pretty cool with everything they did. They teach you a lot about Houdini. Yeah, they do. So this theme for me is an A-. For you, it's higher. What? You're an A. But I like history, and I like magic. I do, too. You know, you want to know something nerdy? Back in the day, how old were you when it came to magic? You used to do magic. Oh, yeah. I did, too. How funny is that? I had all kinds of tricks. We were always showing. Yeah. We were lucky enough to, in our town, we had a little magic shop. Oh, nice. In the back room, they put on magic shows. I bet they did. They did one. Is that what's wrong? So wrong. One too many individual messages. So bad. It's so wrong, man. I can see 23-year-old Greg with lips on his face. It's terrible. Mr. Whodunny. Mr. Whodunny, teach me the sleight of hand. The Spingali deck. The Spingali deck. They were really nice about showing you. I bought Card College. Card College is one of the best books that you can buy written on card, on slide of hand. I love the, man, I've got to say it now, the Spongeballs. Oh, the, yes. Yeah, the slide of hand. Yeah, that's so amateurish. My kids can do that. But, yeah, like, Matt, I did. I think everybody in our age range went through a magic phase at some point as a kid. It's fine. Some age. Mine was maybe a little older than others, you know, like. Did you ever try to levitate? Did you ever try to do the levitation with the feet? Here's another. This is great. Bear with us because we've not talked about this. No. It's sorry to get off track on games. It's magic. I'll tell you the worst magic story that I have. It was when I was first starting to dabble in it, and I was a young teenager. I'd mess with magic a little bit when I was a kid, but not a lot. So we're down in Orlando, Florida, and we're at Downtown Disney. and there's I remember that magic shop down there yeah so in there well no there was a magic shop I didn't go to the magic this was like a this wasn't a magic shop this was like a just like a I don't know they just sort of sold a bunch of little odd men's weird shit like souvenir type things and everything so there's this guy that works there and he's standing outside there and he's got a playing card and he's got two LEDs on each end of the playing card and he those are like D lights or something yeah he would it was just literally like a bent LED and you had a hearing aid battery in between them that powered them, but they were on each end of the card and it gave the card some weight. And he was levitating the card and throwing the card from hand to hand, circling around it, moving his hands in between. Oh yeah, they did. And I was just like, and especially not with the twirling LED. I was like, oh my god, he hands you the card and you can expect harm like this card. It's real. It's back in there. And I was just like, this is fucking stellar. So, I never grew up with money. So, you know, this thing cost like $35. And this was back in like the 90s. The late 90s. So it was a decent chunk of money for me. And so I thought about it the whole time. Like our last day, like our plane left at like noon or something. It's like 8 or 9 in the morning. We're laying out by the pool getting ready to leave. And I just kept pondering about it. My mom was like, do you really want that thing? And I was like, yeah. You were worried about the whole trip. I was. I was tore up about it. So I run down there to that store. That dude's there. He's working behind the counter. He pulls it out from behind the counter. It's not set on the counter. Oh, man. This is like the most bootleg magic right here. Okay, yeah. And so I'm like, okay, I got it. I go and I open this son of a bitch up and I get it home and I put in the VHS tape. The VHS tape. And it's like filled with a camcorder. It was him. It was him. That's him. And what it is is it was like this super fine string. You actually had to pull it apart to get it. And then you used putty on it. I remember. You had to attach it to the card, and then you put, like you balled up tape, and you put it in your mouth and let it hang out of your mouth. Or you could do it over the head, but over the mouth was the easiest because you could levitate. And then when it looked like you were over top of the card, it was because it was in between your fingers. That's right. Or you could push it. Yeah, you could manipulate that string with so many hands. Because people thought you were manipulating it with your hands. Yeah, and it was a very good illusion, but I was very depressed that I spent $35 on one of these. Those magic tricks, I was like that too. I was like, oh, shit, that's it. I've got actually a skill. It just sucks. Yeah. Once you learn it, though, it was very impressive. But I got gypped on it, and I felt very disappointed. We're going to move. Thanks for taking us down that road. I still have it. I wish I'd have brought it today. You have everything. I could have done it for you. I've got a box of magic tricks, too. I don't got mine. Different stripper decks. Remember the stripper decks? Not those stripper decks, guys. Stripper decks were some of the – listen. I said Dex. Dex! That's what I said! Super Dex. What? Just stop it! Don't tell us about your drink. Don't tell us about your drink. Alright, enjoyability. So this encompasses how much do you want in your game room? Are there special magic things that happen that make you want to come back for more? That's what this is encompassing. I'm in an A, and I'll tell you what, this may easily be an A-plus in joyability for me. I've got a lot of reasons why. I'm in an A-minus, and I thoroughly enjoy it. And the thing that I like the most about it is, like, we've sort of discussed this before, that it's a pin that when I step up to it, I'm like, okay, I'll play it, then I like it. Whereas to me, I feel that those are keeper pins for me because the pins that I go up to and I'm really blown away with at first and I really like, with the exception of dialed in. Dialed in, it blew me away when I first touched it, and then it kept me there. But that's a rare exception with dialed in. But most pens I go to, and they are fun at the first, and I like them, get old very quickly. Okay. You know what? For me, Aerosmith kind of got a little stale. Yeah, same thing. You step into it, and it's like, oh, this is pretty good. Guardians, if they don't fix that code and give me a little more, I can see that kind of, I love it still, but kind of getting a little stale for me. I would take it home today. I told Zach, I said, if you ever go to get rid of this, before you sell it, let me take it home for two weeks. Just to play it. A lot of people, because I'm Penn State, have been a little bit vocal about my enjoyment of this game. Didn't want to give too much away because I wanted this review. But a couple people were like, man, it's just a honeymoon phase. Chill out. And I'm aware of that. When I go to review these things, we don't want to bullshit these people. We're raving about them. It could happen. It could happen. It could happen. But you don't know what's going to wear off. But this feels like more to me. It does feel like more. It really does. It feels like more to me just because there's so much to do. Well, that's the thing. I'm just now getting the shots down a little bit. So now I'm opening up to be able to explore the code. Once you get deeper in that, you see stuff. That's what I'm saying. Special stuff. So that's why I feel that it's not just the honeymoon phase. It's because of the depth of that code, what Josh put into it. I feel that it won't get old because of that. All right. You ready for mine? Yeah. So where are you at in Joybill? You're A-minus-7-8. people often say that i just rant and i say that i love something but i can sometimes not back it up yeah i'm gonna back it up greg with why i enjoy houdini out of the box it has flipper toppers what other machine does that maybe some jersey jacks you get some ruby red slippers and stuff um but they put that in there you get purple silicone for the Flippers themselves, not just black, purple silicone, and on the post. Color posts. Thank you. Thank you, American Pinball. You get an LCD screen, not one but two, and they both are implemented well. They're not just thrown up on a machine. One is part of a theater on your back glass, and one is part of a theater on your play field. You get custom-made spotlights, back alley creations. Instead of ugly spotlights, you get some that look like canister lights from the theater. That's not cheap to produce, I'd say, to begin with. No, it's unneeded. It's just for aesthetics. Yes. You get that. You get ornate lock pop bumpers. You're not going to get that ornate of pop bumpers on anything besides, I would say, a Jersey Jack. J.J.P. J.J.P. is going to give you that. You get a catapult that throws the ball 22 inches into the air that never gets old, and it never misses. You get another catapult. You get magic targets that have magnets that swirl the ball around in unexpected ways. You get a Subway. On a contemporary machine, thank you, manufacturers, for not forgetting about Subways. I love Subways. You get Easter eggs everywhere. Greg, I'm still uncovering the damn thing. Yes. And it's not just Easter eggs. They are tributes to pinball players. Yes. There is a reason. There is a reason. And when I go to enter my name at the very end, I can't put ZL in my initials because the Z is missing. And I said to myself, why is the Z missing? I talked to the guys that built this. There's a reason. And when you find out why, you're going to giggle. And I appreciate that. Like you said, there's a ton of that type of stuff in there. Yes. There's targets. There's a leaf target or leaf switch, and it's a certain width. Joe Balcer said, why are we using this big old target when all we need is just the width of that switch? That way we get more room for people. I love that. That's a first. Maybe a first at Pinball. There's a wooden planchette. A handcrafted wooden planchette. There's a toy in there that lights up. There is a ball save, you guys. Ball save modes. Instead of just draining, if you can get into the mystery shop. And I'm going to keep going because this is the reason that I bought Houdini. In the mystery magic shop. Thank you. You can get awarded the ball save modes. So you have to get them timed just right if you're going out the out lane. You've got to have it lit. But if you do, there's two modes. One of them, you have 30 or 40 flips to hit all seance targets to keep your ball alive. A second chance, if you will. And then the other one, escape from death, I think. You get 30 seconds. And in that 30 seconds, you have to hit all the escape targets. Yeah. And then you can keep your... Like, simple coding and care to the pinball player like that keeps it going for me. You've got inverted flippers. Yeah. Have you ever seen that? There's a mode on. And they're in mode, so it's not like I'd hate to see what the wizard mode's going to be like. They're just typical modes where the flippers, they stay up. And then they flop. They flop. So you're crossed, and they stay up, so you have to hold them down to come down. And isn't there a ball save on these for the flippers? What do you mean? Didn't Josh say that so that you wouldn't screw it over when I switched back? No, there's no switching. That's Ghostbusters. That's what's nice. You said he didn't want to do that. Yeah, you don't know what I'm talking about when it goes from back to normal flippers. Yeah, yeah. When it goes from, good point, yeah. So that way you're not screwed over like some games. I do that sometimes, and every time it happens, I think, I really appreciate that. That's a good call, right? Yeah. Because I'll lose that last ball because I'm doing all this stuff. And it's like, all right, we'll give you your ball back to start your regular game play again. Love that. You've got the unique head on it that grows on you, that really grows on you. You've got special modes. So for me, these special modes, man, I went into, it's like a hurry-up mode. It's one of the jail modes, or no, it might have been jail mode. It's a very unassuming mode. But after you hit the third shot of that mode, Houdini, you're trying to get him to escape from the asylum, and the GI goes black. It goes like a wizard mode. This is a mode, Greg. The GI goes black. And all of a sudden, you see Houdini on the screen trying to escape this asylum with spotlights on him. Yeah, that's right. There's three shots on the playfield. One of them is the correct one. And Kugler said, if you look right, if you look just right up at that, he'll show you. Houdini will show you what shot to make. But then the GI spotlights the playfield. And they go around like you're looking for him. That is a cool model. It really is cool. Inverted flippers mode. You've got all of these cool modes. And then last but not least, the fun that they're having in this pen. The historical information they're bringing is a breath of fresh air in a pinball. It really is. Because we did something unique and different than a superhero game. I like it because I'm a history nerd. But they're having fun in a sense because they poke fun at the other manufacturers. And you guys will see the video right now. But they pull up in the mystery. He'll go down. He'll grab your mystery award. But sometimes he's going to grab something like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man head that's melting. And he says, who are you going to call? Not that guy. Amazing how many things this hat can hold. Ugh, that is one ugly alien. Let's see what else we have. Let's try that again. 20 seconds of fall save. Amazing how many things this hat can hold. Nuclear annihilation. Good pinball, bad for our future. You can tell that they put their heart and soul into the pen and they had a good time doing it. It just wasn't like, I'm getting a paycheck. They may not have even got a paycheck. This is a startup company. Who knows? This is the truth. But I think at $7,000, the way the market is, this is an $8,000 to $9,000 pen. The way the market is. It stacks up, yeah. And so I think that that's what's going to help sell these machines is everything that you just listed for $7,000. For $7,000. Yeah. I think that you can't go wrong. It's a great value. It's crazy saying that anything at $7,000 is a great value. But if they keep cranking these things out at $7,000. But in the pinball world. There's no reason not to buy one. That's right. Yeah. It's phenomenal. I agree. It is phenomenal. Get those bugs fixed and stuff like that. All right. So let's talk about the overall rating. We compiled this all. I'm going to A-. It says 3.79. I'm great with this. I'm going to B+. I feel like it's a B-game. I feel that it's an average game. You had it ranked pretty high, man. Yeah, but it's that game. It's that good. It really is. Pros and cons. Pros, we listed them. Value. The price, actually, we usually talk price as a con. But for this, I think it's kind of a pro. Pros are everything we listed, just about. Cons, what don't you like about this? For me, there's bugs. There's bugs, but it's just shipping. So that doesn't bother me too much, but it's still a con. Con, it's a new pin. New manufacturer. And a new manufacturer. We're not bullshitting. No. We told those guys, like, one of the things that you're going to have to get over is this is new. Like, can we trust American Pinball? Yeah. I don't know. Only time will tell. Only time will tell. And let's be honest, let's not bullshit. These guys came out of the gate in not a great way. No. And we won't even talk about that. You guys can look it up yourself. But just associating themselves, I think they were just, they didn't know. They didn't know better. They got Joe Balcer in there and fixed things up a bit. Yeah. A lot. Fixed things up a lot, not a bit. A lot. To fix things up a lot. Very fast. They had to scrap this entire machine. Yeah. The entire machine and do something else. In a short period of time. But as far as they went in that time frame, it's amazing. There's plenty of sleepless nights, I guarantee you. I still have some worrisome. I do. I have reservations, too. But it's nowhere near like highway. That's interesting. That's a bold statement coming from you. I like Alien a lot. I know you do. I like Alien a whole lot. But I'm way more terrified of highway. and not just because they're overseas or anything but I think that all of that was so negative and all the line, the refunds all that, I think that a lot of that stuff is what kept Alien out of some of the twippies I think that that's what's going to ultimately hurt sales they hurt people, how much did you have to pay for this and wait? how long did you have to wait for your $7,000 that you were scared you were going to lose? You didn't. You didn't. No, you didn't. They never made people. They didn't even make people pay for the $250 deposit. That was a distributor. Yeah, yeah. So that's what I'm saying. So I feel better about this in American than what I do highway. This game is shipping it right at a year. Yeah, yeah. People seem to share that sentiment for the most part because sales seem like they're taking off pretty well. If you guys want a Houdini, get in there. Yeah. And tell them SDTM sent you. We'll layer it. Layer it. Flip it out. Not that we get paid for it, but it does help prove that people actually take our opinions seriously. Yeah, they take mine, not yours. But it's all good. I only point you in the directions of good pins, so it's fine. I just point you in the direction of a pinball machine. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, only time will tell. We can't say back or forth. and we're doing this for you guys. So we're going to try to protect you. That would be my only hesitancy. But what we can say from being up there is that everything's brand new. It's nice seeing on the assembly line. I'm like, oh my God, it doesn't look like there's blood on that. Like somebody died on that. Everything is fresh and brand new. Yeah, it's nice. Everything's organized very well. It's small, but there doesn't need to be anything. And you can tell they were tweaking things to accommodate. It looked like everything I was looking for, but... But they're new. They're still new. And I don't know, as long as they don't do anything stupid, I don't think there's anything, as long as this pen functions well, I thought I'd have to tweak it out of the box. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I think that this is going to sell, and I think they'll go on to game number two easily. They're excited about that one, too. Yeah, they're already talking about it, getting ready to work it up. They wouldn't let us have it, though, would they? They wouldn't tell us. We tried talking a little bit. We won't tell, I promise. We don't have thousands of people that watch these videos. So I think as long as they don't do something stupid, then I think this game is going to be a hit. And I think that it will allow them to go into game number two successfully. This game to me is already a hit. I think so. I think so. If you buy a new machine right now, what are you buying? You buying Alien? You buying Pirates of the Caribbean? I want Pirates of the Caribbean. I probably, well, but this is my thing. But you want $9,500. I want $9,500. That's what hurts me. You want a Guardians? No. Well, do you want an Aerosmith? I'd take a Guardians. I'd take them all, but if you were going to designate some money, what are you buying? I'd buy this. And that's no bullshit just because it's in this video. At the price point, I'm excited to see what Spooky does with Alice because Alice comes in a little cheaper. TNA? I would like a TNA. Yeah. I like TNA a lot, but I just don't want to own it right now. I'm not going to own any of these because I'm too broke. I think I'll own a TNA soon. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You bought one not too long ago. But Alice Cooper would be the only thing that would maybe be there, but we know nothing about it. But Price Point is good for me. Price Point is six something. Yeah. So, I mean, it's not far off. Heaven feels good. I know. I know. It's tough, guys. It's tough because this is a good game. Maybe you wait a little bit until they – or maybe just get one now and play and have a lot of fun. That's what I did. I'm loving every second of it. Now, if I had, I will tell you, I still want a Pirates. And I would take a Pirates. Oh, I want a Pirates, too. But the problem is, is Pirates is a little bit more money. Quite a bit more money. $2,500 more. Yeah. And, like, that sucks. That's still quite a bit of money. I know. I know. And especially if I had a collector's Pirates. I don't have the money to spend $9,500 on a pinball machine. I don't really have $7,000. Because Pirates is more loaded, but the price reflects the difference between these two pins. $2,500? Well, maybe not. $2,500? This thing is trying to load it. Yeah, but the second play field is pretty good. You've got a catapult, throws the ball 22. You've got a – Yeah, but you're shooting the ball with a cannon. It's not – I will tell you this. Like, I like the shooting of the cannon, but this is a little bit more – the ball gimmick in this is a little bit better than Pirates. It doesn't go as far. Yeah, it's just such a short thing. It's still really cool, but it's not as visually. Wow. Can I do a lot with $2,500, Greg? Oh, I can do a whole lot. You know what I want to do? Just buy them both. I agree. That's what you need to do. Buy them both. Buy a TNA. Buy a Pirates of the Caribbean. Buy a Houdini. I just don't think you can go wrong with this at the price point. I guess I've got to concede to what you were saying and say yes. If there was a pen right now that I was going to go buy brand new, it would be this. you guys heard it here first alright what do these people need to know about Straight Down the Middle we're a Twippy Award winner we are a Twippy Award winner for YouTube it was very exciting, very unexpected we were happy to make it in the top three I know I was like dude we actually got it made it in the top three yeah I don't know I don't know what to say about that but I'm happy about it because we put a lot of work into it. We spend a lot of money doing it. It is. It's a lot of, you spend hours and hours on editing and just little pictures and video play and everything. Connections, talking to people, trying to figure out stuff. Talking to people all the time. Yeah. We do a lot of work. We try to respond to everybody that we can, the comments and everything. That's the best part of this, is just the fans and having, talking to them. Trying to get that groundwork. or find the information. So check out our other YouTube videos. Thanks for voting for us for the Twinkies. And one of the greatest things. What? We picked up a new sponsor. That's right. You guys seen it at the beginning of this video. Marco's Specialties. Marco's Specialties. So we had a big spiel at the beginning of this. So thank you, Marco, for joining the SDTM team. Check this out real quick. I was going to tell the people where and when and how they can see Marco's. There's upcoming shows, and we're going to be hanging out at their booth as well, aren't we, Greg? Yeah, they'll be at Louisville with Larry again, aren't they? They have this whole promotional thing with extra machines and stuff that are at the show. So they're going to Louisville Arcade Expo the March 2nd through 4th. They'll be there. Then they're going to be at Arcade Expo in Banning, California from March 16th through March 18th. We're not going to be able to make that one. But we are going to make the Texas Pinball Festival in Frisco, Texas. that's going to be March 16th through the 18th as well that's their next three shows we're going to be there yeah if you guys need pinball parts yeah and I'll tell you what no bullshit with this just because we're close Bull Bull Show is really growing and it is a fantastic show yeah come on out we're going to be there in a minute now there's no big unveilings or anything like you get in Chicago or Texas or will there be but I mean you know you're still going to get to play a Pirates there you get to play a Houdini there So you still got all that. There will be a Guardian. I'm sure there will be a Guardians there or something at some point. But, you know. Come hang out. Come hang out. It's a fun. There's a lot of pens, a lot of arcades. Flip N Out Pinball's always got all the Jersey Jacks. Yeah. Flip N Out Pinball runs a new show. Yeah, it's fantastic. And say hi to us. And when you're there or right now, right now, whenever you get done with this video, you guys saw the Franchi artwork logo that we just threw to you. Oh, my God. Why did we almost. They saw that. Yeah. They saw it at the beginning. And so, buy one of those. Help support our cause. Help support what we're trying to do here. Twitch. Check work. Yeah. Wednesday nights, 8 p.m. He's going to keep on doing those big old deluxe tutorials. I've been streaming more. You've been doing good, buddy. Yeah, you just came earlier, 5.30 or so. Check out my Houdini streams, as well as any other new machines I'm going to get in. America's Most Haunted needs to get some stream play. Yeah. We've got Facebook. Like us on Facebook. And while you guys are at it, our buddy Larry is flipping out pinball. Please do this for us. Please go to his Facebook page and like it. Follow him on that because that helps him out a lot. And he gives you updates on machines and different things. Do that for us. I like it when his feed pops up on my Facebook. That's right. Pin Stadium, Pin Graphics, do that for them and Marco as well. Marco's on Twitter too. Ooh. Yeah. I want to get on Twitter. We're not tweet heads, are we? No, it's so much more to keep track of. No, no, I can't do it. Let's do some more. Buy a t-shirt. We love you from the bottom of our hearts. Yes. This is Straight Down the Middle with Zach and Greg. We'll see you next week, right? Head to Louisville. You hit it off with bumper dance, breaking down the metal again. Metal again. You had a plane with a slingshot, you're rolling out the alley again. Alright, so what we're going to do, like I was telling Josh, I appreciate you being on film, first off. You didn't have to. You can tell me to piss off. Piss off. There you go. You didn't have to do it. Typically, that is what he tells people. So it tastes like, what did you say, what did you mention about it? Oh, dirty sewer water. You know what? This is no bullshit, guys. I tried coffee the first time three weeks ago in my entire life. Really? What's wrong with it? No beer, no coffee. I'm a weird dude. I don't know, man. I'm a weird dude. I'm watching you guys on YouTube. I'm watching you guys on YouTube. There's no coffee involved.