Well, you know what that sound means. That means it's time once again for a little bit of Don's Pinball Podcast. In your greasy ear holes, tell your mama that you haven't been washing them because you want to get this pure and undistilled flavor in your ear. It's episode 164. Let's celebrate. Oh, get that holiday hustle on, everybody. We're almost off work for the winter break, right? Everybody gets a break for the wintertime from your job, At least if you work in the pinball industry, it seems. This factory is about to shutter the doors as we go and hang out with you and yours this holiday season. Winter is reaping around, but hasn't really sunk in just yet. I'm still celebrating it. I'm still happy. Ice is just starting to form in the lakes here in central Wisconsin. And, you know, we're anticipating getting some snowfall. I haven't had a shovel drive weight number one. Tell you what, though. Come back and get me in the middle of February when I've just had enough of this knee-deep in snow. Tell you where I'll be, down in St. Petersburg, Florida, in the sun and fun for pinball at the beach, plain evil dead. Hello, everybody, once again. Don's Pinball Podcast is here. Grab your carpet square. Snacks are on the counter. Drinks are in the back. We're going to watch some movies. We've got a film strip today that we're going to get through. We'll start off with none other than the Stern Pinball because the cup, not only is it runneth over, The cup has launched. I'm not talking about cups in any other manner around your facial area. I'm talking about the pinball cup that Stern released. So we've been seeing teasers of this pretty much all month, and then it finally dropped on us last week. A pinball competition funded in part by Sterns and Sutter Connected, or at least that's how it's conducted. So you play games, you win points, and then there's races, which will be limited time entry areas, and then, you know, at the end of that week or whatever, they tally the votes and you get to see where your bragging points fall down. What I haven't understood is exactly what this is. And I don't think I am alone. I've heard on through the podcast, oh, Sphereverse. Nobody else seemed to figure it out either. But we know now. We know now and we clearly have leaders. So what I have surmised and learned just this morning is there's a set of five challenges for essentially every Insider Connected game that Stern has. and as you play these games and you get these challenges, score this many points, hit a skill shot, beat this specific mode, then you get graduated points awarded to you 5, 10, 15, 20, 25. Now, I thought, okay, so you got to go out and find every Insider Connected game so you can collect all the points and then, you know, see if you were the first one to the finish line is how I thought this worked. But no, as it turns out, you gain these points every time you accomplish that challenge in that game, right? So I went on Metallica, I got the first four, and I was like, cool, okay, Metallica's done. Went over to Star Wars, had an amazing five billion point game, cleared out all the challenges in one shot. And I'm like, great, I'm going to move on down the line. But no, if you go back and play it again, you get the points again. And so then it's like, oh, okay, so these people that have nearly 10,000 of these points accrued, they've just been, you know, maniacally going through and playing games over and over and over again. which I guess speaks to the whole point of this thing, which is to spur engagement amongst the pinball community, which is happening. And I guess it makes it easier to compete. Essentially, you don't have to be the best player. You just have to be persistent. If you play a game, you know, a thousand times and get 10 points every time, you'll be, you know, at the top of the leaderboard right now. So that may be, in fact, what's happening. People over there just like in their basement, haven't even showered, haven't come up from their Cheesy Bites pizza and just like spurring on the points. So it's fun. What I do like about this thing is how they set up the tiers, right? So they're doing qualifying right now. It'll run until I think the 20th or so of the month, and then the challenges will start after that. And so these people that have been maniacally playing every game to completion as many times as possible without sleep will be placed in their own tier far away from me. So I don't have to stress about, you know, I can't go to work today. Colin's sick. I got to play pinball. I need 10,000 more points in this game. I'm not even enjoying it anymore. I just want the points. So for the try-hard point grinders, thank you, Dennis Crystal, for that try-hard term, they'll have their tier. I'll play as much as I typically play. I'll see what tier I fall into. And then if I want to go on and continue to compete, I'll be in relatively the same company. So I dig that. I dig any event that makes it more fun to go back to my games. This is like when you ripped up the Game Genie back in the day and just tore back into your NES collection because you could play every game in a new way. So thanks Stern. Love this kind of stuff. This is fun. What I wish was a little bit more fun, and I think this will come, is the Stern Insider Connected app. It took me a while when I first got into the app to find out where I even go to find this. There's five logos on the bottom of the screen. Make it very easy to kind of pick different parts of the app to go to. But none of those will take you to the Stern Cup. You have to go to one of the banner ads, flip through them until you find that challenge, and then you can hit it. I tell you get to the challenges for the December things that are going on as well. And it's like, I just wish there was a way to put like all the challenges in one quick area. I could hit and find everything that will probably come. But this is what we have for now. The other thing I would like is some push notification options. I would like to enable this. So as I'm playing the game in real time, when I, you know, incur that challenge or I succeed at it, I can get a little push notification. A little buzz in my pocket to tell me like, okay, keep playing. You don't have to look up at the screen, but, you know, mission accomplished. Go on to the next one or something. So maybe that'll come as well. Would like to see that. But I'm going to continue going down the line here and at least get the points. It is fun. I do like the real-time Insider Connected achievements that you get in the game. The little bloops that come up, like it's instant satisfaction. Those I love. Of course, all my games that I have at home, I've essentially got all the ones that I'm pretty much going to get. and even the cumulative ones you know the the bronze silver gold when you hit this target 50 times 100 times 300 times you know i've gotten those and so it would be fun if they would go back periodically and just dump in 50 new ones you know uh i don know you hit an orbit 75 times and you get an achievement just throw stuff in there so those of us that have these games at home and keep playing them after there a code update we can get something new You know a dump of new 60 challenges or something Just to keep that going, I would love to see that eventually. Hopefully, that's where we're going to get. And hopefully, they'll get back to these John Wick contracts. Remember when that was a thing? Remember when this game launched and it was, you know, Star Wars level of complexity as far as the shots and layout. A couple of ramps, a drop target, some stuff to hit. But no giant building to go put balls into or anything. So what was a spurn engagement early on with the release of that game, and the operators will attest to this, is when the contracts dropped, people ran out to go and get those limited time achievements. And not only were they limited in time, but they were limited in number. Maybe they were unlimited in time, but there was only 200, let's say, that you could go out and get. That was fun, and it seems like for the past couple of months, there's been nothing. Now, Stern did clarify early on that it's not something they want to just continue dumping. They want to keep it special. But, I mean, at least one every couple of weeks, I would think we would get something. So I haven't really had a compelling reason to fire up John Wick again. And the game shoots fun, and when there's challenges to go after, that's really where the fun part of the game comes in. Playing in that universe and going after a specific challenge is what I want to do. I would say it's fun to go play the modes, but I have no idea what the hell is even going on in the modes. I know that I'm in the purple mode, I'm in the green mode, I'm in the yellow mode, or it's not even the colors that are the modes. The colors are like the Hogwarts house fraction that you're playing for, and whatever. I'm lost, man. I'm lost. I see colored lights. I hit them. I feel like I'm doing good, but I've got no feedback from the game as far as how I'm progressing. When I'm playing Star Wars, and I'm dropping off the bombs on the Endor moon to blow up the shield generator, like I've got four icons on the screen and they're lined up with four shots on the play field. And when I make those shots, I can look up and see, okay, I've got the middle two. I need to go for the outside ones. When all four hit, I know that that mode is complete. None of that exists on John Wick, or if they do, I can't seem to find them. You know, a progress bar or something. X-Men has been out a month and has progress bars in there. when you pick your mode you can see where your progress was when you left off like you know tell me like what i'm supposed to do and give me some sense that i'm progressing towards something instead with john wick it's kind of like all right i hit 60 shots i guess and then at some point the scoop starts flashing and like that will end the mode or like the modal time out and am i supposed to play this game where i just you know play the mode as well as i can until it times out just get as many points as i can once it times out i go to the next one or is there a way to actually complete the mode. The only way that I ever found to complete them is to take the glass off, roll the ball 30 times up each lit lane, and then finally throw it in the scoop. And that's not very fun. So can we address that? Either, you know, is it a timed mode where I try to earn points in that time limit? Does my multiplier go down when time goes on? Does my multiplier go up? Should I save shots for later? Should I be in a frenzy in that last five seconds? Or should I just trap up, let it time out so I can go into the next mode and continue getting points. I have no idea. Please some coder tell me. I'd like it if you could tell me on the screen in the form of some sort of progress bar, putting that out there, please. And thank you. Speaking of please and thank you, we have been getting an overabundance of releases from Stern. It seems I can barely catch up. Man, Metallica is sitting over here. I've got one of the X-Men left over here. I'll be leaving soon. You know, Wick is still over here. That was a released this year. Jaws has come and went and the only way I could keep bringing in new games is if I keep putting them out. And it's getting exhausting to have these games for only what seems like several weeks and then there's some new release on us. And I think before the month is even out, we're going to get a Dungeons and Dragons at least reveal Brian Eddy's new game, Dwight Sullivan on code is what I had heard. Who knows who's doing the art? I'm sure by now everybody that goes to Stern is asking for Jeremy Packer (Zombie Yeti), Zombie Yeti, to do the art. we'll see I haven't really been angry at any art I've seen from Stern recently so I think whatever they pick will be just fine maybe they picked up my buddy Michael Barnard from Russian Jaws fame for another go at this fantasy title that's forthcoming please let this be the spiritual successor to medieval madness right this is a not really swords and sandals but like dragons and pizza rolls kind of thing so let's do it. You know, you're going to roll the 20 sided die. You're going to roll the pizza roll. You're going to have rolls over your belt line. Uh, it's Dungeons and Dragons. Like let's do it. So I hope this game is more compelling than Venom, but I hope it has the type of code engagement that Venom had the leveling, the experience point building. Brian Eddy will probably be uniquely suited to this or at least Dwight. Cause I think he coded Venom as well. Um, but whoever was behind that code, that was the best part of that game, was leveling up, unlocking characters. That's what I wanted. Pinball, I had predicted, I think over the last couple weeks, given the market and how it is, given the difficulty, moving games, seeing what game prices are doing on the used market, I was thinking, you know, there's no way that a game that's not completely stellar is going to be a sales success right now. And then, of course, Metallica comes out and completely changes all that right so you know i picked dnd as being kind of like the slow seller more of a john wick uh than a jaws let's say um but i'm hearing a lot of chatter now people are starting to get excited and a lot of that may just be pre-release hype that we always see um but i'm getting a little excited about it now and this is a game that i've for sure already written off buying new in box because i just i have too much i'm starting to finally make some progress at bringing the collection back down to a more manageable, reasonable level. So it would have to be something fairly revolutionary for me to go at this, especially with Evil Dead right around the corner and Avatar out there somewhere in orbit, orbiting the import scene right now with the collector's editions. I need to get that thing in my house. I do have some compelling reasons why I went in this Avatar CE, and I'd like to kind of have some time to devote to sorting all that out and really giving my reasons. And so I thought I would do for the bonus show for this one on Patreon, I'm going to go into everything of why I got myself an Avatar CE pre-order, what my plans are for it, and my justifications. For those of you that are interested, head on over to patreon.com backslash Don's Pinball Podcast. Come on in the door for five bucks, just like Steve Haskell did this morning. I got the update, man. It like every morning I wake up and there more friends in there and then I compelled to generate even more fun content and you know build the community that we doing there and on discord so I definitely called the last two stern releases opposite you know I saw the reveal trailer for x-men I saw it was jack danger it looked more fun than foo fighters and I was like this is it man look at all the stuff that's going on I went and played the game I'm like man this thing's gonna be great the le's were limited in number from where they've been. It's been something we've been asking for, build some more exclusivity into this hobby. And Stern is answering that with 811 of these X-Men's. So I was like, that's it, man. I got to grab one of these, right? I didn't get a Jaws. I'm going to go ahead and get this one. And I called that wrong because they can be had for about 12,000, 11,500 right now, new in box. Mine, freshly powder coated, will probably sell for right around there and will be the best value on the market and it's everything i sell is or best offer so if you're interested like some of you have reached out already um let's finalize some of those offers here maybe we'll be picking someone soon to pick this up if you're interested in picking up an x-men le with a topper all powder coated for bargain basement prices get at me don spinball podcast at gmail.com or discord or youtube or whatever what have you um but metallica came out we knew metallica was coming out with a remastered was it going to be spike three was it not uh turns out it's a hybrid there's some spike three innards in there but man did these 500 games sell out in a flash now would a thousand metallica remastered le's have sold out that quickly i'm not so certain i think a lot of the drive for this game of course the art was amazing everything about it was fixed this is a game that people enjoy this is a game that you know the premiums were selling for 12 13 some thousand and now for that price you can get a brand new upgraded version of course it's going to sell but i don't know if they would have churned through a thousand with the frenzy that we saw with the 500 i think that 500 number was just the extra category that pushed people to go ahead and get that le and congratulations you guys that got it if i would have got one i would have definitely sold it for 5 000 more by now when you see what these things are going for because i think the premium pretty sweet too but either way heck yeah this is a fantastic game i I love playing it. It'll be going out to the 1UP Lounge in Bellingham, Washington, probably in early February. And you can go get your hands on this thing. It's Cab Custom decked out. I'm waiting for the last parts to come back. From the powder coda that got dropped off yesterday, it'll be complete by the New Year's. And this is a game I don't want to sell, man. I want to keep this thing. This is something I would probably rebuy again down the road. And thankfully, with the sales success of this game, and as great as this game is and how well it plays, the premium should be in production for ever i think at this point and you know the band's back on this they like having this game out so renewing license shouldn't be an issue my dog ate my pop filter my microphone so excuse the plosives if they're coming in your ear i apologize if you got your raycon earbuds in right um but i was thinking all right so metallica is going to come out great you know it's not something i need to rush out and buy and get in my house uh x-men's probably going to be the one to own. I got that backwards. So maybe I'm misjudging or judging too harshly this Dungeons and Dragons game that I know nothing about other than rumors from the internet. So we'll see. Maybe it'll do well. I hope it does. I hope the game is fun. I hope the game is fun and I hope locations will put premiums out so I can go play it. Now, when are you going to be able to play this realistically as a human? You know, I guess you could stock the factory and try to make friends and inroads there took me about two years i managed to do some of that or you can go to the consumer electronics show which is happening in the second week of january i think out in las vegas uh it's rumored that they're going to be there stern has had a booth there that was where no that wasn't where they unveiled venom last year was that was a comic-con i believe although i'm getting things confused i was thinking maybe it was southern fried gaming expo but no that was in July and that was for Godzilla 70th. Rambling aside, it looks like early January will be the first time at a show this thing will be at. As a member of the general public, the Consumer Electronics Show isn't exactly open. Although if you can finagle yourself some sort of business tied to the electronic entertainment industry, you can get in there for about $150 is what I said or what I heard. I could get in there as media, as media does get invites. If you have a ton of TikTok followers, a ton of followers on LinkedIn. Is that a thing? Getting LinkedIn followers? What, I'm missing the boat on that? Podcast listens will get you a media invite. And the criteria is you need to have 10,000 streams in the last 30 days. And dang it, I only have 5,500, which can I just say completely blew my mind when I looked up the actual metrics. I don't tend to follow these very closely. I'll check reviews when they pop up, but I'm not furiously refreshing to see what my listens are for this. I know people are listening. Um, and I, I honestly, I'm so busy just keeping up with all the messaging and everything that I don't bother to really track, but I went and looked and yeah, just on Spotify in the last 30 days, 5,500 and something listens, which, which is nuts, man. So thank you. Uh, those of you to listen, thanks to people like Steve to join the Patreon and that's not even counting in the Patreon streams. It's not counting the, we are pinball streams. So collectively I'm probably at that 10,000 limit, but I would have to cobble it all together. And who has time for that? The game's going to be everywhere, right? This isn't going to be a slow walk release, you know, where you have to wait for that yearly event so you can play Ninja Eclipse because it's going to take a couple of years until they're coming out. You know, this game will be unveiled and then on locations within a week or so, most likely. It'll probably be at Pinball on the Beach as well. So if you need another compelling reason to go down to Florida in the dead of winter, especially if you're from the Midwest, that would be another cool reason. Also hang out. I'll be there. Not as a special guest or anything. We'll be hanging out. So yeah, let's go get some food and play some dang pinballs at the beach. That'll be fun. What else do we got? Twippies? We'll talk about those. Star Wars is awesome. Blew it up today. Got a message from Jeff at MadPinball.com. He's got the pro and premium comic editions of Star Wars. Now look, I did a post today on Facebook. I get it that this game mechanistically isn't sexy and exciting. The code, if you don't get in on how these multipliers work, you're like, all right, it's just a drain fest. I'm going to go to something else. Most locations have the pro. Most people have never put a ball up in the hyperspace loop. And until you get that, I can forgive you for not understanding how fun and compelling this game is. This is a game that I enjoyed the first time I had played it when I came across a pro in Madison Wisconsin at a bowling alley And I looked at it and I was like well didn a Star Wars machine already come out You know the day to East version Uh but no this was a new Stern version I played it and I was like this is kind of dumb There five drop targets as a couple of ramps That kind of it. What, what even is this? What's the type fighter on the spring? But for some dang reason, I was like hitting shots. I wanted to, I was progressing through modes. I was really early into, you know, getting deep into the pinball hobby at this point. And I was like something about this game. I walked away and I'm like, that was more fun than I think it should have been. That same day, I also played Ninja Turtles for the first time. And it was fun playing that. There was definitely a lot more going on. But like Star Wars stuck with me. I was like, why did I like this game as much as I did? And so I came across it again, I think about a year or so ago. And I was like, yeah, you know, this is fun. I think, how much are these things? You know, I should be able to pick one of these up and just play it for a couple of months. And I found one locally, picked up my premium. Rest is history. It's all dressed up. It's the only game I have that I've gone out and purchased a mirrored back glass for just to make it look just awesome. It's got light up panels on the side. Like I love this game. I love this game so much. Got 5 billion points this morning chasing pinball cup scores. My God, Stern, it's working. The insider connectivity is working. What a fun fricking game. And I get that some people don't enjoy it, but the more I talk to people, I don't think they've played it a whole lot or maybe played it early on. Maybe the code got better. This is a game I didn't play at release. I played it years down the road. But yeah, I would say I kind of super dig this game. And the comic art version for a while was the one that was sold out. It was the one that was selling for more monies. And now they're available again for MSRP. So if this is a game that you've always kind of had interest in, you can pick up that comic one right now, which has got the awesome art from the comic books. I'm just saying it wouldn't be the worst thing to pick up a premium. And Jeff at MattPinball.com, he's the guy to go to. He's the guy to go to. If you need a topper, get at me, because I'm constructing my own toppers for this game. Of course, the Stern toppers were limited to 500. They sold out ages ago. They go for multiple thousand dollars online. I can get you pretty close to that with something cool that lights up if you just email me and we can talk. More details, they're in limited release. All right, putting that out there. What else has been in the news this week? American Pinball has been the perennial favorite for December. Loser Kids has it, man. They scored the interview with Fix. they asked him the direct pointed questions that were like just all right let's go man lfg loser kids let's hit it with it um and really we got some reveals we got a lot of insight um they even asked some questions about like the legal stuff that's going on dave actually talked about it what a legend uh thanks so much for doing that dave fix um i called him up afterwards and i was like thank you for going on to this podcast and putting out this transparency you know because uh you know people do like american pinball games people own them and if you own a game you want to know that you're going to be able to get parts and service and things so i think it it helps when you go out and you're not you know just secretive and keeping everything close to the vest um i don't think we're uh anywhere near having a good idea on all the decisions uh that come out of that pounds out illinois warehouse um but yeah it was definitely funny fun fun listening and uh yeah big thanks to dave for coming out and doing the show man i gotta get my my filter fixed freaking dogs um but yeah uh games are coming out from them there'll be something new uh sometime in the new year still not renounced exactly when it's coming out and maybe they don't even know for sure yet feeling out the market seeing where it is uh but that was cool to check out so yeah i'm gonna comment on all the legal stuff because i don't want to stick my fingers into that business. Um, well, you know, I'll just, I'll follow along as a casual observer. Um, but yeah, that was definitely interesting. Shout out to, uh, uh, the loser kids there, uh, for all the good work that they do. Speaking of good works, did a massive recording for, we are pinball this week. We got retro Ralph on YouTube's own son of retro gaming new and now into pinball and just killing it, man. God, I got a great, uh, great lineup there. Um, he's modding his games too. I saw some powder-coated rails there. I love that stuff, man. He came on and talked with me and Cengiz for about 90 minutes, and we didn't even get to the Twippies. Dude is co-hosting the Twippies this year. They're happening down at Wormhole, if you haven't heard. February? Yeah, later in February, the 22nd, I think. They'll be going on down there. February is going to be a pinball month, man. Going to get out of the wintertime and going to get down to Florida at the beginning of the month, and then down to Houston for Wormhole and the Twippies. I managed to score a ticket that was only 40 And then I locked myself out of the car Talked about that on the Patreon But that's coming on up We talked for 90 minutes with this dude We were planning on an hour And we were totally just soaking up all of his time It was so fun to hang out People love the show, go check it out At We Are Pinball Wherever you're listening to this podcast We Are Pinball is there as well So go peep that But we didn't even get to the Twippies We gotta have him back on when it's closer To talk about those But that's coming up I want to do a couple of episodes, have a couple of ideas. I think sometime next week we'll do a year in review, just kind of recap everything now that we've seen the whole year, or at least by that point. We can look back at the releases that came out, how they do, how do we think they were going to do, what code did well, what code still sucks. John Wick, come on, give me some progress bars and some mode guidance, man. I need it. I need it. So we'll be doing that. We'll probably be doing that from a sunny location that's not Wisconsin. And more about that in about a week when I get out to the winter homestead. Super excited about what's going on there. All right, do we have anything else to talk about? Spooky pinball. Let's see. D&D, American Pinball question mark. Pinball at the beach. I think I covered it. I think I covered it. I do want to talk some Jersey Jack, and I'm going to take that over to the after show here because we're coming up on time. But thanks again for joining an episode of Don's Pinball Podcast. My fun pinball journey. Eric is not the only one. We're all on our own pinball journey here. But yeah, I'm having fun with Stern. I'm going to jump back on these games. I think we'll bring the music back in here. For a very twisted Christmas. I know most of my Christmases are twisted. Most of my days are twisted, if I'm being honest. Birthdays, holidays, Mother's Day, it's for sure. It was that one. Take care of yourself and each other. I was trying to think of the guy that did that talk show Oh well We'll quit rambling Y'all have fun, email me At donspinballpodcasts at gmail.com Last minute gift purchases can happen this week Try to stay warm And for God's sake, stay off the ice It's not thick enough yet Later