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BDYETP 62: Deeproot Deep-Sixed?, Ritchie to JJP, Lyman leaves Stern, Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Cactus Canyon, Spinal Tap, Mando Review

Bro, Do you Even Talk Pinball·podcast_episode·2h 30m·analyzed·Sep 7, 2021
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Deep Root Pinball founder charged in $58M SEC fraud; industry reckoning on pre-orders.

Summary

This episode covers Deep Root Pinball's collapse due to SEC charges against founder Robert Mueller for a $58 million investment fraud scheme affecting nearly 300 investors, mostly retirees. The hosts also discuss fallout affecting pinball media, including threats against This Week in Pinball's Jeff, and warn the community against pre-ordering from unproven manufacturers. The episode touches on broader market dynamics and industry scams.

Key Claims

  • Robert Mueller and Deep Root Funds LLC defrauded nearly 300 investors of $58 million between September 2015 and February 2021

    high confidence · Direct quote from SEC filing reported in episode; sourced from ThinkAdvisor.com story

  • Mueller paid himself roughly $1.6 million from investor funds between 2016 and 2020

    high confidence · SEC filing details cited in episode

  • Of $58 million raised, Deep Root only spent less than $10 million to purchase life insurance policies as promised

    high confidence · SEC order quoted directly in episode

  • Mueller used investor funds for personal expenses including two weddings, a divorce, a daughter's private school tuition, a Hawaii condo, jewelry, and family vacations

    high confidence · SEC filing details cited in episode

  • Hosts recommend waiting 6 months after a game's release before purchasing to avoid early production issues

    high confidence · Kevin Manning stated as show recommendation

  • Deep Root's signature shipping crate was an existing product that they simply added their logo to

    medium confidence · Hosts discussing Deep Root's promotional videos; indicated they found this info from videos shown

  • This Week in Pinball editor Jeff has been receiving threatening messages related to Deep Root coverage

    high confidence · Direct quote from Jeff's statement published on TWIP; he states threats ramped up while researching Deep Root article

  • Jeff from This Week in Pinball is taking a Twitter/social media hiatus due to Deep Root-related stress and threats

    high confidence · TWIP published statement dated August 30th, referenced in episode

Notable Quotes

  • “You have 300 people who were scammed out of their money. The negative impact that it's had on pinball. Everything surrounding it. Now it's just sad.”

    Kevin Manning @ ~mid-episode during Deep Root discussion — Emphasizes the scale of harm and reputational damage to the pinball community

  • “Don't ever give money to anybody. This is our official show recommendation. Don't give money to a product that hasn't been produced yet, period. Especially from a company that is a startup that hasn't produced anything yet.”

    Kevin Manning @ ~during post-Deep Root recommendations — Clear public warning to pinball community; formal show position on pre-orders

  • “He was either lying, but you saw that he was paying people. He was in operation for years about producing a product. So something was going on. You knew it didn't make any sense.”

    Nick Lane @ ~mid-Deep Root analysis — Hosts' earlier suspicions about Mueller's finances and inconsistencies

  • “My policy for TWIP has always been to, as much as possible, to cover everyone and everything, but maybe that is not the right approach.”

    Jeff (This Week in Pinball) @ ~from published statement read during episode — Reflection on editorial approach following Deep Root controversy and threats

  • “You're basically a beta tester when you buy their first game, even if you have it. You're buying a lot of problems, too.”

    Kevin Manning @ ~during startup manufacturer discussion — Characterizes risk profile of early purchases from new manufacturers

  • “It's not like just us. You know by now. Yeah, you should know by now, right?”

    Nick Lane @ ~discussing repeated warning patterns about Deep Root — Acknowledges that multiple sources warned against Deep Root over years

  • “Best thing about that game is the art on it. You know, although I'm sure there will be somebody who's like, ooh, we have to resurrect this game and save it from the ashes.”

    Kevin Manning @ ~discussing Deep Root game qualities — Skeptical about fan efforts to preserve Deep Root machines

Entities

Robert MuellerpersonDeep Root PinballcompanyThis Week in Pinball (TWIP)organizationJeff (TWIP editor)personKevin ManningpersonNick LanepersonDennis Nordmanperson

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Deep Root Pinball founder Robert Mueller charged by SEC with $58 million investment fraud affecting nearly 300 mostly-retired investors; company collapsed without producing significant product inventory

    high · SEC filing dated August 2021; ThinkAdvisor story; detailed fraud specifics including $1.6M personal payments, $1.5M+ in lifestyle expenses, Hawaii property purchase, multiple weddings/divorces

  • ?

    community_signal: This Week in Pinball editor Jeff receiving threatening messages while researching article about Deep Root's fall; taking social media hiatus due to harassment

    high · Direct quote from Jeff's published statement: 'Over the last few weeks, I've been getting some anonymous cryptic messages that borderline on blackmail. This weekend, as I was researching the article...the threats ramped up'

  • ~

    sentiment_shift: Clear community pattern of repeated scams (Papa Duke/Raza, Zidware, Big Lebowski, Deep Root); hosts warning that new community members unfamiliar with history are vulnerable to repeat fraud

    high · Nick: 'there's like new people getting into the hobby that don't know the history of a lot of this stuff and haven't seen the previous scams'; episode discusses sequential scams from J-Pop, Skippy, Big Lebowski, Deep Root

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Deep Root's over-engineered shipping crate was re-branded existing product; added unnecessary weight/cost and storage problems without solving actual shipping damage issues

    medium · Kevin discussing promotional videos: 'he didn't invent that. It was an existing product that he found. And they just, like, stamped their deeper logo on the side. It's so dumb.'

  • ?

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.452

0:00
Coming up on this episode of Brody Even Talk Pinball, you know that thing that we've been talking about for the last four years? Well, it happened. All that and more, coming right up.
0:30
I need a job in New York. That's right. And now, the Hall & Oates of Pinball Podcasting, Nick Lane and Kevin Manning of Buffalo Pinball. Woo-boom-shakalaka. What's going on, everybody? Hey. Happy Labor Day to those of you in the United States. Happy Labor Day. The official end of summer, but it's still, I mean, it's not quite good weather in Buffalo yet, So I'm clinging to the t-shirts for a little longer. Yeah, for those joining us on Labor Day live, thank you. It's early enough. Hopefully you're going to go out and hopefully you got some good weather and you enjoy your day off. Do some grilling, hang out with family. I did all that yesterday. So today we're talking about pinball because the pinball world decided to, in the last month and a little more, do everything all together. But before we get to that, why don't we thank our partners? I'll do it this month how about that thank you to our partners pin stadium the premier sponsor of buffalo pinball check them out at pinstadium.com light up your machine make it look great with their app controlled LED lighting use coupon code buffalo to save 10% the mod couple pinball.com if you got a pinball machine and you want to give it your own personal flair check out the mod couple pinball.com for great mods for your pinball machines if you don't have a pinball machine and you want to buy one check out flipping out FlipnOutPinball.com You will not save 10% with coupon code Buffalo at Flippin Out, but they have a bunch of pinball machines, brand new hopefully in stock they had a Led Zeppelin in stock for Nick but new pinball machines are tough to come by but Zach will hook you up and check them out at FlippinOutPinball.com Pinside If you want to talk about pinball, you can go to Pinside.com the award winning place to learn more about pinball, talk to other pinball owners and you can review and rank your pinball machines in a totally objective manner over there at pin side. Jersey Jack pinball. If you want a great looking pinball machine with amazing rules and cool lighting, check out Jersey Jack pinball at jerseyjackpinball.com. Pinball raffle. If you want to try to win a pinball machine, you can do so at pinballraffle.org. They just gave away another one. So a brand new raffles open and check them out. It's a charity that supports their inclusive arcade in Frederick, Maryland. Our good friend Pinball Joe does great things over there. They're a certified autism center. Community Beer Works, we were just down there for our Mandalorian Launch Party Tournament. Pinball is back at CBW, so if you're in the Buffalo area and you want to play some pinball, check out Community Beer Works. You can also drink some great beer there.
Papa Duke (John Papaduke)
person
SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission)organization
Buffalo Pinballorganization
Stern Pinballcompany
Jersey Jack Pinballcompany
Pinsideorganization
Zidwarecompany
Pinbergevent

content_signal: This Week in Pinball reconsidering editorial philosophy of covering all manufacturers equally; acknowledges potential risks of platforming fraudulent actors

medium · Jeff's statement: 'My policy for TWIP has always been to, as much as possible, to cover everyone and everything, but maybe that is not the right approach'

  • $

    market_signal: Hosts predicting another startup scam/pre-order fraud will occur despite Deep Root warnings; pattern appears cyclical and inevitable given community dynamics

    medium · Kevin: 'Do you think how long until another company starts up like this that takes pre-order money for a machine that doesn't exist? I mean, it's already happening with the Celts guys, right?'

  • ?

    community_signal: Dennis Nordman departed Deep Root early, characterized by hosts as warning sign ('canary in the coal mine') that preceded company collapse

    medium · Nick: 'you know when Dennis Norman peaces out that stuff's about to go south. He's kind of like the canary in the coal mine, right?' Hosts indicate Nordman later went to American Pinball

  • $

    market_signal: Hosts discussing unsustainable market conditions with high demand/low supply driving prices up and enabling risky pre-orders; note that used machines now sell for more than new, reversing historical trend

    high · Kevin: 'the demand is so high and the supply is so low that people are just going nuts and throwing money at whatever comes out...Used games have been selling more for the new in-box games'

  • ?

    product_concern: Hosts recommend 6-month post-release waiting period before purchasing new games to avoid early production/code issues; even established manufacturers have quality control variance

    high · Kevin: 'My official recommendation, buy a game after it's been out for, like, six months...Even with established manufacturers, there's usually issues with the first few games produced'

    • 3:11
    Tilt Cycle, got a game room. We have game rooms. If you've got a house, if you've got a wall, if you've got a plug you want to plug some stuff into and make it look cool, check out TiltCycle.com. Dan Burfield takes old pinball parts and recycles them, upcycles them into his amazing modern art. TiltCycle.com. Comet Pinball. You can light up your pinball machines and do it in a way that preserves that original look and feel with modern LED lighting. CometPinball.com. I did some Comet Pinball LED-ing this month that we'll talk about during our game room updates. Pinball Mix. You can take your pinball machine and put whatever music on it that you like. PinballMix.com will take your music, put it in the machine, and if you use coupon code BUFFALO, it'll save 10% and get a free Easter egg. And our friends at Titan Pinball, they just had to renew their coupon code BUFFALO because it had been two years. Apparently every two years you have to renew the code on their site. So happy anniversary to Titan Pinball. Thanks for being a longtime sponsor of the show. Again, if you're buying silicone rings for your pinball machine to replace those gross rubbers that leave the stains on your flippers,
    4:19
    get them at Titan Pinball. You can buy a code Buffalo to save 10%. How did I do, Nick? I think you did good. All right. Yeah. Good job. All right. With that, I think you know what time it is.
    4:30
    Here's the tip. It's the latest pinball news. Show hunt. It's on fire. All right. It's time for the latest pinball news, and we have a lot of news for you this month.
    4:41
    Kicking it off with the big one. This is the one everybody's been waiting for. not that one not our website, this one DeepRootPinball we're heading over to ThinkAdvisor.com for a story that reads the SEC charges San Antonio Advisor in a $58 million investment scam and who is that but none other than our very own friend Robert Mueller at DeepRootPinball so what you need to know scamming is easy nearly 300 investors invested $58 million in the funds. Investors were told that the funds would invest in life insurance policies and deeper related businesses. The advisor used some of the money for personal expenses, including two weddings and a divorce. Divorce ain't cheap. It's not. Two. Hard to believe that this man got divorced twice already and is on his third marriage. It's soon to be a third divorce, I guess. Weird.
    5:35
    So the lead of the story says, the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday charged San Antonio-based investment advisors Robert J. Mueller and Deep Root Funds LLC, along with Policy Services, Inc., with defrauding nearly 300 investors of $58 million. According to the SEC order, Mueller and Deep Root persuaded investors, many of whom were retirees, to cash out their annuities and individual retirement accounts that they held with other investment companies and invest in two pooled investment funds that they advised. Mueller and Deep Root told investors the funds, Deep Root 575 Fund LLC and Deep Root Growth Runs Deep Fund LLC, those are really dumb names, by the way, would invest the life insurance policies and Deep Root-related businesses to provide relatively safe returns to investors.
    6:21
    Currently, September 15th through February 2021, Mueller and Deep Root defrauded two investment funds. They advised nearly 300 people who invested roughly $58 million in the funds. uh mueller paid himself roughly 1.6 million dollars from 2016 through 2020 using investors funds must be nice mueller also used more than 1.5 million of the fund's assets to pay hundreds of personal expenses including his daughter's private school tuition vacations with his family his second wedding his second divorce his third wedding jewelry for both his second and third wives, including engagement rings and wedding bands for both wives, other lifestyle spending for and by his family, and to buy a condominium in Hawaii. Stultz Jordan viewer says, three divorces if you count how divorced he was from reality. That's good. That's really good. When asked by the SEC counsel during investigative testimony about his use of the fund's assets to pay for these personal and family expenses, Mueller asserted his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination. Mueller is a member of the State Bar of Texas.
    7:29
    While defendants raised more than $58 million from investors in the 575 Fund and the DGRD Fund, they commingled the money in Deep Root and Policy Services bank accounts and spent less than $10 million to purchase life insurance policies for the fund. So people invested $58 million, and they only took $10 million of that and actually invested it in the things that they were going to. Okay.
    7:51
    The defendants, the order continues, also purportedly include life insurance policies as assets of the funds that Mueller and Policy Services had purchased for Mueller's earlier investment funds. Notably, defendants purchased no new insurance policies for the funds after September 2017, despite raising approximately $43 million for the funds after that time. Wow. What a scumbag. Yeah. The order states that the defendants used the vast majority of the fund's assets, virtually all of which came from investors in the 575 fund and the DGRD fund, like a piggy bank to fund Mueller's deep-root-affiliated businesses. You know how disgusting this is? These are people's retirement accounts, 300 people who he stole from their retirement. I mean, think about how important a retirement account is, right? To fund his stupid pinball business. Yeah, and whatever other funds. Whatever other garbage and nonsense that this loser was doing. Indeed, Mueller, the order states, quote, funneled more than $30 million of the fund's assets to the relief defendants in non-arm's length transactions. Whenever he determined the relief defendant businesses had expenses that needed to be paid, and he did so without any analysis as to whether such transfers constituted suitable investments for the fund. So that story comes to us from Melanie Waddell from thinkadvisor.com. so wow I mean that's a lot to take in this came in I don't know a couple weekends ago what was the date of the story August 20th so two weekends ago basically I woke up and somebody had found this and posted it on pin side and then people started digging into the SEC filing and then you know this story came up to kind of nicely summarize things and there's been subsequent coverage of it but it was like on one hand it was like not a surprise at all. On the other hand, it was a huge surprise, like, what depth this guy went to, like, scam people and defraud people. I don't know. It's like, as we've said all along, he's come out, he came out firing, like, things are easy, we can handle everything. I went back and I looked through some of his greatest hits in his interviews. It's just as ridiculous now as it was then. And, you know, we've been saying, buy machines that exist, wait until this company actually produces something before you buy it. I don't know. And we told you so, I guess, a little bit. Yeah, I think we've been saying this stinks since, I think, going as far back as 2017 because I'm trying to remember the first time we would have talked about this. And if somebody wants to dig it up, God bless you, on our YouTube videos, I'd love to know.
    10:31
    I mean, we were hammering hard on this by 2019. but I think I remember talking on the podcast about how Deep Root was a sponsor of Pinberg, and I'm like, what idiot sponsors like Pinberg? When you're not even close to releasing a game, but you don't even have anything. Like, what a waste of money. Like, it just seems so stupid. I remember Robert saying that pinball's easy and slamming like Stern, and I don't know if he slammed JGP, but, like, you know, he's got it all figured out. So, you know, it stunk, then it really stinks now, And part of me was like, well, we did tell you so, and we try to help people. And hopefully nobody who's a regular viewer listener was ever in on this stupid product. Not regular listeners, viewers. I don't know. It's up to you at this point. I'm just joking. I hate to see anybody who got fraught up by this monster. But, yeah, I'm glad we were in line with reality. We saw it a mile away in terms of what a joke this guy is. It's just sad, man. It's just such a bad mark on pinball, right? There's so much negative stuff that's involved in this. And I can't wait until we're kind of done with Deep Brew. I think that, you know, for the next few podcasts, there's probably going to be more information. We'll talk about it. But a year from now, hopefully we'll just wipe ourselves with a stink that is Deep Brew. Even just the amount of time that we have to talk about this. It's just so bad. You have 300 people who were scammed out of their money.
    12:03
    The negative impact that it's had on pinball. Everything surrounding it. Now it's just sad. We had our fun talking about the haikus. We kind of just hammered on it, warning people. We saw how bad this was to an extent. It's even worse in some ways. You knew that when he's saying he was spending almost a million dollars a month. Nothing added up. Nothing made sense that this guy said.
    12:25
    So he was either lying, but you saw that he was paying people. He was in operation for years about producing a product. So something was going on. You knew it didn't make any sense. You knew how could he have this much money, and, well, there you go. And you know when Dennis Norman peaces out that stuff's about to go south. He's kind of like the canary in the coal mine, right? Like, Dennis Norman's like, eh, don't like what I'm seeing here. We'll see you guys. So many people. Somewhere else. Over at American Pinball. He's going to be over there. Did you ever watch his videos from, like, December where he had those, the pinball media people? Yeah. Not us. We wouldn't invite him because he knows better. Rudy Sioux was invited, though.
    13:03
    But that was back when they were going to do a thing at. Could you imagine going down there and saying you can't talk about it and just being a puppet for his, like, kind of, like, endorsing him by having these people. Like, look at all these people down here. Yeah. It's an implied endorsement for sure. It is an implied endorsement. That's why you don't get ripped up. I know, like, the temptation to be like, oh, I want to be part of this. Like, you don't. Like, have you watched those videos? I watched the, like, 15-minute video about the box. Holy shit, dude. I watched it, like, in the last two weeks. And did you watch it recently or at the time? I watched it at the time, and then I went back. I watched a little bit of it recently. Oh, my God. Dude, his box is so – this is just so stupid. This is like – there's a documentary somewhere. And he even had a documentary crew, just like a true narcissist and sociopath. He was documenting this stuff. I was watching the DeLorean documentary. Oh, yeah, yeah. He had a documentary crew following him around. Oh, yeah. I'm sorry they had all this footage. These guys are so, like, and you got the Elizabeth Holmes trial going on now, which we likened Robert to Elizabeth Holmes for years now. It's all coming to fruition. Yeah, but, like, for those who don't know, go watch the Deep Root Box video where he's talking about, like, he, I don't even know where to begin, Kevin. I'm getting, like, tongue-tied. There's so much to get through. First of all, shipping pinballs is not really a problem that anybody needs to solve. Like, it's fine. I've taken delivery of games, and not a single game has been damaged by the delivery process. It happens, yeah. It happens. It's usually a fork with ramming into it, but you're taken care of. You're not on the hook for that. Yeah, the shipping company is responsible for that. The manufacturer has to jump through some hoops that they just ship you a new one. Yeah, he over-engineered. I mean, there's insurance on it, right? It's usually the shipping company pays for it ultimately. He over-engineered this crate, this wooden crate, which God knows how much money it added to the cost of not only the production of the crate, but the heft in shipping, like the weight increases. And then what do you do? You get this weight that can, like, not really fit through a doorway, and you're stuck with this crate? Oh, where am I going to store it? Like, it's just a problem. It's so stupid. Like, this idiot. You just, like, can just see that this idiot doesn't know what he's talking about. And then you watch the pinball media just kind of, like, witnessing it unfold. Then you take some, do you see the other video? Before we move on from the box, the thing about the box is, like, he didn't invent that. It was an existing product that he found. And they just, like, stamped their deeper logo on the side. It's so dumb. This thing already existed. This looks like a mockumentary. You're just in disbelief that this is reality. And then did you see the other video where he's showing something off like a No Good Gophers? Yeah. I couldn't even make my way through the video. I still didn't even know what I was watching. He's talking about the total pinball ownership experience and all this crap. Yeah. You're like, oh, God. He flew all these people down for a non-working game. He's showing them a box, and he's showing them a No Good Gophers, and he's like, oh, we're going to reveal this. they really want us to reveal this at the pinball expo or something. Just blown... I had to turn it off. It was just so painfully stupid. Yeah, it's really bad. He never had anything, too. That's the crazy thing. It's not like he had... There's not like the tragedy in here. It's like he had a really good product or something that won't see the light of day or like, oh, it's really too bad because at least he made something that was really good. He had a really good game. No, this is just all crap. All along. All garbage. Best thing about that game is the art on it. You know, although I'm sure there will be somebody who's like, ooh, we have to resurrect this game and save it from the ashes. Like you didn't learn the first time around from J-Pop trying to make Raza, and then he stole all your money, and then he goes over to Deep Root, and they steal all your money, and then just let it go, people. Let it go. So do you think how long until another company starts up like this that takes pre-order money for a machine that doesn't exist? I mean, it's already happening with the Celts guys, right? Yeah. I mean, like, you think that this is the death blow of it, right? You would think and hope, but there just seems to be no end to the nonsense. Like, stop doing it this way. Stop doing this. Don't ever give money to anybody. This is our official show recommendation. Don't give money to a product that hasn't been produced yet, period. Especially from a company that is a startup that hasn't produced anything yet. Yeah, and, like, even when they do produce games, these startups, Those games are plagued usually with a lot of problems because it's not easy to make pinball. And you're basically a beta tester when you buy their first game, even if you have it. You're buying a lot of problems, too. Even with established manufacturers, you don't know what the code's going to be like from a game from the start. They've gotten a lot better. Like, CERN definitely has gotten a lot better at updating code, but it might not be fun to you, you know? I've said it before and I'll say it again. My official recommendation, buy a game after it's been out for, like, six months. And then, you know, even like you said, even with established manufacturers, there's usually issues with the first few games produced or the first couple months. And then there's still tweaking going on. There's code work being done. Make sure you buy a game that you know is you've minimized the chance of significant issues, right? Or you can at least anticipate the issues and know going into your purchase what you have to deal with. Yeah. And I think part of the problem is just the pinball market right now. The demand is so high and the supply is so low that people are just going nuts and throwing money at whatever comes out. It's like they don't care. I just want something new. It's available. I'm going to buy it, whatever. And then because the market's so crazy, I don't care if I can turn around and sell it. Used games have been selling more for the new in-box games, which never used to happen, right? You used to open the box and take a $500 hit because it was used now. And now it's like the opposite. It's like, oh, you have a game immediately, I'll pay you more for it, rather than having to wait for it from the manufacturer. Yeah, well, this is not good. I mean, this is not good because it's not like the economy is booming in a way that makes sense. I mean, the world's got hit with a pandemic. There's supply shortages. Like, this is not good when prices are going up. So things are out of whack with reality. I don't know when or where the dust settles, but I don't think it's good. Yeah, yeah. I don't think it's good. I think a reckoning is coming, but we'll play them wrong. All right. I think that's enough for Deep Root right now, but I'm sorry to everybody who lost the money. Some folks were able to get, like, chargebacks on their credit cards. How bad do you feel for people at this point who were in on Deep Root after, like, you know, like a decade long of just seeing, like, these scams and J-Pop being involved in the mix? Yeah. I feel more compassion. Like, it's like I'm not a monster, but, like, there's, like, a range of sympathy for people who maybe got scammed by, like, J-Pop originally. He was, like, the original scam. Yeah, yeah. It went like J-Pop, then it went Skippy, then it went like Big Lebowski was kind of around that time. And, you know, I feel really bad for the Big Lebowski people. I was close to it. At least they're still sort of. I don't know. Anyways. And then you have Deep Root. But, like, Deep Root is like we've been – people have been – it's not like just us. You know by now. Yeah, you should know by now, right? Like, yeah, I'm not a monster. it's not like I don't feel bad at all but at the same time it's like man you just stuck your finger in the plug what more mourning do you need? I think part of the problem is too easily you've always got new people getting into the hobby that don't know the history of a lot of this stuff and haven't seen the previous scams and they just say oh those are the people yeah I get it buy games that exist don't buy from J-Pop There you go. Yeah. Well, you know, we're going to be talking about it. I'm sure it's five years from now there will be a new scam or somebody, unfortunately. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. All right. Well, that leads us into our next story, which means this week in pinball is taking a hiatus. And it's related to the Deep Root stuff. So this came out August 30th. The Deep Root stink, man. You can smell the stink all the way in Buffalo. Like, it's how bad this is. And Jeff and This Week in Pinball have been working together. Like, Jeff had an ongoing thing where, you know, they were promising to give away one pin from each of the Deep Root designers. Oh, really? To people who supported him on Patreon and stuff. Oh, wow. It's still on his site. Like, if you go into the history, you can find that stuff. And he's done a lot of coverage of him and stuff.
    21:22
    Let's get to the nut graph here. over the past several months I've tried to spend less time on this website due to real life stuff during that time I've been brainstorming how to spend less time on the website and increase revenue to make this week a more sustainable long term our income has come from the folks in the pinball community thank you and most of that income has been pumped back into the websites and brands that's the Twippy Awards show and the Twippy Awards show to improve our products and content last year we broke even for the year a couple formatting changes blah blah blah put that on hold In the recent weeks, as I'm sure you've seen, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Robert Mueller and entities under the Deep Root umbrella, including Deep Root Pinball, in a $58 million investment scam, which we just talked about. I've been working on a massive article about Deep Root, similar to the one I did about the fall of Highway Pinball.
    22:12
    Deep Root's been controversial. From the moment they came into the pinball scene, they were the definition of talking the talk before they walked the walk. They made huge claims. They did not take any pre-order money. Well, at first, and then they did. They made huge claims.
    22:28
    Let's see. They promised to make Zidware customers whole. They also sponsored and advertised through many entities in Pinball, including terms like Pinberg. Pinball shows like TPF, IFPA, several content creators, including Twip and many others. I ended their sponsoring and advertising when they started taking pre-order money from customers.
    22:48
    Oh, thanks, Donnie. monetizing stuff has always been a struggle and the opposite of being sponsored by manufacturers or other pinball companies in this small community has always been a concern I cover my thoughts on it more in this article from 2019 alright so here's what let's see okay so I keep notes on information I've heard about from all pinball manufacturers my notes are separated in a few different sections but the big two are public stuff for example rumors from podcasts on upcoming titles and private stuff, stuff I was told off the record or in confidence. The private stuff is not shared until either one, it becomes public from someone else, or two, that person told me the information in confidence and gives me the go-ahead to share it. In working through the timeline of the article about the fall of Deep Root, I was going through the undated notes, I think from the end of 2020, from a weird phone call I had with Robert. It was sometime after the failed launch in September 2020.
    23:41
    I had only talked to Robert on the phone a few times, so I was hoping for a big positive update. My notes from the call were mostly about the fact that they were going to start taking preorder money. One of the notes that said he mentioned FCC official investigation. He shared some of the worst-case scenario stuff but was confident that the pinball venture would succeed. I had made some additional notes that Robert explained that the FCC would likely find Deaver and there was a small likelihood of a temporary shutdown. It is clear that the FCC meant SEC and that I had not heard him correctly. He also shared some updates of the development of the machines. My biggest takeaway from the conversation was that they were starting to take pre-order money non-refundable. After the phone call, I called a friend, and that person added a second person to the call. I don't remember what all we talked about, but I told them about the call, and that SWIP was cutting all ties and deeper because of the pre-order money. Over the last few weeks, I've been getting some anonymous cryptic messages that borderline on blackmail. This weekend, as I was researching the article and contacting people about it, the threats ramped up. people threatening to destroy TWIP and that they had, quote, information. The only thing I can think of is that it is linked to the phone call. Maybe I should have handled things differently and dug deeper, investigated, tried to investigate, and tried to get some facts on it and try to report on it. Maybe I shouldn't have done any interviews with them or reported when they did other interviews. I'm definitely not perfect and have made a lot of mistakes with TWIP and learned from them. This whole Deep Root scam has just made me sick. My policy for TWIP has always been to, as much as possible, to cover everyone and everything, but maybe that is not the right approach. So he's taking a break from Twitter, and he's getting threats.
    25:20
    But he was involved with Deep Root. And, you know, like you said, you get involved with these people, and stuff happens, right?
    25:28
    Yeah, I mean, not to the level that he should be getting threats or anything like that. I appreciate Jeff and what he did with This Week in Pinball and putting out news. I mean, we took a lot of our news when we were talking about it, and we always give credit that this is what This Week in Pinball is reporting.
    25:43
    I can relate when you get the fun sucked out of a hobby that you enjoy because of bullshit or people. Like, I don't know what's going on. I don't know the details behind this, but getting threatening messages is just uncalled for.
    25:58
    Yeah, I mean, Jeff definitely in This Week in Pinball definitely cozied up to Deep Root, but also gave us a lot of quotes from Robert and allowed us to talk about it. So I didn't see anything wrong that he did. He gave him a platform, but it was still blatantly obvious. I don't think he ever ran interference for him in any kind of meaningful way. So it's too bad, but, you know, he's got that stink on him, right? Like this is the fallout from something like this, and it's unfortunate, and I feel for him, and I appreciate all the work that he's done over the years. So, yeah, take a break, man. Don't let something as stupid as pinball affect your life, right? Like, this should be fun. Appreciate what you did. You appreciate all the time. You broke even. I know you don't make a lot of money or any money really in this as content creators. So, you know, just because I maybe or we're saying, maybe you shouldn't have cozied up with it that much, it's okay. Like, you don't deserve this at all. That's terrible. I feel bad for him. Yeah, well, it reminds me of running the summer open and getting shit from people and us just saying, all right, that's enough. We're done. This is not fun anymore. We're going to take a step back and maybe not do this anymore and focus on other areas of the hobby that are more fun. The thing that's going on deeper is not this week in pinball's fault at all. Oh, no. At all. So stop focusing your anger or whatever the hell is going on with him. It's got to be people who had a horse in the race or put money down who's going after him. Yeah. I wonder, like, I was trying to figure out, I'm like, why would you even go after Jeff? Like, he's reporting on the news, and that's his purpose.
    27:40
    I don't know. Well, we don't have all the details, but, yeah. People are just looking for an excuse and somebody to blame for them getting scammed. And even though, you know, even in the deeper threads, people were saying all along, like, proceed with caution. You know, J-Pop's got a history. This guy, something isn't adding up right. We've been saying it all along. But other podcasts like this podcast and stuff have been saying it all along. Yeah, this podcast was in it as long as we were saying it's bullshit. I know not everybody listens to us or them, but it's on Pinside, right? It's like if you spend some time doing it, you'll see that there's enough warning signs. And plus, you're also going in on a fucking product that's not been made. Yeah. Like from a new company. It's not like they have a track record and, you know, like, it's not like Stern saying we're going to make a game and we're taking pre-orders on it. It's like, yeah, there's probably almost 100% chance you're going to get that game, right? It's very high. Not in this case. So, yeah, leave the poor man alone. Yep. Yeah, don't harass each other. If you're threatening people, get some help. Get some therapy. Seriously. All right. Next story on the lineup is Steve Ritchie peaced out of Stern and moved over to JJP. This comes to us from Pinball News. So is Pinball News our new source? It's going to be everybody's new podcast source. Pinball News, okay. Yeah, I mean, he's been doing it a long time, way longer, from like the early 2000s, Pinball News has been doing it. He doesn't do like a weekly summary, but he definitely hits the big stories. So props to Pinball News for keeping it going.
    29:15
    So not only did this news break, there's also some additional news here that broke in the story. But this was on August 2nd. Steve Ritchie had his first day at Jersey Jack Pinball, greeted by JJP founder Jack Guarneri and the head of game design, Steve's former fellow designer at Williams & Stern, Pat Lawler. There they are, Steve with his VR goggles on.
    29:42
    And Pat and Jack. So, yeah, Steve started way back at Atari in the late 70s. He's been doing stuff all the way through. you know some of his greatest hits are like t2 getaway uh star trek next gen all those games then he went back to stern and the early 2000s working on stuff like elvis and world poker tour in 24 spider-man which is i was trying to think like what my favorite steve richie game is it's probably spider-man i don't know what do you what's your favorite steve richie game uh love zeppelin oh premium premium edition nice um what's your favorite one uh spider-man spider-man You never owned one, but you had... I had that loaner for a couple years. Oh, you had a loaner. From Adam. I don't remember that. I've owned a few Steve Ritchie games. Like, I've had No Fear for a while. I'm worried about my memory. I remember the No Fear. Yeah. All right. I need to get my... We're getting old. Yeah. Oh, so amongst all this, there's this. Spider-Man and ACDC, both of which spawned several remakes, multiple different editions, and it is understood to be the company's biggest sellers. These latter two titles were collaborations with Lyman Sheets, who crafted the GameStopper and Rules. Oh, by the way, Lyman also left Stern Pinball in his case at the end of last year. Their two biggest names are now gone. Yeah. Two oldest and biggest names, I'd say. You know, I mean, Stern's bringing in a lot of, like, newer, younger talent, which is good. They've kind of insulated themselves. I mean, they probably figured, look, these guys aren't going to be here forever, so thankfully they've got Raymond, and they got Keith, and they got Tim. So that's great. And these are all tournament players. So I think I'm happy with that. Yeah. But Lyman, like there was no doubt that Lyman was their best coder. Yeah, 100%. In Lyman we trust. You know, that's why they put him on like the big money, big cash money games because they knew people would be like, well, Lyman's doing the rules. I'll throw the code down it. Yeah, I mean, I haven't. My last Lyman, I was like always kind of like I'm always going to buy a Lyman game. but then he got put on kind of these jacked-up priced games, and Batman 66 did nothing for me. I am tempted to get Alvara House of Horrors if I can grow a money tree in my backyard. Yeah, they're pretty backed up on those from what I understand. But Eric Russell on Syracuse was saying that game's really good. Yeah. I asked him, I was like, what games are you going to be playing? He's like, I guess he had it on loan. And when he's telling me it's really good, I was like, oh. Yeah. Okay, because we played that game when it first came out and it had nothing in it. Yeah, you got to the end of it and broke it. Yeah, it's easy to dismiss it, but I guess now it's something special. Yeah, you can see, like, it's a fun layout, fun to shoot, and it's got interesting toys and cool stuff. Yeah, yeah. It's got Lyman rules behind it. Yeah, and it's like I don't have a medieval madness, and it's kind of like that layout, so it's nice to have that layout in the game, you know? Right, right, exactly. So I listened to the Jersey Jackpinball podcast in an interview with Steve after he joined, And he sounded pretty excited to – he said the handcuffs are off now. So I wonder if, you know, there's obvious speculation that, you know, at Stern there's a lower bill of materials, obviously. Well, speculation. I mean, it's just a reality. Like their games, you know, Jersey Jack games are several thousand dollars more than usually Stern's are, you know, when you kind of get their pricing levels even. Right. Yeah. So I'm curious to see what he comes up with at JJP. Nick and I were talking. I was like, I wonder if they'll make JJP make their flippers, like, super powerful because that's how he likes to design his games. Well, that's what I'm hoping for. Yeah.
    33:22
    My favorite flipper system are sterns, the way they feel. I think that they're snappy, they're powerful, they feel good. So, yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, I can't imagine Steve Ritchie designing a game with the way the current flippers feel on JGP games. It's not like they're bad or unusable or anything. And you were saying that Pat Lawler kind of likes how they are. Yeah. But Steve is known for fast and flow, and, yeah, they're going to have to change that. I've got to imagine that's a condition that he's set. So hopefully that leads to that. I think if they get their flipper the way they feel on par with Stern, then there you go. They've got that world under glass feeling. They've got everything in the kitchen sink. It's just let's get the flippers up to that kind of strength and feel, and you're almost unstoppable at that point. Richie likes that rock and roll, like non-stop action feel in his games. He needs those super powerful flippers to nail those ramps to get that feel, I feel like. I really wish you can get kind of like a full disclosure from Steve Richie, like what did he want to do and couldn't do kind of thing, like what was holding him back specifically.
    34:27
    Because he always struck me as a person that was like, let's get this one shot perfect, and let's move on to shot number two and get that perfect. Like, he even talks about in interviews that I forget what documentary it's from, that he talks about even, like, the way, like, when you hit into a scoop, the clang it makes. Like, that's how he thinks. And that's when you're designing machines for four years. Like, he gets it. The way a game hits a ramp and turns around, like, he really thinks about this kind of stuff. And you can see it in his games. So yeah, I wonder what happens When he has a larger bill of materials And stuff I look back to something like Star Trek Next Generation Where you have the cannons Firing off of the slingshots That's probably his most loaded game And most crazy outside of the box toys And stuff like that Yeah, it's weird, I mean, No Fear is kind of An open kind of play field I mean, it's got the skull and moves But other than that, there's not a huge bill of materials On the game The jump ramp is different than what he normally does, but mostly it's like your standard fan layout with that jump ramp on top.
    35:32
    Yeah. Well, this is cool. I mean, like, look, we saw what he's done at Stern. Now we're going to, like, if you ever kind of had that fantasy, like what would C-Bertie do with a lot of money in that J.J.P.? Well, now we're going to get to know. But when do we get to see it, though? That's the thing. 2025? Yeah, they're still backed up. Because we got Lawler's next game and we got Eric making a game. When the hell are we? I mean, Steve's got to have a design ready to go. Yeah. You'd have to imagine. But still, it's like, how does it work on a J.J.P. game? Yeah, he said, I think this was on the J.J.P. podcast, that he had done two Whitewoods that he left at Stern. So it'd be weird to me that they would produce a game now that he's gone that he had designed. They paid him for it. They might. I mean, they might own that Whitewood, right, or that design. No, they would. But I just think, like, hey, it's our new Steve Ritchie design. It could end up being like Deadpool. Like, everybody speculated that that was Trudeau that designed Deadpool, and then Gomez took it over. And they're like, it's a Gomez game. So, there may be a similar situation here. Okay. Well, Gomez would make sense to go for Steve Ritchie because Gomez, I think, I think Ritchie, like, mentored Gomez, right? Or there's a lot of, like, Gomez influence, right? Yeah. So, and I love what Gomez does. Like, I think Deadpool's really cool. Yeah. So, all right. Looking forward to seeing what Steve Ritchie is going to do at Jersey Jack Pinball. What else we got on here? Do you know anything? Like, are they still pushing to do multiple titles a year with JJP? Or are they just – I mean, that's what Jack said a couple – like, last year, I think, that he did an interview.
    37:05
    But then GNR came out, and it was such a ridiculously huge hit that they're so backed up. And I think with a couple things, like they moved their operations, so they had to rehire their whole staff, and there's a pandemic, and everybody's struggling to hire folks, and there's part shortages. I think all of that is just kind of snowballing. Yeah, so, yeah, it's like when are we going to see this game from them? It's going to be years. It's going to be a while. Which is weird. Yeah. Unless, you know, maybe at their new facility, they're going to eventually be able to ramp up a second production line. Well also I mean like you know Steve kind of like retirement age right I put that in quotes Yeah So maybe he likes that he can just take his time off a game and not have to crank out a game and really dial it in and that it Like, that's all they're looking for in him. He's always had a longer time frame at Stern, though, too, right? He didn't always do a game a year?
    37:56
    Was it Star Wars before Zep? No, it was Black Knight. So, yeah, he's been kind of in queue. Yeah, I remember hearing that he had a longer design cycle than the other designers, though. Maybe a little bit, yeah. I mean, he definitely got the best themes. Again, putting quotes, the best themes. I mean, Star Wars, best theme. He said he wanted to do Led Zeppelin since he was at Atari, and he got Led Zeppelin. I'm sure they got Led Zeppelin for him. Right. He probably got crack. Well, he should. I mean, he's the senior designer there, right? He's the king. He is the king. So I'm a fan of Steve Ritchie. It's just I only – I mean, I've got two of his games now, but I didn't have a game for the longest time, and I've bought games before. They just never – I think the layout and the rules just never jived to the point where they were keepers for me. Or I just was trying to rotate games earlier on. Like, you know, I had an ACDC, and that was all wrong. Yeah, ACDC was fine. That game, like, that was one of those games where we played it in tournaments so much that I was like, I'm good. I don't need to own this game. I feel that way about Metallica, too. It's like, it's fun when I play it, but I don't even know. I know, yeah. So that's that. All right.
    39:09
    Here. Stern Pinball launches Insider Connected platform. So Stern announced the launch of Insider Connected, a comprehensive technology initiative to connect the universe of Stern Pinball machines. The platform is designed to enhance and extend players' engagement with the games across both home and commercial environments. It also presents professional operators of the pinball machines with a robust set of tools to drive location play, build player loyalty, analyze performance, make adjustments remotely, and maintain the machines.
    39:43
    This was not a good article to pull up here. There's no pictures of it. Let me see if I can find something here. So basically this is like score bit and pin quest. Don't look at this stuff on the screen. It has nothing to do with what we're talking about right now. I'm trying to find the – is this one? Yeah, here we go. This one will have it. Here we go.
    40:03
    There's Gomez talking about it. So you have – you will log in with your Stern Insider Connected account, and then basically it will generate a QR code that identifies you. So you don't have to have a smartphone. You just have to have a QR code. And then you take it, and there's a QR reader on the pinball machine that you hold your QR code over and it scans it and it's like, oh, hey, it's Kevin. Here's all your achievements on this game. Here's how many times you played it, whatever. And then, yeah, the big draw right now that I've seen has been the achievements. So it's going to remember you and the game is going to set certain objectives and things for you to do on it outside of the scope. So it's kind of cool because it brings a second level of stuff to do on a pinball machine if you have one of these accounts, which I'm cool with. I listened to some of the podcasts with George Gomez, and he talks about, you know, when he worked at Xbox and they were working on Xbox Live and achievements and stuff like that. So they're very much in that mindset of, you know, let's bring this to pinball. Let's get connected, even though it's been around forever for video games. But it's about time. I'm excited to see some of this stuff happening. Yeah. And you can compare scores with everybody else too, right? Right, right. And they're going to have, I think, on like location games, they'll know or you designate or something that's like a location game. So it makes those scores, I guess, you know, more valid than somebody at home who can, you know, everybody's – I see people making comments, oh, you can take the glass off. Yeah, you can. I mean, you take this – this is not like we're setting up remote tournaments, okay? This is just a cool, fun thing to do. So when I get a certain score on my Pirates and Kevin gets a score on his Pirates, it's like, okay, it's not the same exact thing, but you get a rough idea. That's all it is. Somebody could cheat and whatever, but you know that. And if it's also a location game, a location game can be set up a little bit differently, but it does carry a little bit more weight, especially when you're comparing yourselves to other locals, et cetera. So I think this is great. This is about time. I'm glad they're doing it. We don't know what the cost is yet. I think the first iteration is going to be more focused on the user rather than the operator. There's also operator functions in there, so I'm curious to see what that is. They said it's going to, I think George has said it's going to be affordable or inexpensive. I forgot the exact words that he used. That sort of means nothing when games are like, you know, a lot of money. Like, what is that relative to? I've always liked the idea of scorebit, but scorebit's very expensive in my book. $200, $300 or something in that range, right? That's the monthly fee for operators. Yeah. So I hope that they do this in a way where they're running it almost at cost because the benefits to them are so good of just getting people on the system. Like this system works when you have more users, right? Like if you make it so people look at it and say, I'm not going to spend that money on it, then it kind of falls apart, right, when nobody's really using this and it dies on the vine. create something that you're just kind of breaking even on, but get it out there. So almost everybody wants to throw it on their machine. And especially as an operator, like, yeah, I kind of like to throw this on the machine and the operator, I got to see what the operator benefits are. I think it's cool for the users, even though only pinball people are going to use it. Right. But we're getting killed on location pinball. Things are not back to pre-COVID levels at all. So we're, it's not good. It's not a good time, at least like from my perspective, being an operator. Yeah. To your point of only pinball people are going to do this, casual people can barely start a game of pinball. So I don't think it's going to do much to get new people into pinball, but the people like us who are really, really into it and want more to do, it's a nice thing for us. Yeah, I would love to get this.
    43:58
    Would you put this on your games? You don't have any Spike 2 games anymore. No, yeah. Would you have put this on Jurassic Park? It depends on the cost. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's like achievements are fun, but are they like $500 of fun? Probably not.
    44:13
    It's going to be built into games going forward for Stern, so you don't have a choice with anything that you buy new from them. It's going to be built in. So if it's part of the experience, like I have Scorebit on my JJP games and I don't use it that much. It's free on JJP, and I'm like, it's cool, but of course they don't have the achievements and stuff like that. What keeps you from using Scorebit on there? I just, like, when I walk up to the pinball, I just want to play. Is it because, like – I don't want to – like, I want to hit the start button and start playing. I don't want to, like, pull out my phone or scan a thing or, like, log in. Like, I just don't think of it. It's not compelling enough for me to take that extra step yet. Yeah, so let's – I forget what this is, what you call it. It's a barrier of entry. Yes, thank you. Right. It's – yeah, I guess barrier of entry. I mean, even though it might take, like, a few seconds, arguably, like, every time, like, there's this – as it stops, right? There's nothing compelling enough on the other side for you to take, even if it amounts to seconds, right, to do that. The games keep track of my high scores for me, right? Sure, sure, yeah, yeah. And if I get a really good score, then I can just, like, I don't have to think of it ahead of time. Like, if I'm playing and I get a really good score and I want to keep track of it, I throw it on Pindigo, and I can do that after the fact. I don't have to have logged in ahead of time. Yeah, RLM says, score, but cost me zero, and I still don't use it. I'm happy to give JGP the data and metrics to improve games. So that's interesting, right? Will people use this? Is it compelling enough? Yeah, there's got to be enough reason to pull out your phone or your QR code and do it. It is cool what they said with the locations. Like, you know, if a location wants to run an event or an ongoing monthly tournament or just play and win stuff, then I think it's a way for us to do it, right? I mean, we used to do the selfie league, but that's cumbersome. You've got people who've got to upload their pictures.
    46:03
    And then somebody's got to love the score, right? There's so many steps, and you know that there's an easier way to do this. Well, if this system can allow us to do that, then that's great. Like, I would do that all the time. Just make it easier for us. It does get us to think that they're dividing systems. So it would be nice if there was one universal system for all of pinball. Oh, that's Scorbid. Scorbid versus Cerns. I get why they want to do it. They want to have control over their own ecosystem and stuff like that. but it'd be nice to like just be able to log on and see compare scores against everybody on any game all in one app and not have to have two apps or an app and a QR code and stuff like that. So, um, yeah, I mean, we'll see, but this does tie into our next story, which is that prices are going up on certain games, even, even more than they did. well, so this happened for like the premium games that were coming out. Um, so like Elvira and Batman they said prices were going up but now it's trickling down to their other games so I brought up the Cointaker website because they have it spelled out here they say they're taking a deposit of $1,000 on the next scheduled run in December 2021 on a Jurassic Park premium the balance of $75.95 is due just before delivery so that's $85.95 for a premium CERN now where yeah so they No, that's $1,000, so it would be $7,695. That's still only a $7,6000 premium. That's not the increase. No, so you pay $1,000, and then the balance of $7,595 is due after that. So it's $1,000 plus $7,595. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. I'm sorry. Like I said, I'm a little slow today. So, for reference, when Jurassic Park Premium launched, it was $75.99. So, this is a $1,000 increase since the game launched. I'm so glad I got Led Zeppelin Premium. I had been kind of, somebody said that they might increase the price. I just didn't see it going up by $1,000, though. I thought maybe like $300-some dollars or something like that. Yeah, so, and on the pros, they're going up by $600.
    48:26
    So the pros are going to be $65.95 now from $5,999. Sorry, I'll say that again. There's numbers in math. $6,600 for a pro. How much did the pros increase by? $600. They were $6,000. Now they're $6,600. Oof.
    48:47
    Yeah. That's a lot. I'm going to be honest. This is getting too hard to operate games. Yeah. We've got – I mean, here's the reality of the situation. People aren't going out and playing games like they used to. We're still kind of crawled back, and now we've got the Delta variant hitting, and I don't know what that's going to send us into.
    49:06
    So as an operator, we're making less money, but the cost of games is going up. So at some point, it's like I can – at some point you've got to ask, is this worth it? Is it worth it? And I worry about my business partners being like, is this worth it? And it's only going in one direction. And I get it. I'm not faulty and stern. I'm sure that they don't want to just arbitrarily raise prices. It's worker shortage. It's everything we've seen. It's supply shortage. It's the microchips. It's everything. So it's just a really bad time. I mean, you're seeing the fallout from the pandemic. And I don't know, man. I don't know. Is pinball just going to be now the super rich person's hobby? We kind of like, Gail and I are now super rich. Spoiler. Somebody on my game room video is like, how do you afford these games? It's like, well, I'm in my 40s and I don't have any kids. And we've been doing this for 10 years. Collecting for 10 years. So it's like, I'm not taking European vacations every year. This is my main hobby, and I'm a huge enthusiast. I can make things happen. Right. But my income hasn't gone up. Not at that rate. Right. So I don't know. It's not great, man. I don't know. I'm kind of bummed out with the Deep Root stuff, the pricing going up. I'm seeing what's happening to location pinball. This ain't good. And you know, like, you see, like, oh, there's a lot of orders for pinball machines. This is just, everything's really weird and wonky right now. I know where the dust is going to settle. What really sucks is this is going up for everybody who has games on order already, too. So they're jacking up the prices if you have an order in. They're not grandfathering you into the previous price, which is kind of shitty, if you ask me. I'm not, yeah, I'm not dogging, blaming Stern or, you know, I understand when JGP did it. I understand that Stern's got to do it. It's just a really weird time. I just don't know what things are going to look like, you know, two, three, five years from now with this landscape and where we're going. Yeah, like new events, like who can blame them? Like, you know, use Rick and Morty's or someone for $11,000. Yeah, exactly. I don't blame, it is insane. And I don't blame Stern at all. I don't blame GTP at all. Who can blame them? They're backed up in orders. Your business, you'd be crazy not to. I just don't know what this does to pinball. But, again, if we have a huge market crash and then the prices of games go down, I don't see them ever lowering these prices. That's the thing. It's just maybe we'll stop this runaway increase in pricing.
    51:44
    All right. How much did Stearns cost in 2005? Like $3,500, I think. Yeah, like probably you probably got a Sopranos probably for $3,500. Probably. Lord of the Rings. I got, in 2010, I got my Iron Man for $4,200 delivered.
    51:59
    $4,200 delivered for Iron Man. So, I mean, Iron Man wasn't cheaper than Spider-Man. Spider-Man came out in 2008, so you're at least able to get, think about what's on a Spider-Man. Yeah. Spider-Man would be a premium these days. Yep. Okay? Or you could just call it an LE because, I mean, it doesn't have the backlash or powder coating. So now you're saying an $8,600 game, which is Jurassic Park. So if Spider-Man back in the day would have been probably even less than $4,200, you probably could get it for $3,800, probably like that. So that's more than a doubling in price in a little over 10 years. I mean, I guess someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I guess you look at inflation and things will double in price maybe every two decades. something like that. So we're definitely outpacing what's considered standard inflation. All right. Well, let's talk about something that's more affordable and better news. Let's go over to the new release of, excuse me, Sorcerer's Apprentice for the Multimortific P3. So this is a new game. If you checked out the channel on YouTube, we have the reveal stream of it.
    53:09
    And this came out a week or so ago. Well, two weeks ago we did the reveal stream a week ago today. And so this is a software reimagining of the Cosmic Kart Racing play field. So if you already own the Cosmic Kart Racing play field, you can grab this for $499, brand-new game, for your pinball machine, and you can download it immediately and not have to wait, which is also a nice thing. You don't have to wait for these production delays. So I'll tell you a little bit about the Sorcerer's Apprentice. So it uses cosmic kart racing and it's a magic wizard theme. It feels very much like a role-playing game in pinball form. So there's a bunch of different spells you can collect and you cast them to break the wards. I like how they reimagined this whole layout. The rings, which were your like ball locks on cosmic kart racing, are now the wards that you have to break with different spells. You travel to different lands. I think this game does a really good job of using the P3 play field to change the total environment. So you hit an orbit shot to travel to a different area. The entire play field changes into a different world. So you can go to the bazaar. You can go to the dunes. You can go to the workshop where you start off.
    54:33
    And then you collect your spells. You can collect keys to open the chest that will get you jewels that make the wizard battle even better. You can collect the shield.
    54:44
    Again, it's $499 available now from Multimorphic. Gaming design, we're Rory Cernuda. Software is Greg Goldie. Art by Eric Ridgway. Voice work by Ryan Tanner of the Flippin' a Mansion podcast. And Jerry Stollenberg was the project manager. So, yeah, there's the spell modes of fire and lightning. Nice spell.
    55:07
    I forget. I don't think they have the promo graphic in here. maybe it's towards the bottom but it listed all this stuff um yeah i don't see it um the number of uh modes and multiballs and things like that but there's a lot and it's really cool and it does a good job of uh of so i i play tested this for about a month before it came out and uh i remember my initial impression was like oh wow this feels like a totally different game even though the the playfield's the the same shots as cosmic car racing the way you shoot it and the The things you need to do on it are totally different. So it's really cool. Highly recommend it if you have a P3 on the Cosmic Heart Racing play field. This is kind of a no-brainer to me.
    55:50
    The Gamma Goat was funny. He's like, I think people are going to start calling it the Sorcerer's Apprentice play field, not the Cosmic Heart Racing play field. This is much more of a traditional game, even though they added the career mode to Cosmic Heart Racing. This is an experience for if you're a core pinball player, if you listen to this podcast, you're going to like this and what it has to offer. Is it a linear game?
    56:16
    There's certain things you need to do in order to, I guess that's true of any game, right? But you don't have to play the spell modes in the same order. You can travel to any world. Like I was watching Turbo play it. And so you start in the, what is it, the office or the workshop. and so the spell there is the fire spell. So the easiest one to get into is the fire spell, but he's like, I'm failing at the fire spell. I'm going to go somewhere else and work on, like, the iso-lightning spell first. So you don't have to do it all in the same way. And you also, you can, it's easy to get to the wizard, but you're not going to beat the wizard if you just get three spells and go to him. You're trying to fight the wizard? Yeah, the sorcerer. Why don't you call the wizards the princess? Well, I call it the wizard. It's actually the sorcerer. But why don't they call the wizards the princess? They should. and then people wouldn't think it's a Nick Cage game. There's a movie with Nicolas Cage called The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Oh, see? You guys done messed up. Maybe there's a good reason they didn't want to call it Wizard, but I don't know. But there's a wizard mode, a sorcerer mode.
    57:18
    It's also, for clarification, this is not their licensed theme that they've been teasing. This is an all-new. I'd like to see a Nick Cage movie. I know.
    57:28
    There's no Nicolas Cage. What, Con Air? Yeah. What's the one where you went and stole the Declaration of Independence?
    57:35
    National Treasure. That's it. People love when you eat on a podcast, by the way. I'm trying to chew on the mic. I hope you guys are enjoying that. That's a Snickers. Nick brought a Snickers for lunch.
    57:45
    So it's cool. Check it out. If you want to see it in action, you can watch. I played it this week or a week ago. It's on the YouTube channel. Go check it out. Always fun working with those guys and helping them show off their games. I'm a big fan of the P3. So there you go. Good news. A game came out. You can play it. It exists. And it's $500. So there you go.
    58:08
    Okay. The other pinball machine, new-ish pinball machine news that got announced today, wow, this month, is Cactus Canyon.
    58:22
    Cactus Canyon remake, which who saw that coming? Everybody saw that coming. It's been rumored from Chicago Gaming for a while now. But they confirmed it down at the Southern Prime Gaming Expo in Atlanta. They gave a rousing presentation in a conference room down at SFGE. So this is their fourth remake title following Medieval Madness, Attack from Mars, and Monster Bash.
    58:48
    Until the start of the week, the plan was to bring the new cactus canine to the show. But on Monday night, the decision was taken not to reveal it in Atlanta. after all due to outstanding approval from the licensure of Scientific Games, who owns Williams Gamings.
    59:03
    Ryan began his seminar talking about delays as a result of the pandemic coming from an eight-week closure of the factory, which was followed by ongoing shortages of many parts along with staffing issues. So same song and dance we're hearing from all the manufacturers, basically. Stuff's delayed. It's hard to find employees. It's hard to find parts.
    59:19
    But, again, these guys have a track record of building machines and putting them out. So you can proceed with a little more confidence when it comes to Chicago Gaming.
    59:29
    After talking about how each of the previous three remakes models introduced new features, such as HD animations, larger displays, interactive coppers, enhanced play field toys, and RGB lighting effects, Ryan described how Chicago Gaming take an original game and disassemble and reassemble it several times to understand how it was put together using that knowledge in conjunction with documentation. He said they have over 850 play fields for Cactus Canyon Remake already screen printed and clear coded, ready for production. In exchange from previous models, Cactus Canyon Remake and any future Remake titles will include a new operating system, which integrates what was previously a separate Remake-only diagnostic menu into the more familiar Bally Williams menu structure.
    60:11
    So you're going to get a new operating system. the new code for the game she said the rewriting of the operating system also allows Chicago Gaming to write new code for the games and edit extra features or modify existing code to fix bugs so that was always the big thing with Cactus Canyon was that it was a fun layout but the code wasn't finished it was like the last game that Bally Williams made and then they just they made a few of them they shut down production and there's the codes leaves a lot to be desired. So from what I've had some, some discussions with folks who may or know a thing or two about a thing or two, and it sounds like cactus Canyon is not going to get a full, like re imagining. It's going to be more of like cactus Canyon complete is what I was told. So it's going to stick to that original kind of Valley Williams feel, but be finished. So, which is good. I, But I think with Cactus Canyon continued, people maybe wanted more out of this title, code-wise, than just being finished in a 90s Bally Williams style. But I'm guessing they're also, because these are licensed from Williams, that they're probably limited in the kind of things they can do. I don't know.
    61:32
    What are your thoughts on Cactus Canyon? I mean, it's hard for me to go back and play a Bally Williams game other than, you know, I didn't even really have any nostalgia around it, right? When I got into the hobby, like, that was only, like, 12 years ago this game might have come out, right? Yeah. Now 12 years ago is, like, we're talking, like, almost like Iron Man. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, it's – even games that had good rules back then, like Medieval Madness, and Medieval Madness still kind of holds up in today's rules. It's kind of good, but, like, it's tough. It's like I could buy a game that came out today with everything that we know and advanced and rules and effects and the depth, or I can get a game that was made more than 20 years ago. And I don't get that excited about that. I'd rather see what's new. I think if I was looking to approach Pimol from this more so like a collector standpoint and I had a lot of money, then I might be interested in something like that. But there's only so much money to go around. There's only so much space. I'm more interested to see the next Jersey Jack, the next Stern kind of game. What's going to come out from them and play that? Yeah. I played that. Medieval Madness. Or no, Monster Bash. There's a restaurant nearby that I found. I was like, oh, they have a medieval Monster Bash remake. I played it, and it was fine. I almost got to the Wizard mode the first time I played it. I was like, all right, that verifies my thoughts on buying one of these. Yeah. Their price is the same as a modern Stern. They're like a premium Stern level. game. Monster Bash is a great game for super casual. Like, if my parents wanted a game in the house, I'd put Monster Bash on a list. My mom will have fun with Monster Bash. My dad, you know, all the cool, funny things it does. A player, somebody who's kind of competent and skilled at pinball, it's not a game for them. At all. Yeah.
    63:28
    It's a good game for learning pinball in that modes and rules. It's very straightforward in how it presents itself, you understand. Yeah. How to progress and that there are things to do in the game very well. It's an amazing game. Like in the presentation, the humor and everything, it's a pinnacle of some pinball achievement. But for a player, you could just destroy that game. Yeah. It's not going to hold up long term in your collection. The price for what's there is what it always comes down to for me. And like Nick said, I'd rather have a new game with modern rules. I was kind of interested in Cactus Canyon, thinking that they would do more with the code. but hearing that it's just going to be, you know, the original code finished and bug fixed and, you know, polished a little bit, maybe balanced, then maybe not so much. I'm happy to play it on location, but I'm not going to buy one. It's a good chance to get it. Yeah. And we'll just get there before he sells it a month later. That's right. And we'll go with it. Yeah. And there you go.
    64:28
    All right. So this next one is a, well, yeah, we can get, well, let's go over here first. Wow, this is a lot going on. Yeah, there's a lot of news. Oh, my gosh. Final Tap by the world-renowned home pin, Makers of Thunderbirds. They don't call themselves world-renowned. You threw that in there. Yeah. Okay, right. Well, they're renowned throughout the world, I would say. They are. It's not necessarily a good thing. Notorious. The notorious home pin.
    65:00
    So this came out. And so this is Final Tap, taking pinball to 11. Let me read you the bullet points and features on the flyer, okay? Oh, this is the renowned home print hype. Oh, my God. I'm sorry. I couldn't. They did say it. I got ahead of myself. I stole your thunder, Kevin. You did. I saw that. All right. So, all right. If you're listening online at home, check the boxes with me. So, bullet point one, stunning cabinet graphics and trim. Okay, we haven't seen that. We'll take your word for it. Original Spinal Tap soundtrack. Okay, we would assume that would be in there. replica models of famous TAP guitars.
    65:37
    Alright. Alright, there's any post-it book. Ooh, there's... Oh my god. Where can I order that? There you go. Those are going to be on your pinball machine. God, I guess you beat the modders to making that. I guess that's... No modder's going to make that because they don't want to lose money.
    65:54
    Exploding drummer? Question mark? Obviously. 27-inch LCD monitor and DMV. A world's first. It's a world's first, ladies and gentlemen. What? I don't understand that. A D&D and a monitor? Yeah. Why? Why would you do that? Yeah, yeah. You're just increasing your build of materials. We're a feature nobody wants. All right. So some of the speculation was that they're going to do all the scoring and stuff on the DMV, and they'll just play video on the LCD screen from an ASCII card. because it's cheaper and easier to implement than actually doing real code work on a... It's just a real head scratcher going on right now. And then, last but not least, renowned HomePin high quality build. That's what everybody says after they've played Thunderbirds. This is a high quality build of... Said nobody. This is the machine that has the plastic lockdown bar that has the buttons that hurt your fingers when you use them.
    66:55
    Yeah. Thunderbirds had plastic trees on it already, though. You didn't ask Baxter for those. You can put whatever you want on a marketing flyer. Did you guys know that? You can? There's no oversight. Oh, they also say industry best warranty and service support, which it's not because. Well, it's easy to support when you have, like, five customers. But their warranty is one year, and the multi-market warranty is two years. So it's not even that. They didn't even get that. Special mechanisms designed for exciting tap pinball action. Wow. That's some Deep Root level, like some cool toys level marketing materials. And yet this guy's actually made a pinball machine and sold it.
    67:34
    Who can you get their games from? It says worldwide availability. See website for agents list. Should we go there? Yeah, let's go there. Bear with us, guys. This is, you know, I'm going off the rails.
    67:47
    Slipping out selling it? I don't know. Zach's probably laughing right now. All right, let's see. Nitro Pinball, King Canada.
    67:57
    Highway Games in Australia. Pinball Star. Pinball Star, RS Pinball in Europe. Zach's not touching this pile of shit. BBC Pinball in China. Joe at Pinball Star. God bless you, man. Good luck. He carries everything. He does. He had Mafia.
    68:13
    I remember he tried to get us to come out and stream Mafia. I like Joe. He's a good guy. Yeah, and we were like, nah. He wanted us to do a twofer of Mafia and Thunderbirds.
    68:22
    He does carry everything. Yeah. He does. There's no no. There's the team. No no on Pinball Star. I don't know. Looking at this website, this is the website I would look at for a high-quality arcade product.
    68:38
    I can make that website. Yeah. In like half the afternoon. This is some 90s GeoCities action right here. It really is. There you go. So there you go. If you want to order a spinal tap. So they got a license that people like. Like, what I find interesting is that, like, Thunderbirds is the one pinball machine that pretty much everybody agrees is total garbage.
    69:01
    It's a game that Pinball Life just had one, and they were selling it for $2,500. So even in a market where everything is going up, used games are going up, new games are going up,
    69:13
    it's half the price of its launch. I wonder if we can just melt down some of the parts and use it for recycling or something there. Take them out. So even with that, people are like, I really love Spinal Tap. I might have to get this. It's like licenses.
    69:32
    People love it. Yeah, it's stupid. There's a lot of people with too much money and not enough sense in pinball. We've yelled this from the rooftops before, though. But for everybody who claims they want original themes in pinball, this is why companies make very few original themes, because you put a license on something. With multi-market, people are buying the license theme before they even know what the license is. Just because it has a license. Dumb-dumbs. It's like, put my money down. I don't care what it is. I want the license theme. God. No wonder all these scammers get into pinball. Yeah. Seriously. No wonder. This is like attention scammers and sociopaths. Think about making a pinball machine. There's money in it until you get caught. Get a late 70s, early 80s, maybe early 90s license. Dude. Mass appeal license. Elizabeth Holmes, she sure just got into pinball machines instead of this life-saving blood test that are telling people they have AIDS or don't have AIDS, and it doesn't even work. Yeah, exactly. By the way, listen to the Dropout podcast. They're doing new episodes, right? Yeah. So there's the Dropout podcast, and there's Bad Blood. Listen to them both. And then watch the HBO documentary. Love you, Elizabeth Holmes. You're amazing. my favorite sociopath I love you too Nick I don't think you understand my vision Kevin alright Steve Daniels says listen to the interview in the latest Pim All News podcast before you throw down any money the rules will not be any more complex or fun than Thunderbirds so international arrest you all over again spinal tap there's a little less letters fewer letters yeah Maybe you spell all the band members' names in one long string or something. How is this guy still making pinball machines? Like, how does he, like, who's buying it? How's he getting the money? This is a real head-scratcher. Who's he defrauding, by the way? I have to ask you to look into this guy. He's outside the country, so. Yeah, he's in Taiwan now. He ran out of China, though, I guess. He was trying to work in China, and that's not working out anymore, so he's over in Taiwan. God, that says a lot. All right. this next one is a we took a request on this one so after our last podcast we got an email from a listener who was like i'd like to hear more about the museum of pinball closing and we did cover it a little bit on the last show but uh we have more details now so let's jump over to that so uh this came out july 21st we're back at uh pinball news museum of pinball in banning california was in out following the aborted attempt to move to a new location in Palm Springs. Now all attempts to secure additional funding to either find a new home or put the collection into storage have failed. As a result, the entire collection of more than 500 pinballs, 900, that should be pinball machines, 500 pinball machines. Yes. Thank you, Kevin. We're going to have a campaign, a weird campaign to stop saying pinballs. Yes. They had 500 pinballs in a jar.
    72:32
    Sweet. New storage space for that. 900 video games and around 1,000 additional machines, which couldn't be displayed and were kept in storage, will be put up for sale by us. Why don't they just call it 900 videos?
    72:44
    Does that make sense? No, it doesn't. The 4,400-square-foot building, which currently houses the displayed pinball and video games, has been leased to a marijuana-growing company with effects from October 2021, leaving just two months to completely vacate the pinball and video room. So the rise of marijuana, killing pinball.
    73:06
    I think they can find a way to work it out. They can have a marijuana place and a New Balance shoe store and a pinball museum. They all go hand-in-hand, and then you need like a Taco Bell there, and you'd be all set.
    73:19
    Is that the choice? I don't know. Pinball players? I'm trying to make it Arby's. Can I make an appeal, Kevin? Yeah. By the way, you've got a lot of listeners and stuff, and, you know, it's like the six degrees of separation. Somebody's got to have connections to Arby's Marketing. So, you know, family, friends, let's figure this out. Connect us, please, to Arby's Marketing. You know what I saw on Arby's Marketing yesterday? What's that? What's going through? Arby's has, like, well, I showed the Arby's shop. Yeah, yeah. Arby's has, they were advertising disc golf, which I got into that. Arby's is on it, man. They're like, I'm wired into them. And then they had a Brody Even Curl shirt, and it's a curly fry curling. Oh, my God. Arby's. Arby's, you're so good. Yeah, they're on it. We have synergy, Arby's. Let's go. You and us. We're ready to go. All right, let's jump back to this.
    74:05
    So the auction, if you want to buy one of the machines, one or more of the machines from the collection, starts 3 p.m. on Friday, September 10, 2021, with live viewing from noon the same day.
    74:21
    It continues Saturday and Sunday, the 11th and 12th, with viewing from 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. I'm assuming that's West Coast time.
    74:29
    They didn't give time zones here. Everybody knows you've got to do time zones, otherwise you're going to hear about it. I can't imagine people who are just at a complete loss right now not knowing what to do. Yep. The event is being hosted by Captain's Auction Warehouse. We're based in Orange County, California, and have previously exhibited at the Museum of Pinball's Arcade Expo events. So it is a pinball auction, which means these are not going to be cheap. They have a lot of rare stuff. If you want to buy the ultimate box full of lights, you can buy a Magic Girl there. They have one of those. I think they also have Cosmic Carnival, the other total box of lights. So you get a box of lights with Dirty Downing Art. You get a box of lights with Zombie Yeti Art. And you can pay a lot of money and an additional buyer's fee on top of that because it's an auction, and that's how things work. So check it out. Captain's Auction next weekend. I think you can actually put bids in now but they going to actually sell everything next weekend There a junior in chat asking is Lyman now with JGP or Spooky I haven't heard of him going anywhere. So all we know is he's out at CERN. We don't know if he's working anywhere else yet or not. Probably HomePen. They need him, man. They need him. So I had heard Joe Balzer had actually gone to HomePen.
    75:46
    He's swimming downstream. Where Korea's going to die. Exactly. Oh, man. But then now he's out. So, like, people don't know if he actually did any work on Spinal Tap or not.
    75:56
    Okay. That seems to be Joe Balser's MO. Amazing. Yep. All right. I just want to show this. We don't talk about mods very much, but this is one I have a vested interest in because I love Tron, and I'll probably end up getting one of these. It's a mod that adds a display to the back board of your cabinets. This is by 86 Pixels with animations by Steven Silver of Multimorphic. So very cool. And my favorite part was I was like, that's cool, but I like how my backboard kind of integrates with my side art. It, like, makes a whole, like, scene. And they're like, oh, cool, we'll do one that looks like that. Because the original one just has this grid on the back, very Tron grid-esque. And then they're like, okay, here's one. We did new side panel art with the art that ties into the other side panel art blades. So it looks more like the original art on the back, on the sides, and then you get the animations in the middle. So it's like, all right, cool, that's customer service. They're also saying they're going to add – so because this goes in the backboard, on the premium and the – well, there's only one. There's the LE – there's a moving recognizer, and the mech for that goes through the back wall. So they're going to design a way for the recognizer to move and also work with this, which means you get a moving recognizer on your pros, which I was like, sign me up for one of those too. Does it move on the LE? Yeah, it moves. Oh, okay. Yeah, it kind of like swings back and forth. Okay.
    77:31
    So now pro owners are going to be able to get that maybe. So it's sounding cool. So just when you thought you were done modding out your Tron, there's another mod you can get. They haven't started shipping yet. I think they're still going to do some beta testing with some of this, but coming soon. There's a thread on Pinsight if you want to learn more.
    77:51
    And we can just show this real quick. It kind of falls into, like, cool, but who really cares because I'll never play it. It's the Ferris Bueller's Day Off custom pinball by Brian Soros and Reby Hardy.
    78:05
    So they took a Mustang and they rethemed it into Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which is a cool theme. I like it. I like the theme. I watched that movie a lot back in the day.
    78:13
    Mustang is their game of choice. They had done a hardy wrestling pin in Mustang, and now they have a Ferris Bueller Mustang. Poor Mustang.
    78:25
    There's the play field. They got the car from the movie in there instead of the Mustang. Real cool stuff. Some pack-outers. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah. The chrome armor. It's a sharp-looking game.
    78:40
    And it works because Bueller has the same number of letters as Mustang. Oh, shit. It's a light up in the back. Look at that. That's clever.
    78:49
    Yep. It is great. So, you know, maybe someday at a show you'll get to flip one of these, but probably not. And then if you want to play the same game, just go play Mustang because it's the same game. But very cool. Nice work. Looks cool. Yeah. Good job. Maybe you'll play it someday.
    79:07
    Is that all the news? Holy crap, that was all the news. We did it. Oh, I didn't pull this up. So we're going to go to your voicemails next because we asked you guys to send in some voicemails. Now you need to go to Anchor. Was this a mistake, Kevin? Maybe. Okay. I need to go to anchor.fm. If you go to anchor.fm slash Buffalo Dash Pinball, I don't know how I put the dash in there when I made the account, but Buffalo Dash Pinball, you can leave us a message for a future show. You can't even figure out time zones. You want them to figure out dashes now? They're not going to do that. We didn't get a lot. They didn't figure it out for this. but we're giving away a copy of Just Pinball of a Zine. We have a few of them to give away, so let's go to our – let's see. I have to go under here, and I go to Messages, and then if I go here – so this is the sample, and we'll play it again. This is from Goran. We answered this last week, but this will be our test. Yes, I'd like to ask each row, what is your favorite topper, and what do you like about it? Yeah, so we answered that last time. Gorin's given a good example. So the next one comes to us from Ben, Chrome Candy Pinball Crane. Are you ready?
    80:19
    Once you go, Zach, you don't go back. There you go. Thank you. Look at that. That was it. That's all he said. That's all you need to know. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Ben from Rochester. He's right. The next one comes to us from Limelight247, Nick Kaiser. Are you ready? No.
    80:36
    This question's for all the bros. and it has to deal with the limelight that you may receive as a top competitive player and all-around streamer for the Buffalo pinball community. How do you deal with that mentally? Is there any tricks, tips, or exercises that you may do to keep your brain in tip-top shape so that you can keep giving us the great content that you do?
    81:02
    That feels like a question for Nick Lane to me. You've been accused of being in the limelight. How do you do it? How do you handle it? Well, see, unfortunately, my friends bear the blunt of it because I had to call them or talk to them about, like, what some lunatics said about me on the Internet or what lunatic business owner treated me. So, Kevin bears the brunt of listening to, like, the craziness. We can talk, you know, we talk about, like, what this lunatic said or what this person did and we're just like, are you kidding me? We kind of are talking to my friend Joe Mann, who's probably listening. Shout out to Joe Mann. And Joe Mann's just, like, trying to wrap his mind around, like, some of the YouTube comics. He's like, I don't know how you do it.
    81:47
    I was like, I know what's on the Internet. Like, we're just, like, I don't know, just trying to wrap your mind. It's like when you're a, like, a normal, quote, unquote, mentally healthy individual, like, and you try to wrap your mind around that, like, it doesn't work. Like, Martha's trying to wrap her mind around, like, it's like, I don't know how Elizabeth Holmes can, you know, sell this blood test product that is giving people, you know, results that are, like, threatening and stuff. I was like, because she's a lunatic. Like, she's, like, once you understand that, people are, like, just crazy and that you can't put yourself and try to understand from your perspective. You're just like, oh, they're nuts.
    82:25
    It's like when I'm going through YouTube comments and I see something that's, like, it's insane. I just, I'm like, I have to sell this to Nick. Oh, yeah. It's crazy. comments, you know? I know. It's crazy. There's crazy people out there. For the most part, like, our chat is really good.
    82:40
    We always make it like a joke, though. I always feel like I might get upset for like half a second, but I always feel like the humor in it. Like, it always turns into like a joke that we laugh about. Like, are you kidding me? Like, what did this fucking idiot say? Well, like last month with this review versus impressions, you worked better out of your reviews. Well, it wasn't a review. It was our impressions, right? Yeah. You just got to roll with it. Let's make fun of you, you know? That's right. All right. So thanks, Nick. All right. The last one is the most serious. So this comes to us from Ian Jacobi. Thank you, Ian, for sending a real question. Yes, here we go.
    83:15
    Hey, y'all. This is Ian, long-time listener, first-time caller. I was just wondering what you thought that Spooky Pinball could do going forward to give better value to the people who are buying their games. I'm a big Spooky fan, but I totally understand the criticisms that people have leveled against him, including you guys, which I don't think you're haters or anything. But, yeah, as experienced pinball players, I'm interested to hear your thoughts. All right. Thanks, guys. Bye.
    83:51
    So what do you think? What can Spooky do to improve going forward? First of all, it's a good question. And thanks for recognizing that we're not haters, that we can criticize a particular machine or a particular aspect of a company but not hate a company. Right? So good job for having critical things. I appreciate you. Seems like a reasonable human being. Thank you. Exactly. Thank you. So I love reasonable questions. And I think this is a really good one. What can they do? The interesting thing is that Spooky doesn't have to change their model. They can keep on doing from a business perspective what they've always done if they're profitable off of it because as we've seen for Halloween people just order the game before they've even played it and Spooky makes money and they profit off that so there's no motivation, there's no business motivation for them to change as of right now and as we talked about people like the hobby's crazy, people are just throwing money at games, if they're licensed they throw money at it they don't need to do anything I know that doesn't answer your question but I'm just saying, like, it's rational for them to keep on doing what they're doing, even if that means, like, kind of shoddy workmanship on some of their games or coming off as not as maybe. And, again, you know, it's not like Stern doesn't do things or JGP doesn't do things that are, like, how does this ever leave the factory? But, like, on the whole, Spooky doesn't have the manufacturing capabilities that Stern or JGP does, and it shows a lot of times. So what would have to change? I don't know. I think they're in a really small location. They live in a town of like 800 people, so that means that you're sort of limited on certain things such as a workforce maybe. I'm sure they have the land to create a huge factory, but you need people to work in that. It seems that if Spooky were to graduate to being on the same level of quality of Stern and J.J.P., they would have to move to an area where they have just a larger workforce, bring more people on the line. and then really decide to up their quality of their standards. I mean, it's a decision that they have to make, too, at the same time. So I don't profess to know the answer there, but I think they're probably a little handicapped based on just the kind of small area where they live in and what options they have available to themselves. Yeah, that was going to be my response. Is it? Okay. It's their physical location. Like, they're limited in workforce. I know they recruit a lot of, like, high school students to put these games together. That workforce is going to turn over. You're going to have to train new people.
    86:26
    You know, I think to a certain extent anybody who's making, like, minimum wage assembling anything is going to have, you know, they're only going to put so much effort into making these pinball machines. They don't have the passion for them like we do. And they're going to be trying to do a certain thing over and over again. And that can be repetitive and annoying. Like, I used to work in a print shop, and I would print stuff all day. And it gets really old and boring. And even with that, there's, like, some level of, like, creativity in, like, how you managed it and ran the printing press and stuff like that. So there was skill involved there. It wasn't just assembling widgets all day. So, but even doing something like that, you're just like, oh, I can't do this anymore. Or, I don't know, maybe hiring more. I mean, I'm sure the turnover at Stern and JGP is huge, too, at the same time. So I know what you're saying by that, or hiring more senior people who are just providing more quality control and oversight, maybe even just that. I mean, some of those things like on Rick and Morty where, like, the play field wasn't as thick and, like, the flippers were hovering, it doesn't matter who you have on the assembly line or where your location is. Like, that kind of stuff just shouldn't happen. It should have never left the factory like that. Yeah, that was higher up in the assembly line. Yeah. Yeah, you know, Penn Island says he's owned two Noonbox Spookies, never thought they had shoddy workmanship, each experience is different. Okay, nice, reasonable response. Yeah, I mean, I'm glad. I mean, people have commented on our last video, and most people were respectful. Like, they've had, like, good experiences, so I'm happy to hear that, right? Yeah, they're very good about customer service, right? Yeah. At least they're not just, like, shipping out games and being like, oh, you're on your own now. They take care of their customers, and that's why people continue to go back to them. Part of the reason why people continue to go back. Yeah, I mean, like, let's just say for the sake of argument that, like, Stern and JTP are A-level companies in pinball. Spooky is like a B, right? Like, they're just one step below that, I'd say. They need to move up there a little bit. Whereas American Pinball is probably like an A, around an A-. Something like that, right? I don't know if I gave a good answer. You kind of said the same thing, and we kind of talked through it a little bit, and even the workforce doesn't change that, I don't know. They're just a smaller operation. Yeah, they just need to mature as a company. Yeah, I think they've got to grow and get a little bit bigger. I think they've got to graduate, and that's what I talked about in the last podcast. It's like you kind of give them a pass for a lot of things because they were small, but they've been in this for almost a decade now, and it's kind of like, okay, well, I think you've got to graduate to that next stop and invest in that, whether that's more QC people or just not allowing some things to lead the line where, you know, a pinball can fall into a cabinet. There's just those kind of stuff. All right. So we got copies of the magazine. I got enough to send to all of you. So Ian, shoot in. So I know Nick and Ben, we can connect up with you guys and get you your magazines. Ian, shoot an email to Buffalo Pinball. Actually, send it to talkpinball at gmail.com with your address, and we'll ship you a magazine. So thanks everybody for submitting their voicemails. It'll be an ongoing thing if you want to shoot a voicemail and have us play it on the show. These were good examples of length and quality. So keep them coming. We like hearing back from you guys.
    89:47
    Okay, what's next? Buffalo updates. So, okay, so a couple updates from us as Buffalo Pinball, both streaming online and locally. The big news is we have a new streamer joining the channel, TurboGrafx7. So Ryan and Dave, they're starting this Friday with the channel. So they stream at 9 p.m. Eastern, 8 p.m. Central. So you'll be able to check them out starting this Friday at Buffalo Pinball on Twitch. They have a great collection. So between Ryan and Dave, Dave's got this insane collection of rare classics. So he's got, like, Zacharia games and Bally stuff and all sorts of neat stuff. And then Ryan's got – he's got a P3, which, you know, I was like, well, you got a P3, you can join the channel now. But he's also got a good collection of more modern stuff. He did, unfortunately, just get rid of his Spy Hunter. So you won't be seeing Spy Hunter on the channel, as amazing as that game is. But, yeah, lots of variety. And Dave is actually the support guy at American Pinball. So he's very good with tech. He does play field restoration.
    91:03
    So, you know, I watch the stream of him, like, painting play fields and color matching and all this stuff. So he's an amazing technical streamer as well. So check them out starting every Friday night, 9 Eastern, 8 Central. It's twitch.tv slash Buffalo Pinball. Also returning this week is The Bro Show. It's coming back. I just wanted to say, Kevin's kind of our scout for talent, and I just want to thank Kevin for bringing on some more blondes. It's almost a completely blonde channel and bald. Blonde and bald, that's what we do. So if you're blonde and you're bald, send us an audition tape, and you might be able to be on the Buffalo Pinball screen. We needed more people that look like Tuna. It doesn't have to be a guy. It could be a blonde woman, too. So that's cool. We don't discriminate on sex. It's just hair color and amount of hair. Between Dave and Tuna and you. And Ryan. Ryan's blonde. Well, Ryan might be redhead.
    91:59
    I don't know. Do we ink the deal? Yeah, we'll talk. We'll get the picture of all of you together at Pinball Shows. We're counting him. We had a bunch of us blondes got together. We're counting him as blonde. All right. I said a blonde woman would work. Absolutely. Oh, yeah.
    92:15
    Strawberry blonde. It counts. A bald blonde woman. There you go. I like it. So, yeah, the bro show is coming back. It's our usual post-Labor Day return. We're going to be doing it every Thursday at 8 Eastern. We're kicking it off with Heist on the P3. These guys haven't played much Heist, so it's going to be fun introducing some of the crew here to that game. We're going to have, hopefully, a giveaway for Multimorphic. They haven't confirmed, but he said he wants to do something. So you get to vote, Team Nick or Team Kevin, and get in on some of our giveaways. So looking forward to that.
    92:51
    Additionally, streaming-wise, on September 18th, we will be streaming the league finals from the 2019-2020 season. We're finally finishing that up. We're going to be here at my place. So I'll be streaming that starting at 2 p.m. Eastern on the 18th. Then we'll probably have a camera on some games during league that night as well.
    93:15
    Tournament-wise, we had a couple of tournaments. Nick's inspecting my Tron toy. Show everybody at home.
    93:23
    There you go. Is this from Legacy? Yes. Because he's got his backpack on. He's jumping into the Tron cabinet. There you go. He didn't jump in the Tron cabinet in the movie, though. No. It's a little bit of a stretch.
    93:36
    Yeah, so we had a Mandalorian launch party tournament. That was fun. We also did a – what the heck is it called? The stall ball tournament down in Missoula Chows for charity. It is. Both tournaments, they had very light turnout, which is like – But also COVID. So, yeah. It wasn't my choice to run the tournaments. We were asked by the venues, and I was kind of – I'm happy to do so, by the way. But I just worried about the light turnout, and it did pan out to be light turnout. Yeah. So that's a little disappointing, but our league is totally sold out, and it sold out really quick. So our league sold out in a couple hours. Yeah. That's amazing. So there's demand, just maybe not tournaments in August demand, or I don't know. I don't know what it is. Yeah, I don't know. I thought what might balance it out is that people were just excited to go to any kind of pinball event or tournament, so that might offset it. That didn't happen. No. You know, again, it's just, when you live in Buffalo, our summers are really awesome in Buffalo, by the way, like really good. I think that's what tricks people into staying in Buffalo because winters aren't great. But I think people still want to give up a weekend, first of all. Because when we hit – and then I don't know COVID. I don't know how you can factor in COVID. There's a lot of people not going out. Like, I'm not going to the Cleveland show because of the Delta variant being bad, even though when we talked about going two months ago, I was in. And it's just kind of like – I get it, right? I get it. You never know what somebody's situation is. So people being careful. Like, Summer didn't come out for the tournament, even though she's vaccinated. And Summer works – Summer's one of our officials, and she works – she goes into, like, a lot of group homes and stuff for work. I guess everybody was vaccinated there, and they still – there was a COVID outbreak. So she's like, I'm not going to come down because I was just exposed, and I don't want to get people sick, which is nice. But a good person does. Right, yeah. Like, I talked to my wife about going to Cleveland after we talked about it. I was like, maybe I shouldn't go. And she's like, you should just go because things aren't going to get better over the winter. So, you know, we're vaccinated, and I'll have my mask on the whole time. So I'm pretty comfortable with it. I'm going to be rooming up with Jeff, and I know he's vaccinated. If you get something, it won't be COVID from Jeff. Exactly.
    96:02
    New event asks, is our league vaccinated? And yes, it is. We are requiring proof of vaccination. We're also allowing hosts to require masks at their location.
    96:15
    No, they're not required. The hosts can. The host can require it, but the league doesn't require masks. Right. And obviously you can wear a mask if you want. Yeah, yeah. Whatever you want. But as a league, we're not. But because we're opening up homes to invite 26 people in to come play football, we're giving hosts the option, hey, if you want to require masks at your house, we totally get it. We're going to allow it. Yeah, I mean, we have 26 people, and, like, these are small spaces because you're packing 26 people in. And it's, you know, we're doing what we can to navigate a bad situation, right? Like, so I think everybody's been understanding so far. And we just sent out an email the other day. We're like, look, we were launching our league. We had vaccinated. We didn't get anybody who had a problem with that. If they did, they just didn't sign up, which is the rational thing to do, rather than stamp your foot around like a child. And then we had to put out an email, which is like, look, you know, things have been bad the last couple weeks. We're seeing people who are vaccinated get COVID. We're inviting people into houses. So, you know, if a host wants to require you to wear a mask, then we're obviously supportive of that. It's just like a host saying, take off your shoes in my house, right? Like, you don't say, I'm not doing that. Why are you making me take your shoes off? It's like, get the fuck out of here if you don't want to comply with that. So it's not a league-wide thing, but it's just a host thing. But we're trying to make the most of a pandemic, which – is this your first pandemic, Kevin? It's my first. It was not around in 1918. Yeah, it's my first two. So it sucks, man. I hate wearing a mask, you know? I hate having to get the idea of getting a shot. All this stuff sucks, dude. I'm just happy we can play pinball. Can we just get through and play pinball with friends? That's all I want to do.
    98:02
    In some ways, it was nice to take some time off last year, but I miss playing pinball with friends. Masks are really annoying when you have classes, too, because they fog up. So I'm not looking forward to doing that, but I'm also looking forward to staying safe. Yeah, build an excuse already. If you were Jay Fair, brother. Oh, man. We were taking bets on how long it would take Jay to use the mask as an excuse for poor play. And I think it's going to be on the first game he plays. Oh, yeah.
    98:30
    Wildcat wonders, what you can do is anyone who doesn't want to wear a mask, you can set up a Thunderbirds in the driveway and they can only play that.
    98:38
    I like that. In the winter, have them outside. playing Thunderbirds. No, that's mean. We can't be mean to people.
    98:47
    That's where we're at with the league. What else is happening? Oh, podcast developments. Amazon is now doing podcasts on their Amazon Music platform, and you can now get Birdie Even Talk Pinball on there. And after a year of screwing around with stuff on Google, We are finally back on Google after moving from Podcast Garden to Anchor.
    99:16
    If you ever need to do anything on Google that requires interacting with a human being, it's a challenge. They like to automate things, and getting a hold of somebody is not easy. So I tried to update the feed, and it was telling me the feed was already claimed by somebody else, and there was no way I could do it. But for, like, the first six months, they were, like, sending email, and then they changed their process halfway through, and they were like, oh, you can do it yourself now, and then it wasn't working. So we're back on Google, the Google Podcast Directory, and also new to Amazon. All right, that's all I had for Buffalo updates. Let's talk some game room updates. Why don't you kick it off? I'm trying to think game room updates. Well, you sent me some pictures. Yeah, all right. So I mentioned last time I was getting powder-coated my Led Zeppelin Premium.
    100:06
    I'm not a powder-coating guy. I mean, we'd go over to Jane's and Ben's house and see what they did, and I was like, oh, that's really cool. But I'm not gravitated towards, like, how many mods and what can I do with my machine. I just usually want to play it. But I messed up putting a sticker on and damaged some of the side art around the flipper button, so it was driving me nuts. So, hence, now I got to throw more money at the problem. But I figured it would be a good excuse to powder coat it. And also, I've talked before, I didn't like how the art clashes between the play field and the cabinet. So this is my first adventure into powder coating. I wanted to do one important thing was to get the same rails that Stern uses on their LE where they're actually screwed into the cabinet. I know a lot of people do the lollipop rails from Pinball Life where they're not screwed into the cabinet. Like they use the pre-existing screws on the cabinet, but there's not pre-existing screws on pros and premiums that are around like the flipper button.
    101:05
    So that requires drilling a hole in the cabinet, but the benefit is it hugs the cabinet like the LE. The lollipop rails, I mean, I don't like how they float out there. You can actually push them into the cabinet. It feels weird. It feels cheap. So I wanted to do that right. I had a local powder coater do it. It's really hard to take pictures of that because it came out way more orange, so I had to, like, lower the brightness a little bit, and I think that's pretty accurate of how it looks. I think it's pretty good. But I think it came out great. Like, I think it really picks up the colors. I think that if Stern did it, they would have done it like that. I love the black. I love the orange. I love picking up the orange from the Led Zeppelin text in the game. It matches, like, the playfield orange perfectly because there's such a gradation of orange. I said that right, right? Yeah. You know it. So I went with, you know, I went with Prismatic powder. It's one of the powder coating options, and I went with flat hot orange. So that's not glossy. Everybody does glossy. The only reason I didn't do glossy was, like, the powder coater local guy, he, like, he steered me off of that. So I didn't want to ask him to do something he's not comfortable with, so I was really apprehensive. I was like, maybe I made a huge mistake. But I think it looks great on my machine. It's more of a satin finish. And what's great about that is it doesn't show fingerprints at all. Like, maybe somebody can help me out here and do this more about powder coating.
    102:35
    After putting that on there, and, like, I like your powder-coated games, Kevin. I've had an ACDC, my dialed-in. But after playing it and not having, like, fingerprints all over, I'm like, wait, why would we put glossy on a pinball machine? Yeah, it kind of looks good, but it doesn't look great with fingerprints all over it. So hopefully that holds up as well. I don't know if, like, the gloss might protect the color a little bit more. Maybe that will fade over time. I have no idea. This is all new to me. But I'm happy with the way it came out. I'm not going to go wild and do this on all my machines unless I just, you know, have a situation where I'm trying to burn money.
    103:07
    A real Robert Mueller kind of situation. Yeah, exactly. So I'm happy the way it ended. Shout out to Matt Taylor for helping me install that and put that on my game. You know, you get an engineer to do it. And you should see the way he, like, smartly, like, put the screws in. I wasn't worried at all. That's right. You got it. Nick needs to have an adult come over and help. Yeah. Are you going to Chrome out Tron? Yeah, probably not. Probably not. I wouldn't. Don't do that. I heard Chrome doesn't hold up well. It looked good on that Ferris Bueller game we were looking at. But you also play the crap out of your games. Yeah, it's true. I mean, I'm not playing Tron as much as I did when I first got it. but um so okay so what else i got more updates like side blade protector things yeah so shout out to i'm trying to pull it up um they're i got from pinball life they're not the ones who make it they're just like a dealer in it it's called interior cabinet game blade protector set so it's made by pinball universe i think that's the german company or something um so this is This is a no-brainer. I highly, highly recommend it. It's $34.95. What you do is that you put it inside your pinball cabinet, like on the side of the cabinet, the inside side of the cabinet, usually where you have maybe pinball art. Or even if you don't have pinball art, what it's doing is that when you raise up the play field, I know I've done this. I mean, you raise your play field up on games a lot. Like when you're working on it, just moving things around, checking it,
    104:41
    and it could scrape it. Like, there's such a, like, a small gap between the play field and the side of the interior cabinet that inevitably you're going to put some marks in there, especially if you have installed play field art on the side. And with Led Zeppelin Premium, obviously I got the expression lighting on there and the side art. So you put that in there, and you just raise and lower without thinking about it. No anxiety, no worry. It's the best, you know, $35 you're going to spend to protect your games. It goes, even games, again, that don't have art, I'll put it in there before I raise and lower the play field.
    105:13
    And then last but not least, I want to be cool like Kevin, so I put the Pin Monk fans on Led Zeppelin Premium. This is like one crazy of this game. Really dead. Emphasis on crazy.
    105:26
    I don't know if that game is a long-playing game. I mean, that game sometimes I have like 20 to 40-minute games on that. And I don't know if I notice it as much. It's hard to say. I think I'll notice it more when I go back and play another game. I never really had a huge problem with it. Although on some long games I'm like, did I not make that shot because they're not as strong? You just don't know. Or it's like, am I starting to miss shots because now the shot's a little different on the flipper? I just wanted the game to play consistently.
    105:55
    It's muscle memory. You know where the shot should be on the flipper, and the game's always going to feel its best when the shot's not moving around because the flippers are fading. It was like $110.
    106:06
    With the Led Zeppelin, the pin monk cooling fans, I guess they don't fit in great, so he had to modify a little bit, but he was good. I think the guy's name is Victor. I reached out to him. He sent me kind of a modified version of the bracket that went in there. I still had to shave a little bit off, but he was eager. He was like, send me pictures, send it back to me. He wanted to fix it, so he was great to work with, so shout out for that. He's also got a thing on his site where it shows the flipper fade on Stern games. Some games are worse than others. Again, I don't know if it's a product that everybody needs. I'm not going to put it in any other games. Led Zeppelin was a longer-playing game. I didn't think there was a major problem with it. But, again, I love that game. It's a longer-playing game, so I threw it in on that. And the customer service was good. And it was like, I don't know, $110. It's not that much expensive. Now, is this a mod that Nick Lane installed himself? I did, yeah. Wow, there you go. Because I didn't have to raise the play field to do it. I can put it on the brackets and do it from underneath. So it's still a pain in the ass for me to do it. Like, it probably took me twice as long as it would have taken anybody else who can raise their play field. But I did it, you know. Yeah. I put the play field all the way up when I did them on GNR. And I like them on GNR. They make a big difference as far as, like, consistency. Like you were saying, like, I could tell, like, after streaming it for, like, an hour, like, I'm definitely not making that shot the way I was when I played it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you just want the game. And I'm more confident having it at league night now. of like anybody who plays it later in the day is going to have the same flipper strength that they had earlier in the day, right? Kroonkainen says, I think flipper fade is fake news. It's still $2 fans for 99. Maybe. I don't know. I'll be honest with you. I don't know if I noticed a huge – I might be solving a problem that really didn't exist. Well, I think there's less of an issue on Sterns. I've heard on Spooky and JJP you notice it more. And it depends on the game, right? Like, I don't necessarily think I need it on my other JJPs. I don't feel the fade that bad. And flipper fade's been around forever. You've seen it at tournaments and stuff when games get played all day. The flipper's fade. It's just a thing. It's thermodynamics, right? Like, things heat up and they don't work as efficiently. So it's a real thing, but it varies by game. Yeah. I think, again, I mentioned this last time, but he's, like, he's got a thing on his website. He's kind of talked about flipper fade per game, and Stranger Things is, like, the worst offender. allegedly, so maybe that came.
    108:33
    And then, lastly, just an update on the speaker system that I bought. What are they called? They're never going to sponsor you. No. I'm struggling.
    108:48
    Right? Pinwoofer? Yeah, I'm struggling today. It had to be Pin something. It's always Pinwoofer. I thought it was Pinwoofer, and then I, like, doubted myself. Yeah, so Pinwoofer. Yeah, I got it dialed in now. It sounds great. So I'm really happy with that. Yeah. I think I was, yeah. I'm really happy with that. Cool. So I'm really happy with the state of my game at this point. Awesome.
    109:06
    All right. I've done a couple things. I have – my big thing was I decided – like, I got that Willy Wonka from Skip back in January.
    109:14
    And playing it – so playing it on stream, I have no problem because I put tons of light on it. But then when you – when I'm not streaming, it's, like, super dark. It's just a really dark game. The GEI in it is very dim, and there's not a lot of spotlights. like on pirates i feel like they did a good job putting spotlights all over to light up the play field and like under the one ramp under the the ramp going to the the ship there's an led strip so there's like nice additional light on pirates to light up that game where um walker's just got a couple like little led spotlights and stuff that don't really do a lot and i was like do i want to do pin stadiums but i was playing my adams and my doctor who and they both have really I put the comic kit in there that added spotlights and LED strips and stuff like that I was like maybe I should do something like that for Wonka and so I emailed the comic because JJP Games used 12 volt for the GI instead of like 6.5 volts which you get on most other games so I was like how do you guys do this for JJP Games and they said well we actually the best way we found is to run it off of the coin door bulb So their matrix kit lets you tap into any bulb on the play field, and then you can run these little, like, connecting wires with connectors all over to anywhere you want to add additional light. So I added, coming off of the coin door, I added, so basically you replace the coin door bulb with their bulb that has not only, like, a flex bulb on it, but also one of the connectors coming out, and that becomes your tap for the rest of the lights you put on. I put two dual spotlights on the slingshots I put a trough light into light kind of underneath the flipper area and I also did a strip across the back under the back box to light up the back area so it looks good, it's all natural white, it's obviously not as bright as you would get with doing pin stadiums or something like that but I feel like it's a good kind of middle ground and basically I needed a project and I wanted to give it a shot. It was about $100 to do the whole game so it wasn't bad I'll have to show Nick when we're done here so he can check out the brightness on Wonka so that was my big pinball project Video game wise Nick do you know what a Vectrex is? Mm-mm This is a Vectrex Ew It's from like 82 and it's a home console with a vector monitor in it. So like the kind of monitor you have in a Tempest.
    111:55
    It's black and white. It looks amazing. So I've actually, this is going to the Girl Geek eventually.
    112:02
    We made a deal there where she's going to be buying this, but then the pandemic hit and we haven't hung out since then and I'm not going to ship it because it's huge and delicate. So that's a Vector X.
    112:13
    But I'm showing that because a new product came out and I saw it on Twitter, and I was like, well, I'm selling my Vectrex, so this looks really cool. So this is called the PyTrek. So it's a cart that you can connect a Raspberry Pi to right there, the Raspberry Pi Zero. It just plugs into the top of it. Here, I'll show you. You've got to get the Raspberry Pi with the header on it. Click it on like that, and then you can load an SD card on the side, and then you can actually run arcade game ROMs using MAME. It just boosts the, it's got all the, so the Vectrex games are open source, like the company said, you can just have them for free, so you can distribute the ROMs and download the ROMs free of charge So every Vectrex game is on there There games that are custom made for the PyTrex to play on the Vectrex So there games that do way more than you ever be able to do with a standard Vectrex game It's really cool. So I've been tinkering with that. So if you've got a Vectrex laying around and you want to do some new stuff with it, check out the Pytrex.
    113:23
    Got a new game for my Jaguars back there, Seaball 2. I've been playing that. And I'm getting a new desk. so maybe the next time we do a podcast you'll be seeing my new gamer desk why are you getting a new desk? because working from home is going to be a thing long term and when I bought this it was just like I'll use it once a month get a stand up desk I didn't get a stand up desk but it's a more contoured one I like my chair and it'll give me the ability to mount monitors and fans and stuff to it we'll be looking good We'll be feeling good in our home office here. So that's it for game room updates. You brought this up last time, and you said when we do game room updates, we should talk about what we've been playing. So what have you been playing in your game room? I'm still playing a lot of Led Zeppelin Premium. Yeah. Well, it's your newest game, so it might make sense, right? Yeah, so I've had it for about a month and a half, and I'm still loving it. I think it might be my favorite certain of all time. It's possible. I mean, I can't make a statement like that when I'm in the, you know, I don't know when the Honeymoon Stage ends, right, like after a few months. Because you loved Iron Man for a long time. I did love Iron Man for a long time. It was my first game. It was great. And it changes over time, right? So your game that's your favorite, even after the Honeymoon Stage, might change in a few years. There's new games that come out, or you just evolve as a player, and there are things that you were once impressed with, you're not. I remember when I started off, I could not for the life of me understand why people liked Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man. And I was just early in pinball, and I just still didn't understand the complexity of rules. I learned the rules, and I get why people like that game even though it's not for me. But anyways, yeah, I think it would be interesting if I feel like that a year from now, but I think Led Zeppelin Premium is like everything I want in a pinball machine, believe it or not. What about Walking Dead? Because I know that was your favorite for a while. Yeah, I think that's had the top spot of Stern for the longest time. That's been number one. So, I mean, I'm not selling that game. It's not going anywhere.
    115:33
    I think it's a great game. Is it my favorite Stern? I mean, Led Zeppelin premium is right now. Maybe that. Maybe Led Zeppelin I'd put number two.
    115:43
    Stern, favorites, I don't know. It's hard to say. I like it. I think it's a great game, but it's sometimes frustrating.
    115:53
    Walking Dead. When we stream, we get asked a lot, what's your favorite game of all time? And I don't really have an all-time favorite game. I have, like, a selection of games that I really love, and I don't think I have, like, an all-time favorite game. Yeah, so, Berg Boogie, I mean, like, I feel like I've talked about this. I don't mind answering again. Do you feel the same about Led Zeppelin Pro? It just feels so empty. I'm quoting, it just feels so open and empty and the dead-end shot instead of a feat. So, no, I don't. I bought a premium, and I talked about this in my review. It's like I look to buy a pro when I can and save money. Sometimes the pro is even a better version, believe it or not.
    116:29
    Yeah, Led Zeppelin Pro, not interested in that game. I don't understand why in the Led Zeppelin Pro they didn't just put that ramp shot in there. Because there's nothing else in there. So, like, why wouldn't you just put the side ramp shot? I know. That's a really weird. I don't think we talked about it last time. and I thought about this after the fact, like, that's really weird that they just had that dead end because the ramp doesn't increase the cost that much. Yeah. Like, the toy, I get it, and the expression lighting. You're getting the premium is overwhelmingly, that's the way the game's supposed to be made, that's the way the game's supposed to be played.
    117:05
    You know, and, again, I sort of, like, shrug my shoulders on this. Like, I like open-ended games kind of. Like, I always kind of liked 24 and the design and thought it was cool. All the shots were far back, but, you know, the theme I didn't care for, the rules, not good. You know, this game has just kind of come together, and I absolutely love the rules. I love the way the ball is always in motion on it.
    117:31
    It's just, I don't know, it's just clicking with me. Nice. All right. That brings us to our review of the month. I did, by the way, Ben. I have, for people who say the ramp shot is hard, I love how it's hard on Led Zeppelin premium. My high score ramp shot is 17 shots in one game. So there you go. I hit that 17 times. There you go.
    117:53
    All right, let's do a review. Let's talk about the Mandalorian from Stern Pinball. So I've got to do that, and then I've got to do – And Ben's right. 24 is cool. It's just way too easy. Let's go.
    118:08
    I am okay. This life is a horror movie. Before we get to that, shout out to Newish Star. So we obviously play their music on every time we do a bro show. And that review is also from Newish Star. You can check them out on Bandcamp. And now, the whole team of Pinball Project. Nick Lane and Kevin Manning of Buffalo Pinball. In case you forgot it was us, it's still us This is us, we're doing a review of the Mandalorian It's Stern Pinball's latest release It's a 2020 release designed by Brian Eddy, art by Randy Martinez Dwight Sullivan did the software and sound by Jerry Thompson Pricing, well, pricing used to be $61.99 for a Pro $77.99 for a Premium $91.99 for an LE at $1,000 for the premium and $600 for the pro going forward. All right, so we're taking a look here at Mandalorian, The Cabinet. So we're going to be mostly talking about the pro. I haven't played the – we're going to be exclusively talking about the pro. I've played the premium, but I haven't played it enough to – I can remark on it, but I have like three games on it, so I'm not going to review the premium. But you can talk a little bit about the differences. I haven't played the premium or LE yet.
    119:37
    So to set the table, how many times would you say you've played Mando Pro? So when did we get it? We got it in June, I think, or was it in May? It might be in May. It's been a while. Maybe June. Yeah, I've probably played the game 30 times maybe, and the Pro maybe 20 or 30 times over the last few months, and then Premium maybe like two or three times. Yeah. So we did play the bro show on it. We had Nick and Jeff and I went down one Friday night and just played it a bunch. We did the launch party tournament on it, so we played it some more there. So we've had some good time on this. I feel like we're in a good place to review it.
    120:28
    So let's start off talking about The Arch. So Arch is by Randy Martinez. I think it's really good. it's got that comic book feel so if you've seen the Star Wars comic book edition it's the same artist so everybody was very excited when that came out that was one of the big criticisms of the original Star Wars game when it came out was the art folks like the comic book style on pinball this is the kind of art I look for that I like in pinball I like the hand drawn art comic style colors are good It's got a very orangey kind of feel to it, lots of explosions, stuff like that. Not super overdone art-wise. Like, I feel like Zambietti, like, just packs his play fields with tons of art all the time. This gives you some room to breathe.
    121:18
    Yeah, I think that's important. Like, I like Zambietti, but, like, sometimes, like, again, art is so subjective, right? Like, I feel like it's almost too much. Like, I feel like there's a fine balance between just almost nothing and then just really throwing the kitchen sink in there, right? And you almost get lost because there's too much art, like, that's competing. And the art could be awesome, but does that work on a play field? Yeah, I think it also, like, makes the ball harder to track sometimes when there's too much busyness happening on the play field. So, yeah, you've got to get a can I find that balance. But I think, you know, the art is composed well. it integrates with the play field they didn't just take like I don't know like a promotional graphic and slap it on the back box custom designed for pinball you got Bilber on there what more do you want you know what I mean so yeah this is good this is in the top tier of pinball art in my book yeah they did a good job you know no doubt I think really nothing to knock on the art side of it above average art package, I'd say. Yeah, I agree. Easy above average. Alright, so what do you think about the sound on this? We played on location, but we've had them turn the music down in the room so we could hear the game more. What do you think about the sound? Yeah. I think the music is the track from the show. I've never seen the show. Yeah, the main theme is in there. Yeah, the music's fine. I think there's some weirdness in the sound in it. It does have kind of like an announcer. Do you know who the announcer is, that character from the show? Yeah, he's in there. It's what's-his-name from Billy Madison.
    123:04
    Not Adam Sandler. No, his coach. I don't know. But, yeah. It's that guy. That's the announcer? Yeah. Carl Weathers. Carl Weathers is the – Yeah, that's him. Oh, really? Yeah. All right. It didn't sound – all right. It didn't sound like him. That's him, yeah. He does, like, all the call-outs in there. All right. Well, still, that's cool that they got Carl Weathers on. That's awesome. Yeah, so everybody knows. Well, I just think Carl Weathers from Arrested Development, that's where. Oh, there you go. Because he plays himself in that. You've got to watch that show. I know. It's one I haven't seen. Yeah. Well, it's weird. Like, so they have, like, I think the call-outs are, I'll think we meant the call-outs are good, and the call-outs are working. They got Carl Weathers. And then there's just moments in the game where there's just, like, silence. like there's it's just like wait what's going on like there's there's nothing to call there's like it gets a whismur like nothing's happening no call outs nothing yeah yeah it's really bizarre and then like i hear car weather's the announcer and then like in bill burr's multiball i hear the patented bill burr voice like freaking out voice which is great and then there might be some other actors that you hear once in a while like from the clips from the show but what is punctuated by the sound is just the total lack of it in certain moments and areas in the game, which is really weird. Yeah, I remember getting to the mini wizard mode, the up-the-middle shot, mini wizard mode, and it was just like, oh, wait, this is the wizard mode? It just kind of started, and there wasn't a lot of fanfare. It was cool when you got into it. I think the gameplay was really cool in the mini wizard mode, But you're right, like the presentation, the choreography is lacking a little bit. And I think it just needs to be polished up a little bit more. Yeah, hopefully it's just a code thing that like they have the assets and it just needs to be plugged in there. Why they aren't after it's been released for a few months is a little bizarre. Yeah.
    125:03
    So, yeah, that's weird. It just seems like something's wrong kind of vibe to it. And, you know, like the voices in the game is sort of like the art too, right? You don't want to go over the top of it where it's just like cheddar box and you eat. You also notice when something's lacking, and there's something definitely lacking in moments in that game. Yeah, it's funny. If everything's going right, you don't notice it as much, but if there's something missing or lacking, then you're like, something's not right there. Something needs to be tweaked or improved. So, yeah, I'm with you on this one. I like that they got the original theme. It's becoming an iconic piece, and so it's important to have that in there. I like that they got call-outs from one of the actors from the show. But, yeah, again, it's like it just needs to all come together in a package. You know, I think of Ghostbusters, you know, with Dwight. I think Jerry Thompson did the sound on that too.
    125:53
    That one strikes me as a really good sound package. You know, it's got really good call-outs. The music, while it's not the original movie sound all the time, it's got songs that invoke the movie, so it makes you feel like you're in there. So I know they can do it. You never know with licenses if it's a license restriction or if it's just like we haven't gotten there yet with the code yet. So we'll see.
    126:19
    Toys. It's got a toy in it. Let's show the toy. I got a picture of it. Where is he? There he is. Literal toy. That's not a toy, though. That's not a toy. That's not a toy because it doesn't interact with the game at all. It's not a pinball toy. It's a doll. It's a toy off the shelf at Target or something. Yeah. so yeah um i guess the the upper play field on the premium is the toy but it's a mini play field i guess i guess if you consider the the ship on pirates a toy then that would be a toy as well um oh and the the premium yeah the premium yeah so even though this is the review the pro um i thought the moving upper play field in the premium was really cool yeah like i liked it like i was like, oh, okay, like if I was going to get this game, I would get the premium. Yeah, so that's what we're looking at now if you're watching. This is the premium. It tips up and down, and it also has two flippers on it instead of one. On the Pro, you get one flipper and the rubber there to kind of bounce it around on. And a lot of times on the Pro, it doesn't feed to the flipper. There's one flipper on the Pro, and when it comes out of the diverter, it's supposed to kind of feed to it, but sometimes it will just dribble out. which is super annoying. That doesn't happen on the premium. You always get a chance to flip it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you can trap it on the flipper and have control of it. So, yeah, it becomes really annoying. We'll get to that.
    127:49
    The premium also has, like, you know the three kind of horseshoe turnaround shots, like the super jackpot one? Yeah, yeah. There's actually a return ramp somewhere on the premium, which is really nice. Oh, yeah, it lowers and raises, which is cool. Oh, it does? I didn't even notice that. See, that's how little. It's got a little light turnaround ramp that raises and lowers. Yeah, so it's not just like that upper playfield, which is cool. You've got a better ramp system, and then it's got that magnet up by Grogu. Grogu, yeah. Grogu, all right, which is also really weird, by the way. I guess we can talk about when we get there. Okay.
    128:24
    Balser said the ship on pirates. So, yeah, we're making the distinction. On the Pro, the upper playfield is just flat and static with one flipper. the premium LE for Mando it's actually like tips it back and forth like this and it's got two flippers where you can shoot on it so it moves too yeah I mean we're talking about toys obviously the ship is better than I mean I shouldn't say obviously but it is better it is more to do it is better it's cooler but this again we don't have to play this game where it's like this is bad like it's cool like you want this game I would definitely lean I haven't played it enough but I would definitely lean towards the premium there if this is something that I did want yeah I was impressed by the moving upper play field when I saw the reveal. I was like, oh, that's cool. It's a mech that I haven't seen before. They're trying something different. I like that. Yeah, very cool.
    129:11
    Display and lighting. So we got this third LCD screen on this one. It's got Dwight Sullivan lighting, which he's been accused of using a lot of flasher effects and stuff like that in the past. I don't really notice that on this game. Didn't seem bad. It seemed fine. It seemed solid. It seemed good. It wasn't detracting from the game. We were playing a dark room the other day. So, yeah, I think it was good. The thing that's weird when you step up to the game, there's no – it doesn't indicate in lights that you have to shoot the ramps to start a mode. It's just like you step up and the only arrows that are lit are the arrows that point to the dong, the whatever it's called.
    129:50
    That's an R or something. Yeah. The metal shot. His ship. Yeah. It's not clear to a novice player that you have to shoot right ramp, then shoot left ramp. Well, the first one you can even put in a scoop, and that will light the scoop to start it, which is weird, too. After you hit the ramp, it will light it to start like that. Then it tells you to shoot the other one, which you're probably going to figure out, but it would be nice. Yeah, there should be better indicators on that. That's an easy thing to fix in software. Not a big deal. So maybe they'll update that in a software update. Like you said, easy fix.
    130:29
    Gameplay. All right. Let's talk about the gameplay. So the shots, how it flows, how it shoots. What are your thoughts on the gameplay and the layout of this game? So the shots are typo very findable. Yeah. And I found that I think it shoots pretty damn good. I think Brian did a good job of creating a unique play field, which is not, like, radically different than anything. You might think it's tough at first. It might take you a minute to find the shots. You might do a lot of bricks. But then once you get it, you know where they are and the shots make sense. I think where the play field issues that I have where it doesn't work out great, sometimes I was getting some rejects or rattles from, like, the orbits. It would kind of go halfway there and not be clean and come back down. Not a ton, not bad. I think some people might have had to do adjustments, but not the smoothest thing in the world either. Again, it's probably just they're pretty tight. He's trying to pack a lot with those shots. Again, on the pro, hitting it up there and not getting the ball on that flipper is annoying. I don't know why they didn't just put, like, the flipper on the other side so you can trap up because the premium sets it up for you to be able to trap up and have control of the ball. So shooting it up that shot and having it dribble out is really annoying and just not – I would say there's a play field design flaw there. Yeah. And I don't think, you know, I've looked on the forums on other people. Most people have that. It seems to be normal. Like, it's not like a setup as far as I can tell. And it should just work out of the box fine. So, just an annoying thing that you kind of got to deal with on the pro.
    132:08
    And then you've got kind of really bizarre to me. You've got a lot of real estate used in the upper left corner of this play field for, like, the child lanes. There's like five lanes that spell child. That's where Grogu is. And it seems, and you remarked on this earlier on, even playing it, it just seems underutilized. You're not, you can kind of completely ignore that area.
    132:33
    I was getting deep into the game, getting good scores in the tournament, and just totally ignoring that area, yet it takes up like 15% of the play field or something ridiculous. So it's kind of bizarre. Now, is that on Brian Eddy or is that on rules? because, I mean, ultimately, when you're making rules for a game, you're choosing as the person with the rules what shot the players need to hit or focus on to score. So, yeah, I don't know. I think this is more of a Dwight thing, but it still just seems like a lot of real estate is dedicated to there. And as I mentioned, on the premium, there's a magnet that will shoot up there, will stop it, and the magnet will kind of move it around, and it kind of randomly will fall into a child lane. But I almost think the magnet is even worse. Oh, really? It's really weird. I think one time I actually took and threw it away from it so it didn't go in any lane. I was like, this is a feature? I finally got it back there. I wanted to go over a lane. Yeah, it was just really, you can forgive me if maybe it's my lack of understanding, but it just seemed really bizarre and just seemed like kind of like a low point in the game and the design. Yeah. I mean, like we've said before, the baby Grogu, he's obviously in there. he's going to get people to drop coin at their fans of the game or of the show. And the magnet makes sense because, you know, he's in the show. He's like, you know, having the ball fly over to him and stuff like that, the little, like, knob from the ship, stuff like that. So theme-wise it makes sense, but it's just, yeah. Real estate on the pinball machine for what you get out of it. There's a lot you're not shooting on this game a lot of the times. The only thing gameplay-wise I'll say is, like, I end up doing a lot of backhanding on this game. I backhand the left ramp and the right ramp and the little turnaround thing on the right. So if you're playing it and you're struggling, try doing some backhands, especially that center, well, the left ramp, and I think you'll have a lot more success. I think the ramp up to the mini play field is a satisfying shot. Yeah. It feels great. Like, the shot, the scoop, whether you backhand it or shoot it from the right flipper, feels good. It's a good, like, nice thunk. You landed in there. There's something to be said about when you hit a shot and how does it feel. Right. Which it's, you got to, until you shoot it, you won't know what I mean. Right. That turnaround horseshoe, like, super jackpot, those three shots there, it's a cool design. Yeah. Like, I like how this game shoots overall, so don't let my kind of criticisms dominate. Like, I think it's a good layout. Yeah, I like it. It's trying something new and it's achieving an interesting layout that is still fun to shoot and it's not your standard fan layout. I always appreciate that. It's not just like, oh, here's your two ramps and a bash toy. Have fun. Here's something new and interesting and find your way around this play field and give you something new to explore as a player. Penn Island asks, wait, this is the first take, right? No, this is the actual, not impressions. It's the review as seen by the intro. I think you're joking, but I'm glad you bring it up because right now. You can never clarify enough, really. You can't. If you're just jumping in, if you skip ahead in the video a little bit, review. It also says in the screen title, this is a review. Okay, but thanks for confirming.
    135:50
    Rules. Man, what do you think of the rules? This is kind of a straightforward mode-based game. So, you know, I'm not, I don't own this game. I haven't, you know, spent hundreds of games on it. But, you know, you get your modes, start the modes, finish the modes, go to a wizard mode for that. Then you've got the kind of multi-balls, which are, you achieve the multi-balls by hitting off the center dong shot, as Kevin calls it, whatever the guy's Mandalorian ship is called. Yeah, that's the ship. There's the target on the right there. You hit that shot a lot, then it starts a multi-ball, then you hit that shot again. and then it starts to hurry up. Yeah, then you shoot that ball again, and there's like three multi-balls associated with that plus a bunch of hurry-ups, and then there's a wizard mode associated with completing all that. And then the other objective in the game is going up to that mini upper play field, completing all those a number of times, and then you go to the wizard mode. So there is, in some ways, a lot to do on this game. You've got a lot of modes. You've got the multi-balls, and you've got the mini play field thing. There's some multipliers in the game which, as far as I can tell, are very reasonably done. Not getting into the realm of crazy. So I think the rules are pretty good. In general, they're not terrible. I think from my understanding of it is it just seemed like it kind of gets into grindiness. The grind comes from a couple things. One, the way I've been playing this game is that there's that center shot, which is very safe. If you watch me in the video of that tournament, I hit it up there, and I trap it, and I hit it up there again, and I trap it. Right? Like, you're – I don't know if I'm missing some things by not setting up, like, some awesome multipliers. But in just time, in terms of progressing through the game, I'm just kind of getting into a multiball, starting a mode, playing it that way. And then also the grindiness seems to be all that mini playfield where it's, like, you've got to have the mini playfield lit. You've got to hit that shot, hope you get on the flipper, hope you can get some wax on it. First of all, if it dribbles out, then you've got to do that again. Or if you even get a couple shots on it, it quickly falls out. So this game gives me sort of some grindy Sopranos vibes to it. I think Sopranos is a fun game, but it becomes kind of a grind fest as you get to the latter part of the game and you're just trying to get this one thing done and you're trying to hit this one shot over and over again, do this one thing. And I think it kind of gets really bogged down into the mud where it's like, I like playing this game on location, it's cool, but I can never see myself owning this game, at least at the type of player I am, my skill set, right, in playing pinball for 10-plus years. Yeah, my best game on it was around $700 million I scored, and I had gotten everything done except for the encounters, which is the shoot the left ramp, get it up top, try to hit the targets on the mini play field. I was just like, I got so close. I was like, you just do it over and over and over again. And to me, that's not fun. It's like, even with like the Razorcrest, like shoot the Razorcrest a hundred times. It's like, it's not inventive rules. It's easy to understand, but it's for, to me it was a very like mid-level overall rules package. It's not like Monsters, right? Monsters is bottom, super basic.
    139:27
    You're going to get the wizard mode the first time you play it, probably. This is somewhere in the middle. It's not like Jurassic Park or Avengers with tons and tons to do. This is somewhere in the middle.
    139:40
    It's fun for what it is, like Nick said. I like playing it on location. I like this more than I'm trying to think. Like, it's like, I'm very, like, mid-level on a lot of this. Like, the art's really good, but, like, the rules are okay, and, like, the shots are really good, but, you know, the art and the sound is kind of meh. So it's like there's pluses and minuses all over this game. But gameplay-wise, rules-wise, it's fun. But I don't see there being a huge update to this in the future. Maybe it'll get like a Dwight Sullivan Ghostbusters update at the end, but that ended up making the game even worse in my opinion. So for what, and you got to buy the game for what's there now. So for what's there now, it's fun. It's not great. Yeah.
    140:30
    Ben, a.k.a. Kroom Kenny says, I feel like Mando is more about building up the multiplier and then cashing in some big mojo. So I am, I've always addressed this game by trying to play through it. so maybe that's it and maybe that's being lost on me I think a good game is when you can build up the multipliers kind of naturally like think Walking Dead you build up the multiplier by making shots and you can make like kind of any shot in the game to build up the multiplier right Led Zeppelin you're building up the multiplier by just hitting shots you would normally hit if you have to focus on specific shots in this game to build the multiplier and then suddenly you're stopping to do what the objective of the game is to build that up I don't think that's bad, but I don't know. Maybe as the type of player I am, it doesn't do it for me. Like I said, I don't know this game well enough in terms of the multipliers and that to really comment too deeply on it, but I can talk about how you play through the game, and the play through the game breaks down into a grind fest later on into it. Yeah, I agree. All right, so what do you think last ability-wise for Mando?
    141:40
    But for me, I could see, again, this is the game, I could see getting old. I mean, I almost got to the end of the game already, only playing it like 20, 30 times. So in my opinion, it's not going to have the last ability in the home that I would like. I always like having something more out there that I can do or a different way to play it to get me to buy a game, drop new in box money and make possibly trade out a game I really like to make room for it. It's got a crush on all levels.
    142:19
    I don't see the last ability there for this one. Yeah, I don't either. I think it's a good game to play on location. I like playing the game.
    142:30
    I just don't want to own the game. I don't It doesn't seem like I want to jump into another game after playing a game. There are points in the game where I feel like I'm doing more work than just having the fun of playing it and hitting the shots in it. So not a bad game, but last ability, unless maybe you're a huge Mandalorian fan or something like that, then it's not there for me. It's not there for me. Not terrible by any stretch. So Penn Island says, I guess we can both play this game. Rank Avengers Affinity Quest Led Zeppelin, Mandalorian, please for this Noonbox turn buyer Kevin, go ahead I mean, I haven't played Avengers much, but it's the game I'm most interested in, so I'd probably put that first and then Mando and then Zepp at the bottom So I've played Avengers Affinity Quest probably 10 to 20 times I've only played the pro of Avengers Affinity Quest so I would rank it Led Zeppelin Premium specifically which might be cheating a little bit but I don't think it changes things that much but Led Zeppelin Premium then Avengers and then maybe Mando I would probably do it that way I don't know Avengers is a weird game I have a weird feeling about Avengers the weird thing about Avengers is the more I play the game the less I like it and that's never good and then Chromecandy and Chad had a different ranking. So, goes to show opinions are objective. I love when people own all of them, so let's read his. He owns all of them. He can say the best. He sort of has no horse in the race, right, when you own them all. That's the most interesting thing. What if you don't own any of them? No, that's good. That helps, too. He's spent more time than you and I on all of these. Let's be honest. There's something when you have it in a home environment, you can dig down. He says Led Zeppelin, Mando, and then Avengers Infinity Quest. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. So, like, Ben, it's weird. Again, like, every time I play it, like, when I first played Avengers Infinity Quest, I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing. And then the more I play it, it's just like, I don't know, it loses its sheen, like, remarkably fast, whereas, like, Mando hasn't lost that. Like, I guess I kind of would rather play Mando these days than that if I had to pick one of the two. Oh, man, do you know what I just realized? We never talked about L1's next game. We're talking about these L1 games next. We can talk about it after the review. Let's do that. It'll be a spoiler at the end.
    145:00
    All right. So I guess that brings us to our ratings of it. So let's go to the old Buffalo Pinball website and scroll you down here and give you our rankings. So here you can see, like, this is our podcast page. And you can listen on Stitcher and Amazon and all that stuff now. So I just updated that. So our rating key, 0 to 2 is a burn it. 3 to 5 is an expensive nightlight. 6-8 is a solid game. 9-10. Get your wallets out.
    145:30
    Who wants to go first? I'll go first. Okay. I give it a 7.5. So that falls into a solid game. Not terribly remarkable, but it's a solid game. There's a lot of good merits to it. I can see why people like it. Again, it's like I see this on location. Happy to put some money in and play it. Will I be there playing it an hour from now? unless I'm having an hour long game probably not but it's not a bad effort by Stern I think there's definitely things to applaud in it it's just it doesn't rise above that seven and a half like into even remotely by territory for me I think it's a seven for me it's a fun game like we said I don't need to recap the whole review but there's a lot I like about it but there's a lot that's just kind of like eh too so it's like you know it's good not great it falls into the good not great category as far as i'm concerned all right so that's our review of mandalorian by stern all right so i had teased that um there was a little nugget about keith ellen's next game since we've been talking about avengers and all that um but according to the uh stern insider pinball podcast george gomez said keith ellen's game is coming in september and his quote was the september game is going to knock you on your ass. Wow, George. The September game, which is an L-Wing game, is just... I haven't seen anything like this in a while. Wow. Okay.
    147:00
    I mean, it's like Gary Stern. What's your favorite Stern game? The one that's on the line right now. Sure. So you've got to take it with a grain of salt, coming from the company. But, I mean, George Gomez, he's made some great games. He knows a lot about good game design. That's high praise. And, you know, he's got a good record, a good track record. The rumor is that it's going to be Godzilla. It's a cool theme. It's not like I'm a Godzilla guy, like some people are, but that's a theme that sounds good to me. Let's have an awesome Godzilla game. That's cool. Stern did Godzilla in the late 90s. People liked that game still today. There wasn't a lot of us. Let's see. Maybe there's some homages to that. Yeah, because Keith is a huge fan of that game He is, isn't he? I thought so Yeah, so I bet we're going to see a nod to that and maybe some of the good elements of like the revamped one We haven't done a game where there's all that multi-ball stacking like that for those huge jackpots like Bram Stokers or like that Godzilla, very similar in that vein I have no doubt that Elvin's going to deliver on a good layout where the doubt comes in place, who's doing the coding and the presentation.
    148:19
    And, yeah, I mean, Avengers Infinity Quest, which we'll review one. I don't know how to review that game. I just really, I almost want it in my home so I can just really just bang my head against it. But, like, again, I'm not rallying against Avengers Infinity Quest, but I'm just it's kind of a weird, I'm just kind of reflecting on it. It's like, man, I just like it less and less. I see why people get rid of it. I see why they love it at first and get rid of it. Like, I get it. call outs and sound are so lacking in that game. It's just like that's rough. And now that there's a new Elwynn game on the horizon, it makes me less interested in Avengers, if that makes sense. Oh yeah. It's just like, let's see what's next. Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what he puts out there. Alright.
    149:01
    I think that's it for this episode. If you haven't yet, be sure to follow us on social media. We're Buffalo Pinball on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. You can check out archives of the old videos and streams that we do. We're on Facebook in a group, Buffalo Pinball. And I just put down below us, I put Discord. It's down there instead of Steam now because we don't really do anything with the Steam group. Oh, yeah. Discord.gg slash Buffalo Pinball if you want to join us in there. And maybe you'll see Jay occasionally in there too. He offers financial advice for free. By the way, there's a style of two and a half hours. Get your wallets out. Throw some love. You can PayPal us at buffalopinball2mail.com. Let us know you love us. You can donate through Twitch. You can subscribe. You can do all that good stuff. You can throw a comment down below, right? We didn't say it's your boy Nick Lane this month. We didn't. If you made it this far, leave us a comment and say, I heard the whole podcast and it sucked or it was great or you guys were totally wrong or I totally agree. Why don't you guys do this? We'll give you kind of a question that was posed to us in the chat in the comments section. If you played all three games, you might want to elaborate how much time you spent on it. The context is good, but Avengers Infinity Quest, Mandalorian, Led Zeppelin, put them in order. Rank them. There is an objective rank, and you must rank them. Rank them in your head. In your head. Awesome. Board Game Brew, I'm sorry. There's really a lot I'm swearing this holiday. I think I make it. I'm disbalanced in the universe between last month. Yeah. You were pretty fired up. All right. So that's going to do it for the month. Don't forget, if you listen to us on your podcast platform of choice, you can drop a review. and it helps other people discover the show. And share it with a pinball friend of yours who you think may like it as well. So until next time, have a good month, and we'll see you on the streams. All right.