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Timings on the Mind (TotM Talk)

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·49m 26s·held·Feb 1, 2016
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.030

TL;DR

TotM tournament hosts seek community feedback on year-long Pinball Arcade series future amid declining participation.

Summary

Chris and Jared discuss their Table of the Month (TotM) tournament series for Pinball Arcade, reviewing a year of play and soliciting community feedback on future direction. They announce tournament results, discuss declining participation and player fatigue, and present five options for continuation (switch to Zen Pinball, restart PA, mix both platforms, community-curated themes, tournaments-only, or stop entirely). They also cover recent Farsight EM releases with technical improvements like dynamic lighting on Eldorado and physics differences versus City of Gold reskin.

Key Claims

  • TotM has completed one year (52 weeks) of Table of the Week tournaments with only 13 more tables needed to finish Season 4

    high confidence · Chris Friebus states: 'we've done now a year's worth of table of the week 52 tables boys and girls...we only have, I believe it's 13 more tables to go, and that'll catch us all through Season 4'

  • Tournament participation and engagement have been declining throughout the series

    high confidence · Chris notes: 'the size of our tournaments has been decreasing with how many people have been playing. The comment threads on Table of the Week, having been as active...I've heard from various players making comments of basically just like, hey, I don't feel like playing anymore...I'm burnt out on TPA'

  • The custom tournament software created by Ksenia allows tournament results to be posted in under 15 minutes via copy-paste

    high confidence · Chris states: 'all i do is copy and paste drop it in and Ed Boon it's done i mean i can literally get the entire tournament posted in its finalized format within 15 minutes'

  • El Dorado now has GI lighting effects that blackout the table when tilted, unlike the City of Gold reskin

    high confidence · Chris explains: 'on the Eldorado table, the El Dorado, they've put in some lighting effects...if you tilt the game, the whole table goes dark' and 'the drop targets don't behave the same way' as City of Gold

  • Slick Chick EM has nine pop bumpers, among the highest on any pinball table

    medium confidence · Chris states: 'Slick Chick has nine, according to Pimblewiz' and notes this is 'up there' in terms of pop bumper count

  • Zen Pinball on Android now offers Marvel pinball bundle packs at discounted rates (approximately $5 off in Australian dollars)

    high confidence · Jared reports: 'they had a software update...Marvel Pinball Bundle...instead of paying $22.28, you pay $17.99. So you get $5 off'

  • Pinball Arcade's Fireball physics do not allow proper flipper zipping technique that works on real machines

    high confidence · Chris notes: 'the key to playing that game is to have the flipper zipper...but the physics on tpa don't allow you to do that at the moment'

Notable Quotes

  • “we've done now a year's worth of table of the week 52 tables boys and girls...we only have, I believe it's 13 more tables to go, and that'll catch us all up through Season 4”

    Chris Friebus @ ~00:22:15 — Core announcement of TotM milestone and remaining roadmap

  • “I didn't feel like playing anymore, or I've had my fill this, or I'm burnt out on TPA...I just kind of wanted to take everybody's temperature”

    Chris Friebus @ ~00:25:00 — Acknowledges player fatigue driving the community feedback survey

  • “I become obsessive during that week and that's all I wind up doing. And it just is not a week well spent”

    Chris Friebus @ ~00:25:45 — Personal motivation behind creating TotM as alternative to Farsight's tournament format

  • “all i do is copy and paste drop it in and Ed Boon it's done i mean i can literally get the entire tournament posted in its finalized format within 15 minutes”

    Chris Friebus @ ~00:36:00 — Demonstrates efficiency of current tournament software versus previous manual methods

  • “I'm never playing City of Gold again. Who knew that a reskin was such a valuable reskin?”

    Chris Frevis (paraphrasing community feedback) @ ~00:52:30 — Strong community reception to mechanical differences between Eldorado EM and City of Gold

  • “if you tilt the game, the whole table goes dark...for us on mobile who don't have any sort of environmental lighting effects, It's a big difference”

    Chris Friebus @ ~00:48:00 — Highlights meaningful technical improvement in Eldorado EM lighting effects

Entities

Chris FriebuspersonJared MorganpersonBlahCade PodcastorganizationPinball ArcadeproductTable of the Month (TotM)eventFarsight StudioscompanyZen PinballproductEl DoradogameFireball EMgameCity of Gold

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Declining tournament participation and diminishing comment thread activity in TotM series over the year, with players reporting burnout on repeated digital table play

    high · Chris notes: 'the size of our tournaments has been decreasing with how many people have been playing. The comment threads on Table of the Week, having been as active...I've heard from various players making comments of basically just like, hey, I don't feel like playing anymore'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Hosts conducting formal retrospective survey with five alternative directions for tournament continuation, demonstrating commitment to community feedback in product iteration

    high · Chris states: 'I put up a poll...I encourage everybody to go over to Pimple Arcade Fans Voting it...I'm going to leave the poll open for a month Before I make any kind of decisions'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Farsight Studios implementing lighting effect improvements in Eldorado EM with GI blackout on tilt, addressing visual deficiency in mobile pinball representation

    high · Chris reports: 'on the Eldorado table...they've put in some lighting effects...if you tilt the game, the whole table goes dark...for us on mobile who don't have any sort of environmental lighting effects, It's a big difference'

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Eldorado EM ruleset differs meaningfully from City of Gold reskin, with drop targets behaving like original (requiring all targets reset before reset) versus reskin (per-ball mechanics), improving gameplay authenticity

    high · Chris explains: 'the drop targets don't behave the same way...you do have to have to drop all the drop targets, both lower and upper, before they'll reset' versus City of Gold allowing partial progress retention

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.148

0:00
This is a Blockade Podcast with your hosts, Chris and Jaren. wizard amusement.com the site to visit for custom pinball shooter rods easy to install totally unique mention blockade podcast for 10 off your order wizard amusement.com sales restoration customization
0:44
You are listening to The Blockade Podcast. I am your host, Chris Frevis, aka Shut Your Trap. Joining me as always, my co-host, Jared Morgan. G'day, mate. How are you? Doing well. We're having a rare rainy day here in Southern California.
1:03
That's good to hear. I like to hear that you guys are getting rain over there. But we are having a very hot day here, what's planned to be. It's supposed to be about 35 degrees Celsius over here, which is over 100 Fahrenheit.
1:18
And we're predicted to get up to 40 this week, which is definitely over 100. I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit, but it's hot. Damn hot. Do you have the – where you're at? Is there humidity?
1:32
Yeah. It's like walking in a steam oven. It's great. Yeah. That makes it wonderful. Yeah. This is pretty typical this time of year. We just get roasted and steamed. So it's a little bit like being in a KFC oven. So here's a question for you that obviously you can answer and I've not understood. So you guys get the jellyfish out in the ocean. Yes. And to be where it's a big thing of don't go swimming. And it happens during the summer. Yeah. Like when you would want to go in the ocean. Yeah. Well, there's up north, up the north end of Australia. It's a tropical region, and there's a particular type of jellyfish called the Irukandji that likes to hang around up there, and there's a box jellyfish as well. Both of those species are very small, and it seems that with jellyfish, the smaller they are, the more intense the pain threshold is on them. So, yeah, there's areas of beach up there in the more popular areas that are actually got jellyfish nets that are very small, and they will filter out most of them, but some of them will get through. You know about it if you got stung by one. I've never had the displeasure, but it's incredibly painful, searing pain like you've never felt before. And then you got to piss on it.

  • Poll on Pinball Arcade Fans has received 27 votes so far and will remain open for one month before decision-making

    high confidence · Chris states: 'I put up a poll...We've had 27 votes so far...I'm going to leave the poll open for a month Before I make any kind of decisions'

    • game
    Slick Chickgame
    [name withheld pending review]organization
    Kseniaperson
    Pimblewizperson
    Voofperson
    Switch3Flipperson
    Captain Bizarreperson
    PinballWiz45Bperson
    Medieval Madnessgame
    Star Trek: The Next Generationgame
    ?

    product_concern: Pinball Arcade physics engine cannot replicate flipper zipping technique crucial to real Fireball EM play, limiting competitive accuracy and mastery progression

    high · Chris notes: 'the key to playing that game is to have the flipper zipper...but the physics on tpa don't allow you to do that at the moment...it's a bit of a physics foible in fireball'

  • $

    market_signal: Zen Pinball implementing discounted bundle packs for Marvel tables on Android platform, creating value perception and reducing friction for new/returning players

    medium · Jared reports bundle pricing: 'Marvel Pinball Bundle...instead of paying $22.28, you pay $17.99. So you get $5 off' plus additional bundles at similar discounts

  • ?

    operational_signal: Custom tournament software dramatically reduces administrative overhead from 1.5-3 hours to 15 minutes per tournament cycle, enabling sustainable long-term operation

    high · Chris states: 'the first uh two tournaments...taking me three hours after a tournament it was over to compile all the scores...the software made it nice for me...I can literally get the entire tournament posted in its finalized format within 15 minutes'

  • ?

    community_signal: Release of original Eldorado EM generates strong community preference shift away from City of Gold reskin, validating importance of authentic ruleset implementation in digital ports

    high · Chris paraphrases feedback: 'Everybody is saying the exact same thing. They were like, I'm never playing City of Gold again...And now I got to go through all that again. It was it was a very large frustration factor for me'

  • ?

    content_signal: BlahCade implementing new feature allowing community Q&A questions in live chat with dedicated thread, improving audience engagement and discussion quality

    medium · Chris mentions: 'we found this cool feature on Blab where you can actually ask questions in the chat and they get sort of pushed into a new area...we've been having fun with it this morning'

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Tournament organizers considering mixed-platform approach (Zen Pinball and Pinball Arcade) to maintain engagement, suggesting platform availability constraints affect community participation

    medium · Chris outlines option: 'let's do Zen table of the week next because there's a buttload of Zen tables that can be gone through' and notes iOS players cannot purchase season passes until all tables released

    • 2:51
    No, that doesn't work. What? We've been lied to? They say that the remedy used to be you pour vinegar on it, but I don't think that's actually the remedy anymore. It's something else that you pour on it now.
    3:06
    Either way, you get those tentacles off as soon as you can. And because the box jellyfish, its venom is actually a neurotoxin, I think. So it's a weapon. It's an advanced weaponary. Weaponized jellyfish. It's pretty nasty stuff. Now, am I correct, though, that it is you have seasons of jellyfish? Like there's certain times where they're not in the water or is it year round?
    3:32
    Blue bottles, which are another type of jellyfish. they sort of sweep in usually around summertime and they're carried by the wind they're sort of like a jellyfish with a sail on the top basically so they're like the pirates of the jellyfish world they just drift around looking for a casual breeze and then they'll get blown on shore and there's a big um yeah they close the beach all these little blue bottles wash up on the beach and you sort of you can step on them um and they pop so if they're washed up but you've got to be careful not to tread on their tentacles because then you're going to have a bad time. Yeah. They're not as bad as the box jellyfish, but they're still pretty painful.
    4:12
    And once again, this has been this week's edition of Everything in Australia Wants to Kill You. Welcome to Australia. Please come again.
    4:20
    Yeah. Makes me wonder, what would a jellyfish pinball table be like? I mean, would it be like just pop bumpers everywhere? it'd be pop bumpers everywhere and um long ramps it's like habit rails that just go everywhere and like in and out of the back wall and like all over the place and they have to have accelerated magnets on them so you could actually go the whole length of the habit rail it'll just yeah maybe maybe the uh maybe the table itself has a little uh electrical feedback in it so you know when the little you know you gotta take your hands off the off the flippers and you know that's the challenge coming through the lockdown bar yeah because that had sold millions of tables with it that'd be great get on that well yeah well they had those uh machines uh back in the day that were you know how long can you grip the handle for you know they're just vibrators yeah right so it'd be the same thing right you know it's a little extreme pinball there was that one elvin g pinball i think it was garage band that actually yeah we just talked about that yeah we Yeah, I talked about that last week. Not electrical feedback. It didn't shock you or anything. Feedback, forced feedback, which is pretty cool. So you could do it. You just hook up one of those massive vibrator motors that they have on the Gottlieb Premier tables, which are incredibly powerful, and just run those through up the top through like a solid bar, and then transfer the vibration directly up to the lockdown bar. And the glass. I still want electrical shock. I want it to be electrical. we were talking about at the pinball show that there was that smell of ozone yeah little cinch flesh would be come out of it looking like you got a fright wig on your hair just standing on edge yeah yeah i reckon it would be interesting concept someone doing like a mod of a table like that has heaps and heaps of pop bumpers on it already and see what they could do with that and re-theme it. I wonder what the most pop bumpers on a table is.
    6:29
    I'm sure someone could probably... That's a good question, actually. You know, because, I mean, like, Adams has the five right there together, but then you get a table like... On what I'm thinking... Slick Chick. Slick Chick actually has... It's an old EM, and I think they might be passive bumpers, but there's actually, like... No, I'm talking active. Slick, Chick, and there's like in a cross. Yeah, nine. Slick, Chick has nine, according to Pimblewiz. So that's pretty up there. That is up there. Because I was thinking, am I thinking Whirlwind that has six?
    7:01
    Is that correct? Yeah, it is true. It has heaps. Yeah. I wonder what the most is. That would be interesting. Where's our statistician?
    7:12
    Stats. We need stats. That's Pimblewiz. He's probably Googling it as we speak. Right? Exactly. Yeah, we should ask ourselves a question in the chat room.
    7:24
    For those not listening to, not joining us on Blab directly, we found this cool feature on Blab where you can actually ask questions in the chat and they get sort of pushed into a new area.
    7:35
    So if you've got a specific question, it doesn't get lost in all the general message area, and we've been having fun with it this morning. So, yeah, we should ask ourselves a question. fun and that we've asked one question each just to try it out hey that's um it is it's good yeah you know hey uh why don't we real quickly talk about the tournament that was just happened this weekend uh yeah that'd be the the tournament of the month yeah it was the final of the season this was our sixth one um give you some results here uh winner of the tournament uh for this month. We played Star Trek Next Generation, T-Dolph, Earthshaker, and Terminator 2.
    8:21
    And Voof took top spot, 49 points. Switch 3 Flip took second with 48 points. And Captain Bizarre took third with 44 points. And that did change because Switch 3 Flip didn't enter his score in correctly. He kind of forgot the last three digits. So he went from having the lowest score of Terminator 2 to having the highest score. Decimal points. They're important. They matter. Going from scoring only 1 million to 1 billion, it does make a difference. Yeah. It's really hard to score just 1 million on T2. I thought about that as doing a tournament of who could score the most.
    9:10
    Yeah. Yeah, you'd have to select certain tables where it scores no matter what, but when their ball drops, it is going to hit something on the way down. So it can't be one of those where I dipped it and it didn't hit anything and I did it twice and then it drained and I got zero points or whatever the minimum bonus is. It'd have to be something fun like that. You could do it on something like Brada Pinbot where you can plunge for a really low skill shot value and have it go into the pops. Right, and then it's going to go to the bobbers. Exactly. Yeah, that would be the random part. There would be select tables that you would do that on. That would be kind of fun to, I think, maybe. I don't know. I think it would be kind of cool. Talk about short games.
    9:51
    It would be, yeah, it would be kind of cool. 30-second games. I like short games. It would be for the tournament for the time poor.
    10:01
    What would that abbreviation be? Right, right. And for the season. And so coming in at third place, Great Dane, he had 220 points. Coming in in second place, Switch3Flip with 222 points. And then blowing everybody completely out of the water was PinballWiz45B with 270 points. I mean, that wasn't even close. No.
    10:25
    As for myself, I took eighth place at 201 points, and Jared, you took 10th place at 194 points. I still managed to clean in there at 10, so that's okay by me. That's right. Because we've got some pretty good pinball players in our little mini tournament. So I'm quite happy with bringing up the rear there at 10th. So that's good. Now, that means next month we will be starting from scratch. Everybody will be at zero points. There will be no seating, no top 10 players to knock off and get their bonus point from anything like that. Everybody starts from scratch. that though has so we've done now a year's worth of table of the week 52 tables boys and girls for those that are math challenged although there were some weeks that we skipped so it wouldn't be quite 52 there was one or two times that we went ahead and skipped because otherwise yeah there's been I mean we just actually did a skip week this past week so that's basically because otherwise we get sometimes too far ahead of tables compared to when the tournament is and sometimes it's also that I forget to post a table at the week and go oops oh sorry Larry I guess this will be an off week but anyway I decree it to be an off week thank you very much for coming but what we do wind up with is that we only have, I believe it's 13 more tables to go, and that'll catch us all up through Season 4. We won't be playing any Season 5 tables for Table of the Week, because that's kind of not the purpose of it. It's not to play the newest and greatest. It's to go back through the archives. Go back through the archives, and on top of that anybody that on console doesn get They don get any of the newer tables No they don Or if you like me and still haven purchased the season I still don have any of the newer tables
    12:29
    Yeah. Are you waiting for it to... You're only playing exclusively on Steam now, right? Yeah. It's available now. Season passes are available on Steam. Oh, absolutely. I don't have a good reason other than I haven't felt like forking over the money yet. I just, you know, have had other things that I've purchased and didn't extend it.
    12:49
    Of course, we've got to bear in mind those folks that are on iOS that just simply can't buy the season pass until all the tables are released in it, which is so annoying. I really feel bad for those guys because it's a shoddy deal, but it's not what you can do about it. It would be the ultimate impatience. I don't think if I was on iOS I could do it. I'd have to buy the tables each week and just cop the extra yeah i don't think i could wait i just don't so with that in mind knowing that we only have essentially three months left of tables before it's uh you know we're done with what we have um i opened up a thread on pimble arcade fans that was uh basically what would you like the future of table of the week turning of the month to be um options for continuing table of the week because the size of our tournaments has been decreasing with how many people have been playing. The comment threads on Table of the Week, having been as active, I can kind of tell there's a lot of fatigue.
    13:52
    I've heard from various players making comments of basically just like, hey, I don't feel like playing anymore, or I've had my fill this, or I'm burnt out on TPA, you know, whatever. so I just kind of wanted to take everybody's temperature because you know see what people are feeling it's always good to sort of do a bit of a retrospective at the end of anything we do it all the time in business and stuff when we're doing projects and it's always good to just sort of take a step back and go so what do we actually think about this do we still like this right because again this whole thing started strictly because when I went on to Steam it was like oh man I gotta retract all the wizard goals no but it was I couldn't care less about the tournament because I was burnt out on Farsight's tournament.
    14:38
    I don't like the way... I don't like the 20-minute play unlimited amount of times. Grindfest. It's a grindfest and the same people dominate every single time. You feel like you have no chance of topping them. And their scores just get ridiculous and it just is not fun. And for me, I become obsessive during that week and that's all I wind up doing. And it just is not a week well spent. So I don't, I didn't, I wasn't missing the tournament aspect, but like I said, my, my whole thing was, it was, oh crap, I got to do all these wizard goals again. And I tended to bounce around on various tables and they're always the same tables. And it was like, you know, getting me to do a table, say like going nuts would be pulling teeth, which by the way, I didn't do any of the wizard goals on because I didn't want to play the table. For 250 seconds on the clock, I'd rather shoot myself in the face. Right? Like, sorry. But there were other tables. That's such a nasty wizard goal. Whoever did those wizard goals should be shot in the head. Right. But for a table like Medieval Madness, which I do enjoy, getting those last two wizard goals, it was like, oh, I already did it on my PlayStation. Now I've got to do that again. Oh, you know, it just kind of became a slog. So that was the whole point of me doing table of the week where it was like, OK, I'm going to dedicate myself to this table and do what I can in that week. And if I can't be on that, I'll probably have most of the goals and at least I'll feel better than having no goals at all.
    16:11
    So that was the whole impetus. And then because so many people jumped on board, it was like, well, hey, why don't we run a tournament? And, you know, here we are a year later. And, you know, this is what it is. So I put up a poll And I'll just briefly run through the questions And I encourage everybody to go over to Pimple Arcade Fans Voting it We've had 27 votes so far Post your comments I'm going to leave the poll open for a month Before I make any kind of decisions Of what we're going to do Just again, taking the temps Seeing what people are feeling But the questions are That you can vote for is let's do Zen table of the week next because there's a buttload of Zen tables that can be gone through.
    16:58
    Or we could let's do Pinball Arcade table of the week all over again. So it would just be basically reopening the threads because I've closed all the threads once we're done with them. So I just reopen them up and people could do what they want with that. That's actually a very good way of reusing the threads I hadn't even thought of. that. It's a good idea. Well, that way the threads never got stale with everybody's comments, and it would be you open it up again, and it would be like, hey, I remember that thread. I was subscribed to that at one time, and throw in some comments again.
    17:31
    Then there's the option of let's mix Zen and Pinball Arcade for Table of the Weeks. And for digital pinball, a go-go sort of thing. Exactly. Digital pinball, a go-go.
    17:46
    Yeah. And that would be if we mixed it, I don't know if it would be one month of Nothing But Zen, one month of Pimble Arcade, who knows? Or maybe there's tables that remind you of similar tables, and I don't know. Like I said, this is why it's in the options. Then there is let the community put together Table of the Week themes. So let's say somebody... The Lawler set, for example.
    18:16
    Yeah, exactly. somebody wants to do a Lawler set, but not just the Lawler set, but his disaster table. So it would be, you know, Earthshaker, Whirlwind, Funhouse, which isn't a really disaster table, but it ties in directly then to Roadshow, which is a disaster table. And I mean, those were all bam, bam, bam. So, you know, or like I said, all EMs, or maybe you want to do one of the trilogies, you know, Jackbot, Pinbot, and Bratapinbot. You know, there's any, some way of making it fun. That way the table of the week aspect isn't so strong, but it's the tournament is what you're thinking about, essentially. Then there was the option of hey, why don't we stop table of the week, but still continue with the tournaments.
    19:03
    And then the last option is let's just blow this taco stand and stop entirely. And from what I can tell, no one really wants that to happen. I think they actually really from what we've seen so far the comments suggest to me because I can't see the poll results yeah but they seem overly like they want to have it continue in some way they like the fact that because I think at its heart what it does is it actually does bring the TPA community together and give them a focus which you know we've been around for a while now and I think um um having something to sort of reunite us again is kind of good yeah um if you do not feel like if you're one of the our listeners that does not like going to the tpa fans uh website please hit us up on twitter at shut your traps at jared morgan or more importantly where we probably get noticed the most at blockade uh let us know what you want to do uh continuing with turn of the week table of the month wait i did that backwards okay see this is the problem with my own acronym. I get confused all the time.
    20:11
    But yeah, just give us, just drop us a note. Let us know what your opinion is. If you're one of our players and how you'd like it to go forward.
    20:19
    There's been also some ideas with changing up the tournament format. I really don't know because right now the tournament software that I have, that Ksenia made for us works extraordinarily well. really well and it's quite specific in the way it works i mean exactly there are there are other things that i've been in the other podcasts i've been listening to there are quite good software programs out there that are meant for real pinball and i'm sure you've seen some brachylope is one well i tried one i tried some the first uh two tournaments and that was when i was complaining it was taking me three hours after a tournament it was over to compile all the scores and post and it was just yeah that was no fun for me if i had been doing that for a year i would have quit so the software made it nice for me the other one that i've seen which is actually one through on one of the podcasts i listened to called the coin box pinball podcast i've got a thing called pin portal and it's um again it is they designed it for their league that they run because these guys are like hobby operators but they they were making this thing and it's pretty nice it will allow you to do different game formats and stuff like that that what the thing that doesn't do because it's not specifically designed for forums of course as it doesn't repopulate all the the tables make all that sort of stuff nice which is probably the thing that like saves you the most time oh absolutely because all i do is copy and paste drop it in and boom it's done i mean i can literally get the entire tournament posted in its finalized format within 15 minutes um yeah and that's really nice and the quickest i was doing it previously i think i'd gotten it done in an hour and a half so the cool thing about pin portal is that it's all online so right at any point you can go on and it's basically got like a web portal um it stands up its own little web site basically and you can just go on at any time and see who's doing what so there is also historical record of what's going on as well so it's pretty nicely featured i don't know if the guys have released it outside of um the u.s yet but um it you know moving forward it might be something to think about if you want to switch up the formats because they just let you essentially it's like how do you want your format to be do you want it to be herb style do you want to be um pin golf and all those sort of different options that you see in papa tournaments yeah and you just select it and select your players and off you go so so anyway that's why it's one of those things where uh you know Polls are going to be open for a month. We'll see what people are saying then, and then I can start thinking about what to do with the tournaments beyond that. For sure, though, I will say this. We're going to stay the same as we have been for the next three months to finish out all season four. Once that is done, then it might wind up being a short season where we only do three months' worth of tables and then start brand new afresh after that or I don't know. It's one of those things where it's up in the air. So please drop us comments. Let us know what you guys are interested in because we definitely are going to value those opinions.
    23:32
    Yeah. Sounds good. Hey, I wanted to, before I forget, I wanted to mention something I saw that was new in Zen Pinball on Android. So I opened it up the other day and they had a software update. And then inside the app, you actually have these packs now. So you actually have a Marvel pack and you have a Marvel pinball bundle and a Marvel pinball bundle too. So if you were new to the franchise, you could get in the Marvel pinball bundle too. You get Thor, Marvel, The Avengers, World War Hulk, Infinity Gauntlet, X-Men, Moon Knight, Ghost Rider, Deadpool and Venom. Now that's a big pack. That's a big pack. And instead of paying, this is in Australian dollars, of course, so instead of paying $22.28, you pay $17.99. So you get $5 off. So it a little bit like a season pass that Farsight offer And the Marvel Pinball Bundle that the first round of tables that they released So that Wolverine Fantastic Four Captain America Guardians of the Galaxy Iron Man Blade Fear Itself Civil War and Doctor Strange Instead of $23.05, that's $17.99. So five bucks off.
    24:57
    Yeah, I wonder what that is in the U.S., if it's still five bucks off or if it's more. Probably about the same because I think what they've done is they've just normalized it. for the exchange rate. So it's about, you know, I don't know what that is percentage-wise, but that's about, you know. Well, that's good if you don't feel like waiting for a Steam sale. Get on that. Get on that, yeah. Yeah. I thought that was pretty cool, so yeah, I thought I'd mention that.
    25:24
    The other thing, since we're sort of on apps and stuff like that, I wonder if now might be a good idea to talk a little bit about the recent release of the EMs that Farsight put out. what do you reckon about that should we touch on that now yeah I don't have any additional comments that I've had previous week but go for it so the beta we've exited beta on Android of course because Fastlight's released all the tables and there was some interesting things come up in the beta this time around which now it's been released I can probably speak to a bit more so one of the interesting things that they've done in this beta is on the Eldorado table, the Eldorado EM, they've put in some lighting effects, sort of, into the table. So before this table, there was no GI effects on the table. So what would happen is if you've tilted the game, it would just look like it was still lit because we don't have any dynamic lighting. But on this Eldorado table, if you tilt the game, the whole table goes dark. Oh, that's what they used to do with high speed. Before DX11 came in, it was just the old lighting. They still managed to make the table go black. It was a wonderful feature. I love that. Yeah. I think this is different, though, because I don't think we actually have any dynamic lighting solution that I'm aware of. Well, no, it wasn't dynamic lighting. it was exactly what you're talking about, though, where basically all the GI light goes out and the table kind of goes dark.
    27:03
    So it was a fakey effect, but it was a really good fake effect. Yeah. And I don't know. That's a good question. You'll have to load up high speed and see if they added it to that table because that was the first one I know of it happening. I'm going to have to check that out. Yeah, right, because that would be the next logical table to put it on because that game is all about the light show. Yeah. And, yeah, it looks just very, yeah, very boring on mobile because you don't have the full-on blackout at the table. I will add that it doesn't, like when you tilt on Eldorado, of course, it doesn't really have, it doesn't dim the screen or anything. It just knocks out all the GI on the table. So it's still top-lit and everything. But it still looks really good. Like for us on mobile who don't have any sort of environmental lighting effects, It's a big difference. So go in there and intentionally tilt the table and see what you think. And then if you like what that looks like, then start sending the support requests into Farsight Studios and get them to add it to other tables you think would really benefit from it.
    28:12
    So, yeah, I was really quite impressed with that. It was quite cool to see that happen. They haven't put it in on Fireball, which I'm not sure why. Perhaps it doesn't actually... There's not a lot of... Yeah, there's not a lot of lighting effects on Fireball.
    28:29
    Because whenever you hit a drop target on Eldorado, it blanks all the insert lights. So like all the pump bumper lights, it drops the lighting on that, at least on mobile it does.
    28:42
    So, yeah, that was just something I wanted to bring up. I think there was something else as well with regard to the beta that was surfaced in the beta. So if you read the instructions on Eldorado EM, you'll know this, but if you're just basing your play of Eldorado EM off the Eldorado City of Gold,
    29:04
    the drop targets don't behave the same way. Thank God. Yeah, you've got to drop all the drop targets, both lower and upper, before they'll reset. And I thought, initially when I was doing the testing, I thought, I'll just check on that because I'm not quite sure. And sure enough, it was confirmed that you do have to have to. See, that was my main frustration with City of Gold was I would knock down nine of the ten targets and then I'd lose the ball and it all pop up again. I just went so close. And now I got to go through all that again. It was it was a very large frustration factor for me. Yeah. And just reading the quick responses that people have been talking about. Everybody is saying the exact same thing. They were like, I'm never playing City of Gold again. Who knew that a reskin was such a valuable reskin?
    29:53
    And all they're playing now is... It wasn't actually so much a reskin. It was actually, that was the original. Well, yeah, but you know what I mean. And City of Gold, yeah, is a reskin. But yeah, I think in some ways they've sort of bastardized the rule set a little bit with the EM. They thought, oh, well, because we can, we will. We'll actually have all the, we'll have the drop targets controlled per ball. But it was to the detriment of the table. Yeah. so interesting to see how they compare fireball i did see one piece of feedback on the forum about fireball which is probably worth um pointing out in the fact that the the key to playing that game is to have the flipper zipper um draw the flippers together and then do a slightly staggered flip and you can pretty much shoot the sources 100 of the time on a real table doing that but the physics on tpa don't allow you to do that at the moment they they just they don't let you do it so it's a bit of a physics foible in fireball there you go look at that it was those f's just a physics foible and fireball um that they might need to look at tuning uh if they can but yeah it might be one of those flipper angle uh deals too um it could be especially since the flippers change angles completely you know from when they're zipped versus unzipped That's true.
    31:13
    Everybody, though, has been pretty universal praise for this pack. I think it surprised some people how fun both of these have wound up being. And that was my whole point with Fireball was that it's a different playing EM that has some different features in it other than just short, stubby little flippers.
    31:32
    So it's pretty cool. I know that one of the complaints some people had was in the beta of it was when you first launched the ball on Fireball there's a skill shot up at the top where you want to just fire it a little bit short and it'll kind of loop around and then drop back down into this section when they first released it in beta the ball basically hugged the top wall I mean there was like anti-gravity and was virtually impossible to make the skill shot. So they did something weird with the physics up there where essentially all of a sudden the ball became very heavy.
    32:12
    Oh, okay. Almost zen-like. Oh, right, okay. But there was a real weight to the ball suddenly just for that section. And there were some people that complained about that. And I was like, well, but who really cares what the weight is up there? It's all about can you make the skill shot or can you not? And then the weight of the ball changes elsewhere. I'm sure it wasn't the weight of the ball, but more of the tilt, the angle that that playfield section was set to make it. But now it's actually, it took a little effort on my part to figure out the analog stick on my controller to successfully hit that. Pull that off. Yeah, because it was one of these things where it was like, I had to pull the analog stick all the way back and then slide it forward a little bit and then do a quick flick backwards in order to do it. You couldn't do it in one draw. It was really... This is my problem in general with TPA in how the plunger works on your analog stick because it's not a precise... If you pull back the exact same amount every single time and let go, it's not going to always fire it the same way. So you kind of got to get this feel to it. Pull it back to the third notch. It does vary. I've noticed that as well. Like it's like trying to do a, I have a lot of trouble doing the skill shot on brighter pin bot because of that reason. And particularly on something like taxi, the skill shot used to be really quite repeatable on that every single time. But now I've got no chance of making it repeatable. It's just all over the place. Well, and taxi should be one of those where it's the, the plunger is overpowered. You know, that should be the whole point. If you do a full plunge, that's going to go right past your hundreds out and your a hundred K and drop back down to the lower, tier. That's right. And instead it's like you might pull back and it'll only get up to the 75 and you gotta do something really special to make it go to the 100 but it's never gonna go all the way around. The same thing I would say is with Twilight Zone.
    34:14
    Any Twilight Zone you find in the wild and you play, that plunger is so light. I mean like what would normally be a full strength plunge, you know you're pulling it back away you let go and on on it's a very easy just ping you know kind of thing and there's a it's a completely different feel on the plunger compared to other pinball machines and i've actually played a toilet zone when it was first release and this particular one stock out of the out of the box has a really strong plunger in it so a really strong spring everything i've played has a very loose spring they would have put that in after the fact to make it easier yeah when they came out of the box they were a really strong strong spring on And you really, you actually had to bump the plunger to do a skill shot. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Like sometimes, yeah. Unless you just were able to get, like, it was like a fraction. I'm just doing like little fingers in the blab at the moment, as opposed to like pulling it all the way back. So, yeah. Because I mean, I've probably played, you know, six or seven different machines in the past three years. They've all had the same kind of plunger. There you go. That's interesting. that makes me wonder then if Farsights, because theirs is a prototype machine.
    35:32
    So I wonder if that's a case that they have a stronger plunger. But in general, I would just say their plungers, there should be some variances. Certain games, the plunger is very important. In other games, it's kind of like, it's a thing, you know. I'm surprised. I'm sure that it is a tunable part of the game. Surely they would be able to set spring to spring. Absolutely. it's just a question of if they care too much right before I forget the other thing that I should really mention about the EMs is I'm really disappointed about one aspect of them and that is that they haven't got EM sounds on the flippers I've raised it in the beta I've got no response back from anyone on Farsight about it and it kind of really disappointed me to go yep it would have been nice to go yep we understand that's important but we're not going to do it because reasons.
    36:24
    So that was the one big thing. And the other thing too is that on, I don't know if it's like this on Steam, but on Android, the real sounds, so the mechanical real sounds when it ticks over, are grossly out of sync with reality on the table.
    36:45
    And it just sounds terrible. It's just so jarring because everything else, there's not much on that table. And a lot of the sound effects like pop bumpers, slings, and flippers are all in what they call the sound pool on Android. So they're instantaneous. As soon as the pop fires you hear the sound there no delay But then you hear the score motors tick away like 250 milliseconds after the the actual action on the play field it like it it like it coming from the past it's like it goes from the past it's really frustrating for me to hear it and i did make the point that you know it's it's one of those things with ens there's so little going on with it that You really, really need to have the sound spot on because it's so apparent otherwise. So, yeah, that's a bit of an annoyance for me. Okay. Hey, we're going to move on to one other thing that has popped up in the past week. And we're bringing in a special guest here, PinballWiz45B, because he's all about this. And has anybody ever heard of this game called Pro Pinball? Oh, yeah. It used to be this game on PC. all the rage. Slowly putting it out again in the Ultra Edition.
    37:59
    Right, in the Ultra Edition and with all the awesome, wonderful whiz-bang lighting and everything and I guess it's just got brought up to my attention that it is available for I don't know, what would you call it PinballWiz? What are they selling it for on Steam as? Right now it's on Early Access.
    38:19
    That's not really complete yet but they're continuously adding features to make the game more complete over time. So here's the reason why I'm bringing him in, because he texted me yesterday or messaged me on Steam and said, hey, it's out, check it out. So I clicked on it and I looked and I was like, okay, great. And I was scrolling down and all of a sudden I see they want $15 for it. $15? $15 for one game, one table. It's not $15 on Android. It's something like $5. It's not something like Pinball Arcade or Pinball FX 2 where they release it all in bundles. pro pinball is basically it's basically the quality of a real life pinball table you're not going to feel it you're going to have the feel of physics anywhere else I still think that's a ridiculous price for one table I think they released originally back in the 90s they had a price point a bit higher than that actually I'm not quite sure yeah and they used to sell VHS tapes for $75 but I think $15, though. It's one of those things, isn't it? As a generation that's been brought up on mobile pricing structures, I think we're conditioned to the 99-cent app when we're looking at pricing. um and for something like um pro pinball and certain other apps as well that are out there that aren't pinball that actually give you longevity and play um 15 bucks is kind of nothing really like particularly in the case of barnstorm studios where you've got that that's like one of their primary things that they're doing at the moment that's their one tricked pony essentially so they've got to price that thing um accordingly you think about um the amount of hours if you've been following the kickstarter on that the amount of hours and rendering time they've had to spend churning that thing out and yeah but you've still got to be competitive with all the other pinball apps that are out there and the main two are pinball arcade and zen they're both charging you know essentially five bucks uh well actually pinball arcade is more expensive than Zen when you think about it. It's about $5 for one.
    40:42
    It's about $3 typically. And then Zachariah I don't know how to pronounce it correctly. They're going to come out. They're going to be the same pricing structure as that too.
    40:52
    You're great. You're wheeling out the Bentley, but when everybody's driving around on the Hyundai, you're going to get laughed at for that price. Sorry. I do get what you're saying. It is on the face value of it it's like well 15 bucks unless you're familiar with the franchise you won't get it but if you were like if you were playing pinball back in the 90s and you grew up with the four pro pinball tables you will go 15 bucks for like a completely re-rendered version of the game yeah i'm going to buy that particularly on pc which apparently will be the first to get different angles as well so at the moment there's one fixed angle uh but um they're doing renders now which you've got to remember that when they do this back in the 90s this pre-rendered concept for the game was the only way they could push graphical boundaries uh for pinball right because there was no way video cards could do like real-time rendering there wasn't even open gl back then or if there was it was very primitive so the amount the way they could do shading and stuff back then just wasn't technically possible so they had to pre-render everything so while in today's landscape with the power of GPUs and everything they've got, it's pretty easy to turn out something like Zacharia pinball from Ask Homework with a bespoke graphics engine and they can do real-time lighting effects and particle shading and stuff. But if you want to stay true to the original, which is what Pro Pinball Ultra is trying to achieve, they have to stick with pre-rendered. And that takes so many Amazon EC2 cycles to do. so it's expensive for them to do it that way but it maintains the feel and aesthetic of the game so that's why you're seeing 15 bucks as a price tag yeah good luck i don't care what techno babble you throw at me the point is is 15 bucks for one pinball table that what that look for 15 bucks i got i believe that one time 22 or 23 zen pinball tables okay that's a lot of variety for that price point you're offering me one table of that variety and if i'm not i didn't play it back in the 90s yeah so you're looking at me being in new years i have no sentimentality whatsoever to it um i i'm i don't know tough sell for you i did it's a tough sell for me i mean well think about it like this way you know we've been talking about uh currently farsight if you don't know this already has a kickstarter going for the doctor who table yeah and it's a kickstarter that is struggling it is and one of the things that people have talked about and we've mentioned it before is why not charge a premium price for premium tables Why not charge? And even with these Kickstarter tables, most people, it was $10 was their max out. And these are for real tables that people grew up with. So if that's a max out price of that, now you're asking $15 or $5 more for a table that was purely ever digital, has no licensing whatsoever.
    44:05
    Yeah, I don't know. I have a different perspective on it because I backed it as soon as I saw the Kickstarter and waited very patiently for them to deliver on that.
    44:15
    So, you know, I got it for a lot less than that because I was an early adopter. You know, if I saw it on the Google Play Store, for reference, it isn't that expensive on Google Play. Like, I don't think it's $15 on Google Play. I think it's more like $6 or $7. So I don't know why they've gone higher on Steam. I think it's $3 on my Google Play here in North America. So I wonder why $15. Is it because they're going to be doing cabinet support, or are they going to have special PC-only features? Keep in mind, at the moment, it's only one viewing angle, but the first update will likely be with the lowest view. But that will be rolled out over all platforms as well. It's not just going to be PC. And then other features like cabinet support, multi-monitor setups, dot matrix displays, a new physics.
    45:15
    Okay, so if I was a cab owner, then I'd be like, okay, thank you. This will work wonderful for me. Eventually. Because I haven't done it yet. To the casual user, it's overpriced. Sorry. Well, they'll look at, particularly in this modern age where people have mobile phones and PCs, we're talking about people that have access to both storefronts. And they'll see the same product, essentially, on Google Play for $3 or $4. And then they'll go over to Steam and go, $15? You're going to have to fill me in here, Spor. That's what happened when Angry Birds went on to PS3. you know here you got a 99 cent app that would give you the entire thing and was getting massive amounts of updates too you know like when you level updates they dropped that thing on ps3 and they were asking okay i won't say five bucks and it didn't even have half the levels that had been come out it's never been updated since i mean it was like why why in the world am i paying this much and then later on they came out with you know the i guess what you'd call the full version that had everything, and then we're asking $20 for it. I'm like, this thing is designed for my phone. I'm going to play it on my phone for virtually free, as opposed to on the console. You're offering nothing new. All you're doing is just bending people over. It's weird. Anyhow, we'll see what happens with the one on Steam. It might be that for your premium price, that might be the platform that gets the updates first or something like that. I'm not sure. It'd be very interesting to see what they say on the forum. Yeah, it might be interesting to see what they say in the forum and pose the question on the forum and then just maybe update the thread with the answer because I don't usually go to that forum very much. But it'd be interesting to get the response from the developers on that and why they priced it the way they did. All right. All right, you have your mission. Go forth and see it. Thanks for calling in, buddy. All right. Well, Jared, for a show that we didn't think that we'd be able to fill out how much we've filled it out nicely. We've just gone and filled it out with about 47 minutes of stuff. Yeah, see, I never worry about us falling short.
    47:34
    Yeah. All right, we should probably wrap it up. We shall wrap it up. So thanks again, everybody, for listening to the Blockade podcast. We do this every Sunday on blab.im. Look us up. We're usually scheduled for 12.30 p.m. on Sundays. that would be Pacific Standard Time, so 3.30 Eastern and God knows when for elsewhere.
    48:01
    But yeah, it's you get to see our ugly mugs and sometimes you get to call in and ask questions and contribute just like Pinball just did. So yeah, join us, won't you? We shall see you again next week, everybody. I have been Shut Your Trap, a.k.a. Chris Frebus. He has been Jared Morgan. and we shall talk to you again next time. See you later.
    48:27
    WizardAmusement.com, the West Coast leader in classic pinball. Makers of custom pinball shooter rods to buyer specifications. Swap out your standard ball plunger with something themed to your specific table. Installs in less than five minutes with no custom tools. Even if you don't own a table, looks great as a pinball memento to admire. Prices start at $39, but mention Blockhead Podcast and receive 10% off your order. WizardAmusement.com. Sales, restoration, customization.
    48:57
    Don't forget to leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that Blackade is delivered to. We can't prove unless you tell us how. Now stop listening and play some InBall.
    49:19
    you