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Tell Me A Story

BlahCade Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·37m 24s·analyzed·Oct 26, 2017
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.028

TL;DR

Blockade hosts discuss story-driven games and Zen Pinball's tournament success; custom machine updates.

Summary

Chris and Jared discuss their recent experiences with story-driven video games (The Last of Us, Metal Gear Solid), then pivot to extensive coverage of Zen Pinball's new tournament and matchup modes, which have dramatically increased their engagement with digital pinball. They also discuss technical challenges with Ghostbusters pinball beta on PC/Android and provide updates on a custom Jaxxed Open machine build with solenoid board issues.

Key Claims

  • Zen Pinball's tournament and matchup modes have increased Chris's weekly engagement with digital pinball significantly

    high confidence · Chris states 'The improvements they've made to this game have made me be playing the game weekly' and 'I'm only playing them in match-up and tournament mode. That's all I've been doing. Addictively so.'

  • Empire Strikes Back Zen table does not save progress on movie modes—players must restart from beginning if they fail the second half

    high confidence · Chris: 'if you only complete half of the mode, the movie mode, and you fail, next time you go to boot it up, you've got to start over from the beginning again' and 'Empire doesn't save that at all. You beat the first half and then you fail the second, you've got to redo the first half again.'

  • Ghostbusters pinball table file is 125 megabytes, significantly larger than typical Zen tables at ~30 megs, creating performance challenges on Android

    high confidence · Jared: 'It's like 125 megs for the table file whereas all the other tables are around 30 meg so it just shows you just how much stuff they packed into this ROM'

  • Ghostbusters beta on Steam/Android has memory leak issues that require closing and reopening the app to resolve jittery performance during ball loading

    high confidence · Jared: 'when you start the game first and it starts loading the ball, it gets really jittery, so you have to actually put it into background mode, bring it into foreground again, and whatever that does gets rid of the memory leak'

  • Zen is planning to bring tournament and matchup modes to mobile platforms

    high confidence · Chris: 'I just cannot wait until they bring these functions to Mobile' and later 'It's totally taking a backseat to me' referring to Pinball Arcade

  • Jaxxed Open custom machine has three auxiliary pop bumper driver boards, one of which is faulty and blowing the F11 solenoid fuse on boot

    high confidence · Jared: 'there's three pop bumper driver boards that are like auxiliary boards...one of those boards is broken and we don't know which one it is...it's blowing F11 which is the solenoid circuit every single time the game boots'

Notable Quotes

  • “The improvements they've made to this game have made me be playing the game weekly. It's incredible what this little bit of improvement with Pinball FX3 has done to my playing of the game.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~16:40 — Demonstrates how Zen's tournament features directly drive engagement and play frequency—a key success metric for digital pinball platforms

  • “I come across these tournaments where I'm like, sure, why not? I'll give it a sample. And then the next thing you know, I'm like, I've got to go better than this. I've got to beat these people's scores.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~22:00 — Illustrates the psychological motivation behind Zen's tournament system and competitive replay value

  • “Empire doesn't save that at all. You beat the first half and then you fail the second, you've got to redo the first half again. It punishes you mercilessly, basically.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~18:30 — Identifies a specific UX/game design frustration with Zen table mechanics that affects player retention

  • “It's like 125 megs for the table file whereas all the other tables are around 30 meg so it just shows you just how much stuff they packed into this ROM compared to the older sort of antique ROMs.”

    Jared Morgan @ ~38:00 — Explains technical constraints and complexity scaling for ambitious digital pinball ports

  • “Well, when Farsight used to say the machines can't handle it and we used to be like yeah sure right, maybe this is where they're kind of talking about it. They would always say that Big Bang Bar is a computational nightmare.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~40:30 — Reflects on past skepticism of Farsight's performance claims and validates their concerns retrospectively

  • “I realized how much I absolutely love these games that are very cinematic and very story-driven...It's not a big one and then you play some and then we're going to do a cut scene. Even as you're playing, it's still conveying the story.”

    Chris Frebus @ ~6:00 — Personal preference statement about narrative game design that influences his appreciation of different game types; potentially relevant to pinball game design philosophy discussions

Entities

Chris FrebuspersonJared MorganpersonZen PinballcompanyPinball FX3productGhostbustersgameEmpire Strikes BackgameFear ItselfgameMs. MarvelgameJaxxed Opengame

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: Zen is successfully implementing community tournament structures that drive repeated play and table mastery through competitive motivation

    high · Chris discovers new tables through community tournaments and becomes motivated to learn mechanics; previously would never have replayed tables absent tournament structure.

  • ?

    event_signal: Zen running weekly tournament challenges on different tables with varying formats (one-ball, normal mode, survival mode) to drive engagement

    high · Chris running Empire Strikes Back one-ball tournament (completed), Fear Itself 3-ball normal mode tournament (upcoming), with plans for future survival mode tournament

  • $

    market_signal: Digital pinball tournament infrastructure is fragmenting engagement between platforms (Pinball Arcade losing ground to Zen Pinball FX3)

    high · Chris: 'Pinball Arcade will be taking a backseat big time. It's totally taking a backseat to me.' Attributes shift to Zen's tournament features vs Arcade's sample-and-move-on model.

  • ?

    product_strategy: Zen Pinball's tournament and matchup modes represent significant engagement driver, converting casual table sampling into competitive play loops

    high · Chris reports playing weekly instead of rarely, attributing increase directly to tournament structure. Mentions being 'addictively' engaged in matchup and tournament modes only.

  • ?

    product_concern: Empire Strikes Back (Zen table) lacks checkpoint save feature on multi-phase movie modes, forcing restart on failure—identified as user experience frustration

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.112

0:00
This is the Blockade Podcast with your hosts, Chris and Jared. You are listening to the Blockade Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Frebus, aka Shut Your Trap. Joining me as always halfway across the world, Jared Morgan. Hello, everyone. I've often wondered if I shouldn't just pre-can that opening and then drop it in whenever, because I think I'm pretty consistent on that. Pretty much. Yeah, you do pretty much cookie-cutter that every single time. Sometimes I like to shake it up, but then I oftentimes will mess it up if I try and shake it up, so I don't know. You bork it, yeah.
0:43
I mean, I do good enough borking our website address. I don't need to bork anything else. That's right. Borker us.
0:53
Yeah. So I hinted about this elsewhere. I don't even know where I hinted about it, but it's been something that's on my mind since I've been laid up with the knee not being able to do much activity. That being said, I'm a wee bit more mobile, and just because it doesn't hurt so much to move around with the stiff leg in the brace anymore, but it's still limiting. I'm still spending a lot of time on the couch, which meant I think I'd mentioned that I'd started playing it earlier, but I've been playing The Last of Us on PS4. Now, this is a game that's from 2013, I believe. It came out on the PS3 first. So it's new to you.
1:34
Here's the funny thing. It's not even necessarily entirely new to me. I tried playing it back then because you know me. I'm a huge, huge fan of the Uncharted series. It's probably my favorite series on the consoles to date. It was one you were playing before TPA took your attention, basically. Mm-hmm. And since then, I've replayed the first three games, and then I played the fourth game, which is probably verging on being my favorite of the series, except for the fact that number two caught me so off guard, and that was the first one I played was number two, that it's hard to dismiss that one, because I got a nostalgic love for that one, but the fourth one was genius. Yeah. Well, so Last of Us is made by the same company, which is Naughty Dog. Yeah. And so I figured, hey, I'll like it. And so a friend of mine, a neighbor of mine had a copy of it, and so I borrowed it and started playing it, and I did not like it. Because I don't like horror games. Oh, that's a little bit too gritty for you. Yeah, there's these things called, they're infected. and basically, I mean, God, why should I bother even describing this? Everybody knows this storyline. The world has gotten infected and it's essentially zombies except for they're like fungal. Their heads turn into mushrooms, you might say.

The Force Awakens Zen table saves checkpoint progress on movie modes, allowing players to resume from the second half if they fail

high confidence · Jared: 'The Force Awakens at least saves your checkpoints for the movie modes. Because this movie mode has two modes in it. So if you beat the first half, then you only have to beat the second half.'

  • Zen's tournament structure allows cross-platform play between PS4, Xbox One, and Steam players

    high confidence · Chris: 'if you're a PS4 player, you can play in my tournament. If you're an Xbox One player, you can play in my tournament. If you're on Steam, obviously, you can play in the tournament.'

    • Blockade Pinball Podcast
    organization
    Mindu22person
    Pinball Arcadeproduct
    Naughty Dogcompany
    The Last of Usgame
    Metal Gear Solid: The Phantom Paingame

    high · Jared: 'Empire doesn't save that at all. You beat the first half and then you fail the second, you've got to redo the first half again. It punishes you mercilessly.'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Zen Pinball planning to expand tournament/matchup modes to mobile platform, which Chris identifies as potentially transformative for digital pinball engagement

    high · Chris: 'I just cannot wait until they bring these functions to Mobile. Oh, yeah. I think, honestly, Pinball Arcade will be taking a backseat big time.'

  • ?

    product_concern: Ghostbusters beta experiencing memory leak and jitter issues that require workaround (background/foreground toggle) to resolve performance

    high · Jared: 'when you start the game first and it starts loading the ball, it gets really jittery, so you have to actually put it into background mode, bring it into foreground again...to get rid of the memory leak'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Large ROM table files (Ghostbusters at 125MB vs typical 30MB) create significant performance and optimization challenges on Android/mobile platforms

    high · Jared: 'It's like 125 megs for the table file...this is going to be crucial to the game being released. It's basically a blocker before it can go out.'

    • 2:57
    And there's different kinds of infected. There's some that are relatively newly infected and so they're like crazy people going insane and they run around really fast. And then you have the next level which is called clickers and these are the ones that they can't see you But if you make any noise, they'll key into it. But when they're walking around, they just make this...
    3:20
    Sounding... It's just unnerving. And then there's these things called bloaters, which are basically like super-duper heavily infected, and they can throw spore bombs at you, and it hurts you really, really bad, and they're really, really tough to kill.
    3:39
    But the part that freaked me out with the game most was inventory management. because I was so used to Uncharted where ammo and supplies are readily available. And in this game, they're scarce. It's survival horror. It's survival horror, and you're supposed to go fairly stealthily through these things. Well, the error that I made that first time playing was I didn't... I would go stealth for maybe one or two kills, and then I'd be like, screw it, let's shoot everything! Well, then when I got to levels where you legitimately did need to shoot, I didn't have enough stuff to shoot with. Yeah. And I got to one of those points, I'm sure you've come across it in games, where you've unfortunately been saving the entire time, and you've saved yourself into a corner where you can't go forward because you shouldn't have saved earlier because you didn't have enough supplies, and now you're woefully inaccurate on supplies, and there's no way you're going to make it through the level. Yep. Because of that. Yeah, I've been there. Yeah. And so... Save regret is what I call it. Yeah. So that's what had happened. I got to this point in the game where I came across a level I just plain couldn't get past it. And so I quit it. And I was like, that's it. I'm done. I don't like it. It was freaking me out. I'm out of there. So here I am all these years later, and the game was on sale for $10, plus it came with the add-on game that they'd come out with later. I was like, I can't go wrong for that. Right? So, got it, and started playing with it, and I was feeling still that same angst, but I'd read one thing, and it basically was, you can make it throughout the game without ever even shooting a weapon. Wow. And I went, intriguing. Okay, so you legitimately can beat all the levels going nothing but stealth. So that's what I embraced. And then I also treated the whole game kind of like it was a Walking Dead episode. Yes. To try and, like, minimize me freaking out over it.
    5:40
    And I got to the point where I got to previously and stopped, and I had a full boat of health and weapons and everything else like that. I got through that level, and it's one of those things where, A, if I had have just gotten past that, I would have loved what came after. Yeah. And, B, after playing the game itself, I realized I didn't even make it a quarter of the way through the game before I quit. Oh, wow. I was essentially still in tutorial mode, you might say, where they're still introducing things and concepts of what you're supposed to do. Wow. That's a big game. Oh, it's huge. I mean, I really milked it too because, like I said, what else did I have to do but sit around on the couch? So I was searching every nook and cranny. But what was funny is you basically have two different kinds of encounters. You have encounters with the infected, and then you have encounters with other humans who have just – basically, the humans are almost worse than the infected because you don't know if you can trust them or not. At least with the infected, you know that they're bad. Humans, you're not quite sure. But it's this weird thing where if it wasn't a battle with humans, I didn't get freaked out at all. I kept my cool. I was able to combat them, and no problem.
    6:53
    And there could be like 10 of them on the screen. But when it came to these infected, if there was like three on the screen, I was like, oh, God, oh, no. I mean, this weird psychological thing that just happened. But what I wanted to mention was that after completing the game and playing the little add-on bit is I realized how much I absolutely love these games that are very cinematic and very story-driven.
    7:22
    So this Uncharted, the newest of the Tomb Raider series, the two games that have come out, they all very much are telling a story. and it's not, you know, we're going to do a cut scene and then you're going to play some and then we're going to do a cut scene and then you're going to play some. Even as you're playing, it's still conveying the story and still helping you. I mean, because the cut scenes are like all over the place. It's not a big one and then you play for, you know, an hour without one and then another one after that. You're playing for 10 minutes and here's another one and then you play a little more and here's another one. It's constantly advancing.
    7:57
    And it's just, I really, really dig that. And where it really came to sharp focus was PS4 also, this month, they've got the latest Metal Gear Solid game, which is the Phantom Pain, for free download. So I downloaded that for free. And I was playing it, and I used to love Metal Gear.
    8:16
    And Metal Gear is exactly the opposite of what I'm talking about, where it's, they'll do a cutscene, and that cutscene will last 20 minutes. Yeah. And then you'll go for a long, long, long, long, long period of time where you're playing the game, but there's not really a story happening. Yeah. And it's not holding me as much. I mean, I'm literally only on the first level, or the second level, you might say, and I'm just kind of like, I don't know.
    8:45
    Yeah, because I remember even with the cut scenes, are they actually rendered cut scenes, or are they game-generated, engine-generated cutscenes? Oh, you know what? Metal Gear has gone into game-rendered cutscenes. They're not CG cutscenes. Yeah, because that's the thing that blew me away when I first saw Metal Gear Solid 1, I think, on PS... On PS1, was it? Yeah it was a PS1 thing Yeah And even then the thing that blew me away is that they even had integration with the controller So in that first scene when the helicopter came down your controller started to vibrate with the helicopter landing And it was just like, wow, this is now next level stuff. This is how you do DualShock integration into a game. And so I'm glad to see that they still went with the game rendered cut scenes. It would take a lot of computational power to actually write that in code rather than just rendering it, though. Jeez. Wow. That's mind-blowing. But the thing is it makes it more seamless going from the rendered cutscene to actually playing as opposed to it used to be like you could pretty much put your controller down and then all of a sudden it would go from the pre-render to the game and you're like, oh, time to play again. Whereas what they're doing in this one, it was kind of funny, is they put a little symbol of your controller up in the corner of the screen to be like, yes, your turn now. You can start playing again. Right.
    10:17
    I remember this game, and it was another one of my favorites. It was a shoot-em-up on PS1 called Philosoma. And the whole idea was you were basically flying this plane around, and the killer hook with this game was that it changed the perspectives of the shooter to different perspectives that you would normally see. So it would be like a Raiden-style shooter, and then it would be a side-scrolling shooter, and then it would actually be a backwards view shooter. And then it would almost be like a... What is that Sega game that has you sort of directly behind the shooter and it like goes up and down sort of around the screen, sort of in a circle. Not Altered Beast. That's not the game I'm thinking of. It's Space Harrier. Oh, okay. Yeah, like Space Harrier style. but each transition between the games was this really nicely rendered cutscene and then you would see the aircraft sort of in the cutscene go back to the sort of central position and then the game would go and just cut open and none of the graphics were anywhere near like the cutscene and it was just so jarring to actually feel that and there were even some cutscenes in there which clearly they didn't actually link back into the game so there was like these two cutscenes back to back where really there should have been an interjection of like another game mode and there wasn't any game mode it was just like oh we've ran out of time so we'll just check this one in there because we spent so much money on the cut scenes we didn't actually have time to write the game I used to remember with Final Fantasy the first 7, 8, and 9 where it was so exciting to see those cut scenes because we hadn't seen CG like that in a game In a game, and shoot, not even really in movies. I mean, you had Toy Story. That was like it. And so these things were so amazing.
    12:14
    And then games started opening. One of the unlocks would be, oh, and you can watch all the cut scenes without playing the game. You're like, oh, that's awesome. And now if I watch it, it's kind of like, yeah. It's not impressive. It's fine.
    12:28
    Yeah, exactly. It's funny how our expectations change as technology shifts with us. Oh, yeah. Amazingly so.
    12:36
    Let's talk a little bit about Zen. A little bit. Have we ever talked this much about Zen? I mean, no.
    12:45
    This is probably the fourth week in a row that we've talked it. The only time we've talked this much about Zen is when we were doing the Zen Book Club. Which we haven't done in a very long time. No, we went through all the tables because it was a hard thing to organize. But now they've essentially done that very thing for us with the tournament modes, haven't they? They've taken all the hard work out of it for us. They've taken all the hard work out of it, and it has been... The improvements they've made to this game have made me be playing the game weekly. It's incredible what this little bit of improvement with Pinball FX3 has done to my playing of the game.
    13:25
    And it's... All I can say is they are a wild success in what they were aiming to do, which was engage the community to play with each other. and that is entirely what I'm doing. I'm not playing the games individually.
    13:41
    You're only playing them in match-up mode. I'm only playing them in match-up and tournament mode. That's all I've been doing.
    13:48
    Addictively so. Good on you, Zen. Like I said, you achieved what you set out to achieve in terms of my playing.
    13:59
    Last week, we did a one-ball tournament on Empire Strikes Back. Oh, yeah. And I thoroughly got my butt kicked, as well as a lot of other people did.
    14:10
    We had quite a few people play, and I'll just rattle off the top five. Number five was XAF Smerl. Good luck me pronouncing some of these screen names. Came in at 19.9 million.
    14:26
    Johnny 3W6 came in at 33.8 million. David 5 came in at 59.7 million. NLKEL74 came in at 67.5 million and then kicking everybody's butts Mindu22 came in at 107.7 million on one ball on Empire which is damn impressive that's a pretty big score right there because it's not a high scoring table and that means he must have completed quite a few modes on one ball and I realized because I hadn't played Empire in quite a while that the thing I hate about that table is everything is timed.
    15:07
    So those movie modes are timed and unlike what they did with some of the future Star Wars games, if you only complete half of the mode, the movie mode, and you fail, next time you go to boot it up, you've got to start over from the beginning again. Oh yes, I remember that. Yeah, it doesn't save your progress. The amount of times I've done that start mode on, I forget which table it was, one of the newer ones. I think The Force Awakens or something like that. Oh, jeez. Trying to get through that first half. Well, The Force Awakens at least saves your checkpoints for the movie modes. Because this movie mode has two modes in it. So if you beat the first half, then you only have to beat the second half. Empire doesn't save that at all. You beat the first half and then you fail the second, you've got to redo the first half again. It punishes you and mercifully, basically. It does. So because I don't feel like being punished anymore, I've already loaded up the next table. It's already in as of Saturday at about 2pm Western Pacific time. That is, we're going to be playing Fear Itself, which is probably my favorite of the marble tables.
    16:14
    And we're going to be normal ball mode, so three balls. Unless you can earn extra balls, go for it. And you are able to put in add-ons. Not wizard mode add-ons, just standard add-ons to pick. And you've got seven days to play that, so it'll be finished right before we record next week for our podcast.
    16:34
    Oh, good. We should see some nice, healthy scores on this. I decided to do the normal play instead of survival mode or whatever because I was, and this is where we're coming into how much it sends getting me to play. I came across somebody else's tournament, and it was the women of power or champions. I can't remember. one of those Marvel tables that they did with the they do, the two girl superhero tables. Oh, the, yeah. Ms. Marvel and the other one, right? Yeah, and I believe this is the Ms. Marvel one that has Squirrel Girl on it. Yes, it is, yeah. I really hadn't given that table much of a glance, and then it was in somebody's tournament, and I was like, ah, what the heck, I'll play it. And that's where Marvel's, or where Zen's got me. I come across these tournaments where I'm like, sure, why not? I'll give it a sample. And then the next thing you know, I'm like, I've got to go better than this. I've got to beat these people's scores.
    17:33
    And I wound up running the table the first time I played this thing, which was amazing, and then having my computer crash in it and not logging my score, which I was so close to being the top person. But then I booted it back up, and I was like, I am coming for you, and played the heck out of it. This time I threw in add-ons and everything.
    17:59
    By the time I had taken first place, thank you very much, I knew the table. I would have never given the table a second look otherwise. They've done this to me on very – I was playing Wild West the other day and trying to figure that out.
    18:17
    It's been working on that aspect. It's just time in front of tables. the more time you spend on the table that you're forced almost to spend on a table that you're going to learn things about it that you haven't seen before yep i remember when i i think the thing that was great about the zen book club for me was because of that very reason like we had one table two tables that we were concentrating on in fact it was one a week where we just slammed that table until we got really good scores on it And it the same motivation Like, it did the same thing, except with the new Zen infrastructure now, it makes it a whole lot easier to do that. Well, when we were doing the book club also, we only had three or four of us actually playing against each other. That's right. And it was pretty obvious if Pinball was 45B was playing, he was going to win. Yes. then it would be usually a competition between Sven and myself, and it would depend on if you knew the table, you'd smoke both of us, and if you didn't know the table, we'd smoke you. Pretty much, yeah. That was what it came down to. And the fun with this is, and it's been confirmed now, if you're a PS4 player, you can play in my tournament. If you're an Xbox One player, you can play in my tournament. If you're on Steam, obviously, you can play in the tournament.
    19:30
    So good. Man, I just cannot wait. I cannot wait until they bring these functions to Mobile A. Oh, yeah. I think, honestly, TPA will be taking a backseat big time. It's totally taking a backseat to me. It absolutely has.
    19:47
    Because it is that thing where you need motivation to come back to some of these and play it more than just, oh, I sampled it, I beat the wizard goals, I'm done with that table and I'm not really playing it again. And the fact that there's such a variety of ways to set up the tournament, you can really shake it up week to week. And that's what I'm trying to do here is I'm really going to be trying to shake it up. And I think the following week, we're going to probably be doing something in survival. But I need to find a good table for that because as some people pointed out, there are certain tables where the only way to score is to start modes. And some of those modes take longer than the 60 seconds you would need for the survival demands.
    20:33
    Otherwise, it would be like, you know, sub a million scores because you just can't run a mode. Right.
    20:41
    I'm going to have to look and see which tables are better for that. If any of you have a suggestion as to what you think would make a good survival table, not just as one person suggested, I think you should do survival while playing Doom. Yeah, that's funny, but I don't know for sure Doom is a good table to do that on.
    21:00
    Probably not. If you know for a fact of a table that doesn't require starting modes to get scorers going. I think that we'll pick that for survival mode for the next time. If you do, why don't you drop us a line either at our email address, which is blahblahblockade at gmail.com or go ahead and post it to the Blockade Twitter handle, which is at Blockade.
    21:27
    Beyond that, that's all I have for Zen because that's all I need. Yeah, that is. That pretty much wraps up Zen for sure.
    21:39
    Well, I'll be happy to have you look at the beta 2 of Ghostbusters on Android. Boy, I sure wish I could play that. You're still having troubles in Steam with it. Oh, this last go-around would be that they finally put the DMD in, and I could watch the table fly by, but if I watched the table fly by too long, the game crashed. If I pushed the start button, the game would crash. I've never been able to launch a ball yet, and they thought that they had what they called a memory leak.
    22:07
    And so they feel they patched that up and I thought that they posted a new version. I went and looked it up this morning and it kicked me back to the old version where Fathom was the brand new table. So no, I still have not been able to play this. Well, that's, yeah. Well, we're in a much better state than you guys. I think for this particular race, they're looking at Android first rather than iOS first because I've seen the iOS beta thread that, yeah, the guys are still waiting on the build. So I think we're kind of doing all the hard work for them this time because they usually do all the hard work for us. They do the major bug crunching over in iOS land just to get ahead of the release cycle. But, yeah, this time around, I think they're starting with Android, potentially because getting it right on Android is going to be harder than iOS because of the different device variants. So, yeah, it's still... It was okay on the Shield. I haven't yet loaded it up again on the Pixel XL. I think it's still suffering from that strange... I think we've actually got a bit of a memory leak as well on Android with it that they're trying to patch. It seems that when you start the game first and it starts loading the ball, it gets really jittery, so you have to actually put it into background mode, bring it into foreground again, and whatever that does gets rid of the memory leak and resets things. so they're doing all they can to try and get that done because that's going to be crucial to the game being released it's basically a blocker before it can go out to get performance at least to the point where it's actually okay and of course we still haven't got some of the graphical niceties in there like alpha panes and stuff because honestly they're just trying to get the performance working right at first this game is the biggest game from a gigabyte or megabyte perspective in the game it's like 125 megs for the table file whereas all the other tables are around 30 meg so it just shows you just how much stuff they packed into this ROM compared to the older sort of antique ROMs that we're used to on some of the games so it's huge and that's I think if it was being released on Stern Pimble Arcade that ROM would be bigger because the audio wouldn't be as compressed so it's a huge table file so yeah it's a very interesting challenge to try and get this table into a platform that originally probably wasn't designed to have it well when Farsight used to say the machines can't handle it and we used to be like yeah sure right maybe this is where they're kind of talking about they would always say that Big Bang Bar is a computational nightmare and And if that was a computational nightmare, yeah, you can only imagine what Ghostbusters is. So who knows? Maybe by cracking Ghostbusters, doing something like Big Bang Bar won't be so difficult. That's right. Yeah, it's possible. Yeah. But, geez, yeah, it's probably one of the most challenging releases I've actually had to see them try and get out. So, yeah, it's going to be, yeah, a few more cycles left, I think, before it goes out. Well, I keep on checking. I'm hoping to finally get a crack at it. It's a fun game. it's good those ghost slings man they're like the killer feature for me they're fun they're also deadly but they're fun yeah real good the other issue that I don't think this is what's causing the problem for me because other people have posted also in the beta the problem that I was having but my computer I'm running Windows 10 they just came out with a major update. A service patch, essentially, yeah, and it will not run for me because I keep on getting these error codes basically saying that, oh, you've already got an update in process and that update needs to finish before this update can happen.
    26:08
    So you're locked. So you can lock. I don't have anything else updating. So I don't know what the issue is. A buddy of mine said, oh, what you need to do is you need to disconnect every USB thing that's plugged into your computer, including your CD-ROM drive, and then it should be able to leapfrog. So I did that. I unplugged everything. No, still not the problem. So I don't know what the heck is going on, and I'm not the only one that has this issue. There's a host of people when I post the error code that pops up that they're all having the same issue. And I had this exact same problem years ago with Windows 98. When they were doing from Service Pack 2 to Service Pack 3. I could not for the life of me get Service Pack 3 going.
    26:59
    The problem is that my computer then is constantly wanting to put the update on. And so I keep on getting this message going, are you ready? So it's doing something in the background that's constantly checking and looking for the update. and it's causing my computer to hard crash more and more.
    27:18
    Which is just, and regardless of what I'm doing, I'll just be surfing on the internet and all of a sudden the whole thing goes down. I'm like, sure enough, when it pops back up, all of a sudden that little window will pop up. Hey, do you want to upgrade? I'm like, yeah, I really do, but you're not letting me.
    27:31
    Is it like you might go deep into it? To resolve the problem, you might have to actually essentially clear the cache like you put on some mobile platform. I've tried some of those things, but it's literally apparently going into safe mode and having it only do the most basic of startups of things, which it starts getting beyond me. I need my computer expert buddy to try and work his magic.
    27:58
    Hopefully they release something that they can deploy without having to go through that update system that forked Yeah Well and I guess Windows is claiming it not their fault Oh, yeah? Really?
    28:13
    Of course they are. It's a operating system, mate. My laptop, it updated no problem. Yeah, it's just the desktop. But, of course, my laptop doesn't have a printer connected to it and a router connected to it and all this other peripheral jazz that goes on to it. But, yeah, that's kind of frustrating. Yeah, that is real frustrating. I'll be doing all I could to actually resolve that issue myself because it sounds like it's just balking everything on your computer.
    28:48
    So, yeah, that would be, for me, I couldn't rest until I resolved it, but that's just me. it'd be triggering me every single day that the computer wasn't fixed. Well, when you spend about a day doing everything you can with Googling and disconnecting and searching and then you realize that entire day was just wasted then you just kind of go you know what? I'm going to see if I can live with this for a while. Yeah, I think I'll just live with that. Yeah, if you're spending a whole day on it I can understand that feeling. I've done it myself. It's very disheartening at the end of the day. so give us an update on where you are with Jaxxed Open okay so Jaxxed Open it's ready to go unfortunately we found that some of the pop bumper driver boards had a there's three pop bumper driver boards that are like auxiliary boards because they ran out of space on the main board that drive the pop bumpers independently and one of those boards is Crook and we don't know which one it is and I suggested that all I do is put one board in at a time with a fuse because it's blowing F11 which is the solenoid circuit every single time the game boots so the only thing strangely that works is the trough kick out that one must be a completely different circuit than every other solenoid because it's working but the main all the other flippers the flippers are dead the drop target bank is dead and the pop bombs are dead so basically dead so it's flipping it's it's making noise it will score um like if i do manual things um but there's just yeah no coil voltage and all i want to do is just get a whole stack of two amp fuses and just eliminate which boards are dodgy and then yeah because all it will do is take out that fuse it won't take anything else out okay um well i presume so because if it if it fails for whatever reason, it just pops the fuse. I go, okay, well, that board's crap. Throw that away. Put a new one in and see if that one's bad. And if it's not, keep it in.
    30:59
    Or earmark it and then put it in later when all the other ones are fine. So I've got like a total of the game came to two boards and one board was missing. So I've got a parts play field with three of them on there. And I put one of the parts play field ones on and that's the one that tripped the circuit. so yeah he said look just i'd prefer it if we just like left it and i'll take care of it when it comes back to the shop so it's ready to go um and i think i've just got to adjust some contact gaps on some of the um contacts or that they're dirty or something because they're just not registering um so i'm going to try and do that but i think i'm just going to leave it for now it's it's at the point where it's ready to essentially just have the last little bits tweaked on it and then it can be done. So any clue what the next table he's going to send over is? Yeah, I'm not sure at this stage. I think he's having a bit of trouble with some of the aspects of the business. So it might be a bit of a break between tables for me until he can sort that out, just the handover of the business. So I'll keep a spot available for it there. And when he's ready, he can flick another one my way. But I think the next one might have actually been our favorite El Dorado City of Gold. so in other words put that one out in the street and just let cars run over it and then it's well you know so long as it's turned off you don't have to hear that annoying music so well this one the this would be the the jack stroker one that i have would have been the only full complete game that i'd be getting the rest of them would just be here's a dodgy old cabinet and here's the playfield drop the playfield in so you have a work reek basically and do the servicing without any connection. So, yeah. And then the idea would be take it back to the shop, plug it into the actual game, like reconnect everything, and then start testing and eliminating any problems. So it really is just like servicing blind here. Yeah. And then take it back to the shop and then just do any final burn at the shop. So, you know, and hopefully that will continue. Hopefully whatever's going on there, they can work out an amicable agreement and I can start doing them again because I really enjoyed doing Jax Open. and it looks really good. Like it's way longer than the $100 I was being paid for, but I don't actually care because I got a lot of satisfaction out of actually taking the Mylar off and making it look presentable for the client. Did you bother waxing it?
    33:22
    At this stage, no, I didn't. I just put the Mylar down and I think I would have sprayed a bit of Mr. Sheen on it just to get the spin back up on it, but honestly, I was just trying to get the thing working, so it hasn't really been a focus for me. So I was just literally manually manipulating the contacts with the ball. And it's not even really level, so the thing was just drifting around, floating real bad. So, yeah, I really haven't given it a lot of, like, focus on play. When you had the play field stripped, it's like, that's the time to wax it.
    33:54
    Well, no, I just did it. I basically just – Mr. Sheen does a pretty good job for it. I don't want to actually go to the extent of waxing it. It's basically just get them out the door. Yeah. So if it was mine, yes, I would. But if it was mine, I'd probably just tripped off all the mylar rather than just the lower section. I actually done it really well. But yeah, can't do it. Got to be realistic about things. So we'll see. We'll see if there's some more coming my way. Hopefully there is. And yeah.
    34:26
    Well, some kids are having a good time there. That's right. I think they're being vacuumed up. I think we actually had enough of them, and we're just sucking them up into the vacuum cleaner. Well, why don't we let Jared go ahead and check up on them. We'll have a nice little short episode this week. So, folks, as we mentioned before, you can go ahead and contact us via email, blahblahblockade at gmail.com. Visit our website, blockadepinball.com, and there you can find past shows as well as shows notes and websites that we happen to mention. Be sure to follow us on Twitter. I am at ShutYourTraps. He is at JaredMorgz. And the show, of course, is at Blockade.
    35:09
    Beyond that, yeah, play our tournament, please. Oh, I should mention, in order to play the tournament, you're going to need to look up my name, ShutYourTrap. And some people were reporting that the tournament wouldn't pop up with just that information that you'd also need to type in the table. So again, we're going to be playing Fear Itself this week. So enter in those two pieces of information and you should be good to go no matter what console or PC you are on. That's awesome. Get flippin'. Alright, so we'll talk more. Hopefully I'll be able to have my own thoughts on Ghostbusters next week. Hopefully. I hope. So we look forward to that, folks.
    35:49
    Beyond that, oh, you know what else? I'm going to tell you right now what we're going to be talking about next week is Stranger Things because that pops up on Netflix on Friday and I guarantee I will have watched the entire thing by the time we talk about it on Saturday.
    36:02
    So, yeah, you know, get prepared, Jared. Alright, folks. I'll get those videos on, because I haven't seen a single episode of it. Oh, my God. What's wrong with you?
    36:15
    We've already covered what's wrong with me. It is available to you, though, yes? On Netflix? I'm not sure. Maybe. They don't have it available? I don't know. I don't have a Netflix subscription. oh oh that's that's okay i thought you did okay never mind no well then i forgive you yeah i have any subscription to any paid service it's just whatever they decide to dribble out to free to wear okay basically i will see i will cease my mocking them um yes all right so until next week thanks for listening bye-bye bye-bye wizard amusement.com the site to visit for custom pinball shooter routes easy to install totally unique mention blockade podcast for 10 off your order wizard amusement.com sales restoration customization don't forget to leave a review on itunes or your favorite podcast hosting service that blockade is delivered to we can't improve unless you tell us how now stop listening and play some pinball you