Welcome to the Eclectic Gamers Podcast. This is episode 20. It's October 23rd. I'm Tony. And I'm Dennis. And today we're going to be talking to you about a lot of pinball, a few video games, and probably the worst tabletop game I've ever seen. Yeah, it's going to be an exciting time. But before we get into all that, let's do our introductions. Tony, what's been going on with you? Well, I finally entered the homestretch on the Wheel of Time. Yeah. I just finished Book 12. I'm working my way through Book 13, so I'm down to two books left. The series definitely hits its stride or comes back to its... I don't want to say it hits its stride because that implies it was slow before or something like that. But it's one of those stories where the last three books are basically just a never-ending crescendo to the end, where it just keeps everything is just awesome. So that's a nice step up because overall with the series, this time and the first time I read through the series, I feel that like book nine and book ten are the two weakest books in the entire series, the ten being especially weak. it's not like it's a bad book I mean I'm not saying it's like a one out of five book but considering when most of the books are something that you would put you know as a four to suddenly get a two and have it followed by another two kind of slows things down a real chunk and then immediately goes straight to fives for the rest of the books so other than that I have been playing a whole bunch of Overwatch surprise. Yep, I'm shocked. Yeah, I know. And I've watched the first two episodes of the new season of Black Mirror, which is, so far, it's been just as good as the previous two seasons of Black Mirror. And that's a show that I highly recommend if you like kind of creepy, five-minute-into-the-future kind of Twilight Zone-ish type things. That whole entire series, there isn't a bad episode of that entire series, and a couple of them are just like heart-rendingly uh uh disturbing interesting i might have to check that one out then oh yeah no it's really really good and other than that i have not been i've been working a whole lot and being on call and unable to get songs out of my head but i think that's a fact of life for about everybody yeah it is a common problem that plagues many of us And what have you been up to? Oh, well, let's see. Since the last podcast recording, I had a birthday. So I get most of a lot of my video games I get as gifts. So I just sort of leave them on wish lists, and I rely on that to be sort of easy fodder for people to be able to get me things. So I got Far Cry Primal, which is the only one of the games I've received I have not yet actually tried. Forza Horizon 3, which I played a little bit of the Horizon 2 and liked. So I thought that would be a fun racing game. the newest Hitman game. I'm trying to play it properly and be stealthy. So far, I've been doing okay at that. What do you mean properly? I mean, Hitman is you just load up and you walk through and you wipe out half of the town to get the one guy. Isn't that how Hitman works? That's how it worked in the older games. But in this game, you don't even start with all of those automatic weapons and stuff. Those are not at your disposal, so you have to earn them. So as I'm going about, I'm trying to, I'm earning them. But generally, I go about and spend 45 minutes to an hour on a mission, and then at the very end, I get frustrated with whatever the last objective is, and then I'll just run through that one and do something really obnoxious and get me called out, and then I'll just try and make the escape before I am dropped as a character. And it's been working okay. And then Overwatch. I did get Overwatch for Xbox One, so I've been playing a lot of Overwatch up until this Friday, which is when Battlefield 1 hit, and I pre-ordered that. So the last three days have been Battlefield 1. A lot of conquest, a little bit of rush in their new operation mode. So I'm enjoying that. I got also as a birthday gift a bunch of Comet LEDs from Comet Pinball. And I'll include a link to Comet Pinball in the show notes. But I've converted firepower over. So other than a few flasher bulbs, everything has been shifted pretty much. Everything has been shifted now in the backbox and in the play field to LEDs, which I like for two reasons. One, they draw a lot less power and put out next to no heat, which is good. The plastics I've been through enough as it is. And the other is I like to play in the dark. And so incandescent light bulbs just aren't all that bright on the older games. They weren't designed so you could actually see the ball all that well in the dark. So I've doubled the luminescence of the play field compared to what the incandescent bulbs were putting out. And so that's helpful. And in the show notes, I will have a link to a little 10-second video I threw together of a side-by-side of my firepower with the incandescence and my firepower with the LEDs so people can look and see the difference. Because it's noticeable in terms of the colors that show in the art and the brightness. So those have been my primary things that are in any way entertaining. And then last week, my AC gave out. It finally rapidly vented out all of its Freon. I noticed it was working, but it wasn't cold anymore. The AC was as old as the house, so it was over 30 years old. So that was a fun $4,500 expenditure. But it's in place. They did not upgrade the circuit breaker, so I will have them back out because we need to go to a lower amperage so that the city will sign off on the permit. But other than that, it seems to be working fine. Well, that's good. And I know some of those unexpected home things tend to pop up and take huge chunks out of pinball budgets. Well, yeah, in a way. I have been preparing, especially ever since the furnace, which had to be replaced almost six years ago now, I've been setting aside money to be prepared to deal with the air conditioning because I figured it passes life expectancy. So while it was an unfortunate expenditure, I had been putting stuff aside to take care of that. But, of course, when I look at the bottom line, I'm always like, oh, well, it doesn't look like I should be buying pinballs because I just spent this much. I could have. You know, the sad thing is, is that that price of the AC doesn't buy you any new in-box game. Not shipped to your door, at least it doesn't in this day and age. Almost. Almost can get you a Stern Pro, but not quite. Speaking of that, speaking of pins and the inability to buy them because of having to buy air conditioning units, I think we should go ahead and segue into pinball. and most of our discussion is going to be about the information that sort of came out at or around Expo. But before we do that, I wanted to, as we noted in the last show, I completed what I guess my research project on American Pinball. The very top link in our show notes will be to the folder full of all of the documents regarding American Pinball. So those people that are interested in reading and looking through all this stuff and doing whatever they want with it, feel free to go at it. But I went ahead and I've recorded an audio clip that we're going to drop in here in a moment. And I couldn't get it under 10 minutes, but I got it under 11. And that will just sort of walk through those files, those documents. And so if it's helpful to you, rather than read it to just sort of hear what is the information that I am putting out there, the number of documents I'm putting out aren't all that many. So it's, I mean, it's less than 10, but they were the ones that I thought were the most relevant and it goes through things from the ownership angle of the company to how they may be acquiring their parts to how some of their finances are in terms of what they've done to draw together funds so let's drop that in here and then Tony and I we're going to come back and we're going to go into a little discussion which will segue nicely into pinball expo because American pinball was there sure they were sure they were. All right, here we go. Audio running. Over the last several weeks, I have conducted an extensive research project into American Pinball in order to try and answer some questions regarding the organization's structure, ownership, and how it is proceeding to try and make pinball machines. I have reached the conclusion of what I think I'm able to find on the public record, and so I want to use this opportunity to summarize the information I have found. In our show notes, you will find a link to my American Pinball research, so you can go over these documents to your heart's content and read and review them and get greater detail than I will be providing here audibly. I'm going to attempt to summarize these things in a clear, concise fashion. I know it could be a little dry, though, so if you don't enjoy this portion, skip it and get to the commentary aspects of the podcast with Tony and I, but let us begin. In regards to ownership, which I think is the big question regarding American Pinball, The short answer is, I don't know who owns American Pinball. I did obtain the articles of incorporation for American Pinball from the Illinois Secretary of State's office, but there's not a lot of information that's really very useful that was included in the documentation. And let me apologize up front for any names, pronunciations I'll be making here and throughout the course of this podcast. I know that Daval Vasani did register the corporation. I can tell you that it was created with 1,000 shares of common stock. Not only were those shares authorized, they were all issued. There were no amendments submitted to me in my records request, so that means that 1,000 is still standing. But I don't know who owns the 1,000 shares. I don't know the distribution. I don't know the count of the people, much less the names of those who actually hold the shares. So in terms of who actually owns American Pinball Incorporated, I don't know. There are additional documents that the Secretary of State's office has, such as the Corporate Annual Report. However, on the website for the Secretary of State's office, they make very clear that they do not track ownership. They don't require it to be reported. So the likelihood of me being able to do yet another info request, which incidentally do cost me money because they're only giving these out certified, they likely don't have the information. So unfortunately, while I can tell you it's set up as a shareholder structure, anyone, well, I guess up to 1,000 people, if we're not getting into fractions here, could own this company. But I just don't know who holds it. So in terms of if you're wondering if a particular person does or does not own it, all I can say is it's possible that they do. But I don't know for sure which entities are involved. The other aspect that I had released on Pinsight a while ago, let's talk a little bit about the business license. That, I know, caused a lot of curiosity, and that is why I actually pulled the articles of incorporation, because the business license application had listed a John P. as an emergency contact. Now, emergency contact does not necessitate that it's an employee or an owner. It just means that for the city, or in this case the village of Streamwood, that a John P. is a potential contact besides Duval to be notified if something is going wrong, if there's some sort of emergency at the facility. So I did redact the telephone numbers in the folder on these because they did appear to be personal cellular numbers, and I wasn't really comfortable putting those out there, even though they are, again, part of the open record, and anyone who wanted them would be able to pull them from the village of Streamwood. But when I ran the John P. number through one of the reverse telephone lookups, it did indicate John Papadiuk as the likely owner. So I'm quite confident that it is indeed him who is listed as an emergency contact. So he, at the very least, has been determined to be an individual who should be noted for the city of Streamwood to reach out to in the course of some sort of emergency at the facility itself. So that's really all I can talk about in terms of the ownership and employee arrangements. It's just it's very difficult on these private companies to get much detail. But this is what I have. And so if it is of use to any of you, I wish you all the best. But let's go ahead and move on to financing. Again, this is going to be a challenge as well. But it's a question that I know has come up. How is American Pinball paying for all of this? Obviously, there are startup. There's a discussion about the need, the money that you would need to raise to produce the Houdini's. But they're also doing this magic girl run and giving those out kind of simultaneously as near as we can tell. I mean, they're showing us images of both machines. So I tried to dig into this. And again, the short answer is I don't know how they're putting the money together. But to me, it doesn't look like they are just doing a wealthy benefactor approach where someone is coming with a lot of cash and is paying for all of this. And the reason I say that is I did find two mortgage documents, both of which are linked from the show notes in the American Pinball Research folder. So let's talk a little bit about those. Both mortgages are on the same property, and that's the Kingsdale Road property that is listed for the registered agent in the Articles of Incorporation. One mortgage is for $50,000, and the other mortgage is for $120,000. The research folder has copies of both of those mortgages for you to be able to review. But in summation, the differences have to do with the interest rates and when the maturation of the mortgages are in effect. Both mortgages list American Pinball Inc. as the borrower. The $120,000 mortgage is a fixed rate mortgage and it's note to mature on January 29th, 2021. whereas the $50,000 mortgage is a variable interest rate and it has a maturation date of January 29th, 2017. So one is obviously much more short-term than the other one. Now that's all I could find in terms of money being brought in for American Pinball. However, we did hear in the Pinball Magazine podcast interview that the overhead costs were very low and I believe the main assumption that I'd seen online which I think there's good backing for and I've tried to supply some, is that the actual facility in Streamwood, it does not appear to be owned by Duval as near as I could tell. Instead, it's owned by Mukesh. Now, Mukesh is the founder of Ametron. I did get a copy of Ametron's articles of incorporation, and you can see that Mukesh and Duval, when that was formed, were both on the board of directors. So in addition to the familiar relationship between the two, There is also a business relationship. That seemed to be pretty widely known anyway from anyone who had looked into Ametron, but I do have the documentation, those articles of incorporation. I also have a copy of the Streamwood Properties mortgage modification, which happened, which shows Mukesh listed as the name involved in that to help provide some additional evidence regarding the ownership there. I have no idea if there's some sort of special rent conditions or there are no rent conditions applied at all, and the facility is just being given to American Pinball for use. I can't comment on that, but I can say that it does appear to be the case that the property that's actually being used, listed as where the manufacturing would be, or I should just call it the Streamwood property, is in fact controlled not by American Pinball, maybe subleased to them, but ownership seems to fall back to McHesh. Which leads me to the final piece of research that I looked into, which was where is American Pinball acquiring its parts? There have been several discussions that people have been contacted about pinball parts, parts necessary for the manufacturing of machines, and that they'd heard from American Pinball about them, but I'd not seen any confirmations about anyone saying that they did indeed make such an arrangement. Again, this is something that would be very, very difficult to find much on. I did find something which may be of validity, but I just don't have any idea how critical it may be. And that is that appears the purchasing service Alibaba. There is an option with them called AliSource Pro where volume buyers can go and use a service to be linked up with thousands and thousands of manufacturers. So in this case, there was an entry for American Pinball Incorporated. And I'm amazed that the AliSource Pro service actually lets people who are not signed in as American Pinball go and look at things. look at things that they were looking into. So while I cannot load, could not load any buying requests, I do have a screen cap of this in the American Pinball Research folder linked in the show notes. I did see that someone created an American Pinball Inc. profile. It says that they're an amusement game contract manufacturer. It says that their preferred categories of products are seals, DC motors, and other wiring accessories. And it gives a small summary of buyer activities, which says they had contacted 21 different suppliers through the service, requested one sample, and put in six buying requests. So there's some circumstantial evidence that American Pinball may be using Oli's Source Pro to try and find parts for the manufacturer of their pinball machines. I have no idea regarding what might have been bought under this name. I can say looking into the volume buyer program that it is set up so that you're supposed to spend over a million dollars in a year through this in order to qualify as a volume buyer. So it does, I mean, Alibaba does sort of expect you to have a fairly sizable purchase record if you're going to be doing it through this mechanism. But anyway, it did crop up when I was looking into the company. So I am including it for those that do actually have some interest in trying to determine maybe where the pots are being acquired. But it's really, I could find no other details than this and so many vendors are available through Oli Source Pro that it still would be a needle in a haystack to try and research it further, in my opinion. That pretty much covers everything that I wanted to talk about before I'm on with Tony to have an actual discussion. The American Pinball Research Folder does include a copy of the Corporate File Detail Report. There's nothing really to go over on that that wasn't mentioned in any other documents I've already covered. I have a few other items that I did not put into the folder. It was mostly my supporting research when I was checking on the veracity of some of these documents I did include. So I've kept them out of here so it's hopefully not too confusing. But you can always write to me or Tony actually at eclecticgamerspodcast.gmail.com if you have any questions or you want to discuss anything or you need some of these other items and you don't want to go through the hoops that I went through to get them. But hopefully me just having them in this folder makes it easier for any of you that are doing any sort of research and wanting to know more about American Pinball Incorporated. Okay, so here we are. Tony and I are back, and now it is no longer info dump time. It is total commentary opinion time. I don't know what you found possibly the most interesting or if any of it was interesting in terms of what I ultimately put together. For my part, I don't think the interesting thing were the articles of incorporation and the ownership angle and any of that. I think especially given how they presented at Expo, well, John Papadiuk clearly is a major influence on American Pinball and I think probably drove why they're put together. I don't know whether or not he actually owns any shares or not. In a lot of ways, I don't care. But what I thought was interesting is the two mortgage documents. And the reason why I think it's interesting is, to me, it indicates that they didn't just come in with a pocket full of cash. They actually did have to borrow or chose to borrow to do this startup. And so given the timelines, especially that $50,000 mortgage, which is not a very long mortgage, only for a couple of years, they clearly planned to pay that back pretty quickly. So if this stuff starts getting delayed, I don't want to say that they're going to have a problem because they have other – I mean there are other properties I think at the disposal, especially if you start considering Ametron and Vassini's dad who founded Ametron as a possible financial source. But setting all that aside, I think there was a plan here. And based off of what we saw at Expo, I don't think that plan is coming together. No, I'm going to agree with you there. I definitely don't think their plan is necessarily working out how they are wanting them to. And it does seem to me like it's a – I don't want to say a destined for failure type thing. But it definitely seems like it was something done light on overall knowledge of the hobby. Yes. And so let's go ahead and quickly give a very brief synopsis on what happened at Expo with American Pinball. For the few listeners that listened to us and didn't hear any other pinball podcast, which has already, I'm sure, gone into great detail about what's gone on at Expo. We're not going to dive into every element of Expo. Neither Tony or I were there. So we're just going to hit the highlights. So in regards to American Pinball, they showed up. Vasani and Scott Goldberg were there, as was Joe, who I'm afraid I'm blanking on his last name. He's helped complete projects in the past. And I believe there was a fourth person as well. J-Pop was not there. And that was not surprising. What was surprising to me was Houdini was not there. It was sort of there. The play field was there. The play field lit up. But it wasn't in a cabinet, which I thought was very odd, given that it was in a cabinet just a few weeks ago at the G2E Gambling Expo in Vegas. So they sort of brought what was described by someone on Pennside as a diorama which I guess is probably as accurate as a thing It didn flip And Tony and I I know we both said that we didn expect them to have a flipping game at Expo And they there and they explaining how they still plan to get the Magic Girls out by the end of the year But Houdini is a late second quarter 2017 planned release. And that's wrong. That's what they're saying. And Joe, who's brought in, I guess, to film. finish off Houdini indicates that, I believe he's indicated it was approximately 70% done, but also that he had to rework some of the shots. Now, I'm not a pinball designer. As long-time listeners know, I mostly work in finance and research, so I have absolutely nothing to do with laying out pinball shots. However, my understanding of standard pinball design was you came up with your concepts, you put together something called a whitewood, and you made sure that your shots worked before you moved forward with, oh, I don't know, the art and all that. People, attendees at Expo, were going up to this diorama, and they were looking, and they were posting a lot of photos, and then, of course, those photos ended up on Pinside, and people on Pinside started scrutinizing the photos, and then you start hearing all sorts of things like, there are still Zidware logos on some of this stuff. There are screws in the middle of ramps that are going to disrupt the ball because they aren't the right type of screws, and they're not in the right position. There were shots that didn't go anywhere. There were shots that couldn't work. There were devices that were conflicting with other devices. I mean, it's just sort of from a geometry standpoint, I guess the game just doesn't play. As in, even if it was in a cabinet and plugged it in and had software for it, it wouldn't work because the ball can't go everywhere. It looks like it could go on first blush. So it's basically just a complete false mock-up. That is the overall feel I get from it, is that it's made to look good, but it's nowhere near ready to be usable. I think you're right. What I don't understand is why were they even at Expo? I think they've hurt themselves very badly by even showing up. Showing up with something, considering who their designer is and all that background, I think that them being there, them making announcements like they have and everything, none of it's helped them in any way shape or form everything has hurt them more than even if they even if the news of them had slipped i think they would have been hurt less by not coming in than they are by actually showing up like they have i agree with you and i just because they failed american pitbull failed to achieve anything positive by being at expo all right so we talked about the houdini play field and the difference i mean basically it's like a step back from g2e from anyone's impression because all of a sudden it's not in a cabinet. No one got a magic girl at Expo. There was at least one person, one of the owners of Cointaker, who was told he would get his magic girl at Expo. That obviously didn't happen. From what was indicated, there are some legal issues that they have to deal with because J-Pop and Zidware were not in the best legal position. It sounds like from what little i understand there are some issues regarding the ownership of the magic girls because there was a prior attempt to sort of bail out zidware in 2015 that didn't work out but the ownership or you know control of the ip sort of transferred at that point or so is being indicated and then the other thing is that while they were at expo they punted on like everything that was not about magic girl but related to zidware and jpop so you know what i'm talking about is braza the zombie game and Alice in Wonderland. So let's talk a little bit about that because I think that ties in so much towards American Pinball because even though those are Zidware products, the whole idea is we got J-Pop, J-Pop did Houdini. American Pinball clearly wants to make money on Houdini, but there are a lot of people who got burned by J-Pop through Zidware. So in theory, the only way you satisfy everything is by dealing with Magic Girl and Raza and Alice in Wonderland, not just Magic Girl. But all they're talking about is Magic Girl right now. And when you bring up the others, they'll say they'll address that later. What I think it means is that they have to sell Houdini to even have the possibility of producing Raza and Alice in Wonderland. Which we've talked about in the past as something that we knew was going to probably end up being an issue. But do you think it would work in the sense that do you think the public, I'm sure some will. I mean, I read the thread on Pinside. I know there are some that love the way Houdini looks, and they want to buy it. And then there are some that maybe along the lines of are convinced by this stratagem of American pinball to be basically pressured into buying Houdini in the sense that, hey, look, okay, they delivered the Magic Girls, so they've done something. And now they're telling us, if you want us to do the Raza and Alice in Wonderland, you have to buy our Houdinis. Yeah. Yeah, I think most, you know, and this is a guess, this is a projection, a prediction, a prediction. But my prediction is most people would refuse to buy a Houdini if they have a friend who got burned on any of these Zidware games until the whole Zidware situation is resolved. And that would be my approach if I was in the market for this game. I think the solution is entirely wrong. I thought so from the beginning. I think, honestly, none of these games should ever have been made, including Magic Girl. The proper thing would have been to refund everyone's money. That's not going to happen. Maybe a partial set of refunds via bankruptcy would happen, but at least then everyone gets satisfied. Instead, what I'm seeing here is you have people that are in on Magic Girl that might get their Magic Girls, and some of them are really pushing to try and ensure they get their Magic Girls. And you will see people, if you check the Pinside thread, who are in on a Magic Girl who are sort of talking up this company. but if they weren't in on raza and alice in wonderland either it was just the magic girls then once they get their magic girl they're done they don't i mean their problem is solved so to speak so everyone's in everyone's got a different a different angle here right and we'll see that's one of those things that's always messed with me is the people who who were in on the magic girl and had the problems with the magic girl and they knew they were behind and they needed more money so they went ahead and bought into everything else as well and just got set even farther back. I don't think, honestly, that those people are ever going to get anything. I'm honestly not sold that the Magic Girl stuff's going to be finished at this point. I think this company, as we've talked about in the past, started in a hole that was so deep that they're not going to be able to pull out of. They're going to be torn apart. I mean, Expo did nothing for them. I mean, it wasn't the most terrible thing that could have happened for them because they did just straight up mock everybody. But it's about as close as you could get. Yeah. The issue is, I think, as a lot of people think, that the production of the Magic Girls was probably J-Pop's compensation for giving them Houdini. but what they I think have found out and didn't realize until Joe came in is that Houdini's not done it's not really all that close to being done I mean I suppose 70 I mean 70 percent is more than halfway done so there's that but it's just it's not done the idea is not done if he had if the shots have to be remade and redone is it 70 percent if the game's not even physically shootable yet I don't know. If there was no white blood, if the game wasn't shooting, they started with art assets without making an actual working shooting game first, how is that 70% done? That's the primary work right there. I don't know. That's Joe's estimate. But here's the thing for me and American Pinball in general. I don't feel bad for them about any of this because I think that they're opportunistic. Oh, yeah, definitely. because after hearing there's nothing that came out of Expo that told me either Scott or Deval Fasani, the two primaries behind the company, are pinball people and what this does to me when I read about the narrative summary of what happened and the questions and answers that were provided at Expo is one of my favorite 80's fantasy movies called Krull, have you ever seen Krull? I've seen Krull many times I love Krull, it's campy, it's terrible in a lot of ways, but I love Krull. Anyway, there's a scene in Krull where the Beast, which is the main baddie, he's trying to convince the kidnapped Princess Lysa to accept him as her new husband. And so what he does to show her that she doesn't need to be, you know, sort of fearful that she can accept him is that he assumes the form of the man that she was supposed to marry at the beginning of the show. And her response when he transforms himself is, there's no love in that form. And that's what I see here. Scott and Duvall are not pinheads. There is no love in their form. This is a cash grab, in my opinion, by guys who don't know the industry, don't love the industry, and clearly at this point, I feel, don't understand the industry. And that's really the big problem because we know companies exist to make money. But this is a small market and it's a hard industry to get production going in and if you didn't know you can just ask dutch pinball or jersey jack or highway who have all struggled with production and these are people who knew the industry so why am i going to trust these fresh startup folks walking in with no pinball manufacturing experience well i don't really think that you probably should uh i think the startup is just that, a startup that has put itself into a bad place. I'm not going to go so far as to say they're guaranteed to fail. I just think they're in such bad shape that I would be deeply concerned about them, and I would most definitely not do anything that involved giving them money until there was actual, you know, here's my money, I will pick it up now. Right. type table. And I don't think they can survive waiting until a game is shipped. I think they're going to have to ask for pre-orders. You know, I don't even know if it'll get to that point, is the thing. I don't think this company's going to make it through 2017. That's my prediction. I think they counted on the J-Pop name to get them money quick. They have now learned, and I think it's now dawning on them, just how many problems with the products are going to cost them in terms of time. And not just Magic Girl. I mean, most of our discussion here has been about Houdini and its not-yet-done state that's now having to be reworked by another pinball person. Had they all to do it over again, bringing in Joe and having him design a game for them would have dropped all this baggage. They wouldn't have had to make these Magic Girls. They would have been able to have a name that was known in pinball. So even though Scott and Duvall aren't pinheads, they bring in a pinball person who's worked on a lot of games, Just give him free reign to be a lead designer for once. And you know what? I think they would have had a shot. And I agree with you. There's no guarantee that they will fail. But my guess is because they are not pinball people, quote unquote, that they're just going to want to cut their losses here. Once they run the numbers a little bit more and realize this is never going to be fast, this isn't worth the sacrifice. Let's just fold this now when we haven't lost. I mean, they stressed how they don't have much overhead in the Pinball Magazine interview that they gave. And when I looked at the business license at the time they got that earlier this year, they only had, I believe, three employees on record. So you know what? They probably haven't invested a ton of money. They could pay off most of those mortgages probably with cash on hand still. So I think they're just going to look at all this and be like, it's not worth it. Let's just bail. We'll eat what minor loss we have. It's a write-off, and move on. Yeah, I think that's a very real possibility. I think it's going to come down to just how much tenacity we're looking at because some people will just keep pushing it until it's either a complete success or a complete failure. They won't take a step out early. Well, anyway, that's all I had to really say on American Pinball. In terms of their expo performance, I would say disappointing but not surprising. I expected at most, or this is about as best as what I expected out of it. And I honestly suspected that there would have been an even bigger crash and burn. But, yeah, I'd call it about what I expected. All right. So let's move on to Stern. A couple items regarding Stern. Let's hit the small one first. There was a coffee table art book put out by Dirty Donnie, and in it was his work for the Aerosmith pen. So it's sort of, you know, I don't want to use the term leak. I'm sure Stern approved the coffee table book. Generalized assumptions, which I accept, is that Stern is behind schedule on production and probably just didn't remember when that book was coming out. And so the book ended up announcing Aerosmith. But anyway, I looked at the art. I thought the art looked great. I like Donny Gillies (Dirty Donny)'s style I think it really suits pinball and of all the bands I had heard in the past when we went and were talking about the next music pin of Stern oh so many episodes ago I think I indicated then and if I didn't I should have that Aerosmith of all the band names I had heard was the most logical band choice in my opinion just because of their remaining relevance and just how broad their appeal is but what are your thoughts on Aerosmith pinball I think that Aerosmith was, as we talked about before, the most expected of them. I don't think there's anything surprising about it at all. The art stuff I've seen looks okay. Aerosmith is a band that's perfectly fine. And I think it makes a very expected but very safe choice for a new music pen. I mean, they're not trying anything different. They're just, at this point, The music pins are just ticking the box of what you would expect based upon the older music pins that have come out. Well, until we actually see the pin, it's going to be difficult to say much else. But for anyone who's an Aerosmith fan and didn't hear this yet, FYI. So anyway, Batman 66, that was the big one. That was the one everyone was expecting to see and see it we did. Tony, what did you think of Batman 66 as it made its debut on the expo floor? Well, I was wrong I fully expected it to be flippable and I'm still in shock that it wasn't but with that said the art package is amazing on that game I love the art on that game Yeah, I the art wise, I would say it was the best looking game at expo yeah i it's so unfortunate that we still haven't seen any gameplay footage of it i mean okay i understand the right half of the game because i've played the dark knight so much uh looking at the layout i can see why it should be a lot better a faster flowing game i would say better flowing as well because i i just i think batman dark knight is not a good flow game but the you know i see where the you know they're more ramp interaction that's not getting lost in the it's just sort of more efficient in my view so uh i liked the look of that yeah but it looked great uh the screen integration looked good the toppers on the two top top tier models of it uh with a little bat signal projecting on the on the ceiling that was a cool touch i thought that was neat you know i don't know why it wasn't it's all in the machine and everything so i'm guessing it's software wise they just didn't want it to flip i'm sure the layout and everything is okay it's not like a whitewood problem or anything it's just yeah no i'm i'm sure there was some reason i'm i if there's anything they're probably still in the point of they could still be an alpha code or something or they're not they didn't have like the latest code updates with them and they didn't want to show something or have people play something that didn't have a good code installed yeah but But, I mean, more likely than not is my guess what it would be with Batman 66. It's just, it looks good. Yeah. I don't see where it's going to be real popular with, you know, like younger people, but younger people isn't really a pinball purchaser problem at this time. I mean, so it's definitely not going to be hurting them very much. I don't know if that'll cause it to have play problems for operators, but I don't know if it's a game that we're going to see a lot of operators picking up either at the price points. Well, I would assume that Stern's not planning to have an operator demand for it, given that they decided not to run a pro model, and they easily could have had they wanted to. They could have stripped stuff out and made a pro. so that that at least to me was their symbol that this is on their boutique line and not oriented towards operators i think that their plan with operators is probably to continue to rely on what i'm assuming are quite robust ghostbuster sales given how well that game is doing overall and it seems to have such high demand that you know while this helps keep the line moving i don't think they're they i don't think i think part of the issue we know about the the whole play field clear coat and all that stuff, which has caused some delays. But I think part of the thing here with Stir and Pinball is that Ghostbusters is doing fine. They didn't need to come out. Aerosmith didn't need to be announced yet. They're still selling Ghostbusters. So, yeah, I don't think that's a big issue. I don't get what the deal exactly was with moving the Batman Super LEs from 30 to 80. The little math argument aside, which is a cute excuse for why they added 50 to the run. It's meaningless in and of itself. I'm sure there was more demand than the 30. But is the price still $15,000? Are the people who were in on the 30 still happy paying $15,000 after they more than doubled the run? Maybe. I mean, I don't know. Again, that's never been anything that was targeted towards me. But I bring it up because the messaging on this product is so confusing. I have no clue what is going on. It is a confused mess. I mean, because they made all those big announcements and how they're the 30 super limited editions and everything. And it's just they've had some issues, as we know of lately. And this just seems like another kind of misstep just in there, how they've been handling announcements and how they've been handling all the normal stuff to do with this one. And it just, they waited so long to release any images. You know, people were having to put their money down before they'd ever even seen the machine. And it just feels like a real lowbrow, not consumer-friendly thing Stern has done with 66. Yeah. And that, for me, that's the issue with the game not being in a flippable format at Expo, is it was yet again people who've already put money, had to in many cases, put money down on Batman 66, sight unseen, and they still don't know how it plays. Where they might have at the very least been willing to give up their deposit. When I bought my house, I put a deposit down. If the negotiations didn't go the way I wanted, I'd have walked away from the deposit. It wouldn't have been worth getting stuck with the house to preserve the $500 I put down. So it's, you know, to me, it's sort of it's like they're experimenting with a new communication slash sales approach here in real time. And they're not very good at it. And it looks really sloppy. And it's unfortunate because they are the biggest pinball manufacturer. And maybe we hold them to a higher standard because of that. And they maybe don't care for that. But, you know, I don't apologize for making fun of their application process. It was stupid. and this is a blunder like it or not it just doesn't make any sense it seems like they're just making things up as we go along and as we can get into as we will get into when we segue to jjp and their endless limited iterations that they've been doing on their machines changing your run numbers when you saying something's limited is pretty poor form in my opinion it's very poor form because people made choices based upon that knowledge of what it was going to be and then you changed it you changed what they thought they were putting their money down on so anyway batman 66 looks awesome wish we knew how it shot poor messaging and sales tactics by stern get your act together guys okay more expo stuff jjp we say we're going to bring them up let's bring them up jersey jack pinball let's start with hobbit um because that's the last we do because we're going to end with the better topic so yes all right so they announced that there's a new version of hobbit the black arrow edition i don't remember or care how many they were making all i know is another special edition it's got a little bunch of black trim i guess there's even a black pinball which sounds uh annoying but i guess you could always change that out anyway what do think of Black Arrow Edition Hobbits? Yay, there's another limited edition that they put out after the game been out for bloody near a year I guess it hasn been that long The game been out for what six months I don know anymore We've probably had one on location for six months in the area here in Kansas City. Yeah, that's close enough. Yeah, I don't know. They're putting out yet another limited edition, and they're really good about doing it. They'll put out an edition that's really expensive, and then they'll put out another limited edition that's really expensive and then they'll put out another limited edition that's really expensive. And it's like, I just, I don't have that kind of time or money. And quite frankly, I don't like The Hobbit that much. No, I think The Hobbit, I wish I had more time on Wizard of Oz. I didn't get a lot of time in on it before it went away. I didn't care all that much for Wizard of Oz. I respected how unique its layout was, though. Hobbit is not a unique layout in my view, and I don't think it's a fun player. I think it's got an awful lot of long ball times because it's a wide body with nothing in the middle, following an essentially standard fan layout. And it's got some clever tech in it, but anyway, I mean, we've talked before about Hobbit. I don't know if there's honestly enough demand to really warrant another limited edition. It just seems like my issue with them doing that, doing the whole like Ruby Red edition, and now this Black Arrow edition. It seems a little unfair to the people who go in on LEs when you make new LEs. It was just like the conversation we just had about Batman 66. You put your money down expecting there to be a limited run, and that this was the Golden Schmaug edition. You put your money down on that, and you expected that to be the thing, and now all of a sudden they're like, oh, and now there's the Black Arrow edition, and eventually there's going to be, who knows, they'll probably come up with some other edition. And with Jersey Jack's problems putting games out in decent amounts of time, I almost feel like the rapid changing of art packages for the same machine is just them kind of covering the whole we haven't put a game out in forever. but here's a new edition of our old game yeah i don't i don't know if there's a strategy behind it if it if it maybe it helps sales i i don't know but i i guess if i was in on le's which i'm not an le buyer i never would be it doesn't that aspect of rarity doesn't appeal to me in pinball but i you know i would find it a little frustrating because it seems like a you're loopholeing your way through to do another le so anyway uh so let's talk about the good you know the better news the exciting news that came out of Jersey Jack. And that was Pat Lawler's unlicensed theme game was finally revealed, and it was in a quite playable state, and that would be Dialed In. Or I should say Dialed In, because I think there's an exclamation on the end. Well, there's the most important thing to know about Dialed In. It's good to see that Red and Ted still have jobs. Yes. Well, you know, here in Kansas, we've had some issues with ensuring that we continue to do road construction. But we're not a political podcaster. We're not going to dive into that. But yes, it's good that they found new purposes in new cities after their 10-year-on roadshow. But let's talk a little bit about the game itself. Let's start with, well, I guess the art. I looked at it. Pat Lawler has worked with this artist before in the past. I think the art looks fine. I don't think it looks Batman good, but I think it looks well. Yeah, it's not ugly. It's not – I thought it was busy, I think is the word I'm looking for, and it was – I don't mind there being an original theme. I actually kind of like there being an original theme. I'm just not necessarily sold on this original theme, but the game looks good. The gameplay looks great. Yeah, everything I've been seeing – I watched a little bit of gameplay footage today, actually, and from what I'd heard from people at Expo. So by and large, I'd say it's been overwhelmingly positive about how the game shoots. So that's good. So for people who were worried about Pat Lawler maybe losing his touch, does not appear to be the case. The game plays well. The modes and stuff sound really exciting. I've heard and read a lot of discussion about the choice of the title dialed in. I don't really care. Is it lame? Should they have named it the Quantum City, which is the city? I don't know. I'm not a marketing person, I suppose. If the marketing folks are saying that dialed in doesn't send the right message, that may very well be true. But I think the whole issue here is you brought up the theme concept. So I do want to bring, you know, I want to mention that, that since this game doesn't have a theme, and while I'm not like a lot of pinheads who want there to be more non-themed license, I don't have anything against a non-license theme. It's just that I think you basically give up sales for next to no good reason. I guess you get full artistic license. So from an artistic standpoint, there's a good reason. And you don't have to pay the license fee, which is a good reason. But I think generally you pay off the license fees because you have the theme, and the theme helps get you sales. No matter how bad I think the Hobbit movies were, at least I know Hobbit when I see the pen, and I can follow along in the story because the story was already told to me in movies. and there are people who liked those movies. So what I think this does is with this theme is I want to talk a little bit about the price point. Of course, we always have to talk about the price points. The price point I think is awful for this game. It's a smaller game than a normal Jersey Jack game. It's not a wide body. So it's in a standard body, and they didn't have to pay for any license, yet it's their most expensive game at $9,000 for the cheap version, which is an LE run at 6,999 units. And then they have a collector's edition that's 12.5K. And there's not, to my knowledge, a whole lot of different... I mean, to their credit, it's just trimmed stuff that's different. They don't change their gameplay. But $9,000, and they didn't have to pay for a license. They used it for the toys and stuff, which, I mean, it's jam-packed, don't get me wrong. But $9,000, it seems really, really high. I think this is the new reality of pinball games. I think that the, I won't go as far as to say low prices, but I think for anybody short of maybe if Stern does keep up with pros, I don't think we're going to see machines under six or seven grand anymore. I think that ship is sailing. It could be. I don't know. So I'm concerned because, again, with this game, in this case, I've speculated that Pat Lawler's – I should say Jersey Jack is selling the game off of Pat Lawler's name. So they've upped the price because they know that it's not going to be a location-appealing theme. Now, Jersey Jack's oriented to being boutique anyway, not an operator-targeting entity. But they had a whole bunch of early orders, pre-orders already come in, and those are people I believe that were buying because it was sight unseen. They were buying off of Pat Lawler's name, which I'm sure there are tons of collectors out there who will buy Pat Lawler's stuff because they love how his games play. Well, yeah. But, you know, given that once this is unveiled, it doesn't really matter how well the game shoots. If no one gets to play it because no operator is going to run this game, then, you know, no one outside of those who already want to buy all the Pat Lawler stuff is going to end up getting it because they're not going to know it. It's like dialed in. Okay, that's not anything. That's not a license we know about. It's not a continuation of anything. It's not Roadshow 2. it's so it's there's no emotional attachment to the concept even though the concept of helping you know a city in disaster works great i think for pinball and lawler has done disaster pins in the past it's just you know it's you're not gonna i don't think there's a long i think there's not a long tail on the sales of this game and so i've wondered if maybe jersey jack priced it higher because they know it's not like Wizard of Oz and Hobbit where you can also sell to fans of those licenses. Yeah, and that's always going to be a help. That's part of the reason license pins are so common is because they sell really, really well. Because you can go, I love this band, I love this movie, I love this whatever, and you have more reasons to pick it up. now I do think that there is a possibility of some of the new features that are appearing in Dialed In is going to be pretty cool like you know the Bluetooth capability and the selfie capability and some of the other things we've talked in the past we talked about using Bluetooth type tie-ins to your phone to allow you to keep track of high scores and stuff like that as stuff that would be interesting. And I think some of these things we're seeing are going to be some of the moves towards integrating the newer technology and the more standard pinball technology. I'm not sure how much I want it actually taking a selfie of me while I play because I don't want to know what I look like while I play. yeah i i thought the selfie thing was uh was probably one of the more from an operation standpoint operator standpoint it would have been a really i thought it was a very clever idea a good way to you know you have the picture associated with the high score but you bring up a good point there are some people that are very uncomfortable having their picture displayed publicly and so you know you get kind of it's a weird thing anyway i that one made sense to me the I like the idea of the integration with a phone. I don't know if I like where it's going, obviously, in the sense that I don't... Let me rephrase all of that because none of that made sense. I'm concerned about the integration that Pat has chosen to try out. Of course, when there's anything new like this, you're going to have experiments, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. so I'm not sure when you're in multiball being able to use your cell phone to flip the flippers is something that's going to have any legs to it well I don't see how that's even going to work well you know I could definitely see people maybe giving it a shot if it's like demolition man and you get a bonus when you play with the handles instead of with the buttons yes I'm not going to hook I'm not going to attach my phone in the middle of tournament play and set my phone on the on the pinball machine while I'm playing and remember to reach up and slap my phone when I need to flip a flipper. Are you sure you wouldn't remember if it gave you a 40% score bonus? Based upon how I've played and stuff in the past, yeah, probably not. Anyway, no, I didn't. So that's an idea. That's an example of an idea that I just don't think probably has legs in pinball. But I thought, yeah, I heard some others suggest this idea, But if you had the ability, at least maybe disable that when you put it in tournament mode, but in casual play, having the ability for the other players to be connected through their phones and activate disruptors, problems, like if enough time goes by, they push a button and it makes a magnet pulse and throws the ball off kilter. See, now that could be kind of cool. And I think it would be even – and if it caused a drain, for example, that player who did it, bonus points to them. You could have all sorts of – right, right. And of course you could have all sorts of fun with it. Well, is this stuff going to be allowed in tournament or not? I could just easily say, well, no, you could put it in tournament mode and that stuff's all disabled. But for casual play, I mean, most of the time when I play casually with people, either at my house or after we're done at Pizza West and we go to Nup's Pub, we play out the extra balls. We do all sorts of stuff that's not tournament mode. Well, yeah. No, that's very true. I mean, anytime you're not in a tournament, you can play it in a more standard fashion like you would at home. Right. And so there are a lot of things I think you could end up doing with this that most pinball is played casually, not competitively. competitively. And I think that a lot of that stuff could be really fun, especially for, you know, the millennial generation and how integrated they are with their phones. Just we go back to a unfortunately, they're going to walk right by this because the theme says nothing to them and the operator couldn't afford to put it on location anyway. And that's a very real possibility. So, I mean, I bet we'll have one on location, but we are very lucky here. And there are some other locations out there in the u.s that are like this at well where you have collectors who are not doing this for money i mean most pinball operators do it more for the love other than than anything otherwise they do a bunch of claw machines and that's it but and redemption games but the notion i mean it's all already when we have a like a highway game or a jjp game on location in the kansas city area they're the most expensive games to play they already are and that's where i get concern back to your point about that you know we may be dealing with a new pricing normal which you could very well be right and it really concerns me because while we've seen a resurgence in operated pens i don't know if the american public is in terms of location coin drop going to accept when games go above a dollar and i think that's a very real concern i mean anything more than i mean a dollar okay i'll slip a dollar in or four quarters or however it is because most dollar machines anymore have a bill taker on it and i don't know when you need to start paying a dollar and a quarter now i think the way possibly around that is when they start going to the uh pay systems where people can start using like their uh the little tap pays like with your phone or something they'll be able to pull away from it because people will not really realize how much that are actually putting into it because I know I'm very much, when I'm dropping quarters, I'm very aware of the quarters I'm dropping as opposed to I don't always feel the same like if I'm putting a dollar bill in or like I went to a place once that had vending machines that they would accept debit card and credit card. And it was totally different going, well, I've got enough quarters to buy a soda and a candy bar as opposed to I want all the things. Yes. So we'll just have to see where this all goes future-wise. But anyway, at least the game looks like a lot of fun to play. So I look forward to giving it a try. So do I. So the last part that I wanted to talk about out of Expo was Highway Pinball's Alien Pinball, which has been known about for a really long time. They'd already revealed the playfield art quite a while ago. And they finally had a couple playable versions of the game accessible. There were a lot of lines. so I know a lot of people that wanted to play it did not get a chance to play it. Highway did put out a trailer for their game, which the trailer was awesome. Very impressive. Yeah, the trailer, I will give them that. Whoever put that trailer together, they did a really good job. With all of the assets, like the pop bumpers with little eggs on it and the alien head with a little tongue that comes out and grabs the ball and all that, overall, I think it looks better than it looked to me when I just saw the playfield art. It still doesn't blow me away. Art-wise, I would probably say visually, overall, the whole package is lower than the dialed-in game is for me, which in turn is lower than Batman 66. Some of that just has to do with the cabinet design and stuff that Highway has gone with. I still like having that screen in the playfield, though. I think it's really, really cool. I do like having the screen in the playfield. The screen in the playfield is one of my favorite things. I know I'm not a huge fan of full throttle but I really enjoyed the screen in the playfield and at I believe around 6500 obviously this is of these new games that was shown the cheapest option available if you want to you want to go and get something the gameplay though again I couldn't tell a lot from the trailer I had heard and read for some who saw gameplay that the reactions seem to be mixed. Some people seem to like how it played. Other people didn't seem to think much of how it shoots. Yeah, between reading online and talking to a couple people that were there, I haven't actually spoken with anybody yet who liked how it shot. But I've also only talked to two or three people about it. And then from, of course, online, like you said, is very mixed. Right. I remember when we were at the Pizza west tournament uh one of our players who had just gotten back from expo said he saw it being played and i i asked him briefly before he had to go take his turn uh what he thought and he he said he really really liked dialed in but that he's just i think he just shook his head at me when i asked about alien pinball because he was wearing the shirt he had a shirt and i thought are you are you in on it he's like no and i didn't even like how it played and i was like oh that's too bad because it shows you the power of theme. I love the Alien franchise. It is one of my favorite sets of movies. Just the four, the pure. I'll even watch the third one. But I again, as an example to you pinball people, just because you like a theme doesn't mean you need to own everything that comes out with it. I've already been very skeptical because Highways design by default is a wide body and as we All know, I do not care much for wide-body pins, by and large. So it's never been something that I thought I would end up getting, but if the gameplay was really good, it would be on my radar. It is not on my radar, unfortunately, even after seeing all of this. No, and it could still be. I mean, it could be, like, something that will, once we actually play it, is better because everybody has different taste. So, I mean, there's no reason to swear that it's a bad game or say anything like that. I have no real idea. I've just heard enough stuff that's not real happy about it for me to be concerned. Because I like the play field. I like what they've done with the art assets. Yeah. One of the things that did bother me with the trailer, it wasn't a problem with the trailer, but that I noticed with the video clip integration, I thought the clip integration was really good. at least in the trailer, none of the clips they showed featured any actors. And that made me a little leery, only because this game is to put you either in Alien or Aliens, depending which selection you make. And without the cast, I have trouble believing that I'll feel immersed in the actual films themselves. Now, I know the call-outs are there. There are voice clips from other actors, though it has been confirmed that Sigourney Weaver is not in the theme at all. She's not incorporated in the game at all. And especially with Aliens, where she is the titular character, she is the primary protagonist. I find that very, very difficult to sort of accept from an immersion standpoint. Yeah, I think it hurts. I mean, I get that it's an obstacle that they just couldn't surmount, and I completely understand. It's just, it's really, really unfortunate because she, while she's not the only one with great one-liner quips in that film, she has a number of the big ones. Yeah, she does. And I mean, yeah, they were obviously able to get the expected-for-any-game-based-off-alien-franchise sound clips without her and without, I think really without the images of any of the actors overall, it's definitely going to hurt it real bad. Now, I really do want to try it. I really want to play it. Unfortunately, I don't know when I might ever get the chance because the person who owned Full Throttle that had it on location sold it. Yeah. and I assumed he owned Full Throttle in anticipation for Alien because again Full Throttle, what sort of theme was that? I'm sorry, no one cared so I just assumed that now I thought it was interesting sort of playfield design but I always in the back of my mind thought oh anyone who's buying this is planning to get Alien and I know he found out that Alien was not going to work by just dropping the playfield in that he would have to also upgrade the computer technology in his full throttle. I don't recall what the pricing was on that, and I don't know if that was the reason that he decided to move it along. But obviously, with that decision, I feel he conveyed that he was not planning to get Alien. And we have another operator in the area, but I don't think he's buying any Highway products. He's expressed concern to me before about going in on companies that might not last, and he wasn't talking about Highway specifically. It just a philosophy for having support as an operator in the long term where you know you have that support with Stern So I just the long story short is I don think we going to see it at the primary locations here in the Kansas City area the primary being the big three where the pins are in great shape. So outside of going to another pinball show or something, I just don't know when I'm going to get an opportunity to play it. Well, we have been talking about going to Texas again this year or maybe to some other big show, And I'm sure by that point that they will have playable ones somewhere for us to at least give a shot to. Though if the lines are anything like the Ghostbuster lines last time we went to Texas, it'll be a one-time thing. Yeah, yeah. Could be. Could be. Though, that was the first time I got to play Full Throttle, and that line wasn't too bad. No, it wasn't. And Full Throttle is a perfectly okay game. Yeah, I liked it there. I wouldn't buy it, but it's not a bad game. It has some things I really like in it. I think it was a very solid game for a first game out by a company that put them in a decent place to move on to bigger things. And now the question is just, is the bigger thing going to work, or is the bigger thing going to crash into the reactor and everything go critical and everybody dies? Yes, and there would be a messy explosion. So let's hope that doesn't happen. speaking of explosions let's go to our second segment which is video games because there was a big piece of video game news that exploded all over the internet this last week i don't know how big it was because it was pretty small to me it was huge but the nintendo switch was announced and this is the official launch name of what was the Nintendo NX and it is a handheld game system that has a dock so it can be easily connected to a TV. It's apparent to me that Nintendo has decided to fully embrace their control of the mobile market or not even the mobile market, but the handheld market, and is not even really going to try in the console home market anymore. And I have to say good for them, honestly, because they weren't going to do it. They weren't going to keep up. And with the people their games are aimed at and with the way they like to do things, I think this is their best chance to maintain viability. you may very well be right on that I don't know exactly what I think of Nintendo Switch I thought that the controllers they showed in the trailer looked pretty comfortable, I liked the controller look and the mobile the ability to disconnect the two sides to have two controllers even on the go little that almost look like the old original NES controllers seems like a really cool thing, but it brings up the absolute biggest problem and the biggest issue in what will either make or break this system, battery life. Yeah. And I would assume it's something they're very aware of and familiar with given their long history from the Game Boy all the way to the 3DS setups that they've dealt with. But given the size of the unit, I wonder. Yeah, battery life is a big one. People will wonder about power. I think it's safe to say, since it is a portable unit, that it's not going to meet current-gen standards. No, it's not. And that's fine, because when you consider current-gen standards, Nintendo hasn't tried to hit current-gen standards in forever. Right. And I think that's okay. The only issue that arises with that is unless you are a diehard Nintendo fanboy, and they have a lot of them, but setting that aside, it means that you need another – if you're a console gamer, or even you're not, you need a console or a PC with some power behind it if you want to play the AAA releases. so you end up needing nintendo you can't just buy a nintendo and be like oh okay i get to play 90 of the stuff that's out there you could do that with a ps4 you could do that with a with a computer you can't do it with a nintendo and so nintendo becomes a secondary purchase it's a oh well it's the add-on just to play the nintendo stuff sort of thing yeah that's the risk and that is what and the thing is lots and lots of people have playstations and xboxes and big computer systems and they still own 3DS's and this is exactly what they are going after and while I know they've said they've done their whole little thing that they're oh they're not getting rid of the 3ds but the truth of the matter is that they said the same thing when the 3ds came out they said the same thing about the ds and when the new and or and when the ds came out they said the same thing about the old game boy systems and they keep them around for a year or so and then they phase them out and i think that's what's going to be happening here uh and we will see how it actually ends up working for them. Like I said, I think it's the battery life is what's going to either make or break them. I think that that has a high likelihood of being the primary. The only other element I think could be major is whatever its initial price point is. Nintendo, unlike what we've seen in the past, not always, I suppose, but what we've seen in the past with Sony and Microsoft is those companies will sell consoles at a loss in order to make money in the long term on the software side. Nintendo has had a long history of always making money off the hardware. And I don't think they're going to buck the trend on that, but I don't know how much it's going to cost for them to pull this whole thing off. Right. And I think that's going to be an interesting thing to see once it comes out. I have to admit, I'm really, really interested in this system. But for me, it's because of the mobile aspect. but then it also comes up to how it is going to be handled game-wise because one of the things that nintendo has always done is it has always avoided putting certain they've kind of had flagship titles that are their flagship console titles and flagship titles that are their flagship handheld titles and it's going to be interesting to see how they go about this uh we already know for a fact that the new Legend of Zelda game is going to be on this system, released for this system. We know that, of course, there's going to be Mario's and all that stuff released for this system. But what I'm more interested in is will there be new generations of the Pokemon games released on this system? Because that is one of the, if not the biggest flagship title in their DS division. Right. Well, I mean, if it does actually, if they end up being this Switch, a total Switch, that they're in reality, despite what they're saying now, it's a phase out of the Wii U, which I think is a given, and a phase out of the 3DS, and it's just the Switch moving forward, then I would expect to see the Pokemon titles on it. If they actually try and treat the Switch like a glorified mobile Wii U, and they only phase out the Wii U stuff, then maybe the Pokemon stuff still exists because the 3DS remains highly successful. You know, I don't know. Or you do it on both. Yeah, I don't know. I would imagine Pokemon in some form will show up on the Nintendo Switch just because it's Pokemon. I would assume so. Now, I would also like to say that their ad, their three-minute commercial, whatever it is, the announcement commercial, as interesting as it is, some of the stuff in that commercial is just hilariously messed up to me i think that's a a probably a kind of common thing for commercials of the time and especially nintendo because nintendo is very big into the whole friends and uh playing your consoles and stuff thing but like like like part of the commercial had them had somebody walking away from or taking their thing to go out and meet and drink with friends and uh another one had somebody sitting on and playing like zelda at home and then picking it up and then going and getting on an airplane and i'm just like well does the battery last long enough for an actual airplane flight in the first part That's what I'd kind of like to know. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, the communal thing. And they've experimented with that sort of stuff before in terms of whether or not how well it works. Though this does remind me, I was listening to the Pinball podcast, and Jeff on there brought up Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. That's a great Final Fantasy. And we're going to have to tell the story on that sometime because he was talking about how – because that one was the one where you had the GameCube, and then the Game Boy Advances would hook up to it, and we played that. And I just thought it was funny to actually hear another podcast, a podcast not about video games, and bringing up a game, which still defines a lot of our conversations to this day. So don't let me forget. Sometime we'll put it into a future show where we explain how you don't play that with Tony. Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. That game is perfectly acceptable. I played it just how you're supposed to. I'm sure that that's what you thought, but I read the manual. So let's go. Before we leave video games, we did have a question come in from Dawn asking us what video game podcasts we listened to. So I'll go ahead and start. I have three that I listen to, and I've linked them all in the show notes here. Game Room Junkies, that's mostly arcade video games and pinball machines. But they do cover console gaming from time to time. So it's one. I wouldn't really push it if you're into modern games, but on occasion they do cover it. And it meets the definition that Don asked about, so I'm counting it as a video game podcast. Like us, it's a mixed gaming podcast. True Achievements Podcast is another one I listen to. It tends to be a weekly. This is done by the owner and a couple of the operating programming types behind the True Achievements website, which is part of the True Gaming Network. True Achievements itself is an Xbox-oriented site, but they also have True Trophies and True Steam Achievements at this stage. True Achievements, though, is their big flagship website. It's probably the biggest Xbox website at this point. I've mentioned them a few times because I do volunteer there as part of their game info team. They have a lot of guides and stuff. The podcast is very news-oriented, so they do a lot of time talking about the new releases. They do a lot of video game reviews through the site, so there's often a lot of discussion of the games that they're reviewing, games that are coming out. Very, very Xbox-focused on the podcast. Not exclusively, but so much so that if you don't play Xbox, I wouldn't recommend it. And the final one is Podcast Unlocked, which is one of IGN's podcasts. It is Xbox-specific. They do go, like we do in our intro, their intro, they'll go and they'll hit on everything, and it's usually Sony is the other stuff that they'll start talking about. Not hit on in a negative way, just in terms of talking about stuff that's interesting, that's exclusive. But they also are very news-oriented. But because they're IGN, they have really good industry access. So sometimes they have interviews with top heads at development studios. They go to all the major conventions and gaming expos and all of that. So of the three that I've named, Podcast Unlocked is the one that I actually rely on the most when I'm trying to come up with ideas about what I want to talk about on this show. because they're so timely and they're very consistent. And like True Achievements, they are a weekly. Well, I actually don't listen to any of those podcasts, and I actually have not listened to a podcast in three weeks because I've been punching through the audio books of Wheel of Time, so I've got quite a backlog. But I listen to three different video game podcasts also. My personal favorite that I listen to is the Co-Optional Podcast. They talk about video games and things going on in the video game industry and people and stuff. For me, it's less about the games and the game information and more about the people involved involved because i like the host and how they interact and how they interact with their uh guests and stuff that they're a very much a pc centered uh podcast because as always their uh main host is total biscuit uh who is a large and well-known uh pc uh gaming guy who's done lots of work from uh you know like he does streaming of starcraft matches and he's uh started off doing lots of like warcraft stuff and starcraft stuff and he said that's his thing is video games on the pc and lots of blizzard stuff um and then the other two podcasts i listen to are actually uh just different sides of the same coin, I listen to the Giant Bomb Cast and the Beast Cast, which is GiantBomb.com's East Coast crew is the Beast Cast, and their West Coast crew puts out the main Giant Bomb Cast. And they are where I get all of my really big video game news. They talk about some of the same stuff, but they've got some differences in what they talk about and they've got personality differences so i listen to them based upon the host and stuff is why i listen to both of them i originally started listening to just uh the one of them the giant bomb cast because it's really long it's like three to four hours normally and but it hits all of the video game news for you know pcs and consoles and everything pretty much every week. And the Beast Cast does the same thing, except for it's not as long, and it tends to talk about different things in depth than the Giant Bomb Cast does. So that's why I've started listening to both of them. And between these three podcasts, that adds up to anywhere between nine and ten hours of my podcast listening a week. Those are long. Yeah. Are they weeklies? Yes, they're all weeklies. Holy cow. Okay, we need to have an intervention with them to explain how long a podcast is supposed to be. Because, oh my, oh my. Let me point out, I guess I should go back and point out, Tour Achievements Podcasts, under an hour. IGN usually runs an hour longer if they have an interview for Podcasts Unlocked. And then Game Room Junkies is usually between one and two hours, but they aren't a weekly. Let's see. Co-optional tends to be between two and three hours, normally around two and a half. Beast Cast tends to be two hours and Giant Bomb Cast is three to four hours typically it's in the three range but they occasionally have special episodes and even if you don't listen to the shows you know regularly the Bomb Cast always does a big end of the year round up and I recommend at least listening to those episodes because they will sit down and actually do tiered rankings of every single game that came out over the course of the year. They basically pick a top 10 for the full year. But unlike a lot of top 10 lists, their top 10 list is them sitting down and they literally all sit in a room with the mics turned on and talk about all the games they want to put in their list. And they argue and the whole thing, every argument about why a game should be in the list or not, it's all there. It's not some random ranking. It's not who gave the most money. It's them just talking about what games they like and trying to convince each other what should be in there. And they post all of it. So it's not unusual to get those four or five hours, and they'll drop those. That'll drop three or four days, boom, boom, boom, boom, back to back to back, as they record it throughout a week at the end of the year. I have heard good things about the roundups. Yeah. So anyway, there you go. Six podcasts to consider for video game content beyond ours, of course. Speaking of video game content, we have reached the end of the video game segment. So we do have a brief tabletop section to transition into. So let's go to the third and final topic of this podcast, the tabletop gaming section. And Tony and I both got to experience a new game to us yesterday, in fact, called Speak Out. Tony, would you like to summarize Speak Out for the audience? Have you ever wondered what it was like to have the giant over-the-head headgear on and try to converse with people? Yeah, that's what this game is. They literally have pieces of plastic that hold your lips open wide, and you have to try and say tongue twister phrases to your partners and have them figure out what you're saying. It is the worst game ever. It was an abomination. The game, I played it twice. The phrases, I get it. You've got this plastic device that holds your mouth open. So some letters, like the letter B, anything that requires you to close your mouth, really, becomes extremely challenging to say. I probably should have pulled what rules there were to better understand because it also seemed like the rules were extremely strict. You weren't allowed to pantomime. you weren't i don't even it it looked like you were just to keep saying the same phrase over to over it's got one of those little minute hourglasses that you flip over and you just are saying the same thing and yeah it's funny and you look funny with a plastic thing showing all your teeth and your lips torn apart open but only for a little bit and then it just becomes an exercise in frustration and it's painful yeah it hurt it hurt bad it hurt the plastic thing is painful and so anyway the name of the game is speak out there will not be a link in the show notes because it's awful and i don't want you to even read about it i'm we're here to protect you we're just warning you that if you're at a party and somebody goes hey let's play speak out hit them because they hate physically strike them that is what you have to do this game is that bad It was extremely frustrating. If you like pain and you like tongue twisters and you like people having weird-looking faces, maybe go with that. Tony played one game, I played two games, and then we put it away and got out Cards Against Humanity. Because we'd much rather play Cards Against Humanity and destroy our souls than play that game again. It was for the best. So everyone in the end was a winner because it was Cards Against Humanity. Actually, I won Cards Against Humanity because I manipulate all the people because I know what they want to hear, and I play it for them. It's just what it is. It's just how it is. It's called preparation. I'm sorry. All right. Well, that's the end of the show, really. for those of you who want to reach us as I often remind you, you can email us eclecticgamerspodcast at gmail.com or you can contact us on social media, the best of which being Facebook which would be facebook.com slash eclecticgamerspodcast We're also on the Twitter as eclectic underscore gamers and on Instagram as the same and if you like the show, please sign up and give us a rating and review on iTunes. It helps the search algorithms actually show this game, which game, show this podcast, which has the word gamers in it, but does not have the word pinball or video or tabletop in the title. We didn't think that out real well, did we? You know, and on retrospect, coming up with the title was something that we just rapidly sort of did. I did a quick search through one of the podcast listings and saw that the name wasn't anywhere, and so we went with it. And then, you know, there was an Eclectic Gamers podcast that ended in 2012, They weren't actually in any of the podcast directives. They were on YouTube. So there you go. It's part of the fun of a – they're only over, what, half a million podcasts now? But we're the world's greatest one on tabletop pinball and video games, I think. I agree. I bet we could win that metric. But anyway, we'll be back in two weeks. That's based in Kansas City. Yes, especially – yes, yes. So anyway, two weeks. Tune back in. We should be here. and I was to say I'm Dennis and so long everyone two weeks I'm Tony have fun