The Pinball Show Ep 96: Return Of The Zach

“I've had a lot of time to reflect on this. It was healthy. It was good for me. And at the end of all of this, I was coming on to episode 96 with two ideas. Either I can give what a lot of people want in this world and I can put on a smile and it can be rainbows and puppy dogs and farts that don't stink... Or I can just keep bringing it and I can keep being real.”

“I'm only here to report the facts. Numbers don't lie, right? I can do one or two. And I thought to myself, you know what? Why am I going to do it otherwise if I'm not being honest and I'm not being real with myself, with you Dennis, as my co-host, or any of the other co-hosts I have and with the audience.”

“Frankly, I haven't seen Scoops this bad since the summer of 86 when I worked at the local Baskin and Robbins ice cream shop.”

“So bravo to them as they rake in the dollars trying to clean up this stern-created design mess. I can just see Steve Ritchie shaking his head and laughing surrounded by Jersey Jack whitewits going, 'See? Stern wouldn't give me an engineer either.'”

“Seems like a lot of trouble to go through all this to hand out basically everything to one company. Or is it? I mean, are we so jaded now in pinball that we're too fixated in waiting for the next shiny toy to come out that we simply can't appreciate pinball greatness when it comes at us straight down the middle?”

“I came into podcasting in this hobby with the express intent of deliberately not trying to make friends with anyone who worked at a manufacturer... I knew people who got into this stuff, who got into podcasting or other content creation. And it seemed to me... their goal was to rub shoulders with people in the industry. And I had no interest in that.”

“And one of the things, and this is, again, in the podcasting circles, this is, I guess it's probably at this point relatively well-known. I don't like to record segments for people. You do not. So I just generally don't do it anymore because it felt like that became a thing, and then it became the thing, and everyone was doing it.”

“And it expands the pinball, Dennis and the listener, that it feels like we reinforce, not the soapbox here, but it feels like we reinforce disingenuous interactions and communications within one another.”

“As someone that saw the value of the platform-based game early in Multimorphic's existence, but was hesitant to buy because of the feel of the gameplay in the past. Yours truly has a LE on order... With more games to come, the idea of future titles only costing half of the market gaming prices of today is very exciting.”

“Universal is filing trademark for Jaws under what they call, quote, 1B, which requires that they have an actual intent to use the trademark on the goods listed. It's a pretty strong indication there's a Jaws machine in the works.”