Yes, Zach, you're crazy! We all know it; we all accept it. That said, you're not crazy for having opinions. You're crazy for saying there's no agenda behind them while calling BS on me and others for having our own opinions. If you don't agree with them, that's totally cool, but it doesn't make you right and me wrong, or vice versa.
Nor does us adding features and options need to spun as a negative. If you think a feature is bad or wrong, and if we add an option to change it, that seems like a positive thing. If you don't like either option, that's also cool, but I'm not sure why you would criticize us for listening to feedback and adding more options. You can rightfully criticize me for lots of things, but criticizing continual improvement of the P3 is what solidifies my opinion that you have an agenda.
Opinions and criticisms aside... some facts you were unsure (or disagreed with) from the last show:
The flipper buttons on the P3 push into leaf switches (not instant on/off microswitches), and you can absolutely control the strength of your flips with quick flips, do tap passes, do various forms of passes, etc.
The story I told on the F&M podcast is 100% accurate. The 3 games Dennis compared to the P3 were POTC (Stern), I500, and WPT. The heart chest on POTC is at the same position of the walls/scoops. The I500 ramps start an inch or so in front of the walls. WPT is pretty much entirely behind the scoops. Certainly there are games with features lower on the playfield, but big/interactive features are most often on the very sides or farther up the playfield for a very good reason... the lower a feature is on the playfield, the more shot angles it blocks, and that generally makes a game feel clunky. Did you really make transparencies and compare the P3 playfield to other games? That's awesome. Feel free to share the pics. I'd love to see them.
Yes, I did stand back in the booth and wonder what you felt about the game as you played. I spent as much time as I could in the booth watching as many people as possible and wondering how they felt about the game too. All of us had a ton of great conversations with people at the show, and we learned a ton from watching people play. We came back with a good list of things to improve... a few mechanical things to tweak, and a number of gameplay and graphical things.
Overall the show was a ton of fun. It was great to see and hang out with everybody again and especially see them enjoying the Weird Al's Museum of Natural Hilarity. I'm super proud of the team for showing such a mature product at its first public event, and now I'm excited to work through of all of our new challenges... like growing our production team to work through the orders. That's my primary focus now.
I was glad to hear you found a few things in the game you enjoyed too, and I loved Dennis's take on Germs. That's actually a mode where the flipper strength control is super important. You're shooting for the moving 'Al-moebas' on the screen to calm them down. The raised walls represent the far wall of the petri dish, and if you hit them too much, you break through (the 'broken' wall drops), and shooting a ball into the now-open scoop ends the mode prematurely. If you really want, you can trap up and wait for the Al-moebas to 'eat' your flippers. That'll weaken them too.
- Gerry
https://www.multimorphic.com