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#142-The Daily Show – Diving into Vegas Trade Shows, Pudgy Penguins Hit the Arcades, and the Allure of Multiplayer Gaming
Step right up to the high-energy buzz of Vegas trade show floors with us! Marvel at the digital display wizardry transforming classic sports games, and brace yourself for the hyper-realistic edge of shooting games that push the boundaries of comfort. We also take a whimsical turn into the world of Pudgy Penguins, an NFT series that adorably waddles into physical gaming cabinets. The metaverse beckons, and we're here to narrate its enchanting possibilities.
Our journey through the arcade galaxy unearths a disarmingly simple game that's as addictive as it is oversized. Imagine a game so engrossing, it could make the internet's favorite T-Rex extinct. We'll unpack the potential of NFTs in arcade games, creating a sense of community that even a plush toy with a QR code can't replicate. Allen 1 steals the spotlight with a modern remix of classic Atari games, adding a multiplayer twist and eSports elements that could redefine the arcade gaming world.
Finally, we step into the social hive of Qbix, an immersive box game that's causing a stir across the entertainment cosmos, Playbox ball throwing game and Hero Zone VR. As we bid you farewell, we extend a heartwarming thank you to our collaborators who've made this episode a treasure trove of insights. Keep your tokens at the ready; we've got more discoveries just a button-press away.
tuning you in. Now to the LBX Daily Show, brought to you by the LBX collective your community to connect, engage and inspire. Now let's get ready to roll with your hosts, christine beer and Brandon Wiley oh, hey guys, welcome again to another edition of the Daily Show.
Speaker 2:Brandon and I are still here in Vegas. I was about to say New York. I don't know why I must have New York on the brain, but still here in Vegas. It's our last day here and we are excited to share some of the stuff that we grabbed from the trade show yesterday. So some insights and a lot of things. The show was really cool. It was buzzing, a lot busier than I think we both expected it to be actually. So we're gonna go at the show floor again today and we'll see if it's still busy or things calm down. But hey, I'm just curious what were your thoughts, what were the trends that you were seeing this year, brandon?
Speaker 1:yeah, well, I mean, first of all, like you said it was, it was almost back, it felt like.
Speaker 1:It felt like it was back to 2019, busy levels, like even the size of the show floor.
Speaker 1:Granted, they fill in a large portion of the show floor now with billiards, and this show is weird because you also get some, like some slot machines and gaming. So you know, you kind of skip around them unless that's what you're looking for. But otherwise, I think one of the things I noticed was that a lot of the sports games so you know, basketball shooting, for example, that one, that one especially had digital displays behind the basketball, so, like in such the red numbers that used to count up how many things you were getting in the timer, you now have this whole digital display when you get it in it like flashes, and so there's a lot more of that type of interactivity with some of the old, the older games. But otherwise I didn't really. I mean, I know we'll talk about some things here that we saw that was sort of interesting, but nothing stood out to me that was like earth shatteringly new or interesting. It was just small iterations on some maybe some old things that needed a little bit of a lipstick yeah.
Speaker 2:So some of the couple, the couple of iterations that I had and this isn't really, I know, new stuff for sure, but some of the weird things that I saw this trade show and I don't see them at IAPA, so I guess that's why they stand out. As weird to me is there was a lot of booths sharing this year, I thought so. A couple of booths had extra vendors inside of their booths, so that was really interesting and I don't know if that was just a hey, we don't know how the show is gonna go, let's share a booth. That just makes more sense economically, you know, because some of the partnerships didn't. They were weird, right. And then the other thing that I noticed was the thing that really kind of struck me as odd is the gun shooting games. So there was a ton of gun shooting games on the floor and these games were weird. Like the guns were like hard-powered rifles. That gave a lot of feedback and they looked like real weapons to me and I don't know, it makes me nervous and it scares me a little.
Speaker 1:You that, yeah, we didn't, we didn't take a picture of it. I don't remember the name of the actual game, partly because they didn't really care, but there was the one where it was literally your job was to snipe people in the buildings and so, yes, technically it was you know the bad guys you were sniping but you're on real sniper rifles coming up their big scopes and taking out people in buildings and I thought that was that was just pushing the boundaries and what's too real and I don't think we need to play that, especially in our centers. But anyway that I agree with you. I think it's pushing the boundaries on some level of realism that I don't think we probably need to have yeah, yeah, I agree, and I don't know if it's just because I'm Canadian, but it made me very uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:I'm a, you know I live in the Wild West and been, you know, arizona and you know see guns all the time. I go shooting and hunting myself and I'm uncomfortable by that type of game. Okay, so I definitely think that it's. We still need it. There's plenty of other fun things you can do, like go on a rope, like that's a fun game and I don't understand, like so why do we need the sniper? Like why we actually snipe people in buildings right next to you?
Speaker 2:know it's on a rope yeah, I know, yeah, right, it's just wrong. This is bloody. It's weird. Yeah, okay, let's talk about them. Cute things, okay, this one I was so excited to see, I'm gonna pull it up here.
Speaker 2:This one was the pudgy penguins game and cabinet and I know we haven't talked a lot about it on the show, but I fell in love with pudgy penguins a long time ago because pudgy penguins started as an NFT right and all it is is a series of these cute little pudgy penguins with different hairstyles and different do's. Right, and you got this little NFT pudgy penguins and I know both Brenda and I have been following them for quite a while just to kind of see what the company's been up to, because they started to build plush and put it into like Walmart. We're seeing that they're starting to do some videos. They built like a game in a metaverse sort of the pudgy penguins that you can play in, and now they have this cool pudgy penguins polar allange game cabinet.
Speaker 2:Now, my okay, and I'm terrible at playing games, so you know what I'm not a good judge here, but like all the game really is is you have a penguin sitting on top of an iceberg and you have to press the button and the penguin jumps over the fish or ducks underneath the seagulls as they're coming along. I really liked it. I thought it was super cute, age appropriate for, you know, younger centers and I think it just appeals because those penguins are so darn cute. What were your thoughts on the game?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I thought it was fine. You know it's one of those type of games that you would just play on your phone over and over and try to get better, you know. It reminded me, actually, if you've ever used the Chrome browser and you don't have any internet and you hit the space bar. I don't know if you've ever tried this in the Chrome browser in a new tab there's like a guy that'll run, runs and you jump over a cactus and jump over different things. It's in the Chrome browser on when you're offline.
Speaker 1:So it reminded me a little bit of that type of just really simple game. You know, the fish calm, it comes a little faster. It gets fly flapping the air a little bit over if you get too fish. So I thought the gameplay was good. My only issue with it is that it's just big. It's a big game cabinet for the gameplay, considering you don't move. There's nothing moving around on the screen at all other than the fish coming in and you're just jumping up and down, you know, and so I thought that was. My only issue is that the game cabinet was just took a lot of square footage, but otherwise it was a great redemption game.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I kind of like the size of it actually. I just think it needs presence and you need to be able to see that and it needs to stand out in your arcades. I don't have such a big problem with the size of it. The few things, though, that I did think about it is if this is really an NFT brand and they're coming into the game space like couldn't we make this a little bit more fun and gamify it with actually giving people an NFT for playing or, you know, getting them to become a loyal brand follower of the Pudgies and, you know, kind of do some of the other things and get some of the other stuff. I don't know if there's another way to pull them into the community. I just thought that might be an interesting idea.
Speaker 1:I think, if anything, what you would do is also supply redemption plush with like you know, like the plush that you could, we were able to go and get in Walmart, right, so you know you got that plush in Walmart.
Speaker 1:You get the box and the box was a QR code. You scan the QR code and that loads you then into their virtual universe. And so I think, like if you had that ability to like, maybe you know if your redemption points, you know, or your credits from this game somehow accelerated so you could get a plush or something like that, that then like loaded you in. I think that'd be probably the easiest way to get people in from here versus trying to like somehow gamify this thing specifically. But yeah, I think when we talk about, maybe one way that could have been done is I know we're going to talk about Allen 1. Next is to have a QR code and be able to like actually on the cabinet or in the game, so to be able to load up and I can then try to get high scores and try to gamify and eSports it a little bit, and then have that connected to my universe, my broader budget penguins universe, like Allen 1.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, exactly, okay. Well, speaking of Ellen one, let's jump there. So I've got a little picture. I've got some pictures of some cabinets. This one's not so great, I'm gonna bump to this one. So why don't you tell us a little bit about Ellen one quickly? And then we have a video that we're gonna pull on screen with the somebody demonstrating the product and talking about what they do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So these guys are really cool. I love what they're doing and, first of all, just real quick, you notice the QR code in the top right screen of that aviation or aviation avian nights game, and so what that is doing is, by scanning that QR code, you're actually creating a profile or connecting your profile online Profile that you have because they have an entire eSports League and built around each one of these games. And so what Alan one has done is they've worked with Atari to basically get the rights to Use the Atari recharged brand. So this is, it's all of Atari's old games like centipede and asteroid and missile command, and they've reached that.
Speaker 1:Well, they recharged it, basically Created. It's still the same original gameplay, same original controls, but the actual screen and how it interacts and when you like, for asteroids for example, they have asteroids here, when you shoot the asteroid, it blows up. They have the. You know the spaceships come through just like usual and they're even shaped and look a little bit the same, but when you actually kill the spaceship, bigger explosions, there's more color involved, and so it's just a, it's just a fat like a little bit of. It feels like a more modern gameplay for Original game and I'm a big asteroids fan and I absolutely loved playing this game, and so aviation or cave, I keep doing that.
Speaker 1:Avian nights is the their version of joust, because for a long lot of reasons Atari Didn't actually have like when. When Atari was like buying, it's like selling off their, the brands. They had sold off joust to a different licensed joust for different group and so they couldn't get the actual joust license. So they recreated the game and called it avian nights. It's basically the joust gameplay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's super cool and I love these big cabinets. So this cabinet here you can stick four people at, and then I think the other one we were playing it had three. But hey, let's bring this guy up on stage and he's gonna tell us a little bit more about what they're all about.
Speaker 3:All right, so we are Alan one. This is We've got two cabinets here asteroids recharged and avian nights. Avian nights, their flagship title. Some would say it might be a reimagination of joust, but we have a cabinet in sports of the four players and a cabinet sports of the two players, and we started about two years ago with developing this and this came out last year earlier. Yes, last year an asteroid recharged. We got to deal with Atari this year to produce ten recharge titles asteroids recharges the first, and these will be available in quarter three of this year to be, you know, hopefully distributed across different arcades, and we're excited to see multiple Atari recharge titles in the future. That's what we're trying to do. So right now we don't have an official price yet. Roughly a rough estimate price would be on the two player cabinets, these smaller ones about 6,500, and these double wide cabinets Are gonna be about 10,000 in that ballpark. Yeah, we do have that. It's on their website as well. It's gonna be Atari comm, slash collections, slash games, dash recharge.
Speaker 2:Awesome, okay, so there you have it. You can go to the Atari website, our tariff comm slash recharge, and you can see all the other titles that are gonna be available. Available, and it sounds like quarter three this year they're gonna be out for distribution. Now, what do you remember? Was it Alan one that's gonna be actually like. That's the game supplier we have to go through to purchase these guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah, alan one is the one that have the side to deal with Atari to basically produce the game cabinets for the Atari recharge games, so they're the ones that are actually doing that. And then obviously they're they're doing some of their own games too, like the avian nights, and actually what I've got here is this this is really cool. So this is their marketing material. I've never seen anybody do something like this, where there's basically a an entire Backstory to the game that they produced in a comic book style, and so you know, I thought that just did a phenomenal job. Telling a little bit about the product is obviously here in front, but then they have a whole backstory through a comic book. So, anyway, some great promotion material as well. So really excited to see what Alan one does, as they really need to evolve their brand new in the industry. So it's good to see him.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good for them. Okay, cool, cool. Um, a few other things that we saw that were new. Let's just put this on stage. This one was super cool. I loved watching you play this. This is the ultimate UFO game and it's just a disc golfing Sort of, and you just kind of throw it like down the clown and you're showing it into different targets and just trying to hit the targets. What I liked about this and you talk about it because you played it, actually I gave it a go afterwards is I love the feeling of the discs and how heavy they were and how well they threw actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean somebody who played, you know, decent amount of disc golf and frisbee and ultimate and everything else. Yeah, I think that the discs that she performed really well. I think I currently have the high score, at least as far as what's there right now, like my high score is the one that's on there. So definitely thought it was a fun game and yeah, it's like down the plow with discs and I'd much rather throw a frisbee, frankly, than throw a ball, so, and I love down the clown, but this was fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, super fun. And then one last game I just wanted to pull up here is this JJ bot. I don't know if you guys have seen this before. I have a little video. You win the amount of tickets on the rule. So I don't know people seem to be excited about it. I just it's stupid. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:It's stupid. There's no, there's actually no reason for it. It's and the control mechanisms were actually not intuitive. We watched at least I watched a woman play and she couldn't figure out the arrows and what the arrows actually made the robot do. It's very counterintuitive because we're used to moving the crane around and dropping down and getting that. You know the ticket ring and for 50 grand I don't know how you're ever gonna get your money paid back from that thing, or you would, I mean over time, I guess. But I just don't know. Like why would somebody want to play that over? I just typical crane. At the end of the day, they just want to take it rings, they don't want to stupid robot going and grabbing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, for sure, I agree. I just looked down. Needs to come along. And I feel we don't even know how much it, how expensive it was. I feel like it was gonna be outrageously expensive and just not worth the money that you know we did, did hear somebody it was.
Speaker 1:It was roughly 50 grand.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:No, no way, yeah, that's yeah, but I can go and get a crane for 3000 or 5000, you know, typical, typical ticket cream. Why would I go and spend 10x more to get the stupid robot? It's just a gimmick that's unnecessary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, all right, okay, so just watch out for those robot cranes. No, no, yeah, yeah, that's just right now. Okay, so we got we pop by a couple other booths during our tours yesterday, so the first one that we want to talk about is Cubix from Inowice, and we have Stefan here who's gonna give us a little introduction to it, and then we'll talk about how we like the games. We gave it a play afterwards, so here we go.
Speaker 4:I'm here from Inowice and I'm very excited to have the LBX collective here at the show watching Cubix. So about Cubix? It's our six player unattended immersive enclosure, one of the newest small footprint attractions to make a hype in the industry. It's only 13 by 13 feet, basically 169 square meters, with 10 feet in height. We see right now a group of three people playing, I think, the zombie game, the must have zombie shooter. Together with that, cubix has five different game titles. Most of those have a very wide demographic appeal. It's important for us to work with families, to work with kids, to work with teenagers, what, at the same time, the older crowd as well. Everything is running unattended. We have a traffic control by using the gates on the sides. Cubix integrates with any POS card reading of NIAC system out here in the market and for overall, it's a very cool group immersive experience that meets all the functionalities required by an FEC to actually run it as an arcade machine, as an unattended attraction. Thank you.
Speaker 2:All right. So there you go. You got a little demo from Stefan, so initial thoughts. We played the game afterwards, right. And they have a new game that they launched and I'm darn you know what. I don't remember what it's called, but it's a cooking game. So you step into the box and you just have to do different actions and actually cook food and kind of go through some different steps on it, and so we were able to actually give that a try this time. Now I guess. I guess I'll just give you my initial thoughts on it.
Speaker 2:I really, I really love the box, like to me it's super appealing. I like the outside of it. I like how they have the TVs on it. I think it's really really well wrapped and it looks appealing. So I think it's going to draw people to the box. But when we first entered it and it's nice that it has little gates on the side but when you first entered it it was weird because there was a little bit of a ramp that went up, which I didn't quite understand why that was there. I think we kind of found out why afterwards, but I know I tripped on it actually coming in, which I thought was really interesting. So I'm just curious as to why that's there and if that might need to be adjusted or looked at.
Speaker 2:And then inside, the game itself was super fun and cool Like I love the graphics, that the graphics look absolutely fabulous in there. But I struggled a little bit because there was three of us playing the cooking game and I couldn't I don't know, it just wasn't intuitive for me to figure out how to grab an item with the hand controller that I had. I kept grabbing something or I wouldn't grab it and then I'd lose it. So maybe just took a little more practice or maybe I'm just kind of dense that way, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:And then with three of us in the box and I think it was that we can get up to six players in that box that even with three of us I found it really hard, like it kept bumping into everybody because I needed to run over to this wall to pick up something and I needed to run over to here to pick up something and move it back, and I just kind of felt like I was getting in the way. Now I know arguably you're going to say that that's part of the fun I'm. I don't know, I'm not sure, maybe it would have been better for me if it was just a two person experience, but what were your thoughts?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I actually really well, I really enjoyed the interactivity, meaning like it's a social experience, right. So this is, you're there, you're with your friends, you're with your family and like you kind of bump in and like you kind of move around somebody and it creates like an additional level of complexity because you have to like, even though you might have your thing and you might be trying to get over here like. One of the things I noticed is, as things start to get going with the shift game anyway, sometimes Kevin would be boiling his egg and I need to boil my egg, so I was kind of like wait for a second.
Speaker 1:As soon as he moved out of the way, I jumped in there, thrown my egg, or I knew that he, I saw that he was moving in that direction and I got in there and I threw mine in first and then, you know, got it out, and so I think having some of that moving around and bumping into each other is part of the experience for me. So I think that enhanced the experience. But, yeah, I can see how I can see how it would be a little bit frustrating, especially if, like, you're a little kid and you're in with, like, all these adults or whatever you're trying to like squeeze in. But I thought it was fun and we only play the chef game. I'd love to go back and play some of the other games as well and see what their see what their gameplay is, but otherwise I think I'd like that. I like what they're doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, me too, me too, and I think it's not that I didn't like having multiple people in the game playing, I did. I kind of got that Like. I think that it was fun. I just maybe what I would have liked is I would have been like to be able to reach over somebody to grab something if they were standing in my way of the object. And then also there was a couple of times where I grabbed something and I go to put it in the frying pan and I thought I had done it correctly, but maybe I wasn't close enough to the screen and it just I'd lose what I did. So then I'd have to go back and get the item refried or something like that and bring it back again, and so that that was the piece that I found frustrating. Yeah, but anyway.
Speaker 1:Well, let's talk about one of my favorite, one of my favorite games. Still on this, you know, still to this like one of the newest things that we've seen is Playbox. So let's check out. Let's check out those guys.
Speaker 2:All right.
Speaker 5:This is the Playbox, or ball tossing game. Basically, players can come here, play two balls at targets and get points based on their aiming skills. The more targets you hit, the more points you get and the more redemption you can get as well. There's the Playbox. Here we have the four player. There's a six player version as well available, available with coin ops and card readers, and this year we have also free to play mode. There's 16 games available and operators can choose and select which game they want to put on their machine and they can sort as they please as well.
Speaker 2:Can you give us an example? Yeah, of course. Yeah, I'll try the Dino Rampage.
Speaker 5:It's the newest one that we have. Yep.
Speaker 2:Nice, okay, I think you have the picture. I'm gonna stop it there, because you pretty much see the next same thing for the next minute in this video. Yeah, super cool concept.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it and I love the, the multiplayer, like the multi-person gameplay. So they do have a single player box. I was over there playing with that one but I didn't mean that's fine for in an arcade and you want to just have like a little redem, cool redemption thing. But again, if you're in trying to go for the social experiences and have that type of environment, having the multi people where you can have four people all together throwing balls and then, like we didn't get to, is the very end. When he gets to the end of the game, he basically just start tossing balls and stuff and it just gets chaos and anyway, it's a lot of fun. I think the interactivity is great.
Speaker 1:They've done a phenomenal job with the graphics and the the gameplay too.
Speaker 2:So yeah, and the one thing that I really like about the model too Is that they give you all of their games up front and you can actually test that out with your client base. You can have it installed and I think it's a six-month period. You get all their games and then you get to decide down which six games you want to keep. I think six comes with the original package and then you can license the rest of them. So I thought that was kind of a cool feature that they had with that product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2:Okay, so we have one last item. Should we roll with that, or do you want to push it to?
Speaker 1:the world. No, let's see hero zone.
Speaker 2:Okay, all right, so we're gonna pull up hero zone. We have David here. This is a VR product from Belgium, and he's gonna tell us all about it guys.
Speaker 6:My name is David Lugo and I'm here representing hero zone, a virtual reality company out of Belgium. Right behind me you can see the arena. A turnkey solution Pretty much has anything you might need to run a successful virtual reality attraction inside of your facility. One of the things that makes hero zone different from your average company is that we are operator focused. We have a discord channel where are over 250 users are all on discord anytime there's a Common issue, problem or solution, someone's looking for you, just type into the discord and you have Operators that are giving you the feedback on. Oh, this is what I use. This is the way that I train my facility or my staff at my facility, and it's.
Speaker 6:I think that's one of the powerful things about hero zone. What you see up there is called the hangout and that was designed by hero zone because of the operators. They were asking is there a place that we can load everyone into before a game starts? And they came up with the hangout. You can play actual virtual reality arcade games, claw machines. There's a basketball shooter and you can theme it for birthdays. You can theme it for Halloween, for Christmas, so it keeps your attraction nice and fresh. Hero zone has any type of configuration you could look for, from software only to a full turnkey solution that you can start making a lot of money with virtual reality, with yeah.
Speaker 6:So this is called dead ahead. This is our zombie shooter, the most popular title, really cool. This is the shooting range where they're gonna get to shoot a myriad of the weapons that we have the ability to play with During the game, and this just gives them the ability to acclimate to the virtual reality world and understand how the guns are gonna function Once they get actual zombies running at them. Yeah my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Okay, so that was David yeah that's awesome, I you know.
Speaker 1:Again, I think what you're doing is great. I love the discord server that they've got and you know that they listen to their user feedback or to their you know their operator feedback is great. And yeah, I would agree that loading room was one of the big differentiators for me. That was a lot of fun, in fact. I could just spend time in that loading room playing around with all this stuff and like, yeah, obviously the game was fun as well. We played the zombie game too, but the the loading room was was excellent, very much cute.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was. It was super cute and I actually really enjoyed it for a virtual reality game. I know I say I get sick of them all the time that I didn't feel nauseous in that one at all and my sight wasn't perfect, but maybe that's just something I have to accept about virtual reality, but I did enjoy it. I like the feedback that you got on the hand controllers when you're shooting the guns and it actually the aiming was pretty darn good. So I had a shotgun, which was really cool, and I kept actually shooting and hitting them, so I felt like I was actually accomplishing something. I don't think I was the last person in that game, so anyway, but yeah, great time. Thank you to everybody actually that did the videos with us. That was super fun and I'm glad that we were able to show off their products on the show.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's awesome. Well, wraps our show for today. You're talking about the music. Next, though, we are heading back down there again today, so if we see anything well, we'll make sure to grab a video or grab some pictures We'll talk about tomorrow, but otherwise, as always, stay tuned and keep kicking ass.
Speaker 2:See you later, guys. You.
