Retronauts - 498: Taito, Pt. III

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

Jeremy Parish, Ray Barnholt, and Brandon Sheffield reconvene for what was meant to be the third and final chapter of our Taito deep dive but ends up being a middle chapter, if that. It's not our fault! 1989-91 were crackin' years for Taito. Be sure to check out episodes 451 and 463 to bring yourself up to speed with this ever-growing epic of a conversation! Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, brought to you this week by Stamps.com and HelloFresh. This week in Retronauts, you will be the servants of the Satan. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronaut's episode 498. And this episode, we're not doing anything momentous. We are maintaining momentum. We started up a series talking about the history of Taito earlier this year, and we've got to see it through. And I don't think we're going to see it through this episode, but we're going to make momentum. We're going to, you know, progress, push forward, whatever you call it.

Yes, if you have missed it. these episodes, the previous episodes about Taito's history, because they were paywalled on our Patreon. You can find them at patreon.com slash Retronauts. Episodes 451 and 463 began our Taito Odyssey. And where we last left off, I believe we were somewhere around 1988, 1998, 1999, talking about tito's move into home consoles. So, before we jump right back into, that and maintain this continuity of discussion, why don't we introduce ourselves? I'm Jeremy Parrish, but you probably knew that because I think I said it already. But with me here, this episode, we have the same people who have been talking about Taito with me. So

please introduce yourselves, Brandon. Hello, I'm Brandon Sheffield, creative director of Necrosoft Games. I like Taito. I like especially the F3 board. That's my favorite. and we're probably not going to get there today, but someday. I think we might. I think we might get there. Okay, maybe we'll touch on the beginnings of the F3. Yeah, yeah, the origins. F3 origins.

But Taito is great. Let's all enjoy. Who else is with us? Hi, it's Ray Barnholt back again. I am full of protein and caffeine. I just listened to Wien. I'm ready to go. Let's talk about Taito.

Wow. That's the full hat trick right there. All right. So, I believe we had just like two last little things to talk about in 1980, some Famicom games. I guess NES games, one of them came to the AIS. One of them did not. Yes, 88. And those two games are Demon Sword and Akira, two very different games.

Let's talk about Demon Sword first, just in passing, because it was the sequel, sort of, to an NES game that had previously been published by Taito. here in the U.S. called The Legend of Kage, which we discussed in a previous episode. This is, I guess, meant to be a sequel, even though there was actually a Legend of Kage 2 many years later. So maybe it was just they said, wow, we really like guys with swords who jump a lot and said, okay, let's do a different thing. Very vertically. Very vertically. Yeah. And it's just one of those games that it's not, it's like a spiritual sequel because it uses the same sort of mechanics, but it's not like in the same universe or anything. I think it's a cool game, though.

I think if Legend of Kage didn't do it for you back in the day, then check it out because, like, the NES port of Kage has kind of simplified graphics, and a lot of people didn't quite get it. But Demon Sword's a bit more graphically complex, more of the era. It's a bit, it's still fun, I think. I feel like if we, if we, as youths, called it Legend of Cage, then we should have to call this, like, Demon Sword or something. Sure. Demonsward? Demonsward. Yeah, so this, I didn't really play much of this back in the day, but I do appreciate the fact that compared to the legend of Kage, it has a more structured design.

Kage is really just sort of like these big, empty spaces that you jump around in and try not to die until you get to sort of the final stage of the four where it does have a little bit of an interior, interior castle structure. But here, it's much more like that throughout. So it's not so much about just like leaping blindly and, you know, sailing around throwing shirigan. It's much more about kind of navigating caves and castles and other structures that have a more definitive sort of like physical design to them, which I find that more satisfying. Yeah, I think it's just, it's just one of those games that's emblematic of that little period of NES games where things were starting to get more structured and complex and had some meat to them, I think. It's got some hot cut scenes, too. No, yeah. Of course, the cuttons, the cinema scenes. Yeah, that's what it's all about.

And you got your seven-bladed sword, classic, legendary weapon that you get to use that gets more god-darn blades on it as it goes along. Yeah, it's like that Saturday Night Live skit with the razor blades, and they just keep releasing more and more complicated blades. This was actually my introduction. I'm talking about George Lucas. Oh, okay. More blades are better.

That's right. How are you going to be general grievous? I don't even know. This was actually my introduction to the Shi Chi Shito, the legendary seven-bladed sword that shows up in a lot of Japanese media that has kind of a classical Japanese folklore and legendary bent to it. Especially in the 80s. I feel like the 80s was kind of like the zeitgeist slash resurgence for that particular

story. You saw it in like, man, I feel like I saw it in Samurai Troopers. I don't want to 100%. Someone's going to correct me on that. But I feel like I saw it in there. It's definitely in some 80s animas as well. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, this was the game that made me realize, oh, that's a thing. That is a, like, you know, when I started seeing it in other places, I realized this is probably not a demon sword reference. They're probably all pulling from some sort of common, like, legend or story or something. And it turns out, gosh darn it, I was right. I love in older games when you see something that takes you on to that journey where you're like, this seems like something that everybody making this game knew about. What does that mean?

And it just like brings you into another place of legend where it's like, everybody knows the story of like, momotado or whatever um but for a lot of us we just discover it through a video game or through an anime or something like that and it's like oh wow everybody everybody really understands this story this is like this is like the brother's graham over there uh i love when when a video game can be the thing to do that just through like this this sword looks crazy and then you look into it and it's like oh it's actually it's actually like a legend it's a long standing legendary item. Yeah. Love that stuff.

Yeah. I mean, I feel like growing up as an American in the pre-internet age, a lot of what I do, you know, revisiting old media, old import media now, like Gundam and Godzilla, is just kind of reverse engineering all the things that I grew up playing

and watching without really understanding like, oh, there's this kind of common pool of references that is totally, literally foreign to me that, you know, they're being drawn upon by the creators, but I'm not aware of them because it's outside, you know, my cultural experience. And, you know, when I make those connections, it's always pretty exciting to say, oh, there's a thing. That's cool. I remember that. You know, even, even something like

in the NES version of Strider, the final boss is a horribly mingled localization of the name Yugdrasil. And that was probably the first time I ever saw, like, you know, the Yugdrasil, the Norse tree of legend the world tree Yeah right world tree But now you know I see that other places And I'm like oh that's what they were doing that game But like it didn't come through because I didn't know what a eugdrasil was and also That's not what they actually called it

It was you know some garbled re translation of a romanized or like a you know name that was taken from Norse into katakana and then back into English Just terrible But, you know, it's kind of fun to, like, you know, sort of put together those puzzle pieces. Anyway, that's more about DevenSword that I thought we'd actually have to say. So that's good. You want to hear a little, little side note about that translation thing. So I was in Japan just a couple months ago exhibiting at the Tokyo Game Show.

And I met a British person in Izakaya, and we were talking about like, the transliteration of English words into Japanese and how, and I was kind of like, in a blasé way complaining about trying to figure out the right, wrong way to say an English word, because it, you have to, like, when, when an English word gets translated into Japanese as a lone word through Katakana, it's, it's like, Aeacon is air conditioning. And, and you have to remember to say it that way because otherwise it doesn't make sense to anybody. But he was saying to me that sometimes it's not like the specific way to say an English word.

Like we all know that Arubaito part-time job in Japanese comes from Arbite, the German word for work, but some things that you might think are English are actually not. So when they say cup, it's koppu. And that sounds like you're saying an English word wrong, because like KAPU would be closer. But if you actually look into the origins of it, Koppu is closer to a Portuguese word for Kup. And a lot of those ones where you're like, it sounds like English, but it's just a little bit wrong, actually come from Portuguese because obviously the Portuguese came to Japan first before any other Western countries. And it was particularly interesting to me with the word cup

because kokebood sounds just like English but wrong. But in fact, it's Portuguese but slightly weird. The end. And then you have this game where instead of saying, Shichi Shito, we say Demon Sword or Demon Sword. Bring it a full circle. All right. So the other notable 1988 Macomb release from Taito is Akira,

which is, yes, an adaptation of the movie, not the manga. It doesn't have all that stuff about like post-apocalyptic Tokyo, you know, and all the little armies fighting. And now it just ends when they put the jars together and they explode. And then everyone has like an existential experience. So that's kind of tough to translate into an ape at Famicom game. So this is actually one of the earliest examples I've found of what we would kind of consider a visual novel. It's really

just, you know, the text being played out and then occasionally you have some choices you can make, at least you know, from what I've seen and played. Yeah, on home consoles maybe because... Yeah, yeah, on home consoles, for sure. Yeah, because on Japanese PCs that

there was probably like some of the earliest stuff that got done, people love doing that. But yeah, it's an interesting one. It does take the movie character designs very clearly. which is kind of fun to see. It's got a neat, kind of a neat look to it.

Not super interactive, though, I guess. Yeah, I mean, they managed to condense a lot of, you know, like fill themselves down to those tiny little boxes to fit as many of them into the game on the ROM as they could. So it has some compromises. But it actually has a really huge amount of text for a Famicom game. Yeah, that's kind of bold, I would say, for a movie that you would kind of naturally assume would be turned into like an action platformer on Famicom at least.

So the fact that it's just kind of like a real story that just plays out. It's kind of interesting. Did you all see the unfinished Akira platform game on the Genesis? Right. Yeah. Yep. It looks real bad. Yeah.

This is probably a better choice. This is probably. Yeah. So I think in light of that, this is probably a good direction. Although you could have, I don't know, take download on the PC engine. just slap Acura on it and it would probably do well. Yeah. are rapidly approaching.

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in the arcades, quite a few games that aren't necessarily, you know, all-timers. I don't know that there's anything on here that people are going to be like, oh, hell yeah, that is one of the all-time greatest video games of all time. But they're definitely, you know, really solid

sort of, I wouldn't say second stringer, that sounds derivative. Just, you know, like the games that don't necessarily, didn't necessarily change the industry, you know, don't necessarily land at the top of anyone's all-time greatest lists, but are still

really good fun, just good solid video games. Yeah, there's a few I really like on here. Keep exploring ideas. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. The first, I kind of, I was going to say I went alphabetical order, but I actually didn't. I have

no idea what the order that I put these down in was. I think I was in a fugue state or something. But I the first one I put down is Don Docodon. And I guess maybe I put this one down first just because I love the Famicom Disc System version's cover art, which is one of those little, like,

miniatures photo of a little gnome. He's a little gnome guy. It's a great little photo. It's like someone gussied up a lawn gnome and, you know, turned it into box art. It's great. It's really good. But yeah, this is another check and pop bubble Bobble type game. Go ahead. Yeah, they hit things with mallets. Um, they jump around. I, I played the PC

engine version, of course, uh, which is also very good and also has good cover art. Yeah, I think, I mean, Don Doko Done was never going to hit the big time, but I think it's, it's quite successful at doing what it tries to do. And it's named after an animatopoeia, which is always nice. Um, but, uh, yeah, I, I, I think it's very good. And it's actually surprising. still affordable on the PC engine compared to most like action games or Taito games in general. So get it

while you can. Yeah, I compared it to Bubble Bobble, but I guess it's more like Fairyland Story. It has more of that style to it. You're a whimsical little fantasy creature, hitting whimsical little fantasy creatures with a mallet. The structure, you know, it

is very much that fairyland story bubble bubble bubble style where you clear a level of enemies and collect the items that they turn into and you have like five seconds to kind of clear out the stage and then you're taken to the next level. But, you know, at the same time, you can throw enemy corpses,

which you could never do in bubble-bobble. You just popped them. But here, you're using their bodies as weapons. That's dark, but, you know, that's kind of, that's a gnomes for you. As it should be. Yeah, this game is, it kind of, to me, is somewhere between Fairyland Story and, like,

Mizubaku Panic, so not the full evolution. of the single-screen platformer style, but kind of a stutter step to get to the end game, which I think Nizabaka Panic kind of is. Okay, okay. I don't know that one, actually. Is that Taito?

Yes. You talk about Liquid Kids? Liquid kids, yeah. Oh, oh, right, okay. Okay, so Don Dondokodon is, I can't say it the proper way, don't docodone. Don't doodon. is Dōondogadon is

Yeah, it's charming, it's cute If you'd like that style of game You would like this one. I'm sure it's on I feel like it's on the EGRAT Mini 2 I think so I don't have a list of games here I also misspoke on the Mizubak It's Mizubaku Dai Boken

is what I There's something else with panic That just inserted itself into my brain But yeah, Liquid Kids I forgot the The English name for it as well don't doco doco panic that's right don't dokey does you turn into

yes turned into a Mario Mario Brothers too that's right let's just confuse everyone and and keep swirling references yes exactly Ray do you have anything to add on this one or no not really not a big fan of the don't docos

really okay that's well not that I hate it I just mean I don't play it that much but yeah too many beads for you oh well yeah Gnome nightmares That's right Yeah, okay I understand

Those guys are scary Speaking of little guys The next game of the list Is Flipple A.k.a. plotting Which involves a little guy who kicks blocks And it's a puzzle game

About matching blocks And I don't I don't really I'm not very good at this game And maybe it's because I discovered it through Gameboy Doing a retrospective video on it But maybe if you

If you saw everything in color It would make a little, you know, just would read a little easier. But it has a very strange system where you kick a block and it flies into a stack of blocks. And that causes some blocks to disappear, but not others. And you have to kind of think like four steps ahead because you only have a limited number of moves. It's very challenging. So it actually makes sense. It's just really not intuitive.

It's basically like if you hit a block from above, it'll get rid of the block. If you hit the block from the side, it'll replace it. And in order to hit it from above, you have to... Or, I mean, you can also replace... You have to make three. You have to match three. So if you do...

You can match three horizontally as well. But in order to hit things vertically, you have to throw it against these, like, inverted stairs that are above. and then make sure that that then balks down into the correct area that you're looking at. It is, it's a little brain warpy, and I don't feel like it super works, but it actually kind of feels to me like it set the stage for the, this is very obscure and probably incorrect, but the, um, the SNK puzzle game that was in King of Fighters 2001, they had like a side,

horizontal well puzzle game that they made that was versus and it feels a little bit like this game to me it's it's a maybe it's mostly the horizontal movement thing but um yeah it's it's it's it's an odd one i i still can't wrap my brain around it but it feels like somebody somebody could you know i'm glad i'm not alone here i think i have an easier time understanding it and playing it than I do Saldam from Jalico. Interesting. It is, though, yeah, very hard to explain. Yeah.

Both those games, I guess. But yeah, I like it. It's charming in a certain way because I think it still has a Taito cuteness to it because you have that little player character. It's like a blob sort of almost like a Puyo, actually. Yeah. And you just moves up and down, yeah, kicking things. And you match one of the type of blocks that you match is the Taito logo,

which I always enjoy when they slide that in there. Yep. I mean, that's five stars right there. Do you feel that they are speaking truth when the tagline says an exciting puzzle game? Yeah. I mean, yeah. You play it and you think, how, this was exciting. Yeah, I feel jazzed up.

Well, yeah, I don't even remember the music that much. How about that? Am I jazz by the music at least? I'm not sure. I think once you get it, it could be exciting. but I think it starts out as a confusing puzzle game and then they should have had that be their tagline. Confusing puzzle game.

That's, yeah, that's going to win the kids. All right, so I looked it up and confirmed that Don Doondokodon is on the Taito Igrette Mini 2. Plotting, aka Flipple, is not, I'm afraid. Doesn't seem to be very sad. Well, I guess you're not going to be able to be confused than Eagert 2 fans. Nope. You have to find your confusion elsewhere.

Yeah. It's just, it's on the regret, too, instead. The next game on this list, however, is on the Eagret Too Many, and that is violence fight, which is way up there in terms of great titles, you know, like Revengers of Vengeance, aggressors of dark combat. Like, it's top tier, just like it is what it says in the box. It's violent and you fight. Also sits right next to the Japanese version of Turok 2, violence killer. That's right. Yes, yes. Very good. So this one, not one that I've actually played myself, but looking at, you know,

watching through videos of it, it seems to be kind of taking that China Warrior thing, you know, the PC engine game with the gigantic sprites that was a very sort of linear, altered beast-ish sort of game. and taking those huge, big-ass sprites into more of a traditional fighting game with different-sized arenas, some that have movement on different axes. And also, sometimes you fight tigers. Yeah. It's very interesting. It's kind of like a one-on-one beat-em-up in a way, almost more than a fighting game.

I mean, it still has, like, zoning and all that stuff. But it feels a little more beat-em-up built scroll. to me because you do have that third axis sometimes and and also because of the the lack of combos and super moves and stuff like that. So it gives me a little more of that vibe. I think it's a hand-drawn pit fighter. It's basically yeah there you. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Pit Fighter. Actually, I think this came up before Pit Fighter. Maybe they were similar. With much bigger sprites than pit fighter has. Right, yeah. But it's very similar. plane. It also gives me

Fist of the North Star vibes, even though it's not particularly post-apocalyptic, it has the way that... Certain buffness to the dudes. Yeah, there's a buffness and there's a buffness to some dudes and a roundness to other dudes that really calls it to mind, but also just some of the ways that the attacks are done, like the

that sharp angle high kick and the... I mean, there's just a few things in there that feel like they were influenced by that. And also the big words popping out when you hit people. Oh, yeah. The comic sound effects. Yeah, yeah. I like the Anamapaya that pops out.

Yeah, I think they might have been, at the very least, they were thinking about it when they did it. Yeah, no doubt. So anyway, that's violence fight. You, any one of you who owns the EGret Mini 2 can play it now and experience gigantic sprites on a tiny 3-inch screen, as they were intended to be played. So then we move on to Battleshark, which I guess introduces us to the Taito Z system. I don't know if either of you are big tech guys who want to talk about this hardware, but. If not, I will say that this is pretty comparable technologically to the Sega System 24 board or the Y board that powered a lot of the super scalar games of the late 80s, the big hits like Galaxy Force 2 and that sort of thing. It's got two 6800 or 68,000 processors with a Yamaha sound chip and a Z80 audio processor.

So basically that whole kind of pool of architecture, the game. gave us the Super Scalar games, the Sega Genesis, that sort of thing, the Amiga, I guess. I guess Amiga didn't have a Yamaha. But, you know, it's still kind of in that like, hey, you like sprites. Here's a lot of sprites. And they're going to get bigger and they're going to fly in your face. Yeah. And who does that? I love super scalers. And I especially love when someone takes the superscaler idea and does something different with it. So I do like this game. I've played it at California Extreme Arcade once or twice. It's not perfect because it is ultimately like sub-hunt or something

because you've got a slow-moving screen, you've got enemies moving across it, and you're shooting them down with slow-moving bullets that eventually get there in torpedoes and stuff. But I quite like it because it's... Sometimes you come up to the surface, sometimes you're under the water sometimes you're scrolling forward

sometimes you're scrolling down sometimes you're scrolling to the side that's the kind of stuff that I appreciate so you got your like surface surfacing mission then you have your mission on the surface and then you have to go back down it's a

I just love watching a big sprite scale toward me there's still there's something magical about that to me because I love when you can look at the inventiveness of a game company. You can really see it in front of you because it's like, okay, we don't have, we know

3D is coming, but we don't quite have it yet, so we're going to fake it. And the way that they fake it just becomes its own, like its own piece of literature in itself. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, why did graphics evolve at all beyond that is my question? It's an excellent question that I will never have the answer to it. This is all we need.

SIGA really tapped into something primal when they came up with a super-scaler style. Oh, yeah. And there is, like, when you play this in a proper arcade setting, there is something that is just deeply visceral and thrilling about just having all these things fly into your face. And when they get really close, they're just big chunks of huge pixels. I don't know. It should be, like, bad and tacky, but it's not. It's good and exciting, and I love it. It's like 60 FPS on a CRT as well.

And so there's a certain kind of a smoothness to it that moves along with the sometimes jerky motion of the sprites that just, it feels kind of otherworldly. I just really, really appeals to me. And I've noticed that there has been kind of a resurgence of interest among other olds in this. Yeah, the superscaler era is kind of currently under development for Mr. and analog pocket. There we go. I don't think you're going to get the proper experience analog pocket. But still, it's, you know, that's someplace that some of the FPGA developers are really focusing on right now, which is, as it should be. Yeah, absolutely.

Sadly, this one is not on the EGRA too many, probably because it is a light gun game. Yeah. And, you know, they've come up with expansions for that thing. There's one coming out this month, I think, or next month, that has a bunch of new games on it. But if you plug in the roller trackball controller and dial controller, it has an SD card that loads in 10 extra games. You know, I could see them doing some sort of weird, like, miniature light gun thing for Operation Wolf and Battleshark and stuff like that. Operation Wolf 3, I don't know. It's never going to happen, but I feel like if they really loved us, they'd try.

It would be really difficult because it can't interact with the screen because it's not a CRR. so it can't bounce the photons back or whatever but they could probably come up with some sort of like gyro thing it would be a lot of work though I just want to mention also that the arcade machine I likened it to

subhunt but because you actually you're looking into a periscope and you're shooting through the periscope so you're actually like aiming in this periscope thing which probably both made it slightly more popular at

first and then limited its popularity as well, because it's, um, it's kind of obnoxious to, uh, to have to look into that screen. It's, it's like, it's why the, the, the virtual boy was never going to make it. Um, and it's all, why the metaverse isn't going to succeed. I can think of some other reasons actually on that one. Yeah, there's, there's probably one or two more, but, you know, the main one. I agree. No one wants to, wants to stick their face into something. thing for like an hour. Yeah. Unless, you know, you just really love, you're like, oh, I want the aliens experience.

Come on. Stick that thing on my face. Yeah, facehacker style. I have one more nugget on this is that it seems to be a follow-up to another game title made called Blue Shark from like a decade earlier. Oh, right. Which is a very similar sort of thing. It's a big stand-up cabinet with a gun and you shoot sea creatures, although it's monochrome.

and, you know, they put overlays at it over it, because as was the style at the time. Yes. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know exactly without knowing everyone who worked on both those games. I wonder how intentional that all was. Mm-hmm. Let's find out.

Kids, if you know, right in. Anyway, so speaking of follow-ups, we also have in the arcade here in 1989, Sagaya, which I don't know why they called it that in some place. Otherwise, it was known as Darias 2. Yeah. And it is exactly what you would expect from Darias 2.

It's got three screens, and it's just more, more, more, more shooting, more screen stuff, more giant fish robots in space. You have to blow up. Who doesn't love that? Yeah, more crazy music. It opens with that line about... Oh, yes, I always wanted a thing called a tuna sashimi. Yeah, that's right. yep as will once again surprise no one i played this on the pc engine and quite liked it um

it's a fun one uh there was there was a megadrive version as well i played that yeah and i i think it was on it was on the mega drive that it was renamed sagaya um okay but i i don't know why yeah the game boy too yeah i was going to say Game Boy was also Seagaya. Who knows? It was just that era of localization. It's like Gradius Nemesis. Yeah.

But the PC engine version has an arranged soundtrack with some new songs in it. So if you love listening to that Taito nonsense, that Zun Tata business, you got to check that version out, too. They also did a Saturn port that had a widescreen mode, which is. somewhat unusual. Difficult, I imagine. Yeah. I do, I did recently get a, I haven't plugged it in yet, but I did recently get a widescreen CRT, which I'm very excited about. So I'm going to be trying all my widescreen Saturn games on there. Oh, yes. Wow. That's exciting. Yeah.

Yeah. I, uh, sadly this one is also not on the Taito Egret Mini 2. Or Taito Egret 2 mini. Yes, that's it. Because it only has one screen. So they couldn't do that. And I don't imagine they're ever going to release a triple-screen mini-arcade console just for like the three, four games that Taito built around that concept. I never say never. But you never, yeah, I was going to say, you never know. Anything is possible. Oh, also the soundtrack to Darius II is currently out on Ship to Shore Records, if you want to buy the vinyl record. That was on a recent, a recent episode.

recent episode of Retronauts for Retronauts Radio. I quite enjoy it. Yeah. If you like hearing the sharp piercing tunes that stab into your brain, you could do worse than that entire series of... That is their stock and trade. Reactions on the radar recognize code TEC3L. Distance.

$12,000. Third and forth sentence. Ignition. Main engine energy level, 20% increase. I always wanted a thing called tuna sashimi. Three, two, one. All right. So a game that is on the Igrettuemini, if you buy the spinner expansion, is camel tree,

also known as on the ball. Or is it camel try? I think it's camel try, but I don't know. It says why not try on the title screen. And so I feel like there's supposed to be a joke there, but I don't know. I don't know. What does that even mean? It means basically nothing.

I think this is one of those things that came out of that story that, who was it? The CEO or somebody of Taito had basically come up with a list of names of products that will be made. Oh, right. Yeah. It was like, these are going to be the names of games. Just pick from this huge list of weirdo things and make something named that. It will lead us to great fortune. I think I talked about this a little bit on a past episode here, but they had that, they had

that system that was like somewhat religious-based, where it was like, if you can match these fortuitous elements, then you can make a game within the confines of matching those fortuitous whatever. And that's why there was so much, like, freewheeling nonsense going on in Taito at the time. They were just, like, stabbing in any direction because. you could so vaguely match these auspicious things. And it actually kind of worked out for them. So, like, weird, weird.

It definitely gave us a roster of games that weren't really quite like anything anyone else was doing. Yeah. Certainly Camel Try, if that's what we want to call it, was pretty different than anything I can think of prior to this game coming out. Well, this runs on the... I say, whenever I played around people, someone always walks up and goes, is that Marble Madness? Sure.

That's because they don't actually know what Marble Madness is. Yeah, but, I mean, it is explainable to some people in some people's head. It's like playing Doom and say, is this, is this missile command? Right. The other similarity is, of course, the Sonic CD special stage, or Sonic One, yeah, special stages. That would come later. And then there's CoroCoro Postnine. But not much later.

For PlayStation, yeah. Not much later, but a couple of years. It makes... It makes me wonder whether that is the one point of influence that that Camel Try had was the Sonic minigame. Would we have it without that? I mean, ultimately, these are all based on the little ball in a maze toy. So maybe someone would have still come up with it, but it's interesting the similarity. that are there, I would say.

It's complete with the goal at the end in the big letters. I don't know. Something similar in there. Yeah. So the way this game works is it's basically doing the Super NES mode 7 thing a year before the Super NES actually came out in Japan. This ran on the Taito F1 system, which is like the little baby sibling of the Z system. It only has one processor, but it's really built around rotation and scaling.

but not in the super scalar sense and the sense of the kind of stuff you would see a lot on 16-bit consoles in the 90s, where stuff is spinning around. So basically, you kind of control a ball or like the Operation Wolfgui's head or Chacken. It's just various objects floating through a maze. And you don't really control the object itself.

You cause the maze to spin around. And that, you know, then the the object you are controlling or guiding, I guess, is the better term, will fall through the passages, you know, being affected by gravity, bouncing off stuff, et cetera. And your goal is to reach an exit with, you know, the Operation Wolf Guys head or whatever. And yeah, it's, it sounds goofy, but it controlled with a spinner. And it just has a very fluid rotation effect that, um, It just works really well. You know, it's a pretty simple concept, but it was really all about the execution, and they did it really well. Yeah, it's good. It's no irritating stick, though. Irritating stick kind of takes a similar sort of idea and is more irritating, which makes it more fun.

Maybe. I still think Camelry rules, though. It is like the number one reason I got the paddle controller with the EGrit 2 Mini. and I'm very happy about that and yeah just great level design as well maybe we'll get to this someday but it is also sort of it was revived for DS as

well the English name is the labyrinth they just called it labyrinth here but the Japanese name was Muash de Kodon so not camel try by name but once you look at it yeah it's camel try it sounds like you are better able to camel succeed whereas I usually camel fail after Camel trying.

I always like to do a nice Camel try run whenever I sit down in front of that, eager to. Nice. Criminally, though, that DS game did not support the paddle controller. Yeah, that is weird. It came out beforehand. Oh, before, right. Man, they should have had the foresight and be like, oh, we, or patch it, patch it.

I know, we need a ROM hack. For sure. All right. So that is a game that you can revisit in this modern day and age. There is no camel do or camel do not. There is only camel trooper. No, there is. I was going to make a Yoda joke, but I messed it up.

You sort of did. You just inverted it. I blew it. I blew it. All right. We're just going to let that lay there. Just sad and pathetic. All right. So moving on, Nightstriker, another super scalar type game.

Another game that had kind of a closed-in cabinet that probably affected its long-term appeal because it looks really cool. But you can't really see another person. playing it so it kind of fails at that you know that kind of crowd drawing crowd pleaser style that's that's the problem with you know arcade game experiences it just it's it's for the person who's already put money in as opposed to the people who are prospective customers but but it's really cool it's like it's basically super scaling's greatest hits it's every super scaler game in one just all the ideas they're right here yeah it's pretty good you can fly around

you can drive on the ground. It moves real fast. The ship moves incredibly fast. It's got the zone choices. We're at the end of the stage. You choose which area to go to. We actually learned something valuable from this game when we were making our own Super Scalar,

O'Deer, which currently, again, sorry everyone is not available to play, but we'll be again someday eventually, probably. But in Nightstriker, they have tunnels. And the tunnels are, it looks like they have walls, but they don't really have walls. They have empty space with, like, light dots on them. And it's so effective, like, you interpret a wall because, well, there are some, like, pillars that go by, which helps as well. but it's it's just a really cheap way of making a wall they have scaling road on top and bottom which looks really cool but they couldn't they couldn't actually make walls that bend and go with the curves and look good so they they just alternate a light pole or a light and a pole and you just your brain fills a wall into that blank space that's there it's it's really cool a lot so kind of night driver taken to the ultimate

extent the next level. Yeah. Yeah, from driver to Stryker. That's right. This also has a version on the Sega CD, which was very poorly reviewed at the time. But I guess people like it now. And it's available on the Mega Drive Mini 2. So you can also try the Sega CD version, which is a little bit expensive these days.

So you might as well try it on the Mega Drive Mini 2. But it's got the... That one has a unique look to it because it winds up maintaining the speed and the frame rate pretty well at the expense of resolution. And so everything's like super chunky, super pixely. It's like it's all, it's like everything's zoomed in, including your ship. It's just really, it's got this fuzziness, which I can understand why people were down on it at the time, but now has kind of a neat vibe to it. It's worth checking out. So it's like, what if you super-scalered on Pico 8?

Yeah, it's a little bit like that. It's like a 56K demo super-scaler version or something. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, at least Taito kind of had the gumption to port it or have it ported because like Sega, I think, was giving up porting their super scalar games to mega drive at that point. Yeah.

You bought a Sega console so you could play Sega. arcade games, and they were kind of like, ah, I don't know, guys, power drift, do you really want that? No, we'll let it be on PC engine and stuff. It's, it's actually, it's actually kind of a smart move on Taito's part, because they, they released super scalar games like this on both the, the mega CD and the Saturn when, when Sega was not putting as many of its games on there. And so they, they could just sort of, like, take the Sega inherent market by Storm doing things that Sega was just like not really doing it that time.

Yeah. Interesting. So doing, uh, Taito does what Sega don't. That's right. That, yeah, that just doesn't quite work. Okay. Okay. So we move along from the Nightstriker to Crime City, a city full of crime.

It does what it says on the 10th. It does. This one kind of surprised me because if you, like, showed this to me in a police lineup, I would not say, oh, Taito game. I would say, oh, yeah, that's day to eat. right it just has that look like vigilante you know dragon ninja uh robocop it it just it feels like that i don't know that's a good one yeah i was just blanking out on that i was just thinking like rolling thunder like but now that you say it yeah for sure it's definitely it has a day to east vibe it's much simpler than uh rolling thunder because you don't you don't have the the the dodge and

the duck so i mean you duck but not like behind staff and that's kind of, that leads into a thing I was going to say about this, which is like, I kind of feel like a lot of Taito's non-cute action games sort of feel watered down at times, like games like this, where it's like, I don't know, humanoid characters or whatever, but this and maybe violence fight just seem a bit loosey-goosey. Yeah. Maybe all they were doing was chasing a trend, I'm not sure, but. You know, it also could be, I wouldn't be surprised, because in a lot of these,

situations in these arcade companies, you get like, okay, the A team is working on Nightstriker with our new super-scaler technology, but we still have all these old boards out here, and so we've got to put something on there, and that's how you get Crime City or whatever. Yep. Or it could be that, you know, the company's heart was really in just doing the cute little things and the crazy superscaler stuff, and then they, you know, said, well, we got to pat out our catalog. So, you know, here's some contractual obligation stuff. Yeah. I will say, though, the name along with violence fight, I mean, these could be

Canon Films movies. It's true. I buy these on VHS. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure those are big inspirations, maybe. You can't say that about the next game on the list, however, volfeed, how do you pronounce that, which is, it's, it's kicks or quicks, how do you want to pronounce that. Yeah. But it's also kind of like the final stage in Arkanoid, where there's like big threatening things that are, you have to kind of avoid and trap. It's a, it's a really strange one.

Yeah, it's an odd game. It's, it is very kicks-like. I, I land on the kick side of pronunciation. It's an interesting game where you, um, you can occasionally get the ability to shoot as well I think unless I'm misremembering I believe you can

and you have a timer which is basically your shield is always running down which is weird and yeah I played this on the PC engine because it got ported there

and the port was okay I do think the arcade original is a little bit better it's a pretty difficult game actually it's hard to kind of hard to get through but it's neat I like the basic formula

of gathering territory trapping the things I don't know it works works pretty well for me and I like that the logo is really confusing to look at it's like it's such a like a metal band

I was going to say yeah yeah it's like a metal band symmetrical logo so that for a long time, I actually thought it was Volfeb, because the D and the V looks so similar. It's the Oaxomoxoa of video game logos.

I don't even know if I pronounce that right. But anyway, yeah, I don't know. This one is also on the Taito-Egrit mini, Egrit 2 mini. And I should spend more time with this little device because I've just played some of my favorite games on it, but not all the really weird ones that I should have been brushing up on.

Got to get on that Volfeet. All right. Okay, so wrapping up 1990, we have one last arcade game. We're not going to talk about 1990s home games because it's pretty much just ports of arcade games. But in the arcade, there was one last game. Also, I think, you know, kind of fitting for the Canon Films titles that you mentioned Ray, and that's Megablast. I think there was actually, I think there was a mystery science theater episode about a game called Megablast. A laser blast.

A movie. Oh, laser blast. That's it. Okay. And there's also a movie called Blast Fighter, which is a very good name. So many blasts. All right. So this one ran on the Tito F2 system.

Brandon, we're getting closer. We're getting there. So close to your F3. F2 also has growl on it, I think. Yes. Which is good. We're going to talk about that for sure. Love growl.

So this kind of strikes me as being the game that you get. when the creators of Darius say, oh, we should do an R-type, huh? And it's not really our type, but it's also not really Darias. It's this kind of weird in-between thing. I don't know. Someone else wrote about this in the notes,

so I will step back and let them speak as an expert. I just have my fresh impressions. Was that U.Rae? No. Okay, maybe I wrote about it in a fugue state. Yeah, you read about it in a fugue state, but all I've got to say about Megablast is that it reminds me a lot of hellfire-esque because you can fire in a bunch of different directions at

once. And they actually designed this game around being able to, so your ship fires in four directions and you can change your, uh, which weapon is on, is, is in which direction. But they actually designed it so that it, you know, there, there, there are times where you have to go down into a corridor and there's a crate down there that needs to be shot by your, your downward shot and and stuff. It's, it's not super complicated, but they did, they did an okay job and they got some, they got some Gundamy robot designs in here and stuff. Um, I wouldn't say it's my favorite, but it's fine. Yep, that fits. I, I appreciate the fact that it is basically just the, the entire premise of this game is, let's give the player all the guns. Let's, you know, let's have them

constantly firing from four directions at once. You've got, you know, know, the little R-type bit, but there's one on each side of your ship, top, bottom, front, back, that's great. You're just this kind of whirling death machine. And it, you know, the weapon mechanic kind of reminds me of Einhander, which was, you know, a decade later. But the way you can swap out the weapons and you can carry multiple types of weapons at once. there's like one weapon that shoots not balls exactly but they're like pellets or something

and they kind of have a gravity effect and they sort of spill out and bounce along the ground so if you are in a space where you're going downward it's great to have that because it just like those kind of collect on the ground and just blow things up and kind of clear out the way for you it just yeah it just feels like it's just one of those games that's very satisfying

because you're really, really powerful. It's really kind of the opposite of R-type now that I think about it. Just because it looks like an R-type with the little bits, it plays like something completely different. Thank you. All right. So that wraps it up for 1989 for Taito. And now we move along to 1990, where there was some cool stuff and also some not cool stuff. But we'll talk about all of them. So to begin with, we have a game called Kaddash. Heck yeah.

And I feel like this is more of a Brandon game than a Jeremy game. So Brandon, take it away. 100% love this game. Kadesh is great. Did you play it first on the PC engine? I played it first on the PC engine. This will blow your mind. Excellent. Very good.

Yes. I played it first on the PC engine. Then I much later played it in the arcade. I actually played it first on PC engine, second on Mega Drive, third in the arcade. The core premise is it's a side-scrolling action game, but it has RPG-like elements where you can upgrade your character stats, level up their weapons, buy new weapons, talk to NPCs.

It feels like they wanted to make a bigger game and couldn't quite get there, but it even, it has some real, like, adventure bits to it. It has story. It has a part where you have to become small so that you can go into the Gnome Village. you turn into like a tiny little version of yourself. It's got four players. The Priest is the best. She's got like a flail that goes way out.

She's not as the best in the arcade version as she is in the PC Engine version, but she's definitely the best there. The Mega Drive port gets all four characters, but is kind of more washed out and doesn't quite feel right. And the PC Engine version, super snappy, very vibrant, colors, but not all the character. Wait, which one? I can't actually now I can't remember which one lost a character. Maybe it was the, um, Megadri version. Well, I should know better. But anyway, the PC engine port is, I'm almost certain the first ever working designs game. Um, it was either

this or Parasol Stars, which is another Taito game. But I believe that Kadash was first because I know that Parasol Stars came out at the very tail end of 1991 from working designs. And so I think this is first. But yeah, it's like this kind of side-scrolling action RPG hybrid genre game, but in arcades. And you just don't see that kind of stuff very often. And perhaps it's because those kinds of things weren't that successful. but they made for a great console port that's for sure and I loved it okay that's what I got to say good music too yeah this really this kind of tapped into the um you know a lot of

stuff Capcom was doing with Magic Sword and Black Tiger and you know later they would do the Dungeons and Dragons games yeah but I feel like this is a lot more focused and yeah At the same time, more ambitious, where, you know, all the Capcom games, I really enjoy them. But there is a kind of almost like a mushyness to the design. It's just kind of like a formlessness to them that doesn't, it just feels like they didn't quite work to their potential. Whereas this one, it's very interesting. I haven't played it nearly enough. But it feels a lot more structured and a lot more, you know, carefully thought out.

Yeah. It's definitely got a point to. to it and it focuses more on the on the action side to where the oh yeah it's the megadrive version that loses two of the characters you could only play as fighter and mage on megadrive um but especially since this is like a on the turbographics it was a chip game too so it's not like they yeah exactly had the had extra space but um yeah it it just has a unique vibe because of the way that story is presented, it almost feels like a Metroidvania,

even though it's clearly not, because you do have to revisit certain areas to get to a different spot. Now that you have this item, you can, like, get across the bridge, or you can use this rope now or whatever. And it isn't one, but it has all these early shades

of these kinds of ideas, like Metroid-y ideas, um, side-scrolling action RPG ideas, um, ideas of telling story in a, in a flat plane like this. I don't know. It's, it, it might be because I played it as a youth, but for me, it was a very informative game about potential directions that games could go. And I particularly enjoy when a game makes you think about the potential of the medium and to me when I played this game it was like oh but what if there was more of this or what if they went further in this direction because it was just just putting out feelers in a variety of different directions without going all the way but for me that really inspired the imagination any other thoughts ray um I am not as informed on cadash as I would have liked to be but uh it's true that it's is one of those great examples of like trying to try to adapt some of

sort of role-playing game type things into the arcade. And I think Namco did that a lot with Draga, Dragonbuster, maybe Legend of Valkyrie. Oh, yeah. Taito, you know, I think this is, I feel like maybe they were inspired by Sorcerian in the exact way that this is set up. Because that was a hugely influential sort of game as well.

Yeah. And so this was just like their attempt maybe to get a bit of the Sorcerian influence in the arcade. And, yeah, it's just another great example of that kind of, like we were saying, a genre mash. Mm-hmm. Yeah, just, it feels like a real attempt at something, and I love to see an attempt. Yeah.

All right. So you can play that one on the Igrat Too Many, and also this next game, which is another Brandon Sheffield special. It's Mizubaku Adventure, aka Liquid Kids. Yeah, that's a good one. Take it away, Brandon. This is all you. Okay.

Well, and also all Ray. I don't want to shut Ray out. Hey, I love it too. You've expressed your passion for it. Actually, Ray, why don't you go first? Yeah, you go first. And then I'll just want to give you the opportunity. Hey, what if Bubble Bubble had longer stages?

There, I'm done. No, I'm just kidding. What if it was all horizontal? I mean, but I mean, that, I'm kidding. But that's also like the first thing that popped into my head whenever I first played it was just like, Yeah, it's just like the bubble-bobble type of gameplay, but as like a horizontal platformer, and it worked out really well, I think. Yeah, except you don't play as like little dragon guys. You play as like little, I don't know what, it's supposed to be like platypus.

Yeah, hippos, okay, yeah. I always thought it was a platypus, but I actually just looked it up and he's a hippo. Yeah. Okay, my guess was dog, so. Yeah, like a dog hippo, platypus hybrid. Yeah. But yeah, of course, it's also a very cute game, just like bubble-bobble and all that sort of ilk, but larger sprites as well. So it's even cuter.

They could add even more cute detail to everything. And that's like my surface level nutshell explanation of it. Yeah, I love this game because it's really, to me, it is breaking out of the shell of the single-screen platformer. It's like using those mechanical. but using them to their logical extension because it is horizontal. It also gets a fair bit of verticality to it as well. But you can do all the things like hop on the ball or whatever, but you're throwing water balls and you can increase their size by holding the button

and you can interact with the world a lot using this. It's almost like elemental world changing because there will be fires you've got to put out with water. There will be water wheels that you have to spin and then it will like raise something or it'll change how a platform works for you. And it just really feels very well, the mechanic feels very well integrated into the world and to me felt very exploratory from a game design perspective because it's like, okay, I've got water. of course I can do stuff with this fire, but a lot of games don't let you do that kind of thing. And for me, it just really was like, it's a vision of, like, what if instead of Mario

being the prototype for all platform games, what if it was bubble bubble. Like if that was, if the single screen platform became more close to the prototype of what we would later have in platforming games Liquid Kids would be like the Super Mario All-Star

Not All-Star, Super Mario World Or whatever. It's just a neat, it's a really neat extension of that idea and design-wise It's another one that gets my brain going Gets my noodle cooking,

you know what I mean? I need to spend more time with this game because you make it sound amazing. It's unfortunately also massively difficult. It's like, It's so hard. It's so hard to play. This is one game where, while I did play it on the PC engine,

I didn't play it as much because I really need to be feeding those quarters in there because it's so hard. And also, they released a version on the Saturn, which is like $500 now, and you can never purchase. It's very sad. I don't know that version. I love that collector's market. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, looking back to this sort of line of game evolution within Taito, water mechanics were a big part of not only bubble bobble, but check and pop before that. They were always, they always had this thing they wanted to do with water. So, you know, it makes sense that they would build on that mechanic and say, you know, here's this thing that we've been kicking around and trying to find a satisfying sort of evolution for. Let's do that.

But what also surprises me is that some of the levels in this game really give me a vibe of early Mega Man, just in sort of their design and structure. I don't necessarily know in terms of the way it plays, not so much, but it just feels like you're a little hippo guy who is doing the Mega Man thing for them, but instead of, you know, beating bosses and getting their weapons, you have water stuff. Yeah. Yeah, a thing that I really like about it is because they built in this kind of primitive fluid dynamics thing, you have all of of those level design-wise, you have those platform setups. Oh, also, you can, you can make sprouts grow, uh, which is, oh, that's cool, uh, to make platforms and, and hidden, find hidden

paths and stuff. But, um, yeah, it has some of that same, uh, single screen platformer vibe to it where it's got like this little maze set up for you in this, in this section. And a bunch of enemies will appear. And you know that if you get them just right, you can make them all like slide down this maze in, like a... I mean, I guess it's just like a maze that you would trace with your pencil. And it's neat, because they got the

fluid, like, going, going down into the, into these interstices and making all the enemies fly with it. It's, it's a really neat idea. I feel like it's a little underappreciated, a little under the wire in terms... or under the wire.

That's not the correct phrase, but you know what I mean. Under the radar. That's the one that it's under. In terms of how interesting it is game design-wise, but I think this genre didn't really evolve too much past this point. This was kind of like the end of it. But it makes you think about how it could have gone further. And it's, I don't know, it's neat. No, absolutely. Yeah, it's a little bit, yeah, it's a bit of a shame. they didn't like try and make a sequel to this or anything because yeah it is that sort of i think perfect expansion of that gameplay and sort of those ideas that were started in bubble bubble yeah and uh i think uh you know you mentioned how it could have been you know the mario type of game in another universe i think also like you mentioned growing growing the platforms and things like that reminded me of like a yoshi game like this could also have been like a yoshi

game. Totally. Yeah. It's kind of like Yoshi Kirby vibes. Like a Nintendo B team, but a Nintendo B team is like a somebody else A team kind of situation. Yeah, all those seeds of that

being planted here, I think. Yeah. Literally. So there's been, we've been talking about some good stuff. Here's a little Sorbet of Badness with Palamedes. I admit this is another game, another color-based puzzle game that I first played on Game Boy.

So that does kind of skew my perspective. But it's just, I don't know, it's kind of doing that Tetris thing. It's got blocks that descend. It's not really Tetris, though. I kind of feel like this is a precursor to magical drop where there's a wall descending and you're kicking blocks up and you have to match them and make them go away. But it's not great. I don't know.

You're matching dice face, like the values on dice in addition to colors. Yeah. Yeah, it's just not like, there's no big chaining, or there's no chaining of any kind, really. It's really just a relatively simple tile match game. It's at least action-y, but it doesn't, I can't say it does anything for me. Nope. You won't find me defending it much either. Plus, I think, like, puzzle games with Dice just give me hives.

I just bounce right off. Yeah. I'm not a fan of Double Dice? No, I'm too stupid for Devil Dice. I can't grok it. And this is just kind of plain, a little bit bland in general. Like, I remember seeing it when the first ads for, like, the NDS version were showing up in magazines. I was like, no.

Yeah. Devil Dice, all-time are named, though. True. Love that name. All right, so if Palamedes is kind of a disappointment, at least we have Space Invaders 91, which is as simple and charming and colorful as Palamedes is overly complex and dull. The notes here say it is the Gallagetia 88 of Space Invaders. Invader sequels. I don't know if that's true, but kind of, not just in terms of the number,

but like the fact that there's a year at the end, but also just the way it takes the basic Space Invaders concept and throws in tons of extra stuff. It really breaks it out of that sort of, you know, simple. The invaders are marching down the screen and they're going to get faster. And, you know, it preserves that element, but then goes in all kinds of other directions with it. It's just colorful and lively and varied and fun. Yeah, I really like it. I might go so far as to say it's my favorite Space Invaders game until you get to the real big subversions later. Like extreme?

Yeah, like extreme. Because it's got, I mean, it's got power-ups. It feels snappy and zippy. It doesn't feel like an old game anymore. You got invaders that expand horizontally and explode, which is just fun. They just threw a lot in here. It just feels like everything they could think of, they put into it, but not in a way that felt bad. It still feels like Space Invaders, and it feels like the...

When I first played this game, of course, on the PC engine, I was like, so this is why people like space invaders. I actually didn't really get it before. Right. This one, it actually, it's really fun to me. And it has like vertically scrolling stages where your ship is actually flying. When you're being a tank on the ground, you leave little tank treads in the dirt behind yourself. It's just, it's cool.

And the power-ups are like strange sometimes and unpredictable. and weird, and it's like, is it really going to help me or not? This, to me, showed that Taito is capable of evolving and playing with a classic, with its bread and butter, in a way that can actually work. Like, they're not too precious about it in a way. Yeah, I think attack of the Lunar Looney's is a little, it tries a little too hard, but this just hits that perfect spot. And there are some subversions in here.

Like the first time you're in a stage with the shield bases above your ship. And you try to fire through them. And instead of firing through them, you push them up with your projectiles. And they move into the lanes of the invaders. You're just like, oh, wow, I just did something amazing and cool that I didn't expect. But it makes perfect sense. And yet it's totally unexpected. Yeah, they're really playing with stuff and kind of subversive.

your expectations, but in ways that feel playful and fun. I mean, the friggin' bonus stage with the cattle mutilation, where it just says, cattle mutilation, and you're just protecting the cows. They're trying to beam them up away from you. But the fact that it starts the stage with the text, cattle mutilation. Exactly. Yeah. Can't beat it.

Oh, yeah. I think this is a great example of just, like, again, where Taito was sort of revisiting these games from, like, a decade prior. so like quix with wolf feed in some respects Ray Maze which we didn't talk about but that sort of is like a reinvention of a maze game from like just a few years prior

you put these in like a collection you put those three in a collection that'd be good like the Taito late era revisitation series yeah for some reason Space Invaders 91 isn't on the EGret too many

yeah even though they you know they give you the ability to flip the screen sideways and do the Tate mode. It's very strange. Wait for another expansion card. Yeah, it could be. That could be it. They could be waiting. I feel like this game doesn't quite get the I don't know, maybe it wasn't super successful

for them or something because it feels like one that they don't bring back up that often when you get into the collections and things. I think it's in one of the memories, this is Taito memories, but it doesn't feel like it gets real pride of place. They don't bold it or anything

you know on the on the back of the box well that's a shame surprisingly a game that does show up fairly often in compilations and such is the next game on the list growl aka run arc

which uh I feel like this is the most 1990 ass game ever made not 1990s 1990 like this specific year this was the year of you know

Earth Day celebrations at school, but also the year of scrolling brawlers and, you know, save the whales. And here it is, it's final fight where you've got to save the whales or whatever. And you can be the Temple of Doom version of Indiana Jones if you want. Not any Indiana Jones, specifically the Temple of Doom version. There's no mistaking it. Of course. I think this game. This is such a weird game.

Like the way that it starts out is really, so when I was exhibiting a game at Tokyo Game Show, like 2016, a group of people from Arc SystemWorks came up and played our game, Gunsport, which is now being released as Hyper Gunsport, pretty soon. He was playing, well, several of them were playing, and this one guy was talking to me, and he was saying that we needed to work on our one-credit experience, which is the, Like, can you fully understand how to play the game and are you engaged by the end of putting in 100 yen? And I feel like growl does a great job of that because the very first sequence is you're in this rowdy-looking bar with all these people. And then someone throws a bomb and then you have to duck under a table and everything explodes and then you're fighting. It's just like this tiny little in-game cutscene that, so quickly is like, I got to beat these guys up. They just blew everything up. I don't know. It's, it's so, it's so cool. Plus, you save the animals and then the animals come and help you. Like, for me, as a vegetarian since I was eight years old, I was like, let's do it. Come on animals. Let's go get them. I don't know. I'll let someone else talk for a bit, but this game, I love it. I have the arcade version. I have the Genesis version. They're both a little different.

Arcade version's better, but I love it. A lot of weapons, too. Oh, yeah, like one degree deeper than that, I think, is to say, like, you know, in most beat-em-ups, the first weapon you get is usually like a knife or a pipe or whatever. Right. And, like, in this game, your first weapon is like a rocket launcher, right? And it's right at your feet. First weapons are rocket launcher.

Not just like a bazooka, but it's like, yeah, like a 12 missile rack, you know, that you put on your shoulder. Yeah, it's amazing. Arnold Schwarzenegger holding up the iPhone. camera lens. I don't know if you saw that meme, but yeah, it's... What a statement. Mm-hmm. And then you get swords and you get knives and you get whips and cuddles and regular handguns or whatever else.

It's cool. It's so stupidly macho as well with... Yeah, there's also a total lack of cohesion to the inner. you fight. It's all over the place. There's like dudes in turbans. There's, you know, like businessmen wearing fezzes. There's ladies in kind of pencil skirts and sunglasses. There's dudes in newsie caps. One of the bosses is samurai. I don't even know what this is supposed to be, but it's just like, I guess everyone who wants to kill animals or poach them, they just teamed up and are like, let's take down Indiana Jones. At any given screen, you can,

could have a newsy and like a terrible, like, Arabic stereotype and then a bubble-era Japanese office lady. Yeah. It's not, it's not the usual, like, fighting game, you know, like final fight and streets of rage and stuff. When women show up, they're clearly, like, meant to be, you know, sex workers, these aren't that. They're like, it's like, you know, they should be serving tea to, you know, people who come in

for meetings or something. It's just, it's very bizarre. But that just adds to the appeal because it's just so all over the place. Yeah, I will say that one of the games weaker aspects is there is a lack of enemy variety, partially because they show you all of those enemies right at one, right at the start. And then that's pretty much what you get. Like, there aren't a whole bunch of new enemies after that except for the, for the bosses. And the final boss weirdly kind of looks like, to me, I always thought he looked like

Neo Mask or whatever, the NeoGeo mascot, you know what I'm talking about? Oh, yeah. What's his name, Mask? Jeez, now I'm drawn to blank. Yeah, but his face, I was always like, are they, like, making an S&K dig? But this was, I think this was before that mask guy even existed. so phantom mask what the heck was his name oh g mantle g mantle that's right it looked like g mantle yeah yeah yeah and of course it turns out that it's actually like some kind of an alien caterpillar in

the end but of course yeah burst out of his body naturally so yeah this was tito f2 um we're we're working our way up to the best the best titular platform of all time all right so to get there we have to go through the Ninja Kids. Not to be mistaken for CultureBrain's Ninja Kid, which is bad, but the Ninja Kids is good. It's also like growl weird, but it's weird in a completely different way.

Why does it look like that? It's so bizarre looking. What a strange aesthetic. But it's memorable. Like you don't forget this game because one, the character designs are really, really weird.

And two, they have a lot of English text in the game that, you know, it takes some liberties with translation and is very memorable for it. Yeah, Servants of the Satan. That's where the intro bit came from. Here is a graveyard of you. Yeah.

Yeah, indeed. Yeah, it's very strange because they had all these, like, neat effects and stuff that they did, and they got like a weird, for some reason, like a crazy climber sequence. And it does have kind of that TMNT four-player vibe and neat effects and things. But the characters, they all look like, they look like frigging Muppets. And there's like a zombie using a powerlifter or power loader from Alien in here, along with all your Muppets.

It's just like, what, what are you trying to do? I feel... The notes say that the visual style is reminiscent of Bonanza Brothers meets the Muppet Show, which seems pretty spot on. Yeah, it's totally right. And it's weird because I guess the thing that makes it still compelling is it really feels like it was somebody's vision. Like, somebody thought this was a great idea.

You don't just accidentally wind up making a game. with a bunch of Bert and Ernie's throwing Shuriken. It's a decision. Yeah, it's a real decision. I don't know that it was the right one, but somebody made a choice. And I love when you can look at a game and be like, well, you decided on it. That's for sure. Yeah, I mean, for as strange as the game looks, it has a great feel to it.

It has like the pace and energy of a really good Konami multiplayer brawler. This is a four-player brawlers. So it's kind of tapping into that T-M-N-T thing, X-Men, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And it really captures that spirit with just like a ton of stuff happening. Everyone's moving really fast. You've got a lot of, you know, freedom to attack enemies and team up and so forth. But, you know, all of Konami's brawlers, they were tied to licenses. And the thing about licenses is that licensors say, you know, guys, you guys, you guys,

you got to keep it within boundaries. This has to be recognizable as the thing we created. And there is no such thing as the Ninja Kids, the media property. So whoever put this game together was just like, I'm putting it all in. Nothing's going to stop me. We're just going there. If I want to go there, we're going to go there. And they do.

They go there. Yeah. I mean, it feels like they could have wanted to make it more of a media property because it has, you know, very distinct characters. It has a cool logo. there's elements here where they're maybe doing the reverse of Konami where it's like, oh, let's rip off the game first and then we'll turn it to a media property. How about that? Who knows?

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And that begins with Target Renegade, which is developed by Ocean. Renegade was just, it was a big thing in Europe. It was like on every computer platform And it just was big there And so there were like two or three renegade sequels That really mostly showed up in Europe We got this one Target Renegate on NES But you know it's it's like

You look at the Zelda timeline And you have like the hero of higher Like the hero of time fails And you have like the Gannon timeline and stuff This is like that with Cuneo Somewhere the Cuneo timeline split from Renegade, and you have the Western Renegade style, and then you have

the Japanese Kunio games, and really, the Twain shall never meet. Because the Kunio games are a lot better than Target Renegade. Yeah. Generally. Yeah, that's for sure. It did work out, though. That timeline did eventually end, that dark timeline. Yes, thankfully.

Except for Double Dragon, which had like two parallel timelines, and then eventually converged. That's true. But yeah. Do we count the movie? Yeah, because Yeah, and the movie Kind of got it in the Ogeo game, so.

Oh, well, there you go. Yeah, but Target Renegade, just about as good as you can expect from that description you just said, I mean, Yeah. It looks kind of like Double Dragon as well,

yeah. Yeah, it has a good reputation as a microcomputer game, but the NES version was what came to the U.S. And not great. I mean, does it have a good reputation, though? Well, there's fondness for it. I guess maybe that's not quite the same thing, but...

That goes for a lot of those micros, games on those micros. Anyway, so on the American side of things, or, you know, like Japanese side, coming to America, I guess. You have three games that I want to call out for consoles in 1999, 1990, the first of which is Power Blazer, aka Power Blade, It was called Powerblade in the U.S. Because it was pretty heavily given a facelift. The Powerblazer is what I wear to the club with my power tie. That's right. But Power Blade replaced a little Mega Man guy with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But I'll also refine the play a lot, actually. The Power Blazer is kind of rough. The Power Blade, I don't know. It's not the greatest game, but I have a lot of fondness for it. Yeah, Powerblazer does the thing where as soon as an enemy disappears off screen, it'll just immediately respond when you go back towards that direction. So like, and that happens sometimes in Mega Man games. It happens every single time in Powerblazer.

Like as soon as they're out of memory, they're just like, they're going to come back in the exact same spot. And it's just like very annoying to deal with, especially when you're climbing ladders and stuff. And so, yeah, they were going to release it here as Powerblazer because it showed up at a CES, but then it disappeared and was retooled into Powerblade. And yeah, much better. Correctly.

Correctly. Yeah, it's your choice. Yeah. Yeah, I like this game a lot. I compared it to Mega Man, and it's not just in terms of the Japanese protagonist's visual style, but also in terms of its structure, you've got like five or six different areas that you have to travel to, and you run, jump, climb ladders, that sort of thing. But the difference between this and Mega Man is that you don't gain new weapons as you go along. You start out with a boomerang, and you, I guess that's that the power blade, which makes sense. And you power that up, you know, it becomes against the ability to hit harder, to travel further, and then eventually becomes like this plasma beam. At some point, you can also gain a robot suit that is temporary and takes some hits for you. But it's, yeah, I don't know. It's just, it's a good example of the form, this kind of mid-NES era, sort of manly man, kind of platform action game designed by a good,

experienced knowledgeable Japanese developer. Yeah, it's Natsime. And they really only faltered a couple times on NES. I mean, they really kicked ass on there. Yeah, Natsomei and Taito seemed to team up a lot in this era. Like, you know, Kiki Kai was originally a Taito game in arcades. But then the Paki and Rocky sequels, you know, the home ports all came from Natsame. And they don't really, I don't like they have Taito's name on them.

so that's a little strange not to like the new one but i mean it's it's definitely yeah it's definitely like the tito thing and yeah yeah now tito is still peddling you know uh kiki kai kaki and rocky sequels making new stuff but i think the latest one was on switch it was like re-scroll or something uh reshrined reshrined that's it that makes more sense so close yes re-scrolling is what you do in powerfully you don't want to do that yep yep don't want to do that. Anyway, yeah, I'm a fan of this one. Absolutely.

I find it much harder to like Ninja Cop Seizzo, which was released in America's Rath of the Black Manta, which does not feel like a mid-NES-era game from a season Japanese developer. It's very strange. Yeah. It's hard to describe, basically. Yeah, the visual style is a good starting point. the graphics are all very chunky and squared off

there's a lot of flat colors over black instead of the more detailed colors and designs you were seeing at this point on NES but all the characters have this kind of like weird sort of like their arms look too short

it's very odd and it's not just the graphics that look European like a European PC game or console game but the overall style of the levels is very reminiscent of that too. Like they're all kind of nonlinear and you have to go through a lot of doors and kind of find your way around trying to find hostages and stuff to rescue. It's just, it just feels out of place.

Yeah, it is such an oddity, especially when you look at the original game and how they also like redrew the cutscenes and the characters and stuff where they apparently, it looks like they used like stock photos of people that they traced over for some of these cut scenes. It's really wild stuff. And yeah, but you're right too. It's just like the graphics and the feeling of it just feels very Euro-like, but

it was apparently made in Japan from all accounts. And it's just, it's so weird. Like both versions of it. Very strange. But I guess they did try to make it a thing here. And that's why it was redrawn so heavily for America.

Like they wanted to, I guess, making it a sort of a franchise because there's also in the game, the plot is just like Black Manta just very anti-drugs. This is a very anti-drugs sort of a story, again, sort of of of the era, I suppose. But he's just like, hey, thanks for saving me, Black Manta. Great, yeah, don't do drugs. Bye now. That's sort of like vibe to it.

And he's very, he's very militant. He's saying no to drugs at every point. I mean, you have to respect... Not that any drugs actually show up. You have to respect that in a ninja. Yeah, true. I mean, keeps his temple clean. But it's only really in the story text as opposed to like Wally Bear on the No gang,

which is another weird NES game, which is more, more tune just like trying to send a message more clearly. And maybe even better than Black Manta, but again, this is such a weird game. Brandon, do you have any thoughts on these games? I know NES wasn't really your thing. I got nothing. All right. All right.

Well, one last Taito-adjacent console game for NES. I think this was published by Taxan in the U.S. That's right. But in Japan, it was published by Taito, and that is Buri Fighter, which was developed by Kidd, who actually show up a few other times in future games by Taito, published by Taito. Yeah, Kidd was a pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah, they did a lot of good action games

before they became much better known as a visual novel dating sim developer. They did all those G-IGO games on the NES as well. They were really good. Low G-Man, Cakemaster, Cakemaster, yeah. Cakemaster, yeah, they did good stuff. They have a distinct visual style and always pretty good power-up systems and things like that.

Bori Fighter is... I think it's on the lower end for them, I would say. Yeah, this was early days for them, but it's still good. It's a horizontal shooter, but then it becomes a vertical shooter. The NES version, I don't like as much as the Game Boy version, actually. The Game Boy version is a little cramped in terms of the visual space, but the NES version has these top-down sequences that just don't quite work. the Game Boy just drops those

altogether. But it's still pretty solid. I guess it's kind of like a take on section Z to a certain degree where the game is automatically moving in a certain direction and you have to like kind of aim and lock your fire in that direction

sometimes turning backwards, sometimes pointing down or up. So you know, I kind of like that. I'm more of a fan of the forgotten worlds and sidearms branch of this design idea, but it does work. Yeah. So, I don't know.

Brifighter, it's okay. So that wraps it up for 1990. I guess we could jump into 1991. Let's actually start with consoles this time because actually there was only one console game I can think of that was notable and was not a port from arcades. And that was Dariah's twin. which is not, it's an original Darius game for Super NES and doesn't look all that amazing. If you, if you grew up, you know, cut your teeth on the triple screen arcade Darias games,

you're going to look at this one or Sagaya or, you know, any of those. You're going to look at this and be like, eh, you know, it's got low resolution, only one screen, low color palette, not really taking advantage of the Super NES color palette, but in playing it for my videos, I discovered this is actually to its advantage because it's the only Super Nies shooter from the early days where there's not slowdown, there's not flicker, it just plays rock solid, it's responsive and good. It's kind of ugly and looks a little simple and has a very minimalist power-up system, but it performs better than any of the other shooters and those kind of rough early days of the Super NES. So,

I think Tycho made some smart choices here. I don't know. What do you guys think? No, you're right. I think it is pretty hard to find, like, a good solid shooter on Super NES, especially. And I'm not a big Darius guy to begin with. I only like maybe a couple of the games, but, yeah, I have played it, and I do agree with you. It is, it is, it does perform a bit better than some of the other more notorious examples of that genre on that system.

Yeah, it's pretty odd that the Super Nintendo for, for its various hardware advantages was not the best system for shooters, which is basically because it wasn't great at showing a lot of sprites at the same time. So, like, weirdly, of the 16-bit era, the best platform for that was the PC engine, which had an 8-bit processor, but just could really sort things very, very quickly and get a bunch of sprites on screen. Um, it's, it's curious, but I do like the, even though it's more simplistic, I do kind of like the environment designs in Darius twin. Uh, and, and, and the colors do get kind of fun later on in like the ocean stage and stuff, but it's, it's got this, um, this kind of like, someone's got like a post-apocalyptic vibe to me, the way that all of the, like electronics and things that you fly through the way that they look. It has less, like this game series to me is

known for having kind of incredible detail on the bosses and just having really detailed pixel art. And this game is much simpler, but in a way that kind of appeals to me. So I like it. I think it's got its good points and is definitely a worthy entry into the Darius Pantheon. Yeah. All right. Moving along, we'll jump over to the arcade now.

There's a game called Metal Black that was just released on the arcade archive series for PS4 and Switch, I believe, and like in the past week as of this recording. Yeah. So that's very timely. Hooray. But it looks like Brandon has some things to say about this. So I do. I'm going to step back.

I like this game. It has a fantastic intro sequence, which just has so much stuff going on along with this really speedy intro that kind of pumps you up. And then it goes from this really heart pumping, like, let's get it going. Let's show this wireframe mesh of a ship turned around and blasting off. And then it takes that straight into this cool downs sound that then leads into this very, very quiet, somber music that starts. off the first stage and you're starting off the first stage

like in the clear ruins of a planet like there's skeletons and buildings it's immediately this post-apocalyptic vibe and it like mechanically it's it's not the most complex thing in the world you collect these little nodes and you can powers up your special weapon

and whatever and they look like little not DNA but little some sort of like atomic structure modules that you're that you're collecting but there's just a lot of like heart in this game and in in that first stage again there's a TV that's playing on a building and that is like rotating through pictures of the people that worked on the game doing weird things even though it looks like it looks like it's like a TV broadcast but it's actually of developers that worked on it.

And there's, like, secret things that show up there. There's a lot of secrets to this game. And one of the first enemies you encounter is a giant, like, hermit crab type creature that is wearing an entire aircraft carrier as a shell. Oh, yeah. It's just a... It has a real perspective to it and a real heart. And the way that first, that the intro into the stage one, again, that's one of those things,

it just hooked me straight away. And then, of course, there's also the weird super-scaler first-person sequences that they decided to put in because they could. But those are, I actually find those pretty annoying because you're supposed to shoot all these ships with these auto-tracking missiles, but the missiles can get really slow. And they can, like, since there's a time aspect, like, you can't. control how fast you can shoot everything, really. So that

part's annoying. But I love this game. Yeah. I would say if you like the backgrounds in the battles in Earthbound, play metal black because you get the same feeling

every stage, the crazy psychedelic backgrounds. Yeah, go for it. But yeah, super stylish game. I think it's one of the classics, whether or not, I mean, you end up liking that I think is worth playing. It's a really, it's a really cool game.

Yeah, it's really neat. There's a bit where, like, you're flying along, and then there's been a moon in the background all this time, and then you, I think it's like stage three or something, and then you pass by another moon, and then the moon that was in the background. scales forward and it turns out that that moon was an egg that had a dragon in it um it's just i mean like it's just it's just a weird idea to have um and there's a lot of those in here and i like it it's really got this unique feeling it's a horizontal scrolling shooter i'm a big fan of those myself it has neat graphical effects um and uh and and and good music and just a

just a weird I miss that era when you could be like how can we make this shooter weirder so that it will differentiate itself from others and that's definitely

what this game tried to do it's peak tidal weird and I think we're going to talk about with that with the next game but there's also yeah Dino Rex which is also just insane looking

Oh yeah it's another F2 game yeah yeah there was definitely something in the water at that point because you know as much as there is like this kind of bizarre surrealism

in this game Puli Rula the next game also has that, but in a totally different sense. They couldn't be more distinct from one another aesthetically. Like metal black is, you know, it's super dingy,

sci-fi technology and that sort of thing. Whereas Puli Rula is, you know, it's somewhere between Windsor McKay, Little Nemo, and, you know, a studio Ghibli movie, you know,

like Castle in the sky or something. Everything is kind of, you know, the colors are sort of desaturated to sort of like a sepia tone and pastels. And I don't know, it's just, it's a really interesting brawler. It's only two players at once instead of four. But, you know, it's fine. It works like that.

And I think people mostly know this for a few specific elements. But it's actually, you know, if you look beyond just. just, hey, there's some really weird stuff here. It's actually a really solid brawler type game and just has a really great heart, good music. I have fond feelings for this one because it always looked interesting, but it was only available in a playable form, as far as I'm aware, for a long time as a Saturn import

that was very expensive. Even back in the day, I don't think this ever came. to the U.S. and arcades, but it was on a Zuntata collection that shipped ashore released and tapped me to write the liner notes for. And, you know, I was excited about that. But at the same time, I was like, man, what am I going to write about Puli Rula?

I've never really been able to properly play it before. Just, you know, farted around with the emulation. It's just not the same. And then, like a week before the liner notes were due, I was in Japan for a trip and stopped at a Taito Hay arcade. and hey, there was Pooley Rula. That was the first thing I saw when I walked up there. I was like,

that's why they call it, hey, because hey, that's the thing I need to play. So I sat down and played it, and the people I was with were like, what the hell is this? And I said, this is a gig, okay? I've got to play this. This is research. Leave me alone. And that's my story. Yeah, just a fun little game. I really like it.

I like it also. I was able to get the Saturn version cheap back in the day in the early 2000s. It was going up in price, but I forget what happened. Some sort of thing. I got into some sort of scheme

that allowed pulling up to wind up in my house. And so I played it on Saturn first, and I quite liked it there. But I do think the arcade version plays a little better. These are all, I guess, Taito worked with Xing on a lot of these ports, and some of them were good, and some of them were less good. I think Puli Rula wound up fine, but the stuff that people tend to know it for is that in addition to this, like, cutesy pastel world, it also has a bunch of digitized graphics, which basically intrude on that world. So it'll be like a sumos fondoshi from the back, so you just see like a big sumo butt or like a...

the woman's legs coming out of the doorways and a big pink elephant in the middle of those doorways and a woman in like a 90s bubble era outfit flapping on a pole like a like a flag just just a lot of unusual things but it is a the core of the game is totally solid and it's a good brawler. It has some projectile action going on as well, which is fun because your main attack is a wand that you can power up to shoot magic out and whatever. Yeah, I like it too.

I guess I felt very lucky to have the game early on because it had this kind of legendary status to it, mostly because of the wackiness. That was how things became legendary at that. Back in, like, the early 2000s, it was like... Of course. Yeah, people would play stuff through emulation and be like, whoa, guys, you're not going to believe this.

Mm-hmm. And so, yeah, I was lucky to have it on Saturn and to be able to just play it whenever I wanted. I think it's on one of the Taichot memories Japanese collections as well. Oh, okay. Yeah, the arcade version. So I played the arcade version next on one of the Japanese Taichot memories for PS2.

Ray, what about you? Do you have any additional thoughts? What can you add about it? It's just, it's a trip, man, is the stereotypical way I could put it. It does have like, what was I going to say?

It's like metal black has some cohesion to it and this one doesn't. That's right. But there is some evidence of like, you know, some cohesion to it because like it goes off the rails very early because it introduces those digitized weirdo characters in like the second or third stage or something. And it does elements of that.

But then it kind of goes back into like relatively more normal, like stages that look like they're more in the world. But then kind of ramps up again into like weirdo backgrounds while the entire time you're hitting a bunch of actually weird, crazy-looking characters and clown mutants and things of that nature. again it's so hard to describe it but it is just a very unique experience give it a look take a look at it and you'll see what we mean as beat them up very uh in a in a class of its own yeah yeah what's the easiest way to play this now it's not on the egret too many is it not in an archives thing at this point i feel like it might have come out some in one of those but maybe not maybe i don't know i don't think so heck i mean legally yeah not too easy to play. Well, you can emulate it. It's fine emulating it, in my opinion. It's, uh...

Or you could always, you know, go to Taito Hay in Tokyo. Why not? It's worth it. It's worth the trip, just for that. You might work on your mister, possibly. Yeah. You can't play it in the browser on the internet archive. Oh, there you go. Okay. That's a quick and easy way. That would be the easiest. Yeah. Yeah, the Saturn core for Mr. is coming along. And I don't think this game necessarily pushes the limits of the Saturn. So my guess, is that you could probably kick that on and play it, but I... Yeah, it's not a perfect port, uh, just by itself, but it's, it's good enough. You'll, you'll get, you'll still get the fun of playing it.

All right, and we're going to wrap this episode up now, talking about one last game. I mentioned this earlier in passing. It's maybe the last of the three-screen tito games. It's the last that I'm aware of. And it's appropriate. It's three screens because it's Raston 3. It's Warrior Blade.

Yeah. And I did not realize this game existed. until I put together the notes for this episode. I had somehow never seen or been aware of this, despite knowing Raston Saga and Raston 2. Yeah, this kind of, this exited my brain as well. So I've played a worse version of this somehow, somewhere. I've never gotten to play the full three-screen arcade original.

And I'm jealous of that because, or is jealous the right word when it's just, something I haven't done but I I am envious of anyone that has because it just has such a look to it the pixel art is like so crisp and fantastic and they were really

because the Rastan the entire Rastan saga has led leant uh what's the word leaned pretty heavily into the kind of Western comic book look and this game

is all the way it's it it looks like a conan the barbarian comic and the animation or like a cover painting actually it's got really deep it's got like really um i wouldn't say high contrast that gives the wrong impression but like really deep blacks and really rich colors it looks kind of like if a boris on shadows came yeah it's like if a boris valejo painting came to life for sure um it this is it it's like a triple screen voris belahoe painting where you write a dragon sometimes and fight with Sophia who's definitely not Red Sonia. Yeah, and also

Dewey, who is, I don't know who Doey is. Dewey. Dewey. But really, a lot of friends of animation, it's really good. It's weird how, like, toward the end of

the popular beat-em-up era, you got stuff like this and Golden Axe Revenge of Death Adder that were actually maybe the best in the series, but they'll absolutely least play of all of them. It's kind of unfortunate, but

yeah, you could play this on an emulator now. At least you can experience it for yourself. Yeah, Taito has made efforts to bring back the other triple screen games in various ways, Darias 2, and Ninja Warriors, but this one just

vanished. Yeah. Bring it back, Taito. Listen to us. Yeah. Get it on there. People love muscle dudes. Well, those monitors ain't cheap. That's true.

Yeah. Yeah. Muscle dudes, muscle ladies. She's also, she's a musselina lady to some extent. She's not as buff as she could be, but she's no shrinking violet or whatever they say. That's true. That's true. Yeah, every time I have a conversation with the people at Numskull who make those quarter arcade machines, I hassle them to release triple screen Taito games.

because they have the Taito connection. They've released Bubble Bobble. So I'm just going to keep hassling them until they're like, shut up, here you go. Here's Raston 3. Just take it and go away. Yeah. It's going to happen.

It's going to happen. I brought back elevator action returns. So now the next project is Warrior Blade. Nice. Oh, man. Elevator action returns. Once we get in there, I'm ready to. Oh, yeah.

That's a conversation in itself. We've talked about that one on returnouts, but I will never not talk about. about elevator action, too. Love that one. Yeah, another little small thing in 1991 is that is when Parasel Stars got released on the turbographics, which is the other contender for possibly working designs first game. Right.

And Parasel Stars is another one of those single-screen, like, platform action things, and you got your little umbrella. And you're, once again, don't you make water droplets on that one, too? I think you do. Yeah, they love water. What's up with that, Taito? Who doesn't? It keeps you alive.

That's great. It does keep me alive. You're right. Big fan of water here. Yeah. Honestly. I drink it every day. All right.

I think that's all the time we have. That's two hours. It's our longest episode yet. And yet, we covered the smallest span of Taito history. This Taito series... It's because the game started getting better. Yeah. Yeah, there's just more to say about these games.

I mean, I don't think our audience minds when we talk about great games and we love them. So it's okay. You know, I thought this was going to be like a two to three episode series. It may be like five parts. If you guys are okay with that, I'm okay with that. Because, yeah, there's really cool stuff here. And honestly, I don't know, like Taito, really one of the most interesting companies around. This episode really, I feel like it really dug into a big part.

of that. Just like the games here, they have connections and are similar in some ways to a lot of other games from the era. But they're also, they just have their own style, their own thing. Yeah. I really, I really like that. Such a variety. Taito games really have kind of influenced the way that I design video games, especially action video games, because of their boldness. And it just reminds me to always push a little further because if you don't, you wind up with something subpar. But if you do, you get like a Pooley-Rula. People will talk about it for 30 years. Oh, yeah.

That lady's legs are really weird. I mean, I'll come out and say it. It's true. They are weird. But fun. Anyway, yes. Thanks, guys, for sharing your thoughts on type. Taito games. We will definitely reconvene at some point. Maybe a game developers conference, that period. I don't know. But there's so many more Taito games to talk about, and I'm looking forward to it already.

Thank you. So, hopefully everyone at home enjoyed this. And if you have missed out on the two previous Tito episodes, although we didn't go as much, into as much detail on a per game basis as we did here, there's still some really important stuff in there, stuff like Arconoid, bubble, bubble, space. Invaders, Jungle King, you know, some interesting stuff. So you can check those out by going to Patreon and subscribing to the Retronauts podcast for $5 a month. That gets you the exclusive, the patron exclusive tier, which means you can go back and listen to like three years worth of biweekly episodes that are only for patrons that include the first two Taito episodes. Plus a lot of other stuff. Plus, there's weekly columns, many podcasts, plus there's Discord access. It's a pretty good deal for five bucks a month.

If you're not into that, you just want to support the show. You can throw three bucks our way, and then you get each podcast episode a week early with a higher bit rate quality than on the public feed and no advertisements. So there's appeal to that, too. Otherwise, you can always just, you know, listen to us for free. That's fine, too. As long as you're listening, we're happy. So that's the pitch for Retronauts, Retronauts at Patreon.com slash Retronauts.

Gentlemen, how about yourselves? Ray, where can we find you and your works on the Internet? Okay. Well, since the world of social media is kind of in a turbulent spot as we record this, I will start first with just some of the cool creative things I do. So there's my podcast, No More Whoppers, which I do with my friend Alex. He lives in Japan. I live in America.

We talk about that. some video game stuff. That's just at no morewoppers.com. You can find all our links to stuff there. We have a nice Patreon as well. And of course, I do make games or try to make games. I have a game company called Bipel Dog. The website for that is Bepel.D.

Dot Dog. And once again, you can pretty much find all the cool stuff I'm doing there. But mainly I've been on Twitter as RDBAAA. But you can find me on pretty much all of the other alternatives, I think, as RDBAAA. In fact, I'm on co-host.

That's co-host.org. I just posted about collecting all 18 of the Namcott original Famicom releases, hold on numbers of Namcott games. Because why not? The yen was plummeting. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And now I have a nice shelf that I can fill out with Famicom games. Those all have a nice little series are very appealing.

Yeah. Don't they all have the nice little clamshell cartridges as well? Yes, but I was okay not. not getting the, well, actually not all of them have clamshells, no. These early ones are just paper boxes, but I was okay not having the boxes because that is an expensive proposition. Fair enough. Yeah, I think only a few of the clamshells or a few of the early games ended up in clamshells. I know those clamshells are so cool. They are. They're really nice. But they're mostly games like, like you see them at the store and it's like, oh, here's Namco Classic or, you know, here's some game that I don't actually care about. It's not, you know, Big Dog or Zevius or something. Oh, well. Yes, indeed. That's a cool concept, though. Everyone should check it out.

Go see Ray's collecting foibles. Yes, indeed. Brandon, how about yourself? Yeah, let's see. I got a podcast as well. It is called Insert Credit. It's a podcast with me and Tim Rogers of Action Button and Franks Faldi of the Video Game History Foundation.

and we talk about, we answer questions within six minutes or else a horrible buzzer happens. That's what we do on there. And it's pretty fun. We talk about obscure nonsense, but in a very structured manner. And I also have a game development company called Necrosoft Games. You can check out our games hypergun sport, which is an arcade action, cyberpunk volleyball with guns.

that's coming out in the near future. You'll probably be seeing something about that in the future at some point. But you can wish list that on Steam. We also have Demon School, a tactics, RPG, kind of JRP-ish kind of a thing that's been doing surprisingly well. It's the first video game I've ever had where it's just getting like fans that I didn't have to tell to go be fans of it. that's the dream yeah people are like spontaneously doing fan art of our NPCs and stuff it's like this this is a whole whole new world for me that I've never

experienced where people are actively interested in one of our video games so that's demon school you can wish that list that on Steam as well I I will say about demon school that I saw it out of the corner of my eye walking past it at Pax West a few months ago and it's the one game that stopped me in my tracks and made me say, what is this? I realized, oh, this is Microsofty. This is Brandon's game. Wow, that's amazing.

You just nailed that PS1 early RPG style, like that just a whole vibe and aesthetic. I'm really looking forward to that one. Thanks. Yeah, we were actually kind of going more for, I mean, not that it's super significantly different, but a little more on

the Saturn end of things with our like 2D, 3D, mixture, but also the way that we have like our explosions and things are all physically modeled polygons with textures warped on top of them and then made transparent. We're doing a lot of weird

stuff to try to get you into that vibe. But I'm glad it's working. Yeah. Pax was a lot of people played it at Pax. It was wild times. And then you can find me on Twitter as long as it exists at NecroSofti and maybe some other places who knows

the rest of who knows what's going to happen out there but yeah also we have a delightful forum forums.insertcredit.com where we talk about video games and music and stuff my version of Ray's

weird spend is I in Japan I just went hog wild on records. I bought a lot of... Sure. Yeah. Records. I brought I brought 150 pounds of stuff back home with me. Jeez. Right on.

It's one of those things where you're like, I really regret doing this while you're doing it. Yep, yep. But then when it's in your house, it's like, well, thanks for suffering past me. I made it, yeah. I got here. I had like a backpack, I had a backpack

and two roller bags, and the backpack itself was, was 35 pounds and just, and all the weight was right on my shoulders only. It was real stupid. It was not my best choice, but, you know, it is what it is. Anyway, yeah, a lot of records. It's, it's, it has been a very good time to purchase items from Japan. Tell you what. Anyway, I went off the rails.

As long as you can find them. That's me. Yeah, as long as you can find them. My, my problem is that I'm looking for stuff that's like way, way in the weeds. Oh, yeah. It's a daily search. I got my Baye and Mercari. What's one thing you're looking for?

Just curious. I'm trying to find the Casio PV-1000 library, CIB. And like two-thirds of those are pretty easy to find. The other one-third, who knows if I'll ever see them? They don't come up for auction anywhere. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there that's just like it might not be expensive when you find it, but you just you just can't find it it's just not nobody's even thinking to sell it and right when I was out there last time I was looking for VHS tapes and and this may be informative to your

experience here because folks I was talking to a bunch of different nerds in a bar because it was a kaiju bar so there was like a kaiju nerd there was a figurine nerd there was an idol nerd there were just a bunch of different kinds of people. And I was like, I'm looking for VHS tapes. And they all were like, oh, I understand that you have a mission. And I need to help me succeed in this mission because they could see the similarities we had nerd-wise. And they were just looking around for places.

And while they were looking and not finding much, I was talking with the owner who is the wife of a like a Sentai movie director. does a lot of like common writer kind of stuff and she was saying that it's just really unfortunate that most of the VHS tapes that they had like VHS was a thing there but then it cut kind of supplanted by laser disc and then much more by DVD and there were just a couple of years like 2005 and then again in 2010 where all the stuff was just getting left out front of shops where they were like take it or we're junking it and just a whole bunch of that stuff like all the the v cinema straight to video stuff in japan a lot of it just went into landfill and

it was just because spaces at a premium and they were just dumping things and and getting rid of it by the by the dumpster full very sad but um this this is the struggle when you're looking for real obscurities like i'm trying to find the the last Bronx VHS straight-to-video movie. You know, last Bronx, the Saturn game, got a live-action straight-to-video movie. You can watch it on YouTube, but I want to have the tape so I can watch it on my CRT and undigitized version, but it just never shows up sadness. So I wish you the best of luck with that, Jeremy Parrish.

Thanks. I appreciate it. I think it will happen eventually. It will just take a while. Anyway, sidetrack, but that's okay. Thanks, everyone, for listening. I'm not going to tell you where to find me on the internet because you hear this podcast every week.

You know, you know where I am. So with that, I will thank you guys again and look forward to talking more about Taito in the future. Thanks, everyone. Be sure to check out the previous two Taito episodes and look forward to the next 20. Thank you. Thank you.