Retronauts - 521: Taito, Pt. IV

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Jeremy Parish, Ray Barnholt, and Brandon Sheffield do a deep dive into the amazing mid-’90s output of Japanese developer Taito, from shooters like Raystorm to role-playing adventures like Lucia. And lots of other stuff! It's an episode packed full of deep-cut classics that you will absolutely want to add to your to-play list. 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

This week in Retronauts, we are fit to be tie-toed. I'm going to stall for time as I look up the schedule to see what number this is. I am Jeremy Parrish, and you are here with us for episode, oh, 521 of Retronauts. But it's also episode four of Retronauts, if you're only counting the episodes, where we talk about the history of Taito games. That's right. This is our fourth installment over the past year of discussing the history of Taito Arcade and Console Games. And it was not supposed to take this many episodes.

But what can I say? Taito makes so many good games or made that we just can't stop blabbering about them. So here to join me with the Taito blabbering, once again, we have Ray and Brandon, guys. Please introduce yourselves, even though I kind of gave away the game. All right. Well, I was first. Hi, it's Ray Barnholz. I think maybe if you're the Tito CEO, this is the fourth episode of Retronauts, yes, because that's the only one you're listening to. Brandon Sheffield, hello, I like Taito.

And, yeah, you should enjoy Taito as well. I actually heard that I've heard from a couple of people that because of this podcast and also my podcast, insert credit, some people have started picking up like mid-90s Taito stuff and learning to love Taito because of this. So I'm very pleased. I'm happy to spread the Taito. Everybody should catch Zahato and move forward in their Taito. to life. Yeah, I feel like the period of Taito we're going to be talking about this episode is one that I feel like I'm familiar with the idea of the games and the names of the games, but never have really seen them that much or had many opportunities to play them. I feel like this is Taito's

slip beneath the radar era. Yeah, so for me, this was Taito's like golden era. Everything that I love about Taito comes from this era. And it's unfortunate because it is definitely underrepresented in current emulation or re-releases, though that's starting to change right now. But I'm specifically talking like 93 to 98 is, like, for me, that's Taito. I love everything about Taito from that era. So we'll see how it gives. All right. Well, everything has been leading to this. And when I say everything, I mean episode 451 of Retronauts, where we started this series, episode 463, where we tackled the late 1980s, and then episode 498 from not too long ago back in December, when we talked about kind of the transitional period between the 80s and the 90s.

So now we move into the 90s proper. There's no denying that 1992 is the 90s. not only in terms of the calendar, but Nirvana's never mind, had already hit the charts. So to me, that's the cutoff point. Like, the 80s stopped there. People stopped washing their hair. They stopped wearing anything but flannel. They stopped using, like, processing on their instruments. It was all just raw, stinky dudes in the music studio singing about Seattle.

And that's where the 90s began. And Taito was there to greet us. Only in rock music. No, no. That was the universe. That was the whole world. Thankfully for me. No, no.

The whole world stopped wearing anything but flannel and showering. It had already been time for clacks for at least one or two years by this point, too. So that that fully confirms that it was the 90s. I'm sorry to say that I never actually made time for playing clacks in the 90s. It was many years later. Same. I'm a bastard. Sorry, Atari.

I'm the cause of your downfall. No, it's okay. didn't, you know, you can't fall prey to the marketing every time. Fair enough, fair enough. Sometimes you have to think independently, but not too often. Too many corporations. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Capitalism needs your support.

That's right. What are they going to do? So here, to bring us into the capitalistic 90s, we have Taito with their game Chase HQ2, which is like Outrun, but with cops. You're a cop, because cops are great. Everyone knows cops. Yeah, who doesn't? yeah that game's okay that's what i got to say about chase hkee too it's a i feel like the thrill

isn't quite there anymore in 1992 for me but uh i don't know maybe somebody else feels different no i think that's about right it's like uh it did feel a little bit like more of the same like i don't feel like it totally innovated upon the original all that much and uh even like superficially, it kind of looks like an older title game, a top speed, which is another sort of similar scaling racing game, but minus the, you know, the Chase HQ offense type things, the guns and whatnot. Yeah, I mean, I like the shooting. The shooting is good, but I'd rather play Lucky and Wild is where I am on it. Yeah. It's hard to argue with that. Yeah, for me, I like the really reductive approach where you describe a video game in terms of other

games, which is extremely unfair, but also unavoidable if your brain works like mine. And I see Chase HQ2 as a combination of Outrun and Road Blasters, which are games from 1986 and I believe 87, respectively. So, yeah, that's Taito dabblin in the past here in 1992. So maybe we don't find inspiration in Taito's arcade games in 1992. Maybe we find them on consoles, where actually they had what I think you might call a banger of a year, just on NES alone. Yeah. The games here are good and also expensive.

It's the rare delta of games that are both desirable and rare and also desirable because they are good and fun to play. So let's go through this list of cool NES games. I guess we should start with the really big one, Little Samson, which is always out there trying to set new records for people gouging NES collectors. I've heard, and I don't know if this is true, but I've heard that Little Sampson became one of the first really expensive collectible NES games, not through any natural process, but because there was a collector who just made a thing of buying up as many copies of Little Sampson as they could, and

draining the market basically have used copies, and then slowly putting them back out. and, you know, pushing the price up. I don't know if that's true. Ray, you're giving a strange laugh. What does that laugh mean? No, it sounds funny. It's just like a typical sort of collector conspiracy theory type thing. Like, oh, someone must have a secret stash of them, and they're slowly trickling them out.

So, yeah, I don't know either way. But you hear things like that all the time. I think Little Samson, I think a more unnatural way that it sort of got into the Zygote, was emulation. Like, I think people were looking at later NES games on emulators and stuff around the later 90s. And so Little Samson comes up and it sort of like blows people's minds. And it's like, oh, well, maybe I should buy this. And it's hard to. Yeah, I mean, I was still paying attention to NES games and very invested in video games in general in 1992. And I had not heard of this game for a long time. And I don't think I ever.

really was aware of it until, like, 10 years later. So, you know, it was, it was one of those games, like seemingly all Taito games from this era for NES, where they just, they just seem to produce it in really small numbers that were disproportionate to the quality that they invested into the games. Like, these are really, really well-made NES games, kind of, you know, pinnacle of the, of the format. And it's really curious. Like, Tito just decided to put a, bunch of eggs in like the later twilight years of the NES Famicom for some reason. I feel like it was partially because they, you know, it was, it was toward the later part of the lifetime and they just had a strong competency there. And so, uh, you know,

sometimes at the end of a console's life cycle, it wasn't the very end, but, you know, um, toward it, you can get the feeling that you can corner the market because there's so many consoles out there that you could just like you could really be the major player in that space in the twilight years i just speculation on my part but that could be something especially since you know they they really knew what they were doing on the platform at that point and making games was probably faster and easier and easier to get to a higher level of polish faster yeah that's totally valid you know once everyone's uh busy thinking about the super n-y s for a couple years you sneak in with some games that people who's still hanging on to the NES might enjoy.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you don't see, I think, as much of that anymore with cross-generational play and things like that. But, you know, something to note about Taito is that I don't think they were really developing that many games for NES, if any. They were working with really, really good external developers who, you know, individually, like, they could produce, like, one or two games every couple of years. But collectively, you know, there's this sort of onslaught. slot, this late-era surge of great games. So Little Samson was developed by Takeru, which was a company co-founded by Akira Kitamura after he left Capcom after working on

games like Mega Man and Mega Man 2 and many other games that were also good, but those are kind of the ones that he's known for. And there's a lot of Mega Man DNA in Little Samson and also some maybe like Wonderboy 3 or Castlevania 3. And it's just visually Just a great-looking game. It feels great to play. It's got Kitamura's design sensibilities, which are very thoughtful and very much about, you know, if you've ever read any interviews with him, very much about the ebb and flow of difficulty and kind of giving players a sense of empowerment before giving them a really, really difficult challenge to humble them that they have to overcome. And it incorporates a lot of interesting mechanics, has great music,

you get to transform your main character into all sorts of little creatures like a mouse and a golem and a dragon. So yeah, it's a very charming, very well-made game, very substantial, very technically impressive and attractive games. So, you know, it's fun to play. And also, if you want to play it and you want to do it without resorting to piracy, it's going to cost you at least $1,000 now. Very cool. But it's good. It is good. You can always look for the Japanese version.

Sere Dinsetsu Lickl. If you want to play Lickl, that's only like $4 or $500 for a bear cart. So see, practically, they're practically giving it away. I've got 50. That's one-tenth of a cartridge right there, Pilgrim. Oh, I meant I had 50 cartridges. I built my throne out of them. Oh, I thought you meant.

Okay, yeah, yeah, sure, sure. Absolutely. Like the Iron Throne, but way more. valuable. Yes. Yeah. So anyway, Little Sampson is one. I don't know if either of you have anything more to say about that.

No, it's a beautiful game. Even the world map is like a very, very lush looking and like very smart use of palette work all over the whole game as well. Just like looks really, really vibrant. So also 92 on NES from Taito, you had Kikmaster, which was developed by kid and if you've ever seen a kid game then you will immediately be able to recognize any other

kid game on site because they had a visual style, a very distinct look to their games. How would you describe that look? It's very unique and one of a kind. I've never seen that style anywhere else but I don't know exactly how to parse it. I'm kind of at a loss as well.

Yeah, I don't know. You mean of that era, of course, because later they just did visual novels. Yeah, yeah, like their girly visual novels, that's something else. But, like, they're 8-bit games. I feel like they did a good job of having, like, organically rounded-looking characters, which is one thing. They also did a very good job of foreground, background kind of differentiation. And they tended to have... somewhat like monochromatic, but like one color tone to their character,

but they would do other stuff with the backgrounds. And I, it's, it definitely feels like they had a standard that they were setting for each of these. Um, yeah, kickmaster is the only of these NES games that I have played from this era. Because as, as I've established in here, I was a, was a PC engine guy. So, of course. Didn't play many of these. But this one is like extremely PC-enginey, and so I played it. It's cool to kick things and then have it, just to have the idea of like, okay, everything in this game is basically happening through kicks.

And like our power-ups are going to be kick-related. They could have called it capericers, but they didn't. So we're stuck with Sparkmaster. That's right. I was going to say, I think maybe the. visual styles kind of has that American comic look in the sense that a lot of their games have that harsh shadowing, just like jet black shadowing on a lot of things. So that's one key thing. They also have a lot of like areas of flat color in back in the backgrounds that have

this kind of undulating quality. Oh yeah. So yeah, it's just, it's very distinct. But it's a very, like, to me, I find it very attractive. I look at it and I'm like, oh, you know, they're really thinking about the limitations of this hardware and the palette. And, how many sprites you can have and tiles and really making the most of it and creating these very interesting backgrounds and characters with, you know, really ultimately very little to work with.

And they were very clearly aware of the delivery of this game that it was going to be on CRTs through RF. And so they have a lot of detail that sort of looks like dithering, but is meant for the colors to bleed together, to give you more detail when you look at it on a CRT through a NRF or composite signal so that it gets

all blurred together so that the reds or the purples are bleeding and kind of giving you more detail when you look at it on a CRT. I think that's another part of it. So there's not actually much more to say about Kickmaster. I mean, Brandon kind of summed it up. You're a dude and you kick and everything you do involves kicks. And that's great. Great. It's like a parody of video games, just the name alone. Yeah, it's like we've given you a mechanic and that's everything. You're going to do everything through this mechanic. And it works. It's video games for sure. It's like that movie in the universe of the show community, a kick puncher. Oh, I haven't seen that part of community, but that's okay. That sounds, yes, it sounds very much on par with that. Yeah. Also that year you had Panic Restaurant developed by EIM, a company developed by some esoteric guy that no one's ever heard of named Kenji Enno, who did some stuff and maybe made some games that you have enjoyed through the years. I don't know. But Kitchen Panic, not really the kind of game I associate with Enno, but he, I don't know.

I think of him as more like mind-bending, trippy experiences, kind of dripping with more of a, like, a grounded reality, whereas this is like a little chef guy being chased around by food, kind of a burger time, but, you know, as a platformer. Well, it's a good reminder that everyone's got to start somewhere. Mm-hmm. You know, like we can't all rock it to the straight into the strangeness or the cool stuff. Sometimes you got to make Panic Restaurant first. Yeah, you got to panic in the restaurant before you can do that silent stuff. What game was that? Enemy Zero.

Enemy Zero. Oh, yes. Yeah, I like Panic Restaurant a lot, actually. Sort of like when I first found out about Little Samson, it was also in Nintendo Power. And so Panic Restaurant just looked really appealing. I guess from a critical standpoint, it does kind of look like every other NES platformer from that particular set of years, like very bright pastel colors and a sort of Mario 3-ish look to it overall, but...

I love that guy's floppy mustache. Yeah, that floppy mustache. I don't know why they turned him into an old man chef instead of the Japanese version, where he's more of a kid. Well, I love it. But, yeah. Americans can't relate to children, only old men. Yeah.

Kind of a Wilford Brimley-looking guy. Chasing the oatmeal. But yeah, it's a nice, just good sort of. standard platformer um very sort of inoffensive and looks pretty good i think and yeah probably probably not worth four figures which is what it commands today but that's life for you no and finally for 1993 tito nes releases 92 i mean we have power blade two the sequel to yes power blade um which is developed by or was developed by natuemay just like the first one did that get as cool of a uh of a as the first Powerblade or not?

It's almost identical. It's definitely, yeah. It's kind of got that, what was his name? Mike Winterbauer style. If you follow his Twitter feed, he probably has a drawing of it somewhere where he's like, my cool Power Blade 2 cover art. That's what he says about everything. Here's my cool, whatever art, my cool, whatever painting.

He's not wrong. Oh, he's great. He's just like, he's got a beat that he hits and every time. But yeah, it's pretty much the same thing. you're an Arnold Schwarzenegger looking dude with a lot of muscles and a big boomerang. And there's a robot in the background that is looking to kill you, I guess. He's kind of just standing there looking, looking at, looking at Mike Winterbauer's cool Powerblade 2 hero. Yeah, he's very, he looks very patient.

He's kind of awed, yes. Very ready to kill you. Yeah, I'm a big fan of Powerblade, as we've established. Powerblade 2 takes away a little bit of the Mega Man elements of the first one. and makes it a little more straightforward, and that is okay. It's still a good game. Also, crazy, expensive. It did not get the radical overhaul for the U.S. version that the original Powerblade did.

Powerblade was released in Japan as Power Blazer, which was about a child who played a bad Megaman clone. Yeah, no, sadly, no, no. No power tie either. And they reworked it to be about an Arnold Schwarzenegger guy who had a cool boomerang and was in a good video game as opposed to a bad one. It's very subtle. It's a subtle distinction. But in Japan, Power Blade 2 was called Captain Saver and actually had no connection in terms of marketing to the original Powerblazer. But here, like, it's clearly a sequel, but I guess they reworked the first one so much and decided to go with that style for the sequel.

that they were just like, ah, it's a new game over in Japan. But here, it was just Power Blade 2. God bless it. Right. Because the first one did not come out in Japan. It was just, yeah. Yeah, just Power Blazer. They, one of the rare instances of Japan getting a worse experience than us, hands down.

Absolutely. And I see Brandon is making a note here to talk about something. I just added something. All right. There's a game called Gunnbuster came out in arcades. Is it related to the anime? It's having nothing to do with the anime. It is 1992, and it is like an early weird FPS.

And it's not that, so it's not that early because, like, Wolfstein was out. But it's an arcade-based first-person shooter where you have full movement. And so you can move your gun, you have a light gun that you can move around the screen. And then you have a joystick that you can use to move your character. And it's all kind of like pseudo 3D, 3D-ish. It's really neat looking. It also has death match, like two versus two team death match in multiplayer in 1992, predating Doom's multiplayer death match.

It has all kinds of neat pseudo-3D environments. There's one where you're in an elevator and you're shooting out the windows and enemies and stuff. And it's got this cool sci-fi. vibe going on and yeah it's just i wanted to put throw this in there because it's another example of um tito not necessarily innovating doing the very first innovation but innovating upon innovation uh there there definitely weren't a lot of first person shooters where you could control your character in arcades uh there were barely any anywhere so it's it's just a neat touchstone that people should, I feel like not enough people are aware of this game.

Yeah, and I'm looking at video now, and it doesn't look like, I mean, it's clearly not true 3D, but it also doesn't look like, you know, Doom, build engine style 2.5D. It's more like if Sega had taken their super scalar technology and tried to use that for an FPS, that's what you'd get. And this is really, this is really doing it for me. I like this visual style a lot. Yeah, it's, it's super cool. So they'll have like some objects that are, you know, they don't rotate. They rotate to face you, so they're always the same face. But they'll have other ones that are like, they're using the scaling and skewing technology

to make a cube that's in the middle of a room. It's just really neat. And it's clearly super scalar because when you look at the floor tiles, the floor is like in these segments and just rotating around. It's wild to look at, and it's super fast, and I don't know, it's really neat. It's really neat. Everybody should check it up. Yeah, I'm looking at a stage where you're fighting on a rooftop in the rain. It's kind of hard to see what's going on, but I kind of feel that's deliberate by design. But who cares? Well, yeah, it's like there's a lot of stuff happening, but also it just feels like, yes, if I were shooting robots on a rooftop in the rain, it would probably be a

disorienting, challenging experience like this. Yeah. Get your Blade Runner moment. Yeah, this game's rad. I can't believe I've never heard of this. Yeah. Yeah. I just had to throw it in there because it's, you know, this is, this to me, this is what

Taito is all about, just some hard, weird action and them making some graphics where you're like, yeah, I'll look at that. Heck, a lot of nice purples and yellows and teals going on, you know? It's rules, so there we go. It's 3D and tertiary colors together. I mean, it just makes sense, really. And turns out, Taito kind of had a pedigree with the arcade FPS games because they also made the Half-Life 2 arcade game. Yeah.

Didn't they also do, did they do the Counterstrike one? Or was that not Taito? Yeah, I think they did. All those things. Good job, Taito. Yeah. That rules. Okay, so that's 1992 in Taito for you.

Not a lot of games, but they're all kind of cool and good. And that's what we like to hear, you know, quality over quantity. For sure. So we move on to 1993. Let's start, let's just keep with the arcade theme. The big arcade release for that year from Taito was Rayforce, which it's a vertical shooter, not a horizontal shooter, which Tito didn't do a lot of. But this one, it's also got that super scalar thing going on and reminds me of the top-down stages of, you know,

Thunderblade, where something you just didn't really see a lot of. They usually like to go for like, hey, you know, we've got this scaling technology. Let's do it from a first-person perspective. But every once in a while, someone would say, well, what if you could use that, you know, for more traditional 2D perspective, but just give it a lot of depth and, you know, like this, this idea that you're in a space. And this is that. And it's a pretty rad. Yeah, I love it. It's on Saturn as Galactic Attack in the U.S. It's got really impressive pseudo-3D sprite manipulation where like in the, I forget if it's the first stage or the second stage. There's, it's like an island. And if you shoot the little joints that are connecting

this island to land, it will fall down. And it's, I compulsively have to do that as quickly as possible so that I can watch, because if you watch, if you do it fast enough, you can watch the whole, the island fall all the way down to the earth, like, scaling away from you. And, and then it has a little poof of, of smoke when it lands. It's just, it's just so cool the way they use their scaling tech there and like having you fly through a grid of space girders out there in space flying into the heart of a planet. You just like go sideways and then scale, like slide in sideways into a crack in the planet or like just going down a, your classic like going down an elevator shaft kind

thing, but on top of how it looks, and also it sounds amazing, it's got great music, it has this really cool shooting system that if it didn't inspire Panzer Jagoon, I would be incredibly surprised, where you have a main shot that fires forward and hits enemies that are on your plane, and then you have a homing shot, which can hit enemies below you as well as on the same plane is you. And those homing shots, like, you hold the button and you can upgrade this. At first, you can hit like five of them, then you can hit eight of them by the end, I think is the correct numbers. That's off the top of my head, so that might be wrong. But, uh, and the, the lasers come out, and it looks really cool, and it's super Panzer Dragoony. And I feel like it was, like that, that sort

of became almost a subgenre of shooter for a while where people were, were aping that, that technique. I don't know. The lock-on. Yeah, the lock-on is like, I love it. It feels so good to do. So I think it's fantastic. It's true. It's a fun mechanic.

It's always satisfying to say, oh, yeah, you crossed my line of sight. And even though I'm not aiming at you directly anymore, you're going to die in a couple of seconds because I'm going to unleash my homing missile. Yeah. And it's interesting because it makes you pay attention to kind of two places. You have to be aware of your. targeting reticle, which is some distance from your ship, and you need to be aware, of course, of where your ship is because that is where you get killed. But because they are on a vertical plane, they're chained to, they're tied to each other. You can sort of use your aiming reticle

as a kind of preview of where bullets are going to go toward you, and you can sort of intuit the whole thing. It gets you into this interesting mind space, I feel. Yeah, I mean, I feel like this fundamentally someone said, what if we combined Zevius with the Atano Circus and just, you know, turn that targeting reticle into crazy dizzying spirals of lasers and missiles and stuff flying through space while you're blasting things straight ahead. And whoever decided that, I love them. They're my hero. They're my favorite. Yeah, it really gives you this feeling of adventuring to me going through the space because and part of that is the pseudo 3D stuff

because you're like flying through a planet and then you go up into space and then you go down into another planet and then you go further into it and it's just really this sense of progress you you can tell where you're going like physically geographically it's very neat yeah this feels very much like the blueprint

for so many shooters of the late 90s you know things like Einhander yeah and that sort of thing And I'd never actually played this one back in the day, but I kind of came into the series with Ray Crisis. And immediately, you know, going back to this one, I was like, oh, I recognize so many of these ideas and even enemies from Ray Crisis. Yeah. Yeah, this really came out kind of like as a holistic idea. And then it kind of, they picked and chose things for later installments, but they never quite reached the heights of Ray Force in my life. opinion. Yeah, the scaling stuff is so kind of ingenious a lot of times and they do so many

different things with it that you would think that maybe later shooters in 3D would do more of, but they kind of don't. Well, I think about, well, I think about Radiant Silver Gun and Icaruga and they do similar things where you fly around girders and all that stuff, but it's, it's a bit more subtle and not like as dramatic sometimes, I think. Yeah, it's harder to actually in some ways show that kind of stuff in 3D because in 2D it's much easier to kind of like you can fade out a background and show okay that's that's background you can't run into it this is foreground um it's a lot harder to do that in 3D and also just when you're already moving around in a in a 3D space you kind of it's a lot more expected that you'll be doing that and and it it doesn't people haven't

quite figured out how to give the the impact in 3D of flying around a space from top down that you can get from 2D. It's a hard, weird problem. I think Einhander is actually a good example of a game that did it okay. And like, Phyllisoma, though it's not a fantastic game, did some of this too, where it's just like changing the perspective on you at least gives you, like in Einhander when the camera moves and you're like shooting off the neon signs and stuff. stuff. Like, that's a really memorable moment for people because you, you get that, that feeling of

progression. But it's, it's harder to do in, in 3D. You really have to think about it, I feel. All right. So moving over to the console side of things, we have, uh, uh, let's, let's start with the Nintendo side of things. Lufia and the Fortress of Doom developed by Neverland and published by Taito. Um, I, I admit this game did not appeal to me at the time because it looked so basic. So like, oh, this is, you know, an 8-bit RPG, but on a 16-bit system. Like I could see playing this five years ago, but maybe, maybe not now. And I've never been able to get into Lufia. What am I missing? Do either of you have any fondness for Lufia? No, sorry. I'm in the same boat. It totally missed me. Well, so I, you know, I didn't play it, but my cohort on the insert credit podcast, Tim Rogers, who also runs Action Button, is a big proponent of this game, and it's largely for story reasons

because it does a lot of interesting things with story and has a much more. serious and kind of, I guess, adult storyline in the ways that things progress. But I've really only heard about it through him. I haven't really played it, but I know that it's like, he's constantly bringing it up as one of the best RPGs of all time. So looks can be deceiving. Okay. Well, I know people love the second one because it has all the kind of the rogue-like elements,

the randomization for the ancient cave. which you really hadn't seen in console RPGs at the time. But the first one... Tuvia, as they call it. Tuvia, yes. Live, love, laugh, Lufia. The first one just never did much for me. So, um...

Anyway, if you are a fan of Lufia, well, I'm happy to say 1993 was your year. Also, on consoles, we have dungeon magic, which I don't have any experience with, but I feel like the two of you would be the right people to talk to, about this game. Was it on consoles?

Yeah. Did it get a port? I don't know. I played it on the PS2 collection from the arcade one. I actually didn't... I don't know if it had a Super Nintendo port, but...

I was thinking like PC Engine. Was it not? No. Dungeon Magic didn't make it to PC Engine. It's a cool game, though. I mean, it's a... It's like an isometric kind of like Capcom's

and Dragons-ish to me. It's just funny. It's contemporary. Yeah, it's like if Spectrum developers had tried to make a Dungeons and Dragons clone, that's what you got. That's right. But yeah, you got your EXP, you can level up your weapons. I don't know. I love an isometric piece of nonsense.

So I like this game. But, yeah, I played the arcade version on one of the Taito Memories collections is how I've played this game. And, you know, it's, it's not going to blow your mind, but if you like going around in dungeons and leveling up your stuff and collecting loot and defeating harpies, then you're not going to be disappointed. Yeah, I can't speak to, like, if it has any, like, gameplay merits over, say, the Dungeons and Dragons games or anything, but I do love a good, isometric arcade game, uh, isometric fantasy, fantasy beat them up, all those things. Uh, you. Uh, Yeah, it works. It works for me. Yeah. Okay, well, my mistake for thinking this was a console game,

I feel like this would have been the kind of game I definitely, if I had seen it back in the day in arcades, I would have, you know, sunk a dollar or two into it and come away with fond feelings, like Magic Sword or something. Like, oh, yeah. Yeah, I don't know if I want to play that game for more than half an hour, but gosh, it was neat. Yeah. Works out. And, you know, that's a, that's a good arcade experience, you know, $0.5.50 for a few minutes of saying, oh, that was neat. Like, that's the tradeoff. That's what I look for. Exactly. And I think, you know, that's sort of what Taito's whole thing was for decades, right? Like, they knew how to make an arcade game. Yeah, they had that one, that one coin experience where you would put in a

coin by the end of it, you knew how to play, and you were intrigued to try more. They, they were definitely masters of that. That's a, that's a very good. loop, very underrated. Yeah. All right. One last game for 1993. It looks like another note from Brandon. Double Dragon 2 PC engine.

Brandon wants to talk about it, so I ask you, Brandon. Will you please talk about it? Yes, I did mention that this whole era is where I'm talking of now. So hopefully everybody's not tired of it yet. Double Dragon 2, it is a, you know, it's a port of Double Dragon 2. but the thing that I want to point out is just the wild music. The port was by Nagzat, and you just got to listen to that soundtrack. They used a very scream-heavy sound library.

A lot of screams. Like sampled screens as a rhythm element kind of thing? Yeah, sampled screams. They used the same library, I believe, but more subtly in Fossette Amor, which is another Nagat game that they did later. but this, it just, it really gives you a totally different feeling when playing Double Dragon 2 because, you know, they, they, what they kidnapped Maria, that's her name, I think. Yep.

And then, and then your first stage, you're just hearing shrieks. It's a bit, it's a bit interesting. Yeah, I, like, when these kinds of games came to CD-based consoles, often the, the biggest thing that they did was add CD Red Book Audio. And so you'd get, like, this weird dissonance between a game that doesn't necessarily look that new anymore, and then this music that was, like, fully contemporary of the time, potentially. And it puts this weird dissonance that I have always really enjoyed on, you know, the,

on the Sega CD as well as the PC Engine CD. where these older consoles that were getting a new life through CD sound, it's a neat space. So if you like Double Dragon 2, this is probably a version that you're less likely to have played. So give it a look. All right. So that was 1993. Moving on to 1994. A bunch of really great arcade games this year. My gosh. Some all timers. Absolutely. Yeah, Taito F3 is in effect now. It, it, I don't know if the first one was Rayforce, but Rayforce was definitely on the Taito F3 board.

And the F3 is where they, they were just, like, churning out bangers on this thing. That's true. Yeah, it was kind of their equivalent of Capcom CPS or CPS2. Yep. Except they weren't just making fighting games because they're Taito. They didn't really do that much or not. So you had a variety of things, all kinds of cool stuff. So let's start with Bubble Symphony, which, I don't know. I love me some Bubble Bobble, but after all the sequels, did Double Symphony really bring anything new to the genre, to the game, to the series?

Not too much. I mean, it's a cool one. I like it, but it's, I see what you're saying with it, it just being kind of, it is a bit more of the same-ish. I was going to say that this is like one of the F3 boards that you can get pretty cheap still. But I just looked at it on eBay, and that was false. So never mind. Nothing is true about retrogaming anymore. Yeah, and there's a Saturn port, which you can also spend like $150, $200 on if you want. Oh, boy. Ridiculous. Love that.

But it's okay that Bubble Bobble had kind of, you know, found its fullest evolution, I guess, like kind of reached the end of its life because its successor was right here, waiting in the wings. In Puzzle, a game that, uh, honestly, I can't believe it didn't show up until 1994. It feels like one of those series that's always been with us. Yeah. And yet, and yet here it is, making its debut in 1994 and would go on to be one of the most duplicated, cloned, and ripped off video game concepts of all time. Ah, yes. It's amazing to think of a time when there wasn't puzzle bubble. Like, there was a time when that concept didn't exist. If Taito hadn't come up with that concept, what would predatory mobile games be in this day of age?

They would only be able to rip off, I don't know, magical drop. That's all they'd have. Man, talk about it. Maybe in a puzzle loop. They'd have puzzle loop. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's one they would have.

Yeah, but they'd be sad. Yeah, Puzzle bubble. So I played the, this is not a, the first one was, actually not on the F3 board, and it was on, like, their own separate, I forget what it was called, B-B-System or something. But I played it like most other American people would have on the MVS, because they released it six months later on SNK's MVS board. I don't know why they did that, but it wound up being like one of the best-selling, or best earning MVS games of the year, which is kind of cool and neat and weird.

And the thing that always struck me about this game, like, aside, the gameplay is fantastic, but what always drew me to it was, like, when I would look at the spheres, whatever you call the bubbles, they had these, like, little shiny, rotating gem-looking things inside of them, and it was entrancing to me. I was like, wow, this is the future of video games right here.

what I thought. But, you know, it was 1994. I was 13 years old. Yeah, they do have like the bubble bubble bubble enemies inside them still. So that's who's in there. Yeah. Yep. And, you know, Bob and Bob are the little guys shooting the bubbles up and sometimes Chacken shows up to help out. So it's kind of a celebration of Taito's cute era. But yeah, the fact that it did so well on MVS is really interesting because this was the pinnacle of the fighting game genre. Yeah. right here, 1994. And this was when S&K was really coming into their own with Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury, the King of Fighters, I think, debuted this year. Right. And here you've got, you know, cute little dinosaurs shooting bubbles. And people just can't stop playing it. That really speaks

to the appeal of this concept. And it is so good, because it seems so simple, like, oh, I'm matching colored blocks together. But then you add in the physics of it where, you know, if you create the right chain reaction or the right match, you'll break stuff loose. And it's so satisfying to dislodge just this massive pile of bubbles from the link to the ceiling. It feels so skill-based. Yeah, it's such a simple concept, but it's, it, there's, yeah, there's an addictive quality to it. Yeah, because like you're, you know, to get that perfect shot, you're like bouncing a bubble off the wall. And when you hit it, you're like, heck yeah, I did it. Um, whereas other most of the falling well puzzle games at the time

it was more about like quick thinking and quick placement but this is like this is aiming and there wasn't a whole lot of aiming in puzzle games prior to this and that I think that was what really set it apart because it was something you could look at and really easily understand what you were supposed to do but you also had to have the skill to do it it's almost like adding in some crane game kind of element to it, where you really got

aim and grab. And if you miss, it's like, ah, heck. But if you get it, you're like, yeah, dude. Yeah. And a great thing about this game is that it doesn't really rush you. Like, there is a time limit on your shots, but it's very generous. And it gives you time to really line things up. But when you've got, you know, the kill line approaching and there's this one shot you could make to clear everything away, save your bacon, clear the stage, keep from getting a game over. It's really, really stressful. And, you know, the game eases you into it by giving you the target line for your shots for like the first, you know, stage or so. But then it takes that away. And it's like, okay, now it's going to get hard. And also, you have to figure out your angles

yourself. You have to really understand how you're going to make these bank shots. It's just, it's really good such a simple but thoughtful design really works incredibly well and i can see why you know it's had so many sequels and rip-offs and so on and so forth and it's just an ubiquitous game format at this point i forget did the first game have versus multiplayer i don't think so hmm because i was going to say that there's definitely time pressure when you're playing oh no it did okay yeah right yeah so i forget the people play video games against other people Yeah, that's kind of where I was at. So there's a lot of time pressure, like a lot of time pressure when you're playing with two people

because it's all about getting moving fast, getting those, like getting a huge bunch of junk together and then hitting that one spot that makes it all fall down, then you throw a bunch of junk at your opponent. Love that. Love it. Yeah. I'd say it's easier to understand to perhaps an average person than Puyo Puyo. for sure. And then to be good at it. So yeah, I think that's also like just the real key thing that really launched it into the stratosphere. Absolutely. Yeah, it doesn't have the complexity necessarily of a puzzle fighter or Puyo Puyo, but it still has a lot of longevity, you know, the the shape of the levels, the barriers, the arrangements of balls that there are bubbles that they, as they come out. Like there's a lot of, there's a lot of variety to this. And also, I believe, Starting with the first one, at the very beginning, it uses the Darius branching level system.

So depending on which way you go through the courses, you know, you can replay it and still have a different experience, have different challenges to face. So, yeah, who doesn't love puzzle bobble? Or, you know, if you're like me, who doesn't love snood? I discovered this as, you know, the Macintosh, MacOS free play game, snood. It was like, wow, I can't stop playing this game. And then later, like a year or so later, I discovered, I think, Puzzle-Bobble 3 on PlayStation and said, oh, hey, this is just snood, but cuter, way cuter. It's got the little bubble bubble guys. I like that a lot more.

Funny how that happens. It's on Steam. Snoot is? Yeah. The game that will never go away. Yeah. The ugly bubble bubble. Puzzle bubble, sorry.

Anyway, so Puzzle Bobble, one of the big ones. One of the timeless ones. Also released in the U.S. as Bust a Move, right? Which made it very confusing later when there was the rhythm game. Or maybe that's, I forget. Yeah, it was Bust a Move in Japan. Yeah, the Rhythm game came later, Bust a Move, but they had to call it Bust a Groove.

They had to call it Bust a Groove here. Right, right, yeah, yeah. But we all knew what they meant. That's right. One of those series advertised itself with, like, tired looking men with toothpicks holding their eyelids open. one of them did not. Yeah.

in arcades in 1994 courtesy of Taito, we have Darius Guiden. Yeah. Which that was another F3 board game, right? It's not actually 3D. It just, it looks like it's 3D. It's doing that cool, like, hey, we're faking it, and we're

faking it real good. Yeah. I love this one. It's kind of an evolution of Rayforce in its pseudo 3D effectiveness, spinning cylinders and scaling bosses and like that. boss that you fight, which is made up of a bunch of different segments that all animate.

So they have like a rotation animation that is just a spread animation, but then when they scale it and move it away, it really looks, it makes it look like it's 3D. It also has this fantastic choral music that you should listen to. Um, uh, vocals very prominently featured in the soundtrack, which is unusual. And to me, this. kind of solidified the sound of Taito. I was surprised later to learn that when people talk about how much they like Taito music, they weren't only talking about this era, which is, I was like, obviously, everyone means Darius Gaiden, but that's not what they meant. But I love it. I'm looking at this first boss, just to refresh my memory. And I love the way that it has multiple

phases. And one of them, it's just dragging its body along the ground. through a forest, and it just leaves, you can barely see it, but it leaves a swath of bare earth behind it, wherever it's been. It's just little details like that, really something you can blink and miss it because you're paying, not paying attention to that. You're paying attention to all the bullets and missiles. But if you, you know, take the time and look around, you're like, oh, look at, look at the way this is affecting the environment. That's so, so thoughtful and cool. This is another game that came out on Saturn, and I think this is why for me it's not a hidden era in much more of a, like, my entire childhood kind of era, because I was, well, not childhood, but a little, early, late teens, let's say, because they were, they were bringing these games to Saturn because it was like the 2D powerhouse, and the F3 board is all about this. pseudo 3D stuff, and so it was a really good fit.

So a lot of these games came to Saturn. So if you were a Saturn game player and had an import shop in your town, it was quite possible that you would be able to play these games. But this also came out in the U.S. Darius Guyton on the Saturn. Yeah, I agree with everything that was said so far. I said before on an earlier installment of this that I'm not a big Darius guy. and I usually like the spin-offs and so this is probably my favorite one

maybe along with G. Darius and I don't know, it's just how it works out for me. I'm also a weirdo who likes like R-type Leo instead of most of the other R-type games, but R-type command, R-type tactics.

Yeah, waiting for that remaster. It's coming. So yeah, Dariah's guidance is the coolest one, I think so. And for all those reasons that were stated, the music especially. Yeah, it's very good. You got to listen to it.

Yeah, I feel like 1994 was really the year where Taito dug into its kind of 80s legacy and said, let's make some really cool follow-ups. They also made Operation Wolf 3, which... Yeah, we can just skip it. Yeah, I mean, it's worth just mentioning what a bizarre miss this was. It's basically, hey, what if Revolution X, but, you know, it's also... Operation Wolf. It's, you know, digitized graphics.

Everyone loves those. Those don't look terrible at all. It's like an animated GIF shooting gallery. Yeah, I think there's an element in a lot of these title games where they were just chasing their competitors in some respects and some ways that works out really well with like Rayforce. And sometimes, you know, they just want to make lethal enforcers. And they went with Operation Wolf 3.

And they kind of went with these not quite as good looking digitized graphics in the same way that, like, Dino Rex did not have the greatest digitized graphics, except this was also a few years later and less impressive. Yeah, Dino Rex, that's a weird one. That's on the F2. Yeah, this game, it's like, it's fine. I think it really does depend on your interest in digitized graphics. And some people really love it.

And I get why they love it because it's weird and goofy. And you get to see the same dude in a jumpsuit, but now it's orange, now it's green. now it's red. If you like that, this is the game for you. But I'm willing to forgive them Operation Wolf 3 because they also created one of the greatest sequels of all time in Elevator Action 2,

a game that I have spoken about at length. So instead of belaboring the point, I'm going to let you two gush about it because everyone loves Elevator Action 2, and if they don't, you should not trust them. Yeah, one of the greatest of all time. I don't know, maybe Ray, I should let you talk first because I also have.

stuff to say, but I've been I've been monopolizing the Taito. Sure. Well, I'm probably the least scholarly about elevator action. Oh, okay. Well, then I'll go for it. I've played the game. I like it a bunch. Yeah, it's really cool. Yeah, I mean, I think it's just a fantastic example of an action game because the jumps are so tight and feel perfect. They go this perfect distance where it's like the distance of jumping over one elevator. And so the entire game is built on, like, elevator amounts.

Like, how many elevators can you have horizontally? They don't fill it with elevators, but it's like that becomes the unit of tiles that you are working with. Yeah, it's kind of the Castlevania philosophy of, like, you know, everything is built around Simon Belmont's jumps. How far can he jump? And that kind of becomes the, the anchor of the universe. Absolutely.

And you've got the, you know, the Rolling Thunder thing where you go into doors, you get, you get a data, you get weapons. Sometimes a hamburger. But it has all this like emergent feeling stuff, which wasn't actually emergent. It was, but you could like shoot out the surveillance cameras. You could shoot out the lights. you can shoot barrels that will roll around and explode and knock enemies over or do whatever kind of stuff. It just really felt like it felt like there was so much you could do in the world. And there wasn't truly that much, but it was way more than you could do in most of the

games. And it made you wonder, what am I going to be able to do in the next level? Like what little interactable is going to be there? It's also just a really neat concept. It's, a, you know, it's a horizontal aspect ratio game that is largely vertical in its progression. So you're going up a tower, down a tower. Sometimes you're going left or right. But the majority of it is up and down. And so there's like the mystery of what's going to come next down there because you can't see it. So it's like an even further evolution of their single screen kind of like the the single-screen platformers that they would do with puzzle-bobble or whatever. I mean, bubble-bubble, because you're locked, you have to take an elevator to get to the next section.

It's smoothly scrolling and everything, but it's still an evolution of that idea, which is really neat. And it's kind of like the raid before the raid, the movie The Raid, where you're just, or what you call it, die-hard, it's after die-hard, and may have been influenced by it. But yeah, on top of that, you got your, you got your Jab the Taff, you got Edie Burrett, you got these great characters, you got amazing bombastic music, you got huge. The soundscape is really good. I meant to say that about Puzzle Bobble also. In Puzzle Bobble, they had these really tinny sounds that would draw your ear in an arcade, little shrieking dinosaurs. In Elevator Action 2, it's just like a really mature, excellent soundscape. And you got crush the old order and create a new society.

Love that. Love that. Well, it's a very, it's a very screamy soundscape, you know, kind of like the PC engine version of Double Dragon 2. There's just so many ways for the guys say like, blah, ah, when they die. And you can kill them in so many ways. You can, like, jump kick them, you can shoot them, you can crush them in the elevator. You can burn them with your explosive grenades. It's just, it's a, it's a cornucopia of murder.

And, you know, that's not normally my kind of thing, but it's just so artful and addictive and just like the whole game is just put together really, really well and really feels like peak 2D action game, you know, a synthesis of Shinobi rolling thunder, elevator action, just a bunch of different games just kind of reaching their pinnacle here. And every stage is unique from or distinct from the last and has its own unique setting. and set pieces. Sometimes you have to just fight your way like survival rounds where dudes come at you in rocket packs

and if you have the right strategy you can set traps for them but you can also just try to gun them down or take them out up close and then the final stage is a missile launch so you have to stop

and that's the only part where there's no forgiveness like you have to get up the silo and stop the missile in a set amount of time or you lose the entire game. Yep. Yeah.

Audio visually is just the whole action movie package. Yeah. It's, to me, it is one of the... Taito is really good at taking their older concepts and modernizing them. And I think this is one of the best examples of it, because the original elevator action, it's good. You can play it.

Like, it's actually pretty fun to play today, but it's certainly old. But elevator action, too, is just like, if, uh, if an indie game dev made it today, they would have a job right after that. Yeah, people would carry them on their shoulders and parade them through the streets celebrating. If we think about, if we think about things like the minimum viable product that you can release, that was like the first elevator action. Yeah. And this one is like, okay, now we have the money. We have our growth. Let's go, let's go all out and do what we really set out to do. So good. Yeah, this is, this is the game that anytime I'm at Taito Hay, the arcade in Tokyo, that is, you know, tons of our Taito games, I always drop. I always drop.

a coin in and see how far I can get. And it's usually the end of the third stage beginning of the fourth. It's a game. It has, it has some teeth to it. But once you get a feel for the rhythms and know where the enemies are popping up, it's just, it's just kind of satisfying and relaxing to gun your way through everything. I mean, whenever you die, it feels like it's your fault. Like it's fair. Yeah. I goofed. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I had a great experience at Long Island Retro Expo a few years ago where they had this on free play. And I sat down and started playing, and, like, midway through stage three, another dude just jumped in, started playing the second, you know, the second player character.

And we never said a word, but we just kind of worked our way through the final stage and a half and stopped the rocket launch. And at the end, we were like, thank you. Great game. Took off. We did our own, you know, win our separate ways. But it was just like, you know, we had to save the world together. And that was very satisfying.

Yeah, I actually have the, I do have the arcade board for this one, so I can play it whenever I want. Luckily, I bought it in like 2006, so it was a very, it was at the, it was very expensive to me at the time because it was $80, including the, the motherboard, but I was like, you know what, I love this game too much. I got to, I got to buy it. Now, it's like $500 or whatever. It's ridiculous. But I'm really glad I have it. A long time ago, my buddy, Vincent Diamante, who is, he works at that game company, and he's the co-founder of Insertcredit. He, uh, he was staying at my place. I lived in like a little townhouse thing, and it, it had a garage that was underneath, um, the living space.

And, uh, I forgot that he wakes up super early. He was staying with me, um, during GDC or something. And at like 6 a.m., I hear, and, uh, all these bullet sounds. and I hear the distinctive sound of a dog getting kicked, and I'm like, oh, man, he's playing elevator action returns down there. It's that soundscape, you can really hear it through the floorboards, let me tell you. Oh, boy. And finally, for 1994, we had Space Invaders Deluxe, which had the original game, a multiplayer version, and a parody version. Every shooter has a parody version. Yeah, got to have it.

Got to have it. I have a lot more to say about the ports of it than the original, so I'll save it. Yeah, we'll get to that. We'll get to that in 1995, which is up now. 1995 from Taito. It's now. That is the moment. On the console front, there wasn't actually that much of note. In Japan, you had Lady Stalker, which, you know, sequel to Landstocker.

Landstocker, good game. People like it. A little challenging with the isometric perspective and the platforming, but okay. Lady Stalker, kind of a rough name there, but it just means like, hey, it's Landstalker, but the main character is a lady. So you're not actually stalking ladies in this as far as I'm. Yeah, you're a lady who stalks. Anyway, that's all I have to say about that.

Pretty good. It's an interesting pickup for Taito, though, just as from a publishing standpoint. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. Maybe they did so well with Lufia. They were like, we got to get more of these RPGs on here. Sure. Made the right deal.

Yep. All right. So you also had a super NES version of Space Invaders, which converted Space Invaders deluxe to the home console. And then Nintendo stuffed it into a Game Boy ROM that could only be, experienced by playing it in a Super Game Boy, which is wild. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. That's weird.

Oh, yeah, yeah. The Game Boy American release of Space Invaders, like when you play it, it's like the Game Boy game. Okay, sure, it's a Game Boy Space Invaders. But you can choose to play the Super NES version. And if you do that, it reboots the system and loads a super NES ROM through the Super Gameboy. and you're playing a super NES game from a Game Boy cartridge. No other game did that in the history of the entire Game Boy line.

No other game took advantage of this aspect of the Super Game Boy. It's just this one to the point that it almost feels like it was some sort of glitch or technical error, but Nintendo put it out. So clearly it wasn't an exploit. It was just something that no one at any point said, oh, we should do that, except, of course, Taito. Man, that rules. I love it. Yeah. And then they would end up releasing it standalone afterwards.

Yes. So, Brandon, what is the other Space Invaders' home version that came out in 1995 you want to talk about? Is it Space Invaders' virtual collection for Virtual Boy? It is not. It is Space Invaders, the original game for the PC engine. And it has, you know, the original. space invaders and also has the dx stuff but it has a versus mode where it's it's similar to to the dx versus except that now there are uh fully animated bitmap schoolgirls behind the wells where you're

shooting um it's course yeah and they're like making making noises and screaming about stuff and it makes it a proper versus shooting game it gives it kind of of that Twinkle Star Sprites vibe to me in a way where you like, of course, DX did this. So this is just, you know, an evolution of that. But you shoot the enemies and when you do things correctly or well, it drops more onto the other player's side. And it turns space invaders into a competitive puzzle shooting game, which is super neat. I really like that. And it's once again, Taito proving that they know how to evolve their own series better than anybody else. Because so often you would have, like, I mean, there were so many Space Invaders' clones,

but they never did as well as actual Space Invaders sequels or reboots or guidance or whatever. So yeah, I just, the reason I wanted to bring this up is because I don't feel like a lot of people are aware of this. version um i was not aware of this version and yeah if you if you look up the versus mode and it's it's it's like it almost feels like it was somebody's pet project to do this because 1995 is late for a pc engine game it's on pc engine cd and it takes the the versus mode and makes it feel like like an f3 game it feels it feels modern and bright and it's just a mode in this game that isn't even advertised on the back of the box. It's bizarre.

So give it a look. Well, the sort of funny thing is that the Super NAS version is called Space Invaders the original game. And it does have a versus mode just minus the anime girls. And just I think the extra ironic bit is that I mentioned they released it standalone in America after the Game Boy version. It was standalone originally in Japan. But just on the box for this American version, it just says, bonus versus mode right on the front. So they at least understood that a versus mode for Space Invaders, anime girl or not, is interesting.

Yeah. I think people might want to try. Here, I'm just going to show you guys what it looks like just in case you hadn't seen it. I'm just going to drop it. Yeah, I'm looking at it now. It's something. Yeah. It's, they redid the graphics and everything.

I don't know. It's a, they got a man-a-maidant back there when, when stuff goes wrong. I don't know. It's, it's fun. It's weird. It's strange that they made it. I love, that's my favorite kind of thing. It's strange that they made it.

Yeah. It kind of feels like it's reaching into the, the quick, gals panic universe. But, you know, minus the skeviness. Like, these are all pure, at least the ones that I'm scanning through. They're all, they're all pure anime girls. Yeah, I believe that is. There's nothing skeevy. That's throughout.

Yeah. That's good. because I don't need porn, even softcore porn in my space invaders. It's just, we've got to save the world from the invaders, okay? That's all I have time to think about right now. Yeah, that's the main thing. Schoolgirls have to save the Earth from Space Invaders. They do it fully clothed.

They're respectable gals. Anyway, so something that is added on here is the Taito X-55 Karaoke system in game console. The hell is that? Well, in 1995, Taito released the X-Go-go-go, as it was known. It is a home karaoke machine where you could essentially rent over 10,000 songs. You would pay for the machine, which was expensive. Then a monthly subscription, I don't know how much that costs, and then a small fee per song.

But this was a home karaoke machine where you could get songs essentially over the phone lines, kind of pre-internet. It actually continued to run as a karaoke service after Taito was bought by Square Inix, so it went for quite some time. The system did, but the ex-go-go itself didn't last that long. Their image girl was a young Namia Amaro. She was kind of pre-fame, so that actually really helped them because you got super famous, like, right after that.

So that was pretty good. But the reason we're talking about it now is because it also played games. So you paid 50 yen per play, and that went to your phone bill, but you had to download the game every time. The games had to be pretty small because the memory storage wasn't great.

They were in... They were stored in RAM. So whenever you turned off the system, they were gone. And so none of these games are preserved on the internet at all. Also, unfortunately, the developer who was talking about this a lot, like one of the original developers appears to have deleted his account. So a lot of my information is now only stuff that I gathered on my forums. But it has a unique-looking game pad. There was a wireless one and a wired one. And games-wise, it had

Space Invaders, 1995. I don't really know what was unique about that one, because there's no video of any of these games, by the way. Space Invaders 95 is Attack of the Lunar Loonies. Right, right. Expanded parody for Paradea-style shooting. There you go. And there was the very first version of Cleopatra Fortune, which is a somewhat long-running puzzle series from Taito. It had a game called Crescent Tale, which is a really nice-looking single-screen plot. platformer where apparently the player's attack caused platforms

to undulate under the enemies. And then there were like your quiz games. There was also a puzzle bubble. Shanghai was here. There was a golf game. A puzzle bubble EX as well. There was an Othello game. That's not that exciting. But yeah, there

was, this is just like a whole console made after the failure to launch of Taito's Wow, which was a console they were trying to make before that. And it's possible it uses some of the same internal stuff. And you can find these, but you can't find it with games on them because they just didn't get

stored. And so they might be gone forever. So I figured it was just worth talking about it. It's worth looking up and researching it. There's not a lot to find. Most of what we have comes from flyers, because there were a lot of flyers that went around, and there's some people collecting those and trying to get information, but it's probably its biggest legacy is it's where Cleopatra Fortune was first made. So there you go.

That's the Taito X-Go-Go-Go. Taito's weird game console, caricam machine, that sadly we don't know enough about. Yeah, pretty crazy. There's always a lot of good examples of I guess networked games in that way or downloadable games or pseudo networking stuff that throughout the history of games that just ends up being

like completely gone forever. Yeah, shoved in the ether. It's just like such a bummer. It's sadness. It's really no long-term thinking at all. Certainly cool ideas, but yeah, can we have an idea

where we can maybe keep the games? It's possible there on some disc somewhere in some Taito old warehouse, but we'd have to really find the right person to even be able to start looking. Yeah, in cold storage somewhere. I wonder if the volatility of the game codes, the downloads, is somehow related to the music licensing, like a jazz rack limitation or something, where, like, nothing could be kept permanently on the system.

I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, like, you start getting music licensing in there, especially in Japan, and all kinds of weird stuff happens and limitations. So I kind of wonder if the karaoke element sort of bit this system's legacy in the ass. Yeah, I don't know if I've told this story on here, but I was working on a game collection, let's say, and we were hoping to use the arranged versions of the music in that game collection. And the publisher rights holder was like, well, we would have to license the license the tracks back from Pony Canyon because we don't own the rights to our own arranged

soundtracks it's just like I love the music industry yep good times All right. So, let's move along to All right. So let's move along to Arcade. games from 95 that did have a little more impact, beginning with psychic force, an early 3D fighter with actual 360-degree movement, kind of an early arena fighter. I feel like this was actually Taito kind of innovating here, you know, doing something. I don't think I'd seen a game like this prior to 96. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I think, you know, stuff like Powerstone, Air Guites. What was, what was that one geeky

something? I don't know. There was, there's DeStrega? Yes, DeStraga. Yeah, there were a couple others on, like, PlayStation and stuff, but this was, this was 95, so it's kind of early-ish, and not a game I ever saw in person, but I feel like it's, it's

legacy looms sort of large, but Brandon says he has more to say about it. Yeah, it's, you know, you're flying around, so that's the main thing. You're above the city in a, a cube arena. And my introduction to this game was through Psychic Force 2012, which came out on the Dreamcast.

I played that first and then went back to the original Psychic Force. But the thing that I think is most interesting about this game is that Taito, and I don't know exactly how this came to them, but they found out that women, especially, young women, they were really intrigued by this game, but didn't want to play it. They liked the characters. And Taito kept trying to capitalize on this thing that they were so sure of, which is that women like the characters of this game. And so they did like anime OVAs, they did manga, and they made a puzzle bobble with psychic force characters, which was called, what was it called um psychic force puzzle Tyson it never really worked out they never really were able to

capitalize on this but there was just um tito had like a a psychic force some year anniversary thing uh and they had a bunch of devs talking about it and they brought it up again that like well women really liked it and so it's just like it was it so that to me has always been really intriguing, like somehow that was the mythology of this game within Taito is that women like this. We have to figure out how to get more women to play this now. Did they consider exploring non-video game options? Well, yeah, they did the anime. They did the manga. And those did fine, but it never took off the way that they, it seemed like they were expecting for it to. So it's, I don't know,

it's an interesting, weird game to me for that reason. And also, I love when a company takes an existing license that they have and an existing mechanic that they have and they slap them together in a different way. So, like, Psychic Force, Puzzle Tyson, like, do those all day as far as I'm concerned. It's always a fun mashup. So speaking of Puzzle Tyson, Puzzle Bobble, Puzzle got a sequel in 19. Puzzle Bobble 2? You're kidding.

No, absolutely not. I'm not a joke. There's also Puzzled a Pond, which that's basically just Puzzle Bobble, right? Like, how are these games different? They seem identical to me. I haven't really played Puzzled A Pond, but it's just

it's Puzzle Bobble, right? Yeah, I didn't really, I got to say, I didn't really get, it had like some obstacles and things in it, and some other weird somethings. I don't know, man. I, maybe they were, were like, how do we make this a franchise that is beyond puzzle bubble, but they're already

doing, well, no, they weren't. The psychic forest puzzle came in like 97 or something. So, yeah, I don't know. Like, the big difference is that you're trying to free one of the astrological signs from a trap. Like, so I guess it's got like a slightly different vibe in that your goal is different. But yeah, I would say it's an unspectacular iteration. Yeah, I feel like this could just be a mode in a puzzle bubble game. It doesn't need to be its own thing.

For sure. Yeah. Swing and a miss. Was it really a title game, though? Oh, was it not? I thought it was Visco or something. It is Visco. There we go. So that's your answer. It's a clone. It's the first puzzle bubble clone. How did I have it down that Taito published this? Okay. Well, that explains why it happened, because Visco was just ripping off Taito. All right. Strike that one from the record. Okay. Well, 95 also has attack of the Lunar Lunas, aka Space Invaders 95. Yeah. Which we mentioned before. I don't know if there's anything more to say about it, aside from the fact that it has a lot of crossover from other games, kind of like the Paradia series and for Konami. Right. And just, non-crossover goofiness

like there's a stage or a background I guess with just like steaks in the background just flopping around like meat steaks like yeah yeah sorry okay yeah no no no I just that's that's great I think there probably is like ghosts if you want referred to like vampire steaks

well maybe I understand yeah I like parody shooters I think it's only natural that they would have tried it with Space Invaders once or maybe twice it just seemed like the thing to do and it's neat. And they did it.

They sure did. And finally, we have... Glowing recommendation, I know. Finally, we have twin cobra. Actually, no, sorry, twin cobra two. So that's four cobras? That's four cobras. Is it two sets of twins or quadruplets?

This is the semantic question for the ages. Never will be explained. But this was developed by Takumi, who emerged in the wake of Toaplan's demise, and basically is, Hally, Part 3. Yeah, it's, I would say it's relatively unremarkable, especially. I mean, it's not a Taito developed game, and so I think that kind of shows where, like,

in this era, it was Namco, Sega, and Taito, all leapfrogging each other with technology and innovation, and S&K kind of, S&K and Capcom kind of operating in their own separate sphere. Yeah, they were, they were doing fighting games and not leaving any oxyxie. in for anyone else. Yeah, and it just shows the kind of the gap between Taito and the others. And your third parties of the time, it just, Taito was a little further ahead than everybody else. Yeah, I mean, reviewing video of this, like, I really feel like this 1995 arcade game could have been done on PC Engine in 1989, with, you know, maybe not quite as much graphical detail,

but it wouldn't have been that far off. It's a little tough to look at after Rayforce. Yeah, it's not quite as involved, but evolved, I guess. But it didn't get a port except on the Saturn. So it, you know, it needed a little more power. I don't know how it might have been originally sold. I mean, I guess it was an F3 game, right? But it was probably just, I would imagine it's like a less expensive board that they could have sold

and someone who could just, you know, shove this into your candy store arcade cabinet and see if that works. Fair enough. down with 96-97. I don't know. There's more to say toward the future. I guess we could do a part five. Do you guys want to do a part five at some point? Because I'm looking at all the games that are just written down here. And it's a lot actually beyond 1997. We could do it. Do we need to go up through the square acquisition in 2005, 2006? I mean, it could be a shorter episode. I could do, like if we go through 96 or 97 today, well, we don't have stuff written down for 97.

Yeah, we don't really have time for 97 anyway. We could go through 96 and then we could start 97 through square annex acquisition. You know. And beyond. It's up to you. If we got to do it, we got to do it. I mean, that's just, I don't make the rules. That's just how it is.

There's a lot of strong PS1 stuff at least. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well, and then once we get into the modern arcade era where you got your, your, like, giant space invaders and stuff. I mean, come on. Yeah, there's stuff to talk about, so. All right, so I guess we're stuck for it.

All right, so let's talk about 1996, where I feel like, you know, it's more in line with 94 than 95. 95, kind of a letdown. 96 had some cool stuff. Yeah. Yeah. For one thing, you've got Cleopatra Fortune here, which Brandon has already mentioned, but didn't really talk about what it is. So Cleopatra Fortune is a falling well puzzler type. It is kind of a big brain one because you got your, there are certain drops that can only be popped or whatever or eliminated through being surrounded by other blocks. or like this can only be gotten rid of if it's also with another thing and then surrounded.

So you got you got mummies, you got coffins, you got gems, those are the main ones, and you're kind of working with all of these things and you can make really aggressively complex combos because of those simple rules of like, I believe it's the mummies can only be popped if they're surrounded by things or in a full line. Gems can only be popped if they're surrounded by stuff. And I think there's something that you need both of them, but I forget. But it means that you can set up really elaborate chains. So you can get like a 15 chain going out of that.

And the Saturn port of it, so it was an F3 game originally, and the Saturn port added mystery mode. and mystery mode is super fun and it gives you a problem to solve. So you've got an existing board layout with some many pieces in place. And then you have a certain number of drops that you are allowed to make and you have to solve a condition in that time. So it's like make a four combo or clear everything or get rid of all the mummies or whatever. and I really like that.

That was not 96 when I think that port came out in 97. But the way that they were able to evolve that system, it's kind of like a bit of an under-the-radar puzzle game, but it's got a really neat system. And when you get into it, there are many people that I've met who have gotten so into it that they're like, this is the ultimate, like, RENSA combo puzzle game.

There's an indie game dev called Bank Bank, who made a version of this for Genesis last year, actually, called Amshay, which you can also get on Steam, just because he was so into this combo system. And it also has a nice mascot character called Patrico, which my buddy Persona, who works at Future Club, Skull Girls developer, is super into and constantly doing fan art. of. And it's just a neat series. It had humble origins on the X-Go-go-go. It got a nice, big version on the F3. It has great music. And yeah, that's what I got to say about it. And it is coming back, sort of. I mean, the Saturn version is back. Right. Yeah, Saturn version back is the S-memories or whatever they call it. And that does have the, that should have the mystery mode in it, which is that version that I really like. Also, despite the

abrasive, the somewhat abrasive sounds and the fact that the Patrick O is always saying, when you lose, it, for some reason, the soundscape of this game puts my partner right to sleep. She can sleep

really soundly when I'm playing this game. That's mysterious, but... Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Try it, try it on the, uh, the person in your life, see if Cleopatra Fortune helps them get to sleep. What is this S memories you mentioned? S tribute, which is the...

S tribute, that's right. The city connections, ports of Saturn ports on like Steam and Switch and stuff. So they've done a couple different ones already. They have like a busted move collection. They got Clearpatro Fortune, elevator action returns. Oh, metal black tribute canceled. Okay, never mind. But they're just like the emulated Saturn versions, but they're at least some easy way to play

them on Steam Tech maybe? Yeah, I'm glad that it's happening because it is going to, you know, it's going to start to elucidate this era. It's going to bring it, bring it out, get people to know more about it because it is a, and it's a very good era. Right. Oh, layer section and everything. Wow.

Yeah. Wow. And the layer section comes with, or, uh, I think our force is included in there. R-Force being the canceled sequel to the original Rayforce, which was still in 2D. Only the first stage exists, but you're now able to play that, which is super cool. Yep. Hot dang. I totally missed out on this.

Okay. Well, cool. This podcast is relevant. Aren't you glad you're listening? Totally. Okay, so speaking of layer section, galactic attack, Ray crisis and things like that, there's Ray Storm. Maybe we should let Ray talk about this?

I don't know. It's his storm. the storm of great gameplay. Yeah, I mean, it is the first right, no, I'm sorry, follow up to Ray Crisis. So it's another 3D adaptation of what happened in Ray Force and whatnot. So it's, of course, it's not fully top-down, it's a little bit angled, so, you know, you are looking forward a little bit into the horizon, not completely. but I would say where these 3D ray games, you know, don't have the advantage of having all the 2D scaling stuff.

They sort of make up for it in like effects, like weapon effects, explosions, any kind of like lock on effects, things of that nature where they really wanted to make a statement that way. And so at least in the arcade version, maybe not so much a PlayStation version, it has like this really badass looking electric. electric thunderbolt weapon like really kind of like just looks really smooth and really good and I really like it. It's sort of like the ride in toothpaste laser in terms of like impact. It just looks good.

A little less so on the PlayStation version, but like look at the arcade version. You'll see it's really cool and just just really good at like ripping through big bosses and stuff. Love that toothpaste laser. Yeah. But that's like a really nutshell way of put in it. Just to clarify, this is the second one. and Ray Crisis was a prequel, but it came out after.

So Ray Storm is the second one made, and thus the first 3D one. Yeah, that makes sense, because Ray Crisis does look a little bit different than this in terms of, like, aesthetic. Yeah, and so this kind of gets into the problem I was talking about of doing the 3D in a way that is as impressive as it was in the 2D. And, like, the 3D is basically non-interactable, more or less. It's just background stuff that's underneath you. And somehow just isn't quite as impressive as a result. And it also gets a little visually noisy and difficult to look at, I would say. As much as I like it, and it's, you know, it's got that cool scene where you're, like, going over a waterfall or whatever,

it's still a little harder to look at. But working designs put it out in the U.S. under their ill-named Spaz label, unfortunately. But it, you know, it's all right is what I'll say about it. I like this series. I'm glad they kept making it. Yeah, for sure. I think it's a good attempt to bring it to 3D. And so, like, it's not going to be perfect transition.

It's probably not going to be as impressive as, you know, from a technical standpoint when you understand all the things that are happening in RayForce in 2D, but you know, look at it and it's like, it's pretty decent compared to all the other sorts of 3D shooters that were coming out on that PlayStation era. Yeah, I'm having a hard time keeping the release order of these games in my head. Because I remember buying one of these Taito shooters as one of my first, PlayStation games, but that would have been like 97 and like late 9690, 90, early 97. So which one would that have been?

I think that was the one a claim released here. I don't remember even offhand because I already messed up. All right. Yeah, that was because of my notes. Well, Acclaim released Galactic Attack, the first game on Saturn. Okay, but what was the PlayStation version of that called? The PlayStation didn't get that. one, if I'm right? I need to be looking at Wikipedia over here. But, um, it, yeah,

PlayStation, I think didn't get the 2D one. Hmm. That's what I think. I could be wrong. What the hell am I thinking of? Because I remember playing early on in owning a PlayStation, a top-down shooter that looked exactly like this. And I thought it was really cool, but also a little overwhelming. And I feel like that was an inflection point where I could have gone and become a shooter guy or become an RPG guy. And I became the RPG guy instead. But are you somehow thinking of In The Hunt? No, that's a very different kind of game. It's very different. That involves some of the ones. Yeah. Man, okay. I don't know. What the hell? What am I thinking? I don't know. Maybe I'm just imagining stuff at this point. Making up memories because I don't have enough

anymore. I've got to create some new ones. All right. Well, anyway, pretty cool looking game, in any case. And finally, for 1996, we mentioned this one before. Lufia 2, rise of the Sinistrils. Sinistrels, how we pronounce that? Not really a fan of Lufia, but Lufia 2, as I mentioned here in the notes, is the Eternal Blue to Lufia's Silver Star, the Final Fantasy 6 to Lufia's Final Fantasy 4, the Dragon Quest 5 to its Dragon Quest 2. Basically, It's the same thing, but elevated, expanded, enhanced, improved. It's actually a prequel, I believe, to the first game. But just has much more refinement and depth and all kinds of extra stuff to do

and is generally regarded as a high point of super NES RPGs, even if it looks kind of ugly. And it's called two for you. You can't go wrong. There you go. Oh, it also introduced like puzzle dungeons where you can push stuff around. which became an element of wild arms just straight up rip this off the following year. Right. That's all I hear about, though, with Lufia 2 is that people either have some sort of fondness

or really big complaints about all the puzzles. You really can't finish it properly without a guide if you wanted to really get through it today. I mean, that's all I hear about it is just puzzles. Lufia 2 has these bad puzzles or whatever. I'm just like, okay. I don't know. I don't know.

My experience with puzzle dungeons has always been. Unless, like, random encounter rates are really high to the point where it makes the process of moving stuff around annoying, I've never found them that vexing. Tell you what, give me a guide for Alondra, that's for sure. Like, I'm not... Yeah, I did Alundra without a guide. Yeah, see, that's... I've met a couple people like that, but I'm not one of them. I was playing Alondra on PSP on a plane once, playing the PS1 version on the PSP.

and I had to stop because I was like, man, I don't want to brute force this puzzle about pushing angels around or whatever it was. It's like, I don't care what order these around. Yeah, like the ice dungeon. Yeah, I kept hearing about how hard the puzzles were

and I had myself, I was braced. I was like, at some point, I'm going to get to a part that's just going to destroy me. And I'm really scared about this, but I'm going to keep playing until I get there and then maybe I can get some help. And then, you know, toward the end of the game, I was like, well, so where was that really super hard puzzle?

You got that different brain going on? Yeah, the only thing it's good for is pushing angels around ice. So, you know, I'm glad that I found my aptitude, although I did kind of peak early. That was like 1998. So it's been a long, slow descent from there. But I feel like I need to go in and spend some time with Lucia, too, because maybe that would be the other thing my brain could handle. It sounds like we need a Lufia episode of retroactive. with some real experts, some real fans.

Yeah, I feel like we're not doing it justice. Yeah. Yeah, so we can find some people who have actually played Lucia, and they can talk about it, as opposed to us saying, no, no. Exactly. Oh, well, so maybe that's not the coolest way to end this episode. But I don't know, it's kind of hard to match that 1994 deluxe release. Well, luckily we don't have to, because I have one more game to talk about.

Oh, yes. Save us. Yeah, what is it? It's Battle Gear, aka side-by-side. That is a, it's Taito's Drift Racing series, which began in 1996. And it came out for a bunch of consoles later. It was released as side-by-side on the PlayStation. But, yeah, it turned into the Battle Gear series, which was like the competitor to Initial D

and Wang Gan Midnight. and all of these kind of like drift-based versus racing games. They stopped, their last one was in 2006. It was Battle Gear 4-tuned. But it was a, you know, it was a series that ran for 10 years in arcades, got ports, and the very first one was in 1996. And it had, you know, that good music. It felt really good to play in the way that those.

kind of highway battle sorts of games do and uh plus i mean the the later name battle gear like that's that's an amazing name in my opinion uh it's real good top names yeah and um you could use uh it had like real licenses so import sports cars from Honda Nissan Toyota Mazda and then later they added some others they weren't in there but um and then it had like toge mountain pass racing like initial D so but before initial D well wait was it before

the first initial D arcade game maybe not but anyway it was in that zone and it was Taito's entry in it and I wouldn't say it was super remarkable but it was you know it was Taito getting fully into 3D really doing this racing thing

I don't know I like it oh yeah yeah I mean that's a good point yeah they were really like still doing like a modernish 3D game still keeping those going but yeah you don't really hear about it in terms like the great standouts in the genre like initial d and wongon which is you know kind of a shame because it's a perfectly fine game it's not like uh title messed up like they used to perhaps in the 90s of some of their weaker stuff like this um yeah it's probably solid racing game it's very it's solid it continued going uh for many entries and it got a lot better as it went on.

So I think the first game is most remarkable in being the first of them. But it does have this really cool sense of speed and when you're playing it, like even in the PlayStation version, they'll have this side of the playfield that's empty because it's the, you're on a mountain pass and there's just like a railing

between you and destruction. You can't actually fall off, but it still gives you this kind of a feeling of of danger and stuff. I don't know. I think it's pretty neat. Yeah. So there. And on a slightly higher now. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for redeeming this episode. It could have gone out

in such a deflated way, but it didn't because of Brandon. Thank you. So anyway, yeah, we again thought we'd make it through to the end of Taito, but we didn't. So you folks at home are just going to have to brace up and hear about really, really

cool games from 1997 and beyond at some point. We'll give it some time. Let your, let your minds recover from the awesomeness that was 1994, because man, that's a lot to drink in. And, yes, these games, many of these games that we've been discussing are available as part of the S Tribute series on Switch and Steam and PS5 and Xbox. So check those out. There's some great stuff that still holds up really well. There's also various collections available, tito milestones and so forth. Taito not too shy about their own legacy. And, you know, they shouldn't be. They've made some great stuff. They deserve to keep it out there. We appreciate them keeping it out there.

We do. Anyway, that has been this episode of Retronauts, Ray and Brandon, thank you for participating once again. Thank you, everyone who is out there listening to this at the moment for listening once again. In case you have missed them, I gave you the numbers of previous Retronauts episodes about tito that you can catch up on at the beginning of the episode, and we'll recap once we do part five, so you can just blitz them all in a row and really just drink in the greatness that is tito for eight, ten hours. I mean, what do you want? Anyway, for those of you who enjoy Taito games and other great classic games, you can find more retronauts all over the internet on various podcatchers. You can subscribe to us as we are primarily patron-supper.

supported through subscriptions on Patreon, patreon.com slash Retronauts. $3 a month gets you every episode a week in advance. Well, every weekly episode, a week in advance at a higher bit rate quality with no advertisements. $5 a month gets you all of that plus. Exclusive episodes every other Friday, exclusive mini podcasts and columns by Diamond Fight, every weekend, Discord access, and occasional other stuff. So patreon.com slash retronauts, that's where you can find us. Brandon, where can people find you on the internet and support you and so forth?

Yes, you can find my own podcast called Insert Credit on any place where there's podcast stuff. That's with me and Tim Rogers of Action Button videos and Frank Cefaldi of the Video Game History Foundation. we do a show where we have to answer prompts in six minutes or less or get harangued by a horrible buzzer noise. It works pretty well. Give that a look. You can also find my own video games from my company Necrosoft games. We just released a game called Hypergun Sport,

which is an arcade action type game 2V2 volleyball with guns. That's on every platform. except for mobile, every platform with a controller, basically. And you can also wish list our upcoming Tactics RPG Demon School on Steam. That's going to be coming pretty soon. And, yeah, keep your eyes peeled. We got more stuff down the pipe. Ray, what about you?

All right, well, I'm RDBAAA on most things. In fact, you can go to RDBAA.a.a.comas, and that's like my link. list, and that has everything worth showing you, including the games that I make, BlastRush and Mash Gadget on PlayDate, and things of that nature. Of course, also my podcast, No More Woppers, No More Woppers.com. I do that with my friend Alex. We goof around a lot on that. But yeah, basically just RDBAA.Space.

And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on the internet, on Twitter and other platforms. Well, really just Twitter, but, man, I got to get away from there. What are we going to do, man? I'm on there as Necrosofty. There aren't any other that quite hit that social structure. It's really a bummer. It's really falling apart. Billionaires are the worst.

Yeah, it's dire these days. Anyway, I'm there for the time being as GameSpite. I'm on YouTube and on Retronauts under my actual name, Jeremy Parrish. And you can find me doing stuff at Limited Run Games also. So that's it. That's the podcast, and that's the people who made it. And I did figure out which PlayStation game I was thinking of in 1997. It was Ray Storm for PlayStation.

Which was 3D. Working Designs published just under the name Working Designs. Yes. That's the one where I was like, oh, this is really cool, but I feel a little overwhelmed. Maybe I'll be an RPG guy. And then, like, immediately after that, I imported Symphony in the Night, have my PS1 mod shipped and said, This is me now. I've discovered my identity.

So, yeah, that's, that's Tito for you. But that's okay. Just because I decided to gravitate toward the Metroidvania instead of the shooter doesn't mean I don't love Taito because, my God, elevator action two right there. That's an all-timer worth, like the entire company's existence was worth it for that. But I promise there will be some really great stuff in episode five of this podcast. Yes, the fifth episode of Retronauts is coming to you sometime soon. In the meantime, you can continue looking for other non-tito episodes every week and every other Friday of your patron. Thanks. You know,