Retronauts - 584: Contra: Operation Galuga & Toxic Crusaders

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

It’s clean-up time! Let’s attack aggressively! Stuart Gipp offers up twinterviews with Tomm Hulett (WayForward) about the upcoming Contra: Operation Galuga, and Sam Beddoes (Freakzone) about the also- upcoming Toxic Crusaders. Strap yourselves in! 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

Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of retro games, the podcast about retro games, the only one, the only podcast about retro games, in fact. Well, certainly the only one worth listening to, no offence to all the friends of the show of the very retrogaming podcasts, and I'm really sorry for what I just said. Hi, I'm Stuart Gibb, and this is another instalment of those episodes

where I do a interview with two people, or two groups of people. But today it really is just two people. I'm talking to Tom Hewlett from Way Forward about the upcoming Contra Operation Gallagher as well as career in general. And I also talk to Sam Bedros from Freak Zone Games and Retro Ware, who's currently working on toxic crusaders

and previously worked on the Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures, video games as well as Manor's Hands of Fate and other stuff that will get into it. We want you to talk to them for a while, so I'm pretty happy with that one. I'm happy with Tom's interview as well. They're both enjoyable, informative. Hopefully you'll enjoy them too.

I'm hoping to talk to both of them again in the near future about other subjects, but we'll see how that goes. This is just my sort of quick, this is what's happening today, intro. I won't waste your time. Let's just crack straight on with it. Okay, I guess the best thing to do would be,

if I could ask you to introduce yourself to the lovely listeners, please. It's Tom. For revenge, Oh, Tom Fringe. I'm Tom Hewlett. I'm a director of Way Forward. And I'm most recently working on Contra Operation Galuga. And that was announced at the summer games first or was it at Nintendo Direct?

I can't recall it. It was the Nintendo Direct. Yeah, that was awesome. Very prestigious, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You always want to get in the direct. I mean, I saw that there was the first thing on the indie world the other day was the new Shanta. So, yeah, Way Forward and Nintendo Directs have a bit of a.

history, I guess. Yeah, let's keep it going. It's very exciting. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But yes, I guess I'd like to know you initially. What are you doing it way forward? What's your like sort of role there? I'm a director, which means I'm kind of, I mean, it could mean a lot of things.

On a project, I'm kind of in charge of the vision of the project creatively, which could mean doing the whole original pitch, or sometimes we're given a pitch by a client, and then I'm modifying that. designing the game, running the team, you know, guiding what everyone does, approving all the stuff as it goes in the game. It's pretty involved, but I guess it's the game designer

job that people imagine. Yeah. And you're directing contra operation, Goluga. Yes. What have you directed on the way forward before? Is it understood? Or is this, what have you done before this? So the first two games I did were adventure time,

the second and third adventure times. That would be explore the dungeon and secret kingdom oh wow yeah yeah yeah okay wow yeah yeah man secret kingdom it's such a shame you can't buy that now what you can I suppose I'm going to a store but sorry I don't mean to dig up a wound

there I just uh just to derail my own introduction really quick yeah we recently found someone of our one of my programmers sent me we found like a speed run of secret kingdom and the way they're you know I hadn't I assumed that people kind of speed run everything but I hadn't seen any and they were talking like there's this huge community for it there's a randomizer for it oh wow like they were

all excited about the randomizer it's like oh my gosh like people like this game this is so cool well it's a really fun game i mean it's a really cool it's a really great game it's like explore the dungeon and then just like well this was cool but what if we did lean for the past you know exactly and it's rare as hell um i enjoyed it a lot i mean i like the first adventure time game as well but i don't think you directed that one so i'm not going to talk about it They're all great, you know. But yeah, then I did Ninja Turtles, Danger of the Ouse. Great, yeah, love that one, yeah.

Goose bumps the game. Yeah, that one's cool. That's like Shadowgate kind of. Yeah, Shadowgate. That was really fun. Snatcher, uninvited, deja vu-like. And then I did some level design to help out on Mummy demastered. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the mobile version of Lit, I did all the levels for that. Oh, nice, yeah. And then I was the director of the Wayforward effort on bloodstained. Yeah, cool. Both the ritual of the night and then all the DLC content that's still coming out. Yeah, yeah. And then Contra. Oh, and SpiderSource.

I forgot Spider-Source. Spiders'ors was an original Wayforward property, which is a running gun, like a Saturday morning gun. So I did that, and then that led into Contra. Yeah, I enjoyed that as well. I think I reviewed that on Retronauts. So, running gun, and that was the sort of contra four kind of linear, like, um, lineage as well, wasn't it? Yeah. The, uh, because there's a lower, you could get like the grappling hook in that as well and that was cool.

Yep. Um, yeah. Uh, but prior to, but just to be, just to get like a clip of here, just like briefly, like prior to way forward, what we, how did you, where did you start? Like, how did you sort of get into this whole sort of industry? I'll keep it short. So when I was, when I was 12, um, we moved to Orange County and my dad, uh, had kind of known someone in our neighborhood. who at the time worked at Virgin Games. So they were at this point where they're obviously a British developer, so their games are stupid hard, especially in the 90s. And they were tired of marketing telling them like, hey, your games are too hard. You got to dumb them down because kids can't play them.

And he found out, this is a true story, he found out I could beat a level three on Battletoads, the Speed right level. The Tobitone, yeah. And people at the office at Virgin were playing. and no one could get past the turbo tunnel. So the fact that some kid could destroy them, they were like,

we got to get this kid in the office to prove that our games aren't too hard. So being good at Battletoids is you owe everything to that. It's true. It's absolutely true. And you can, if you think my games are too hard, you can kind of blame that. I have no point of reference.

But anyway, so they hired me to come in once a week in the summer and test games and this was this summer that Street Fighter 2 came out in Mario Paint and like the Super Nintendo was hitting at stride

so I enjoyed the income but I showed up and tested global gladiators and what else the legends of Kairandia is the point and click oh wow

I'm trying to think what they were doing at the time Robicop versus the Terminator was that then cool spot was that then it was cool spot era yeah it's hard So I did that, and the next summer I tested games from home.

I don't know why that changed, some political thing. And then I would still, you know, we were still friends with the guy. So I'd just get rums and stuff that he'd want my opinion on. So like Robocop Terminator, I just got to play Aladdin was the second year. It was the like the from home year. Yeah. And then a jungle book was just check this out. So it's just that whole era.

Yeah, nice. So then from there, I wanted to make my own games. So I got some friends together and we did like an indie group before there were indies. But we got licensed by Nintendo and we were working on a Game Boy RPG called Mithri, Game Boy Color. And then that eventually led to me pitching it to Atlas because I worked at Electronics Boutique for my day job during college. And my friend from there also worked at Alice. So he was like, oh, you should pitch your game to us. So I did.

And then that's how I met Atlas. And then they hired me to do QA a couple years later. And then I rose to from QA to Loke, and I would lead projects there from a localization standpoint. And then I wanted to have more of a development side, like make the games and design them, which might have changed at Atlas now that they're also Sega. But at the time, they were just doing Loke. And so then I got a job at Konami where I produced Contra 4 with Way Forward. And then I worked there for a couple years, and then I moved over to Way Forward. that's yeah I mean

Contra I mean were you playing contra like as a kid as well was that like something that you were into yeah I think I played it the first time I rented it at Christmas right in in in 89 and I actually didn't like it the first time I played it but I didn't have another player

and then I think my friend probably rented it a couple weeks later and I played it with a friend and I was like okay I get this game now it's two player and it's not quite as overwhelming when you have two players I mean, I was going to say with the difficulty of the turbo tunnel, I mean, Contra's harder than the turbo tunnel, right? I mean, I would say it was, but. Yeah, well, when I got, so when I rented Contra, I'd had, it was, I got my NES the year before. So I'd obviously played it at Friends houses and stuff before that.

Yeah. But I'd had a year of, like, hardcore getting good at games before Contra. But by Battletones, that was like three years later. Yeah. So, you know, a whole lot can change in three years. are you still are you still good at video games or I'm still good at video games

that's awesome I wish I was good at video games I have an NES mini with all the games I owned backup copies on it yeah but you delete the drums after 24 hours obviously you're going to have to go to jail yeah no actually I actually didn't do the download

people did the download every game and I literally saw it as like a no this is my backup of my personal collection so I literally have like these are games I have in a box section and these are games I have cartridge only section like I turned into a little nerdy project I can't like I'm not one to talk because I like curated I curated the Snows menu I curated the Mega Drive menu

like I just had to have them all you know just like just as not all the rums God no just the good ones yeah yeah so so I and I'd still play those but when we before COVID when we were all still working with human beings in person, I would play them after hours and people would come see old games and I could explain like, this is why this game is good. It sounds quite utopian, actually.

I love the idea of that. I suppose that's what I do as well, to be honest, but the problem is no one comes and goes, hey, what is this? Because no one wants to see me play like old master system games. But anyway, I digress. Coming on to Contra 4, so that must have been kind of like,

I mean, that's got to be kind of wild to be given that. Or would you say given it? That's probably an understatement. How did you get under Contra 4? Kind of. So I just started at Konami. Yeah. And I was having kind of a rough go of it.

The producer I was assigned to left, like left company a couple weeks in. And the only info I had is like, she's the one that for my interview was like, oh, I want to work with this guy. So I was a little bit confused and directionless about like, what am I doing here? I don't really have a project.

So we were going to do some internal pitching. And they said, just bring, you know, bring some pitches. And I thought, this is great. I wanted to design games. And now I get to pitch. This is, okay, This is what I signed up for. Yeah. So I thought, what Konami properties would I want to work on or revive?

And I was, the Wii had just come out. So I was really excited about the Wii. And I just finished Trauma Center as my last game at Atlas, the Wii, the second opinion, the launch title. So I thought, we got to keep this Wii train going. This is awesome. So I pitched Rocket Night, Contra, and Silent Hill for Wii. Right, right. And my contra, again, this is this thing about, like, what would, what would make people excited about the Wii?

So mine was like a 3D contra. Yeah. Kind of like years of war, but gears had just come out. So I didn't know that. But like, it's kind of a focused third person. Yeah. FPS style third person and you have the Wii remote, whatever. And then my, another producer that, my friend Simon Lye, he pitched a contra for DS coming from the

like new Super Mario brothers came in a couple months ago and it made unlimited money people like old games it turns out let's do Contra but New Super Mario Brothers

and so the head of production said hey these two guys are excited about Contra Simon's idea is clearly the correct one let's make that a game and put Simon and Tom on it together so then we pitched it

So that was, that was like we passed at the production bar. Then we had to pitch it to the president. And he was actually the producer on Contra 3. And Axelay, Mr. Katawa, and a couple other games from that era. So we ended up, Simon realized it was the 20th anniversary. The game would come out on the 20th anniversary of Contra. Yeah. So we pitched it as like, look, it's do Super Mario Brothers, but Contra.

And look, it's the 20th anniversary. So we'll have like a museum, it'll be super cool, everyone will be excited. And so that kind of touched Mr. Katawe's like, oh, has it really been that long? Like nostalgia, like, oh, yes, we should celebrate this. Yeah. So that's how the game, I mean, we really were kind of given the game, but that's how it came together. And then also, Way Forward had been sending demos to Konami. And so the head of production said, hey, Tom, do you know anything about Way Forward?

Do you want to play this demo? do you have any opinions? And I played Shantae, so I was like, oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah. This is like the perfect developer. They can do the art. They can do the gameplay. Like, yes, we should we should use them. So we just met with them and they were cool. So it was that simple.

Yeah. Going back very slightly, the Wii Rocket Night and Wii Silent Hill, I mean, they ended up being made, not on the Wii for the Rocket Night, presumably. Right. Unless it was, it wasn't on the Wiiware, was it? It was only on Live Arcade and PSN. PC, I think. Yeah, correct, correct. Yeah. And Silent Hill would have been shattered memories, presumably.

But that's interesting that they ended up sort of existing anyway. That's cool. Yeah. So the other thing that happened because of that meeting is, so Simon had been the associate producer on the silent oil games. Yeah. But after this meeting, you know, the head of production said, oh, Tom seems to care about Silent Hill. So we're going to swap them. So Simon and I swap. But other than, so we both had Contra. And then we were swapped otherwise. So Simon got Winks Club. which I would have been on. And then I got put on Silent Hill and lived happily ever after. But the producer on Silent Hill saw the pitch and kind of kept that in the back of his mind. So we kind of slowly developed what a Wii Silent Hill could be. And we did a demo and then that kind of went away.

I got busy on my other projects. And then he had been working with Climax and Origins. And he kind of morphed the Wii Silent Hill into a climax project, which became Shatter memories. Cool, cool, yeah. And then Rocket Night, that actually ultimately happened because of a separate pitch. I just wouldn't, I wouldn't shut up about Rocket Night. No, no, I mean, nor should you.

Nor should you. No, should I, yes. Yeah. Anytime, whenever Rocket Night is not present, people should be saying, where's Rocket Night? Where's Rocket Night? Yeah. And he puts on his cool shades. No.

But I did end up, what I learned from Contra in the 20th anniversary is I did end up signing Rocket Night based on appealing to Mr. Katowai's nostalgia. Yeah. I was like, you know, he was the mascot. He's like, oh, you're right. He was once our mascot, so we shouldn't abandon him. I got to say about Rocket Night was like back in the day that I was when I came out and I was much younger and angrier and more toxic.

And my reaction to it being not exactly like the Megadryph once was just like, you know. And nowadays I play that game and I'm just like, what was my problem? This is fun. This is good. I have all your forum comments right here on a spreadsheet, so I've remembered. That's awful. I don't really do that.

I'm not crazy. Right, right. Yeah, no, and it's still available, which is crazy to me. Yeah, it's on Steam, right? NPSA, you can just buy it. I think it's on the Xbox backwards compatible. So everybody, go buy a rocket night.

Yeah, you're right. It is on my series X. You're right. Yeah. Good game. I've been able to go back to it and figure out the way to get. you know, like the hard mode stage just by beating the bosses in certain ways. I never did figure that out, so I need to go back and view that. Probably won't collect all the blue gems that I can't be bothered, but the one of my gems I will, the hard mode thing I will do.

Anyway, sorry, going back to Contra, like, obviously it's not your sort of first rodeo on Contra, so I got to ask, what is it that is sort of bringing forward from Contra 4 into the new game, if anything? Sort of a development of just the ideas. I mean, obviously with Contra 4, we had a lot of discussions about what was our take on Contra, both way forward individually and then me and Simon at Konami and then kind of coming together and share vision. And so obviously, like, you know, Way Forward and Matt Bow's on the creative director and all the guys that worked on that, they had some great ideas. and they really examined all the games

and me and I'm sure other games too me and Simon played like Gunstar Heroes and talked about what's different from Contra and Gunstar heroes like they're not the same you wouldn't do Gunstar things in the Contra and you wouldn't do Contra things in a Gunstar what are they and why is that?

So there's a lot of thought there and then you know you carry that with you as a designer you just think about here's my feelings on running guns with the asterisk of like and then if it's a contra here's what that means yeah so that eventually led to you know you know it kind of came up on mummy demastered I wasn't directing it so I didn't make the gameplay but I just thought about okay you can shoot in this Metroidvania and you can aim lock like contra so what does that mean and you have all these different weapons what does that mean so then we you know we way forward decided to do spider soers and Matt came up with the idea and the concept and then I was assigned to it and so it was kind of like okay what if we're making a way forward running gun but it's not contra branded but it's kind of kind of spiritually in that wheelhouse. Yeah.

So we made spider sores, and then Konami basically said, but what if it was contra branded? Oh, I see. Okay. And so it's really this evolution just from Contra 4 and then other games I've worked on like Rocket Night and then other running guns.

And then, okay, now we're back and it's, it's an official contra. Yeah. So it's kind of like the final exam of like, okay, what have you learned?

What is still valid in 2023? What maybe isn't and why? You know, there's things we did on Contra 4. I wouldn't do again for various reasons, not because they were bad, but just because that's like, that's Contra 4 and we're not Contra 4 anymore. Could I ask, like, for example, such as, what would you not do from Contra 4 or what have you not done from Contra 4? Well, other than not having two screens, obviously.

The simplest things are, in Contra 4 we kept a very old school difficulty. So if you were playing on easy, you couldn't complete the game. there's certain things that didn't unlock and so you had to play on normal and then hard. Can I make a confession at this point? I only managed to beat it on normal by doing that like bug that gives you like 99 lives on the first level.

By dying at the like moment that you kill the boss and get an extra life. Right. That gives you like 99 lives. That's the only way I could do it. There was no other way. However, I did do all the challenges. There's no way to cheat that.

So props for that place. Thank you. Good job. I'm proud of you. Yeah, so, but on, you know, I have, was very opinionated about that at the time, especially the easy mode thing. Like, that was my, I'll admit it, that was my baby. It was of the time.

I mean, people weren't talking about accessibility and, and difficulty back then, really. It was just like, it is what it is. It was a different time. And so, my current boss, the head of production way forward, like, I argued with him personally. He was the producer on Contraforan. And he was like, you know, I don't necessarily know that this is right.

And I was like, no, it is. It's an old school game. This is how they worked. That's why we're doing it. And so at the time, that certainly did signal a certain type of player. Like, this is a legit contraigant. And they were very excited about it. To other people who wanted to enjoy it, maybe it was less exciting that they couldn't see the end of the game.

I mean, you know, we were locking out, I think it was two whole stages. yeah i think i think it was something it ended off to like six i think yeah the city which i felt like that was a good exciting set piece you rode a giant omoo from nascar and you killed it and you rode off on your bike yeah that's if you're uneasy that's great for you but now with uh the discussions we have uh we didn't do that so you can play operation gluga uneasy and see all the content good but obviously there is also like normal and like super hard for people

who want to like push themselves and yeah this is still like my it's still my baby this like concept of how does difficulty work and so now we have a lot of things have happened in the last 16 years more people have played

well from soft games exist yes but because of that specifically Eldon Ring let's say people who weren't as good at Contra have beaten from soft games yeah which is crazy on paper because Frumsoft games are really hard and longer

than Contra. So you've got to master more stuff in a Frumsoft game. And Frumsoft games aren't apologetic and they're difficult to either. So it's not like they dumb themselves down to appeal to mass market. It's like both, they found ways to make things accessible in Eldon Ring like having summons.

Or Spirit ashes, whatever they're called. You know what they are. They're the cool guys that are in all white and they fight for you. But so you can customize your Elden Ring experience, there's things you could ignore if you're like, I'm, I'm too good for that, right? And that's on you. That's your decision. But then,

again, like the quote, more casual players have also risen to the challenge. They're like, oh, I understand why this is cool. Like, I get beating my head against the boss for an hour and then finally getting victory. I know why that's worth doing. And so maybe sometimes I want to do that. And so for Operation Galuga,

I'm really hoping, if you play it with, on the easiest its settings, it is the most accessible contra ever. To to toot my own horn, that's my hope. It's a hope, guys. If I do it, let me know. But that's my hope. But also, if you play it on all the hardest settings, it's the hardest contra. Oh, that's a total order. Hardcore uprising is possible.

The, I'll get to that a second. Let me do my spiel. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, sorry. But my honest hope is that someone who is new to running guns or, Maybe they watched a let's play, and they're like, oh, these look pretty cool. They can play the game. And when they finished it, they still feel like they got a contra experience. Again, it's not dumb down.

It's not like, you beat the easy contra on baby mode. It's like, hey, you beat your first contra. That's awesome, because that's what people did with Eldon Ring. And then they moved on to Bloodbourne and Sekaro, like hard games. So that's my hope. But my hope is then, Contra is there. You can just up the difficulty. and now it's like it's your

second row or it's your whatever but then hardcore players don't feel like I had to unlock all these things before the game was even worth playing for me because it's so easy like that no like this is it's here to challenge you too so like you can jump in having

contras and be like oh oh I got to like up my game to beat this contra so that's my hope but I can say promising data so far the the level designer of Contra 4 who helped make hard mode so hard, he played our normal mode

with some of the harder settings set, and he got stuck at, like, stage four. So, like, we have some legit challenge here, guys. Look forward to it. Yeah, you might not be able to tell me this, but how many stages are there this time? I can't tell you. That's fine. That's fair enough. My other question is, is it going to be like an arcade one-run experience, or is

they're going to be like, can you suspend and save life? If you reach page three, you could then quit and come back and continue. So there's two play modes, which is kind of what we did in Spider-Source. There's story mode and arcade mode. So story mode, obviously there's story content, but also you have a stage select. So you'll go back to the stage select. You can replay stages if you want. It'll revert your lives.

If you were at zero lives, it'll bump it up for the next stage. And then arcade mode, which is a linear experience, start to finish. but you can quit out and resume one arcade session. So, you know, as long as it takes you to get to arcade, you can keep playing and it'll save your progress. Right, right, cool. I preface this with you, you might not be able to tell me this stuff. That's fine, but it's four players in arcade mode,

and it's two in story mode, is that right? Yes. Is there a distinction, like, there? Like, why there's only two in story? I'm sure there is a good reason for that, but I'm just curious. There's two reasons. One, just to keep the story focused.

We can, I like customizing story based on who you're playing as. Yeah. And so with two characters, that's manageable. With four, it's a little out of hand. But also, we have some, well, I guess I can't share. There's characters show up in the story that you're not necessarily controlling as well. Right. I see.

Okay. It's the same, I assume arcade mode is the same stages. It's just not without, say, cutscenes or story stuff. It's just, here at the stages, have fun. Okay, like classic kind of contra. And then it's also for a player, like the other way, the reason that split is I figure if you have four people together played, they probably

don't care about the story. Yeah. You could be like, hey, roommate, I want to see the story. You're going to help me play it. And then he has to like watch the cutscenes. But if you've got like three other people over and you have sodas and chips and stuff, they're probably like, dude, just hit start. Yeah, you're not wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, because you tell us

about playable characters in this game at all? Yeah, there's a bunch. So when you first sit down to start a new game, you can play as Bill and Lance in story mode. In arcade mode, you can also choose the proletectors. So you get your four characters you get. Thank you for doing that for me specifically. Probo red, Probo blue, and it was for you specifically. That's good. Do they say, again, do they have the English accents? They say to proletons serve? They say sorted. Perfect. So I did, I did you one better. They say British things.

This is the best game of ever. I'm sure they spell color with you, but you never see them writing it, but you could assume. No, we have, we have some programmers that are British, and I get to see their faces light up as I told them cool pro-protecture things. That's great. But then

as you play story mode, you're going to unlock other characters in the story, and then they become playable in arcade mode as well. Cool. Right, right. We've revealed Ariana and Lucia. Ariana is a new character. she's from Galuga Island so she's been there

kind of dealing with the invasion forces and Lucia who's another agent she'll join Bill at Lance at some point she's from Shattered Soldier right am I missing remembering that that's where Lucia originally appeared yes so I guess I should say game content wise

Operation Galuga is a new game yeah it's not just a remake it's not like an HD remaster thing no it's new stages and new buses and stuff. Story-wise, it's a retelling of the original game. But kind of, so, you know this, too, but other people, if you don't know, the Contra storyline gets a little confusing based on which territory you live in. Yes.

There's the Japan story, which is the legit canon story to this point. There's the U.S. story, which is originally takes place in the 80s. And then does like a weird time jump. And then there's the European story, which is ProPotector, which I don't even, I assume it's the future because everyone's a robot. But with Contra 4, we kind of tried to go, okay, this is, here's where this takes place in the timeline. And here's why they all mush together now. And we kind of retcom things and made things fit. Yeah.

With Operation Galuga, Konami, their kind of thesis for the project is like, okay, it's way too confusing. we're starting up from the beginning this is the first mission now and we're establishing it and so we know what the whole timeline was because of the past games but now we're kind of adapting it so it's kind of like an MCU thing

where that data the story data from before doesn't necessarily apply but fans can see like oh okay they did that here this character's from that yeah why did they mention this like that they shouldn't know about that yet so that's kind of how we're doing it so

so yeah Luce Lucia in Shattered Soldier was a bioroid, I think, which is some sort of cyborg android robot being. I didn't remember because I pressed start whenever the story. And that was in the far future. I think Shattered Soldier was further. Neo-Contra was in 4,444. Shadow Soldier was before that.

Anyway, so in Operation Galuga, there's a character named Lucia, but she's not necessarily the same Lucia. So what's that about? I guess you'll have to find out. Yeah. Nice with a sort of legacy character. It's good to know that there's going to be sort of legacy stuff there. I mean, I wouldn't expect anything less to be honest.

Yeah. And then it's also just because we're there, you know, we did flesh out. So Bill and Lance are part of the Contra unit, but the Contra units is part of the Earth Marine Corps. And that's part of the Federation. So like there is more of a sense of context, too. I think Japanese original drop people in. They're like, here's some stuff. I don't know.

There's aliens. And we're kind of, we're building the universe so people can understand, like, oh, okay, I kind of get the groups at play. And you'll be more invested in it, I think. And there's also a new, like, weapons system in this game, as we've seen in the trailer. Could you tell us about that, please? Yeah, so weapons, there's another thing that kind of carried over from Contra 4, but then further evolved, is the weapons. So with Contra 4, I was playing Cave Story at the time. And I thought, hey, weapons should power up.

It's really interesting to power up weapons. And then if you get hit, they power down. Maybe Contra could do that. And then as I researched Contra's, I found out, oh, Contra kind of already did that here and there. But so with Contra 4, we kind of canonized that every weapon had a level two. So if you collect the weapon twice, it stacks and it has some new effect or it's better. Yeah. And so even before we were assigned Operation Galuga, I was kind of thinking, okay, if we did Contra again,

what would we do with the weapon system? So my pitch for this game was overloads. And so what that means is you have your weapon. It levels up just like Contra 4. But if you want to, if you, if you're in an emergency, you can overload it, which means destroy your weapon,

but then you get like a big effect. So this was also, it's kind of like, so Conchre 3 had smart bombs. Yeah. But you ended up hoarding them just to the boss. And then you just spam the smart bombs. And then you'd be like, okay, let's clean up. And that's not interesting strategically to me.

So overloads are kind of taking the place of that. But also things like the barrier from Contra 3. What if you could use the barrier? What if you could store the barrier like a smart bomb and choose when to use it? Because maybe you'd use that during the boss. And then you'd fight the boss normally, but have the barrier. And so that became the overloads. So based on your weapon, there's a different effect.

So machine gun is going to be barrier. And then crush bomb, let's say, is like a big screen. attack like a smart bomb, but not really the same. And so then it just opens up a lot of new strategies. So if before you were like, oh, I'm going to have spreadsheet, because I love spreadsheet in one hand. And then in my second hand, I'm going to have homing as a backup in case I lose spreadsheet.

I'll just go to homing. You could play it like that, but you could also think, okay, well, I have my spreadsheet shot. I'm going to dedicate my second slot into useful overloads. So you could be like, well, I know I'm going to need this effect later. I'm going to use laser. I'm going to have laser in my second hand for when I need it later. I'm just going to overload it and use it there. Or not.

Or save it for a boss or you know, or you just have one hit left and you're going to die and you're going to be like, okay, well, I'm going to overload this and hopefully it makes the difference between dying and winning. So having all that risk and reward and improvisation, it was just really exciting. So that's what we went with. And people like it when they play it. So I hope everybody likes it. Yeah, and it's, um, it is not a hard release day yet. It's 2024, so the first quarter, presumably.

Yeah, early 2024. Right, right. Okay. I'll ask as well like pie in the sky because I like to do these kind of theoretical questions as well but first of all I want to ask what is your favorite contra that you didn't work on which is like your contra

because everyone seems to have a different one Contra 1 it used to be it used to be Contra 3 because it's I mean it up to the game and it showed what the Super Nintendo could do and what Konami would do on the Super Nintendo and it was really cool but with Contra 4 when I was replaying them

it's very short and I don't like the alternate stages on Contro 3 top down stages Yeah So yeah you know I meant to ask that actually I mean is there going to be any like Gameplay sort of variety in Operation Gallagor Is that another thing that you can't reveal yet

You know like the top into the screen stages from like Contra 4 And stuff like that I can get to that really quick but my favorite's the first one ultimately because it's hard to be. It's a very solid. It's a very well-go game. But here, I'll segue it. The first one had those base stages from behind the player,

which was like early 3D, really impressive. I thought they were cool, yeah. And it kind of established that one of Contr's things was having an alternate play stage. So Super C had the top down. Super Nintendo had the mode 70 stuff. Yeah. So yeah, we went with auto-scrolling on hoverbikes for ours.

We did that a little bit on Contra 4, but I thought in 3D we could do some more with it and make it more interesting, sort of show people what could be cool about an auto-scroller now that it doesn't have to be straight left and right. Yeah, that has turned up in hardcore and hardcore uprising, and it seems to become kind of a conjure staple, which is great. I mean, Contra 3 is, for me, that's the iconic one, but just because of that bit where you pass under that enormous battleship and there's like six different weapon arrays in a row that you have. to deal with. I think that's really cool. So, yeah, anything sort of close to that I'm looking forward to. I mean, even

what's that game? Blazing Chrome did that as well. The spirit of those old stages, the mode 7 and the three was really like, hey, look at this cool trick we did. Like, that's really what they were doing, right? Yeah. Especially on

hardcore on the Mega Drive. They did crazy stuff. But anyway, so we don't have like a top downer or behind the back stage, But that philosophy, we definitely have some cool tricks of, like, some little flair, like, oh, look what we did. Look at that neat thing that you haven't seen before. So the philosophy of that is still part of the game, even if, you know, the alternate stage isn't literally that. So the kind of high in the sky again, but if you were, like, if there was another sort of,

I'm wondering if there's any other sort of Konami sort of property that you'd be interested in working on if the opportunity sort of arose. I'd say that you haven't worked on before but actually to be honest if you just want to say something else again then I'd be interested in that as well

all of them well yeah I mean that's a clear answer isn't it yeah I'd love to do a Castlevania I worked with Koji Garashi on Order of Ecclesia

doing some loke and then obviously we worked with them on bloodstain doing gameplay stuff so I'd love to do like a Castlevania more Contras I'd love to do more Contras Rocket Night

you know, I revived at once. I'd love to continue that. I'd like them to get those old games back out again, but, you know, the interest isn't there. They're great games. They're quite niche. Rocket Night Anniversary Collection, everybody. Let's do it. I would love that. I would love that, yeah. But then I also, I never worked on a Gradius.

Yeah. And that's like, from when I was an indie, an indie developer, actually, we pitched a lot of random stuff, and I've worked on almost every game. Every brand we pitched except Gradius. well yeah i mean i think that operation glue is sounding like it's going to be fun i'm looking forward to it's probably my current most anticipated game um i can't think of anything else at all it's even in the league really i'm a big old-school guy obviously which is why i'm on this show and i think it's going to be great so thank you for talking to me about it i'm really grateful

and i'm hopefully i'll be able to get you on here again in a let in a more sort of of, in a less interviewee sort of role as a guest, you know. Of course, of course. Because it's been, I can reveal exclusively to the Nauties that it's been sort of thrown around for like two years and for whatever reason it just hasn't happened yet. Now it has. So the dam is officially broken. The ice is officially broken, I think.

So is there anything else sort of the way forward's working on, not necessarily your sort of, that you're working on that you want to tell us. about quickly before we wrap it up. Other stuff way forward's working on. I don't know. There's some cool stuff. I mean... I guess stuff that's been revealed already rather than like... I'm excited to play that

Shantay game. I don't get to play... You know, I'm really focused on my game, so... I don't know. I sort of sneak peeks of other games usually, so I'm really excited about that Shantay game. I see, yeah. When I saw that, I'd seen that before on the stream, they did the stream of what they had a while

back to raise money. I think, like, here's to cancel, Shantae Advance, here's the game. I actually saw it back when I was at Atlas, when I first started talking to Matt. I was on, he'd sent me the demo and I checked it out. So it's crazy that. I mean, I'll be on it on a day one. I'll be on it day one.

I can't wait. If the, if the cartridge isn't too expensive, I'll get that as well. But the stream I tuned into it, the exact moment I tuned into it was Shanty being spanked by like a mummy or something. And I was just kind of like, I was like, okay. Okay. It's just like the absolute worst possible moment to tune in. So I'm kind of curious if that's still in there. I guess we'll find out. We can't reveal that. You have to buy the game to find out.

So yeah, that'll be fun. And contra, it will be fun. And I'm looking forward to when that officially drops. And thanks again. And hopefully we'll talk soon. Yeah, thanks so much. Thank you. Hello there You've just heard from Tom and soon you're going to hear from Sam

and I'm just here, Stuart Gibb, hello, to form the sort of really sort of disappointing filling between the two beautiful granary slices that are the sandwich that is this episode. In fact, I'm not even going to keep you for long, I'm only here to sort of form a buffer between the quality content and this which is just meaningless waffle

Jesus, let me at least give you some kind of fact to make this worth it I don't know, something about video games did you know Sonic is blue because they had run out of all the other crayons at Sega that's not even true, I'm desperate, I'm flailing it I'm trying to fill at least a minute and I've got nothing

I've got nothing whatsoever You know what? It's a really good game in Bio Menace on PC You can get it on Gog I think it's free actually So going to get that

It's got nothing to do with anything that's coming up Oh, that's a minute Great Yeah listen to this interview with Sam It's really good, bye So I think the best place to start is, as is, what's the word traditional? That's the one.

It's probably just if you were to introduce yourself in a sort of polite, sort of classroom-ish way to the listeners, you know, because I've never been good at getting these things going. So that's probably the best way to do it. Hi, my name's Sam Beddows, better known as Freak Zone Games, and I made the Angry Video Game Nerd Games, a spectacular spot. and a bunch of others. And I'm from England. Yeah.

Oh, me too. Wow. Yeah. Whoa. There's always these little things that come up and that's just, wow. We like Sonic here. Weird. It's amazing.

This is just how it all started, isn't it? Yeah. So what do you work? I've got to ask, what is it you're working on at the moment at present? Well, right now my main thing is toxic crusaders, which I'm doing with retroware games. So it's, uh, technically it's not a freak zone game. It's a retroware game, which I am the lead developer and designer on. Right, right.

And it's great. Yeah, Retroware have been putting out things like Prison City, I want to say. That was a pretty cool game. Yeah, that's one by program answer, the guy he did, like, was it the Transylvania Adventure of Simon Quest? Oh, wow. And stuff like that. And he got together with Retroware, and they got creative altogether and made this awesome A-Bit thing, which is just... It's a really cool.

Yeah, I'd be meaning to do a review of it, actually. But retro, so retroverse seems to have come up reasonably recently, like, and with some stuff. Is there a, what do you know of the story is there? It's the games division of screenwave media. Oh, I see. Okay. With Cinemascar and YouTubers and things like that.

They, what is we started, they had, they published some games before. They'd done like, what was it? I think it was called Usual Words. And a few things like that that they had done on PlayStation before. But, and then they were looking into, because I did the Angry Video Game Nerd games, and because they work with Cinemassica, but the Angry Video Game Nerves games were done when that was Screw Attack.

And then when Screw Attack closed down, they got merged in with Rooster Teeth by Full Screen. The company, full screen, bought Screw Attack, and they merged them with Rooster Teeth. Rooster Teeth had no interest in these games. And so they just kind of went away, you know. And then the guys at ScreenWave, working with Cinemascar,

we're interested in, you know, basically liberating this game from this limbo. And so they picked up, they went and and got Angry Video Game Nerd Adventures and Angry Video Game Nerd 2 off of Rooster Teeth. Right. And they brought it back

and they helped me to make it better and better and brought a deluxe collection out. So it's kind of screenwave. I mean, they've made their own arcade and things like that. And basically their games division, whether it's their arcade or their actual games publishing is retroware.

Right. I see, okay. So that's interesting. I didn't know. I did wonder what the connection was, where it came from AVGN to retroware. I'm not sure if it was something that they just created or if it was a adjacent company that they merged with. I'm not sure about that one, but I know that that's basically what it is. It's the guys at Screenwave, their games division. Okay, I see. Okay, well, let me go back a lot, just kind of sort of in brief. How did you get into this whole business in the first place? Like, what's your earliest stuff, and how did you get into that?

Oh, man. Well, it goes way back because actually into the art of making games, it was way back to the Acorn Electron. Good, good, good. Yeah, I had the, actually, I'm a bit young for the Acorn Electron, but we were, we were dirt poor growing up. And so my dad had, would get hand-me-downs of computers and games from his, from his mates that, you know, their kids would have an acorn and electron and stuff. and his mates would be like, hey, you can have this because I got my new, I don't know, Atari ST. Right, right. Give them hand-me-downs and give me the ACON Electron.

A lot of my mates had Nintendo's and stuff. Believe it or not, the NES was really popular in my neighborhood despite it not being popular in the entire country. It seems to be very regional, yeah. It's very regional, the NES. Now, ACON Electron, that's BBC Micro, except not school, basically, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah, I think the NES was, yeah, you say regional popularity. And I think it's because, when Nintendo kind of stepped in and said, Oi, Mattel, stop messing it up. And they were, you know, they were about to launch the Super Nintendo.

And I think they just sold them all off real cheap, you know, and all the stores sold all the stock off. And I think that that's when all as poor kids started getting Nintendo's. You know, so the NES was weirdly, you know, it's like, oh, it sold like crap here in the UK, but actually as poor kids, that was our console. And also the Ninja Turtles game gave it a really. real boost around that time. Yeah, I've never seen

a, like, a pre, a face, and there's bundle for sale that doesn't have that in it, like in my life, like I can think of. Even I own that. I didn't even own an house. Yeah, exactly. It's pretty wild. And it was that, and so a lot of my friends had those, but, you know, we couldn't afford that, and

we had the Acon Electron handed down. And along with it, some tapes with the games on, but more importantly, some of the books with how to program it and a bunch of game examples, there was one called me and my micro and like you say it was basically the BBC micro was the uh you know the big uh home computer from the BBC and ACON was the well how do you say the budget version

yeah it was a lower cost alternative yeah that's what Wikipedia says yeah we had the book me and my micro and you'd go into that and it would be like here's how to make games and it would have some games that you could make by typing it in but like the type in list like listings like in all sort of CVG magazine kind of sort of yeah exactly it was in basic it was in basic code and you would just type the code up and you could save it onto a cassette tape. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. You'd have you'd get magazines, which instead of having the demo disc, you know, they'd have at the back, there's several pages where you just type up the basic code and then you can save it to a tape. And I happened to find one of those, it was not

magazine, it was like a like a softback book with a bunch of them in in my school library and took that home and programmed those in. What I would do is I would then, because I'd read me in my micro and I had a rough idea of how you actually write basic. I would then change the games to be to my liking, you know? Yeah, yeah. I tried to, eventually I had

the NES eventually and I tried to like, I attempted, wanted to do a sort of remake of Mario or close to it on the ACON. That never even got close to happening, but you know, I tried. Yeah, yeah. I think with Mario, many, many have tried.

Yeah. And then quite, although we did get stuff quite the great piano sisters. So I guess there was that. And so, sort of, there was some sort of iPhones of iOS games that you put out, Awesome Land, Jump and Shoot Adventures. Oh, that was a bit later, I believe. And Manos the Hands of Fate. So I've got to ask about Manas, because, I mean, is that the official game, the official game of Manor's the Hands of Fate? Yeah, as official as it can get, because... It's 33,000 classic, incidentally, if you're not familiar. Yeah, yeah, I love MST3K, and I just used to love just bad movies in general. I used to

pick up, you go to the pound shop and pick up those Godfreyho ninja flicks, you know. Yeah. And watch all those with my mate. And we would try and MST 3K along to it, you know, pretend that we were funny, you know. Yeah, that's my entire career. Yeah. The number of things, you go to like bad movie nights and stuff and there's just so many people like, oh, I could, I could be MST3K. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, yeah. But we'd do that. And, you know, knowing that we weren't good at it because it was for us, it wasn't, we weren't trying to do it for the internet, you know. know, we weren't the irate gamer or whatever, the irate science theater 3,000. You know, we weren't doing that. It was more just entertaining ourselves. But we really loved Manos and everything about it in not just in a this is terrible way,

but in a this is really endearing sort of way. Yeah. And we used to joke about, like, because I was making games at the time, I'd started making, you know, just mostly mobile games. I wanted to go onto a console, but at that time it wasn't really attainable first. small indies. You know, this was before Super Meat Boy and Braid kind of changed the environment.

Yeah. But like, yeah, we were joked about it. What would have happened if I made a game of it? And we're like, oh, would it be a point and click adventure or would it be this and this?

And the one day I sort of found out that it had a very similar effect to Night of the Living Dead. And you see there's often Night of the Living Dead games that come out by tiny developers or Night of the Living Dead remakes, which are done on, which looked like they've done on somebody's Sony camcord. You know, and it's because around in the 60s, at least pre-60s, something like that, if you have, you have your script, which you can copyright and you have your movie, which you can copyright by putting a copyright notice on it. But what happens in the case of Night of the Living Dead is he, you copyrighted the script that was called Night of the Flesh Eaters, I think it was.

Oh, I see. And then brought out a movie based on it, and the movie was called Night of the Living Dead. but no copyright notice on the movie. Right. Which means that nowadays, the law would be that it's copyrighted because of the script. Yeah. And it's copyrighted by default nowadays anyway, right, to whoever created it. But it basically meant that the movie immediately went into the public domain because there is no copyright on Night of the Living Dead.

Yeah. There is one on Night of the Flesh Eaters. Right. And Manos had a similar fate, funnily enough, I say fate, but it was called, I think it was called Fingers of Fate when it was a script and Tom Neiman

who plays the master in the movie came up with the name Manos, the hands of fate. And they put the name on the movie and forgot the little couple of out notices.

I'm not here to say oh, I'm taking advantage of that because this wasn't about oh, I'll make loads of money off of this. This would be a really

funny thing to do and we could do it. Yeah, yeah. You know? I mean, it's not, you're taking the millions off the table

for the Manas, the hands of fate, writers and directors. No, it's made with affectionate, isn't it? It's an affectionate type of thing. I mean, there are sequels and prequels that movies that people have made, and Jackie Ray Naiman, who played The Little Girl Debbie in the movie, is involved in all these.

There's a video of her playing the original release of the game as well. Oh, wow. Yeah, and people that were involved in the movie often got in touch. So it's as official as it can even be. It's a sort of a thing that, like, it's sort of an actual conclusion of those old licensed games that really weren't anything like the movie in terms of what actually happens to them

or what you partake in them. So I did enjoy that on that level. Well, that's what I came up with in the end because we were saying, what would we do? Would it be point and click? Would it be what? And what came to my mind was those angry video game

nerd episodes with Back to the Future and Roger Rabbit and Star Wars and all that stuff and it's like, this is how, you know, the likes of LGA and used to adapt games into movies. And I'm, Platformers is my thing. You know, that's what I do. Yeah. And I was like,

could adapt this the way that LJN would have in the 80s imagine a reality in which Manus was a successful movie and a game company like LJN paid for the rights or whatever and made it. Imagine a world

in which that happened. This is the game I'm making. You know? And we had a lot of fun with that. So speaking of AVGN, that was the next thing, sort of the main, next thing, presumably, after Manos. So obviously, how did that, like, come about? Did you pitch it or did someone get in touch? Sure. Yeah. So I've been pitching a game, but I've been attempting to pitch an angry video game nerd game for quite a long time. But when you're James Rolf and Mike Matei, and it's 2000 and what, 2005 or whatever it is, you're probably getting emails constantly with people

being like, I want to make money off of your character, you know? So I would send emails about with pitches for a game and I think they were mostly ignored because it's like this is, you know, we get a lot of this. And what I did eventually, because I kept thinking, I was like, I could make a game of this guy. And when I was, specifically when I was making Mous, I watched a lot of AVGN for reference, for,

you know, to look at these LJN games and stuff. And so, it was heavily AVGN inspired. And so I was like, well, the next step, I should, you know, I could use this game and basically an expansion of this, but with the actual AVGN character and parodying all those games that

he reviews and stuff. And I was like, where do I go with this? And I tried sort of fruitlessly to get in touch a few times. And I was like, well, I like Screw Attack a lot. Screw Attack worked with them. But I didn't pitch it to Screw Attack at first. At first, I was, what it was was Manos was on mobile, purely because it was the easiest place to publish. And then Steam Greenlight hadn't come out yet.

So you'd have to have a publisher to get your PC game on Steam. And I was like, I want to put Manos on PC. Can't get on Steam right now. What do I do? And so I went to, at the time, there was a thing called Indivania, which is similar to what, did itch.io now. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, I put it on Indyvania.

And I was like, where do I advertise this so that people know? Yeah. Because I was able to advertise the mobile one easily. I think I spoke to, I sent stuff to all the sites like Otaku, et cetera. And they thought, this is fascinating that this exists and they all reported on it. But there were a lot of comments like, oh, I won't play this because it's a mobile game. I need buttons, you know, even actions, even. Even Stuart Ashen

I said, I want to play this but I can't play touch screen games. Well, I need to get this on PC one form or another, but now I need people to be able to know that it's on PC because I don't have that kind of reach. And what came to mind was, I love Screw Attack and they love retro games

and they're the kind of people that would enjoy these movies too. You know, it's like, it's that sort of community. There's a lot of crossover there. And on there, I went looking on their website for, how do you advertise with them? And I contacted them to ask about, buying some advertising and Craig got in touch with me and he said you don't have to pay us

for advertising we'll do a review so they did a review of Manos yeah they didn't you know didn't charge me for advertising or anything they did a video review of Manos it was really cool and I really liked it yeah it was really good of them it wasn't the highest score in the world but that's that yeah who cares right well I mean not who cares but that's not the point that was very valuable to me yeah and I think I prefer that I prefer them to put out a review with criticisms then for me to have paid them for advertising, really, and that's how we get noticed.

Yeah. And that drove some sales, but it was Craig who he said to me, if you ever want to work on anything, because I really like this, and I really like how you got the NES feel, you know, the authenticity. You did it all,

did you do all of it yourself, the visuals, the sound, the everything was. Yeah, I had a mate. And my mate Candice pitched in with ideas. Right, right. And testing and all that. But it was, yeah, it was just me making the game and her testing and giving feedback.

That was it. That's just broadly speaking, because nothing's ever really a one-man sort of show in my experience. But so that led to AVGN adventures through Craig. Yeah, because he basically said, if you ever want to work on something with us? And I was like, well, there's something I've been trying to pitch to Sin a Massacre. And he said, oh, really, yeah, we do their merchandising. So why don't you pitch it to me? Interesting.

And I did, and we spoke, and we worked together, and, you know, went from there. That was, when was that? That was 2000. Oh, gosh, 2012, I think, maybe 2011. Good Lord. Okay, yeah, that sounds about right. And the original Angry Video game with Nerd Adventures, that was Steam and 3DS and Wii U, I would say. Yeah, 3DS and Wii, that's right, yeah.

Yeah, and that's a, just for everyone here hasn't played it, in which I shame on you. that's a platformer that encompasses lots of references and jokes from the AVGN series but does so with what I see what I would say is a remarkable competency and that sounds backhanded but what I mean is when you get games like this that are licensed or tie-ins as the series attests they're usually not good

yeah oh he said the thing oh yeah yeah they're usually just, yeah, exactly, but this one actually does feel good, I mean, I've been back, and I've personally beaten this game probably like four times, and then the sequel twice, and now the deluxe version I've done, I'm on my second go through that, and

I'm, like, I'll just tell you straight up, I really like these games a lot, especially the deluxe version that came out later, but we'll get to that. But before then, I've got to ask, like, I know James made a video with this game in it, but was there any other sort of connection there or like did you pitch anything or was it just kind of a case of like go

ahead get on with it sort of thing yeah so at the time of the first avgien game and it was mostly me designing with with a bunch of input from the guys at screw attack and some from james and mike but james was uh out filming the movie oh yeah he was real really really really busy and there was a lot of, you know, like people say that, you know, there's a lot of delegates in screenwave nowadays in a lot of his work, but it has been for a long time before that as well. You know, there's, even before

the movie, you know, Mike Matey wrote a lot of AVGN. Yeah. You know, like, listen, James is a passionate guy and he loves games, he loves movies, and loves to talk about things he loves, but it's always, there's always been collaboration there. So, yeah, you can't put, babe is not new. Yeah,

yeah, I don't think he could put out that much stuff with that level of quality, if it wasn't heavily sort of pulled together. That's not a criticism obviously. His love for games and movies and his passion and his sort of, I would say,

he's very sort of charming and funny and stuff. But he does do that with help. And I think that's what brings people in. Like his sort of, his attitude and his personality bring people in. But I think, yeah, he gets help and always has and always will.

With the game, obviously, a lot of it was James and Mike checking everything and making sure they liked it and, you know, making changes if they really wanted to. But a lot of it was my design, complemented with some of the guys at Screw Attacks Input. Like, you know, I'll give you a story. We were working on the hell stage, which, how, how, what sort of language level?

You know what I mean? What kind of profanity? Are you asking if we can say, on the show? Yeah, can we say on your show? Well, we have. I mean, Jeremy said it was. How many times can we say, on your show?

God, I don't know. There's three. Probably five. Okay. So we've wasted three of them. Oh, no. And they might be bleeped by the editor. Oh, well, well, I guess if they're going to be bleeping them,

we can say it as much as we want. Well, that's four now. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so I think that answers my question. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the stage, the fact consumed, which was the hell. level based on

it gets so childish it makes me laugh based on doom mostly based on doom but other sort of hellish games and stuff we were working on that and as you go down that stage there was a bit of the idea is that at that stage is you descend you go down and down and down and down

further into this hell world and then you reach the bottom where there's lava and the idea is you start ascending so it's like you're maybe escaping but then this devil creature comes down and you know fucks your shit up stops you from getting out and then you have to fight it. But the dissent, you would get to the bottom,

and that was just a Mario World-style lava raft ride. So in Mario World, you'd often get on a raft in lava, and you go along and you have to jump over stuff, but also keep up with the raft. And then, like, Chad was like, I'd find that the lava raft ride, like, it's okay. It's a bit dull. And this was Chad at Screw Attack.

And he said, we had these fire sharks, sharks that lived in the lava that were on fire. It was a reference to a fire shark, idea in one of the in the pitfall episode of abe gin and chad said what if you tame one of the fire sharks and then ride it across the lava and this was it was actually we were nearing the end of development and he came up with this idea we don't have much time and it's like well yeah of course i'm going to do that and so i stayed up until 3 a.m that night making that work well yeah because i was like we don't we don't have time to do it but i'm making time to do that you know well it's one of the most

memorable parts of the game, I think. Yeah, exactly. And there was a lot of stuff like that. This is why I don't like to say I was entirely the design. Because it was like I submitted a game design document. I came up with the ideas for the levels, the names for the levels. I wrote most of the dialogue, etc. But, you know, it's moments like that. Like, I can't take credit for that idea and don't want to take credit for that idea. That was Chad James. Yeah. You know, and there was a lot of stuff like that. And it made for a really memorable game, you know. I think it was me that added the fact that the shark could fire laser beams we just

wanted to build that up as much as we could he had a few more ideas that didn't make any like he said couldn't there be a point where the sharks starts burping up

baby sharks and stuff and I was like we gotta we gotta rain it in somewhere yeah yeah it's only not not really that rained in in general

but I agree that at some point yes and you know there's a lot of things sort of tucked away like the sort of cameos which and the

the shit pickle and such. So that was all enjoyable. Another reason to sort of go back and replace. When I first beat the game, I didn't even know there were other characters. If I recall correctly, I don't. Yeah, you can get through that whole thing without even unlocking. Yeah, I completely missed them. And I was like, well, I really wish I'd had Mike on the way through

because that gives you access to so many more things. Yeah, he's the scout. He's the speedrunners. Yeah, it was him. I want to say Justin, the skeleton? Kyle, yeah. Kyle, excuse me. You know what, you know, we don't say Kyle Justin, we say it's the guitar guy.

The guitar guy, okay. And then bullshit man is the final one. Yeah. Yeah. It was James, not James, sorry, is the angry video game nerd, Mike. Yeah. I just thought it was Motherfucker Mike, because that's the name that he was using when he would show up and do videos in place of James while he was busy. But apparently, Motherfucking Mike is not an angry video game nerd character, but there is a Mike who is Mike Matey.

so it's not confusing at all yeah yeah well that's what because i had him in as motherfucker mike and mike we say no no no that's not an a vgen character please just put it as mike and in fact when they did the avgien episode on the avgeng games he made a thing of going who the fuck is mike so you have uh the nerd mike the bullshit man and uh guitar guy So following that, what was next after AVGM, what did you move on to after that? So immediately after we finished AVGN, we talked about doing AVGN 2. Oh, right. Yeah, so that was already on the dog. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, because they were making the movie, it was like there was a lot of, of are we making a second game, or are we making the game of the movie? And I pitched a game called Angry Video Game Nerd, the game of the movie of the show about the games. But it was because, of course, there's the movie studio, and there's all kinds of stuff like that you've got to go through. And we were like, well, maybe we'll do a level that references the movie or something like that.

So we started talking about that, but that got, there was a lot of stuff, there was a lot of waiting to know what James was up to and what we could and couldn't do. So in the meantime, I made Jump and Shoot Attack on Mobile. Yes, I played that as well. It was a long time since I played it, so I don't remember that. It's very short and simple, and I think I would have done it very differently if I was making it nowadays, but I had this idea.

It was inspired heavily by a game called, what was it called, Kid Trip. I remember Kid Trip with the coins and it. Yeah, I remember that one, yeah. Yeah, the developer come up with this really cool idea of, like, It's not one of these runner games where, you know, it's not an endless runner, but it's like a full platform game, but it has the controls of the auto run and the jump. Yeah. And it's like, actually, yeah, this is kind of like if you're playing Mario with the D-pad taped down.

Yeah, yeah. And it's obviously there are parts where you need to run left in Mario, but you can design your levels around never moving left and never stopping. And you can actually design intricate platform levels around that. And that's what Kid Trip showed. And it's SQL miles and kilo. Sorry, go ahead. No, sorry, I was just to say, I guess the natural conclusion of that was Super Mario run, but yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Eventually, Nintendo actually made it. Yeah, I really like Kid Trip, and I just remember thinking, I wish there were more games like this on mobile, because mobile games either lean towards these super casual runners for that sort of thing, or they just make a platform game with virtual buttons, you know, which is just better off played anywhere else. And I like the idea, and I thought I could go somewhere with this. It wasn't so much I wanted to copy Kid Trip as it was, I was like, I wish this was a genre and not just a game. I want to contribute to this genre. I actually got in touch with the developer of Kid Trip to make sure that he was cool with it and he was.

I guess it is a genre now with Super Meat Boy Forever and such. Yeah, yeah. And what's the other one? I really like, Spicy Piggy. That's by Tom McCluskey. I'm not familiar with that one. I'll check that one out. Yeah, it's by Thomas McCluskey who worked on, he's a pixel artist.

He's actually done some work on Toxic Crusaders with me. Oh, nice. And he's done, he does a lot of itch. He does things like the Resident Evil 4, 8-bit remake on Itch.io and stuff. But he made spicy piggy with, oh, I forget the name of the publisher. Sorry, but it's very, very good. It's very challenging. I think the one I enjoyed, and it's sort of different, was a Bean Quest,

which is just automated jumping. That was a lot of fun. Control the left. and right movement and he's just constantly jumping. Yeah, that was a really cool idea as well. Yeah, yeah. I'm not a mobile games guy, especially now that it's all this, it's all just either microtransactions or just obnoxious advertising.

But I felt, at least at the time, I felt that they had potential to kind of replace a game voice, you know, because we were, I know that they don't have buttons, but if your game is designed around not having buttons, it can work. And I felt that like, you know, we see, like the Game Boy. Like, I always say, yeah, mobile games are much more simplistic than console games. But when we went out and took the Game Boy, Super Mario Land was far more simplistic than Super Mario World. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

If the games were designed around the fact that they weren't buttons, I felt like there could have been fulfilling proper video games on mobile that aren't these garbage, you know, whatever is to get now. Yeah, and. I mean, yes, I mean, to be honest with you, I'm no one of the talks, I probably put about, 10,000 pounds into tap titans, so I should be shot. But, yeah.

So following Jump and Shoot Attack, that was when you went into assimilation. Yeah, because, well, unfortunately, Jump and Shoot Attack was, it absolutely bombed. That sucks. Just a, yeah, it's charging money from a mobile game up front. I played it at the time because I was just looking for Freaks Zone. And I was like, oh, I didn't know this existed. I'll buy this. Can you still play it, or is it being out?

Yeah, it's still available. Yeah, it's free now. No ads or purchases, it's just three. The older game, Awesome Land, you can't play anymore, unfortunately, but it got truncated because of the, when Apple dropped 32-bit support, and I've not prioritized bringing it back because I've got a lot to do on these other games. And it's not my favorite game I ever made. It was pretty quick. It was a sort of a Mario tribute, very straightforward, made in maybe a month. It was just to get started, you know.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But, you know, a jump and shoot absolutely tanked. And as I say, it's, again, charging money up front for a mobile game and trying to market it to the people that don't play mobile games. I should have known at the time that that wasn't a good idea, to be honest. Right, right. But it's free because the guys are retroware. You know, one day we might do a super jump and shoot,

possibly on consoles, possibly enhanced mobile one or whatever. But so it's, you know, it's with them. to hopefully do something with one day. So we just left the original. It's completely free. No ads, no micro-transactions. We make nothing off of it. You just play it.

But it's very short and very simple game. I think I'd have done it differently if I'd have done it today. Yeah, it must be a sort of compulsion to do that, to go back and to make sort of changes or to redo it. But staying with AVGN to ASS simulation, that's good name. I love that. It's just beautifully pure old, just like ASS. Yeah, I think that was Chad as well.

The nonsensical name as well, isn't it? I don't think there's any assimilation going on in the game. But each level, as you've alluded to... We're trying to work it into the plot after the fact. Right. So as you've alluded to, the levels in that game are sort of based on the different James Rolf series. Is that fair to say? There's a bored James World.

There's a Monster Madness World. Yeah, they said that they were saying that because they wanted to do a game of the movie, but it was looking complicated. They were like, right, we want to do a world or at least a level that plays tribute to the movie. So I said, why don't we kind of encapsulate, although it's an AVGN game, we kind of can do like a just cinema massacre as a whole.

We pay tribute in a sort of roundabout way, right? There's not like a, there's not like a you know what's bullshit level. There's, or whatever, but there are levels. Well, you go in a sewer. There's lots of shit there. Yeah. Well, that is the, that is the mainly the AVGN, the celebration of AVGN because of that Ninja Turtles episode

that we didn't cover in the original game. And then you have the Monster Madness, which is obviously Monster Madness, the show is just James talking about horror movies he loves and old horror movies a lot of the time. And so the world is the AABGN in like retro horror, black and white and a bunch of old horror tropes as well as horror game tropes. Then you've got the board games level, which with, you know, to reference board James, his other series. There is. It's so lucky that his name is James. Otherwise, that wouldn't work. Yeah.

And the other one is Area 52, which was paying tribute to the AV-Gen movie. And we also had, we just had a Japan stage. Was that based on the Godzilla Thorne? Or was it just a Japanese? Finally, in retrospect, it is. Because at the time, again, I think it was the guys at Screw Attack, or at least it was Chad again. It was like, we really want a sort of Japan level. And I did.

So I was like, right, general, not just Japan, general sort of Asian culture. least the Western misunderstanding of Asian culture level is what I went for. Yeah. And funnily enough, for the deluxe version, and rightly so, to be fair, for the deluxe version, they were like, we want to make some changes to this because of a couple of things. And one is that what the hell's it got to do with AVGN? And two, you know, the conflation of, say, Japanese and Chinese culture and stuff, I mean, it's not a very nice thing to do.

Right. And yeah, I don't think we did it particularly badly, but in retrospect, it's something that's like, you know, AVGN is never been, ever been about like cultural humor, right? Or racial in any way whatsoever. And we always try to go. Sorry, I mean, really, I think what it is is, intent and tone and time

like always changing I mean there were things that were acceptable literally two years ago that are now considered unacceptable and that's not a whinge like it's like oh cancel culture it's not like that it's just decency it's just like oh actually with hindsight this should be yeah well often especially now we got the internet somebody

who has been hurt by things for a long time will come out and just make it clear and others will back them up and we'll go oh shit you're right let's not black up for little britain yeah absolutely yeah yeah um i mean i watched i watched trading places i loved trading places and the whole third act i was just like oh christ well one of my theories is spaced and oh yes yes oh it's mostly stood that sounds up really well it's just every now and then just a slur will come out i think it's it's for me it's that episode with david williams is just like with volva yeah and he just yeah there's a particular point

I mean, you know, most of it, I'm like, that's pretty fair. There's a particular point where, you know, Diamond Pegg says a certain word that we don't say now. But you look at it and it's like, yeah, well, if they made space today, they wouldn't say it. And that's cool, right? We don't, we don't like dig our heels in and decide to become, now I'm a double racist. That's not to say that the original version is like appalling, like, of assimilation. I mean, it's just, it's a thing that was noted.

I don't. I don't think it was even noted by any players. I don't think it was even noted by it. It was us internally. We just kind of went, well, in fact, the guys at screenwave and we were just like, you know what, maybe we don't do it that way, and maybe we make it more relevant to AVGN.

And I think the end result of the deluxe version is way better because now it's the Godzilla world. Because, you know, that was a little bit of a Mandela effect thing for me, because having played both versions, when I did DX, I found myself thinking, I don't remember these kaiju battles in the background before. I'm sure that these are, and the vow and hour this confirms that they were.

So that's nice. Yes, I think it was Ryan at Screenwaves' idea, possibly. It might have been Mike Matei, but they were just like, we need to make this world more relevant to AVGN, and we also need to maybe step away from the whole joke of conflating Chinese and Japanese culture. Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, good call. So we did. And the level layouts were mostly the same, except the first act, we altered it so that it's open so that you can see the kaiju fight better, you and it sort of slowly reveals them. So there's a summit going on in the background. And as the level opens out and you can see more of that.

And it just was, I feel like the, I mean, I like the original level a lot, but, you know, I think that the deluxe version is infinitely better, not just for the cultural reasons, you know. With APGM 2 as well, you added the collectable power-ups that give you new abilities, and I enjoyed finding those because I found that, now I'm trying to think of a good way of expressing this, they were hidden by someone who has played enough retro games to know where to hide things. Like, which, because it's like the kind of thing where I'd be like, I'm going to, for no reason, try and climb over this wall because that's where I would hide something. Yeah, it's like, if you're curious, you're going to go here. And so here's your reward for your curiosity.

Yeah, that's one of the things I like about the games. I like games that do that. So it's like in new Super Mario Brothers, when you go into a random sort of pointless cubbyhole and then you get two coins. I'm just like, yes. That was the, the Miyamoto thing, isn't it? It's like, you even go to the very, very first Super Mario Bros. And it's like, oh, what if people break out of, of the roof of the stage and climb along the scoreboard. A lot of developers will go, better make sure they don't do that. And Miyamoto goes, oh, if they do that, they get this reward. Yeah. You know, it's, yeah, and AVGN2 as well. Was that, was that Unity?

Were they both Unity or was it? AviGN1 was actually Fusion. Right, yes, of course it was. But then that was remade in Unity. Yeah, for Deluxe, I completely rebuilt it in Unity. Yeah, you can tell because it's got all of the effects from two and the I want to say

chromatic sort of aberration that's right yeah all that sort of stuff is in there and of course the original talking about the deluxe versions for a bit the original games

had sort of some things changed around like some of the cameos aren't there anymore is that right because it's probably of rights reasons I don't know

it's not not even not even necessarily that it's well for one thing when we did deluxe well Mike and James and Sinamassica have more have more time to be involved

right because like the original game a lot of it was kind of me as a big fan and the guys at Screw Attack sort of doing trying to do right by James and Mike and then getting their approval you know send it to them and then when they've got the time they're like yeah this is okay

whereas it was the two things right when we decided we were going to do deluxe one was I said instead of finding getting Matthias at MP2 games who's like the only one of the only people who does ports of fusion games instead of like getting him

out of his busy schedule and doing whatever, I want to actually use AVGN2's code to rebuild AVGN1. And while we do that, let's make the improvements that I always wanted to make to it. And Brian and the guys at Screenwave loved the idea.

And they said, well, what are some things you would improve? And they made suggestions of improvements such as the Japan level, but also I said, I said things I would like to improve. And I also said, we should go to James and Mike and see what they would improve. as well, because then retroactively, then the AVGN has more involvement in his first game then, you know? And so there were a lot of things like, well, for one thing, Mike hates the unicorn boss in the original game.

He was like, what the hell is that got to do with it? And he hates, like, vocally hates it. You can see him on stream, say, what the fuck has this got to do with AVGN? At the time, it was, this is the happy go lucky platform. former's level, you know, this is the kids, this is Super Mario, etc. And I just put in there a I was like, what's a funny thing

that you would find at the end of a level of that? A super happy unicorn, you know? And while I don't think that everything that exists in the game should be from an AVGN episode, I think, I get where he was coming from, that that didn't really line up in any way. It was just out of nowhere.

So... Yeah, you replaced it with, what was it again? The Berenstain Bears. I thought that was it. I was trying to remember if they were in the second game or the first one, yeah. And I got to give some credit. So that ties him with the episode as well, because it's like, I remember this being something different.

That's good. Yeah, right. Well, that was, that was a brilliant moment. I've got to give some credit here because, uh, well, Mike, uh, in Sicily was like, no unicorn. It has to go. And I was like, well, I kept thinking, what about the people that remember the unicorn? If they liked it or whatever, it's quite memorable.

And I was like, well, what do we replace it with then? Because I made a, uh, uh, sort of a vow to myself because we knew there was going to be stuff that had to be cut for this to get really. things that were either mandated from cinema massacre, from screenwave, from Nintendo even. There were things that would have to be removed. And that's why I made a vow that any single thing that has to be removed, I will try and think of something better to replace it, right? No blank spaces, no, oh, there used to be a thing here.

Instead, something is here that's better than what was here before. So every time they're like, we'd take this out, I'm going to take some time and think of something way better to replace it and way more relevant to AVGN, et cetera. And I feel like we did for most of it. Can I interject real briefly? You mentioned things that would need to be cut from Nintendo. I'm kind of curious about that. What sort of stuff do you mean? Did that come up with the Wii U release and the 3DS release?

There's a couple little things where they were like, oh, we're not sure about this graphic. It looks too much like something from Mario or whatever. Oh, I see similarities mostly. Okay. It was more sort of cut to just to release the game on Nintendo in that year. It wasn't stuff that Nintendo would reject. as such it was more just if we want this on the market you should probably you know not have certain things like

just like cameos of random people that aren't to do with the game and things like that and we'd had like with the cameos that's an example yeah well that you're replaced them with future James right with future AVGN yeah so we originally had a bunch of cameos from other YouTubers which not only was just wasn't a lot of it wasn't really relevant anymore because these were often people that worked

with screw attack and the game wasn't a screw attack game anymore. I was also like how many of them are not involved in scandals? So never mind let's not talk about that. Exactly that right? Because there was stuff with John Tran, stuff that he had said and

he was almost a cameo in the second game. I spoke to him personally and there are stuff and it's like you don't know who's next right and so both the guys at Cinemascar and the guy at Retroa. And I completely agreed with them. They're like, we don't want anybody in this game

that isn't part of angry video game nerd or cinematic. It makes sense to me. I mean, I can think, not that I'm going to get into it, but I can think of at least two from the original who are now in some hot water. You never know, do you? And it's like you're tying yourself to people. It's a loose canon. You're tying yourself to people and you don't know what they're

going to do. And that's not that I don't trust or like these people. It was an honor to have some of these people in the game and related to it in some way. But you just never know. And at the very least... There's controversy even within AVGN sort of camp as well.

Right, exactly. At the least, we can limit it to that. Yeah, yeah. If anything happened with the guys at Sinna Massacre, at least we know that we had some kind of control. We were directly involved. You know what I mean. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

So we kept it close to home. And I think that was the right thing to do. But in that situation, I was like, there are people that are going to be really sad about this. And some of the cameos themselves were sad about it, you know. And so I was like, I need to think of something better. And I had the idea after playing, what was it? It was Luigi's Mansion on 3DS.

They re-released Luigi's Mansion on 3DS. And there's bits where there are features from Luigi's Mansion 2, but it has, you got sending them back in time from Luigi's Mansion 2, if I remember right. And I was like, well, how about we have the nerd from the future, come back and warn you that there's also going to be a sequel, et cetera, give you advice, but also on top of that,

he gives you power-ups, which didn't exist in AVGN1. He's brought them back in time for you. That was the thing that I thought up to, I do think that's better than the cameos. Some people might not agree, but I think that. No, I thought so, because I really enjoyed the interactions between nerd and future nerd as well. They'd be abusive, like, just, oh, it was very funny. So I have to give credit here because Mike said, no unicorn, absolutely no,

unicorn and I was like well what can I do in that place that's like that's that much better in the same way that future nerd was better than the cameos and I don't know it needs to be more relevant to AVGN and I was just I was racking my brains about it because all they basically said was no unicorn you know and I told my wife my wife Tracy I was telling her about it and she's not even big on AVGN or anything like but she's watched episodes with me because you know they're on the telly. And she said, what about the Berenstain Bears? Why the Berenstain Bears? Because the bears, she goes, no, because

the whole thing about them is that reality has changed and is different from how you remember it. And people are going to be playing this game, and it'll be different to how they remember it. Well, there must have been such a light bulb. Oh, my God, yeah. She still has no idea how great that idea was.

She does not understand. I'll keep trying to explain to her. I'm like, that's brilliant. You know? It's too good. It's too good. Yeah. And so I put in the unicorn head in the background as well there's like a unicorn head on a stick so it's just as like a callback but I

was just like everything about that the idea of using the Bear and Stain Bears made me feel better about losing the unicornage it doesn't feel like the game has been censored or I didn't want it to feel like the game had been compromised in any way and so I was just like I just took up

on myself to and you know everybody else involved as well get their input as well on just every single thing we had to remove. I was like, we need to subsidize it with something better objectively. Future node alludes to it, I think, as well. He says something like this is

something's changed or something like that. Yes, he does. Yeah. But, so moving on from AVGN2 a bit. Let's talk about spectacular sparky, because we haven't talked about that much yet. That seems like it's your kind of baby. Is that fair to say? Like, really? Yeah.

Yeah, that's a passion project. Yeah. So how did that come about? How do that come about? Gosh, it's, so there are a lot of ideas in spectacular Sparky that started off when I was making games in the Games factory at age 12. You know, there were characters like... It so comes off that way. Like, you can just feel it when you play. There's so much that's just like this feels like you've had hanging around that you've desperately wanted to put in games. I mean, a lot of it was stuff that was for other games that I had designed and never made. You know, there's a lot of it was, you know, stuff that was concepts that came in from other things. So there was a bunch of games that I never made. made, there was, there was going to be a game called Shig that, along with John Locke, the writer, designed back in school. And we never made it, but, you know, the character, Shig is now a major character in Sparky, you know, and there are certain stages and areas and characters, which were originally, so ones I had for something or other, or callbacks to stuff that I drew as a kid, even. But with Sparky, it was, so it started out as, this was when I was still making mobile games. I had AVGN and stuff, but on the side, it was mostly mobile games because

they're easy to publish, or they were at the time. And I had a mobile game, which was kind of a space shooter, but with a cute rabbit character who would use his ears to flap. The idea was it's kind of almost, I don't want to say flappy bird, but I do love the whole keepy-uppy-upy way flappy bird works. It's more like, almost like a balloon fight or joust type of thing, you know, with that's more retronauts right there yeah exactly it's that infinite something about that infinite double jump just feels really really great super maria with the p wing there you go yeah yeah exactly but you know very much i think joust and balloon fight uh too that i go to a lot because when it was a mobile game i actually even had similar uh physics to joust where it was that real

slow acceleration and deceleration and stuff um and it was the idea was it was mobile and it was it was like Flappy Bird and Jouse but with a gun you know and we were working with that and it was just getting better and better we were enjoying it but what we had was I was like oh it's going to come out on mobile

and then onto consoles with a publisher or we find one and what was happening was that the control scheme for mobile and the control scheme for console were really at odds with each other like I had something that was really fun on mobile so you would actually tilt

in the style of funnily enough you mentioned Beans Quest. I had the idea of Beans Quest where you just move left and right, but I was using tilting, kind of like in a doodle jump to move left and right and a tap on the left of the screen to jump

and a tap anywhere else to shoot exactly where you tapped, inspired by a old Nes game Gumshoe. You have a Gumshoe? I know of Gumshoe. I didn't actually play Gumshoe. Yeah, it was the inspiration of Gumshoe where in that you would shoot the character,

Stevenson, to make him jump with the light gun. It was a Zappa, a Zeper game, wasn't it? Yeah, you would fire at him to make him jump with the light gun, and you'd fire at enemies or whatever to shoot them. And the idea was, instead of tapping Sparky to make him jump, because you would obscure the screen too much, you'd tapped a little button in the corner to make him jump,

but tapping anywhere else would shoot exactly where you tapped. So it was Gumshoe-inspired. And it was fun on mobile, but then adapting that to console controls, there was nothing that felt good. It was always a compromise. And ultimately, I think most of the people that want to play this kind of game are going to want to play it on PC or console.

And so we just looked. it and we were even started recording voiceover for it. You know, we were going into studios and recording voiceover and things because I got my mate Carl involved to designing some characters and doing voiceover. And like you say, this whole... There's a lot of voice

in this game. There's quite a lot of story going on. Well, the whole passion project thing you mentioned Carl was my friend in school. And back when I was making games in the games factory, Carl used to do sketches of all these character ideas. He had. Right, right. And I was like, hey, Carl, do you want to meet up and do this? But for real,

you know and so it was all this this passion project thing but we just i was like let's upgrade this to a console platformer this make this my next platform game and for a long time i wanted to make a game in the style of gunstar heroes or alien soldier i was going to say a big time alien soldier vibes with the busboys yeah so i just merged those two ideas i had the you know the core ideas for an agent alien soldier slash guns it's basically gunstar slash alien soldier but made a little more accessible a little less daunting and also a little goofier yeah uh and I had that idea, and I was like, well, there's no characters or worlds for this idea, and there's no control scheme for Sparky.

And I said, let's put those two together. It'll work. And his infinite double jump, I think, worked really nicely with, it's like, you know, Gunstar with Kirby jumps, you know? Yeah, yeah. And so we put that together. And a lot of Carl's, his character design is very free form, right? I designed Sparky and a lot of the major characters, but Carl was very good at, like,

weird, gross alien things. Yeah. And being that it started out as a space shooter, we really leaned into that. Well, I mean, if I may say so today, I did fight what appears to be a big penis. So, yeah, which then lost its foreskin because I shot it off.

Yeah, that was my idea because... Sorry about the spoilers, listeners. Well, in, in, like, every big space shooter from the Mega Drive, there's what, like, what's with all the dicks, you know? Yeah, what's that game? Guy, was it, Gainu? Yeah, Gainu, Gaini. It's but the Chioaniki guys.

Yeah, and there's just... Lots of dix in that game. Yeah, it's gross, man. And then, you know, but even, you look at any of this sort of, oh, it's creepy alien stuff, you know, and it all goes back to H.R. Giga. Yeah, of course, yeah. And his love of genitals. For the love of genitals.

And I was like, well, we can do a joke about that, right? Every space shooter has a penis boss. And there are still space shooter levels as a callback to what Sparky was originally going to be. Yeah, he's in like the Agamatic from Sonic as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I was like, why don't we have a dick boss and have some jokes about it? Obviously, in a way that's child friendly, it's not a...

In a way that's plausible liability, I guess. It's like in Phoenix nights when they get the dick and put the snake top on it. It's a bit like that. Did you notice that the character Shig, he's he is the colors of the bisexual flag. I did notice that, no. And because, well, I'm a sort of low-key bisexual man.

It's not like any more. I mean, you've been not saying, I was like, well, yeah, it's low-key in the sense that I'm not. Everyone's only after you. Yeah. Too late now. Too late now. And I was like, how do I, um, well, I, I,

I just wanted the little implication that Shig kind of is, and I don't want to make it a big deal. I think it's, I love, you know, I love good representation in characters, but I also, I don't like it to be too heavy-handed. And I feel like it's not up to me. Look, I'm, look, I'm married to a woman. I have only a female relationships. It rarely, it barely affects my life in the way it does a lot of queer people who really, really struggle. So it's not my place to speak for them. However, I wanted some kind of little gag in there. So we had the penis boss and we just had Shig point out there. He could handle it, he says.

Nice, nice. Yeah, that's fun. And, yeah, as I said, I got the alien soldier vibe today. And I don't know why it didn't occur to me before. But I think it's because I thought, I have to fully admit, I haven't finished this game yet. I got to, I just beat four forearms, the skeleton boss. And I would consider that probably the first real skill check in that game,

because that's not easy. It does, it does seem to be the, what was it, the Capra Demon, Dark Souls, where I went. I mean, I beat it because I remember like a dash, because I was actually forgotten, but then that was when it occurred to me. I'm like, hey on a minute, I'm fighting a multi-segmented swordsman with basically, with what is essentially spruced up megadrive music playing in the background. And I'm dashing around the screen doing essentially the Z-Dash from Alien Soldier.

This is Alien Soldier. Yeah, well, that boss is basically Chi Tiger when you fight him on top of the train. Yes, exactly. Yeah, that's the vibes I got. It's very fun. It's good. I'm excited to keep playing that game, and I will be finishing it because it will not be fit me. I'm on the fire planet now. So there are difficulty settings in the option, hidden away in the options menu. I know that people don't really like to use those. So it's the thing I've noticed watching people play it. I've seen people get really either find it far too easy or find it far too hard, depending on their experience with this kind of game. And just, but they don't want to go and change. the difficulty and that makes me kind of sad because the difficulty's there for that reason you know but we just really don't like doing that people are just very proud yeah i mean difficulty discourse is genuinely the worst thing in the world i think there i think there are some people that i've seen who honestly just feel like if they change a setting they're not playing the intended game and to be honest with sparky the intended game is what you find fun yeah whatever's

fun for you that's i like that it's um not to get into it but yeah i pro i would probably and the kind of person who enjoys learning a game, so I would probably bang my head against it. If it was something like not this, but if it was something like St. Sorrow, I'd put it on easy and not care, because it's a power fantasy anyway. But with this whole I would try and beat it. And I'll probably try

the harder modes, just to see what they're like. But, yeah, I had fun with it, and that's on Steam Switch. Is it on PS4? It's just Steam and Switch at the moment. Right, right, yeah. Um, yeah, everyone should pick this up. It seemed, I mean, it was Nikall that's published this one, wasn't it? Yeah.

Yeah. Now, not to be rude, but I haven't seen a lot of talk about this one, so I'm hoping that it's not gone completely under the radar. Yeah, well, it was a difficult time because, um, Well, I signed the agreement before the Kutaku article about Nicholas. Oh, really? I was bound to them long before any of that happened. For what it's worth, they've always been good to me. Right, yeah, yeah. I've never had, well, you know, like when there was,

because the thing they mentioned in those articles is that there was trouble with getting paid on time. And I remember there was a time when they had an issue with their accountancy department, but they always got in touch with me and explained why, and then they subsidized me for it, and then they got it fixed. That was the only thing out of those articles that mentioned that I ever experienced with them. Right, right, okay.

I didn't have, both financially and legally, I don't have the option to just go, I'm dropping them because of a thing that I read, right? Absolutely. But also, from my point of view, they've always been good to me. Obviously, if you don't want to support them, that is your right.

And I understand, and I do believe that a lot of people didn't buy Sparky because of who published it. Right, right. And that is unfortunate on my part, but for what it's worth, they have treated Sparky fine, they've been good to me. It's just that I

happen to believe that it came out right after all of that, and people see who, you know, and it's it is very unfortunate. At the same time, the game wouldn't exist if Tyrone and Nicholas hadn't seen my prototype and given me as much as I needed, as much

time and money as I needed to make it and put his faith entirely in me. There was no point. Aside from saying, you know, bring the difficulty down a little bit and a few things like that, there was no point during Sparky, which anybody at Nicholas said, change this, change that, you can't do this. Well, it does feel incredibly sort of singular, you know, the, I'm being positive, but it's one of those things where if I'm saying it wrong, it's going to sound backhanded. No, go for it. It's quite indulgent, spectacular Spark. because it feels like it's you sort of going like, this is my chance to do all the cool things.

Yeah. Basically. I've got to say it, I've got to say it, we got Retronaut's favorite son, Dave Bomber on that. Yes. You know,

the point that was written for him. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, he's great, as he always is, because it's lovely. We love Dave.

Oh, yeah. There are multiple voice actors who parts were written specifically for. It wasn't, oh, I have a train announcer and I need a voice. It's,

I have Dave. and I need a role. So, yeah, there was a lot of that. One in particular, I always said, and I'm sure you guys know Mensky, but me and him we made the two-person, Sean Barrett fan club, because we both love this, highly unsung, completely unsung voice actor, Sean Barrett, who famously, he was in, you know, Starfleet. But he was also in Dominion Tank Police and all the manga films from the 80s and 90s. He's famously, if you can think of a children's British thing or even some of grown-up British things from around the 70s, 80s and 90s, he's probably in it.

And he has this most wonderful voice. And we both used to love this role that he had in Dominion Tank Police of Lieutenant Britain. And he always said, bigger, it's a better, and it always has been. And he would say all things like this. And we loved him. And we always said, if I ever do a game with voices in, I want to try and get him. And he mostly does audiobooks now. And at the time of recording Sparge, he was 82.

But he, I mean, people know him as he was the voice of the, you know, in return to ours. He was a little robot TikTok. Right. Yeah. And he was things like that. in the dark crystal and stuff. But he's often, yeah, he's never the one that gets the credit. He was always the, you know, a supporting actor.

But we just thought he was absolutely wonderful. And he was in things that both of us remembered from our childhoods, despite being having 10 years of difference between us. And so we just would always gush about Sean Barrett. And I said, if I ever make a game with voice acting, I need to find him. And so I started designing this character based around characters that Sean Barrett has played in old manga. films. So he's partially

Dominion Tank Police. There's a little bit of Cyber City Oedo 808 in the character design. There's a little ghost in the shell. I don't think he was in Ghost in the Shell, but there's a little callback to just cyberpunk anime of the time because he was so prevalent in those. And it's this character, Sergeant, blown apart. And I was like, either we get him or we get somebody to do an impression of him and we've paid tribute to cyberpunk anime

of the 80s and 90s, you know. And it was so hard to find him. And in the end, Mensey asked Stuart Ashen, it was like, when you got people like Robert Llewellyn and Warwick Davis to be in your movies, how do you get in touch with them? How do you find their agents?

And he just pointed us to where he finds their agents. And he was saying, oh, it's a long shot. But this is where, you know, this is where we find the agencies. And we went there, there he was.

Right. And that's wild because I'm familiar with that Dominion tank police dub and I didn't clock it with him at all. Yeah, that was, uh, yeah, uh, Lieutenant, uh, Captain Britain. Yeah, the, the Puma sisters were really interesting when I was like 14. So yeah. Anyway, yeah, he, um, Sean Barrett, yeah, his, his role in those. And I, we even, uh, worked in a couple of lines from Dominion Tank Police to reference. There's a, he says bigger is better and it always has been, which was a threat. Yeah. I can't remember if that made the final

cut of the game, but there are lines. That must be like super like a moment, though. like that's wild i love that oh gosh you wouldn't believe like when we got the the recordings from him and i listened back to them it was there's there's much so he has although he does this uh you know yeah bigger it better it always has been kind of voice his actual real voice is like treacle like he's like if you hear him doing his audiobooks it's like yes my name is sean barrett and i'm here to read a book you know and so i phoned him no he phoned me up to discuss it and i said to him do you remember the voice that you did for Dominion Tank Police? He's like, yes, we had a lot of fun with that, he says. And he was very, very, very well-spoken chap with this soft voice. And he said,

well, would you like me to try one of these lines in the voice and just see if you, uh, see if you like what I do? And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, give it a go. And he suddenly goes, what's the matter? What's a bucket? You'd ever seen a man take 15 hellfire around to the pelvis and beat the enemy to death with his own seven legs. And he goes on a big rant like that. And they just stops and goes, what did you do today, Granddad? Absolutely incredible. But yeah, like, for example, with Dave, with Dave,

Dave, Dave Balmer, who has been on this very show. Many times. Yeah, talking about Sonic and Knuckles, but I remember right? Yeah, and he, with him, I was, you know, the game was coming towards completion. And I was like, I'd feel terrible. Like, I've got references to Sonic the comic and this podcast that he does

to Sonic, the comic, the podcast is fantastic. And he does voices. I was like, I'd love to try and fit him in somehow. And I just remember there was a train level. And the train level was a little bit dull and repetitive. So I was like, let's put in some funny announcer stuff. So I got John, the writer, to write some funny announcer stuff. And I was like, I bet this is the kind of thing Dave would do.

So he got on the call and he recorded it. And it was a lot of fun. I feel like in a lot of ways, because we were so excited to get voices in, I've seen people play the game and they're going oh shut up there's too much dialogue shut up and yeah they're probably right but you know what it's great I love the dialogue

in it I love it I mean that's what I mean there's too much everything that's why I like it so much it's just everything it's just like exactly to sparky the game with too much everything too much everything in a good way yeah and you know it's not an unfriendly game as you mentioned there's the difficulty settings you can save after everything you know the levels on

I think that in retrospect something I would have done and should have done is a proper skip. So, you know, if say you've, you've, you sample, you said you died quite a few times on four four arms. Well, on the fifth attempt, although there's a skip button, you skip every speech bubble, right? So you've got like it as you're skipping through them. There needed to be a button to just skip the whole cutscene, just like that.

I mean, it only takes like a second, though. I won't admit, I won't deny that I did think that. Like, it would be cool if I could skip all this, but it's like five seconds. So I wasn't. But it's still, it is inconvenient, especially when you get him frustrated at the game. You know, it's like, yeah, well done. You've told us your funny jokes about forearms and whatever. I wrote that scene.

John didn't even wrote that scene. I wrote it because I just had this stupid four forearms gag in my head. That's funny. Thank you. You resisted the idea of putting a four-four skin or anything like that. So that was good. Well, I had the character design already. Well, Carl did a rough character design, which was.

been sort of redesigned, but the idea, it showed that he had these, the, unlike, say, General Grevis, who has four arms, he had his arms, like, split at the elbow into two. So he's got two arms, but they split at the elbow. So he's got four forearms, and that amused me. And I wrote that whole scene, and I got a voice actor, I know, to record it, because they can do this really funny sort of not-joker sort of voice. And I was like, yeah, I like this.

I think it's funny. It's also really obnoxious. I just feel like specifically, like you say, that's kind of the fight. That's kind of the skill check fight. And I've also had this obnoxious dialogue every time you retried the skill check. Like, yeah, I should have had a straightforward instant skip button or even maybe have an auto skip dialogue that you've already heard when you're retrying that boss, you know. That's a regret.

I programmed a lot of the cutscenes in a way where the things move into position. so a character might move off screen between lines or whatever so what happened was if there was a skip button like a proper skip button I have to then program everything to move to where it needed to be and actually adding a proper skip button would have meant recoding loads of cutscenes I think it's one of those things where gamers maybe don't know how difficult these things are in a program it's like it's like I've seen online a lot of them and I'm not a programmer so I might be wrong here but I've seen a lot of like

why don't they just let us redefine all the buttons? And then there's this idea that that would be somehow easy to program. It seems like it would be incredibly difficult to program. It's not just the programming and scripting part. Sometimes it's just the logic of it.

Like, for example, rebinding buttons, well, there are games that can break. If something that needs to be on a trigger is moved to a... If you look at my game, Night Terrors, you need to be able to independently jump slash flap and

attack. And it was designed. Originally, it was going to be for mobile. So it was you tap the left side of the screen and the right side of the screen. And the guys at Nicholas were like, now we really like this. We want to put this on consoles. So they did. And we have it. So you use the left and right bumpers or the, what was it, the A and

the Y buttons. And a lot of people, you know, and by default, what a lot of people are going to do, they're going to see that game. They're going to go, ah, I've used to jump being on A and attack being on X. That's if you're using the Xbox layout. Yes. Right.

And so they'll go to your control scheme and they'll change it to what they used to. The problem with that is that breaks the game because you're using one thumb now. And Night Terror has to control like a pinball machine. You need your two end. You need both thumbs. And, you know, obviously if it was going to be for consoles from the beginning, I might have done that differently. But that's just one example. But it's things like things that you might need triggers.

You might need an analog trigger for this and might not work with a button. sometimes you've got to save players from themselves they might I forget who I'm quoting here but given the chance players will optimize the fun out of the game

yeah that was nice one yeah nice one should you yeah no problem yeah I appreciate the quote get it printed up and put it on my wall a nice little picture of you next to it a little thumbs up yeah

I've got a little Billy Metro on the wall and he says play to win Yeah, exactly. I'm not saying that we shouldn't offer accessibility features at all. I try to do those as much as I possibly can, but there are times in which, yeah, people say, why haven't they done this? And it's like, believe me, we thought about it. And there was a reason that we didn't.

Yeah, that's my understanding having, I don't, again, I'm not a program, but I've read quite a lot of books on the subject and development and documentaries and stuff. And the idea I get is, as you say, these things. things really aren't as simple as they seem, and they will have been thought of. Yeah. say this because that's the upcoming thing that's what's next and for the record you can play a demo of this now

on Steam and it's quite extensive it's quite a long demo and you can play as like four of the characters I want to say um yes Toxy and what is his name I think you can play it you can play in the demo I think it's

Toxy major disaster Junk Yard and Yvonne I think of the play of ones That's right yes I played as them all today a big I played it before but I went to refresh my my memory. Now, this is a side on beat-em-up, like Streets of Rage style, or more pertinently, I'd say like Turtles, the recent Shredd's Revenge game, or on what the games that that

is inspired by, obviously, but Toxic Crusaders, like, that's, that had the games in the deck of the day on the NES and the Mega Drive, and I have to say they weren't great, but this is much better. But the point, I guess I want to start with is how in the name of Sweet Christ, did this come about, the Doxie Crusaders' video game? Because this is a deep pole. This is real deep.

Even within like trauma, this is deep. So what happened there? Well, I don't know how much I can, you know, how much detail I can go into because of that. No, of course. I can tell you that. That's my problem. Yeah, I can tell you that this was a deal made with,

because I say this isn't a freak's own game. This is, I am the, I am working for retroware on this project. but mostly it's the genius of Ryan Scott, who's like the CEO, I think, of Retro, he's the director. Right, right. And he makes things happen. He was the guy that came to me and just said, I want to put AVGN, one and two deluxe on Switch.

I will get the rights to it, and we will do it. And RetroWe have been publishing games for a while. And, you know, Troma quite nearby. They're in, relatively, you know, to English people, they're miles and miles and miles and miles apart. But in the grand scheme of things in the US, these two companies are quite nearby. And I think they just kind of started a thing. And I know that Ryan really wanted, it's just something that he really wanted to do with them. And they made it happen.

And they came to me and said, well, you made AVGN. We like you. We like you. We work well with you. We'd like you to be the guy to develop it. And was it going to be a fighting game? Yeah. So Ryan was like, let's make a toxic Crusader's game. And I immediately said, this needs to be a co-op beat him up. Did you watch the show when you were younger? Yes, I did. I was a fan. I was a fan. Yeah, I got some toys and everything. Yeah. And I remember it being on, I think, BBC, but I don't remember seeing that much of it. I actually went back and looked at it after the demo. And it's surprisingly funny and good. Like, I was. There was even a comic with art by Richard Ellson. No. Okay. Well, I've got to seek that. I've got to seek that.

It only lasted like five issues, and Richard Elton Drew maybe two, but it's beautiful. Yeah, and it's, yeah, I was a fan. And so was John, who's, you know, he was the writer on Sparky, and I got them to bring him in for Toxie as well, because that was what was really cool. Although it is a, it's not a Freaksone game, it's a retro game. They gave me the opportunity to bring people in that I know and that I work with and I would with Freak Zone. So it's, you know, close enough, if you're a fan of Freak Zone, you're going to be, the signature is going to be, there, you're going to feel the freaksonishness. I do get those vibes, yeah.

When I found out that it was you working on it, there was a little bit of kind of like, okay, that makes sense with the dialogue and the style and everything, that does make sense. Yeah, like, effectively, there's a lot of people working on it, you know, and although I'm lead designer and developer, you know, it's not final say on things. And so it's not a freak zone game. No. It's not made with freak zone. money. And so we, this is a retroware product. And, uh, you know, this is Ryan's game and we are making

it for him. And it's, it's, it's great. And you know, you have to understand the guy really knows what he's doing. Um, and you know, it's, it's taking while because we want to make it perfect, right? There are things in the demo that, that have changed since we put that demo out. I think there are new demos that will be coming out to show how much we've improved it. Um, because we're, I wonder, there were some things in the demo that I, that I found, because I love the demo. Don't get me wrong, but there were some things where I thought, like, that seems almost like a placeholder. I think that will change. Yeah, there were things that are unfinished, there were some bugs and things here and there. There are things about the combat that we,

we were, even before we put the demo out, we were like, this is going to change and improve. Yeah. So it's, yeah, the final game is, like, I don't know release or anything like that. That's up to the guys over there, but we want it to be like the absolute best it can possibly be. and hopefully you'll hear more soon, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's on my radar. It's, um, is it the two players or four players at the moment? Up to four local. Perfect.

Wow. Yeah. Okay. So we have some great people on it, though, that, uh, they gave me the, they brought some people in and they gave me the opportunity to bring some people in that I knew and I have, either have worked with or always wanted to. And we got in, we got Steve Gregson to do the art for the cut scenes in these beautiful comic art.

Uh, we got in people like, we got in some of the pictures. pixel artists that do Sonic Robo Blast 2. Wow, yeah. So we've got Motor Roach and a bunch of people like that. I mean, the pixel art really stands out because it's like now, again, I'm going to be polite when I say this. It looks

really like, I don't mind to say expensive, but the art is like spot on. It's like really it's not stiff at all. It's really good looking. Yeah, some really talented guys doing the pixel art. Junkyard's double tap attack is insane. Like, it looks so good.

Like, for love of Christ, don't change anything about that. And maybe the way it works mechanically. But the sound effect it makes it perfect as well. Perfect 90s. Yes, I did all the sound work. Oh, you did? Have you done the music for this one as well? Yeah, partially.

So in the demo that's out now, that music is all mine. The final game, it's a collaboration. It's partially me, but mostly the band Psychostick. Oh, wow. And actually, some of the music you hear in the demo, the final versions are like remixed of those songs that I wrote, but remixed by Psychostick with like real guitars and everything, but also with that Sega Mega Drive sounds still in there.

We didn't really talk about it, but you did the music for AVGN and Sparky as well, right? No, I didn't do Sparky. I did the music for AVGN and Manos. Sparky was Gloomgeist, somebody I knew that I felt could do Sparky better than I could. That's interesting because I honestly thought, because it really does sound quite similar to how AVGN sounds.

Well, I directed him, and I was like, this is kind of how I want it to sound. So there was a lot of direction. There's a lot of like, it's less kind of like air quotes eight bit style, but there are the sort of the orchestra hits and the megadrive sound effects in there and things. Because AVGN2, I think it's got an incredible soundtrack, especially at the Japan level. And I was really just like surprised when I saw it was just like you did all the music. I assumed it would be like Els or something, but no. Yeah, no, I think, you know, when I showed Manos to Screw Attack way back,

I think also the fact that I did all those things was inviting to them. You know, like it's helping get the job, maybe. The thing is, let's say you're somebody that makes games as a hobby in the 90s, and you're getting halfway through secondary school, and you're seeing how this is not a career that you're going to have, right? I mean, now, obviously now, I'm a game developer, but at the time it was like, unless you go and, I don't know, make 3D models for EA, you know, unless you move, you get yourself carted around to whatever studio,

you're not going to make games for a living. That was what we thought. Yeah. So what you do is you go, well, what's the next best thing? Yeah. And so, and you try them all. And so, like, I went to college to do graphic design. I thought maybe graphic design.

And I went, okay, and I also was, I was like, maybe music production. I'll try some music production, and I did. I did a little bit of music production. I learned that, and that wasn't going anywhere. Graphic design I did for a while, freelance. and I just felt like you didn't really feel very valued in that business and it was going okay

and then so I just was like well if I tried to do games again particularly when the whole mobile game renaissance sort of happened and then the indie games broke back into the consoles and PCs again but when that opportunity came up I was like well I not only do I know how to make games

I also now know how to make music and how to make graphic designs for menus and logos and all stuff that. So I was like, I could just do the whole thing with no overheads, you know, and so I did. So, out of curiosity, like, the first AVGN game, well, everything has built on everything else, hasn't it? Like, Manos became AVGN, which became AVGN2, obviously. Yeah. There seems to be some AVGN DNA in spectacular Sparky, if you don't mind me saying, as well.

Yeah, sort of. There's no, there's no AVGN code in there, and it's very different philosophically. It's not about the, you know, the actual level traversal. or the platforming is actually very minimal and sparky. It's much more about the combat. But yeah, except for that sewer level, the weakest level's got some platforming going. Yeah,

it does. But even that, it's very mild compared to Angry Video Game Nourge, you know. But it's, in fact, it has to be limiting for how the combat because that dash move

was going to break a lot of the combat unless I go full Celeste with it, you know, but I think that the platforming would have been a lot easier if I'd remember that that move existed. Yeah, that was a thing, though, it's because the dash is,

um fundamentally important in sparky and i tried to put everything in i could to keep reminding the player it exists but you still see people just forget uh i think even now there are things that i'm like i could have done this i could have done that to make it clear to remind people because i think what we did it was i think the thing i mostly did was i added these in the first in the tutorial stage there are like these like bramble type vine things that you have to dash through to learn the dash but i think what happens is a lot of people go, ah, that's the move I use to dash through these vines. Gotcha, yeah.

Right, and not past enemies. And I think I prioritized making the line in the tutorial funny over making it informative because he should really say you can dash past enemies without taking damage. But what he says, and I wrote the dialogue in the tutorial, what I wrote was, you'll dash past all your responsibilities because I thought that sounded funny. It's funny, yeah. Thank you. I thought it sounded funny, but obviously it wasn't informative enough.

because I assume that people would figure it out through trial and error, but you see a lot of people that haven't realized that the dash lets you go past and through enemies without taking damage and that you need that. And so we also try to do... The first major boss would be impossible without it. Yeah, we tried to also put in bosses where it's like, it slowly requires the dash more and more,

the more bosses you fight. And there are parts where it's like, now if you don't do the dash, you're not going to beat this boss, you're not going to win. And you're not going to get to the later ones. The problem there is that what happens people just don't beat that boss you know um and so obviously there should have been things uh to

have made it clearer i think you look at some games like um where actually they'll show you a little video of it happening to show you that you can do that and stuff i think something like that may have been better uh i don't know but yeah that's a big thing with the difficulty that's a i think that's the biggest thing i've noticed is that people just forget that you can and must do the dash move It's interesting in hindsight, really. I mean, for me, I would never have noticed that as an error. Like, I'm just enjoying it as it sort of is.

But it's interesting to have that sort of stuff highlighted. The sort of stuff the player wouldn't probably notice at all. I think it helps that you and I have both played. alien soldier. That does help. Yeah. That definitely helps. I want to talk a little bit more about toxic if that's cool. Just very briefly, because we're coming up to like an hour and a half, so I think we should consider wrapping up soon. But Toxic Crusaders, now, again, very fun. Demo already out. Demo's fun as it is. It's not done, but it's there. It's for Steam. Actually, a lot of stuff has been majorly improved since

that demo, so it's, although I think the demo is good. I think, you know, there are people that rightfully have some criticisms and a lot of those have already been met in what we're working on. That's awesome, yeah. I think there were six playable characters and the other two that weren't available. If you can tell me, is that just for the demo? Are they not available from the start in general? Every character is available from the start in the full game. So you have, you have Toxy, No Zone, Major Disaster, Headbanger, Junkyard, Yvonne, and Mrs. Junko, Toxie's mom, who is she's awesome I'm really excited to play as her

it's such a strange character but she's so awesome in the game like we had so much fun making her and will there be any other trauma characters appearing in the game like Sergeant Kabuki Man for example Ah Maybe that's a possibility that may happen

Your response to that is a noise A noise Okay that's good to know Tapping my nose You can hear that audibly I'm sure I can and it was great thank you um uh so that's we don't know when that's out yet because it's when it's done it's

being polished up it's going to be a very nice sort of a yeah a thing and that drops on quite looking forward to it i believe they are planning to do some new demos at some point cool okay because the first one was part of the demo next fest or something wasn't it the steam yes that's right yeah and you got a lot of feedback from that you said from different yeah tons and there's also things that we're already even when we put the demo out there things were like we need to we want to make this better but we didn't want to just you know never put a demo out see i thought it was it was really great the i'm going to just tell you live on the podcast why the hell not the only thing i would do if it was me is i've made the

hit counter bigger but that's um i don't know if you're doing that yeah that may be uh something it was uh yeah for since the demo i think yeah we've got uh quite a lot of things like that was the combat is a little faster and not not like the animations are faster but the actual movement of the stages and stuff and just the pacing of the levels themselves and things are things that we are building on and uh i thought the writing and the voice acting was was really good are there any of the old voice actors back or is it all new cast this is the it is actually the the guys at team four star uh doing the voices oh from um little curabo and um dragon ball Yeah, Frangle of All the Britsch, yeah, all that stuff, yeah.

And the writing is John Locke, who also wrote Spectacular Sparky. Yeah, as you said, yeah, yeah, it's got that perfect, like, Saturday morning, slightly cheesy, but actually funny. He was a fan of the show, as I was, so his characters that he already knew. And we, yeah, we've got these comic cuts. I think there was one in the demo, wasn't there, one of the cutscenes. Yeah, there was, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I think there's new demos coming within too long.

And as I say, the only reason there's not a release date is just because we're refining a lot of stuff because we just really want to make it as good as it can be. And there are things about it that we wanted to change, you know? And finally, there's going to be a Tremor video game better than the Tremor project. I should also mention that at least for the fundamental combat loop, for the actual controls, we actually got Menski to come in and consult because I felt that I had not made a beat-up before. You know, I'm a platformer's person, but Menski knows. this genre extremely well, you know. And so we got him into just, I mean, we literally, he was in my

home office, it had acetate, sellotaped to the screen and a marker and drawing lines, you know, to get things exactly as they should. And we were timing things down to the frame to what would feel, right, you know, and it was crazy. And although, you know, he had to step away because he's just, He'd not been very well. And so he did step away eventually, but the core combat of this game was designed by a man whose opinions on beatem ups. I massively respect.

I feel like personally, not that it's not my opinion matters that much, but for me with a beatem up, the first hit you draw on enemy, you easily know if it's going to be any good. And for me, I was just like, yeah, this is good. Yeah.

Yeah, well, there's the, you know, the amount of time we spent, you know, on exactly that first year, or those four, the, well, that first combo you do. Yeah, Messi calls them the, Bing, Bing, Bang, Bong. Because it does the first hit twice,

and then it does a medium hit, and then the heavy knockdown. Yeah. And, you know, like, we both love Streets of Rage 2. I think that's the most perfectly tuned one. Yeah. And, you know,

and, you know, Medsky happens to be the guy I know who knows why we love Streets of Rage 2, you know, and why we don't love, say, double dragon neon, or what was the one, the takeover and stuff like that, which are fine games,

but Summit doesn't feel right. And he was able, you know, with his help, we were able to, like, discern what it is and why. Like, because the takeover should be great. And playing it, you can see, they've tried so many things to get that hit to feel right. They've got this spark effect and that sound and this screen shake and this time. And you can tell that they've gone, this doesn't feel right. And they've kept trying and adding and adding that.

And it's still not quite there. Whereas I feel like in Toxy, even when you're playing as the characters who have the goofy sound effects, like actually no zone's not in the dead. demo, but he's got like, he's got boxing gloves, so he's got like kind of goofy sound effects and stuff. He's the, uh, he's the showboats. Uh, and it's just about getting the timing exactly right. It was down to the, down to the frame that we were getting the, the hit to feel right. And I think that even if we hadn't gone back and improved on other things, I think that that that's something that Toxy is nailed in a way that many modern beatamups don't. And that was

very, very important to me. Having said that, we have sort of been eating quite good for that genre in my opinion. I mean, I did like Double Dragon Neon, but I do take your point. There is a feel to that, but things like Shredder's Revenge and Streets of Age 4, for Christ's sake. Oh, yeah. They really just nailed it. So I think this is going to be another one. I mean, there's been a while

since it's Shredder's Revenge, where it's about time that we've got another. It's definitely more Streets of Rage than it is turtles, at least in terms of gameplay. Like, obviously... It seems that way, the way that you can't roll around each end of the screen immediately, like, to jump around with that. I mean, the obvious comparison is Trekkers revenge because, you know, 90s cartoon property

Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I didn't want to make it explicit, but yeah, that's absolutely it. A lot of people have said that, and that's, yeah, it makes sense, but, you know, gameplay-wise, this is much more of a streets of rage than it is a turtles. Well, playing it today, it reminded me mostly of the Bucco hair game for Kami, the arcade one. Yeah. Because you get the fully cartoon animated cutscenes with the voiceover from, like, almost out of the show. I mean, there's different people here, but they're doing those voices, you know. Yeah.

And it really did feel to me like, yeah, this is like the Bacchio hey game we've got dialogue going on while we're playing it and it's got those very vivid cartoon graphics that's just the vibe i got anyway and that was a great game so cheers i mean for the comparison i mean um yeah yeah there's also uh like the i always felt that in even in streets of race the grappling was always like awkward so we actually replaced it with a full-on super mario bros to lift and throw yeah and it makes like amazing cartoon which uh i came out with the idea and i suggested it to mensky and men's He went, oh, like two crude dudes.

I was like, like, what? And he showed me footage of this game, two crude dudes, which did pretty much exactly what I had suggested. And I was like, see, this guy knows what he's talking about. That's awesome. I mean, I think it's going to be, like, great fun when it drops. And I'm going to pass a little of you for a copy of it so I can review it.

But at any rate, yeah, that's going to be a lot of fun. I think we should probably consider wrapping it up at this point. This has been good. It's been very informative. And thank you for coming on. It's been really interesting. Thanks for having me. Yeah, maybe we'll get you back.

at some point. But now what I've got to do is I've got to do the customary retronauts wrap-up. So first of all, where can people find you online and follow your antics? Okay, so I'm not saying Twitter anymore. No, it's X. Because of reasons.

Well, no, I'm not saying that either. Do you know what? You mentioned X and Elon Musk. We did say we get five uses of the word. Oh, okay. I use my fifth right here. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, you get my point. Yeah. It's unfortunate because, I used to use that the website that now belongs to that and he has got all my followers on there. I used to do it all there.

I feel your pain, honestly. That's my entire audience is on Twitter and I do not want to be there anymore. Yeah, and a little bit of an awkward position for that. But effectively, your preferred social media platform or you can find me at Freaks' own games. I use that username everywhere. I like to use threads.

I'm on Blue Sky, but I'm also aware that Blue Sky isn't a good place to promote a business because it's mostly, you know, friends talking among themselves because these invites and stuff like that. So, but go to, if you go to FreakZonegames.com, there's links to all my social media except Twitter slash X. So you can find me on all of those things there.

You can find all my games there and other games that I worked on. And yeah, follow because I'll be, you know, I've got some exciting stuff. for next year, not just Toxie. I was going to ask you about that, if there's anything you can tell us at all. Because earlier when you said, you slipped, I think, you let it slip when you said,

I need to be working on other games, plural. And I was like, oh, really, oh, really. So, well, when can we expect an angry video again at Venture's three? Yeah, obviously I want to do that at some point. That is up to the people at Retro Ware, and right now we are, you know, fully toxic so it'll be a while if we do that uh but at the moment you know is

obviously freaks on games is my business and retroware is like it's it's my bread and butter it's my day job you know and i don't mean that in a in a negative way i love work no no no of course but that is that's what i'm doing for my bread and butter and there and when everything's up to date with that and on evenings and weekends i have freaks own games still as a thing so there's stuff in the pipeline for that too. Can you give us anything at all, even the most cryptic possible thing? Yeah, there's a few things I can hint at. There's

I'm actually working with some other developers to get some somewhat popular PC games onto console that weren't before. That's the thing that I'm doing. I got my dev kits and I've got approved as a Nintendo publisher. So you may see Freaksome games as a publisher and

porting house for some games that I love on PC. That's awesome. That must be That's something that if I could afford to that I would definitely be doing. There's one thing I'm so excited about. And it's been hard work to get it running on Nintendo hardware because this is a game that's doing a lot of stuff. Yeah, it's crook, isn't it? But my God, it's an indie game that I've been a big fan of for a long time.

And I'm currently, yeah, outside of Retroware, I'm currently working on a Switch port. Oh, my God. It will be very soon that you'll hear about it, I think, because the dev is very keen. And at the time of recording, it's the day of the devs today, isn't it? So, yeah.

I will tell you as soon as I'm able to, but God, I am so excited. Not just to be working on, but just the fact that this is going to be on consoles, because I'm a console guy, and I love this game. So I'm not going to be approaching other people for that as well, eventually. Obviously, you know, time permitting, because I want to make toxic crusaders with retroware,

and, you know, I want to make sure they get their money, So that is my day job. Yeah, of course. But yeah, there is more coming from Freaksone games as well. Looking forward to that. I'm glad of that. I'm glad it's still a going concern. I mean, good Lord, I'm excited about 2014.

Let's put it that way. Yeah, you're excited to go back in time for 2014. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. That's great. And Retronauts, of course, if you enjoy Retronauts and you would like to support Retronauts, first of all, thank you.

Second of all, you can go on the Retronauts. Patreon, Patreon.com, Sfor-slash Retronauts, where you will find us with our hands, Eagley Cup to receive your coppers. But for the $5, I'm not even going to mention the $3 tier. There's a $3 tier, but it's not as good. So the $5 tier will get you two bonus episodes per month, entirely new episodes that are only available via the Patreon.

But you'll also get the Retronauts weekly episodes a week earlier as well. So you'll just be incredibly cool and everyone will look up to you. You'll also get access to Diamond Fights tremendous This Week in Retro columns. And you'll get access to the Retronauts Discord, where I have been informed, I am not allowed to reply to anyone who insults me. So you can say anything you like to me. and I won't be able to do anything about it. And, you know, you can just be horrible and personal,

and it'll be hilarious. Thank you very much for listening. I've been Steward Jip, and I'll be back in the near future with another episode that's probably not made up of interviews, but it might be. Who knows? Bye.

Bye. Thank you.