Retronauts - 585: The Years-In-Review Revue: 1994

Episode Date: January 15, 2024

Jeremy Parish, Diamond Feit, Stuart Gipp, Kevin Bunch, AND Jared Petty all somehow manage to cram into a single podcast to finish up out conversation about the year 1984 before leaping through time a decade to wrangle the facts about ’94! Amazing! Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts, call me death because it's all about the fours. didn't work as well as I thought it was going to on the spur of the moment. Let's try a different one. This week in Retronauts, call me a golfer because it's all about the fours. Oh, there we go. Okay, that's much better. All right. So anyway, we're here, and by we, I mean us, talking about the years 1984 and 1994. As you may recall, from a previous episode published not too long ago, we have spoken about 1974 and parts of 1984. But we did not. finish that conversation. And so we are here to resume it and segue on a decade ahead. And that's where we're going to cut it off because Bob Mackie has already recorded a conversation

about 2004. And that would just be a traffic jam of confusion if we had multiple conversations about the same thing. The retronauts would never cover the same topic more than once. Just that's unthinkable. Not going to do it. And actually, not going to do it is kind of in between the two dates we're talking about here, we're just going to totally elide over George Bush number one. And two, actually, because we're skipping 2004. So good times ahead. Enjoy the podcast. Thanks for joining everyone. Good night. Oh, wait. No. Actually, we haven't started. Oh, that was easy. Sorry. It's been a long day for me, and it's only 8.30 a.m. It's just, yeah, it's going to be rough. So I'm Jeremy Parrish, which I probably have mentioned before. But if not,

that's me. And this is kind of ostensibly a Retronauts East episode. There's also Retronauts East Plus and Retronauts Far East. So it's about as east as you get this episode. Let's start moving in concentric circles further and further away from me, the host, as we live in a heliocentric universe and my middle name is actually Helios. So here also, just kidding, Diamond. My middle name is actually Jeremy. My first name is Helios. Helios Jeremy. Yes, exactly. H. Jeremy Parrish. That's what the kids call me back in school. Anyway, here also in the triangular space known as the triangle, we have.

I'm Jared Petty from Limited Run Games. And for those unfamiliar, the triangle is the Raleigh area in eastern North Carolina. It's also an instrument that you can use to very limited effect. moving a little further out to a place a little further north along the eastern seaboard we have. This is Kevin Bunch, and I am quantum leaping from year to year in a desperate attempt to get home. That's pretty much retronauts in a nutshell. Every episode ends with us saying, oh, boy. Let's see, let's just skip straight across the Atlantic and the ruins of Atlantis and speak to our UK correspondence.

Hi, I'm Stuart Gyp and Kevin Blanche never returned home. Wow. Ouch. Harsh. Wow. Spoilers. Are we at the series finale already? Can't believe it. All right. It's been a great podcast, everyone. Then finally, even further east, so far east, it might as well be west, because that's the way I have to fly to get there.

We have our Japan correspondent. And Epic Stan Diamond Fight. Hello. Epic. Epics. Epic. Epics. Epics.

Okay. Yeah. Okay. See, my brain is on epoch. No, like, Fortnite. No, as in the cassette vision. And no one should be standing that. Well, I just unlock Peter Griffin, so I will be standing it all day long.

So, we, like I said, have covered 1984 to some degree. We're going to touch up on the rest of that. But it occurs to me, after seeing. some of the notes that Stuart and Diamond have not actually been on one of these year in reviews in review, right? Is that correct? I was on the 2004 one. I think I was on the, I think I was on the 2003 one. But that was like yesterday. You've been on the one hosted by Bob, whose format is a little different than mine, because my format has evolved through the years, as I've discovered, that if we try to go in depth about everything, it would actually take the entire year to get through

these reviews. So what we're going to do is kind of cover 84, the dregs, the remnants, the detritus, and then move on to 94. And I've broken 94 into really three different categories, besides just kind of the general, what the hell was happening on planet Earth in 1994? There's consoles, computers, and arcades. And I've asked each person on this show to pick one or two items from each of those categories in each year to lead the discussion on. We used to try, like I said, to talk about everything in those years. And that just can't happen because we are a mouthy bunch. I mean, I haven't even given anyone else a chance to speak yet. And we're like 10 minutes into the show. So as you can see, we are all hoist by my partard. So because of my

pitard. You guys have to kind of rain it in a little bit. So we're going to, we're going to hit the high points, the really important cool stuff or maybe the really unimportant, uncool stuff that just means a lot to us. That's, that's the thing. So we're going to jump into 1984 and finish up that conversation. I believe episode, I want to say, 579 was the previous years in review, review for 74. Oh, 582. My God. I totally got my numbers wrong. So check that episode out. And now we are going to mozy on into the stuff that we didn't discuss in 84, which was myself and Kevin and binge Edwards who can't be here due to family conflicts. So everyone else, what the hell were you doing in 1984? Very little due to not being born. That is no excuse. in 1984 i was plugging away on a on a calico atom the finest of all computer systems which my family had wisely chosen at that point as our household PC i was buying remaindered calico vision games

for a dollar each and enjoying them in my in my console slash computer hybrid i was playing the buck rogers planet of zoom super game on cassette at all I was fooling around with the word processor and the very, very, very loud printer. The daisy wheel. Yeah. I know a lot of you're imagining a dot matrix, but that thing had a daisy wheel. It had a typewriter printer. And it was like, it sounded like a Tommy Gun.

Like when they talk about like a Chicago typewriter, they're not exaggerating with the printer for the Adam. It's a lot of thing ever. I thought it was like Chicago Book of, you know, manual of style. It's actually like Chicago like Mafia. Oh, that's what you call a Tommy Gun. It's a Chicago typewriter. for the ratat-tat sound that it made. Not having been in the mob in the 1920s, I did not know that.

I think someone hasn't played Rezi 4 enough. That's correct. Or maybe I've played it just enough. So I was doing that, and then I was traveling to arcades with my family and uncle and playing lots and lots of wonderful arcade games that year. Not so much the games that came out that year, although I did play a few. of them, but the fact that at that point, the 1980 to 83 classics were in there with the new batch, and it was just one of the best times to walk into an arcade. They hadn't gotten

red of like centipede and Pac-Man yet, but you also had the brand new stuff. It was an amazing time to get arcades. All right. And Diamond yourself? Well, I would have been in the third grade, I believe. Because 1984 is one of the earliest years I can actually remember, like, as a year because of there was so much going on. There were two Olympics, one of which is a country no longer exists. And we had an election. That was kind of pointless. And it was just so much. And I recall, video game-wise, I'm sure I spent the bulk of my year playing the Commodore 64 because obviously I didn't have it in EAS yet because no one did. And I didn't import a Famicomac. because I wasn't that kind of kid, but I'm sure I played a lot of computer games and arcade games, whenever I could find them, and probably even some Atari games, there's probably some leftover Atari games I was still plugging away at. And all in all, I was pretty satisfied with the state of the 1980s because I was, you know, I was a dumb kid, I didn't know any better. There you go.

Yeah, yeah, 84 was a very memorable year for me, too. I do remember things before that, but 84 was kind of where everything became concrete. Maybe because that's the year we got a color television and all of a sudden television was in color, as opposed to monochrome. But also, that was the very brief. period of my life where I liked baseball and the Detroit Tigers were good back then. I don't know if they're good anymore, but they were good, very, very good for that year. And so I actually went to pro baseball games and saw them when we went up to visit family in Michigan. And that was cool. And that's the last time I thought sports were interesting. So now we're going to talk about

other things that are much more interesting, namely video games, because they're like sports, but you play them by sitting around and just only using your thumbs. And that's amazing. The human body, what a powerhouse. We can do so much with so little effort. So, 1984, I don't think we really talked about the computer industry for 84. We talked about consoles because there just wasn't so much to talk about when it came to consoles in 84 and also our kid games.

But the computer business was really kind of blowing up. And there was a lot of stuff happening first and close. closest to my heart being the debut of the Apple Macintosh, which really should have been just an amazing system for games, but due to Steve Jobs and everyone else being a little weird about video games, didn't really ever quite realize its potential. But still, the games that it did give us were very influential and in some conceptual ways. So we will talk about the Apple Macintosh very briefly, because Jared Petty has put his name down to talk about the Apple Macintosh.

Jared Petty, go for it. 84 is my favorite year for computers ever. I love this year. So many amazing, American computers, so many amazing things happen. The original Mac is kind of useless. They put too little RAM in it because they couldn't figure out

how to make it affordable to put more in or internal business purposes or God knows. It depends on whether you're asking which Steve Jobs movie or what book. But they put 120K RAM in it, which was barely enough to run the operating system. So you had room left for about eight pages of text in Mac write or like

one or two pictures in Mac paint. And that didn't lend itself very well to games. You got yourself a pretty convincing Zork right there. I mean, yeah, you can get Zork out of it because you can keep most of the data on a disc and just stream some text into a window. Wait, did that would have an integrated disk drive, or was that the model that we had to have an external disk drive because Steve Jobs was like, no moving parts ever? It had an integrated disc drive. Wait, no, wait. The first one might have had an external.

Come to think of it. Oh, you may be right, Jeremy, because he didn't want to, there was no fan. No drives, no fans. Right. None of them work anymore. Yeah, none of them work anymore because he wouldn't put a fan in him. He'd already destroyed the Apple 3 this way, completely wrecked the company. And, but the Mac is amazing.

A Mac was an outer space computer to most home computer. people, we'd not seen the like of it. That high-resolution screen, that graphical interface, the fake demo where it talked to you, those were space-age concepts in computing. People wrote long treatises and marketing pieces on the mouse so that we would understand what it was and how it worked. And computing was about to get friendly and simple. And if Mac had been able to put 2506K in that thing, first time around, I think it would

have been a lot more success. or if they'd be given it the price down a little bit. It's too damn expensive for what it could do. And there wasn't any software ready for it. You know, they could have saved millions of dollars by not hiring Ridley Scott to make their commercial. That too. A year later, when Multiplan and then a little after that, when Excel ran on it, when Pagemaker came along in a couple of years, and when there was some RAM in the thing, and they managed to speed it up a little, it was a great computer for doing all kinds of work. But in 1984, it was a prophecy.

It was a curiosity, and everyone that bought it was a fool. And because of that... This has been the case for every Apple 1.0 product throughout history. They set the pattern right here. They really did. And it's, you know, you couldn't play much on it. They put through the looking glass on it, which I have, it's, you're just moving chess pieces very rapidly around a board.

It looks like a strategy. game, but it's an action game. It's kind of like chess hockey. It's not good. It looks neat. It's very beautiful in that one bit. It's true black and white. People forget about the Mac that it doesn't have shades of gray. It's just black and white. It's just that high-res fools you with dithering. And so things look deeper than they are, and it's very beautiful. But another thing I keep in mind with this is that I want to reinforce a year earlier, the Apple 2E came out, which was an iteration on 1977 technology

that they neglected for six years because they wanted to leave it behind. At this point, the Apple 2E is selling heading into the millions and it is keeping the company alive. That's what's floating Apple. A seven-year-old computer at this point

with a, thank God, that double high-res upgraded graphics processor now so you can get way prettier and multiple color graphics out of your Apple now that look way better than what you could on a two E a few years ago. You can expand the thing to all the hell. It's around this time.

It's up to 128K of RAM standard and 80 column standard. So it's a fine business computer. You do much more with it for business than a Mac, and there's more software. And this is floating Apple until the Macintosh can come into its own. So I talked a lot there. I'm going to shut up now. I just want to jump in here and say that for years,

I liked to point out the fact that Nintendo liked to follow in Apple's footsteps, And here we see, you know, a hint of what was going to come 15 years later when the ancient Game Boy was keeping Nintendo afloat during the difficult in 64 years. So once again, Nintendo following Apple's lead. There we go. And it's like sheer coincidence. So I'm sure this was the year that my elementary school opened a computer lab. And I'm pretty sure it was full of two E's. And we didn't have any color screen.

And so we had these monitors, which were basically, you know, different shades of green. So there's another Game Boy connection right there. It was all just, you know, I was being trained. I was being trained five years early for what I would be doing. Someday you will catch them all. Oh, the Apple, too, has such an odd graphics display in general that it's, it thinks it's a monochrome machine, even when it's color. And I'm not even going to begin to describe it that works, but it's a trick that allows it to have beautiful monochrome graphics and beautiful color graphics on the same games.

And literally the resolution changes between them. And so you get this gorgeous, gorgeous look to a lot of those monochrome games. And Apple 2 gaming, Apple 2E gaming is huge this year. And that's a lot of what's propping this up. And then as we move into next year in schools, by the time schools all have two E's, it's Oregon Trail and Speedway Math and number munchers and the MEC games that are keeping Mac alive. It's largely a gaming and small business computer. Even this late, which is weird. Or not Mac, pardon me, the Apple too. The Mac becomes a gaming computer next year with things like,

you know, balance of power, which is one of the all-time great video games, Shadowgate, which is not, but is really atmospheric and neat, stuff like that. Thank you. All right, so that's how things looked on the American side. Everyone was a gog over the Macintosh, even though they didn't actually buy it. Stuart, walk us through what was going on in the UK, because they had computers there, too. Well, I mean, I only know sort of with hindsight what was going on at all in the UK. I mean, looking at the list that's here, it's a big one.

I mean, Jetpack, Attic Attack, and Saber Wolf are probably like, I mean, they were all from Ultimate Play the game, which later became rare where they were all included on Rare Replay. The reason being, other than history, is there's some of the few Spectrum games that are still actually quite fun, particularly Jetpack, which is, I would play Jetpack any time to enjoy myself. Attic Attack is a top-down, a top-down flick screen game that's all right. Saber Wolf is probably the simplest of them, which is just a sort of basic maze game with really beautiful. visuals that avoid the kind of general color clash thing but Jetpack is the one to go back to and it's a remake of it but honestly

the original is fine like it really doesn't have any it's very spectrum so you get that kind of experience and you get that feel but you also don't have to contend with the usual nonsense that you would normally have to put up with the clashing and the slowdown as such the slowdown that is there just makes the game

more playable frankly because otherwise it would be nearly impossible but it's a really simple single screen shooting slash collecting game that just gets progressively more difficult as you build this rocket and then sort of stock it with fuel. Elite coming out this year is wild.

It's not the sort of game I ever really got into because it's sort of too complex for my interests, but David Brabant programmer, I believe, I'm sure everyone knows what elite is because I believe they got an Asport as well. Or was that Europe only, I'm not sure. But essentially...

Elite did, yeah, get an ESPort, but only in Europe. Right, right. Okay, that makes sense. I can't even imagine how they managed to get that on a joypad, but I'll worry about that later. Yeah, they brought it over here on set of computers because eventually I played it and loved it. Yeah, I mean, it's a game with a long tale.

It's been going, I mean, we had elite, and I think it was Frontier or Frontiers and all the way up to Elite Dangerous. And I understand the basic premise is that you're sort of heading through. Heading through space, interacting with those ships, docking, buying things, trading things, that sort of thing. And it's not my sort of thing at all, because you don't jump on anything. So, I mean, maybe you can. Do you jump on things in Elite?

No, no. Elite is, you're spending pretty much all your time in a cockpit, cockpit shooting down wireframe spaceships and buying low and selling high. It's like Drug Wars in space with 3D graphics in 1984. It's another one of those games that felt impossible, like, for the time. Yeah, it was the big BBC Micah. pro game. Yes.

They didn't have too many on that thing that were really like, this is the reason to have this computer. But Elite was that. I guess one of the few that, one of the few BBC microgames that wasn't like an educational school's toll. But, I mean, the big one for me in 84 looking at the list is Jets at Willie, which is the most British game ever made, possibly. In terms of like...

From the cover art, really. Yeah. It's a sequel to Manic Minor, which is. probably one of my favourite specky games that was from the previous year programmed by Matthew Smith who was this kind of odd

program of a bug bite software who after he made this essentially disappeared off the map and became a recluse for a very, very long time and I think it was retrogamer magazine that tracked him down and he was just like

no, I wasn't a recluse, I just finished like I didn't buy it nothing to say but Jet said Willie what that is is a flick screen platform game in which you play as Manick Minor who's been demanded by his nagging wife, look, I didn't make it, that he's got to tidy up the house before he comes to bed.

Actually, I think it's his housekeeper, isn't it? Oh, it's his housekeeper, is it? His housekeeper demands that he clean up his house, which, you know, I kind of feel like, why have you hired this person if you're... Yeah, that's a really good point. Hassling you to do their job for them. I didn't spend too much time reading the cassette in late, I must be honest. There's some lore going on for you.

It might be like that Seinfeld episode where he hires the maid, and then eventually the relationship turns naughty, I don't know. Listen, you know, housekeepers, it's like anything. You have to clean up the house before the cleaners come to clean the house. So, you don't seem as sloppy. I don't understand that behavior. Why do people do that? Do what?

Clean that, no, clean up. Yeah, well, I don't understand that behavior either. But I don't understand cleaning up before the housekeeper comes over, cleaning the hotel room before the, the housekeeper comes in. I'm kind of with you on that one. Maybe it's like a social light. We want to think we're untidy, but not too untidy. Right.

And I guess it could also depend on the nature of the items you have laying about. The conversation is steered away from the topic, which is, can you see Willie on the cover of Jets that Willie? I need to know. You can. There is minor Willie with his head in a toilet, presumably having drank too much. He's vomiting, yeah. Yeah. But the actual game.

He's clutching a bottle, actually. Well, maybe he's going to vomit, and then he's going to pull back out, have a bit more, you know, there's a cycle going on. Speaking of cycle, getting back on topic a sec. Yeah, Miner Willy, JetZit Willie is this

unbelievably, unbearably, fastidiously difficult flip-screen platform. I think there's about 60 screens, and about three of them are bugs, so if you're going to them, you've just,

your game might just be ruined. That was a thing that was initially passed off as a feature because I remember it was in, like, Crash magazine, their statement was like, these rooms are dangerous,

rooms filled with poison gas so if you go in them there's a chance you might fail and then later it was like no actually we just we just made an mistake here are the pokes to type in to fix it so what is more spectrum than a game about a man vomiting while also being unwinnable without using cheats that have been issued data by the publisher i love it it's still fun even though it's impossible don't expect to finish it there's another bug where if you um basically when you enter a screen that's your spawn point if you die. So if you fall from other screen and land on an obstacle, you will just lose all your lives in quick succession

as you fall, respawn above the pit until you die. I think that inspired that one stage in Atlantis No Nozzo that was deliberately designed to do that. I think that inspired real-life murders probably this. It's really bad. But yeah, my advice

for the Jetsuit, Willie, if you haven't played it, start the game, try and find this screen called the Banyan tree, which is quite early on. And if you can beat it, prove it and I will give you £100. No, I won't do that. I'm not giving you my money.

I was playing it for research earlier this year. It had been a while and I just, I understand Brexit now. I mean, it's one of those games where I can get reasonably far into it because of the sheer level of Stockholm syndrome and patience

that I've got full games like this. It's why I'll play stuff like this and I'll just kind of go, what's everyone whinging about? It's fine. It's absolutely fine. the extent of abuse to which I will tolerate from a video game You wrote a book about this?

I do. I do, very big about this. All games are good available now. I like Jetset's really well enough. Like, when I... When I bought a Spectrum, this is one of the first games I loaded up. And, you know, it's... It is extremely difficult.

I will probably never beat it, but it's very charming. You know, it's got very cute... I don't know if cute's the best word for it, but it has very interesting graphics and enemies and the animation at the end when you lose with the boots. That's funny. It's pretty great. I can understand why a kid would think this is such a great game. Compared to Manic Minor, which, again, I do prefer,

which is a single-screen game with like 20 levels in a very beautifully designed game. And Jets at Willey is so sort of, I'm going to say sloppy by comparison, because we've gone from 20, like, condensed levels to 60 huge sprawling ones full of bugs. It's incredibly ambitious by comparison. I guess it's kind of like going from... This is the stupidest comparison ever, but I guess it's like going from Vice City to San Andreas

in terms of size. But ultimately, it's very difficult to recommend as an experience, like a sit-down and play this, you'll have fun kind of experience. And at Jetpack, though, you can play it today and you'll have a ball. It's great fun. Honestly, it's probably the best spectrum game

that I can think of. And I don't like saying that because I want to say it's bang as a match or something, but I want to say it's dizzy, but it's not. It's Jetpack. You sure it's not Horace Go skiing? Wow, that must have been difficult. It was difficult, thank you.

And Horace Coast singing, we don't talk about Horace Go skiing. All right, so going from one impossibly opaque game to another, Kevin, take us through the Tower of Duraga and Packland. What was going on with these Namco people? They made some innovative revolutionary games that hated us. Yes, so this was the year Namco published Packland and Tower of Duraga in Japan. Pac-Land did come out in the U.S. as well through Midway. And it is dramatically different from all of the previous Pac-Man games because it is no longer a maze game, but it's a platform game where Pac-Man is running along and he's, you know, dodging obstacles and jumping on platforms. And once he gets to the end of the, you know, screen and everything, he just turns around and runs right back because he's got to go back home.

And Druaga is sort of a maze game where you have enemies and you have different requirements for. for clearing each stage, but also for finding the objects that you need to get on to the next stage, which is remarkably opaque, and it does not give you any hints whatsoever. And both of these games became very influential for especially Japanese developers. Nintendo pulled a lot from both of these games, most obviously, with Pac-Land. For Super Mario Brothers, I know Shigeru Miyamoto. has talked about how the visual design of Super Mario Brothers was very much taken from Packland and it's blue skies and it's a colorful ground and trees and all that fun stuff.

Tower of Draaga though, boy, everybody in Japan was aping this. Took the wrong lessons. Yes. So this is sort of the origin of the hidden objects design mentality that you see in a lot of Famicom games. So, like, Super Mario is fairly straightforward with it. Like, here's some hidden blocks. You get them.

You get little bonuses. Zelda, they took from that, like, oh, we could just hide shops and eventually dungeons behind, you know, just random cliff walls and trees. Yeah, I like when they're hidden inside of a tree. And until you get the magic candle at the end, you can burn one tree per screen before you have to go off the screen and come back to reset the candle. there might be, you know, 50 trees on a single screen. Yeah, it's agonizing. And then you go from there, you get stuff like Milon's Secret Castle, which is just all hidden blocks. You have Super Zevius, also by Namco, which takes from Juaga the concept of you have to do some arbitrary secret thing to advance further in the game.

You have Takeshi's Challenge, which is sort of the ultimate expression of. this particular design mentality, you know, Castlevania 2's got weird little hidden secrets that are poorly explained, like, you know, dealing at the cliffside, which I guess that's more explanation than anything you get in Draga. But it's also known for having this sort of communal aspect to its play, because it became a huge hit for a reason, and that was just because, you know, people would share information, you know, both verbally and in some cases, is they'd have literal notebooks set up near the cabinets and they would just mark down what they'd figured out how to get through each screen.

I could understand why this got passed on for Western release with this in mind. But yeah, it's one of those games where Japanese folks have a lot of nostalgia and respect for it, despite it being kind of awful to play any time outside of its original context. It did get a couple of sequels that are a little more friendly and interesting. If that notebook thing traveled overseas, I don't think that they would be full of polite, like hints for the game. If it was Britain, you'd be like, okay, what do I do on this screen? Oh, it's a penis. What about the next screen?

Oh, that's a penis again. Just, it would be an awful scene. It would also be some boobs. There would be breasts, yes, granted. I mean, to be fair, I'm sure the Japanese notebooks were also full of penises and boobs. but they probably also had some useful information in there mixed in. And they were probably drawn more, you know, artfully, too. I mean, if they weren't, I'd feel a bit sort of despairing at humanity in a way.

Obviously, that's what you would do. Yeah, in an arcade maybe, you know, Japanese love hotel diaries are very rarely dirty. They're usually like all esoteric and mournful, but very rarely have any penises in them. Love hotel diaries. Yeah, a lot of love hotel rooms will have journals that people can write in. Really? Yeah. You have my attention. Yeah.

I've never heard of this. How many changed the subject of this podcast? Very much like the arcade. They're kind of like little confessionals people have written in. They're not nearly in everyone, but I've seen them in once before. I just got to get a plane ticket. Anyway, Draaga is part of one of those things that the only way to experience it properly was to be there one time.

And it just feeds into my manic desire to be reborn in Japan just in time to hit like peak 80s bubble Japan at the right age to soak in the cocaine and excess. Well, not the cocaine because that's illegal, but the excess. I don't think they really did a lot of cocaine there. No, not a lot. They were drinking

a lot. You got to give them that. Yeah, but it was an amazing time and an amazing place, and just a, this kind of time capsule bubble sounds, sounds rad. I wish it could have been there for it. I do love the communal, like the communal thing in games like this and in microcomputer games at this era. I don't

don't know how much the influence are sort of going back and forth. I mean, obviously drug is incredibly influential, but there were British games before this that were similarly sort of esoteric. So I think it's just a natural compulsion towards like conundrums and puzzles that

arose in people making and playing video games. It's just kind of cool. Yeah, it seemed to be something in the water in Japan at the time, because 1984 also saw it wasn't cocaine. It was probably just sake. Maybe the sake replaced the water. Anything is possible. It was a magical time.

So on the home computer front, you had games like Dragon Slayer and Hydelide and the Black Onyx, all of which drew from Western RPG traditions, but skewed them in different ways that were better suited to the Japanese audience. I mean, the Black Onyx was pretty much just wizardry, except with Japanese text, which, you know, that's a good step right there, playing a dense, complex, difficult RPG. that involves lots of mapping and lots of skill development. Like having that in your native language, that's really beneficial. But Dragon Slayer and Hydeleid, like the Tower of Draga, shifted the idea of RPGs from text and menus to a direct action style. Like Heidlid, you know, kind of predated the East series by introducing bump combat where literally you just watch. into a monster, and if you hit it with your sword and you're strong enough, you will kill the

monster. And if you don't do it right, then it will hurt you back. And that's really, really simplified. Really kind of a like a real-time version of what you saw in Rogue, which I know did make it over to Japan around this time. So that might have been one of the influences there as well. And then you had Dragon Slayer, which is a strange, strange game where you, you know, the, in the wizardry games and other games like that, a barge tail, et cetera, there's a town where the game begins. And you kind of use that town as the hub.

You go back to the town or, you know, whatever, to buy things, to rest at the inn, to level up and so forth. Dragon Slayer gives you the town in the form of your house, but you have the ability to pick up your house and carry it around with you as an item. You can pick up one item at a time, in the dungeon and carry it around with you.

So maybe you have like a cross that will, you know, scare monsters away. But then that means you can't pick up the tokens you need to take back to the house to gain experience and level up. So there's this kind of risk reward. Like sometimes you want to drag the house with you and keep it close to a place where there are a lot of tokens to collect. But you become vulnerable while you carry your house around. as you, well, you might.

So it just has this very strange, interesting design loop. It's very, and also, this is one of the games that introduced the opacity and unfriendliness of enemy leveling that you see in games like Saga or even Final Fantasy 8, where as you go through the dungeon, you can kill monsters. And, you know, it's a very simple kind of bump combat like hidellied. And if you're stronger than them, you'll kill them. Cool. But the thing is, when you kill a monster in the maze, it is replaced somewhere else in the maze by another monster. But that other monster, the replacement, is one tier of power stronger than the monster you kill. So the more monsters you kill, the more powerful the monsters you face become.

And it's not just like a, and every, you know, every monster is leveling up alongside you. It's literally a case of there is a set number. of monsters in this maze, and they will, you know, the weak enemies as you destroy them will just never return. Instead, they will be reborn as a monster at a higher tier of difficulty. So it kind of forces you to question, hey, should I stab this little skeleton guy? Because he might come back as a dragon, which is way deadlier. So it's a strange game, but interesting and also very influential, and continues sort of to run even now. as the Legends of Heroes, Trails games.

Not really, but Dragon Slayer was designed by, oh, shoot, what was his name? Yoshio Kia, that's it. And all of the games that he designed really had nothing to do with each other, but he called all of them Dragon Slayer something, like Zanadu, Romancea, Legacy of the Wizard, etc. And eventually they landed at Legend of Heroes, which was, I think, Dragon Slayer 6. and that's pretty much a standard turn-based RPG, and that's kind of where you've gone at this point. Anyway, we went from Strange to Fairly Standard, but, you know, at least we took the detour. Anyway, I do want to wrap up 1984 because it was supposed to be like a sidebar, and it's already like half the episode.

So fight, please stand for epics for us. Yeah, I just wanted to highlight two games that happen to come from Epics, that's E, P, Y, X, and I think they are both. originally made for Commodore 64, but appeared on many of the machines. One of them I've already mentioned in retrospects a few months ago, which was impossible mission, not mission impossible, impossible mission. Yeah, don't get them mixed up. It's a very cryptic sort of platformer adventure game, and as a kid, I simply did not understand it at all, but I was still fascinated by it, and I kept trying to play it over

and over again, and I really hope to, as an adult, I really want to try and tackle this with an actual manual and figure out how it works because I feel like I owe it to myself to finally close that loop and figure out what the hell this game was even about. What'd you play it on, Diamond? I was playing Commodore 64. Good, okay. That's the best version. Yeah, that's

the one to play. I really covered it the Master System version of this game when I was a kid, but I never did get it. I didn't get to play it till the remake on DS, I think, it was on DS. Same exact game, but like upgraded graphics, smoother graphics. You know, Diamond, there's actually a book called Impossible Mission the

official guide, which is like a making of plus walkthrough, so that might be worth getting. It seems quite obscure. One of this print-on-demand sort of jobs, but yeah, it's good. Really interesting game, and still really fun to play now, today, I would say. Yeah, I'm kind of

curious. I know there's a version for Switch, but I don't know if that's good or interesting at all. I just don't know there's something on there on Switch. I think it's one of those pretty much direct emulation jobs. I don't remember who does them, but they're all over like Steam and Switch. and they're really not satisfying at all. Honestly, if you can find it,

the DS one isn't that expensive, and I think it comes with the original on the cartridge, so it's worth looking for. Oh, that'll work. But it might be a pal-only thing, I don't know. No, I've got a copy. I found in the store here. So I grew up on the 7,800 version,

so not only was it inscrutable, it was literally impossible to beat. Oh, yeah, that's the one that bug, right? Yes, that has a bug where one of the objects you need to beat the game is hidden by, behind one of the computer terminals so you can't search for it. Oh, God.

So that's fun. But that's because the room is full of poison gas, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. I played that version. I played that version so much. And, like, I never got close to finishing it, but I would have been extremely mad if I did. I like that.

That's like the Simpsons of a Wizard of Death. The game is unfinished a bullet. It's because of poison gas. It's one of those, it's one of those PC games that they actually went to the trouble to make it a good tandy port and make it all pretty. and that one has good sound and good color, too. That's a fun one to play. Does it have the sample speech, like, really just iconic?

I try my best not to do. I have a PC speaker, so no, it doesn't sound awesome like the sit version does for the sample. As a matter of the guy falls, it kind of sounds like he's going like that. They try to do a human voice to the PC speaker, and it does not work. Anyway, the other epic scheme I wanted to mention is called Summer Games, because like I said, They were Olympics that year, and summer games is a really just fun collection of various Olympic events, all, you know, summer themed, obviously. And to me, even as a kid, I noticed that whatever technology they used to animate the little guy in both these games is basically the same sort of sprite. So you basically have this little guy running and jumping.

Oh, well, in this game, the little guy runs and jumps in, like, search just computers. But in this other game, he's running and jumping and, you know, using poles. and jumping over hurdles, and maybe, you know, I couldn't even tell you how many events are in the game off the top of my head, but I know there were a lot of them, and the computer version enabled us to not only we, like, my friends could come over and we could all play together, we could name our own characters,

and I think the game actually saved them to some degree. So if we set a record in a sport, you know, if we did something really, really good, we could play this game over and over again, we might not be able to break that record for many, many play sessions. But then if we did, the game would tell me, oh, you broke a record. Like, oh, we actually, we're getting better at this game.

So it also included, you know, sort of chip tuney versions of various national anthems. But they also included one for, like, a nation that they named it for themselves. So it was like an epics nation with an epics flag. And it's just some sort of weird little, you know, a tune. And I think we would use it sometimes just because that was weird to us. And it was like, oh, is that a real, you know, you know, we didn't even know if that was even a real country. But, you know, we figured it out. I feel like I'd be really remiss if I didn't mention that both these games are on the first Evercade

Commodore 64 cartridge, Summer Games and the Busball Mission. So that's one way to play them, I guess. I swear I don't work for Evercade and I'm not employed to provide me. All right. And with that, I think we can't, all right. And with that, I think we can, I think we can, put a bow on 1984. There were many other things that happened in 1984. I didn't even touch on Sega's kind of divestment from Gulf and Western or the fact that Capcom debuted and other cool stuff like that Commodore bought the Amiga. All kinds of wild stuff happened that would have knock-on effects and video gaming. But it's time to move ahead a decade to the year 1994, from 80s

cocaine excess to how would we define 94? 90s cocaine excess 90s. No, it was I think everyone was on like you know,

just sugared up with with Mountain Dew Code Red, not code red yet, Jolt Kola, I don't know. Nineties Jolly Ranch or excess. Was it was Surge out yet?

I remember surge. I believe so. This might have been the age of orbits also. Little little gummy balls in your sugary water. I guess it was basically Boba,

but bad. Anyway, so yeah, 1994, there is a list of things that people have added that happened in the year 1994 here in the notes, almost none of which have anything to do with video games. But go ahead and walk us through some of these things, folks. Well, it's funny, Jeremy, you mentioned sports that you actually like baseball. So 1994 was a really bad year to like baseball because they stopped playing baseball. Major League had a major strike, and in the August, they stopped playing, and they never started again for the rest of the year. So for the first time in 90 years, there was no World Series in 1994, which was really frustrating if you were a fan from New York or Montreal, because those two teams had a really great year, and especially Montreal, because shortly after that, they lost all their best players because that team was perpetually underfunded, and eventually the team would just move away from Montreal altogether.

but that was like the year they seemed like they were really going to be going somewhere and they just didn't get to do it, which is a real tragedy. Where is the Montreal team now? And I guess they are no longer the Expos. They became the Washington Nationals about 10, 15 years ago, I think. They have the logo that looks like Walgreens. That's great. A little bit.

I always think they're like the Walgreens team whenever I see them on TV. But in Washington, they did finally win the World Series, I want to say, in 2019. So, you know, they got there eventually. Yeah, I feel like Montreal made a huge mistake by naming their team the Expos. Like when you name your team for an event that happened decades, you know, at a certain time, decades later, it's like, well, here's our former glory. Here's our baseball team that reminds us of when we did something cool once. The Knoxville Whigs Fears. I'm so mad they moved to Washington and split my market.

The Orioles have never been the same since the nationals came back from Montreal. Oh, you took half the money from my team. This means that I can always count on one team to be doing pretty well. But speaking of tragedies, there was the rather unfortunate case of Los Angeles' most famous unsolved murder when two people were killed on the evening of June 12th, and we never figured out who did it. It's really, it's just unfortunate. Are they still looking for the murderer? I'm sure there's a hotline still accepting tips.

to this day. But in this case, the suspect happened to run away from the police, and this turned into a major media event that also overlapped with Game 5 of the NBA Finals. So while I was trying to watch the Knicks in the goddamn finals, NBC decided, you know what? We'd rather show, we'd rather show this van driving on the highway. It was really more of a sport utility vehicle. It's a Bronco. It's a Ford Bronco. But in any case, you're watching, they decided to put the car in the big picture mode. And then the finals, they're the little, the little picture and picture square in the corner. And I was just staring at like, I want to watch the basketball that actually matters. I don't care about the man in the Bronco. And boy, do the next two years really suck

for me not caring what the man of the Bronco? Because he's going to come all over the news pretty soon. We're talking about the famous co-star of the movie Airplane, correct? The naked gun. He was the naked gun. Oh, the naked gun. Okay. Or in Thuron. Paul Simpson, yes. I mean, my understanding is this is unsold in name only. Like, it was really obvious that he did that he did it. Like, he said he did. Like, he wrote a book about having done it.

This is a society where one is innocent until proven guilty. Even if he was, you know, even in civil court, he was, uh, he was held responsible for the deaths, I believe, but, uh, he is not criminally liable. He lost a lot of money in that, but. All right. Well, I guess I'll make that clear. If legally, he didn't do it, but he definitely did kill. It's weird.

Like the burden of proof, if I understand it correctly, I'm going to caveat this. Civil court has a lower burden of proof than criminal court. So in criminal court, they weren't able to prove that he was guilty of murder. But in civil court, he was successfully sued for wrongful death. Yes. Wrongful death? Yep. He had to give up a bunch of money to the families of the two victims.

That's wild. I don't think he actually did. I think they're still waiting for that money, actually. Yeah, I don't think I ever saw much of that. I'm really taken aback by this, this wrongful death. That suggests there is also a rightful death, which... Oh, there is. I'd like to be tried for that someday.

I mean, according to Joan on Pachi, there's blissful death. Yes, yes, you did it. You did it, and it was deserved. Go well done. It's a gift certificate. Yeah. For the record, though, this man was later convicted of a crime. So you can describe him today as a convicted felon, but it wasn't, he's not a convicted murderer.

Oh, yeah. Wasn't he, like, robbing someone or something? He was. Why? He robbed. He burglies. I think. That's wild.

Anyway. That's crazy old, O.J. Simpson. What's probably more interesting from that year is that that was the year that Pulp Fiction came out and won every prize, except the Academy War for Best Picture, because that went to Forrest Gump. And not the Shawshank Redemption. Also a very good movie. What a year for cinema?

What really ended up happening is, I would say, for the next, let's say, five to 15 years, every movie decided they wanted to sound like the Pulpiction characters, which just really didn't work out that well. But, you know, I think there's some good movies came out of this. Such as? This is not a movie podcast. I'm not going to go into him. That means you don't have any. Pulp fiction, too.

More pulpy. But hey, the English Channel Tunnel was finished this year. That's pretty cool. Was it 94 also the year of the fugitive? Oh, what's that? I don't know. 93. Well, I was still watching it in 94. The fugitive fever continues until 1934.

Yeah, 94 was actually kind of. of a ridiculously stocked year for best picture, which is why it's all the more infuriated that Forrest Gump won, because, like, that's the one you watch today and you're like, really, really? Yeah, that's exactly what happens. You know, the technology of interspacing Tom Hanks in with old footage that blew some minds, and it's so commonplace today that it's kind of fascinating. It's a controversial opinion, but I think Pulp Fiction is good.

That's just, I'm just, it's just me. I just, it's all I think. It's fine. Very good movie. Yeah, Forrest Gump is basically like if Billy Joel turned, we didn't start the fire into a movie. And I guess people really loved that. Anyway, Kevin, you were saying about the chunnel. That's not to be mistaken for a chunder.

Is that correct? Correct. This is the English Channel Tunnel between France and Britain. Yeah. You know, making it easy to travel between the mainland and the British Isles for, you know, the first time. Ever for buying booze. Little did they know what would happen 30 years later, or 20 years later. Yeah, I mean, I don't think anyone could have seen that one coming.

The Channel Tunnel is there so that Brits can drive over there, fill their cars with cigarettes and booze, and drive back. That's all it's for. Speaking of Brits, this was also the year, apparently, that the American version of the NHS fell apart. Yes, this was Bill Clinton's big thing that he was pushing for when he got elected, which was the U.S. Health Security Act. This was going to be, it was going, the goal was universal coverage. It's not quite set up how the NHS is. Yeah. It was basically like the governmental, fully subsidize health insurance for, you know,

people who are underemployed or unemployed or, you know, elderly, etc. And if you are working, we'll subsidize it for small businesses, but otherwise, you know, big companies, you have to pay 80% of these costs. etc. And it got lampooned to hell and back, much like the Affordable Care Act would be, you know, 15 years later because it was a very large bill and Republicans really didn't like it. Yeah, if there's anything that the GOP really loves, it's making sure that we do not give money to Americans to be healthy and instead spend that money on killing people in other countries. But there is a game twist on this because Maxis put out. Sim Health, which was sort of a

pseudo-simulation. It's not really a simulation of what it would, you know, what would be the outcomes of having different health systems. And that got them in some hot water with the political press

because they're like, oh, well, this is advocating for universal health care. And they're like, listen, it's not a real simulation. But yes, that's what it says. I have a friend who's favorite game is SemHealth, and I used to just, like, ridicule that constantly, because it's the game that looks the most like just work. Like, it actually just looks like your screen if you were at work. And that fascinates me. And now I respect the man for having that

as his favorite game. I've moved on. I've evolved. But, yeah. I think there's a great segue there, because while our government decided that we couldn't actually have health care, actually, they did decide that we needed to have more video game regulation, because the The hearings which began in late 1993, concluded in 1994, and by years end, I guess the government didn't set this up, but the government leaned on the video game industry to create their own board, which is the ESRB, which started in late 1994. So we had a lot of discussion in the halls of Congress about what video games were going to be too violent for children or adults or anyone to see at the time, which is just really frustrating when you go back and watch these hearings. and, you know, you see executives throwing each other under the bus, and in the end, it didn't really matter because all that happened was, you know, we put some letters in front of the boxes and like, okay, great, so now it's okay, but...

I have to prove that I'm 18 to see penises in Boulder's Gate. Okay. Yeah. And, you know, the video game market was still kind of like, it was still very soft. This was during the, you know, not quite a crash, but signed a kind of crash. It was a recession, a video game recession. Yes. That started in late 93, and it had a number of factors, like the technology behind video games was just changing really, really quickly. You know, 3D tech was coming into its own. Japan had a recession, but it also had a strong yen, so not only were companies there not making money internally, they weren't making money from foreign countries.

So this was a bad time. It kept going for another, like, year or two. Yeah, and it's funny you should say that because if you look at the list of new consoles that debuted in 1984, they're basically all Japan exclusive for now. Several of them will come to America later and do quite well. And some of them will not come anywhere and they will do nothing. But, you know, 1994 is the year that the Saturn and PlayStation launch in Japan, all late 94. And, you know, those are pretty big. One's really big.

But even the one that didn't do so well in America, pretty big console. and definitely, you know, big impact on the medium as a whole, I would say. And then the Pladia and the PCFX came out too, and nobody wanted those even in Japan. So, yes, 1994, as mentioned, this was a year that saw some movers and some shakers moving and shaking. This was kind of the very tail end of the early 90s. And the general confusion around what the hell video game technology should even be. In 1994, it started to finally shake out. So you have things like the 3DO and the CDI and the TurboCD and the Jaguar and so on and so forth, kind of shaking out.

And in the end, one console would emerge standing tall, the Sony PlayStation, and there would be lots of other also rounds. But really in 1994, you started to see those also rounds getting pruned, really, making way for a more sensible, I think, structure for the games industry. And whether, you know, you necessarily approve of how Sony has handled its dominance, the fact is things did become a lot saner and, you know, just kind of easier to follow once PlayStation. and sort of rose to become so prominent. So let's talk about some of the wild and woolly game systems debuting this year. Why don't we start with the best of the bunch? Kevin, tell us about the 32X. I love the 32X.

So this was something that U.S. retailers really wanted. It was sort of the baby of Sega of America. and the idea here for the 32X, which is an expansion for the Sega Genesis, is that it would provide a relatively low-cost upgrade for Genesis owners to quote-unquote catch up with how rapidly advancing video game technology had been moving. Circa 1994. There were several different variants of this that they sold at retail with different pack-in titles.

So there was one with Doom, there was one with Star Wars Arcade, there was one with Virtual Fighter, and there's one that had Doom and a fighting game, Cosmic Carnage, which I do quite like. And the reasoning I understand where they were coming from on this, the technology had shifted so much since the Genesis had come out, and since the Super NES had even come out. So wanting to fill that gap, I can see where you could make a financial argument. for it. And in the 32x hardware, like, it's extremely weird, but they put out some really, like, top-notch ports of Sega's arcade games.

You know, you had some of the recent 3D stuff, Star Wars Arcade, Virtua Racing, Virtual Fighter. They didn't look as good as the arcade, but they looked really good. You had top-notch ports of Afterburner and Space Harrier, which is how I discovered space area because my aunt had a 32x and I played a ton of it. And a lot of these, they actually tended to run better than the Saturn versions that came along like the following year, which to be is absolutely wild. But it never really had a lot of support from other developers because, you know,

it's a hardware expansion. That's splitting your market to like a really sad degree. a second hardware expansion. So the wild and cool thing about the 32X is that if you had a fully kidded out Sega Genesis, you had the Sega Genesis, you had the Sega CD, you had the 32X, which meant you had three different power adapters, three bricks plugged into your wall. And on top of that, the 32X, it didn't just take over the system. It was kind of like it sat on, not just physically on top of the system, but technically, it was kind of like an overlay for the Genesis.

So if you plug in a 32X and you don't have it hooked upright, you might see only the 32X graphics and not the Genesis graphics that are streaming in below. Or, you know, kind of like as an underlay. Right. You've got to have that bus cable plugged in, which is just like a weird cable sticking out of one and into the other, even though they're connected in another place too. This has made the 32X really difficult to emulate and to recreate with modern technology. And I don't know if the poly mega can do it. I don't think it can. But the only way, you know, besides an emulator on a PC that you can do it that I know of is to take the analog mega SG and plug in a 32X on top of it.

And then you have to run the 32X, like you have to run it through a digital analog. converter, or actually the genesis signal through the digital analog converter, which then runs through the 32X, which then can only output through analog video. You can't do an HDMI connection from that. So you have to upscale it if you want to use it on modern systems. It's possible to do it if you have the right cable and the DAC, which is like a $100 component. But it's just like, you know, you do all that and then what do you get for it? Calibri. Calibri is great.

Shadow Squadron's great. Calibri is not a great game. It's interesting. It's fun that they made a shooter out of a hummingbird. And, you know, bug, or not bug, tempo is really cute. But it's also not actually that good. That's the thing is, like, I've played some of these games just out of curiosity. Like, these look great.

I need to play them. Colibri, a hummingbird-based shooter, cool. And then you play them, and it's kind of like, oh, okay. I feel like the library, even though it's small, it does kind of err on the side of quality, and the quality, like, is there. I think that it's sort of undeniably impressive what you're looking at, and there's a lot of fascination tech-wise as well.

But when you have got your Sega CD, sorry, your Sega CD and your Dren Genesis and your 32X, and what you're able to do is play corpse killer, you ultimately have to be forced to concede it wasn't worth the money. But no, those arcade ports have really just, crazily impressive. Like, afterburner, I, I'm not an expert, but like, for me, that that is like, peak. It's, it's so close to the arcade, if not identical, that I couldn't believe it was running on something that was powered by a megadrive, you know?

And we got after burner and space harrier, but not outrun? That's kind of offensive to personally. That is odd, yeah. You should have bought more 32 Xs. I remember seeing Cosmic carnage on Gamesmaster when I was a kid, and it's not maybe the greatest game ever, but it's one of those things where it's like look how many colors we can fit on the screen. It's this incredibly garish kind of fighting game, but it's stuck in my head because it was just so striking visually. And I want to say,

well, I've got an outlet to talk about the 32X. I think the Doom port gets a lot of stick. It doesn't really deserve. I think that's quite impressive considering what they're working with. I mean, yes, the music sounds like farts, but like, just put a CD on. That was my first exposure to Doom was

the 32X port. I'm like, this game is so cool. And like, I I had nothing to compare it to because it was 1994. Like, who's got a PC that can run Doom, not that many people? I mean, there's probably more people than had a 32X, but. Up on my hill of privilege, I was looking down my nose at you plebeians and playing real Doom. I'll say for Cosmic Carnage, what makes it interesting to go back to is that, you know,

most fighting games, when you block and attack, there's like a time where you can't do anything. You just have to like hold that. But not in cosmic carnage. You can cancel that blockstone into anything, which, uh, makes for an extremely, like, aggressive and terrifying game. It's really fascinating. Also, the soundtrack is fantastic. Look it up. I mean, the real down of the 32x for me is the fact that, um, I apologize if anyone here enjoys it. The air quote Sonic game for it is just a lump of old shit. It's awful. It looks great, it sounds great, and the levels have nothing in them. They're just huge, empty, like, alpha look.

Like, it's so bad. Well, we all should have been tipped off that the game was called Sonic Ass. I mean, that was a cutout. I just want to point out that I think it's very interesting that, you know, because the 32x flopped so hard that Sega basically had to change all their plans, I think. But apparently at one point they did announce and even show a picture of a sort of, unified console that would just be like a hybrid 16-bit 32x like in one machine without the sort of blocking thing together was that the neptune that was the neptune yeah which i saw somebody started

making uh like PCBs for like you could make your own neptune yes yes kevin that's what i was getting too i the other day on youtube i saw a video about a guy who's like oh yeah and now you can just get this thing so you like you can you can go online you can get the parts you need and i you might need to like take apart your own genesis to do so but basically with 3D printers or whatever you can basically have your own version of that today if you're you know if you're willing to put in the time and invest in it and that's just that to me is impressive i like i like that yeah i underestimate Sega fans they will move the earth to make these things happen it was an era of frankincinnian hardware for sega a year you have this you have the

saturn which is just a duct tape together piece of weirdness and then they're like oh and also we'll cram the Genesis into a handheld. Like, what a weird, weird year for hardware design at Sega. Jared, what I have discovered in my video project experiences is that Sega was always just bodging things together and doing weird stuff with their hardware. Like, you know, from the fact that half of the library for the SG-1000 came on cards that could only be played with a card adapter. Yeah.

Or by plugging it into a Mark 3-Card. console, which got the colors wrong for all the software, there was, there was no like all in one SG 1000 proper experience for playing those card games. So yeah, they just, they just kind of made it up as they went along. You know, they were a, an arcade company first and foremost. So I think they were just like, well, you know, we put out new arcade hardware. The arcade owners are going to upgrade their systems. So clearly that works at home too, which is not the case. But, you know, you can kind of understand the philosophy there. But yes, the 32X was kind of undermined by the fact that the same year that it came out, the Sega Saturn launched in

Japan. So in the same month? Like, wasn't it all November, I think? Might have been. Yeah. I did not actually put down the exact dates. But it was, yeah, not the best thought out plan. Definitely the era of two sagas not communicating with each other very clearly and jockeying for international dominance. But interestingly, according to Wikipedia, the best-selling game system of 1994 was not, shockingly, the 32X, or the Genesis, or the Super NES, or the Jaguar. It was the Game Boy. Oh, I can believe that. And supposedly, it had hardware sales of 7.5 million units, even though this was kind of the Game Boy on decline. Like at this point, it was five years old and was woefully underpowered compared to anything in the market at this point.

Sega's Nomad was out now or was coming out soon after. Yeah, you just had all these other platforms, portable and consoles that just made Game Boy look kind of sad. But it just kept plugging away with some pretty good games. And everyone just sort of took it for granted. But I think part of that was buoyed by the fact that the Super Game Boy came out that that, that you. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And, you know, all of a sudden you could see what you were playing on your Game Boy.

And that was really cool. Like, wow, all of a sudden, I can actually identify the objects on screen, and I can see all the little bullets flying at me. And I don't have to worry about, you know, the bleed and the brightness and the lack of lighting. I can just play these games and enjoy them. And so that was actually where I first really got into Game Boy was, you know, I'd played the port. system, some, you know, that belonged to other people. But once I got my Super Game Boy, then all of a sudden I kind of went into, um, Game Boy cartridge acquisition mode, which, you know, meant going to used record shops and things like that and just finding whatever

cartridges I could for $15 or $20 and, you know, stuff like Metroid 2 and Final Fantasy legend and so forth, uh, Zelda. It was good times, good times. Um, so I, I guess if you're counting Super Game Boy as Game Boy hardware, I can understand. how it definitely, you know, topped the sales charts. Yeah, I can see, I mean, Super Game Boy, even taking that aside, there were quite a few. I mean, stuff like Donkey Kong Land, I think, was out this year. I could be wrong on that. No, Donkey Kong Land was not, but Donkey Kong Game Boy for the 94 game.

Yeah, yeah. Which actually, you signed up to talk about. Do you want to talk about that? I wouldn't mind if you're not, but I don't want to talk over the Super Game Boy, of course. I mean, I first played a Super Game Boy this year. first time in my life. And it left me with an unquenchable urge to get one because I was just, I enjoyed it so much. It was just such a pleasure to play Kirby on that thing. But yeah, Donkey Kong, what is sometimes called Donkey Kong 94, I think probably erroneously. I don't

want to say stuff that everyone listening to this already knows, but it's probably the best gameplay game. It's in the contention, I would say, as this remake or port of Donkey Kong that maybe initially seems kind of old hat but then just blows the roof off once you beat it, once you beat Donkey Kong for the first time. And of course, once you know all the tricks the game teaches you, when you do those initial stages,

you can just backflip your way up the girders and completely break it, which is very fun to do. But basically, Donkey Kong Game Boy is this single, well, not single screens, occasionally scrolling platform game, where you need to collect a key and then take it to the doorway to rescue. I don't know which princess it is Pauline in Donkey Kong.

She's a mayor, not a princess. Excuse me. Mayer S. She's an elected official as opposed to, you know, selected by the divine right of kings. She might be on city council at this point. We're not sure. I respect Pauline a little more than I respect, Peach, in that respect. But basically, what the game does that I find the most fascinating about it,

other than the level design being just, like, tremendous the whole way through. They're like a couple of frustrating levels, but you'd expect that from a game like this. what gets me is that you every few levels you'll get a little cutscene and every time you get that old cutscene that will teach you something new you can do in the game and you've got two buttons one of which is kind of

a nothing button and the D-pad and you've got probably like more moves than Mario 64 in there I mean in fact there's probably transferred over to Mario 64 some of these moves yeah they're probably about it but it means you can when you read play it

with all the skills that you've learned you can get better times, you can get better scores, you can really rinse the game, because you're not going to run out of lives because it's just kind of throwing them in your face the whole time, like almost any Nintendo game. But the fact that a game just keeps going and going and going, and going and going, and never stops being

fresh, like, ever. There is no point where you're just like, I'm kind of bored of this. I'm kind of over this now. You want to get to the end, and you want to get to that final boss, and when you do it, delivers, like, completely. It's probably the most complete experience I can think of on the game, Boy, others may disagree, and they have every right to do so.

But if someone said to you, this is the best Game Boy game, it would be difficult, I think, to argue with them in terms of what it offers. And, I mean, are there even any missteps? I can't think of a single one. You've got the back to your backup in there. It's perfect game. Yeah, it's the most ridiculously over-scoped game I can think of. So no one was asking for this. Like, the design team could have just made four Donkey Kong levels and shipped Donkey Kong on the Game Boy, and they would have been fine.

And they're like, no, we'll just make a hundred-level Mario puzzle platforming masterpiece that's infinitely replayable and no one knows. And then we'll just kind of hide it behind this box. It's definitely a game that it was designed around expectations and, you know, part of its brilliance is in subverting that. And so if you pick it up in 1994, you've seen lots of ports of NES and arcade games that are, just like, hey, here's a monochromatic version of, say, Pac-Man, you know? Like, it's just Pac-Man. So you assume, oh, okay, well, yeah, I love Donkey Kong, and I'm feeling a little nostalgic for it. I want to pick it up and play it. And so you pick it up and play it, and it just seems like Donkey Kong. And then it slowly reveals itself to be so much more. A big part of its

impact is just, you know, that initial expectation and or lack of expectation, really. And the fact that the more you play, the more it's like, oh, wait, hang on, here's more. Oh, actually, yes. Actually, there's even more than that. And it's just, it's very generous. It's a very generous game. I find it. I'm sorry.

I was going to say, do you think the way they approached Donkey Kong Jr. in this game, which is like the last time he's ever been relevant, informed how they decided to, you know, bring in Bowser Jr. in Mario Sunshine, because he fulfills sort of the same role. He's like the head lackey for Donkey Kong, and he's like a boss for certain parts of the game. I forgot him completely that he was in X. It's been a while since I played it. And as soon as you mentioned it, it's like, oh, yeah, that entire aspect of the game that I've completely forgotten about. I think a testament to this is that every time that they tried to recreate it, they completely screwed it up. I mean, Mario versus Donkey Kong is the closest thing to this, getting a remake next year on the Switch.

And, you know, it's fine, but it has none of the charm at all. of this because they just couldn't recreate it which I guess is why that series went off in such a different direction because they realized now we can't do this, we can't do the same thing we can't capture lightning in a bottle twice like this and you know there's never there's never been anything

as good as this before or since really in terms of Donkey Kong and I part of me wonders if it was kind of a flex of just like well yeah everyone's mad about this 3D rendered Donkey Kong country stuff but this is a real Donkey Kong game I don't know I doubt I mean it's better than Donkey Kong country

And I loved on the country, man. move on to something completely different. Yeah, right. Let's move into something completely different. Diamond, what the hell is Dr. Hauser? Is that, like, Doogie? No, it's, what's his name from Brian Lurie? I wouldn't be surprised if they took some inspiration there, but no, Dr. Hauser, to me, is a fascinating creation. It actually debuted on the 3DO, and it's a fully 3D, I guess, prototypical survival horror game. It's kind of more of an adventure game. It's kind of more of an adventure game. game, but it's like, you're in a house and you're exploring the space and you're looking for Dr. Houser. You don't know where he is. And, you know, you can get killed. It's not really like monsters, but there are hazards that can kill you. And it's all running in full 3D on a console, which is like, this is pretty early for that. I think it comes out in the spring of 94, so like even before the PlayStation or Saturday exists. And yeah, of course, if you look at it today, you know, the frame rate is atrocious and the graphics are

really, really simplistic, but it's still a really interesting game to look at, and, you know, if you can get it running, I would say, give it or give it a try. I know it has different camera angles you can, you can cycle through, and the house is full of, you know, mysteries, and there's, it's, it's, it's, I'm sure someone has created an English patch for it by now.

There, there must be English patch right now. There is. It's too, yeah, it's too, yeah, it's too similar to not be patched by this point, but, um, or you can watch people like, I know Retro Palace has played it, but, yeah, it's the kind of game that, I never heard of until many years, many years later. And then I think because it was on 3DO, it didn't do so great.

But I think anyone who played it in Japan, who also had, you know, was involved in making games, they all looked at us and said, oh, wow, we can do this. And I think they really took this as sort of a challenge. Oh, we can do more from this. And I don't know how directly it might have impacted Resident Evil. I think it might have made them think about doing all 3D and then decided, oh, no, we can't do that yet. But in any case, you can certainly see some crossover potential there, or at least with D. D also kind of has a lot. You know, you're walking around a house.

But, yeah, it's not the can of game I can recommend playing very easily because it's hard to actually acquire. But it is, to me, is fascinating. And I love watching people play it and try and figure it out. Interesting. That doesn't sound like my jam at all, but I'm pretty interesting. That excite you. Okay, so, Jared, tell us about Pac-Man 2. That was the game from 1994 that you said, I want to talk about this.

Yeah, yeah. I was going to talk about it, I knew how it Coase, but I wasn't there for it in 94. That came much later. So, Pac-Man 94 was, boy, that was a surprise. Yeah. You get Pac-Man 2, and you're expecting maybe something Pac-Mani-ish or maybe Pac-Land-ish. What you don't expect is the prequel to The Last Guardian. a game about yelling at your dog

and it not doing what you want. Pac-Man 2 is a side-scrolling, beautifully animated adventure game where you don't have direct control of Pac-Man, but you have to make him do things anyway. And you accomplish this by prodding him with a slingshot. You shoot him, you shoot things on the screen

to try to draw his attention to them. You shoot him when you're mad at him. And depending on the mood and the events that have triggered in the game, the Pac-Man's entity in one moment, he may or may not do what you want and you solve puzzles with them. It's kind of like a LucasArts game with all like the, really, it's a very beautiful game. All the gorgeous, gorgeous layered backgrounds and foregrounds and really pretty animated characters and lavish color palette, But especially for low resolution like you have on a console, it's really impressive compared to what you have on PC. But taking that and then adding an extra layer of frustration to the already esoteric format.

It is the kind of game that I play, and I'm like, what the fuck were they thinking? Just why does this exist? But it's not in the, boy, I never want to play this way. It's in the, man, I can't wait to see what. happens next way because it's so bizarre, I just want to keep going. And Pac-Man has so weird stuff go on during his day, man. Like, Pac-Man has some strange days. His day-to-day life and the tasks he accomplishes when he goes out from his house before he comes back to his little family, I don't know if that's Ms. Pac-Man or Pac-Mom or what that's hanging out at home there. I know they've

like retcon that, but Pac-Man 2, a game worth experiencing today, if you never half because it's so weird. I love this game. It was on it was on Wii U, I think, virtual console, and that's the last time it was officially available. But I discovered this one going through a pack of snowsrums when I was a kid. And I'm like, oh, Pac-Man,

as you say, I was like, oh, Pac-Man too, this will be a maze game. And you're like, huh? Why am I playing, like, dogs crossed with lemmings crossed with like Monkey Island? What the hell's going on? I absolutely loved this, and I got obsessed with it because it's like you really need finish it. You know, you want to know all the mad shit that's going to happen next. You want to

see Pac-Man's mood change and his absolutely demented expressions that he pulls when he's really happy or when he's really sad. They're like, reanimate his whole walk cycle so he's like depressed or he's like jovily walking along with this huge mouth, like big pack smiley mouth. And they do integrate sort of the old games in. I think there's some arcade machines you can play, like put versions of like some of the old games on. And there is some, oh yeah, he turned into like super pacman and he can like fly around and eat the ghost and so if you shoot a power pill at him i'd forgotten all about that and yeah the whole thing is just bonkers like you have to play it it's so bizarre that they called this pacman too i mean pacman is in a weird space at this time but

still stew it's funny you mentioned the expressions because this is also the game that you know the pacman too which is which is only the english title by the way in japan it's called hello pacman but you know the the international box art also has this sort of unhinded drawing of Pac-Man on a hang glider and he's making this face which is sort of I guess it's the face it's kind of like a road like the road warrior face or Matt Max face

before the people like hit the car and like you know explode it's like he's terrified of what's happening to him it makes me wonder if maybe there was some Western sort of written a Stimpy slash animaniacs that kind of thing sort of influence the more bigger takes the bigger kind of cartoons like that

it does it does strike me of something that like they looked at Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry and pulled from that. It's like you didn't look at the Hanna-Barbara Pac-Man cartoon. Yeah, I loved this game. I rented it all the time. It's so good. All right. So I need to push us on through so we can actually finish this episode.

So, Kevin, you have two items that you've selected. Pick one and tell us about it, which is it going to B. What stands out the most to you in the year 1994? Let's get interesting. We'll talk about the Cotton games here. Cotton, 100% for the Super Famicom and Panorama Cotton for the Mega Drive. These were both sequels to the arcade game Cotton, you know, Fantasy Night Cotton. I forget what the full...

Fantastic Night Dreams. Fantastic Night Dreams, Cotton. Yes, thank you. which was a really weird, cute-style shooter where you're like a little witch on a broom and you're hanging out with fairies and you're shooting enemies to try and collect magical candies. The fairies need them for something,

and she just wants to eat them. So you're playing, you know, not quite a villain, but you're like a reluctant hero that you're only doing this for your own game. So Cotton was fairly popular. They ported it to the PC engine CD. Eventually, it got ports to, like, the PlayStation and the NeoGeo Pocket. But at this point, they were looking to port it to the Super Famicom.

And early in production, they realized, hey, we could just do something a little different. So this is sort of like a remix, Cotton 100% of the original. So, like, the stages are more colorful, and they've shifted things around. So it's a new experience. But it plays more or less the same. So if you're interested in cotton, you can try that one out. And Panorama Cotton, they took a completely different approach. This is like a space harrier game.

So you're behind Cotton and you're sort of flying around to this rail shooter space dealing with enemies. She's also after Candy again in this one, as is her way. But this is really impressive. This is probably the best, like, Space Harrier style game short of the 32-Ex. or like the X-68,000. It's really cool. It's exceptionally rare, although I believe both of these have had digital reissues or are about to have digital

reissues. They're on Switch. I think they're Rattelika, so they're very bare-bones, courts, but they are there, so that's nice. They're very cool. I highly recommend checking them out. Yeah, Panorama Cotton for me is one of those things where you look at it and you're just like, I can't believe this is running on the hardware that it's running on.

It's insane how impressive it is. It's ridiculous. I was deeply impressed the first time I tried this out because I'd heard about it for years before I tried it. And I'm like, yeah, that might be good. Space Area 2 kind of sucked, but holy crap. I bought it just before it got expensive, played it a great deal, and then sold it at exactly the right, or wrong moment. Pardon me. That was a story that started happy and ended sad.

Yeah. So we really are running out of time. So rather than me tell you about Super Metroid or the Lunar Games again, Lunar Eternal Blue, I'm going to just kind of give a rundown of some of the games, the notable games of 1994, so you can see how overloaded this year was with great games. You had Wario's Woods and Adventure Island 4, which were the final NES and Famicom games, ever published legitimately under Nintendo license. There were two Donkey Kong games after years of silence.

there were how many is this for Sonic game Sonic 3, Sonic 3 and Knuckles, Sonic 3 and Sonic Triple Trouble 3 and Nucles is the only one that really matters there Earthbound gym Earthworm Jim Someone please make that crossover for me Final Fantasy 6 aka Final Fantasy 3

My God Era the Acrobat Two Disapping sequel Not as good as the first one. You could read all about it in Stuart's book. All right. All right is good on sale now.

Alien versus Predator, there's two of those, actually. There's the arcade one and the console one, which are both totally different games. The console one is the Jaguarer first person game, right? Correct. That was really huge back in the day, yeah. The arcade one is the Capcom brawler where you get to play as Arnold Schwarzenegger and not appearing in the movie, Lynn Kurosawa. Also takes out.

Yes. She's cool, but she's not in the movie. I guess they couldn't get it. Sigourney Weaver's likeness in there, a license. If you want to play that one at home, you've got to buy a big Capcom logo with some buttons on it. Or not. Breath of Fire 2, Bubsy 2. Castlevania Bloodlines, Konami finally giving Genesis fans a little love.

And Contra Hardcore also, a lot of love, actually. A couple of really badass games there. And there's tournament fighters, Team and T. So that's their Led Zeppelin moment for Genesis, a whole lot of love. Demons Crest Clockwork Night over on Saturn Yeah Geograph Seal on the X68,000

The precursor to jump and flash Cosumi Ninja Oh Kirby's dream course Yeah still play that to this day Or multiplayer with friends I love that game to death The best golf game actually

Second best after NES open tournament But you know Dream on Kingsfield The prequel to Eldon Ring or whatever, Elder Scrolls. Yeah, whatever. One of those from soft games.

Live Alive recently remade for Nintendo Switch and other systems, I think. Very well. Very well, really. Delightful game. So many Mega Man's. There's Mega Man 5 with a V because it's for Game Boy. X2 with an, whoa, I just got balloons on Zoom. That was, if you give the victory, the V,

sends up balloons on Zoom. That's really weird. You can't see that. Are we all trying it now? Oh, there we go. This is completely useless for anyone listening to this episode. Stupid technology. I think it only works if I'm going to miss Jeremy.

Mega man V. Mega man X2. But that's not 10-2. It's X2. It's very confusing. Some Roman numerals, some not. Mega Man soccer. And over thrown a bone to the genesis.

as fans, Wiley Wars. Only on Sega Channel. Yes, the ignition factor for those really expensive super NES games that no one bought. Is that like a firefighting game? That sounds awesome. It is, yes. Magic carpet. Yes, magic carpet.

The song that Oh, geez. Steppenwolf? Yes. I was going to make a joke about... Is that from Cochran watching a spaceship? Yes, thank you. God, I couldn't remember his name.

I wanted to say Jeffries, but no, it's the other one. We're a couple of years out from that. Yep. Got to get through the Post-Atomic Quora first. Mutant League hockey, speaking of Post-Atomic War, pitfall of Mayan Adventure. We recently discussed this on an episode, so no need to belabor the point. Pocky and Rocky 2, maybe the most expensive game on this list, and it's a list that has earthbound on it. That's telling us something about Pocky and Rocky 2.

It's a list that has Pulse Man on it. Pulse Man. Is that also expensive now? Oh, yeah. Oh, okay. Well, Shaq Fu, not expensive. Streets of Rage 3, Shin-Magame Tensei 2. Super 3D Noah's Ark for those of you who want Doom at home.

That's Wolfenside at home. Super. That's Wolfenside, right. Okay, we have Wolfenstein at home. Super Punchout. Tempest 2000. Jeff Minter finally discovering how to drop acid and share the experience with the world. Toki-Mecchi Memorial.

Umihara Kawasee. Uniracers, the game that was banned by Pixar for apparently looking like Lampo the Lamp or whatever. I hate Pixar now. Yeah, they're the worst. They used to be really cool, not anymore.

Wario Land for Game Boy. That's why the Game Boy was the best-selling game of the system of the year. It had Wario Land. And Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel. Genuinely good game and I will stand for it any day. Yeah, it's just the themes.

The themes are really, yeah. A kamikaze squirrel, not great, is it? No, actually, the opposite of great. There's a degree to which it could be described as horrifically racist. Ah, yes, that's the one. Anyway, so that was the console space. There was a lot happening in arcades, and we're just going to blast past it

because most of it is kind of like the final gasp of fighting games before they started to, I don't know. Like the next year you got Killer Instinct and that was kind of the end of the show. The Out Foxy next year.

It was. But that was more of a Smash Brothers kind of thing. I know, but that's what was a great. A proper fighting game. Oh, I played so much at Foxy's. Here are all the fighting games

that I cared to write down, not all of them, just the ones I cared to write down. Tekken, which is actually, that's very important. Tekken, it's, you know,

it's people like it for some reason. Killer Instinct. Oh, I guess that was this year. So that's, that's the end. Okay. King of Fighters 94. So in some ways, the beginning, it's the beginning and the end all in one. Fight, do you want to tell us why King of Fighter's 94 is the beginning of all things good,

like the reason to exist in the planet? Well, I just think it's, you know, we're living today in a media-saturated environment where everyone, you know, they're willing to give up a testicle to get a shared universe of characters together. I actually am not. I am, but not what of mine. These do not speak for me. And, you know, 30 years ago, S&K said, okay, well, we have these, we have these Fatal Fury games, these are successful, we have Art of Fighting, which, you know, some people love, and we've also been making video games for about 15 years for this point. What if we, what if we put them all together?

What if we decide it's all canon? It's all happening. And they make this game, King 594, which is not only this sort of amazing conglomeration of various ideas they've had around the office, but also some really interesting original characters and also the fact that for the next 10 years basically they commit to making a new version every year every year they make it like if they call King for 94 because guess what this will be 95 and 96 and 97 98

they're going and only when the company basically dies only when the company dies do they say you know what maybe we have to slow down a little bit and even then it took him a couple of years yeah they kept I mean yeah 2000 yeah 2003 they kept the annual They kept doing annual stuff. And then after that, like, okay, let's just do 11, I guess. Yeah.

But it's an amazing game. And certainly, if you were into fighting into the time, it was kind of the preview because honestly, you know, we play all this. It's like, oh, geez. So when are these characters going to fight the Street Fighter characters? And that would take a few more years. But still, it was kind of like, it was a big, it was a big turning point. We realized, oh, geez, anything is possible.

You know, black can be white. cats can love dogs. It's all possible in the future. So that was the beginning of King of Fighters. But that wasn't all that S&K had for the world. Kevin, tell us about some show two, two, two, two. Yeah. So 1994, towards the end of the year, S&K put together Samurai Showdown 2, which was the sequel to the previous year's Samurai Showdown. So this was a huge hit for S&K. I think this might have been their most successful fighting game in the United States. It's certainly the one that I've come across people who were around at the time. It's the one they remember best out of all of these that they put out. Well, aside stylistically, so, like it drew like a moth to the flame. The art and the smoothness didn't look like other fighting games. Even Sam Bishow 1 didn't have this sense of contrast, I think, to the character and background art.

I remember at the time thinking it was the best-looking video game in arcades. Keep going. But they, yeah, I totally like, I want to confirm, like, I could not stay away from this machine. It's so moody. It's incredible. Like, all of these stages, and not all of them have, like, these full soundtracks. Some of them just have, like, very, like, understated, you know, there's a couple instruments. There might be someone chanting, or you might just, like, hear the wind on top of that.

I remember, you know, especially Genjaro's stage. Oh, yeah, this is where they introduced Gengro, who was sort of the rival character for the rest of the series. They introduced Seeger in this one who didn't really show up again, but he was really cool. Yeah, I'll go ahead, Diamond. I just, you know, Samurai Showdown was a really strong debut, and it had a lot of great things going for it, but they really cranked out an incredible expansion, which also, for the record, in, in Japanese, this is not called two. It's a specific called Shin Samurai Showdown, or Samurai Spirits, of course. But it's sort of expanding that game and, you know, they replace one character with another character and they

create a bunch of new characters. And they really go all out. Like, okay, what the hell can we put in this thing? What if we make a giant German man who's just got a big glove? You know what I mean? Like, this, you know, the series, the first game is mostly swords. It's mostly swords. You know, there's some other weapons are there, but it's mostly about people with swords, mostly men, some women. And, but Simmerichshund, too, is like, no, no, no, we got, we got staves, we've got spears, we got clubs, we got a big rock, and this guy, he just got a big old glove, but, like, he can load a, he can load a bullet into it and, like, flick you in the face with, like, it doesn't make any sense, but oh, my God, that I love playing Seeger.

I love it. He can grab you, he can throw you, he can just punch shoot you. It's, oh, geez. Yeah, I was, I was just trying to get edgy in anime at this point, and this fulfilled all my dreams and wishes. Like, it felt like every videotape that I borrowed from someone that I probably shouldn't have been watching at that age and just the marvelous sense of ultraviolence and style and blood. I do think this was the first great weapons fighter. I can't think of another. And it was also deeply intuitive. You didn't have to be good at fighting games to feel like you were accomplishing something in Sammy Show 2 unless you were playing somebody who was really good. And that was nice, too. It was very, very approachable. It had the honor. I know it was popular.

enough that it transcended my arcade and it became the one machine at the Pizza Hut. And that was always in my town a sign that a game was really popular. If it was popular enough that the Pizza Hut kept it, then you knew people were playing it. And there were always people gathered around reading that ridiculous mistranslated intro. Yeah. One of the more infamous S&K local editions for sure. Yeah, I remember like around 2002, a friend of mine, he was running tournaments. and the arcade he was running them at had a NeoGeo machine and he asked them like hey can I pop in like Samurai Showdown 2 and KOF 98 for my event because I have the MVS cards and they're like sure whatever do that and they were so popular like having them back in there that the arcade asked him if they could just keep them in there for like I don't know they were there for like six months or so yeah so yeah they had long legs these games especially Sam Show too we were so washed over with with fighting games

after Straight Fighter 2, that I think maybe in retrospect, sometimes we forget that a few of them really did stand out, not just for fighting game people, but the narrative is they all became about fighting game people, and it sort of became its own niche market. But there was a period where there were a few standouts that everybody enjoyed. And I do think that this is one of those few rare games

that was just everybody who liked video games played this if they went to an arcade. So, Jared, I can't believe you totally dissed Weapon Lord like that. the first good weapon-based fighting game. I said first good, great weapon-based fighting game. You're correct. There were lots and lots of other fighting games in 1994. I think I mentioned tech and killer instinct.

There was primal rage. Yes. Better than you think. Didn't that have like a giant monkey that peed on you as a killing move? That's exactly what I was going to mention. Yeah, okay. If nothing else, it has a big monkey that pisses asses, which is perfect. Stupid fucking video game.

If we're talking about fighting games, you know, Mortal Kombat 2 came out at the end of 93, so we were definitely still playing a lot of Moral Kombat 2 in 1984, and we were also seeing a lot of Mortal Kombat clones at this point, and that was, Primal Rage is definitely one of the more interesting takes on the Mortal Kombat formula, because instead of photographed actors, they're basically little stop motion dinosaurs and giant apes, but it's all violent and it's all gory, and there's there are finishing moves, and the control system, like the, like the input, puts you actually do to moves is really bizarre. It's like, instead of doing a joystick motion and pushing a button, you're like, you're holding a button and then doing joystick motions. It really doesn't really make sense, but we certainly played a lot of it at the time. And it's like, I know there was a sequel at some point, and then the whole thing kind of disappeared. But for a while there, it seemed like it was going to be, it was going to be something bigger than it turned out to be. Yeah, the sequel didn't. I was going to say the sequel didn't actually even come out, but there is Prototype Cabinet at the Galloping Ghost.

You can check it out. All right, there it was. I'll add Primal Rage is like probably the only game on this list that is not like emulated very well because it had some weird security code that has not yet been cracked. So really the only way to experience it properly is the arcade cabinet as it turns out. So also in 1994, Capcom continued to as the joke goes, prove their inability to counter the number three. they think that after two you get super turbo and X. No, X is way after two. That's that's Roman numeral 10. We already went through this with Mega Man. But to their credit, Capcom was doing a lot of other really cool stuff at the time, including Saturday Night Slammasters 2. Yes. Cyberbots, which involves robots and stuff. That's wild. Darkstalkers, the night warriors. And finally, going just for, the popular appeal of the era X-Men, Children of the

Adam, which would eventually blossom into Marvel versus Capcom. I can't believe all of these were the same year. That's crazy. Yes. They kind of overdid it, I think. And then you even had weird stuff like aggressors of dark

combat where the developer ADK said, what does our name stand for? It's aggressors of dark combat. But they didn't know until Mortal Kombat came out and they realized oh, combat is spelled with the And also Golden Axe the Duel, Sega's last gasp for relevance for that franchise until many years later. There's a weapon fighter, Jeremy.

They said, yeah, they were like, well, what if Golden Axe were a fighting game? And no one liked this, as the caption says. So that was the fighting, that was the fighting aspect of the arcade. But also in arcades, you had all kinds of other stuff happening. Some were like holdovers from the olden times, like my personal favorite elevator action too, which feels very much like a throwback even in 1994, but it's so good. Yeah, it's awesome. You had windjammers, the famous basically Ultimate Frisbee video game. You had Goku Jo Porodias.

That's the chatting. You think that's chatting parodias. You had, you know, you still had some of those pre-fighting game walk-and-punch type games. but elevated, literally, with a Tower of Doom, Dungeons and Dragons. Capcom said, what if we put like a proper leveling system and consistency in here? This is the essay, the essay that leads to Shadow Over Mysterio, which is the real masterpiece. Like, this is the, this is laying the groundwork for one of the great all-time brawlers. So I have to pop out, actually.

Yeah. Yeah. Kevin, I know you have to take off. Why don't you give us your bona fides so people can. find you on the internet. And we will continue without you. So you can find me online at Ubersaurus on Twitter and Blue Sky. And you can find my work under Atari Archive on YouTube and in a book that is available now. And thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us. And I hope everything goes well for you. We'll get you next time you're on the show by definition.

Yeah, all the best, Kevin. Bye, Kevin. All right, so also some holdovers from the olden times. You had Jurassic Park, the last great, actually maybe the last super-scaler game, just absolutely bonkers. Super cool. You had another brawler type game with Alien versus Predator, which I mentioned before. You had a few classic sprite-based top-down shooters like Gunbird and Ryden DX. Then you had the cool innovation of polygons and a racing game with, let's see, what was there? Sigurrally, Cruising USA, Daytona USA, a lot of America racing all in polygons. At the same time, you had puzzle bobble, which feels like a game that is much, much older. But this is just the beginning of its reign, kind of like King of Fighters 94. You'd think, oh, this is from a time long before that.

But it wasn't. It was from here, and it just kept going. That NeoGeo, what a wild piece of hardware. Prequilt is snood. Oh, yes. Oh, God, fucking snate. Sorry, that's what it was. And then you had Blombie car.

Blombie car. Blombie car. I don't know what that is, but it came out in 94. No, it's like an isometric racing game. It looks really, really dated for 1994, but it's called Blombie Car. So I'm going to give it a pass regardless. Yeah, fair. Sounds like a spectrum game, to be honest.

It does, yes. It looks a little better than a spectrum game, not a lot. Anyway, so arcades was, they were kind of a transitional state. You were either playing fighting games or you were playing weird holdovers or you were dipping your toes into polygons. Meanwhile, on computers, actually, you know, most of these games weren't even polygon based yet, a tiefighter, basically. That was it.

Everything else was still kind of 2.5D and so on and so forth. So let's talk about cool stuff that happened on home computers. Mostly you had Doom clones, just as they weren't first person shooters yet, just as the arcade was heavily dominated by fighting games, the home computer gaming scene was heavily dominated by Doom-alikes. So, uh,

the game that was most like Doom was in fact, Doom 2. Stuart, tell us about it. Well, I talked about this with Diamond and David Craddock on the Doom Clones episode relatively recently, so I'll keep it as brief as I can. But for me, Doom 2 is like, one of those games where it's like, this is really, really good and also

it's not as good as the game it was inspired. fired by it because it's just a much more open, much bigger stages, and there's something about it that to me feels less focused, like just kind of pushed out. But at the same time, it's got the Super Shotgun, it's got a much bigger best area with some really, really cool monsters. And, you know, the level design is pretty great. It's just, it leans a little bit more on, like, engine tricks that I think the original game does in a way that sometimes makes it feel like you just need to keep quick saving, because you're moving over, like, for example, very thin, pits over huge like very thin uh balanced beams over like toxic pits that just kill you and weird

little tricks and traps they just like the level that's actually named tricks and traps or it's like look what we can look what we can do with this engine now and you know it's great um it's not as pure but it's still incredible um and it pretty much deserves the acclaim that it gets yeah i'm just one of those purists who make sure that every time it comes up i say well, that's not as good as Doom. It's a great game. But you know, what was as good as Doom was System Shock. Jared Pettie, tell us about it.

Yeah, System Shock, which is a Doom clone in probably the farthest from all of these from actually being like Doom. It's got more in common in a lot of ways, I think, it's more half-life zero than Doom, too. System Shock has the trappings of a first-person shooter and some of the mechanics, but it also functions. very much like an adventure game or an RPG. It's got a lot of Ultima underworld vibe and its DNA. It is a story-driven, environment-interaction-driven, spooky space shooter. System Shock sets, of course, the ground for much more frightening games to come in the wonderfully enigmatic System Shock 2 and in Biocococ, et cetera, and all the other shocks to come.

But even on its own, it's a small, contained game with a great, Villain, Shodan is genuinely frightening, a little disconcerting. The very, I think this is one of the first video game examples of kind of a U versus Glados thing going on, which is a lot of later games draw from the evil AI on one end, you on the other in a lonely place. System Shock was recently remade and by Nightdive and cannot recommend it enough. This is a game that holds up far, far better than you imagine. we say that on Retronauts a lot, speaking to a retro audience. But System Shock, I would

recommend to people who like video games in general, whether they listen to this show or not. The remake really is worth checking out. Can I just note real quick that there's also the System Shock remaster that they put out, which if you're one of the more sort of pure experience, it's like that, but with some of the nasty, grubier edges kind of filed off, so it plays a bit more contemporary while not losing any of the functionality or visuals. But the remake is amazing, so that is an option. Yeah, absolutely. And then directly in between Doom 2 and System Shock, you have Marathon, the actual shooter,

not the multiplayer extraction-based shooter. It's never coming out. That may or may not come out at some point in the future. Anyway, the original Marathon was a Macintosh exclusive until the Bondi Pippin Atmark came along, and we got Super Marathon that may or may not actually have come out as a retail product, Marathon was a, it's a doom-style shooter, but, you know, added some technological innovations to it, but also very heavily story-focused, which also involved an artificial intelligence that wanted to kill you and do stuff, bad stuff. But eventually the AI decides that I don't want to kill you. I actually want you to be my little puppet running around doing stuff for me. And so the story goes in some interesting directions. There are friendly and hostile NPCs. There are, you know, kind of like in Doom, you have sort of the different race systems where certain enemies will turn against each other.

You have cool weapons. This was, I believe, the game that invented grenade jumping, where you could fire a grenade at your feet and it would explosively propel you upward so you could reach places you weren't supposed to go. It was really big on land-based multiplayer. had a lot of interesting modes which carried on through into games like Halo and just was generally pretty cool a good quality shooter that Mac users were pretty insufferable about I can say that as someone who was a Mac user and was probably insufferable about it I think they had the right to be honestly it was that good it was very very impressive

as the Inclones guy I mean I think Marathon and its sequels are phenomenal games truly top of their class, but that was pretty much all there was on Mac. So, you know, it's a little bit like the Chihuahua barking a bit too loud to try to scare off the big dogs. I want to say we had an LC3 in our high school that somebody had put marathon on. I had an LC3, and that was not a great experience. Yeah, but it was a blessing compared to, you know, work at school. That's true.

You get that little 200 by 150 pixel windows. surrounded by a bunch of stuff. Yeah, good times. Anyway, marathon. Very cool. So there were some games on PCs that did not want to be Doom. And there were some pretty major franchises that kicked off here. Warcraft, Xcom.

Okay, those are the only two that kicked off. Oh, no, Elder Scrolls Arena. Wow. So some pretty big, long-running franchises got their beginning. on PC in 1994. And you also had continuations of other series, including both Tie Fighter,

X-Wing, and Wing Commander 3, the sequel to Wing Commander 2. Weirdly, Mark Hamill, not in the Thai fighter game, but in Win Commander 3. Well, I mean, why would Mark Hamill be in a tie-fighter game anyway? That's a good question. That's a good question. He would have been the little

guy you shoot down. And you can't kill Luke Skywalker in a game where you play as the Empire. That's just like that's that's not canon right there this is you know just off it it's like the bad batch or something it has nothing to do with so many business meetings i was in right now oh are you allowed to talk about them probably not any more than this though well i do want to give a shout out to zork anthology uh which is just it was a collection of zork text adventures but you know in 1994 that was kind of cool. It's like, hey, here's something from 15 years ago. It's only text,

but we're selling it as a package product with, you know, like a book and stuff, some maps. And just, it was a rare instance of, at this point of publishers presenting video game heritage as something good and notable and worthwhile, like something that still had actual value, not just as a product or as a free download, but as a thing you could own and re-experience. And that was great. It gave me a lot of respect for the Zork series. I also want to mention

Systems Twilight, which was another Mac exclusive game that not enough Mac users are insufferable about, but was a very cool, I think it was a shareware game, but it was very like, it just felt like

kind of ahead of its time, kind of like narratively along the lines of something like Tron or the Matrix. And it had that very distinctive Macintosh thing. going where a lot of sound effects were just created by someone recording audio into a microphone because Max could do that so easily.

And so you just have like this very weird kind of like custom bespoke kind of game. It just felt very, very warm and interesting. I don't know. Maybe I'm just making that up. But have you ever played it, Jared? I feel like you were the most likely to play it. Yeah, System Starlight I've played. And that came along.

but it was not contemporaneous for me. That came along later. And I agree with you. It doesn't get enough praise. Although I see, when I read like Old Mac gaming forums, I see it brought up more and more. I think people are rediscovering it. More is a legend.

I think more people are watching it than playing it at this point, you know, because it's emulating old Macs isn't always the easiest thing in the world. I had real trouble doing it. Yeah. And so I don't think you get a lot of chance to play it. And my own memories of it are many years old, but I do remember enjoying it quite a bit, finding it kind of provocative, if I remember right. Well, there you go.

And also, I believe both the Ultima and KingsQuest series kind of reached their end this year. Did King's Quest go on beyond seven, or was there a new? No, there was one more beyond it called Mask of Eternity, but we don't talk about Mosque of Eternity. Okay, so King's Quest came to its end. Ultima also came to its end. Ultima got like a nine after this, I think, but it was also terrible. This is where Ultima came to its end. Right.

Yeah. The last good Ultima game. No platforming, just role-playing adventures. I would argue that Serpent Isle is that even eight's not great. The Serpa 7-2 is the last good one. Yeah, Ultima 7 is like peak, right? That's the really amazing. Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm thinking Wizardry 8 is the one that everyone thinks is amazing. Oh, Wizardry 8's really good. Yes. No, Ultima 7, 1, and 2 are both very good. Very sad. So Ultima, the shambling corpse, the zombie corpse of Ultima. slogging away at eight before bringing us nine. And finally, Ultima Online, which was the part

where it got good again. Yeah. Anyway, so a lot of stuff happening in 1994. We really kind of dashed past a lot, but honestly, a lot of the stuff we've already had full episodes on. Like, I was thinking, oh, I want to talk about Lunar Eternal Blue, but then I said, actually, maybe that should be a full episode. And then I realized we actually had a lunar episode. So, yeah, 94 is, um, has been very fertile for. retronauts coverage in the past. So there's still some things in here that we need to touch on. Like, I've been meaning to do a Shin-Magami Tensei 1 and 2 and so on and so forth.

Episode for ages. I'm going to do that in 2024 by God. Maybe there should be a Mickey Mania podcast. No. That's not. Who wants to talk about Mickey. Oh, okay. I think we have sort of done that with John and Thomas.

But we may not have got to Mickey Mania. I mean, Mickey Mania is like the end of good Disney games for long time really so yeah i mean the one thing i want to mention in the sort of jip camp um is kid clown in crazy chase because i friggin love kit clown in crazy chase and no one ever talks about it is that better than kid clown and nightmare world everything is better than kid clown and nightmare world but no it's an isometric uh running game on the super nintendo full of like weird little secrets and funny animations and uh daft is a brush great fun also love dynamite heady from this year but that's an episode at some point because i was obsessed with

Don't know my headie. Obsessed. So any final thoughts on the year, 1994, before we say farewell for another year and reconvene in 2024, December to talk about 1995. It was good, wasn't it? It occurs to me that 1994 was the year I graduated high school, which means it was also the year I went to college, which means it was also the year that I got my first email address and then sent my first email. So, really, we're coming up on 30 years of me being an online person, which is, seems like a lot. Yeah, actually, come to think of it, I got online in 1994 for the first time, discovered the World Wide Web, which was still a little baby. And the first thing I did was try to find a website about King Crimson. And I remember finding a little 64 by 64 pixel scan of the cover of in the Court of the Crimson King.

And I was like, wow, cool. Someone on the internet has heard of King Crimson. I don't feel alone anymore. That's really quite sweet. And then I became a terminally online. I mean, for me, given what we've gone over here and what we haven't gone over here, I would like to volunteer that this may be one of the best years ever for gaming. The sheer number of 10 out of tens that have just dropped on this list,

like stuff we've barely even touched on, like, Final Fantasy 6, and, like, you know, system shock. and Sonic 3N. Knuckles, like for me, up there with the very best games that have ever been made. Yeah, again, we've covered so many of these games in their own standalone episodes, for Metroid, etc., just there's so much quality and depth of content here. And even though the console industry was kind of struggling at this point, that was on the business side. It was not on the creative side. The 16-bit consoles had hit their true maturation point here.

And everyone who was making good games, games knew how to make great games and really get the most out of that hardware. And so it was that kind of peak era you got back then with the older consoles where everyone had finally figured out how to harness the limitations of the technology and squeeze the most potential out of the machines. And yeah, just great design, great tech, just, you know, the kind of the peak. And 94 was also, I think, a other than those great, some of its parts years, where we in Retronauts tend to break things down year by year in these episodes because it's the formatting for the new year, but we were living in a world in 94 where if you walked in an arcade,

again, it was 1990 through 1994 arcade games. It was that last true lifeblood arcade era. There were still Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat machines in there. There was still, you know, all these things you associate with that era were hanging around. If you walked into a game store, every great Super Nintendo game, not called, you know, Krono Tricker, or, you know, Mario RPG was on the shelf staring at you in brilliant colors. And it was just such a time to be playing games. You were just surrounded by excellence wherever you went. And that was really cool.

It had been a really fertile time. And you were kind of getting to enjoy that last gasp of it before a new generation started. And everything got really weird. And frankly, with 3D, games got really strange for a while. The next couple of years in gaming were very, very different than anything that come before. I think if you read like games magazines from this era like eGMs for example there is just so much happening. So many games coming out for so many different systems like probably like 15 individual friggin systems. Individual magazines were this thick. Yeah. Phone book

sized and there's not a single bit of space that isn't full of screenshots or words of you know and ads obviously like ads out the ass but like that's just that's commerce for you. But it's an incredible time for gaming. Like, everything is crazy. Like, you don't know what's going to be the winner in the console sort of arms race yet, you know? Even stuff like the laser active are still hanging around and being covered. And it's mad and great and wild. And it's well worth revisiting.

Yeah, I don't know that we really got to do 1994 justice here. But that's the breaks. We'll just have to, you know, cover some more of these games in standalone episodes. But that is all the time we have here in 2023 to talk about 19. 1994. So you'll just have to make the most of it and look forward to next year's year in review. Year in review reviews because we'll be revisiting those once again. So thank you for your time. Jared Diamond and Stewart. Please tell us where we can find you on the internet here in the year 2023 and going into 2024 Diamond. Please kick us off. Well, I'm saying it right now out loud. I am. Hoping to be even more online and more visible in 2024. That means more podcasts and more streaming and more everything. So thank you again for 2023, everybody.

It was a really good year. And I look forward to what's coming in the fours. Lucky number four. But if you want to find me on the Internet for now, until I get a website again, you're going to slip for me at all the various services. Lookup Fight Club, F-E-I-T, that's my last name, C-L-U-B. That's a noun or a verb that you already know. All right.

Stuart. Hello. Yes, you can hear me on Retronauts. You can find my writing on Retronauts, or you can buy my extremely good book. All games are good, which is about how every game that I've ever played and you've ever played is actually good.

And if you disagree, I'm afraid you're wrong. It's good. There are no bad games. And that's available from Limited Run Games in Hardback or on Amazon in paperback. They're both very excellent versions. it really does come down to preference, but I go for the hardback because if you don't like the book, you can use it for more like, you know, useful things like propping things up or like a brick for a wall, perhaps, I don't know. Yes, your book is almost as thick as a 1994 EGM.

Almost, but not quite. And it covers maybe slightly fewer games, only a few hundred. Since we're Americans in its social media, our next promotional video is going to be taking your book out and shooting it with various kinds of guns to see how far the bullets go through. just to test the protective factor. That sounds amazing. Speaking of limited run games, Jared, where can we find you? Could it be limited run games? Yeah, it could be a limited run games.

Or I make videos about shooting Stewart's book. No, I make books. I help out with that process. I help Stewart make his book. I help Kevin make his book. You can find those at Limited RunGames.com. I hope you do. They're really good books, and you should read them.

If you're listening to this in particular, you're just going to like those books. If you hang around through all this episode, these are the books for you. So please get them. They're wonderful and reasonably priced. And then I do fun stuff on the internet over. I'm on Threads in Blue Sky, Instagram. You can find me at Petty comma Jared, where I rant about various and sundry topics. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on the internet.

As always, you don't really need the... the spiel here. But I will say you can find me on, not on Twitter, but on Blue Sky as J. Parrish. busky.com. I do love my busky. Wow, that sounds really rude. I, okay, yes, blue sky. That's where I'm posting these days. I have one-tenth of the followers that I did on Twitter, and that's fine because I have zero percent of the Nazis. And that's true. So, yeah, that's it. 1984. What a year. By golly. Thanks everyone for listening for through another year of Retronauts. If you have not checked out our 1974 and 2004 episodes, please do so. They are available on fine Patreon and public

feeds, I believe. So check those out. Enjoy. And we'll be back again very soon with another episode that is also about old things, but not quite as rigidly defined to the calendar as this one. You know, I'm going to be. I'm going to be able to be I'm

I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm You know, I'm going to be able to be.

I'm going to be. Thank you. Oh. Oh. Oh. I'm on. Thank you.