Retronauts - 591: Gaming's Cruelest Challenges

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Jeremy Parish, Ray Barnholt, Stuart Gipp, and Jess O'Brien crowd onto a therapist's couch as they work through the trauma of playing the cruelest video games ever made. From poison mushrooms to broken puzzle translations, it's PTSD all the way down. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

This week in Retronauts, we talk about why gaming is like April. It's the cruelest month. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. parish. And that was a little bit of literary heft for you from this video game podcast. I promise that that T.S. Eliot reference will be the most intellectual thing that will happen to you in the next 90 minutes. So please buckle in and prepare to be stupefied as we as we talk about things that are just too stupid. Why did they make these games like this? It's unfair. So here with me, To protest the unfairness of the universe, we have an all-star cast of retronauts people.

I think I mentioned that I'm Jeremy Parrish, so I don't need to tell you that again. But let's see, we have a returning regular who hasn't been on the show in a while. Ray, from the West Coast, introduce yourself, even though I spoiled it. From the West Coast, yes. Hi. It's Ray Barnholt, of course. Welcome. Thank you.

Thank you for welcoming me. I'm welcoming myself. Hi. From the far, far opposite side of the world, we also have our UK correspondent. Oh, hello, I'm Shurjip, and in addition to the literary heft that you just experienced, I'm here to provide some regular heft. Phenomenal. I'm carrying a few extra holiday calorie pounds as well. So this will just be a hefty podcast.

I meant Gravitus. What on earth are you incendiated? Oh, sorry. No, I'm kidding. Sorry. Fine. Okay. I walked into that one. I probably should do a little more walking to get rid of those holiday calories. Anyway, finally, here also from someplace in the middle of the country.

I don't actually know exactly where. You're just in one of those time zones that I always forget about. One of the flyover states. It doesn't matter. I'm not here intentionally. I grew up in them, so it's fine. But hello, I'm Jess Voidberger O'Brien coming at you from a featureless room in the center of dark maze that I do not have a map for. And that's just her living room, folks. All right.

Anyway, so the title of this episode is gaming's cruelest challenges. And this is going to be another one of those podcasts where I think we're just going to bellyache for 90 minutes. And everyone's going to join in and punch down at video games that have already been beaten up on plenty. No, hopefully we'll have some new insights to bring. And I, you know, am a fan of not just trashing video games, even if they probably deserve it. So I'm kind of curious to hear everyone's thoughts on why would they design games like this? Usually, it's probably just going to amount to because they, you know, wanted to make more money. But there are so many ways to make money with video games, especially in the days before everything was a loot box, that I think, you know,

there's a good conversation to be had here. So please join me and the rest of this podcast crew as we talk about gaming's cruelest challenges. So I'm laying down some ground rules before we get started. This is not just like, oh, this video game is really hard. It's more about games that take a swerve that just at some point, you know, you're enjoying yourself. Maybe it's a challenging game already and you're, you know, kind of grappling with it. You're coming to terms of the reality of it. You're having a good time. It's escapism. It's fun. And then all of a sudden, I don't know, where it just dumps something on you, untelegraphed, unexpected, and it spoils the experience because it's just unreasonable, unfair. It doesn't fit. It's not cohesive with the rest

of the experience. So that's what I'm talking about here. And sometimes those things, things are totally justified, but that doesn't make them any less cruel. So I guess, since I've already talked for like five minutes nonstop, I'm going to let someone else jump in and start, and I'm going to look at the notes. And it looks like the first person on the list is Ray. So Ray, tell us, what is your inaugural cruelest challenge in video game, the one that sticks with you and just wrinkles? Okay. Well, I'm going to be the basic bitch today and warm up and give you all

good old Super Mario Brothers 2, the lost levels. That would be the original disk system version. Now we all know or we're told that this game is hard and we've all had our Mario podcasts here where we've litigated it plenty of time. So I'm not going to

pass any judgments here. It's not about that. I just want to serve up some things about this game for you. Now it's true that it is harder. It is, it's baseline difficulty is about where the first game ended at as far as level design goes in complexity. So loss levels just keeps going from there

and introducing new gimmicks to throw you off like the poison mushrooms, the super springs, the wind gusts. But those are gimmicks. And I would say arguably not cruel. They're surmountable, right? What is cruel in my mind

are the trick-warp zones that send you back multiple worlds. And there's not a lot, but they're mixed in with some of the more normal forward-moving warp zones. So there's one in World 8-1, so towards the end of the game. And it can send you back to World 5, for example.

So be careful there. And that's like the one thing that really tricks you on. Now, what else is cruel is this barrier that they put up to accessing another four worlds of levels. Okay, well, first there's World Nine, and that's the first secret world,

and all you really have to do there is just beat the game. that is finish World 8-4 without using any warp zones and then you get this other bonus world. Oh, that's surmountable, I would say. I mean, especially if you got fooled by the backwards warp, then you're definitely not going to try to be bold enough

to find one of those again. So if you've got the stones to just, you know, go through another Mario game like that, you'll be fine. But if you want Worlds A, B, C, and D, you have to beat the game eight consecutive times. Pass World 8-4 another eight times. And mind you, there's no saving or passwords in the original version. So this is just all endurance.

How like, what if your power goes off or something? Like, who has the, like, how many hours would it take to achieve this without safe states? Right. Well, hopefully you have some faith in the Japanese power grid, you know, back then, right? Or these days, you know, you can just do safe states. But anyway, that's what it was on the original version. Now, if you played this game first in Super Mario All-Stars, like we did on this side of the world, you know, they did soften those requirements a bit, mostly because all those games

in All-Stars have progress saving. And so you can come back to things. So it was less about sitting there all day and just trying to enjoy the crazy platforming with the Mario brothers that we know and love so much. Maybe, guys? Lost levels, right? Yeah. Anyway, really just the backwards warps and just that barrier to getting to the rest of the special worlds was just kind of like, wow, man, they really went for it. It is, like they said, for super players. Yeah, you know, I don't really enjoy the lost levels in any of its myriad forms, but I do, I'm willing to stand up for it. I realize the fact that I don't enjoy it is because I am not. an 11-year-old Japanese child in the year 1986.

But if you were that child, yes, unfortunately, I mean, just imagine there's so many good years ahead. But no, no, no, the boom economy here. Nope. Nope, the miracle's over. But, you know, this game really was more like an expansion pack to the original Super Mario Brothers as opposed to a proper sequel. I really feel like that's the way it was presented.

was, you know, Super Mario came out in September, 1985. It was a massive bestseller. Everyone played it. Strategy guides were bestselling books. It was just ubiquitous. It's actually a little difficult to explain what a phenomenon this game was, especially, the original Mario was, especially in Japan at the time. So, you know, once the disc system came out and they were able to make games cheaply and sell them

cheaply, you know, for half the price of a cartridge, then they immediately said, whoa, the kids love Mario, and they have gone to crazy lengths to master Mario, and everyone out there is an expert, let's give them something they can really sink their teeth into. And so you ended up with the loss levels, which, you know, to a degree, I think, yes, that's very teeth sinkable, but I also think that they probably dialed it a little too far in the difficult direction. And I don't really think you see a lot of Nintendo developed and published games after that that go to quite such lengths to be difficult. You know, Zelda 2 was also pretty rough, but that's about it. Like, they kind of step back the entire game.

Like, there's a difference between, like, rough and mean. Like, it's just kind of mean to make someone do this eight times. Like, it's just unreasonable to do to somebody. 11-year-old Japanese child or not. I agree. I mean, they had to go to school and everything. Yeah. That must have caused all kinds of delinquency, grades dropping as children sat up all night, trying to finish Mario 2 the 11th time.

Yeah. Like the more recent Mario games, you know, in the past 10 or 15 years, they have their super special worlds with the super hard levels that people, you know, need to spend some time with. But it's not through the whole game. Like from the start, the loss levels is like, here you go. Here's a poison mushroom. Ha ha! And then, you know, deal with that. Deal with the rest of this for 50-some levels.

Yeah. And the fact that Mario 2 did not have any kind of save feature despite being a disk system game. Like, I feel like that was a bridge too far, in my opinion. Like, they could have at least saved, you know, like cumulative progress. Oh, you beat the game four times. Now you just have to beat it four more, not necessarily in one sitting. Go take a nap. But they didn't. They had all this rewritable media and deliberately. Like, that's a choice. They made a choice not to let children save their progress because Zelda was the debut title on disk system. And that had save features built right into it. So, yes, there was an arcade mentality here. And that mentality was, we hate 11-year-old children. 1886 on Famicom in a nutshell Pretty much

That didn't occur to me that they had the capability Of having it be saveable I was just like oh it's probably because it wasn't like time yet Technology-wise to have this feature And it's like no wait a minute They totally knew how to do this This sucks. They did that on purpose That's mean

Yeah it was a Mario 2 was a cheap pickup It was you know The Famicom cartridge was like 50 bucks. The disc system game, I think, was 25 or 30. Right. It was a shoe-in. If you just got a system. Yeah. Like, you were going to buy this. And it's not like action games didn't have safe features. There were lots of action games that had safe features on disk system that lost them when they came to NES. Like Section Z, so much more manageable on disk system because you can save, you know, every time you beat one of the area bosses. Castlevania let you save.

The original Castlevania, and it's dinky little six levels. Like, you know, in America, we had to just power through that and spend half our playtime just trying to beat Dracula. But on disk system, you could make it all the way up to Dracula's castle and be like, you know what? I need to go freshen up. I need to, you know, take a few weeks to kind of brace up for this fight. And you could do it. And you could just jump right back in and fight Dracula, but not America. But not Mario 2. Nope. Nope. Forget it. I mean, I think that like even if you do go to get to worlds A through D, they're just like more normal levels. Like you're going to want to see like,

something really cool, but you don't. It's just more Mario, well, at which point you don't want to play Mario anymore. You want to whip the disc out the window into the passing trash. I would view it more as like, well, you've been beaten so much for all the rest of this game. Like, I don't think anything could surprise you by the time you reach A through D. I feel like they sort of got it. I mean, I think World Nine ends with like, I might be misremembering this, but it has like a special like stage with like messages and coins and things. Yeah.

So they kind of got it backwards. right? They should have had like they should have had the unlocks be the other way around I don't know it just seems like they made a mistake in fact they probably did and we should try and interrogate me a motion about it at some point. I think they felt more renewed when Super Mario World

was being made so like the special stages in Super Mario World are a bit more wacky as well as being challenging and so you do kind of get more of a reward for finishing all those I'd say you know a personal mental reward I guess but yeah

Yeah, I kind of agree with Stuart. They could have leaned more into the weirdness because by this point, all the kids knew how to get into the so-called minus world on both the cartridge and the disc system. They worked differently. They were different. So they expected weird stuff like, you know, a stage full of Bowser's floating around like they were squids or something. And, yeah, Mario 2 never quite goes that far. So another missed opportunity. You know, I'm going to be able to be.

Okay, have we beaten up on one of gaming's most beloved franchises of all time yet? Have we done that enough yet? In general, no. Oh, okay. Well, let's move along anyway, since this isn't just the Dump on Mario podcast. But we might come back to Mario later. I don't know. Maybe it's on someone's list.

I'm going to jump over to Stewart now because Stewart is bringing the science. And by the science, I mean, 8-bit microcomputer games. from the UK, which I don't think there were any of those that weren't cruel. So this is going to be very elucidating. No, there's a punchline to this. I just want to apologize in advance to any of my retronauts website readers, because I have written about this before, so I'm going to sort of be doing the greatest hits now.

I can't remember if I've talked about it. It's a different medium. It's all good. Yeah, exactly. It's money for old rope. But basically, one of my favorite games as a kid was this game called The Candlelight Adventure on the Spectrum, which is the third game.

a series called Ollie and Lisa. I've never seen the first two or know anything about them. Doesn't matter. Don't even think about it. But what it is, is this sort of single screens adventure game, a 2D platformer, where you take control of this horrible little thing. God knows what it's supposed to be. And the basic mission is he wants to assemble a car from car parts that are hidden all around this world. I don't know why. I didn't really bother reading the tape in Lee. I just know he needs the car parts. That's all I do know. And I think what I generally like to do with this is, what I like to do is I like to ask the people listening

when they would tap out of this, like as I keep revealing more nuance to how shitty it is. Because it's really bad. And remember, this was my favorite game. So I had a bag of like 40 games that we got secondhand, and this was my favorite one of those 40. All of the rest are the worse than this. You know, I love the spectrum, but it's a tough love, you know.

Anyway, so you've got this big castle. you're a little fella, you have fall damage, you can't fall too far without taking damage, and when you do fall, the damage process is you sit there for, I want to say, about eight seconds, maybe ten, before you get back up again. And that's also when you get hit by an enemy as well. So if you fall off something, you'll take damage, you'll stand there, as soon as you recover, you'll be hit by the enemy and you go back into

the damage loop again. The enemy will then disappear, but there's every chance it may respond by the time you're back up. So that's That's the first problem I have. Looking for these car parts, the first, the most prominent problem with them is that they're invisible. Oh. You can't see them at all. There's like nothing that indicates where they are. You can get hints, but the way you get them is that you have to find a telephone in the game.

And when you walk up to the telephone and press the button on the joystick, he'll do a little brief conversation. There's another 10 seconds or so animation, and then an arrow will appear. and the arrow appears in like a thought bubble it's like right left up down you get it now the problem is all the arrow does is point to a door because the it's single screens with doors you know

you can go in a door and you'll walk to another screen the following problem is if you go in a door and you go to another screen then go back in the door you came from you may end up on a completely different screen and then if you go back in the door again you may end up on like a fourth different screen these doors don't make any sense so you could draw a map but you'd be drawing what can only be described as a ridiculous chart

I would have been out by that point once I realized that like the doors don't like consistently go to the same places like I piece out at that point like no so okay so let's say you've got an arrow that says go right there's a door there you know that somewhere through that door there's going to be a car part the problem is it could loop back to somewhere that you accessed from the left earlier it doesn't make any sense don't worry about it. Forget that. The clues are useless. They have no function.

So next thing you need to do is if you know where a car part is or if you've intuited where it might be, if you walk up to it and press the button, it doesn't do anything. You have to find a magnifying glass before you can even do it. When you use the magnifying glass,

you have to watch about 12-second animation of him looking left and right through a magnifying glass. And if he doesn't find anything, he'll sadly tuck it back into it. his pocket which is another like eight seconds or so of him sort of shrugging if you do find it

the screen will flash the little window will appear with a picture of the car piece and it's like yeah you got the car piece and your magnifying glass is deleted it's obliterated from existence you no longer have the magnifying glass it's gone now

what you've got to do now is you've got to trying to think of the best way to explain just how hard this is okay you can't worse? Yes, there's so much more. I'm really sorry. This is my main event for the episode. Wow. You can't hold more than one car piece. Sorry, I need a snack. I'm going to get comfortable. Is that snack poisoned by any chance? No. It might be by the end of this, yes. But I'll keep it quick. You can't hold more than one car piece. No, no, no, no. I'm not rushing you at all. I'm saying I'm going to get comfortable. So take your time. I'm having a snack and getting comfortable. So she regale us.

so you can't carry multiple car pieces so you have to go to the garage and drop the car piece off now this is a screen that's the thing you don't like the first time I got to the garage I thought I'd finish the game but no

you have to take it to this garage which is probably about 30 or 40 doors screens worth of traveling to drop it off and then once you've dropped it off you can now get another car piece but that means you have to find another yes you have to warp through doors at random to get back to the garage. Is that correct? Okay. Well, I mean, you can learn how to

get there. As you play the game, you can learn what gets you where, because there is some kind of logic to it. But when you're a kid, it's really not easy. And when you're an adult, it's really not easy because you don't want to. But anyway, you get this car piece. You drop it off. It's there. You're like, great. Got it. Let's go get another one. You go and find another magnifying glass you're going to find another car piece I think there's about there's at least ten of them somewhere in this world

now I think the basic aim of the game is you need to find out where they all are so you can get them in the most efficient order so you won't have to backtrack as much but you're always going to have to do at least some ridiculous amount of travelling because one of the pieces is very near the beginning of the game where the garage is the end

of the game if you see I mean it's completely sort of non-linear in that respect but the problem is The problem is, there's a time limit. No, shut up. Of course. Of course. Yeah, you have, in fact, there isn't actually health, which is probably the only friendly thing about this game.

When you take damage, like I said, you're sitting there for a good 10 seconds, and that's your health. That's your time ticking down. So every time you're wasting time, you're just going, come on, move. That's so stressful. Oh, my God. You can get more. Oh no, sorry, I'm slightly mistaken There is also health, I'm wrong

You can also just die Sorry, I forgot about that But no, you can get more health You mentioned fall damage, so I'm like, you can get candles that extend the length of your time limit You can get health, hearts that extend your health But the problem is that they don't respond And there's only so many of them in the world

So you'll have to like factor in when is the most efficient time to get them and also do you have, do you even have enough time to finish the game? Because it's really unclear, the only way to tell is this really unobvious graphic of the candle that's kind of melting away. And I'm sure there are elements of this that I'm not even remembering sort of the hostility of, because I never finish this fucking game. I have a question.

Yeah, of course. Your little, I have a question about motivation. Why are you building a car? I think it's so he can drive his girlfriend somewhere or something, Lisa or something. I think she won't leave the castle unless it's in her favorite car or something. thing. I don't know if it's worth it, dude. It's a really classic microcomputer premise, you know.

There's a lot of microcomputer games about, like, how awful women are. Yeah, that's surprising. I hate to say it. Hey, come on, it's not my fault. We will, I suppose it's not entirely my fault. But, you know, as a nation, we spawned

some awful things. And this is probably the worst of them. So, yeah, my favorite game on the spectrum, one of the friendliest, the friendliest spectrum games, genuinely, but I can think of. Yeah. Was this system like a torture device for, like, prisoners or something? Yes.

It was a torture device for children whose parents weren't rich enough to buy a Commodore. Made by Scotland Yard to break people or something. Well, no one actually paid money for Spectrum games. They just copied discs from each other. So as a result, every game was punishment for having been stolen. So it's just kind of like a self, oh, sorry, Casspectrum. sense, my mistake. No, but, but yes, like every, every, every game is like this, you know,

kind of self-flagellation loop. You steal it, and then you play the game, and then you regret having stolen it. You're chastened. Yeah. It's, it's, it's its own, the crime is its own punishment. And the best thing about it is I would sit there with the, I'd get out, it would be like, okay, it's spectrum time. Because I couldn't just go on it whenever I was a little kid.

It was like, you can play on the spectrum now. It's like, yes, Ollie and Lisa time, slam it out. shove the tape in, sit there for 10, 11 minutes, like, it's coming, it's coming, it's going to load soon, I'm going to get to play Ollie and Lisa. Yeah. And then, I think the most car pieces I've ever got is two, and that's including when I was an adult and I was a little bit more aware of what was going on. Wow. So, yeah, it's really horrible. And I love it, and I'll always love it, I think.

And, you know, that is my, I think that's why I'm here, you know. I don't mean here in retronots. I just mean what that's why I'm here. I will shout out that I'm looking at screenshots of this game. I think it's really, like, the graphics are kind of nice. I can tell what I'm looking at. Like, the colors are very pleasing. Like, it's well illustrated at the very least.

So you've got that going for you. It's not like you're picking up things. You've no idea what the hell this dood is. Yeah. It makes good use of the aesthetic, I think. It is a nice looking game for a spectrum game, but unfortunately it is like being stabbed with a million tiny razors. Yeah, with pretty looking razors, I guess.

aesthetic razors. All right. More sterling software from Europe. Thank you. Anyway, Jess, why don't you tell us about your cruelest experience in video games or one that you find sufficiently cruel to tell us about? It's so hard to follow up, Stewart's pick, though. Just keep that in mind. It's a hard act to follow. I'm also talking not from firsthand experience, but my spouse recently did a let's play to fulfill some sort of a charity. promise that was made to do a let's play of Zork. And I've not played Zork myself. Obviously, it's a very

famous text adventure game, no graphics, blah, blah, blah. Okay, those are all difficult. But I did not know that Zork had like more than one maze in it. And I have a map of this maze in front of me. And I'm like, what the Christ am I looking at here? But so there's more than one of these bastard mazes. This is a mess of a map. You never get a map in the game, obviously. So you'd have to buy a guide or something like that or attempt to make something that made sense because this map does not make sense. The dungeon or whatever you're in doesn't make any sense. In the very first room of this maze, if you go north, you loop around to the same room over and over again, but you don't know that. Like, it never tells you that you have gone to the same room. So you could

go north forever and have no idea that you're standing still practically. So that's cool. And besides these warp-style loopy loops, there's also just regular dead ends. So you would think this like, oh, well, if dead ends exist, there wouldn't be these warp points that send me back to the same room I'm in. So there's no like logic that follows through there. You'd kind of have to just, I don't know how you would surmise this. But you might be clever and be like, oh, like, I'm going to try to Hansel and Gretel this shit. I'm going to leave a little trail of breadcrumbs behind me so that I can tell where I've been and where I haven't been.

But too bad sucker, that doesn't work because there is a thief in the maze that is just around randomly. And like if you leave something on the floor, this guy will come and probably pick it up and you'll have no idea if you've been in that room or not. I think you might actually be able to run. into this thief on the same, like, square and he'll, like, kill you or something. That's cool. You can have different interactions with him, actually.

Oh, yeah? Which is one of the kind of cool things. Like, you can give him one of your prizes, and he's like, oh, thanks. And he walks off, and then you can't get the points for that item. But at least you won't kill you. Oh, you're bribing him. But actually, he's essential to solving one of the puzzles now that I think about it. Oh, really?

Yes. But I don't want to spoil that for you. Oh, no. I was definitely going to play it after hearing about how bullshit this mazes. But also, I thought this was wild too. I didn't know this, but there's stairs in some of the rooms of this maze, but it doesn't like point it out to you. You just have to be like, go up and it'll like let you go up or down.

So in addition to your cardinal directions, you have to deal with up and down in this maze. And yeah, none of these rooms logically connect to each other. they go all sorts of places. They're not just in a row where a door goes someplace that makes logical sense. So yeah, this seems like a nightmare. And I also just noticed on this map that in some room there is a useless lantern. So that makes me happy. Oh, go goodie. Oh, yay. That's what I've got on Zork, something that I haven't played myself, but I heard a lot of secondhand, like, wow, this is bullshit information about.

Yeah, there's a, I recognize this map that you embedded in the notes. It's from the Zork anthology, I believe it was called, a collection that was released in the early 90s. So, all you had to do to beat this maze was wait for 10 years and then by the new collection that came out for a different system. And then you would have a maze given to you that would kind of guide you through. Yeah, were there any, like, guides for Zork out there for purchase? Yeah, there were. Was it like a phone number that you rang? Oh, it might have been a phone number. I wonder. Yeah, and it cost $6.

a second. No, Infocom, you could buy tip books and clue books for them. And I believe, I know some of the games came with Inviso clues packed in, where it was like, you know, the invisible ink and you would use a marker. Oh, that's lovely. Yeah, I think you could buy those separately for some of the games. So there probably was a tip book for Zork. And I actually, I really wanted to, to lift the Inviso Clues thing for our plumbers don't wear Ties strategy guide, but it's very, very expensive to do that. And there aren't a lot of printers who have the ability to use that invisible ink anymore. So that was a disappointment. We came up with something different, which I think is still good. But yeah, so that is kind of one of the hallmarks, you know,

the memories. If you played Infocom games back in the day, you definitely experienced Inviso clues, Inviso clues because that was really the only reasonable way to finish these games. They were, some of them had really smart, clever puzzles, but all of them eventually got to a point where you're just like, wow, I'm trying to think like the designer. But the designer was probably not entirely sane. And I can't think like that. I can't bend my brain sideways. Glaring at the Hitchhiker's Guide game right now. That was the one that, Stuart, would you like to be on the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy episode in the

the near future. I would. You would? Oh, that's fantastic. Great. I'm looking for. Is the Hitchhackers Guide episode just me, like, locked in a room having to play the game? No, we actually did kind of like a little, a little bonus episode where we tried to get through the Hitchhackers game.

And I think we might have gotten to like, I think we died a couple of times, but that's it. That sounds likely, yes. Anyway, so please look forward to that, everyone. But, yes, Zorke definitely had some moments like that, for sure. I like the fact that the only discernible ways out of this maze are two troll room and two cyclops room. I mean, they would sound pretty bad. They both don't sound like great options, you know? And I don't know the goal?

Like, I'm looking at this map, and it's just like, where do you want to be? I mean, I think I would try and make my way to the center and maybe use that knife to, you know, get out of the maze in a slight darker way, maybe? The rusty knife. Well, there's also an exit to the grating room. And I don't know if that's like, there's a grate in there or if it is like grating on your nerves or if it grates you like cheese. Yeah, like like a carrot. You go in there and it's like someone sort of sliding one of those like school chairs across like a plastic floor just constantly. That would be awful.

Yeah, I think Zork too had a puzzle where you had to get on a carousel and it would deposit you in a random direction after you got off. And there was also a puzzle that turned out to be like a game of baseball, which was indecipherable for anyone who wasn't from the U.S. or Japan because they're the only countries that like baseball. So everyone else in the world was like, what the hell? I don't know if you can vouch for that. I mean, I just had to play like 50 baseball games for the game of your directory, and I'm honestly none the wiser. That makes sense. There you go. You got guys, you got people standing on like mounds.

They're running circles. They run around a bit. I don't know. It's not fair. It's not fair. They just keep catching the ball and it's not fair. All right. I'm going to jump in now and do my first entry in the round robin, which is actually I'm going to cheat.

It's going to be multiple entries because I've been playing. some really freaking obnoxious games for NES works. And all of them just kind of clumped together, not in like a Katamari. It's more like a dung ball of misery. Oh, that's not entirely fair. Like, Monster Party is actually a pretty fun game. Like, Monster Party is famously weird. It has a very surreal sensibility to it.

It plays pretty well, like the balance between, you know, you can be the little kid with the baseball bat who has really short range, but he can hit projectiles back at enemies and kill them in a single shot. That's fun. Or you can be a demon that flies around and shoots lasers. Always a good time. It's a solid game. It's really well made. But apparently when they converted it from the Japanese version, which never actually came out and released it for the U.S., they decided, for some reason, to add an extra boss to the next to last stage, the tower. So instead of having two bosses, in the tower. There are three. Okay, sure. None of them are difficult. Like, I mean, okay, one of them is tough if you're not the demon, but they're all manageable. But the thing is, to clear

every stage in Monster Party, you have to defeat the bosses until you collect a key, and you collect a key by defeating a certain number of bosses. So in the tower, you have to defeat two bosses to get the key. But there are three bosses, because they added the extra one. And they didn't think to change, this is according to the cutting room floor, they didn't think to change the programming code to look to see how many bosses you had defeated, to recognize that you defeated two or more, it looks to see if you were defeated two bosses. So when you defeat a second boss in the tower, you are given a key. But if you go into another room and defeat the third boss, you will suddenly lose that key. And the thing is, the game doesn't drop icons or give you,

any indication whatsoever that you've gotten a key aside from a tiny little icon in your power up bar, like your health meter bar at the bottom of the screen. So it's very like subtle and you probably won't even notice that you have suddenly lost your key until you get to the end and you can't exit and you have no idea why. And you go back down the tower and all the boss rooms are empty and there are no hidden spaces or anything like that. And you think you might think there would be because the level before the tower is actually a door maze, kind of like what Stuart was

talking about, except logical and consistent. So you might think, oh, well, there's maybe a secret that I'm overlooking. No, it's just you can't beat all the bosses in the tower. You have to skip one. But there's no way of knowing that. You just soft lock. Oh, God. You soft lock.

That's the absolute worst thing. The only way to beat the tower at that point is to die. And have to continue and you start at the beginning of the tower but when you start a continued game you start with much less health than you're probably going to go into the tower with initially so it becomes much harder to do the second time through so that's really cool I don't know if we can necessarily count that as a cruel challenge because it is sort of unintentional I don't

think they meant to do this by design it's just one of those things I have a similar one on my list By the way, that's... Neglect is a form of cruelty. Neglect is a form. Yeah, I'm a steward. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough.

I like that. It's like some kind of Sierra thing, except worse, because it didn't mean to do it. Yeah. I think oversights count as long as it's the result that matters, you know? When you're trying, oh, it's the worst. When you can't progress and you don't know if you've just done something wrong, and it turns out, no, it's just fucked. Brilliant.

It's like life, isn't it? Just like life. Perhaps the cruelest, perhaps the cruelest challenge of all is one that is not your fault. And you fell into because somebody else made a mistake. That's true. That's what it's like to be a voter nowadays. We're going to make an existential. Oh, no, you just, you just, oh, they're got political. Gotcha, gamers. All right. So, so kind of related to the monster party one is a case where the developers discovered a glitch and said, oh, that's so horrible, we're going to keep it, and that's Ninja Guidon for NES, where when you, normally, when you make it to

a boss at the end of, you know, World 1, 2, or 1, 3, or whatever, 2, 3, 3, 3, et cetera, if you die against the boss, it'll send you back to the beginning of the stage right before the boss, so you have to fight your way back. That's tough, but it's not totally unmanageable. In World 6, the final world, when you make it to the final boss and you die, instead of sending you back to the beginning of 6.3, it sends you all the way back to 6-1, with the notable fact that 6-2 is one of the hardest video game levels ever created. It is phenomenally difficult. Just absolutely brutal. World 6-3 is also not a cakewalk, but 6-2, crazy. There are three forms to the final boss, and if you don't get a health reset between them, you also don't get to

like to refill your special attacks. So if you make it past the first form of the boss and die against the second form of the boss, you get sent back to 6-1. The first form does stay dead, but the only way not to have to recover all that progress is by beating all three of those bosses in a single run, which is I did it as a kid, but that's because all I did from, you know, from like, like six months of my life was played I didn't. So I got really good at it. But I cannot do that now. Like just getting to the final boss when I, when I did my recent NES works episode, I was so proud of myself for even getting there that I said, you know what? Well done. I beat the game. So I didn't get to see the ending cutscene, but that's okay, because I've seen Castles fall before. How many times I've beaten a Castlevania? So many. Anyway, but that was a glitch where they were like, hmm, that makes this game balls hard. Let's let's keep that. It's incredible. unbelievably rude.

So yes, let's just keep that in here and not fix it. So they definitely knew about it? Oh, they did. They've said, yes, in interviews. They were like, oh, yeah, that wasn't supposed to happen. But we liked it, so we kept it. Wow. Thanks, guys.

Can I just interject and say that one of the most liberating experiences in being a gamer is when you realize that it doesn't actually matter if you don't beat the final boss. You can just watch the ending. I'm only recently getting this out, because real quick, I've been playing Borderlands too, and the bosses in that game are just so. dreadful. And today I was just like, you know what? I'm not doing this. I'm just

not going to do it. I'm just moving on. It doesn't matter. Yeah. I won't get the achievement. Who gives a shit? I don't think as you grow older, part of becoming a more mature person is learning to respect your own time. I'd be like, I don't need to prove this to, I don't need to prove this anybody. What am I doing?

Am I having fun? Yeah, it's very valuable to learn if you're a child playing Ninja Guyton. Like, I'm good. I'm good. Time for snacks. Do you think that the kids who did that were the kids who became, like, surgeons? No, because they messed up their hands and their eyes playing this video game. I mean, look at me. No, I think video games, you know, NES games taught an entire generation of children about the sunk-time fallacy, the sunk-cost fallacy.

But I think we all learned the wrong lesson. So that's very unfortunate. To just be more stubborn as the answer. Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah, just we dig our feet in. We're entrenched. Thank you. I have some more NES ones, but I don't want to take too long. So I'll come back to those after this next round, Robin. Let's jump back over to Ray.

Ray, what's next on your list? I see your list. You've got some nice, juicy, obscure ones. So let's go. Thanks. actually. I have an addendum to Mario. Oh, wow. All right. We're back to punching on Mario.

Get them. Get them. When you... When you unlock World Nine in Super Mario Bros. 2, they only give you one life. So you do have to finish World Nine with one life. I forgot to mention that. What the hell?

It's for Super Players. Wow. Okay. Well. Yeah, and you can't continue, right? Yeah, right. Yeah. Thank God that's not true of real life. Okay.

Yes, my next game here is Unlimited Saga for PS2. I don't know how familiar you are with Unlimited Saga, Jeremy, but feel free to help me fill in some gaps if you can. I don't know. So with Unlimited Saga, actually it's not Unlimited Saga, it's just Unlimited Saga. They didn't capitalize the G because they were like, this is too weird even for this series. I played a bit of it and said I really respect the fact that they created this and I do not want any part of it

so I can't help you too much here, sorry. All right, fair enough, I'll try my best. But yeah, this is maybe the most maligned of all the saga games. I remember this Japanese magazine called Continue. I think they named it one of their Kusoge of the Year. So there's an indicator of where it was at And, you know, over here, we had, like, well, the Final Fantasy Legend games,

but also the Saga Frontier games for PS1, and those were also a little bit quirky, but people did end up liking those over the years. Unlimited Saga, not so much. Unlimited Saga, well, it's a saga game, but it featured no graphics. Okay, just kidding. What I mean is most of the time you would move around maps and dungeons and stuff as if you're moving a piece around a board game. And that's just one of the visual elements of it.

And some of those, so, like, I, first of all, I thought it was amazing that Squirionix decided to localize it for English markets because they didn't, well, they did the bare minimum to market it. So I have the back of the box here. And, well, some of the ads, too, they read, I quote, only those brave enough to accept this challenge can experience seven. adventures beyond imagination. And then also a call out here to visit the Hall of Valor at usaga.com,

which says our entire online community awaits brave challengers. And I will add that this also just happened to be one of the few square games to not get an official Brady game strategy guide released alongside it. Romanceing saga did later, but not this one. So Squaranax just kind of translated and said, good luck, because this is all you're getting. and yeah it would have helped because some of this is

kind of obtuse to a lot of people especially if you're just like coming off of playing Final Fantasy 10 or something but I'll get into that one of the main gameplay things in Unlimited Saga is called the Real the real system, R-E-E-L it looks kind of like a

halo ring laid over the screen but it kind of moves like a slot machine, real that's what they're going for there and it's basically used for almost everything you do in the field so like opening chests treasure chests with a success fail state can be kind of like

by chance or by skill like you have to stop the reel on the on the success marker oh I'm loving this so you can get the failure marker or you can get like the dynamite marker which is like a failure plus a bad effect so there's that and it's also used in battle a lot so it determines

the effectiveness of attacks and spells and I think missing or hitting but some people would hear that and be like well with that and like moving pieces around the board it's like the real thing is like a dice roll right and the board game movement like tabletop RPG players

can understand that kind of uncertainty and I think if you're working on a saga game under Akitoshi Kawazu the creator of it you're probably one of those nerds to begin with but I think for most people, especially on this side of the world where there were not a lot of saga games released, I think it threw people off

because it looks like you need great timing for this real stuff on top of paying attention to everything else that the saga games are known for and don't tell you a lot about. So like life points over hit points and how open-ended you can grow your party and stuff, how everybody can basically use any kind of weapon and just be customized very, very loosely

however you want. and what I was getting on earlier is that I think most people playing console RPGs aren't looking to think too much and if you come into this expecting a Squirionix jaunt like Final Fantasy

to have your brain off a little bit and just enjoy cutscenes and stuff you're just going to hit a wall like within minutes and give up by a frustration and unlimited saga just I think abstracted things enough with the visual stuff

and the board thing And it just kind of, that's what it did to a lot of people. The other thing is that, you know, with that board game movement, it's kind of like a level of skeuomorphism that people weren't expecting, I think, again, from a Squarianx game, especially one that otherwise does look kind of decent. Like, Unlimited Saga, they got those fancy comic style cutscenes. They got amazing music. They got great sprites and the battle scenes that I think the frontier games were known for. But I think for most people just became kind of upsetting. and I also think they didn't follow through enough

with kind of the tabletop sort of visual goals of it because that also runs the risk of confusing people when you have these other sorts of elements that look more like expected of a modern game and to that I would also bring up like a decade later we got Crimson Shroud for 3DS from Yasumi Matsuno and his crew and that's a game that is like unapologetically a tabletop game

like on your 3DS where you were tossing literal dice and moving literal figures representing your heroes and there's no mystery as to what you're getting similar to that also even more recently like Squoenix came out with a game called Dungeon Encounters which just looks like straight up graph paper

but again you see that and if you just want to drink the chemical compound that gives you a computer RPG and with nothing else dressing it or spicing it up like you get that you get that and you want it and you get it And we're now more attuned to those sorts of things.

But Unlimited Saga just did not hit at all for the most part. And otherwise, like, on a high level, it is just a regular saga game. It plays a lot like all of the other saga games. It's just kind of this real system stuff just really turns people off and just didn't work. Just didn't plain work. And that's basically the nutshell I got for Unlimited Saga. Thank you. I really think that this.

this game existed and was localized because Akitoshi Kowazu cashed in all of his chips. He, you know, this was around the same time that Hironobusaka Gucci left the company and, you know, like Final Fantasy of the Spirits Within was a flop. So all of a sudden, Kuwazu was kind of like the guy who had been there longest. And I think he was like, all right, here's what I'm doing with my seniority. I'm making this game and I had an interview with him once

where he said like, I know, you know, this is not a game, this is not the kind of game other people would like, but it's something I wanted to do. So the man, the man just like used

all of his political capital in the company in one shot and this was it. He got to make the weird tabletop randomization RPG that was like the game he had always wanted to create because that's what he came into Final Fantasy

having been a fan of all those River Hill soft tabletop games like that was his background he was the most Grognard hardcore tabletop RPG fanatic of probably anyone making early Japanese RPGs and so like you know Sakaguchi leaves

and he's like this is my moment this is finally why I've been holding on for all this time 20, you know, 15, however many years of seniority and experience, the corner office, this is it. And God bless him. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, you call it cashing in his chips and, man, what a gamble.

Because, like, he's still there. They're still making saga games. People love them. Like, it worked out. But, you know, they still, they still, the saga game still do just this random cruel bullshit, like Saga Scarlet Grace, the most recent to come out, is actually the most approachable and friendly of all Saga games, and yet it still has invisible, it still has invisible level scaling. So this totally open game, you can walk around on the map, which is,

you know, very kind of abstract, just like a map style pinpoint sort of thing. You can, you can cruise around, fight enemies, you know, trying to level up and stuff. But there's kind of this world tendency thing going on. And after you fight enough, the love of the enemies start getting stronger and stronger. And you don't scale the same way they do. So if you don't beat a boss for a chapter and move on to the next chapter soon enough, eventually it will become impossible for you to clear that chapter because the basic ass enemies will just be way too strong and forget about defeating the boss. Wow. So this is not explained. It's just at some point you're like, Huh. Why am I not steamrolling these little random encounters that used to be so easy for me? I'm supposed to be getting stronger. What's happening? Well, what's happening is you got co-wazood.

I'm not too familiar with anyone, because I'm not really an RPG guy, but was he the fellow who did Crystal Bearers, Final Fantasy Crystal Bearers? Oh, no, that's a game. That's a game. Okay. You know, I had Unlimited Saga. I bought it randomly because all the reverever. That's the way to do it. Yeah. Well, no what it was. I think all of the reviews in, like, UK magazines that I was reading at the time were just like, huh? That noise, basically. Right.

And I was just like, willfully, like, obscure as, like, contrarian. And I was just like, yeah, I'm going to give that guy. And also, you know, it was cheap because nobody bought it. So it immediately became cheap. And it had really lovely, it was like in a lovely cardboard box with like a nice plush kind of embossed logo and like a little book in, like, art all over it. And I was just like, oh, love it. this is very nice and I think I played it once and then that was just like no no way now now see the thing is now I really want to try it again because I wonder if maybe now I might be like maybe maybe maybe you know you think that's you think that's the case but even going into the game knowing full well what I was getting into and being at least in theory a supporter of all that is kawazu I still find that found this just it's It's tough to love.

It's just, it really is, like Ray said, too random. It's like dice rolls the video game. Dice rolls for everything. It's rough. It's really challenging. Like, takes away player agency at a certain point when it's all dice rolls. That kind of sounds all right to me because one of my favorite Game Boy Advance games is Mega Man Battleship Challenge. Just watch a let's play then.

Why even play the game if it's all random? Because I like to pretend like I'm skilled, you know. I can just sit there holding the game. the buttons and just going like, oh, yeah, I'm absolutely beasting this. There is something nice about not having to take any accountability whatsoever for the outcome of the game you're playing. Exactly. It's not my fault if I lose. I haven't lost. That's one way to look at it.

The game has lost. And if I win, I'll take the credit. All right. So, Stuart, what is the next pick you have on your list, something you have played and find unspeakably cruel? Yes, I'll keep it sort of brief of this one, but I want to talk about Chips Challenge, which was, again, one of my favorite PC games as a kid. And I want to talk very specifically about a few of the levels in it, because if you haven't played Chips Challenge, what it is is a conversion of an Atari-Links game by, I can't remember the name of the company. but the developers, the designer's name is Chuck Somerville. Epix. That's the one. Yeah, I don't know why I can't remember that. It's really obvious. Little fella walking around collecting computer chips in what can only be described as God. I didn't even have to describe it. It's like Frogger, but like puzzles.

Like you move one square at a time and you dodged like bugs and you've got a like soccer bun. It's like big soccer ban. I was going to say, it's a sockabon, right? Yeah, it's sort of. There are sockabon bits, but there's also dodging things and logic gates and like toggle switches. sorts of things. Zelda-ish, but with no combat, I guess. You could say, and all you can do is move and push things. That's it. And it's great. I loved it. Because I especially loved it, because I had it on a Windows 3.1 computer, which was mostly just stuff like, well, you know, Minesweeper. And then suddenly there's this game that's got all, like, ideas and levels and cool, fun things, and like, yes, let's go. And other than the first 10 levels, which are training levels,

like explicit tutorial levels, every single stage is completely self-contained. It presenting a certain type of challenge, whether it's a maze sort of thing, or it's like being chased by monsters sort of thing, we have to react quickly, or a soccer band style level, you have to push blocks into water to create a bridge to the exit, that sort of thing. Fair way into the game, there's a level, maybe level 40-od, and there's a level called Blobnet, which is a bunch of box rooms of about, I want to say, maybe nine tiles or four tiles a piece, and they have, they're bordered by computer chips alongside gravel, and gravel is,

if you're standing on it, you can't be hurt. So it's basically the only time you can be hurt is when you're in that space with those computer chips or if there's nothing there, if a monster's there, you'll get hit. And up until this point, all the monsters that you've seen follow established patterns, like there are bugs that will always follow the right wall,

the wall to the right. There are parametial that will always follow the wall to the left. There are walkers that will always turn left when they hit a wall, that sort of thing, you know? So Choo Choo Rocket basically Pretty much The blobs move randomly Entirely randomly

One ticket at a time And there are something like 88 chips in this stage It's this huge repetitive You're essentially running A checkerboard Sort of collecting these chips Except whenever you've got one

That space is now empty Which means the blob One in four times It's going to be in that space And it's random whether or not He'll be there When you're there So if you don't

Well, I put it this way, there is no way to do it and it be safe. It's not possible. So you will eventually reach a point where you've got to make multiple one in four death runs across these spaces. And, you know, those odds aren't good. That's an exponentially ridiculous probability issue there. Yeah, it's not great. You know, it's not great. The thing is, I'm sure that there are like pro strats that would avoid this, but I don't know those pro strats.

You know, I'm not part of that community. But for me, that's the tip of the iceberg, because later there's a stage called Totally Fair, which is basically what you have to do is manipulate this monster into following you, so it stands on a switch. And that's fine. You know, it's not easy because there's another monster outside of the area you're manipulating that's trying to catch you. So it's a bit of a run around, you know, it could be get frustrating because you might accidentally lead the monster in a wrong direction. But like, whatever, it's doable, it's difficult. By that point, you don't care. And then maybe six or eight stages later, there's a level called Totally Unfair,

which completely mirrors that stage's layout, except you're blocked off from getting into the area so you can see the monster. You have to memorize the solution from that previous level and execute it without being able to see what's happening above you. And this is a game that while it does have passwords, there's no other way to go back and forward to levels that you've been to memorize that. So you could, if you knew the password, Jess, you can jump back and you could check it out and then jump forward and try and recreate it. But, like, even that's a pain in that.

Like, a real pain. And to be honest, part of you is going to be thinking, like, no, surely that's not what they expect me to do here. There's got to be some kind of, like, clue somewhere. And there is, there are a couple of small changes to the layout that do indicate, like, how far up and down you've got to go. But, like, that's it. and it's not just up and down, you know? And that level of just like, I'd never seen that before

and I've never seen it since. That kind of remember the exact solution from a previous stage and not just like how you do it. I'm talking how many steps you take in which direction and when. I've never seen that before or since. And in a sense, I want to stand up and I want to just say, well done.

You found a puzzle within a puzzle within a puzzle. And I really like that in a way. I really, I can't help, but kind of like that. That is impressive, yeah. And honestly, I mean, there are other levels besides that that are just tedious, but that is the one that stands out from here. It's just like cruel, really cruel, I think. But, yeah, I want to keep that brief at Chips Challenge. Pretty much that's it for me from that one.

You know, I've never made it that far into Chips Challenge, but that sounds horrible. It is, yeah. The closest thing I think I've ever experienced to something like that in a video game is when I played all the way through Chrono Cross in Japanese and, you know, to find the true ending in Chrono Cross, spoilers here

for a 25-year-old video game. I haven't played it yet, no. I'm going to be really chronic-crote. I've played Croto Trigger recently. Okay. I'll take my headphones off. So, one, it's 25, but two, okay, so I'll just say

there is a sequence that you need to execute based on your actions and this is actually kind of told to you explicitly in one room kind of in a sort of out-of-the-way place that you actually do have to go to during the course of the game. So if, you know, you're playing the game and you read the language, sure, that's fine, that's cool. But if you're an idiot who's like, I love Chrono Trigger so much, I'm going to play through Chrono Cross in Japanese before it comes out in the U.S. so I can get the experience. and I'm going to write a fact about it. If you're that dumbass,

well, that's a real challenge because you get to that final encounter and maybe, maybe it occurs to you like, huh, there's something happening here that's different than other battles. And I think I remember what I, you know, where I experienced this before, but I'm in the middle of this battle

and there's no way to go back to that place and have that conversation and see what I'm supposed to do here for certain. So I guess I'm not going to get the true ending. So that was, yeah, that was my own fault. So I can't really count that. Yeah, I was going to say, you trolled yourself there. I did.

But, you know, that idea of like, hey, here's a thing that you see once. And then a few hours later, you're going to need to recall it and do it again. That's wild. That's a little rough. Yeah. But not quite on the level of Chips Challenge. Just to keep it super quick, I will mention there's, a very similar thing in, in my opinion, similar in Alex Kidd in Miracle World when you get

the Rosetta Stone, which tells you how to beat the puzzle on the final stage. The problem is it was not correctly localized, so it's right to left, and there's no indication of that's the case. Oh, great. Duh. I mean, let's face it, no one's getting that far in Alex Kidd anyway, so it's not really that big of a deal. But, you know, it's there. No, I actually had that on my list, so I'm glad you mentioned it. Oh, sorry. No, no, no, it's fine. You actually said it better than I could. But there is one other factor, which is that to input the Rosetta Stone sequence, even if you know it's supposed to go right to left, it's done through platforming. So you have to make very precise jumps onto very specific tiles in a specific order in order to beat the game. With a slippery ice controls on the master system deep-heard. That is not a, yes. I didn't want to say it, but you're right.

No, no, no, no, it's okay. I hold my hands up. I've just said I love Ollie and Lisa. I am well aware of the cause of my chosen systems. I mean, that's even if you get the Rosetta Stone, because to get it, you need to get the letter from the castle, and that doesn't, you might just miss it in a random room. Oh, what a game.

Holy shit. Anger game. Jess, what's next on your agenda? Permission to be on my bullshit. Please. Silent Hill bullshit. This is gaming spiless shit after all. Well, I mean, this is like,

the least retro of like anything on this list is all I'm saying, but, you know. Silent Hill is 25 years old also. Now it's retro, but it's like the least oldest of a lot of these things we're talking about, but I just know too much about it. So here I go. But there is a puzzle in Silent Hill 3 that this is so funny because you're bringing up a bunch of different things that like kind of funnel into this story. We're bringing up programming errors, Brady Games guides, localization issues.

We got it all, guys. This is incredible. This is the greatest hits. Yeah, this is the greatest hits, you know, everything. We're peaking early, is what you're saying. It's just very relevant to all the things that just got mentioned. But there's a puzzle in Sionhole 3 that is so hard that fans have been inventing justifications for why the answer is what it is for like 15 years. And like it's not even the Shakespeare puzzle, which is like very famous, the hardest puzzle mode.

It starts you off. The very first puzzle is you have to know. five Shakespeare plays. I haven't read King Lear. Whatever. I play video games. I don't know the bard. Whatever. But like the... Man, I thought my T.S. Eliot reference at the start was going to be the most literary we're going to get. But no, no. You just eclips me. But I'm skipping that because that puzzle is bullshit because I think, you know, to be a fair puzzle, it should be self-contained. It should be in the room with you. You should be able to, you know, if you're if you're 13 years old and you've only read Romeo and Gillian, fuck you kid like you know that sucks you can't solve it um but i'm not talking about that puzzle i'm talking about the hospital keypad puzzle which is a bit later in the game um so it's this you find this really gory gross poem about cannibalism about eating somebody's face you know

so you read this poem in this spooky-ass hospital and there's no numbers in this poem but next of the poem is a numbered keypad to access this whole wing of the hospital that you need to go to to progress the game So you kind of have to surmise from the poem, like, how do I get numbers from this thing? You know, what if a human face can kind of fit on a, you know, three by three keypad if you squint? And that is basically what you're supposed to be doing, right? So like, okay, maybe like one and three could be the eyes and five is the nose and eight is a mouth and, you know, stuff like that. Sure, but like something's screwy here with the answer.

Because for the answer to actually work, the ear has to be, like, under the cheeks, which is wrong from the other side. It's like opposite on the other side of the face here. So, like, what the fuck? So it turns out that whoever was in charge of programming the solution into the game, just put it in wrong. And, like, they goofed up. And there's a one instead of a four in this puzzle by accident in the solution to this. And Silent Hill fans have been justifying this messed up. face for goddamn years to make up for a programmer's fuck up. And the Brady Games guide also has a very convoluted explanation for why, of course, it's this is the answer, of course. Because like when you make a Brady Game's Guide, apparently, they just, you know, they send you the game early and they go, here's the game. And like, you can kind of ask them questions, like translated questions between like America and Japan. And it's just like there's some mishaps happening there. But this isn't even one of those things. It was just,

a guy in the black box of Konami or whatever just hit one instead of four and ruined this code for everybody. So I've seen people posit that, you know, the person whose face you're eating in this poem, well, they're dead. So they're lying down on their left side. And that's why the blood goes that direction. No idea why these numbers correlate that way. Because it doesn't make sense. They've, they screwed up. Can I, is it explicitly a human's face and not, like, for example, a Bassett? Because then maybe you can make this work. It seems to be, like, from a stalker's perspective, so it's very, like, you know, like,

icky, like, romantic, definitely about, like, someone he had a crush on and was stalking. That doesn't completely rule out it being a Bassett, but it makes it less likely. Well, like, you'd think that this would be caused by a translation goof up, but, or, or the fact that like, the translation team would be working with a computer keypad, which the numbers go, the opposite way of a phone keypad. So it's like, oh, maybe that's why this got messed up. But, like, they actually, like, the localization team checked with the art team. It's like, okay, this definitely goes the other way. Okay, good. We're squared. And then some programmer screwed up. They took all that effort and some programmers screwed up the code. And there's

no feedback for putting the code in, right? You can click these numbers for age. You don't know how long the code is supposed to be. It's four digits long, but it doesn't stop you from putting in more numbers after that. And there's also, to top it all off, there is some note somewhere in the hospital that says, the doctor has the code. You'd think four would be enough, but he kept going, which implies it's longer than four digits. Oh, what a nightmare. Yep, bad. You would think, meaning you should think.

Yeah. I have to ask, and I apologize if this undermines this at all, but was this one of the games where you could choose the difficulty of the puzzles and it changed the solutions? You can't do it on the fly, though, I don't think. You can't like change it mid-game. So you're kind of, once you get past the Shakespeare puzzle, you're locked in. Right, okay. And that's in the same level as another puzzle that is also technically, it's not broken, but we've been solving it wrong for 15 years. It's also been justified the wrong way because the Brady Games guide was like,

Oh, of course. This is why it's like this. They didn't know. They were guessing, too. So this is the Silent Hill that no one likes, right? Not yet. Oh, no. That's the fourth one. Oh, okay. And then everyone after the fourth one.

Oh, yes. Normal fandom over here. Yep. All right. Well, I'm going to take it back in time a little more to keep ragging on NES games, ranting about them, because I just keep encountering so much BS. So Predator for NES Hands up if you've ever played this game

It is a game Go on No, I was going to say is it the same as the master system one But probably not, right? It is not, nope Okay, all right That sucks too It was actually

Apparently produced by the same Development Company That created the Rambo NES game Which I kind of like Yeah I've talked about that a lot on the show So I'm not going to talk about it here

But apparently they actually subcontracted it to a company called Clown, who didn't have a lot of experience making video games. And they did some really technically cool stuff with Predator. Like, if you've never played it, you know, part of it is a bad kind of standard NES platformer where you're running and jumping and you're Arnold Schwarzenegger, but you have a terrible selection of weapons and you're very limited in what you can use. You might accidentally pick up a grenade and then you have to like throw a grenade and wait for it to explode. and an enemy in order to progress.

Just terrible, but, you know, kind of standard fare for this era. But it also has something called Big Mode, where you are playing a gigantic spright, a gigantic sprite of Schwarzenegger. It kind of looks like, you know, it's like the same scale as the Kung Fu on, or what is it? What's the name of the game on, on Turmographics? China Warrior. The China Warrior. Yes, China Warrior.

I think it's called the Kung Fu in Japan. Yeah, the Kung Fu. Yeah. The Kung Fu. The, there's only one. The Kung Fu. Yes. Wow.

The definitive article. Meeting a celebrity. The Kung Fu. Exactly. So, you know, it's really impressive to see, technically, you're playing a background tile as opposed to a sprite. But still, it's really impressive. It still sucks as a game, but it's impressive looking. However, like, yeah, the big problem is they had a lot of apparent technical expertise with

the NES. They were really good at doing stuff that you hadn't seen before, but not so good to the level design. And there is a level that I got to. And even with cheat codes for invincibility and things like that, I was absolutely stumped. How can I possibly beat the stage? Nothing that I did or cheated to do seemed to work. And it turns out the answer is that there's a door, which you can see, but it's kind of in an alcove, and there's a platform over top of it, and then it kind of comes around underneath, and there's a platform leading up to it. But you can't actually jump high enough from that lower platform to reach the door. But because this isn't like a contrast, I mean, it looks like it wants to be contra, but it's not contra. So you can't jump down

through the, you know, through the platforms by pressing down on jump. You just Arnold Schwarzenegger's too beefy to do that. So there's, it seems like there's no. way to get there. But actually, there is an enemy that, like, throws projectiles at you that's stationed kind of above the door. And the platforms above the door are sort of uneven. They, like, there's like a rise. So they're, you know, like if you look at background tiles, there's like a row of background tiles and then a platform kind of ends and starts again at the row of tiles above that. So the way to beat this level is to stand at that kind of junction where the platform rises and there's a there's not a gap,

but there's a corner. And then you wait until the projectile throwing enemy throws a projectile at you. And when the projectile hits you, the knockback will push you through the platform and cause you to clip through. And then you will fall down to the door. I thought this couldn't possibly be the solution, but the only solution I can find in facts for the game, say, this is what you do. Get out. So you have to exploit a knockback glitch in order to complete the stage. Now, there are multiple paths to the game. It kind of branches at some point, so there's like two possible paths you can go through.

This is one of them. but I can't imagine a child or an adult in 1989 playing this game and saying you know what I really need to do to finish this is deliberately take damage and glitch. Yes, that seems like a wise and sensible solution. No, you're going to get down there and you're going to be like, I can't jump up there.

There's no way to get up there. This is stupid and impossible and turn off the system. A red herring or something, yeah. It's, I mean, maybe, maybe I'm, maybe, I'm overlooking something. By the point that this episode comes out, I will have published a video about this game. So I'm sure people in the YouTube comments will tell me in great detail and with a very, very cordial and polite tone that I missed something obvious. But as far as I can tell, and as far as people who have written about the game, on the internet, definitively, can tell.

that's how you beat stage six whatever or whatever six of Predator for NES. And that, my friends, is bullshit. That's bullshit. Absolute. Yeah. Complete. This is why programming is all fake. It really is just, you know, tricking rocks into thinking.

That's all we're trying to do here. Well, these rocks did not think very well. Yeah. Thank you, programmers. Okay. Well, I'll save the rest of my NES complaints for my NES complaints for next round. I'm feeling a little head up right now, so I need to calm down. So I'm going to pass the, I'm going to pass the mic over to Ray while I, while I let my temperature come down a bit. Sure thing. Well, I'm going to talk now about one of my favorite PS2 games, which will

sound crazy once I start talking, but it's the nightmare of Draga, Hushigino Dungeon. Now, this is a mystery dungeon game in the franchise alongside Shear and the Wanderer in the Pokemon Mystery dungeon games, supervised by the same creators and everything, which give you randomly generated dungeons every play-through and you lose all your stuff if you die, but you're expected to replay and level up. So you're moving and exploring dungeons, also with very turn-based rules of movement and such. But it's also meant to be a sequel to the Tower of Juraga, which is the classic Namco Arcade game, 1984. And in Tower of Juraga, the stages are pre-made mazes with secret treasures that you have to find by doing

certain actions like early on you have to kill two black slimes or whatever and the speed boots will appear at some point in the maze and you have to go grab that and then grab the key to the exit door and the thing is that in that original game all those things the enemies and the items they don't always show up in the same spots every time just that the maze is the same and the missions to get the items so nightmare of draga follows this setup on top of having the mystery dungeon rules like leveling up and risking your inventory and stuff like that but it's also actually counterintuitive to mystery dungeon because most of the game you are given preset dungeon maps

they're not randomized and a known special item still on each and every floor and I don't think the special items change positions either in it but really the whole thing is that this game is kind of massive now mystery dungeon games are kind of long to begin with even if you don't factor in you know having to restart and replay some of those parts of it so the original Tower of Raja had had 60 floors, 60 levels, which is a lot for an arcade game that is meant to,

you know, torture people. But that's a different cruelty story. Rather, in the nightmare of Duraga, it has four chapters. The first three chapters total 60 floors. And then chapter four alone is 60 floors. So that's 120 floors of mystery and dutchening right there. But keep in mind, these are not randomized layouts. I mean, I do have the strategy guide right here.

from Japan and it has maps for every single floor, minus some of the boss ones, because they're straightforward. So if you're like a drag-ahead, one of these old drag-aheads from Japan and you love taking notes, you'll be fine just with these pre-made mazes, right? So you complete the game, chapter

four. Turns out there's a fifth chapter, and this time it is randomized. It is now actually a mystery and dutchin game. After you did all of that, 120 floors, chapter five itself is 120 floors. So you are now in a

Similar to the original Giraga Like once you beat the game It's like guess what idiot Double game There's twice as many of the things you thought there was I think that was just in some of the home ports Isn't that right Ray? Yeah something like that

Plus there was also the arcade sequel Ishtar I'm sorry that Return of Ishtar yes Which is about Like the story conceit of Ishtar Is like going down back through the tower Which Valve would still later for Half-Life 2, Episode 1.

Okay. So it's 120 more levels in this special randomized version of everything. And of course, everything is like crazy hardcore and everything. And that's basically it. Except there's also like a hidden secret layer of dungeons in just the main game. Like in the first three or four chapters, there's like a whole section of the game called another dungeon. And this is also like randomized and

probably even more hardcore than even this fifth chapter is. And I'd never even actually got a good read on how many floors there are. I think it is just like extra stuff that you can do whenever. Sort of like the item worlds in Descaya games.

Oh, yeah. Sort of a similar thought process there. And like you find these hidden exits in the main game in Nightmare Raga and these will take you to one of the another dungeons they call them. That's it. I just want to tell you how much of a slog this game is, despite the fact that it's like the first half of it is like straightforward, right? Pre-made mazes just to have a map. You'll be fine. And then it's like, oh, now it's actually a mystery dungeon game. And you might have to be dying and repeating a lot more for about 240 levels of fun. Ray, I think you actually overlooked the most infuriating thing about the American version of this game. Okay, yeah, all right.

I will go ahead and mention that as well. That kind of falls in there with the Ninja Guideon Monster Party localization disaster, but it might be the worst of the localization screw-ups. Yeah, so, yeah, I guess to set that up, first of all, you know, we didn't get a lot of mystery dungeon games in this country for quite a while until, like, the first year-in game showed up on DS, right? And so it was like that and like the Tornaco game for PS-1. Chokobos Dungeon.

Chokobos Dungeon. Pokemon, too, but I think Chocobot was first. Yeah, right. And so a lot of people weren't used to it. And, you know, they were critically maligned. But they, nevertheless, Namco decided to go ahead and localize the Nightmare of Juraga. And the thing is that in the Japanese version of Nightmare of Juraga, you can pull up the submenu, just, you know, your regular menu. And you'll get a hint as to how you need to find these.

two special treasures on each and every floor. They took it out of the English version. It was too much for them. There was, I guess, a budget that had to be met, and they could not, in fact, translate all of these hints. They couldn't even translate the title of the game. It's not Nightmare of Duraga Mystery Dungeon. It's Fushigino Dungeon.

I'm the American box art. Like, Americans don't know what Fushigino means. Yeah. It's just like karaoke. Fushino This is one of those things that just makes me raises many questions

in my brain Is this the one where When you If you reset it It yells at you For ages Like Rister Rossetti style Because it auto saves

Or less Yeah Yeah Okay They do that Yeah Because they they They copy

Protect the saves So it's like Also one of the few PS2 games Or you just cannot Copy the save Over to a card Really

Really? Yeah Really? Yeah, it's locked because it is very important that you play this game according to the rules. I guess, wow. I mean, the thing is, I didn't even know this had been localized because I must have, I mean, in my searches, I must have seen it, seen that it was called for Shiggo Dungeon and went, well, that's not, that's not localized. And I was going to play it.

Is this the sequel to Fisigi Yugi? What is this? It was also like localized fairly soon after the Japanese release, like only, like less than a year, I think. So it was a few months between the releases. And so you're just like, you could have spent some extra time, I guess. I mean, well, apparently you had no faith in it to begin with, but like, geez, guys. I mean, they could have saved more money by just not localizing it if they weren't going to do it with the stuff you need to finish the game. I'm not, you know, it's weird.

Yeah, Namco was doing some weird localization stuff at the time because like a year later, they released Mr. Driller for DS as a launch game. and they took out all the extra modes they just had the arcade style mode but there was a bunch of extra stuff in the Japanese version and they were just like we'd have to localize item names that's hard

let's not do that so you didn't get the quest mode I will also add that you know crowdsourcing hasn't also been kind to this game because you go to game facts and it's just like one fact and the person did not finish it and so all we really

have is the Japanese strategy guides to go on for any sort of indication of what to do. That's in Japanese. Yeah, it is in Japanese. I know. It's a, yeah, it's a real pickle. It's a real for Shigido.

I do enjoy this game, actually. In terms like the mystery dungeon stuff, it is just kind of fun to go through, and I'm just into the drag of stuff in general. So I'm not saying I've completed any of it, or I'm any sort of expert or else I would be writing the fact, but not so much not really but uh yeah it is it's a game i'm going to have my steward moment here

because i this is very positive no this this is a positive thing it's a i i don't understand like this is going to make people say i don't understand why that happened but okay um so i was assigned to review this game when it came out for oneup dot com back in the early days of the site and i was like what the hell is this and threw myself at it for like 12 hours because it was, you know, not a full review session. I did not complete this game. Let's not even pretend. But I liked it.

I was like, huh, this is, this is kind of interesting. And from that point, I actually liked roguelikes. This was the game that made me decide, rogue likes are neat, and I like them. They're a thing I enjoy to a certain degree. That's encouraging. Yeah, like, even despite all of the cruelty and the complete lack of direction that the American version included, I was like, this is not so bad.

It made me interested in Duraga also. So, yeah, this was like a loadstone moment for me, keystone. That's actually kind of, even on the smaller scale, that's quite reassuring, because I was going to, I wanted to give this a go. Like, I saw there some screen shots, and I was like, hey, this looks like my kind of thing. And then I hear that the heat, the hint sheet's not there, so it's not really finishable. And I'm like, well, I guess I won't bother then. But now you're like, oh, this was the game that got me into these games.

So I've got to be something there. From here, you can go on to mystery dungeon games that you can actually complete. Didn't something similar happen with Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter? They took some feature out that made it so much more palatable when they localized it, or am I completely imagining this? Oh, I don't remember. I don't believe so. Well, the listeners will know.

Listeners of Redfern. Assemble. Anyway, so thank you, Ray, for walking us through that nightmare. Hopefully I can have someone get into The Nightmare of Jiraga and we'll all translate these insigua. Please help. Stuart, what's your final pick for this episode? Oh, I've got to pick one. I've got so many unbelievably brilliant ones as well.

No, you know what? I'm going to go with something a little bit like not the actual main games challenge. You know, it's like the kind of challenge for someone who's a completionist. I'm going to talk about Crash Bandicoot 4. Now, hands up, this is not actually a retro game, but it's a sequel to a retro game

that is sold on the third. fact that it is finally the fourth game in the retro series, and specifically throwing back to the classic Crash Bandicoot game player that we all missed so much. So I want to talk about Crash Bandicoot 4, because it's also like smashing your own face in with a rock, to be honest. Now, here's the thing, the Crash Bandicoot games, 1, 2, and 3, I'm very fond of those games. I hold my hands up to the fact that they are.

If you weren't there, they're very unappealing, I think. I think it's hard to be Crash fan now unless you already weren't one because he's quite a bad character but I liked them but he shouted at Nintendo headquarters I don't understand when I did that

do I get on that but no I do time but Crash Bandicoot 4 finally released a few years ago now it's a much great fanfare as the final finally recognizing

the quality of Crash Bandicoot in a brand new platforming adventure that throws back to these original three platform games and what stands out for me about the original three crash games is that they are games that I have gone back to quite frequently because they're quite easy to blast through

they're not necessarily super easy games like there's some slightly unreasonable difficulty going on in that first one but it's the kind of thing when once you're good at it that sounds a bit dismissive once you're there like you're okay with it you know what I mean it's like well I know this is a bit unfair

but this is the bit I'll push through and then everything I'll be fine and you can 100% of those games in like four hours maybe maybe not including the time trails and I'm not doing time trails I don't have time for that get all the gems 100%

it's nice and it's rewarding you know there are some challenging moments but it's designed that people can finish it you know and they would push and there'll be some frustration but you'll make it to the end and you'll be done and it's a breezy enjoyable thing that's why people like these games that's why people go back to them

crash four is like wading through a swamp full of piss I cannot with this I cannot with this game to use the parents of the youth of today what is different about it is the goals are essentially the same

in that make your way to the end of the stages and for 100% completion you want to get all of these gems you need to collect all these gems and to get the gems you just get you have to break all the boxes in a stage and you know in the original games you'll have I'd say maybe 40 boxes in a stage.

Maybe the later levels you might get up to maybe like just over 100, maybe. Crash 4, I think, like, the first level's got like 160 or something. And if that's not your immediate kind of like, okay, like something's gone wrong here. It's the fact you reach the end of the stage and it's sort of like you've got 149 out of 150 boxes so you don't get that gem. you do get the gem for getting enough fruit and there's also two more gems you can get by a beating it without dying like three or more times and some other final thing

like just one hidden one in the stage somewhere so first of all you're like so right okay when I missed one gem one box now the problem is the way it works is you can't just go back and get that box you've got to get them all in one run and you know that's what makes it challenging in the old games that was kind of okay because that's what makes it challenging

there's a few moments where you're kind of mad but they're designed that way there's always got to be at least one level that's annoying because that's what's memorable, right? Yeah. But Crash 4, it's like, you go back and you're like, where's this one box? And it turns out it's behind a step and it's invisible.

You can't see it because it's behind a step, like a downward step. And it's a linear facing game where you can't move the camera backwards. So if you don't know it's there already, you won't be able to get... That's not fun. That's annoying.

That's not like... You are unlocking memories that I purposefully forgot about Crash 4. When you started talking about Crash 4, I was like, oh yeah, I didn't play that. I did. I hated it so much that I just deleted it. I forgot all about it. But yeah, it was fucking bullshit. It was so rude. It's like the defense for this is just don't get 100%. Like, no. It's Cush Bandicoo. I always got 100%. It's also like, it felt like, you know, and Crash 3 is my favorite for what it's worth but like it felt like they they there was a difficulty curve of 100%ing where it's just like

you could go through the first couple of levels of a given set because there was like five or six of them in the little like set of each little spoke and you could just do it in one run you could just get all the things and it wasn't this like really obscure place you had to get to or something like there and then later on there'd be harder ones where it's like oh that's a mystery how do I get all the way over there. I have no clue. And, like, it felt reasonable because they saved the tricky ones for less. It felt like Crash 4 was right out of the gate. Fuck you. You're not getting all these boxes. If that was something you liked as a kid, fuck you. You're not going to get that. The thing with Crash, the old Crash Games is this isn't universally true, but generally

if you missed a box, you could go back and get it. And if you couldn't, the levels weren't very long. No, they were like two minutes long. Dude, these levels were so long in Crash 4. Oh, my God. And the checkpoints weren't that good. I'm really sorry that I've dug this up from the depths of help. I'm coming back to me. But, I mean, that's like the half of it. I'll keep it quick. But, like, once you get, once you figure out to get these six jams, the problem is, when there's a jam for dying three or fewer times, dying four times is the most annoying thing in the world.

Yeah. Like, why do that? Like, why even add that? It's just, it's shit. It's just adding shit for no reason. Like, these levels are hard. Getting all the boxes is hard. Isn't that enough?

What do you want for me? Yeah. But, like, yes, you can get a gem and then you don't have to get it again. That's great, right? But that means that if you are trying to get all the gems and you do lose three lives, you're just like, well, that's fucked. That's, yeah, that's gone. That's done that wrong.

Yeah. And that's frustrating. When you get to the end of a level, and I've talked about this before, but when you, my least favorite thing in any platform game like that is when you get to the end of the level, you're like, Christ, that was really hard. And then the game just goes, you're, you sucked. You did it so badly.

You missed two boxes, you idiot. Moron. And then knowing that that's not just a two-minute dash, that's 15 to 20 minutes of pouring over every detail everywhere because there are boxes off the screen behind things. You know that when you bounce on a box to break it, sometimes they put a box above the box off the screen, So you've got to do a high bounce off the damn screen.

Yes. And do a double jump to hit the box. Now, then there are these things called inverted levels, which are the same levels again, except they've been mirrored. And you have to get six gems again to get 100%. Oh, my God. I'm so upset. I forgot about all of this.

The problem with this, what it is is it's just shit, isn't it? It's just cruffed. It's just piled on shit because they're like, we need to make this worth $60. Let's just pile on as much needless bobby. works as we can. Let's make the players do all this crap. Like, here's what they needed to do to make the game feel worth $70 for crash fans. It's make a good crash game. What's not to say, because the levels are so long, the idea that you can't die more than three times is like, okay, if that was a precedent, like any, I don't think any other other crash games had any

challenge of that sort. Nothing like, no, you're allowed to die? Screw it. Oh, no. They did have the death platforms where you had to get to a certain point in the stage without dying, but they were generally quite near the beginning, quite reasonable. Yeah, like, they weren't so ridiculous. It's like, okay, now you've got significantly longer levels with a really hard, like, parameter to fulfill. And it's like, this is way too much, y'all. And they're not even, the levels, as well as being long, they're also very difficult levels. So hard.

Yeah, lots of killing, lots of death. And, you know, you manage all that. You get these things called the flashback tapes, which require you to get to a certain point in the stage to get them. And then once you've got them, you unlock these all. awful 2D levels where all you're doing is breaking boxes. You see, it's all coming back. It's awful, isn't it? I deleted this so hard.

My actual least favorite thing about this game, the peak thing that makes me the most pissed off about this game, and this is like the most annoyed I'm ever going to be on Retronauts probably. Okay, here's right. I'm actually getting mad. Okay, stop and compose myself. Oh, boy. Let's go.

In the original Crash games, there are bonus levels, okay? Yes, you need to get everything in the bonus levels to get 100%, But they're bonus levels. They're just, do-de-do-do, do, do, do, breaks some boxes, cut loads of fruit, get some extra lives. Yay, fun, nice, good. After the first one,

the bonus levels in Crash 4 are deliberately designed to be like, nah, you can't get that box now, you stupid arson. You bricking, you moron. So the bonus levels are actually just, like, significantly difficult, intentionally frustrating level design.

Kaiser levels. Yeah. basically. Crash 4 is Kaiser Crash. It's a bonus area. It's supposed to be bonuses. It's not meant to be just a middle finger in my face. Am I allowed to

have fun in this game at any point? Or is it just to make me regret ever playing? And what really sucks is I love the game feel and I love the graphics and that game made by people who won't say this, it could have been really great and unfortunately it was a load of old ass. I haven't

even got into some of the stuff that sucks about it because I don't want to go on and on and on, but I mean, I could I could and maybe one day there'll be an episode about Crash Full which will just be therapy. It'll just be me and you being like what the fuck is it? Being mad. Being mad screaming for two hours.

Yeah, that's what I think is that's why I think is cruel about it, not only to make a game that is pointedly deliberately frustrating about making as many misables as possible in a game that encourages you not to miss things. It's not like it doesn't matter.

I think like the biggest crime was that it made me question Do I like the Crash Bandicoot games? Like it tainted my nostalgic, like warm feelings for the original games. It's just like, I think I hate you, Crash. Yeah. I think the worst thing about it is that other people like it and I have to live in the same planet as them. So you feel crazy.

Yeah, exactly. Because I'm just, everyone's like, it's great. Just don't bother getting 100%. And I'm like, that's a terrible cop-out because there's no other content. That's the only thing to do in the game. I know. Maybe the call of dutification of Activision led to something where it's like, yeah, just play Crash 4 for 40 hours a week and then prestige and you're good, right? You'll love it forever. Oh, God. They actually made that, didn't they? They made Crash Team Rumble, which was literally Battle Pass Crash Bandicoot. Oh, God, yeah.

Oh, God. I memory hold that, too. I'm the biggest, I'm a huge Crash fan, and I've not even touched that because no. No, that's fair. damn wowsers more like shit bandicoot get them drag them show them what for go back to australia it's finally upset we got there we got there people i wrote a book all games are good buy it now all good stores well mostly limited front of amazon but there's actually a chapter on crash four and it's like the only bit of the book where i just talk about how bad it is so that's the exception that proves the rule wow it does make me like nostalgic for like some of the nes games we've been about. It's just like, yeah, there's a hidden block that you need to get. And it's like in every

level or whatever, you know, like, Milon's secret castle. Like, oh, those are the days. I got to recommend. There's a video by a YouTuber called Kedikaris, who's infuriatingly young. But it's extremely good, like, forensic discussion of why this sucks in a very entertaining way. So I'd recommend that, basically. Or you could just ring me on the phone and I'll go on about it for hours at you. Here's my phone number. Plus 447. No, I won't give that. I feel like that's kind of the issue, though, when, like, nobody is making 3D character platformers for years and years except like Nintendo. And everybody's just sort of like forgets. Forgot how to make the genre.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah. It made me think that maybe Mario 64 isn't so bad after all. Sorry, that was just trying. In aggregate, yeah, pretty good. Oh, gosh. Don't play Crash 4 kids. All right. So we're going to wind down. I'm going to let Jess share her next pick for us, and then I'll bring it home.

Yeah. So I was going to talk about a famously bullshit, another maze, but it's from a game I also haven't played. So I feel like I really shouldn't talk about it. You should just watch the video I saw about how rude this puzzle is. But it's from an abduction, which I was meaning to play. But now I'm like, I don't think I'm going to play this if I have to deal with this in person. But you should watch, I highly recommend watching Second Wins video, the worst puzzle of all time. design delve. It's a simple maze that is made god-awful by just making it so you can't see how you're fixing the maze, basically, to really truncate that down. Instead, you should just watch that. Instead, I'm going to talk about something that is not retro, but it's not fair. And I'm also breaking the rules here probably because it's technically a mod. So the rule on retronauts is that we can talk about games once they're 10 years old,

but the corollary is that eventually every game will be 10 years old to go for it. Listen to this in nine years. Thank you. Thank you for permission and forgive me people who have not given me permission. But it's part of a series that is retro, so it's fine. It's fine. But it is part of a retro series. It's part of the Half-Life series.

But Half-Life Alex is the best fucking game I've ever played, right? I cannot gush enough about how much I love Half-Life Alex. But I wanted more. So I'm like, oh, I hear there's some good mods for this. and the most recommended one that I saw at the time, I'm so sorry I hate to, like, you know, kick an indie dev or anything like that. You know, that's punching down.

But Half-Life Levitation fucking sucks, man. Because, like, so it's, you know, VR, all that stuff. The VR feels great, except, like, you know, if you're a big Valve fan, one of my favorite things about, like, Portal, Half-Life, et cetera, is that they have the developer commentary nodes that you can unlock and listen to all these incredible, insight, how hard they playtest these things, all these things that they learned about, like, human psychology and human nature and human, you know, the body. What the body can stand to do in VR. And it's like, okay, like you made a whole mod for this entire VR game. You must have watched the developer commentary. You've got to know the do's and don'ts, right? No. Motherfucker, whoever made this game did not do that because there's more than multiple notes that mention.

How difficult it is to portray motion in VR, because it makes people immediately sick. Like, your inner ear does not like to deal with this, right? So whenever you are in a moving thing in the actual game, Half-Life Alex, if you're in an elevator, if you're in a train, you'll notice that they only give you these little tiny windows to look out from so that you're not, like, completely disoriented motion-wise. And this developer did not care about that because there are, oh, there's elevators, there's all sorts of crazy shit going on. There is a part that was so mean that I, like, I climbed a ladder in a train, a moving train. I had this really bullshit, a really bullshit train sequence where it was already disorienting because the windows were huge. And you have to shoot the guys on other trains through the windows. and I'm like so dizzy and I'm trying my best.

And I'm like, okay, what now? I climb a little ladder. I'm on top of the train going like 80 miles per hour in a tunnel. And there's all the combine for some reason left traps on top of the train, which does not make sense. Why would they do this? But you have to go around and like try to avoid all of these precariously placed trip mines on top of a moving vehicle. Like, I got up to the top of the train, and, like, my knees buckled. Like, I can't explain how disorienting this is.

Like, my knee just fucking gave out, and I was on the floor trying to deal with this part of the game through gritted teeth and half-closed eyes. And I was just like, why would you do this to me? Didn't you play the developer commentary? Fuck. So were the minds, like, sell-tapped to the top of the train or, like, something? Like, how did that work? Oh, God. I don't.

It was such a nightmare. So they put them on there and then, like, they were there at the station and no one went like, one of those things on top of the train that looked like mines. The combine thought of everything. I don't know. Yeah, don't worry about it. Oh, boy. We've got to mine the top just in case this idiot goes up there. I have a headset, like an old Oculus thingy, and I want to play Half-Life Alex. And I have Health Life Alex, and I booted it up. And I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing, but I need to make space to play this. Yeah.

And that was like two years ago, and I just haven't made any space because you can't make space. impossible. Makes place. No, all that happens is more things keep appearing and nothing disappears. I encourage everyone who has the means to play Half-Life Alex, and even if you think your inner ear is really, really powerful, I recommend against playing Half-Life limitation, unfortunately. The final boss was a nightmare, too. Don't get me start on that, whatever.

I think it's cool. There are mods for that. I didn't know. I know, right? I want to like this. I, you know, my heart was broken, and then I was just mad. about it. Is it as good as Rick and Morty virtual Rickality?

I would not know, unfortunately. That one went under my radar. Oh, you mean the best game ever made? Under my radar. Yeah, second best off to other Rick and Morty game, I guess. I guess, you know, it speaks to like the overall challenge of VR game design. Yeah. I feel like it was hard enough going from 2D to 3D, and now we have to like, or VR

designers have to factor in, like, the inner ear, like you said. Yeah, and, like, I don't expect an indie developer to be able to playtest things to within an inch of their lives, like Valve clearly does constantly. But it's like to not take in the lessons that Valve has learned and has said out loud to you, the player, that's bizarre. Why would you do this to me? Like, there is reams of lessons learned over, like, the past 10 years of doing real VR games that you can build on and look at.

To me, it's just a lot to go through. through, but yeah. But it's like making a mod is a lot to go through, right? So it's like, why not do a little bit more effort and just like learn the hard learned lessons so you don't make me nauseous. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to wrap up this episode by taking us back into retro territory all the way back. Go ahead. I went way off course there. Sorry. It's all good. That sounded horrible and I'm glad that I will never play that. So I'm going to bring things full circle also by talking about two games that are kind of related to things we've already discussed. So related to Nightmare of Duraga, in a sense, is Hydelein.

So, Hydelide for NES. Basically, the inspiration for Tower of Duraga. And Tower of Duraga was, of course, the inspiration for Nightmare of Duraga. Anyway, hide lied, I don't think people, you know, have played the NES game generally and said, oh, I think I should, you know, really decrypt this game and figure it out. because you pick it up, you start playing, and the first sprite or slime sprite you encounter kills you, and you start over from the beginning, you have to figure out how to manipulate the soft save feature, not a hard save, soft save, and then, you know, record passwords

and stuff. So it doesn't make itself very friendly. But for my NES works video, I did play most of the way through the game, but I had to tap out when I got to finding the third of three fairies you have to rescue. Because the first two are easy enough to get a hold of, but they're very random. Like, both of the first two fairies appear in trees. On specific screens, the trees are selected at random. If you press and search the wrong tree, on the first screen, you'll be attacked by bees that immediately kill you. That's just realistic. On the second, on the second fairy, the trees themselves actually walk around and if you search a tree, a walking tree

that does not have the ferry, it will just kill you. So you have like a one in six chance each time of finding the fairy. Okay, BS. But it does have a soft save feature. So you get to that screen, you hit soft save, you know, from the save menu, and you die, reload the game. There are worse ways to play an ES game. But the third fairy, to get the third fairy,

you have to kill two wizards. Now, you can't kill the wizards with physical attacks. You have to kill them with a magic spell. You have like six magic spells and only one of them will work. And it's not obvious really which one does it. But eventually you'll discover, oh, these guys are throwing fireballs. If I shoot them with a fireball, they'll die. But the thing is, if you shoot a wizard with the fireball spell, it will disappear, but then it will immediately reappear.

The only way to kill them is to kill them simultaneously with the fire spell, which only flies horizontally across the screen. So you have to line up both of the wizards who are walking around hitting you, throwing fire spells at you, horizontally simultaneously on the same level as you. And in that instant, hit both the attack and defend buttons or whatever it is, A and B, simultaneously, which is how you cast a spell. while that's queued up, which you have to do by, I think, hitting select, and you can't have it queued up for too long, or it resets to the first spell in the list. So you have to hit both of them simultaneously with a spell that only flies in one direction, but the really cool part is that Heidlide takes place in, you know, the Legend of Zelda-style

screens, it's flip-scrolling. So you walk to the edge of the screen, it flips over to the next screen, you're in a different space. So the wizards only appear in this one space, and the space they occupy is only about a third of the screen wide. So at most, I think the widest point where the wizards appear is like five tiles wide, maybe six out of, you know, however many it is 16 tiles or whatever on the screen. So you have barely any space to maneuver. They walk around at random up and down the length, the height of the screen. the screen. And so you have to survive long enough to line them up with the spell queued. And in the split instant, they're on the line with you and haven't killed you,

lower your defense, cast the spell, and hit them both. I spent about 20 minutes trying to do that. And it sucked. And I hated it. And I knew going into it, I looked in a fact, because I have no idea where I'm going to find these fairies. And it said, this is what you have to do. Even knowing that. it was pretty much next to impossible. Like, I can't imagine having the patience to do that. But I also, even more than that, can't imagine ever stumbling across that solution without a strategy guide, without tips of, you know, any sort, like some sort of spoiler to say, this is what you need to do. Because that is not a task you are going to attempt.

You are going to cast a spell that maybe kills a wizard and you're going to say, oh, he reappeared. I guess these guys just can't be killed. There must be, you know, these are just a thing I have to avoid. No. There is a puzzle here, and it is not a puzzle that a normal human would intuit through any normal means. And it's not like this is a game that will train you to think in this way. No. There's nothing else like that.

There are no other enemies you have to kill simultaneously. Yeah. In fact, to that point, there's no real reason to use magic, period. So that was when I, like, had to discover how do I even cast a spell? Because I see there are magic spells at the bottom. I have a magic meter, but what's the point? Not really much of a point. So anyway, that's Heidelined.

Wow. But we're going to end this. Does anyone want to add anything about Heidelined before I bring up my last one? Well, I think other than that a little moment, what you said about, like, the soft saving stuff? I think that does make Heidlide playable, more playable than people have let on. over the years and so and it is also kind of an important game

in like early RPG spaces so it's not quite as hard to get through even the NES version so I'm like you can accept that except that point you can get this on the

egg console on the switch now but I think it's one of the computer versions isn't it? Yeah it's probably the X1 or something I will say so it's probably even less friendly there's a they had like remake of the first three on Windows

95, much like how they did with the East, East Chronicles. And so if you can stomach trying to boot that up in a VM or something, it's on the internet archive, so you can find Hyde Light 1, 2, 3. I would just recommend trying those versions other than just going

with the NES, but yeah. I want to play the Saturn one where you're like a fella and it's like a FMV. Virtual Hyde. Yeah. I mean, that game is just rules. I mean, look at it. Look at it. Come on. That game is amazing.

Amazing. All right. So I want to bring up at the very end here, perhaps the most obvious and famous of BS games, which is Atlantis no Nazo for Famicom, which almost came to the U.S. as super pitfall to, but we were spared. So Atlanta's no Nazo is a difficult game. Sunsoft's designers sat down and said, Super Mario Brothers is very popular.

Let's make our own take on Super Mario Brothers, but let's make it even harder. We're going to make 100 stages, and the whole thing is going to be about finding your way around and, you know, decrypting secrets and basically trying to figure out the way to the end. So the hundred stages are not linear. You have to travel around through different doorways. It is consistent.

There is a path through the game. It's not an easy game or a fun game, but the design does at least have some ambition to it. And it's consistent. You know, you have to learn how to use your attack, which is a little bomb that you throw and it rolls along the ground. blow things up. But a lot of enemies will see the bomb coming and hunger down beneath a shell or something and it won't hurt them. So that's always fun. Birds

will poop at you. You know, it's that kind of game. But there is one level called Zone 44, the 42nd of 100 stages. And once you reach that stage, you die. There's no two ways about it because

this zone is called the black hole. And it literally is a black screen. You spawn midway through the screen, and you fall to the bottom and die. And then you spawn for your next life at the same spot. You fall and die. So the thinking behind this game was... I've never heard of this before.

Holy shit. You know, kids own this game. They don't have to go to the arcade and put $0.25 in. They've paid their money. So we can make this as arbitrary and unfair as we want. So they literally just added a screen that if you go, to that stage, you will die, so you must learn never ever to go to that stage, avoid the door that takes you there, because that's it. That's the end of the game, and you have to

start all over and find your way through the hundred stages from the beginning again. Wow. And that is just unbelievably, almost like admirably cruel. I'm impressed, yeah. I actually, I think it's kind of beautiful. Like, this was not an error. This was not a clipping glitch. This was just the designer saying, you know what, we can do this, and kids just have to suck it up. You know, I'm looking at an image. I'm looking at an image of this screen, and not only does it say, Black Hole, it has a little exclamation mark like it's happy that you came here to die. Black hole, yay! It's kind of metal in a way, isn't it?

Fuck you. You did it. You got an arbitrary game over. Oh, man. That's, I love, I mean, the whole thing of spawning and then dying again immediately is just like, you know, it makes me go, oh, spectrum. because that's a very common thing back then. I mean, my only experience with this game

and Retronauts, kids with your bingo cards, get ready, I watched Coronet play. She played it for 12 straight hours and finally beat it. So let's say, well done to the V-Tuber. All right. I watched Ari No play it.

He's not a V-Tuber, but that is a classic episode of Game Center CX. Did he end up beating it? My memory's foggy because I have to think about it right now. I don't spoil the ending Okay, yeah, yeah, fine

Let's let the kids you could sound I've seen that episode too And I can't remember, so I don't remember, yeah I mean, you know, it's one of those things where it's at or he got one of the A.Ds to do it, so I don't remember which of any of these I don't remember like every single game center episode

I do not remember any of which ones he actually succeeded on like it's a surprise every time I watch one of these even if I've seen it before I did look at the old episode guy and yeah, he beat it okay good for him I'd also say this game was so crucial to history

that they immortalized it on the Famicom Classic Mini and like the only other game that would have taken that spot was Spalunker it's not on that so it's Atlantis Nonazo as like the figurehead of Kusoge on the classic mini there which I think is just beautiful yeah it's yeah and before this game there was no such thing as a black hole It's true. They invented the Disney made a movie about it.

Scientists called Spaghettiification when you enter the black hole. That sounds delicious. So it's actually, it really does kind of bring it back to Mario. Anyway, thanks everyone for listening to this Retronauts episode. I hope you have enjoyed our tales of cruelty, our tales of ribaldry, and other assorted tales. I'd like to thank everyone who joined me this afternoon this evening for sharing your travails and your woes and your PTSD. It's been good, purifying, you know, cathartic fun. And I hope people at home have enjoyed not having had to experience these games themselves.

We did it for you. You're welcome. So if you enjoyed listening to these tales of sadness and misery and anger, well, I have good news for you. Retronauts is a podcast that happens all the time, once or twice a week, by God. So you can subscribe to Retronauts by going to pretty much any device that isn't Spotify and looking for Retronauts. And there we are, right there. But you can support the show by going to Patreon.com slash Retronauts. And for just a few bucks a month, you can get every episode that we record and publish on Mondays for free a week early at a higher bitrate quality with no advertisements or promotions besides us saying, hey, thanks for listening.

And that's really cool. You can pay an extra $2, $5 a month, the price of like two-thirds of a latte at Starbucks at this point. And for that amount of money, you get free patron exclusive, permanent patron exclusive episodes every other Friday. There's like, God, like a hundred of those now. We've been doing it for four years. So yeah.

And then Diamond Fight does a column and mini podcast every weekend. and they've been doing that for several years. So there's hundreds of those. That's a lot of content for two extra measly dollars. I highly recommend it. Yes, we are the value menu of podcasts. And unlike other things in the year 2024, we actually do mean value. So that's patreon.com slash retronauts.

That's my pitch for you. Thanks for listening. Everyone, where the hell can people find you and your projects online? Ray, it's been a while since you've done. been on. So please, give us an update about where to find all things, Ray Barnhold. Yeah, sure. Well, I don't know about an update. I think I've said this before, but I have my site of links. You can go to RDBAAAA.space, and you can just get that whole layout of everything I've been doing and where you can find me on the social sites and all that. I will say, you know, if I have to stare down becoming

a full-time Twitch streamer, I think I will take on completing all of a nightmare of Raga. That would just be like my Twitch career. Wow. We'll see about it. Because, you know, there's some, there's a cool retro streamer who is like 100% in every N-64 game, something like that. Something that's like a career-making sort of Twitch project, I think, is going to be my thing.

But we'll see. If I'm still unemployed in a year, I'll let you know. But yeah, otherwise, RdbAA.a.a.comase is where you can find all my stuff. Oh, don't do that N-64 one, because there's only about 40 games. and what is just done with that? Nothing. You've got nothing left. Hardy har-har, Stuart. Hardy-har-har-ha-ha. The truth hurts. All right. Jess, what about you? Where can we find you on the interwebs?

Yeah, I'm Jess O'Brien, but you can find me as Voidberger on pretty much everything that matters. Your blue skies, your Twitches and stuff like that, your YouTube's. My current big project, also you can go to Voidberger.com, and it's all my link tree and all the things and stuff like that. My big project right now that I'm doing is a D&D actual play podcast that's more like a radio play because we put in all the sound effects and music and it's, oh, it's so good. And by we, I mean me. I'm sound designing it. But it's a comedy horror podcast.

I'm the sound designer, editor, and I am a slime in the party. So it's fun. It's good times. Oh, nice. Casey Green is on the staff of a skull tender. from This is Fine Fame, and he's funny as hell. Stuart, how about you? Oh, hello.

I'm Stuart Jep, and you can find me on Twitter. I'm sorry, X and Blue Sky. You know what? Can I edit that out where I corrected it? No. Okay. Okay. And I wrote a book called All Games Are Good,

which is all about how I genuinely and sincerely love games with titles such as Aero the Acrobat and Kingdom Hearts 358 days over two. And you can read all about why I'm wrong in the head and wrote those things down. A big fat book with a thousand billion pages and a lovely hardback cover from limited run games, a book so powerful, but even when you're done reading it, you can use it to bolster things, physically bolster them, and kill people, which was its intended use. That's why I created it. Is admissible in court, you're saying this?

Yeah. We're not editing that out. Oh, boy. Well, I guess none of that matters then in that case. Just whatever. I can just say what I won. I can't think of anything worth saying. That's it.

And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish. On the internet as Jeremy Parrish or on Blue Sky as Jay Parrish. Tricky, I know. But there I am. You'll find me mostly doing Retronauts, my YouTube channel, Jeremy Parrish. and at Limited Run Games, publishing books such as All Games are Good by Storage Chip. It's a cool thing that I do sometimes, and by sometimes I mean as my 9 to 5. So anyway, that's it for this episode.

Thanks again for listening. If you enjoy this episode, like I said, please support us on Patreon or, you know, just listen to us for free and tell your friends about us. That's cool. But if you do support us on Patreon in a few days, I have a patron exclusive episode coming up, another Retronauts Radio episode where I talk about music. So if that's your thing, great. And if it's not, well, there will be other things coming along for patrons. So, you know, okay.

Cruel, cruel world must I go on. Cruel, cruel world, I'm moving on. I've been living too fast. I've been living too wrong. Cruel, cruel world, I'm gone Cruel, cruel world, I'm gone