Retronauts - 629: Darius

Episode Date: August 5, 2024

WARNING: A huge podcast “Retronauts” is approaching fast! Join host Kevin Bunch, Brian Clark and Christa Lee as they discuss Taito’s long-running shooting game franchise Darius. 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 on Retronauts, I've always wanted a thing called Tuna Sashimi. Kevin Bunch. And this time, we are not actually talking about tuna sashimi or sushi or seafood that you can eat, per se. We're talking about seafood that you're going to be filling full of lasers and missiles and bombs. We're talking about the Darias franchise by Taito, which I'd say is sort of one of the company's flagship, flashy shooter series. You know, they started it back in Round 87, and the latest release, it's a compilation a couple of years ago, so they understand there's an audience for it. And joining me, we have a pair of other Darias Heads. I'm not sure what you call Darias fans.

I'm not sure either. Darius Heads works, I think. Dryas Head, yeah. All right. Let's start with you on the West Coast. I'm Crystal-E. I guess I do a lot of things. I service, I like repair and modify video game consoles, like old retro consoles,

RGB mods, HDMI mods. I'm guessing if you're listening to this, you probably know about those. I make music every now and then. I do video production for Action Button, the YouTube channel, Tim Rogers. A couple other things, but I also play Darius. That's a pertinent piece of information. The most important, truly. and who do we have

in between the coasts I am in between the coasts hi everyone it's Brian Clark from One Million Power and I never level my shot up to the laser never No you never should And you're going to learn that version all the time

You'll learn all about that shortly I'm sure So what are your experiences with Dariah It's like what draws you To this particular franchise Brian, we'll start with you since you went last. What initially drew it to me was definitely the weirdness. The history of games is not lacking in weird shooters, that's for sure.

But I feel like Darius is weird in a very special way, not just like shock value weird, like maybe some other games like R-type were, even though I love R-type as well. don't get me wrong. But it really goes in heavy on the vibes in a way that I don't feel like other series do and also has a lot of substance to kind of go along with it as well. Yeah, I would absolutely agree with that. Krista, about you? Yeah, I really only got into STGs in the last like five years or so, and I'm typically I'm sort of drawn more to vertical scrolling shooters that, you know, Michigan, Asana and such. but I really like Darius

and I really like Grodius and I like the way that they use spacing I find horizontal shooters a little harder to play because I'm not as good at like parsing out bullet trajectories over the longer angle of the screen, you know, the wider. A tighter vertical is a little easier for me to get my head around. But Darius having such a long display it sort of evens out.

You know, you go far enough, you loop back around to being, like, really easy to read. I like the level up, the upgrading system as well. And I, I appreciate the, um, the unique, yeah, the unique aesthetic qualities of it. I think, I think, uh, Taito doesn't get enough credit just generally. But I think the, there's a very pop, um, pop art appeal to Darias that I think is, especially when you get into like G, Darias, Darius Guide N. And, yeah, I think it's a really unique and interesting game.

Yeah, they are extremely flashy. Like, these are sort of Taito's standout showcases for technology in a lot of cases. Yeah. So you start off with, like, these horizontal shooters. And, like, yeah, the basic gameplay to Darius, like, the leveling up system is pretty unique. And visually, like, they are very interesting and unique as well. But the core gameplay, like, it's a horizontal shooter, you're dodging things, you're trying not to hit the landscape, you're grabbing power-ups.

And that's not anything too out of the ordinary, but, you know, the theming and the, like, wide-screen display, and even when they go down to, like, the smaller displays, like the single screens, they're still doing a lot of really, like, flashy stuff. They're really showcasing, like, no, we know what we're doing. we have some really cool ideas. You should sit back and just enjoy the ride if you can survive that long. I've heard it described, at least the first one described as like, gameplay-wise, it's not really all that far away from Scramble.

Yeah, yeah. But it's just all the dressing around it that makes it so special. Yeah. The thing that always stands out to me for me with Darius, it is, it's the scramble, the Zevius, you know, bomb and shoot dynamic. But the fact that Darius incentivizes shooting down waves, that like waves of enemies are sort of unitary in a way that once you, you know, you shoot out like there's five enemies moving in a similar sympathetic pattern. And if you get all of those five enemies typically, at least when you get to like Gideon and G. Darius, they'll drop a power up like that, you know, they're, or points, right? So they're sort of incentivizing like wiping out entire waves of enemies, thinking about space control.

control and the way you're moving to anticipate where they're moving. There's a push and pull with Dryas that I think is, it's really engaging. And I think that's part of why it's a lot more approachable than some of these. Yeah. And I feel like, with the exception of maybe Darias, too, unlike some of these other shooter franchises, like Gradius and R type, that are very, like, heavy on memorization and knowing what to expect, uh, Darias, at least, like, a lot of them in the franchise, You can kind of just go by the seat of your pants and rely on your firepower to get you through.

Some of the bosses you need to know what they're doing because they do love their gotcha traps with the bosses. But the levels themselves, like they're usually, you can see what's coming and you can sort of plan around it, especially in the games when you have so much real estate to work with. Yeah. So yeah, as of this recording, we have five Dorias arcade games. We have two console games. We have a portable game. We have an extremely weird British computer game that I absolutely can't wait to talk about.

And just a lot of weird edge cases and ports to consoles and arcades. It's interesting. It's an interesting series. Oh, yeah. And I guess we almost forgot to talk about the other big thing that people really know to derives for is there's Zunata. soundtracks. I feel like a lot of these are sort of Zuntata's like seminal works, if you will.

Absolutely. Yeah. Groove Coaster has definitely kept a lot of them in the public eye. Yeah, I feel like I did mention this like, or want to mention this later, but Groove Coaster is really sort of the it's not a Darius game,

but they have so much like Darias stuff in it. Yeah. Like you can even play as the Silver Hawk is your little icon. It's really cool. I forgot about that. Yeah, it's a really cool game. It's the only one I use in that game, really. Why would you go to anything else? Yeah. So I guess let's get rolling. Let's talk a bit about the games themselves,

because God knows there's a lot to talk about with all of these. First up we have Darius, just plain old Darias, first game. It was released in 1987 globally. You know, first in Japan, then it was ported around. the U.S. and rest of North America, Europe, et cetera. So this is the horizontal shooter. Like we mentioned earlier, this is spread out across three screens. And this is sort of like the gimmick for this game at a time when you had a lot of gimmick game cabinets.

You know, like you had Sega with their deluxe hang-on and outrun and space area your cabinets. You had you had Darius with this ultra-wide screen. And he had your Zuntata soundtrack, which was very, like, ethereal and spacey and weird. And everything in this is just, like, aquatic themed, except for your ship. Your ship is, you know, a spaceship. But you're fighting shrimp, and all the bosses are like fish and sealicants and a squid and octopus, a whale. You'll learn a lot about sea life just by playing through these games. Yeah, they should really list these as educational programming.

Absolutely. I think one of them, they even mentioned that they actually had to rent or borrow like aquatic life, like, laser discs or tapes or something because they were running out of ideas for species of sea creatures to include in these games. Yeah, there's some esoteric ones when you get into, like, Cheaterias. Some of the bosses are pretty deep cuts. Yeah, a lot of things are like, is this a real creature, or are you just getting weird? And it's more often than not. It's a real creature.

So, yeah, it's a very straightforward game to play itself. You have your main shot button. You have your bomb button, like Scramble or Zevius, et cetera. Certain enemies are colored red, green, or blue, and if you destroy them, they drop an orb of that same color. Red ones power up your gun. green ones power up your bombs and blue ones give you a shield which thank God the shield is very important for these games every time you collect seven orbs

of a particular color on a single life I should point this out you get a permanent upgrade to the next step I guess you'd call it or level or I don't know how you'd really consider it but these are this will change your main gun from just like, I guess, a Vulcan cannon or missiles or whatever, to a laser and you collect seven more after that. You get a wave gun. The bombs, they will, they're in originally,

they will just drop a bomb right in front of you into the, you know, below you as well, because it's a bomb. Then that becomes a two-way bomb, and then a four-way bomb, and then the shields. They just change color, and they're able to take more hits per upgrade you grab. So you definitely don't want to miss these. There are a lot of them.

them so usually depending on your path through the game because that's that's the other thing this game has branching paths um you you can find certain numbers of uh powerups like one path will give you a lot of shield another one will give you a lot of uh bombs i think we discovered that the last time we played at the galloping ghost we did and one is not the game that you have to worry too much about missing power ups and we'll get to that later but yeah one is especially if you pick a route that lends itself to what you're prioritizing there, you'll probably do fairly well. And we'll get to these details,

but if you're playing old version, you don't, you shouldn't, unless you're really trying to challenge yourself, worry about powering up your gun past a certain point anyway. So it always, whenever I'm playing through, it always seems to me like,

my God, there's so many red power-ups that I'm just dodging. They're almost as bad as the action. enemies at some points. They are. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, when you die, your power-ups will drop down to the lowest upgrade point of whatever your specific level is. So once you've made it to, you know, laser or wave, if you die, you'll stay on the laser and wave. You won't go back to the missiles. And same with bombs. And your shield, like, whatever level they're on,

they'll stay. Of course, this is a game that allows for two players simultaneous play, but it's not really, like, balanced around it. The power-ups don't become, like, more frequent or anything if you're playing with two people, so you have to sort of divvy up who gets what. It's a lot trickier. This game must have made some enemies, I have to assume. I haven't played it two-player hardly at all. I think maybe we have on a couple of occasions, but apart from that, it's, I'm actually,

I was actually surprised here when I looked at the notes and I was like, oh, yeah, this is a two-player game, isn't it? I think the only time we've ever played it two-player The only time I've ever seen anyone play this two-player was when we were visiting Japan and they had the deluxe cabinet at warehouse at warehouse before they closed

Yeah, I don't think I've ever played it two-player You're not missing anything Yeah, no It's just it's just secret resentment Over not being able to get power-ups is all it is And yeah, so there's branching paths The game doesn't really tell you which route is which

until you actually take it. The cabinet has like a little chart on it. That sort of is your guide. But every time you kill a boss, the path splits. There's a high path and a low path and a rock in the middle that you really have to try not to run

into if you're me. I'm so glad they got rid of that after the first game. Yeah. It's very mean. You're like, all right, I can relax for a little bit. Oh, God. Oh. So yeah. Different paths will take you through different stages, and there's multiple, like, end stages with each with their own boss. And some of these bosses are much easier than others. So you get to, can either have fun with octopus, uh, who dies like nothing. Or you can, uh, fight what? Great thing. That one's a big one because you can sort of point scum off them. There's a few of them that are real easy fights. My, the first route I learned was Strong Shell. And Strong Shell has a bug where if you point. Blank him. He basically

dies as soon as he fully materializes. You can pick some real gimmee last boss fights if you choose the right routes. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about the hardware design, because it's not just that it's a three-monitor game, because it's a three-monitor game at a time

when that was actually very, like, difficult to actually make work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is a game that took two and a half years to design according to the hard. hardware design team leader, Yuki Haru Sanbei. The initial CPU they were targeting for it, he didn't really mention what it was, but it was incapable of processing graphics

across all three monitors. So they ended up using two 68,000 CPUs and high-speed dual-port memory, which made this game much more expensive to make than they'd actually originally targeted. That's fascinating. Do you know how much memory it had? How much memory does it have off the top? I don't know, maybe some of the design book specs would say, I don't have one of those within arm's reach, but I don't recall having read that, though I'm sure it's out there somewhere. Yeah.

So, you know, Sanbei, he was sort of a tech guy at Taito for a long time. He started there in 1979. I don't know if this was during or just after the Invader boom, but he was involved in a lot of the hardware and software design of their games in the 80s. And I think as of, at least when I was looking into it, he's still at Tito as their technology advisor. Wow. Yeah, and I mean, he's still done interviews for the, at least the Darius Cosmic Collection book. Yeah, so he's an old timer there.

I'm always curious how many, like, old heads are still at those firms. Right. Especially one like Taito, where it's like, I mean, it's a subsidiary square and they're not really, not really producing a lot. So it's like a kind of a different setup. Yeah, I'm not really, I'm not sure. Like, I feel like all the people I hear of in these Japanese companies. have long since, like, retired or gone off to, like, teach or something. And, I mean, and even the people who left Taito, like, Ogreda, who will get to later,

like, he still comes back for things. So it seems like nobody ever really leaves Taito. Yeah, they're going to drag Nishikato back out to design a new game. Oh, God. Going to reanimate his corpse when he... Eventually passes. Hopefully we do a Space Invaders episode before that happens. I hope so.

Yeah, that would be great. One day, I'll get to that. It looks like those 68,000s were clocked at 8 megahertz, which is pretty fast. Wow. So this is a beefy game. And it did come in two different sizes. The early ones had 19-inch-inch monitors. The later ones have 15-inch, which stills like,

a 45-inch-wide-screen display, so that's a lot to keep track of. And they do a lot of really interesting stuff with audio. Like, that was clearly an important part of this game's design. It probably explains why you have this Zunata soundtrack that's just so, like, distinctive. So in the Japanese cabinets, there's sit-down machines, right? They have seats because it's a lot like those candy cabs that are so popular there now. and these deluxe cabinets they have what they called the body sonic sound system which was basically a subwifer that they put under the seat and let you feel the music

you can also adjust the volume on it which can overheat things and cause them to burn out but they're super cool and I feel like I didn't really get Darius at least the first game until I played it in that particular setup because then like... Absolutely. Then it's like, okay, whoa, okay, now I get it. It's not just a shooter. It's like a whole thing.

Yeah. Yeah. The one at Warehouse was absolutely pounding, too, that we tried. It was pretty amazing. Like, it's... They're a little bit hard to track down in Japan these days. I mean, there are some places in Tokyo. There are a couple notable places in Tokyo that have them, thankfully.

but outside of there, they're a little bit tough to track down. But, I mean, if you can, it's really a very different experience than playing the stand-up U.S. one. Do you know if it's at Taito Hay? It is at Hay, but last I checked, which was November of last year, they did not have old version in it. I don't know if it was new or extra, but I remember getting a couple levels in and going, wait, something's not right. Right, right. They do have the sit down there. It's right next to a Ninja Warriors, which was sort of the inheritor of that cabinet.

And also, Takadano Baba Mikado has won with the old version running in it as God intended. Yeah, Ikeeda, who runs Game Center Mikado. He is a big fan of the old version and does not like the other two very much. It does not really like the Ninja Warriors either. Really? But Daddy Volk is there. A lot of people don't like that game. I love it.

I think it's great. I didn't start out loving it, but a switch flipped in my brain at one point, and I was just like, this game is amazing. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't know how to explain what happened there. Ninja Warriors again is, like, phenomenal. Oh, yeah.

This is a Ninja Warriors Defender podcast. It is now. All around. It's great series. Check that out, too. So, yeah, not only did you have this subwoofer system, but it also had a headphone jack, which, God, I have not seen many arcade games do this since, you know, the 90s, really. So you could, you know, plug that in, so you can listen to the music over the headphones, or what most people ended up doing is they would just plug in their cassette decks and record the music. Yeah.

You know, this is sort of the, on the cusp of when video game soundtracks were becoming popular in Japan. So the timing worked out very well for this game in that regard. Yeah, I've seen, I've seen like 1987, 1987, 1988, 88 vinyl releases of the Darias soundtrack. I think it was like one of the, I know Namco, I think really, because of the YMO connection, I think they really, you know, were right there at the starting line. But I'm pretty sure this is like one of the first few. Yeah, I believe you're right. From all the research I did for the Zunata, et cetera, stuff for the other podcast that I did recently,

the video game house bands. Check that one out, too, if you haven't. Yeah, the, not the vinyl version necessary, but the CD soundtrack even has a little spot in the anime high score girl as well. I remember him sitting at his dad, Haro was sitting at his desk in school listening to it. Nice. I respect it.

So when they were bringing this overseas, obviously they did not use the same cabinet design because God, outside of racing games, you weren't going to find too many sit-down arcade machines in America or Europe. So this was redesigned by, I think, the Taito American folks. So something that is, that has the depth of an American cabinet and the height of an American cabinet, but it's like extra long. So the idea here was that it would be able to fit through your standard doors into the arcade spaces. You had the 15-inch monitors, they got those through Wells Gardner, which was sort of the big manufacturer of arcade monitors in the 80s. They called them Prismatic.

I don't know what that actually means in this context, but that is how they advertised them in their huge blowout in Replay magazine, which was sort of the trade magazine for the arcade industry at the time. I think they're still around, actually. Yeah, they were really pushing this, especially for arcades, not so much other places you'd find games like grocery stores, etc. But yeah, these are huge cabinets. They're kind of hard to move around. Ikeda actually relayed in an interview the story about moving Japanese Darias cabinet up some stairs, accidentally hit a wall and knocking chunks of mortar out of it onto a car. parked on the street below and

I just feel so bad for whoever owns that car Yeah There's there's also a story in that same book Because he's doing it with another author named Outska Gichi And Outska talks about Relocating to Tokyo years ago And hitting up a friend you know Hey do you have a place for me to stay and this friend was like yeah I've this house that I own

But no one lives in in Tokyo you can stay here And he came in it was an abandoned house, and there was a driest cabinet in there, just sitting, sitting in the middle of the house. I think it had the monitor and the board gutted from it, but the cabinet was just there. So there's all sorts of weird, interesting stories about this horribly unwieldy cabinet floating around out there. You'll be sleeping in the cabinet tonight.

Right. So, we're going to be able to be. So we're going to, we're just, we're We've talked a little bit about the music. The main composer for it was Hisayoshi Ogara, aka OGR. He was sort of a famed member of the Zunata in-house. The founder, really? Yeah, the founding member, even.

So he really is the person who defined, like, the Darias sound, I feel like, particularly for this game, but just the series in general. In an interview he did with Gaming. Moe, he said that the theme for it, that he did was an enormous entity lurking within the universe, which tracks with the very ocean-themed enemies, because that's how I consider, you know, the deep of seas. Yeah. And all the Darius games that he composed for have different themes in his mind, too. I don't know if he's explicitly said what all of them are, but he said that they all have different themes, which is why they all kind of sound different from each other, I guess. Interesting.

And this won the first ever GAMIST Award, which was given to the game that the most readers wrote in and voted for, which surprised everybody. Because there were a lot of other big games in 1987. This was the year after Bird or 2 and Outrun came out. And those were both massive games. Wow. They overshadowed Darius in a lot of ways. But apparently the people who read GAMIS were just hardcore fans of... of Iron Fossil.

I was going to say it just, I think, if nothing else, it just goes to show you what kind of people were reading Gameist or anything else. Yeah. But it doesn't really seem to like Darias did super well. Like Senji Ishi, he was the editor at GAMist. He recalled Darias did pretty well. Ikeda from Mikado noted that most of the cabinets were replaced by Ninja Warriors, not too long. after Darius came out. So he sort of, you know, takes a very different view in the U.S.

We can look at replay magazines, like percentages. It looks like only around like 6.5% of all their polled operators even picked up the game. It did pretty well at the ones that did, but like it doesn't seem like it was a huge seller for Taito because a year later you could buy it for $1,800, which is, wow. A huge discount given that its original price tag was $5,000. Yeah, I think I'd buy it for $1,800 right now. Yeah, where was I, one of the same for $1,800? Seriously, I wish I could get this for $1,800.

This is an expensive game if you really want the cabinet now. Yeah. We've danced around. We can delve into the different versions of it. I know we've talked a little about the old version and the new version. Who wants to take us through these? I can do it. So old version was the original, and as we alluded to, there's a very bad balance between weapons here.

When you upgrade your regular shot up to a certain point, it turns into a laser, and then that eventually turns into a wave. The wave is very desirable on paper because it has piercing properties, so you can, you know, shoot it through stalagmites and stalactites and whatever. obstacles there happen to be in the levels, which is very nice, again, on paper. But in old version, as soon as you power it up to the laser, the damage just doesn't scale. And around the time you would normally get it up to the laser is unfortunately the big wall boss fight for most people, which is fatty glutton, I probably sent shivers down some people's spines just now when I said it. Um, but it's, it's just, the only reason you would ever power your weapon up that high and old version is to challenge yourself. Uh, the, the smart way is just to keep it just shy of laser and you'll actually do pretty well. You point, but you point blank fatty glutton and you'll be fine. Um, everything else is okay to upgrade, uh, the bombs and the shield don't, don't have any such bugs and you, you want to get those up as high as you can. Um, new version was mostly bug fixes.

They changed some things like the rank not increasing as much when you power up. And the laser does do slightly more damage, but they still didn't really fix it. Uh, they changed the power up distribution as well. And basically no one plays this version. I, I don't think you really see it running anywhere. Uh, because they just didn't do enough to it to make it worthwhile. Extra version is interesting, though. We mentioned Zenji Ishi from Ghamist earlier.

He was on this as a consultant as a huge Darius fan and at least as of a certain point, the country's highest score in the game. And his goal was actually to make it more accessible to new players and also encourage people who were familiar with it to explore different routes than they were used to. So he kind of rejiggered around routes a little bit. he wasn't able to change stages all that much, but any your routes that you knew before may or may not be the same. The laser is basically fixed, so leveling to it actually makes sense.

And bosses now take damage when their destructible parts are attacked. Some of the boss patterns have changed to make them harder to cheese. Most notably was Iron Hammer, where you could just kind of camp out in the, upper left corner and he couldn't hit you. It would take you a while for him to, it would take him a while for you to, him to whittle you down, but you could beat them without much fear of taking damage and now you can't do that anymore. Ishi thought that it went over fairly well, though, again, Mikado's Ikeda and Otska

in this interview that we've been referencing kind of said the opposite and, just called it boring instead of that no one really played it. So again, you have conflicting opinions on how well this version actually did. But extra and old are relatively different from each other, but I still feel like everyone who I know who plays this game just plays the old version. I don't know what it is about it. I know on one hand, the old version is the only one that came out overseas. Like, they didn't bother bringing out new and extra, because, again, no one, no one was buying it, apparently. So, uh, what, what's the impetus? Does everybody, does anybody have any, uh, differing version preferences from old version here? I think I've made my opinion

fairly clear. I think I've only played old. I don't think I've, I've, I've missed with new and extra. My, my Darius expertise is, uh, far higher for the later games. So I actually sitting here thinking, man, I need to play some more drys. You'll be jumping in soon enough. Yeah, yeah. I'll get to the Saturn. If you can handle those later ones, you can definitely handle the first one. Yeah.

I feel like I've played the old one the most, but I do appreciate extra a lot. I do like the rebalancing, because like a lot of what they ended up doing because they couldn't just shuffle stages was that they moved enemies around and like power up locations around. So I think it is interesting. It's sort of, I'm not going to say it's a different game because it is still Darius, but it's a lot, I think it's a lot of fun to mess with, even if it's not the, you know, quote unquote competitive game. And I do feel like some of the ports are more based on the extra version in terms of how they handle their power-ups and everything. Yeah, that tracks.

Just why they always mess me up when I play them. Which, yeah, we can talk a little bit about the ports, too, because I did mark those in as well. So obviously, you don't get the ultra-wide screen. on these things until you get to the most recent like PS4 switch era releases on arcade archives in the Darias Cosmic Collection. So they're

all very zoomed in. So you have the original ones that came out were on the PC engine. You had Super Darius on the CD-ROM and you had Darias Plus that came out some months later on the Who card. And Super Darias has like a weird little bug

where if you're using the wave beam you don't get any points for killing. anything. But on the flip side they, because they had all this extra room on the CD, they added in Dolby Surround Sound, which is extremely cool. This might have been one of the first games to do that and is a great way to hear the music. But they also brought back a bunch of bosses that they designed for the arcade game

but didn't end up using. So now every stage has a unique boss, which is pretty cool because in the arcade game, it's just like, okay, Stage one has a boss. Stage two has a boss, regardless of which route you take, et cetera. The only, like, independent bosses are in the very last boss. They also had Darius Alpha, which was a PC engine release. It was like a boss rush. They only made 8,000 copies of it.

So it's a super expensive day. That's why it's like a billion dollars today. Yeah. I don't. I wouldn't worry about it, really. If you really want to play it, it's on one of the Cosmic Collection. the um the dryest plus and deris alpha are like two of i know it has like enhancements if you play it on the super graphics i think it's the only pc engine game that like improves or it's

like mint to improve uh with the super graphics um but they are they are normal pc engine games they aren't interesting they're not made for super graphics there's only like five games for 1941 makai mora a couple others yeah i mean the super graphics uh no one bought it, so I'm not shocked there's only like five games for it, but it is nice of them to add some upgrades to something, like, kind of surprised, this was it. It basically

looks like a PC engine inside, or a turbographics inside. I've serviced a couple. It's weird. You also had a remix of it on the Game Boy Advance is Darius R. Apparently, it showed up on some Japanese feature phones.

And most recently, the developers of the Darias Cosmic Collection, M2, they also were the people behind the Mega Drive slash Genesis mini console from a few years ago in 2019. And they included a version of Darius for that. As far as I can tell, this was originally like a homebrew game that M2 like picked up and they sort of refined it and finished it out

and added it on there as sort of a, well, what if Darius had come out on the Mega Drive. This is what it would look like, right? It's a pretty cool. And that's a really cool version. Yeah. It's pretty neat. I prefer it.

I don't know what it is about it now that I think about it, but I prefer it to the PC engine ones. Yeah. It's still pretty zoomed in, maybe slightly less, but for whatever reason, it's a lot more playable for me than the PC engine versions are. I'm not staring at it right now, but my recollection is that it's letterboxed a little bit.

So you still get a bit of that, wide aspect. I could be just making that up, but I think that's, I think that's the case. Yeah, it's been a little bit since I play this one, so I'm not positive either. It feels really good, though. It is great. And they did make a standalone cartridge of it, like a year or two ago called the Extra version, which lets you choose, like, between the different versions of the arcade

games rules, which is cool. And I think they also add some, like, little features to make it a little easier to get through, like, I think the player two ship, Tiat, I think her power-ups don't decrease when she dies, which if I remember also is the case in the PC engine games. I don't remember off the top of my head. I feel like that's true. But it makes it a little easier to get through, which is funny because I feel like every time I beat the game, it ends up with Tiot, but it's always like a no-death run,

so it doesn't matter. And that one, that brings me to Darias Plus. which is the extremely weird British game. This was, released in 1989, is a purported enhancement of the arcade game for the Amiga, the Atari ST, and the ZDX spectrum. And just imagine thinking to yourself an enhancement on Darius, the arcade machine, on the ZDX spectrum.

And you'll kind of have an idea on what to expect here. So you do have your choice of stages. There's still different routes. The only bosses you really fight are fatty glutton, urchin, a smaller version of fatty glutton, octopus, and the lobster. And, like, the weapons are super weird, like, they reset after every stage, and when you grab a weapon power up, you don't just get the weapon, you have to, like, pick a little floating power up that's floating through the sky and, like, attach it to your ship. so you go from like a forward missile to a three-way shot to a beam laser this is an extremely cramped game

there's like a lot of enemies and your ship is huge your hitbox is huge it's very generous with the shields thank God but I can't say I would recommend playing it but it is a weird game it's worth trying once at least

visually it's just unrecognizable as Darius to me I couldn't believe it when you first showed it to me. I'd never heard of this until now, but I will say, if you're listening to this, you should grab your phone or a computer, and you should just Google Darias Plus, that's the plus sign, Amiga, and just look at the cover art because it's awesome. It's really cool. It looks like a Drexia album.

It's really good. You could count on British games having incredible cover art. Yeah. And then incredible music, which this game barely has a soundtrack to it, and just baffling gameplay. This also was intended for a Commodore 64 conversion, which never came out. And that is even funnier to me that it didn't show up on the Commodore, but it showed up on the Spectrum, which is like such a much more budget machine. Just truly incredible. Yeah, that's wild.

In like, It's like, 1989, was also the year that we got... Well, Japan got Darius 2, which is a hateful game made by people who like suffering. That's how I describe it. You may have different views, but... It's pretty evil. It's pretty evil. So the conceit behind this, they wanted everything to be bigger and better, so there's bigger bosses, there's more, like, fights, there's more explosions, everything's got to be, like, cooler looking.

They adjusted how the power-up system works. So now it's sort of more traditional. Every time you pick up a weapon upgrade of whatever type it is, like you have your bomb upgrade still, your main shot, your shield. They also added a laser that sort of fires at angles. Every time you pick up one of those, your weapon like goes up a level, which on the flip side, when you die, you are back to square one. And this game does not give you a lot of power up. It is very stingy with them. Yeah, it's very, there, it's almost like, for lack of a better way of putting it, like, overly authored where the power-ups are.

Like, they intended it to be played a very specific way, and they intended you to always be in a specific state of power-up at any given point. But that just makes death basically game over. You might as well just run out your lives and start over. Yeah. I, you, one thing I'll never forget about this is, Kevin, when you were and I, when you and I were at, uh, Hey, and Akihabara, I think you were upstairs playing CVS 2 or something, uh, but I was watching someone play Darius 2. They got to the last level and died, fully powered up. And I've never seen someone smile through pain more than that guy did. Uh, I said to go over and sympathize with him and I felt like I probably should have like, offered to go buy him a beer

or something because just how crushing. Yeah, it's awful. Yeah, it's a very brutal game. And there is a reason for it. When they were playtesting this game, they kept getting hardcore Darias fans and they were all

extremely good at the game and they were just like on the machine for so long. It was not bringing in a lot of revenues. They kept tuning the game to be more and more difficult. So they ended up tuning it for the hardcore players and not the general public. So

that's why it's kind of super mean. They did bring back the bosses from the first game as like mini bosses. They call them captains. And that sort of becomes a sort of a trend line for future Darius games. They keep bringing back these captains, which is

cool. It's cool to have them there to fight. You don't really get anything for like killing them other than some points, but you know, it's neat that they're there. And this is the easiest version of fatty glutton you'll ever fight. Yeah, thank God. Ogreda is back.

I feel like this is sort of the catchiest of the Darias soundtracks. It's the one that's easiest to listen to. It's very YMO, yeah. Yeah. Very YMO. That's a good way of describing it. It has a similar, like, concept behind the hardware. Dariahe's 2 was designed around a two-screen cabinet.

They also released it as a three-screen. screen version later on, which has some tweaks to the gameplay to accommodate the fact that you have more going on on the screen. Enemy show up earlier, your shots are on screen longer. Your number of shots is capped, which makes the three-screen version more difficult to actually, like, play through, which, you know, that's exactly what Darius II needs is something to make it harder. Some of the weird, like, bits of trivia that came up during.

researching this. This was directed by Hidehito Fujiwata, who really didn't want to work on this because of the size of the project. People hit Taito were giving him all sorts of bizarre suggestions for it. I think my favorite one is that it was boring to have all fish bosses, so some of them should be vegetables. Oh, yeah. I so badly want to see the version of this game that just has the bosses as vegetables. Yeah, absolutely. Fight a, fight an eggplant or something.

This would have been the time. Someone suggested that they should make it a vertical shooter because they're better, which, you know, I'm not going to disagree because that really deris. I love that just like a categorical statement. Vertical shooters are better. You should make it a vertical shooter. This person was in the room when Salamander was getting made. Why not both? Yeah.

Can you imagine DeRai's too having like the alternating stages like in salamander? Oh, man. Oh, man. How's you weird? So, yeah, they did their location test at Rosa Kaikon in Ikebukuro, and apparently there were fans there before Fujiwana even arrived, even before the place it opened. They're apparently just like hiding behind pillars. And when the place opened up, they just went directly to Darias II, which is how it ended up getting tuned so badly. infamously, if you manage to beat this game,

it says Darius 3 is coming next year in the end credits. This was solely because the developers thought Superman's ending, the movie, where they say Superman 2 was coming next year was cool. Like, they put together a proposal for Darius 3, but it never got anywhere beyond that. So, like, it's just this weird non-sequitur. We're still waiting. Still waiting.

It's coming out any time now. You'll see. Yeah, it's a weird game It does some things I really like Like the last stage for the first 40 seconds or so There's no sound effects It's just the music and it's very like Oh wow

Kind of a gun buster thing Yeah, it very much feels like that Sort of same gunbuster Situation, it's just very like It's very vibing Yeah It's also extremely difficult because that last stage is brutal So you probably will die

before it gets to the before the beat drops, but absolutely horrible. Right as the beat drops, I think, is when it starts getting really rough, and that's probably no coincidence. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's in like

the second stage boss, like you kill it and then you fly inside of it and you have to like go through the inside of the enemy ship and then fight another boss. Yeah. Yeah, it's got some interesting ideas. It's just, I kind of wish the game was a little nicer about it.

And then there's that thing where you use this on a couple of bosses, too, I believe. But like, there's this thing where there are these sort of bombs located in various parts of the levels. And if you blow them up, it just causes a large on-screen explosions. And you can essentially take out some bosses in one hit using those. Yeah, like, I think the first boss has them pop up. But they're none of the bosses that you need that for. That's the thing. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's sort of a continuation in the first Darias game. There were, like, hidden items here and there. That's true. Gray ones were, like, points, like, gave you a random number of points. And yellow ones would destroy all the enemies on screen. So I think this is sort of like this game's equivalent of the yellow item. I haven't thought about that, but you're probably right. It's much harder to hit because, like, you have to bomb it in the glowing portion when, like, the gate on it is open.

Yeah. So, like, you have to have good timing. It's, it's a choice. In this game, in this game, it didn't come out outside of Japan. But Sagaya did. This was a modified version of Darias 2 that was made for the European market. I believe if you look up all the flyers and service manuals and stuff online for it are from the UK, not the U.S.

Apparently, the team was told that Darius games were too long and that it needed to end after five stages. So a programmer named Tatsuo Nakamura handled all the changels for this version almost single-handedly. There's a lot of differences. Like, stages are a lot shorter. There's fewer levels. The difficulty has been tuned down, although it's still extremely hard. The bosses have a lot less health. So they die significantly faster, thankfully.

It still doesn't get rid of the thing that really makes dry as too hard as the thing, which is the specifically spaced power-ups. Yeah. And, like, the stages are shorter, but the... That doesn't mean they give you, like, all the power-ups that were supposed to be in those stages anyway. You're just kind of on your own. The only time I've ever seen a Darius II machine outside of Japan is at The Galloping Ghost in Chicago. The owner, Doc Mack, when he announced getting it.

It said it took him several years to, like, track down a Darias 2 board, and he had it, like, installed into a custom cabinet. So if there was any kind of U.S. release for this, it was probably very much. much a gray market import from Europe or Japan. Yeah. The current, I should have mentioned it before, I guess, but the current setup for Darias 2 at Hay in Akihabara is very interesting. They have it on a large, I don't know how big, but it's quite large digital display. So it's upscaled and it's very eye-catching, but it's strange not seeing it in, you know,

some form of the original cabinet and on this large monitor. I think I've seen pictures of that, yeah. Yeah, I think it's most of the wall, too. It's pretty sizable. It's definitely a good bit of it. And I think they have like various like fish like plushes stacked around it and things like that.

They got to be on brand. Yeah. So this also got ported around a bit, not nearly as much as the first Darias game. And it's mostly Sagaya. There is a Sagaya slash Darias 2, depending on what region you're in cartridge for the Genesis slash Megadrive. And it plays like a retuned and rebalanced version of Segaya. It's also much easier, especially because you can play as Tiot.

And much like in Darius for the Genesis, Tiot does not lose her weapon level when she dies, which means that you can actually, like, clear this game if you die. Like, it's, I mean, you can't really clear the last stage if you die because you desperately need to have some level of shield. But if you die before that point, you're good. Imagine that. I actually really like that. I like that port a lot, actually.

Yeah. I like Segaia. It's a great port. The only thing missing is that you don't get the tuna sashimi line at the start. Yeah. Except to say it yourself, that's all. Yeah, you do have to say it yourself. not a problem. Yeah, easily taken care of.

It got a master system port that came out in Europe and Brazil, and it's a really good conversion. It's missing some of the stages, but the soundtrack is very much the Zuntata soundtrack from Darias 2,

and it converts over to that, you know, a little PSG chip remarkably well. This was developed by Natsume, which kind of blows my mind that they worked on a version of Darias for anything, but, uh, huh, I've never seen that before. That sounds really cool. Uh, it's also on one of the cosmic collections, but, uh, I should boot it up when we get done.

It was like the pinch hitters for a bunch of master system ports of things. It was really strange. Natsume had like a good five, ten years there where they were just cranking out, like the coolest stuff. Just, yeah, really incredible. Uh, what times we knew we were, what times we were in that we didn't know about. Yeah, I remember picking this one up in London while I was there on my honeymoon because we stopped at a game store and I ended up buying a Zeta Spectrum. And when I bought it, they're like, here, we'll throw in some games for you. So, like, they threw in, I think, three Spectrum games. And also I mentioned I wanted Sagia for the master's system.

And they're like, eh, we're never going to charge you for that. Here, you can just have it. Oh, wow. So I got a five-pound game for free. Wow. What a bargain. Yeah. It's a great game.

There's also Super Deraius 2, which is the PC Engine CD port. It has all new bosses. The soundtrack's been rearranged. Super weird. Not sure you could really call it a Darius 2 port, but... Yeah, it's pretty different. But the rearranged soundtrack is T's music, though, so, you know, you're getting something pretty good there, at least.

Then there was the Game Boy Seguya game, which is not really a port per se. It's like, you know how the Game Boy Mega Man games mash up two Mega Man games in one? And that's kind of what happens here. They sort of mashed up Darius 1 and 2 and called it good. It's more bosses from 1 than it is 2, to be honest. I just played it for the first time fairly recently. And I was pretty surprised by what it actually was. You can get quite far in it cold, too, if you're decented shooters and just playing it for the first time.

Yeah. That's one of the games I most play on my Game Boy, actually. I really like it. I love the soundtrack. It sounds so cool. And they do the warning enemy boss thing. They like scroll in the background in such a cool way. I love that port. I got to spend more time with that. It's, I mean, it's a shooter on the Game Boy, but it's cool for what it is. There's some cool shooters on the Game Boy. You know how much time I sunk into R-type in college? Oh, yeah. Oh, man. And, you know, now we have technology such that, even though it's a Game Boy shooter, you can play it with an arcade stick. Yeah. The dream. That probably just breaks it.

Probably just breaks it wide open. Maybe. Maybe that's why I had such an easy time. I wasn't playing it on an actual Game Boy D-pad. All right. Time to put on my turbo button, just like on the original Game Boy. Yeah, there was a Saturn version that was reasonably accurate. You could, like, zoom the screen in and out.

so you have that sort of widescreen option. It has some hitbox bugs, but it was as good as you were getting for a while. And then showed up on a few different collections. There's the title Memories 2, Jilcon collection for PS2. It's on there. It's on the Cosmic Collection, both the two-screen version and Segaya. And I think last year, the Arcade Archives released the three-screen version. It's the first time that's been reissued.

And if you... And if you buy the physical version, of what is it is it tight do they call them Taito memories the new I forget what they call them

but whatever those new tito collections are you can get the three screen Darias two and Dino Rex both on one collection I saw this You know that's the ultimate team

right there Dino Rex is a pioneering work That Beautiful sprite work Beautiful sprite work But the most annoying screeching sounds that you'll ever hear in your life.

Yeah, the game should be outlawed, but the sprites, really good. I don't understand why it's so much louder than everything else in that game. It's like, it's unrelated, but the other day I was playing Ultra Street Fighter 4 with some buddies at locals,

and, like, you could barely hear any of the sound, and then any time one of the characters died, and you lost a round. The scream was just like, You could hear it across the room. Someone who's shouting is like, could someone please stop poison, tell poison to stop dying? I'm like, I'm trying.

But I'm not I'm going to be able to I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to I'm a bit of I'm

So yeah, Duraius 2, that's Dino-Rex. This has been your Taito-1989 sidebar. The next game on my list here is actually the next two are console games. These were Super NES, Super Famicom releases in the Derrius franchise.

The first one is Derrius twin that came out in 1991. The Super Famicom had just come out, what, 1990? Yeah. In Japan? Yeah. So you have some branching paths, but it's like really weird.

Like they start branching and then they close back in for level D and then they branch back out and then close back in so you always have the same final stage. Which is odd because it means you can, because Great Thing is not the final boss in this game, you can go through the game without fighting Great Thing. Yeah, every stage has its own boss, which is very welcome. So the weapon system is a lot like Darias 2s. So like you grab an item, and that's your power up. It does let you retain your weapon levels when you die, which is so, so nice, because it's super easy to die in this game. It has a lot of us like gotcha kills, which are unusual for Darias.

I was playing this again today to refresh my memory, and I don't know if it's the hit boxes or the hurt boxes, but I was getting hit by things that I swear I was not close enough to. Yeah, the hit box is huge for your ship, I feel like. Like, you can get a shield, and the shield will protect you from bullets, but everything else will just brush up against you and you'll die immediately. It's kind of awful, and there's no continue. So, like, yeah, the game's fairly, like,

lenient with your power-ups, and you can even set yourself to have, like, a ton of lies in the options menu, but good, good luck. There's also two really weird power-ups on a couple of the stages that's sort of like a weird little, I don't know how you describe it, like a hexagon or something. Yeah. With a red orb in the middle. If you grab that, it changes your weapon, your main gun. And if you grab, you want to grab the first one of these because this is one of the rare games. where the wave is extremely good. So you grab that thing and then you power up your new main gun

and you will just shred everything for the rest of the game until they inevitably brush up against you and, you know, scratch your paint and you explode. That fish just keyed my ship. This was also like, this game is so generous with the power-ups. And I think it's because this was designed, around two-player simultaneous play

which I haven't done with Darias twins since I was a kid and a friend of mine rented it but I seem to recall it was pretty good yeah they gave you a ton of power-ups you will probably be maxed out within a couple stages if you're playing solo and with

two people you're good you don't really have to worry too much the music was composed by Shizuo Aizawa and programmed by Norihiro Futukawa aka Nakayama Ryden, who I think I've heard you talk about

him, Brian, a fair bit. Yeah, he is, I feel like his most memorable thing is Dencha de Go. If anyone who's played Denchadego, at least the earlier ones, I'm not sure if it still happens, but on the title screen, you'll hear somebody saying,

Dencha de Go! And that's actually his voice. He still does that when he's a guest on all of the Zun Tatan nights when he introduces himself. So he found his thing and he's sticking with it. I respect it. That's beautiful. He also played the Daddy Mulk

Shami Sen solo on a guitar. That's right. That's right. That's him. And weirdly, the original Japanese version only has mono sound. The overseas versions do have stereo audio, which I guess makes this the rare overseas game that

Japanese collectors are really after because they want the extra sound channel. And it's a good soundtrack, too, like especially that first level song is great. Yeah, like, this is an early, like, super NES, super Famicom game, so they don't, they're not really familiar with all of, like, the weird sampling tricks you could get out of the system, but, like, the compositions are really solid.

Yeah, they saw that Zun Tata sends some melody there, and that's, that really shines through. Yeah. So it's, it's an interesting game. It's more fair than Darias, too, which I like, a fair bit. The Sioux Fami has a reputation for not having a ton of good shooters, but right in that early, like, first year or two, you know, Grotty's three, obviously, Darius Twin and the next game. And then there's the Alesta game, too.

I think that's super early on, too. Super Alesta is so good. Yeah, Superlesta is amazing. It's like a puzzle game. The shooters that are on Sue Fami, I guess there's a cotton game, too, but that's not as good. Yeah. But, yeah, really, really cool library. Underrated for shooters, honestly.

Yeah. There's just not a large volume of them, but they're really good. Right. Except maybe you super R-type. Maybe if you had checkpoints. R-type 3. R-type 3 is great. Yeah, R-type 3 is great.

Yeah, Super R-type's evil. So, yeah, this game does get kind of BS once you get far enough in, specifically the last stage, is just nothing but captain fights. So you'll be fighting like three captains or four at any given time. You can kind of cheese it a little bit. You can find a safe spot at the top or bottom of the screen. And then you just have to deal with enemies dropping angled shots at you. It's harder than it sounds, though, at least in my opinion.

Because it takes so long to kill any one of those captains that they're just on the screen forever. So all it takes is one mistake or one big. that angle, and you're, you're kind of done. Yeah, I went into that stage the last time I played it. Like, I had no shield, but everything else was powered up. I had, like, full level wave, so, like, the beam was huge. So I was able to hit a lot of things and kill them reasonably quick, but just, like, with no shield in this game where, like, anything touches you, you die immediately.

Or even if it comes, like, within your, you know, within arm's reach, uh, yeah, it's, it's tough. It's a tough one to try and get through. But, you know, I think it's a pretty good game. I'm not going to say it's my favorite shooter on the Super Famicom, but it's very good. It's solid. Was it internal to Taito? Yes. This one was.

The next one was not. They had interesting working titles for it, too. So the planning documents that they scanned in the Darius Cosmic Collection book had it being called Return to the Darius. since the story features the descendants of Tiad and Proko returning back to Darius. But they also listed the other titles, which are not that remarkable, but the other ones that were on the docket were Hyper Darius, Ultra Darius, and Legend of Darius. I feel like they had a little bit of like Capcom Street Fighter 2 syndrome in there with those first couple ones.

Yeah. But nonetheless. Return to the Darius would have been great. That is a great name. They did well with Dariah's twin, like, sort of centralized and the fact that it's two players simultaneously. It was smart. Yeah. Yeah.

Which, you know, Gradius 3 is not, and neither is super our type. So, it really setting themselves apart here. So it really sounds to me like it could have, it was almost a real, uh, the Ninja Warriors again sort of situation, whereas the Super Famicom version of that was called the Ninja Warriors again. And then I think it just came out here as the Ninja Warriors. Like, I could totally see this game having been returned to the Dera. Darius in Japan and then Darias twin with the U.S. release. Yeah. Absolutely.

I guess we've alluded to it. The other Super Famicomom Darius game was 1993, it was called Darius Force in Japan and Super Nova in the U.S. Which, boy, if that's not the most generic ass name, you could possibly pick for a shooter. An even better example than the one I just picked to illustrate the same point. This was developed externally by Act Japan. Zuntata did not do the music.

although it's still pretty good, it's still kind of weird, just not as, like, it doesn't have that Zunata vibe to it. Although I will say the title screen, just being a heartbeat, seems absolutely like something Zunato would do. Yeah. Ah, so cool. It is very cool. This is the first game that lets you, like, choose your ship, too,

which is a mechanic that they brought back in some of the later Darias games. So you can pick a ship based on the one from Darius, one from Dryas 2, or a third one that's unique to this game. They each have different weapon loadouts. This game's kind of tricky, no matter which one you pick. So I'm not sure which one's actually the best. It's weird. So the unique system to this game, which absolutely sucks,

and I wish they hadn't had done it, is that if you... I hate this so much. It's awful. So if you're firing both your guns and your bombs at the same time, they're both powered down one level. So the idea is they want to encourage you to only use one or the other at any given time. But stages are kind of designed to not give you too many things you have to deal with from both angles. But it's still very, like, tricky to, you know, figure out which one you need to do at any given point.

You have to unlearn so much Darius muscle memory, though, because until we get into the next game, there hadn't been a Darius game where there was any reason to not be always holding. down, you know, both buttons. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And when you die, you're back to a checkpoint system, which I don't think any of the ones before this had checkpoint systems other than like the console ports. Yeah.

I think that's right. Yeah. Which on one hand, this usually means they drop you back in, like somewhere right near where you can get some power-ups because you're in the same boat as a Darius II where once you die, all of your power levels drop back to the defaults. So they do give you some options to, like, recover. There's all sorts of weird things that drop your items. But, yeah, it's still very tricky.

They still don't really give you enough to really, like, blast some of these bosses on recovery in particular. And they also have an extremely weird, like, level select layout. It's like a rhombus shape instead of, like, a pyramid. So, like, if you go the bottom route, you have five stages and you get one ending. The middle route, you get six stages because you went up one and then, you know, over five or whatever. And that's a different boss, different ending. And then the upper route is the seventh. You get seven stages.

You also fight like a weird evolutionary theming to all the bosses. The final boss on that route is like a human skeleton. Because, like, yeah, they don't have as many aquatic-themed enemies. They're more, like, reptilian and, like, I don't know, they go other parts of the animal kingdom. It's very strange. No vegetables, though. No vegetables. They still did not give us the vegetables.

Sadly. Yeah. One day. And there's, like, a lot of weird, funky Mode 7 effects. Like, I know there's one stage where they, like, rotate the level around you, and you're, like, floating around in different angles. It's just kind of weird. And they, like, to zoom in on the level, select. but yeah it's very strange

something about this one never really jelled with me like I can get down with Darius twin like it's a little different feeling but not that different but this one maybe it's maybe it's because of depowering both of the weapons when they're fired together but I can't I've never really been able to crack it yeah I've only ever just like touched it and then you know jumped off like I just couldn't

yeah yeah it's not I don't know I don't hate it like it's fine it's just there are better shooters on the super famicom if i'm going to play a super famicom shooter like why would i play supernova or dryus force or whatever you want to call it yeah Fortunately, the next game in this series is much better than Darius Force, and that is Darius Gaiden, which was a 1994 released. We're back in the arcade space. Taito had just put out their F3 hardware platform, and this is one of their, like, showcase games for it. The F3 rules?

Yeah, I just, this reminded me that I was going to go get an F3. I was going to order one, and then I forgot to. Oh, oh, you need to get that. Yeah, I do. How could you forget? I know, I know. I, like, got sidetracked with other things. I was getting some arcade boards, and I...

You could be playing elevator action, too. Exactly. The game that Jeremy Parrish convinced Japan Taito people is really popular in the U.S. I love that. Might be my favorite anecdote. I mean, I'd say it's really popular in my personal experience, but I don't know that I'm the audience that you'd want to do,

focus texting. The people who love it really love it. Yeah. I mean, you can't hate on a game with Jab the Taff. Jad the Taff, yeah. No way. That soundtrack's incredible. Oh, the soundtrack.

Yeah, I love that game so much. The Taito compilation album that it came out on the vinyl album, that's the best soundtrack on an album that also has songs from Metal Black on it, which is really saying something. That is a lot. God, I love Metal Black. But, like, yeah, Darius Guidon, because it's running on the F3, which was really, like, pretty powerful for the time,

it might be a single-screen game, but it's extremely lavish and just like a graphical showcase. So this was developed by a team of fairly young, fairly inexperienced programmers. It had a

fairly relaxed development cycle. They weren't like pushed really hard on a deadline, which is probably why it comes out feeling kind of as good as it does. They really had time to work with it. So because this was a single screen game and they couldn't

to, you know, use the ultra-wide screens from the previous two arcade releases. They just threw in all sorts of funky stuff on the stages, just to, like, give this game a lot of variety. And they had an inferiority complex about it. They said in interviews, but, like, there's no reason that they ever should have. Yeah. The Darius legacy haunting them, I suppose. It's absolutely gorgeous. It's one of the prettiest shooters of the pre-cave era.

I don't know. I think this might be, if it's not the best in the game in the Dariah series, it's certainly in the running. Yeah, I think it's a sort of a fear of music, remain-in-light situation where people, like, either you think Darias guide down or you think G-Di-Daius. Yeah. That seems to be the way it is.

So a lot like other shooters at the time, they combined missile and bomb into one button, And then the other one is for an actual bomb, which is the black hole bomb, which goes through, like, different phases, like the alpha beam that you'll see in G. Dioraius, chargeable bomb, et cetera. So there's like a, you still have the power-up system. There's one for missile. There's one for your bomb, one for your shield. You can also pick up extra black hole bombs. And when you die, you're only, like, depowered one level on each track.

Yeah, I think it's the most recoverable, maybe, of at least any Darias game up until that point. Yeah, I think it's easier to recover than G. And like the black hole bomb, this is also one of my favorite anecdotes. They put it in there to satisfy people in the company that wanted it to be a vertical shooter, because, like, those kinds of bombs are very common in vertical shooters. So, like, once again, someone at Taito just really wanted Darias to not be a horizontal shooter. and I'm really curious if it was the same person. I had not thought about that.

I'm struggling to think of another horizontal shooter with a bomb. I hadn't, like, put that together and it was, oh, yeah, vertical shooters have bombs. I think, yeah, just have to go back as far as, like, Defender to get something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess Zero Wing does if you use it properly, but... Oh, that's true. Oh, right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's very true.

Oh, I like Zero Wing. Yeah, it's great. So, yeah, we have the captains again, like the last several Darius games. But what makes this sort of interesting is that they have a specific weak point on them, that if you only attack that and destroy it without killing the rest of the enemy, they will be captured and they will join you for a while and, like, float around and attack enemies. And eventually they die automatically. But it's really nice having that extra firepower.

You and the captains make it happen. that's right none of them are Captain Crunch because he is not a fish but yeah maybe maybe if they do a remaster of this game I love how for lack of a better way of putting it

artificial auto fire makes them like bug out and behave incorrectly though I really admire the the street like the quarter circle inputs for the specials I like that as a little augmentation of horizontal scrolling

shooters. Yeah, like this, it's, uh, I feel like there's another game that did that too. Another shooter? Yeah, I'm trying to think. I mean, I'm thinking of like Final Fantasy 6 or whatever, which had, you know, quarter circles for seven's moves, but yeah, it's definitely not common for shooters, but I feel like there was at least one other one. Was it Batsugun that did something like that?

I have, I haven't played enough Botsugan. I think Batsugan does. I don't know, but it's very cool in this. It's just the whole captain. thing is very cool. And I think it informed a lot of what they ended up doing with G. DeRaius since they've made that like a whole mechanic.

Just be careful if you're using like 30 hertz auto fire or something and don't depend too much on the captains then. Yeah, like this game does have built-in auto fire. It's not super fast. And it's funny because like a lot of Japanese cabinets for these games

have like been modified to have like an artificial auto fire, turbo fire. Most arcades that would ever have this today will absolutely have those buttons on them. But it's very much like, well, you've got a captain. You better lay off that button, I guess. Yeah. Which I always forget.

It's like a like a Tatsigen situation with the lightning. Mm. Yep, yep. And we are back again to not wanting to power up all the way. Because the way this game was like, there's like a little bug to it. So there's a version of the red of your main gun shot that, like, fires little bits out with it that do extra damage. And those cause, those increase your, like, damage per second so much more than the successive level-ups that there's really no reason to go beyond that point. It's not impossible if you go beyond that point.

Like, it's not, it's not Darius one old version where you might as well give up. Like, you very much can still do it. It's just not maximum damage. And I made a joke earlier about dodging red power-ups in Darius I. Holy, they are really a pain in this if you're trying not to over-level past that point. Like, because they sort of spin in circles in a lot of parts, and the later levels will be much tighter quarters, whereas the one in the Darius one will often just float downward, so they're considerably easier to avoid. these are like, it's like introducing another puzzle element to it or something if you're not just picking them up blindly.

Get me. Come on. Don't you want more? Don't you want a laser? But don't beat yourself up if you end up going past that point. You can still do it. Yeah. It's not the end of the world.

It's just not optimal. And, yeah, I think, like one of you marked it down that this was like one of the more memorable soundtracks in the Darias series. It might have been you, Brian. It's very, like, it's very operatic. Yeah, it is. I'm, I prefer the G one, but I do really like. Oh, do you? Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. I love what Ogura has said about this. I love what his themeing was for the G1, too. But the central theme, according to him, was truth isn't what lies in front of you. Truth lies elsewhere. And that's just such like an ephemeral statement and is perfect to couple to this soundtrack in this game. This is probably my favorite, but I can, I like, I like, I like,

G's a lot, too. It just didn't hit me quite as hard as this one did. Yeah. Especially the live arrangements of this. The live arrangements of this are something else. I feel like after Darius Twin, this was like the first Darius game I actually played.

I remember finding the Saturn version of it at a flea market for like 10 bucks. Jesus. In what, 2002 or 2003? It was when I was first really like getting into the genre.

Saturn 1 got a U.S. release then. Yeah, I did, yeah. A claim brought it over of all companies. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. You know, they also brought over Rayforce, so, like, they were occasionally doing the right thing here and there.

What's it called? Galactic assault or something? Galactic attack. Galactic attack, that's right. God. Which is the most generic name. I bought that from that same flea market, stalled, like, a few months before this one. I thought it was a big tito.

Yeah, Taito fan, I guess. That guy, like, he always had the best stuff. That's where I bought my Neo Geo. Oh, wow. For, like, 150 bucks with two games. Jesus. What a flea market. Jesus.

God bless you, Gibraltar Trade Center. You are with the Angels now. But, but, yeah, I really liked this game. I never got very far in it at the time. Now I can do pretty okay at it, but, yeah, super cool. I really like it. It's not a bad one credit clear to learn. Again, depends on the route.

You can either make it fairly easy for yourself or fairly hard for yourself. But this was the second Darius game I learned after Darius won. I do want to talk about Darius Guided Extraversion because this is like a weird one. I don't think most people really understand the story to it because I sure didn't until I was like digging into it. Kind of buried recently. Yeah, it's extremely buried. had to find some weird sources for this. So you can find this, like, supported in maim,

and I think that's really the only way anyone's really gotten to play it outside of the occasional board that's popped up. But there is a... This appears to have been released a few months after the initial game. There's a lot of, like, mystery around what it was. Like, was this an official product of titles that didn't, like, come out? Was it a fan, like, mod of this game? something like Street Fighter Rainbow Edition or something like that.

Some people thought it was based on an early version of the game that was like a location tested. But it actually is, so in Famitsu, published an article in 2015 at an industry event slash tournament held at Makuhari Messe in January, February that year, called Tokaiji 2015. And in that article, they mentioned that the original extra edition was not an official product,

but Taito was officially recognizing it then that it was one. They didn't really describe it any further at the time. When the EGrit 2 mini-a-cate console came out a couple of years ago, Game Watch did an interview with Taito's staff Tetsu-Egawa and Taki Hito Fujiwana, and they talked about Darius Guide Extra in that interview as a variant of Guiden that was location-tested but canceled afterwards. So the context for the mini was that because they wanted to include an unreleased game

So it was between this and Don Cougar, which is a fighting game They ended up going with Don Cougar Because Dori's Guide and Extra was never fully debugged And it's kind of funky, like graphical layers will cut out Both an emulation and not an actual F3 machine. Music will occasionally cut out So the boards The boards that are floating around

They probably either came from those location tests And like made their way out of Taito and sold Or the data was otherwise like copied out And people were cloning it Either way it came out at some point unofficially in the 90s One other fun little thing According to a member of the Japanese Game Preservation Society Which is like their non-profit over there

And this person's anonymous because, of course, much like Rainbow Islands EX, it was a customized version developed internally, and they never, like, originally intended it to be publicly released. Wow. So it does some really interesting things. So it rearranges the stage order of the original game, remixes the bosses and enemies,

and it has its own built-in 30-hertz auto fire, which is super cool. And if you start it on the second player's side, you play through every single stage in alphabetical order with no branching paths. Oh, my God. Which takes like, I think it's over an hour and a half for a full place. It has to be.

Jesus. There's like a video online on YouTube somewhere, someone going through it. And stamina that would require. Yeah. It ends with level V-Dash, which is a battle against storm causer, which is also a great boss name. Yeah, that's great. But yeah, it's kind of buggy. It was like unofficial for a long time.

Never came out on anything. but hey, you can play it on emulation and it's kind of cool to check it out there was a guy who brought this to Magfest a couple times he didn't bring it this last time unfortunately but that's how I got to

mess with it and it's it is a lot of fun even the two-player mode that is just like a gauntlet is kind of awesome you imagine just like hunkering down for an hour and a half at Magfest and just playing playing through all the stages in alphabetical

order. I think that's called showing off, really. Yeah. If I could, I would. I won't lie. We talked a little bit about it, but yeah, Deraeus Gaiden came out on the Saturn and I think the PS1. The Saturn version is extremely good. It's got a little bit of slowdown. The PS1 version has more slowdown. It's more jerky, but it's playable. And also got included on a few different arcade ports on more recent consoles. It's on the Cosmic Collection. The PS1 has an unnecessary CG intro, too, and that's about the only feature it really posts over the Saturn one. I need to watch that. I've never seen it. I've only ever played the Saturn version. And, like, Cosmic Collection. But... Yeah. Like, I honestly forgot it came out on PS1 until, like... Most people did. We were doing this video.

Yeah. Thank you. And that brings us to your game, And that brings us to 1997's G. Which, would you call this your game, Krista, of all these? Yeah, yeah, definitely.

This is, this is the, um, the shooting of the, like, I have a tendency towards cave, towards, like, Don Maku. And of the pre that, of, of the sort of, um, post-Sevius, but pre-cave era, um, Giderias is the game I've, probably the game I've spent the most time with overall. I, it's, I really, I've been slowly, slowly working on a one CC over the past, a year plus, year and a half. Nice. Um, yeah, I, I absolutely adore this game. I haven't learned this one yet. I keep meaning to.

It's tough. There's a little bit of memo. It's some of the stages, depending on the routes, I'm just kind of learning the easiest route right now, right? But there's, yeah, it's a tough one. The bullet density gets pretty bad pretty quickly. Oh, man. So this was running on the FX system, which was a arcade hardware based on the PlayStation console. There were.

So, Taito. There were. Right. There were a lot of these. I've got a copy of Zevius 3DG and a sole edge board. The Namco System 11. The System 11 and the System 12 are also just essentially a PlayStation with some ports on it that hooks into a ROM board. And the FX system is pretty similar. I think it's all in one board. It's been a minute since I've looked at a Gitoris. But I believe it's all on one board. And it's just, a PlayStation with some added, like some RAM and a ROM and stuff. It's, it's wild how many, how many manufacturers Sony licensed the PlayStation hardware out to. Yeah, it must have been, I mean, I guess it makes sense. That was like the big console at the time and you knew you could get a good port off of your arcade board to the home.

Yeah, it's two boards, sorry. I think, uh, I think Kuturagi steered them, uh, in the specific direction, too. Yeah, that sounds like that. Yeah. So it sounded like they originally were considering using the Sega System V, which was compatible with the Saturn hardware. But then Kutaragi stopped by Taito and paid them a visit, as was how it's written in here. I don't know what he did exactly. It seems like nobody can say no to that guy.

That's like the running theme of stories about him throughout history is when he shows up somewhere. And by the time he leaves, whoever he's visited ends up on PlayStation hardware. I don't know. The height of his power. He got G. Dorias. Yeah. But yeah, it's a single screen game again. It sounded like they wanted to do

a two-screen version, but they just didn't have enough development time to make it, like, work with the hardware. But this is the first Darius game to use 3D models. Originally called CG Darius. You know, in context, there weren't too many other, like,

3D graphics shooters at the time. Like, there's Seveus 3D G. Yeah, and the R-type one's not out yet, I don't think, at that point. Yeah, R-type Delta, and there's, like, Ray Force and Ray Crisis were around the same time. Yeah. Although, I don't think either of them worked as well as G. Darias did. Ray Crisis is a great soundtrack, though.

Great soundtracks to those games, yes. So, yeah, power-ups here, they sort of work, like, in the original Darius. There's, like, a missile, a bomb, shield, ship that does retain its power level after dying. after you've upgraded like a full level. So again, like the original Darias. But the big things here is that you have capture balls that you can use to capture various enemies. You can't capture bosses, but you can capture like little popcorn enemies. You can capture like mini boss, I guess you'd call them like bigger ships.

And each one has its own abilities and different uses. Krista, how key would you? you say that capturing the right enemies at the right times is to being able to make a clear of this easier. So, so it varies on the stages they get really dense. Like, I'm just,

I think it's the all up route that I've been doing. So, you know, the simplest one. And by the time you get to stage three, three, yeah. At the time you get to stage three, it's like you need them basically as a bullet sponge to like, because you're

just getting absolutely just swarmed with shots but um you know because because you have the the shootout beam the sort of dragon ball beam struggle mechanic um you don't want to you so you have to play very defensively with the with usually a captain

because you don't want it to take too many shots so and you don't want to use the ability too much because you'll you'll wear that out so really it it's not super crucial but it does help a lot with sort of clearing the screen and yeah So yeah, you do, like you mentioned, once you have these captured enemies, you can sacrifice them to use it as a bomb, like in Darius Guidon, or you can use it to fire the alpha beam, which is just a general giant beam, the sword of which you don't see too often in horizontal shooters at this point, but it's super cool. The idea behind it came from an old Tokasatsu TV show. They didn't identify which one, but

yeah, bosses also will shoot out beta beams, which are the same basic concept, and the idea is that you can, you know, get into these beam fights, like in Dragon Ball Z and whatnot, and you can mash the button to make it more powerful. It's kind of cool.

I feel like it had to have been Ultraman that they were pulling that from and just didn't want to say it for fear of... It's the most likely, yeah. Bondi Namco or whoever. I think they own Alterman, but who coming after them for mentioning Ultraman or something. And I love

this. The beam isn't balanced around auto fire, but rather how fast the worst person on staff at shooting games could mash. Which is incredible. That's kind of a good idea, though, for like accessibility concerns, right? That's a shockingly good way of

approaching it. Yeah. The beam is where I mentioned there was a lot of memorization. Knowing when to have a captured enemy. Because typically, in the boss fights, the boss will sort of shoot out a couple popcorn enemies right before it

or a couple of like steps before it's going to do the beam. But knowing when to do that, knowing how to sort of retain your capture balls, things like that, that's a lot of the strategy. Or I mean, if you can just tough it out and just like shoot the boss to death. But as it gets further

and further on, that's, that's quite taxing. I was going to say, these bosses have a lot of health. Yeah, yeah. Even the first boss takes a lot of hits. before he finally goes down. They're so tanky. They are very tanky. And, you know, they had a lot of fun with, like, the 3D graphics in this, like, the way your ship moves around in the space and, like, how they will shift the camera.

Like, all of a sudden, you're still playing horizontally, but now, like, everything's at, like, a 45-degree angle because you're flying up. Like, there's, like, enemies coming from the background and cameras spinning around. some really interesting things that I don't think a lot of 3D shooters after this sort of early period really do. Yeah, not really. I think, I guess

no, Salkyu Guarintai doesn't do anything like that. Yeah, it's pretty singular. It's very cool, but, and it works a lot better here than like Raystorm did, which was in development at around the same time and, you know, Raystorm's a vertical shooter and it's got

a very distinct angle of where the camera is compared to all the action, and it's kind of annoying to play that way. But I never have any things of those kinds of issues with Cheiterias. Yeah. Yeah, legibility is not a concern, really. Oh, right. And that's what I wanted to mention. Like, you talked about having to know when to use the beams. That reminds me of border down on the Dreamcast. Yes. Yes. Which also is a game focused around giant beams

and having to know exactly when to use it to, like, maximize your score so you get, like, extra lives. and whatnot. Metal black, too. Yeah, Metal Black. You know, Taito's own metal black. Is there a staff continuity between Metal Black and Jeterias? Because they feel so, they feel like the same game sometimes.

Like, they have a lot of the same ideas. I would be really curious if, like, the staff on Metal Black and the staff on Gitorias were the same. Yeah, I'm not sure. I know, is a border down is, if I'm not mistaken, has like been said to be a spiritual successor to metal black like explicitly right yes yes yeah but i don't i haven't really heard anything about crossover and chidarias now that you say it And, you know, I think we definitely have to talk about the music, because the music in this game is great. Yeah, it's incredible.

So Ogreau was back for this one, and his concept for this was mixing in non-musical noise, like traffic lights in the such. and the idea of chimeras and sort of the inherent tragedy behind them, which is also very, like, new agey for a concept. But it is such, like, an experimental soundtrack. Yeah. I remember buying... A lot of sampling. Because I remember buying the CD for this before I'd really spent a lot of time with Jeter Ice,

and I'm like, what the heck is going on in this game? I don't feel like it's as difficult of a listen to independent of the game as maybe Durias one is. I think that one has the hardest soundtrack to just like listen to in a vacuum if you don't have any attachment mental or otherwise to the game. But I feel like maybe G. Durias is second to that. Yeah, that's probably the case. Yeah, I really love the heavy amount of sampling and the cross-genre stuff that's going on in the G-Dirai's soundtrack. And I feel like in the, not that I've heard anyone say this, but if the soundtrack and, in Gaiden was too weird for you.

You can kind of go to the live arrangements and it takes a little bit of the edge off because you get more guitars in there and things like that. But I feel like the live arrangements of the Gitorious songs don't even try to do that. No, not at all. They just, they kind of give it to you straight. Yeah, it's got almost a dance floor kind of feeling to it. They're like, listen, this is weird for the sake of weird, you're in. Yeah.

All right. Yeah, so this didn't get a Western. Arcade releases a Japan-only game. Any cabinets you see in the U.S. are, you know, imports. But I did get a Western PS1 release, which I feel like is where most people experienced it. I actually had a friend back in college where this was like one of the very few shooters she was familiar with. And she's like, so interesting. She's like, I love Jeterias. This game's like ending made me cry. It's like so good. Oh, my God. Wow. Yeah, the ending is really beautiful. So she's listening to this, you know, shout out.

So there were two versions of this game, the original one, which is the most common version. It's the one that the PS1 port was based on. And when the game got reissued on, like, the Tito Legends 2 package for PS2, it's the one that they included. There was also a version 2 that the Taito sales department wanted them to create. They wanted an extremely difficult version of Giderius, but the person who who wanted it, left mid-project. So the next manager decided that they wanted to use it for his score attack event with GAMist. And Zengi Ishii, who is still working on GAMist, told them that he thought it turned out very well.

But in general, it's like, it's a more difficult game. The game speed has been changed. They just didn't really have a lot of time to work on it. It's a little bit of a mess. Maybe Zenji Ishi isn't the best person to, like, run that by. to represent like the common person just to see how well you've tuned your game. Right.

But if you want to try out version two, they did include it on the Darias Cosmic Revelation collection, which also includes... Which also includes G. Darias HD. It's like an HD remake of it. So yeah.

Any other thoughts on G. Darias? Not really. You should play it. If you're listening to this, check it out. You should play all of these, except for Derryes Plus. Yeah. They've actually, they keep updating to the GDRIS HD

HD executable. They were doing, I think it's done now, but they were doing a beta test of it for the Steam deck, because these are like the very, very rare M2 shooting game releases

that actually get Steam releases. They don't, I don't think they all have, but Gitorias has, and I think the Cosmic Collection Arcade Skew got a Steam release. I don't think, the console one dead.

I think you're right. Yeah. I believe that's correct. But yeah, I've bought Jeterias about four times that I'm going to buy it again when I can get a board. I love that game. Oh, God, that does remind me. I should point out to anyone who is interested in these games, the Steam releases of basically all of

these that are games that had like three or two monitors in them. That functionality exists on, like, the cosmic collection and cosmic, well, let me not cosmic revelation, because it's a single screen, but, uh... Right. Yeah. Well, to rise burst.

Um, but yeah, they, uh, they have functionality for multiple monitors, uh, and you can, of course, if you have a widescreen monitor, you can enjoy, like a widescreen display. Uh, so that is very much ideal compared to trying to play it on console like I do like a fool. I believe they also have, um, you can pipe, uh, the base channel out. into a speaker that you sit on. Yeah. I think someone, I talked to someone on Twitter a while back who said that they mounted some kind of a speaker or sublifer under their seat to try to recreate Body Sonic.

That's a dedication. God love it. That sounds familiar. I feel like I saw that. I respect the level of integrity M2 has for those early Derae's games. Yes. Yeah. So after Jeteros, there's sort of a long break, which kind of makes sense, because

shooters kind of fell out of fashion, outside of like, the really hardcore Don Makku stuff for a while there. But in 2009, Taito published Darius Burst for the PSP, which has gone on to have a very weird legacy. But this original PSP release, you had an arcade mode where you play through five stages. If you finish that, you unlocked a burst mode where all your weapons start at max power. and you could freely switch between them, but you only have one life and the difficulty is set to like hard. And if you clear that, you get mission mode where you clear stages with very specific settings.

And sort of the big mechanical thing here is the burst system, which allows for a large beam to be fired in any direction. You can even fire like your main weapon while the burst beam is going. You can like drop it off somewhere on screen and like fly elsewhere. There's like a rechargeable meter for it. In arcade mode, it recharges just from killing things. And in burst mode, it just regenerates automatically. And from G. Dorias, they brought back that bosses can do like the beta beam again

so you can get into the beam fights. I feel like being able to position it was the natural evolution from G. Diorias's alpha beam. Like they probably didn't want to just use the alpha beam again. Yeah. So they thought, what can we do? what if we make it positionable, which is a pretty neat feature. I have maybe the least experience with Darius burst weirdly out of all of these,

except for maybe some of the console ones, but I do appreciate the burst system. Yeah, yeah, I've played it on my PSP a little bit, but not, I've mostly played the console, all the subsequent games. Yeah, I don't think I've ever actually touched the PSP version because I've never owned a PSP, but like that widescreen display makes a lot of sense. for this. Yeah.

I bought it a while ago on a Japan trip. I have it. I don't think I've actually ever put in the PSP version once. I got it before it really blew up in price. Thank, thank God. One day. From Derrace Force, of all things, they brought back the ability to choose one of three Silver Hawks that are unlocked.

Like, the second and third ones are unlocked by clearing arcade and burst mode. And the third ship actually doesn't. have the burst system at all. It's based off of the one from the original Darius game. So, like, all of your weapons are stronger, but you don't actually get to take advantage of the whole mechanic behind the game. I guess that's just for the old heads. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's like how when Zanek cross Zanik, you could unlock the ship from the original game, and it's super overpowered. I guess it's that same concept. They did also bring back the same usual colored items that power up your main gun and your

bombs and your shields. But each weapon has like certain attributes to it that will allow it to destroy specific projectiles. So like once again, you will, you will be in that position where you're going to try and dodge specific power-ups just to make certain sections easier because then you can destroy like the projectiles coming at you, which is super weird. And again, I haven't played a ton of Darius burst, so I'm not familiar with that to the extent I'd like to be. But like, it's an interesting choice. And Ogreda only did one song for this game. He was independent by this point.

He had left Taito as an employee. So the new composer was Shohei Tsuchia. I think that's how you pronounce that. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So he wasn't really familiar with Darias all that much. He purposely didn't listen to Ogreta's music, so he wouldn't be influenced by it. But he did read interviews with Ogreter so he could understand the point of view behind his sound

tracks, which I think is a fair way to go. Yeah. Like, the soundtrack to Derise Burst is pretty good and it's very, like, unique. Yeah. Yeah, I really like it. In this original version, it did end up getting ported to iOS and Android as Derise Burst's second prologue. Second prolog.

Which is also an extremely, like, goofy name, but... It's hard for me to imagine playing this game on a phone, but hey... It sounds awful. Just absolutely atrocious. There was that moment where they were, like, we're going to put Mushihame Sama on an iPhone. We're going to put Death Smiles on an iPhone. And it's like, what?

Oh, God. Why would you do this? But why? You know, Akato Blue works out of an iPhone, but like, I would still rather play it with an arcade stick. Yeah. There are some. I can see Gradius working, at least the opening stages of Gratius. But that's just because you don't have much bullet density.

Right, right, I think. That's the key. Yeah. And then after that, Darius Burst sort of took out a life of its own. So the next one after that was Darius Burst, another Chronicle, which was an arcade remix of the PSP game that really came out in 2010. I feel like if you're an arcade rat,

this is probably the version you're most familiar with. God knows the one I've seen the most often because... A shocking amount of places in America got this that I've seen. Really? Places you would never imagine to have a cabinet of this side. Yeah, there was an arcade in Brighton, Michigan, which if you're from Michigan, you know of all places, sort of like halfway between Detroit and Flint in sort of the middle of nowhere, and their arcade had a deraest burst machine and a rhythm heaven machine. It's truly wild. I think they have a my, my, too.

I think they do have a my way. I don't know who's run in this place, but God bless them. Yeah, they're doing the Lord's work. But, yeah, der I's first, another Chronicle came out 2010, and then in 2011, another Chronicle EX came out. I think that's the, is that the console version, or is that also arcade? I don't remember off the top of my head. I think that's the console version. Yeah.

I, I, this is very hard to keep track of. So forget us if we get some of this information a little bit wrong. You basically need a chart to keep track of this. There is a YouTube video that basically details all different. is. I've seen it as well. So this was also supposed to be ported to the Xbox 360, but they ran into difficulties.

So that it got pivoted to this arcade release, you know, another chronicle. They revealed this in a Zuntata night stream. And I think for the panel, the Darius panel that Kevin and I did at Magfest earlier this year, I grabbed a screenshot from it so we could use it in there. I hadn't heard about it before that point.

Yeah. I don't think anyone had. That was very new news to me. So everything it was redrawn to accommodate the fact that the arcade version is two widescreen monitors that does still play like the PSP game. All those mechanics are back. You have original mode, which is like traditional Dariah style branching paths. You have Chronicle mode, which is the mission-based mode with rearranged levels and bosses under

specific conditions and the way this is set up for the arcade game is that they're not meant to be all done by a single person but rather all arcade goers with access to that machine are like communally going through these missions like because there's like uh 3,000 missions or something ridiculous with this thing yeah they originally wanted 5,000 they settled it on three um so yeah it's it's wild uh and then the another Chronicle E.X introduced original EX mode and event mode, which

you know, the original EX mode is like new, harder zones. And event mode has like online missions. This was only a Japan feature. You know, sort of the era of Japanese arcade machines getting online features and those are just

non-existent, really. It's both a good and bad thing. Yeah. So you do have the ships from deris burst are back. They also added a bunch more. Another Chronicle E.X.

They all, again, have different loadouts and abilities. You still have the huge waves of enemies coming after you. This is not like a bullet hell style game, but it's like, I don't know, it feels a little more active than some of the other deraic

games. Like it's... Yeah, it definitely is. It's kind of tricky to get through. I do enjoy it. It feels very different. I haven't sunk a lot of time into this game. I would like to learn a route for a one credit clear one day, but it feels

it's hard to describe how, but you have to have a little bit of a different mindset when you approach it, I think, than coming off of most of the other Darias games I can think of. And I love that the arcade game is really built around multiplayer as well. Because there's like, what, is it four

setups in the cabinet? Four people can barely fit. in there like four uh four you know slim people can fit in there next to each other yeah it's a little bit of a tight fit but uh but like i've never actually gotten four people in there at once i think the most we ever managed is three yeah but like it's it's a lot of fun with that many people because there's a lot of screen real estate thank god and like power-ups are plentiful enough that you never feel completely screwed over plus you got the plus you have the beam no matter what. Right. So it's super cool. And apparently there was a lot of like stories of communities

that sprung up around this game. When they put out the Cosmic Revelation collection, they included an arcade version of another Chronicle. Yeah, there was a whole interview with two people who had met each other in an arcade playing this. And they ended up getting married. There was a picture of their wedding cake in the interview and sort of of in as much of an approximation of the Darias font as you can make in icing. It said, Wedding, a huge love couple, Tetsuya, and Mizuki is approaching now. That's so cute. That is the cutest meat cute from an arcade, I think.

It really is. Yeah. I hope they're doing well. I hope so, too. I mean, if they can beat up, it's not King Fossil in this one, he's like some other name. They can get past that sealicant. They're doing great. Yes

So, so, like, so, so, like, this game, Dries Burst in general just has, like, all these ports, and they're a little baffling to keep straight. So here's our attempt at a chart. So there's Chronicle Saviors on the PlayStation Vita and PS4 and Steam. This came out in 2015. This includes Chronicle Saviors mode, which is sort of a story mode where you're all knocking stages on a grid.

And there's like a crap load of DLC ships from Sega, Cave, Capcom, other Taito games. Like they went all out with the licensing on this. Yeah, there's a ton. Another Chronicle EX Plus is on the Derives Cosmic Revelation. Oh, there you go. We did write it in there. It's an update to the arcade game. So this one added all the original events from event mode from the arcade game plus some new ones.

It's a little higher resolution than Chronicle Saviors. And then there's Chronicle Saviors core for the switch, which is Chronicle Saviors mode plus the Sega and Taito DLC. And they added in some new stages and content from the original PSP game. You can understand why this is so hard to keep track. Yeah, I hope that's informative to somebody who's like, which version of derives burst do I want? The answer is, I can't tell you, whatever you're feeling. And if you want all the DLC for all the different company ships,

you kind of have to get Chronicle Saviors, because I think the licensing probably ran out on carrying those forward, which is why they only did Sega and Taito ones on, C.S. Core. Yeah. I'm trying to get this right. I believe that you can't get the DLC. Yeah, you can't get the DLC for Cave and Capcom on another Chronicle EX on the Cosmic Revelation.

But I think that the Cosmic Revelation version is the most feature complete outside of being able to pilot the Duranpachi ship. I think that's the way it works. I think I had that PS4 release, that initial physical PS4 release from Japan. And I think even less than a year ago or a year ago or something, I was able to go on there and buy all the DLC, including the Cave DLC and all that stuff. Yeah, I believe it's still up on the store. So let that be your warning to grab that stuff while you can, I guess.

Right. Yeah. That's all the Darius games that we have. Final thoughts. How are we feeling about Darius in general? Oh, I love it. Yeah. I think it's, I think it is a really good, if you're not, if you don't feel super confident with shooters, I think that Dorias splits the difference really nicely. Some of the games, the games that we've maybe described as being a little easier, Guy Den and G definitely. I think, and probably the first game, though it's a little harder. But they split the difference between being approachable and then teaching you a lot of really important things about fundamentals and, you know, spacing and how to dodge proper. properly. I think that they're really, really good starter for somebody who's like, I want to play a horizontal shooter. What do I play? A lot better than something like R-type, which is like super memo heavy. Even I love R-type, but it's, you know, but yeah, I think, I think Darius is a phenomenal series. I wish they would make more, but Taito is very strange now.

Yeah, I learned I learned Gradius and R-type clears first before I went to Darius but in retrospect I really should have done Darius one first because I felt like I I feel like I would have gotten more out of it and it would have maybe been a little bit smoother

of a difficulty curve. So yeah, I heartily agree that even one, though it may be intimidating because of its age, I think maybe people shouldn't be as intimidated by. Two is the one you should absolutely be intimidated by. But one is fairly friendly. And if you're interested in,

you know, kind of experiencing one of the three monitor games and you want to learn a one credit clear for a game that's not too bad, I really would recommend one. Guidon is great. And again, I feel like the difficulty curve is not too horrible if you pick the right route and maybe pick that one if you want to learn one a little

a little more like modern feeling I guess yeah um for me I would say that uh my advice if you do want to play to rise too is just play the Genesis version it's the only version of that game that's remotely like pleasant yeah yeah I I kind of agree with everything you said it's it is a very good like starter series in general um and yeah there's just nothing really out there quite like Darias, like it's very funky, it's very weird, but in a very approachable way. Yeah, you'll be able to appreciate the soundtracks, in my opinion, a lot more if you have that mental association with the game.

Like, it sort of unlocks something for you. Yeah. I think I got the Darius one soundtrack before I was super familiar with the game, and I put it on and kind of be like, this is kind of weird and abrasive. But then after I spent a bunch of time with it, now I can put it on and be like, oh, yeah, here we come. Great thing. Let's go. The great thing theme is objectively. No, the great thing theme is like the most listenable.

Yeah, the most listenable one on there. But even some of the other, you know, kind of harsher ones, now that I have the mental association with them, I really can appreciate them a lot more. Yeah. And we can end the Darius portion with a quote from Ogre. Quote, Darius is a deep game. End quote. That's right. It sure is.

It sure is. He's on to something. So this has been Retronauts. This is a Patreon-supported show at Patreon.com slash Retronauts. The $3 level, you get each episode one week early and at a higher bit rate. And at the $5 level, you also get access to Friday bonus episodes, Diamond Flight's weekly columns, and the Retronauts Discord server. So thank you very much for your same. support keeps us going.

And Brian, where can people find you on the web? Yeah, so you can find my translation work at 1 million power.com, and I'm B. Clark OMP on pretty much all the social media platforms. I started doing YouTube videos a few months ago. So far, they've all been about side-scrolling beat-em-ups, going through those in chronological order, but I'll be getting into some other types of games pretty soon, hopefully some shoot-em-ups, too. and even videos about Japanese music, too.

So if that sounds interesting to you, check that out. It's YouTube.com slash B-Clark OMP. And there's a Patreon for that as well, too. Patreon.com slash one million power. And let's not forget, you do have a book coming out as of this recording soon. Oh, that's right. I do. Oh, my goodness.

I'm going to be recording a video about that pretty soon, too. Yes, it is gameplay harmonies, Japanese recording artists in the video games about them. It's a very narrow-focused book where I write only about Japanese video games, which have featured not the music of, but the actual likenesses of Japanese recording artists. So if that sounds interesting, keep an eye out on that one. That'll be coming up for pre-order, I think, sometime fairly soon from Limited Run. That's awesome. It may even be out by the time this runs.

Who knows? It may be. That's the mystery. Krista, how about you? I am on formerly Twitter as O-P-P-P-O-P-P-O-O-O-R-P-U-P. I need to stream more, but I keep forgetting to. I do my mod work and repair work. I'm in the Seattle area, and I do take mail-in orders.

If you want to go to soundretro.com.com. dot CO sound retroco is the name of my my shop um send me an email if you have any PlayStation you know older stuff uh i kind of cut it off at xbox 360 but any you know arcade um console computer anything like that that you need serviced um happy to oblige if you i you know like i said earlier i work on the action button uh videos so you know youtube.com slash action button more of those will be coming

and yeah that's pretty much it and I can vouch for your work personally because you've fixed up several of my

very esoteric consoles some really oddball ones yeah yeah thank you God bless you leisure vision yeah

for being relatively easy to work on between you and Jeremy Parrish you're really keeping her in business with the oddball

old consoles uh huh I've got a channel left that probably needs work at some point so God, God willing.

And as for me, you can find me on Mostly Blue Sky at Ubersaurus, although I am also on Twitter as well. Occasionally, I check in on there like a couple times a week. I run the Atari Archive YouTube channel and Atari Archive.org, which is the related website for that. That is Patreon supported at patreon.com slash Atari Archive. And I've got a book also out through Limited Run, and that features sort of the history of the Atari VCS-2,600, and its first two years of releases, sort of digging into what made them tick, what people were thinking when they were designing them, all that fun stuff, plus all the competing systems from that era. So check that out if that sounds like an interesting topic to you. And with that, we leave you to your tuna sashibi. night.

Oh, a lot of it. Oh. Oh. Oh. Ah. Ah. Oh.

Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Thank you.