Retronauts - 641: Tales of Games Journalism & Games That Hold Up

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

Nadia and David Oxford join with Jeremy Parish, and Diamond Feit to talk about the challenges of half-analogue, half-digital game journalism circa 2006 and games that stand the test of time. 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

Thank you everyone for coming. I'm sorry I'm not the BBS person, Florida Aitlam. But I am Nadia Oxford and I have been a games writer's since 2004. And I want to talk a little bit about what it was like to cover games in the analog age, usually before cell phones. And I brought some fellow old people with me. This is my husband of 23 years. Introduce yourself. My name's David Oxford, and I've been writing about video games for almost a song. Maybe longer, actually, if you count the Mega Man Network. Yeah, he's the admin of the Mega Man Network, which is not paid writing, but it is certainly writing. Oh, there you go.

Next, in line. David, you don't look at day over 22. I'm Jeremy Parrish. I've been writing about video games in some capacity since about 1998. So what is that? Like 15 years at least? Maybe 16? 10.

25? 26. I don't know. Time just all compresses. You're right about video games long enough. You lose the ability to count. Oh, that's amazing. We're all friends here.

I hate this man's taste. I'm going to make a game that I like. And next in line. Absolutely. Hello, my name is Diamond Fight. I've been writing bad games since 2009, and I'm just happy to be here. I'm happy to have you. So basically what inspired this is I was cleaning up a bunch of crap in my apartment

so that the landlord won't evict us. We have a rent-controlled apartment, and I don't want to lose it. And that's what I realized. I have collected so much stuff between my husband and I that really is a diary of what we did. And I wish I had to bring it all and show you all and go on and on. But unfortunately, we only have a little bit of time, and Mr. Cubert ate some of it. So let's get going. So I started writing for the Internet in 2003.

That was before I started getting paid for it. And I started to blog on the backgrounds for Diaryland, if anyone remembers that. That was back in 2003. I have a big fat mouth. but I'm terrified to talk, so I wanted to express myself somehow. I ran that time I was actually working as a janitor at a mall, and so I had a lot to complain about because people don't know how to use toilets properly.

You would think, but apparently their parents failed somewhere. I used to, like, just kind of blog out games, culture, acting like hot shit in general. I had my first breakout hit when, I don't even know how I found it. I found this McDonald's hentai. It was really funny because it was, Officer Big Mac as a frisky employee

Ronald McDonald ended up in an RG I don't know, it was ridiculous and I just wrote a whole thing about how ridiculous it was and how funny it was I think, I don't know if you I remember you commented on it Parrish and that made my day

because I was like my mentor acknowledges me when was this? This was 2003 probably Oh this is probably why I hired you to write for one up No you hired me because I had a Mega Man page and I referenced

Jethel on it No, it was definitely the McDonald's torn. I'm so happy to hear that. Actually, the next point I want to make is I wrote for you, the Toasty Frog Zine, which was just a bundle of paper stapled in the middle. The way Zine should be, I was actually in a Mega Man scene recently. I wrote a story for it.

It's so glossy and perfect. I'm like, no, zines are supposed to pieces of crap. No, those were published at Kinko's. Yeah, yeah. There's kink all throughout this story, apparently. It's kink all the way down. So, why don't we talk a little bit about how we started like blogging and writing for the internet uh david why don't you go ahead oh wow like i said before

i think my earliest was when i just started writing for the mega man network after you picked a fight with the uh original founder of the site did i fight i fought oh my god okay so anyone here know uh steve watts ever heard the name uh well he's like the he's the editor of game informant hour not game not game spot yeah and i see wow we he's something that we met on a Mega Man message board that he took over, but we had a fight because I thought he was full of himself and I called him the Pope of Mega Man Town.

But we're good friends now. He's a cool dude. Yeah. Anything else? Well, things kind of evolved from there. I was writing for the Mega Man Network. I eventually kind of broke off and started my own site, Poisonmushroom.org because I wanted to kind of, you know, do more than Mega Man. And

eventually from there I got in some other stuff. I don't know if anybody remembers advanced media network or combo with k.com. That was one I spent some time with. And, you know, I've kind of bounced around here and there since. One of my, I guess, one of my proudest accomplishments is I actually got to write for Nintendo Power for a hot minute there before they ended up closing the magazine. So I made it in just in time to get my name in there.

That's awesome. Before I move on to you, Parrish, I want to point out that back then, people let's comment on your stuff on guest books. Now, these were very unregulated. You could write whatever you want. You could post whatever you want. This is around the time that terrible memes started to rise. Terrible images like Lemon Party and far worse. So I actually had a friend whose church had a guest book and someone spammed Tub Girl on it and there's no more guest books. Guestbooks did not last. Let's put it that way. But that's how people commented on my stuff back in the day. Parrish, go ahead. Yeah, I remember when I installed a comment system on my blog in like 2002.

and I felt like I had unlimited power, and then I read the comments, and he was like, oh, I never went there. Oh, people had opinions. So how did I get started writing about video games? Yeah. I mean, I bought this gigantic book of how to code HTML and created a GeoCities page for myself in 2006, but it never occurred to me to put video games on there.

But then around the time Final Fantasy 7 came out, I started blogging, or not blogging, but posting on the unofficial Squaresoft home page. Yes, our good friend, Andrew Vestol. talking about Final Fantasy games and basically being kind of a stubborn, pig-headed jerk like all people on the internet are.

And I posted there so much that when Andrew Vestel, who ran the site and his friends decided to launch a new site called the Gaming Intelligence Agency, they said, why don't you write some stuff for us? And I said, okay, and I helped design the page. And yeah, from there, kind of, you could say, snowballed or spiraled,

depending on your perspective. But my first official, like, paid gig was when a game spot paid me a lot of money, like a crazy amount of money, thousands of dollars, to take the free chronocross fact that I had written for game facts just on my own and said, will you, like, edit this for us and let us publish it as our guide? And I said, yes. Wow, of course, because now everyone does guides for free. Yeah, they gave me a ton of money to write Skies of Arcadia now.

and then the dot-com bubble burst, and they stopped paying people lots of money to write strategy guides. That's too bad. I got my foot in the door, so that was good. You cast in at a good time. Jeremy, I'm assuming when you edited your guide, you changed the chrono cross to dollar signs.

Yes, exactly. Like Kesha, you know? Yeah. That's the easy to the guide for you. It was. I mean, I will say that the guide I wrote, for the hell of it, based on the Japanese version,

despite not reading Japanese very well, was pretty damn good, especially once people started writing to say, hey, you got all this stuff wrong, and I corrected it. It was a community effort, but I got the money for it. So that's what counts. That's games journalism for you. Yeah, absolutely.

How about you fight? Well, I started blogging for myself in 2004 on my very website, and after a couple of years, I just writing about, you know, random life stuff, you know, moving to Japan, that sort of stuff. I started writing about games just for myself on the blog,

and then there was a community-driven site called BitMob. I don't think of it. Oh, I remember about, yeah. Okay, but I just worked for BitMob, which was work. It was all like free submission stuff, but I was like, I got into that, and that was fun. And then through that, I started to sort of, I guess, through social media, started to connect with people who other wrote for real sites for real money. And then I just lucked into a gig with Chris Kohler over Wired.

Nice. Needed help for Tokyo Game Show one year. And I was like, well, I live in Japan. I can be in Tokyo. And that started at all. And then from there, I got, you know, gigs here and there. And, you know, it's never been more of a job than it is now right now because I work a lot of retronauts.

And I've been laid off from all my real jobs, you know, who pay for health insurance. But I'll take it. I'll take it. It's fun. What I do now is fun, so I enjoy it. Yeah, can't argue that. I actually forged your perspective because you were in the analog Japanese age, which is probably a little different.

But Japan had crazy feature phones too, so we'll get into that. I did. I had one of those. Nice. So the first honestly goodness piece of writing that I was paid for, you guys all kind of said your pieces. But yeah, in June 2004, you, Jeremy, asked me to write an article about Mega Man in the very brand new one-off.com, f-in-chat. Yeah, I think I don't know what drew you to my writing I'm really sorry

But You had a foul mouth And a dirty sense of humor And I thought Games journalism needs this This is the juice That we need to make this industry good You're not wrong to be honest

It is pretty funny It is fun to swear about video games Like most early game sites I wish I could have found a good screenshot But it's really hard to even find anything in Archive.org these days. One-up's layout was a very web 1.0 venture, I think. It was really most game sites back down. It really laid out more, like, magazine pages than actual, like, what you get now, which is, like, covered in ads and SEO and everyone's stealing your

information at the same time. Articles are, when I handed you an article, you edited it for my voice, not like, this has to have SEO compliance, this has to have keywords, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was also kind of... I mostly just took the cusses out. Or just smooth them over a bit. Or the really, like, nonsensical arcade fire references. One thing I did not do was edit out your love for rambling, discursive introductions

that take about three paragraphs to work their way around to the actual topic. I thought that was great, and I left that in this, you know. Oh, that's really cool. Usually people, working for Kat, Kat Bailey, who I worked with at U.S. Gamer, she's just like, yeah, you got to cut this down. Her and Katie McCarthy was the best editor I ever worked with, but game journalism did not deserve her. Oh, yeah, of course. I mean, you're number one. You're Uno. I wonder if that's where I get it from. Also, back then, something that's really nice is that writers were not expected to wrestle with backends and edit their own work and put HTML in it and put social media links and everything.

No hocus pocus to please the inscrutable Google algorithm. So that was nice. And, yeah, I got paid for my first article. I remember vividly was $240,000, which was pretty good because it was like 400 words. But I was paid with the check, and it was mailed to me, and I had to haul it to the bank like a Schmendrick. And the thing is, one of the funniest differences, I'm from Canada, One of the funniest differences between Canada and America is that our bank systems are so different.

Canada is heavily regulated when it comes to money in banks. America is America. So I learn very quickly, when you bring in a U.S. check from a place that these people have never heard of in their life, the bank tellers are really happy about that. They love you so much when you do that, and then they hold your money for a month.

So what are the light covering E3 during the early odds? Now, first of all, I want to point out before I forget this t-shirt that I am wearing right this minute is from E3-2006. 2006, because they had a demo unit of Sonic the Hedgehog 2006, full of so many unhappy and sad and confused people. I'm just like, oh, I died. Can I have the shirt? Thank you. Bye. Did you know back then how bad I was going to be? I was pretty, I was like, you got to fix these controls here. It's just not going to happen. Was there a booth girl dressed like the princess who kissed any Sonic cosplay? Unfortunately, no, because they were cowards.

Sega. Sega. How dare you? Sega. Is there a timid era. So, yeah, my first was 2006, and that was a great E3 to start with, because that was a really exciting E3. It's, like, still drenched in memes that lived to this day. I almost died on the way there, because this was the age before GPS and whatnot, and I got into a taxi at L-A-X, which is a Hellmouth, as we all know. And I was going to the good old Hotel Figura.

Figueroa. Figueroa. Figueroa, such a lovely place. So the driver of the taxi is like, okay, where's your hotel? Like, what's the address? I'm like, I don't know. You know L.A. I don't.

I'm from Canada. Like, do you, it's a hotel Figuora. It's everyone goes there. So he's like really angry. I don't know where that is. So we had to stop on the side of like an L.A. highway so I could fish out my instructions because they weren't in my bag with me at my front. went into the trunk, fished out the instructions

which were printed out probably from MapQuest or something. Yeah. So we survived that. But the thing is, I had to wait a long time for someone to collect me in the lobby of the hotel because I didn't have a phone. The phones were kind of becoming a thing, but I didn't have one.

So I just sat in the hotel like a four child, was waiting for someone to acknowledge me. I did see Sharky. Like, Sharky saved me. I would learn then that Sharky's a really cool dude. I just read most of plague dogs by Richard Adams, which is a really depressing book about dogs getting tested on. But you did rescue me, so thank you.

Yeah, sure, that's what I was there for. Yeah, I think that was the first time I ever met you in person. It was. I read your stuff online for quite a while before I said, hey, would you like to write some stuff for one up? And then, you know, three years later, you came to E3. and yeah it was it was a really different experience back then because as you say there were no smartphones

we were still like two years away from the iPhone and it just felt very like kind of pick it up as you go along I think that was probably my third E3 so even then it was pretty new for me and yeah it just it felt very much kind of seat of your pants and especially for people who were online because there wasn't really a system in place for E3 for websites. Because the entire games industry, like the press, you know, was primarily print-based at that point. And it was just really beginning to make the transition to the digital side of things.

So it was really geared toward the schedules and the timing of print deadlines. And those of us on the website side were kind of like the core schmucks who had to work really, hard and didn't get a break. And that was always like a sticking point for me because, you know, One Up was part of the Zip Davis game publishing group. So there were tons of magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly, official

PlayStation magazine, computer gaming world, GMR, a couple of others. And they would go to E3. They would have their appointments and that was it for the day. Yeah. Five o'clock, they were clocked out. They went to parties. They chilled out.

Had dinner. Went to bed. it was awesome for them. We went to appointments, and between every appointment, we were typing, you know, madly to get stuff up online. We finished our appointments for the day. We went back to our hotel, type more. Like, I would literally write until I could not write anymore and started falling asleep on my computer.

I would go to sleep, get up, and do it again the next day. And then, you know, once we got back from E3, it was like, well, back to work. Yeah. And, you know, once the E3 crew for the print magazines got back from E3, it was like, well, take a few days off. You had a busy week down in L.A. We have a deadline in three weeks, so, you know, aim toward that, get your stuff done.

So there was, you know, some real resentment on the online side toward the print people. But to my satisfaction, that eventually went away, and the print people had to start working like us. And they had a very hard time. They had a much worse time of it than we did because they were so used to the lush party experience, you know, going out and clubbing with heat. Eokojima or whatever, that it was really tough for them to kind of adapt to the internet version of things. And then all the magazines went away and they had to adapt no matter what. Yeah.

I don't want to sound like I'm gloating. It all really kind of sucks the way things are gone. But just, you know, there was this transitional state that I lived through. And it was weird and frustrating and kind of bad sometimes, but it's kind of funny when you look back on it. I remember during that era. that like I didn't get to go to E3 and I like I wasn't basically I was working from home and covering stuff as part of the I guess you could say the home team and basically what that ended up amounting to was late nights downloading assets from press sites and emails and all this stuff trying to upload it onto a back end dealing with the broken stuff and just lots of that and it was absolutely no fun and it was like all these games and it's like does anybody even care of it? about these.

I think we eventually put our foot down, like, okay, we're going to have to, like, you know, scale some of this back or something because we can't just keep going on like this. No, absolutely. I do have to say that, you know, in the transitional phase between print and online media

being the focus of shows like this, E3, I feel like at one-up, we kind of hacked the system, cracked the code. We did things that people, the publishers who were showing games weren't necessarily expecting

and kind of jumped the line a little bit like I remember 2006 I think or maybe it's 2005, I guess 2005 when Nintendo had their big booth and they were showing off new Super Mario Brothers for DS for the first time that had never been playable before like that was going to be one of the big games for the show

we had a booth that was just a cross from Nintendo's booth And because we were exhibitors, because one-up had a booth as part of Zip Davis at the show, we were in on the show floor before the show started. And there weren't really guards and protocols in place once you got inside the show. So before the show started on day one, I walked over to Nintendo's booth, played the New Super Mario Brothers DS demo. And the moment the show opened for the public, I had written up a quick hand. On Preview, uploaded it, and we had the first coverage of the game. Right.

Even though we weren't supposed to have played it yet. But, you know, the embargo was basically, there wasn't really an embargo, but basically the understanding was you won't publish anything until the show starts. So as soon as the show started, we had that up there. And things like that, you know, quick turnaround. Like, I remember maybe he was playing Castlevania Portrait of Ruyn. And Koji Igarashi was there demoing it. So I did a quick hands-on impressions demo.

with a couple of comments from him and got that up, like, you know, within half an hour of playing the demo, just being able to vomit out words that quickly and make them coherent and hopefully somewhat interesting. Like, those articles would do gangbusters because it was the first coverage online and people on forums like NeoGaf or whatever were out there just, like, hitting F5 on every website at the time

looking for new content to go up on the front page. You were just, like, so casually writing what is SEO gold these days. I mean, we didn't know what SEO was. No, it was really great. It was really awesome. Is that, like, you know, some sort of country? Is that a code for something?

It's a really bad country where people are very alphabetical. It was, you know, like the Internet hadn't been gamified yet. Right. Like, there was no system in place, and people were still kind of thinking in terms of print. Like, you know, this stuff will go up at the end of the day. Like when, you know, IGN was in its early days as PSX power and IGN 64, like they would publish. At the end of the day, everything for the day would go up at the end of the day. And they still kind of took that approach, even, you know, going into the 2000s and kind of moving into that digital era.

So being able to just, like, jump on stuff and quickly upload it from the show floor gave us a huge advantage. And, yeah, I feel I have good memories about, you know, as stressful as E3 was, like writing 30 articles in the space of four days. and, you know, based on hands-on oppression and interviews and so forth. It was taxing. It was exhausting, but I wasn't old yet, so I could do that. That made the difference, right? And, you know, it kind of, like, the stuff we were doing helped, I think, kind of set the standard for the way things should be for better or for worse.

Like, you know, maybe it's my fault that there's so much expectation of rapid turnaround content. I think that would have happened anyway. It's just we were kind of there a little ahead of everyone else. just because of the weird relationship that we had with the print media group and the fact that it gave us this kind of inside scoop that, you know, like other websites didn't have because they were still kind of isolated. They were digital press, and we were digital butt sneaking in,

kind of coasting in, you know, drafting off of the print. So, yeah, it was an interesting transitional period. Absolutely. The part about the Nintendo security reminds us. me of a story. I think it was from Matthew Green, press the buttons.com. He's a old friend and colleague of mine. I think when we were working combo, advanced media, whatever, I think he's got a story about basically he's kind of like taking like some footage or it was like, you know, kind of like a panning shot of like the E3 show floor, just all the different booths, not focusing

on any one thing. As soon as it focused like as it like turned towards square eunuchs, apparently like there was like some security that was. I took a picture of SORA. they were not happy about it. Like, why would you put Sora there for not to take a picture with him? I don't understand. I still imagine just the anime dust cloud, like, coming up behind, like, you know, the security guard's feet as he's, like, you know, rushing up, like, saying, you can't do this. You can't do that.

And it's like, do what? What about you fight? You were at Tokyo Game Show around the same time, weren't you? Yeah, I'm thinking of, you know, the picture thing that reminds me just, in general, when you walk around Japan, there are places that just expect you to not photograph them at all. Yeah. Like, even throughout outside. Like, I know I've been down to Den Town,

which is sort of the, you know, the electronics nerd district or whatever of Osaka. And for one day, I was walking down there, and there were just, there were some women in maid outfits. Yeah. They were selling tapiochi, which is very much an Osaka dish. So, you know, it's, it's on brand. And I was like, oh, look, maids are serving takoyaki.

I will photograph this and laugh at it. And as soon as my camera around, they're like, oh, no pictures, no pictures. I'm like, okay? But you are out. You know you're outside, right? So it's not, it's very, it's, it's, it's, it makes perfect sense to me that to be at E3 and to have all these things set up and like as soon as you got here, Square Enix, one of the

more Japanese, Japanese companies, they're like, oh no, no, no, we are asserting our right tier, you cannot photograph our promotional booth because, yeah, reasons. Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll post a picture later. What's that? Are you waiting to me or what? Hello. I'm saying hi to you. Hi.

I've heard that's true that, like, I'm Japanese. Doesn't really like that kind of stuff. Like, even nowadays, especially nowadays where, like, a lot of tours are kind of rude. Like, they don't even like when you need to cuddles in the store. I don't know if it was like a culture thing or. Yeah. I mean, if you try to take a photograph in a Japanese arcade, someone will appear from nowhere and give you the cross arms or hold up a little sign that has a camera on it and a cross-swash through it.

Yeah. It's, it's, it's. I'm always on the lookout for that because it's just a, I think, a respect for privacy. Yeah, I can understand. Yeah, I do get, I do get some of it. Obviously, for people, I understand for people a little more than I, like, understand objects. Like, a lot of stores in Japan just have a sign on the front door saying no photographs. Yeah.

But to me, it's like, this is a 7-Eleven. If I'm in 7-Eleven and I see a, you know, a humorous beverage or something, it's like, I'm just going to take pictures of beverage. You know, I'm not, this is not violating anyone's right. But what I mentioned earlier about the check thing, that's also very funny to me because when I started, excuse me, when I started writing for Wired, you know, I'm working for an American company who are paying me in dollars, but the only way that Condé Nass would pay me as a freelancer was via check. and I don't know the situation between Canada and America. I assume, you know, I know you both have dollars, but Canadian dollars are just kind of like sillier dollars. Colorful dollars.

They're called loonies. Yeah, Loonies, exactly. And Tunis. Japanese banks, no one uses checks. So a check to me in Japan is worthless. Right. So what I would have to do is I would have to store up all these checks and then periodically either mail them back to America

or when I was in America, I would just take them all to the bank. with me. It's like, oh, hello, I'm going to deposit all these checks now. What a pain in the ass. And at least one occasion, it was too late. Like, the check was too old. Like, we can't catch... Dale check, yeah. Oh, well, I guess I, you know, there's ten bucks on the receipt again. I was not getting paid a lot of money. I need to stress this. I was not going to

pay them to something. No, I mean, there are ATMs in Japan now, and I think it's gotten a lot better now, as far as, like, getting your cash. Like, a lot of stores, like 7-Eleven. Like, any 7-Eleven in Japan will take my American bank card and give me money. Like, that's great. I don't think that was the case 15 years ago.

I think 15 years ago, like, the post office ATMs would maybe take foreign cards, but that was a maybe. And other banks, forget about it. Like, Japanese banks, whatever. We can do a two-hour panel about Japanese banks. I can tell you that there was a kiosk at Narita Airport that would take foreign bank cards. And there was one other at like the city bank in Shibuya. So if you wanted to get cash while you're in Japan, those were the two places you went with a foreign bank.

Yeah, that was the thing. I wanted to look for foreign banks that had outlets in Japan, and as I lived in Japan, those numbers went down every year. Like, there used to be a city bank in Osaka. They're all gone. They used to be HSBC over Osaka. They're all gone. And so thankfully, some Japanese banks caught up.

But yeah, for a long time there, I would just get paid in checks like, okay, I'll just, you know, look forward to this, you know, for Christmas, I guess. I thank God for 7-11. Sure. But I also think, you know, when you talked about media, you know, I remember going to my first TGS and Chris Kohler, who's the editor-Wire, he explained to me, and said, okay, when we go in, the first thing you need to do is go to every booth and get the press kit.

Yes. And by press kit, you have to go to every booth and you find the information booth. Like, you've got a, first of all, you've got a giant booth. Like, if it's a Sega booth, you've got a giant screen with Sonic the Hedgehog or a Yaku's there or something on it, and like this three panel, like all the stuff's around here. But somewhere in this booth, there's going to be a little desk. And at the desk is going to be a very polite young woman, and that's like the information desk.

So you've got to find the big booth, find the immigration desk, talk to the person to say, excuse me, I'm here for the press kit. Now, I'm not a fluent Japanese speaker. I try. I really do. But for the life of me, I could never ask this question right the first time or the second time. It took me at least three tries to communicate what press kit was. Even though I showed up there and I

clearly had a tag on my, I wear a tag as it's press. Like, I'm looking for the press. I know you know the word press. I was like, I'd ask several times, then she would understand me, then she'd have to find someone else. I had to introduce myself to that person. We had to trade business cards. And then I got the press kit,

which was usually a CD. Yeah. You know, some of the CD inside an envelope full of like flyers, but always the key in code being a CD, and that was like the files that you needed. Usually the screenshots or logos probably, I don't know. I actually don't think

I've ever seen a, like there was a time when they gave out a thumb drive, like mad, they could not give us enough thumb drives to save our lives, but when I was at E3 2006, I was a little fish, so I had to go to the games that supposedly no one would care about, and I went to this little tiny booth in a

corner with a couple of guys from Poland in it, and they gave me a trapper keeper a witcher trapper keeper full of press stuff. And that's how it was usually done in the day. And that was a great presentation because, again, no one knew what the witcher was. I was there with a couple other guys. I don't even know who the hell they were.

And they were showing us, like, footage of Gerald setting some guy on fire. And he turns around, he starts talking about the game. And someone beside me points to the screen and says, that dude's still on fire. And the guy showing us the game looks back at the screen and says, oh, yeah, soon he will die. and I just never forgot but yeah I have this beautiful Witcher Trapper Keeper

that unfortunately it's in my house somewhere I think in its place it's so excited to find it another problem though that we really had to struggle with at that time was I did not have a laptop

a lot of people did not have laptops back then the laptop I did have and the laptop most people had the batteries were crap they were like the nickel ion stuff no reliable Wi-Fi signals

This was a big thing. Like, you had to pray to God, if you did have a laptop, you went, like, from place to place praying to God that someone did not lock their Wi-Fi, which a lot of people did not in the day. Like, it was not automatically locked, usually, so. What we had to do was go to an appointment and scribble down things on notebooks

and run back to... Do you remember Zip Davis had this, like, big back rooms area that was just all PCs trying to, like... It was like the Hunger Games. He was like, type up your thing, publish it before the deadline, if you can. And I've got to ask you a question, okay, this E3 was actually when Luke Smith was still working with you guys. And I saw him in the office, and I swear to God, he was typing, like, he had slid three quarters of the way down in his chair and was typing, like. Yeah, that's very loose.

Yeah. Why did he do that? Like, was he okay? He's just Luke Smith, you know? I mean, he's done pretty well for himself, so I think, you know, it works out. Yeah, he's like the creator of destiny, so it's all good. Like, I can't criticize. Yeah, my very first E3 was 2004, and that year, I had, you know, a power book, Macintosh Powerbook,

and there was something about the way Apple's Wi-Fi protocol worked, where once I got on the network, like, it wouldn't release the T-C-C-Cube. CP IP lease or something so throughout the show my laptop was connected to Wi-Fi and no one could get my IP number so I had like the best signal of the show because I was there early and I never relinquished that lease I never got off onto another network the entire show so I was like the one person who had connectivity back then if you were gone it was a miracle yeah that was one of those power books where the battery was like this big and you could press a button, it would pop out, and you stick another one,

and it had, like, 10 seconds of power so you could swap over. So I would just keep, like, swapping those and recharging the one that was out of action. It was a madhouse. It was something else. Are you going to tell the story about the Superman Returns? No, I'm not going to tell the story about Superman Returns. Oh, okay. That's too bad. There was an incident with Solid Sharky handing in a preview of the Superman game at E3 that year,

So I guess you are going to tell this story. Yeah, okay, I will. I wasn't going to say anything. But basically he handed in a preview of whatever E3 was showing of that Superman game that year, which apparently was an empty court full of nothing. And he were supposed to just kind of go around and punch things like, you know, walls and whatnot.

So Sharkey wrote this article about Superman's a dick. And he mentioned something, he said like, I think the headlines says something about super dickery. And John Davison, who owned OneUp.com, he lost it on this article he turned fully British because he's like Super Diccary

What the bloody hell is this That's such a British Games Press thing to do though I know I don't know who's mad Like Sharky was the most British games press of all of us He still is I think John just felt protective and territorial

Like you can't You can't move into my territory I'm British I own super dickory then And then like the EA got kind of upset about it I think Yeah, apparently EA was not happy with that video. On the other hand, maybe they should have put out a better demo.

That is true. I think they had a better demo behind closed doors or something, didn't they? Probably. You know, it was like, you were supposed to, like... I see you, like, gasping in, like, reverence at something here. Oh, it's that Triple E! Right? Excuse me, excuse me.

We're going to have a small rant here. I bought the Triple E notebook. That was the first generation that ran on the Linux. And when I saw my first netbook, I was like, Holy Crop, I must own that. And that was my first real personal writing tool that belonged to me. Netbooks should never have gone out of style. I see these Chromebooks now, and I'm like, garbage.

Just garbage. It's still a beautiful piece of machinery. It's so solid. It's so heavy. It's just gorgeous. Oh, man, yeah. I adore it. And I have a Death Note sticker on it because it was out of 2008 when this came out.

Yeah, so Netbooks are about 2008. When I hear it, Gem Z, Gen Z, is really huge into, like, netbooks and stuff like that and just lost technology that kind of went by the wayside. I am so proud of them. I don't know if you pronounce Molskine or Molskine, but I have 10 billion of these books because, to this day, publishers adore handing them out to you. We usually with, like, an embossed logo there. You can see, he can barely see it for the Nintendo World Championships 2017.

If you look inside of it, I have some scribbled notes about, Does anyone remember origin by the Assassin's Creed guy? It was a game about humanity, like, that really, in humanity's evolution. It was... Trees Desolet? Yes, yes. I don't remember that. A lot of people don't.

But you do, because you've got the moleskin. I got the moleskin. No, this is for the Nintendo Championship, but the interview is inside of it. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I scribbled. And, of course, my Nokia Britchbone, Mr. Brightside Chip-Toon ringtone, not required, be recommended. Yeah, I had that.

You'd mentioned your apples. Does anyone have like any old, because I also had a Tashiba thing that was like this and this had a crack in the screen and no battery whatsoever, but I wrote on that a lot too. I don't know if any of you have any fond memories of technology. Did one not give you guys stuff?

No, I mean, they provided us with desktop computers, but let me tell you those aren't much use if you're walking around the show floor in L.A. You need a laptop. So I would use my laptop at work pretty much all the time. What's up? Tablets, like an iPad or? This was pre-tablets.

Tablets, I think, debuted in 2010. And we're talking about like 2004, 2005, 2006. It was a different world. Those laptops were like 10, 12, 14 pounds. Mine was a big girl. no yeah i had one of those 17 inch power books and like you could kill a man with one of those things that'll learn you like i would be walking around the streets of l.A. with this expensive technology comforted by the thought that if someone came up to me and tried to steal it i could

just crack up with a corner of that thing and it might crack my screen but it would definitely destroy your skull yeah i felt safe yeah i definitely bought an early notebook like that AIS, maybe not the same model, but a similar one. Because I was so excited to be a writer, and I didn't have a laptop at the time. I was like, okay, well, I need one to travel with, so I got that. And it was very handy and very useful. However, as we mentioned before,

when I went to Tokyo Game Show, all the stuff that would give me was on discs. Right. And my notebook did not have any disc drive whatsoever. So for a few years there, I would get these discs, and usually I would have to go to Chris Kohler, who had, like, an actual

laptop from America, and he would just put it in there and he would basically read all the discs for me. But after a couple years, you know, this was around the era when Japanese games sort of fell out of fashion and Kiji Nafune said they were dead or whatever. Oh yeah. So for a couple of years there, Chris Kohler stopped going to TGS. And then I became the sole TGS reporter. And yet I still would collect all these discs and then be like, okay, what do I do now? And I have to like find someone in the press room with a drive or find maybe a desktop PC in the room that was open and and I could put the drive in there.

So fortunately, I think by that point, some publishers are like, all right, here's the USB. Yeah. You know? Because I did the USB drive. And, you know, and then a couple years after that, it's kind of like, okay, go to the press website. And down, like, you know, it was like it was by publisher, publish. Like, I think Capcom by that point had a press site to download stuff from.

But, you know, other publishers, maybe not, smaller people, no, like, they barely, you know, that was mostly just flyers. Like, oh, here's a flyer. Yeah. There's pictures of my game on the flyer. This is for you. Like, okay, thank you. I can't put this in the Internet, but thank you.

What year was that? I mean, this is like 10, 11, 12, I don't know. I mean, this is a gradual curve. Yeah, I mean, there definitely was in a Tokyo game show. I remember it was like the last one that went up attended in force with more than like two people. And there wasn't anything there. Like the most interesting demo we had was for Crackdown 2, which is an American. game by Microsoft.

When the most interesting thing at Tokyo Game Show is a Microsoft game, something has gone there. They went through some really weird times where everything that was on the show was either already shown to D3 or it just wasn't... Japan was a little slow to get to the HD era.

Yeah, there were a lot of issues. There were handhelds. There was the PSP Go. It's just, you know, just a lot of mistakes for me. With Capcom, I think it was around 2007 they started doing more of the images and assets online because I've started recently archiving some of their old press releases

and going back through the old stuff like there's very little in the way of any sort of video or imagery or anything. It's pretty much just a text that barely describes what they're releasing. I also have a stack of like promotional DVDs somewhere in my home that are like

from TGS like year for year like people just hand them out and were they from a publisher? Were they from random people? I don't know because I never opened them. but I didn't have a stack of these I should probably send them Frank Sepaldi because, like, who knows? Who knows with all those DVDs?

Could be anything. That's cool. It would be cool if they struck bolts somehow. But, yeah, speaking of press literature, like, there was, back in the day, we used to get a lot more in the way of hard copy reviews. And Parrish and I were just talking about the massive leak for the new, what was it, like, Mario RPG on 3DS? Yeah, the very final Mario RPG for 3DS. Someone leaked it, and Nintendo lost it. No, it was a...

It was one of the Mario RPG. Mario Luigi. It was a Mario Luigi. That's it. Yeah. The most unnecessary remake ever. Hey, it was a good game either way. But anyway... It was. Yeah, back in the day when they used to send us cool stuff like that, we used to be kind of accompanied with literature. That was actually really nicely printed.

I have here my old, like, you know, hey, thanks for playing our game. Flyer for... that came with Dragon Quest Six. And it's basically Happy Valen Slimes Day. Very cute. Actually, they gave me a shirt, too, that says, will you be my Valen Slime? I still have. It's very cute. And also, there were review guides.

This one, I think, is from your, the game you previewed, right, David? The WWE something or other? Yeah, it looks like it. I think it was Raw v. Smackdown, or maybe it was Smackdown versus Raw. 2010? Yeah, yeah. And back then, it's like the review guides that you received would tell you, like, you know how to play the game, etc. But they could be controversial because some people saw them as, like, okay, the publishers are trying to get me to play the game their way,

and I'm the one reviewing it and there was a big issue with Layer, I think it was. Yeah, Layer was a terrible... Oh, yeah, the PS3 launch title. The PS3 launch title, that was terrible. Six Axis only. Six Axis only.

And, of course, I got terrible reviews and the reviewers were basically told you didn't read our review guide, you know, etc. And it's like, no, I'm sorry, the game sucks. It just didn't control very well. I always enjoyed the... They weren't, like, nicely printed like this.

Just the letters that Nintendo would say. with its review copies because it always had the weirdest embargo limitations. You cannot mention this one very random specific detail until such and such a date and they would like maybe it was Super Mario

Galaxy one or two where you couldn't mention the existence of Mr. L until like a specific date but it had like a breakdown. There was like a bullet list of like here is the date at which you can mention this thing about the game. It was so

just like so anal. They always had very random kind of embargo stuff and usually for stuff, often for stuff that we knew about, like it was on the internet like three days before it even... Yeah. I remember being spoiled by L being real

in 2006 on a destructoid in a headline. What was that? What do you mean? Oh, like the, um, it was before galaxy came out and I was like spoiled that like Luigi was even in the game at all which, you know, some people are like Luigi's in the game, well, of course he is, but

like prior to this, Luigi wasn't in any of the 3D Mario's, so. Yeah, he really was what's that? I'm just curious, but about the later review guy, do you recall it being, like, specific or delicate in describing how the successes was supposed to be used? I unfortunately did not have

that I did not review, but I think it was a big painting arcade thing. Like, they made a whole comic about it and everything. I'm sorry about embargoes You got stories about bargles are those are the most

like ridiculous embargoes you see All right I'm glad you asked so I went to Konami headquarters for three days

to play through Metal Gear Solid 4 and review it and then this was going to be for one of the cross reviews for EGM

so it's going to be in print and then I was going to publish the one-up review but once we finished they said Oh, actually, you can't review the game in this issue. You have to wait a month and publish your review in that issue.

Oh. So it was this like this rush to get the game completed so that we could hit the deadline. And then they said no. And I posted a blog about it and then people like were attacking me and mocking me for not just breaking the embargo and publishing it anyway. I was like, man, you don't understand how this business works. If we just go ahead and publish a review based on, you know, an exclusive invitation to the company headquarters to play the game, do you think we're ever going to be invited back for future review opportunities again? Yeah.

I know that you're desperate to hear our opinions on this game, but got to wait. Got to wait. Companies, I find that a lot of companies have given a game a bad review. They're like, yeah, whatever, fine. But breaking embargo, that will piss them off real fast. Oh, yeah. That is the number one way to break your relationship with the publisher. So I will say that one workaround that used to be available for dodging embargoes,

when it came to games developed in Japan, usually Japanese games came out a few weeks to several months before the American version. So you could import the game and just play through the Japanese version. and write impressions of the Japanese release, and they weren't going, like, what could they say? You can't write about this game that you purchased with your own cash money through an importer from Japan. And that was, like, really before the time of simultaneous releases.

No, it took a while before we got to that point. That was something I was involved with a lot because I was in Japan, and Chris Kohler was living in California, if something big was coming out, like a console or just a game that just had along, long lead time between Japan and American releases, he would just be like, hey, can you get me a copy? And I would just, I would, you know, I'd buy it and I'd mail it to him.

And then usually that was, you know, that would still get to his house way before, you know, the release or whatever is coming out. I know that the 3DS, the 3D has like a month gap between Japanese launch and American launch. Yeah, I definitely, at least one, maybe even two, I think I bought 3DSs and set them overseas. Who wanted them was like, yeah, here you go. But I also wrote about an impression for my own.

for game pro one of the last things number for game pro was a story about the 3DS launch in Japan was like what it was like and what was happening and that sort of stuff and you know like I don't know what the rules were for the American staff is like this is happening in Japan it's already out if you don't like it cry about it

these days they might come after you they might send the Pinkertons after you it's basically the stuff that's going on these days even if you buy something legit Red Dead Redemption too baby yeah I um that was kind of my secret weapon for a while for you know remaining employed was I would just import games and write about them and they would get a lot of

traction just based on those preview versions from from Japan like I imported Final Fantasy 12 when it first came out in Japan and you know wrote about my first 10 hours with the game I don't really read that much Japanese just enough to kind of get by but that article got so much mileage it ended up on VH1's website oh dang other places it was all over the place so yeah there were like just weird little hacks that I stumbled into to get traction on things that of course are no longer relevant. I can't imagine how I would survive in the modern games journalism world if there even is no survival. That's the point of this picture that I posted. The GIF is the current state of games writing. It's a really bad place. So I want to thank everyone for coming.

I want to just kind of encourage you all to support independent creators, which we all are to some extent. I am Nadia Oxford. I do a whole lot of writing and game consultation. If you want me to do anything, like just give me a shout. I will do wet work. I won't. That's a joke. But I do, I have a code word. If you know the code word, I'll do the work. My main job probably is as podcasting. I do Retronauts.com, of course, and I am part of the Blood God pod. Axel Blood God. We are an RPG podcast. We cover RPGs, old and new, Eastern, Western. We're fully independent. We've been at this since 2020. Yeah, I also have a Patreon, Naudia Oxford, that has

kind of my personal writing where I am storing some of the stuff that I rescued from Internet Archive and kind of re-edited a bit and put up just to kind of preserve. Yeah, if you guys want to promote anything, now is the time. Starting with you, David. Well, you've got nightworks.net there. Unfortunately, that's a landing page that isn't functioning at the moment. Oh, sorry. Yeah, if I can get back to it, I usually try to write it on Poisonmushroom.org and TheMMNetwork.com.

And also, you can find me in Nintendo Force Magazine. And that's got a website, Nintendoforcemagine.com, I believe. Is that right? Right? And, yeah, carrying on the Nintendo Power Torch there. And, yeah, we also stream on... She and I, we stream occasionally on Twitch at NightWorks, the same spelling there, so. And we wrote these books, too. They're on Amazon.

Yeah. And better bookstores everywhere. Yeah. I sold out, and now I just work for a games publisher, so no more journalism for me, sorry. You did your time in the trenches. I did. I do a lot of work for restaurants these days, which is up there, but my website is over there, fightclub.me, my last name, F-E-I-D, and then club. That's the word you know. also we got a I've got a trivia contest coming up in a few minutes in this very room

so as soon as we're wrapped up here I'll take over and ask questions for you and then you answer them I was worried about us clearing out space but it's just yeah just diamond okay thanks everyone like for coming and do we keep our seats yeah we are journalism yay I'm going to be able to be. I'm going to be. ...which... ...you know,

...their... ...on... ...their... ...that... Thank you, everyone for coming to this panel. I am Nadia Oxford. I am a podcaster and a writer. I am primarily with Axel of the Blood God,

which is an R&RB podcast, and also with retronauts, for whom I am supposedly representing, I suppose. I have a couple of great friends here. First, let me hear from my... friend at Diamond Fight. What's my name? You already put the thing. Yes, I'm Diamond Fight, and I'm very happy to be here and talk about what Nadia has selected to talk about. I'm not going to spoil it yet.

I'm about to spoil it. And, of course, our good friend, Mr. Jeremy Parrish. Hi, everyone. I'm going to spoil it. We're going to talk about games that hold up well. You knew that because it's on the sign outside. I'm not spoiling anything, because all of you read your responsible people. Sorry, Nadia. Oh, no, I have complete faith in everyone here being good readers and good responsible people. So what it has here, actually, is just kind of a real of games that we're kind of going to be talking about. It's just going to be playing so they can all look at something while I java on. Because, well, let's just start, huh?

Okay, perfect. Yeah, so games that have aged well, what makes them good coming back to? Are they what coming back to? Are we just nostalgia poison? Let's find out. we're going to just kind of talk about, like, it's kind of kind of a personal topic because I try to put a value on these games,

and I found it very difficult because, yes, this is more subjective than I realized when I put the topic. Have you checked price charting? No. They're pretty good at value. Yes, so what kind of value? Oh. We're talking about games that you might want to go back to a play,

that you might consider not like the total rip-off games that somehow fetch a billion. on the secondary market. But when we generally say a game is good, like it had aged well, we mean it's still fun to play and or good to look at the spite of age, like myself. And how does that happen?

What is the secret sauce that earns the game, the secret, you know, age well mark of approval? Does the sauce even exist? Or are we just, as I said, nostalgic blind and apt to just give passing marks to flawed games of arched childhood? What do you think?

Let's open this up. Do you think I have any truth to my words, or am I just blotering? No, I'm just the idea of terrible. No, I really, I think with this all the time, it's something I worried about a lot when I was, when I first discovered I would be a parent. Yeah. Because by that point, I was already very much,

I was already retro-brained at that point. I was already like, oh, I love old games so much. And new games are fun, too, but I really like these old games. how will I convince my children that old games are fun too? If you live your entire life and everything is, you know, HD photo realistic,

like how am I going to show them, you know, the joy of, you know, maneuvering blue square to meet red triangle? Like, you've got to, it's going to be a hard leap. But I do think it's real. I do think it's possible. I do think that the more you engage with,

you know, meaning of especially, you know, I think everything has merit. Obviously, you can, you know, you can, if you were born in the last, 40 years, maybe 50 even, you've probably most every movie you've seen in theaters has been in color, you know, except for maybe Ed Wood. And, you know, but if you go, some people like, they go back in black, black, like, they can't take it. Yeah. There are people out

that were like, I can't say I'm black and white movies. They're silent movies. And, yeah, and it's different, but it's like, you can do that. There's still plenty of good silent movies. There's plenty of good black and white movies. You know, I've heard the train, the train coming the station. I've heard that's very exciting. I hope to see it soon. But, um, I think games have an extra advantage because no matter what, you're going to be pushing a button or pushing a lever and getting something out of it, and that's going to be, that's going to make it special to you, you know, if the game is good. If the game is not good, it won't be special. But that's my point. The point is that I think video games have a unique ability to grab us, regardless of time that has passed.

Yeah. Even if graphics and sound have changed way faster, you know. You can watch, there's plenty of 1970s movies, like the War Stars. War Stars, I've heard it's a pretty good 70s movie. Like, those movies are fine. You can show them a kid today. It's like, oh, it's great. It's War Stars. I love this movie so much.

Whereas the game from the 1970s is kind of a harder sell. Yeah. But there's still good games from the 70s. I'm sure of it. Positive. When you said War Stars, I'm thinking of, what was it on the, was it on the, was it Trooper Graphics Fighting Street, where they had to take Street Fighter and change the name around?

Yep. But that was Capcom. Like, that was their own game. Like, what was, what happened? It was a weird choice. Did it lose a bit? What about you, Mr. Parrish? I mean, I think it's a little of column A and a little of column B.

I think there are some games that hold up really well. And I think also we as humans do tend to have a habit of looking back at things that we have fond recollections of and saying, oh, this is great when in fact it's not. But as someone who missed out on a lot of it. games when I was growing up because my family couldn't afford to buy every console under the sun and every computer, you know, I've been going back and playing a lot of master system and even NES games, Game Boy games, turbographics games that I did not experience as a kid. And sometimes my reaction is, this is extremely bad and I hate this, but sometimes my reaction

is, oh, this is really good. And even if I don't necessarily enjoy it now, I do have an appreciation for what the creators were trying to bring to it. I realize that's probably not like the common approach to things because I've become very like analytical and meticulous about that sort of thing, having worked in the games press and reviewing and retrospectives for 20 plus years. So I realize I'm a little bit odd, but I am saying that, you know, there is a certain immutable quality about a good old game. And, you know, I was sitting in our. booth just a little while ago and looking across at, you know, the, the arcade machine that's

been set up over there. And I saw someone playing Super Mario Brothers. And, you know, I was just struck thinking, like, I've played a lot of other games from 1985 on consoles and computers. And I really, you know, watching that game play appreciate what a revolution Super Mario Brothers was and how much it stood out amongst the competition for home gaming. It was so slick and it looked so solid and good and everything about it played so well compared to anything else that you could get for a home computer or console at the time. It really did deserve to, you know, put Nintendo on the map, put the NES on the map, put Mario on the map in a way that they hadn't before because it was just that much better.

And I think, you know, I know kids, young people, teens and pre-teens who have played Super Mario Brothers in recent years, and they enjoy it. They appreciate just the quality, the responsiveness, the tactile feel of it, the audio, the visuals. Like, even though it's very dated looking, it does not look like a modern video game. You know, it's more primitive than Minecraft. So that's kind of the low bar to clear. it's still a great game, objectively.

Oh, yeah. Actually, looking at one game here on the screen, which is Megamon X, which, in my opinion, is a game that has gauged perfectly in every, I mean, his bias, of course, we can see. I wrote the Mega Man's Country Field God and Mega Man Field God and my husband. So I was a Mega Man fan. But Mega Man X, I think I could recommend to anybody

and say this is like the pre-mo action game. This is the one you want to play. And one of the reasons why I think gets such an easy, because everything works together in this case. The music is still fantastic, the Sprite works, still fantastic, the gameplay, still pristine. The story still has zero rescuing X at the end for us. Still epic.

So yeah, to me, that is the pinnacle. Everything just works together, everything was perfect like from the beginning. And it actually also makes me wonder, I've heard the argument that Sprites age better than polygons. And for a while, I did believe that. When I look around now, I see younger developers are developing games that are going for N64,

and play Stacey install which is so funny to me because when I think MCC4 I think oh god that face like fastly smeared nastiness I mean there are acceptance and we'll be talking about them very soon but yeah there's a game coming out I can't remember the exact name

there's an obvious parody of Golden Eye and they have like the Sean Connery model instead of you know Sean Connery Coromgo instead of who they used for the original Golden Eye I don't know anything with James Prostin Thank you instead of him and it looks really fun it looks really cute obviously they clean things up. They don't make him as

blurry and awful as they were, but when I think back also to early places in the games, like if they didn't try to make a human, he usually has some really good stuff. Like, Jumping Flash was a very compelling game because, oh, it's a cute little rabbit. I don't care. It's made of polygons. It's a robot rabbit. It's supposed

to be made up polygons. Yeah, exactly. So that's the kind of games I think that really succeed. And we look also at, say, Konami. One thing that I will get into is how Konami is pretty much the reason why 50% of these games actually aged well. When I look at the info, say, for Metal Gear Solid,

which is, of course, the pinnacle of PlayStation 1 games, the polygon work in that is still so well done. And I really appreciate, or I think why it's successful, is because Konami doesn't really give their characters' faces in the Metal Gear Solid. They have, like, vague indentations. So your mind can fill in the rest. They don't have these horrible, blur, bit in that eye

staring back into your soul. So what do you think? Like, Sprite, obviously, we expect a, kind of cartooniness. We don't really look so much at digital sprites and say, wow, that age's great. Like, the other than all of combat is okay, you know. So what do you think, like,

sprites versus polygons? Do you think one is more apt to age more than the other? What do you think, by? Well, it reminds me that maybe a year or so ago, Alex Praoli, who we know in Japan, he made a video about why 2D graphics age so

well, and he theorized it it's because they're by design, they're made to make you fill in the blanks. Yeah. Like, you know, especially on an old CRTV TV, like everything was designed bit by bit to sort of, you know, blur together a little bit and give you an image of, oh, okay,

this is a space bounty hunter, and she's got power armor, and she's got a visor. But, like, if you look, if you examine the sprites, like, there's, like, a bunch of dots that don't seem to relate to anything. And, like, the reason it is, because, you know, once you put them through that, you know, the scan line filter of what actual TVs looked like back then,

it all just kind of just gives a shade, it gives a, you know, a hue to her, to her outfit. And then the little touches, of course, like the fact that Samus in Metroid, like, essentially breathes a little bit when she's standing still. And then, like, when you're low on energy, she's kind of like, and she's panting. All this stuff is like, like, in that point, of course, they've worked on sprites for so many years. that they really had the crack down. And then, like, when we jumped into Polygon, I think it took a couple of years to get it right.

That's just why if you look at early PlayStation games or, you know, Sega 3D games or, you know, some, it's 64 games. They don't quite look right because they're figuring out how to do it. Yeah. But I would argue that some of that stuff ages, some of that stuff ages well in that

you can see, you can see what they're going for. You can see, okay, we've been working with one kind of medium for a long time. how do these work? You know, and you mentioned Metal Gear, but I think of Resident Evil. Like, the people of Resident Evil, like, all three of those original Resident Evil games,

they're basically sort of like puppets. They have a face, they have a body, they have, like, colors, they have, you know, they're wearing clothes. But, like, their hands are just kind of like big, chunky, like, bricks. Their faces are, their faces never change. So, you know, there's a great moment where I think

in the Spencer Mansion, where you walk through a door, and whether you're playing is Chris or Jill, you just get this really big close-up of like just their face or like their facing sort of their front and it just you know if you look at it today it's kind of like oh that's kind of quaint you know in 96 I was like whoa look at this compared to what I had even two years ago so I think context helps everything age well

but I do think sprites have an extra advantage that from the start they were relying on a lot of imagination whereas I think polygons at first were sort of like oh this is our dreams fulfilled this is what we always wanted to make it's like and it took a few years soon to say no actually we can do this now we can do this now which is one thing I love about indie games that indie games now today are in fact we're leaning into this sort of like you know what polygon models from the 90s did look kind of weird but we're gonna make a weird game so we want you to look at these weird guys we want you to look at these stiff animations

you know there's so many especially horror games yes like the um the annual um what's it called horror demo disc or haunted haunted demonism I think it's a collection of free games so many of them are relying on sort of that PlayStation aesthetic quote and it does it does work beautifully and I've played

you know even a game that came out earlier this year a crow country if you haven't tried that yeah that is a game that is even that very much is dealing in aesthetic with a capital A and it looks it kind of looks like you know the lost cousin of like a square game like all the all the all the characters walk around, they're very, I want to say blombie. Blombie, is it active?

I saw the screenshots, and it rhyming very much of Parasite Eve are those like pre-rendered backgrounds that you get in Final Fantasy 7, which are full of character, are still great. But that's the magic of procuratorship because it's not pre-rendered. Because you can spin the stick, so you can look around, and indeed the game is very much about checking your surroundings and looking on the walls for, like, hidden codes, or a button you have to push. So I really feel like it's a perfect example of something that's new so hasn't aged yet, but is drawing on years of memories, of video game memories, and sort of plays with that, which is one reason I think Crow Country is a fantastic game.

I was looking at this for research. I was looking at it for research on this. I'm like, this is like someone who understands what was nostalgic about the PlayStation specifically. So if you can grasp onto what works, you can really have, you can really take it to the next level. What do you think, Eric? So let's go back to your example of Metal Gear Solid. Diamond said something about context being important,

and I think Metal Gear Solid is a great example of why it's important to understand what technology was being designed for with that game, because if you change anything about the quality of Metal Gear Solid's graphics, if you up-res it, if you give it a higher frame rate, you know, than the 15 frames per second or whatever that the PlayStation could do. If you, you know, filter the textures and make them more detailed, it all falls apart. Yeah. Like, that game was designed very specifically for standard definition televisions with that resolution,

with those, you know, polygon counts and frame rates and texture details. And, you know, that's a, I think that's a game that doesn't age gracefully if you take it away from that original context. I think it starts to look kind of rough. But when you play Metal Gear Solid, as it was originally designed for, it's so immersive and it just pulls you in. It's really, really interesting.

So that's something that I think is really a challenge for people who either want to recreate, republish old video games for modern systems or who just want to get across to new audiences, like, hey, this was really awesome in 1990. I think that's really challenging. But, yeah, I do think bitmap graphics, 2D graphics,

I mean, there are some really bad 2D graphics in video game history, but I do think they tend to age better and a great example of that is another Konami game. I was recently playing Castlevania Portrait of Ruin. Oh, that's a great. And the graphics, like the art,

the 2D art in that game, aside from the character art, which is a whole thing. the background art and the sprites look so good. It's kind of peak Castlevania. Like all the learning they brought into the DS is amazing. You go into

the sort of city, like a French city, and you're running around bakeries and stuff and just there's arches and yeah, the waiter who slings cocktails at you that can poison or heal you if you stand around. It's also detailed. It's so beautiful. And then you

get to the peeping eye, which is a recurring enemy in Castlevania. And in the older game, starting with Rondo of Blood, peeping eye is just a bunch of jointed circles. It's like a big eye surrounded by like a yellow, some flesh, and then it has like a tail that kind of follows along behind it. And it's annoying, but it's, you know, just kind of memorable, and it's one of those, like, trademark enemies. For some reason, for Portrait of Ruin on DS, they decided,

this guy needs to be polygons now. So they got rid of those jointed like, you know, contra, what is it? Contra Hardcore Yeah, style graphics where everything is just jointed circles and replaced it with polygons and it looks so bad and it doesn't fit

the aesthetic of the game at all and it just stands out like a sore thumb and you just, you're wondering like there's this huge gray boxy thing that you wouldn't even know as a peeping eye if the little, you know, the little caption didn't come up at the bottom when you hit it and say peeping eye.

Yeah, no, I know. It's such a bad choice. It's usually a very striking enemy because you see it very early in the game. Usually it's looking at you through the window and then it finds its way in. So, yeah, turning that into a piece of crap is really disappointing.

Yeah, so, you know, it was possible to do good 3D graphics on DS, but that is not a good 3D graphic and it's a choice that they replaced a perfectly serviceable 2D graphic with bad 3D, and it does, you know, count against the game, but I will say portrait of ruin is awesome enough

that it doesn't matter. Yeah, I said it's pretty awesome. Yeah, go ahead. I want to mention Metal Gear Solid because also earlier this year we celebrated the 20th anniversary of Metal Gear Solid The Twin Snakes, which was a... Did we celebrate that?

I wrote a whole column about it, you know? So that's a celebration. Anything I write as a celebration. Even if I don't like the game, it's still celebrating it because I chose to put the words into the computer. But what I thought about the game a lot is that that's a game that, you know, it's remaking, game that's only a few years old. So, you know, it's for a different system. Obviously, they had to redo it from the start because it's a completely different

systems. Obviously, redo everything. But that is a game where, yeah, they had to sort of make, you know, higher resolution graphics, higher versions, and it's like, it's aged differently. It ages so differently than the 98 version, just because it incorporates its own thing. And also the fact that, you know, between 1998 when Middle Gear South came out, in 2004, when 26 came out, you had the Matrix. And the Matrix left this gigantic, you know, sort of crater-shaped hole across all forms of media. So all of a sudden, the Twin Sakes, like, okay, well, we have these cool characters. What's cool?

The Matrix is cool. Well, we better have a lot of Matrix stuff in this game right now. So let's have, you know, let's have slow motion backflips. Let's have, like, bullets, with some people's eyes. You know, and the director, the cutscene director, quote, unquote, Oh, my God. Kitamura, Kitamura, UK. He obviously enjoyed, you know, that aesthetic,

and he was playing with that a lot. So it's like both games sort of have a very different feel, even though, you know, they're both, you know, nowadays they're both old, quote of quote. Like, one is 20 years old and one is 27 years old. Oh, my God. So, like, what's the difference there? But, like, they both have completely different sort of atmospheres

when you play them today, and they're both sort of, you know, from different, even though they're relatively close to the timeline, they feel like they're from completely different eras, which I think is just fascinating, you know, like how much change in that time frame and how much those games in turn changed. Whereas, you know, the Resident Evil games, the original 96, one in the 2002 remake, those also have, like, those also have very different feels, but they still, like, they seem closer. Like, if you look at them back to back, I don't know, they feel like they hit still the same spirit, whereas solid and twin snakes

are, like, from two different universes, even though it's bold. I mean, consider that Metal Gear Solid arrived four years after Super Metroid, which you were mentioning earlier. Twinsnakes was 10 years after Super Metroid. Like, yeah, the radical upheavals and technology and graphics is just unbelievable in this day and age. It's also an interesting thing about, and this only came to mind now, we're talking about the Matrix. Game direction, well, of course, was always a thing, but it really became a big thing, a big important thing, in the 3D space. Like you mentioned the Matrix, and it's like, well, now you're implementing the Matrix, because we can do that. You can't really implement the Matrix into Final Fantasy 6 if you try, but that'd be weird.

It's not working for me, no. One thing I brought up was how Konami seemed particularly successful in making these games that age well in different ways. The thing that was fascinating me most about them is how, what a grasp they had of the NES palette, especially the blues, the greens, the purples, And how they built, like, say, for example, Castlevania 3, which you saw earlier, they built that village and, like, had those beautiful sharp shadows and the lichen, like, blotted on the walls and stuff like that, but just really knew how to use the NES. And I'd say Castle VIII and 3 is still a fantastic game,

despite that terrible level with the falling bricks, which you can bypass if you're Alicard, you got Alicard, your love with that. Or you could just not go that route. You guys might have a little more insight into Konami than I do, but what was their magic at that? I'm not saying all the other games is great, God knows, like, Biaubili, I think you just covered that one. It was kind of a, who was the inspiration for the first episode of Captain N,

which was a mess, and so was the game. Also, the cover, art, the guy has no neck, is really weird. But, I don't know, what do you think? Like, does Konami have some kind of special magic, or are they just really good at what they do? I mean, biobilly looks great. It does. And sounds fantastic.

It flies. It's just the parts where you have to push the buttons and enjoy yourself. That's where it kind of falls apart. And you kind of need all the three of those elements, or the game's going to fall apart. Right. And also it also didn't help that the Japanese version was retooled for the American version. It's not in translation.

They also made it like twice as hard. Didn't you do a video by really not that long ago? And like you said like with the numbers of like, it takes like 16 jump kicks to kill like a regular guy or something? It's, yeah, it's ridiculous. It's stupid. I remember that. It's just bonkers.

It's tedious. Yeah. That happened a lot. That actually happened with Cass Leight of 3 as well. Like as much as I love the game. if you died at Dracula, you didn't get stem back to the staircase. You were sent back to the entire level, and this is a hard gauntlet. I don't know how I finished that game.

I'll never do it again. But I do think the artists at Capcom, I'm sorry. Everyone makes that mistake. Yeah, it's a hard case, though. I do think once they figured out, dare I say, a system that worked for them, I think you see a lot of their games, even though they obviously have different people behind the scenes directing different games.

I think if you look across a broad spectrum would say the NES games that came from that company, you see some patterns, you know, like almost all of them have these sort of the figures and these sort of faceless people, but they're very clearly, you know, they're very clearly people. Yes. You know, like the contra guys are the double-dribble people who are just like, they're the contra guys where they're playing basketball. They're really, they're really in a lot of similarities. I mean, I also, I'm a little bit older, so I remember I had, I played a lot of games with the Commodore 64.

Yes. And a company called Epics made a lot of games. Yeah, nice place. And they also had like a style where it's like, here's our guy. We need little guys. Like, if you play Impossible Mission, your little guy is going to run around this base and search for like hidden documents. But if you play summer games, your little guy is going to run down the track and jump over the hurdles. And it's like, I think what they discovered, oh, we have a, you know, this is the thing that works for us.

it looks good for us and they sort of pass that around the office and that's just I think it's sort of like learning like like it's like what do you call like the wisdom of crowds it's just inside the office that's what no that's why mentors are really important that's why disappoints me that's so many people are getting pushed out well everyone's getting pushed out the game industry what am I saying what about you I mean diamond what you just described is what weirdos on the internet now would call an asset flip as if it's a bad thing to reuse institutional knowledge and build on your strengths. No, I think a big part of the appeal of Konami games

on NES especially was they understood the limitations of the technology, the fact that you could only use four colors for Sprite and one of those had to be transparent most of the time, that you only had so many colors that could be on screen, most of the NES's colors were terrible.

They understood how to use those things effectively and understood that, you know, the technology of the day, the composite video or yeah composite video cables

or RF and CRTs consumer level CRTs were going to make everything kind of smeary and they took

an impressionistic approach to graphics what you described you know like the lack of faces and the brick

work in Castlevania and the backgrounds and things like that all of that really relies on as you said earlier the user

the player's imagination to kind of flesh things out. It's, you know, the same way that a Monet or Monet painting works where there's color and, you know, it's used

in sort of broad strokes, literally broad strokes, and it relies on your familiarity with a scene and the way light works to kind of cause your brain to say, ah, yes, I know what this is supposed to be. And their artists, their graphic

artists, were really effective at doing that. Compared to a lot of developers, on NES who went with a more cartoony style like we see with Mario 3 here and that works really well too. You know, you look at games like Adventure Island or Mega Man and everything is really crisp. There's like a black outline on things.

They do a lot of sprite overlapping so that you get a lot of colors and an individual sprite but fewer things on screen. That's really smart too. But Konami generally, you know, most of its games took a different approach where it was more trying to create that naturalistic feel and they found a style and a process that worked for them.

and, you know, really built on that and exploited that ability that kind of, you know, again, the institutional asset flip knowledge and it created a very consistent, very reliable library. You picked up a Konami game and you knew most of the time it was going to be really good unless it was like, you know, under the ultra label

in which case, who knows? 50, 50, skater die. It's good for that theme song alone. Yeah, but then you've got like Defender the Crown. I don't know. Oh, I had a friend who had Defender the Crown. I remember watching it and saying what it is this. Yeah, we're here on that video right now,

and I did not like that game as an adult as much as I liked it as a kid. Yeah. You know what, Jeremy, you just broke the concept of, like, art and paintings, and now I'm wondering, is there anyone out there who walks into the Met in New York City and's like, oh, boy, some of these paintings sure have an age well. Does anyone else do that? Yeah, like, what's Monet's problem? How come he wasn't working in HD?

Like, I need someone to up-res this. Where's the AI to fill out Monet's details? Oh, God, I just threw up. Chronically, there are those kind of pros who do that. Oh, there are. Oh, absolutely. And everyone makes fun of them deservedly, so. They don't actually go to the museum, though.

They just, yeah, they just grab things off the internet. Like, oh, here, I made it better. More to Lisa, more like more like more fail. So here's what Rothko was actually painting with his large blocks of solid color. Yeah. So when you said a high-outhing-in-in'-classic art going in classic art, my brain farted, and I, but what I wanted to say, actually,

the reason I love paneling with you guys is, because you bring up all this great stuff, I don't even consider my money of my notes, like the whole CRT thing, I had never even thought about that, how, of course, like you said, for a game to age, well, everything has to kind of work together most of the time, and you can, of course, get away with playing a classic

game on a HDTV. It's not going to look good, but it's going to look okay, and the game's still going to play good unless there's lag, just a whole other thing. But it actually made me think about how when games are up-res or redone for the modern aid, I think of a debate that's going on with Final Fantasy Pixel remasters. And a lot of people have a lot of things to say about the sprites. Now, I think

they're great. I think they're done in a way that it's supposed to look like is going to be okay on HDV. To me, I can see the detail as well. I mean, the character sprites in the pixel remaster were created by the original creator of the sprites in Final Fantasy 5 and 6 for Super an E.S. They were, but you have 20-year-old to put a sprite of, like, an original sprite of Terra up and, like, look how beautiful this is.

And it is, but there's a certain smeariness that's missing that really really gave her character and gave them dimension, actually. This is something that people who are trying to preserve and recreate classic games through emulation and so forth have been wrestling with for a long time, because,

I mean, if you kind of watch the way things work, there's back and forth, ebbs and flows, how things are supposed to look. And, you know, early emulators just gave you the pixels on screen. And then people started saying, well, you know, that's nice on an LCD, but that's not really what the games are supposed to look like. So they started building filters in,

and you've got some really bad weird filters like Eagle and SAI and that sort of thing. But as resolution and processing power has improved, you've started to get things that try to more carefully emulate the workings of CRTs. And I remember, you know, it's probably been 15 years. years now, seeing people start to really break down online how CRTs actually created graphics and how they're supposed to look. And, you know, there's still kind of like a religious war about this. I think there was a, you know, CRT pixel Twitter account that a couple of years ago posted a screenshot of Castlevania Symphony of the Night with Dracula's portrait and how it

looks in pixels and how when you look at it on a CRT, it makes his eyes look like they're glowing, red, instead of just being like two little red dots. And that's true, but some people have pointed out that, well, not every CRT looked like that, you know, like a nicer CRT wouldn't give you that much smearing, and it would depend on whether you're using S video or using composite video and blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, there's just, that's the whole thing, is that older games, there was no single standard for what televisions looked like or what cables people were using. Now you have, like, you're using an HDTV or an ultra-HDTV.

TV and you're using H.D.MI to get your picture out. And, you know, your big issue now is how much, you know, input lag is there? Display lag. But, you know, in the older days, that wasn't necessarily the case. And someone could be using, like, a super cheap Admiral TV, or they could be using a nice Sony Trinitron. And game developers had to kind of work around that and account for that and make their graphics look, you know, good in all of those different standards. And not everyone did, you know. Some people just said, here's what you got. But a lot of developers really put some thought into it.

And it really shows. But, you know, it's funny. I'm putting together a book of photography of classic game boxes right now. And there's an television game from like 1987, and it says, for use on color television. And that right there, like, that shows you how different the world was at the time. because, yeah, we still owned a black and white TV in 1987. It finally got moved out of the living room in, like, 1984 and into, like, a side room because we finally got a color TV.

Yeah, Mega Man 2 looks so cool on a black and white TV. I plugged my NES into a black and white once. I was like, wow, it's really cool. Like, everything looks so much more detailed without the color there. But, I mean, you know, the developers and publishers had to explicitly say, do not use this game on a black and white TV, because the Atari 2,600, had a color and black and black and white TV. mode.

Large did, yeah. Yeah, like, that was, things have just changed so much. And, again, developers really had to, if they really cared about their work and they, you know, had the time and budget to put that much attention into it, really had to stop and think, like, how are people going to be seeing this game? And I think that's, I think that's part of what worked about Konami's approach was that, you know, it works in a crisp, clear image, but it also works really well when you have a super smeary, you know, like

those little crawling ant dots and so forth, the color bleed, like, oh, why is there red and green and blue all over the place? What's happening here? I used to just go up to the TV screen and stare at it to try and figure out how it works kind of strange child.

Yeah, so I don't know where that was going, but Konami, cool. Yeah, actually, the whole thing about the CRT televisions reminds me how most of the time, most of the games had played on the NES and S-NES, and the N64 were on one of those big floor units that

had the wood paneling, and it was starting to die. I had played on it, so at a time, I got to the N64 and Shadows of the Empire, he gets to the level where you're in the garbage disposal, well I said that's it, it's game's over. This is garbage. But the great thing about those

old TV is you could keep the system on and turn off the TV and it would shrink to this little dot and you could still try to play in that little tiny dot of that pin dot on the screen. That's how we did it in a day. Kids these days will never know. So I'd like to talk a little bit about just games that some people say have aged well.

Maybe you disagree, maybe you agree. An easy one is Chrono Trigger, which I showed up here a little while ago. I mean, I can't think of a game that's aged about it than Tron Trigger, other than the Mega Man X. It's just the perfect RPG. The graphics are insanely great. The music is otherworldly. It's a very compact, very fun, very breezy JRP that still manages to deliver a lot of release, you know, significant emotional hits.

It is done by the quintessential dream team, and that's how I feel. I don't know if you guys feel the same. I think it's bold of you to say it's no game is aged better than Chrono Tricker while you've got Super Mario Brothers three videos running on the screen behind you. You've got a point, actually. You're going to cause some fights to break out here. Well, okay, it's one of the best, because you're right. Absolutely right. I think pretty much every Mario game has aged really well, except you can make a case for, say, Mario Sunshine. I'm not a fan. Are you a fan? Mario Sunshine was never good.

So there you go. They heard you down in the convention hall on that one. Mario 3, what you see up here, of course, it's a fantastic game. I'll still pick it up. I'll still play through it. I don't know if kids like it at all, but I think it still looks very good. It isn't really interesting graphical tricks. I mean, the original graphical trick when you think about it was giving a character a face with Mario and the mustache, and that's, of course, been the standard ever since, but

yeah, what do you think? Mario 3 aged well. I'm probably the original NES game. Like, I think I'd refer that to all the All-Stars. All-Stars is great. I just like it, original. Very nostalgic. See, that's a funny case, because in that case, you've got

the 16-bit version of games that were only, you know, say four or five years old at that point but because they had to redraw everything and sort of remember everything the all-star version plays very differently like the physics are different especially when like you know especially where the one in three games where you're jumping into bricks and breaking bricks like they just feel totally different in the all-star game whereas you know Mario 2 which is more about like jumping and picking things up and throwing them I feel like that's closer I don't know I'm a big Mario 2 fan

my husband to love you for that. Dokey, do you know what's called it? I do. But then you can trust that with

the Japanese too which I feel like has, that's the case of something that has aged badly in that

everyone who tries it if you're not, if you don't do your homework, if you don't like say, investigate what it

is and who made it and why they made it, why they released it, I think it was only, it was barely a year after the original,

right? Like eight months, nine months after it was a this system this system game so it was like early 86 versus October 85 right so it was a very quick turnaround for Mario 2 in Japan

yeah it's more of an expansion disc it's like oh you think you're so good because you bought the Super Mario Brothers strategy guide well try this punk which is why I think for a lot of people I think myself included when I first got to play Mario you know when I first was like the Japanese

Mario 2 lost levels what I want to call it when you first try they're like geez what the hell is this game why is it so mean why does the game so mean to me and you know it's just a case of you know again context more than anything

like it's a perfectly good Mario game but you have to realize it is specifically made and released at the time for people who were so good at Mario it's like well you know you think you're good at this well then you know you better

you better try harder you know whereas for me is you know at a teen in the 90s I was like I'm trying it's hard like, hey, I didn't Howard Lincoln say if it was Howard Lincoln? Howard Phillips. Howard Phillips. That's right, different guy.

It's confusing. Yeah, I mean, that was their mistake to hire two guys named Howard. Yeah, well, look at the wrong thing. But, yeah, he said, this is not going to be very popular in America. Kids are not going to like this, and that's why they came out with Dofee to McPanage with Mario, too. But, yeah, I was never a big fan

of the lost levels. But otherwise, Mario Games generally age very well. here's one that might be spicy. Off great out of time. I love the original N664 version. Don't get me wrong. I skipped school to pick it up. That would have the gold cartridge.

But if someone were to hand me the NCC4 game now and say, play this, I would. But I'd be like, oh, gee whiz. I was just kind of playing the DS version right now because the original N64 version really looks weird. If you look in the backgrounds, the trees and stuff, they look kind of like, okay, well, that certainly is a too many. like, did not?

Yeah, I actually had trouble with Ocarina Time back when it first came out. Like, I enjoyed it, but, yeah, it just didn't click for me in the way that others all the games had. So I'm one of the weirdos who was not on board with that, this is the greatest game ever. But it makes me feel like sour grapes to say that. So I kept my mouth shut. So you're in your company, I suppose. Okay. I do think Ocarina Time is a very particular case, very peculiar case in that it did come out.

And it hit so hard with so many people. And then, again, because what we talked about with the sort of the 90s and the polygons, like, only a few years later, people were already like, this game is ugly, you know? Or in the case of certain, like, just control decisions. Like, this game is frustrating. It's annoying to go into places

and constantly switch equipment, which I thought was nice how they sort of took that in consideration when they made the 3DS version. Yes, and you changed foods just with the button. Right, yeah, the double screens, like they try to think of some, you know, quote, quote, quality of life improvements, which is kind of a funny saying because, you know, the game, in most cases, in most cases, I think the video game was very clearly made with these things in mind. So it's like, you don't need to fix what it wasn't broken, but sometimes as time has changed, as tastes have changed, people want certain things from the game that aren't there. Yeah. if I can change topic totally to

tank controls. Yeah. Tank controls became an albatross for a lot of games from the 90s. People like, oh, I hate this, I hate this. But it's like those games were made with those controls in mind. So when you take them out, like say the HD, all modern versions

of the Resident Evil remake. Yeah. You know, that is very much, you can, it's both, both work. You can do the, the tank controls are there if you use the D-pad. But if you use the analog stick, it automatically just moves you in one direction. And you can see, yeah, it's a lot easier to move around with the analog stick, but also it makes certain parts of the game trivial because it was designed to,

it was designed to make you, okay, you need to very carefully run down this hallway. And if you used to stick, like, okay, well, then I did it, done. But then, of course, what happens when you change camera angles? guess what the tank controls are doing what they're supposed to do and sometimes the analog sticks like oh now you're going to the left they're going to the right you don't know where you're going because it's all relative yeah um so i do feel like you know sometimes quality of life changes aren't necessarily improvements although they can often placate people who just want you know i would say more more thought more modern approaches to games like you If you've never played a game with tank controls and you get a tank controls, I understand it's going to be really intimidating, you know, but in most cases they're there for a reason. I agree, yeah.

Postals, except for them. Postal should not have tank controls. It's done. No, the tank controls give a good weight to certain games that are made for it. Meghan Legends, I have to give a shout out to, of course, Megam Legends, too. They all use tank controls, and something about the strafing in that game feels good because of the tank controls.

And of course, I knew Megaman Legends, God willing, would probably be analog. But those tank controls, to me, are really part of what made the experience so special. Still kind of good to go back to. I still like going back to the Legends games. How about Donkey Kong Country Games? Oh, here's the thing. I love Donkey Kong Country Games. Some of my favorite platforms, I think, too, is brilliant.

I think some of David Weiss's best work in terms of the music. I've been at Weiss fans as day one. but it's been kind of cool to say oh don'tcom country one two three four whichever didn't age well blah blah blah record graphics ugly I don't believe any of that I think that don't come country still rules

I will say that that's another game that didn't really click for me but when you play donkey Kong country on a CRT with the kind of connections that we had back then it looks so good it looks phenomenal like you don't you don't see the pick You just see, like, everything is very, has a lot of depth and a lot of dimensionality. And it just looks great.

I mean, it really was great counter programming by Nintendo to put up against Sega Saturn and PlayStation and say, eh, you don't need those systems. Look, you can get 3D graphics here, even though it was just a total lie. It was such a compelling, convincing lie that I, yeah, that's fine. I do think the game is kind of eh from a gameplay perspective, but that's just good. You know, Nadi, I think based on what we've already talked about several times, you know, Donkey Kong Country, the original one was 94. So I think part of the age badly opinion is the fact that so many other games from, like, that period, on the Super Nintendo, that just relied on traditional sprites kind of look even more

amazing. We talked to Metro Metroid, which was 94. You talked about Chrone Trigger, which is 95. You know, dare I mention, you know, the Yoshi, you know, Yoshi's Island, which is like, you know, that is 2D,

that is, you know, purposefully 2D, purposely child, it's like it has an incredible, you know, deliberate choice that was made to make it look unlike anything else. And so that's why I think, you know, 25 years later, it's still like, he's almost 30. But, but But not only that, they specifically took a piece of built-in hardware, the FX2 chip,

that was designed to create 3D graphics and said, what if we use this to just make really cool 2D graphics? And it was a very sort of sideways approach to technology that I think really added something to the game. No, you're absolutely right. I never thought about that. But yeah, thanks to the FX2 chip, if he touch fuzzy, you get dizzy. It doesn't work so well in any of the subsequent ports because, There's no half chip to touch and get dizzy with.

But I think that's a big part of it. I think sometimes things age badly, quote, unquote, because people look at contemporaries. They will look at that. Look at that. If this is great and this is only okay, this is aged badly because it's only okay. Whereas, like, Dunkin Country is still, you know,

I still, I played it not that long ago and we did a podcast about it. I was like, this is fun, you know? You know, it doesn't look as good as some of its contemporaries, but this is still a fun game to play. I'm still enjoying this, and I can still appreciate it.

You know, I guess I don't love it under the tree, but, like, pretty good. I have to say the episode, the level where you have the snowstorm coming in off the mountains and blinding you, that is one of the best depictions of snow I've ever seen in my life, and I'm a Canadian, I know from those depictions.

So they got it perfect with that kind of gray lights and the washed out white look that they're like, where the hell am I going? I don't know. So they did it really well on that. They would always just get top marks for me for that. Then Rare and Nintendo knew what they were doing. Although, as you said, it did kind of live.

They made you kind of think that for the NCC4, you were going to get, like, Jurassic Park level of graphics because he got mentioning, like, Silicon Graphics and all that. But, yeah, that didn't happen. Kind of like blast processing. It's all the big lines. Nadia, I've always wanted to ask you, as a Canadian, how many words do you have for snow?

Slush, swear words, more swear. I'm not shoveling, let my brother do that. I did it last time. That's, yeah. Although, you know, last year when you get you snow, it was just 70 degrees. Most of that, it was great. It was fantastic.

Anyway, we have like 10 minutes, so I wanted to, maybe ask the audience if you had a couple of games that you think age well, and you just want to talk better a bit. Middle-year solid five to say? It's fan and pink. Yeah, it still looks good. It still looks good.

And, of course, he has a diamond dog. That ages it perfectly. He's such a good boy. And, yes, it's, uh, I can see that still being a, is that 10 years old? I believe so. Next year. I thought it was 2015. Oh.

Which, this ground zeros and the phantom, yeah. Yeah, Phantom Payne was early 2015. We ended up with two copies in Fantacain, and I don't know how it happened. I got my PlayStation 4. It was actually the Canadian exclusive bundled with NHL, 90, whatever the hell it was. Not 90, 2000, whatever the hell it was. And maybe your solid a five. a copy medal they're solid five from someone, and I have two copies of the game I haven't played yet.

But yeah, here's really great. Too bad about how it all ended. Anybody else? Mario Man. Street photo, too. I mean, you played out for anybody. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Even the original, like, S&ES, like, I just kind of break that out. I'm like, oh, this is just retro as hell. Where the hell's Vegas? Where's the place? Who cares? It's all about guile, Ryu, and classics. You're absolutely right. I can still play Street Fighter like anywhere, any time.

I suck at it. but I just don't like it. Anybody else? That's, sorry, I mentioned that. So that's another case of a game that has, you know, a great reputation, a very long history, and then you have sort of a attempt was made to modernize it, you know, when you had the HD, the Super HD remix version,

which I would say is 2008, 2009, right around the same time this pre-fri-to-fourth is coming out. So, like, that's like a case of, okay, we have this game that everyone knows, everyone loves. What if we make all new graphics for? They couldn't change, they didn't want to change, like, the way it played. Yeah. So they had to make sure, okay, you have the same number of frames, and, you know, so they wanted to keep something the same.

But they redrew all the graphics. And that version is now sort of in its own little bubble, especially because they came, they later made like a, I guess, a remaster or a sequel for Switch, depending on how you view it. Yeah, that's true. Very weird because they charge 50 bucks for it. But I feel like it's interesting how you have this other version, which was, you know, again, it's supposed to. to modernize it, but it ended up becoming sort of a, its own world, whereas the original Street Fighter 2, I think, still, you know, still holds up in ways

that just, you know, the HD remix, quote unquote, does not. Yeah. And then earlier this year, of course, you had Street Fighter 3 at Evo again, and everyone's like, whoa, this game really is awesome. Like, yeah, it really is awesome. It looks, in other words, it looks great, but it plays great, and people are still out there

doing amazing stuff with this now 25-year-old. Yeah, Street Fighter 3 is still king in the... I'm not a fighting game fan, but I understand that's still pretty much king. Purple kind. Sorry. I'm thinking fine on the credits. Legend of the River King, for... Yeah, I've heard of it.

It's so cute, and I'm amazed. I'm new to the game by color. I didn't have one as a kid. Isn't it a great system? It's so neat. It is. It is. To have a great port of Dragon Warrior 3 on it, by the way.

But I'm just amazed by the colors and stuff. Yeah, it's so unique. Yeah, River King. It's like an RPG, right? Fishing Archipage? Yeah. It's one of the games I always wanted to try. It looks really cute.

Did any of you try it? No, fishing, I don't know. I love it. That's for Big the Cat. It's not for me. I do think that it's funny how more, I'm seeing more fishing games out in the indie space these days. And I do find a lot of them are using Game Boy-esque graphics,

I think that's, you know, maybe not the River King specifically, but I think a lot of people played a lot of games on the Game Boy or handled systems that relied on fishing mini-games, and I think it's funny that a lot of games are sort of pulling on that nostalgia. The one I'm thinking of, it's not out yet, I believe, it's just called normal fishing. But, yeah, okay, I'm going to point you to grab it. Yeah, it's called Normal Fishing. It's an indie game. There's a demo out there.

The main game, I don't know what's coming, but, like, that's a game it looks like an old game and it plays like it, and then the more time you're like, hmm, there's something abnormal what this fishing game isn't there but that's part of the chart yeah absolutely I was going to say the original Star Fox which is kind of like it's interesting because

it's such a push of what they could do with the system and so it's so primitive like it's just like an R-wing is like 20 polygons or something it's something about that I don't know if it's my nostalgia glands but I've always just thought it sticks together really well because of how primitive it is

that one's a lot like Middle Gear Solid in that if you upres it if you make it more than 12 frames per second it just doesn't quite have the same quality. There's something about the, like the muffled quality of the Super NES

sound processor, the sampling that they used and the voices, like all of that just works together with the limitations of the visual technology to, yeah, that game kind of transcends what it should be. And you take away any of those

limitations and all of a sudden you're kind of like, Like, I could never get into Star Fox 64. I know a lot of people worship it, but to me, it just like, she can try, but I'm moving at 12 frames per second, so I'm just going to clip right between her bullets. It's going to be great. No, like, it just, there was some mysterious quality about the original Star Fox that I felt that the sequel is kind of lost out on. Yeah.

I think so. I did love 64, but after that it's all kind of like, I remember playing Starvox command that my first E3, 2006, sent me to look at that game. And I'm like, wow, this really doesn't need the stylus, but I guess we're using the stylus now. So, yeah, that was, I guess I had time for one more. You need me, money. Fellow in the back.

Yes. That's actually a case, I think, where the HG, the up-res does talk me. Yeah. I actually like Twilight Princess, but it's definitely a case where you look at some of the graphs, especially in the kind of Twilight worlds. It's like, wow, this has a lot of smeary bloom, doesn't it? I mean, it's got

cell shaded graphics. And cell shading is 3D's attempt to be 2D. And I feel like when you have something that has a really strong visual direction like that in 3D polygons, you know, very simple graphics. There was Mega Man Legends up here earlier, Mega Man Legends too.

And that's another great example of working within the limitations to kind of create something very simplistic looking that scales up and down really well. Mega Man Legends is great because it has so much personality in the character faces, the opposite of Middle Gear Solid on the same technology at the same year, but they just used really great texture animation to create the impression

of faces that no other game on PS1 had at that point. And they finally busted out money for decent voice acting. Yeah. Ish, yeah. Yeah, so, yeah, cell shading is, it's kind of the cheat code for polygons to become immortal the way the 2D sprites are. Yeah. all right any final thoughts um i had a tangent i was going to mention but i feel like we're

getting we're getting the signal from off camera because it's almost two o'clock so we should probably we should probably yeah jump bust out right let's age well ourselves by not running over time thank you everyone so much for coming out of restaurants uh supporters of retronaut sorry supports at patreon dot comforts. We have a whole bunch of content. I'm Nadia Oxford. I write. I do consultations. I do a whole bunch of stuff. Podcasting, obviously. I have some books here. Megamman books, 20 bucks each. Don't make me take them home. So yeah. Thanks, Johnny. Thanks for being a great audience. Thank you.