Retronauts - 695: The Years-in-Review Revue: 1995

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

Jeremy Parish, Kevin Bunch, Benj Edwards, and Jared Petty bring our 50-40-30-years-ago retrospective series for 2025 to a close by looking at the major events and games of 1995—just in time to get ready for 2026's Years-In-Review Revue! Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts 

This week in Retronauts, we're five talking. Everyone, welcome. Everyone, welcome to Retronauts episode. Oh, I did it again. I forgot to Retronaut's episode. Oh, I did it again. I forgot to, look at the episode number. But I can be forgiven because this episode was not supposed to exist. This was never supposed to happen. But no, here we are with episode 695, the third part of our years in review, review, the annual tradition, which is supposed to happen in January. And here we are mid-May. I think this episode goes out in June. We really kind of biffed it. But every time we do one of these, the scope creep just makes them go longer and longer. And, you know, 10 years from now, the entire year will just be spent talking about the games of 10, 20, 30, and 40 years prior.

Such as our lives. Anyway, this time we are talking 20, oh, no, 30 years ago. 1995. It was 30 years ago. and we are disappearing into mummy dust. I am the host mummy for this episode. I am your mummy. I am Jeremy Parrish.

And with me here in the sarcophagus of retro gaming, we have the usual host of, not idiots, fun-loving friends. Surf! Turf! Okay, one idiot. Who was that idiot? I am the idiot mummy.

lives under your house in Aquatines. I am Jared Petty. Oh, see, I never saw that, so I didn't get the reference. I thought you were just screaming for no reason. No, I was being a mummy. There was a reason for your screaming. Okay, well, welcome, Jared Petty. I apologize for calling you an idiot. It was actually... I'm kind of an idiot, Jeremy. It's okay. Fair enough. I'll concede the point. Let's see. Who else is here in the R.D.U. Triangle, where we are currently under a Biblical level of rain. That would be me, Ben Edwards. Hello, Ben Edwards.

Just to warn you, this is not going to be a funny episode. All the joy is drained from my life. And so don't expect any witty witticisms for me. Why is the joy drained from your life? Because I drank a Coke yesterday and I have low blood sugar today. That'll do it. Everything's fine, really. I mean, I've got a great family and pretty good job, but, you know.

But you drink a Coke, okay. I guess that was witty. That was kind of witty. Sorry, I just wanted to prepare you to be let down. I feel so much better about surf turf now. Well, I don't know what surf turf means anyway. It's, you know, steak and lobster. I know that much.

Okay, well, then you know what to me. I've been to the Angus Barn, Jeremy. Have you? Wow, Mr. Moneybags over here. Yeah. Mr. and Mrs. Moneybags. Nice. And finally, the same person in the room, not actually in the room.

Far away. It's your local Ramsey's the second. It's Kevin Bunch. Wow. I think I shot you one time in Life Force. That's fine. I showed up again in the Eternal Champions and had a great time. Excellent.

Okay. What you did to Moses was not okay. Listen. I do what I do. I threw baby Moses in the river once, so I can't say anything. You can't park the Red Sea, just expect to get away with it, right? Am I right? That's what a ginger calls combing their hair.

Hey, anyway, so let's move along to talk about the video games and events of 1995. We've regaled you with exciting tales of 1975 and 85. There might have been a 65 in there. I can't remember. It was a strange vintage. But we are now on to 1995. And sadly, the one person who really wanted to talk about 1995 is not able to join us for this episode, Chris Sims. He has conflicts, scheduling conflicts, which is very tragic because he sat in on two episodes in which he could not really participate that much, waiting, just biting his time and now his time is here.

And he had to bid us farewell. Very sad and ironic. But that is life. That's all Alanis Morissette's fault. Was that a 1995 song? It might have been. That sounds right. Alanis, Morissette.

That sounds about right. Ironic. So if we do the ironic, oh, 1995. Yes, jagged little pill. See, there we go. So this episode was born to be ironic. In a way, Chris not making it. It's like a new job when they make a podcast.

Okay, I don't know. Whoa. I do not expect you to sing today. Don't I sound just like a lot? Alanis. I'm just impressed Alanis knew what a podcast was in 1995. She was ahead of the curve. She was ironically, way

ahead of things. Traffic gym, when you're already late, a no smoking sign on your cigarette break. It's like 10,000 spoons when all you need

is a knife. It's meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting is beautiful. So anyway, in addition to a song on the radio that pedants could get so angry about, we had lots of things happening in the video game world. And none were bigger and more momentous than the launch of the virtual boy, binge, take it away. Tell us about the launch, the biggest thing to hit video games in 1995. Five, five, five, five, five. It's like 10,000 spoons

When all you need is a knife That's what the virtual boy was like It was like 10,000 knives in your eyeball 10,000 knives Yeah Well They tell me I'm supposed to be an expert About the virtual boy

At the very least you faked it convincingly in a book I faked it long enough to convince MIT press To let me co-write a book called I already forgot what's called Seeing Red I had to check my notes there Wasn't that about a panda? Yeah, a red panda

Pixar Anyway, let's see Okay, I like how easy it is to get you thrown off Off the topic Oh yeah, okay Let's squirrel Virtual Boy is the novelization of that film Is that how it works?

Virtual Boy launched in 1995 So yeah, that's the right year July 21st, 1995 in Japan, August 14th, 1995 in the United States. I don't know what to say that I haven't already said. I mean, it's the weirdest, craziest game console. Why did you put your name next to the item? I don't know. I told you, I'm all off.

My feng shui is out of alignment and my architecture is in remission, the third moons in the sun. He had that Coca-Cola, Jeremy. Yeah, hit that. I hate that hard stuff. Invis us on the Coke. I'll just tell you that the Virtual Boy is a stereoscopic, you know, semi-portable game console that has read only graphics and it sold 770,000 units worldwide, 140,000 in Japan, 630,000 in the U.S. It's probably a statistical error because the U.S. is much larger than Japan. So I don't know if it was proportionally that much more popular.

or just, you know, there's so much more people. But it was discontinued and only about five or six months later in Japan in December of 95. But it held out in America for about a year until August of 96 and it had a lot of price cuts. I mean, it kind of held out in the U.S. for a year, but the last game came out in February. So they were just kind of kicking it down the road like, oh, there's going to be more games, just you wait kids. Look out. Here comes Dragon Hopper or whatever it's called. Yeah, yeah, just hang on.

Don't give up. Please buy the stock that is in the stores and no one wants. You kind of get the impression that inside Nintendo, when they first showed this thing off, people clapped and like, yeah, yeah, and then walked out of their and kind of going, oh, no, oh, no, oh, no. And they had to know. Like, it's a neat thing, but I think they had to know it wasn't going to sell well. Yeah. I mean, boy, we wrote a book about this, I guess. There's like, you know, it was a novelty project from Gunpei Yo Koi who saw this technology from Reflection Technologies, a Massachusetts-based company.

And he thought it was cool and it was an expression of his withered technology ethos, which is like using some kind of cheap, readily available technology to make some new thing, like the Game Boy with a dot matrix element. LCD and like the Game and Watch that had, you know, watch type technology and stuff. And so it was, I think they knew it wasn't ever really going to be successful. It was sort of like a placeholder for while the N64 was still cooking. So they needed to get a product out the door and they just needed to get it done. I really, I don't think it was designed as a novelty product. I really think that the idea, you know, as it originally existed, was that this would, be the next generation portable Nintendo system. It would be a new, amazing experience. But then

as the realities of it set in, and they had to keep making compromises, it just became less and less compelling. You know, I think it's the, kind of like the fake maxim about the frog that doesn't, you know, notice that the water's boiling until it's dead. It was just one of those things where like here over here is the platonic ideal of Virtual Boy, which would have been incredible. It would have been so good. And then here's the actual release version, which was no longer really portable because it weighed too much because, you know, there were FCC regulations that required, not necessarily required, but they were concerned about radiation emission being that close to a person's face since you stick your face in the machine. And

So all of a sudden it has this metal framework inside of it that makes it too heavy to carry around conveniently. It can't be face mounted. You know, they could only get the red LEDs because everything else was too expensive. A year later, multicolored LEDs would have been, you know, totally affordable. But we were just on the cusp of consumer level colored LCD is capable of creating a full range of, you know, full gamut of RGB color. So it was just, bad timing and technology that sounded good in theory, but in practice just didn't work out. Yeah, it's such a neat idea, but it'd be almost impossible to sell, looking at it from a marketing perspective, without a screen, it's very difficult to show anyone what's going on. And if you just watch someone having fun with it, they inherently look like an idiot because of the shape of the device. So it's a really hard... Lucky beta testing. Yeah, it's a hard thing to sell.

How do you convince someone? As a kid, I was fascinated by the 3D. And I actually really liked the virtual boy as a child. But I got the headache after half an hour and was like, okay, I don't know how much I really want to play with this. And you combine the fact that it's hard to show off with the fact that you look dumb holding it, with the fact that it was probably a little too pricey, with all the compromises you just pointed out, A good idea didn't pan out.

And to their credit, I think, it was very wise of Nintendo to kill it when they did. But I do hate that things like, you know, Mario Clash, for example, are still locked away behind that wall. There's some neat games on there. Yeah, I think compromises a good way to describe what happened here because this was like a period where the idea of VR gaming was having a time.

It was a moment. And this is really the only thing from that push that I feel like really got to market and even then it's not really virtual reality. But like I know Sega was working on like a VR helmet for the Genesis. Hasbro was working with

the Sartoff Labs to develop like a VR system that was going to run all sorts of like funky Maxis games and whatnot and all of those died because, you know, that they were too heavy or they ran really poorly. Tetsia Miziguchi.

They were too expensive. Miziguchi, you know, of Res fame, actually told me that he was working on a 3D visualization project for the Game Gear, which is wild to think about. But then I remembered, oh, yeah, the Sega master system did have the 3D glasses. So, you know, that was, that was a thing. It was part of video games ever since ever since Sega gave us Sub Rock 3D with the periscope that you look through to create like the dual screen, you know, alternate active shutter system. Yeah, so I, you know, you guys just made me look bad, but the best thing, you know, if you want to hear us, we talked really great about the virtual boy on the, I think we did a podcast, Jeremy with me and Jose about the book.

That was, if you're interested in the virtual boy, I highly recommend listening to that. So it's like the whole console was a bit of an enigma and it was like a series of compromises and other things. So, yep, it's weird and wild. But it totally, totally had a bunch of really cool games on it, too. I mean, it had some, you know, had Waterworld as well, but it had some really neat games. I think the only game that came out for Virtual Boy in any territory that is not locked to Virtual Boy is Panic bomber, the Bomberman puzzle game, which also came out on a few other systems. Everything else, you can't play it unless you play it on Virtual Boy. Like the Wario Land game, the original Mario Tennis is still on Virtual Boy.

And that's where it got started, and that's where it lives. There was that sort of Star Fox quarter shooter, Red Alarm. There was a top-down Star Force, Star Soldier type game called Vertical Force. The first Shinemagame Tense game that ever came into America was a, like a dungeon shooter, kind of a... Puzzle Dungeon Shooter. Yeah, imagine you were... Yeah, imagine you're Jack Frost playing the binding of Isaac, and that's kind of what it was like without the randomization. Jack Brothers, right?

Yes, Jack Brothers. There was a, there was an amazing, it does. There was an amazing, interesting Lovecraft-themed first-person corridor shooter called Insmouth No Yakata, which, which, like, it's actually really cool and good, and you can play through it in about 15 minutes. but it has this branching corridor system based on your performance. So you have to play perfectly to get the good ending because it kind of does that Darius puzzle-bobble, like, branching stage thing. But you don't have any control over which stage you end up in. It's just based on how well you play.

So there's some really cool stuff on Virtual Boy. There's also some really dreadful stuff. Ask me how I know. But it's all out there. And it's really interesting because the system only had 22 games in total. total in all regions, but attempting to acquire a complete set is nigh impossible because the last few games that came out in Japan were released, just kind of pushed out the door in vanishingly small numbers. I've heard rumors that they were like two-digit quantities of

those. Oh my gosh, really? I don't know that's true, but like I feel there's got to be like an MOQ on how many virtual boy games you had to make, but maybe not. I don't know. At that point Nintendo I think didn't care. I mean, to the point that virtual lab, the box, miss spells Nintendo three different ways. So, I mean, you know. That's also the worst game. Yeah. Virtual Lab, yeah. It is. Although there was a great piece on, oh, crap, the Bad Games Hall of Fame, an interview with the programmer of that game, like, two years ago, that offered some interesting insights. It doesn't like make the game any better, but it does at least make you understand, oh, the reason this game is bad is because the person who was who was responsible for

it had to program it in a weekend without knowing the hardware in any way whatsoever. So yes, that explains why the game was complete shit. Wow, that's a, I think I need to read this book. You do. That's a story I want to hear. Oh, it's not a book. It's, um, It's a website. Bad Games Hall of Fame. I want to say that's the website that it's on. The webmaster, let me quote little bits of that in the second printing of my Virtual Boy book. Yes, I have one, too. Yeah, we saw about, I think, 560 copies of my book. So that's a new record for my book. For my book. For any book that I've co-authored. I feel like that's pretty good for Virtual Boy.

Yeah. That probably outsells some of the games. That's like a one-to-one attach rate. That's like the best for a book. It's like, I think the Bible only sold 800. So, like, I think that's pretty good. I supposedly made over 500 books. I haven't seen it yet. But, like, that's a pretty good return on my original $30 investment for the buying a virtual boy at TotsR.S., right?

Yeah. We're going to be able to be. I'm going to be. We're going to be able to be. All right, well, congrats on the numbers. Thanks. Now we should talk about the other things that came out that year. Sega Saturn launched.

I think we would call that. a premature launch. It was five years ago this week, actually, from the time of our recording. But it sort of dropped precipitously at $399. We should talk about $299, though, because that might be the single most remarkable instance of just a, like, is it an own goal? It's just canny opportunityism, I would guess. It's either this or that time Kenji Eno did the thing with the logo,

but I think it's this. The thing with the logo. Oh, yeah, where he was going to announce that he was making games exclusively for PlayStation at the PlayStation Conference, and the PlayStation logo behind him morphed into a Saturn logo at the conference.

He said, I'm producing exclusively for Saturn and walked out. Oh, okay. A bunch of Sony execs standing there furious. I did not know about that, but that does sound like a Kenji Eno thing sort of thing to do. Yeah, you'll be told that story.

Ah, okay, of course. I mean, that would have been my guess, yeah. So all of this ties into the first ever electronic entertainment exposition, RIP, that took place in 1995 prior to this video game stuff was just kind of crowded into a little tent next to the porn at Consumer Entertainment Show in Vegas and Chicago each year. And finally, video games said, we should have our own show with hookers and blackjack. In fact, forget the hookers. And so they had the E3.

And let's see, the first one I think was in Atlanta, and then eventually it moved over to L.A. From what I've heard of the old E3s, they did not, in fact, forget the sex workers. Oh, okay. But that's a whole other kingdom. Well, there you go. I mean, certainly when you went to the L.A. convention center and left the building, the premises, there were people handing out cards to spearment rhino or whatever that was called the strip club. I never actually went there myself, but every year there were people out there, you know, ladies handing out the cards, come, come see us, and we won't be wearing clothes if you do.

So I guess that's all part and parcel of nerds. But anyway, E3, Sega came out and dropped a megaton saying, yes, our new system, the Saturn, is coming this year, but it's not coming this fall like we previously announced. you can go to three different retailers right now and buy the system. And people said, oh, okay, there was no build up or marketing hype leading up to it. It was just kind of there. And then all the retailers that were not the chosen retailers said, Sega what? Like, why did we get locked out of this?

So it was just a bad choice all around. 400 bucks. And it kind of just whiffed. Go ahead. I have a small short story about the Saturn launch that's just sort of illustrative of that is I was at Toys R Us one day, maybe a weekend in 1995, and I was walking down the aisle. And suddenly the Saturn was there and for sale. And I had never like it confused the heck out of me because I didn't know it was coming. I had video game magazines and I guess I knew it was coming in the future. But like suddenly it was there as a big, like just shocked me. So, yeah, that's how weird it was the launch. And so it caught consumers off guard, too, because we didn't know that it was coming. You know, nobody, like to spend $400 bucks on a console, you kind of have to plan for it in 1995 because that's a lot of money.

Absolutely. The self-funch was, yeah, the stealth launch was a disaster for so many reasons. Consumers weren't ready for it. Even their biggest fans weren't ready for it since they announced it at E3, which at that time was not covered the way that shows are now. there wasn't nearly as much, you know, games press coverage of it. And so it took a while for the word to get out. And beyond that, though, they made it exclusive to, I think, three retailers. Yep.

And cut everybody else out, including, I kid you not, Walmart in a pre-internet world. Pre-internet, there's no Amazon, you can't buy the Saturn at Walmart. And that just angered Walmart and that they didn't want to carry stuff for Sega. It just turned into a nightmare that lasted them, actually for years. took forever to click they were still dealing with that during the dreamcast like four years later yeah amazon only sold books at that time i guess yeah technically it was around in 95 i guess it was around i bought books from them around that time but yeah i remember back when amazon sold books as opposed to having no idea what books are yeah books are strange anyway so all of this is

sort of preface to uh sony's press conference the following day where the company's president got out under stage and simply said $299 and then left. And that was it saying, you know, this system is going to be $100 cheaper than the Saturn. And also the subtext, you know, also being we didn't screw over our retail partners, which was really what E3 was for at that point. It was for retailers and buyers. So just kind of coming in saying, hello, we're doing this. And why would you, why would you team up with Sega when you could team up with us instead? And the system arrived like three months later and did gangbusters. And Sony is still a major force in video games.

And Sega, they're actually, they've been doing really well for themselves lately. I just read yesterday that their year-over-year profits were way, way up because they sat down and said, what if we just made really good games? And it's paid off for them. Yeah, the Shenmu gave us, or Saturn gave us Shenmu, and Shenmu gave us Yakuza, and Sosek is cool now. That's my take. Except Saturn didn't really give us Shenmu because they didn't get that version out. No, no, they didn't.

So Saturn wasn't even good for that. Saturn's actually a really good and interesting system, just not in America. If you go all in on the Japanese stuff, the library there is amazing. It's expansive and vast and so varied. Here in America, not so much. The Saturn is the ideal importer's paradise that everyone dreams of, I think. When they think about importing games, like the Saturn collection actually feels like that. I've been collecting Saturn games for years, and I'll still come across things I've never heard of that are awesome.

It's great. You do have to watch out for the occasional Bear Boobie, but generally those are not as prevalent as they would have been on like the latter-day PC engine or PCFX or something. So just advance with caution. Yes, it's a minefield of milk. Yes. Okay. Anyway, well done, Sony. I have to stop now.

You killed Jeremy. You broke him. Good job. You killed Jeremy. Good. Anyway. I told you it would be a bad day. That was actually the funniest thing you've said.

Thank you. So, So those are kind of the big events. Let's, let's, I'm going to try this. I'm going to, I swear to God, I'm going to do this. I'm going to go down a list, an alphabetical list of arcade games, and then we're going to circle back and talk about the things that are of interest to us individually. And we'll see if we can make it through here.

So here we go, in no particular order, it's alphabetical. 19XX, the war against destiny, which actually, I don't know if the episode is out yet, but there's a Capcom Shooters episode that I recorded at Midwest Gaming Classic with Kevin Bunch here, talking about 19XX, the war against destiny. Also, on a similar front, we have Arrow Fighters 3. The gray game, Arc Invader, or no, Ackinvator. Is it Ackinvator? I thought it was Arkenvader.

O my God, I messed up. Area 51, where you kill aliens that are being held captive, I think. Sounds horrible, but that was America in the 90s. Baku Baku animal. Battle balls. Is that like, I can't remember the name of the game,

like Magnetica or something like that, where there's like a spiral of of orbs and you have to like move them around. Oh, I don't know. Yeah, I remember that game. Yeah, I'm not sure. Okay. Bubble memories, the game where you remember

Bub and Bob. Cyber Troopers Virtual On, the latest in the Virtua series from Sega, except it's not a Virtua game, it's virtual. So I guess it's not tied to that. It's kind of weird. DDR Megamix, the next generation version of the Snack Mix, Checks Mix, is that right?

Yes. Don Pachi. Was this the origin of the bullet shooter, the bullet hell? It's one of the first major ones. We'll get to that. Double Dragon Neo Geo. That's not actually its title. It's just Double Dragon.

but it was on NeoGeo, which differentiated it from the double dragons that are fun and good. Extreme downhill, which is kind of what the NeoGeo double dragon series represented. Fatal Fury, sorry, Fatal Fury 3, now featuring three times as much Mai Shiranoi. Fighting Vipers featuring No Mai Shiranui. It's a different fighting series. Galaxy Fight, I don't even know what Mai has to do with Galaxy Fight, but that was a tie-in. to Trip World, wasn't it? I do not know.

I have never played Galaxy Fight. Oh. I think that was the Sunsoft fighting game? It is. I don't know how it relates to Trip World, but... Jakopo is like a

hidden character or something. The cute little fuzzy guy from Trip World. It's a really weird choice. Gals Panic 3, speaking of boobies, that's boobies plus quicks or kicks if you're like that. Game

Goku. Golden T. Finally, after more than a decade, someone figured out how to do golf games a different way than Nintendo did. One of the most popular arcade games ever. Kabuki Clash. You can tell it's serious business because it starts

with a K. It must be a fighting game like Mortal Combat. The King of Fighters 95, Ben, sorry. Kevin, I'm surprised you didn't stick your name next to this one. I can only stick my name next to so many games. I guess you have talked about a lot of S&K fighters recently, haven't you?

I have. You and Diamond, yeah. Yeah, okay, so that's fair. Kukoku Tiger 2, which is sort of a sequel-ish to Tiger Heli for NES, but way fancier. Manks T.T. Some sort of racing game.

I don't know. Marvel superheroes, if Chris Sims were here, he would tell us all about it. But he's not. So instead, I'll tell you about Mega Man the Power Battle, which is kind of a Mega Man fighting game but actually just more like just a boss gauntlet of Mega Man games

and you pick up powers from the guy you defeat and it's an interesting idea I don't know if I like it but it's an interesting idea Night Warriors which this is the predecessor to Darkstalkers right? I think this one is the first Darkstalkers I think Okay so Darkstalkers is also

I thought it was Night Warriors, Darkstalkers and then Darkstalkers 3? Or is it Darkstalkers, the Night Warriors, than Darkstalkers 3? I know that there's a Darkstalkers 3. Yeah. I think you're right. This is the second one. I keep forgetting that had a different name in the U.S. And they're still using that Morrigan Sprite to this day. 30 years later. Pange 3, Power Instincts Legends, Psychic Force, Pullstar, puzzle bobble 2X the quiz King of Fighters

which I've actually played a little bit of despite the language barrier and it is a King of Fighters quiz game it's not really about King of Fighters trivia it's just like

you know dressing around quiz game stuff no kidding really yeah rave racer which is like Ridge Racer which is like Ridge Racer but ravier

real bout Fatal Fury So how can we have... Okay, is real about Fatal Fury the same as Fatal Fury 3? No, there are two different games that came out on either end of the same year. This would explain why you didn't sign up for King of Fighters. So we'll get back to that. Rise of the Robots. Sando R.

The famous game about sandwiches. Sagar Rally Championship. Everyone's favorite racing game that has a cool theme song that says, yeah. Shack Attack. Soul Edge, the game that gave us. Soul Calibur. Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter the movie. Strikers 1945, no relation to 1943, but kind of the same game. Tekken 2, Twinby Yahoo, the search engine shooter, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, Virtua Cop 2, Virtua Fighter 2, Voltage Fighter Gaukeiser. I've never seen

the game, but I am familiar with the anime from the trailers that would play. before, I think it was AD Vision videotapes. And it's very true to those trailers. Okay. All right.

So, Fighters After Dark kind of thing. And finally, World Heroes Perfect. Is it really, though? Yeah, I mean, that is a lot of fighting games. That's a 1995 arcade right there.

Wow. That is. All right. Sort of the end of that boom, period. So let's circle back around. And there were a few items here that some of you wanted to talk about in greater depth. So let's start with the one that's not a fighting game, Ackinvader.

Kevin, what the hell? Akonvader came out in the U.S. as Space Invaders in 1995, the Attack of the Lunar Loonies. This is basically what if Peronius was made as a Space Invaders game. So, you know, it's very goofy, very silly. there's a lot of references to other Taito projects, like the first boss. You don't fight him yourself, but in the background, there's the general from their fighting game Kaiser Knuckle, who's like the impossible final boss. Do you at some point fight Raston?

Oh, gosh, I don't know, because I've never made it super far in this game. But I wouldn't be shocked if there's a Raston, like, reference in there. If you do fight him... There's a Darius reference. If you do fight Rustin, his magic sword burns out just before he gets to you. So it's okay. And I think my favorite part is that one of the, you have like a selection of characters like in Perodeus too, right? And one of them is the girl from Kiki Kai Kai.

Oh. So you can play as Pocky from Pocky and Rocky. That's so cool. Yeah. It's a very silly game. It's a very, like, interesting take on Space Invaders. And I'm pretty sure it was the last, like, major. arcade Space Invaders game.

Probably. Yeah. It's very much worth checking out. I don't think it's really available that readily right now, but it's on some of the old PS2 collections. It's on the third volume of the EGrit 2 mini

game cards. I still need to get that card. Okay. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, so I feel like this was not the game to save Space Invaders fortunes, but It's an admirable attempt anyway.

The parody game thing kind of, I think it kind of peaked like five years before this came out. So it feels a little behind the times. But it is charming and goofy and fun. And I do have to keep reminding myself that a Taito PS2 collection from 20 years ago is not a current release. Yeah, it's wrong to think about. You know, this was, there's still some parody game things just, you know, from all the other companies that weren't Kadami and what. Because I think Game 10 Goku is also kind of a sort of a parody thing, too, for Data East, I think it is. I'm pretty excited.

Or no, Jalico. Because I just bought all four Taito Memories discs from Japan. Like, they have twice as many as we did there for PS2 and a Japanese PS2. So I bet you Ockinvator's on there. I've never played it. I'm pretty excited. Pretty sure it is. All right.

I get to play it. Yay. Just brought that home. And I just added EGrit 2 Mini Arcade Memories Volume 3 to my eBay cart. Excellent. Thanks for nothing, Kevin. You're welcome. All right.

So Jared is highlighting Chris Sims thing that you're not going to talk about. Yeah, I was just moving my cursor around foolishly. But you could talk about Cyber Troopers Virtual On, the game from Sega, not Capcom. I will talk about Cyber Troopers virtual on. It's the very first VO game. And I was not there in Japan in 1995 to enjoy this when it was new. Oh, no. I came much later.

A decade later, to sad, dying-esque Japanese arcades. Not as sad and dying as they are now after COVID, but they were still kind of sad and starting to die. But one thing you could still find when I lived in Japan were plenty of Cyber Troopers' VO machines, the first one. Those appeared to be very popular among the old school guys. And they used to go down to the arcade and watch guys come on the weekend. And they would just play VO for hours.

And these were people that have been playing VO since 1995. And there's a, so VO is near as I can tell, having played quite a bit of it now. It's more akin to a fighting game than anything, even though it doesn't have fighting game moves. It's a 3D-2 robot battle in a limited-sized arena where you have complete freedom of movement, virtual fighter 2 style. You're much more mobile with your robots than the big kind of clunky Sega fighters are. But the techniques you're still using are all about anticipating where your opponent's going to be next. It's all about Footsie's kind of stuff.

You're really doing fighting game things with literal tank controls. It sounds unappealing, but it's incredibly awesome to play. And the nice bit about playing with Japanese arcade players in a very general sense was that a lot of them took more interest in teaching me than in whipping me. Like they all knew they could destroy me, but they were often very, very generous with tips and tricks and training to help you get better. I could have had my own karate kid arc with VO, I think, in Japan when I lived there, had I chosen to. And I sort of wish I had. So that's a game that to this day, when I go back to Japan, I look for. It's very hard to find now.

And it's no fun at all with one person. You need two. But if you have two people, it's a blast. All right. I don't have friends, so I will never be able to play it the way it was meant to be. but I'm glad for you. I'm happy for you in your social life. I'll play it. I guess I can play with a friend of me, sure. So Kevin, let... I'm not smiling.

We can't tell you. You look like a gear. You're so mechanical. There is a Saturn port, if you want to try that. Even came with a customized controller just for playing virtual. Can you do like PlayStation and link two systems together to go head to head? I've never tried that. Is it possible?

I don't know if Saturn can do that. I remember there is a... version of a virtual on for Saturn that I think had online play or something? It may have had online, yeah, yeah. Sounds right. On a 14-4 modem? Hmm, good times.

By the time I got there, that stuff was long dead, so I just fooled around with that and bought the controller. I've really only played the arcade one, because I've seen it around at a couple arcades in the U.S. even, and it is a lot of fun. I didn't realize it ever came out here. I have no idea. I think they imported the cabs.

Oh, okay. All right, Kevin, tell us about Don Pachi, the famous Mafia ruler. So this is the first... Going down in a hail of bullets. What a way to go. A hail of B bullets. So this is the first game in the Dodon Pachi series from Cave. I don't remember if Cave had really done a whole lot before that, before this, but this is really, I think, the game that put them on the map.

Cave came out of what company? There were a few companies like Etting, Rising, Cave. They all sort of came around at the same time. And I want to say that they migrated and formed their own company from other studios. But because I did not prepare for that particular point, I don't know what they were. Caves are sort of a natural limestone formation from mineralization over millions of years. So my chronics is what you're saying. Yeah, ex-micronics developers.

Yeah, I intended to dig into Cave a bit more, and then I forgot, because it's that kind of morning. I like what I did. But anyway, yeah, Don Pachi, this was published by Atlas, of all companies. A purportedly Atlas wanted them to make something in the vein of a Toaplan shooter. A Toaplan had just closed up shop. That's probably where Cave came from now that I think about it. Yeah, the previous year.

So the developers made an attempt at the... that. They consider that they failed miserably at making a game like Toaplan would have, but it was pretty popular, as it turned out. It's sort of a, it's a vertical shooter, and it has a lot of bullets, which was just really starting to come into its own as a design mentality, like filling the screen with a lot of things you have to maneuver around and you have a tiny little hipbox on your ship that you can use to get around these things without getting blasted constantly. It also has a chaining mechanic, which is sort of how you get high scores in this game. You have to shoot things within a certain time limit to keep your chain up and your scores get multiplied over

time. It's a very interesting game. There's a lot of cave traditions that start here, like having a true final boss and a second loop that like has revengeable. It's coming at you whenever you shoot enemies, that sort of thing. It's pretty cool. I think it actually holds up pretty well. I don't think it's quite as popular as the next game like Dodon Pocci is today, but I think it's very approachable. It's probably the easiest game in that series, too.

So, well worth checking. So I looked it up, and yes, Toaplan, went on, the people at Toaplan after its closure went on to form A Ting, Tamsoft, Cave, Gazelle, and Takumi. So, yep.

That's probably why they said, hey, can you make us a Toaplan-style game? because they were basically saying, we are hiring you to do what you do. Yeah, and they did it very poorly, but in a way that people liked. I've never heard of any of these companies for some reason. All Japanese stuff, huh?

Yeah, you're not really into the Japanese Don Maku arcade scene, I think. So that probably explains it. It never came to Gatlinburg, so it wasn't in Gatlinburg. I don't know about it. That's the problem. Yeah. There's, yeah, Dunpachi is a delightful game.

I agree with Kevin that Doonpachi is definitely the superior of the two, but it's really worth playing even today. I think it's forgiving enough compared to most later bullet hell type shooters that it can be a good point of entry for that sick and broken hobby of playing those. And I recommend it to anyone for that. There are dozens of us fans. Oh, I love vertical shooters. All right, so Kevin, you signed up for a lot of arcade stuff. Tell us about Real About Fatal Fury and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, neither of which are Fatal Fury 3.

That's true. But I will have to talk about Fatal Fury 3 a bit because Fatal Fury 3 came out very early in 95. It was, its development cycle was disrupted by an earthquake, so it didn't really get to be fine-tuned and bug-fixed to the extent they wanted it to. It came out kind of a mess, so they kind of took another crack at that sort of game with RealBout Fatal Fury. So it has a lot of the same Sprite elements, graphical elements from Fatal Fury 3. It has some tweaks to the game engine to make it a little more

interesting, a little less rough. But it also continues the story in such a way that is, I think, a lot more interesting. It's nowhere near as broken. Fatal Fury 3 to actually play. It's not very janky in comparison. But it's really cool. They brought back a lot of fun characters from the previous Fatal Fury games, because, like, Fatal Fury 3 only brought

back, like, the main three, Terry, Andy, Joe, and Mai, and for RealBout. They're like, okay, we can actually get some of the other characters people like in here. We can have a lot more of these funky new characters. We'll bring in some of the bosses from Fatal Fury 3 is, like, playable characters that were popular. I think, like, all the Real About Fatal Fury games are very well considered. and I feel like the first one kind of gets overlooked a lot, but it's really, it's a really cool game.

It has some, like, really fun graphical flourishes, too. Like, there's ringouts in it. And when you ring out somebody, every stage has, like, little animations depending on what happens to them as you push them out of the fighting arena. Like, my favorite is getting someone knocked into a train, and the train leaves the station, and they're just, like, looking out the window.

Like, hey. Yeah. Cool game. So they threw in a lot of returning characters, but I feel like they probably had to calibrate that so it didn't step on King of Fighter's toes, right? Because they were drawing from kind of the same pool of characters to a degree. Obviously, King of Fighters drawing from a bigger pool. Right. Yeah. Fatal Fury, they brought back characters. I think they brought back Kim from Fatal Fury too in this one, which he showed up in King of Fighters from 1994 on. but they also brought in, oh, God, who else was I thinking of? It was a Duck King, yes, who didn't show up in K-O-F until, like, 2005. Billy Kane showed up in this one.

He also showed up in K-OF-95, so, like, they were just really pushing Billy. Yeah, so how does that game differ from Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3? They're pretty much the same thing, right? Oh, yeah, one-to-one. Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, I would argue. It was the last good Mortal Kombat game, and I'm sure most people would probably agree. Hence the name Ultimate. Yes.

So this was, you know, Capcom loved issuing revisions of their Street Fighter 2 games. This is this Midway's version of that for Mortal Kombat 3, which is like fine, but kind of rough. This one, like, adds in things that were missing. So they brought back, I think Cano came back in this one that he was missing. or no, Kano was in MK3. Never mind on that. They brought back, like, sub-zero with a mask and a couple other hidden characters. They rebalanced everyone.

There's like a two-on-two team battle mode. But just in general, this game actually, it holds up a lot better than the other early Mortal Kombat games. There's a surprising amount of depth to the combat and the combo system. It has, like, like, these little chain combo things that you could do. Kevin, you said you regarded it as the last good one. I mean, are you including things like from nine on in that? Like, do you actually not like the modern ones either? I mean, I think they're fine.

Okay, I wonder. I just think this one's better. Okay. Cool. Can you qualify that a little bit? Very interested. So, Ultimate MK3, it's a very fast game compared to the newer ones, particularly the last couple, are kind of slow-paced the way they wind up playing.

As a match in this one, it flies by. Cool. And one thing that's very interesting to me about this is that this game is still, it's still reasonably popular. It still gets a fair amount of play even today, especially online. And I guess recently, the past few years, people have started digging into the frame data of how all the characters move. moves work. And they kind of realized that, oh, this one character, Melina, we thought she was really bad. Only, she's actually really, really good because she can punish a lot of things that no one else can. So as someone who played Melina in this game back in the day is one of

my characters. It's very rewarding to see what was once the worst character in the game now be considered one of the best. That's really cool. Thanks, Kenny. So, like, just by playing as Molina, no one understood that she was good except you, I guess. No, I was terrible with her too. Oh, okay. So, like, people didn't understand how to use the character until they hacked the game? More like they didn't realize

that, I think it's her role move where she just sort of rolls along on the ground like Sonic the Hedgehog. They didn't realize just how fast that came out until they were able to sort of dig into, you know, the game frame by frame. They're like, okay, so this is a lot faster than we thought,

it was. It's a lot faster than a lot of other moves in the game. Oh, also, all of these other moves that we thought were, like, reasonably safe against everything else in this game, turns out there's just enough of a window to punish them that she can do it, and other characters can't. So does you just have, like, ridiculous priority? Is that it? Like... I think it's just speed. Okay. Yeah. Um, yeah, there was a period, like, gosh, 15 years ago now, that makes me feel old, uh, that some friends and I were playing the craft. out of the Nintendo DS port of this game, which was really, really good. That was sort of the last time I really dug into it, but, you know, every so often I get to

mess around with it and see what's going on, and I appreciate that it's still kicking. We're going to be able to be. I THANGHAMILEEN SULLIVAN WHERE THEIRMAN. THEIRMANN COLEEN SULLIV. So that was the arcade scene. Now we have an hour left to talk about computers and consoles. What have we done, gentlemen? Our usual tomfoolery.

I know. Let's blitz through here. Talk about computers. Here's a list. Beavis and Butthead in virtual stupidity. Command and Conquer. Kind of surprised no one put their name next to this one. Crusader.

No remorse. Descent. Destruction Derby. Discworld. Empire 2. Exile. Escape from the pit, pit, pit, pit. Flight of the Amazon queen. Full throttle. Heroes of might and magic in this economy. Hexon. I have no mouth and I must scream. Limbing's 3D. Mech Warrior 2. Sivmeyer Sivinet. Simtown. Space Quest 6. Terminal velocity. The 11th hour. The dig. The Journeyman Project 2. Terminator future. Future Shock, Ultimate Doom, Warcraft 2, Worms, and Xcom Terror from the Deep. This is not an all-inclusive list. This is just a slice, a sampling to give you an idea of what delights and marvels awaited those who preferred to play video games on their personal computer. But let's dig into a handful of these.

Jared, this is your section. Well, you're going to tell us about Descent, Mech Warrior 2, and Worms. And somewhere in there, Benj is going to get a word in edgewise about Ultimate Doom. Actually, Ben, you've been very quiet. I'm putting you on the spot. You have to talk about Ultimate Doom now. Go for it. God, don't do this to me.

Yes, yep. I knew it. Let's hear you Benjing. Okay. Let's see. And then we can purge. Oh, God. Don't get me started with that one.

I'm sure you heard it a lot growing up. Yeah. I used to make a joke about a head of brother named Purge. Anytime people would be like, binge, where is that? You should actually go to Portland Retro Gaming Expo, and it could be binge at Purge. That would be cool, yeah. I'd get a button made and wear it on my lapel. Do it.

Okay, so Ultimate Doom is, you know, the ultimate version of Doom, which came out in 1993. Wow, it's very sad that they made no more versions of Doom ever. It's like Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. It's just the best one ever. No, not really, but I... You know, it's got the first three episodes of Doom, the non, you know, first there was a shareware episode, and if you registered it, you'd get two more episodes. And then they added a fourth episode called Thy Flesh Consumed, which is very difficult compared to the others. And I think it, you know, brings the double barrel shotgun into the original Doom, if I recall.

I remember buying this, you know, Doom 2 had the double barrel shotgun first, which came out in 94. And so it's just, you know, it's doom, which everybody knows about. Doom is great. And this is awesome, but it has an extra episode, basically. So that's about, there's not much to say unless you want to talk about doom, which I think everybody knows about first person shooter, doom. Yeah, I mean, we don't have to go too much into detail on that. The premise, I think, is understood.

It's a cultural touchstone. But was this also the one that had a bunch of, like, user-made episodes in it? Or was that a different release? That is Final Doom, I believe. Which is different than Ultimate Doom, even though Ultimate Doom means Final. Yeah, which is weird. Thanks, Ed. So I should have called this Penultimate Doom.

Doom on the PlayStation had, I think it had the Ultimate Doom. And then Final Doom had, I don't know, Doom 2 and Final Doom in it. So it was something like that. The PlayStation versions are pretty good of these. But, you know, I bought the boxed version of Ultimate Doom because I thought it was a great retail release with a big box and I got Ultimate Doom and Doom 2 probably in 95 and I still have them. I used to have them on my shelf behind me.

I'm looking, but they're not there anymore. I don't know where I put them, but I think that's one of the most important things about this was that it was a high profile retail release of Doom, which was largely, you know, published by GT Interactive instead of self-published by Id. and I don't remember who did the original retail. Maybe the GT Interactive, too. So just read John Romero's book. It's really good.

That's all I got to see. Yeah, that's a really special thing about this. I'm glad you pointed that out. You know, for those of us on the PC side that didn't buy the box copy, our collection, Doom collections were like a collection of floppy disks, usually the shareware disc, and then maybe something we ordered from Id, and then three Wad files that we got from her friend at school, and a pirated copy of Doom 2,

and maybe some user maps and these were all like just on your desk in seven different fonts on five different colors or you can just buy this box thing and get everything and more for at that point a really, really low price. It was a great deal.

Yeah, it was like I was really proud to have a retail copy of Doom, which I loved so much, you know, and I got, when I first met John Romero at some conference, I got him to sign the CD and I do have that in my shelf over here. So I'm still proud of it.

It's just, it's a cool release of a wonderful game. It's cool. It's all I got to see. All right. It's time for the Jared show. Jared Regalus. Tell us about these personal computer pastimes of yours. 1995 was a hell of a year to have a PC.

It sure was. And dissent was a big part of that for me. Any of the three you played dissent before? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But I played it on a Macintosh, which I guess people didn't call a PC back then. But I even bought a crazy wingman flight stick for it because otherwise trying to navigate

those 3D spaces just seemed like a lot to ask. So you bought a flight stick just for dissent. That's awesome. I did. And I still wasn't any good at it. The keyboard controls are crazy. You know, I couldn't figure it out. It was amazing to be in 3D and moving around and stuff, but it confused me a lot. Yeah, for those who have no context in this, so I understand that like in 1993, Doom comes out, and that's just a flat plane and then fakes up and down on stairwells and passages you just auto-ane. You know, then we get, you know, we've got Quake coming around, but in the middle of all this where Quake allows us to aim up and down, descent instead is just like, no, that's for, that's

for babies. You can fly up, down, sideways, left, right. You're effectively a helicopter that doesn't have to worry about staying stable. And then you're going instead of through big open spaces, through tiny little twist, and branching mine tunnels. So you're traveling around the inside of, like, the vents from alien in a fast, heavily armed tank that can go any direction. And ambushes, multiplayer, like, in descent in particular was beautiful because you just

do like the Star Trek 2 thing. You know, the reliant goes by and the enterprise just rises up behind it and blows it away. I have done that so many times in dissent. And it feels great. You have to play against people with two-dimensional thinking. But it's worth mentioning that you couldn't just go in any direction. orient yourself in any direction.

This all took place in space, so there was no gravity to speak of. There's some inertia, but even that's kind of muted for the sake of enjoyment. But it becomes very disorienting very quickly because you have to navigate through all these tunnels. It's not like

you're in a big room and there's tunnels branching off to the right left, etc. They go off in the ceiling and the floor. And they twist around and you have to keep kind of orienting yourself and rotating and moving on all three axes. And it's, it gets really hard to keep up with. It's, it's really, really like, just kind of mind blowing that they did this at that time. This was a year before Quake even came out.

So, yeah, it's incredible. They were on, they were on something. I honestly don't know how to sense not still around. It's such a good formula that I think it could still work. I think it's just too demanding, too complex. Like, trying to navigate truly three-dimensional space, that's not something that video games make you do very often. Remember Colony Wars?

Colony Wars on the PlayStation reminds me of dissent a little bit. You can maneuver in any direction, like, orient yourself. That was Synosis, right? I don't remember, but I just remember it was good. A cooler looking version that doesn't play as – it doesn't have the same substance, as my guess. It was – you know – oh, go ahead. No, no, you can talk about dissent. Colony Wars is just cool as a space shooter.

I remember dissent being more corridor-oriented. Isn't that right, Jared? Yeah, you're largely indoors or in large rooms sometimes that are arena-like, but a lot of times you're narrow tunnels. And it alters enough. The stages are – the maps are really well designed. The enemies are great. They're very simple, like polygons, but they're colored and shaded in such a way that they look menacing. Lots of bladed edges.

And so in the dark, they're actually kind of scary sometimes. And the multiplayer makes the game. It is a death match paradise. It's one of the best deathmatch FPSs I've ever played. So, yeah, dissent, play it if you never have because you will not be disappointed. And by my take, most of my friends played with joysticks. I played with mouse and keyboard, and that made me better than them, I learned. I think dissent is hard to learn mouse and keyboard, but it's easier to manipulate the 3D space with that than it is with a stick.

That was my, but that took, you know, again, I played it too much. So I'm monopolizing here. Our second game, Mech Warrior 2. I feel like this is the game that comes in between your other two games. Like, you're going from mech-based 3D space shooter with a multiplayer component to something that's more mech-based and tactical to something that's tactical. Yeah, Mechore, you're steering around a – I mean, you're not controlling a battlefield. Like, you are still in a cockpit, but there's a very small number of moving pieces on that map every scenario, and you need to be acutely aware of where your allies and enemies are at every second, or you are dead after the first few missions.

It is very dependent on the right. As much of it's about building and customizing your neck before a battle as anything, making sure you've got the right equipment, the right gear for when something unexpected pops up that you're not surprised by it and you're ready. You feel so good when you prep in just the right way. It's, you know, if anybody's familiar with Battletech, the tabletop game, Mech Warrior is just a first-person version of that. And I've played most of the Mech Warrior games now, and I still think Mech Warrior 2 is my favorite.

I don't think they ever hit the balance of complexity and playability as well as they did with Mac Warrior II. Everything after got more complex. Wasn't Battletech just the robotech machines that Fossa could get a license for? So not the Valky's. I don't know the history behind Fassas licenses with them. Most of them are ground vehicles. There is aerotech that are fighters. And there's even a few transforming ones that look suspiciously like Macross, the Phoenix Hawks.

but I don't know the history there for the last year. Yeah, I thought Battle Tech was like all the support mecks and stuff that you see, like on the deck of the Macross or the SDF-1, you know, like the kind of the beige bipedal mechs with the cannons on the back and that sort of thing. There are a lot like that, but there's about a million models of them, and they're all very customizable. And so what you do is you destroy enemies, collect the parts from their destroyed mecks. Then you go to the second game, which is mech customization, managing your mercenary team,

etc then you go back in you know it's fun it's it's got that kind of excom thing where you prep for the battle you go to the battle you can reap the rewards you come back you do it all again I agree and you know triple triple uh PPCs for life uh that's that's the armament choice and turn out that infrared mode the second you got it they never turn it off because uh looks really cool it almost it's it's victory it almost has a star wars arcade look when you go to infrared and uh I like that and then finally I've been monopolizing finally you take away You take away the mecksuits, and inside it's just squishy little guys. Everybody loves worms with good reason.

I grew up playing simple artillery games on old computers, then I played, you know, scorched earth, and then I played worms. And worms is the one that has endured. Turn-based, shoot things in an arc to kill your friends, taunt them across the room, couch, competitive multiplayer. That's just what everyone needs in life. Okay, that's all I have to say about worms. It's a good game. That's weird. I like scorched earth better.

Sorry. I can say it's weird that I missed worms, given that I remember playing a lot of scorched earth with a friend of mine in school. That's because it's better. I like scorched earth is better than worms, but worms is the one that we still have. That's true. Yeah. It's really hard to play scorched earth now. Or upon worms, you can still grab for just about anything.

I've never played scorched earth, but I do like the Vondergraf Generator song. I'm pretty sure you can still buy scorched earth. off of the guy's website, as an aside. Wendell Hicken. Like the guy who made it. I think he still sells it. Wow. That's truly, I should buy that.

Randall Hicken, that's his name. Okay, so that was the personal computer side of things. I think we were just kind of on the cusp of PC gaming really, really exploding into the mainstream, which would happen a few years later. But this is when, you know, 3D accelerators and hardware-based acceleration began to sort of trickle into the market. And once that really caught hold, suddenly PCs were not limited by, you know, their graphics, cards and their systems and could really realize the potential, their potential as gaming machines, but we weren't quite there yet. Instead, 1995 was the year of consoles. I put down a list of all the consoles on the U.S. market that I could think of. I might have missed one or two, but this

might be the most saturated the American console market has ever been with choices. It utterly eclipses, like the peak of the Atari 2600 era. It makes that look like baby toys. There are so many, there were so many systems in active circulation with active publisher and developer support. In 1995, you had the Super NES, the Genesis, the 3DO, the CDI, if you want to call that a console, the Game Boy, the Jaguar, the Game Gear, the Lynx, the NeoGeo, the Virtual boy, the PC and TurboGraphic 16, the PlayStation, Saturn, and I guess if you want to consider like Sega CD, a separate platform and Jaguar CD, 32X. 32x, baby. 32X.

That was that year two. Oh, man, I forgot about that. Get PC engine, or sorry, Turbo CD in there. And that's a dozen systems being supported on the market. It was time, my friends, for a shakeout. and the first to fall would be virtual boy, deserved it as so. I think we should talk about that. This was very much in that period of sort of almost crash that hit the video game space.

Yeah, the 16-bit market got clobbered around this time as the price of carts increased, and there were just so many games and consoles out there that sales dropped off a cliff for everything except the big hits. And like economically, it was a bad time because, Japan was in the middle of its lost decade, and if I remember, the yen was still strong in 95, which means that, you know, sales overseas weren't really bringing in a lot of cash. So it was just a bad time for the companies making the games, but it was a great time if you wanted to play games. So I have a long list here of console games, and we're going to talk about a few of these. A lot of them we've already talked about in previous episodes.

There is no logical sequence to this, no alphabetical sequence. I don't know how I put this list together. I might have been stoned. No, I don't do drugs. I might have been drunk. Might have been on melatonin. I might have just been stupid. I don't know.

But here we go. Buckle in kids. This is Jeremy's unbridled id in list making. And I don't mean it as in doom. But you are doomed. Clayfighter 2. The ignition factor. Pack in time.

Not by pack and soft. The Mega Man 2x, Brandish, Metal Warriors, Kirby's Avalanche, Ogre Battle, Hagenet, Earthbound, chrono-trigger, primal rage, Dracula X, Mega Man, Booger Man, Yoshi's Island, aka Super Mario World 2, The Secret of Evermore, Donkey Kong Country 2, Breath of Fire 2, Final Fight 3, Alien Soldier, actually I don't think that one came to the U.S. Barclay shut up and jam The death and return of Superman Fantasy Star 4

Ristar Beyond Oasis Crusader of Senti Echo Jr. The Adventures of Batman and Robin X-Men 2 Clone Wars Light Crusader Comics Zone, Weapon Lord Vector Man Garfield caught in the act

Gargoyles Spider-Man separation anxiety Spot goes to Hollywood Earthworm Jim 2 Toy Story Toe Shindin'in, Jumping Flash, Rayman, Ridge Racer, Road Rush, Viewpoint, Twisted Metal, Zoop, Wipeout, Mario's Pickross, Kirby Surama 2, Donkey Kong, Lance, Street Fighter 2, Game Boys, Chicago, Sendit, 4M for Real, cannon fodder, syndicate, 5, white man can jump, flashback Atari

Carts, Return Fire, the Deadless Encounter, Crabra, Quarterback Attack with Mike Ditka, Advanced Dungeons, and Dragons, Brain Dead 13, Panicomor, Puzzle, Puzzle, FirePro Joshi, we're in the Japanese stuff here, I Cho Iniki, Galaxy, Frowline, Unah, 2, Oskah, 20% maximum, Linda, Cube, Sapphire, who put this stuff on here? Red Alarm, Pelleroboxer, Mario Class, Jack Brothers, Insmouth, no Yakata, Wario Land, Virtual Boy, and Virtual Lab. So that's how your brain works, huh? I guess. That's like a map.

I think these were kind of by platform, actually, just not alphabetical. I don't know. I make no defense here, but if you manage to follow that, Congratulations. I couldn't. Panzer Dragoon being besmirched here. I'm so sad. I understood every word, Jeremy. Okay, good. I didn't. What was that all about? It's like a peon to the, peon to the, whatever that word is.

To the lost, yeah, the lost age of video game excellence. That's so cool. Okay, anyway. This is a really good list of games. We could easily talk about these forever. I mean like puzzle bubble oh my god Even Street Fighter 2 gameboy I think is cool Herbie Dreamland 2 I mean This is a great list

You should have signed up for some of those But you didn't This would be 10 hours long This podcast I'd say time for a 24 hour live stream Of just going through 95s That would actually be kind of fun If I could

No let's not Enough drugs Kevin Bunch Tell us about Earthbound Oh boy I feel like there's not a lot I have to say about Earthbound that people can't just find out at this point.

But for me, this is a particularly... I think that's true of just about anything on this list, though. I don't know. There's Wikipedia? I feel like people don't know enough about Booger Man for their everyday life. It's a pick and flick adventure, you know. But as for Earthbound,

this game was kind of special to me because I didn't really play a lot of RPGs at this time. Like, I played Dragon Warrior because I got it for free. And I really enjoyed it. I wasn't really into sort of like sword and sorcery fantasy type settings. So I kind of bounced off of a lot of everything that came after that point. But baseball bat and psychic power fantasies. Yeah, you put me in something that was like a contemporary setting with like weird stuff and aliens and psychic powers.

And I was, I was intrigued by this. And I remember renting it a fair bit. And eventually, like, I got a copy of it for Christmas because, you know, they couldn't give these things away. My mom realized this. And I played the living daylights out of it. And so did my brother. I think he might have actually played it more than I did.

But it's like such a weird and like funny and charming game. It has a very like particular sense of humor that comes through very well in the localization. Yeah. Like it mechanically, I don't think it's super like special, but it has some like great ideas. is in there for how you handle random encounters and how you deal with random encounters when you're dramatically stronger than the enemies that I really wish that more games in the genre had taken a hint from. You can modify your consumables to upgrade their abilities, their, like, healing power.

And you do that by adding ketchup to your hamburger. So it's done in a way that's like very intuitive and extremely American. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny in that sense, because it's very much like, here's sort of a pastiche of, like, Western culture, but... Suburbia. Yeah, suburbia, seen through a very, like, particularly weird lens. Yeah, that's the only game I've ever played that lets me call my dad on the phone to this day. Yeah.

I feel like there should be more dad calling. And they'll tell you how much money he put in your bank account. Yeah. I wish my dad would still do that. I don't know. That's kind of the plot of Final Fantasy 10. That's a good point. Fair enough.

Well said. So, yeah, between this and Chrono Trigger, like, it was a good time for me as someone coming back around to RPGs. Ben, I feel like you were trying to say something in there. Yeah, I have an earthbound story. I don't, did I ever tell you the earthbound story? I don't remember. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. Is it the greatest story ever told? It is, but it's very brief. So, first of all, it's interesting that I got earthbound. I bought it. used from Blockbuster. You know, it was one of their previously rental-rented games. I used to get a lot of games.

I got Legend of Zelda link to the past that way. Some of their good stuff. But I just had the box and the cartridge, and I never had the manual, sadly. So anyway. But during, in 1996, I think it was August or September, we had this horrible hurricane called Hurricane Fran. And they came through North Carolina. And I'm in Raleigh. And, you know, we were expecting.

a hurricane to happen, but we didn't know how bad it would be inland because normally it would just blast the coast and not have much effect, you know, two, 300 miles inland. Yeah, that happens sometimes. We, you know, my brother and I were up late. I think school was preemptively canceled and I was playing video games and I was playing earthbound all through the night while, you know, this storm swirled and dumped rain on us and trees began to crash down around us. We lived in a wooded lot.

we had like acres of forest around us basically and all through the night this crashing of trees coming down while I was playing earthbound until the power went out you know finally at like 3 a.m. or something and it was just such a dramatic night and such an interesting memory because I absolutely love this game. It's one of my favorites of all time and I beat it in a really weird way later even though it's one of my favorites back then I sort of gave up on it at the time and revisited it later by dumping the save game onto an emulator and playing it on an old iMac like on my bedside with an emulator and then i finally finished it later like many many years like 2006 or something and i wrote about it on my blog at the time on vintagecomputing

dot com um anyway it's just such a interesting game that has so much i don't know if pathos is the right word but there's a lot of like you know just like the mother three is like crazy like that. There's a lot of emotion packed into it, but Earthbound also has a lot of this sort of packed in, you know, humor and emotional turns in such an unassuming-looking game with, you know, an assuming-looking setting, but it's very deep and very masterfully done. It's just one of the greatest games of all time. So I highly recommend it. Like Kevin, I was not huge into the Sword and Sorcery RPGs other than I played Dragon. Warrior a lot on the NES or something.

But this, I never got into Final Fantasy really or anything, but I loved Earthbound just because of the setting and the music is so quirky and cool. Anyway, so there's my Earthbound story. It may be the second time I've told it on Retronauts, I don't know. I don't think I've heard that one before. Okay. There you go. So well done.

Thank you for the fresh content. And speaking of fresh content, here is Jeremy talking about Brandish. So Brandish, what a weird game. You guys played it before, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So it started as a PC game in Japan. a PC-88 game, developed by Nihon Falcom, published here for Super NES by Koe, and I think

kind of widely misunderstood. Back when the Gaming Intelligence Agency had a fundraiser, they had a thing called The Gauntlet of Pain, where if they could hit certain tiers, certain goals, someone would write a game about a terrible RPG, and I signed up for brandish thinking, okay, sure. And I played it and realized, oh, this actually is not bad. This is really good. And it takes a little while to get used to the perspective, but it's not bad. It is a dungeon crawler in the purest sense. You like get dropped down into a deep pit and have to crawl your way out, fighting your way out. The weird thing about it is that your protagonist always faces forward. It's it's kind of like, what if you had tank controls? But instead of your character moving relative to the screen, the screen must moved relative to your character. So anytime you turn, the screen, the dungeon rotates 90 degrees around you. It's disorienting. I think it makes more sense in the PSP remake, the Dark Revenant, which came out like, I guess it was like 15 years later. The Dark Revenant, you know,

because it's a 3D game, it allowed the dungeon to rotate around you as opposed to just jumping 90 degrees. And it's a weird choice because, you know, like, it's a strange way to put a player into the midst of the game. But once you connect with it, it does work. And it's really good and thoughtful, like sort of a meteor version of the dungeons in East, where you, like the entire ecosystem takes place in the dungeons. So you can recover health in the dungeon. So you can recover health in the dungeon over time, but you do have to watch out because if you rest too long,

an enemy will come up behind you, find you sleeping, and kill you. It's weird to me that they have like the 90-degree rotation thing when this was a game on Super NES, which had built-in hardware-level support for rotating backgrounds. Like, did you guys not make that connection?

And I, you know, I think the game probably would be liked a lot better if it had, you know, that one feature. But basically you just have to fight your way up and there's different zones in the dungeon. Like you eventually get to a zone that is entirely dark and you have to kind of stumble your way through until you can find a light source of some sort. It's just, yeah, it's a very chewy kind of challenging, just pure combat-oriented RPG with an action element to it. Really, really good and interesting. There were several sequels. There was branded

to the planet buster, that's a sword that's so powerful. It breaks the planet. That never came to the U.S., though it did come to Super Famicom. And then there was, I think, a brandish three and maybe four that were only for PCs. And those were really late in those systems' lifespans. I mean, by the mid-90s, Japan had pretty much started to migrate over to Windows. And, you know, the homegrown PCs like the PC-98 and the X-68,000 had all started to taper off. And so these were kind of like the last men standing on the Japanese PC systems. But obviously, those have never come here. Was it on like the Marty or the 9800 or what was it on?

Like the late ones. I thought they were on PC 98. Maybe they're on the town's Marty. I don't know. Cool. I was wondering. I love Brandish. You once described it as a slipsism simulator, the world rotates around you.

And I thought that was profound. I typically did not use that line here because I've used it before. But yes, that is my very clever line. Thank you for reminding the world. No problem. You're a pretty clever guy. I think the world should be reminded whenever possible. Ah, that's an extra 50% payment on this episode for you.

He's a genius. Absolute genius. It only works once. Sorry, you blew it. Damn it. Anyway, yeah, brandish. Good, weird. Play it on PSP if you can.

but, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's, it's a, it's, it's, it's quirky and strange, but good once you get your head around it and has a great soundtrack. Anyway, let's talk about something totally different. Oh, no, it's another RPG. Jared, tell us about Krono-tricker. Yeah. We did just, we did just have a live episode about this, but bring something fresh to the table, something we wouldn't have thought of. Oh, good Lord. I doubt I can do that about Krono-tricker. I mean, this is, there are no surprises to be found in Krono-trickrower. Trigger, for those who are listening to Retronauts, none whatsoever. It's just great.

And it's wonderful. And for all the reasons you've already heard, a long time ago, I think the very first Retronauts episode about Krono Trigger was held back in the one-up days. And Scott Cherokee was a frequent contributor to that. And Scott said that what he thought of Kroner Trigger was it was like someone had taken and made a list of everything he hated in RPGs. and then took all that out and just left the good stuff. And I do think that distilled is a good way to think about Kroner Trigger.

It does do some things that at the time were amazing new ideas that hadn't been seen before, but much more it's an act of refinement. It's taking genre conventions and saying, how do we just purposefully make these the most fun, the most colorful, the most joyful, the most frightening we possibly can? And they hit a secret sauce there. I, breaking down what produced the extraordinarily successful product Turner Tricker is would be beyond the powers of anyone that couldn't interview the creators for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours.

But somehow they managed to make just about everything fun. And in a hobby that I really love, it played thousands of games over the years, I can't think of one with less tension as related to depth than Krono Trigger. It's a very accessible game with a ton of meat to it. That's fairly rare. Yeah. I love it. I think it's wonderful.

Greatest RPG of all time. Asteris. I don't know. Okay, so let's talk about something that's not an RPG. Chris Sims signed up to talk about Mega Man 7, but he's not here. So I can just say, they shouldn't have. All right, binge, tell us about Yoshi's Island, Super Mario World 2. By the way, just an aside, I think Chrono Trigger or Chrono Trigger is John Romero's favorite game, isn't it?

Like, he's always cited it as one of his favorites. That explains anachronachs or no. Was it an acronachs? Yeah. No, that was the Tom Hall's game, isn't it? Oh, okay. I wonder if John is frog in his own head cannon. Yeah.

That would explain why those are the enemies you have to fight in Dai Katana. It's probably so. Okay. Yoshi's Island, Super Mario World 2. Was that like a Yoshi's imitation right there? Yeah, that was unintentional, but it was probably. like a 40-in slip. Oh, I thought it sounded just spot on.

Awesome. So Yoshi's Island is another one of those games where this was probably the last new game I bought for the Super Nintendo because it came out fairly late. October 4th, 1995 in America, I believe, August 95 in Japan. And it's, you know, it's not late for Japan. I guess they were making games for the Super Famicom until the 98 or so, right? But in America, it felt late because a lot of people were switching over to, you know, the 32-bit consoles and stuff. 32-X, yeah. Yes.

Got to play Star Wars Arcade. Yoshi's Island is a very, for a long time, it was like the most interesting and unique Mario style, you know, Mario game. Now they've, you know, made follow-ups and remakes and stuff like that. But for a long time, just the art style, first of all, is what strikes you. because it looks like crayon drawings. And it was completely unique at the time. And it used a superfx2 chip, I believe. Like the, you know, the superfx chip first was in Star Fox, right?

Yeah. So this is like an enhancement of it that's probably faster. It can do more effects. But it was great at scaling these, you know, big, beautiful sprites and stuff like that. And so it's just a graphically beautiful, gorgeous game, colorful, fun to play. And you're riding, you're controlling Yoshi, who's, and you have baby Mario on your back. And if you get hit, baby Mario goes into a little bubble and you have a timer before you die to recover baby Mario and get him back on your back to pop the bubble. And you're, you know, collecting things.

It's sort of a collect-a-thon game in a way and platformer. kind of the original. Well, no, I guess Donkey Kong Country. Yeah. It feels even more than Donkey Kong Country, it feels like, you know, because there's so many things, so many things to collect, and it has that scoreboard at the end of every stage. And this is the first game where I was proud that I had 100% at every stage in the first world or whatever, you know, group. So were you ever able to beat the bonus stage that unlocks when you get 100% in the first world? I don't remember, but I do remember beating this game and loving it so much that I played it through, which was rare for, like, focus. You know, I've recently found out that I have ADHD, like, I got diagnosed maybe last year, and, like, that explains, like, you know, fidgeting every time Jeremy talks pacing around, you know, looking away, losing interest.

As long as you're saying it's a, it's a you problem and not a mea problem. Yeah, it's a diagnosed disorder. It's called retronauts disorder. so but this is one of those games that held my attention you know that's a rare thing it held my attention all the way through there's few games like that like katamari damasi is a game where i sat down and i played through the whole thing the first time i played it um rampage on the nes for some reason i played through that probably you had infinite continues but i played through that and this is one of those games where i just basically played through it like just nonstop until i was done and it was just a beautiful wonderful game i will add that i have a a three-year-old, and this is one of the games he really likes having me play, I assume, because he thinks it's very, like, colorful and very fun to look at. And also he loves Yoshi, so that's also a factor. If they said, Wario, he'd be set.

This is on that short list of video games that if you just say the name, I smile. I just feel happy inside when Yoshi's Island comes up in conversation. It has really good sound effects, by the way. They're really satisfying, like, when you collect. coins and hop and stuff and pound the ground and also the music is really fun and I think about the music pops into my head all the time and it's a great it's just a great game it's one of the best super nes games anyway yeah you mentioned the super fx two chip and you know one of the things that really stands out about yoshi's island is the fact that they had this powerful 3d processor

co-processor much more powerful than the super nes CPU in the cartridge And unlike all the other games that made use of FX or FX2, they didn't use it for 3D elements. They used it for rotating and scaling sprites. So it maintains this hand-drawn look, but it has these wild effects that still look hand-drawn, but also manage to fill the screen and do all kinds of stuff that couldn't have been done before. And I feel like that sort of thing is pretty commonplace now because everyone picked up on this idea. of, oh, we can scale and rotate sprites. And, you know, you've got everything from, like, vanilla wear marionette characters to

just people abusing the idea of scaling and rotating sprites. But here it all feels very consistent. And it's always very surprising. You know, they throw all kinds of stuff at you, whether it's just like big guys who come out of the lava and chase you around or giant doors that close or what is those like big slabs that fall forward into the screen in the, in the dungeons, and you have to avoid getting squashed. But then you'll do things like fight a raven on the surface of a moon, and the moon is barely bigger than the screen, and you're rotating the entire universe as you

run around, like your perspective on the universe, as you run around the planetoid, trying to get a one up, you know, get one over on this raven by like punching things through the planet to pop it on the reverse side of the planet. It's just, it's so creative and so inventive. And even though all the bosses are just bigger versions of standard enemies, they always do something interesting with that. It's not like, you know, some of the Castlevania games where it's like, here is a skeleton, but now it is really big.

It's like, here is that cute little puffy guy, but now he's huge and you have to like attack him until he breaks into little pieces and then you take out the little guys and things like that. it's just yeah it's so it's so pure and joyful and people do complain about the collectathon element of it but you don't have to collect everything to beat the game however fun without it yeah however if you really want to like really go for it get all the flowers all the red coins and all the stars and all the stages and all the stages in a single world you unlock bonus stages which are unbelievably hard like the first one i've never been

Eaton. Poochee ain't stupid. I can tell you the name of it because you have to ride around on that goddamn dog and you don't have any direct control over him. So it's kind of like the character that you rely on for that stage is an agent of chaos who makes things harder for you and you have to like plan all your platforming and action around him. There's also the fact we didn't, we didn't mention the fact that instead of going with kind of like the standard Mario attacks because you're Yoshi, Obviously, you can eat enemies or spit them out, but you have the ability to chuck eggs. Like, Yoshi has an amazing egg production capacity, and eat an enemy, pop out an egg, just, you know, you can carry six rounds at a time, and there's a targeting cursor, and you can choose how you target, but you're throwing things, doing bank shots, and that factors into a lot of finding the secrets, defeating the bosses. it just, it's a much slower-paced Mario game and kind of more complex in terms of its interface. But it justifies that by just giving you a lot to do and making it always interesting.

And the visuals definitely help with that because every world has its own kind of visual style and is full of little fun surprises, like the monkeys eating coconuts who will, you know, throw things at you, but then you can steal a coconut and then spit seeds like a machine gun at the monkeys and they'll get mad and run off. Yeah, I love this game. The gameplay is incredible. I love that mechanic of the eggs. Like, I just loved it immediately.

You can just, it feels powerful for some reason to take it, like, swallow an enemy and pop them into an egg, like, instantly. And I like also the fact that I think in this game you can sort of, can't you touch some of the enemies, like the shy guys without getting hurt? I can't remember. Like, it's more like you can kind of push him around or push you, or is that? There's some enemies that you can. You can manipulate to a certain degree.

But for the most part, it's kind of standard platformer rules where if you bump into a shy guy, it's going to mess you up and you'll lose Mario. Maybe you can stand on his head or something. Is that what I'm thinking about? No, because you've got big old Yoshi clodhoppers. You've got gigantic shoes. So anything you jump on, it goes and pops. Oh, yeah. So I'm thinking of something else.

But this is like. You're thinking of Mario, too. Yeah, I'm just thinking this is where my brain was going. I remember it now. I just like the fact that they put shy guys in this game from Super Mario Bros. There's so many variants, too. Yeah. There's like the little guys with the spears, and you have to watch out for the spears because they're kind of unpredictable.

Yeah. I'm also thinking about pushing the rock around. You can push this rock to get places. It's really cool. I love this game, but it feels like a bonus. And I'm hearing the sound effect in my head as you do that. Yeah, this feels like a bonus game. Nintendo never had to make.

And it probably cost them a ton of money to develop it and make those chips and everything. And it's just like, it's like Super Nintendo, beautiful bonus extra. It kind of makes me think of when they made Super Mario Brothers, the idea was we've got the stock Famicom NES ROM. This is what you can do on this system with no enhancements, no supplemental hardware. Let's put everything into this. And then, you know, a few months later, they came out with The Legend of Zelda, which was, an entirely new peripheral that had all these new capabilities. This kind of feels like they were saying,

let's show what we can do with two-dimensional gaming, and then in six months we're going to put out Super Mario 64, and that's going to take things in a totally new direction. So, yeah, it does feel like that kind of final statement by Nintendo, like we're kind of, you know, making our definitive effort here. in this style of technology, this mode of technology. And as you can expect, you know, they poured decades of experience into it and created something amazing. Indeed.

Wow, Yoshi's Island. Okay. Let's talk about... I have to force myself to stop talking about it. We can move on. Let's see. Wow, there's a lot of comic book games that Chris Sims was going to talk about, but he's not around. So, wow, Kevin, you've already gone through your list, haven't you? I went in heavy on the arcade games. You did. Okay. Well, I guess it's over to Jared now to talk about Fantasy Star 4.

Yeah. Because we haven't talked about enough RPGs. Exactly. I mean, we're going to at Krono-trigger. So for the console war purpose, we've got to have the best RPG on the Genesis as well. And I do think that Fantasy Star 4, while well-recognized, in lists and pantheons throughout the internet, as time has passed

as kind of a fading star, because Fantasy Star 4 is much, much, much more dependent than many RPGs on playing its predecessors to fully enjoy it. Fantasy Star 4 is very specifically a game

made for people who play Fantasy Star 1 and 2. It is the third part of a trilogy. The culmination of a story wraps everything up thematically. It ties in to part three a very little bit. But the team that made this was really making the final game in the trilogy. So that number four is often during this leading.

When you play it now, you'll see a competently done Genesis RPG with decent music. And if you play it for an hour, that's all you're going to get from it. However, if you play Fantasy Star 1 and enjoy it, and Fantasy Star 2, and enjoy it, then this game is a series of fan service delights and not in the, you know, bad skirt flipped up. I just saw your underwear way. But in the good, wow, that's just a resounding retelling of something I already enjoyed that came out a different surprising way.

Like when you play Mega Man 9 and you're jumping from disappearing platforms and suddenly they do something you didn't expect because the developers were clever and they want to fool you. It kind of has that vibe to it, comparing it to one and two. but in an RPG way. I'm probably completely blowing selling this to you. My point is that it's real well put together. It's decently translated.

There are definitely some problematic moments in it that you'll know when you get to them. Nevertheless, it feels like the five-year love letter that it was. It took five years for the Fantasy Star 2 team to complete Fantasy Star 4. It's a good game. Yeah, and it is just seeping with love. love. And that's what I really love about it. This is one I got from Blockbuster, another one I think, previously viewed, and I loved it. And I wasn't, like I said, I wasn't big into these Japanese RPGs at the time.

I didn't play through the whole thing, but I remember enjoying what I played of it. It felt like a solid theme. Was the fact that it was space theme? Did that help? Yeah, maybe that was it, you know? That would do it. Yeah. I have Fantasy Star 1 on the master system, and it's pretty cool, too.

I think I've played that. Yeah, one is good. Two is better, and four is the best. That's really cool. And if you're my one friend in high school, you love three the best for some reason. I don't want to be that guy. There's always that guy, you know. There's always one.

Yeah. That's not acceptable. Liking Fantasy Star 3 is a crime against humanity. I don't think I'd go that far Oh no I wouldn't really either But I like to say things I don't mean Because it's better for the podcast Extremes

Hyperbole never hurt anyone Well actually it did But that's not in this particular instance I hope So binge why don't you take the lead On talking about a role-playing game And tell us about Light Crusader

Oh yeah Light Crusader is cool The funny thing about this is I don't think I've played it until we, you know, there was like this Sega 30th anniversary collection of Genesis that you bought us a copy of, Jeremy, and we all talked about it for some reason. Did I? That was so nice of me. Yeah, it was nice. And I still have it. It's great. So Light Crusader was on that collection, and it's a Genesis game. It came out in 95, obviously, October for North America, May for Japan. And it was, I don't know, I was developed by Treasure. Yeah. We developed a Gunstar hero. and Dynamite Hiddy.

And, but it's, you know, it's an isometric role-playing game, and it feels a lot like, it's not a rogue-like. It feels like it should be. It's like, it feels a little bit like Diablo in a way before Diablo. Although, Diablo may, what year did Diablo come out? Maybe of 95 even. I think it was 96. Yeah. So it wasn't before Diablo, but it feels like a rare, deep.

I don't know. almost Western-style feeling role-playing game to me instead of Japanese because it's, I don't know, it's a fantasy sword in combat and, you know, you've got a spell system with fire, water, earth, and wind, and you kind of solve puzzles and jump a little bit, I think. It has some platforming elements that are frustrating and isometric stuff, but I just remember, like, I was just trying it randomly just to play the collection, but I actually ended up playing it for several hours, which. which is another one of those unique and rare things. So that's why I know it's either a good game or it's something that happened to attract me to it, you know. And it was mostly, it's like an action RPG kind of. I think that's what attracted me to it.

It wasn't just like random battles. It has the, you know, the action element, as in you move around and attack people with your sword, kind of like Zelda or something. And then it's got the RPG leveling. and that's what it is. Hmm. Yep.

Good game. I still should play this someday. It's very underrated. You can save. I think the saving system was fairly generous, too, which is another reason I liked it. It wasn't, like, extremely punishing. Like, you have to, you die and you restart at the beginning or something. You didn't need a typewriter ribbon or anything.

Yeah. You got to just, you can make some progress on it, chip away at it, and kind of get through it. Yeah. Someday I will play that game. But it won't be today because today I need to tell you about the 1995 video game that has probably had the most enduring legacy of them all. And that is Mario's Picross. So no one played this game at the time. I don't feel like the Picross series really caught on until Sudoku took. took off, you know, like 15 years ago. And then all of a sudden people were like, oh, wait, there's this thing that's kind of like that Nintendo makes, and they've been making these, and they're actually really good. And they're more varied and interesting than Picross or than Sudoku. Why don't we play these?

And so now the developer, Jupiter, makes like 20 Picross games per Nintendo platform, and they just keep churning them out. And they become increasingly complex. They've got like mega picross and 3D pickross and stuff. And I don't know about that. But in its original incarnation, Mario's pickross for Game Boy, it is basically picture crossword. So you have a grid and there are numeric values in each column and row. And those indicate how many blocks are colored in in that rower or column.

and the way the numbers are clustered, you might have like three, one, two. That means there is a block of three consecutive colored blocks, then a standalone single colored block, and then another collection of two contiguous colored blocks. So the challenge then is to figure out where in the row or the column do you place this? And when you're working with a 10 by 10 grid, it's usually pretty easy unless you have one row that's just like a one and then you know where

the hell is that going to be so you have to kind of start from the bigger more complex things and logic it out and say well okay so we've got the three one two that's six total spaces but also the spaces in between that adds up to eight if there are 10 lines on this row that means that one of the blocks of the three has to be, you know, this specific block based on just the way the numbers fall. And then you start to cross compare that with the columns and adjacent rows and so forth and slowly, steadily just sort of math your way through the grid. And it sounds maybe confusing or boring or mathematical, which it kind of is, but it's like the only way that math is actually fun on the planet. It's the one good application of math because you're making Mario

pictures. You're creating Gumba Sprites with math. What a great idea. Anyway, so there was a sequel to this a couple of years later and now I don't know how many Picross games there are on 3DS or yes, 3DS and Switch. And lots of people make Picross clones. Konami created their own clone system where it's all like creating Konami sprites and so forth. There's color pickross and so on and so forth. But the original Mario's Pickross, still a great game. I do think it was probably at its best on 3DS because of the touchscreen element and the larger resolution.

But you know what? Game Boy, still good times. The series probably shouldn't have gone on to become a sort of mainstay of the medium. but it did, and I'm happy for that. Yeah, I'm actually kind of happy too, man. I got a shriveled lima bean where the puzzle-solving part of my brain should be. But I really, really like Peacross for the same reason I like Mind Sweeper. It's kind of like you said, you're doing good things with math, and that's very, very difficult to find in life.

But it's the kind of game that the Game Boy was sort of made for. And I really love that we get to keep having them on console. I don't need newer and better P-Crosses every gen, maybe, but I do want a P-Cross every gen so that I can play it on that hardware. That's really the main thing. I don't want to pull anything old out and play it because I'm lazy and don't want to plug it in it anymore. Wonderful game.

Was it on the Game Boy? Yeah, was it. Mario's P-Cross was originally on Game Boy. Because I played the Super N-E-S version, you know, Super Famicom version a lot on, was that in 95 as well? I don't know. I think that came later. It's the game I've played the most on the Nintendo Switch

Super NES thing. For some reason, I've played Mario's Picross like crazy. I love it. I am a bona fide minesweeper addict, and I love Pickross for the same reasons. Yeah, it's a great game. Mario's Super Picross, 95 in Japan. Wow.

Technically counts, yes. But Mario's Pickross was March 85. March, 95. March, September. Yeah. September. So there you go. Game Boy First. Wow. We all know that's how it works. Benj, I know you've been dying to talk about balls all episodes, so we're going to let you wrap this up, bring it home.

Tell us about Vecterman, the game that is all about balls, okay? One, am I not allowed to say the T word? No, you are not. Because that's not what these are. Vector Man is another game I got a blockbuster, believe it or not. one of these used previously rented games and man it blew me away i got i think i got this you know probably 96 um even though it came out in october 95 in america and um i bought a used genesis from my friend in high school in 96 like for 20 bucks or something i don't remember

it's a pretty good deal and it was a genesis too and i needed software for it so i bought like Gauntlet 4 at Toys R Us. They still had some games at that time. And I got Vector Man and, man, Vector Man. Vector Man is really cool because it has these, you know, dynamite-hitty style. Jointed Sprites is what I would call it. Yeah, jointed sprite thing that's also in the game we talked about earlier that's slipped my mind by a treasure that's the Gunstar Heroes has some enemies like that. There are these balls that move around giving a smooth.

pseudo-3D animated look to the graphics. Yeah, I think people... Not really 3D. Really kind of started to see that employed a lot by Konami in the 80s. With games like Contra, you'd have like an alien

and the body would be a stationary background, but then it would have arms that would like swing around and attack you. And those would be sprites that were just kind of strung along a line so that they could rotate and move at different speeds to create the sense of like,

here is an undulating tube or something. Yeah. So it's, yeah, Contra had that, Life Force, Gradius, some other games that escaping at the moment. Streets of Rage 2, I think, had it for like the alien mini-boss. Oh, okay. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. So it was kind of a popular technique, and Sega basically said, we're going all in.

Yeah. We're going to make some tubes out of balls. Developed by Blue Sky Software, which is cool. And it's just, it's a, it's, I forgot to mention it's a platform game where you run around and you jump and you shoot, you know, you're shooting. It's a shooting platformer. I don't know if you call it run and guns. I don't know. But yeah, it's great.

Yeah, it has a, it has a really good sense of atmosphere, which is surprising because like the character is just a bunch of green spheres. But there's something kind of alien and imposing about a character like that, sort of inhuman, that actually really. fits the Sega Genesis, which had this sort of cold mechanical sound and looked to it like a very specific palette. Like, to me, the iconic Genesis games are less like Sonic the Hedgehog and more ones that are like, this is, you know, a video game where you are in a hell made of robots. That just, I don't know, that just fits the tech. It's dystopian, set in a dystopian future in the year 2049, where Earth has become a toxic

wasteland. So it's like the music, this is what struck me. This is the first game I'd ever heard with a techno soundtrack. I remember that really struck me when I got out, when I got it, because that was like, oh, this sounds like my Mortal Kombat movie soundtrack. Yeah, it was like a new, you know, fashionable thing at that time, that kind of music being popular and used in things like this. Anyway, so, yeah, it's a very.

environmental. It's got great sound effects too, great sound, great frame rate, smooth. Every game I love has a great frame rate. I hate choppy games. That's the same with Mario World to Yoshi's Island. It's just, you know, the Super FX, too, makes everything butter smooth. And in this case, Vector Man is really smooth, all of the transformations and motions and everything. Great. A year after playing Vector Man, I went to see The Rock, the Sean Connery movie in theaters. And I thought that those big glass balls, that they were carrying around that were full of VX gas looked just like Vector Man. The whole movie came to take me out of the film. I kept getting tickled

because I was like, no, don't break Vector Man! They should have done a puzzle Bobble vector man crossover where there's like a monster ergai made out of the balls

from Puzzle bubble. Anyway, they all hatch, and then Yoshi spits them out and everything's connected, man, I'm telling you. I never got to spend too much time with Vector Man

back at the day. I remember it was a game that I mostly saw you know, at kiosks for the Sega Genesis. It was like one of their big, I feel like this was their flagship game for the 95, like Christmas season, that and Toy Story.

But I really did appreciate it once I did get to go back and play it because you've talked about it. It does play very smoothly. It doesn't really look like anything else. I think the closest analog you could make is like Donkey Kong country, but even then, it does, it very much has its own visual style and appeal. And I don't know.

I know there's a Vector Man, too. I know there's other big Genesis games that came out in 96 and I think even a few in 97. But this feels like sort of the last big hurrah for the system. It was. And it was a good note to start winding down on. It was definitely, it felt like a late era game at the time. I remember it feeling like, and it was great. It did feel late era.

That year they were trying to sell us so many. different things that it got confusing, but Vector Man was a good one to try to sell us as opposed to, you know, the 32-X. I would say that it's kind of the Genesis as equivalent to Yoshi's Island. I think that's totally fair, yeah. Better Rye Star, which also was 95. It's a showpiece for sure. It's all connected, man.

Or Yoshi's Island with Vector Man made out of eggs, that could have been another crossover. They missed. Oh. You know, the sky is wide open now that Sega and Nintendo's, would like to team up. Yeah. They'll probably get RZS to create it, and no one wants that. You know, maybe if the Super NES, it had blast processing, we could have gotten Vector Man

made out of Yoshi eggs. What could have been? What could have been indeed? Well, we'll have to leave it at that just mourn the future that never was, or the past that never was. Anyway, mourn something. Just be sad. That's the message of this episode of Retronauts.

I totally feel feeling bummed out. All the joy All the rain Yep Benj it's spreading You brought it It's like a virus I'm glad

I hope I brought all of you down This episode And made you feel miserable Mission accomplished We started as mummies And we finished even more dead Look at that You hear that thunder?

I do Man yeah This storm outside I'm happy we haven't had a power out But it was It was wild Because it was There was no rain

Nothing just kind of gloomy And there was a crack of thunder that shook the house and sounded like, you know, a bomb detonating. And immediately it began pouring rain. It was like straight out of corny Hollywood. I've never seen something like that before. It was like all of us just jumped in shock at the sound of this thunder. And then all of a sudden, it was just, you know, biblical deluge outside, wild. But even even the weather is sad about

1995 in video gaming, which is a shame. It shouldn't be, because there was a lot of great stuff, even if there was no Vector Man made of Yoshi eggs. So anyway, gentlemen, thank you for your time. We've only barely touched on the world of 1995, but hopefully in the past three episodes, we've kind of provided some context of what the world of video games like, what the world of video games was like 30 years ago, 40 years ago,

even 50 years ago and how different and in many ways not so different it is today. So thank you for your time starting with Chris Sims who cannot be here today. Thanks for nothing, Chris.

We should do a 95 part two with Chris. We're not going to do that, but I'll make sure that next year we call him in for 96 and he can really just go to town on that. We have a director's cut.

So if you have enjoyed this episode, and it hasn't made you too sad to want to listen to more episodes like it. Well, that's great because there are so many episodes that you can listen to of Retronauts. We are a podcast that has been running for more than a decade, multiple episodes most weeks, if you count the bonus stuff, which you should because it's good. If you subscribe to Retronauts, we are Patreon-supported, subscription-powered. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. A $3 monthly bid donation, support, subscription, whatever you want to call it, get you access to all of our episodes a week early

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I used to say that's an amazing amount of content for the cost of a Starbucks latte, but now Starbucks Lattees cost $8. So that makes Retronauts even more remarkable a deal. Absolutely go to Retronaut or Patreon.com slash Retronauts and subscribe and, you know, just have a normal coffee instead of a latte. It's good for you and good for the economy. And good for us, too. It lets us make more episodes like these. and to pay contributors, such as you guys, where can we find you?

I'll let you fight it out to see who goes first. That was me. I got in first. You did. You did get in first. It's like the buzzer on Jeopardy. So I'm Benj Edwards. You can find me online. I mostly hang out on Blue Sky these days. I am at Benjedwards.com, which is not at all confusing, but that's my name.

And, you know, that website also has my stuff on it and stuff. And I'm at, I write about AI for Ars Technica right now, so don't shout at me. It's not my fault. I didn't make it happen. But it's an interesting world. So, hey, we forgot to talk about 2005. Did you? No, Bob already did an episode on 2005.

Oh, okay. Bob likes to do the modern century, the modern millennium. He is a millennial, so we let him do the millennial episodes. Yeah, I'm right on the verge. Not us Gen Xers, though. Yeah. Hey, I'm a millennial. I'm an older millennial.

You're an exineal. A xenial. Yeah, I always thought I was a Gen Xer growing up. Before millennial with the old man brain of a Gen Xer. So, okay, binge, that's where we can find you, making sound effects and buzzers and stuff. Kevin, what about you? Where can we find you on the Internet? Well, when I don't have Gen Xer on Wii, I can be found on Blue Sky.

I don't remember seeing. Gen X or On Wee. Was that, was that published by Nintendo? I think that one was a PC engine one there. On Wii? I'm on Blue Sky at Atari Archive.org, which is also my website. It is also the name of my book. You can find that on Limited Run Games in Amazon, Atari Archive Volume 1.

That, in turn, is a spinoff of my video series on YouTube, where I'm going to through the Atari 2,600 library in chronological order and delving into the history and context of every single one of these releases in the book is a greatly expanded take on the first two years of the 2600's life. Very much recommend it. I might be biased, but check it out and check out my other work. And Jared. Yeah, hi, I'm Jared, and I'm unemployed. but when I'm not out there uselessly banging my head

against yet another application, I am writing things for IGN right now fairly regularly, and you can find a lot of my work over there at the moment. I also do the top 100 games podcast, that's a real thing, and a lot of fun. And finally, you know, you can find me on Blue Sky, threads, or Instagram as Petty, comma, Jared, and that's spelled C-O-M-M-M-A.

So P-E-T-T-Y, C-M-M-M-A, J-A-R, ED. And I'm just the lovely human being to follow us. And finally, I'm very excited. You guys get paid. Wait, what? What was that earlier? Yeah, everyone who appears on Retronauts should invoice about it. I didn't know that. I thought this was a known thing. I had no idea. I'm so excited. You've been doing it free this whole time. Oh, yeah. Totally. I'm not getting to keep track of who invoices. I just assume people invoice and I'll pay it. And that's, I'm probably paying people who are. on the show, they just send me invoices and are like, hey, Jeremy, okay, sure. Okay, I'll send it off. It's great. No, yeah, but all seriousness, um, thank you very much for having me. This is a precious place for me. And any time I get invited to be on is really special. So, appreciate it. Thanks. Well, thanks for being on. I miss working with you. I miss work with you. Thank you for forcing me to do this. Absolutely. Yeah. We're, we're going to drag you in. Miserable. Anyway, um, finally, you can find me,

the jackass rodeo ringmaster of retronauts was that what it was called the jackass rodeo you called yourself yeah you called it the jackass rodeo once that's a that's a Jerry may perish originally that's an old timer yep it just popped into my head

I remember Chris Kohler saying so it's a that's lived for eternity in the back of my brain oh wait no that that one was different you don't want to bring that one up You should cut that from your notes. All right, sure thing. So anyway, yeah, you can find me on Blue Sky as Jay Parrish, J-P-A-R-I-S-H, Blue Sky Social.

You can find me making stuff at limited rungames.com. Currently, I'm putting together books, like a Chonte Strategy Guide, finishing that one up to get Matt Boson's approval. Hooray. Also some other stuff that I can't talk about. I'm always here on Retronauts. Well, not always, but often here on Retronauts. And I'm always on my YouTube channel, which is called Jeremy Parrish. You can find me there, publishing books, doing other things.

And I finally started to get some of my websites back online. So you could go to SIG-Eiden.com and see articles about the SG-1000, because I know you love it. So there you go. Anyway, that's me. That's them. That's us. That's the show. And that was the years in review, review.

We're done now. So please join us again in like six months to get started on that. next round. Hooray. Good times. Thanks, gentlemen, and thanks listeners, and

please look forward to another Retronauts episode in a week. And I think I'm hosting that one, too. So there's no escape. Let's see. Endless cycle.

No escape for the princess this time. Yes, we're talking about the best RPG of 1996 next week. So please join us. Until then, please don't join

us. Please go do other things. and try not to be too sad about Vecterman never being made of Yoshiags. Thank you.