Retronauts - 717: The Worst Games You've Ever Played (And How to Save Them)

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

Jeremy Parish, Diamond Feit, Stuart Gipp, and Kevin Bunch try to bring a little light into the world as they talk about terrible video games—not by heaping scorn upon them, but by envisioning a better reality where they turned out to be pretty OK. 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, wow, these video game nerds are angry. It is not 713. It's 700 something. 17, 700, edge of 700 teen. I don't know. Anyway, it's a retronauts episode. I'm Jeremy Parrish. It's still pretty early in the morning here in the United States of A. And I have people who are also with me connecting at various times in their existences. Please introduce yourselves. Let's start from here in the U.S. of A and sweep eastward. until we end up all the way around the globe. Who else is in this time zone saying, Uh, not nearly caffeinated enough. It's Kevin Bunch. That's what the giant sonic mug is for, my friend. It is the size of my skull, and it has enough coffee to caffeinate me for at least an hour.

And over in the United Kingdom. Yes, hello, the kingdom. It's me, Stuart Chip. And this episode invalidates the premise of my book, so we'll have to be poled, certainly. Alas. But at least it's a tax write-off. That's true. That's always better than actually making money.

Actually, according to the fabulously wealthy, it really is. But I think you have to have the money first before you can really enjoy the benefits of a tax write-off. And then finally, bringing us up at the tail end of the tail end of... of the day. Hello, this is Diamond Fight, and today we're going to find out how uncanny can sometimes be a slur. Wow, is that the new... Oh, sorry, I shouldn't have said that out loud. Hey.

Yeah, that was rude. Please bleep that, Greg. It's Scarlet Witch on the phone. That's going to make it seem so much worse if you bleep it. That's true. Okay, maybe leave it. I don't know. Is it really a slur if that group doesn't even exist in reality?

I don't know. It's weird. Anyway, we shouldn't be using slurs no matter what. Not even for these games. These are games that deserve slurs, but we're going to rise above that. The premise of this episode, this is the worst games we've ever played, parentheses, and how they could be redeemed. This is not your typical people being angry about video games on the internet. because there's way too much of that.

It's extraordinarily toxic, and it's just bad. This is not that. And this is not, despite the intro, this is not bagging on the angry video game nerd either. It's actually bagging on the people who watch the angry video game nerds amusing, groundbreaking videos over the past 20 years, and say, oh, this comedy bit, this must be a factual opinion. I am going to take this received information that someone told me as a joke and internalize it as fact and forever feel that these video games he made jokes about are, in fact, terrible and possibly equivalent to a giant bucket of vomit. Gentle listeners, the angry video game nerd is a comedy show. The things that he says are rooted in some level of truth, but not fully truthful or factual. Some of the games, many of the games that the Angry Video Game Nerd has talked about and made jokes about are, in fact, quite entertaining. And, you know, after a decade of posting videos about NES games and anytime I cover something on YouTube, that was a topic of an Angry Video Nerd video skit, I would say, I get all kinds of responses that are just regurgitating his jokes and his, his,

comedy as fact and it's it's discouraging so this is this is the antidote to that this is this is the antibody stewart please do go and listen to the episode where i interviewed james ralph he's a charming man he's not angry in the slightest he's a lovely lovely man he's uh very detached from this whole thing i believe he's very he's very much a work guy and i think he's just about his family he doesn't really get angry about dr jekyll and mr hyde maybe he did when he was seven but it's all the performance, you know, as Jeremy says. But he's a lovely, lovely man. Yeah, we've broken K-Fave for James Rolf now, and I apologize for that, Mr. Rolf.

No, no, it's fine. Sometimes it needs to happen. After 20 years, it's finally time to draw back the curtain and reveal the reality of old video games. Some of them are kind of bad. But even within the bad games, there is the truly terrible games. There is still a germ of hope, a potential forbid game. This episode is a savaging and a salvaging. We are going to talk about video games that we find genuinely bad, but also, stop and ask, how could this have been better? How could it have

been better? And you know, the reasons for bad video games are myriad. I don't think anyone, aside from maybe, you know, what's his face? Tukashi, Takeshi. Katano, director? Yes, yes, be Takeshi. I don't think anyone has ever sat out to make a genuinely bad video game. B. Takeshi did with Takeshi no, Chosenjo, but that was kind of a bit also.

There was that pen and telegame, but that never came out. Smoke and Mirrors, that was kind of parrida desert bus. And maybe the guy who did Hong Kong 97, I can't remember his name off the top of my head, but that game is, it feels like it was intentionally bad. Yeah, that's a thing. Like, it's actually, I

kind of hard to make a genuinely bad video game. Like Penn and Teller's video game, it's still amusing. It's like, it's so horrible that you, you kind of have to laugh at it. And the same with Takeshino Cho Senjo. Like, the, the things you have to do in that game are so audacious and so beyond the pale, like seeing actual karaoke and sit and wait for, I don't know how long an hour for something to happen. It's, it's hilarious. It's genuinely just like, oh, this is, this is kind of clever. No, bad video games back in the day happened generally because there were very few people working on that video game. They had little time, little money, as they say in Final Fantasy Tactics. There just wasn't the opportunity to sit down and say, what if we playtested

this? What if we sat down and came up with a really good design concept? What if we actually made a good video game. A lot of times it was just, hey, our studio needs some money so that we don't go out of business. Let's just put this thing together that we were assigned. We've got four weeks to do it. And they gave us, you know, pizza for a weekend. And that's our pay. Let's just go. And yes, those games did not turn out well. But you look at things like if infamously bad in ES games, quote unquote bad, like Jaws or, you know, some of those LJN games, like Friday to the 13th. And you look at them and you're like, oh, the people who made this game were trying to do something and it didn't succeed because, again, they had four weeks to make this game.

But there were some ideas here. There were some ambitions. And so this conversation is really about us looking at some of those games, games that we have played and personally found execrable and say, yes, thank you. It's the one thing I can do this morning. And just, you know, step back and say, how could this not have been that way? How could this have gone right? And because, you know, we're just amateurs sitting here, armchair quarterbacking video game design, maybe it's going to come off as pompous or condescending. But that's a risk I'm willing to take because I'm that way on the Internet every single day.

So please, let's get started. I've been jabbering for quite a bit. So I'm going to kick it over to Diamond to kick it off because you have put your first game in the background of your Zoom chat. What do you mean? These are just here, I'm just here with all my friends and family. Nintendo's favorite polycule. That's right. Dam is just thinking out with their friends.

They were a good time. No. I believe it or not, here in Japan, I do not have this many white friends. Not even, not even among English speakers, so I have this many white friends. So this is the, please explain what we are talking about since no one listening to this as an audio podcast can hear. Yes. My first choice, and I picked mine chronologically, just to be extra, my first choice of the evening is anticipation. supposedly Nintendo's first video board game, according to the box, which also has a picture of

some extremely white 80s people, oh, I should add extremely white 80s adults, and that was part of the pitch. Like, this is a game that not only is it for everyone, it's the idea like, oh, you and your adult friends get together and play this at a party somehow. So that was kind of, you know, but for me as a kid, I was like, oh, maybe this would be a way I could play games with my family because I was like the primary video game. player of the household. I was like, oh, what if I get this kind of game?

It looks okay. Maybe we'd all play it together. And it never reached that point because when I played it, I was like, no, this is awful. I don't want to play this ever again with, you know, with an enemy, let alone a family member. But I mean, it was developed by Rare, Limited. It was. And it has some banging music. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's, this is a case, I would say, unlike some of the ones I've picked today. It's not a poorly made game. I think it's just some aspects of it were poorly thought out. And thus, when you play this video board game, immediately you're struck by, boy, this is just not a good board game. It's not a board game at all. I don't want to play this board game ever again. That's the problem. Yeah, it's trying to be, if I remember correctly, like, win, lose, or draw, plus also a guessing game, plus also trivial pursuit. It's just taking some. several things that were sort of in the atmosphere at the time, the cultural sphere, and saying,

what if we did all of these at the same time on an 8-bit NES? And let's use all of our memory on the music. Yeah, definitely the board itself looks like the board of True Pursuit. And the gameplay is definitely drawn from Pictionary or Win-Lose or Draw. I would say probably Win-Lose or Draw more than anything because that was on TV at the time. That was pretty big that its celebrities up there, you know, drawing. But, of course, though point of those games, Pictionary, Win-Lose-A-Draw, is that you play with people,

and the people draw the thing. You know, you show them a card, and the card says hemorrhoids, and they're like, hmm, how do I draw a picture of hemorrhoids? How do you draw a picture of hemorrhoids? I would just draw a small butt and put some dots on the butt and draw an arrow going into the butt. It's like, okay, what are these dots inside the butt? And so I would probably say hemorrhoids.

Is hemorrhoids actually one of the things in the game? game, because I want to play it now if it is. I hope not because I can't spill hemorrhoids. We'll get back to that later. You're thinking of the sequel, Ascissipation. Nice, nice. When you play anticipation, the computer does all the drawing. And at the easier levels, it's dots.

You see dots on the screen, which means basically the computer's playing, connect the dots for you, and you have to guess what the picture is. At the upper levels, the dots disappear. But it's still the same animation of a little cartoon pencil going around. thing. It's all one color. And to me, it's like, okay, I understand probably it would be very hard to work out an NES game where it's like, oh, one player's going to draw on the screen and the other points have to guess, because if you're all looking at the same screen, then everyone can see the prompt. So you have to like come up with some sort of like, okay, everyone, close your eyes, I guess. But if you're going with this route, if you're going to go with the route of the

computer's going to draw the pictures, why not have actual pixel art or some sort of, you image that appears and disappears or somehow morphed or or uncovered slowly. Instead, you just get this very basic line drawing going around the screen. And, you know, some of them are okay, but some of them are just nonsense, you know, especially some of the ones that are just called, I think it's miscellaneous or popery. They're like clever, like they're like phrases, but they're like really weird phrases. I know one of them is, um, I look this up. One of them is clever clogs. Yeah, it's British. That's the thing. They're selling this in America and expect American

kids in the 80s to have the first clue about British sling. Yeah, all right. Clever Cloggs. What I'm hearing from this is that anticipation is due for a Switch 2 remake that addresses all of these issues. You could use the mouse. You can use the same cover. I have a question for Diamond. In this game, not only are you watching these very slow drawings and sitting in front of a TV with people who can see the same answers as you. But then you also have to input the answers, incredibly fiddly with the controller. Yes. Basically, if you remember the old arcade games when, you know, you got a high score and you

have to put your name on the list, a lot of game, a lot of those arcade games just have give you a list of the alphabet, like A through Z, and you push the joystick or scroll a wheel or something, and you're just pushing a cursor up and down this line to enter, you know, three letters, your initials. That doesn't work so well when you're trying to type in one, even two full English words.

And you don't have a lot, it's timed, of course. You do not have a lot of time. Spelling counts, of course. And it is just, it's infuriating, you know, even a basic on-screen keyboard, not even a quirky, just like something with rows that you can move up and down on would be

incredibly helpful. It doesn't even have that? No, no, it's a line. It's a literal line of A through Z. Good Christ. Zipping back and forth with the cursus. I mean, to write clever clogs, that's pull out like 200 inputs or something. It's crazy.

It's a lot. Even if you know the answer right away, it's like, oh, do I know the answer right away, and can I spell it before the timer runs out? Then the answer might be no. Something worth mentioning about anticipation is that it was, I believe, the first four-player NES game, even though it shipped before any sort of four-player their adapter. So you could have four people or four teams sharing two controllers. And basically you buzz in with, you know, one person would buzz in by pressing the D pad and the other person

would buzz in and try to get first by hitting a button. So they were really, they were really trying here. But I feel like Rare got tapped for a lot of these things because they were the most prolific Western NES developer by far. And they did a lot of contract work. And I think, you know, rare as people really wanted to be making games about like weirwolves and amaze stealing treasures or cool racing cars, blowing up sea serpents and things like that. And instead they were like, oh, well, we're going to take this contract job to make a board game or to make a Ouija board table that kids can interact with. You know, just shit like that that no one wanted, except Nintendo's marketing executives, I guess. and so they just kind of had to do their best. Yeah, the text thing you're talking about, like,

I've played some of the other rare TV show, say, ports. And I feel like they all have that awful input. So it really feels like they already had like this code template and they were just using that over and over again for all of these really terrible games. Fortune, Jeopardy, like Rare made all of those. Double Dare. Remember that one as a kid? Oh, man.

Actually, Jeremy, I'm glad you mentioned it because Will of Fortune and Jeopardy, those are games that I played. I put home version of those games, too, except I play them on a computer, which means I just type in my answer. Sure. And that makes a huge difference. You know, that has problems too, but. If only the Famicom Basic Keyboard had made it here. I don't want to spend too long on any one game because there's five games for four people each. So let's wrap this up in the next minute.

Diamond, how could this be saved? Well, as I mentioned, the text input system had to be, should have been reworked, has to have been reworked to make it viable, given the timer situation. You know, a single line and having to scan up and down, up and down for every single letter as just interminable. It doesn't not work. As far as the game itself, as I said, I think if you're going to have the computer do all the image reveals, then take advantage of the fact that it's a computer, you know, a family computer, if you will, and manipulate the image in some way or have, you know, an uncovering, maybe an animation or some sort of like, oh, we're going to give you a hint here, look carefully at the screen, because the slow drawing animation

and the often awkward sort of results really don't add up to much fun, you know. Some of the drawings are okay. I'm not going to say all the drawings are bad. You know, you draw a top hat, it's only some ways to draw a top hat. A top hat is a top hat. But when it comes to the frame, you when it comes to say, I don't know, certain animals or I believe, what is it, I believe one of the clues is just a piece of cheese, you know, and I've seen the drawing. That's not cheese. That's not a cheese. Sorry. All right. So anticipation. Does it need to be saved? Maybe not. But you've come up with a scheme anyway, and I respect you for that. We're going to be a lot of it. Oh! Oh! Oh,

Oh, and Yeah, and Oh, and Oh, Oh,

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. All right, let's move along to Stuart, who's really breaking against Type with his first selection here. Stuart, tell us what a bad game is, even though you don't believe that any games are bad. I don't, but I've gone very left-filled and out-of-character for this first choice, and I think it's going to surprise a lot of people. Sonic Heroes, Sonic Heroes. Do you play Sonic Games, Stuart?

I do. I like them. I think they're good, mostly. Except Sonic Heroes, apparently. No, I don't like Sonic Heroes. I think it's awful. I think it has atrocious controls, like, even for a series. is that in 3D really generally has quite weak controls

until very recently with that Shadow game where they seem to have nailed it. But in this game, but basically there's a forced gimmick where you have three characters at all times. You have Sonic and Tales, wretched little tails and knuckles. And what they've also done is they've made it

so the basic enemies are no longer sort of just bop and move on. The momentum is gone. They all have health points. They have like HP. And what that means is if you're fighting enemies on platforms over an abyss, which you often are, and you're using the sonic homing attack, the other characters will also attack behind you. And what can happen is you can be doing the A button repeatedly to hit them over and over again. One of the other team members will kill the enemy while you are doing that,

and you'll just poming attack forward off the ledge and die. That happens a lot because there are really just too many commands of this game. Everyone has their little special commands that are mostly useless, but generally we'll just end up getting you killed. It's got atrocious story, even for a Sonic game and cutscenes, and it all seems to be pitched at the level of a toddler. On a scale of 10 to Ken Pinders, where would you put it? I have the utmost respect for Ken Penders, quite frankly,

for making his piece of shit. For 15 years, people taking the picture. piss out of him every day on the internet and saying don't do this, you're an idiot, this is garbage. And he still did it. And I honestly respect him for that. Even though, as I said, his comic is horrible,

troublingly sexual crap. Don't read it. But anyway, it's basically the Sonic game, it's a Sonic game that hasn't really have momentum. It's just kind of enough. You do move quickly, but when you move quickly is generally because you're on like some kind of

crappy grind rail. I don't like grind rails. I don't know why they keep putting them in games. You're just going forward and there's nothing to do, except hop left and right, like you're playing Kaboom or something. I'd rather be playing Kaboom on the Atari than doing that, you know? But anyway, it sucks. It's very, very bad.

But the frustrating thing about it, and this is going to bring me into the how you can you save it, if that's okay, Mr. Parrish. Yeah, please, by all means. I think this game is only a few tweaks away from being really fun. It's kind of like bubsy in that respect. Because if they tie to... Bold claim.

If they tightened up the physics and the collision, then the frustration factor would just sort of disappear because it would just be, oh, that if you die, it's my thought, I made the mistake. And if they generally decrease the difficulty and maybe the length of the stages and focused on what does work about the game, which is the spectacle, the visuals, the sound.

Like, when the game is firing on all cylinders, it's very fun. But that doesn't really happen because you're constantly just being funneled into combat encounters that aren't enjoyable because you don't want to have combat encounters in a frigging Sonic game you want to pinball down something

you want to bounce off a wall you want to run up a wall you want to collect some rings you know there are rumors that this is getting like remade which is both crazy to think of and also quite welcome because it really is so close to being excellent but the problem is it's just so buggy it's just so hard to control

and if they was simply able to tighten that up I think we'd be looking at at worst decent Sonic game I like the part 6.5 out of 10 2 pandas out of time Kevin

I like the part about this game where you have these you know repetitive stages as you put it and you have to replay them

like three times with your different characters and you know I guess chaotic they kind of remix them a little bit but the other three teams like it's just

the same basic thing and they all play the same with chaotic it's usually about finding a certain number of objects within the levels. And these are levels that are based entirely around following you forward. So if you miss them, you might be incorrect. Like, the camera won't turn around to let you go back and, and get the thing that you've missed. You'll have to

find a warp back to the beginning of the stage. It's just, it's just a piece of old shit. It's terrible. But it could be saved. It could be saved. All right. Well, thank you for taking one for the team and talking about Sonic so that we don't have to. You've got a Sonic mug, Jeremy. You love something. I like drinking coffee out of the Green Hill Zone. That's about it. That's fair. They do have good beans there. They do. I mean,

they're the meanest beans, actually. That's true. So, Kevin, lead us through your first selection here. What is bad and how can you baptize it for redemption? Well, we've attacked one sacred cow with Sonics. It's time

to attack a different sacred sacred cow with Zelda. Wow, rude. Don't talk about a princess that way. Specifically, wow. Zelda's Adventure, the CDI game, which I have played through. This is firsthand experience. So this is the one that's got sort of the top-down angle. They're kind of aping the original legend of Zelda in this one.

Except you control Zelda, you're sort of wandering around a map, bopping things with a rod and exploring dungeons, solving some basic puzzles. It all sounds like it'd be pretty good. It does not come out pretty good. Like, it's so close to being a decent game, and it just doesn't really make it. And I pin a lot of that on the enemies, specifically how the game handles how they spawn in when you enter a new screen. In most Zelda games, enemies sort of, like, appear in a specific location, or if you're talking about the first game, they kind of. pop up at random somewhere in the middle of the screen. If they're coming in from the edge,

it'll usually be like a delay for a couple seconds. Not so here. Here they just pop up wherever they want, and that includes at the edge of the screen, and that includes where you just walked in. So you will just take unavoidable damage, and these things, they don't really drop stuff very, very often, particularly health. So I remember trying to finish. this game and having a very chunky lifebar by this point. And just getting to that final dungeon, I would take so much damage that I would have like a handful of hearts left by the time I did it. That's kind of like getting to the final dungeon of Zelda 2. Just constant attrition. Yeah, but at least Zelda 2 gave you lives. So, you know, if you died, you at least got a refill.

Not the case here. Well, at least the CDI had a really awesome controller to play with. Oh, yeah, yeah. Very responsive, very well ergonomically designed. You know, you got your fun little remote control, or you got to use the equivalent of, like, a Gravis game pad, which if anyone remembers that, that's not superb. I played Josh JetRabbit. I remember that. Yeah. And it gets better, quote unquote.

So this game has a lot of, like, you know, we'll say subweapons, but for the most part, they're considered magic spells. you buy a lot of these. They are very expensive. Money does not drop very quickly in this game. And also, they all take a cue from Zelda One's arrows where you use money to fire them off because you use money to fire these magic spells. And you only need a few of these to finish the game,

but there's like so many more that you don't need. Oh, like Secret of Evermore. Yeah. Yeah, I like this in concept, but I don't like this in execution, because, again, there's just not that much money here. So I feel like a lot of the issues with this game, you could have resolved if you did some tweaking to the enemies. Like, can you have them spawn away from where you're coming into a screen?

Can they drop money more often? Or can those things be less expensive to buy? I think if you tweaked those, this would be a perfectly cromulent Zelda game. Like, not incredible, but, you know, pretty decent. the other two on the system. I mean, people are always clamoring for Nintendo games featuring, you know, where you play as the female character from that franchise, where she gets to take the lead.

And here we have, what's the name of the company, animation magic or whatever? This one was done by Phillips. I don't remember who might have done work on it. In any case, they delivered years ahead of, you know, Bonanza or Super Princess peach. And they blew it. I feel like just on principle this game needs to be redeemed. Also, it'd be kind of cool if Nintendo said, no, no, this is our game. We're going to remake it and make it good. But they probably have better things to spend their, you know, time and energy and development budgets on. I know someone did a Game Boy remake of it a few years ago. I have

not played it yet, but I'm curious how that turned out. I mean, not one that I don't want to jump the gun. I mean, there is that Arzette game, uh, Jewel of Faramore, which was a take on this by, uh, I can't remember who made it. I think Aldi Soley was involved. Seth Fulcerson was the director. But I don't want to jump the gun in case. But I'm not a lot to talk about it because then weirdos are like, Jeremy Parrish is just promoting limited run games stuff. But that's for Wanda of Gamelon. Limited running games, though. There's so many excellent products available at reasonable prices now. It's true. But that was Wanda of Gamelon. Like, that was a different Zelda league game. They're not them mixed up because I don't know which is which.

I haven't played these because they're on the CDI. And also, if I had the opportunity to play them, I would probably say, no, thank you. Also, they cost like $2,000 or $3,000 a piece now. Yeah, I guess that's true. There's no way to play them now. That's a shame. Well, hey, there's a CDI Mr. Corps now. So you could play at least the first two.

And by the time this comes out, I don't know. I don't know where the digital video card. 24 hours development thing is going. That's going to be the thing to get me to set up a home NASNAS Network. work. Finally, I can load CDI ROMs, ISOs onto my mister. That's the dream.

Okay, so Zelda's adventure can be saved, but it's not that difficult. It sounds like just kind of a rebalancing, really, like adjusting drop rates. I think difficulty is going to be very much the main thing for the main theme here in this episode. For mine anyway, yeah. Possibly. It's not,

not that difficulty in itself is bad, it's that many of these games come about being difficult badly. Yeah, the execution is the issue really. It's always the case. Right. And that's the case with my first round draft pick, and that is Ikari Warriors for NES. And I've gone through this on my, you know, NES works video series. But I can recap. It's bad for a lot of reasons. First of all, if you've ever played Icari Warriors in the arcade, you know that it used the famous S&K loop lever system for controls, which is a joystick that also has a rotary element built into it. So the idea was that you press in a direction to move your little Ikari warrior guy around so he could be angry in any direction. But then you use the rotating loop lever element that is integrated into the stick to adjust the direction that the character faces and aims and fires. So it's kind of figuring out how to do the Robotron 2084 thing without a dual stick of basically integrating that into a single stick. And it does kind of, it has a different feel to it just because of the way the loop works. And there's actually, there's a company that released a kind of like a build-it-yourself joystick kit a few years ago

that allows you to play Ikari Warriors correctly on the S&K 40th anniversary collection. I think it also has Mr. Core support for the Akari Warriors and other S&K arcade machines. So the means are out there. When you're looking at porting this to an 8-bit system whose interface consists of a cross-pad and two buttons, you got some problems there because there's just no way to recreate the range of control and, you know, like the direct control element of the arcade game to that system. And so what the developer, in this case, did was to say, anytime you change direction, your Ikari warrior's entire body should slowly rotate into that direction.

So if an enemy is coming up behind you, you can't like turn, you know, run the other direction and kind of turn around and shoot at them. You can't, you can't move and shoot in different directions as you could in the arcade game. Instead, what you have to do is slowly rotate your little guy to face the enemy, and at the same time, you are moving toward the enemy. So, all of a sudden, the element of moving nimbly around the battlefield while aiming in a different direction, as in, you know, Robotron and other games of that type, suddenly that's gone and you are only moving and shooting in the same direction, like at the same time, and that's your only option. But when you have enemies flocking you from many directions simultaneously,

it becomes a very difficult game because you can't shoot anyone without walking toward them and they pop up right next to you. And so basically, you were constantly dying because there's no way to shoot guys without also taking a hit. And of course, bad guys kill you on contact, but, you know, you can't return the favor. So it's bad times. On top of that, it's a Micronix developed game. And they've really struggled with the NES hardware.

And so as with most Micronix games, your character and objects around your character all move on like every third frame, that's when they animate. So it's very, very sputtery. If you actually like run it in slow motion, you understand that your guy is like moving and then kind of jumping to where he would be if he had animated those three or four frames where he wasn't actually moving. So it just feels bad and everything on the screen does that. Tons of flicker and slowdown because it's an early NES game without an advanced memory mapper. And it just, it's a really, really challenging game. There's a lot happening in Akari Warriors.

You can play two people at the same time shooting, throwing grenades, getting into tanks, collecting power-up icons, killing lots of guys who are also shooting lots of projectiles. It's really, really rough, and it plays really badly. And on top of that, it just never ends. Like, if you can somehow survive, and they built a cheat code, Abba, into ABBA, to allow you to continue. Even if you abuse that and just keep forcing your way through, it just keeps going because they took the arcade stages. It's a vertical scroller. And they more or less doubled or tripled the length of every single stage. So what should take about 20 minutes to complete in a

perfect playthrough is something on the order of an hour, 15 minutes, an hour and a half. It's preposterous. There's no variety really aside from kind of like the backgrounds and like you move into spaces where things are even harder. But that's it. It's just, it's a horrible, miserable experience. Have any of you also played Ikari Warriors for any yes? Oh my, yes. Yes. Yes, yes. And of course, I was at the age where I didn't care about these issues as so much as this was a way to play Akari Warriors without putting quarters in a machine. So I just sort of grin and bore it, if you will, and abuse the hell of that code. But, yeah, even with the code, eventually, I think you just get tired.

You're like, what am I, you know, war is it good for? Yeah, yeah, it's agonizing in certain ways. But I should, I just also want to add that over the years, many other systems have tried to port Akari warriors to their particular controller. And even much later systems like the PlayStation 1 and PSP, like, even, those systems, it doesn't quite work. They try to use like the shoulder buttons. It's like the means to turn yourself so you can sort of like walk and turn separately.

But it's very awkward. So the NES version really didn't have much of a chance, you know, except to abandon it and just say, oh, let's just, you know, turn left and shoot left. Turn up and go up, you know, and shoot up. But no, they don't do that. Instead, you've got this painfully slow rotation. So painfully. I mean, when they put this digital eclipse to the S&K. Versery Collection. I think they added, I don't know if it was the NES version that was included

or if it was there as a bonus, but I know they added like twin stick controls, like more contemporary, which was... I think that's for the arcade version only. Right, right. Okay. So, but this NES version, because I'm afraid I haven't played this, this Angry Warriors game. Um, it doesn't even have like a lock on. Like, you, like, you can't shoot in one direction, hold the button and move backwards while shooting forwards, like slash slash TV or something. Because, Jesus Christ. That, that, that, that, that, that, hadn't really emerged yet. So I really feel like the only way for this game to work is for them to have just said, you know what, we have to abandon what made the arcade game unique because

we just can't do that on this hardware. Let's discard that and create something that works here. I think Capcom was really good about doing this. And Capcom got good at doing it after they kicked my chronics to the curb and said, you know what, we're going to make our own games. You go work with S&K now. So that was their first shot in the cross-town rivalry. They said, oh, hey, S&K, we know some great guys. They can do your home ports for you. And, you know, it's just been bitter rivalry ever since. But no, just drop that. Make it just play like Commando, but let two people play at the same time. And right there, in 1987, you would have had a unique novel experience that no other NES game could give you. And that would have been enough. Also,

So, like, cut those levels in half. You don't need all of that. Also, the, you know, the spawning code, the respawn code, ABBA, that's nice, but maybe make it so that it's not actually possible to respawn into a space that you're stuck in. The first time I ever played this, you know, it's a vertical scroller. It's ratchet scrolling. So once you go up, you can't go back down. I was playing with my brother and I died and I respawned. You know, I ran out of a lot of. lives and continued with the code. And my little guy spawned into the sort of alcove where it was like a structure in the middle of the stage, in the middle of the screen. And you can enter it from below, but you can't get out. So it was kind of like a trap. And, you know, in normal play, you would know, oh, I can't go in there. I should not scroll the screen forward any further. I don't think you would be able to, actually. I think, you know, it exists at a point on the screen where you just can't scroll the entrance off while you're inside the alcove. But because you respawn at kind of at the bottom of the screen when you continue,

it is possible to respond inside that alcove with no way out. And so that was the end of my experience right there. I could not go anywhere. No one could shoot me inside the barrier. I couldn't blow my way out. So that was just the soft lock. Always a sign of a good game. So yeah, just, you know,

get rid of the ratchet scrolling, make the stages half as long, and ditch the rotary element, just make it a straightforward shooter, and that's good enough. Or even, like, instead of using the, I think, B button for grenades, which you rarely deploy, put grenades on select and use B as a sort of, you know, like Gunstar Heroes, where you, when you play as, I think, blue, and you can hold down, or, you know, when you attack, you, like, stop in place and rotate in all directions. Use it for something like that. Like, use the B as a sort of hold your ground thing where you can rotate in all directions and then continue moving on.

I've played games that do that, where you use, like, one button to kind of lock down your direction and for your facing. And then you can move in another direction while being sort of locked in that space. Yeah, as I mentioned earlier, but something like the 8-bit ports of Super Smash TV, that they did that. So you could press button one while firing to the right and then walk to the left while continuing to fly to the right. I mean, that wasn't a good port, but at least you could control it to some extent. I think Forgotten Worlds also did that on some of the systems. So, yeah,

it could have worked, but it didn't. And that is, that's the Micronix way. I feel like a lot of these particular, like, gripes about this, the 7800 port actually, like, addresses them. And it's not an amazing game, because, you know, it's Carri Warriors without the loop lever. It's It loses a lot of its gimmick, but, like, it's playable. It's perfectly fine. Okay, well, I was not watching the clock as I talked. Oh, Diamond. I just want to shout out.

There's a video online by the YouTube channel called Displaced Gamers, and they have a series called Behind the Code, where they analyzed a lot of old video games, and they did a video about this, I think, last year, where they looked at Ikari Warriors, like the actual program behind it. They analyzed what made it so slow, you know, choices that were, that sort of make it slower than it should be. And they demonstrate by changing even just, you know, one or two bits of data in there, you can dramatically improve performance. And, you know, again, was it a matter of time?

Was it a matter of who cares? We have no idea. But the fact is they went there and they show you that, no, this game absolutely could be salvaged. It can be made much more enjoyable. Yeah, and sorry, I'm going to skip my next entry because I've talked so long on this one. But I don't think in the case of my chronics, it was a matter of them not caring. I feel like they just weren't good at working on the NES. But, I mean, you look at the sequel to this game, Icari Warriors 2, Victory Road,

and they added a lot of stuff that wasn't in the arcade game. There's like, you go into these buildings and there's a shop where you talk to bartenders and you can get into these like arena fights. and there's kind of like this soft RPG element where you can collect an arsenal of weapons and swap between them. They took that arcade game and said, let's do a bunch of new stuff for NES.

I think they kind of looked at what Capcom was doing and said, oh, whoops, that's why they kicked us to the curb. We should catch up. But I mean, they tried. And they kind of broke into the business with a port of elevator action, which was a pretty damn good port. Sure.

So I don't feel like my crew, didn't care. I feel like they just didn't have time and weren't entirely clear on the technical details of the NES, is my guess. So when I say didn't care, I don't mean the people who made it didn't care. I think the people who were, you know, approving things and sending things out, they're like, hey, is it ready? It's ready. That's what I do. Oh, yeah, absolutely. 100%. Executives, don't give it damn. I'm a lot of it. I'm going to be able to...

...and... ...and... ...and... ...and... ...and... ...the... ...and... ...the...

So that is me talking too long. And now I say Excelsior, Diamond. Please take us into your next game. We're moving into double Jeopardy now. Everything is worth twice as much. Double anticipation. Well, yes. One year after anticipation, there is the case of the uncanny X-Men, another NES game.

And this one's a really rare case because I'm I feel like this is one case where I, even in Nintendo Power, in highlighting the game and telling kids like me to go buy it, they kind of, you know, quietly admitted in the text of the magazine that the game was kind of bad. I remember very clearly the blurb was like, oh, we just wish they were bigger because, yeah, this is a game starring the X-Men, but the characters on the screen are all extremely tiny little men. And, you know, you described that, you know, Ralph Jones and Clark Steele, the manly characters of Akari Warriors, described them as little guys. They are, you know, giants. They are juggernauts compared to the characters and uncanny X-Men. But not actually juggernaut. These little pudgy little guys who are just a little stubby arms and legs, they all kind of have the same general sprite shape that's kind of color differently.

And even though the game stars six X-Men of recognizable, you know, acclaim, it basically comes down to do you. want a punching X-Man or do you want a shooting X-Pan? Because that's what you get. You've got obviously two buttons, A, A button, B button, right? One button jumps, which is of questionable usage because it's very much like a top-down scrolling action game. So it's really not a lot of places to jump to. And one button attacks, which, as I said, you either punch or you shoot things. By the way, it's backwards. B is jump. And A is attack. So already, bad sign. Yeah, the levels look bad. The enemies just look like, look like nonsense sprites.

Like, they don't look like anything. Like, you know, it's lots of NES games had these, you know, bizarre enemies that you don't know where they came from. I'm thinking like, Konami's Teenage Muttered Turtles, like the things you fight in that game don't really make any sense. But at least they're recognizable. Like, that's a bird. That's a robot. That's some sort of hopping monster. That's definitely a man on fire.

Yeah, yeah. Like, the things in Un-Conn X-Men, I don't know what they're supposed to be. I really have no idea. they're like blobs or snakes or But not the blob No no not the blob No nothing moves to blo Maybe a slinky or a spring

Like it's very abstract And just your guy You know your guys are tiny The enemies are tiny And weird shaped The levels were all just like A mix of colors That don't really make any sense

The levels You know Don't about Akari warrior levels Like these levels are pretty long You have to like search around for things And find a teleporter You'll fight a boss who's supposed to be, you know, a major X-Men villain.

And maybe they're recognizable color-wise, but, you know, what are they doing? They're probably just running around trying to punch you, okay? I guess. Some X-Men villains punch, but some just, like, you know, do clever things. There's no room for clever things in this game. And, oh, I'm sorry, I missed the worst part of all. This game is, it's two-player, but it has to be two-player. Which means if you play one person, you have to pick a partner, and the CPU controls

that partner, and the CPU has no idea how to play the game. Oh, God. Oh, it's a great sign. Yeah, yeah. It's dreadful. It kind of sounds like a really bad version of what eventually was X-Men Legends, you know? I mean, there's lots of X-Men games that have ups and downs, but this one, I think, is really

one of the worst ones. It's one of the first games I remember playing on NES and just absolutely just being appalled. Like, no, wait. No, this can't be that. Like, even anticipation is competently produced, you know? Yeah, this is one of those games that I saw at the rental shop. One of the few where I looked at it and looked at the back of the box and was like, you know what, I like this cover art, but I'm not going to spend my 90, you know, my 90 cents

on this. This is just not a good use of my weekend. So I did not ever rent this game and I've never played it and I have got it coming up pretty soon in NES works and I'm not looking forward to it. But, you know, it kind of speaks to the state of the X-Men brand. at that point that this is what they dredged up for it because it was kind of like the sea tier of Marvel properties at that point. You had, you know, Spider-Man and Iron, I mean, even Iron Man was kind of like a sea lister at that point, but, you know, The Avengers. You had, um, actually

Marvel was in kind of a rough state. You had Chi-I. Joe. That was the big selling comic for Marvel at that time. Daredevil, I guess. Yeah, yeah, Daredevil. But X-Men was, there was, there was cool stuff happening in the actual comic. Like, it was undergoing a creative renaissance. But there weren't that many people reading it. It wasn't until they had a bunch of wrap-around covers by Jim Lee and were like, this is issue one after, you know, 260 issues. Now we're finally at issue one. That was when X-Men became a big deal. And, you know, Rob Lefeld, single-handedly created X-Force, and it was such an amazing feat. They made a blue jeans commercial about it. Of course. I don't want you about it.

No, I mean, it may have been the... This is 1989, right, this game. Right. So this would have been timed around the point that Pride of the X-Men... Yeah, the pilot. Yeah. Pretty close, yeah. Showed up and then kind of didn't do anything, and they never went anywhere with it.

So it wasn't until, like, 91, 92, that you had the X-Men Renaissance, and it suddenly became the biggest comic on the planet and broke the comics industry. But at the time, yeah, this was like kind of like the post-Jim Burn era where you had a bunch of the people who were going to be doing image comics. comics, you know, founding image comics, uh, were working on it. And, uh, you know, Chris Claremont was still writing it and, you know, had all of this bondage, uh, and mind control fetish stuff in there. But, but, but for the most part, it was just kind of, um, I think people kind of felt like it was past its, its heyday. And so they were just like, yeah,

just put a bunch of miscellaneous little, little guys into a bad video game and ship it. We've got some nice, uh, you know, boilerplate Jim, Jim, Jim burn artwork on the front. Let's go. John Byrne, sorry, Jim Byrne. Anyway, so how could this game be saved? Can it be saved, Diamond? Well, I think step one would be to drop the mandatory co-op. I feel like if you're not either, if you can't get the AI working to have a decent partner, then just play the game solo. I think that's a big issue.

A more complicated issue that I think would, you know, would go to greater lengths, but probably takes a lot more time, is to really think about who are the X-Men and what do they do? because I really feel like what they came up with just doesn't cut it. You know, the fact that basically Nightcrawler and Wolverine and Colossus essentially look and act the same, that's a failure. That's a failure from a design standpoint. You know, Nightcrawler, they interpret his powers by letting him walk through walls, which is okay, but it's also like most of the game is not about walking through walls.

Most of the game is about running around and fighting all these little weird enemies. So it's like, you've got to have some combat capability to do that. And that's more of a kiddie pride thing anyway. Yeah, yeah. Also, they could have picked Kitty Pride, but they didn't because, you know, the only woman in the game, I think, is Storm, you know, which is a good pick, of course. But she did call Professor Xavier a jerk. So I feel like she was probably grounded at that point. Yeah, for sure.

Does Kitty punch people, actually? Does she ever punch anybody? Yes. I don't know if she has. Has she? Okay. She probably, like, punched the brood queen or something. She's like phased her hand through someone's face and then threatened to unfazed inside their face.

It's great. That would also do her a lot of damage. Oh, sorry, go ahead, Kevin. It's an 80s NES game, so you can only have one playable female character, if any. It is a shame because all this stuff that they did, they got wrong. The later games on like the Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo got it all right, they figured it out. But then again, they did have the fidelity to display the characters in much more impressive graphics. I mean, there were some X-Men appearances on NES that looked pretty okay.

There was a Wolverine game where he's recognizably Wolverine. I don't know if it's a good game, but at least you're like, oh, I know. That little brown and orange guy, that's definitely Wolverine. All right, so that's the solution for fixing Uncanny X-Men. A game so bad that no one has actually been able to figure out who developed it. That's really remarkable. There's Internet sleuths trying to figure it out. They're, like, breaking down the code.

We really don't know. The Wikipedia says, possibly. Possibly. There's a lot of hedging of bets. And, like, definitely whoever made this kind of slinked into anonymity in history and said, yeah, we're not, we're not ever going to make another video game. Maybe it was that one X-Man whose power is to be forgotten every time you stop looking at him. I can't remember what his name is, but that is a real one. Oh, yeah, the silence.

I was going to say Zandar. All right, so let's move along to Stuart's round two pick. molly on it. Oh, nice, very good. Yeah, thank you. I used some UK slang almost. Oh, yeah, you did. You're quite the clever plugs today. I am, right? And now I'm cream crackered. My choice is the great Waldo search for the NES, which I only actually played very recently on a stream because a friend of mine demanded that I do so.

Now, it is difficult to think of a worse game that I've played than this in terms of, well, we all know where's Wally. I'm going to call it Where's Wally? I'm sorry. It's Waldo to you. Sid's Waldo. But we all know what that is. It is a series of books that you, with big scenes across double pages with hundreds and hundreds of characters and actions

and interesting things going on. You're supposed to find Wally. You're supposed to find Wurf, Wendor, wizard, whitebeard, oddlaw, the evil version of Wally, which is Waldo backwards, which doesn't work and the British ones, obviously, you can't call him. E. E.O. E. E. E. It's not his name. Anyway.

And they actually did make Waldo games while it did it again, Wally games for the Super Nintendo, for the Mega Drive. And for the most part, while they're not particularly good games, you can look at the screen and you can scroll the screen, you can see all the mad shit going on, you can be like, where is Wally? There he is, got him, and it actually looks like

Wally, okay? You can see who it is. Fundamentally, it basically works. And on this game, this NES version, the NES, God bless it, it just does not have the kind of fidelity it needs to display a where's Wally style scene so everything looks like

a friggin, like a Lowry painting, like friggin' matchstick man or something and you have to just sort of interpret who Wally is. Now I'm very good at finding Wally. I have found every Wally, you know, I'm a master. I'm excellent at it. And playing this game on Medium and getting to like the second

scene, there's this huge brace of characters, although it's not really that huge. It's very cut down. And despite that, I'm sitting there thinking, Where's Wally? I genuinely don't know, because nothing on this screen looks even remotely like him. It looks like Lemmings, you know?

You're having to determine what the game has decided is Wally, is Waldo. And it's really difficult. It's a whole, the whole genre of the Where's Wally books, that's a stupid thing to say, is based on, like, perceiving these intricate scenes and trying to spot the colors of Wally, the red and white stripes, you see that and you're like, ah, there he is. But this

doesn't even do that. So you're just looking at what is essentially a jumble of poorly drawn pixels trying to guess ESP somehow which one is supposed to be fucking Wally. I can't finish this game on Medium. I just

can't do it, and I've tried. God help me. I can't find Wally, and it hurts. You know? Yeah, I feel like there were several of these NES activity games where you're not really playing a game as just like you're doing a thing. There's also color a dinosaur where you just kind of have to stop and say, what was the thinking here? Like, who really thought that, you know, millions of people were going to line up to have this experience on their aging NES? But in color a dinosaur, you can actually see the dinosaur.

You can tell it the dinosaur. You can, but there's only so much you can do when you color a dinosaur on A-Bid hardware that, anyway, it's, the point is, just a bad idea. Such a bad idea. How can this be redeemed? The problem is, the only way I think you can redeem this on the NES specifically is to make a completely different game. Like, I think you could have a game where you play as Wally. It's not about finding Wally, because they can't do that. You have to do, like, you put Wally in all the different crazy scenes, like the fantastic journey, the giants, you know, all that crazy stuff. Like the Dracula Castle, you've got a recipe for a fairly bog-standard little platform game there, you know? Like you Wally's, maybe Wally's got to find his stupid little dog, woof, you know, that's like the goal of the game. But you can't do a Waze Wally search on this system. It just, I just don't think it can be done. Maybe with advanced, like, mappers, better graphics, maybe, but it just doesn't seem feasible.

I mean, this was the peak of Carmen San Diego Mania. why not make a game that is in just a straight-up rip-off of Carmen San Diego, where you play as a kid trying to find Wally around randomized locations. It could work. Integrate, like, the visual search element into there somehow. But, you know, make it, making an adventure. Make it a mystery detective game. Something, yeah. No, I agree.

Like, the NES just, it didn't have the resolution or the memory or the color palette to make this an effective. concept. It's just, it is really just taking a, a wild stab at things. I feel it's a little bit like Dragons Lair. Like, when they ported Dragon's Lair, I'm using ported with inverted commas with my fingers here, you can't see it. We all know that Dragons Lair on the NES is legendarily horrible, you know. The Super Nintendo game, honestly, it's really not that much better. It's quite a bad platformer. But what they did there, to their credit, is they went, okay, we obviously can't do this. We cannot put the Dragon's Lair experience on a system.

Let's just make it into a platform. The Game Boy version is just a Spectrum game called Rollercoaster that they put Dirk the Daring in, and that's fantastic for me, obviously. But that's what they should have done here. Maybe they should have got a Spectrum game and put Wally in it. Jetset Wally. There you go.

I'm in. You got me back. By the way, Stuart, here in Japan, he is also Wally. Oh, good. Correct. Waldo. It's not even a good name. It's stupid name.

All right, so, Kevin, let's move along to your round two draft pick. Who have you chosen to redeem from their own intrinsic badness, which game? I'm bearing down on Darius 2, a Taito's arcade game from, like, 88, 89. I feel like that's a pretty bold claim. Well, I guess, Darius, I've been wrong for years. I think the thing everyone likes about this game is the Zunata soundtrack and not so much playing it. because it's kind of a miserable experience. It's three screens.

It's so cool, it's so cool. Well, there's the three-screen version, but there's also a two-screen version. I think that's the one they balanced it around. It's even worse than the three-screen. So basically, the big problem here is that the game is way too difficult, even for, like, a shooter in that genre. Because when they were doing location tests, most of the people who showed up were the hardcore Derriya. 1 fans and they just completely cleaned its clock so they're like okay well we have to make the game harder I guess so they only tuned it for the sickos and as such now you have these

really long stages that they have a lot of interesting set pieces I'll give it this there's like a lot of good work that's gone into this game that you'll never see so many giant robot fish exactly and the reason you'll never see it is because there are just barely enough power-ups in this game to fully upgrade your ship by the time you get to the end of it. So you only... By the time you get to the end of the game? The end of the game. Wow.

Do you lose power-ups if you die? You lose all of them if you die. So the only way to fully power up is to make it to the end of the game and not die once. Yes, it is a game that you cannot ever mess up on. And I remember back in 2019, when I visited Tokyo, there was an arcade, I think, hey, in Akihabara that had a set up for this game. And remember my friend Brian and I, just seeing some guy going through it and getting all the way to the last stage and dying once and just like hanging his head and slumping down and just like, well, I'm done. I've been playing this

game for like 20 odd minutes and I might as well just give up. So there's no way to recover. The game is super long. It's not a great look. Does it have the branching paths? I think it does Not that anyone's ever made it past the end of the first stage I'm gonna say I've never made it past like the second stage of the original Dorias 2 It sort of sounds like this is the greatest three of the Dorias series Like just needlessly brutal

Yeah it's like I feel like this is sort of the trend at the time Because R type 2 also came out around the same time It was also exceptionally brutal And you know bringing up the three screen thing So the game is balanced around two screens And three screens they just you know they added more screen space, but you're like, your bullets, you can still only have the same number on screen at the same time, but now there's an extra screen, so you can't fire as many

as you'd want. So, yeah, it's not, it's not good. So Taito took a few stabs at fixing this game, so they did an international version called Seaglia, which was a single screen. They cut down a lot of the stages. They're much shorter. They cut out several of them. And that helps a little bit.

They also did a Sega home port of Sagaya. And the way they tweaked this a little further is that if you, you can go into the options that you can choose to play as the player two character, Tiot, who has an extra default level of power up. So even when you die with that ship, she at least has like a little bit of power. It's not as brutal, but it's still pretty bad. I feel like they should have done is they should have just done something akin to how the first of Darius game handles like power-ups, because in that one,

you grab enough of them and then you hit sort of a new benchmark where if you die, your power does not drop past that point. I feel like if they did that, Darius 2 would be a lot more playable. But as it is, it's like, well, this is a great soundtrack,

and I really wish I could see it in action and in context. But I guess that's what Superplay DVDs are four. Well, I'm not any good at shooters, so I have nothing to add to this conversation, except that I think three screens are neat, but it's really sad that they actually make the game appreciably worse. Unlike Ninja Warriors, which is, like, the more screens you add to that, the cooler it gets.

If they had like a 10-screen version of Ninja Warriors, it would actually be the greatest video game ever made. It's true. You're the Terminator, but a ninja, and you beat up tanks with a Kunai. That's, how do you beat that? And the villain is Daddy Mulk. What a great, what a great name for a villain. Everybody loves their Daddy Mulk.

So, final round for this recording. I don't think we can make it through more than that. So I'm going to defer my second round pick to third round, since I talk so long about Akari Warriors. Here's another game that I might go on for a while about, and that is Alf for Master System, the game about the alien life force, the game where they said, here's a puppet-based sitcom. Let's make a video game about that. And friends, that was not a great idea. There's probably a reason that it was on Master System and not a more popular system in the U.S., sorry. I mean, it's the truth, just looking at sales numbers.

At least we got to talk about Sagaya briefly. That's pretty good on Master System. That's true. That was Master System. That was a good point. But, yeah, like, how would you turn Alf into a video game? You probably wouldn't turn it into an action platformer by appearances that's actually an adventure game set around.

the tanner household, but they live next to a deep lake and by a busy highway shopping pavilion. And there's a cavern infested by bats in their basement. It takes some liberties and none of it's actually any good. And the game is very, very difficult and again, not in a way that is meaningful or good. Sorry, it's not very good in a way that is not meaningful or justice. It has really bad controls and collision detection. It's even worse if you play it on the power base converter on Genesis because there's some sort of like registration error that Nicole Express, the blogger Nicole Express has gone into. That was unfortunately how I played it. So I had a really bad experience. But even if you take that away, it's still a really rough, really difficult game. Alpha is not a good platform action character. He's a dumpy little alien, and that's not to be racist or anything. It's just he's like three feet tall and shaped kind of like a furry pear with an ardvark for a head. And he just, you know, you don't look at him and think, this guy is going to put Mario to shame in the hopping stakes. And it's rough. You have to jump around in a cavern avoiding bats and stalactites and pits and stuff. Don't like it. At some point, you have to go dive. The one good part of the game is that when you go diving, there are little sharks with cat faces. They are catfish, and I really, I like that.

It has nothing to do with the sitcom, but it is the kind of joke that would have been in the sitcom. So I feel like it's cromulent. Does he the catfish? He does not. You think so, but no, they kill him. I guess, you know, when you give a cat, a fish, a body, it becomes much deadlier. That's true. So you basically, what you're trying to do in Alf is travel around this, this incredible.

incredibly baroque environment surrounding a suburban household and collect parts for your spaceship. And because it's an adventure game, you have to, you know, acquire things that allow you to acquire other things. For example, you go into the kitchen and you get a stick of salami. What does the salami do? It allows you to smack bats out of the air when you're in the cavern. Of course. Because, of course, a stick of salami is how you kill a bat. I guess because it has garlic in it?

I don't know. Sure. It sounds kinder like dizzy. Kind of, but worse. Yeah, of course. Of course is worse. So, yeah. And then, you know, meanwhile, like, everywhere you go, there's these guys in trench coats

with grabby hands who are just like coming after you with grabby hands. And, you know, they're supposed to be secret agents, you know, to try to capture Alf and dissect him to learn about aliens. But they just look perverted and gross. And I don't like them. and they're everywhere. You have to avoid them while also avoiding cars and bicyclists that drive past on the highway. You can spend all your money at the shop on things that you don't actually need and waste your money and kind of soft lock yourself.

As you make progress into the game, suddenly the Tanner household is infested by roaches, the size of a man that you have to avoid for no particular reason. And the Tanner's never actually appear. At no point do you see Willie or any of the other parts of this nuclear family. So it just seems like why was this Alf? Why couldn't this have been some other generic game? Moving around a household with all these soft locks trying to find pieces of something. We're talking about Alf in high-tech world here, aren't we? Yeah, pretty much.

But at least, you know, this is my formula to save the game, is actually make it more like Alex Kid, high-tech world. When you're using that as the standard, someone should aspire to, you know the things have gone horribly wrong. It's a very dark time for retronauts, right? Alex Kid High Tech World is a fraught game, but I feel like when it just, you know, just totally dicks you over in an un-telegraphed way, it's kind of in the same spirit as Takashi no chosenjo, where it's just like, it's so audacious and so mean that you just have to laugh and you

say, okay, well, next time I'm not doing that. Like, why? Why does looking at a suit of armor cause Alex to instantly die? No one knows, but it does happen. You know, you can accidentally burn an important note that you need to acquire, and that's the end of the game. And it's pretty mean, but I feel like as you kind of play through Alex Kid High Tech world, aside from the Ninja Forest scenes. There's not really an expectation of dexterity or skill. It's just like find all the stuff you need in the right order. Don't screw it up somehow and, you know, do it within a time limit. And it, you know, it's a trial and error, but fundamentally it is a better adventure game than Alf. And I feel like, you know, just do that. Have him walk through the household and

through the town talking to the Tanner's. Maybe he has to like find a trench coat so he can go out into the streets in public, you know, just like, just make, make the use of the premise of the sitcom, which God knows was not a good sitcom, but at least I feel like the fundamental concept of a little alien guy living in a suburban household trying to lay low so the scientists can't find him and dissect him, and eventually wanting to get back home to Rhonda or whoever, like, there's something there that you could turn into a decent adventure game, but Alph on Master's system is not that. It should not have platforming action, and there should be no weird guys with grabby hands. Take those guys out, and you've automatically bumped it up a star.

The premise of Alf is sort of the premise of American Dad, isn't it? I was just thinking that. Like, I've never made that connection before. I'm like, no, no, that is just that is just Roger. Huh. I did not know that. Anyway, any final thoughts from anyone else on Alf? it's funny that Alf would be jumping because that's the one thing he would never ever ever do in the TV show

because it's a puppet right no I mean the household the set was full of holes for the puppeteers to work him from beneath so people would constantly

die while recording the film well maybe not actually but it was dangerous non-stop death I never saw Al I was loyal to Roland Dratt so I never saw Elf I mean

maybe the UK was spared I don't know Oh, we've got a lot of great puppets. We've got Ed the Duck. We got the Otis the Ardvark. We got, what's his name? Don't forget, spitting image. You know, hack of the dog.

We're just normal men. We're innocent men. Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, the entirety of spitting image and the whole band of genesis right there. Yeah. But, I mean, there's a spitting image spectrum game. Let's not get into that. Okay.

So, Alf, he could be redeemed, but really, it's Alf. So why would you want to? I don't know. People are redeeming Gell. and bubsy these days, so it's probably Alf's turn at some point. More is the pity. The developers did Alpha job. Yeah.

I'm here a week. All right, Diamond, what's next? Oh, boy, it's my turn again. Well, next up is a game. I just want to highlight my feelings about this game. This was a game that I bought back when, remember many, many years ago, when a game would go on sale on Steam for like $1, and that would be newsworthy alone, like, oh, my God, it's a video game for $1.

Oh, yeah. You only had two or three games in your backlog as opposed to $2,000? Yeah. So once upon a time, Postal. Postal. The 997 game went on sale on Steam for $1. I was like, oh, I've heard of postal. I would like to play postal. I will pay Steam $1 and play postal. And I immediately regretted that decision, which is something I don't think I honestly ever had before for buying a game for $1. It was just, that's how my visceral reaction was like, oh, oh, oh, oh, no. And, I'm not even talking about the sort of narrative or other elements that could be viewed as objectionable because, of course, they're there, and of course you might not like this game, like, on premise alone. But for me, if you're going to make a video game and it's about a guy who runs around shooting lots of people, step one is the shooting has to feel something, responsive, amusing, diff, like, it's, whenever I play the game, I feel like, I feel like, I'm, I am never sure if I'm hitting anything. I know I'm being hit. I can see my guy getting hit with blood over his face,

but I'm firing my gun. People seem to be slowing down, but shouldn't the gun do more than slow people down? Shouldn't the gun injure or perhaps even slay other human beings? I don't know. That's not how postal works. Also, in the original version, I'm pretty sure when I first played it,

it had tank controls for a top-down, like, shooter games. which is just, you know, we talked about Akari Warriors before. Like, imagine being surrounded. Like, oh, I need to fight some guy behind me. Time to slowly rotate. No, no. I think at this point, you can just use analog stick and just push the push stick, and it works. But not when I first played it.

So someone out there is actually, I guess, preparing this game piece by piece. I don't know if that's good for them or not. But at least it's more playable today than it was when I first played it. but it's still just, ugh, it's so ugly. It's so ugly, too. Everyone has their own personal Mount Everest, and this is someone's. Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, we talked about the fake 3D at Long Island a few weeks ago.

It's like, this is fake 3D, and it's not really 3D, but like you have little 3D characters on a giant static screen. But the giant status screen isn't a 3D model. It's like someone drew the dirtiest town you've ever seen. and they didn't give it a second pass either. Like, everything's sort of like wobbly and misshapen. Like, these are just, these are really ugly things to look at, and it's not fun to play. And I really immediately rejected this game in a way that I don't, can't recall ever doing before.

Certainly enough, you know, yeah, I really, I really dislike Postal. And the fact that it has a sequel that is sort of terrible in many completely different ways is kind of remarkable. Oh, there are like four sequels to Postal. There's many sequels. I'm just saying, if we're talking about games I've played, I have played Postal 2, and I have played Postal 2. They're both terrible games, but they are entirely different video games and bad for different reasons. Postal 2, however, does have a dedicated piss button, so that is something, you know, walking around, pissing on everything.

If you want a first person pisser, yeah, sure. Yeah. So you played the original version of Postal, not Postal Redux, presumably, because they added, like, twin stick to that. I mean, it doesn't make the game good, but it exists. I mean, that would help, I think, but I don't know if it would, you know, do they also fix, like, hit detection? Because that's, I feel like it was a big issue for me. See, this is an interesting one. I'm sorry, I know it's your choice.

I'm very talking today, which is good, being a podcast, I suppose. But, um, I, see, I recognize your experience, but I don't, it wasn't my experience. with this game. And I think it's because I played it on the Redux version where I think they have tightened it up quite a bit. The problem is it is still postal fundamentally. It's still a drab, unpleasant, mean-spirited kind of gross game. And I think there's a place for being edgy and being mean-spirited. And to their credit, this game is the one that does pull back from the worst excesses. But, I mean, it's pretty bad. It's not a good game. It's a miserable game. I mean, there's no reason to play. It's not like Postal 2, which, as you say, also sucks, and it's racist, and it's just fucking disgusting. But there is something of an interesting idea and structure to it. That is what it has over Postal 1. But, yeah, there's no reason to play Postal 1.

You could play, I suppose, hatred instead. I have a lot of questions about the state of PC gaming in 97 that Postal did well enough to warrant a sequel and then multiple other sequels. I guess it was the headlines it got, you know. I think so. I'm discussing some slaughter game. I really do. I think that, you know, I glossed over that because I really don't care about that aspect. Yeah.

Because when I played it, it was already old news. Like, I just want to see how does this game, you know, how does this game function to a video game? And I rejected it on that basis. But, yeah, there's all sorts of stuff we can talk about if we go out, like, a in-depth postal episode. But I don't want to do that episode, so let's not do it. I'll do it, Diamond. I only do it if we do in the movie.

I'll talk about the movie. I think we've done controversial games already, though, right? So have we? We must have. Some games, sure. I don't know. I heard postal I zoned out. The entire premise here of naming a game for a murderous rampage, while that was still

kind of a fresh concept, the idea of, you know, a single postal worker going on a killing spree because he was fed up with his work. It's the fact that that became, you know, part of parlance and slang is questionable enough, but it had only happened a few years before this game out. And they were like, yes, we should definitely name our game after this one government worker who lost his mind and murdered a bunch of coworkers. Like, you're starting on the wrong foot right there to begin with. And again, I'm even discounting that.

I'm even discounting that aspect, even though I've talked about, I think, on the community show, why I hate that term because I worked for the post office and I never stopped hearing jokes about it. And I'm like, I don't really have a joke here. Sorry. Well, it's gross. It's just edge-lordy, isn't it? Which, again, I don't mind a tiny bit of edge-lording when it's applied in a way that maybe means something or says something or has something to say. But it's just a really mindless, violent game that swings at being thought-provoking right at the end but just doesn't land. Because why would it? Why would running with scissors ever make anything of any real substance or quality?

They wouldn't, because they can't. Don't have confidence. No confidence. No confidence. No confidence. So what's next? How would we improve postal? How would we redeem postal?

I guess someone out there is trying. Someone out there is trying to fix it. I guess. I don't know if they'll ever succeed until you maybe start over, but... Maybe remove the gun. guns and just have him going up to people and giving them the mail. That would be a better game. That's like Paperboy.

Yeah, Paperboy. And then give Paperboy like a gut. That would be what. I mean, everyone else is trying to kill Paperboy, so I feel like he actually has some justification going on a shooting spree. But a postal worker, not so much. Okay, so that was Postal. Stuart, what's your final pick for this episode?

Okay, this is another game I've found out about relatively recently, and it is Men in Black, the game on the PlayStation 1, ostensibly based on the popular hit film Men in Black, which I think we can all agree is excellent entertainment. Now, what they did with Men in Black, now, you think Men in Black, and you want to play a Men in Black video game. In fact, there are many Men in Black video games in which you do the correct thing, which is shoot aliens in the face.

You know, that's what you want to do, and you play these games. Does that include Alf? Oh, God, yes. Yeah, he's in the middle of some shitty quip And his just jaw comes off I'm sorry The talk of postal has made me quite violent Yeah, you've gone over to the other side

But he's like a puppet So it's like the foam falling out Oh no, there's guts in there Kevin There's a guts in there anyway Man in Black What they did, instead of doing something good and fun They made a fucking Inscrutable 3D sort of adventure game

Along the lines of something like Alone in the Dark or Resident Evil with tank controls, very poorly implemented tank controls and the main issue I have with this game and I'm afraid I can't be particularly in depth about it because I'm unable to progress past the first like 10 minutes because the first thing it does is throw you into this apartment building with enemies and there is a bomb in the building

that is about to go off. Now I'm sorry, I skip the cutscenes, I'm not watching that so maybe they told you what to do in the cutscenes I'm pretty sure they don't but what will happen the first time you play this game is you will immediately will be like, okay, what are the controls? Okay, got them, bottle go off, game over, back to the title screen, start again.

Okay, I know what I'm doing, I guess I'll go in this room to the left. There's nothing in here, boom, dead. That's how the game starts. You have to do exactly the right sequence of events in exactly the right order, exactly the right timing, or you will just game over. And that's the whole game. Every scenario is about somehow already knowing

what you're supposed to do and executing it. Even the slightest, like, divergence from it. you will be killed by some unfair instant kill thing, like frigging mortal combat mythologies or something, you know? But worse, much worse. It's a vile game. It has terrible combat,

which you could have just copied Resident Evil, but no, it's like this weird shuffling back and forth kind of terribly animated nonsense. And really, it's just the sheer specificity of what it's demanding of you. It reminds me of

like, I don't know, like, if you've got a Sierra adventure game and you condense it down to just the shitty things, you know, just the shitty things. And there were so many of them. You would have Men in Black the game, which was, you know, it was followed by much better Men in Black games based on the TV series, based on the second movie.

I can't remember the names, but there is a pretty good shooter on the GameCube based on Men in Black. And I don't understand why they watched that movie, this exciting, dynamic, funny movie, and when, uh, let's make a really crap version of Alone in the Dark. I don't get it. It was a mistake. Anybody but me played this horrible game.

Afraid not. No, I don't blame you. Sounds wretched, though. It is. I was going, I wanted to play every single movie licensed game on the PS-1, so I was just going through them to find what was good. And this stood out as, I mean, in all honesty, it would be quite a good game to stream,

because it's very funny, just to watch the reactions when you routinely are just destroyed by something you couldn't possibly have... predicted but no I mean can it be saved uh honestly yeah probably if they just relaxed you know just relax the difficulty a little bit maybe remove the ludicrisons and death things like climbing down onto a dumpster if you do it just wrong you just break every bone in your body and die it's just i think like a survival horror point and click uh okay clock tower right the original clock tower. That's what we think of

and we think survival horror point and click. It could work, but Men in Black is not the license for it. Men in Black is like this bodacious, funny, quippy oh shit, a giant alien shoot it in the head game. And that's what they should have done here. There are action games on the PS1, like Apocalypse, the Bruce Willis

game, or C12 Final Resistance, which is a very late Sony game which is quite underrated. Even something like Siphon filter with the men in black skin would be better, I think. But that's not what we got. I do think this could be saved by fundamentally changing everything about it, which isn't a very good answer. What really I wanted to do is urge people to try this for themselves so they can experience what a truly shit game is like, like just fails on every level.

I'm kind of astonished by how drab it looks. Yeah, it's so muddy and ugly. It's just awful. That alone is kind of offensive because one of the strengths of the movie is that it's a very vibrant kinetic film. It's fun to watch. It's fun to watch. It's fun to enjoy. Even you ignore the jokes.

Like, it's just a fun movie to look at. There's lots of crazy things going on. And instead, you've got, like, you know, what looks like the lowest tier of Resident Evil knockoff. And it's like a decent-looking model of Will Smith running around an apartment building, like shooting or kicking guys. Like, come on. What? Really? This was your, was this your first pitch?

Like, among movie licensed games, it's a cliche to say. that they're terrible, but cliches are cliches for a reason. And among the sewer, among like the dragon hearts, you know, and this is the worst thing I have played probably ever I can think of. It's just unbelievably awful, and I urge you to play it yourself and try, God, try and find a way to redeem it. Like put it in the comments or something, you know, let's go. Let's fix men in black.

Yeah, if only visual now, had been popular in the West at the time, because I could see you, like, turning this into, like, a visual novel type of game. Yeah, you can date those smoking worm aliens or something. It's, like, a mystery game. You know, you're solving the mystery of, you know, whatever crime is going on. I guess at least the only saved with graces, it wasn't in black, too, I guess. There is an alien that looks like Vincent Dinoffrio, so someone would be into that. True.

What a performance. What a performance to that movie. Okay. Man in Black. Maybe a game that can't be saved. Maybe you just need the little forgetter thing to flash. I can't remember what it's called. Yes, the neuralizer. That's it. I call it Menning. That's how you save this game. Oh, I don't remember ever seeing that game. It's entirely possible that I have played it and they were like, sorry, here you go. To be honest, if I had a neuralizer, I'd try and forget some game I really liked so I could experience it again. I don't

know, Yosius Island or something. Fair. So speaking of games that we really like, Kevin, what's your final pick for this episode? I'm getting on brand. I'm going to a 2,600 games. and that is the Pac-Man port. Oh, my. I don't even necessarily think is the worst game on the system, but it is like such a profound disconnect from the source material,

which is very good to this, which is extremely like, it's mediocre at best, and it just gets worse, like the more maze games showed up on the system. Like, there's a list of things to gripe about with this game. And for me, they really come down to, to, like, what are the ghost behaviors, the difficulty curve, which is basically non-existent, and, like, all the audiovisual elements involved.

So, you know, everything. Don't forget the maze layout. Oh, yeah, and the maze layout. You know, I'm willing to give it a little bit of grace on the maze layout just because, like, any sort of game being ported to the 2600s, a little bit of a miracle. But it's not great, and it would probably have been better with something a little closer to the arcade.

My understanding is that the programmer made a lot of these changes deliberately, that he was like, you know what, that's a pretty good popular game, but I can do better. Yeah, I know he's done an interview, Todd Frye, where he mentioned that he did not really like Pac-Man,

and I think it comes through on this port. I hate it, and now everyone else will hate it, too. Because, like, all the aspects he took away of what he thought made a good Pac-Man port are not the ones that I feel like people who like Pac-Man would have chosen. So, like, you don't have all of the visual flair, you don't have the same sort of, you know,

cutsy animations and tunes. And, like, you can't get great music out of the $2,600, but you can get, like, a short little ditty out of it. What he decided needed to be carried over was this two-player mode, which means that on a system that has barely any memory and very small cartridges, a good chunk of it is being spent storing what's happening in this other game state

that you may not be experiencing because you're playing it in single player. And therefore, the ghosts don't have any sort of interesting behaviors. They just sort of zero in on wherever Pac-Man is instead of having little corners they like to hang out in or what have you. Additionally, like it doesn't visually look the same. he's claimed that this was because Atari had some mandate about having black backgrounds, but everyone else that worked with him at that time was like, yeah, no one ever mentioned

that to me, whatever background I felt like in. So I think that was just a choice that he made, and maybe, I don't know, he was on so much cocaine at the time, he just forgot that was his choice. It's a bold claim. I don't know. It's a litigious claim. He was on a lot of drugs at the time. He'll even admit that.

Oh, okay. Yeah. He did actually admit it in the Atari 50s. Then we're fine, legally. We're in the class. Yeah, he brings it up on the Atari 50 documentary. Citation needed and provided. Okay.

Very, very high. So, you have these things. It handles, like, lives differently than the arcade game. Like, you just get a new one every new stage, so you always have a ton of lives. And, like, the power pellet, you know, in the arcade game, it sort of counts down as you get further into it to make it more difficult, so you'll finally lose.

Here, it's always the same length. So, yeah, it just it tops out in difficulty very quickly when you're playing it, and then it never gets any harder. So once you kind of get the feel of what you're doing in it, that's the game. It gets very boring, and you just

kind of keep going until you get bored and quit. So, you know, a lot of the things that I would say, you could use to fix it, like, are things that the later Pac-Man games on the, on the 2600 did, you know, they rework the base layout, which, you know, again, I could take her leave, but they opted not to have a two-player mode, because that's a lot of space. That's very valuable that you don't want to waste on this. So instead, you have, you sort of,

I guess I'd say proper ghost behaviors that sort of better match what the arcade games were doing. They more accurately represent the difficulty curve of the original game and the scoring and live systems, all that fun stuff. And the color scheme, like, Ms. Pac-Man still has, like, the blue background, but, you know, they sort of match the blocks in the maze to what was going on in the arcade game, which makes it feel a lot better. So there are options here, and there's a million hacks and, like, home brew ports of Pac-Man that exist on the system just to say, like, oh, look, what you can do if you really put your mind to it. The upcoming Namco DLC for Atari 50, they're reworking it for that, right? They're making a new version of the game for that's DLC. So they have the 2,600 port like as is.

They also have a 7,800 port that's new from what I understand. Oh, 700, my apologies, okay. Which should be pretty interesting. Yeah, 7800 Ms. Pac-Man was developed by GCC who created Ms. Pac-Man, and it's very, very good. So I feel like that's kind of the standard they have to shoot for. I mean, I played this. I've talked about it before, but I had this little hooky device called TV Boy that had loads of Atari 2600 games, and this was one of them.

And I really found it hard to get past this really fundamental thing, which is that the dots aligns. They don't even dots. Like, they fucked it up quite badly there. Yeah, I'm pretty sure what they did there is they used, like, the missile sprite on the system, which is basically a line. Yeah. And then I think they used the ball.

Sprite for the power pellets, which are sort of blocks. I guess that makes some degree of sense, but still, Pac-Man doesn't eat lines. He doesn't do lines unlike the developers. And, uh, allegedly. Yeah, and, you know, GCC, they did the other two Pac-Man games on the, on the 2600, so they, they're kind of miracle workers. Yeah, Junior Pac-Man's really good. They really had, like, a fundamental understanding of the game, because, you know, they did

the arcade versions as well, and they hacked Pac-Man into. Miss Pac-Man. It's like they had to figure out what people liked about it so they could carry that forward and improve on it. And yeah, I kind of wish that they'd had a shot at this one, but it came out too early. Yeah, I feel like all the problems with this one are really, most of them are technical. And I do feel like the formula for a good, 2,600 Pac-Man has been sort of pretty well established by other developers at this point. So, yeah, I think it's very redeemable. Mm-hmm.

All right. Well, I guess that wraps it up for this conversation. We don't really have time for another round. I mean, we could do another round, but I've got an appointment that I have to get to, so we can't do another round. So we're going to, what's that? Sequel. I smell a sequel. Potentially.

If people actually like this episode and. don't comment on Patreon to say, please don't ever talk about this again. Then we should certainly reconvene to cover the second half of the games that we all had on our lists that we haven't touched yet. And if not, well, we can just leave the people who did enjoy this wondering forever,

what could have been, what would the next conversational topic have been? You'll never know unless we do another episode, and only time we'll tell. Is this a good episode that should be, you know, followed up on? or is it a bad episode, the worst episode you've ever heard, how could this episode have been redeemed? That is for you to tell us in the comments on Patreon or on the website, depending on

where you hear this. Wherever you hear this, thanks for listening. Retronauts is, of course, available for you to listen to on most internet platforms, excluding Spotify, because F those guys. I hope that you are listening to this on Patreon because Patreon subscriptions is how we continue to exist as humans. It's very important to us, and we're grateful for your support. We will continue doing our best to put together interesting and insightful conversations about video game history for your edification and delight. Anyway, you can find us at patreon.com slash retronauts and subscribe to the show. There's lots of bonuses that are outlined there. Please come and take advantage of them.

Enjoy many things that you cannot hear outside the bounds of our Patreon. Or, if that's not how you like to roll, don't go to patreon.com slash retronauts. Just listen to us on other platforms. Enjoy the free episodes. They're also very good. Same quality of commentary, just not the same quality of audio as on Patreon. And that's it. Anyway, that's our pitch.

So you can find me individually, Jeremy Parrish, around the internet at places like limited rungames.com here on Retronauts and on my YouTube channel where I have covered some of these games and they've often made me very sad, but I don't take it personally. I don't hold it against those games. I want those games to be their best selves, and that's what this episode is all about. Anyway, Kevin, where can we find you online? You can find me on Blue Sky and YouTube and on General Web's, the General Web as Atari Archive. Atari Archive.org is my website and my Blue Sky Handel.

I also have a book with the same title through limited run games that covers the first two years of the Atari 2600's life. A very in-depth history. I highly recommend it as the one who wrote it. I highly recommend it as the one who edited it. Stuart. Hello. I wrote a book called All Games Are Good, also for limited-run games,

that covers a fair number of games considered bad. Now, I wouldn't normally do this, and feel free to remove it, but I'm going to cross the streams very briefly because I had a webcomic called Mary Hell. I wanted to raise some money for Mermaids, which is a charity that raises money

and helps out for trans kids and their families. And we did a swimsuit special. We did a Marvel-style swimsuit special for the comic. It's $3. Every penny is going to go. Two Mermaids.

You can find it on my socials or MaryHellcomic.com. Anything that Gumroad takes away from it, I'm going to make up myself. It's all going to go to them. And this doesn't sound like much, but we're already well over $100, which for a very niche comic like that is quite nice and good. So yes, Mary Hell Swimsuit Special, for Mermaid's charity, please buy it. There's nothing to do with video games. For that, I apologize.

All right. Very good. And Diamond. You can find me right on the internet by looking for Fight Club, F-E-I-T, That's my last name. CLUB, that's a blunt object that you could use to break some of these video games if you own them and felt displeasure about them. I have my website, fightclub.me. Otherwise, use FightClub and look for different social accounts.

I'm on there somewhere. And that wraps it up for these terrible games, but they didn't have to be terrible. And we hope that you go away feeling good about video games that could have been better, if that makes any sense. We'll be back again with more episodes, possibly even following up this one. Look forward to us on future episodes of Retronauts. Hooray. Bray. Good night.

Thank you.