Retronauts - 747: Asterix, Pt. 2

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

A belated return to a certain pair of violent Gauls, courtesy of Thomas Nickel, Audi Sorlie, John Linneman, and Stuart Gipp. Paf! By Toutatis!! etc.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, the joke that I originally was going to do here was very, very different in the original publication, but I've localized it, so it's no longer particularly funny, unfortunately. Hello, I'm Stuart Gibb, and that opening joke I just did isn't actually representative of the Asterix localizations, which were very funny, and I'm now ashamed of it, but there's nothing I can do about it. I can't redo it, I can't go back and change it. I've asked, and I've asked, but there's just no way to do it, unfortunately, so we're all going to have to live with it. and for the first time ever in history of Retronauts, one of the opening jokes has not landed, so I apologize for that. I'm Stuart Gip, and rather than do any long, lengthy preamble,

you know what this is. It's part two of asterix as it says so on the front of the page or the app or whatever you're using to listen to this. You know what's going on here. So we might as well introduce everyone. So I think if we go in alphabetical order by first name again, who's with us today?

I'm Audie SIRLE from Lim to Run Games and Digital Foundry. And I love Asterix. And it's me, John Linneman, coming off of playing World War Battle Heroes Field Army's Call of Prison Duty Simulator. And so everything Asterix will feel like gold. Can't wait to talk about it. Have you been enjoying VG games by any chance? Maybe.

Yeah. Right. And I'm Thomas Nickel and I love Obelix. I don't get it. It's his kink. It's okay. We got this. No kinkshaming.

So far, I think this has been a tremendous episode. I'm very, very happy with how it's going. Now, last time we went through an enormous amount of Asterix, although it'll be sort of a smallish amount of Asterix, but in great detail. Because there was a lot of ground to cover as far as appreciating where Asterix fits into the universe, so to speak. We got from the Atari 2,600 Taz game,

all the way through to the Konami Arcade Beatemup, which we mutually agreed was very good, I believe. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And today we're kicking off in 1993, which is a big year for Asterix games, as you'll soon see. Although some of it's in dispute, we'll probably get to that, with Asterix, simply named Asterix,

which is on the Game Boy and the NES. Now, my understanding is that the NES game is the Game Boy game or vice versa, but I might actually be mistaken on that. It has been a while. No, you're absolutely correct, and this is an interesting one. Now, we did say in the last episode, though, I think we said, Astrogon, Konami is the only arcade Astrix. We're actually wrong on this.

I just want to put a correction out there right now before we get further. Oh, wow. There is a Korean Simon Sess game in the arcades called Dongjak-Gomon, where Astrix does appear as wrong, like, the characters that you quiz against, I guess. Oh, shit. How do I possibly have forgotten that? I know. I didn't know how to approach you about this because I know you were going to beat yourself out.

This is an audio. Is this born out of our foray into the world of Korean DOS games? So prior to this episode, John Lidman and I have spent some time together playing games, and we kind of went down this Korean rabbit hole. Yeah, we pretty much just played Korean DOS games for a week. I discovered in a random screenshot on a Korean site that the asterix appeared in Dongjok-Jak-Gohman. I don't know if I'm saying that right, but... Well, if only one of the many fans of that game could let us know, that would be...

Yeah, if you have a cabinet, please dump it, because I think it is undumped based on the screenshots. But yes, Asterix on the NES and Game Boy are kind of the sibling games, but it was part of this larger promotion, and it was a fairly big promotion in the UK and France in accordance with Pardke Asterix, which we talked about last episode. So this was part of a pretty big campaign. And I have a lot of nostalgia for the NS in Game Boy games and it has a lot of meaning to me, whereas the superintendentucky game follows the same design guidelines that came from infograms, but is developed by a different group and shares some similarities but isn't exactly the same game. Yeah, I recall that this game in the UK, I mean, the Total magazine definitely gave it the cover. I'm sure at least some other magazines probably did as well.

In Germany as well. Astrox was quite on some magazine. Man, total was a cool magazine. I really enjoy it. I base a lot of my writing on that and Sega Power's kind of irreverence. So for me, it was like Superplay was like my number one magazine. Am Mean Machines, which I think Rich would have been part of. He was, yes.

but yeah Total was kind of like my my second choice there from Superplay for Nintendo stuff and yeah writing is just really clever yeah that I love the design

of that magazine completely different tangent here but like you know no it's worth mentioning I think it's a very different world because when I've when I've revisited games magazines like EGM the American magazines

I don't dislike EGM I do like what it offers I think the way they do reviews is still actually one of the most interesting ways to do reviews, which is four different perspectives. Yeah. They were basically ripping off Famitsu. Yeah.

I never read Femitsu or, unfortunately, so I always associate it with EGM, which is an accurate. You never played our Korean arcade games either. I know. I've exposed myself as a complete fraud. But no, what I love about that is when you look at EGM's sort of everything other than the reviews, that it's completely free of. criticism. Everything's great. This is awesome. This is awesome. I think I might have talked

about this before actually, but when you get total, it's just kind of like, we've got our Amiga's out, we've done a deluxe paint picture of the reviewer looking really pissed off. Maybe we can do an episode on the British Mags or something. Oh, it's on the dog. It's coming. Like, I'm definitely doing that. Yeah.

Because this is the actually conversation I've had a lot since going to America's and working there is kind of the mentality's behind these magazines. Because I felt like the independency of the British Mags was much stronger, whereas the American magazines were wrapped up in a lot more of like dealings. Plus, also, I felt that the personality doesn't really come through us freely in the American X. You're telling me that the personality of game fan didn't come through.

Hey, game fan, maybe, but I mean, EGN and GamePro. What is the personality of game fan? Like, oh, I don't want to get on a game fan. I got my first issue of that this week. Someone sent it to me in like a big lot of magazines that I picked up. And it's incomprehensible. I mean, it's cool. It's Dave Halvinson in a nutshell, right?

I don't know. The only thing I know about, no, I don't want to say the only thing I know about Dave Halverson, because I don't know if it's true, and it would just be dodgy if it's not. It's probably true, whatever it is. Probably, yeah. But I don't know.

I just feel like the worlds of games and the video games and of anime, of quickly devilhood, should have been. Um, let's just, yeah. No, I do, I do want to do an episode about UK magazines because I have a few, I'm going to try and pull a few favors and get some names from that era to, I was thinking of doing it like a documentary style. But anyway, that's not asterix. Oh, asterisk. What they would have done for asterisks is they would have got a picture of Andy Dyer, the editor of Total or whatever. They would have given him a deluxe paint asterisk's hat and a deluxe paint asterisk facial hair. They would have had him say, this game is a load of pantyrex.

Storix. That's what they would have had him say. I was afraid for a second you're going to tie this into a different Andy D. And I got a little word there. Oh, for God's sake. This is the insider podcast. Such deep cuts into John Limman and all these early careers here. I like this. This is a retronought, which is not a Dave Balmer episode that feels like a Dave Balmer episode

because we've just immediately gone completely off the rails. It's great. This is just a normal Monday for me. But asterix on NES in Game Boy. So there is something truly special about those games. I know that we're going to get into a little bit more of a critical eye on the gameplay very soon. But when you talk about those games, you have to talk about someone that was a good friend of mine, but also is someone that deserves a lot more respect in the industry for kind of what he achieved.

And that's Alberto Z. Gonzalez. He was a Spanish. Fantastic, man. Yeah, incredible. mostly known for his compositions, but he was someone that kind of lived the bedroom coder's dream. He grew up in Spain and still lived there and as a kid just started

bedroom coding on his own, made demos and kind of games. Small ones noticed that there was a gang company in his neighborhood and left a cassette in their mailbox and got his job that way. A cassette like a spectrum program. I think MSX or spectrum. I forget why you told me, but it was one of those consoles, and they just like, hey, you know what you're doing?

Why don't you come work? And kind of got in with the industry that way. And so I want to self-taught and as such looked at the limitation of those consoles and microcomputers with almost no limitation because he figured it out in an orthodox way. You have to do it. And he joined what was called Bit Managers, who are the developers of the Game Boy and then yes the asterix.

And Alberto did the graphics as well as the sound for this game. And I think in that area, these are among the finest Western developed games that those handheld and consoles ever had. These guys are really good, yeah.

Would it be fair to say that the, because I don't want to be completely wrong here, but that's just an infagram's kind of sound for the Game Boy that I think I'd, I mean, stuff like Smurf's Nightmare, is that one of this? That's also about it too. Yeah, because I was about to say, there's a very distinctive sound

to those games. Arpeggios and heavy lead melodies. It's kind of that European demo scene, almost C-64, like RPA-O sound. Very similar, I think. And the way this was achieved, the reason why you have that sound is that the sound driver was made on the spectrum, I think,

and then outputed towards the Game Boy and N-E-S. and so it gives a very distinct and different sound. It's not using anything kind of pre-made. It's all based on Alberto's own sound driver. And, yeah, I mean, the one thing you know, if you know Albatto's music, it's the arpeggios, and you mentioned Spurr's Nightmare, and I think the track Another World from,

no relation to the best game ever made. But that track in Smurrers' Nightmare is the greatest composition ever done on a Game Boy game. Like, it's bar none. other people can have other tracks but for me it's that one I can't think of a better one yeah it's just incredible

but with Asterix you know the music here too is the one thing about the way of doing it is that he's sort of like the stam bush of game music it's just very uplifting and positive and driving so I really like how he

approaches for example Asterix theory I got this game when it came out on both consoles and Game Boy and NES. And the one thing that really struck me immediately was just how like encouraging the sound was. I think it's kind of driving kind of buoyancy to it. It follows your step. It follows the action.

It drives the kind of adventure. It's one of these scores that just really fits with the pacing of the game. It's always a good thing when these really matters. Well, I think it sets the pace for the game, and then the gameplay, you know, for it's better or worse, it kind of complements the, you know, sound and art design of the game really well. This is one of those games where you get like a package. Yeah. And it all flows together. That being said, though, it is a traditional kind of standard platformer of the era.

I actually think the point about the music is really interesting because until now, I think we've kind of determined that Asterix doesn't really have a, unified sound in the game world, right? Because there's no strong themes to draw from at this point, right? No, you just have see shanty death metal in the Commodore, like you said. Yeah, yeah. I mean, for me, I think of like,

Asterix, whatever it's called from... Right. That's from the movie. Asterix Sondas versus Caesar. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, even the Konami game, the music isn't like exceptionally good. Like, it's fine, but I think it's worse

than Konami's usual fare. Right. It's just backdrop music. And then this is the first of the Asteris games that I think has a genuinely great sound to it. That makes you want to play the game, which I always feel is critical to any good platformer. You need great music. Yes. Oh, yes.

I mean, this is a game that, I mean, I first played this on one of those sort of hooky 16 and one cartridges where, you know, like, after a certain number of the games just keep repeating with different names. Right. And one of them was Asterix. And I was like, well, this is asterisk. This is going to be, like, licensed, whatever kind of game. And I actually really rate this. I think it's pretty high up on my list of, like, my favorite Game Boy games. I'd probably have at least top 20.

It has the minimal graphics of something like Mario Land, which I think suits the Game Boy perfectly well. Mario Land, Bill and Ted. Okay, to an extent, to some extent, it has the minimalism. It's not, I mean, it has parallax. That's what I was going to say. And I feel like this is something that really deserves to be stressed, is that this game has true overlapping parallax scrolling. On Game Boy.

On Game Boy. And now, for those that maybe aren't aware, the Game Boy, like the NES before it, it does not have a second background layer for scrolling. So there was no hardware support for this, right? So usually in games, when you would see a parallax scrolling effect on Game Boy, what they were doing was sort of changing the interrupt as you moved down the screen. So that you would essentially, let's say you have like a background and a foreground. They don't intersect.

They're just two separate, two different parts of the image. And you can scroll them at a different speed to create the illusion of parallax. But if you want to do anything that's above that line inside the parallax area, you'd probably have to do it with just pure sprites. However, asterisk works, though, the background scrolling behaves like a 16-bit game, where you have the full stages, the full stages, visible, trees, platforms, whatever, and then the background layer is behind it. And it's not just a single flat layer either.

They actually have multiple layers along the ground to give it that pseudo-3-D effect that was common on the Sega Mega Drive, right? Yeah. The one caveat here, and I think this is probably where the secret lies in terms of how they pulled it off, is that this game runs at 30 frames per second rather than 60, unlike most Game Boy games. So I think that they're using that extra time to sort of like perform whatever operation they're doing to allow this trick to work.

But given the ghostiness of the Game Boy screen, 30 FPS actually looks pretty all right on there. That's interesting. I never actually noticed that before because when I say it's sort of has a lot of, that kind of early minimalist look. I mean, it does have small sprites. It does have small blocks and bricks and collectibles. But that doesn't mean it looks bad.

It means it looks, it doesn't blur, you know, as much as it would in something like Mario Land 2. It's a lot more detailed than Super Mario Land 1, I would say. But it's of a similar sort of size and perspective. I think it's kind of the best of both worlds in that respect. I think it's a genuinely great little platformer for the Gameboy. the NES version I'm less familiar with because while I have played it, if memory serves, it's one of those Europe only games and it uses some weird mappers that doesn't

end up well. Yeah, it does. Yeah, so it's the Europe only game. But it's a very different game, I would say, right? Audi, like the Game Boy game is a very fast-paced, almost momentum-driven platformer. Yeah. Where it's very easy to fall and slip and, you know, lose a life. But it's about like managing all these small platforms, moving platforms, all kinds of

stuff while dodging enemies and getting through it a high-speaker. whereas the NES game is a slightly slower-paced affair, perhaps a little bit more traditional. As far as NES platformers go? So it's not the same level designs. I always thought it's the same. Not the same game. Oh, wow. Yeah, there's slight differences.

And I think... More than slight, I would say. Like, you can tell that they're derived from the similar source concept, perhaps, but the actual design layouts are pretty different as of the mechanics. The NES game focuses a little bit more on action because you have, rather than like a projector anything you have your punch, you can pick up, you know, magic hodron to get like invincibility, things like this, that I expect from Asterix.

Their secret areas to get points. It's fairly traditional. But yeah, the Game Boy game is definitely, like John said, like more momentum-based and kind of driving. The NES game has much more melee combat in it, where you're moving along, you're hitting the enemies. And also some of the animations, I feel like Asterix himself looks far more like Asterix in the NES game going to the larger spray.

A little bit less like. Cole Cogan, a little bit more Astros. But they have some really impressive touches in there. Like, when you get certain pow-ups, you'll see him kind of like do that thing he does in the animation where he kind of, his feet kind of flap. The feet, flapping, yeah.

Which has his, direct from the comic. Pointing his nose at the sky. Is that the thing when he drinks the magic potion? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They perfectly replicate that. Yeah, absolutely perfectly nailed that. Also, the little Anamonopias when you hit the enemies, right? Yeah, kind of pop out.

The paw and the poof and that stuff. Very cool stuff. Yeah, they really did nail. That was the thing about Bip Managers in general, not just from Albatto's music and graphics. It's like, in terms of capturing source material, they were really good at this. They kept doing Loonie tunes games, Smurfs, like we mentioned earlier.

This is kind of their forte, and infographics kept using them. And it's, Stu mentioned that this game was only in Europe, both for Game Boy and NES, as well as Super Nintendo. They were all European only. Right, right, right. though all of them had planned the U.S. releases via ElectroBrain. See, I actually think that especially the NES game as well could have made, done well in the U.S. If it had been released years earlier because it was 1993 at this moment.

Yeah, it was late. Like no way they were going to waste their time releasing an Asterix game in North America where most Americans were not familiar with the property at all. No. And, you know, I think for people picking it up now, you have to play in, 50 Hertz unless there is a prototype out there of the U.S. version, which runs correctly in 60 Hertz. Right.

I mean, the Game Boy 1 is universal, so we don't need to worry about that there. But on the NES and Superintend, though, you might want to hunt down those prototypes. They don't have any real differences from the European retail release. I believe we discovered that on the Super NES, when Thomas bought a copy recently, we tried to play it at 60 hertz, and I think it did not work. No, it does not work. It does not work. It's a bit off, yeah.

Yeah. It didn't work correctly. It's really too bad. Like he's mentioned, it's too late, but it's too bad. It didn't get a release. ElectroBrain did eventually go and publish Jim Power, which is another favorite of mine.

Jim Power. So, who knows what kind of reverence the game would have had now if the audience is because the problem is that when it is European only, it does get shafted into this kind of weird corner for game historians and just kind of game history. and just kind of game history in itself. Yeah. It's like, yeah, it's this neat thing, I guess, from Europe.

I haven't really tried it. And it's really big, I mean, this point of this podcast series, I guess, it's just kind of like, no, no, no, there's way more to it. When you pick up Asterix and you hear the game over track, man, it's just like, it's unlike anything else you ever heard on NES or Game Boy. The credits theme in both of these versions, it's just like, it's game music, which really invokes something that, both Japanese and U.S. developers at the time hadn't really tapped into yet.

It's years ahead of its peers on that, like, just on that one subject. So, you know, the 8-bit versions of this really is something that most people should try. It's not for everyone. It still has issues with, like, the pits. I don't know if it was mentioned yet, but like... Not yet, no. That was the first thing that struck me. So I did not play these games until you recommended them to me.

and introduce me to Alberto, who's what a nice man. Well, I'm a wonderful person. Just great. But, you know, the Game boy game especially, I notice this in the very first level and the second stage as well, there's these pits. But the way they're drawn so close to the bottom of the screen, your first impression is that you're looking at like platforms. Yeah.

So I, every time I pick this game up after a while, the first thing I do is jump down that pit because your brain just says, that's a platform. You quickly realize, oh, wait, no, it's not. But it's only a problem in this first level. The other levels, the pits are clearly defined like any other platformer. But for whatever reason, there's initial sections, man. It's not great. Yeah, but also on the first level, when you start playing and you come to the first pit,

even if you know it's a pit, the way the level is laid out with that small platform right before. And the collision detection, that's just a little bit, maybe too lenient. You have to struggle not to fall into that first pit. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it's not, certainly we aren't arguing for a perfect game here. It doesn't make the game in any way unplayable or bad. No, absolutely not. It has its kind of specifics there where you're like, yeah, you know, probably could have done with a few more design codes,

but like overall the package is really strong for the eight-pits ones. I mean, stupid questions for audio, if you know that. What's that, Bit Manches first, big breakout game they did? I think they had done a few other things. I think this was their first kind of breakout as bit managers. They had been, I think from what I remember, a lot of those guys, when they were working in Spain for that other company, they mostly did conversions.

And Alberto's first project was Altered Beast for the MSX. Oh, okay. So that was kind of the conversions they were doing. And I think they got a little bit frustrated with how this was handled. Yeah, it makes sense. They came bit managers and started pitching products to Infigrams. And then I don't recall if this or Smurse was first. But it was certainly among the first big breakouts that they had.

I think the Smurts were rather late. Yeah, I think the Smurst was after this. Yeah, it could be. That's another one that was like just absolutely incredible art direction and sound. You told you to buy that a while ago when we were in retro shopping. And it was a good suggestion. Oh, sure. I think there might be a Smurfs episode.

in the future. At least the ones by Alberto. There's a lot of Smurz games, and I'm not a big fan that property as at least in the cursions of asterix. Castle of Smurth and Stein. Yeah, true. Smurf-tastic.

So, I feel like that pretty much covers off the 8-bit games there, right? I'd say so. Yeah, because it is a 16-bit version. Yeah, released presumably at the same sort of time. Yeah, released around the exact same time, and this is actually, when I was talking to Albert about it,

I believe the Super Nintendo version was kind of the base design and the base pitch from infographics aside of what the series of games was going to be. Yeah, I mean, they do share a couple of assets like the blocks and everything. The blocks, the Asperts itself, it's kind of based around that same stance and kind of sprite sheet. There's something I've got to ask about because it's been bugging me since I was like 15. Now, I figure there's a simple answer to this, which is that they're sequels, but the Asterox game, on snares, the Astros and Obelix game on Game by Color, and the first PS1 game, the

one, not first, but the one that has platforming levels plus a sort of almost advanced was style kind of thing. Now, what they all have in common is they have these little yellow blocks with a weird symbol on them. Oh, yeah. And when you hit them, stuff comes out. And it seems very unusual for three, sort of

three generations or whatever, two generations, I don't know, these things would persist, because it suggests that they're being developed by the same basic sort of team? So what's the deal with these little yellow blocks with the width and one on them? I think this just comes down to the design guidelines that Infograms had for the series, because they wrote a pretty substantial, like, Bible for... It wasn't used as much as I think they were planning to, because, as we'll get into, asterix, kind of goes into a slump after this. But I'm pretty sure this comes from Infragram. because they actually published all them.

But I forget who developed the PlayStation game, but I think the Game of Color game is a rage software game, actually. Right. So, yeah, they're not the same development. It's just unusual of all things to see from something like that. It's like iconography that doesn't really... It doesn't fit from the... It's not from comics, really.

Yeah, that's what I was wondering, is it something they've somehow missed? Because they look like blocks that have like a weird stylized A for asterix on them, almost. I don't know. No, so I think... So I think that's just this weird kind of Bible thing. Right, right. I think I can actually answer that because this sign we can see on these blocks is a Celtic design from the ancient Gauls and Celts. It's called a triskele.

It's a three-legged symbol. It's found in many cultures from what I've found out. A word of yellow? Oh, well, I'm very ignorant, Tom. I don't know these things. I'm an ignorant man. Oh, well, again, this is probably me studying archaeology pays off for once. You like the Indiana Jones of video games, aren't you, Thomas?

Yeah, without that. Maybe one day they'll make an Indiana Jones video game. So, no, do you think so? Not a single one. Hey, there's some good ones. Yeah. But yeah, anyway, so that sign is a typical Celtic, Gaulish sign.

I had no idea. What an interesting deep pull, though? It's from nowhere. But this is actually one thing. I made a note of when we played that game at John's place. the Estnese game especially leans very heavily into that Celtic imagery

and Celtic also this choice of colors. We have levels made up of stonehenge-like stuff with the monolithic stones and everything. I think they did go a little bit into the popular historic elements for that and I think they just found this is a nice sign let's put it on the blocks because you find something nice

in there. I think also it probably is more subconscious than anything then but like these games were very heavily marketed towards the United Kingdom, Ireland, England. That was the mass market for these particular games. I think Asterix at the time had faced a little bit more scrutiny in France and Belgium. But the English market was still very strong for it. And the movies that were being produced after this as well were much more geared towards the English,

slash even the American market. Yeah, 1994 was Asterix Conquers America, right? Right, which is a terrible movie. But that was their big hope. That was like the one that they were... That was the one I was going to break out. Yeah. And kind of killed off the franchise for a little bit.

Was Craig Charles Asterix in that movie? I think so. Oh, my God. It's real bad. Listerix, Mike. I mean, we're not even talking about the SNS game now. I'm going to talk about Asterisks Conquers America. Like, in that movie, they meet Native Americans.

which are depicted very... So it's not really... It's based on some albums, but most of the movie is much more mean-spirited. And they meet these Native Americans, which, by God, uh,

not the most flattering a depiction you've ever seen. Uh, and the way they speak is that they only say English, like, cities and food items. So they'll talk like

Oklahoma, tacos, burrito. And it's like, Jesus Christ. No way. Yeah. This is in the French dub, by the way.

In the English dub, I forget what they did. But in the French dub, it's real bad. I don't remember that being in the German dub. I'm sure the English dub is very tasteful indeed. I think it's pretty bad still. But I just remember when I was doing research about Asterix in general many years ago, I came to that. And I was reading all these, like, pretty critical pieces from the time.

94, 93, about just how, like, you know, this was unacceptable. So, yeah, not the best time. And the Super Nintendo game as well, not the best time, I will say, we raved about the 8-bit version. Yeah, there is a huge issue with the Superintendo game. Just the levels are very by the books kind of European platformer based now. Well, they kind of, you don't think so? No, because they're usually just straight lines, either vertical or horizontal, right?

There is some vertical exploration. And, like, just the structure of them is so pain. You're right. The progression is... It just all feels very haphazard to me. It's not sprawling as in like an mega platformer, but like by that, by this time in Europe, I mean, these platformers were very by the books like this. So, you're right.

I mean, I would say it's generic to a fault. Like, that doesn't mean it's, that doesn't mean crappy necessarily, but... No, but it's unspired. And you really don't get much out of playing. And my biggest peppy with the Superman version is just controls. They're so floaty in comparison. And that's part of the problem is with the what you're right. So the enemy placement feels very cheap.

Oh, yeah. It's designed to catch you off guard as you platform. Yeah. The platforming itself is very slippery. Your attack is garbage as well. Yeah, your attack is very limited. The actual layouts of the levels are not all that fun. And they're often bad, I would say.

like the very first level made me raise an eyebrow. Oh, God, I know what you're going to say. Yeah. You're walking along. You're going from left to right. You reach the edge of the screen and there's just like a pit, like a jump, a blind jump even. And you're like, uh, okay, you jump off, you die. You do it again.

You go to the, you go down a little bit lower and you're like, okay, so what am I supposed to do here? There's no indication. So you try jumping again, you die. Eventually you discover, no, you actually have to walk to the end, then walk back to the left and go down a few platforms. And only then there's another pit, but this pit, there are coins in the shape of an arrow indicating that you can go down there. That's it. So it's still you jumping into a bottomless pit. It's just that that one has an arbitrary arrow placed on it.

There's also, I think that you can jump. There's a bit where you're supposed to jump off and hook back to land on a platform that's behind you. But again, there's really no indication that it's there. You just have to spot it and be like, know what you're doing. And yeah, it's very haphazardous, as Thomas. Yeah, and the worst thing on top of that is this is one of those games that has a large bounding box around the player. So the bounding box obviously is like when you hit the edge of this, imagine a box around your sprite character. When you hit the edge of it, it'll scroll the screen left or right, depending on which side of the screen you hit or up and down.

In this game, the entire time you're walking to the right, like a normal platformer, you see more of the visible screen area behind asterisk versus in front of it. So you're basically like only see this little sliver of gameplay area as you walk forward. And then you combine that with all the pits, the cheap enemy placement. And it just constantly feels like there's a lot of unfair stuff happening around the game. And every time you die, you got to retry that entire section. And it just becomes this like exercise and trial and error as you bumble your way through these boring levels that repeat the themes over and over again. Over and over. They're just too long.

The game is... It just goes on. Too long to say me. I don't know if any of you actually beat this game, but that's always been the funniest part for me, is that there is no end boss. The ending is just so underwhelming. Yeah, you just literally see Asterix, sorry, obics,

kind of sleeping, and you walk over, and that's it. And the ending isn't great either. So... And that just ties into how generic it feels. Like, without those characters in there, and the fonts and such like that, There's really nothing to differentiate this from any old generic platformer. It just feels like a total middle of the road.

Yeah. Not horrible, but not really well-designed platform games. Yeah. It just feels he could have been anything and then at some point, okay, let's just put some Asperx characters in there. Which is weird because, you know, you look at, they're all based on the same kind of design spec. Yeah. And the Epic games are much more faithful, much more, you know, they're shorter but better experiences. is.

Yeah, they did different things with their obstacles and platforms. Right. I guess here it was just like, this is not done by bit managers, by the way. The Superdine game is by, who did that? I think it was Infogram's own internal team. The music was not done by Albert. It was done by his name is Frederick Menson. It's also not very good.

It's not very good, but he went on or had done alone the dark. So, I mean, there's some pedigree to him. Sure, sure. It's just the music here, again, it's just sort of this generic, boring, uninspired. It adds nothing to the levels. And honestly, in a game like this, really good music could help push you through the game, even if you're getting frustrated. And without that, there's just no reason to keep playing. Very ambient and kind of weird.

There's no real melody, so to speak. There are melodies, but there's nothing. There's no sense of adventure for me. It's just happening. It's just there. And that's the only reason ocean ever. got through with anything, right? Ocean Base a ton of middling license games,

and the only reason you could enjoy them at all was because they usually had great music. Oh, incredible music, usually. So... I like some of those games, but it's me. I mean, that's the thing I love it. The most about this Asterisk game is because I should like it because it's me, but I still don't.

Like, every time I go back to it, I'm like, oh, yeah, this game will be all right. And it's like, yeah, boring. Three levels in, I'm bored and I'm dead anyway. So it's... I laughed out loud when I saw the snow layer where it's just like... Yeah, same patent.

Yeah, they fix these like twinkling dots in perfect squares and it just kind of scrolls across the screen and it looks really bad. I think the only part of the superintendent game that could be argued kind of in favor of is that... So there's a mind cart where like a... It's not a mind card. It's more like a roller coaster stage that's in each version. And the superintendent one is certainly more dynamic than the ones found on 8-bit versions. but it's also frustrating

due to kind of how the camera works. So I don't know if it's better. It's just more visually interesting on Super Nintendo. Yeah, I mean, there's some of the later areas look better. And like there's like an Egyptian pyramid kind of level, I think. And that actually kind of reminded me of quackshot. But then I was like, wait, this is much worse. Much worse, quack shot.

Quack shot is one of the best games ever made for Sega. But there's, I think the best part for me about this game is just like, like some of the iconography is pretty strong. There's some of really nice gradients overall. Yeah. Good use of color. Yeah. But the game itself is largely forgettable.

But the best thing you can say about a game is it's got some nice gradients. I think you've been onto a loser. It should be in your book at that point. All gradients are good. All gradients are good. So, I mean, compared to the other 8-bit games we've talked about, not just the Game Boy in any but also last time when we talked about the master system games, this is

worse than all of them, I think. Yeah, and it was the first 16-bit one. I mean, you can argue for the Konami arcade game, but like... Yeah, but... But this is like the 16-bit game. You do have to accreditations for that.

That's the thing. Yeah. But when it came on in 1993, I mean, everything else looked so much better. I mean, there isn't even an idle animation for Asterix himself. I think this game, if I'm not mistaken, because I used to watch two shows

called Game that was Game Master and then Games World I think which were these like TV it was on Sky Yeah sky was Games World Games Master was Channel 4 Dominic Diamond and yeah

Yeah I had satellites I got to watch those when they were airing And I remember that on Games Master The Superintendent game was featured as one of the challenges For one of the seasons So it did get heavily promoted through that show as well.

Wow. Yeah, I mean, we are harping on now, but I mean, it's not that bad of a game. It's just so incredibly bland. Underwhelming. Because it has, you know, usually when you have like the 8-bit slash 16-bit crossover, either they're very different or they're the same, but the 16-bit version is at least technically more impressive. Yeah. And in this case, you can start arguing even for it at like other than the gradients and some back.

background outs. It's just like that first stage man on the superintendent game is way worse looking than the first stage on NES. Yeah, absolutely. It's the kind of game that I sort of write off in the sense that it's, it only exists because they had the license, it feels like. It's just like we got to do an asterisk game. They're done. Like that that's what it feels like to me. I was talking about this a little bit with the handheld Mortal Kombat games, which exist because they were able to make them, I think. It was kind of like, we need to get these out. We need to get these out on every system. There, we've done it. It's finished. There, done, move on. And that's the worst thing I can say about many games, really,

is that they don't feel like they've been made for any reason other than to exist. Yeah. To be on a shelf and make money. Yeah, basically. And there's nothing to recommend it, really. It's not God-awful, but, like, I'll put it this way. The game based on hook is, like, way better than this. So you go and play that instead.

Oh, hook on Superdino? Oh, my God. Yeah, that game was. That's an incredible. game too. It's so good. So good. Yeah. That's an awesome. There's a licensed game from, I think, the same year that I like way more.

Yeah. Man, I love Hook. Yeah. Hook is super good. I have the Japanese hook Super Famicom Ecyclopedia right here. Nice. So you're hooked. I know you do. Yeah, that's, I've always wanted to see that in person. You've got to bring that next time. I got to bring it, yeah. But that's another Ukiote special. I think that was their first game, actually.

That's another Retronauts episode. Yeah, Ukiote. And, by the way, another game that you told me to buy at a retro fare, and I did, and I didn't regret it. So I have this reputation across the world for just recommending the worst games. But what I come to find is actually I recommend mostly good games to my friends. I've got to ask, because I don't know this. This is based solely on playing both games and assuming that they're the same developer.

Did they make Skyblazer? Yes. Of course they did. Of course they did. I knew those games were related. So in The Encyclopedia, there's an interview with the whole dev team. and they mention that they work on Hook 2 at the moment, which will be based on the sequel to the film,

which never came out. And as such, the game is trying. Hook 2, hook with a vengeance, nice. Hook with the vengeance. So they changed the Skyblazer at some point. But Skyblazer is like absolutely awesome. I'm so pleased that I've always suspected that they were related,

and now I know for a fact that they are. And then they went on to do spawn. And Stuart, let me tell you about a game called Coolie Skunk. Oh, I know, yeah, I knew Colis Skunk. Punkie skunk. That's also for the same team. They made the spawn game on the Super Nintendo as well. They did, yes.

I got to play that. Yeah, I have it. It's an interesting game. Okay. Okioeta, meet us again. This is what these episodes are, setting up future episodes. Hook was such a weird one, though, and that would be fun to cover because so many different developers made hook games. I mean, there's even an Irum. They did arcade, and then there's the ocean games that are, yeah, which are awful.

Really bad, really bad. And then they did the PC version, the Amiga version, which is a point and click. Like Monkey Island. So, gentlemen, could we say we're just sitting up a sequel hook right here? Oh, no, that's not that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can we say this is ending on a cliffhanger and we actually do cliffhanger next time? Oh, no.

I'll do that with Stuart. Cliffhanger isn't off the table, but I think hook would be far more interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, cliffhanger had some interesting ones. Why are we here? So much the Salernian episode, yeah. Oh, yeah. Um, yeah, Asterix, where we've done, well, I mean, when we're talking about the SNS game, we've got to desperately talk about almost anything else that's better.

Yeah. That's true. But now we've got, uh, the next one to talk about would be Asterix and the secret mission for the last system and game game game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is kind of, uh, a good one again. Yeah, this is kind of the last of the great Asterix games coming out for a while because this is the sequel to Asterix, we talked about the last episode.

Yeah. Uh, which was the last episode. done by, what's his name again? Tomozle, Endo. The Cossil Vision. Yeah. And follows a lot of the same design basics as that. But, man, this is a showpiece.

You know, we said that about the other game. Last time, it's like, oh, this is a showpiece. Here, though, they are just going all out. And I'd argue that this is even better than the original Astrox game. It's, man, at first glance, this looks like a megadrex. drive game even, just without the parallax, but it's very detailed. I remember that

there is a little bit of sort of puzzling going on in this game, which is akin to how there's a little bit more puzzling in Land of Illusion that there is in Carsevolution, maybe, because there was this kind of rash of 8-bit sequels that, you know, you had like sort of late games like Donald Duck,

Deep Duck Trouble, and Land of Illusion, for example, and I guess this is the asterix version of that, because it definitely shares I'm reasonably sure there are some enemy sprites in this game that actually are from Land of Illusion. That maybe sounds mad, but I'm sure that the fish are the same fish. I'm sure that some of the stuff that turns up is the same. That could be, I never thought about that, but I mean, I wouldn't put it past them to do that.

But it's a remarkable game for 8bit, you know, it really is. It's a lot of fun. It's another great little, fairly simple, but really enjoyable platformer for your master system. When you look at the detail of the backgrounds here, like the Sprite, the color depth. If you put the screenshot in front of someone and asked which console is this for, if they managed to narrow it down to kind of like, well,

that looks like a Sega kind of color palette. So it's Mega Drive. Like, I think very few people would look at this, especially in still and say like, yeah, this is a master system game. I mean,

if you showed screenshots of this game versus the first Genesis Mega Drive Alex Kid game and said, which one is which? I guarantee people would get it wrong. be like, oh no, Asterix, that's the Mega Drive game, and the other one is obviously Master System, but no. The only thing about this game that I

personally don't like, and I can't remember if it's the same as in the first game on art, is when Asterix does a sort of straight punch, he winds up for a second, and I find that kind of annoying. It's only in this one. It is a little annoying. It's a cool animation flourish, but it's not great for gameplay.

It takes out speed. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's perfectly playable. I mean, I'm looking at it now because it's been a while since I've played it, and it looks like Asterix has a double jump. He does. That's got to be one of the earlier double jump games, surely. So it's an early double jump, but it's also one of the more flawed ones because you don't get the height. That's the one thing I remember the most about playing this game is that, so like with the first one, you have kind of two distinct routes you can do based on which character you play as.

But in this game, it's way more expanded. Yeah, yeah. And you're basically getting two games and one. Oh, wow. And the Obelix one is much more like action-oriented, more like a Mario. And then the Asterix one is more acrobatic in that sense. But the double jump, it just lacks a little bit of height. And you end up doing these jumps that you are pretty certain you're going to make it.

And then you don't. Yeah, I remember some very tricky platforming in here for sure. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, I think it's interesting that it exists at all, to be honest, because I can't remember the first game. I remember playing that had a double jump, and this has to be up there. Like, I'm sure there's much, much earlier examples, but I can't think of what they are right now. I mean, this is late, right?

So this is like 93 still? Yeah, but even then I don't associate the double jump with games until, like, the PS1. I'd really like to look through that and see, like, the history of the double jump, because it has, that has to have been. They have to have been. And I'm sure if I, if we put all the heads together, we could think of it. One was Super Goalsinger. Oh, God, of course.

That was earlier, but I think that's the first one I remember. Yeah, yeah. Wasn't there one in Trojan, something like that? Or a Dragonbuster, I think Dragonbuster. Yeah, Dragonbuster. Yeah, there's got to be plenty. We'd have to look it up a little bit. Are we talking about Retronaut's episode about double jumping?

It could happen. It could be a lot of research. But I tried in real life. It doesn't really work, I'm afraid. No. Oh, I can do it. But I do want to say about the punch being a little bit annoying. I actually find, like, you get used to it pretty quickly because it's similar to, say, like, the Castlevania Whip.

Yeah. There's a bit of anticipation there. But once you get the hang of it, it becomes easy to sort of like time your attacks. And it just, you know, it's natural. It's not really the attacking that bothers me. It's when you've got, when you're wanting to break open blocks to get items and you're just wind up in front of them and you're just standing there, winding up and attacking. That's fair. That's what mostly bugs me.

The fighting is okay. it's just time there's not that much no there is a lot breaking though I mean there is definitely some but it's not like horrible but the main thing again is like you mentioned audio the asterisk stage is they have a lot of like puzzle solving elements still yeah like the other one where you know you'll

like go get a potion and you use the potion to you know create like you know either like drain a pool of water or create platforms things like that right where you're basically just like you've got to search a level find the thing to use on something else and then that allows you to proceed and

And it's very simple, but I feel like it's, it's very satisfying. Like, it sort of scratches an itch in your brain, or you're just like, oh, yeah. But then there's also some really crazy stuff like that surfing level. Oh, my God. That's right. Which, man. Which has some parallax scrolling again, by the way, which I'm always a fan of. But this has, like, dynamic slopes.

This must be the most exciting game you've ever played. Well, I actually would like to know how, like, what they're, because the water that you surf on is just straight blue color, which makes me think that they're actually doing something programmatically. Like, it's not a tile map. It's like they're actually playing with the lines on the screen in real time to create these waves. And it's a really neat technique that's fun to play, actually. I just think it's impressive that you go from that surfing stage, jump on the back of Pirateship, and then just kind of keep going.

It does fade to black, but it's just really cool dynamic. Yeah, yeah. That's cool. That's another thing, which I think I noted back in day when they were wrote the article. It's like there's actual progression throughout the game. The game is fairly simple. That's the one thing I noticed, though, mostly when playing this back in the day, because this is another one where I bought it when it came out. And I think I finished it with my buddy, like on the play-through, which we turn it on. Oh, dear. But still, I mean, I, when I was

a little kid, I got the Tom and Jerry game for Christmas, the Master'ston. And I finished it within 20, within about 30 minutes. And I went back to that game tons and tons of times because back then, when you had a game, you just kept playing the game. Oh, yeah, yeah, I did say. And the Tom and Jerry game at least had, like, replay value because you could catch Jerry earlier in the stages if you knew what you were doing.

I got Last Action Hero for Superintendent for Christmas. Oh, for the Superintendents. I wrote an article about it. It's bad. I did the game game and it's a piece of shit. Yeah, that's the same as Game Boy. Wow. And then the NES game is unique, and then the Mega Drive and Superintendent games are alike, but have differences.

Are we anything about future last action hero episode? I think it could happen. I think it could be. Oh, man. So this game, among the absolute best you can get out of Master System, again, Europe only. But I think this one is fairly interesting,

and I saw this when I live in Brazil, there was a Brazilian version of this released, like, way later. Was it Monica? It was not Monica. Monica was not, that was a dragon's trap. Monica. All right. You know.

This was, this was, uh, this was, uh, Aventura's of Tebe Colossos, which was like this cartoon. And I remember just seeing that on a shelf there in Itaim in Brazil. And as I mentioned in the last episode, I just didn't think about these games when I was there. Yeah. And I just remember seeing it turning it around. It's like, this is totally just the secret mission. Like, you just ripped it off.

And I didn't know this thing. This is 2003 that I was there in 2004. Yeah. modern Audi's yelling at past Audi. Oh, absolutely. I don't sleep at night because of this stuff. Mad, that past Audi guy. Yeah. I mean,

he's probably better than current Audi, but that's a complete conversion though. And has new backgrounds, has new main character sprites. They all look pretty bad, I'd say. You can look it up on YouTube, I'm sure. Avantura's the Tevogloso.

and just see how it looks. But it's all simplified, and it all kind of just feels like, you know, we were talking about, like, the graphics detail on the sprites, for example,

for Asterix and Oblix, which looks almost like Genesis. Yeah. Whereas the Tabricorosso version looks like sub-meag master system. It looks real bad. Yikes.

Wait a second. I found a tech toy version of this. That is Asterix and the Secret Mission. Yeah. So they did release the Asterix version as well. So wait, they just released the game twice? Yeah. All right then.

Yeah, yeah. So Brazil, because of the strength of the master system and how sustained it was, later on, a lot of previously unreleased as well as like redesigned games like this came out. So it's not uncommon that you have two versions of the same game. Most famously, of course, it's like soccer games, which they still update with like new teams. So that's not too, it's not too uncommon that they did that. I'm actually, I'm looking at footage of this right now. It's not, I've never seen it.

This is not great. This is a bad sprite hack. It's pretty bad. Monica was better. Yeah. My, my eternal struggle with this game, Asterix and Secret Mission is it did get a 35th anniversary. Christmas box set

for the asterix franchise not the game itself so when it came out it had like this

box with like a t-shirt the game and this like translucent plastic box as a collector's edition

was that like they did a version of lucky dime caper that was yes same thing right

same thing for that and I had never been able to get the I have almost a complete

asterix kind of like a game collection. But I've never been able to afford this because it's like when it actually pops up, it's like 5,000 euros now. Holy shit. Yeah.

So it's just like, I'm not going to pay anything near that for anything that you get related. So if anyone else has that out there and want to sell it to me for cheaper than that, I'm willing to, I'm willing to negotiate, but you just, you just told them you can get it, they can get 5,000 for it. I don't know if that's sold. Right, right. You know. Isn't that with the,

the Game Gear version included, not Master System? That's a Game Gear version, yeah. Okay, that's what I thought. Yeah, you've shown me images of this before in your pursuit. And yeah, it just doesn't even pop up much. It is on Game Gear.

I think you're a only game gear. The Game Gear version has like subdued colors compared to the Master System. So I think the thing about... That's unusual. Well, I think they look pretty good. actually. And there's a few other changes to it as well. It's not exactly the same. They definitely made some sort of tweaks to it. But I think, again, the colors on Game Gear,

it has a much larger color palette than Master System. And it was also being created for a very low quality portable screen. And as a result, it looks different, right? So, good or bad, it's not just a direct port, it seems, that there is some effort into it. There is a little bit of differences to the stage. layouts, if I recall correctly. It seems faster? That could be. I mean, it has slightly... And I guess the interesting thing there then is that the European Master System version

would have been 50 Hertz only, right? Yes. And Game Gear is basically a 60 hertz machine. Yeah. So I've always wondered, does it faster because they didn't do conversion work on the speed? I'm pretty sure. That's what we said last time when you talked about the first. LASTrox game and Master System.

It's probably the same thing then. But, you know, they definitely did a good job at Translating. Like, things like the surfing stage, for instance, it's not just, like, zoomed and cropped. Like, they actually did proper work to sort of format the artwork to fit on the game to your screen. And, you know, I feel like the levels work a little bit better in terms of, like, slight changes so that you're not, like, getting hit constantly by off-screen stuff. Although, the sprites are still pretty darn big. So it is harder. It doesn't.

It looked, I mean, when I tried it on the Game Gear, it felt like one of the games they had actually done the work to make it playable. Because quite a lot of Game Gear games are borderline unplayable. Yeah. Yeah. But something that I don't know, something that might know about Secret Mission to me is it almost feels like a best of of Sega's like in-house 8-bit platform games. Because so many obstacles are taken from others, like from Lucky DimeCaper, from Land of Illusion. And there's stuff that really is just kind of a redux of those games. And that's not a bad thing.

It's just a remarkable how similar it can be. So I guess if you've played all those games, it's not going to seem like anything much new. It's just it is still a very accomplished game, I would say. Yeah, it's like a Best Elf album. Yeah. Nothing wrong with that. No. So wait, one thing I'm trying to confirm here is I think the Game Gear version allows you to run at a high speed.

And I can't, I don't think that's in the matter. Master System version, is it? That I don't remember at this point. On Game Gear, you can, it's almost a Sonic the Hedgehog style run where it's a different animation. His legs can have like these like cartoony smoke effect and he moves it like twice to speed and it kind of changes the dynamic of the game a little bit. And I just played through Secret Mission recently on Master System and I don't recall being able to do that unless I just didn't miss it.

Yeah, maybe, like you played more recently than me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will have to double check, but you might be right about that. I think you can do that run on the master system. It just might not be that much faster. Because the whole mass system game suffers from slowdown, more or less the entire time. Because there is so many, there's very little sprite flicker,

but there's quite a lot of big things on the screen. Yeah. So it does seem like it suffers from slowdown a lot. well it's like on the ice level you've got quite large snowman sprites exploding into four further sprites with Romans inside while the snow effects are happening it's all sorts and the game does run kind of slowly I think you can do the sprint in the master system version though I'm pretty sure it's there I'd have to go back to it I was just looking through the manual here and there's no mention of it I need to I'm not prepared for this because I the game gear version is the version I've not played recently. So, and I was just looking at footage of it. I'm like, wait a minute.

This is running is happening. And that's not something I did in the master's conversion at all. Well, if any retinor's listeners would like to verify this, and get in touch, mark your envelopes, asterix, sprint. The thing that makes me wonder about this is because, you know, the level with the rain where you have to chase the shady looking guard? Yes. Until you reach the end on game gear, you can basically do this sprint and catch right up with

and the screen scrolling at a much faster speed, whereas on Master System, you just kind of walk after him and he moves at your same speed. I hate to say it, but I've looked it up, and Nastricht's definitely doing it. I'm just playing it, and yep, he's doing it. Okay. You hold the punch button, and then you can,

and you run. Like Super Mario. Complete with the smoke and with the sonic style moving. So that answers that then. So when we played this recently, Thomas, neither of us figured that out. Yep, because you have to, I think it's because you have to hold the attack button, which also takes the time to load up, and then, because you can't just do it spontaneously.

That's pretty funny then. But the manual doesn't mention this. No, I didn't see it in the manual. I need to look through again, but yeah, that's, uh, that's some weird stuff. But I guess it shows how not critical that move is to actually play in the game. Yeah, it may have made certain sections easier, though, because there were definitely some tricky moments. I mean, in the state where you hunt that Roman guy, he just adapts to your speed.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because it's a puzzle again. You have to push a block into his path, and then you can beat him and get the item. So now let me end up on with the good Asterix games. I'm afraid so. But still, I think it should be said again. I just played it a bit today.

Just put in some paradox scrolling in the background, and you have Megadrive game. at this point. It looks just that good. I just think these are amazing these late mass system games that came out in 92, 93 and so on. I mean, they put still so much effort in there. I mean, same with Jurassic Park, for example.

It's just a great game. Yeah, absolutely. So, the same, apparently the same year for mass system game, gear, and megadrive, although I believe the 8-bit and 16-bit games are quite different here. We got Asterix and the Great Rescue.

Oh, yeah. Which is not really great. It's bad. Yeah. So this is where, unfortunately, we get to do a great downturn. And this did get a U.S. release, which always frustrating is that this is the game that Americans actually got. And this was done by core design. The makers of Wonder Dog. Wonder Dog, Tomb Raider, all the best.

Chuck 2, son of Chuck. Chuck Rock. Well, Chuck 2, son of Chuck. I guess. That's actually not a bad game, which is ugly as sin. I'm sorry, what is your problem with babies? Chuck Rock sucks. He has a good band.

I don't like this Chuck Rock's like. Yes, he does. All right, Stu, would you rather play Chuck Rock or Dizzy? Oh, Chuck Rock. Even I'd rather play Chuck Rock. Oh, all right. Making me angry about Chuck Rock. Maybe a better caveman band than Chuck Rocks.

the B-52s when they were doing the Flintstone steam. Oh, well. Oh, yeah, that's true. Or do the dinosaur. I'm just going to go play BT Racers. I'm going to go play the Flintstones ocean game based on the movie. Oh, yeah. Well, that ocean game is, that's funny,

you bring that up because it does make you kind of think of asterix in the Great Rescue in terms of quality. Yeah, it's not great. So this, you know, because everything is laid out here to be something that could have been fine. you know, it's very similar in setup to the games we talked about. If you're gonna, like, if you're just gonna list kind of what it is,

I think you'd be hard-pressed. It's like, well, it's the same as the superintendent game or the master's some games. It's the same setup. Like, what's so much worse about it? And it's just like, well, everything is executed so much worse. The controls are horrendous.

The graphics are real blocking and ugly. I hate the sprites. I don't like, the sprites are very detailed, but they're super off model on a way that's not that pleasant. Yeah, Obelix looks like some guy. Yeah, just some guy.

I mean, I've got to be real, though. I don't hate the 8-bit version of this. I really don't hate it. I think 8-bit is better than 16-bit, at least, yeah. It's better than 16-bit, but in the same year, you have Secret Mission. See, that's the thing. I don't think this is on the 8-bit. I don't think this is appreciably worse to the point you could call it garbage.

like by comparison. If you go from one to the other, though, it feels pretty bad. The level design is not good. No. I don't agree. This is where the world goes around. I really don't think that it is.

I don't think it's as good. I don't think it's as strong, but I think that the level design is fine because it's just that kind of open truck rock design. Because it is chuck rock. It feels like chuck rock to play. And there are lots of, you know, it's not just completely like whatever.

It's a venture. platforming, there is stuff to find, there is exploration, and there are some sort of puzzles to solve. It's no great guns, and it's way better than a 16-bit game, but I would not call this garbage personally. I do quite like it. The prior game is a Japanese-developed game with

solid Japanese-style level design, and I would say European-made platforms from this era were largely worse. I'm sorry to say. Especially when it's exploration. It's just my opinion. I am prepared to acknowledge that I am the guy who likes Radical Rex.

The thing is, I think, Radical Rex. Again, I played this a bit today to prepare for this podcast because I do my homework, actually. And just the first level just feels so random. You start in a tree. You go right, there is a door. You have to go left. Oh, there is a key. You go underground.

There is flames coming up and there's platforms. And this is not level one to me. A level one does not look like this. Yeah, that's the problem. There's just all these confusing directions. You don't know where you're going. You're just looking for stuff arbitrarily. the layout feels weird

and not enjoyable to explore. It has none of the right pacing of a platform game, especially early on. It's just, it's madness. It doesn't work. I think also, in accordance to, like, the source material usage, it's just, it kind of looks like asterisk,

but it certainly doesn't feel like it. Even with the Romans, even with, like, on 16-bit version, you have a little bit more in the way of, like, the Gallic forest. and Roman and the imagery. Yeah.

It's there, but it's at the same time done in this stylistic way that does not really fit. I don't know what they're going for here, but it feels almost like a British comic or something. The 16- Yeah. Sorry. The 16-bit for me is way worse,

if only for the addition of a time limit. Like, not only do you have to figure out these quite confusing maps, you've also got to figure it out quickly. It also has a thing I really hate again, a 16-bit game. It has these wallpaper background, with just some fish.

This is the fish level with fish in the background because this is what we do. We do put fish in there. The 16th version though, like graphically, the one thing I do like about it is the color usage. It stands, it really

pops, which was not the norm before Western developed Genesis games or Mega Drive games. So it looks neat. Core design had a lot of experience. on the system by that point, right? So, and they knew what they were doing, technically.

I did the chuckrock. I think for me, like, maybe I'm being too kind to the 8-bit version, because, to be honest with you, there is so much further to fall. Yeah, yeah. When I play that game, I just kind of think, like, this is an all-right platformer, I'm fine with this. But, like, I like it better than the SNES game, you know, I have to say. Yeah, okay.

But knowing what's coming up after Great Rescue, like, Power of the gods, which I think is way worse. Way worse, yeah. And way more expensive. Maybe that's why I'm more reasonable towards this one. I mean, my comparisons to this game, the 16-bib version has always

been like Dragon Slayer on Super Nintendo. They feel very similar. Oh, God, yeah. They look similar, they feel similar, they control similar. I don't think they're developed by the same. I don't think Core Designs. Dragon's layer always feels like a proto-tomy,

so, yeah. It's never good, right? It's horrendous. And, but yeah, graphically, it's fine. The music is actually by Nathan McCree. So who would go on to do, I think it did Tomb Raider, right? Possibly. I'm not sure, to be honest.

But yeah, that's, man, I had never thought about that Dragon's Lair comparison, but you're totally right. Yeah. It's got a lot of those, like, flimsy platforms where you're like running on like a narrow log or something that's, we've got, you know, there's something about the level design and the layouts that feels very familiar to that. Yeah. And you just kind of have this large, overanimated sprite character that doesn't feel great to control. And I don't know. Yeah. There's a reason why that comparison is out there.

But yeah, Nathan McCree was definitely Tomb Raiders composer. Oh, cool. I just had double-christ. I'm not a big Tomb Raider guy. But the music here isn't that bad. And the sexting bet version, it's not that bad. It's not the most memorable. I want to flag up that time limit again because I actually don't mind time limits generally.

like I like time-based games. But in this game, it really does feel like they just were like, this game's too short, people are going to finish it too quickly. Yeah. Let's just give, like, there's a level here where you start with, I think you start about 40 seconds to finish it. And if you know what you're doing, you'll still be very low on time by the time you get to the end.

Yes. And it just feels completely arbitrary. I mean, again, the 8-bit version doesn't have that. So maybe that, again, also helps me to kind of like it more. but yeah, time limits plus this sort of

open end level design is always a horrible combination. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean,

yeah, I don't mind it in like, obviously, for example, like Mario has time limits, but they're very

rarely a problem. Exactly. With this, it's not so much that they're there. It's the fact that there's nothing more frustrating than

running out of time while you genuinely have absolutely no idea where you're supposed to go or what you're supposed to do. I've never liked

time limits. No. Unless there's like a ticking a clock for like a bomb or something as a challenge? I think it's when I think about stuff like Dead Rising, I like them there because there's an actual

reason for them to be there and it's sort of meant to replay them. But when it's something like this, I don't hate them as long as they're generous enough that you're not going to be losing because you haven't memorized the level yet, which is not fun. It's just that arcade remnant from before when you didn't want to play too long

on the money. That's all there is. They were. Or if you walked away from the machine they didn't want you to, you know, for the game to just sit there, right? I guess, yeah, it's probably... I think that was the actual reason, right? Because if, without the time limit on an arcade game, if a player walked away,

the game would just sit there. Yeah. So they put the time limits in to ensure that it would eventually just kill the character, and then, you know, you've got to put more coins in. But this game specifically to me is just a clear-cut example of just it's there because they kind of half-auster. Yeah. Well, yeah.

It feels quite half-a-foss, yeah. Especially, like, it doesn't make sense to the level design to have that short of a time limit. It's a contradicting game design. Also, it's just weird that the map screen is like, you know, the map from the books, and then you'll go to like, okay, I'm going to this

location in Rome, and the location you go to is a bunch of floating green platforms in a void. Yes. In space. It's like, well, don't bother setting a sense of place if you're not going to... I never saw that in Rome, to be honest. Yeah. There's also the snow level, I remember, which has, like, these foreground

objects that, like, blocked the entire screen. It's just like not well designed. Speaking of not well designed, there was another 16-bit megadrived game, wasn't there? There was. I'm afraid there was, yep. Asterix and the power of the gods. The only powerful thing about that game is the pride catches nowadays. Is it expensive?

It's expensive now, yeah. I have two copies of it. You have a few copies of it. they have one that's in French and one that's in English All right Now you're rich I just love the idea of like

The whole retro in market Of just being like Hey this game's You don't see this on eBay for often 80 quid please Like no No one's gonna pay that for this game

Because it sucks Nobody wants bad games It's just not the truth Not the case Ordy John that reminds me of two weeks ago Oh When we went retro shopping And the guy always looked up

The price on eBay When we were interested in something. Great times. Great times. No, I think the reason this is pricey is because it was like, was this like 96 or 95 or something? It's like, it's very late. It's very late for the system.

And most of this games just didn't sell very well. So there's not many copies out there. I think small print runs at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's a cheap one, 45 euros in France. I wasn't aware that this was an expensive. Well, maybe the power of the gods version is expensive or something.

So, yeah, it's not one. I mean, it's not among the most expensive games, but considering how crappier is, it's expensive, I would say. Yeah, it's not good. Conceptually, like, at first glance, you might think, oh, it's like a faster-paced asterisk game, right? Yeah. If you actually move through the world quickly,

it seems like it has, like, some energy to it that was lacking in some of the other games. But it's very clunky, and the level design is, again, very poor. It doesn't play well. It's worse. The level of design, I think in this is worse. It's pure nonsense.

It's got more of a backtracky, adventurey kind of a thing going on, hasn't it? Yeah. But the problem is, like, the sprites to me, the sprites look even worse. Like, Asterix's jump sprite looks absolutely ludicrous. Like, God knows what they were thinking. They're trying to make it look expressive, I think, but almost like an Earthroom gym, right? But with, like, one-eighth of the number of animation frames or something. I mean, the thing that gets me is, like, when Asterix,

jumps in this game. On the downward arc of his jump, he just transforms into a different character. His entire physiology just warps, and it's just awfully drawn. It's just a badly drawn spright, and they should be ashamed of themselves. It happened to me once, but no sudden that. It should be ashamed of themselves.

He's a lazy developers, and I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I would never say that seriously. It's hard to kind of go over this game without repeating yourselves a lot from the previous core design games, because it kind of follows the same philosophies. and as such kind of just it just brings those issues back into it but then expands upon them without fixing what was wrong with them in the first place. I think though that like the actual kind of like action gameplay like the melee, this is slightly better because you have like this new like bashing move that's from the comics and the hit detection is slightly better.

The stage actual is like stage design. so I mean like graphic designs are way more expressive than what Great Rescue was. There's very little in the way of like backgrounds with some stars or anything. Here you have gradients. There's some nice parallaxes in this world.

The gradients on the Mega Drive. Good old gradients. And there's even a stage where like you're on this ship or you're like on a barrel but you're fighting the ship and it's doing a lot of interesting like graphical stuff here and it actually shrinks the screen

which I don't know how many games do that. I mean, I know other games have smaller playing fields because they're rendering a lot on screen so it's a way to maintain performance. But the rest of the game is full screen, except I think the map screen. Yeah, the map's like isometric kind of. One of the things I do like about the game.

Yeah, the map screen is neat. But that ship stage is real interesting because you suddenly get this big border around the actual gameplay, which... That switch on Mega Drive, it's kind of uncommon to see that. It sounds like the Lion King Stampede stage where it's in like a box. Or like in Pitfall, the Mine Adventure, the second stage of the waterfall,

where the left side of the screen is basically cut off. And I think it is related to however they're doing like scrolling or objects. They're doing something specific that requires them to draw this way. Actually, in the case of this game, I think it's the vertical scrolling bits. when they show like the ship kind of bobbing up and down. Right. You know, and they're like doing horizontal, sorry, it's like vertical strips with like a horizontal kind of rocking.

It's to, it's to simulate that scaling effect. Yeah, there's a scaling effect thing they're going for. Or maybe not scaling. Maybe that's the wrong word. It's like it's the treasure like, no, it's like that treasure like thing that you would like the rotation. Yes. Batman and.

Yeah, or the Batman game, right? Adventures of Batman and Robin where they do like kind of the, the, the rotation. objects to give it the sense of like arcade like flare. They do that same kind of thing here. And I think it's why it has the borders. It's actually quite neat. I think that's like the best part of the game. I think that I mean,

I think this game is one of those things that's almost kind of less than the sum of its parts because there are quite a lot of ideas here I quite like. The whole idea of questing all over an isometric kind of a room map is a cool idea. Getting stuff meeting people who will then help you get to other areas or other like places in the game. That's a cool idea. the stage where you go to like the Roman outpost and it's on fire is extremely cool idea. It's a very like atmospheric and kind of cool.

Like when you go to the pirate ship and you just beat the shit out of the crew, you know, that's quite well done as well. But unfortunately, the level design is so full of blind jumps and bullshit. Yeah, yeah. It's awful. It just brings the whole thing down because if this had just been slightly more carefully done, it could have been a bit of a great, I think it could have been great, but unfortunately, You know what it reminds me of a little bit, James Pond 3, where it's just fast. Oh, it's faster than it needs.

Like, it takes a franchise that exists, and it just makes it faster because, you know, Sonic is popular. But then the level design isn't designed to compensate for that. So it's just kind of like running around blind jumps. It just doesn't feel enjoyable. That's one of my favorite megadraft games ever. James Pond 3? Yeah, for real. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love James Pond 3. Oh, man. It's wonderful. Now, this thing's going to derate completely. Oh, wow. Yeah, I'm afraid it is. My whole point is... So, like, this is the criteria we're working from is James Pond 3 is a good game?

I love James Pond 3. Yeah, it's great. Are you sure you're not confusing that with James Pond 2? The show is a fraud. The enormous, uh, huge expanse of levels that all have tons of it and stuff at the world. I just... I'm stuck on this. I've never, I've never spoken to somebody that loves James Fon 3 before. I love it.

I recognize that it's got some pretty massive problems. It's a massive problem. The whole, the whole thing is, oh, I'm not having this. Not having this. No, sorry. Oh, my God. I love it. To get back on topic, there's two things I'd like to mention about.

Power of the gods, if you remember what was about... I wish I had the power of the gods. I'd smite the both of you right now. Oh, you wouldn't hit the wrong person. I don't deserve it. Anyway, what I like about it is they really tried to... to at least somehow get the mood of the comics because they have these nice digitized comic panels in the beginning. That looked really, really nice for the Megadorf, especially.

True. That's a good thing. And the music, the music is really, really terrible. I really hate it. It's fine Nathan McCree again. It was fine on Great Rescue, right? I don't know what happened here. It's grating.

It just sounds painful. There are some musicians that were. would come into their own, though, once they switch to, like, non-synth-based platforms, right? Yeah, right. But he did fine on the previous game. Yeah, he did fine, but it wasn't great, right? No, it wasn't great, but, like... I know, I agree, though. It's really weird. It sounds terrible. This game also, if I recall correctly, makes use of a lot of, like, public domain music, like, classical music.

So a lot of it isn't even original. It's, like, transcribed, and it's real... It's just real bad. Yeah. It's probably the worst non-jems Megadrive soundtrack. Is it non-jams? It's not gems, no. Okay.

Wow. You wouldn't know it from listening to it, but it's not. Would you believe this game had a Park Asterix campaign, though? If you told me, I would believe it. Absolutely. I don't know anything about Park Asterix,

so I believe everything you tell me about it. Yeah, so this was, and I believe this was the last time they ever actually attached at Park Asterix promotion to an asterix video game. Is there even in park astricks anymore? Do people care about asterisk enough to still have that?

It's still popular. Like park, Roblox or Park, Merculus or something. So, I never been. I always wanted to go, obviously. Yeah, and I will. You want to meet the real Asterox, don't you? Yeah. I want to hug him.

Yeah. And I know from just watching, like, YouTube videos and stuff that at this point, it's more in name than in theme. There is still the village of things like this, but it's mostly known for, like, import roller coasters. Right. So it's, so it is like Roblox and

miraculous ladybug and like It's more like a six flag. Just kind of like yeah, you have these random experiences that aren't attached to asterix in itself. So instead of like the Astrox like Spooky Ghost Train, it's like the Lowell Surprise spooky ghost train. Yeah.

Well, I know. No, it's stupid. I'm sorry, I'm just enjoying myself saying the names of slightly out of date children's brands. Now it's amusing me. Wait a second. There may be a revelation here. I'm looking up in Sega magazine from the UK,

and I think one Richard Ledbetter may have reviewed this game. Oh, boy. I'm trying to find out. Excitement. This is exciting. Yeah, yeah. Okay, here's what Richard says in his comment. Personally, I don't see what makes Asterix such a hot property.

He's not that funny, is he? But even if you're... Can you just stop? I can't take this. Even if you're a real nutter for the cartoons, I think you'd be hard-pressed to get much fun and excitement out of this game. It's blatantly unfair about the ways it treats the player. It's tough to control and likes to smack you with a dose of certain death

just when you least expected. Admittedly, in the here and now, the gameplay has a bit more to it than the previous asterisk stinker, and the graphics and sound are fine enough, but paying money for this would not be. be on my 10 clever things list. See, this explains so much of my relationship to Rich, it seems like. Oh, dear.

The passive-aggress enough that gives me, it's just because I look like asterix and I like Asterix. What did they say about James Pondthry? They gave this, they gave this game a 72. That seems way high for why you said. That's so much higher than, yeah. That's just, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's a British magazine from back in the day, a really low rating.

I mean, they all gave 90s, 95. 98's whatever. No, that's, I mean, I'm not casting aspersions here, but that is kind of a mean machine's trademark, I think, to give something absolute roasting and then still give it like 70. Yeah. It's still, it's fine.

This game made me want to kill myself, 85. Chip a sound. There we go, though. Piece of history. Yeah. I mean, I agree with most of the points raised, apart from the asterix not being that funny. Yeah.

You know, but it's true. It does have, it is, you know, honestly, going back to it in my mind as being, like, way worse. I don't know. This might like this better than the 16-bit version of the Great Rescue. If only because of the ambition, you know, the previous game didn't have any ambition. I find a way more grading to play. I honestly just find this way more frustrating and tiresome. I mean, like, I feel tired after the first thing.

I think I just don't really want to play either of them. Yeah. It's hard to kind of... To give a bit of contrast right now, by the way, I just looked up the M-Games review, because we were around at the time already. And my colleague Robert Bannett, who did that Megadryph,

pixel book, if you may have been familiar with, gave it a 39. Ah, small like it. And here's what he said. The designers are crazy. Asphics and the Power of the Goddess is a crowning achievement in a series of indignificant asphic adaptations.

The sprites jerks who lovelessly drawn scenarios with a maximum of four animation phases which don't remotely do justice to the comic book template. At some points, the game becomes so slow despite the lack of enemy sprites that you fear for the health of your megadrive. The opaque storyline and unimaginative puzzles

won't lure in elementary school student out from behind the comic. Please, no more sequels. Wow. And his final verdict is, to finish this off, made the sky fall on their heads, unimaginative jumping game

with loudly technology and simple adventure interludes. And by the way, there was a deeper translation. right now. Well done. Exclusive translation. Right? Yeah, thank you for that. Wait, so Mean Machine Sega gave James Pond 3 in 89.

Things are coming together now. So is this like a British thing that I'm missing? Well, no, here's the thing, because I'm going to talk about this now because you've raised it. Now, I absolutely 100% understand why people would bounce off that game. Because you're right. Giving him the incredibly increased speed, then making these levels that require you to really dig into the secrets to complete them. It's a weird combination.

But there's something about that game and how unbelievably extensive it is that just greatly appeals to me. There's just so much to find in that game. So many weird little touches and weird ways to change the ending and bizarre secrets.

And there's whole hidden characters that you might never like encounter. I just, that just does a lot for me. I think it's a good thing. I can fully respect your appreciation of a game like this. It's not for me. It has the same problem that Reloited Rescue has, which is that it doesn't let you say.

You can use, you can do passwords except they're really, really long and not arduous to put in. I have to say, though. And you get one every five hours or so. The overall comment here on this game in the Sega magazine is that it may not look like it, but Operation Starfish is a truly sound platform game. And I'm wondering what they mean by it may not look like it. Yeah, it looks like it. But anyway, we are way off topic.

Yep, we have one more Asterix game to cover. Well, yeah, too, technically, because we're going to do... Oh, right, right. Yeah, I forgot about one of them, yeah. Because I want to talk about Asterix's Caesar Challenge. We'll defeat the Cesar. Which is the... Oh, boy.

One of the oddest one that we're going to cover in the sense that it's not a platformer. But what it is is a PC Mac and CDI, Philip Ced. is it Philip CDI? Yeah. I can I remember the Panasonic which video. Okay. What it is, is it's a multiplayer board game

slash Mario Party-ish kind of thing. Though it's not quite Mario Party. You go around the board and you do play mini-games, but they don't often have both players interacting, if at all. It's more that you do your turn, you'll do your

minigame, and whether you success or succeed or fail will result in whether or not you get what you need. I think there's a trivia aspect to it as well, but it's been a long time since I played it. Well, there are different aspects. There's a slight light trivia one, where it's like, what's, like, a word for this?

And you have, like, three options. Yeah. It has clips from different than movies. The actual board itself is based on the two trevaux of the Asterix, I think, is that right? Yeah, 12 to us.

The 12 tasks and the Tor de Gaul, the Astrix. Yeah. So there's like some kind of like familiarity to the different spaces. Because there's a lot of different spaces and they're all interactive. They're all animated like a comic panel. Yeah. So in terms of like, I have to admit, I love the Phillips CDI. But it has some issues when it comes to actually playing games.

But something like this is perfect for it because it doesn't really require too much in the way of like, you know, responsiveness, reflexes, gameplay, you know, these things that make up a video game. So this is kind of like the perfect game for that system where you just sit down, you have a fairly good board game and then a fairly good usage of the license. Yeah. I mean, it's easily the best looking Asterix game maybe ever, is that fair to say? Because it really is just pretty much all directly taken from the books. and the animated sequences look great. But what it's like, for example, the mini-games that come to mine,

like, they're all quite simple. They're almost like kind of almost, I'm going to say it, they're a bit Hugo-ish. Yeah. Where you've got like dogmatics going through a cave trying to find his bone. Did someone say, oh no to Hugo? Did I hear a no-no? You might have. You may have.

He was a staple of the entertainment world of Europe in the 90s. You leave him alone. If Hugo was here right now, would you say it to his face? Yeah, would you Would you say that to Hugo's face? I don't think so. Would you say, Hugo,

fuck yourself. I would be terrified if I saw him in person. You can only speak to Hugo over the phone. If I saw this creature in person, I would be deadly afraid. Yeah, because there would be no god. Talking to Hugo over the phone and trying to guide him to this site for the interview

and being like, okay, left, left. That's a four key on the, on the phone pad. Now, I can actually tie Hugo into this, okay?

because when John and I were discussing Hugo a few years ago, I told him about the call-in show, which was across Europe. Every country had their own Hugo Call-in show. Yeah, we had a... I remember it. Norway actually had a kind of half-hour, I think maybe it might even have been an hour,

but it was like an entertainment block. So it wasn't just the call-in show. There was these segments. And it had an actual Hugo, animatropic puppet. So it was all controlled and like speaking and this and that. So it wasn't just a bigan character like in Denmark in the other countries.

We actually made Hugo into like a living character on screen. And there is a clip of this on YouTube where you can see that segment. In that segment, they are giving away a Philip CDI. Oh, wow. How about that? So yeah, I mean, Philip CDI was not popular. To clarify quickly, did they give to the winner or to the loser? Well, you know, it depends on who called it.

It wasn't me. Well, I mean, one could argue that Philip CDI had an audience in a certain country. An audience. Yeah. Oh, nice, nice, nice. Now, I mean, the CDI... You were in a CDI and a copy of Burn Cycle or whatever was on the CDI. Burn Cycle isn't that bad.

The CDI, okay... It's one of the best. Like, unlike something like James Pond, which is just filth, you know, the CERN. CDI has a lot of usage because at the time when I came out, it had a lot of qualities that today or like, say more like 15 years ago, when the PlayStation 2 came out, it was promoted very much in the similar vein in the sense that it was like this multimedia system and it could play movies on CD, not unlike playing movies on a DVD disc. and when you look at that feature with the CDI,

it looks great. I mean, the actual hardware itself is not great for video games, but the idea behind the product, I think, was novel, and in many ways, especially when it came to those video features, pretty well done. I mean, the price is a problem, right? I mean, a PlayStation 2 cost a lot less than the CDI cost made, it came out. Yeah, but it,

I'm still amused that this was all during the Rainbow Books era, right? Where, like, CD audio, we often refer to it as red book audio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then there was yellow book for CD-ROM, and then there was blue book for enhanced CD, and then green book for CDI and then orange book. Like, all of the stuff ties into the fact that Phillips was one of the creators of the, of the compact disc spec, right? Yeah. So when you think about it like that, and you think about the things that it could do beyond games,

It does kind of make sense. It's just, they made some really bad decisions with the, with the interactive part. The hardware itself is bad. But then you have games like Asterix where it fits with what that hardware could handle. And then you, so you have a mixture of, like, video,

uh, as well as static graphics as well as like, there's like a coloring section and, like, you have these cartoon clips. Uh, it mel, it ments all these together.

Uh, It's a pretty neat package, and it fits asterix real well, and it fits the CDI hardware real well. So this is not by any stretch of the imagination. It might sound funny. It's like, oh, it's an asterisk game on CDI, but it's actually one of the better performing games and one of the better executed games on the CDI hardware. It's funny you say that because it is effectively similar to those the code monkeys developed

games for Phoenix games like Animal Soccer World. It's much better than that. But it's that type of thing, right? Like here's some animation. Here's a bunch of mini-games. It's much more coherent than that. Like, they're not... I mean, the thing that I love about this game,

and nostalgia I have for this game playing it, is that something the game did, which I think is just charming as hell personally, is it would have these sequences where Getter Fix would appear and talk to the players. And he would say, sorry, and he would say, like, now whichever one of you first touches the game box will win.

Yeah. And then there would be really, real-life fights. Like, me and my friend would just immediately be wrestling each other, trying to stop the other from touching the game box. And then to add insult to injury, even if I managed to touch the game books first, you then had to click on which player won. Yeah.

And then that would be another wrestling match to try and get the mouse to try and click on the guy. And that to me, like, it's totally almost like unintentional, but it's so funny and memorable that that's what I took from it. Is it unintentional? Because I think, doesn't he, like, actually kind of, I think he has some comment on, Like, I think it does like some fourth wall breaking at times this game. I might, like, I haven't played this now at least 15 years. So like, excuse me if I'm wrong.

But I do think that the game has a lot of fun with the fact that like it does bring in some elements of like, you know, like you mentioned there, like fourth wall breaking. Yeah. That you have to do something in real life. There's touch the, touch the game box. There's touch the computer. There's touch the keyboard. But you don't know what it's going to be until he speaks. So you kind of like on edge, like, tense up.

Like, what's he going to make me do? I think he is, I think at some point he does ask if you're like, are you being honest? Well, okay. Congrats or something like that. Yeah, no, he does say that. You're right. I'd forgotten about that. Yeah, so I think the game itself has a little bit of fun with this,

imagining that you are actually wrestling. No. I've got to ask you because this is the only chance in my life I'm ever going to get to find this out. Yeah. Do you remember the mini game, which is like the javelin throw? Yes. Do you know how to do that? Because I could never figure out how to do that.

No. No one knows how to do that. do that. It's undocumented on the internet. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. No one has ever done it. This feels like the kind of conversation I always have about California games, to be honest.

Well, that's the entire game. Like, everybody bought that game and nobody really knows how to play it. The skateboarding, like the half-pipe, and no one knows. Like, people might say, but they'll never prove it. Yeah, they say they know, but... They'll never prove that. But, yeah, I mean, this is, you know, Seeser's

Challenge on PC. I believe it was only released in French. on the CDI. It might have had a German version as well. But I don't think the English version was released on the CDI. So if you want to play this in English, you would have to go with the Big Box DOS version. It is, yeah.

It's abandoned and it's on the Mac as well, and it's really good on the Mac. That's the way I play. If you have Retroarch on your Xbox Series S, it works with DOS Box Pure. Oh, nice. Oh, yeah. So there's not much to say about Caesar's challenge beyond that,

but that leaves us only one game. which is good because we've gone through a lot here. Asterix and Obelix. And which is actually good. Yeah. Well, I would say it's clearly in the good area now. No, no, let's listen to the man that just said that he loves James Pond three and take his opinion seriously. So you don't like James Pond.

Fair enough. James Pond is filth. You don't like Dizzy. Is it just English games? Is that what the problem is here? No, no, it's just terrible. No, no, no, no, I can't think in history that English people have ever done anything wrong to deserve this. No, I mean, one or two things might come to mind, but it's a negligible.

I have to dig a little bit deeper into this, but, you know, this is something you can discuss later at the tribunal. But, uh, asterisk and obliques on, primarily on the Super Nintendo and Game Boy Color, uh, did have a DOS and Macintosh and Windows 95 version as well later on North Weather Times I did not know there was a Windows 95 version now I coveted above all things I would love to try those versions Yeah I mean the DOS version

Also supported by the SIRSX with Retroarch I think that the win version is actually on ExoDOS or ExoWIN 95 as well Yes I believe it is in that archive So and Was this game ever Was this game originally just going to be called Obelix? Did I imagine that?

Because I'm sure it was previewed as just Obelix. Yes. I remember that as well. I believe the title screen of the Game Boy game says Obelix. Yeah. But yeah, it is, you do play as both characters, but it is kind of based around Obelix being the main character. I mean, you have to go to the menu to switch to Asterix if you want to play him as the first player one.

So it's really Oblix-centric. But this is an interesting game, though, because this is. actually bit managers coming back and it's their I think it's one and only Super Nintendo game they were primarily

on Game Boy and Game Boy of Color and would keep making games for that until 2001 Yeah, the Gidimau's and Otte fans Yeah, they sure did But this is the only time that they kind of went into

the Super Nintendo and I mean there's a lot to be said about this game but just on the surface level again, graphically and musically, this is something that really nails the tones. Very impressive. It looks amazing. It looks so good. So good animation, I think.

Yes. Huge sprites, tons of animation frames, like, very recognizably asterix and obelix. Yeah. I mean, the step up from the first SNS game is like astronomical. Astronomical. I think you can still see a few elements. Of course, we have still the blocks with the sign on it, for example. Some color choices are similar, but.

otherwise it's just such an upgrade. Yeah. Or what the kids call low-up nowadays. And I will talk about them both, but I would also say the Game Boy game is a dramatic upgrade too. Like visually speaking, it almost looks like a 16-bit game, but in like monochrome. It's just super detail. The sprites are huge, really well animated. It still has parallax scrolling in some stages.

It's super impressive for the Game Boy. And this was released on Game Boy and later Game Boy. It wasn't a dual format. Cartridge. I don't think so. No. It's not. Because this would have been released way before Game Boy Color was even a thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. But it did get a Game Boy Color exclusive version of the same

basic game. Yes. Okay. Okay. Good. Good, good, good. I'm sorry, I'm just reeling here because I've never known anyone hate James Pond that much. Like, that really is wrong. I don't hate, I like James Pond. A game that generally reviewed really well. I'm just taking it back. James Pond 3. Yeah, by Richard

Ledbetter. It's a lot worse. He doesn't even like Asterx. That's true. Well, like, Richard led worse. I bet he's never heard that before. Please don't ever let them hear this. Oh, he never listens to this show. Yes. But,

Asperics and Oblix, you know, the game that could. So this is, it's interesting because all the other games we've talked about primarily have been a single-player experience. Yes. Outside of the arcade game.

and when this came out, some magazines actually, I forget what, it was not total. It might have been like Enforced or something like that. It was one of the magazines that I read

and it was kind of halfway good. But it actually said this was a port of the Canami Brawler game. So when I bought it back in the day, I was very confused by I do love this game,

I didn't take me it. It's not a port. You know, Audie, I wonder about that, but I have to think because the visuals are actually not that dissimilar, like huge sprites that look very accurate. Like, what if they'd never played the arcade game and they'd just seen screenshots, right?

That's probably something that happened. I mean, there was no internet, really. I mean, there was, but not like this. They couldn't just look this stuff up, right? Yeah, the first stage start, if you have two players, it starts very similar to the arcade game. I could absolutely see why some people would have made that mistake. Yeah. Just on like a surface gander.

I mean, especially look at Obelix Walk Cycle. They are similar. They're very similar. It's straight from a cartoon comic. I love that. I think there is an argument that this is one of the best-looking Super Nintendo games in places. It just absolutely nails the comics, I think. Like, think about level two when you're on the boat getting onto the pirate ship,

and you've got the waves crashing all over the place. And really nice paradox, that's beautiful level. Can I get my whinging out of the way before we've really posse about this? Just, please do. The controls? There are two main things I don't like about this game. Well, I guess three, but I'm not going to say it sucks outright because I don't know if it does. Because when I played it back in the day, I didn't like it that much because I found it really hard.

Okay. It's true. You've still got the very small attack. But also, this game's got the time limit problem, I think, to an extent. Because I remember getting stuck because there's a mission reasonably early in the game where you have to break down doors. Yeah. And I didn't know you could do that. That's not the game's fault, because I would have had the manual.

Or is it? Or is it? I don't know. There's a little bit kind of like, oh, I see, when you do a charge attack, you knock down the things in the background. I now know this. But I felt like the level designs were a bit flat. They are a bit flat. And so there are a number of issues.

I would add another issue if you permit. I think enemies are a bit too spongy for my taste. So they're spongy, and a lot of them have projectiles, which, combined with Stu said, you know, you have to be very close to them, but they are cross-screen and hitting you pretty easily due to the flat-in-line.

I mean, if I play as Obelix, right, his feature is he can just beat any Roman with just one slap, and if I have to slap a generic Roman three times and get hit by his flimsy saw, that's a bit annoying. You know what the problem is? It's like when you play the Avengers

and you play as the whole, can you punch one normal guard, and it just loses like one small chunk of health. Like, come on. Yeah. But, no, I mean, This game, I think, I just want to put this out there, like, I don't love this game, but I like it a whole lot more than, like, Power of the Gods and a whole lot more

than a secret mission, I would say. It's a lot more fun than those games, yeah. And the fact is, well, I do think this game is quite hard for the reasons we've stated. You do get reasonably quite short passwords after every, almost every level. So that's, you know, that's not as huge of a problem, I would say. Yeah. And I do like the rugby stage. The rugby stage is awesome.

Yeah, rugby. Sorry. Yeah. Well, they ripped it off from both of us. Bust the Busts Loose, the Tentunes game. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. That's an amazing stage in that game. But it's really cool because whenever you pass the ball, the music changes.

So Obelix has got his more kind of rambunctious kind of, I'm going to charge through you music. And Asterix has his, I'm nimble and nippy, and I'm, you know, it's great. I love that. So, like, in terms of feel, in terms of presentation, I think this game is absolutely spot on. Like, it's just in the design it falls down for me a tiny bit, but that's all. It's not a perfect game. but, you know, this is a console generation that had, like, you had, like, magical Quest 2 and 3, the Mickey games.

Oh, yeah. Uh, which are incredible, like, co-op games and experiences. You know, like, see, you're the mana, so you have, like, RPG co-op. This is kind of like the era of the best co-op games from a retro game perspective. And this is a pretty good co-op game, and it's one of the few times where you kind of get to go through this adventure type game with Asterix noblicks together. Yeah, you think that would be way more common.

Until XXL. Yeah. But even XSL is not two player, right? No, but they are on screen together all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, this is a really fun. It's a really fun game. It has a lot of, it has diversity.

The more interesting aspect for me is that it has a soundtrack Ballabats to Gonzales, which is its only Super Nintendo soundtrack. Oh, right. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah. And when I talked to him about it, he said that, like, the most fun he ever had composing music was for the Super Nintendo, but there was a crunch for this game.

So he didn't, like, get to play around for that as much he wanted. And there was a sequel planned, but canceled. Oh. So he never got to work on a Super Nintendo game. And it's the one console he's always kind of been like, I could have done a lot more on the Super Nintendo. Yeah, for sure. It's interesting. It's sample base.

So he could have done whatever he wanted. really. Yeah. I've always wondered what he would have done. But what's here? It's pretty good, but it is more ambient than other soundtracks of his. I mean, I kind of feel like it suits the sort of the game with its relatively basic level layouts that has this kind of almost ambient feel.

I mean, playing with two players makes it a lot more pliable when you're both attacking enemies and you're both exploring. And the fact that it has those slightly simplified layouts to me feels like a concession to the co-op whole thing. But it's interesting you mention it was a crunch because this game is packed. There's a lot of levels here, and there's a lot of variety,

and I'm surprised to hear that it was rushed for that reason. I would say it's been crunched together. Yeah, crunched together. I mean, the game itself really does favor to players, and the Box Art itself has both characters on the front. All the screenshots have both characters. They very, very much communicated that this is not a game to be played by yourself.

now not everyone is of course fortunate enough to have friends you know like Stu so he had to play it by himself I haven't got any friends at all so if you play this on a single player I think your experiences with it are going to be substantially more negative than my first time was with my best buddy

and we had a hell of a time it was just a lot of fun and we could kind of cover more of the screen at the same time and have a better control of the sponginess is still there and all that but the game itself is definitely designed with both players being on screen when you're only one

it doesn't take any consideration into that. Yeah, agreed, yeah. But it's they ported this to the game by advance as well, is that right? As part of the... Yes, as part of the... Pacto.

Yeah, the... Pathamor one. Yeah. Yeah, the... Oh, man, what's that called again? Paththamore. Yeah, Phaftamol. You're right.

Yeah, which has an exclusive game based on Asterix and Cleopatra and then this. Yeah. I mean, they've brought this game back several times. Yeah. So it's clearly from infographics standpoint, it's extremely big success. I'm not really sure why we didn't get a secret. I haven't tried really the PC versions of this game,

but would it be right to assume that there's a version out there that has like a CD audio soundtrack as well? No, it actually has like, So if I recall correctly, it does have like CD audio, but it's just a Super Nintendo Sam. Right, right. I think it uses MIDI, like FM. Does it use MIDI? Oh, really?

I think it's just typical PC MIDI playback. I wondered if it was going to be something like Maui Mallard or Pitfall 95 for FMG. Right, which has a Red Book audio. Yeah. Well, for Pitfall Windows 95, of course, the Pitfall soundtrack came from the Sega CD version. Yes, of course. Right. And of course, FMGM as well, yeah, of course.

Yeah, yeah. But Maui Mallard was interesting because specifically that's, soundtrack was made for that PC version. Yeah. And it's hot fire. It's awesome. It's real good. Yeah.

So I'd be curious to see, though, the Game Boy Advance version is not very good. If the DOS version supports like sound canvas or MT32, though. Yeah, we did fire this up a couple of days ago, but we didn't take note of this. The only thing I took of note when we were testing it out quickly was that obviously you have a lot more real estate on screen. The screen is much wider on the. PC version than it's on superintendent? Well, I think it's... It's not really high-res, but it's more like the supernese version's like 256 pixels by

224, right? Right, right. PC seems to be more like a 320 by 240 thing, which is pretty typical or 320 by 200 maybe. Yeah, I think it's not as tall, but it's certainly wider. Yeah, so there's a little, I think there's a little bit more screen real estate on the left and right, just because of the difference in resolution. Yeah, I think that's how it goes. and yeah it has a really nice super gameboy banner

it's one of those games that has an exclusive banner which I know some people out there collecting games specifically to that so this is one you have to pick up and yeah there was a Game Boy Color version that came out later so the Gameboy game like I think John mentioned earlier that's in its so that's another bit manager's production

it's kind of based on the same game but it's straight up obelix it's a very much just tended towards Oblix's gameplay. They're both in there, but, and you can play. Yeah, but even more so now, it's an Oblix game. Yeah, you're right. And it really favors him. And, yeah, level designs are tighter.

The oral gameplay, I think, is tighter on the Game Boy game. I remember enjoying this Game Boy. I didn't play a color as much, but the Game Boy game, I play a lot. I believe the, the main thing with this is that it actually plays more. like the NES game that they made, right? It's slower pace than the original Game Boy game, and it's also more zoomed in, like a lot of late Game Boy games. So you get more detailed sprite work.

But as a result, the gameplay itself is somewhat slower, which is not necessarily a bad thing. No. I also want to point out that this game has slopes in it. Sure does. So that's a thing that I always have to comment on, it's Game Boy Games with slopes. Because I think to save on cartridge memory plus the small,

screen pixel real estate. A lot of Game Boy games didn't use slopes. So all the platformers use like 90 degree angles, right? Like you look at like Super Mario Land 2, all 90 degree angles versus say Mario Bros. 3 with all those slopes. And occasionally, though, you'd have developers that were like, now we're going to do slopes anyway, and this is one of them. And I think that's cool.

Yeah. I'm not going to disagree. But I never really, honestly, it's kind of surprising to me because I play the hell out of on Game Boy. And it's one of my kind of cherished Game Boy memories is playing this. The Game Boy Color game, I think I've only played it once. But it'll, I mean, I'm just looking up screenshots. And it looks very good for Game Boy Color.

Yeah, they did a good job with the conversion. Yeah. So it's strange to me that I never, like, really picked this up. I have a copy of it. I just never fired it up. On the Gamebo Color, it was just Obelix, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Esther X was killed. He was killed off. It's dead off screen. Yeah. So, but yeah, this is, I mean, this is one of the, this is one of the most popular of all the video games. Yeah. It was a huge success in France when it came out. Even to this day when I go, I go retro shopping a lot with John Germany.

I always see loose copies of this as well as boxed. It's just always there. So it's just one of those kind of centerpenter. pieces of 16-bit game releases there in Europe. Very affordable. That's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's true of most of the games we've talked about, with the exception of power of the gods, and maybe the CDI one.

Yeah. They're all, I mean, Secret Mission and Great Rescue don't seem to be that expensive. No, I don't think so. Though I still wouldn't recommend really paying for Great Rescue on the Megadrive. No. It's not really worth it. But that, I mean, we're not done with Asterix, but we are kind of done with the 16-bit and 8-bit eras now, more or less. So we've got a fair amount of,

we've got PS1 and PS2 to cover in that whole sort of era. And I think that's enough for another episode, personally. Yeah, I think so. I think so. A trilogy of Asterix episodes, which is not something I ever expected to do, but I guess when you bring me on, this is the sort of thing that happens.

So, well, I'll show you more accurately. When we bring, when we bring YOL on, this is the sort of thing that happens. But thank you very much for this feast of asterisk's information. And by feast, I, of course, refer to the feast as held at the end of most of the asterix books, where whatever the net.

I was going to say cacophonics, but I don't know what he's actually named in the original. The Bard? Oh, uh, yeah, I don't remember on top my head. Did you know that in the terrible Asterix Congress America movie that he is voiced by Rick Mill? Is he really? Yeah. Drop that Fred Rick Mayout. Uncredited, apparently.

Uncredited, because he was ashamed of how. crappy the movie was, I guess. Is that... Wow, I love Rick Mayol. I didn't know. He's awesome. Yeah, he's the best. He was the best.

The best there is. Maybe one day there'll be a Rick Mail Games episode of retronauts. He knows. He was in a lot of commercials for Nintendo. Yes. And he's the voice of Hugs of War as well. Yeah, that's true. So one of my favorite movies of all times,

Drop Dead Fred. Oh, hell yeah. Which, you know, it's... May he rest in peace. I mean, what a loss. Hey, can I take this opportunity to complain about the nostalgia critic video about Drop Dead Fred?

Yes. I mean, I don't watch his content. Oh, good. Then you don't need to. Don't watch it. He spends the whole thing complaining about how childish Drop Dead Fred is. And I'm like, yes, that's the point of the movie.

Yes, that's the whole point of the movie. Doug? Yeah, my gosh. You're fucking idiot. Yeah. I don't, man, people who don't get that movie and then complain about it and it's like, oh, you still have an anxious. Like, yes.

All right. We need to sit down and have a talk. And then you leave my house. else. But no, when we get to the PS1 games, we'll be talking about some of the movies that I imagine. So, yeah. So I guess, again, if we go with alphabetical order by first name, as we have before,

where can our dear listeners find you on the internet? I guess that's me first. Yes, it is. Yeah. My parents had to name me with an A, didn't they? You can find me on Twitter at PC98 underscore Audi. You can find me at Limit Run games, and you can find me on Digital Foundry. So go there, subscribe, ring the bell, and get those notably instant notifications.

And you can find me, of course, at Dark OneX on Twitter. If it's still around with the time you hear this, there's no guarantees. Also on YouTube.com slash Digital Foundry, doing all kinds of good stuff there. Just put up a new retro episode again at the time of recording this, but who knows when you actually hear it. Right, so then only me left. If you want to find me online for whatever reason, you can find me at Twitter at Bimbo Fortuna, or you want maybe to check out Maniac.de, which is the website of our good old German print magazine, which I'm working for. If you have enjoyed Retronauts and you would like to support Retronaut and also get lots of extra Retronauts things,

for a mere $5 a month at patreon.com ford slash Retronauts, you can get two full. extra episodes per month, week early access to every episode, and also you'll get Diamond Fights Tremendous This Week in Retronauts columns, very, very good stuff, and also recorded so you can listen to them. You'll also be able to go on the Retronauts Discord and call me all the swear words under the sun, and I won't be able to retaliate or do anything about it. That's one of the rules that I've been forced to agree with. So thank you very much, and we'll see you again for the third in this trilogy of Tremendous Asterix episodes. I'm trying to think of another asterix reference to go out on,

I've got nothing, I can't think of anything. Another killer ending from me.