Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 107: SEGA's arcade history, vol. 2

Episode Date: July 10, 2017

Jeremy, Ben, and Benj convene again to continue their discussion of SEGA's chronology of arcade classics. This time, we take aim at the years 1986 & 87, with greats like Out Run, After Burner, Quartet, Alien Syndrome, and more!

This week in Retronauts, Saga! Welcome to another episode of Retronauts East. I can see you can see. We're off to a lovely start screaming Sega because we are not in the 90s yet. It is not time for clacks, but we're getting there. This episode of Retronauts East follows on from one a couple of months ago where we tackled what was supposed to be the entirety, like the full span of Sega's arcade legacy. And it turns out they had so many games and they were so interesting to talk about

that we only got through 1985. So, instead of saying, oh, no, let's panic. What we said was, oh, well, we should save those other games for a later discussion. And that later discussion is now, here today, on Retro-Naziast. So, with that said, I am Jeremy Parrish, and joining me this week, we have... Ben Edwards. And... Ben Elton.

Just like last time. Wow, it's almost like we're a continuation, a part two, a mark two, if you will. There was no Sega Mark 2, but there was a Mark 3. That'll be next episode. And it'll be just like history repeating. Except we passed the point at which Mark 3 was actually a viable. Ah, whatever. Anyway, yes, so we're going to talk about Sega games.

This episode's standout game is Outrun, a driving simulator that has inspired countless gamers to dream of cruising down the roads of Europe. Top down, wind in their hair, a good-looking blonde companion in the passenger seat, breezy calyso tunes playing on the radio. Now, I can't help you with the European road trip part or the attractive blonde riding shotgun, but I can at least offer a helpful pointer in getting set up with that dream car. That secret is true car. With true car, you get real pricing on actual inventory. Not numbers made up by true car, but pricing from an actual dealer, one of 13,000 true car certified dealers nationwide.

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Some features are not available in all states. So we have talked about Sega games a fair amount in the past. the master system, the Genesis. A long time ago, we did Dreamcast. We've talked about some of their individual franchises like Sonic. And, of course, we've talked about their early arcade games. But this is, in this episode specifically, we'll be focusing on arcade creations by Sega in the years 1986 and 87, which I kind of feel like was maybe sort of a glory age for Sega.

I mean, they went from being this company that was kind of like, uh, we have some cool ideas and some cool tech, but nothing really stands out and as an all-time classic to the stuff they produced these years, where you're just like, oh, those are all-time greats. This is really where they came into their own. I don't know why I'm having trouble speaking today. This is really where they came into their own. And we did talk last time about how, you know, they started bringing on this really great talent sort of toward the mid-80s, like Yu Suzuki and Reko Kodama and Yuji Naka. And, you know, I think at this point you start to see those really talented people sort of come into their own and really sort of start to take charge of the creative direction

at Sega. And so what you have is these really great inventive technologically advanced games. You know, people talk about the citizen cane of video games. What is the citizen cane of video games? What was the citizen? Ankyo alien. No, that was more like the Gone with the Wind, Gone with the Alien Wind. No, you know, when you look back and say, what was the Citizen Kane of Movies? Why was Citizen Kane interesting? Well, it was because it was, like, technically a very sophisticated movies. It used a lot of camera techniques that were interesting.

It had an interesting story. And also, it was a very self-reflexive movie. It was a commentary on the industry that birthed it. I don't know that you necessarily see any of that latter portion in these Sega games. I don't know that any of them are commenting. on the nature of video games themselves, but they definitely are doing interesting creative things and pairing it with technological innovations.

So I'm not saying that Outrun is the citizen cane of video games, but I'm not saying it's not either. Yeah, it's definitely we have a period of refinement here where these people who had come on and were trying all kinds of new techniques to do interesting things in the arcades are now taking those ideas that they'd had and that led to some kind of raw games with cool ideas, but that were maybe had problems, and now they're refining them.

And you get these really just eye-catching productions out of them now that they've had some time with their platforms and are just developing and iterating on them. Yeah, I think in sort of the latter 70s and the first half of the 80s, in the arcade you saw a lot of sort of spitballing, especially when it came to interfaces and hardware concepts. Because everyone was like, there's this new media form, new media form. let's do things with it. And, you know, toward the mid-80s interfaces and concepts, you know, mechanisms and like control metaphors and everything began to sort of take a standardized form. So what you saw was companies like Sega, instead of spinning their creative energy saying, like, how should people control this game? Should they use like a track ball and a joystick and five buttons? they would say instead, like, okay, this game is going to be controlled with a stick or a yoke and two buttons.

But what can we do with the other parts of the arcade technology? Because, you know, we are a manufacturer. We control this creative process from beginning to end. So it doesn't have to be super standardized, like in a home console where everyone is working to the same hardware spec using the same controllers. They had a little more freedom and flexibility. And you saw that in things like, the after burner cabinet, the sit-down version, or in some of the crazy stuff they did inside the cabinets that would go on to become like the basis for their home hardware

in the future. So they were really, they were focusing their innovation in other areas beyond just like the basic functionality. And so you started to see a lot of creativity in how these games were expressed and, you know, just how they were presented and the player experience that surrounded them. And I think that's a big part of what made these Sega games so memorable and so exciting is that they kind of worked from a common baseline and then, you know, it's like jazz music where everyone's kind of working from the same beat and then they're doing like crazy improvisations.

That was kind of what they were doing here, except the crazy improvisations were like a, you know, $500,000 assembly line process. So there were limitations, but every game had its own kind of unique principle. And they kind of built on common themes like the superscalor technology. And you were constantly seeing new ideas used with these technological innovations. And a lot of them would become mooted once 3D polygons took sort of center stage. But before that, it was kind of a question of like, how do we get to that end that everyone is is kind of approaching, like, how do we create immersive games with the tools that we have?

And Sega came up with some really inventive, very memorable, very sophisticated processes and devices toward that end. And you really saw those start to really take hold and begin to spread in 1986 and 87. One of the things we talked about in the previous, the prequel to this podcast was how there was so much variety in the different directions Sega was trying out in order to try to make an immersive experience. So again, without 3D polygons, there's a whole bunch of different things you can do to try to approximate a more realistic experience than just small sprites on a screen. And at this point, you know, they had some that worked. They had, like you mentioned the super scalar technology.

And that was really powerful and it let them do a lot of things. So they're like, okay, we're going to go with this. And we've got, you know, somewhere from half a dozen to a dozen games on this list that all use that technology in various ways now that they had. and had it as a powerful tool, and we're going to do various things with it. Yeah, and I think it's worth mentioning that I think we sort of missed talking about something important in 1985 when we covered those games, and that is the advent of the System 16 board. That was not a game itself, but it was a hardware sort of internally developed standard that they would use as the basis of their arcade games, and they would iterate on with

different versions. But the System 16 board was kind of like, it was kind of a watershed moment for Sega, I think, because the System 16 board, I mean, it was a 16-bit system, okay, sure. But it was a Motorola 68,000 processor. That's the same processor that you saw in the Apple Macintosh, in the Amiga, and eventually in the Sega Genesis, Megadrive. and it had a Z-80 sub-processor and a Yamaha Soundship. It is exactly the architecture that they eventually, you know, came up with for the Sega Genesis. And all these tools working together, I mean, you had a video game running on the same processor as a very expensive GUI-based home computer in 1985. Like, that's crazy.

The Macintosh was a year old at that point. So, you know, these were not cheap machines. But, again, they could afford to do that because they were probably selling cabinets for like $10,000 apiece or whatever. I don't know. But, you know, that's just kind of like the buy-in cost. And people were pumping quarters into them. So it became worthwhile. How many quarters is $10,000?

That's 40,000 quarters. That's a lot of video games. But if a game is popular enough, people are going to, you know, they're going to do it. As long as you run it for several years. And they'd even do things like, you know, we need more power. Well, we'll put more 68K boards in it. Sure, why not? What the hell?

So, yeah, the 16m-16 board, not all the games we'll talk about in this episode necessarily use that technology, but it was kind of a launch pad for like a springboard for a lot of these ideas, for a lot of these games. And so that was a big deal. Another thing worth mentioning in 1986 is that this would be Sega's entree into the American home console market. The NES, of course, debuted in a limited market in 1985 and then expanded throughout the middle of 1986 into the overall U.S. market. And Sega was like, oh, we got to do that too. So they launched with a package remarkably similar to the NES package. You got a light gun. You didn't get a robot, but that's okay because Rob was stupid. I like Rob, but he was stupid. But you got, you know, hang on safari hunt.

So you got a racing game and a light phaser game. And it was very much kind of, and then, you know, I guess you could get Alex Kit or whatever. So your Mario-style game. Don't forget the N-E-S-style game pads that are directional. Well, and that was something that they had sort of iterated on in Japan since the SG-1-thous. Yes, SG-1000, I just point out. They were very bad at first, and then they continued to refine them and make them more Nintendo-esque, and they turned out to be pretty okay.

I'm not really crazy about the square D-pad because I always end up strained. I think that was a patent issue. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, Nintendo had the deep-ed patent. The cross-shaped patent. So, I mean, that only really got me in Zillion, for whatever reason. Whenever I play that game, I always end up ducking and, like, crawling along the ground. I don't think.

Crawling through the whole game. Yes, crawling through the whole game. But, yeah, it wasn't really until this generation that inputs for home consoles got kind of standardized at all. Because on the earlier stuff, you had all, you know, you had some with joysticks, you had some with track bat balls. You had all kinds of, often on the same system. And weird joysticks too, weird shapes. So, yeah, it really started to standardize in this era. Right.

But even more than standardization, it means that I think Sega began developing its games, its arcade games, with an eye toward the home market. They were also aware of the limitations of the home market. The master system was an 8-bit system, and it was a very powerful 8-bit system, but it was still an 8-bit system. There was only so much you could do on the master system. But that, you know, that kind of created this gulf where they were able to say, like, you know, we're putting together the best-looking arcade games in the world. You can't do this on any home console.

So you should go to the arcades and play your Sega games. And then, you know, they would show up on the home versions and they could say, oh, this is the hottest arcade game in the world. It's not quite that good here. But, but, hey, you can play it at home. So it was kind of like this, you know, it was a model that had existed for Sega in Japan for a while. But I don't think they really began to, I think, capitalize on it until the master system sort of went into the international market. And then all of a sudden, like, they started, you know, they were putting out these great games in the arcade and also they had the home options. So, you know, for something, if they wanted to put put out something a little chewier, like an RPG like Fantasy Star, they could just do that on the home console.

And that allowed them to, you know, really put together just the most impressive quarter pumping action games, imaginable. And that became sort of the defining Sega style. Do you know if there was how the division inside Sega was in terms of development for consoles and arcades, whether they were combined or separated? I think there was, there was overlap for sure, because I know like Rako Kodama worked on arcade games, but she also worked on a lot of home games. But I think there was some separation of divisions because, like, you don't really associate you Suzuki with home console games. You don't really associate Eugene Nakko with arcade games. I mean, I'm sure they all crossed over somewhat, but I do think there was kind of

a church and state separation there. I feel like you've really got a dichotomy in, excuse me, the list of games we've got lined up for 86, 87 in the arcades in that there's some that seem like they are adaptable to the home system and were ported, and there's some that are just not designed for that. Like, you're not going to have Afterburner on an 8-bit system. I think they put up a burner on master system. I guess they did eventually. It just wasn't that good. Yeah.

Like, it's not... NES port, too, isn't there? Attention version. Yeah, okay. So there are theoretical versions. I actually think that was made by Sunsoft. I think that was developed by Sunsoft and then published in the US by Tengen.

Yeah. But like, you can tell that like as an arcade game, it's not designed with the limitations of the home system in mind. You know, it's doing whatever it can with the arcade hardware. Whether there's those other things that are a list, they're a lot less graphically challenging that seem like they were designed with, okay, we can port this straight to the home system. So we can have it both places.

Yeah, like the first game we'll talk about Action Fighter is better known for its master system version, which people think really highly of than for its arcade version. And that is, you know, just like a top-down spy hunter-style game. So, yeah, that converts over really well to a home game. But again, you know, fantasy zone. Oh, that's not one of the games this year. But, you know, the, the, the, I just totally blinked out on the name of it. Damn it.

Afterburner, yes. Like, that's just, that's too much for an 8-bit system. be able to handle. And honestly, the 16-bit version, the Genesis version of Afterburner 2 wasn't any great shakes either. Yeah, it's just, I mean,

none of the home consoles had the power to just push that many scaled pixels for, you know, a couple generations yet. Yep. So they changed Enduro racer from a, you know,

over-the-shoulder racing game with the super scalar stuff to essentially isometric, overhead, simple. Yeah, so sometimes you just converted. Let's talk about that when we get to Induror

Induro racer. But we should go ahead and just jump in and start with 1986. And I put together a list based on, I don't even know how I ordered these games, just whatever came to mind, I guess. So, 1986 is the year in which, what was, what happened that year? I can't remember. Oh, the shuttle blew up. Reagan. Reagan happened in, like, 1980, though.

He was still happening. I think this was the point where he started to lose his memory. Probably. Yeah. Challenger. Challenger, yeah. But in the arcades, you had a company known as Sega

jumping on the success of whatever the heck cool games they made in 1985 and just, this is not a very good narrative. Anyway, 1986, really cool games from Sega, starting with one that we just mentioned and is not like that technically impressive. It's very much in the mold of Spy Hunter, but kind of is sort of like Spy Hunter Plus.

that's Action Fighter. And I don't know if you guys have ever played this. I played a little of the Master System version, but I've never seen it in an arcade. Yeah, I've certainly never ran into it. Never in the arcade. So the thing that separates Action Fighter, such a generic name, man.

Generic Action Fighter, what separates it from Spy Hunter is, one, the name. And two, the fact that you don't have just one vehicle, but three, I think Super Spy Hunter or Spy Hunter 2 tried to do some of that. Spy Hunter 2. Actually, actually, there's at least four because I was watching a playthrough and there was a dune buggy that came up too. Oh, I'd never seen the dune buggy. Okay. All right. Well, so you start out on a motorcycle, which is very, very vulnerable and not very strong and has a very short-range machine gun.

But then you have the option to, like, go down different paths of the road, which is something you'd see a year later in Outrun. Not even a year later. Later that year at Outrun. But the difference between this game and Outrun is that going down different branches of the road. the road doesn't take you down like a different path to the end it allows you to go into different vehicles and actually play through different sequences so you can split off and go into a boat sequence or into a car sequence and I think the goal is ultimately I don't know it's it's kind of hard to tell just from watching playthroughs but my understanding is the goal is to go to like fly to the enemy fortress like their island fortress because it's a super villain layer or whatever and

blow it up. So you have to, like, you ultimately want to get to the helicopter. Yeah, I think the end was and that's kind of the most important thing. So I guess if you play it, you know, MinMax, you know, take the critical path. You're going to mostly play it as a like a top down shooter and a helicopter, but it doesn't have to be just like that because there are to these different paths and different vehicles you can take. I assume if you want like to go for score, then you'll want to delay getting into the helicopter as long as possible. I'm not really sure what the strategies are, honestly. This is, this is not a very common game. It's not one that's been reproduced frequently, as far as I can tell.

It has a very weak marketing angle with the name. Action Fighter. It doesn't literally be any game. It doesn't sound like a racing or shooting game. Yeah, it sounds like, like, yeah, kickboxing or something. It sounds like something tied into action force in the UK. This is the name of the G.I. Joe Skystriker in the UK. It's the action fighter for action force.

But it also looked very, like, coordinated. are eating oriented. Like, it moves extremely quickly, and there's just a million obstacles on screen at all times. It does at least tell you in advance if there's going to be a fork in the road, which is something Spy Hunter doesn't do. So it's a little fair in that regard, a little more fair than Spy Hunter. Yeah, you get warnings, but then there's like off-road sections where there's just like rocks everywhere. It just, it looked, I haven't actually had a chance to play it, but it looked brutally difficult from the videos. So that's even what I put in the nose. It looks brutally difficult. I think we agree.

In fact. I do like when you switch vehicles, there's this big graphic that flashes like a strobing frame-altering thing where the vehicle that you've jumped onto is shown displayed on the screen. Yeah, it's like it's a translucent overlay of like some really nice sprite art actually of whatever you're going into. Is it anything like altered beast when you do the transformation? A little bit, yeah.

But yeah, it doesn't take over the entire screen. it's like an overlay on top of the screen, which they do by, like, doing, you know, frame. It's not translucent. It's not like translucency, but. Frames frame flickering. Wow, that's really tough. Yes. But, yeah, it looks cool.

It's not something I'd seen a lot up to that era. Okay, so Dune Buggy. I need to go back and play some of this game. I wonder if it's on Sega Classics collection. I'm not sure. Can you grab me that Vita right over there? I've got Sega Classics collection on that. Yeah, I didn't even, I didn't think to check this Sega Genesis.

Collection. Oh, it's Siga Genesis collection. So who cares? All right. It's not going to be out there. Well, the hell with you. All right. So that was Action Fighter. Kind of an underwhelming sort of start to 1986. I think I want to build up to Outrun. So let's jump ahead to Wonderboy. We've actually done an entire episode on this, but you guys weren't there for that. So if you have thoughts to share on Wonderboy, how's your chance to do it? It's a game with surprising, surprising, and it's surprising legs, surprising endurance. I never got into it at the time. I mean, so I had never actually wondered why I had played some of the early Adventure Island games that were pretty directly modeled on it. And I just never got into them at the time. Like my feeling was, and it may just be because I never got far enough. But just like the constant forward movement, and it seemed like most of what you're doing

at the beginning of the game is just trying to memorize and dodge rocks and that sort of thing. It sort of seemed like an entire game that was a mind cart level to me. but which is which you know having watched more of the full game of wonder of wonder boy is not really fair like as you go farther it gets you know some more interesting platforming challenges and more variety but it also gets really diggish yeah it is it is very much in the quarter gobbling mold yeah um i really feel like this game was extremely inspired by super mario brothers i feel like sego looked at that or west one or sorry west stone west stone sorry yeah um i i feel like they looked at Mario and were like, like everyone else said, oh, we can do that. And they came closest, but they adapted the mentality of their game design for the arcades. You know, Sawyer Brothers, it did show up in the arcades, but later. And it was originally made for a home system. So there's a timer, but you can, you can take it pretty easily, pretty leisurely, if you want. Adventure Island does

not give you that option. There is a constant timer that counts down, not in terms of like a clock, but in terms of poor Wonderboy's endurance, his health. Like, he's, I don't know, living in a world He's dying slowly. He's dying quickly. He has a very high metabolism. He has only a few seconds to live. Wonderboy needs food, bed back if he does. At all time. So, yeah, your endurance meter, your health meter ticks down. It's not a health meter in the traditional, like, video game sense where It's a fruit meter. Basically, if you, if you, it's a hunger. Oh, it's like a stamina meter. It's a hunger stamina. Okay.

So you constantly have to run forward and do everything you can to collect every piece of fruit you can find on the screen because that replenishes your health or your vitality, your stamina. And some of them just like appear as you get near them. So you have this huge advantage if you've memorized the levels and know where things are going to show up. It really pushes you forward at an extremely fast speed. And it really challenges you to learn every little bit of, every level. And there are 32 levels, just like Roy Brothers. And World Four is always like a cavern with a

boss who's basically just the same boss with a different head every time. So they kind of, you know, cut really close to the cloth on this one. They cut very much around the pattern of Mario. But they put their own indelible stamp on it. And one thing that I did discover when I was, you know, when I was researching the full Wonderboy episode of Retronauts was that unlike the home versions that we're more used to, the arcade version has sort of like not quite a status meter, but it has this little box where it shows which weapon you currently have equipped. You know, you have the axe and you have the fireball and whatever. And that, I feel like, was the inflection point from which they started doing the RPG elements that you started seeing in the second game. They dropped that in the home version of the game. And when Hudson adapted it for Adventure Island, they also dropped that. So it actually took Hudson longer get into the sort of proto-R-Pg

Metroidvania style. It wasn't until Adventure Island 4, which was the very last game officially released for Nintendo Famicom in Japan, that you finally saw Adventure Island go full-on adventure, but Wonder Boy 2, which we'll talk about, I think, within this episode,

was actually more of an action RPG. Yeah, you have the whole split in the series that I'm sure you guys went into in the other episode between sort of the action side and the RPG side. But the other thing I wonder about this, I don't know enough about Sega a history to know if this has any. Are you wondering about Wonderboy? I am wondering about Wonderboy. That's why you got his name. I'm wondering if the, the concepts behind this had anything to do

with the history leading up to Sonic, because part of what this seems like is it's like Mario, but got to go fast. Mario, but you're always moving forward. And in this case, it like, it lost a lot of Mario in service of always moving forward. It's really just a single path through, whereas, you know, when you got to Sonic, there's a lot more interesting platforming. I can see sort of a spiritual connection there, but I don't think there's, but I don't think there's a direct connection. I don't think there's any staff in common. And, you know, Sonic evolved from its own ideas and kind of came into being, like, that's pretty well documented, how Sonic came about. So I do think it's an interesting connection, like an interesting parallel. But, yeah,

I think it would be a little bit of a stretch to say, like, yes, Sonic, the great wonder boy clothes. No, no, yeah, definitely not. Did you talk in your, I'm sorry. Oh, that's all right. Yeah, just sort of parallel things of how do we do this platform or keep people moving and sort of two different answers to that question. Did you talk in your Wonder Boy episode about why it became Adventure Island, stuff like that? Because that confused me as a kid because I'd played Adventure Island first and then I played Wonder Boy. Yeah, so I don't know the full story there, but basically the game was developed by Westone, an external developer, and published by Sega.

But Westone owned the rights to the game. but Sega owned the rights to the character Wonderboy, is my understanding. So Westone was like, hey Hudson, how would you like to publish this cool game we made? And Hudson was like, yeah, okay. So they couldn't make it Wonder Boy. So they kept everything the same except Wonder Boy. And they changed that to a cartoon caricature of their real-life mascot, Takahashi Meijing, the guy who could do... Press buttons.

16, was it 16 button presses per second? Something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's why Master Higgins is actually Master Takahashi in Japan. That's why he's got this weird underbite and baseball cap that Wonderboy does not. That makes sense. There you go. All right, another game, not based on the contemporaneous licensed property that was very hot in America at the time, Transformer.

Yeah. Playing arcade games as the right of all sentient beings. This one's kind of cool. Really? I think so. Well, in concept, not necessarily an execution. Yeah, I think it's actually kind of a done-in-a-game. I've played it both in the arcade version and in its super, or sorry, Master System in incarnation.

And I don't like it in either form. It was one of those Master System game cards, wasn't it? It wasn't a cartridge, yeah. A My card. So on Master System is called Transbot. In the arcades, it's called Transformer, but the concept was basically the same. You are a little spaceship.

No, actually, you're a little dude, a robot guy, and then you can transform into a spaceship. But there's not really that much point. It changes your, like, target profile. It makes your hitbox smaller. It changes, yeah. Well, it changes a couple things. And so the robot moves slower than the spaceship.

So you slow down your scrolling speed, and the robot also tends to have more spread weapons. So it kind of changes how it plays to, like, more slower, but it's pretty. Maybe I should give this game more of a chance. I mean, I'm not saying this is necessarily a good game. But, and it's also, I mean, it's, you know, it's very similar in all these concepts to Namco's 1985 Macross game, which obviously so, so Macross was poop.

Which was also kind of poop. No, not kind of. It was poop. All right, all right. And then there's also Convoy-Nazzo. That's got kind of the same concept. Yeah. Except there isn't like flying, you know, you're playing as an Autobot, so you drive on the ground, and that really sucks.

Yeah. I mean, this was, so this was really a heyday. of transforming giant robots in Japan. So everyone, everyone did one of these. We should do one of these and we should make the game suck. That was the universal mandate. But, but yeah, and I actually, I mean, this one has actually looked so similar to Band-Ey's Macross game that I sort of wonder if they're like, just let's do one of those too, but it may have been a development already. I don't know. I feel like the real spirit of Macross wouldn't hit Sega until afterburner, those curlicue missiles. Yeah. That is, that is like, that is missile ballet right there.

was definitely a franchise that came into its game heyday much later than this. The early ones are not so great to actually play. There were, I mean, there were a few interesting concepts. But, yeah, the, I was looking at these, and it's the home version of this. Yeah, someone added a bunch of notes. Sorry, yeah, this was me. This was me. I added these.

So in the arcade, you just power up by killing things. It's very straightforward. Oh, just like real life. Yeah, just like real life. That's how I power it. You power up by killing things. Your shots get stronger in both modes. and, you know, your spread gets wider robot mode, et cetera, et cetera.

But they, like, for some reason, they discarded that in the home version. And instead, the only power up is this power up that gives you a roulette wheel that, like, spins on the top of the screen between, like, A through F powerups. And you land on a random one. And each power up is a random combination of either robot or ship and some different weapon. And so, I don't know if there's any strategy to this game at all or if it's just one. Yeah, it's all coming back to me. Now that you mentioned that that's why I hated that game. Yeah, it's so confusing.

The worst power-up system ever, basically. I don't know who decided that would be a good idea. Like, you know, some of the combos are actually pretty good, and several of them are terrible. Like, when you first look at this game, it kind of reminds you of section Z from Capcom. And maybe that's where the alphabet system thing came in. Because section Z, you're like section A, then B, then C. All the way to Z. Maybe not.

I don't know. It reminds me, I think all the Sega games have this trademark art style. It's very cartoony, and then they have black outlines and stuff. And I think that sort of turned me off with Transformer, too, or TransBot. So I think it looks a little kiddie kind of her I did. Yeah, they did have that very pastel look to some of their games, but not all of them. In fact, the game we're about to talk about next is sort of the platonic ideal of cutesy pastel Siga style. And that's Alex Kid the Lost Stars, which was their other attempt to do the Mario thing.

Although Alex could have been around for a while. This wasn't his first game, was it? Didn't we talk about an Alex Kid game last time? Yeah, I think there was. Oh, no, no, no. It was my hero, which kind of became, or Teddy Boy, which became, like, it feels like, it feels like the basis of Alex Kid now that I think about it. It's got that same isometric, not, not asymmetric, but like that forced perspective, the same pastel color scheme, sort of the same physics and attack skills. It just kind of feels like, not quite what it should be.

I think they really wanted Alex Kidd to be their mascot, but it was more of a Keith Courage than a Mario creator. Yeah, I mean, it definitely feels like a lot of the home console 8-bit platformer games. You know, I wrote down, there's several others that it reminds me of in various aspects. Like the fact that you have two-player co-op and you can stand on the other player reminds me of like Chippendale. Yeah, okay, well, that's worth mentioning is cooperative play. Yeah, so there is two-player.

That was pretty new at the time, a platformer with co-op play. I mean, you had, you know, Mario was kind of the standard to beat in 1986. So they did something that Mario wouldn't do until, like, 2009, new Super Mario Brothers is we. Yeah. I mean, you had, like, multiplayer mini games in, like, Super Mario 3, but you can't actually play some levels that way. Right.

And then, well, you had Mario Brothers in 1983. Sure, sure. But that was less cooperative and more competitive. Yeah. Without the actual ability to attack the other player. But this was very much, like, two people tag along together in the arcade. You play as either Alex Kidd or a girl named Stella, and both basically have the same skills. And like you mentioned, you know, you've got that Chippendale thing where you can pick the other character, the other person up and toss them.

Can you pick them up? Yeah. You can bounce off them, yeah. You can definitely stand on and bounce off them so you can use them as a leg up. Is this the game with the big dice everywhere in the background and stuff? What's the deal with the dice? it's just it's it's got like toy and game background style every like I said everything like you said everything is super pastel and cute so everything in Alex kid is just like it's like toy land so it's very much like a teddy boy taken to the next level so Sega was like the ultimate purveyor of cute video games in the 80s and then it became well you see the sea change in 1986 because you start to see a lot lot fewer cute games from them and a lot more like hardcore action games. I really, I think a lot of

it was they were starting to look toward the international market. You know, they, again, this was right around the time that the master system made it to, you know, the Mark III made it to the West as the master system. And I think they really got serious just in general about appealing to Western audiences. And you did have, you know, games like Zaxon where, you know, in the past that weren't super cute, but you see the super cute games kind of start to fade away. And in 1987, I think there's like, 87 has Wonderboy in Monsterland and Fantasy Zones 2. And that's it.

Yeah. That's it for the cute games in 1987. So I think the success of Afterburner and Outrun made them say, like, whoa, Americans liked them some grim and gritty. Not that those games are grim and gritty. They're kind of pretty. They're beautiful games, but they're more on the realistic side. Yes, they're more, less cartoon, less pastel.

And so Nintendo kind of became the pastel cartoon company as opposed to to Sega. Sega started to adopt a more Western style, I think, in their game design. And that's something that's pretty much held true since then. I mean, there's definitely, if you look through Sega history, there's definitely this thread of games that are just could never come to America. because they are so specific to Japanese tastes, but you also have a much larger group of games that are meant to appeal to kind of the broadest audience possible. And I don't mean that in a pandering way.

I just mean in a sense that I think they were one of the Japanese developers to sort of latch onto the fact early on that, oh, you know, like not everyone likes the same things that are popular here. And there's a lot of money to be made by figuring out what the alchemy is to move into the international market and, you know, draw in audiences that way. Very smart. Although if we want to segue up for a moment on things that started out very Japanese-centered, this next one on our list.

Okay, go for it. This seems to be a personal, you seem to have a soft spot for this one. I have some connections on this one. So dump Matsumoto body slam. So this was a wrestling game, a tag team, tag team wrestling game, which when it first came out in Japan was, themed on real-life, real-life Japanese women's wrestling

league and the star of this Dump Matsumoto was like the big heel of the time. She was, that was her name, Dump, Dantumoto. Matsumoto, yeah. And it's, like, I don't know anything about this game. It's just like another crappy wrestling game as far as I can tell. Sorry.

It's cute. It's, yeah, so it's all done like little superforums. There's like a little bit of grappling, but it's mostly just like punching other people until you can get a cool. But you can, you can like pick up objects. But the story behind And the people who were, like, the licensed people, is really interesting. Like, Dump Matsumoto is like, what would her equivalent be in American wrestling? Paul Kogan.

No, not Paul Kogan. Because he was never with the iron sheikh. She was a heel. Like, I don't know enough about America. It's like if Under the Giant were a bad guy. Yeah. She is not, we think Japanese women you think, like, very petite, but she is a big woman. Most of the time.

Andre the Giant. Was he? Yeah. I think he was. I mean, he was poised against Hulk Hogan and wrestling. Mania or whatever. I think he was something. I don't know.

I'm sure people who actually know American Wrestling will chime in in the comments. I don't know. I will never think of it as anything except Fezic from the Princess Bride. And he's so lovable. But Dump was kind of, I mean, Dump was a phenomenon. Like she, you know, crossed over into all kinds of Japanese entertainment. She showed up in anime. Like, if you watch Megazone 2-3, there's the leader of a biker game named Dump, and it's her.

I mean, I don't think she was actually voice acting on that one. But the character design is just straight up her. in this sci-fi movie. And she actually did some voice acting and a few other OIPAs, I think. Yeah, I mean, it was very much like the kind of styling they had. She was the leader of the

the Gokaku Domey, the atrocious alliance. And they were like, you know, done up in kind of like punk rock, almost like, road warrior, basically. And their rivals were the crush gals who in the game are called the fresh gals. But they were like the cutesy,

you know, very pretty. more traditional-looking wrestlers, more petite, more... As far as that goes for wrestling. Yeah, I mean, they were girls you might take home to late your parents' meat, as opposed to Dump Matsumoto who would eat your parents? She wouldn't necessarily eat your parents, but she'd probably, like, beat them up and take their money. Oh, definitely.

But, yeah, I don't know if you followed this link that I picked up, but I just was looking around for information about Dump Matsumoto in general. And the story of her big showdown with Chigusei Nagoya, Nagoyo, sorry, is just amazing. It's definitely worth looking up. But basically, apparently it was a huge deal. And Dump Matsumoto won through some really dirty tactics and broke millions of Japanese girls' hearts because Chiguesi Nagoyo was their idol. She was their hero. She was going to win against the bully and know the bullies won.

So that happened like two years before this game came out. So at the time this game came out, she was like, I assume this like very famous and very reviled kind of public persona. And then shortly after the game came out, then her rival came back for a revenge match and got revenge. But anyway, so that's really interesting context. Like to me, that's a lot more interesting than the game itself. Yeah, I mean, the actual game, I mean, it's serviceable, I think, you know, you've got tag team stuff. You got punches, kicks, grapples. can pick up weapons and use them from around the ring.

And apparently there's a secret match against aliens if you do the right things during the game. Right. You get a last match. I was honestly, it's a big improvement over a Poe from, from 1983. Yeah, it's not like there were a lot of good wrestling games out of this time. And it's certainly better than anything I covered on NES works at this point. Yeah, it was serviceable.

Muscle tag team and tag team wrestling by Data East. And then they brought it out in the U.S. And because, of course, no one knew who the characters were, they just got rid of them completely and replace them with a whole bunch of generic dudes and it's kind of boring. So anyway, yeah, like you said, this is a very sort of cutesy, super deformed game. Like there's these little cartoon caricatures of the wrestlers. I like the visual style a lot. It's got a lot of personality, but I don't feel like it's that interesting as a game.

But then again, wrestling doesn't do anything for me. So maybe it's amazing. I'd say it's not notable from a Western video game perspective, I think. Maybe for Japan, but not here. It was serviceable at the time as far as being a wrestling game. All right, so, and then at the opposite end of the spectrum, moving away from the cute, we have the grim, the gruesome, the body horror game

Alien Syndrome and that's kind of... Now we're talking. Yeah, that's kind of Sega's first big step into more of the gross out game design as far as I can think. Can you think of any of the earlier games they did

that would be more along these lines? Nothing really jumps out at me. Nope. I feel like this game was very very heavily inspired by aliens. I mean, how could it not be? but it um kind of i feel like sort of presaged you know games like not so much gain ground but like uh oh crap what's it called smash tv that's what i was not say smash tv the top down arena sort of feel is very much like what smash tv picked up but it's also in a way a little

more ambitious than that because that is just a nerd well not ambitious but it's it has different aspirations than smash tv because that is very much just a shooter like yeah like we're very much in the Robotron vein, yeah. This has whole maps. Yeah, you're exploring sort of a large space. This is in some large space. To me. Yes.

Gonlet was a contemporary of this game, actually. That was 1986 also. So kind of people sort of coming up at the same idea. Yeah, it's a big top-down maps to explore around. Co-op. That's my favorite thing about alien syndrome. The co-op. And then it has this cool little map idea that there's actually like maps of the level

posted on the wall. And if you walk by them, then you get this little overhead map that pops up just briefly that shows you are here and here's the rest of the level. But then you walk away and it goes away against. You have to kind of remember what you were doing, which is kind of a cool idea. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

No, it's a, it's a, um, there's a lot of really good ideas in this. And, um, it kind of reminds me of, um, in a way, it seems to take inspiration from shooters like Gradius or 1942 where you can get like, you know, extra firepower, little dudes who will tag along with you and help. shoot. There's also, this is sort of, I think, the, no, I was going to say it's the first Sega game where you have to rescue characters, but no, it's actually taking that from Flicky. Remember Flicky guys?

Yeah, yeah, Flicky. Flicky's DNA shows up in a lot of Sega games, and this, I think, is one of them, because you are going through these stages, and your goal is to rescue survivors from the aliens and liberate them and get them from being killed. So that's very much, like, kind of the point. And then I think the way it works is that once you're going to be able to be able to, rescue enough people, then you get to move the next level and take on a boss and so forth. And, yeah, I, I've only really played this in home conversions, which, none of which are that

great. But the arcade game, you know, I watched some videos of it, and it seems pretty intense, pretty fast-paced. The graphics are very detailed, but not in a sort of cluttered way. It's got that, that same sort of vibe as, you know, like splatterhouse, where everything is really gross, but it's also very distinctive and everything is drawn really clearly. So there's not a lot of clutter, despite all the graphical detail. Yeah, like that's all you playing backgrounds, but so that you can see your nice blood sprays going across them. Yeah, I saw this in the arcade in person in the 80s.

I think, I thought it was really neat, but I was so young, I'd probably had a hard time playing it. But I think that isn't there an Alien Syndrome port on the NES, Tengen, as you say it? um or something i think that might have been i want to say that okay maybe that was there is one on the easiest yeah yeah it's the unlicensed one but there's you know there's probably so it's a good home ports too yeah um it's fun co-op speaking of co-op games uh co-co co-co-co-op yeah that's right it's uh it's twice the fun um and that is quartet so again 1986 is that is the same year gauntlet came out in arcades right that

was an 86 year? It was 85. Oh, really? Okay, maybe that was the inspiration point then. But you have quartet, which is so named because you can play as more people at once. Yeah. And this game reminds me a lot of, you know, Capcom shooters like Forgotten Worlds or Section Z, but it's actually slower.

It's almost like a combination shooter platformer, but not, it doesn't feel like contra. It's a weird combination of a lot of stuff that you never really saw again because Maybe it didn't really quite work, but yeah, it's got, it's got the proper player co-op. I feel like it did work because people really like it. Well, yeah. It's got a lot of, a lot of diehard fans. It's one I've never had the chance to play properly. I've played it, but I've never played it with three other people.

Right, yeah, I mean either. Which is hard to make work. The machine looks like gauntlet a little bit because it has these different colored sections, wedges with the four players. Right. If I had seen this in the arcade, I think I would have loved it because I just love co-op games. Yeah, I never came across in the arcade. It seems like it.

This game actually exists. It's like you had to be there. You had to be there kind of thing. So you've got the four players, but then, you know, it's not like one of these top-down things like, oh, it's a side-scroller. But it almost, I mean, it almost seems like kind of defender DNA in there and that you're going back and forth trying to accomplish things within this scrolling platform. I mean, you have to get to a door at the end.

But in order to open the door, you have to find the enemy that has the key. Right. So it is very, like, slow-paced. and methodical, but I feel like when you have four people working together, it would be really fun. Yeah, yeah. Like, I'm watching, like, single players go through it, and that it just doesn't seem like it. It works really well that way, because there's tons of enemies. You don't know who has the key. You, like, you can get a jet pack, so you can reach things easier, but then you get hit and lose it, and you're kind of screwed. By the way, you didn't mention the character

names. No, I was going to, though. They have great names. Go ahead. Lee, Joe, Mary, and Edgar. I would always play a very heroic. Because why not? Very heroic names. Lee. They sound like my grandparents' generation, sort of. It does a little bit. So, maybe this is set in the 30s or something. Maybe it is.

Yeah. They're like a jazz quartet. That would be cool. They were trapped in alien space. They were trapped. They escaped from the holodeck from one of Commander Riker's simulations. He was playing jazz with them. They got away.

This needs a bonus level. It needs a bonus level. You told me not to go on any tangents. I'm not trying so hard. What? What are you talking about? Yeah, but you see this game, Sony's a bonus level where each of the characters finds their own instrument, and then you have to jam. Okay. All right.

Anyway, there was a sequel that people don't like as much, but I would, this is one of those games that I would really love to play at some point. Yeah, yeah, to play it for real. And it is proper format with... Guess what? I have a machine downstairs. Do you? There are only three of us. There's only three of us, though, so it's not going to work out.

Yeah, it's like, I mean, I guess that's maybe why we never saw more of it is because, like, it works in it. context, but nowhere else. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing where there's a master system port, right? And it's still called Fortette. So they should have named it Do It, right? Yeah. It's not four-player. It's only two-player, yeah.

So it definitely misses the point. Don't have the four-player adapter for. Yeah. Was there one for the master system at all? I've never seen it. I heard of it. No, no. So it's just one-man-em-old.

All right. So to wrap up 1986, two final games, one of which is the big ones. And that is Outrun. Would you guys agree with my characterization? I've never played this game. I don't. What? Get out of here.

I hear it's the citizen cane of video games. I'm not saying it is. I'm not saying it's not. It's just putting it out there. I'm kidding. Okay. How could anyone not have played Outrun? Yeah.

I don't even like racing games. I've personally played this many times in the arcade, even in the 80s. It was popular. Yeah, I don't like this. I don't really like racing games. But as someone noted in the notes, I guess is what you do in notes. Creator Yu Suzuki called this not a racing game, but a driving game.

And that is really the idea behind the game. It is driving simulator. So Yu Suzuki loves cars. He's like, you know, Kazanori Yamaguchi, or Yamauchi that way, the Grand Tourismo guy. He's just, he loves cars. And so I kind of feel like Outrun was an excuse for him to go to Europe, rent a sports car, and just drive around for a month. what he did. That was his research for this game. And he translated that into, he translated that into the most just wonderful driving game, racing game, whatever you want to call it. I mean,

there is like this, this timer that counts down. So it's kind of stressful. But at the same time, it's really just so chill. There's this huge emphasis on just like recreating an experience. So like, you know, this is one of the ones we were talking about where the super scalar technology already exist and now it's just being steered towards a particular purpose in this case it was i see what you did there steered oh yeah yeah so so he's trying to recreate you know the ambiance of these places he visited in europe and then he does things like you know you have a selectable soundtrack so it's like you have your own car radio and you're just punching in what you want and it's not just a soundtrack it is a sound it is an amazing soundtrack yeah so i covered that in a retronauts radio episode because

data disks put out an amazing LP of this game uh but i know it's you know available iTunes or whatever it's just such great music but yeah and so then and then you know they put this in a cabinet where you can just sit down and basically you are cruising the roads in europe one of them moved while you drove one of the deluxe versions of the cabinet i don't remember the one that moved but i've seen it online but there's something that struck me about this game just a minor thing which is that there's two people in the car there's like a blonde-haired woman in the passenger seat so it's that is the experience part of the experience evidently yeah yeah so if it were made today that you might be able to select your gender

and swap them around to swap them or something. Or not. Or not. Who knows? But yeah, I think that is kind of the idea behind Outrun is like, it's not just, you know, you trying to get to the goal. It's you just going for a drive with a cute girl. And it's

when you finish the game, it's not like you're rewarded with a kiss or something. You get out and she gets out and then all these people like come over and pick you up and throw you in the air and they drop you. dropping out of your head. It's a little goofy, but there's just a sense of fun that pervades the game.

But one of the really great things about Outrun is that, like Action Fighter, it has branching road paths. But in this case, what happens when you choose a different branch is that you go through different scenery. So if you go one route, you know, you'll always start out with the palm trees, kind of, you know, like south of France or whatever. But if you take one path, you might go. through a rocky tunnel, you know. If you go through the other path, you might go through a desert area. And there's, there's like, I don't know, seven or eight different kinds of scenery throughout the game. And it's always shifting, always changing. So the longer you drive, the more of Europe, you know, quote unquote Europe you get to see. I think it's in it also the, the, one of the

directions is normally a little bit harder than the other. I believe the right directions are harder left. So it's kind of a difficulty select at the same time. You can like be, you know, I just want to chill out. so I'm going to go this way, or I want a little more of a challenge, so we're going to go the other way. And, you know, there is the timer element. You have to drive fast and you have to drive efficiently and not hit other cars or you'll lose time. Doesn't the car bounce around when it hits things?

Or is that the home version? I just remember it sort of comically flopping around or something. Maybe in the master system version or something. I think it could be. Could be. Yeah. But this has been remade for 3DS by M2. and like Super Hang-on

it is just a fantastic port that they really put a lot of love and care into. There's the 3D visualization, and it's got the ability to steer by tilting the system, the gyro controls, yeah. Yeah, I don't feel like I'm really doing justice to this game because I don't have the vocabulary to talk about why a driving game is great.

It is the experience element that you need to just experience it. Oh, the other thing that's going on here is they're also using their super scalar stuff to do more things in the sort of pseudo 3D. So it's not just flat tracks. You've got hills and banks and all kinds of stuff that they can do by using their superscalor technology to simulate as if you had a full 3D track.

Right. And it's so subtle that you don't really notice it unless you're looking for it. For a long time, I thought the game Power Drift was the first time SIGA did that. But going back and revisiting this, I was like, oh, no, Outrun has rises in the road. They're pretty minor.

It's not like you're going, launching into the air. It's like, it's like rises. It's gentle, yeah. But it's sort of creating a terrain that's just a little more realistic than what you could have had earlier. And I wonder if, you know, this was the sort of things that Nintendo was going for with their Mode 7 Mario Kart games that they're trying to move towards, again, having like terrain without having a real 3D structure there.

Yeah, Moad 7 didn't pull it off nearly as well. Yeah, no, this was, I mean, five years before. It's a matter of six years. Yeah. power you had in the home council. I was just thinking my first impressions of this game. I was trying to think of how we could convey the impression it made on people when it came out. I just remember seeing it in the arcade and it was just beautiful, just the graphics,

you know, very colorful, very detailed, large graphics and the music and the presentation and the cabinet, all that combined to make it really good like eye candy, like video game candy that you wanted to play, you know what I mean? It attracted you to it. Do you guys remember the website UK Resistance? Yeah, a little video gaming site. They were big Sega fans. But in the early 2000s, they started talking about how much they hated the darkness and grimness of contemporary video games and started talking about something called Blue Sky Gaming.

And this is what they were talking about. They were talking about Outrun with, you know, passing breeze playing as you're driving down this wide open highway. Wind in your hair. Yeah, with blue sky above. Like to them, that was sort of an. ideal of video gaming. And I can definitely relate to that. Like an anti-oppressive atmosphere. Yeah, exactly. Aren't there some indie games now that draw on that aesthetic of the Outrun era? Some of them are like chunky polygon drivers or whatever. There are a couple of them. I don't remember

what you're called. I know there's 90s racer, but that's more, I think that's meant to be more like Ridge Racer. Yeah. But you know, this vibe did kind of live on. I feel like there's sort of a push pull with Namco and Sega in a lot of respects. They were like the arcade rivals and the 80s and into the 90s. And I think pole position was the first game that did this sort of perspective, right? You know, Sega tried to do the behind-the-car

thing with turbo, and then pull position came along a year later, pulled the camera down closer to the track, made the car bigger, and was just much more impressive. This, I feel like, was Sega's attempt to sort of wrestle that back from Namco and give not only a more visually impressive experience,

but also to change the vibe of the game and to make it more in inviting and more appealing, and not so much about F1 racing, but more about, like, going out for a cruise with your girl. And I feel like Namco eventually kind of got back to that with the RidgeRacer games, like Ridge Racer Type 4, especially, really felt like it had that same sort of chill European vibe as this game. But that was 13 years later. It took a long time for anyone to match this game. Maybe the theme is that your car doesn't explode when it taps other cars. there is that unlike pole position

it's not meant to be stressful and oppressive yeah yeah that's why I like everyone and I think also this was you know like you were saying it just it caught your eye in the arcade as just this really impressive like nice looking thing and this is sort of part of Sega's push to have like a centerpiece arcade game like you have

this is the thing in the middle of the arcade that you know maybe it's more expensive than the other games but it just looks so nice and something you want to do you're going to be willing to put more money into it. Yeah, I feel like every arcade maker worth their salt has had a big breakout game. And Sega had been around for quite a while. You know, Namco had Galaxian and then Pac-Man. Nintendo had Donkey Kong. And Sega, I don't think, really had any game that truly just stood out and made people say, wow. I mean, Zaxon was visually impressive, but it was also really complicated and

unfriendly. But this game, I think, was where they became like a first-rate arcade powerhouse. and they became a company to watch where you saw the Sega name and the marquee and were like, I need to go play that. Yeah, at least as far as American, the American perspective goes. I don't know how they were perceived in Japan. Maybe they had... Sega's had a weird relationship with Japan. I don't know that any of their games before this were necessarily, like, huge either.

I mean, Sega owns their own arcades in Japan, don't they? So they sort of have their own space. Yeah. It's sort of a different environment. where you're not directly competing against all the other. Right. All right. And then one final arcade game for 1986 from Sega,

kind of a denouement after the amazingness of Outrun. And that is Enduro Racer, which is kind of like the less good version of Outrun, kind of in the Hang-on mold. Yeah. It's like an off-road hang-on. Yeah, it's like stunt biking hang-on, basically. It's like Hang-on meets Excite bike.

I'll tell you, I'm a huge fan of Endura Racer on the Sega Master System because it's one of the first games I got for it when I got a used system in the early 90s or something. Okay, so tell us about that because the arcade version does nothing for me. I'm like, I don't care. Well, I'll tell you the transition, which was that, you know, there's something fun about the feel, it has a sort of loose feel on the master system version

where you sort of fly over bumps and it's really fun. You can steer while you're in midair. I think that has a lot to do with it. And you can get power-ups that make you jump, faster and jump higher and you just get through the tracks and it's fun but um i remember the first time i saw it in the arcade after that i was like oh man indoor racer it's got to be awesome because i love the home version but i think i sat down on it i think it was one of those things you sit on and it just it was really hard and it just seemed like it sucked i don't know why it wasn't the

same feel and i think it's very difficult and there's something about the flying they got the flying part from the arcade, but it's not as fun in the arcade when you hit a bump and your guy flies up to the top of screen. Like you're like, what the heck's going on? You're going to like 20 feet in the air. So is this the one where they change it to an asymmetric perspective in the home? Yeah. So it's really mechanically, it's a kind of different setup. Yeah, you might even see some screenshots for me if you search for Endurracer because I used to blog about it on vintage computing. I did something about the Zandum Enduracer at the end. There's this really cheesy. If you beat the game, there's this, it says something like the road of

Enduro Racer is long. You've endured many hard challenges and it just goes on for pages and pages of scrolling text. Anyway, so I transcribed that for my blog back in 2005 or something. Nice. So, yeah, so the home version, like, it's not as visually impressive as the super scalar version, but evidently they nailed the mechanics on the isometric jumping. It sounds like, I haven't played it. Yeah, it's fun. I don't know why it is. I just love it. It's one of my favorite. home games. I don't know why. I don't think anybody else likes it as much as me.

That's just something about it. Everyone's got to have their little niche where they love something more than anyone else does. It's just the freedom of it. It feels like it's not punishing too. It's kind of easy to play and fun and, you know. Would you say that Indura racer is your heyunkio? Yes, my Yankee. I mean, it sort of looks like the home version of Indira sort of looks like the plus plus version of Excite bike. Yeah. Like you take the basic like, you know, bouncing off hills and put it in I was going to say that when I first saw Indura racer, I thought it was an excite bike clone. But you don't have that mechanic where you have to aim up and down when you land or you spin out and stuff and you don't overheat.

You just, I think you stay on the track, you jump over the bumps, and you avoid the other players. And it's not like a race where you guys keep coming at you. And the more guys you pass, the higher your score at the end of the race when you get. to the end. So it's not like first, second, third. If you pass 10 guys, you get 10 points and you can power up with it. And this is the home version. I think the arcade version work like that, too. You just keep passing other bikes as you're going down the Mode 7 track.

So maybe that's why I like it. I mean, there's no pressure to actually be first place, and you can just relax and try to do your best. And also, you're not punished for hitting the bumps. They don't slow you down. In fact, they speed you up if you have the right power-ups. You can start flying really fast. Nice.

You try to hit all the bumps, so it's really neat. That's different than most games that I know. And so, you know, caller number nine for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of chocolate. Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus

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Cold Case Files, the podcast. Garcia is walking into the home of a real monster. I was nervous. I realized what kind of person I was dealing with. It's a goosebumps moment. Download new episodes every Tuesday on the Podcast One app or subscribe at Apple Podcasts or Podcast.com. For those of us in the Patreon game, it's easy to know what we're worth.

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We're going to read them to you now. We're going to start with a letter from Alex. Does he have a name, Alex Funky? Alex Kuh. I don't know. Not Alex Kidd. Hi, Jeremy. As a longtime listener from Germany, I'd like to take the opportunity to shed some light

on the situation of my home country in the late 80s. I'm assuming this is not about the. Great Wall falling. Now, he talks about how Nintendo didn't really have much traction over there. My earliest post-Itarry console memories were affected mainly by Hang-on, Lucky Dime, Caper, Alex Kid, and Outrun into which I saw most of my time. I mean, think about it. In that setting, I imagined would be Florida.

A cool white guy with a blonde chick behind him, beside him, drove in a Ferrari Testerosa at incredible speed that ejected both in a car crash. and then the unforgiving time limit that motivated me to go beyond when the impressions of the setting slowly decreased. But if I remember correctly, I never got through to the end. I never owned the system and game during that era. Until Super Mario Card came along, Outrun was my favorite gait racing game. I loved the Xbox remake and started the download of my 3DS as soon as the 3D version was available. It's a real bummer that the gameplay does not hold up as I remembered it. But almost 30 years later, I must admit

the racing genre has been enhanced from there. My memory will always glorify Outrun as a high-paced, ultra-hard mega-fund racing game. That was my personal benchmark for all the racing games of the era. I think it's interesting that someone from Europe played Outrun and said, oh, yes,

Florida, as opposed to Americans who played it and are like, oh, yes, Europe. That's interesting. The palm tree thing. Is there, are there palm trees? Yeah, I'm assuming in Mediterranean area. Yeah. Yeah. It's got to be. Like I said, South Korea. I keep thinking like Southern Italy or something, you know, that kind of stuff.

Anyway. That'd be Mediterranean. Yeah. Yep. All right, from Adam Ismail. Outrun is a classic for sure, but I always preferred Super Hang-on. An M2's perfect 3D classics port is one of my favorite games on 3DS. These games were a bit before my time, but as a racing fan, they would shape the titles I'd grow up playing and loving, like Daytona and Sega Rally. Also, I can't recommend Super Hang-On soundtrack enough. It's every bit as good as Outruns. Were they composed by the same people? I don't believe so, but I'd have to go back and double

check. But they are great. They're so good. From Frankie Coleman. Wonder Boy in Monsterland was the first video game I ever played, and Super Hang-On was the first racing game I ever played. There's still two of my favorites, along with Outrun, which is still my favorite car game. I love Hang-On and Outrun's sense of speed and simple controls, and their beautiful art scrolling along towards you as you zoom ahead. They're both really fast games, but they're also pretty relaxing, because of the art, music, and the mood they both create, other than the occasional crash into a sign or rock on a tricky curve. They both have amazing music that I still listen to while driving. Outrun was the first vinyl album I ever bought as well. I couldn't let that one

pass me by. Now I have a growing collection of them. Wonder Boy and Monster Land is a game I've never actually been able to finish because I couldn't play well enough to beat the timer, but it became a bigger influence in my life than I thought it would. I love simple little monster designs like the one in the game, the ones in the game, and fantasy adventures, starring cute anime folk, became my favorite shows and games. It also influenced my own art just as much as better known things like Final Fantasy. I want my characters to give the feeling Wonderboy art gave me as a kid. I love Nintendo as a kid, too, but Sega had these mid-80s arcade games with art,

sound, and general vibes that no one else provided as well as they did, for games that played so well. Mario may have won in the end, but Wonderboy, that couple in the Ferrari Testerosa spider, and that motorcycle fella, you know, just as much to me. people are really obsessed with that Ferrari Testerosa. Well, I think it's interesting, though, listen to the Outrun soundtrack while you're driving in real life. That's a good idea. I should try that.

It is. One thing I do like about the Ferrari Testerosa element of Outrun is that the logo, if you watch the back of the car, it mirrors itself. Sometimes the horse is backwards. Interesting. From John Brandon. Only experiencing the Master System Genesis ports of these games meant that when I actually saw a real live after. Burner Arcade Machine as a kid, I was amazed. So smooth, so fast. But it was Galaxy Force that to me was the first real 3D game I'd ever played. It is still impressive today. But that is a 1988

therefore not eligible for this discussion. But it's pretty amazing. And I think this is about it. For sale, 1986 Ferrari Testerosa, 25 cents are best offer. That's a great headline from 2049. Dear Retronauts, as a Nintendo Kid, and before realizing it was a middling imitation, Rad Racer was my favorite game. But once I started going to arcades, I was just the right age to play and appreciate Outrun for its style, and not just its substance. And it's definitely the game that's influenced my aesthetics the most. I want what I drive, where I drive it, and what's on the stereo to look, feel, and sound like Outrun. And to this day, I still put on the soundtrack and wind my two-seater across L.A. to the beach. And while I might

be too busy now to take a leisurely walk through my old favorite, uh, took through my favorite old Nintendo and Square games, I'll always take time to take Sega's perfect scale model of driving his pastime for a quick spin. For a 30-year-old game with one car and three songs, it's nearly as impressive and definitely as classic as the Ferrari it gives you to drive. I wonder if he married a blonde, too. Does he have a testeroza yet? Assuming this is a man. Poor woman is fine. Yeah. So, okay, two more questions. From Justin Brown. What's Sega's deal with Alien Syndrome? I didn't play Alien Syndrome until Sonic's Ultimate Genesis collection. Hell, until then, I barely knew that the game existed, often confusing it with the subpar Sega Brawler Alien Storm.

To my surprise, I find a fantastic play on Gauntlet with giga-esque monster designs and two-player co-op. What was this game on the Sega Genesis? Why were we bored with Alter Beast when the Alien's franchise was still going strong? Granted, the Mega Drive didn't come out in the West until 89, but Sega was still licensing terrible ports onto every system as far as 1992, including Game Gear and X86,000, the only good port, but curiously never the Genesis. I don't know what Ziggins deal is with Alien Syndrome, but it's a property they seem eager to forget. It does seem like a good question.

It seems like it would be a good home. Was there not an update on the Wii wear of Alien Syndrome? Like a new version of Alien Syndrome? I believe there was, yeah. I forgot about that. It was pretty good. I didn't really look into sports, ports, and spinoffs and everything for this episode. That's all right.

Okay. finally from Noi Baladoid or Viadolid. I guess that's his name. Sorry about butchering your last name. Two questions for Sega games from that era. One, Body Slam. Not too many female pro wrestling games out there. I think this was the first one. Who spearheaded it? How did it come about? Do you know the answer, Ben? No, I don't know the team that made it. Don't Matsumoto? I don't think don't program the game now. Why not? She can do anything.

She probably beat up the programmer. who made the game. The theme to quartet, and it doesn't matter from Sonic Adventure, have a very similar melody. Was this on purpose? We have no idea. I'm going to go ahead and say,

yes, it was an homage. I don't really know, but it wouldn't surprise me. It's like I does love the self-referential thing. Okay, well, thank you, everyone, for your letters. Keep an eye on Retronauts.com and on my Twitter feed, GameSpite, because whenever we are planning to produce episodes, I post solicitations for questions, and you, too, can contribute to this show and have us read your questions aloud and be completely incapable of answering them.

And butcher your name, too. That's right. That's a special treat that we offer to you, the listeners of retronauts. So moving on to 1987, I don't think we'll spend as much time on this as 86, because, for one thing, we don't have as much time left. but also because I feel like 87 was a year or 86 was a year of innovation and 87 was a year of refinement. It really feels like the crazy ideas that they started putting out in 86,

they spent 87 just kind of refining those, putting out, you know, incrementally improved versions of the hardware and basically just hammering everything to feel a little more substantial, a little more solid. So you didn't see the kind of like wild-eyed, wow, that's crazy. I've never imagined this before. so much in 87, but the games were arguably better, except maybe, I don't know if anything was quite as good as outrun,

but we'll see. So to start with, there is a game that everyone should be familiar with, and that is Shinobi. And that is a straight-up rip-off of Namco's Rolling Thunder, the Namco-Segaa rivalry at work again. But it's a very, very good rip-off. In fact, I would say it might be better than Rolling Thunder. I don't know. I think it probably is. It's got a lot of interesting things in it.

Both were really popular in the arcade when I was a kid. I mean, they're both 2D platforming, side-scrolling shooters, and they both have an element of verticality to them in that you can jump, but then you can also press up and jump, and you'll jump up to a different level. And Shinobi actually, like, takes that to sort of a next level. There are a few places in Rolling Thunder where you have to go up or down several levels. Mostly you go down, but Shinobi has, like, entire levels that are just vertical.

And so you're sort of ascending towers and sky, skyscrapers and stuff. And then the other thing I did with it, which is interesting, is sometimes it would put you in the background kind of when you jump. So there'd be, like, fences in the middle of the level. And jumping up was also jumping over. Yeah, that was a really popular gimmick on Super NES, but I'd say it was doing it five years in advance.

Right. Yeah, I don't remember a lot of games doing this before. Like, you had a lot of games up to this point that had layers being used for parallax, but not so much layers being used as actually part of the action. There was a layer element to Star Soldier, developed by Tecmo, Takan. I remember what they were called to that point. But it's really confusing. Like, that element of the game never made sense to me.

I've never played the arcade version of Star Soldier, so maybe the problem is just that I'm trying to see, like, the NES interpretation of an element that needed arcade hardware to make sense. But it was very uncommon, and it is interesting because there are parts of this that will definitely remind you of some of those stages in Supercastlevenu 4, where you can walk past enemies without contacting them, because you're in different layers of the background. It's on the other side of the fence, yeah.

Yeah, it's definitely something you didn't see in games at that point. Shinobi had big characters, sprites, too, right? They were, they were, I think they were about the size of the Sega games, right? Wasn't that tall? Like, Rolling Thunder had really big, you know, properly proportioned guys. I mean, compared to like, Alex kids. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's, um, they're not like,

huge. It's not like... Yeah, it's not like China Warner. Yeah, I was going to say that, that stupid turbographics game. It's not like that. But, yeah, they are bigger than you saw a lot. I'm very detailed. The bosses are very large. Don't you rescue guys?

There is a hostage element, yeah. It's not... This isn't one of those games where you have to be careful not to shoot the hostages. That's good. They didn't come along yet. They don't get friendly fired. Right. But you have to collect a certain amount

before you can get out of the level, I think. What about the bonus stage where you throw a first person throwing shuriken... That was like... That's really cool. They, they so ripped that off for the Wii when they were doing those demos.

Like the pre-launch demos, they were like, hey, you can fling Shuriken from... Didn't that show up in a game eventually? Oh, boy, I don't know. Is it just a mini-game? I don't know. It's a mini-game in some collection. Anyway, but yeah, I saw that.

I was like, oh, they like Shinobi. Yeah, yeah, it was very... I mean, it's a very kind of throwaway part of the game in Shinobi where it's just this little bonus challenge between levels, but it's also so distinctive. It's like one of the things you think of, like, one of the things you remember about Shinobi is this like very kind of 3D looking.

Graphically rich. Graphically cool. I mean, they advertise Shnobe like crazy in the early days of the Genesis. I remember seeing it in commercials and on print ads or something before Sonic era. Yeah, it became a pretty durable little franchise for a while. There were several sequels, especially on Genesis. And then they never really followed up in the Saturn era, as they did with so many franchises, just kind of let it die.

And then it came back for a couple of games on PlayStation 2, Shinobi and Kunoichi, which were different. They were more, in a sense, almost more arcade-like, if that makes sense, even though they weren't arcade games. But they had that element of the, where you had to, like, basically keep kill streaks going. Like, you would become stronger if you managed to kill consecutive enemies quickly. This isn't like that. It's more, like I said, more Rolling Thunder.

There's an element of sort of avoiding enemy fire by using cover, similar to Rolling Thunder, where physical obstacles in the environment, there are things you have to jump over, but there are also things that can protect you against return fire and enemy attacks. So you kind of have to learn to maneuver through the environment and, you know, make the most of the situation. Let's have that sort of thing in like Bionic Commando, too. A lot of people are hiding behind cranes. by on command of and I didn't this

yeah I played this also not only on the Genesis but there was a Tengen port on the NES There was a Tengen port for NES And I thought that was weird later because I was like Why are your Sega games on the NES?

Because it was during the height of their rivalry I was thinking that But of course Yeah it was weird There was the whole relationship Between Tengen, Namco and Sega And so a bunch of Sega and Namco games came out from Tingan and Atari.

Rolling Thunder was another one. It wasn't their port for that. I mean, there were a bunch of Namco games that Namco published in Japan, and then, because they had a falling out with Nintendo, they didn't publish here. And they gave those to Tengen. Because Namco and Atari had a connection. Tengen was an offshoot of Atari. So, yeah, so that's kind of how that worked.

And then Atari did a lot of publishing of Sega's arcade games in America. Like, they published Sega's Tetris, didn't they? I don't know, but I know. It's worth noting that Tengen was an offshoot of Atari games, I believe, you know, the separate arcade company that was separated in home Atari at the time. Right, but they were doing the arcade versions of some of these games and had the connection with NAMCO. I'd have to go back and refresh my memory on exactly what that connection is, but that is why you saw Tengen publish games from NAMCO and Sega, some of which were developed and published in Japan by NAMCO or by Sunsoft. It's just kind of a weird motley collection. So you had like, this is an episode to itself, but Tengen had like sort of their internally developed games and they had games that they brought over from Japanese devs.

So kind of a combination of things. But yes, Shinobi did show up on NES, courtesy of Tingen, along with Fantasy Zone and Afterburner and Alien Syndrome. And I want to say one other Sega game. Some of which worked better than others. Yes. I don't know. Anyway, so yeah, Sega is, sorry, Shinobi is just a great game. Like, I played it a few times in the arcade and was never that good at it. Yeah. Well, it's very, it's, it's demanding in that it's, you know, like Hunter kind of thing. It's a one-hit kills. And, you know, there's a whole bunch of different enemies and situations that show up through that you see them the first time they're going to kill you. And so you kind of have to figure out how things work. It's kind of this weird combination, it seems, of forgiving and unforgiving. and that it's really easy to die. But there's also things like you actually don't die in a lot of cases if you run into an enemy,

but you run into like a non-lethal part of them. Like if you run into their head or something. It's kind of like rolling thunder where you can bump into me and you'll take an extra hit. Well, you'll lose like half your health bar and bullets to take away your fold. But yeah, anything like a bullet and knife, or sort of anything that's actually deadly and you die. But then the enemies also do things like stand there and reload sometimes. And so you have openings. Once you sort of learn how a particular set of things work, then it's more fair.

Right. And you're not just reliant on range to terms. attacks or melee attacks. You have both and use them situationally, which is really cool. And there is a really great spiritual successor to this game on Game Boy Advance called Ninja 50, which is now very, very expensive, which is unfortunate because it is like, it is so, so much in the spirit of Shinobi and really captures that and kind of takes it to the next level that I wish it were more accessible because it's so good. Yeah, I think I remember seeing you do a review of that yeah i remember something like that yeah i have my precious cartridge of it and i will never like

All right. So getting back to the Super Scalar games, there was Thunderblade. And this is kind of what I was talking about with 1987, where they were not necessarily like pushing forward technology anymore, but more like thinking, okay, we have this. What can we do with it? And Thunderblade is a great example of it because it is, you know, partially a behind, it's a combat shooter where you're in a helicopter, hence the name. And it's partially behind the, you know, behind the ship, behind the, behind the, you know, behind the ship. the chopper viewpoint. But then you have to get to the choppa and then in some parts

of the game it's top down and it kind of does this like seamless transition which is really impressive

for a game that's not using polygons but it uses the super scalar effect to create the impression

of building scaling past you and when you're going forward it's very much the outrun approach

where you have like rows of the same sprite sort of moving past you and getting bigger as they do. But the top-down sections are really interesting. And unfortunately, these parts don't come across in the home versions very well. But basically, it's like you're flying between skyscrapers.

And the buildings consist of like stacks of the same square sprite overlapping each other. And it creates this impression of like, you know, the buildings moving past you dimensionally, so the tops of the buildings are bigger and they're moving past more quickly. It's like using a whole stack of parallax to do a top-down 3-D effect to give you. It's such a simple idea, so obvious, and I don't think I've ever really seen anywhere else. And it ends up basically making a 3-D zibious. You've got that perspective of the really old top-down shooters, but you've got this 3-D effect going on.

And I don't know that it holds up that well as a shooter today, but it's so cool. looking. It's just, it's like, I wish I had seen this in the arcades back in the day because I would have been blown away by it. I love, you know, kind of these visual effects. Yeah, like mechanically, it doesn't seem like it's even really any improvement on Zebius. You've got, you've got a machine gun that you're shooting down at the ground and you can shoot some missiles at the ground that have some splash damage and that's it. But, but yeah, the effect of, of having this. You kind of saw the same effect, not from the same perspective, but in the chapel of Symphony of the Night, where you've got the one chapel like the nave

where you've got the sunlight coming through the stained glass windows and it's just like 10 layers that kind of scroll back in the background. It's so cool and it's just a great effect that was not in my opinion used nearly enough in 2D games because it's not necessarily realistic but it creates a great illusion. It's very

immersive in that sense. So yeah, Thunder Blade, maybe not that great a game, but damn, it looks cool. Pretty much. Yeah, it's like you've got Space Harrier and you've got Zavis and you're just going back and forth between them from a gameplay of respect to it, but I'm not sure it looks cool. Yeah, so let's talk about the other two Super Scalar games for the year because I feel like those are kind of the big ones.

They're both great. Let's talk about Super Hang-on first, because we've already talked about Hang-on, and this is basically more of the same, but way better. You know, Hang-on was like one course, and this is, this gives you four courses, each with a different number of levels. There's like an easy course that's six levels, and then a hard course. It's like 16, and it just has way more to do than in the original hang-on. And it looks better because it's using more impressive hardware.

It has one of those big moving cabinets if you got the deluxe version, which I never saw in person, but boy, I would love to play that. They did a great job of recapturing that vibe in the 3DS conversion of it by M2. and it has sweet as hell music. You guys have anything to add about this one? I can't remember if I saw Hang-On or Super Hang-on in the arcade with a motorcycle. You could sit on and lean. I think Super Hang-on was the only.

Yeah, I think that was super hang-in-on. I don't think the original was that. Yeah, and you control the whole game just by leaning. Yeah, I remember wanting to sit on it, I think, when I was too little to sit on it. Probably too poor. It was like a dollar to play that or $2. Yeah, it was really expensive. Yeah.

I mean, the cabinet cost, it was some ridiculous amount, like, $20,000 or something in 1986, $87. Yeah, I don't think I ever sprung for this one. I did try out the next one we're going to talk about it. But this one I didn't do. So let's, yeah, we've already talked a lot about hang on. So let's just jump ahead to after-burner. Hang on, I mean. You can't go.

Stop. No. Your band. All right. After-burner. Guys, take it away. So, yeah, this one I did see one of the big, so this had the full. so after burner is

is the super scalar tech applied to what you Suzuki originally wanted to do by all accounts he's actually said kind of but also it's you Suzuki watched after Top Gun and was like Oh yeah let's do that

so they're going to do Top Gun but I did see I did see where way back with the original Out right totally blanked no no no the guy flying around with the gun

Space Harrier Way back in Space Harrier in the design docks for that they were versions of that where you were a plane. And one of the problems was, though, that, like, all the angles you could move at you used to have the plane drawn at all these angles, and it just, the space for that wasn't there in the hardware at the time.

So now he could do it. And so after burning, you've got these super scalar environments moving incredibly fast at you. And they're mostly clouds, but... It's mostly clouds. Yeah, it's not super complicated in terms of the environments. Yeah, it's clouds, and it's this mostly flat terrain, although some stages you have obstacles, of arches and pillars and stuff. And then we got this...

Yeah, I didn't actually either. I've seen it on videos because I did play this in the arcade and with one of the huge sitting cockpit four-speed back ones. And it was incredibly expensive. And the game was so fast and so hard, it was over in like a minute.

And I'm like, well, crap. You just spent two bucks on that boy. This is one of those... Another instance of the F-14 Tomcat being like this huge pop culture phenomenon in the 80s. Like the Lamborghini. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, very much like the test. I mean, basically, you know, you had Top Gun, you had this, you had the Skystriker in G.I. Joe. And even the Jets and Macross were pretty much based on the F-14. Yeah. Then a bunch of, you know, Transformers were based on the F-14.

Like, people just loved the F-14 Tomcat. Yeah. But this is the game that really let you be in a Tomcat, more so than any of the games based on gun, which were not that great. This basically said, I don't want to be a realistic simulation. I want to be, balls out crazy!

Yeah, this is very much another one of the, this is going to be the centerpiece of the arcade kind of games. I recall going to an arcade when this was new, and people were waiting in line to pay five bucks a ride, to ride on the one that was like you could practically go upside down, and your whole seat would move up down, left, right on a gimbal or something like. that. It was crazy. And there was probably another version of it that didn't have that, which I think I actually played.

It came in a stand-up cab as well, yeah. I also remember one of the, like one of the helicopter Sega games had a similar, you know, it had a stick in the middle and you could fly around upside down and stuff. It was probably one of the Thunderblade games. Yeah, that was probably Thunderblade. But yeah, Outrun and Afterburner. Those are two of Sega's most iconic arcade games in this era, without a doubt. Yeah, and I'm sure they made you Suzuki irreplaceable.

Yeah, hopefully they paid him well. I would assume that at some point he was paid pretty well. I read that in Japan, they didn't like to stand out in the company. Like they didn't like to have a star or a hero or something. So they would just sort of the whole company would take credit for it or something. So they may have not promoted him and made him super wealthy or anything. Eventually, I mean, they let him make Shenmu, so I don't think you get to make Shenmu if you are a nobody. Yeah, I mean, initially they didn't really promote the creators publicly, but sort of in the years, as the years went on, people sort of found out who these guys were.

Yeah, the public, so that's Afterburner, I guess. Yeah, and like, as a game, there's not a whole lot going on with it. You know, a bunch of planes fly in front of you and sometimes come from behind you, and that's annoying, and you shoot missiles at them. You shoot them. You got a machine gun. You got a missile, lock. or something and if they lock you you have to shake them off or something

and there was a I remember I swear there's a we version of this too like a sequel or something. Really? Yeah, we wear or no it was on the PS3. Oh yeah yeah there have been some sequels and renecks and it was pretty fun yeah that was the new one on the PS3

but just yeah but I mean in the arcade at the time it's just like it was so fast. Yeah, like you've never seen anything but like throwing that many pixels at you basically. Yeah and I think Sega also released After Burner 2 the same year, which was kind of more of the same, but with more variety, and sometimes missiles would come at you from behind, and they're almost impossible to shake off. So you die right there. Yeah, it was really just kind of an expansion. But actually, now that I'm looking over the notes and just kind of taking an overview, 1987 was really the year that Sega made a whole lot of shooters. Because if you look at these games, most of them are shooters. There's Fantasy Zone 2. which I don't think actually was an arcade game, though.

I think that was a home game that M2 ported back to arcade hardware years later. So maybe that doesn't count. But there is SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative, which is the best missile command clone ever. Yeah, this one's weird looking. I never played this one in the arcade. Star Wars was a different video game. Yeah, but talking about the Reagan. It was clearly named after the Reagan era initiative.

When I was a kid, I was really little, and the news was on every night, and they kept talking about Star Wars, Star Wars, Reagan Star Wars. Like, why are they talking about science fiction on the news, Mama? I didn't say Mama, but that's just part of the story. Yeah, between this and Contra, things that were very controversial in the Reagan era became very popular for video game titles. Yeah, so this actually, I was watching, like, the attract mode for this has, like, New York City getting newt. So neat. Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. Well, you play, I mean, it's missile command without the sense of overwhelming futility.

Yeah, this plays like missile command without the sense of futility. Like, missile command, you keep playing and you know you're going to die. But this, there's actually like an end to it. Well, and yeah, and it goes back and forth between the two modes. So there's like the defense that's more like regular. Defense is more like regular missile command. But then offense, you're actually like tooling around with your little satellite in space. And it's kind of a twin sticks shooter in that you're moving your guy and you're moving the crosshairs that you're shooting with.

as you would in Missile Command, only they actually had, it was actually like a joystick plus a trackpad, evidently, in the arcade. Yeah. Which is kind of intriguing. And then,

and then led to completely horrible compromises when people tried to do a home port effect. I'm sure. I'm sure. Apparently one of them, one of them I was reading about, I've never seen it, but I was reading about them,

one of the versions, you would control your guy and then hold down a button to control the crosshairs instead, and it sounds like the worst thing ever. I don't think you. I can't imagine. But the, like,

in terms of gameplay, it's so Missile Command. You fire at a point and your projectile explodes into a circle and anything that hits a circle is destroyed. I mean, it's... Same mechanics. Basically, like, they said, well, Atari is not going to make a good Missile Command sequel, so we will. It's kind of weird that it was 1987 and Missile Command was like 1980, 81.

But okay, sure. I mean, why not dredge up an arcade concept from the past? Yeah, it's very much like Missile Command Emotion. I'm not reference a gigantic military boondoggle. Sure. That sounds good, too. Yeah. It's got these very trippy graphics, too, though.

Like your explosions are not just this white circle. They're kind of like this neon rotating blue and green effects. It's very, I don't know, it has sort of this neon aesthetic that I associate with different things. I've never played this game, and I never will. Just out of principle. I'm mostly familiar with it from its master system port, which no one likes. And evidently for good reason. But the arcade version seems really like I would like to play this at some point just to experience the weirdness of it.

But it is a very odd game. Like the concept, okay, missile command, but so late and so referencing a weird thing that made so many people angry. I don't know. Really, really odd choice. And then if you want a more traditional shooter, Sega also created a game called Sonic Boom, which has nothing to do with Sonic Boom Ice and Fire. No, no, no, no, no, none of that. Sonic without the hedgehog.

Yep. It's literally just 1942, 1943. Like they said, hey, Capcom made some cool shooters. Let's do those, exactly. I mean, everything from the formations of red planes flying in that you can blow up to get power-ups to enemy planes flying slowly from the bottom of the screen up to the top and then moving around at the top and shooting a spread of bullets at you, like it's

1942. But then you get like two or three stages in and all of a sudden it starts to become more of like a modern era shooter. It's really weird. It's confusing.

It's confusing they'd spend the resources and you know at Sega's height, creative height and everything, the resources to develop just a plain old clone of 1944. Well, the thing is it seems like a clone of

1942 for the first couple of stages but then if you play it further, you're like, oh, no, this is actually like it becomes more of a you know kind of like a more evolved later era shooter you start to take on more science fictiony type enemies and there are much more ambitious bullet patterns like i i jumped ahead in a video to watch the final boss and it was just like how are you supposed to avoid those bullets it's not

quite don macu but it's getting there um so yeah it's it's a really weird game because if you just happen to tool past it in the arcade and played the first stage you'd be like okay cool Well, in 1942, I played this like five years ago. Why do I care? But, you know, then if you take the time to get further in, it's kind of the opposite of the traditional arcade idea of putting all the cool stuff at the beginning. It's like putting the boring stuff at the beginning and then working your way to the cool stuff. I feel like, was there a master system version of this?

I don't think so. I've never played this game. That's weird. Because it almost seems like something that's more designed to be, you know, easier to support to a home game. Yeah. Yeah. I am not familiar with this game. Maybe there's something more to it that I'm missing on.

Yeah, there must be something we're missing. Why does this? Please write us, please write in or complain about us on forums and why we're stupid. Let's see. What else? It's 1987. Two last games. Okay.

Oh, no, three. There's Wonderboy in Monsterland, the first sequel to Wonderboy. Like I said before, it took the... I don't know if I'd go that far. But this is the beginning of the movement of the series toward more of an RPG kind of experience movement of this series towards an RPG.

Did West, West, whatever that Westone, did they develop this too? They, Westone developed all the monster boy, Wonderland, Wonderland. And so, Wonderboy, Adventure Island? Once, like, Super Adventure Island, too. After the first one, that was Hudson. Hudson, yeah.

So I'm wondering why, you know, Adventure Island 4 was like, Metroidvania? Metroidvania, yeah. That's that term? Metrovania. that was a Hudson game and that was that was many years later I think it's curious that they that took that path too and Super Adventure Island too is sort of like that as well on the

super NES but yeah it took it took Hudson longer to sort of um I guess to go in that direction but Westone Westone was right away just let's let's go this was very much like okay we're going to do it entirely away with the whole continuously moving right thing and Instead, we're going to expand on being able to pick up different weapons, and we're going to have a whole system. Yeah, there's an economy. There's a shop system. There's an experience system.

But the thing is, as the, whoever wrote that letter in about the game mentioned, it has a very, very harsh time limit. And you have to, like, fight enemies and get them to drop our glasses in order to keep going. Yeah. So it's a weird holdover from the stamina economy of the original. I mean, it's very much a midpoint between Wonderboy and Wonderboy. Wonderboy 3, which is a full-on Metroidvania that was just remade for a Switch

and PS4, and it's great. You go into the whole Monster Land. Yep. Set then, yeah. It wasn't quite there yet. Yeah, no, I feel like this game is just kind of a, well, nice try guys, but didn't quite pull it off. Try again.

We'll do it better later. Then there's Heavyweight Champ, which came out the same year as Mike Tyson's punch out on NES, and kind of does the same thing. It kind of harkens about. back to Nintendo's arcade punchout, where you have a, like, very close-in viewpoint with a transparent fighter that you control, like, your hair and your gloves are solid.

No, no, you don't have the green grid thing. You're just, like, see-through. But your gloves and your hair are solid. And so it lets you see your opponent up close. But this is much more of a traditional boxing game. It doesn't have the crazy special attacks and everything of punchout. It doesn't have the weird personalities. It's more just like, yeah.

Yeah, it's like. it does the punch-out thing, but makes it boring. That's pretty much right. I haven't played it, but watching it. It's like, this is designed to be punch-out but realistic, and the result is it's punch-out, but kind of dull. Dulled out. And then finally, a game I had

never heard of, until I put this episode together, Riddle of Pythagoras. Which sounds like, what is this? Is this some sort of math game? Is this about like triangles? No. No. No, it's arcenoid. It is actually just

arcanoid. Like, it's literally arcanoid. There's nothing about it that is not archanoid aside from the visuals. It takes away the science fiction theme and goes with like ancient Greece. Saga, you're confusing me here. It's the same thing where why they devote the resources to clone archanoid, you know.

We really need an arkenoid clone, guys. Put it out on the market. Sometimes you want a puzzle game. I don't know. Speaking of which, I'll put one little note about that, which is, I was looking that up just before the show and I saw somebody did a rom hack of Arkenoid on the NES and they turned it into riddle of Pythagoras for some reason.

Okay. Why? I don't know why, but that's hardcore. No, that's not even hardcore. That's just like a waste of your life. Why would you do that? No, you can't be that judgment. Someone was in the right place and the right time to have fondness for any game you care to mention. Don't listen to Jeremy. You keep on doing that. Keep turning everything into riddle of Pythagoras.

All right. Fine, fine, fine. All right, anyway, that is pretty much the entirety of the the notable Sega canon of 1986, 87. That's a lot of games. That's one company turning out a bunch of games, some of which were very, very advanced, some of which were not. But, you know, you take the good with the

bad. It's the facts of life. Any final thoughts on these two years of Sega's Ove? I'm glad they were over. They were good years. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a lot of sort of iterating on the technology

they'd been developing in arcades over the previous years and really pushing it to do some impressive stuff. Just from my, someone growing up with an NES, I would say the after burner and Outrun have a lot of show. They're very showy. They might not be as depthy as I would like in terms of the gameplay experience. But that's just my opinion. But they're arcade games.

I mean, yeah. You've got your home console at home to be things you're going to sit with, but they're, you know, not as graphically request. So you're in the arcade, you want something that's going to blow your mind. And steal your quarters. And steal your quarters. I mean, that's what they're for. You go to the arcade for a relatively short experience that's just like this aesthetics and speed and everything that you can't get on your...

If you were a Sega fan and you want a deep games in 1987, what you would do is you would buy a master system. And you would buy Golvelius Valley of Doom. You'd buy Fantasy Star. You'd buy Zillion. Wise. Stop that. Please. You would buy the more substantial deeper games

that Sega put on its home system, which were very good. There was a combination. Like, Sega really got the difference between home and arcade games, maybe more so than any other... Capcom was up there, too. Capcom definitely got it. Yeah. And we just saw in their home ports of arcade games.

If you're me growing up, you have the NES at home, and you know, later the Super NACs, and you have a whole bunch of really, really excellent games, but they're not going to, you know, have any... the graphics that are anywhere near what you can do with these arcade cabinets. So that's what you're going to the arcade for. Yeah, like you've been blown away. Sega had a good intuition of the difference in the experience between console and arcade gaming.

And I think they really played that up and took advantage of it. Yeah, nobody did it better than this. At the arcade, have these centerpiece arcade machines that just attracted everybody to the arcade. Nobody did it better than Sega during this period, in my opinion. I mean, I was a, I was a Nintendo fan boy. You know, we had our stupid console wars back. then and I was all Nintendo all the time, but I wasn't going to pass up taking a look at Afterburner because you just can't pass that up. Yeah. Yeah, I dropped plenty of quarters into

Afterburner and I always sucked at it. Then I'd go back and play my NES games and be like, oh, Metroidvania, you're for me. We know all about that already, don't. But I did really enjoy Sega's arcade experiences and I did enjoy their Master System games when I got to play those, which wasn't that often. But anyway, yeah, great stuff. And we will definitely get back to the Sega history, the arcade history sometime before the end of 2017. We'll look at 88, 89, maybe beyond that. And we could have teasers because someone already wrote in about Galaxy Force.

That's coming up next year. And what else is there? Golden Axe? There's all kinds of great stuff. Oh, man, golden axe. We'll talk about altered beast. That's my favorite. Yeah, altered beast. Altered beast.

No, it's bad news. And then it was dynamite ducks. It was weird. There wasn't that. That's too. All right. So later. That's coming up in a few months.

In the meantime, I have been Jeremy Parrish for Retronauts. You can find me on Twitter at GameSpite and at Retronauts.com. You can find Retronauts at Retronauts.com on iTunes, at Podcast One, and on the Podcast One app. We're also supported by funding through Patreon. That's you. You say, I like this show, and you give us money. If you do, if you don't, okay, that's fine. You can't please all the people all the time.

I understand. It's nothing personal. But if you are interested in helping to keep this show alive and helping me to eat food, you can go to retro or sorry, patreon.com slash retronauts. That'd be cool. Three months a month, three bucks a month, get you one week early access to our episodes. That's great. And also goodies.

Jeremy needs food badly. Very badly. And I'm Ben Edwards. And I am also on Patreon at patreon.com slash Benjedwards and I run vintagecomputing.com. And if you want to support my work, looking into the history, early history of video games and computers, check those things out. And I'm Ben Elgin. You can find me on Twitter at Kieran, K-I-R-I-N. And then I also have some of my old stuff on Tumblr at Kieran's retrocloset.tumbler.com.

Only one N in Kieran that time, just to be confusing. It's the best Tumblr around. It's fun. I don't know if there's going to be a lot of stuff related to this episode because obviously I didn't own Sega Arcade cabinets. There's none of those in my closet. But there is other retro-notts-oriented stuff on there as well as other fun stuff from the 80s.

All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks, everyone for listening. And we'll be back, as always, in a week with a full episode and maybe sometime on a Friday with a partial episode, a micro. You never know. Thanks. Thank you. And caller number nine for one million dollars.

Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10.

Oh, gosh. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to boost mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network, can get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month, plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. The Mueller report. I'm Edonohue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General.

Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do.

The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.