Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 108: Marathon, Super NES Classic, Final Fantasy VIII

Episode Date: July 17, 2017

Jeremy, Ben, and Benj talk about Bungie FPS classic Marathon in a Micro-sized conversation that balloons out of control into a full-length episode. Then, Retronauts bloggers Kishi and Kim Justice drop in to discuss the Super NES Classic Edition & Final Fantasy VIII (in that order).

This weekend Retronauts. Frog blast event cards. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another Retronauts micro episode. hopefully this one will be short and efficient. I make no promises because we are talking about a topic near and dear to my heart and that of one of our guests.

The third person here to be like, oh, no, what you guys are talking about? What are you guys doing? Why don't you love me in this room, Jeremy? And we are talking about Bungie's Marathon trilogy or if we end up talking about the first game for a very long time,

then we're going to talk about marathon and get to the other parts of the trilogy sometime in the future. We can probably talk about them all at once. The micro thing is a ruse. I'm telling you right now. If we're not through with the first marathon by the time we hit the half-hour market, then I'm going to do an emergency bailout.

We'll see. That's what that cord is on your seat. Yep. It's actually an inject button. I send you first. Into the deadly tower is going on. That's right. So hi.

I'm Jeremy Parrish. And with me here, you probably recognize the voices of Ben Elgin. That's right. I switched the direction this time. It caught you off guard. Ben Edwards. And we're going to talk about Marathon to the best of our abilities.

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And we will definitely touch on Marathon in the 90s Mac gaming episode that we'll live do, but I just love Marathon so much that I wanted to break it out into its own topic. And I know Ben is also a huge fan of the game and played it a lot back in the day, which is really when you needed to play the games. I admit it. They haven't aged that well, but they're really good. They were great for their time. And I have a lot to say about them, but I'll try not to be the only one talking for the next half hour. So anyway, Marathon. So Ben, what was your first experience with Marathon? Let's mix things up a little. Oh, geez. I owned all of them. So the trilogy is you have Marathon, and then Marathon 2, which was just kind of expanded on all the concepts. And then Marathon Infinity, which purportedly wrapped up the story in an incredibly complicated way, and also gave you the developer tools to make your own levels. So you discover the game just by buying Marathon? I, yeah, well, so I actually had Pathways into Darkness, which was, okay, well, there you go. Yeah, so, so I would tell us about that one, because that's one that I've always meant to play. I'm very, like, aware and knowledgeable about it, but I've never played it. So, yeah, I did play it. I was, would not say I was super good at it. I'm not sure I actually legit managed to beat it. But so, yeah, so Pathways was kind of a weird hybrid. So it had this first person interface. And, you know, you could, pick up guns and shoot monsters with them. So it had this first-person shooter elements, but it was also very much an old-style adventure game in that you were trying to piece together what you were doing. You could pick up various items and use them in various locations.

One of the big features was actually like the ability to talk to corpses. So there's a crystal you pick up early on that'll let you stand over a corpse and have a conversation with it so you can find out things about the plot and things about what other items do. Yeah. So like the overall thing is you're going down into this pyramid and like there's an ancient god sleeping at the bottom and you're trying to figure out how to hopefully right and the the further down you get like the more like the closer you get to the ancient alien it's basically chthulu yeah i was just about to say is this an hp lovecraft i mean it's very it's very very much like lovecraftian in that sense and things get weird and like bizarre and surreal the further down you get but sort of in the the upper levels

you're mostly talking to the corpses of your fellow american Soldiers. Yeah, it starts out with a military aesthetic and just gets weirder from that. But then as you go further in, you start finding the corpses of Nazis who went in the pyramid because of, you know, Hitler's obsession with the occult. Apparently, he was trying to wake the sleeping god or whatever. So, yeah, it seems like a very interesting premise. And I think it was kind of betrayed by its technology. I've played a little bit of it. I want to be like, okay, so I didn't play much of it, but I played a little of it. and it's very clunky as a shooter. It's very clunky.

And the shooter kind of gets in the way of the adventure. Yeah, yeah. I think that's fair. Because, like, I mean, the shooter was the part I was not very good at, which is why I would hit roadblocks when, you know, monsters would just come up and kill you. And you're playing the first person part of it in this very little window. It's pretty primitive.

I mean, it's sort of along the lines with Wolfenstein. What sort of machine would you play this on back in the day? Like, what, you know, 60-20? Color Mac, yeah. 60-020 or 60-0-3. So, yeah, it would run out an LC. Eventually, I had a centrist, but this may have been before that. Or the 2-SI kind of era maybe, or 2C.

It might have been a little more demanding. I mean, I've got the manual if you want to look and see what that's for it. Of course, the 2CI costs like $10,000. You want to see if it has cracks in there? There's the manual. Okay, Pathways and the Darkest. It also says a corpse whisperer. This is the subtitle.

No. Okay, I just made it up. No. but yeah so you're so so it's a very primitive sort of first person thing it's a little slow it's a very tiny window you can you have a pretty short draw distance um and it's very maze like as in a lot of the old first person stuff would be um but yeah when it tries to get actiony it's pretty clunky yeah i mean it feels very much like they played ultima underworld which was what 1991 and said this is too early 93 okay so it was pretty contemporary It came around the time Wolfstein 3D came out, and they're still bitter that they didn't get credit for that. Ultimate Underworld came a little before Wolfenstein. It was essentially simultaneous, maybe a little couple months later. Okay, so Pathways into Darkest and was also 93, so a lot of people kind of coming up with the same ideas at the same time.

The Walthstein 3D was 92, right? Yeah, I think it was already becoming clear that this sort of first-person 3D thing was where a lot of good stuff was going to go, and people were trying to make it work. And this was. Okay, here's the system requirement. Requirements, okay, if you want now. Mac computer with a 68.020 or better system 6.05, hard disk, two megabytes of free RAM. Yeah, so anything with a 68.020s, right? So you had to pay a high Mac tax to be able to play this game.

There was no such thing as a small Mac tax back then. There were expensive computers. We were just coming out of the era we were in in our previous Mac episode. We were mostly talking about 2D games and just starting to get into cool color 2D games. And now suddenly we've got people coming along and trying to. to make 3D really work. Right. And so, yeah,

Bungee was definitely at the forefront of that for Macintosh. And they were an interesting studio because they were entirely Macintosh focused. In the darkest age of the Macintosh, no one wanted to support the Mac in the 90s.

It was a dying platform. This is why I was playing these games because Buncey was there for us, man. This is why I gave Destiny a chance because I still feel a little bit of fun for Bungee. Yeah, everything else was going on over on PC, but Bungy was making things.

Although I think the only person from Bungy in the original era still there is Jason Jones who runs the company. And apparently is like a ghost figure who shows up sometimes and then doesn't. Yeah, I don't think any of the original people are still working on things there. That's what he wants to do. But yeah, Marathon was definitely their next big thing.

I don't know if you've ever played any of the alpha versions of the game. Or like their tech demos. There was a... I can't remember, I think it was a Mac Addict magazine or maybe MacRole. I may have had a demo, yeah. It was one of the two, but it was basically like...

Did it have some that quote? And actually, maybe one of the marathon discs, maybe one of the sequel discs, actually had the game versions locked... When they put out the trilogy in a box set, they had a bunch of extras in it. Okay, yeah. So it may have come out in that. Okay, so somewhere, I don't remember exactly where it was, but I do know that there were, like, old versions of the game.

And in the very beginning, it very much felt like the next pathways into darkness. It was very, like, orthogonal spaces, and... very slow-paced and clumsy and kind of ugly-looking, but they kept iterating on the technology and eventually came up with a 3D engine that wouldn't run, I guess it would run full-screen if you wanted, but it was a bad idea because you lost the entire HUD, but otherwise it was kind of windowed, so it was like three-quarters of the screen. You hit F-1, don't you? I don't know.

Full-screen? I don't know. You're talking about Marathon, right? Yeah. I just played it this morning. You hit F-1. But it was so demanding. the cool thing is it has all these incremental if you push f1 to like f9 or something it just gets worse and worse and worse like it gets interlaced and it gets low resolution and stuff so you can play it on a pretty you know less demanding machine yeah sure if that was even in the original build the shortcuts may have been added later but uh i think you could play okay they were shortcuts to the

Never touched. Because you could also set all these things in a setup screen, depending on what hardware you had. Yeah. So anyway, they kept refining the technology and eventually came up with a pretty cool first-person shooter. There were no, weren't there no function keys on most Mac keyboards? That was only like the extended to the way. Yeah, you may have had to do like command one.

So that's why you probably never hit those. Yeah. Because on most Mac keyboards that were shipped with the machine, they didn't have function keys. Yeah, they didn't back then. Just that extended thing. Anyway. But yeah, so the engine they ended up with was really cool because it kind of leapfrogged from this very primitive one they had in pathways

to something that was in a lot of ways more fully featured than, say, the original Doom engine and Wolfenstein ones. Yeah, Marathon came out pretty much at the same time as System Shock on PCs, and they both did a lot of things that the other tried to do. System Shock had more of like a full inventory system and was more of a proper RPG. And I think Marathon was a little more technically sophisticated, like it had, you know, vertical aiming.

It had real verticality. There was this really weird element to the game engine. You know, it was the 2.5D design that you saw in, you know, stuff like the Doom engine, the build engine, and so forth. But the way they built the engine, it's hard to explain. but basically you could have spaces that overlapped with each other as long as the like the vertices

of their defining boundaries their defining polygons didn't overlap, didn't touch then you could have spaces that existed within the same space which doesn't make any sense but you could like go into one room and then kind of like follow a hallway around

and go back into that same space and it would be a different room. So the so the reason this happened was because this was this was part of the tricks they did to make something make something 3D before things were really fully 3D so none of these games like do right there's no real like levels are basically defined by not you know like height their height maps yeah yeah yeah so you don't have real full 3D models of these levels um they're all defined in 2D layouts but then given heights um and so so it's designed so you can do things like you know go

down a set of curved stairs and come out in a basement that's defined to be different height Basically, yeah, so let me interject. Like, each portion of a screen, or of a stage is divine, does I, each portion is defined by small polygons. And each polygon is given its own, like, properties, its own height. It's like, this is a lava tile or whatever. And because we don't have a real full 3D environment, the system is, and when it finds out, like, where you can go and what you can see, it's not really just, you know, casting

race into a 3D environment. It's just going from one polygon to the next connected polygon. is the way it's programmed internally. So if you have polygons that aren't connected, even if they're technically in the same space, you can't go between them, you can't shoot between them, you can't even see between them.

But so you can do, yeah, you can do weird like four-dimensional stuff. You can have tartises, basically. You can have something, you can have something that looks a little from the outside and then you go through it and it's actually fills up the whole space. I was just going to say, like,

I designed a house once and had the same problem. Vertices everywhere. Okay. You can go within, other rooms. And this, yeah, this all didn't really become apparent until, until Marathon Infinity when you can make your own. And, like, all the, all the underlying tech sort of was suddenly visible. But yeah, it did allow them to do some kind of weird and interesting things. And you had these very elaborate maps that, you know, compared to, like, Doom were just

extraordinary. You know, most shooters at that point were still using orthogonal space, where it was like, you could look at eight directions, or, you know, rooms could, polygons could exist, shapes could exist in one of eight directions, card in directions, and the corners. But here, it was just like, whatever. Like, Doom had a height map, but it was a single height map, and all it affected was the visuals. Right. So, like, you didn't aim up a guy on a ledge. You would aim in that direction and shoot.

Yeah, everything snapped to whatever the hype map said was the height for that thing. I think in Doom, you couldn't have rooms on top of each other, right? You could do that in marathon? You could do that in marathon. You could do all kinds of weird things. And it became very, like, it allowed them to do some pretty complex level layouts. Yeah, like, because of these, the restrictions of having to connect one polygon to another, like there were restrictions, like you couldn't have two doors directly above one another.

You could only have a doors there, but then you could have a door offset and up higher, and then the rooms behind them could be over one another. So, yeah, it was sort of this weird in-between tech that had some weird restrictions, but you could do a lot with the way they set it up in Marathon. And you did have real Z aiming. It goes to show how much we take modern 3D engines for granted. Right. Yeah, now it is.

And stuff where you can just do whatever you want and all those problems have been solved. Right. These people, the developers were solving these problems, you know, at this time, the John Carmex and the Jason Jones. They were doing these things. Yeah, there was no, there was no 3D engine. You couldn't just build something and say, have it, you know, do what it's supposed to do. You had to, there were these low-level tricks that it was using to, make things that looked like an enormous 3D space when really that's not how it was stored.

Yeah, the first 3D polygonal FPS engine was Quake, right? That was 96. That was actually, yeah. At least the mainstream. So this predates that by a year, a year and a half. So obviously they didn't have all those tools available to them. But, you know, they took what they had available and they kind of gimmicked it as much as they could and came up with a really fast-paced first-person shooter that also had a really strong

narrative and exploratory element to it. Even though you move from stage to stage, it's not like this massive interconnected space. Within each stage, there was a lot of kind of moving back and forth and solving puzzles and opening doors and throwing switches and so forth. And some of the levels were very intricate. Yeah. Like the engine also allowed you to do kind of interesting things like have levels that were based in vacuum. You had a health meter and a shield meter and then you had an oxygen meter, and that didn't come into play that often. Like, you could go underwater and your oxygen would deplete. But then there were like two stages in Marathon that were in vacuum. And all of a sudden, that became an issue because not only did you need to know where this

shield charger was, you needed to know where the air charger was. And they kind of maxed that out in Marathon Infinity with a stage that you have to complete with no air chargers. There's just like a few oxygen bottle pickups that'll partially restore you. So it's like a hard time limit for this really complicated level. So there's some really kind of ambitious, hardcore design going on in the Marathon games. I'd like to interject just for a second that it occurs to me, I was a PC guy in the 90s and you guys were both Mac users. So Marathon meant so much more to you. We touched on this a little bit where that they were supporting the platform when other people weren't. And I was just wondering, what did you think of Doom when it came out? Were you jealous when you couldn't run it on

your Mac, and was Marathon the answer to that, you know? Yeah, very much. I don't know. I don't know that I was jealous of Doom. I saw it and thought, that seems interesting, but I'm not really sure about the, like, the heavy metal cover vibe to it. And at first, I was actually really dismissive of Marathon because I thought, oh, it's just more of the same. And I don't really think Doom is like my, my jam. But then I actually watched someone playing it a bit, and he was solving puzzles. And like, he started reading all this narrative text in a computer terminal. I was like, well, this is really not what I expected. This is interesting. So I tried it out and really got into it. So I actually think Marathon was a game

suited to my temperament. Whereas Doom, I've learned to appreciate, but it's not a game that I would just automatically was like, yeah, I just want to go kill stuff really fast. Yeah, I mean, somewhat similar to that for me. Although, you know, I got right into Marathon from Pathways. I actually am not sure I played Doom at all until after I'd first seen, had some time with the first. marathon so for me it was like yeah this is all right but it's like it doesn't can't do quite as much with the physics as marathon can and it's got no story I didn't I didn't even care about the first person shooter at all until I played dark forces and then I was like oh my god it's star wars and an FPS or a doom clone this is amazing and that came out on mac and PC at the same time so

there wasn't really a sense of like oh I'm missing out because I just I see you guys your your eyes are lighting up like crazy when you talk about It's a profound cultural experience, this marathon. Yeah, I don't think it's just like a, oh, they're the only ones who love the Macs, so therefore I love this game. There were lots of Mac games I played back then that was like, this is crap. And there were lots of ports of games, you know, simultaneous ports, simultaneous releases from other publishers where games were like, eh. But Marathon did have this very unique combination of like Twitch action and very thoughtful, kind of elaborate, labyrinthian narrative.

that was very intriguing, and it's one of the few games I've played, especially the third one, where you really have to sit down and, like, puzzle things out. You have to pay attention. You have to put things together. And it doesn't feel, it doesn't feel like it's pushing too hard to be like, aren't we mysterious? Ooh, it's like an ARG. Like, there are games now that, that I think do that naturally and intuitively, but there are a lot of games that are like, oh, this game is so deep and so mysterious. This didn't do that. get in your way. Like, it was, like, mostly it was optional. Like, you needed to interact with a terminal sum to figure out what you were doing and where you were supposed to go. But, like,

the deeper story stuff, it was in there, but you didn't have to spend time with it if you just wanted to run around shooting stuff. That was fine. You have to talk to computer terminals to advance the story and to activate certain switches and stuff, but you can literally just tab through and not pay attention to a single word that shows up and figure out what you need to do by just killing everything and finding your way to think. It occurs to me that this is like, this Doom versus Marathon is sort of like Mac versus PC, or PC with quick and dirty and stuff. Marathon's a thinking means game with a static quality.

You had system shock, which was very much along the lines of marathon. I'm trying to simplify this to black and white. I don't think that works though. Sorry. But yeah. I'm saying there's there's something about the design of Marathon that's reflective of the Macintosh mindset culturally of users of the Macintosh at the time. It feels like a

Mac game, not like a game that would be on the PC. There's something intricate and aesthetic about it. It's just not. I mean, Marathon 2 was on PC. Yeah, I mean, there were certainly... I'm talking about the first marathon. There were a game home PC like that. Nobody played Marathon 2 on PC. I never heard of it until later. But, you know... Well, it came after

quake, so, I mean, for PC, so why would you want to play it? Yeah, and they were coming off, and they were coming off pathways, which was this whole, like, adventure game paradigm. So there's still all this story stuff in there that you can dig into if you want to. And, man, there was a lot of it. Like, so there's this website that was us,

Tell us about it. It's been around since marathon story, called the Marathon Story Pages. And there are thousands and thousands of pages of, like, digging and analysis in that website. And it was a whole community. Like, Jeremy's in there somewhere. I'm in there somewhere. We all sent in stuff. They would do, like, they would do contests about, you know, obscure trivia and have people

send in, like, new things they'd found about, because there was just stuff all over, and, you know, some out of the way terminal there'd be something or there'd be some bit of environmental storytelling. Yeah, especially in the third game. There's so much that's hidden out of the way. And you really have to, like, really explore the stages to find these interesting clues to what the story is actually about. And there were stuff like, and the third game, of course, had level editors, right?

And there was stuff written in the maps of the levels that you would find if you went in and looked at them with the level editors. Yeah, one of them says, like, Bob's late for his big date. But then also, like, Jarrow were at Taussetti, which is like, you know, the big mysterious precursors of the game were at the planet where you started the first game at, which No, the Yaro were the, wasn't that the, that was the race that, in pathways into darkness, told you like, hey, there's this thing about to wake up under a pyramid. Yeah, well, and they're like the alien emissaries. And they were also the things that had trapped the, so this comes back in Marathon Infinity, the plot is because you won in Marathon 2 before the slavery race that you've been fighting, basically had a hissy fit and caused the sun of a local system to go Nova.

And, oops, there's a Cthuloo monster inside. Turns out. So then we got to be. do something about that in Marathon Infinity. And the ARRA were also the ones who had imprisoned it. This is a cultural phenomenon, the likes of which most PC users have no idea. I mean, there's lots of... PC gamers have all kinds of stuff like that. I don't, I just don't know. I don't see it.

There's lots of people writing this stuff about Doom or Quake or whatever. Well, those games weren't focused around the narrative. But again, you have a lot of stuff like System Shock. Yeah. You had, you know, you have Elder Scrolls games. My God. There's tons of stuff like that on PC. I think Marathon stands out for Mac users

just because it was one of the few instances of a game like that making it to the platform. System Shock did eventually make it to Mac. Yeah, but it attracted a big community because it was... Like a religious experience or something. There's thousands of pages written about it, interpreting the story and, you know...

Yeah, and there are games like that on PC too. No, I've never heard the like of that anywhere. You need to pay more attention. I'll go scrolls for one. Okay, well, that wasn't the first person shooter. was it? No, it was a first person RPG. Yeah. No, I mean, I think, I think to respect that things like this existed elsewhere, but there was, there was a sort of a unique community for this because it was the big action

and story thing that was unique to Mac at the time. And so it attracted a lot of people from, you know, attracted to people who liked action games and people who liked Deep Story and so on, who all happened to own Macintoshes, all kind of came together for this moment. So really cool. Yeah, I mean, any game with, I think a pretty well-developed world and a pretty well-developed world and a pretty elaborate narrative will have been. get its own fan base that dissects everything. I mean, look at, you know, Zelda timeline theories. This is just like the Mac didn't have a lot of those games unique to it, and Marathon didn't have any traction on other systems. So it's, you know, kind of a symbiosis in that,

in that sense. It is the symbiosis that exists on Mac, but there's plenty of those on consoles, on PC. This is just the experience that we had because we happened to own Macs. And I owned a Mac because I wanted to be a graphic designer. And in the 90s, if you wanted to do art and graphics and desktop publishing, you owned a Mac. So that was how I came across. Yeah. So Bungee, you know, they supported the Mac and were pretty unique in that respect. There were a few other companies that did. You had a spider web software kind of popular. up around the same time. And they've never found the same traction, I guess, because it's one guy, yeah, exile. It's basically one guy and he makes RPGs that are like visually about 15 to 20 years

out of date. Yeah, it's a little more niche. They're good. They're really good. And they have even more narrative and much more elaborate world building. But it is definitely like, if you are into the CRPG style of the early 90s, then you will love Spider-Web's games. Whereas this was, Very ultima-like. Whereas Marathon was very much, you know, kind of of the times. Like, it was a cutting-edge first-person shooter that had some technical advantages and design advantages over what was popular on PC, and in some ways wasn't quite as good. So, you know, it was the kind of thing that just builds, you know, Star Wars versus Star Trek rivalries. It's like, you know, the... It was actually competitive with PC offerings. Yes. And that was uncommon in Macintosh gaming. And it was also, it was also became, as it went on, the first mod community on Macintosh. You had

you had those communities spring up around Doom and things too. And Dark Forces also had a mud community. I think Dark Forces showed up like a year later. Maybe not even that long. Wasn't it 96? No, it was 95. It was too late, yeah. Is it 95? Okay. I think it was like

mid-925, actually. So it was like six months after Mac or after a marathon. But yeah, and then I think Bunchie was one of the early companies to really embrace their mod community to the point where they started hiring people out of it. So you had people doing art and level design for the later marathons that were people who had hacked mods for the early ones and people who were big in the fan communities.

You know, they hired artists who were off out of the like story pages and so on. And then, of course, with the last release, as we mentioned, that they went and just straight up released their own dev tools for it. So Marathon Infinity came with Forge and Anvil, which was the level. editor and the art music and physics editor. Yeah, and what's really interesting about Marathon is that so much of its DNA still exists in the things Bungy is creating. Like, Halo is very much like, what if we made Marathon a console game?

I mean, you've got so many of the same concepts, like the bizarre thing that is a threat to all life that they've discovered, and artificial intelligences that go rampant and take on a life of their own and become a huge threat if you're not careful, and so on and so forth. Yeah, very much carries on their themes. I mean, the covenant is basically the four where you've got like a master race, that sounds bad.

Hierarchical slavers. Yeah, like, basically they are a slaver race led by kind of like a high end, non-combatant race, that then have all these client races who are very analogous to the races specialized into various uses, yeah. Like hunters are taken straight from them. It sounds like a racing game.

It's a racist game. And then, you know, in Destiny, you still see things like the rampant AIs and unknowable threats from outer space and so on and so forth. So, yeah, like this DNA, it's just part of Bungy. It's who they are. Yeah, and that's why the hookout. I mean, I remember at the time, Microsoft buying Bungy, everyone was like, what the heck is going on? Traders.

It was a betrayal. But, I mean, from Bunchy's particular, I mean, Bunchy, much said as much like Microsoft was giving them whatever they wanted to make their vision into cutting edge console games. I mean, they had input onto, they said they essentially had input into the hardware specs on Xbox. So it's sort of, I mean, you can definitely see why from a developer standpoint this was, you know, a ridiculous opportunity for them. Yeah, they were clearly very, very talented and they needed to be enabled by a budget to do amazing things. Yeah, they were, they were a dinky little independent company that

when they started talking about Halo that was originally going to be a Mac game and Steve Jobs brought them out at Mac World but that was basically the point at which go to Waypoint and read their history of Halo and kind of gets into what happened with Bungee around that time and it has nothing to do with Marathon but it kind of shows the direction the company went

but basically it was a small publisher or small developer that wanted to go bigger and had a lot of ambitions You know, they produced Myth, which was the first fully 3D real-time strategy game. I could go on and on about Myth, too. Everyone was able to get into that one. They tried some really brave things that didn't work out, like Oni. Yeah.

Which was the game where everyone realized, oh, if you model 3D spaces after real-world architecture, they're not very interesting for a video game. But it was a good try. They tried. Marathon became before all of all of that. And it really kind of was the launching point for Bungee, like the sort of cult that they built up around this game. I don't think they became rich off of Marathon, but it established their reputation. I mean, for something that was primarily available on Mac, I think it did quite well.

Well, you know, Marathon 2 did make it to PC. And then I think the original Marathon combined with Marathon 2 came to Pippen. Super Marathon. Apparently, that never actually made it to retail because a box copy of Supermarathon is... It's worth a thousand dollars. It's extraordinarily rare. One of the guys who ported Marathon 2 to Xbox 360, like, that says, Holy Grail. He wanted to find a copy of that game, but was not able to.

Well, and then eventually they open sourced the whole trilogy, so now it's out as, oh, what's it called? M1A1? Yeah, that's... That's A-LF-1, that's right. Al-F-1, yeah. And so there's a site out there where you can just get all of them. A-1-A-1 is a special,

no, it's a special version for the first game, Marathon 1 for A-LF-4. Okay, yeah, yeah, so it's the rebuild of Marathon 1 in the new engine. So, yeah, so they eventually, Bungi, eventually open-source the whole thing, and then people have since basically rebuilt it from the ground up to run on modern systems.

Yeah, and after the developer tools, Forge and Anvil came out, like the games took on a life of their own and got these total conversions. I never really played any of them just because I never really had time, but they seemed really interesting. They were very ambitious. Yeah, people built entire other games in like different settings. A lot of them were just like,

hey, this is basically Marathon 4. Let's just continue the same themes as the first game, which that's not interesting. Do something new. No offense to everyone. I get it. I understand the desire to do that to build on what's come before, but I kind of feel like Marathon was a complete story. It had a beginning and an end. And like, I don't want to know about the further adventures of Lila, the AI. It's, it's okay. Like, she was kind of given a footnote, and that was fine. You're a marathon purist.

I am. Keep, keep it to canon. There's an element of Marathon that was important. Sorry to interrupt you, but you can touch on this after you talk, Ben, which is the networking thing. Did you guys ever play it on the network? Yeah. Yeah. the first one, but I did play the sequels. Yeah, I didn't. I mean, so we did, we did land parties in, in college. I built, I mean, after Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity came out, I started building network game levels of my own for us to play. I actually basically built our dorms in some of the academic buildings in Marathon.

Only, only because you could do crazy things, as we were talking about at the beginning with the engine, I did things like, okay, this is my dorm, only if you go into my dorm room into the closet, then there's like an elevator to a portal to like an underground tunnel that goes to the other buildings. And then there's a TARDIS in this other closet that's an entire arena. And yeah. So, yeah, we had good times with that. Yeah, I thought about doing that with my school campus. Like, oh, it would be cool to turn these spaces into like a virtual space. Yeah. In hindsight, it's probably good that I didn't do that because apparently that's like, yeah, there's been some bad stuff that's happened with people who did that.

Yeah, well, I mean, Marathon is at least enough of a fantasy setting that I think you can kind of divorce it from the issue of actual guns on campus. No, like, I actually took poles around my dorm, like, what do you want in your room? So, like, one person's room was underwater. And like, at that point, at that point, the realism is kind of out the window. Yeah, that's true. I didn't really, like, this is the game where I discovered, oh, I don't really like playing competitive gaming that much. Like, I played some death matches. Yeah, we didn't take it too, so it helps.

For months at a time, I would play, and I was always like, oh, you know, I can hold my own pretty well, but I just, it's not really doing much for me. But then Marathon Infinity came out with co-op in the campaign mode. Yeah. And it wasn't really that well designed. It wasn't really made for it. There were like one or two places where you could only do stuff by teaming up with someone else. And it was totally optional. But the idea of being able to play with another person in, you know, the campaign mode, that was really fun.

I was never able to talk anyone into playing the whole Marathon Infinity campaign with me all the way through. But what little I did of it was really cool. And when they finally added that to Halo with ODST, like I was all over that. It was really great. So that's what I'm into. Yeah, I never did a lot with the co-op. Just because he said it wasn't really built with it for a whole lot. Yeah, our scene was just more the pickup and land play.

Fortunately, no one in our group was, like, ultra-competitive. So it was really just kind of casual, blow each other up for anything and have fun. Are there enough people with Macs at your school to play this together? So I'm thinking about it now. I remember we played it down in a computer lab. So I think we must have, I must have taken, like, I know I built my levels on my Mac, but I must have just taken them over to, like, a Windows version of Infinity or two and played them on that.

I was, I worked on the student newspaper, and everything was Macintosh. and the student will help. Oh, well, yeah, that'll work. So not only that, but we had Power Macs. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I mean, I had a Power Mac that I bought to do independent study stuff at college, so that was really useful.

Yeah, so there were like six stations right there, an embarrassment of riches. Yeah, a Marathon was on the forefront of the whole network play. Because even Marathon 1, back in 94, had, like, network play with microphones and stuff, which was not a thing that happened a lot back then. Yep. I agree. Well, we're half an hour into this episode, and we're not even to Marathon one. Well, we've been talking about all of it.

Yeah. But that does fine. It's kind of an all-inclusive thing. So why don't we just kind of touch on the things that actually were sort of memorable and interesting about Marathon? To me, it's very much, it's a combination of narrative and atmosphere and level design. Like, to me, those three elements really clicked, and that's what makes Marathon so. interesting. There's a lot of variety in sort of the level settings and concepts. Even in the first game, when you're just in the colony ship, you know, you play most of it. You're in a colony ship that's been carved out of the moon, the Martian moon, demos. And then it's like self-propelled and flying off to colonize another planet. So it's very kind of claustrophobic and kind of dark. And then sort of midway through the game, there's this rogue computer. that kidnaps you and is like, so I'm going to use you for all, like to find out all the things I'm interested in.

So why don't you go over to the alien ship? I'm going to beam you over there. Why don't you take notes and tell me what you find? So against your will, you get beamed over into an alien ship. And all of a sudden you're in like this pulsing organic space full of like weird purple liquids and monsters you've never seen before who have like weird fire guns. And you're just like what the hell is going on? And your, like, your, like, interface starts getting corrupted by, like, having problems with the alien tech. Like, you, so you can pick up this, normally you pick up a weapon and, like, all the stats of it show up on your little interface. And then you pick up this alien weapon and you get, like, static. Garbage and static and weird things happen. Wow. But, yeah, yeah, so even the first game has that variety. And then, and then you get to Marathon, too.

And you're right, we could go through and do more podcasts on an individual ones. But it opens up even more because then you get outdoor environments. Yeah, you just start going down to the planet a lot. And you get real liquids. that you can move through. Real liquids? Well, dynamic. Liquid that you can actually go into as opposed to just purely aesthetic backdrops.

Wow. Which was a new feature at that point. And you have like ambient sound. Yeah, just the design of everything was amazing. I still remember like the loons on loon sounds on the planet. Yeah, the second game is probably my favorite just because it did represent a huge leap forward in the technology. And it didn't feel so. cramped and crowded anymore.

And there's, like, the, the, the settings really reflect the narrative and that kind of the flow of the story. Like, you go down and you're sort of exploring a planet for a while, and then the AI that's controlling you goes under attack by the aliens who want revenge on him against him. So then you're summoned back to his ship. And there's some really great, just like, super intense action-only stages where it's basically like a one-man holding effort against an army of aliens that are trying to get to the, the robots or the AI's core and like I feel like that level um I can't remember what the name

of it was it was something about a shotgun I feel like that's what what what bungee was trying to do in halo with the library stage but they just didn't pull it off whereas this is like it feels like this desperate holding measure and there are waves of enemies coming at you and they just get bigger and more dangerous every time yeah it's like a one-man towered event and then durnal like all you can do to protect himself and to kind of arm you is to beam in weapons and ammo and stuff. So every once in a while, every few waves, you get more ammunition and you get like a health refill,

and then it's back into hell again. Yeah, it was a great set piece. And then that kind of turns into the sort of quiet stage where you're basically running through Durandall's core and destroying it because he's like, I don't want to be taken captive by the enemies, just blow me up. And then that turns out to be a faint,

and he's actually, like, stuck himself in a computer chip in your character's brain because your character is a cyborg. and he's basically kind of like tilting the odds in his favor by making this ancient computer that's obsessed with balance think that you're like doomed and the enemies have an upper hand so when the ancient AI is like oh things are going out of balance so then he like basically it's it's not very interesting to explain it's very convoluted but it's it's really it's really fun to watch it

unfold and the way the game shifts and evolves. Like you get taken prisoner and all the cool stuff you have is taken away. And so you have to sort of fight back and rebuild your ammunition again. I have a question. Metroid Prime. This reminds me, you know, you unveil a story as you scan things as you go along. Yeah, I mean, Metroid Prime, I think, was very, was very heavily influenced, influenced by Marathon. Also, such a shock. Like, both games have the same narrative approach, which is you get your story by accessing computer terminals. And that's one thing that I really like about the marathon games is that some of the computer terminals, the AIs are talking to you, whether it's one that likes you or one that hates you.

But in a lot of cases, you find backstory stuff. And the idea there, at least especially in the first game, is that the four slavery race has a client race called the Sfit that are basically computer hackers. And they are going up to terminals on the ship and trying to access all the data logs. So then you, you, like, will see one at a computer terminal and blow it up and then go over to the terminal. And there's all this information that gives you backstory on the game and starts to give you clues about who you, the player character are and so forth. So it's kind of like there's a diagetic reason for these little breadcrumbs of narrative information to be doled out. So that's really clever. And then, of course, but of course, there's still an enslaved race.

So, you know, your AI, people like Durandol are like, well, we can talk to them. and let's work something out. And then, you know, so you have these shifting factions eventually, you know, and things were, characters that were previously, enemies start fighting alongside you. Yeah, I mean, Doom had had the element where you could, like, cause enemies to attack each other because there were different species. So, you know, enemies of different species, if you could, like, kind of kite them around and get them to cause each other damage, you could make them fight.

But Bunji actually turned that into a central element of marathon where basically the, the plot of the entire game. The whole point that you're trying to accomplish for Durandall is to liberate those computer hackers from the slaver race. And so there's one stage where you go and you destroy the cyborg that is controlling the hacker race. And in subsequent levels, then the sift, the hackers are on your side. So it completely changes the power dynamic of the game. And then that's something that shifts back and forth, especially in the third game where you're like traveling through time and trying to prevent the, like, the catastrophe of them happening by like changing the timeline and you, uh, you end up serving like different

action with the ancient supercomputer. Well, there's that. And then also like sometimes you are working for Durandall and sometimes you go back and you're working for the AI that hates him and wants to destroy them. So the human characters are trying to stop you in that case. Yeah. Now I can see why there's a thousand page story. There's a lot to this. There's a lot to this game. And, you know, even though the story plays out through the terminals, like, if you're not paying attention to the terminals in the third game, you're like, why are the human bobs shooting at me all of a sudden? I don't understand.

And even if you do pay attention to the terminals, it's still very confusing. The third really ramps it up. But, you know, you can kind of blow through it. Yeah, it has those electric sheep stages, which become progressively weirder and more complex. Turn out to be your own subconscious. Yeah, it's like you're fighting through your subconscious mind, sort of liberating yourself from the shackles of the AI slavers. That's crazy.

It's a really interesting game. And it does a lot both in terms of the action and in terms of the story to do the most with what it has. So like the fact that the most interesting characters in this game are computer AIs is not a coincidence because it means you can interact with them at a computer terminal rather than trying to have convincing real people. You know, there's people in the game, but the bobs, you know, there's these little pixelated blobs. You're not going to like form an emotional connection with them, really. Well, except the ones that run at you and explode because they're actually healing parasites. Like, you learn to hate them. That's kind of an emotional bond.

But, yeah, I know. Lack of a bond. Like, this game kind of, it has that same problem that you saw in, like, Bioshop, 13 years later, where you have, you know, characters that they want to talk to you. The developers wanted to have talked to you, but you can't really interact with them. So you're just basically having one-way transmissions from people telling you what to do. you can't shoot them they're telling you what to do

on a computer terminal so you're just like there's the guy who's like after Durandle gets blown up he's one of the human resistance who starts giving you orders and he's actually like a photograph of Jason Jones who's been given

like a fake cyborg augmentation and you like just get orders from him and then when Durandall wakes up he mysteriously disappears it's almost like Durandall wasn't dead at all so strange I'm very happy. And the Marathon story page was great because it noticed things like

when the human resistance leader is talking to you, the IP from which he's communicating to you, it's like the server is called Piltdown, which is a reference to Piltdown Man, which was a famous hoax. So there's like all these little breadcrumbs that people kind of piece together and were like, so what's actually happening here?

And that's what makes Marathon so interesting. They put a lot of thought into the story. and they did a really great job of building the story and the action into sort of a cohesive whole. Yeah. How was the architect of that story? Was it Jason Jones or someone? I think Jason Jones was a big part of it.

Alex Seropian. And then the third game was developed by an offshoot of Bungy called Double Oat. It was like some guys who worked with Bungy and then went off to do their own studio. They handled the campaign. And I can't remember the names of the people who were involved. But there's credits in one of these main.

you'll say. Product design, Jason Jones, programming, Jason Jones. Story is Greg Kirkpatrick and Colin Brent. Greg Kirkpatrick was the one who kind of guided the story all the way through to the end. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds right. Well, I wonder what he's up to these days. I don't know. I think he went to double-aught and then left the games industry, if I'm not mistaken.

Which is a shame, because he came up with a really cool story. I mean, the final story ends with you, like the final game ends with you, like, becoming the god of destiny. Wow. It's a little bit transcendent. It's kind of heavy. Yeah. Heavy. But the third game, like I said, it has a really complicated story, but they match it

with the, just like the pinnacle of game design in this kind of 2.5D shooter's space. There's a level called Acme Station, called Acme Station, because it's like the most you could possibly do with this engine. And it's a really difficult level because it's very intricate, very complicated. It's all based in vacuum. It has like all these narrow hallways, and it's like crazy lines of sight, which shouldn't have been possible with the technology. And there's enemies, like, shooting at you and dropping explosives that track you down the halls. And you're trying to achieve objectives before running out of oxygen.

And then you go to the next stage, and it's still in vacuum. So you're like, oh, my God, I have to find a station to save and to refresh my oxygen. It's great. Great games. Yep. I'm really sad that they never. managed to put Marathon Infinity and Marathon

1 out on Xbox Live Arcade because the plan that they had Freeverse software who did the development on Marathon Infinity if the game

was a success if the game was enough of a success they were going to put out Marathon 1 and Marathon Infinity as like DLC for that and just run them

on the same engine so you could get a trilogy but apparently Durindle did not do well on Xbox Live Arcade and people were complaining because they got sick because of the head bobbing

and so on and so forth. Speaking, getting sick. There's something on this page that I print out in trivia of the Marathon Bungeyedia Wiki says during Marathon's development bungee adopted

a testing policy of play till you puke in order to play test the game there's a period there. In order to play test the game each member of Bungee Studios had to play from start to finish twice. The term was coined due to the nausea associated with playing marathon

for too long, usually setting in during the second playthrough. I can see that. That's a long time to be playing. There was a kind of a really hardcore fanaticism around playing the game. The Vidmaster's Oath was that what was it? Yeah, Vidmaster Oath. You never run by pressing Caps Lock.

Yeah, don't you kill every born on board colonist. This sounds like you're making this stuff up. Nope. No, no. Always grenade jump. Alien culture to me. Wasn't grenade jumping in there too? Oh.

So here from the end of the end of the. the manual for one is lessons applicable to the game move fast seize the initiative wields superior firepower dive into the melee anticipate enemy movements slaughter the defenseless endure that's not quite the vid master's oath but it's close that was the first game version i think it was in the second one that's if you are good at marathon you are the vid basically if you could if you could beat it on the hardest difficulty level which was ridiculous well vitting was a special technique that they came up with because um you know this was before like dual stick shooters and it was before full mouse and keyboard control. So they had, you know,

like the standard control buttons move forward, backward, strafe, right, left. And then they had buttons that let you look 90 degrees left and 90 degrees right. So vitting was called, was what they called it when you were moving in one direction and you would turn in another direction and take down enemies. Yeah. Wow. So by mastering that ability, which is something I could never do, it opened up your tactics and your capabilities and multiplayer especially. Yeah.

So that's what vidmasters were. People who mastered that technique, which was just beyond me. I was just happy to beat the games on something other than easy. Yeah, so the control scheme I played this morning was the numeric pad

was moving me up forward and back and maybe... Was it strafing left and right here? And the left side, there was some strafing, there was some looking, there's some up and down looking. It has,

even in the default, configuration has multiple options because you can do strafing and looking with separate keys, but you can also do them as modifiers instead if you want. So you can hold down one of the like shift or controller command keys and turn your regular movement into strafing or looking even if you want. I don't think I usually played it that way. I think I usually played it with the two sets. You can also do mouse if you want. Yeah. And there's there was a there's kind of a complicating element and that I think Apple desktop bus connections could only register like three key presses at a time. And if you tried to do more than that, it wouldn't register. Yeah. You could

definitely run into problems. So that was good times. But anyway. So we should say again, even though it didn't make it on Xbox arcade, that you can get all of these still off of, if you look up Al-F-1 Marathon, you can get all three games on a new engine that will run on any mannered system. That's A-L-E-P-H. A-L-E-P-H-1-Marathon, look for Marathon at that.

And also the story pages we were talking about, if anyone wants to dive into that are still up. They're actually hosted. They're hosted it by around. rabbit hole. And Marathon story pages where the first hints of Halo happened. Yes. Bungy sent emails to...

That was the I Love Bees thing, wasn't it? No, that was... I Love Bees was Halo 2. That was Halo 2. This was back in the 90s. Just Bungy was like sending emails to the story page guy, like dropping hints about the story

of their next game that they were building. Writing as Cortana, who was now part of Windows 10. Was the sort of the same temper as Dorindol and Jaius. So Cortana's name, like, kind of comes from the same concept as Durandol. I think whatever, you know, they had in mind for Cortana eventually changed. Like, she was supposed to go rampant in Halo.

Yeah. That didn't happen until Halo 5. So a bit of a delayed gratification there. Those pages are hosted on bungee.org now, but they're pretty easy to find. If you just Google Marathon story, they'll come up. And there's a lot. Yep. All right.

Well, I know you guys need to get home, so I will stop talking, but I could keep going. Yep. I won't, though. We'll talk a little more, probably a little bit more about a marathon. in the 90s episode of Mac Gaming, which will be in a couple of months. And until then, yeah, just everyone go play Marathon. It's so good, even though dated, it's fine.

It's good. Yep. All right. That's tricky. Guys, thanks for stopping in. Tell us where we can find you. Ben Jedwards at Benjedjedwards.com. Patreon.com slash BenJedredgecom.

Vintagecom. All kinds of stuff. I'm all over the place. It's everywhere. Everywhere. Wait, we can't end this episode without saying Frog Blass the Vent Corps. Frog Blass List. Sorry.

Okay. Got that out of the way. I'm Ben Elgin. I'm Kieran, K-I-R-I-N on Twitter. But also, Kieran's Retro Closet. Tumblr, only one N in that, Kieran. And I will definitely snap some shots of the manuals and stuff for Marathon around the time this episode is going up. So you can find that there.

You forgot something very important. You didn't reference. Hey, Ankio, Alien. I haven't yet. Just you wait. Find a way to work it in. Well, I mean, you have to dig holes to stop the four. I don't know.

Anyway, so, as usual, I've been Jeremy Parrish. For Retronauts, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. You can find me writing at Retronauts.com. And, of course, you can find the Retronauts podcast that you're listening to now at retronauts.com on iTunes, on Podcast One, and on the Podcast One app. We're supported through Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. It's how I eat my food.

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you can rest assured that True Car has a history of happy customers. customers who, on average, save $3,000 off the MSRP. So when you're ready to buy, visit TrueCar to enjoy a more confident car buying experience. Some features are not available in all states. All right. So this was supposed to be a micro episode, but then the conversation went on a long time, and it turned into something more than a micro episode. So I'm expanding it into a full-time episode or a full-time episode. full-time. And I thought this would be an opportune moment to bring in some of Retronaut's writing contributors, or bloggers and news people. So I am on the line now with Kishi.

Hi, I'm Kishi from Retronauts. That's a great intro, very upbeat. Yeah, so Kishi, tell us a little bit about yourself, if there's anything to be told. What's that line from Goodfellas? I don't know. I haven't seen it. For as long as I can remember, I always wanted to be a retroner. Okay. Well, that's pretty much the qualification we need. Now I'm living the dream.

That's right. So, yeah, to kind of make your podcast inaugural debut, I guess that's redundant, I thought it might be good to go over probably the biggest retro gaming news of the past couple of weeks. And it is a couple of weeks old now, but I feel like it's going to continue to be sort of a big topic that will sort of dominate conversations about old games for a few months to come. And that is the super NES classic edition. So what is your first impression of this thing? My first impression, I got up Monday morning and my girlfriend I was making some tea or something, and my girlfriend's...

Have you heard about this Super NES Classic Edition? I said, no. She's like, yeah, it's got Yoshi's Island and Star Fox, too. And I said, what? Because, I mean, we all knew this thing was going to happen in some form. Well, we assumed, but as we learned with the classic NES edition mini-consul, you really can't assume anything about Nintendo's business decisions because you think, oh, they're going to do the thing

that's going to obviously make them a lot of money and they say, no, actually we're going to do something completely baffling. Thanks. That's true. And you can't always trust the rumors no matter how many insiders agree with it. I'm still waiting for Mother 3 in English. Yeah. Well, this, I mean, for all we knew, Nintendo was going to release, like,

they were going to follow up the NES Mini with a Sega Master System. Classic Edition or something, just to throw us off the set. But they actually did the expected thing and came out with the Super Niesmini, or announced it. It isn't out until the end of September. Yes. I'd say the only unexpected thing about it is just what a strong showing they're putting on here. I mean, I wrote an article. But it only has 21 games versus 30.

That's a rip-off, right? That is true, and it costs more. But for the games you're getting, I mean, back in the day one of these games would have cost 80 bucks yes

this does not have Chrono Trigger on it does it no it doesn't no it doesn't because Chrono Trigger with tax

cost me $90 back in the day back with my fat Clinton era American bucks yeah so we should appreciate the deal

we're getting here I don't disagree but I wrote an article yeah go ahead I wrote an article for Retronauts back in May called Don't Let Hype Happen to You

sort of looking back at the lives left in shambles by Nintendo's failing to supply good numbers for the NES Classic Edition and ending with a warning for people not to fall for the same trick twice when Nintendo announces the next big thing and when I heard about this announcement I just imagined Nintendo looking at what I wrote

and saying you know what? Challenge accepted. Like, here's a rock-solid lineup of 20 of the greatest games. 21. Okay. That's right. 20 of the greatest games and also a 21st game. And it could be crap, we don't know, because no one's ever played it in its entirety.

But this, I mean, the NES Classic Edition had a few games you could call filler, like Ice Climmer or Gallagher, the NES Port of Pac-Man. Yeah, I mean, I get why those games were on there. maybe not ice climber. I don't know about that one. But Pac-Man and Gallagher, I mean, those are, those are crowd-pleasers. Like, if you want to sell one of these devices to, you know, the average person who doesn't follow video games closely, but, you know, they're 40 years old. They remember being in the arcades as a kid and going to the roller skating rink and seeing Pac-Man or Gallagher and being like, oh, and tossing a quarter into it. Those games were there to kind of stroke that little bit of nostalgia in their brain. and make them say, oh, yes, I need one of these. Which wasn't actually necessary because Nintendo underproduced the NES Mini so severely that casual buyers never actually saw one in stores. Yes, you're absolutely right, though. The games they selected totally made sense for their nostalgic marketing approach.

But for the Super NES Classic Edition, the games they've chosen, even the hardest or the hardcore fans could agree, these belong on there. There's very little you could call filler. I mean, the weirdest thing on this system, I think, is that we're getting Street Fighter 2 turbo hyperfighting, which was the second Super NES Street Fighter game. But in Japan, the Super Famicom mini is getting Super Street Fighter 2, which was the third iteration of Street Fighter 2 and had four additional characters and, you know, more gameplay modes and everything like that. That's really weird to me, and I don't know why we're not getting the more advanced game. I realize some people think that hyperfighting is the best streetfighter 2, but I'm not sure I agree. And it's really weird that there's this one kind of sizable disparity with what is technically the same game.

Yeah, I could see the argument for both. And I think it ties into that nostalgic appeal we were just talking about. I think Turbo came out at a time when people were still, like, as excited they were ever going to be about Street Fighter 2. And by the time Super came out, everyone was just kind of sick of shelling out for that. the iterations. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I only bought Street Fighter 2 once on Super NES, and that was the first, you know, version because Hyperfighting was like an incremental improvement. It didn't really add that much in terms of content volume. It was just like, here's some extra modes, and you don't have to use a secret code to play character versus character, you know, like the same

character versus themselves. But Super Street Fighter 2, I was tempted because it did offer more characters and had, you know, a greater volume of graphical detail and everything like that. So to me, like, that would be the more appealing game. It also had the code where you could make characters like the CPU fight CPU, and it had the tournament mode. I know I talked about this before, the Battle of the Fight of the Phelongs that my friends and I put together where we used a code to make 16 different versions of Phelong fight in the tournament bracket mode

and we never touched the computer and we just wanted to see which Phelong would win. I don't remember which one it was, but it was definitely a Phelong. A Phelong won somehow. But like, you know, the Super Street Fighter release

for Super NES, I feel was the most content-complete version of that game for the platform. So it feels a little weird that we're not getting that one. But aside from little nitpicks like that. And they're not getting Dream Course over there that Kirby's

dream course. They're getting, I think, crap, I don't remember. They're getting Goimon, Mystical Ninja, Mystical Ninja featuring Goimon instead of Castlevania 4. There's like three or four games that are different between regions, but otherwise it's pretty similar, and everything we're getting here

is like, oh, yes, I will play that. That's fantastic. Yeah, F0 is a little perfunctory, but at least they didn't waste a slot on pilot wings again. That's true. And, you know, F0 does have at least beyond the perfunctory element of like, hey, this was the big tech demo game at the Super NES launch. It does have that sort of like, I don't know if it's ironic, but a little bit of cachet with Captain Falcon from

Super Smash Brothers. Like Captain Falcon is kind of a memeish character now. So I can see them including that for, you know, a couple of different reasons. It's not necessarily a game I'm super eager to play because it is a single-player racing game. Yeah. But it was, it was impressive at the time, and it does, you know, kind of have that legacy of a major character in Smash Brothers, which I know a lot of the Nintendo kids are really into. Certainly.

But, yeah, when you go down the list, there's just, it's just classic game after classic game. Mega Man X, Super Goals and Ghost, Contra 3, Kirby Superstar, on and on. Yeah, the interesting thing about this, you know, the very limited lineup, it's only, again, 21 games versus 30 on the Super, or the, uh, the, the, uh, the S classic. There are enough kind of seemingly huge gaps here that I could really see them justifying another one of these with another 20 games. Like, yeah, we've got Kirby Superstar and Kirby's Dream Course, but we don't have Kirby Star Stacker. Are we, or is that what it was called? No, mean, uh, not mean bean machine,

Kirby. Avalanche. Avalanche, that's it. God, dang it. There's so many of those games. There actually was a Super Famicom version of Starstacker. It only came out in Japan. Oh, okay.

Well, and there's that. There's no Final Fantasy 2. There's no Chrono Trigger. Um, there's no Kirby 3, Kirby's Dreamland 3, which was kind of one of the technical, uh, high water marks of the platform. Mega Man 7 is missing. Mega Man X2 and 3.

Like, there's a ton that is not on this system that you're like, oh, yeah, if they put those on another one of these console iterations, I'd get that for sure. Certainly. One of the most glaring omissions from me is Donkey Kong Country 2. And I understand why they'd want to put the first one on there, just from our key value, and why they wouldn't want to put two of them on there. But for me, two just supersedes the first game in every respect. Yeah, and you can't really say, oh, well, we only wanted to put the first game of a series on here

because we've got Final Fantasy 3, but not 2. So that kind of, yeah, it's a little, it's a little like, I'm sure they had to make difficult trade-offs, and I probably would have made some different ones. But I guess that's part of the fun of these is, like, you know, complaining about the games that you really wanted to see and second-guessing the executives and whoever put this together. Absolutely. On the whole, though, it's just so solid as a lineup.

So what do you think about the, the end of the increased So what do you think about the increased price? The NES Mini was $60. This is 80, and it only has two-thirds as many games. So where the NES Mini was basically like $2 per game, this works out to be about $4 per game. Well, practically speaking, I think a lot of people aren't expecting to pay MSRP anyway. Okay, so it's like $20 per game. Yeah, due to how difficult it was to track down an NES Classic Edition, I think people are already stealing themselves to pay some kind of markup just to get their hands on one.

Since then, people have sort of been feeling burned by the whole experience, which is good in a way. I'm seeing a healthy amount of cynicism from people just to protect themselves from the possible disappointment of not being able to find a super envious classic edition. But I think part of that is people not expecting to find one for the $80 tag price, maybe expecting to pay some kind of markup.

I feel like Nintendo, I mean, I've seen where Nintendo has said that they're going to be, you know, producing this in greater numbers and making it more available. We'll see what that actually means. Sometimes they say one thing and they have some weird idea of what words actually mean. Yes. But maybe for once they're speaking the same language as us. Yes, but just looking at the MSRP, I think the $80 price is fair, even for fewer games. because more of these games are deeper experiences than a lot of the NES games you'd see. As the 16-bit generation went on, games became deeper, more intricate, more of a time value.

I mean, a lot of these games, they're not ephemeral experiences like an ice climber or a balloon fight. They're 20, 40, 50-hour RPGs like Link to the Past, Final Fantasy 3. Even Kirby Superstar, which is a platformer, is a very long and intricate experience. So I think the price is fair. Yeah, I think also people kind of need to understand the angle Nintendo's coming from. I'm not necessarily saying it's the right angle. But Nintendo, more than any other company in video games, is really determined to sort of preserve the perception of value for its games.

I mean, we've seen that with, like, their mobile attempts and, you know, charging $10 for Super Mario Run, which kind of blew up in their face. But it was an attempt by them to say, like, our work has value. Our products have value. And if you look at the way the pricing on this kind of breaks down versus on the NES mini, it kind of parallels the pricing structure they've used on virtual console, where NES games are worth kind of a, you know, the least amount of money. And Super NES games are priced higher.

And then you have like N64 games and kind of exotic imports. that are priced with an even greater premium. And these prices, you know, these come to like, if this is $4 per game slightly less, then that's half of what you would pay for each of these games on virtual console individually. So, you know, compared to sort of the pricing structure they've used in the past,

it keeps the parallel, but sort of ratches the price down to be a better value, assuming you can actually find an $80 super Nias Mini. Certainly. And I'm definitely in, favor of fighting the devaluation of classic games. You know, I'm not a very rich person. I don't think I'm speaking from a position of too much privilege here,

but I'm willing to pay a fair price, even for a game that's been out 20 or 30 years, because I think those games still have value. And I appreciate the fact that some publishers do still put effort into providing an experience that makes these games feel like they are worth something, as opposed to just shoveling a bunch onto a crappy emulator shell disk and saying, here you go, 60 games for $10, they're all crappy,

but they're all good games preserved crappily. That doesn't do anyone any good. Like if you just want a lot of games for very little money, just go emulate them, just go steal the ROMs. I mean, this is meant to be a better experience. It's meant to be a standalone plug-in-place, system. This time they're putting two controllers in the box, hopefully they'll have cables long enough, that they'll actually be usable in an American living room. But this is

meant to be, you know, a more premium experience. You don't have to fuss with things. You don't have to get your Raspberry Pi working. You don't have to worry about, you know, emulator GUI front ends. You don't have to worry about deleting your ROMs after 24 hours, et cetera, et cetera. Just get these 21 games, plug them into the TV, and go for it. Another part of the value proposition and really a huge part of the appeal of the super envious classic edition that I've kind of been beating around the bush about

is that they're finally giving us super FX games, including Star Fox and the good version of Yoshi's Island. Yeah, we've had Yoshi's Island available for GBA sorry for 3DS ambassadors people who bought 3DS at the original full price and got 10 free GBA games

and also on Wii U virtual console but both of those have been the 3D or the Game Boy Advance iteration of Yoshi's Island which was Super Mario Advance 3 and was a very good port for a system that was in a lot of respects less powerful

than the Super NES and had no bonus chips to enhance its its capabilities but it just, it's not the same. It was fine on the GBA, they even added some extra levels, but it's just not the real thing, and this is the real thing, and it's never

been offered by Nintendo since 1995 when it was on a cartridge. And even a lot of emulators don't run these Super FX games the way they should, so this is sort of adding a lot to the appeal of getting a super Brande S Classic Edition and not just settling for an emulator.

Right. Yeah, I mean, that is definitely a big part of the appeal. And, you know, the corollary to that is the fact that Star Fox 2 has never been released. Oh, my goodness. That game was canceled. And even the creators of the game at, you know, Dylan Cuthbert at Q Games now, he had no idea. This blindsided him. It came out of nowhere. And he was like, I, you know, I'm, I met Dylan a couple of months ago when I was at Bit Summit in Kyoto. And I've been in contact with Q Games social manager, social media manager. And so I kind of was chatting with him about, about this whole thing. And he was like, yeah, Dylan just was just, he had no idea this was coming. And so some of the creators of Star Fox 2 went

out and had drinks together after it was announced that the game was coming out. They're like, oh, well, finally more than 20 years later, this game that we created and finished and QA tested and had prepped to go and marketed, it's finally coming out. Yeah, I don't know how a lot of people feel about Star Fox, too, but for me, I saw it teased in Nintendo Power back in 95. I saw it in EGM when they covered it at the CES of that year, and I was really looking forward to it, and I was always disappointed that it never came out. So for me, this is a huge deal. This alone is enough to get a super N.E.S. Classic Edition at any cost. Yeah, I agree. I'm, I don't think there's anyone who is not at least intrigued by the prospect of Star Fox 2. I don't think, I haven't

seen a single person say, oh, I don't want that. I would much rather have, you know, like, I don't know, the, the Super FX version of Doom or something. Like, there's, there's, there's, there's, this is like a no-lose kind of thing. It's like when Earthbound came to virtual console for the first time, or Earthbound Beginnings was released in English a few years ago, like this is a pretty big deal. It's a game that's been lost to time.

It's just been sitting in the archives, collecting dust, that has been dusted off and presented to the public to play. And like that alone, for anyone who's interested in kind of experiencing the history of these video games, like that alone right there is

more than, you know, sufficient justification for hunting down and buying a super NES movie. Yeah, this is something Nintendo can offer that you can't get anywhere else. A couple Star Fox 2 work-in-progress ROMs have leaked out over the years, but even the most complete one is only like 95% complete. Yeah, and Dylan Cuthbert has said, like, the finished game had more to it, and like the leaked version was not finished and was not the fun. final game. So I don't know exactly how much more there is to Star Fox 2 than some of the

beta versions that have leaked, but I'm hoping that it's better than the one that I played. I think the only one I've ever played has been a pretty early build where it was kind of not even a game yet. It was kind of abstract. It kind of reminded me of X for Game Boy, actually, where I was just like, this kind of seems like it's almost a game, but not quite. So hopefully, having played the original Star Fox, I'm assuming that the game that we're going to get is more along those lines, more polished and complete. Yes. I think even in complete form, what you can expect is a very different experience from

Star Fox One. It was a very divergent sequel. They wanted to branch out and look at other things. Miyamoto especially has always been resistant to the idea of iterative Star Fox sequels. He's always wanted to look at new ideas for better or worse. But I think Star Fox, too. It was definitely for the better. You don't get a lot of those long form, intricately designed, rail shooter stages. It's more focused on, like, small skirmishes. But these, you know, it's dogfights where you can now fly around in any direction, shooting down an enemy. It's very exciting, and it has this real-time strategy element where you go down to a planet. But while you're there, up on the world map, all these missiles and fighter squadrons are still homing in, on Cornaria, and you have to focus on defending them as well in managing your time. And there's also kind of a rogue-like element where things would be randomized when you would start up a game. There might be missiles in different positions or different planets

would be captured by Andros. And I think the main thing missing from the early builds we've played so far is that there was more of that randomizations for different scenarios every time you play, which is a really exciting proposition. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, the team at Argonaut that did a lot of the programming work on StarVox and Star Fox 2 hailed from personal computer backgrounds and I feel like in a lot of respects

what they were trying to do with Star Fox 2 was sort of reintegrate some of those PC inspirations from the genre like things like Star Control and Elite and kind of create something that was more than just a linear rail shooter which is a lot to

ask for the poor Super NES. And I'm curious to see how well they pulled it off. I know that a lot of elements of StarVox 2 have been pilfered for other sequels to the game like Star Fox 64 and Star Fox Command. So I'm kind of interested in going back to the original game and seeing what's there and kind of exploring that. Yeah, you can appreciate where all those different elements originated. And even though they have been in other games here and there, they've never really been all together in one game since Star Fox, too. So you get this unique combination that's uniquely appealing. I agree.

So any final thoughts on the Super NES Mini? I'm trying to keep my expectations in check in terms of being able to find one. But boy, would I like to find one. Yeah, that's going to be the challenge. I know a lot of people are ordering them from overseas because they're apparently kind of rolling out in waves for the UK pre-orders

and a lot of places in the UK will ship overseas. So people who don't mind paying a premium, converting their dollars to pounds, have been jumping on that. But I'm hoping that the American version will be pretty easy to get. I actually was

able to pick up several NES minis. Not through scalping or anything like that. I just happened to be online at the right times. Amazon Prime was doing instant deliveries of them in select markets one at a time and I just happened to be

at my computer when Raleigh, North Carolina came up, so I bought one and ended up giving that away. They make good gifts. So I'm hoping that I have luck again this year and I'm hoping that everyone has luck, not just me, and that

scalpers go away sad, and can't actually sell their systems for more than list price. But I don't know, I'm not sure if Nintendo's quite up for doing the right thing yet. Yeah, and I think because they've been up front about this being a limited life product, inevitably there will be some people left out. So for them, I really hope Nintendo will bring whatever emulation solution they came up with for the Super FX games, bring it to Switch, bring Star Fox 2 to Switch, let everyone play it down the line at least.

Yeah, here's hoping. Nintendo moves in mysterious ways. All right. Thanks a lot, Kishi. It was good having you on, and I don't doubt that we'll have you on again soon, so I'll look forward to that. Yes, thank you so much for having me on. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Fittos, Lus Debtos, Luce, Vickos, Vicos, Vicoz, Vinocec. And so here for this final segment of this episode of Retronauts, I've brought on one of our bloggers, Kim Justice. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Yeah, hi, I'm Kim Justice.

I do a channel on YouTube where I do documentaries, reviews of video games, all that good stuff, mostly about European computer games, PlayStation, all that sort of thing. And just recently, I've been doing a five-part series. It wasn't supposed to be five-part, but it kind of got that way, about Final Fantasy 8. I worked on... That's not a British computer game at all. No, it's not. It might come out on the spectrum one day.

You never know what with Homebrew and all that. some sort of Final Fantasy will be, though, I'm sure. But yes, it's a game that I played sort of way back when for a little bit, and I decided that I actually wanted to finish it this time around. And so, yeah, I ended up doing a, I guess, combined about four-hour video on it, which I made and released over, I guess, six weeks, two months, and just full on. So, yes, it's all done now, and it's all up to watch on YouTube. So if you go to my YouTube, you can find it.

and I've been posting about it on Retronauts as well when the parts have come out. Yeah, so why didn't you finish Final Fantasy 8 back in the day? What was it that kept you from playing all the way through? My copy got stolen. Oh, that'll do it. Yeah, and I never replaced it. I'd kind of come to a bit of a choke point, I guess is the word, like early on in it.

I wasn't playing the game right, if I remember correctly. And there was one particular boss that just ruined me. which is kind of weird to think back now now that I know just how easy Final Fantasy 8 is to break. I mean, you almost have to not try to just break the game completely, but I didn't the first time around. Well, it was a really

unconventional approach not only to Final Fantasy but to RPGs in general. It really, with the game, the developers really, it kind of feels like they did sort of like Hideo Kojima did with Middle Gear Solid 2 and we're like, well, we have this

massive success. We could just give more the same, or we could use this opportunity to do something really different and innovative and put that in front of our expected audience. And that's what they did. And the expected audience more or less said, um, no. It was, it was very much a, a divisive game. I really liked it. And the more I've played it, the more I've liked it. But to really understand, you know, how easy it is to break, you have to stop thinking in terms of, you know, RPG dogma and sort of the standard processes. And most people, I wouldn't say they don't want to do that or aren't capable, but, you know, I think there are certain expectations that come hand in hand

with the name Final Fantasy. And at that point, people weren't so much used to seeing Final Fantasy radically change every installment, which is kind of what it does now. But at the time, they were like, well, this isn't exactly like the other games, so what the hell? I think it was also, especially for us in Europe, it was kind of different as well, because really, in Europe, we'd only had Final Fantasy 7. Right, yeah, the console RPG was really slow to sort of take root over there, even more so than here in the US. It was, yes.

We'd never had Final Fantasy 3 or 6, didn't have Krono trigger, Earthbound. They all never, I mean, people imported them, but you can imagine how expensive that was, so very few people did it. I mean, they're expensive enough over in the States, I believe, back when they were released. On cartridges, they were, but once you got to the PlayStation, then they were pretty much standard price.

So I think that made them a lot easier to swallow. But, yeah, so that's kind of the background there. What was your ultimate kind of conclusion on Final Fantasy 8? Where did you come out on the game, having played it all the way through, with the benefit of hindsight and nearly 20 years of, of experience and kind of tampered expectations, tempered expectations.

Well, there was a lot of stuff that I didn't know at all going in. I never knew about things like the orphanage scene, for example, which is kind of infamous among the people who've played the game, didn't really know. And there was a lot of stuff that, you know, it's kind of like the logic at some points just goes completely out of the window. Sometimes in a way that's kind of in character, when you think of the way that people like the gooner tend to act,

during the game and he comes up with the big plan of like, wait, well, you'll just move through time and sort this out. And it's like, uh, okay, then how do we do that? Well, you just do it and you just find each other again. But then that's him, that's his character. So there's little kind of subtle things like that. It's, um, on the whole, it was a very interesting experience.

I enjoyed most of it. I mean, there's some parts of it that are just like, I don't know what you have thinking here, but it takes a lot of risks. As I said, I mean, And it's like, it's kind of like an RPG sandbox in many ways, especially in how the gameplay is, because all the characters are pretty much blank slates in terms of, you know, they don't have any specialisations as such, even. So you can kind of do what you want and just break the game in so many ways from the off.

I mean, I think I played the game for about five hours before I even did the seed exam, just kind of experimenting with refining. with refining magic and doing triple triad and all that sort of thing, just to get my party to a level that was like, well, okay, I feel comfortable to just go on and enjoy the story. Well, did you discover throughout the game that maybe it was a mistake to level up your party? No, not really. The thing is, I mean, the one thing that I didn't really like about a lot of Final Fantasy 8 was its dungeons.

to be on the summer limit was kind of like I find a lot of the dungeons I mean obviously there's Ultimatia's castle at the end which is fantastic and worth playing the whole of the game for but then some of the other dungeons in the game I find to be a bit copy pasted like things like the prison the D's District Prison

it's just like you're going through the exact same floor over and over again and so I was kind of happy to have a strong party that I could just whiz through that I mean and it even then gives you things like you can level up guardian forces skills like no encounters

except for bosses and it's like there's all sorts of things like that in it that make it because obviously another thing about Final Fantasy 8 if you don't know is that leveling is bad if the viewers don't know yeah that's what I was referring to so when you said you were leveling your party up you didn't necessarily mean experience

levels you meant more like getting them a breadth of skills and opportunities and so forth yeah junctioning magic to their stats yeah junctioning magic to stuff turning monsters into cards so that you don't get those fatal experience points. You're right, right. Okay, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that entire concept of avoiding level up is so counter to how we've been conditioned to play RPGs that it really took a lot of people

off guard. And so the game has been kind of a hard sell for people, I think. But yeah, I really enjoy it just because of how unconventional is. But, you know, we'll eventually do a full-on Final Fantasy 8 Retronauts as part of our deep dive Final Fantasy series. So I don't want to get too much into it, but I do want to talk about one aspect of the game that I think is really kind of highly underappreciated, and that's the soundtrack, which in my opinion is maybe Nobu Um, I realize that's a bold claim, but I really, what's that? What's that? That is a very bold claim. It is, but I love the soundtrack to this game.

It really feels like the first time that Uematsu had, he had, you know, the technology and storage space at his disposal to finally create the music he wanted to. He was always constrained by cartridge limitations and hardware limitations on the Super Nies, and Final Fantasy 7, I think, was kind of a learning experience getting used to the PlayStation sound.

So it has this very sort of flat, and lifeless feel to it, which, you know, fits, it fits the environment of Final Fantasy 7. It fits the themes of the game. But it can be a little bit of a difficult listen. But Final Fantasy 8, like, it's a very, it's a very diverse soundtrack with a very, like, kind of fresh live feel to it. And I think there is some live music actually within the game. So, yeah, so to me, it was kind of a revelation. Like, I enjoyed Final Fantasy music before that, but this was the first time I was like, oh, yeah, wow, this is, this is amazing. Yes, I mean, well, when you think of things like, just a general before we get into tracks, I mean, there's a lot of songs

on the soundtrack with kind of like repeated motifs. Like, you get the ones that have, that often have, like the da-da-dun, da-dun, like that constant motif. And I wonder if maybe, like, in an earlier final fantasy games, that was something that Urimatsu wasn't necessarily able to do, because maybe with, like, the limited range of samples, perhaps they'd all kind of sound. similar, whereas in F of FF8, they all kind of have their wildly different takes and express different emotions because of that a lot better than perhaps they would have earlier on.

No, actually, light motifs were something that Uamatsu did a lot. Starting with really Final Fantasy 4, where you had sort of like the central theme of Final Fantasy 4, and it's repeated through these different variants, and sometimes very strangely. Final Fantasy 5 did the same thing as well, and then Final Fantasy 6,

you got character motif. light motifs. So you can kind of tell like when a scene was built around a specific character because their theme would kind of come in. And that, you know, sort of tied in with the game's sort of centerpiece, musical centerpiece being an opera. So it's actually, it's actually something he really did a lot. But it does show up here. And I think it is put to use in a much more subtle way than in the past. And, yeah, it has a really good, just kind of, it helps unify the overall soundtrack, even though it is musically the most diverse Final Fantasy soundtrack to that point.

Oh, definitely. I mean, when you think of things like the S-star theme, for example, that's, I mean, I don't think it might so have done much like that before. I mean, certainly there's so in FF7, that kind of like... Where it's kind of dissonant? Dissant, yeah, sort of minimalist, like sort of ploppy sort of. of sound. I mean, some people think that's one of like the least of the tracks on FFA, but I can see what he was going for with that one. Yeah, he did something sort of similar with the lunar

terrain theme on Final Fantasy 4, but that was almost just like there are sound effects and sort of like an ominous timpony in the background, whereas Estar is more, it's fully developed, it's fully fleshed out. And that's, I think that's what he was able to do with the soundtrack was to take some of his recurring ideas and really sort of build them up into something more musical, more robust. And so I think the soundtrack holds up really well. So what's your favorite track from the Final Fantasy Eighth soundtrack? I would say that my favorite track is probably the, I mean, I like all the final boss themes, like for the Ultimisha Battle, but particularly the extreme.

Thank you. So, you know, Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!

I'm... Oh! And that's when you're And that's when you're fighting you're fighting these like the griever uh summon basically i think that that's the last form of altamisha when you're fighting her like in space like or in like time in space right right right so yeah okay so that's it's trying to remember that starts out with like a chorus of voices sort of yes it's got like a chorus of voices and it kind of goes into a sort of um very sort of slow sort of acoustic guitar

i think harp actually maybe um kind of like vincent's theme in a way F7. And it sort of does that for a minute, and then it kicks into, I know this one, the classic final fantasy boss theme, you know, like the da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-dda. Right, with like the kick drum and the sort of staccato, very forceful, upbeat, strings and everything. Absolutely. And it kind of goes into sort of a very sort of heavy prog rock direction from there. As Uwamatsu often does. Yeah, I think that piece really fits the battle because of all the Final Fantasy multi-phase final battles, the one with Ultimisha is the one that took me the longest to complete because she has the ability to, like, strip away your powers as you're battling. So not only does it remove an ability, it also diminishes whatever capability happens to be junctions to that.

And then she's also, like, knocking members of your party out. And, like, if they die, then they're replaced with someone else. And eventually you run out of people to replace them with. So it becomes a sort of grueling contest of endurance. It's a tough battle. Yeah, okay. So even knowing all the tricks, you had a tough time with it. I managed to get lucky and beat her first time through.

She fortunately didn't knock out any of my, like, attack junctions or anything. So I was still able to, like, do damage. but I only had like two characters left by the end. Okay, yeah, that's, that was kind of my experience. I've only played all the way through Final Fantasy 8 once, and I didn't know all the tricks. I kind of intuited a lot and stumbled into a lot of things, but I hadn't, you know, read advanced strategies about,

here's how to min-max the game or anything like that. So, um, so I didn't have, you know, the ability to just go in and completely stomp her, uh, like some people do, but, but yeah, that battle took me a really long time to finish, like probably the, better part of an hour just for that one phase of the battle. But I refused to give up and just clung on tenaciously, even though she, like, stripped away, you know, the, the, um, the spells that were junctioned to my character's health. And she knocked out four of my party members, so I was down to two. And it was basically like squall delivering damage. And then Renoa was

like casting magic. And then she would die because she had like a thousand hit points after she had her junctions stripped away. Yeah. So then Squall would have to revive her. So it just took forever, but it was intense, and the music, I think, really works well with that. I was left with Squall and Selfie by the end. Okay, that's... I tended to use selfie quite a lot. Yeah, she's the best character in the game. Maybe not, like, from a gameplay standpoint, but as a character, she's the best character.

She's just so fun. Just always talks about blowing fins up. Yeah, she's secretly violent, but she also loves trains. Yep, adores trains. train, train, take us away. Exactly. So, yeah, I would say my favorite Final Fantasy 8 theme is probably the Ballam Garden theme, which is good, because you hear that so much throughout the game.

but it's just so it's so relaxing and so melodic and it has um you know it's it's again one of those instances like the one of the first times in the game where you start to appreciate the broader range of instrument sounds available to Uwimatsu because a lot of it is kind of played on obo, I think, or maybe, I don't know, some sort of reed instrument, but it has this sort of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, so it has this sort of like, not jazzy, but just like a very, a very peaceful sound to it.

Yeah, just nice and understated. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. And it never really gets boring. And like I said, it's good because you spend a lot of time in the garden. It's the first Final Fantasy where you have sort of a central home base that you return to over and over again, which is a really different concept in the series. Like up until then, Final Fantasy was always a quest where your party was always being pushed from one place to the next. But here, you know, you had Garden as sort of like the academy where all the students went to.

And so it became sort of their home base. And that's like the sound of your home base, which is really nice. exactly it's um exactly i agree with pretty much everything you said on that one um it's um because yeah even something like midgar in ff seven um even though that's kind of one place it has obviously all different place so you get lots of themes but yeah you're constantly constantly moving through midgar to different locations so even though you spend god probably like eight or ten hours total in midgar throughout the game um you're never just like in one spot there no it's a really nice theme. It's definitely one of the better ones from the game, I think, especially as far as

as, like, the towns go. I mean, I think that some of the other themes, like, with regards to towns and sort of, and the world map theme as well, perhaps a bit less memorable, but that one does stand out. Yeah, well, the world map theme is, is interesting because it's so different than usual. It's like pluck strings and tuned percussion, and it sounds very, not, not jarring, but it just has a really unusual sound for a Final Fantasy musical theme. But I like it. It's just not one that I want to listen to a lot. No, same. So you highlighted a couple of other games, a couple of other themes from the game. What else did you have on your list of favorites? Well, I think, yeah, I mean, I'm one of those people who do like The Eyes on Me, Son, I have to say.

I never sang my songs On the stage on my own Whenever said my words Wishing they would be heard I saw you smiling at me, was it real or just my fantasy? You'd always be there in the corner of this time, a little bar. Okay, now that was a pretty controversial song at the time

because, you know, like, it's a vocal theme in Final Fantasy. It's a love theme. Like, the series had never had anything like that. But you're okay with it. You're okay with it, even though it's like a pretty famous, I think, Asian pop singer singing it. And you can still dredge that up at karaoke if you go to the right places. I imagine.

So, yeah, back in some sort of dark corner probably. Yeah, no, I'm really okay with this song. I get a sort of soft spot. I think it soundtracks a nice moment in the game as well, especially after you kind of just get off of one of the games more, you know, when the lunar cry happens and, you know, Rinoa gets properly possessed. And it's, and it's all a bit much. But then you get the kind of nice scene with Rinoa and Squall and you get that soundtrack in and, yeah, I dig it. It's probably one of my, um, better liked, um, sort of vocal songs from games, you know, probably not as good as like Snake Heater, but better than I'm the Wind. Yeah, vocal themes in video games from the late 90s tended to be more on the miss than hit side. And, you know, I think they sort of captured maybe more of a success and more of a hit with that song than they intended to with eyes on me. And they spent a lot of time trying to recapture that.

I don't know that they've ever really been that successful. Maybe Kingdom Hearts clean and simple. is the only other one that really compares. But every Final Fantasy since then has had some sort of, like, hey, top of the pops kind of vocal theme that never quite takes. I did like the,

in Final Fantasy 13, the Sunleth Waterway has a vocal theme, but it's not positioned the same in the game. It's not meant to be like a love theme or like the central theme of the game. It's just a theme when you're exploring that happens to have vocals to it, which is, you know, like very unusual, but, but it works really well there.

Kind of like, I guess, Blue Dragon as well with Eternity as like, this is the constant boss theme, which is just pretty, again, definitely not a love theme, that one. No. Yeah, but, you know, Eyes on Me was a very different kind of song for Final Fantasy 8, for Final fantasy, and so was the alternative battle theme. which accompanied the battle scenes with Laguna that you play through when Cloud has, or Cloud Squall has his psychotic fits or whatever. He like falls into a dream and dreams about this completely goofy dude who fights with the army.

But, you know, you're kind of used to the sort of Prague rock orchestral themes all the way from Final Fantasy One up through Final Fantasy 8. Like Final Fantasy 8's main battle theme starts out almost like a news. cast introduction. It's like very bold, brassy, kind of like a very steady driving rhythm. And then you get to Laguna's battle theme, the man with a machine gun, so called because Laguna fights with a machine

gun in the, yeah, yeah, yeah. And instead of being like any other Final Fantasy battle theme before, it's just like straight up EDM. It's like techno music. Thank you. And it's kind of a little cheesy with the drum machines and the do-to-do-do-to-do-do-do-to-do-do-do-d-d- But it sounds like a sort of a TV theme almost, I was saying.

A little bit, but then, you know, it kind of, kind of the main melody sort of kicks in. And I guess the closest thing the Final Fantasy had done before was the Genova battle theme, but this isn't nearly that intense and dark. It's much more sort of poppy and upbeat. And it just sounds. It sounds so strange, and it really, it really complements those scenes in the game because the first time you have a Laguna sequence, you have no idea what's going on. You're like, you're playing as Cloud, and then all of a sudden you're playing as some other guy, and he's with these other two dudes, one of whom attacks with just by throwing an anchor at people. It's, like, super crazy, and you have no idea what the hell is happening.

And then you go to, like, a bar, and he's trying badly to hit on a woman. and you're just like, what? And it's so disorienting, and so is that battle theme. It's just so unlike anything else that's ever been in any Final Fantasy before. You're just like, what is this? So it really does a great job of kind of setting that part of the game separate and making it sort of clear musically that, yeah, this isn't part of the main adventure. This is something else.

Yeah, something completely different. You know, just let it happen sort of thing. And then your final pick to talk about, that was... the self-thats. Yeah, that's interesting. That's not one that really stands out to me that I would have picked out. So I'm curious, what is it you like about that track? I just have it's got a very gloomy sort of mood to it.

I mean, although the dungeons, again, as I said before, don't necessarily, I don't particularly like them necessarily. I do think that the music in them, I mean, probably, I think it's find your way is probably the more famous example. But I just like the Salt Flats has got this very like sort of pondering, sort of gloominess. And it's just a case of just a track that just fits the surroundings perfectly. Just those lovely like pre-rendered graphics. And it's just before you get to Estar,

and you're kind of just in this desolate landscape. And you can pretty much see right till the end of the continent, and there doesn't seem to be anything there. So it almost kind of makes you feel a bit lost. Mm-hmm. And, again, that's something that, I think, obviously, that Uimatsu's kind of done before in other Final Fantasy games, there just seems to be something slightly different to that. Again, maybe it's just the fact that maybe, like, just the little technical things, like it been in kind of like Walt's time as well just gives it that sort of slightly different feel to other dungeon themes of his. Yeah, I agree. I admit that part of the game doesn't stick with me that well because it's, you know, like deserts are never that interesting to look at. And also, it's kind of short. And then there's a boss that you fight and it's an undead boss. And I didn't quite realize the properties of some of my abilities at that point. And there's one menu command you can get that gives you like a free super healing ability. And so I tried using that on the boss and it killed it in one shot. And I was like, oh, well, that was anti-climactic. I wonder what's supposed to happen there.

So it's good for me again. Dead Bosses get the ex-potion out. Yeah, so that boss, like that whole section is just kind of like this, oh, well, that's done. Okay, on to the next for me. Yeah, so we've kind of, I think we've, like, the common thread between all the musical picks we've named so far

has been how they're sort of like interesting, distinct musical form so far. And the final, track that I wanted to call out is pretty much along those same lines, and that's the spy. Which is the theme that plays when you're, uh, you're sneaking around in the missile base, and it's selfie and her team. And, um... Yeah, like, that's, that's an interesting bit because it's kind of a dungeon, but you don't really fight people so much. It's more like a...

No, it's kind of... You kind of sneak around. Yeah. It's not even really stalled. It's more like you're in disguise. It is... Yeah, it's not so much about like trying to avoid being seen, but more like just kind of try to blend in.

So it kind of stands out. But then the music itself is just like this kind of funky sort of guitar-driven piece that would not be out of place in like some 70s police movie. Exactly. Yeah. Again, that was really different for Final Fantasy at the time also. getting that kind of a whack-a-wacker-wacker sort of guitar going as well yeah that's um yeah that's an yeah that's an interesting pick um i kind of um yeah again

i think something that he was starting to do as well with final fantasy seven with a couple of the themes in that um particularly i'm thinking one of like the um slum themes that kind of becomes a dungeon theme like the do-da-dun-dudan like sort of has a similar vibes that but then f-facts like the spy is sort of like a tighter more refined version well and on top of that, it actually has like real guitar samples in it, which really makes it stand out because that was kind of the big thing with Final Fantasy 8 was like all of a sudden you started to hear real instruments, you know, like I mentioned oboes earlier, and then here you had this sort of like, you know, very kind of authentic sounding, chunky guitar. And I think, I think that was that was

kind of Uwimatsu showing off a little bit. I think he was really proud of the fact that he got to bring his pet guitar into the into the game soundtrack. And the chocobo theme is actually, it's a mods to chocobo, I think, in this game. And the subtitle is actually like featuring In's Stratocaster. So it's like, hey, check it out. I get to use my guitar and I get to put that in. So there's like this little element of kind of like pride to the musical sound of this piece. And

that makes me really happy. It's just like, you don't really get to see individual expression so often in a game of this scale and scope, you know, when you have hundreds of people working on a game and it's four discs long and 60 hours of gameplay, like everything kind of becomes systems oriented and team oriented. But then there's one little bit where the composer's like, yeah, I'm going to put a little bit of myself in here. And, yeah, I think the Chocobo theme is more upbeat. beat. But the spy is where I really noticed and was like, oh, yeah, this is something you would not have heard in a previous Final Fantasy game because you just didn't get these kind of audio

samples. And I think that's less special now because, you know, audio quality in games has improved so much. But at the time, it was something that really stood out. Definitely. So that's a pretty, I would say pretty eclectic sampling of music. And maybe that's, maybe that's the appropriate Final Fantasy 8 experience, the authentic Final Fantasy 8 experience. It's a collective. Everyone will have their different favourite bits. So do you ever think you'll return to Final Fantasy 8 or do you think this one playthrough is pretty much like you've done your time and it's time to move along, get on with life? Yeah, I think it's probably time to move along, move along to the next thing. I had a nice go with it for a bit and yeah, it's definitely

satisfied as far as that game goes. And perhaps as far as Final Fantasy itself goes for a while. Yeah. That's understandable. One of those games is a pretty big commitment. So what do you see as like the next adventure for yourself? Are you going to do any more big projects for video or are going to keep it small for a while? I'm certainly not.

It's to be a while before the next multi-part series or anything. I release, excuse me, I release videos almost every week. so I've got one that's coming up about the Xbox in Japan and it's sort of mixed fortunes over there and I'm currently working on something... Mixed, that's generous. I'm currently working on something to do with Half-Life as well. Interesting.

This will be kind of a fun trip back, seeing how good it is to play now, sort of in. Okay, well, I'm sure everyone can look forward to seeing those posted on Retronauts.com. But would you like to tell everyone where else they can find you on the internet in case they want to seek you out specifically and check out your body of work? No problemo. Where you can find me on YouTube, you could just search Kim Justice or enter YouTube.com slash Kimball Justice. I'm also on Facebook.

I'm on Twitter. I'm on Patreon. I'm on all that sort of good stuff. So do feel free to search for me and you can check all that stuff out. And also, I occasionally do writings for RetroGamer. And, of course, you can find me every week today on Retronauts. Okay, great. And I've already done my spiel in a different part of the episode, so I won't belabor the point. Kim, thanks for joining us. I definitely want to get you on at least once a month, if you're good for that, to talk about different things.

Maybe in the future we can talk about, you know, things that are more along your specialties as opposed to your sort of odd excursion into Final Fantasies realm. Yes. No problem. I look forward to it. But yeah, it's great to get more exposure to, areas of gaming that I think I don't know that much about, and Bob doesn't know that much about. So you're providing a valuable service. Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Jeremy. Yeah, thank you for joining us. And

everyone else can look forward to more of Kim's work on the site and hopefully in the podcast in the future. Okay, cheers. I'm gonna' be the same. I'm gonna'n't

I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm, and I'm, and I'm, so,

See you, See you, Star Side. Get ready for hard work. For high expectations. for high fives for you've got this for i did it for you're hired you've got it in you now let us bring it out of you if you're as serious about your success as we are bring it visit rm u dot edu today robert morris university get ready the muller report i'm edonohue with an ap news minute president trump was asked at the white house if special counsel robert muller'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.