Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 121: King of Fighters/Lost Game Experiences

Episode Date: October 16, 2017

Two Micro episodes combine powers to become a full episode! First, Kurt and Rob of Hardcore Gaming 101 join to discuss King of Fighters. Then, Ben and Benj follow up with a home gaming-focused counterpart to our recent arcade memories episode.

Hey there, Retronauts fans. I'm happy to announce that Jeremy and myself will be hitting the road once again for the Portland Retro Gaming Expo this October 20th to 22nd at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. And for the first time, we'll have a table on the show floor so you can chat with us and buy authentic Retronauts merchandise. And that's not all. At this year's PRGE will also be hosting a live panel called Behind the scenes of Metal Gear, featuring guests who worked on actual Metal Gear games. It will be held on Sunday, October 22nd, at noon, so we hope to see you there. We're also putting together another Retronauts meetup, which always ends up being the highlight of our trip. For more on this and all of our other Portland plans, be sure to follow us on Twitter at Retronaut so you can stay completely up to date on everything we're doing. Remember, that's the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, October 20th to 22nd at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. Be there.

This week in Retronauts, a small change of pace as we have more micro-episodes than we have space in our schedule for. Instead of just holding on to these for months, decided to put them together into a single double episode. Please enjoy. This Week in Retronauts, Absolute Karate, that's Kyo Kugan. And don't forget it, Dwebenheimer. Hi, everyone and welcome to a retronauts micro recorded in a noisy hotel in where the hell are we? Garden County? Union Bill, North New York. Actually, the outside is noisy, not the inside.

That's true. The hotel itself is quite quiet, but there's a bunch of bros and muscle cars. Actually, someone corrected me. They're super cars. Super cars. It's like, you know, $100,000 plus Lamborghinis and stuff. Using those cars as they were intended and driving at about 35 miles per hour around in a parking lot. That was just what Enzo wanted when he created his Ferrari. I'd be okay if they were funny cars, but there's nothing funny about this. And they were like fire-breathing funny cars. Can you imagine?

No, no, no, no. It's not Sunday, Sunday, Sunday yet. So anyway, hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish. And with me, of course, you recognize the dulcet tones of none other than Bob Mackey. Hello, I'm going to disappoint everybody on this podcast. Please tweet at me. And special guests, since we're in New York, which is adjacent to New Jersey. Kurt Kalata.

Of hardcore gaming 101. And this is Rob Russo. or Xerxes from the Hardcore Gaming 101's podcast. That has a name, right? It's, well, it had an old name, and now it's called the top 47,8,858 games of all time. So I haven't really been listening to your podcast because it's something personal. I just don't ever have time to listen to podcasts. So why 47,000?

Well, I wanted an arbitrary number, and when I typed in games in Moby games, that's how many results it had. So you're covering every game. Theoretically. As of the point that you started your podcast. Yeah, which was about a year ago. We're maybe about 0.001% done. We just ranked our 200th game. So the way it works is that people nominate games one way or another, usually through like, you know, five-star review on something because we're whores.

But, no, it's, and they nominate a game and then we will rank it in comparison to other games we've ranked. And in fact, I got this idea from another podcast by one Chris Sims, who was just on your show. He did one. So I stole it directly from him. But his is about comic books, which I know nothing about. So I thought, what if I did something about games? And the joke is that it's totally scientific and not arbitrary at all. Right, of course.

As all rankings of objective or subjective matter should be. Yeah. And can tell us a little bit about the history of hardcore gaming 101. It's been around a long. ass time. 2003-ish, I think. It was something that I started in college, kind of. You've been online doing stuff before that, though.

You were doing stuff in the 90s. 97 was the official date that I started the Castlevania Dungeon back when I was in high school. And I kept through that up most of through college, or at least through high school. But after a while, it just kind of gets boring, writing about Castlevania. Does it? Well, at that point, they were bringing out, like, maybe a new game a year, which, you know, you focus on that. What was that like? Like, a new Castlevania game every year.

Tell me about the good old day's dad. It's, there was pluses and minuses because at the same time, there was one every year. But at the same time, they did kind of get very samey after a while. That's true. Which is, you've played one Castlevania judgment. You've played them all. I mean, nowadays it's almost better because you get Castlevania like games, but in different contexts, like, you know, Guacamale or Axi and Verge or stuff like that, that basically fills in that without actually being a Castlevania game. but yeah I'd start doing that and then I did a contra website which I forgot about at some point and then I decided to sort of take the idea of like a fan site

but condense them smaller and that was where hardcore gaming one came from it's too bad we don't have just like the whole weekend to record here because we could probably get you to do a pretty kick-ass contra episode with us but it's not on the agenda instead what we're talking about this week is in this micro episode the King of Fighters So, Bob, I've noticed that, you know, living in Berkeley, California, you've become a real radical hippie type. That's true. And I don't have a lot of living space.

My kitchen is a hallway with a stove in it, as I say. Yeah. So I've noticed that while I gather a lot of games to, you know, chronicle and photograph, you believe that physical possessions are a burden. Yes, everything is transitory, Jeremy. It's what Buddha tells us. So I guess for gaming you prefer not to own, but rather to rent, to acquire. That sounds like a great proposition. Is there a service that I could take advantage of?

Well, Bob, as a matter of fact, there is. There is a service called Gamefly, the best way to buy and rent all your favorite games, but you could just rent if you want. Okay, that's good. And you're saying, okay, so I get a game and I'm done with it, and then it's the mailman's problem, right? Pretty much. Good. I can't stand that guy.

You don't have to possess. You don't have to worry. about the burden of physical possessions weighing you down. You have more than 9,000 titles to choose from, and I know that you don't have space in your home for 9,000 games. That is very true. I actually got the landlord to check that out for me, and there's only room for 8,000,

and I don't want to break any building codes. Right. So, yeah, Gamefly lets you try your favorite games in movies before you buy, if you ever want to buy them. I don't know if you ever would. And you can keep the games as long as you want, which is great for, you know, the big, meaty RPGs that you tend to enjoy. So do our listeners have some sort of

incentive to use this fine service you call GameFly. Why, yes, and as a matter of fact, they're offering Retronauts listeners a free premium 30-day trial by going to Gamefly.com slash Retronauts. It'll let you check out two games and or movies at a time, and it's only available by going to Gamefly.com slash Retronauts. which I know very little about. I played some of the King of Fighters back in the 90s and tried to wrap my head around their mechanics

and was like, this isn't Street Fighter, I don't understand. I'm not capable in my lizard brain of understanding more than one fighting game's schematic. But the series has just kept on going, and it's up to what number 16? now? 14 of the numbered entries. I thought it was 16. Okay, sure.

So do you no longer use the years when you refer to them? Do you refer to like 97 is 3 or 4? How does that work? It would everybody get confused. Okay. Yeah, beginning with the, yeah, I mean, it was confusing at the time because you had like, you know, a game released in the arcades in like 1997 coming out for PlayStation in 1999 or 2000.

It was still called 97 and people were like, it's 2000. and why do I want to buy King of Fighters' 97? But somebody, before we started recording, saying King of Fighters 12. Yeah. And what does that mean? So at a certain point, they switched over. I think 2003 had both naming conventions.

No, 2003 was the last one on the NeoGeo. And then they moved to the Atomus Wave, where they created a game called Neo Wave, which doesn't count among the number entries. And then they made 11, which is what he was onus there. And then when they changed over, because they were at the point, they're like, we can't make these yearly anymore. I kind of like the idea of like a King of Fighters like, you know, Ought 9 or like King of Fighters 13.

Like, oh, it's like 1913. It could be like really, but it's not. Yeah. It's just, uh, do it dust up in the boiler works. Put up good dukes. Yep. Justicos. They actually renamed one of the King of Fighters 98.

When they brought out for the Dreamcast in America, they called it King of Fighters 99. And they gave it some sort of subtitle, which was confusing because there was an actual King of Fighters 99. Right. Which they gave a different subcontactors in America. I remember I was kind of following the series at that point and I remember it just being kind of a mess in terms of the numerations.

So it's good that they switch to the numbers. Yeah. But it also does sort of denote a change in eras. You know, it was the S&K years for NeoGeo and then S&K was bought out by

Playmore? Playmore? Yeah, I don't know. I haven't quite worked like corporate structure-wise. Like S&K sort of reassembled But there was like Arruzé or whatever. Where did they come in?

Yeah, they came in first and tried to turn S&K in, like, all their properties into gambling and, like, Bichinko machines. What a pipe dream. That'll never work. They supposedly killed off the NeoGeo pocket color so they could use the screens for their Pachinko machines or something. And then Playmore came in. There was no erotic art of fighting Pachinko? Not yet. Maybe Konami can step in and help with that, though.

There is a King of Fighter's dating game series. There are nine episodes and three DS games. Wow, okay. So, like dokey, dokey king of fighters? No, it's compared to that stupid witch-touching game is pretty straightforward. Oh, geez, I didn't mean like that, actually. You know, like, dokey-dokey, like, my heart's pounding. Oh, it's, it kind of resets the entire universe and recast all the characters.

Like, I think East Howard and one of them is a principal. And, like, my sheer newie is your sexy next-door neighbor. No Kusanagi in the history of South Town has ever amounted to a hill of beans. It's practically rights itself. I know, right? Well, my perspective on these games that I really don't know a lot about is I did like fighting games. I like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, but these S&K things were kind of inaccessible. So for me and a lot of other friends, I think we watched the anime that they brought over first.

And we wondered what these games were. I mean, you would read about them. That girl has such bouncy breasts. They did like to animate. What is this fighting game about? Yeah. Was it my? Who was the best?

Okay, yes. Jeremy's now ashamed that he said that, I guess. But, yeah, I mean, I feel like that could be why I'm not a statement. tapped into these games, is that, of course, I could have always accessed them later, but when I was into fighting games, they were kind of hard to play. No, actually, I remember my just because back, you know, when I was buying anime on VHS, they, like, all the, all the animas had an intro trailer before you could actually watch the 30 minutes of content that you paid for, and they were always advertising Fatal Fury of the

motion picture, and that was like, that was one of the images they were very proud of was her, like, flinging her fan forward and her body kind of continuing to vice. vibrate for several seconds after work. That's whatchip animation is all about it, 1994. We should be back up and we should probably back up and, like, kind of talk about how. We should, because I mentioned the two words, the secret words, Fatal Fury. Yeah. Okay, so go.

Yeah, I had to look up the history about this, but Fatal Fury was, what was the guy's name? He was, he would been with the industry forever. He had worked in I-Ram and created Moon Patrol. Yeah, Takashi and Nishiyama. Yeah, he got Mutual and Kung Fu Master. Yep. And then at some point he left for SNK and won the first games, I don't know for the first one, was Fatal Fury, which is also subtitled fighters in some versions. And it's sort of thought to be a street fighter two for both, but it's actually some.

supposed to be a Street Fighter Wonderbop. Because he had worked for Capcom and he's one of the big guys who created the original Street Fighter. So that was his way to sort of compete with that. That's kind of one of the reasons why in the Fatal Fury there's only three playable characters. Terry Bogart, Andy Bogart, and

Joe Higashi. Because it's going back to more of the like you're just playing as Ryu style. Yeah. Oh, and they were all kind of, they all had their different type of moves, but one of the main gimmicks behind that was that two players could play at once against the C-P queue character, which didn't work in practice at all, but it was just something that set it

apart from at that point, the Street Fighter 2. Now, I know, Kurt, you just said that it's like it probably wasn't intended as a Street Fighter 2 knockoff, but I always think of S&K in this period, like maybe that period or shortly thereafter as kind of like specializing in like boutique knockoffs for their own hardware. And by boutique knockoffs, I mean, they're technically like, this is what they're going for, This is the trend, but we're going to do it our way, and we're going to make it look really good on our hardware, and it's going to be the thing. So they've got, you know, their fighting games are, of course, like, you know, they've got characters in all of these games that are basically just street fighter characters. And I could probably think of another example of fight, written it down.

That gets into art of fighting, which is kind of a legendary rip-off. Well, after Fatal Fury, Fatal Fury 2 was definitely more of competing directly with Street Fighter 2, because, all the characters had different word locations, even though it didn't really make any sense in the context of the story. And I forget when it came out, but the other main series they brought was Art of Fighting. The main gimmick of that was the gigantic characters

and the scaling, which became representative of a lot of NeoGeo. And that was where they introduced the idea of, like, layers, sort of, like, you know, the front layer, the back layer. Yeah. That was fatal fury. Oh, was that? Yeah, that had that too.

There's actually three layers that you could sort of shift between. And that was one of those things that, again, didn't really work all the much. Like later games actually kind of got rid of that. Like Virtual Fighter, I think, was the first to make that work, and it made more sense with 3D because, you know, the idea of sidestepping aside from a projectile.

Like, I get what they were going for with these. But I've played, you know, the older, I guess it was Fatal Fury that tried that. I was just like, it just, it doesn't quite communicate in 2D, and it's a little overly complicated. I think if they had just two layers, it might have worked better. But having the three layers, It just, it's really frustrating. Like, I can't use it to good effect, but the CPU sure can.

Yeah, it's a... In the earlier games, it was a pain because you didn't just, like, shift between them, but you actually, like, jumped between them and people, like, face each other, and you could sort of deliver... You could hit each other as you jumped past each other. But it felt like it ruined the flow of the game, I thought a little bit. And by the time of the later ones, like, this sort of rebooted it as a real Bail Fury series, which was a little bit more, like, Street Fighter Alpha, like, a little cartoonish.

And by the time they got to Garrow, Mark of the Wolves, all of that was gone. That's like way. Yeah, that's like, well, it's competing with Street Fighter 3, so that was much later down the line. So with King of Fighters, I guess, like, that was apparently not supposed to be a, like, a crossover deliberately, but there was just an idea of like, let's just take, we've got all these characters. Let's like put them in a, do you know how they came up with that idea? They had started doing crossovers at some point. I think it was Fado Fury special that as a secret character had Ryo Sakazaki. from art of fighting

and then Art of Fighting 2 they had Geese Howard but like art of fighting and fail for here even though

they take place in the same canon they're actually different timelines like the art of fighting games take place in the 80s so when they had

Geese Howard and he's like young and has long hair instead of having the like the buff and the Hakama classic geese yeah

so at some point they decided that to combine these series although weirdly enough like they're entirely different canons.

That's where it starts getting confusing, because they both focus on the city of Southtown, which Geese Howard had, I think, killed Terry Bogard's father, and then there was a whole big revenge thing of that. And he technically ended up dying at the end of the first fail fury. Like, if you watch the intro to get a Mark of the Wolves, this was really dramatic scene where they're fighting at the top of Geese Tower, I think it's called, and Terry Bogart knocks him off. That Howard Tower.

And Terry grabs him. And Geese is like, I'm not going to be at your mercy and just lets himself go and plummet to the ground. So for a while, they were operating under the premise that Geese Howard had died in this continuity. They brought him back. They were like, oh, he felt. He survived. But in certain games, he's there as like an angel or a zombie or just whatever weird context that they could do. But anyway, going to the King of Fighter's thing, they aged up the art of fighting characters to match where the fatal fury ones were.

And they also, Geese Howard is still alive in this timeline, which is like, oh, ultimately, it sounds unimportant, but, like, one of the big things about King of Fighters is just how they build up all these characters and the weird role of relationships they have and how they, like, actually pay attention to it in the context of these games, which is really kind of bizarre. How did they do that early on when the games are kind of, like, didn't have as much? like right now when you play like say King of Fighters 13 there's like before every match there's like a nice little like repartee between the characters and you get an idea of like how the characters relate to each other that way

but in the first ones right it was just kind of the win quotes and like a couple ending scenes and it was the win quotes and like every and certain games they would have little pre-fight animations but they didn't really have much to them they're very short and they didn't have any text to them either like they would just speak

in Japanese so a lot of that was lost in the English-speaking audience because there is so much King of Fighters tie in merchandise. Like if you look at the Japanese Wikipedia article, there's drama CDs, there's comics, there's light novels. Weirdly, there wasn't an anime until much later. Like, they had the Fatal Fury and Artifighting enemies. But a lot of that was flesh out with supplementary material, which, of course, we never got and may not have cared about anyway. Besides my, like, were there breakout characters? Kyokuzanagi, which is one of the original characters that they created for King of Fighters,

and his rival, I always thought was a really stupid character design. Like, before I got into King of Fighters. That's interesting you say that. Go ahead. We used to go to Chinatown a lot because my college was pretty close to it in New York City. And they had, I like the bootleg poster section. You get like five posters for $10. And they had all sorts of different things.

And I guess they really played up those two characters aiming them towards the Yawoi fangrim. girls, which was very strange. Yeah, Yori was always kind of sort of the sort of key example of the stylistic approach that S&K took with its characters. I mean, Street Fighter is a pretty motley rabble. You've got the dudes and the geese,

and then you've got, you know, Chunli who's wearing something that's kind of like a traditional Chinese dress but sort of modified for combat. And, you know, Sagat is a Muay Thai kickboxer. And so everyone's kind of, like, sort of real martial arts. And then it starts to get a little weirder as you get into, like, Street Fighter Alpha. Yeah. But, yeah, King of Fighters and Art of Fighting, it's pretty much just like dudes and street clothes.

And the street clothes start to become more stylish and more fashionable. And you start to get more like, no one's actually going to fight in an outfit where their legs are bound together with like a bit. Bandana or something. Yeah, that's Yori. But they, you know, it definitely helped the S&K games really stand apart, I think, from all the other competitors because you either had like sort of the, like, elaborate fighting style, you know, real world martial arts outfits of Street Fighter or just like, what the hell are these people even, like, these bizarre characters, these like arcane suits of armor and stuff like that of the lesser series. But then you had, you know, like, it almost feels like S&K was designing these games for cosplayers. Like, these are cool-looking characters who you want to go dressed as for Tokyo Game Show or ComaKet. I can definitely sort of see that.

And they got more bizarre as they went along. At some point, they got, this is one character artist, Falcun, who I think was kind of one of those wannabe fashion designers. But he was actually one of the main designers for the 3D spin-off, Maxx. impact and there was a whole lot of alternate costumes that he had designed and they're they're really weird like he actually created like a self-insert character that was a girl a girl a girl yeah a gorilla no girl okay i forget her name i think she was korean or something like that huh interesting um but going back to the basis of king of fighters in addition to bringing together art of art of art of fighting and feal fury they also brought in the two characters from the akari warriors series ralph and clark and then uh from Psych, well, yeah, Psycho Soldier. Athena and Kensu. And Athena was actually from the previous game, Athena, like the goddess. But she had been recast as a Japanese pop idol.

Right. And Kenzu had been around because he showed up in Crystallus. He was like a minor character. So he had been around before that because that was an Athena and Cicist. Okay, was he? Both Athena and. Is he like the prince, the captured prince who has to be rescued by Athena? Actually, yeah.

Was he? I know he's a second player in Psycho Soldier. Because he's a, I don't know if he's in the original Athena. I don't think he is. I think he comes from Psycho Soldier. But it's not really, you don't need to understand any of this to play. Like, I don't know how any of that factors into the. Yeah, yeah, none at all.

They change what Athena is, like, they frequently, now that they can, now that they're not using the same sprites over and over. But like she was, apparently they really wanted her in like a schoolgirl uniform for a while. And S&K refused to do it because they thought it would. it would hurt the game's, like, appeal in the United States, which is, like, you've got, like, 90 characters in this game. Like, they'll just pick the one they like. Right. And I assume they saw Sakara from Street Fighter Alpha and were like, oh, okay, I guess it doesn't work. I assume the Akari warriors don't fight with machine guns?

No, they have rapid fire. Like, one of the guys can, like, punch sort of like a fist on North Star character to make them explode. One of the ones that they're on. A special Micronix attack that makes the frame rate chug between 20 per second. Oh, there was actually a, oh, this is a tangent. the Neo Geo Battle Colosseum game. I think she, one of the main characters had attacked, like, a glitch something. I may have dreamed that.

I can't remember. The Battle of Colosseum games were weird, so I would totally believe it. I mean, you've got, like, the Metal Slug aliens and stuff. Yeah, that's when, like, the King of Fighters game sort of kept it really localized in the series that they were taking from. Like, a samurai showdown was one of their other big characters, but they're like, we can't feature any of these samurai's because that was too ridiculous. Except for King of Fighters 14, they're just like, screw it, knock a rooos in. Was that a continuity thing because Samurai Showdown is an early 20th century game or something like that? It's much earlier.

Yeah. It's like, yeah, it's set way before King of Fighters. So, yeah, I think despite the retconning involved with Geese, there was, like, story is actually super important to the King of Fighter series. It's the most fascinating thing about the series to me. It's just like how elaborate and arcane the story has become. So I can see where they would be like, no, we got to keep it. You know, you can't, you can't bring. a 19th century samurai

into South Town That's crazy. Yeah, yeah. But they have like a magical, like we have Athena's like has magic powers for some reason. And, um, Well, she's a psycho soldier. She's a psycho.

So like time travel shouldn't really be beyond the realm of possibility. I think it's has, or they could have had like a relative of like so and so. I mean, I feel like they actually had the like some sort of contrivance to get the, the samurai showdown characters. built in there as soon as they opened up the Orochi saga. Because

you have basically like the whole story for three games built around the idea of a character who's like the modern day manifestation of the Yamata no Orochi, the like the legendary eight-headed serpent who is defeated with the three mythical treasures of Japan. So

why not just like have you know Ukio or someone fall forward in time? It's fine guys. But okay sure. Yeah. They They tried to keep it at least a little constrained to reality, reality quote unquote, in the mainline King of Fighter games for most of the time. It's weird to look at the King of Fighter games as, uh, as kind of, they're oddly grounded in a way that Street Fighter just never was post-Street Fighter 2. Like in Street Fighter 2, you've got like, you know, the guy does yoga and he's got a yoga fighting style.

And because yoga people are flexible, he can stretch his arms all the way across the screen. they just don't do stuff like that in King of fighters like there are some like projectile attacks like you know Keo has his fire and Yori has his other fire I guess purple fire which he loses at one point I think yeah there's some version of the game where he

loses his powers and doesn't have those attacks and then he his legs are still tied together though right yeah that's the important part he's got to his handicap yeah so and but like it sticks very close to like rather than having all these like fanciful styles like it is more like there are like multiple Taekwondo characters, multiple Muay Thai fighters, multiple, you know, karate fighters and stuff like that. And they're like, some of them are like they invent like dojos that they come from. And there's the, what's that guy's name, Mr. Karatey. Oh, yeah, that's the father of the Sakazaki's yo and Yuri. I'll pretend like I. Yeah. Well, he's also called Mr. Karate. He was one of the bosses from Art of Fighting and he has the Tengu mask. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And he has some sort of connection to Dan Hebeki in the crossover games, right?

Yeah, because Dan Hibiki from Street Fighter is a parody of both Riosakazaki and Robert Garcia. Like, they just kind of meshed the two characters together and gave him a purple key to sort of make fun of them. And I think in Marvel versus Street Fighter, like the ending kind of parodies one of those games. Yes, that's right. That's right. Yeah, so we kind of wandered off track here a little bit, but it's really hard to stay focused. Yeah, it is a sprawling series. So you mentioned Garo, Mark of the Wolves.

That was one of the later games. That was like when that came out on Dreamcast at the very end, it was like, I can't believe I have a game system at home with graphics, 2D graphics, this beautiful. It was amazing looking. How does that fit into King of Fighters, though? I mean, there's art of fighting and Fatal Fury and like the Battle Coliseum and the crossovers and King of Fighters, but then there's other stuff like that. It's still, that one is still operating on one of the Fatal Fury timelines, so it's technically separate. But by the time King of Fighters 11 came out, they finally decided to start integrating characters from that game to it. Like Terry Bogart gets his outfit from that game where he's in the bomber jacket and the longer hair.

Megaro is about, like, a major character is Geese Howard's son, right? Yeah, like, it goes off the premise that Geese Howard died, and Terry Bogart is all guilt-stricken, and he finds Geese Howard's orphaned son. So he raises him. And it takes place like 10 years where he's an angsty teenager. And Rock has the abilities of both Terry and his father. And because of the time skip, a lot of the characters in Mark of the Wolves are either trainees or sons of the characters from Fiel Furi. Because the only returning character, I think, is Terry. So you have one of the characters, Kushnud Butt, who they've renamed.

He has a different name in Japan. Why on earth would they do that? He's basically one of the Kikugan guys like Yuri and Vyo. And one of the characters is, I think, sort of like my, or sort of like Andy, Hokko Tomarro, I can't remember. Would he be their progeny? Yeah, something like that, because he's missing. And there's two sons of Kim Caff Wan. There's the Goody Two Shoes and then the Rebel.

And they both have, like, basically his style, but slightly different. And he's a Korean character, right? Yeah, he's a Korean Taekwondo fighter from Fatal Fury. And since they kind of kept these separate for whatever reason, they've just, for a long time, walled off. Garo from King of Fighters until King of Fighters 11 when they brought in Oh, what's her name? It's the girl with the, I don't know, oh, whatever. They brought in, I can't remember her name.

There are 5,000 characters. Yeah. Hokuto, no, it's not Hokoto. She starts with Nate. Anyway, they brand Tizok, which is the Hawk guy wrestler. Yeah, he's pretty cool. Gato and who else do they bring in? Bijonet, which is like my favorite character from that game,

Is she a pirate or something? Yeah, she's a pirate lady. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's really cool. I know a lot of these characters, not from the King of Fighters games, but from the Neo Geo Pocket spinoffs, especially like Gals fighters

and matched the Millennium, because those were like, those played so well and they were a lot more, to me, accessible than some of the, like, they didn't expect you to be quite as immersed in the systems as the Neo Geo games.

They were easy to play because they need to be portable. And the Neo Geo Pocket Collar had a really good, like, clicky joystick for that sort of stuff that works uncannily well. It's kind of hard to explore a series because it goes off in so many different directions. And I say this before we've done the Dragon Slayer thing.

But it might be easier to maybe talk about, like, focus on some of the more interesting characters or like some of the more interesting changes between the games. Actually, maybe we could talk a little bit about some of the mechanics. Like what makes King of Fighters distinct from like a Street Fighter series? is that's the part that I have the hardest time wrapping my heads around, my head, I just have one, my head around because it's like I, you know, I pick up a King of Fighter's game and they look and even kind of control like Street Fighter, but nothing works the way I expect it to. And it's really difficult for me to kind of get a feel for what this series wants for me. And I know like there's the, you know, the team element and combos work differently. And of course, S&K boss has become like a derog obligatory cliche for a ridiculously difficult final boss. Yeah. So I don't know if you guys could offer some insights into that, into that, but then maybe we could circle back to talk some more about the characters.

But I do think that's an important aspect of the series. It is, but I probably am not qualified to really get into that. I'm not like a super fighting game. Lack of qualifications is never disqualified. Anyone from talking about things on retronauts. Well, I mean, the thing about the I think there's different things to appreciate about King of Fighters. and one of them might be the mechanics. I have a feeling that a lot of the feel of playing a King of Fighters game

compared to playing a Street Fighter game is really influenced by the fact that it was on the same hardware for, like, how many years? About a decade, yeah. So it's on the same hardware, and it just keeps coming out. And the sprites don't change from 96 onward until... Everyone is more again. Yeah. King Fighter's 12 was when they finally redid everybody.

They try and, like, cheat it by, like, shading the sprites differently using, like, you know, just, but it all, it, they're the same sprites. And, um, but, uh, I do have to say that S&K did amazing work at like just pulling out details and, and, you know, the illusion of abilities with the NeoGeo hardware that you never would have thought possible. Like, they, they got some life out of that system. They, I mean, it definitely. And that's like, so one of the ways to appreciate King of Fighters, even if you're not a super hardcore and of, fighting games would just be like to appreciate the quality of the sprite artwork and how like they could get just like incrementally better animations is also a big deal and uh so there's that aspect to it yeah as the car capacity grew then you started to see elaborate background

animations and like basically it's almost like they would you know take video stills and digitize those oh yeah that was their uh their office was in osaka i believe um by the esaka train station so I think in almost every entry there's like a battle that takes place from a different angle of that train station at least for a number of years. There's I lost my train

of thought. I'm thinking about trains. I'm thinking about a socket. There's, so I wonder whether like some of the way it feels different than Street Fighter has to do with like the sprites are kind of, they're on the smaller side. I think because they have so many characters, they're a little bit smaller and the animation isn't quite as much compared to Garamark, the Wolf Blitzh, which is, like, along with Street Fighter

too, one of, like, the high marks of fighting game, Sprite animation. So it feels a little bit, I feel a little bit stiffer than something like Street Fighter. They really did, yeah. Yeah, and also, I think the, just kind of the art style and some of the character design specifically, like the clothes they're wearing, I think that kind of lends to that, that stiffer feel. I don't know how to explain it, but. Yeah, it's hard to take the language about the outfit, you know, it seems very starched, I guess.

for lack of, like, high collar and, like, stiff pants. So, yeah, everyone does seem a little bit, I wouldn't say jerky, just a little siffer, but, but not necessarily in a bad way. It just, like, it seems very deliberate and it's universal. Yeah, you're not seeing, like, a lot of, like, the intricate animations of, like, clothes kind of flapping around. Now, other things, except for the mind. Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, but what's interesting is you really want to compare, like, where the sprite art was. Like, you can look at S&K or Capcom v.S and K2, where they had to read, Capcom would redraw the sprites. And the first time I played it, I was like, wow, I didn't realize the King of Fighters really was ripping off the Capcom style. Oh, no, wait, they drew him. So, like that. And then there's S&K made SVC chaos, where they redrew street fighter characters, and they're kind of like more like Neo-Geo. They put it like a very distinct type of dithering, shading maybe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's a more limited color palette. They really ran into serious memory limitations as that series progressed. You can tell because in the very first one, in King of Fighters 94, every stage has this cool, like, intro animation where it's like, you know, you're going past like a wall or like doors are opening or something, gates closing or every single one of them. And as they go on, that happens less and less. The final stages usually have something cool.

like one of the final stages is like on an aircraft carrier or something like that and like an inside like some kind of it's like it's like the inside of a battleship like a like the bridge of a battleship but it's got like all this like like rich guy like gold that you know i would say trumpesque decoration to it and it's it's really it's little things like that that i think make it stand out um well since they were making a new game every year like the core of it kind of stayed the same they're always characters that you usually count on reappearing. But they also changed some of the baseline mechanics as it went along a little bit, especially starting in 99, where they looked at, I think Marvel v. Capcom was probably at that time. They borrowed what they called strikers, where you still have three characters, and you'd pick a fourth one who you could do a quick command, and then they'd come out and do an attack. And they really ramp that up in King of Fighters 2000, where there's almost, there's a ton of

strikers that they just grabbed from different other SNK games. Like, they really brought the S&K fan service up to that one. They brought in characters from Robot Army. They brought in, like, a discarded design for kill before he was a real thing. Just so much bizarre stuff that they brought in just for fun. Yeah, the team element is something that really sort of stands out in King of Fighters. And that started with the first one, right? But you had like a preset team.

You couldn't choose individual characters and build your own team. You had to just like go with a trio that they gave you. They were arbitrarily assigned to weird countries too. Yeah, at the time. I mean, when they still... Was that, like, a Street Fighter 2 thing? Like, well, Thailand. Yeah.

It's like Mexico. And then it's like, who's in Mexico? I don't think they're... Oh, it's like Brazil is the Ikari Warriors. I'm like, Ralph and Clark, okay. I guess they were fighting through the jungles of Brazil. I don't really want to know where Ralph and Clark were up to you down there. There's some like Soldier of Fortune magazine type stuff going on there.

But they're always divided into teams in all the King of Fighters games of three of them. And they actually change in the entries about. who was paired up with which character. And then King of Fighters' 1984, they need to be, you always pick those three characters. And later ones, you can mix mats, but if you cared about the storyline, then you had to play as a team, because they were the ones that would give unique endings. So you had to have, like, the sort of canonical characters for the proper interactions. Otherwise, it was just like you're just fighting.

Yeah, pretty much. You would just get a generic ending. What kind of, like, beyond that first game, what sort of determined what characters were together? Or was it just like story bonds or fighting styles or family connections or... There was always an Akari team where they had Ralph Clark and a third character. Like it started off with Haidern, which is some generic army commander and then Leona and the later ones. There was the Fight of Fury team where they kept together at Terry Andy and Joe Higashi.

98, I think, introduced a female team where they had My, King, and Yuri probably. There was an art of fighting team where they typically had Yo, Roe, Robert and Yuri. Wasn't one of them, like, as the series progressed, like, one of them was, like, the mature ladies team. And it was, like, all the characters that had been allowed to age a little bit, all the, all the women. There are two characters named vice and mature.

But I think it was, like, it was some of them, and then King. And because King is, King has been allowed to, like, kind of, like, gracefully intermital. Like, she's still, like, can, you know. But she's, like, the one he wears, like, a suit, you know? Right. And she's, like, supposed to be a moister. Yeah. So by old, you mean they're 28?

Yes. Yeah. That's what I mean. I thought so. Yeah, actually, you know, we keep kind of dinging on Mai because of the sort of overly elaborate fan service that they've given her. But for the most part, I feel like the series has done a really commendable job of bringing in female characters and making them diverse, making them interesting and unique and not necessarily playing them up for sex. appeal like king starts out and you know she's very androgynous short hair wears like slacks and a dress white shirt and a vest over top of it and initially is kind of presented as a male character and then surprise it's a samus twist she's a she's a girl yeah some back in art of fighting because it looked like a male character and then I think it was either the first and the second game or like if you did a certain move and even then their clothes would kind of fly off so not exactly the most yeah her her Her origin isn't exactly the best.

They're like, a bra. Oh, my God. But, Jeremy, I think your point is well taken. Like, my really is, even now where they've got, you know, they have much more, they can do much more with, like, the resolution and stuff. Now they've moved full 3D, of course. But they, my is the exception. Like most of the, most of the women characters are really not. But then again, my kind of takes up all the room for that, even from the first appearance, right?

she is literally hunched over with her cleavage, like, facing directly to the player at all, like, at her neutral stance. And it's just like a pendulum. Yeah, but it's notic. But then you have, you know, characters like Yuri, who's, like, a very young, very athletic-looking, probably like a teenager. Yeah. But she's just wearing, like, a short-sleeve ghee and, you know, sweatbands and there's no real sex appeal to her. And then you have Athena who, you know, she's got the schoolgirl thing. sometimes, but then sometimes she's got like the very like flowery pop idol thing.

Yeah. Occasionally in some of the, I guess the spin-offs, she's been like in her original, you know, Psycho Soldier Athena. They brought in a S&K versus Capcom. She's in her bikini armor from the original Athena game. But other than that, she's pretty modestly closed. Even then there's a, like, Kasumi. She's, I don't know exactly what she has some sort of karate master uniform.

There's a lot of those. Yeah, I know. But this is very specific. Right. And then there's WIP who, look. Like, wears a very starchy military uniform. Yeah. And is, uh, she's, she's paired with the Akari characters, right?

Or is a metal slunk characters? She isn't from that game, but I think she's paired with. She's paired with them, yeah. Uh, there's Hanako who's supposed to be a sumo wrestler, even though she's like an 18-year-old girl. Does she actually look like a sumo wrestler? Oh, no. She's, like, skinny. She's pretty skinny.

But she has all the powers of a sumo wrestler. Sure. Why not? Um, and then there's, there's, uh, as we said, like, there's mature who is, like, she's like a reformed bad guy? I can't. She was paired with Eori. They're like part of the villain team and they were killed in 97, which is why they only make sporadic appearances.

Because the structure of the King of Frater's game is that 94 doesn't really have much of a story. 95, 96, and 97 are part of the Erochi Arc. 98 is a dream match where they take in most of the characters in the previous game, regardless about whether they're dead or not. Yeah, 99, 2000, 2001. That does another character arc with... Isn't that the Nests saga? The Ness saga with K-Dash and Kula and clones of... Yeah, see, that's where the story starts to get like...

Like I said before the episode started to know, sometimes you look at Street Fighter and you're like, this story is pretty goofy, but then you look at King of Fighters and you're like, man, Capcom, they're babies. They have no idea. They don't even know what they're doing. And that's another instance where I think King of Fighters, like their women characters have a chance

because there is some characterization as the... that they have, like, it's not just like this character's in love with that character. It's like, this is so-and-so's daughter. Yeah. Right. Like, so-and-so is like they're related or they have like, you know, they, I don't know, I'm just making this up, like, they own a restaurant together and, you know, it's like, or whatever. Like, there's some, there are, there's, there's a background there that gives them a level of,

it gives all the characters, frankly, like a level of, like, of humanity that's kind of weird, considering that. And it helps you distinguish them because, to be honest, like, as much, like, as much, As much as I love the series, like, there's, to me, it still looks like there's jacket guy. There's jacket guy. There's the three, like, karate key guys. There's, you know, it's because you don't have that fanciful street fighter style where there's like, by now, like, what do we have? Like, there's like the robot mask trench coat guy. There's the. There's, you know, like the whole Urian thing where he's like half. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I even know what he's about. Yeah. And then. like Charlie came back from the dead as like a Frankenstein character, so like a zombie or something. So yeah, they've pretty much gone off the rails with that one. But the King of Fighter's storyline gets weird and more like of a grounded sci-fi sort of way, if that makes sense, where they're like, you know, the big storyline with the nests was that they were trying to clone Kyo.

I don't know why Kio is so special, but they made like a thousand clones of them. And then there's K Prime and Chrysalid and Zero. And, like, all these characters are based on Kyo. And it's like all this cloning saga. It's like they said, you know, that Spider-Man thing with the clones? That was really, really good. We should do that, too. They were wrong.

Biggest criticism of fighting game expansion characters is they're just like the other ones. Let's just, like, dig our fingers right into that. Mortal Kombat things that can do clones. Just you wait, guys. Yeah. Street Fighter was also doing that at the same time, Alpha, and all of those. They brought into some sort of M-bites and Psychopower. M. Bison, there's like the 12 girls' name for the months of the year, and all of them are, like, female clone host bodies for Bim Bison.

Okay, guys. Whatever. King of Fires is the only fighting game series where I feel like I actually have an idea of what the story is, even though my idea is more about how these characters relate to each other. But that's more interesting than, it always has been, than Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter. But that's actually something that I think makes the series commendable is that the story can work on multiple levels. You can care about the sort of like ongoing minor soap opera between the recurring characters, or you can be like into the overall saga and try to like, you know, know the canon. Or you can just, you know, play it as a fighting game and mix and match your teams.

Yeah. So do we want to like give like a current, like what do you think is the ultimate king of the king of the king of fighters? My favorite is 11. because around 2003 was they start pattering itself more after the Marvel versus games and it's just much faster pace game and they allow tag teaming

which I mean my attention span is pretty low when it comes to fighting games so if I'm just like get a board of a character I could just switch out immediately and have another one instead of having to lose and that one was a little bit like every time they make a new mechanic it's a little bit unrefined but 11

they really like is the best version of that And also because they brought in the Garrow, Mark the Wolves characters, and they also brought in other characters from really obscure SNK games. Like, two of the characters actually come from the Kazuna Encounter. Right, which is mostly known because it's so expensive for the European version. Yeah, they made like 10 copies. Yeah, so it's like an infamous game.

And that was a sequel to a game called Savage Rane. And Savage Rane wasn't particularly good. But Kazuna Encounter, it had a lot of weapon-based fighting and also had a tag-based system. So they brought in the boomerang guy from that game, Hayate. And there's a guy in like a crow mask named Jazu. So they had to integrate these weapon-based characters with more of a melee traditional fighting game. Yeah, they had sort of done that before with whip because she has a whip. I can't remember if many of the other characters had weapons.

Well, I mean, in SVC Chaos, they bring in quite a few Samurai Showdown characters and they're just like slashing away. And that's S&K versus Capcom versus S&C? Yeah, yeah. And then NeoGeo Battle Coliseum brings in like Power Morrow from Tamara Showdown. I am a fraud. That's okay.

Those three games all kind of run together in my mind. And all of them are like super wacky takes on, increasingly wacky takes actually on the concept. I mean, once you get zero from Mega Man in there, it's just like, okay, whatever. I'm sure we'll have an article about this, but how are these available now? I know there's a few on the Switch, but again, there's so many of them.

I'm not sure which ones are... A lot of them are available not only on Switch, but also on PS4. The Arcade Classic Archives is like... It started on PS4, I think, or maybe PS3, and then has expanded to Switch. Can the Wii Virtual Console have a ton of these two? Yes, you can get a bunch of them on Wii Virtual Console. Every time they do it, they do it annoying thing where they start with King of Fighter's 94, which, I mean, that didn't even get a port when it came out. Nobody likes that game.

but there are two types of... Well, there's all kinds of different Neo Geo ports based off of who actually made them. So you have the arcade classics archives, which are done by Hamster, I'm pretty sure. I've never actually bought any of them, those are supposed to be pretty good. Yeah, they're good.

I don't know about Bob, but I picked up a bunch of them to kind of study for this episode. And that was how I reminded myself that, oh, yeah, I'm no good at these. They have so many weird games on the PS4. But then you have the ones done by Code Mystics, which I think they did Metal Slug 3,

Last Blade, Garamark the Wolves, Samurai show in a special five, I think, is one they did. Then you have the ones that are the PS2 classics, because they've released almost all of these on PS2 compilation discs. And they released those. Those were the ones that came out as like the Nests saga, the Orochi saga. They came out specifically designated as like, here's the trilogy of these fighting games. Yeah. And what's really weird is to be, there was, even in the context of the PlayStation 2, there were two different releases in territories

because the one in Japan is different from the one they released in America because I don't know who developed the Japanese versions of them but the American ones were done by this company in Texas they were I think terminal reality which is I want to say the company that also made blood rain

but they were doing emulation work at that time so they had also done the metal slug anthology and generally those games the emulation was not as good as the stuff that whatever comes coming out of the Japanese side. Like, they tended to, the Japanese ones, put in a little bit more effort as to integrating

arranged soundtracks, which is another really big draw of the King of Fighter series, whereas the other ones were just, here's a ROM of the game, it's working. But at the PS4, they're basically the PS2 games, and I feel the emulation of those is a little bit weird because it's a PS4 emulating a PS2, which is emulating a NeoGeo game, running on an HDTV that already has, like, it just adds to the, lag, and that depends on the quality of the emulation to begin with. Like, I know the metal slug anthology, at least the

first one on there, just has a lot of lag in that particular version that's almost unplayable. And they have different display options too. Like, I was playing the 80K spirits on the PS4 yesterday, and some of them had display options that gives you, like, the really crisp look, and

some of them had 240P support, but these ones don't. Again, certain ones do, certain ones don't. ADK spirits doesn't. And just looks really muddy compared to the ones that like code mystics did where they you know put a lot effort into making it look good yeah the ACA games are a little weird because you can't as far as I can tell you can't get like crisp integer pixel scaling but you can put scan lines on it so when you add the scan lines then it's soft but it has scan lines so it does kind of look like you know

what you would actually see on an arcade monitor but it is a little like where's where's the where's the you know like the true pixel scaling resolution That's why I love with the M2 stuff where you could choose if you want to do one by one or you try to put it in the correct four by three proportions you want to add scan lines like they just went crazy about the sort of

things that they didn't have offered. Well the ACA lets you do like you can change the size proportionally like 100% all the way up to like 200% one step at a time but you still can't you know if you do it like 100%

you're still not getting like hard pixel edges So it has that soft filtered look, which some people like, I'm not a big fan of. But, you know, like, it's a pretty minor issue. Otherwise, the options are pretty good. You can get, like, you can play the American version, the Japanese version. There's a caravan mode for, like, competition. They have a ton of options. So just because I'm griping about the graphics, like, that's kind of stupid.

Like, they're really well made. And, like, if you are wanting to play these games, they're a little spindy at eight bucks a piece. but if there is a specific game that you really like, then this is a, it's a really good way to play them. Just like one game from like the classic NeoGeo part of the series that you would recommend above the others. 98 is the one that everybody always points to as a favorite because that's one of the dream matches.

But then again, both King of Fighters 98 and 2002 were remade later as unlimited match and ultimate match. And those are pretty well regarded too, right? Yeah, everybody loves those because that's the one where they bring in like all of the characters. is heavy d back heavy d was already in king of fighters 98 oh yeah that's right i can't remember

they probably they had a character in king of fighters 94 that was based off of heavy d the rapper i was going to make a joke but it turns out to be true yes that's exactly i think his name was what's his actual name it's not really heavy d i don't know but has an exclamation point in his name yes it does that's the important part okay yeah so here's king of fighters 98

it's got high score mode japanese mode english mode caravan mode and you can do various options that comes recommended I cannot come I cannot connect to the internet in this hotel but yeah there's

like it they did a good job with these these ports for PS4 and switch you can actually get King of Fighters 98 in 2002 on Steam also oh yeah and the at least the

Steam 1 doesn't have quite as many features as the PS2 version of 98 but it's still pretty good. I mean, you're missing, like, maybe the arranged music, and I can't remember if it has it, and some of the 3D backgrounds that they decide to put in, but that's no big loss. Yeah.

And King of Fighters 13, I think, is... 13 is on there. It's the last one that's going to have Sprite art because it's, but it's, you know, it's not quite like, like Arc System Works resolution, right? I don't know what resolution it is. Like, they're kind of working on, like,

240P old arcade monitor, and then, uh, I think there may be like 480-ish. like SBGA resolution. It's not quite blaze blue or blast blue. How are you supposed to say that? Is it blaz blue? I do not know.

I think you don't pronounce the Z. That's what I heard. Blah blue. Blah blue. Somebody was upended about that on a podcast. I'm going to look that up. The pronunciation police. Yes.

See, I forget those things immediately on purpose. Yeah, so, um, yep, brave brew in Japanese. What? Play blue, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Look, it's, it's, uh... Ballblazer. Yeah. So we should, we should wrap this up. It's getting a little. little long for a micro episode, but any final thoughts on King of Fighters? It's like the series fascinates me, but I am incapable of playing it effectively. So it's kind of one of those like

things that is a little out of reach. And I grasp for it and it pulls itself away from my my delicate fingers. You don't need to play it competitively. I've never even just the sort of I can't even play. I can't even play competently single player. But it's just something to get to get into the lore of. And the music was another thing that actually, ease me into the series because each of the teams has different, like themes to it. Kios is always called Esaka, like the train station.

It's always a hard rock theme. Eori's is always saxophone-based. There's usually a hard rock theme for the Korean guys. So they sort of keep that consistent thermosum, except for the games of the bad soundtracks like 2001. You mentioned a competitive scene.

Is that, are these games played in the high-level video game fighting tournaments? I don't remember seeing them, I don't think so. I don't know if there's anything they take seriously. King of Fighters 14, they came out last year, and I don't know if that was in Evo. I don't really follow the scene. I haven't heard. My impression of 14 is that it's gotten kind of a lukewarm reception, but that might just be because it's no longer sprite art.

It's ugly as hell, but they have so many new characters in that game because when they had to redraw everybody, they had like a tiny roster. Yeah. And the fact that they look kind of crappy makes up for the fact that there's so many of them. Although just this week, I think there's a CG anime that just started King of Fighters' legacy. And apparently that is real bad-looking. Every CG anime is bad-looking. But this one is, like, worse character mortals than even King of Fighters 14. I have to see if it's worse than Berserk, because that's pretty bad.

Yeah. I think it's okay to appreciate King of Fighters on a purely aesthetic level. I think that is, especially the classic games because you're seeing how much they could do with very, very little. And that's always the appeal of, like, NeoGeo games. And although it didn't get as like, it's not like Garu or something like that, you know, they were going for something. And it really, it didn't strike the same chord here in North America, but you can kind of appreciate it as this kind of beautiful little artifact. And it was an annualized fighting game series. Like, how often does that happen?

And they change more than like, between Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter Alpha 2, like, they had new backgrounds and stuff. But they really shook up things a little bit more with each entry because they were always like slightly changed. in the mechanics, swapping in and out characters. Especially around 99, they sort of took a different style to them, both with the character designs and just the general atmosphere is kind of like a little edgier and more modern, more electronic. Well, I mean, King of Fighters is on 14. Street Fighter is on 5.

Yeah. Well, that's not counting all the alphas and zeros and X's, yeah. EX, yeah. But still, still. Yeah. I mean, those were all kind of dead ends in a sense. They're all canon. Every last one of them.

Somehow. Somehow. And Bob, any final thoughts for yourself? You've been very kind of this episode. I just feel like a total fraud. And I was cramming for this subject, but it is hard to get into if you're really new to it. Because, again, I confuse all of these S&K fighting games. And I know there's good stuff to them, but it just like, just this volume of stuff hitting you.

And I feel like I need to dip into maybe like 98 to see what I miss. Because, again, like, by the time I could access these games regularly, I had stopped playing fighting games because I sucked at them. So I was just like, well, that's not for me and I'll just forget about it. But now I'm learning that there's like a lot to these things. Yeah, I mean, I followed this series somewhat closely in the late 90s just because I was like, no damn it. I'm going to keep 2D games alive in my heart. So that was one of this few series that was kind of like, you know, big and still in 2D with sprites.

But I just like I never could get into it. And going back to it now, I'm like, man, there's so much to this series. like this whole nests things and the whole ash crimson thing we didn't even mention him it's just like it's okay there's so much they forgot him and 14 and it was but um the first game actually played in the series was 98 called 99 in the dream cast and i was just it's very overwhelming get this character selection screen with like 40 different people who are all of these people why do i have to select some of them how do any of these play uh like i was only got into it because one of my friends in college was huge into S&K stuff.

Chris Raza, who writes for Hardcore Gaming One-to-One every once in a while. And he sort of helped introduce me to the lore of all this. Like, it's easier to be like, oh, that guy did this. This one is a lost character from something other, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's wild nights at college. Yeah. Wild college years. Yeah, I mean, I still play occasionally more versus Capcom, you know, just for fun.

And I can recognize at least 80% of those characters on the screen, even though there's a hundred little squares. It's like, oh, I know who that guy is and who that guy is. And that guy's probably from a comic I never read. But with Art of Fighting, I'm just like, where's the baseball hat guy? Where's the, oh, wait, that's, never mind. Which one? Yeah. Rebel Schools is a baseball hat guy.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, I guess to sum it up, like, if you see one of these, you'll see a character selection screen that's massive, and that kind of feels like the game's telling you, go away, you know, but it's not, you know, just try it out. And nobody's really that good at any of them anymore because it's not, you know, it's like, just. give it a shot. All right.

Thanks, guys, for walking us through the King of Fighter series because we couldn't have done this on our own. My God. So we'll wrap this episode up. Thanks, everyone for listening. Hello, it's me, Bob Mackie. I don't know a lot about fighting games, but I do know a lot about the Simpsons. And you can listen to my other podcast, Talking Simpsons, every Wednesday at

Talking Simpsons.com. We have a Patreon, too, with all kinds of extra stuff, but you can find that on your own. But if you like The Simpsons, give the show a shot. and I will say you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. Guests pimp the hell out of yourself. Go for it. You carry this.

You deserve. You deserve the appletes. Give them your money, everybody. Oh, that's right. Yeah, well, I'm at HG underscore 101 on Twitter. We also on Patreon at patreon.com slash HG 101. And we're running a crowdfunding campaign through a British publisher called Unbound to create a big book of Japanese video game of insecurities, which I think the only

S&K game I have scheduled there is that Days of Memory dating series. but the idea is just to feature lots of pictures and lots of really weird Japanese games. I'm trying to figure out as much that hasn't had anything written in English yet. I love the concept. Even if you're a big nerd, there's a lot of stuff. You got Lolita syndrome in there, right? There's a couple of games. I'm like, this is kind of historically important, but they're creepy as hell, so I kind of don't want to put that in there.

But if you can read about them, you don't have to play them. You will not be on a list. although there is the game that started dead of the brain there's this game that a middle schooler had bought in Kyoto I think and somebody found out about it and actually caused the government to examine the Japanese pornographic game industry and found that it was not up to code

so the guy went to jail and they had to start making other games wow all right so look forward to that support that on Kickstarter please oh unbound yeah they actually take care of all the design in editing so I can you can find a there's a link at the top of the hardcore gaming one-on-one dot net yeah it's my pinned tweet at the moment there's also a link to the hardcore gaming one-on-one podcast which is if you like retronauts and you want less depth and

no I mean we do we do we rank the games and we go through them pretty fast we just finished recording an episode that covered well the one that's up right now I don't know what will be up there but I just there is a huge argument on our latest episode 62 about super rc proam for game boy if you didn't if you want to know what what it's like to argue about or hear an argument about super rc pro em for gay boy that goes on for i think over half an hour wow just an argument and it's three people versus me i'm just trying to like explain how like you know if you think about it this does a good job and like kids loved it and it sold like a million copies don't put it all the way down uh where did they want to put it like by like x men for nes or something like that like towards the bottom of this list and like it's come on or something like that it was it was it was down there you know like just you know so that's the kind of thing we do um that sounds like time well spent honestly yeah well and then the second game we did was the original far cry which um is another interesting game to talk about and and we just have to do what people nominate so that's how it works and you know is what we do next

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So diversify your gaming budget by signing up today. We'll start playing all your favorite games absolutely free for 30 days. This week in Retronauts, home games, and don't spare the horses. Hi, everyone, and welcome to... You look okay there, bitch? Just freak me out there for some. Did I? Yeah.

Was that, like, a reference to a 50s Western show? I don't know what it's from. Home James and Mosedars bear the horses. Yeah. I don't know. I forget. Anyway, it was just a random reference. For this exciting episode of Retronauts Micro,

hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish. And this is a continuation of our last Retronauts East episode. co-starring Dan Edwards and... Ben Elgin. And last time we talked about the experience

of playing arcade games during the 80s and 90s. And now we're looking at the flip side of that and talking just kind of about, you know, the process of being a home game person, playing video games at home. And... That's too broad a tonic.

It is broad. It is broad. It's probably going to narrow down. But we'll be just, you don't know, again, it's a loosely organized Discussion and we're going to cut it short at about 45 minutes because it's a micro episode and those are supposed to be 10 So this is the new micro they mean they've expanded now that we've gone full time But yeah so we've talked about the arcades and what it was like playing video games in arcades

Playing tokens and quarters and Chucky cheeses and singing bears and all that kind of crap And now you know we're talking about the flip side of that what was it like to to be a kid in the 80s and 90s who wanted to play video games at home. And you had consoles and computers and you had different experiences than now. But playing video games now has its own culture around it.

It's all pretty much internet-based. There's a lot of YouTube. There's a lot of game facts. There's a lot of social media and forums. It's just, it's a different, like you approach video games differently as a result of not only the way the games are designed, but also the resources

that are available to you. Those were not there. There was no YouTube in 1987. No, internets. Nope. There was a primitive internet, but it was not used for sharing video game facts.

And you definitely were not watching live streams of British people playing Minecraft. I was in Eski. Damn, that's awesome. You logged on to the whole Earth Electric link. Yeah.

All right, San Francisco hippies, tell me about the latest patch to Minecraft. I did have some video game Asky art from BBSs in the early 90s, but yeah, not game facts. So, where should we start? No, we have lots of things, but what should we start with? We're still suffering from Burger King poisoning. Yeah, that's only you. That's because you made the bad choice of eating a Burger King.

I did not. So let's talk because Ben brought his mist journal. And I have my mist journal that I dug up recently. Ben did not bring his missed journal. Yeah, you blew it out of these things. I got other props and stuff that are. That's not helping. You messed up, man.

It's okay. I played it on the Atari Jaguar, like I told you. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. Why are you sorry? I don't know. It just seems like a bad way to play it. It's a great way to play it.

Like, probably not as bad as playing it on PSP, but still. It was actually a good port. It was a competent port. But that's just the only way. Did you have mouse controls for it? Or was a joystick? No. I used to Dpad.

I used to Dpad. But it was rendered well, and it was neat. I mean, I could do it. We got this set of Jaguar CD games from Tiger Direct, and it happened to be in that set, you know, 96 on their own clearance. And I played it. It was fun. But anyway, so yeah, no game facts. So, so you're solving the puzzles by your lonesome, making your maps by your lonesome, basically.

Yeah. Video game manuals used to have these pages at the back that just had lined, like the rule old lines that said notes or things along those lines. And you were actually supposed to use those to write things down and use them for later. yeah and on you know on nintendo games it might just be like your passwords that you're saving for for continues or whatever um but also yeah stuff for puzzles stuff for things you learned about the game you know find out what weapon works on one boss write it down so you remember later because you're not going to just be able to look it up so and if you're like me you didn't write it and now your manuals are worth a lot more money i don't know i actually really like it when i buy a game to photograph and scan and i open it up up and it has like life in it. It's like the velveterine rabbit. The love makes it real. Yeah.

It's a, it's a, like, I know some people are really particular about getting, you know, perfect mint box copies of games. And I guess I should be because I'm photographing them and publishing them. But I feel like, I don't know, like the games that have somewhere to them have a story to them. Like, these are games that people actually played. And hopefully they're, they're kind of worn because the people liked these games. They wrote their names on the,

back of the cartridge and marker and they thumbed through the manual and it's got water damage on it and it's not because they're careless yeah well coke was water back in by the way came into the taps yes that's right uh bengge lived someplace with brown water he thinks it's coke but i drank more coke you know than anything when between the age of like four and 18 i must have drank thousands and thousands of gallons yeah i didn't understand that water was important to yeah it was good for you back then grew up for that but yeah

it was real sugar not corn syrup I like the I like the perspective of the history of an object of how it was used and the where like Jeremy is saying I appreciate that also in computers too that have been modified I like to keep those modifications because it's part of the history of how it was actually used and that's

very valuable to historians in all fields not just this yeah and I think I think during this era, a lot more games were kind of designed with that expectation in mind that people were going to be taking their own notes, working stuff out, that because, you know, we didn't have instant access to all the answers, um, that more things were designed with the expectation that you were going to maybe draw your own map or you were going to write, write down these clues that someone gave you in the game and then, you know, have this on hand

to use later, as opposed to just the game keeping track of it all for you. Um, because, you know, nowadays with the game doesn't keep track of it, well, you can just look it up anyways so what difference does it even make um and there's like there's niche things now that still do this because people think it's fun so you've got your adrian odyssees that are geared towards making maps because that's fun for people there's this guy there's this guy who does these videos where he makes maps and i and now derby's doing it with metroid right oh yeah it's it's it's it's you know it was something that i really did sort of out of necessity when i was playing in es games the goonies two and metroid and a few others like i didn't really know how to navigate

gate video game spaces at that point. So I would use the actual... So I would use graph paper to make maps as I went along. And, you know, I wasn't super meticulous about it, but I tried to kind of keep it to one screen per graph paper square or whatever. And I would take notes on where, you know, you needed to find secret passages or where you could find items and where the doors were, where the hidden spots were, and that sort of thing.

And it was not something that someone taught me how to do. It was just something that I intuited naturally. And a lot of people did. Like, if you look back, like lots and lots of people played games, making maps on graph paper. Some games you can't play without making a map. I mean, you just get hopelessly lost. So that was a big part of not just console games, but a lot of computer RPGs, like the Hard's Tale on Might and Magic. Well, back with, back with, like, text adventures, when you had no graphics to live,

look at it all. Often, like, drawing something out. Zork. It was the only way you'd have any idea where you were or what was going on. Yeah, so stuff like Zork. Yeah. When I started doing these maps again and tweeting about it, someone tweeted back at me that they had just picked up a

copy of wizardry for NES. And it seems like some older lady had played the game like a grandmotherly type and had taken these beautiful, meticulous notes. and her handwriting was so good, and she made not just like graph paper maps, but like extensive notes written out in this, you know, just like this elegant, almost calligraphy, like this

elegant hand. Awesome. That just like I would love to see those up close. Like those are real video gaming archival treasures, like these things that are not part of the games themselves, but they are so so connected and so integral to the, you know, the experience of the game and to watch the way people like interpret these games

and you know, put them down into writing is really fascinating to me. Yeah, they taught handwriting very well back then previous generation. You know, they don't even teach cursive in the schools around here anymore. I didn't know that. That's not really kind of where I was going with that. Yeah, that's a tangent.

It is. I think it's cool that I mean, that's just another thing that people won't have the experience of the requirement of using paper and the craft of the paper and the ink. That's just sort of a lost art. That's my point, I guess. Yeah, I mean, at a certain point, I stopped making maps because I got better at navigating, you know, virtual spaces in my mind and keeping track of where I'd been. But then after- Cyborg implant. Yes, that was very helpful.

once I uploaded my brain to the internet. No, then the need for mapping actually disappeared because games started creating maps automatically for you. I don't remember what the first game I played with an automap was. I mean, the legend of Zelda had it, but... Can you say Junius 2 had a map built in? It did, but that was not a useful map. I mean, it showed you where you were in the world,

but it didn't give you any details on how the space is interconnected and where you, how you could go from one space to another, where the items were. Super Metroid. Yeah, Super Metroid, obviously. I was trying to think if there was anything earlier last. That was a groundbreaking map. I just, yeah, sort of became the standard.

Yeah, it was very detailed. It showed you, let's see, the area you were in, it showed you where the hidden passages were. It would kind of like automatically create boundaries for the spaces you were in. So if there was, you know, a broken line, you knew, oh, there's more overshadowed. here. I need to go back there. It also would give you like this little sort of grade out dot where there was a hidden object on that screen and you hadn't found it yet.

So you knew to go back there and look for it. Yeah, energy tank or missile or whatever. Yeah, it really became the gold standard. But, and then the one thing, like, the thing that are tangentially related to this is I really wish everything on 3DS would let you write on your maps. Like a few games do. Some of the Zelda's do. Zelda, Etrain Odyssey. And I'm like, in that dream odysy.

And it's like such a useful thing. And it also, of course, you know, tickles the nostalgia from when we were all doing this on paper. And like, I'd like, why does everything on 3DS not do this? It's been surprising to me, though, as I've been starting to do these game maps and I'll, you know, tweet about my progress. It really resonates with people. Like, people are way more into this than I expected. I thought most, you know, people would be like, what the hell are you doing, weirdo? But every time I tweet out a map, it gets hundreds and hundreds of likes and retweets.

and shares. I'm like, wow, this is like something that clearly connects with people in some, some respect. Well, that was a universal experience for a certain generation of gamers. And you're tapping into something that hasn't been, it's been mostly forgotten. So, and it resonates, like you said. Yeah, so it's gratifying to see. Like, I'm really happy that people are like, oh, yeah, I did that too. That's awesome. It's like a way to connect with the game, even when you're not actually playing it. Um, which sort of sake was into the other thing that

we did have, you know, we couldn't look up maps on the internet, but we had magazines, which often had maps of stuff. A lot of time, you know, just the first few levels to give you a taste of stuff. So, like, Nintendo Power would create maps of all kinds of things. And then sometimes you'd get the strategy guy, which had tons of maps. Yeah, before we segue all the way out, I will say, though, like, kind of building on something you just said, that doing, creating these maps, just for the couple of games I've done them for, Metal Gear for MSX and Metroid, doing like these really extensive in-depth maps.

has really helped me appreciate how these games are constructed, how these virtual worlds are put together. Like even doing anatomy of games write-ups, I never really kind of stopped and took a holistic view of the world and how all the pieces fit together. The physical space. The physical space, not only that, but also like the kind of flow and how you're supposed to go to one place

and then backtrack and retrace your steps and how things are designed to kind of push you and guide you. You can get this overview of the game design through the maps, yeah, which was one of the things I, I mean, I think that's one of the reasons I kept subscribing to Nintendo Power Forever. It's just even for games I never played, looking at these maps and like getting this design sense of how these games were put together. It was just so great. Well, and when you create a hand-drawn map, and it's really kind of more reductive. And, you know, I've been putting like the interactive spaces in a stage, like in Metroid, like drawing the platforms and where the walls are. But you don't put the background. own details in. You don't see colors. You don't see things like that. When you break it down like this, you start to see that like each area of the game has kind of its own personality. Like some spaces are very sort of wide open and expansive. Some spaces are very dense. There are like these motifs that repeat throughout. It's, it's been really interesting to kind of get inside the

creator's heads this way. You know, some of those in Nintendo Power were collections of screenshots. Remember screens as arranged in a map, but some of them, a lot of were illustrated specifically for the magazine. And it might be interesting to talk to some of those people who did those illustrations back in the day. Yeah, I would love to do that. But my understanding is that early Nintendo powers were actually mostly created in Japan by, I don't remember the publisher, if it was Shoka Kuggen or Shuehasa.

I don't remember who it was. But, yeah, my understanding is that all that stuff was created by an agency. see in Japan. So finding those people would probably be impossible. Yeah, for... Which is disappointing, but yeah. I mean, even over there, like, it would probably be really different. Some intern working on salary was drawing these things. Yeah, exactly. Like, it was...

There may not be any record of, like, who actually did this work. Well, if anyone listening knows... Let us know. That would be awesome. But, yeah, someone else suggested that to me, and I was like... It's impossible. I think Simon Parkin said something to me about that. And I was like, as much as I would, that would be like a dream article, like, I don't even know where to begin looking for people who worked for a design publishing agency in Japan in 1986. That's, it's tough. Yeah.

It is tough. But it's, you know, it's even if we don't know who actually created those maps, the fact that their work is out there and people still kind of hold these fond memories of it. The artistry is left behind. They've left a legacy. Yeah. So anyway, you were saying before I pushed back to where we were going, where we had been. Yes. What?

You were saying? So one of our big sources of information without having. everything online was these magazines yeah um so you know you've had your nintendo power you had your what was early on eGM and game pro when did they come in um they came in around the same time as nintendo power 1888 89 yeah like for me nintendo i had nintendo's at home so nintendo power was the one i had subscription to but i would pick up random issues of other ones just off the shelf sometimes there's actually a really there's a several year gap in the u.s where there were no publications covering console games. And up until, I think, the launch of Nintendo Power, the only publication that even

cared at all about console games was called Computer Entertainer, I think. And Franks Sefaldi... Oh, yeah. Computer, video games and computer entertainers. No, no, no, not VGNCE. It was the Computer Entertainer, which was a newsletter put together apparently by a woman in somewhere in California. And this is something Frank Sefaldi told me about a couple of years ago. And I had never heard of it. That's the one with the review of Super Mario Brothers One. Like the only printed review of Super Mario Bros. One was in a newspaper someplace. I think that was Ed Simrad. I really doing a freelance thing for a newspaper. I'm pretty sure that's what you're thinking of. But yeah, this one publication, it was like basically zine style. It was very sort of low-fi.

But it's like the best resource for getting actual information about release dates and about, you know, publication schedules and things like that. Not only for NES, but for other platforms like Atari 7800 and whatever else was still extant at that point, 1986, 87. It was a lonely case. So I guess I got into Nintendo about the same time as Nintendo Power was starting up. So it was with about with Super Mario 2 because I know there's a Super Mario 2. Claymation cover for Super Mario 2, which I think I have. That's the first issue of Nintendo Power. They sent that to everyone.

Millions of copies of that issue went out. But remember, it was Nintendo Fun Club news first. We've talked about that before, right? I think so. And that turned into Nintendo Power? Yep. Right? Yeah.

So we have nothing else to say. It seemed like Ben was going someplace with that. Yeah, sorry. I was just, I mean, that was kind of our source of, that was basically the source of of information from on high on what was going on in the games world, what was coming up, and also like stuff like maps and stats and things of games that were out, you know, without having, without having game facts, without having YouTube, we sort of got this all filtered through the corporate magazines. And other than that, it was just, so it was kind

of the two things we had the corporate magazines. And then you had like playground rumors on the other hand, which is, you know, people who had just seen games, but it was a very reliability depending on how cool your friends were. were important. Remember, I think you wrote about the minus world in a notice. Yeah, yeah. And that was a rumor that spread really fast around my neighborhood, you know, that you could go to the secret world in Super Mario Brothers. Yeah, a lot of these things came from magazines. I think the minus world was in Nintendo Fun Club newsletter, but not everyone had access to that. Right. Yeah, because I didn't know that. I had a friend who

subscribed to it before I did, and then I subscribed for like the last two or three issues before it became Nintendo Power. That's what we do. So a lot of these things, like, there would be one kid who was kind of like the early adopter and had all the cool stuff, and information would sort of trickle from him. Of course, also, some people just lied about stuff. Yeah. Well, I have a similar story, which is that, you know, I did BBSing in the early 90s and early

internet. You know, I used the internet from 93 for the present. And so, and CompuServe. And there were forums on CompuServe in the early 90s where we talked to. about video games. And at my school, I was probably like the only kid with CompuServe. So I would download all the Mortal Kombat Fatality stuff. And then I would reformat it into my own notes and pretend like I was the guy who made all this up.

And then I had handed out to all my friends and these other kids. And they thought I was so cool. Such a stinker. Yeah. Fanzines were also a thing back then. I don't know exactly when those started up. But there are a lot of people who kind of got their start in the games press by doing fanzines like Chris Cole.

Chris Kohler didn't. I remember hearing that. Yeah, Jess Reagan and a few other people. And, you know, they were all like 12 years old. So I know they look back on their old stuff and they're like, oh God, I'm such an idiot. But, you know, like they were pretty much imitating, you know, like taking their cues from the publications at the time. You had your Nintendo power that had the very dry sort of corporate tone. And when it tried to be personable, it was like dad jokes. But then you had stuff like, you had stuff like. game fan and EGM, where it was like by, you know, snot-nosed punks, putting together magazines, like 200-page magazines with a staff of five people every month just trying to fill out as many pages as possible to justify their, you know, their ad sales and getting information secondhand from Japanese magazines or like one dude would go over to Tokyo Game Show or space world and take a bunch of photos, you know, it was just like ramshackle. And so there was this kind of amateurish air to it. And a lot of attitude like, you know, as, as, you know, tends to be kind of like the the macho element of video games, that's always been there. It's not something that's

brand new. I feel, you know what? I feel like that was invented by those magazines, that macho thing that's so looked down upon now. I think it came from EGM, like especially EGM. GamePro was more like a kiddie thing. But EGM broadcast that, you know, EGM and persona. Yeah, and game fan.

Be edgy enough for an older audience. I feel like that was the genesis of that whole gamer identity thing. I feel like it was probably channeling something else, but it definitely was a vector that it spread through. Yeah, way of spreading it. But what blew my mind about EGM, I think I first started reading it in 92, and I subscribed to it till the end. And it was not afraid to criticize Nintendo games.

You know, Nintendo Power was a propagandic arm of propagandistic, whatever the adjective is, you know, arm of Nintendo. I used to call it Nintendo Pravda. No, Pravda. That was a common one, yeah. So when I was a kid, I had no idea that that was the case. I didn't know that they were afraid to give. bad reviews to their games, and they, you know, were always going to be positive about that.

This game got a 3.5 out of five, but it's not good. What's the deal? Let's get it. Hey, guys. What's going on? So, um, that was cool. That was like discovering a whole new world. It's kind of like, uh, you know, you have the front of something and then you, I don't have a metaphor. You go behind the shop and there's guys like, yeah, kid, you want some of this. Yeah. handing out crack, okay? You want some crack. But you're talking about the flip side of that is

a lot of these publications, you know, not having a lot of official access to stuff that, you know, you get things then sprinted that were not really a whole lot better than playground rumors. So you'd have stuff about, you know, things coming out next year. And, well, you know, maybe half of those things

actually existed next year. I actually have, although that happened even with the official stuff. So, like, I actually just took some photos of some of Squares newsletters from the 90s. This was another thing. A lot of the publishers would put out their own newsletters to supplement what would get into the magazine. So Square had the Ogopogo Examiner with Square's newsletter for a little while. I have a few issues of that. I just put some up on my

blog. But a lot of them were talking about how this game in Japan, Final Fantasy 5, was going to come out as Final Fantasy 3, you know, any time now, really. And this was in Squares newsletter because they just, you know, they knew some things were going on internally, and it might happen and they printed it. Yeah, a bunch of publishers had their own internal rags that they, like, I think the one that I subscribed to was Sunsofts. And that one confused me for a long time or filled me with misunderstandings because it talked about, like, it had an interview with the American who designed Blastermaster.

So I didn't realize it was not an American game. It was made in Japan. It was, he was actually the guy who like did the cutscenes for the U.S. version, but they didn't present it that way. It was not like, here's the guy who added the new story for Blastermastermaster. It was like, here's the guy who made Blastermaster. Yeah. So they played kind of fast and loose.

Yeah. I didn't understand localization back to me. Yeah. You were, you know, seven years old. Yeah. Didn't understand much. I didn't understand. I don't know.

Just forget it. I kind of want to know where this was going to go. Deadly Towers. What? everyone. Thanks for listening. It was tricky. I mean, we had the EF and the FE code that we found in Nintendo Power that made it easier.

What code is that? The EF or FE code, if you die, you get your password and you put EF or FE on the front of it and it gives you like all the items to give you power enough to actually go get somewhere in the game. Now that's something that is

definitely lost in video games. It's password hacking. Yeah. And what about the Justin Bailey code? in Metroid. Yeah, that was just, apparently, just a thing that's totally random. Coincidence. Yeah.

That happened to give you that set of save state. Yeah, there's a few of them, like, uh, Icarus fights Medusa Angels. Like, I don't think they were actually designed to be real codes in the game, but it's just, you know, the, they activate certain things. Happened to set the bits. They got you that game state. The game genie, we made a code called Luigio that did something really cool in Super Mario Brothers. I don't remember what it was, but. Yeah.

I don't know that I ever really hacked passwords, but I know some people did. But what I did was I actually cracked the Mega Man 3 code. Yes, those you could do. Like Mega Man 2 came out and Nintendo Power was like, here's how it works. And so I sat down to Mega

Man 3 when that came out and was like, I bet I can figure out how this works. You're like a little Bletchley park. I don't know who that is. Cracking this enigma codes during World War II. Yeah. Okay. Why not? I am a computer and technology historian.

What do you expect? I understood that reference. Okay. Okay, good. Yeah, so I sent that into Nintendo Power, and they gave the credit to someone else. Oh, man. They're monsters.

So you could create any Mega Man 3 code you want. Yeah, so it's like this spot is an energy tank. Yeah, it was like, you could specifically choose which bosses you wanted to have defeated. So if you're like, I don't want to fight Topman again, you can have Talkman defeated, but you could also have, you know, four energy tanks. Well, Castlevania 3 had like a grid-based. You can put a whip in one. The grid-based ones like Mega Man and Castlevania were pretty easy to do.

Yeah, because it's just not that many bits in the end. It's only a little bit of information. Well, the last thing I've got to say about Deadly Towers is what I've always said about it, probably, which is the mapping. My friend mapped it, and I, you know, I scanned them and put them on Vintagecombeck back in 2005, and they were the first deadly tower maps on the Internet. I'm still proud of that. Still probably the only ones.

There's been more Yeah, there's VGMaps.com That does a lot of games Even if they don't really need it It's exciting We got all these comments There's probably like 100 or 200 comments On that post they're like

Oh, I didn't know anybody else Love Deadly Tower You know, they felt so good Anyway, we don't have to talk about it anymore It's okay What else do we have on our list? What games did you guys map? I'm curious

I didn't, I always let my brother do it Because he always liked to map things And write notes about everything And he had just stacks of graph paper So every once in a while I'm at my mom's house and I find an old notebook and it's full of maps and lists of monsters and

you know he tried to measure there are games like Arkon on the Atari 800 where he measured the shot speed of every character and you know tried to quantify all that stuff unsurprisingly he became a programmer that kind of mind

so okay so yeah like the how you treat video games as a prediction of what you're going to be like when you grow up yeah I'm kind of think what else I mean I did have like I had some maps in this Mist notebook right here. I, like, drew out one of the islands. Wow. Oh, yeah, there was this one that was all, like, platforms connected with walkways. I've got that one drawn out here. The old platforms.

On with, yeah. So Mist is actually a platformer. No. Sure. Yeah, I've got some... I actually drew several of the islands in here, as well as just writing out a whole bunch of the puzzles. Yeah, I've got what appears to be, like, the impact site for Tokyo 3 from Evangelion. Yes. This is clearly an impact creator. I have that one right here. Same island. Yeah. Whoa. now that I look at this, I'm like, wow, what happened on this planet? I need to go back and play Mist sometime and see, like, what world is this? Your maps are pretty much than mine.

How did I beat that without drawing any maps? I don't know. I must have just looked them up or something. Well, I don't know. I did not make it through Mist without a little bit of cheating. I must have looked at the internet at that point yet. You can tell, you can tell Jeremy is the more graphic artist between us. His maps are much nicer.

Oh, yeah, look at these constellations. I've got the arrow and the flamingo. I've totally got those too, yeah. We pretty much strew all these same things. You know what? I think the Jaguar version may have come with a manual that had some clues in it. Yeah, there's the constellations. It's like some of those things.

Wow, I haven't looked at these. I have no idea of notes. These mean nothing to me now, but they're very detailed. Do you have the keyboard drawn out too? I do have the keyboard. Yeah. This is probably boring for the listeners at home. So while they look at the maps, I'll tell you about.

I'll scan this and put it in that episode. I can put some on my blog too. I got the keyboard. I got that one. But I'm trying to think what else said. I mean, I think I did the manhole, too, which was. was Shannon's earlier thing. Yeah, that's a cool man.

And that, you know, you were just talking about people getting to programming. I mean, that led directly to me doing my own HyperCard adventure games, which I, you know, made maps for and then created the game from the map. Did you see the new HyperCard stuff on the Internet archive? You were telling me about that. Yeah, that they'll run HyperCard in the browser now, which is pretty awesome. Pretty neat. That feels like, good job, Jason.

I can't believe that hadn't happened before. Like HyperCard in a web browser. Yeah, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. But that's brilliant. I mean, there's a lot of, you got to re-implement, there's a lot of depth to it.

You got to re-implement a whole scripting language, so it's not a small project. Okay, here's the part in Mist where I cheated. I did not get the sound puzzle. So I was like, stumped there, and I drew it out. Yeah. And as far as I could get, but I was like, what the hell am I doing? And so then I went and looked at a strategy guide at the mall or whatever, and it was like, you're going to get different sounds when you go different directions.

And I said, oh, so my notes here, North, clink, clink. E, Vyush, S, clank. west were okay my my east is bzwee and my west is twiddle but you know i guess it's whatever yeah like our our anamatapea are different yeah you've got more of like a a brazilian portuguese style i've got more of a japanese yeah but yeah looking back through this yeah i took a lot more notes on miss than i realized and then i spoiled the plot at the end sorry about okay everybody's played that by now right i think so a hundred times so give them the colored pages that's all i got to say

Because you want to talk about buying things, I don't remember. Oh, yeah. It costs a lot of money back then. I mean, the Toys R Us buying experience? Or is that? Yeah. I'm Mike Rips. No, the Toys R Us buying experience.

There's not that much to say about it. But I don't think they do games the way they used to where, back at, starting with the NES days, they started to put their game. behind like the security wall. So instead of, you know, just going and saying, hey, I want to buy Mario, you'd have to go to a wall and they had these plastic laminated cards with the box art on front and underneath each.

Underneath each, there was a, like, a vinyl pouch with a paper ticket inside that had the price on it and the name of the game. And it represented the number of stock they had of that game. So you would take that and take it to checkout. out, and then after you paid for it, you could take it to the security wall. They go, security to pick up, security pick up. Scartai.

This depends on where you live. Yeah. I'm not where we left, but security to pick up. Yeah. So the bottom of that flap had the back of the box art, too. You never lifted up the flag? It was really awkward when you were like, you know, four feet tall and there were things

on the top rack. You're like, what's up in that game? That's how, you know, not only Nintendo Power, but there are a lot of games that didn't get any coverage and you just saw them for the first time at a store and you could sit there and study the box art and say, what is this? Yeah, I mean, I used to go and obsess over those. I would like look at everyone that I could and be like, what is this game? Some of them I could tell right away, this doesn't seem good, but some of them were kind of tempting. Like Athena had really cool

box art. And the back of the box, the platform actions seemed like maybe it was okay. And I almost bought that the summer that I was hunting all over the country for Castlevania. and I'm really, really glad that I held out for Castlevania. Instead of... Athena. Athena. Can you imagine? I wouldn't be doing this job now.

Yeah. I'm glad you made that. I got the X-Men Nintendo game one year for my birthday, and it was so bad we took it back, and I got Bionic Commando instead. Nice. It's a good trade-outgrade, yeah. It was cheaper, too, but I was like, Mom, can I get an extra game because it's like half the price?

And she said, no. Oh. But, you know, harsh. I had fun with the X-Men just a little bit, but, you know, it was hard. Throwing it off a building, setting fire to it. Running it over with your car. The other thing about... You're driving young.

Toys R Us. Well, I had a power wheels. Power makes a go. The other thing about Toys R Us that was so neat was their glass wall case, cases of actual physical examples of the game consoles and accessories that you could see under white, you know, brilliant white light. Yeah. And, you know, I remember looking at the Atari 2,600 Jr., the XE, the 7800, the NES, the Sega Master System in that era. And also then when the Genesis came out, I was like, whoa, what is that?

And turbographics. And then they also had this area off to the left in the store where I was that had a big display of Game and Watch, portable games. It was like the dual screen ones that would flip up, like Zelda and Donkey Kong. I always associate those with older electronic stores. I don't remember seeing a lot of those once, you know, like the NES came out. That was early, yeah, it was really early on. Yeah, it was probably around the time the NES first came out. Now, I bought, I bought some stuff at Toys R Us, but actually more commonly in the, like, early 90s, I think, maybe late 80s, early 90s, I would go to the mall and go to Babbage's. That was my spot.

Look, check this out. You've got the Babbage's bag right there. You've got Babbage's software, et cetera. Yeah, so this was before everything merged into itself. We were left to that. Listen to that, bag. No, stop. It's awesome. It's before everything merged into GameStop. But, yeah, so there was Babichism, Software, et cetera, and Electronics Boutique.

But they all had, they had console games, but then also still had computer games. You could get Windows and Mac stuff in there. So you'd have all the displays side by side of basically all the platforms. And a lot of times a bigger selection is because it was a dedicated store. How about Electronics Boutique? Yeah. I mean, that turned into E.B. games.

I have a receipt for, what is this, Nintendo pre-own, what, here is this, 94, 1499. Also, I've got an egghead software receipt. Wow, Egghead, Crossroads, Boulevard, and Kerry. There is a store there. Max Tor, 13, 1.3 gigabyte hard drive for $200. Yeah. Nice. And a PC game pad for $2.99.

That was a Gravis. There's, there's, there's, oh, this is the one. That's an interesting receipt. Toys R Us has Kirby's Adventure for $10 for the NES. That was a great deal. And I got Final Fantasy 3 at the same time for $61.99. It's not a bad price. Yeah. Gaming was expensive.

May 14th, in the early 90s. And they've got this stamp that's taken, you know, once you go to the security and you pick it up. Yeah. So you can't get it twice. Right. Babbage's was great, though. This is kind of getting less retro, but during the PlayStation era, they carried Saturn import

software for a while. It was just like, I don't know how they ended up with it, but there were like all kinds of games like the Konami MSX collection for Saturn, the Shinobi game by Victor Kai. I even saw Radiant Silver Gun, and I went back to buy it

the next day, and it was gone. 50 bucks for Radiant Silver Gun. I screwed up. I blew it. It's worth like a thousand now. It's not worth that much. But it's like 150, 200. Yeah. It would have been good to get. It would have. Reminds me. I just, You know, I bought a copy of Bons Adventure on an NES, you know. Oh, wow.

And I have that. Yeah, it's like pristine. Really? I have everything complete. That's worth. It's worth like $1,000 in great condition complete. Yeah, it's complete. Because I got it when I was older and I kept everything together and didn't smash the box, you know.

So that's one of my most. Nicely done. I also got Final Fight Guy from Blockbuster. I used to buy their pre-owned games a lot. And that's worth, you know, I've got the. box in the game but no manual. Oh, I need to borrow that from you to photograph. Oh, really? Yeah. Cool. I'm just bringing it over. But this is something interesting I found in my old receipts, which is game genie supplemental codes. Do you remember this? They had these in stores

in a little pad that looked like a note, like those peel off. I think I saw some of those, yeah. Peel off note pads. They have like a glue top and then you peel off a paper. And so they were always updating like it says, here they are, your hot game genie codes for Mortal Kombat game. That's why it's for Mortal Kombat game. And it's an update, you know, because it wasn't in the code booklet for the Game Duny. They should have done those, like, phone number tear-offs that people would do on college campuses. Like, I need a drama. Instead of putting a phone number, put like, here's a game genie code, pull it off and take it home.

That'd be awesome. Yep. Well, that was at Kmart. I got a lot of stuff at Kmart. Yeah, those, you know, before the NES era, before Babbage's, electronics boutique, I remember video games being sold mostly either in department stores or in, like, dedicated electronic TV shops in malls. Yeah.

Like there were these kind of, yeah. Yeah. Like, there's nothing like that anymore. I don't know when they died out exactly, but you would go in and it would just be like a wall of televisions and, you know, novelty electronics. No, no, no. Like very, very small. Like basically like enough room for you to walk in and there would be, you know,

a cabinet and a desk on one side. We just had Radio Shack. Yeah. But no, this didn't sell stuff like, you know, the little fidgety diodes and stuff as Radio Shack did. It was just like TVs and stereo components and like kind of high-end stuff. I'm sure it was very expensive at the time. But then they would get like, wow, we got the new Atari system. Check it out.

And they'd have it on display. Did you ever have that in the mall where my, at North Hills back when it was an indoor mall, they had these software stores would pop up. up for a while and they would put the hottest games in the window playing on a monitor. That's why I first saw Prince of Persia on the NVGA or something. Yeah, we had a Walden

software. Oh, Walden. Yeah. The video game spinoff of well, not just video game, but software spied off of Walden Books. Yeah, I remember Walden software. Yeah, they were always overpriced, but then they would, like, because they were overpriced, stock didn't sell very quickly

there. So once things kind of reached end of life, you could find good prices on close-out software. I got Mega-Man there way after it was out of print, like right before Mega Man 2 came out, just a couple of months before Mega-Man 2 came out, like no one else had it. And they had just marked it down from like $60 to $25.

So I bought it and was like, oh, this game's great, even though it has a terrible cover. They sometimes had like import Game Boy games and all kinds of weird stuff. Yeah, I was thinking I wrote a little story about my first, my earliest game-buying memory. Right. Tell us your stories. Uncle Benge.

Don't die. Don't die with the wrestler, burglar. I had no idea what you're talking about. Spider-Man, you know. Uncle Ben. Oh, yeah. Uncle Ben. Okay, sorry. Yeah. Just the Jay threw me off there. Anyway. You're used to it by now. It's in your name.

Yeah, but I'm not Ben. Like, Ben and Benj are completely different things in my mind. That's the funny thing. You know, there's like, it might be, might as well be Peter and Rob or something. You know, that's the way I think about it. Anyway, earliest computer game buying memory. My dad was sort of a train nut, and every weekend he would take us to local train yard to watch freight trains because it was just a hobby. His dad did it with him, and he was interested in the machinery, but on the way back, we'd stop by a store called Chips and Bits, which was on Atlantic Avenue, I think.

And I always think of it when I drive by there. It was like, oh, my gosh, that's where that awesome software store. And we went there one day, we just got an Atari ST. it was probably like 1987 and my brother picked out Ultima 3 Exodus and that was just so exciting and it's like all these games you can

buy them, they're in boxes you can take them home you can you know like why don't we buy all of them you know that's what I was asking you know but I must have this must be before Exodus because I remember I mean I remember thinking like

like why don't we get more of these games you know why do we only have one why are we only buying one of you like two when Exodus came out? No, well, Exodus, the ST port, you know. Oh, maybe that was later, okay. Yeah, whenever the original Exodus came out, maybe, but, you know, this is 87, so I wouldn't, I don't know if I would be saying that stuff when I was six, but I just

remember getting access there and it was just a really special place. So it's funny how that resonates with me as a, it's sort of a special place in the city just because I have that memory there every time I drive by that place. So it means a lot to us, gamers. I think probably one of my first, like, impulse versions, Like, I'm looking at my list of old games. And, like, I mean, the first things I got was, I'd saved up my own allowance to, you know, to get my NES. And that was about the time to where Mario 2 was coming out.

So I had to get that because, obviously, Mario. But I think one of the first thing I, like, impulse purchased was Clash at Demonhead, which, that worked out pretty well. Like, it had his cool box. And it was kind of inscrutable to me as a young child, but it's got a lot in there. I think I may have drawn some maps for that, too, because it needs them. It does. I have another small story We have time

We do, but then we have to wind this one down Because I know you have things to do Yeah, I got to go You should do Clash of Demonhead mapping like you did Yeah, that'd be cool I just remember just the excitement of being a kid And hearing about games secondhand Well, there was, I feel like it was around Halloween

In whatever year it was 88 or something This one kid in our neighborhood Had Super Mario Brothers 2 And I feel like I had never even seen it At that time in a magazine or anything And we were, like, so excited. We all had to go to his house and play it. And his dad, they said, like, his dad had bought it on a business trip somewhere else and brought it back.

And he had it first in the whole city. And I talked about that at Blastermaster. When we ordered Blastermaster, and it wasn't even at any retail stores locally. And we had it first, and that actually meant something. Like, it was a cachet among the kids in the neighborhood, you know, it was a cool thing. Anyway. Yeah, I mean, shortages and scarcity. was a thing for Nintendo even back then. I remember

I got Ninja Guide in when it first came out for NES. And my aunt worked at a warehouse at Best Products. And so she was able to pick it up when it came into the store room. And when she picked it up, like one of her coworkers said, hey, can I borrow that from him when he's done? Because like he hadn't been able to find a copy for himself. Going to see other people's games was definitely a thing. Like I remember one of the things I would do all the time as a kid was. go over to my friend's house to see Final Fantasy.

I wasn't even really, you know, I hadn't got into RPGs at that point yet. I don't even know what was up with this, but he had it and would play it, and I would go over. It was a beautiful game, too. Like, I couldn't believe the graphics for Final Fantasy. We had a friend who had that. The first time I saw Super Mario Brothers was before we even had an NES and my family, and we went to a friend's house, and it just blew me away. So I don't know how universal this episode has been compared to the arcade ones, where we were kind of, you know, getting other people's opinions and speaking more in general terms. But I think there is value in hopefully these recollections and anecdotes.

I'm sure some of them have been mentioned before on the show. But that's okay. Hopefully people enjoyed listening to this. If not, well, in a couple of days, there will be another episode of Retronauts, and you can listen to that instead. So thanks for bearing with us. And Ben and Ben and Benj, thank you for your opinions and memories. You're welcome.

It's been a pleasure to be here. Indeed. Fantastic. So this has been Retronauts Micros. I have been Jeremy Parrish. That has been Ben, and that has been Benj. Benj, Benj. So I don't even know where we're going with this.

But, yes, you can hear more Retronauts podcasts if you enjoyed this one, or even if you didn't, at Retronauts.com, on iTunes, on the Podcast One network and the Podcast One app. And if you want to help make this podcast happen month to month, week to week, you can support us through Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts. that is how this podcast happens we travel we record we buy equipment we play video games we talk about stuff you give me gin and i have to pay for binge's gin yes so binge why don't you tell us about yourself um i don't know i'm a freelance journalist and historian technology video games computers and you can read my work at vintage computing dot com and i have a patreon patreon patreon dot com slash bench adverts ben i'm looking for a job Anyone need a C++ programmer?

I do. But aside from that, you can find me at Kieran on Twitter, K-I-R-I-N, and at Kieran's Retro Closet on Tumblr. That's Kieran with 1N that time. And I'll try to put up some stuff relevant to this episode by the time it goes up there. So you can probably see some old maps and manuals or something. We'll see what I can find. Sounds good. All right.

And you can find me on Twitter, yes, as GameSpite. And he's not here, but you can find my co-host Bob at Bob Servo on Twitter, because you should follow him too. So, yes, that wraps it up for this Retronauts Micro. We'll be back, like I said, in a few days with another full episode, and two weeks from now with another micro episode, look forward. I'm going to be able to be. The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General.

Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. 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.