Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 124: Metroidvania Beyond the NES

Episode Date: November 6, 2017

Chris Sims and Benj Edwards join Jeremy once again to survey the history of exploratory platformers. This time, it's Master System and Super NES games. (Or would be, if the discussion hadn't been sidetracked by Chris' freshman journey into Super Metroid.)

This weekend Retronauts, we're getting roided up. Hi, everyone, and welcome to yet another Retroats East. I didn't think you noticed my muscles. Yeah, you've been juicing, man. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and as usual, for a Metroid-dun-dun-done-dun-focused episode, it's also Ben Jedgwick's. And we're here. Got to talk about this stuff that we've been talking about, but we're going to talk about a different part of the stuff that we've been talking about.

So we haven't talked about it yet. The third part of the stuff. Yes, that's correct. So we have in the previous Metroidvania episodes discussed the prehistory of Metroidvania. And also Metroidvania games that appeared on the NES, which was kind of like the fertile crescent of Metroidvania game design. So now we're going to be talking about games from the 80s and 90s that weren't on NES. And as we'll find, there actually weren't that many of them.

I don't know what it was specifically about the NES that just made people say, I want to design games that are like Mario, but maze-like. that ethos didn't really exist on the competing platforms and then when the technology transferred over to Super NES that all but disappeared there's like three Super NES

Metroidvania games it's kind of weird Yeah there's not even a Super NES like Castlevania game as a Metroidvania Yeah one of the two Super NES Castlevania games is a more linear version of a sort of

of exploratory PC engine game game. They like took out all the, all the extra stuff. Everything that's good, let's take it out and bring it to America. That's what they say. That was the ethos there, yes. Okay. So, referring to Dracula X. Rondo of Blood. It's not Rondo of Blood in America. It's just Dracula X. You can also call it Vampire's Kiss if you want. Okay. We're referring to both games. Okay. Dracula X being the interpretation of Rondo of Blood. But it's good to recognize them as different games because they are. Yeah, they're definitely different games. Okay. But they are not Metroidvania again. games, either one of them, although Rondo of Blood definitely comes close. However, it doesn't

quite qualify for the purposes of this discussion. Maybe next episode, when we talk about Symphony of the Night, in our part four, Metrovania episode, we can talk about Rondo. With some of the stuff you've got on this list for this episode, you might as well talk about Rondo of Blood. Because there's, like I said, we can talk about it next time in the context of Symphony the Night. I've got this all mapped out. Don't worry. We're okay. We're okay. That mapping.

Unlike Metroid 2, this podcast comes with a map. We normally have three opportunities per year to see Retronauts Live. This year, we've been to Midwest Gaming Classic, Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, and Portland Retro Gaming Expo. But it's almost Thanksgiving, so we're going to give you one last reason to be thankful in 2017. Chris Sims and I, which is to say Retronauts East, will be putting in some appearances at Super Famicon in Greensboro, North Carolina, just down the road from where we live, as a bonus 2017 live appearance. Look for us on the floor and on panels on November 18th and 19th. We'll be talking to Luke Edwards, Star of the Wizard,

looking at the history and impact of Night Trap with the guys from limited-run games, and more. That's Super Famicom in Greensboro, North Carolina, November 18th and 19th. Be there, or wait for the live recordings, I guess. See, people don't get that joke yet because we haven't published that episode. Give it a week. It'll be...

This is like back to the future. I'm getting confused. Yeah. So which one of us is the stand-in for Donald Trump? All right. So with that terrible note, let's begin this discussion. Actually, maybe we should begin this discussion by contemplating what is a Metroidvania. No.

Why did the Metroidvania genre appear so sparsely outside of the NES? What's up with that? I have to imagine that at least part of it is because they're hard to make, right? Like, they require, if they're going to be good, they have, they require a level of thoughtfulness, which you see in Metroid, which you see in Metroid 2. A ton of NES Metroidvania games Like Blastermaster, they're really great There was no lack of quality there

I can give you a technical answer that you won't like Which is none of these games are Metroidvanias Until Castlevania Symphony in the night came out Congratulations, you're technically correct Which is the worst kind of correct That's why there are so few for other platforms I mean there are some of these where you're reaching quite a bit I think

toward Metroidvania But you know there are some that are like that were earlier we've talked about I forgot how anal retentive you are about this imaginary word I totally forgot about that yeah but as we discussed a word has to have a common meaning

among people or else it's pointless the common meaning is exploratory platformer so well you mentioned platforms and I think that's part of it too because if you look at the NES era and then the post NES era there are a couple of really dominant genres there's the

Mario style platformer obviously the continues into the Super NES. And there's, once the Super NES arrives, there's the fighting game. And then there's the side scrolling beat him up, which would be every license game. Like every movie would have an accompanying

side scrolling beat them up. Like we talked about with the Batman episode. So you get those games that I think are generally not to knock them terribly, because I love final fight, but they don't require as much thoughtfulness. You only have to...

Yeah, most of those games required. Very little thoughtfulness in terms of design. It's just like, let's just put the same three dudes out here over and over again. 2P. 2P. Or not 2P. Yeah. I get there.

I hear you. And what was the other guy's name? 2P and what? Jay. Jay. I think it was 2P and J. That's my favorite kind of sandwich. So, yeah, I've, um...

It's peanut butter pickles and jelly. Uh-huh. Sorry. Peanut putter. It says two pickles. Okay. Wow, I only had like a sip of this. I don't know what's going on.

Yeah, this is already a wild one. Okay. I'm over here with water ready to talk about Metroidvania. You fool. No, I've been thinking about this a lot. Like, as I've been preparing these extensive notes for this episode, like what did happen? And, you know, sort of thinking back on it, the most vibrant time for the style of game was like 1987, 88, barely into 89? Well, what happened around then? Well, at the end of

1988, Super Mario Brothers 3 came out in Japan. And I think that changed the focus. It was a linear platformer that was just as full of content and ideas and surprises and things defined as any of these exploratory platformers. And I think it kind of made people step back and say, you know, we don't necessarily have to create these convoluted, exploratory interlocking worlds where it's easy to get lost and people give up and get frustrated. We can create the same sort of wealth of content, this richness of design, in a game that is a lot more straightforward and a lot more accessible. And I think if you look after Super Mario Bros. 3 launches in Japan,

which of course is where most good NES games were designed, you see people step back away from the sort of free-form, open-ended, continuous world platform design in favor of games that just kind of take more of a Mario approach. I think also Mario 3 kind of marks an important technological step for the system because, you know, platformers started with things like Pitfall and Jets at Willie where you had a single screen connected to a single screen connected to it, like it was, you know, you'd flip from one screen to the next. There was no scrolling.

Super Mario Brothers, Metroid and so forth, you got to scrolling, but it was just on one axis. So, Memorial Brothers 3 was, as far as I can remember, the first game to have two-axis scrolling on NES. Like, it was a technological step forward, having the ability to go left and right and up and down within the same space.

You know why they were the first, is because Nintendo developed the mapper. Right, yeah, the MNCCC3. Yeah. It was a, it was a, technological improvement for the system, but it also, you know, is one of those cases where technology brings game design change. So you no longer were limited to just moving along, you know, left or right or up and down. You could do all of it. And you see that in Mario 3

stages, like the very first stage, there's the ground path. But if you get the leaf, you can run and jump and there's this entire path up in the sky with bonuses and stuff. And you can backtrack, too, in the same level. Yeah. So all of a sudden you have a game that is Mario, you know, left or right, get to the goal. But it has all these other things in it, too. And I think that that freedom to sort of break up these spaces and make things, you know, digestible, to give people one space at a time to deal with and reward them for exploring within those spaces.

I think that really changed up, you know, it sort of gave people the freedom, designers the freedom, to create richer experiences without necessarily putting that sort of expectation of you are on an adventure. You're going to finish it from start to finish, or play it from start to finish. You're going to hit your head against Deborah Cliff. You're going to figure out all these obscure mysteries, and that's the only way you're going to succeed. And so games could be more approachable while still being substantial. I like this theory, but I think you're thinking a little bit too deeply about it, which is that I don't think the developers were like, oh, we can unlock all these experiences. They're like, we can unlock all this money.

That Super Marvel's 3 sold like 20 million copies. And they're like, I want to get into that. So they copy. Copycatch. Sure. Of course, there's financial incentive there. But that's assuming that game developers create games just because they want to be rich, which is clearly not the case. I mean, this is a capitalist system.

It is. But people don't get into making games just because they want to be rich. Yeah. I mean, sure. Because they, you know, they want to work 100 hours a week. Yeah. And maybe get some royalties that their game succeeds. There's a creative impulse here.

The publisher does it because they want to get rich. If you look at these games where everything is becoming, in the 1986, 87, 88, where games are taking on these more expansive designs, it's not because they're like, oh, yes, by adding RPG elements to our video game, we're going to become wealthy. But what about Zelda 2? I feel like Zelda 2 is what sparked a lot of this. A lot of them came up before.

Action RPGs on the N.E. A lot of them were in development before that. I think... We've talked about this before, but what year was Zelda 2 was it 87? It was the beginning of 87. Okay, and what about Castlevania 2? Beginning of 87. Okay. Well, I think Jeremy...

Coonies 2 was beginning of 87. Rigar was beginning of 87. Wingham Adola was late 86. Yeah, so they're all in the same. They're expanding... We've talked about them expanding on Super Mario Bros. The platforming, adding another dimension to platform. You're just like putting aside the creative impulse, which is a really weird thing to do.

Obviously, there's money in there, but that's on the publisher side. On the developer side, it's usually like, we want to make the best game we can. What is the best kind of game we can make? And I think the technology and the design that Squamarii Brothers 3 introduced was a route to creating great game experiences that weren't quite so taxing, quite so laborious and demanding on the end user. And that's kind of your ideal is like something that someone can just slide into and play. easily and have a great satisfying experience without necessarily having to, you know, spend time and write down passwords and draw a map and that's your thing. You're making me want to play Supermar Brothers 3 again.

It's a good game. I know. I think you're on to something, Jeremy, because I think what you see, Castlevania 2 is bad. What? God bless it, it tries. But I think what you see is it's trying to. It's a lot of bad things. Let's say that.

It's trying to put together pieces. that even the pieces haven't been refined at that point. But what you see, like, post-Super Mario Brothers 3 is that you see the pieces that we would later come to associate with the Metroidvania genre being refined in other spaces. You see

like Mario 3, branching pathways, secrets, secret areas, like entire secret levels that you could play that game and never see. On the world map, you can create shortcuts. Yeah. Like, people just started talking about a shortcut on one of the maps where you can, like, break a rock and get to the mushroom house or something.

Like, no one knew about that until just now. 2017, 29 years after this game came out. I knew about the break in the rock on the path. Is it a new one they found out? I think so, yeah. It was in the World 7, right? Something like that. I can't remember.

There's one where you just break to the Rock and you go to a whole other screen. That's in World 2. And one of the... Yeah, it's a different one. It's like something that doesn't seem like you'd be able to do it, but you can. Oh, cool. I love that. But then you also see, like, RPGs getting refined.

So you see, like, inventory systems and picking, up different weapons and changing your characters through that way, branch off into its own genre. Like, what you see, I think, is the proliferation of multiple genres that would later get recombined. Because, like you said, things start off with pitfall. But, you know, Final Fantasy is pretty early, but that's also getting refined throughout, you know, five or six games by the time we get at the end of the Super NES lifespan. So what you see is it all breaking out and being refined so that it can be recombined into what we know. Yeah, and I would say the other, you know, the other part of the coin, the Super Mario Brothers 3 coin, is the action RPG genre, the top-down Zelda-style experience. The ideas that you see in these Metroidvania games, platformers, they started to show up a lot more frequently, especially on Super NES, in the top-down action game.

Yeah, the link to the past style. Yeah, but even before that came out, you had stuff like Lagoon, you had games like Soulblazer. Like, there's an entire trilogy by Quintet, Soulblazer, Illusion of Gaia, Terra Enigma. Like, that right there, that's about as many of these top-down action games as you saw on NES. Plus, there was Secret of Mana. Plus, I mentioned Lagoon. There was, like, Young Merlin, if you want to include that. There were several other games that all linked the past.

They all kind of take this approach. They're flattened Metroid-Vaneus. It's top-down Metroidvanias. It's like they, you know, for a while there was this mindset, like everything has to be a platformer. And then now platformers kind of went off into the more of the action style. What if we go back and look at Zelda and say there's some merit there? And I think Nintendo creating a link to the past in the style of the original Zelda definitely emboldened people. It made them say, yes, that is the right choice.

And they said, hey, we can make money on that. But people were already going in that direction. You know, you had Final Fantasy Adventure and before Zelda 2 came out. That was on Game Boy. But then the sequel to that, Secret of Mano, was on Super NES. So, yeah, I love those games. Yeah, so you saw, yeah. I was just playing the Minish Cap again recently for the first time in 10 or 12 years.

And man, that is a wonderful game. And I was thinking, man, this is just like a Metroidvania, but you can't jump. It's just top down. There's pretty much items you unlock and you power up and et cetera. Yeah. And so I think what you really saw happening in this period that we're talking about is this is all sort of preamble to the actual games is that for the most part, these genres, like Chris said, we're starting to sort of go off

in different directions and explore different concepts. And, you know, you would see those recombined with Symphony the Night and some later games, Dark Souls, if you must. That's like the the Hayanko alien of everyone else. Oh, no. I still, actually, no, I did play it one time.

I can't get, I can't get into it. I have not played Dark Souls. We're like the only or the isolated biosphere people, BioDome, whatever. Because we like a certain kind of game that's kind and tender to us. Okay. I like to be hugged by my video games. Exactly.

I mean, I love Animal Crossing. People who like Animal Crossing, what's the Venn diagram, Animal Crossing, and Dark Soul? You'd be surprised. Is there an overlap? There is an overlap. People need their come down after Dark Souls. They're like, I need my animal friends. Anyway, Tom is way more evil than anything in Dark Souls.

I understand that Dark Souls is kind of. like the lower levels of the mines in Stardue Valley. Is that right? I haven't played the lower levels of the mines. I have. Is that where they delve too deep and too greedily? Yes, exactly. You guys are too clever for your own good.

Just stop this podcast right now. So is there anything else to say about this, like this theory that I'm putting forward, anyone care to refute it? I think you're right, because I think you do see games take their cue from whatever the dummy. it game is at the time. And in the 80s, it was Super Mario Brothers. Like, Super Mario Brothers redefined video games and defined them for the console market. Except Super Mario Brothers, too,

which nobody copied. But it's still like, you move left to wrenches. Yeah, Bible admissions. Yeah, I have. I just did a slideshow on religious video games, by the way. Why are you making this reference? You should know better. That's the only one, though. There's none others where you can pick up and toss animals. You and so that's where you see

whatever they do in those games becomes what people do. Like, you even see, like, branching pathways in the later Mega Man games, which are, like, pure, like, action platformers. Yeah, Mega Man Six really kind of goes all in on that. It doesn't do it well, but it's there. It's there. Nice job, Capcom. Yeah.

Golf Club. Okay. So, with that being said, why don't we venture into the world of Metroidvania? Let's backtrack. Yeah. Backtrack and double-down by way. Okay. So we've talked, like I said, about NES games,

but there were other games in the style happening, you know, kind of flirting with the ideas that we saw in Metroid and Castlevania 2 and so forth. They didn't necessarily go all in, as Benj will remind us repeatedly. Yes. But the spirit was there. The sort of desire was there. Yeah, burning desire.

Burning desire. So speaking of burning desire, actually, there's no... There's nothing. I think the first game that merits mention is the Sega Master System's first foray into this, which was Zillion, which is a pretty strange game because it's based on an anime that is a tie-in to a toy. It was like a laser tag gun that was sold in Japan, and there was an anime spin-off, and this game is based on the anime. Guess what? Isn't the light gun for the Sega Master System the same shape as the gun? Yes, the Lightfazer is the Zillion gun. Yeah, and Zillion, which is cool.

And the toy and the whatever, the anime. Yep, anomaly. So we never actually got the Zillion toy line here, but we did get the gun in the form of the light phaser. Yeah. Zillion, I have a neat story. But the light phaser does not actually work in Zillion, or in the sequel, the Tribune.

But you can hold it in one hand while you're playing. I guess if you want to lose. Okay. Yeah, I got into the Sega Master System about sometime in the early 90s when I started collecting old games. And I was pleasantly surprised by Zillion when I first played it because I was like, wow, this has way more depth than I ever thought in a game like this. I mean, because it's an action platformer where you... It's a 1986 action platformer on Sega Master System, which is not like where you go for depth.

It's just a little too early and kind of in the wrong space. That wasn't really Sega's forte. Yeah, exactly. So, but you can power up your guy. I don't know if you wrote in the notes, but you can get better at jumping and have more stamina and have a more powerful gun. I never survived long enough to find that. I don't remember if it persists after you die, though. I don't remember that.

So the death feature is interesting. It's something you would see in other games further down the road, but you have three characters, and each time you die, like your character's out of the action, and the next character in line takes over. So you have three lives, but each character is a little different, right? Yeah. I think so. It's actually been a long term. I still, I almost brought the cartridge, but I was like, why should I just show you the cartridge?

Yeah, that's not going to give me any important clues to how plays. I didn't have the box for it, but it has this code system. In every stage, you shoot these weird trash can looking receptacles to get codes. Right. So I think it's probably worth mentioning that this game, you know, it's pretty much contemporaneous with the original Metroid. and maybe not surprisingly it's somewhat simpler than the original Metroid because Metroid was really designed to be to show off the Famicom disk system hardware

which was an expansion on the NES whereas this game was just kind of like base cartridge level and so it wasn't really it was it was a licensed tie-in as opposed to like a proof of concept for a new platform so I think understandably it's not as sophisticated but instead of doing the scrolling thing it's more of the classic PC like flip screen thing where you go from one screen to the next. And it really draws its cues most heavily, I think, from impossible mission by epics, right? Wasn't that an epics game? I think so. Whereas you're going through like one screen at a time. You're finding passwords. You're using keys to advance. You're fighting, you know, against passive traps and

against enemies while doing so. Like the two games have a lot in common. Yeah, I didn't notice that until I watched that video who sent me earlier. Because I never really played Impossible Mission back in the day. Yeah, I felt like the connection was there, and then the video they were referring to is one by Retronauts contributor Kim Justice that she put together a few years ago.

It was a good video, and it does it lays out a convincing... Yeah, she makes that connection and really reinforces it, and I'm glad I wasn't hallucinating because I've never really played Impossible Mission. Yeah. I feel like it was a European favor.

why she is, you know, she's UK-based. So, of course, she, she's all up on, on her knowledge about that. Z-X. Yes. But, I mean, that, that style of game, you know, I've referred to Jets at Willie and a few other games along those lines. Like, that style of game was very big on that computer platform. So Impossible Mission was kind of in that same space. And you have Zillion that's kind of drawing on that. Kind of like the, the Japanese MSX version of Castlevania. It was like single screen, sort of infinitely scrolling loops, where it's like you're exploring, but it's kind of in a limited finite space, and then once you complete that space, you move on to the next.

Yeah, like a single challenge at a time. Right. So you are getting the codes and then unlocking a terminal that lets you go onto the next screen or something like that. Chris, do you know anything about Zillion? I do not. Well, you should. It's, well, it's mediocre.

But it's really cool for a Sega Master System game. Oh, I forgot. Yeah, you mentioned in the notes that Opa Opa, like your power, but you also have to fight Opa Opa. It's kind of weird. Isn't that a monster from a different game or something? I mean, Opa Opa is the main character of Fantasy Zone. Okay, that's what I was talking about. Yeah. That ship. But they're like, they fly at you and attack you in this. But they're also helpful. It's weird. Yeah. It's like friend and foe, all in one. I honestly just read that in a instruction manual. It's been. And I haven't plugged in Zillion and played it in about 12, 15 years, something. It's been a long time. So the thing that makes Zillion difficult to play and to map is the fact that the layouts, I think, are consistent from game to game, but the actual codes that you get are changed every time. And they're not just simple codes.

They're all these, like, weird ciphers. So you have to, like, yeah. In Kim's video, she talked about, like, coming up with your nomonics. Like butt and boobs and this sort of thing. And they do kind of look like that. Binoculars. I call it binoculars. That works too.

Her mind was in the gutter. As she usually is. If you've read any of her work or watched her videos. Yeah. So that kind of creates an added level of difficulty because you have this like weird character scheme and every time you play it's a different code. It's all random. Wow.

But I mean, I guess that is replay value. Otherwise the game would be kind of simplistic. And you can't just put out. one walkthrough that everyone can follow. Right. So I had a friend who owned this game back in the day, and I liked the idea of it, but I was always really terrible at it. So I never really, I don't know Zillion as well as I should, but I think it's a pretty cool game. And definitely kind of like flirts with the Metroidvania thing, even if it doesn't go all the way in. Yeah. It's not a whole date. It's just a

flirtation. Yeah. If your upgrades persist after death, I would say it's there. It's sort of a proto-Metrogy. Right. If your power-ups persist after death the way they don't in Super Mario World. I was... You're just asking for trouble. Chris is... He's charging up.

He's about to charge. Go on, Chris. There are single-use items in Castlevania, something of the night. We're talking about Super Mario World. Not the fairy candle? Not the cube of Zoe. I want to digress here. second, which is, I think I realized something that makes, for me, a true Metroidvania

is if you can grind by killing enemies anywhere and get more powerful to go on and be more powerful. But you can't do that in Super Metro Metro. You can't do that in Super Metro. Super Metroid is not a Metroidvania. It's a Super Metroid. But you can't do that in any Metroid game. Can you?

No. But in, that's why it's a Metroidvania. It's got to have the Vania in it. It's a Castlevania. Symphony of the Night. That's just Castlevania. It's Castlevania, Symphony in the Night. And everything after that and Zelda 2 and Rigar, you can sit there and charge up your experience.

So you're telling me, Zelda 2 is more of a Metroidvania than Metroid? Than Super Metroid, yeah. Because it has an action RPG element where you can build up your experience and get more powerful just by killing enemies over and over again. I don't disagree with you here. So if Benj were putting this episode series together, it would be about six games and we'd be done. You're right. Good thing. You're not the one putting this together.

It is a damn good thing. So with that said, let's move along to the next game. This one's kind of obscure because it never came to the U.S. But it's a game that has a really huge following in Japan. And in fact, it was the inspiration for the game La Mulana, if you've ever played that. Yeah, I have. Like, you know, the first time I saw LaMulana,

I was like, oh, is this based on Metroid? I asked the creators, the guys at Nogoro. Like, what games were you inspired by? hoping they would say Metroid. And they were like, well, if you have played the games we looked to, you'd know. And they weren't being, like, they weren't being snotty. It was just kind of that, there's a, no, there's a tendency I've noticed among Japanese developers and even corporations to be very gun-shy about referring to other people's creations,

either in a positive or negative light. And it's not like a, it's not like a pride thing. It's just like, you know, we don't want to bring these other people into this conversation because, you know, it's a cultural thing. Yeah, like, almost like a respect for privacy or, you know, like, let's not, let's not bring them into the discussion because, you know, they didn't ask for it. Yeah. So they weren't being cagey or anything. But it was not helpful to me because I was like, well, I clearly haven't played those games. So, can you please tell me what they are?

But it turns out it was this game. It was Nightmare 2, Mays of Golias. I have this on the Famicom. Yes, I have the Famicom version as well. I almost brought the cartridge just so I could hold it up. It's good that you didn't because I have two copies of it somehow. You got to give one to him. So all three of us have it.

I will have it on the Famicom that I do not owe it. With our powers combined. That's fine. I own two copies and haven't played it yet. Okay. Nightmare. I don't know where the second copy came from. But yes, I have two copies of Nightmare 2.

It was a lot by Ames of Galeas, I guess. So I've never played the original Nightmare, but my understanding is that Nightmare was basically like King's Night. If you ever played that, the Square Soft, top-down fantasy shit. I have on the Famicom as well. It's a green cartridge or something. I don't know. I think I have it, yeah.

Kings Knight. But yes, it was like a top-down shooter. This game is not a top-down shooter. This game is a side-scrolling platform. Well, no, it's a side-view platformer. Again, it's the flip screen by screen. So it kind of, it means, and that makes sense because this game started on MSX. The original version was MSX, which did not have free scrolling.

So it makes sense that they went with the flip screen style. But it is a game set in a huge castle, and within the castle there are multiple portals to sort of like subworlds. And it's all very sort of open-ended, and it's all very obscure and esoteric because there are treasures and secrets and powers and weapons and all sorts of things hidden within the castle, but some of them are very obscure, some of them are very difficult to find. And so it's one of those games that was really sort of keyed around the idea of that that schoolyard sharing of information.

Like this game, I feel, was very heavily inspired by Falcom's creations, games like Legacy of the Wizard and Zonadu. This sounds kind of like Deadly Towers, and I'm not joking. A little bit. There's some obscure, weird stuff that you wouldn't even know was there unless you had a guide. It's definitely that same mentality, that same school of game design. And I think these games were created around the same time. Deadly Towers was 87 also.

Yeah. So, yeah, like they were all, I think. Stuff. I feel like they were all sort of inspired by Falcons games, Sorcerian, Zanadu, Dragon Slayer, that sort of thing. Like lots of secrets, lots of obscurity, some RPG-facing elements, but an action genre style. Yeah, so. And there's, aren't there some of those Namco, like Dragon Buster or Dragon Something that are kind of like this? Dragon Buster is a little more direct action.

It doesn't have like the hidden stuff. And there's an overhead kind of maze. Tower of Draga. Yeah, Tower of Draga. And it's sequel. That feels like, I feel like all of those games were in a period where they were experimenting with this idea, but they didn't just get it. None of them really congeal to me into like the thing that you want to play. I don't know what it is.

They're all missing some little element of probably it's just some sort of punishing difficulty or having to reset after you die or something like that instead of just letting you go on and build up your character and be strong. Yeah, that mindset didn't come into games until Dragon Quest, where if you die, you lose half your gold, but you keep your experience. And Dragon Quest is the same thing. If you keep throwing yourself at the bad guys long enough, eventually you'll become powerful enough that you can overcome whatever was stopping you. That's what I'm talking about. That's the grinding element where Dragon Quest, I could play as a kid. That's a Dragon Warrior, though. It's not a Metroidvania.

Yeah, but this is what Metroidvania introduced. this Castellano Symphony Night took an action platformer put in RPG elements like the grinding of Dragon Warrior where you can just go out and fight random encounters until you get strong enough if you're not skilled enough to do it

by yourself you can get strong enough to face more difficult enemies easier anyway we talked about that before that is a RPG element you're looking at us weird I'm just listening okay good I'm anticipating

I have something to talk about don't you worry. Okay. Okay. What are you going to talk about? I'm going to talk about Super Metroid. Oh, that's still years away. Yeah, we're not there yet.

We're a long way away from that one. I'm going to be three hours in. I know. Well, you know, I'm actually surprised a lot of the games on this non-NES 8-bit Metroidvania, it's all master system stuff. Nightmare 2 was not. The next game, Golvelius, Valley of Doom, is. And this is an interesting one because it's, I guess, closest indes

in design to Riga. Is Galeas related to Gileas? It's not. Okay. I love Riga. Galeas was by Konami and Gauvelius was by compile. They both mean the same thing in Japanese. Yes, they both mean, you're going to die a lot.

You die. Golvelius was a game, another one that my friend who owned a Master System, master's system owned, and another one that fascinated me, and I did better at this one, because it's like a combination of Zelda and Zelda 2. Although the side-scrolling portions are more like Dragon Buster as opposed to Zelda, too, because they're all just like forward-scrolling. There's no back-tracking. There's no exploration.

You go into a cavern or a dungeon, and you just march, left, or right, and kill stuff along your way, and then there's a giant snake at the end, and you kill it. But then you got into the overworld. Oh, yeah. Someone with the giant snake. Yes, the giant snakes. And then you go into the overruled, and it's like top-down combat like Zelda. Oh, yeah, okay.

I need to play this again. I think I played on an emulator, but I don't have. have the cartridge. It looks fascinating. Jeremy, please tell me about these Bible holes. I put the Bible hole reference. Oh, did you put the Bible holes in there, wouldn't? What the hell is that? There was a funny video I watched.

Oh, yeah. There's a sort of nonsensical thing where you run around. This is the quote from the YouTube video. I don't know who said it, but you dig yourself into these holes here. There's old women that live in them, and for some reason they sell you Bibles that increase your gold. I was thinking, yeah, that sums it up just about right. Yeah, Bible hole sounds like something that's going to lead to some sort of scandal,

evangelical scandal somewhere down the room. That's where we put all the Bibles. No, there is some sort of lack of intellectual storytelling rigor going on here. That was common in a lot of those games for the master system and other things. They're not necessarily self-consistent. Or if they're self-consistent, it's nonsensical. It's like falling in a hole in getting Bibles that give you gold. you know, just doesn't make any sense.

That's, I think that's just one of those... Not everyone, not every game could have Pay Me for the Door Repair Charge. Gollelius actually reminds me a lot of another game that we didn't talk about in the NES episode, but also by compile the Guardian legend. I don't know if you guys ever played that. We talked about it one time. Did we? Okay. It was like the legend of Zelda meets a top-down shooter. So you'd explore the top-down maze, similar to in Gullvelius. And then instead of doing side-scrolling, platforming, you would just go into it. top-down combat view, and you'd, like, shoot up things and try to fly around and blow up bad guys. Yeah, maybe we didn't talk about that. Maybe we talked about us thinking about the Battle of Olympus or something.

That's a different game. Yeah, it is. I like the Guardian legend. Yeah, it was really good. But Govelius feels like sort of the rough draft for it in a lot of ways, except more fantasy Zelda-facing as opposed to sci-fi. So, you know, we talked about the action RPG and how it sort of supplanted the the Metroidvania in the 16-bit era.

I think, you know, you saw that with Zelda, kind of going sort of one direction to the other. Zelda 1 was the top-down action RPG. Zelda 2 was a side-scrolling, mostly side-scrolling platform or action game with RPG elements. Then Zelda 3, a link to the past, went back to the top-down view.

The same thing happened with the game that I think in Japan was kind of like the main competitor to Zaldo, which was Ease. Why is? No. The top-down... Yes. The first two games were top-down

RPGs, much simpler than Zold in a lot of ways, although they did have real RPG elements, but they also had like really brain-ded combat where you just run into bad guys and impale them with your sword until one of you dies. But East 3 did the Zolda 2 thing and became a side-scrolling platformer. And I feel like East 3 is more in the Metroidvania style

than Zalta 2 was. have the top-down view, there are RPG elements that you love so much. Yeah, you can get experienced by killing any particular bad guy. It's a much smaller game. Yeah. But the controls are terrible. I've played this. I just don't like it. I can't get into it. I don't know what it is. Is it a cultural barrier? No, I think it's because it started as a PC game. And so it was converted to consoles. I'm sure you played the Super NES version. Yeah. It was converted to, I think, PC engine to Genesis to Super NES by different companies. I think the NES version was developed by Tonkenhouse.

And have you heard of Tonkenhouse? Like Tonkenhouse cookies? Nope. Yeah, not exactly a big name in game design. So, I think part of the frustration comes from that. The game, the game was remade a few years back for Vita. What was a PSP? PSP or Vita?

The Oath-Falgana. And that brings it more into line with E-7, E's 8. where it's not quite top-down view, but it's like a three-quarter camera perspective with multiple characters that you juggle between and a very reflex-oriented combat. You know, in our Samus Returns episode, we're going to talk about, I'm positive of it.

We're going to talk about the reflex-based combat, like the counter system. You just have this feeling in your bones. It's just a hunch. You know, it sounds like something I'll find intriguing. Yes, the melee counters in Samus Returns and how that kind of slows down the pace. The East Games, the remakes, the modern remakes,

use something similar without slowing down the pace. Like, enemies attack more frequently, and when you dodge an enemy attack, it slows down the action, so you get like a bullet time effect. And basically, you're rewarded for a successful dodge. Rather than being punished for not dodging, you're just rewarded with an extra opportunity to attack

and to deliver some extra damage. So, yeah, they're really good. I would, personally, I would skip E's 3 altogether and just play Oath-Polgana. It's the same story, but done much better. I feel like I played it, and I liked it better. But I cannot get into any of the Ease things. It's just one of those, it's somehow too Japanese for me to get into, sort of like all those Falcom games, the legacy of the Wizards series.

It is a Falcom game. It is? Yeah. Damn. You didn't know that? Yeah, no, I didn't. Okay, so legacy of the wizard is great, but I couldn't, you know, I've played some of those other games that were, you know, on emulators for the MSX or the PC 98 or something.

And I don't know, I just can't get it. And the E's, all these wise games, I just can't get into the Ys because it's my least favorite letter. So I didn't like EAS either. I'm sorry, I do have to ask a follow up on those. so it's number 26 out of 26 no what isn't it aren't there only 26 letters in the alphabet

there are yeah so it's 25 you're saying you're not talking about alphabetical I'm talking about ranking order yeah no z is probably the last I like them in the order that they that's somehow even weirder A is my favorite so to you Q is better than R

yeah like it's a more versatile practical letter. Listen, they're in that order for a reason. Everybody wonders where alphabetical order came from. Somebody decided which letters are the best, and they put them at the front. This is even weirder because we just... BuzzFeed did not exist in, like, the Roman times. Top ten letters.

It is even weir to me that you, Jeremy, are immediately like, oh, it's versatility that makes a good letter. It is. Like, go watch Wheel of Fortune. Those are the top five letters right there. They give them to you on the final round. Lenny, right? Yes. R. L. Stein. No, but for you, the South Five Letters would be A, B, C, B, C, B, C, B.

That was a sidetrack that we really didn't need to get on. It's not nearly that funny if you're not sitting here with us. Oh, it's hilarious. That's good Patreon subscriber-only content is what that was. They're laughing for five minutes. Yeah. So I didn't like the East Games either until I played East 7, and they really retooled how the series works. Like, even East 6 was kind of.

What console is it? like PS2 or something. I think it's on a few. I think it's on Steam now. So you can play it pretty much however you want, but it plays on Vita. But they changed, they overhauled how the series works

and they added that reflex-based combat and it works much better. And the games just feel more fully featured, fully realized at this point. I mean, the first few East games are pretty good. But now there's been like, what's Ease 7, both of Falgana, C of Celsetta, and then East 8.

So that's like four games in the past decade. So, more master system. Wonder Boy 3, the Dragon's Trap. This is a good one. Yes. Have you played the original version? I know you've played the remake. I have the cartridge version.

You didn't bring the cartridge with you, did you? No, I almost brought it up. I'm really glad you didn't do that with any of these. Which of the Wonder Boy games was featured on GameCenter CX? Probably the original. I feel like that's the one that's like most punch you in the genitals hard, which is kind of what Arna goes for. Okay.

But yeah, this one is not just a straightforward platformer. It's more of an action RPG. Very much in the, I don't know, what is it, what would it be comparable to? I don't really think as of what, 1989, anyone had made a game that was quite like this on NES. Are you talking about Wonderboard 3 right now? Yes. Okay, not the first one. It's a lot like, I don't know, there's, I mean, Zelda, too, kind of, but it doesn't have experience points.

Well, it doesn't have the experience points. It doesn't have the top-down area. It's, like, one continuous space. I guess Castlevania 2 maybe, but it doesn't play like Castlevania 2. Plus, it doesn't have the experience points. It reminds me of Super Adventure Island 2, which came much later. Yeah, which is developed by the same people. I think that was developed by Hudson.

But, I mean, Adventure Island and Wonderboy are all the same thing. Watch that. I mean, listen to that podcast, and you'll find that. It's a big complicated mess. But I would say if you want like a modern analog to Wonder Boy 3, besides looking at the remake that just came out this year, the Shantae games are probably the closest thing to it. They feel like they were really designed in that same style. Like you have sort of this village that sits in the middle of the world and then you go exploring in either direction left and right and, you know, kind of branch out increasingly from the main town. But you keep going back to it.

even though there's not like an in there that you sleep in. It's just sort of like kind of your launching point for your future adventure. Yeah, that's a pretty good comparison. Now, am I correct in my understanding that the 2017 remake didn't add anything to it? It's just a straight remake of the original game? Well, it added new graphics. Yeah. And there is like one little element that it added.

But yeah, the game, that game actually got it start because the guy who programmed it really loved Wonderboy 3. And he designed, like he programmed his own engine for a Wonder Boy 3 remake. Like, he tried to recreate the game engine. So he created such a faithful engine that Wonder Boy 3 can actually switch over to the original graphics, the remake. So you can get the 8-bit graphics just seamlessly from the new graphics. And the game is exact, like, there's no new locations or anything in the game. It's just, it's the same thing. You can even use the same passwords.

Like you can use the Sega Master System passwords. You can take a Master System password, input it into the Switch or PS4 game, make some progress, get a password there, and then take that back to the master system and have the same progress. That's exactly what I did. Did you? No. Oh, but the potential is there. The remake is incredible.

Like, just the fact you can push the right shoulder button and it sort of swipes, side swipes to the left and the original graphics come back. you know, it just comes back and forth if you want to toggle between them. And it's amazing. It's just very, very well done. You said that it changed one element. What did it change? He added in like some bonuses. Apparently there was a dummy bit in the password system that was present on master's system, but not used.

So he added some stuff to the game, like some rewards that you can find if you do like ultimate completion and really search around. There's like five items you can find. I didn't find any of them myself. Wow. But they're in there. And those make use of that dummy bit. So you can still, you can still save it in the password. And when you take it into master system, it doesn't do anything for you. But then if you take it back into the modern game, you'll still keep that stuff. Who is this fellow who did this? Omar Cornut. He must be a genius. He's, yeah, like he just really loves, he loves Wonder Boy 3 a lot. Yeah. And he created an amazing. This is a Amazing recreation of it.

See, everyone who creates a recreation of game should be the greatest fan of it of all time like this, I think. Well, I think that's dangerous. You know, if you're not careful, you could be too slavish or, you know, to feel like it's too precious to change. But he did it right. Like the remake keeps all the original content, the same physics, everything, but it adds new visuals and new animation. New music. And, yeah, like, modern versions of it. I think this is probably a good case study for this because it's a game that is obscure enough

that doing a complete faithful recreation of it is going to introduce it to... It's also audiences like us. It's obscure here, but it's actually, it was a really big game in Europe and Brazil. So it has a lot of fans outside the U.S. I also think it just happened to be good enough to actually. actually do a faithful. Yeah, that was my next question. Does it, does it hold up, like, compared to, like, modern, like, indie game that would be? It feels like, I think you could probably just pretend it was a new game and it would pass for one of these indie games that

come out. Yeah, I am. So my, my feeling is that the new animation really makes a big difference. Even though it's, it's based on the same keyframes, the more fluid animation, like, it's 60 frames per second of like just beautiful hand-drawn animation that sort of adds into the the very sort of choppy animation that originally existed. It doesn't physically change the game, but it changes your perception of it and makes it feel more fluid. And I feel like I control things better when I'm in the current graphics mode as opposed to the original. It's a really weird, I don't know, like I can't really explain it. Like you wouldn't think that just having different animation would affect how you play the game. But I feel like I have a better sense of, you know,

the game physics, the jump arc, the attack range, things like that than I did on the master system version. He was really careful to keep, you know, the original attack dynamics, like how far, you know, how many pixels forward your sword attacks or whatever. But it just, it works better. It's really strange, but it's great. Nintendo should do something like this for Super Mario Brothers, one. Wouldn't that be amazing if It was exactly the same game, but like fluid animation, 1080p, you know, and you could switch back and forth any time you wanted, that would be just amazing. Was Mario Brothers Deluxe? Was it the same? Was it the same? It was physics and everything? Yeah, it's not that deluxe, really. It's got red coins. It also lets you play as Luigi. It has Super Mario Brothers 2 hidden inside of it. It has a save system. It has a world map. It's a pretty big overhaul. But it is the same graphics.

And I think it would be interesting to see There's kind of a thing going around right now online Where people are like, hey, Shigar Miyamoto What about the guy who did all the hand-drawn art For Super Mario Bros. 3 in World? Kotabe was his name. Would you ever want to make a game that looked just like his hand-drawn art? Yeah.

And Mimodo's like, oh, I feel like we should always be moving forward. So they're not going to do that. But I feel like Nintendo is way too married to the original Sprite art of Super Mario Bros. brothers. Like, that's iconic for them. It is iconic. You can play as Sprite Mario from Super Mario Bros. and Mario Odyssey.

Yeah, that's exciting and cool. I love that reference and reverence of the past. I think that's awesome that they recognize it, but it would also be fun to do something else, too. I agree, but I think they depend too much on that nostalgic marketing to change up the game that way. If anything, we're going to see stuff like, you know, Mario

Odyssey having the sprite art as opposed to the original Super Mario Brothers done up in Odyssey style art. Yeah. Alas. Alas. We didn't really talk that much about the design of Wonderboy 3, but I do think it's worth mentioning a few of the design elements that are kind of noteworthy or interesting.

It's a game that introduces the idea of character transformation, which I hadn't really seen in games before that. But the entire point is that you're Wonderboy, you start the game, you fight the final boss of the previous game, you know, like Symphony of the Night. And after you defeat the Mecca dragon, he curses you and changes you into a lizard man. And the entire point of the game is like get back to your human form. That's what you're really after.

You're not trying to save the world. You just want to be a human again. And that's another Chantay connection too. Yeah, you turn into different characters, like different creatures. There's a lion, a mouse, a lizard man, a piranha man, and eventually Hugh Man. And like each character, you have to go back to. town. That's one of the reasons you go back to town. You have to go back to town to transform into the different forms as you acquire them and switch back and forth. And there's a lot of

environmental puzzles built around which form you're in. Like you have to go to a certain place in order to turn into say piranha man, but initially it seems like you have to be maybe lion man to get to some place where piranha man needs to solve a puzzle. So the question is how do you get to that place as piranha man? So the whole world kind of becomes this navigational puzzle. So it's actually really thoughtfully designed. I think that's one of the reasons it holds up so well is because there is so much care and attention put into the structure of the world and the way everything interconnects. I love the mouse. The fact you can go back to where you just were as the mouse and then suddenly you get into these new areas. It unlocks it and stuff.

Yeah. And you kind of see that, I think the first game to rip that off might have been Castlevania 3, where you know, have the helper characters and you can transform it. to one of them. And, you know, you have Grant Anasty who can turn into, well, you turn into Grant Anasty and then he can climb walls and ceilings and stuff. Another game that did the same thing was Little Samson for N.S. Like three or four years later, one of the characters is a mouse who for some reason throws bombs, but he can do the same thing. He can crawl along ceilings and walls. Can mice actually climb ceilings? And they actually threw bombs? Yes. I've seen that. I've seen that. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what the deal is with mice throwing

bombs in Japanese games, eight-bit games. It might be a reference to an old anime or something for all we know. But I guess it says something that I'm more offended by the idea of like these mice climb walls and walk along ceilings that I am like, oh yeah, they throw bombs.

They can climb pretty well in real life. I mean, I've seen it. Well, now I'm really worried that I'm going to wake up and look up one one night and there's a mouse of puppy. You're going to open that little trap door on the ceiling and a thousand mice can pour out like in the end of Jones. And call her.

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Some features not available in all states. Now on Podcast One Sports, it's a family affair on Attack Each Day, the Harbaugh's podcast. We're going to attack this day with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind. Hear incredible stories on Sound of Success. the Dick Anberg podcast. Oh my. And guess who's talking America's favorite basketball team? Hey, it's Jay Moore, and it is time for America's Lakers podcast. Listen on Apple Podcasts, the new Podcast One app. And where else, Jay? Podcast1.com. We just bought it like a few days ago.

What kind of car? It is a 2017 kiosol. That's neat. But it is used. Good. already. Yeah. It's a former rental car, but it only has like 9,300 miles on it.

Right. So it's got a backup camera, and I love that back-up camera. Nice. Anyway, it's not a Metroidvania. Back in on it. Did you see the headline yesterday? It was like Kia recalls 300,000 souls. I did.

It was the day after I bought that car, but it was the, those were the 2014 to 2016 models, and mine's 27. I just like the idea of recalling souls. It's just like, uh, are you of sorrow? All right. Moving into the second half or second portion of this episode, we're going to begin with a few letters that I got from cool listeners like you. I'm pointing at the microphone.

That's you. You're a microphone. From Ethan Morris, early Metroidvania's. I think the interesting thing that I would like to hear you cover is the question, is there anything the formative era of Metroidvania's offer that the later games haven't iterated on and improved? I'm thinking specifically of the core Metroid and Castlevania brands here. The favorites tend to be Symphony of the Night in Super Metroid, but I'm not convinced that those

games are better than their handheld sequels. I feel like these classic games get a lot of credit for their plays in history, but future games surpass them in responsive controls, visual fidelity, narrative, variety of challenges, etc. So the big question to tackle is, what can I get from early iterations of the Metroidvania formula, that I can't get better from more recent games built on many years of iteration and experimentation with the form? So guys, I'm going to keep it over to you. Chris, talk about Symphony of the Night.

Yeah, this is going to come up again on the micro episode, but I like the handheld Castlevenias a lot, like the Hiroshi directed Castlevenias. I really like Ari of Sorrow, Don of Sorrow, Porto de Ruyn, Order of Ecclesia, I think, is actually pretty underrated even. But the thing about Symphony of the Night is that it is at least as good as those games are at their best. completely divorced from the experience of playing it for the first time

and the kind of realization that there's a whole other game in there. Symphony the Night is pretty unparalleled in terms of just the options that it gives you. I don't think any other game, especially like the immediate follow-ups, the ones where you're actually playing as a Belmont and have a whip, no other game really gives you the versatility of that game just by having one button for the left hand one button for the right hand

and letting you combine weapons in different ways controls are amazing yeah it's you the thing that makes that game so good is that you have so many options for dealing with everything that you encounter like you know enemies don't have as a general rule

like particular weak points so you are allowed to deal with them you can do the fireball spell. You can, you know, use, uh, you know, a sword in one hand or, or jump behind them and use a, like the, uh, someone that, uh, the heaven sword, but, you know, to take care of things from a distance. It's a really, it's crammed full of stuff in a way that you've written about recently, Jeremy, with all, like, all the little touches. But, uh, as good as the later games are, I think, I think the best they get is on the level of Symphony of the Night. And I do think those games get there. I think Don of Sorrow is an extremely

good game. Yeah, they're great. I would say aria of sorrow in terms of play mechanics and overall castle design is better than Symphony of the Night, but it doesn't hold up in terms of visuals and music. Because, you know, it's GBA versus PlayStation and like peak 2D on PlayStation. Don of Sorrow holds up better, but I don't think that the overall game design is as good. If you could combine the look of Dawn of Saros with the gameplay and overall castle design of Ari of Saro, that would be a game that would exceed Symphony of the Night. In terms of Metroid, what do you think? Is anything better than Super Metroid?

I personally think Zero Mission is the best Metroid game. It is. It's really good. It's up there. It might be on par with Super Metroid. I think, yeah, I don't know. I like it better because it, I don't know if I can. It's hard to, yeah.

I just, all I remember is the feel I got when I played it. I experienced joy, as I mentioned. I'm going to mention in another podcast soon. It's just something that was really fun and delightful to play. And, of course, Super Metroid was such a revelatory experience. We'll talk about that in a minute. I'd like to add on Castellan Symphony Night. I like to play those Game Boy Advance games,

the Castellan games on the Game Boy player, something like that on the TV, and I really, really missed the extra resolution of the PlayStation Symphony of the Night game. Graphics. It was good. I think they are, like, arguably the best handheld games. Like...

Ever made? They're pretty close. I don't know if I'd go that far, but they're up there for sure. They're certainly... They're no entry and Odyssey. you. I don't know. I've never played that. They're certainly my, uh,

I know a Yankee alien. I, I would put a, it's Game Boy. I love, I love Pokemon, but I would put up the Castlevania games up there with those. It's like, just, I can play them over and over and over again and have. Yeah, I have two. They're great. That's what we all agree with. That's why we're here. Yeah. Too bad that run ended with mirror of fate. Yeah. That's a, that's a rough one. I have, by the same people who made Samus returns.

Really? Yeah, Mercury Steam. That's why they've definitely improved. They were working with worse source material, too. Yeah. That's the only one I didn't complete. Mirror of Fate. It's the last one, right?

Yeah. I find Mirror of Fate, I think I talked about this last time. I find Mirror of Fate to be very interesting and audacious in its storytelling and very, very bad in its actual gameplay. Is that where you switch from a boy to a girl? No, that's Porter of Bruin. Okay. Mirror of Fate is the 2.5D one that's a spin-off of the show. Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. It's Castlevania, colon. I didn't get through Portrait of Ruin, and I definitely did. Lord of Shadow, colon, mirror of fate. Yeah. I actually like the HD version of mirror of fate a little bit on Steam.

I just, I don't know why. I couldn't get into it on the 3D.S. Okay. There you go. Really looking forward to Bloodstant. Yes. Me too. All right.

So from Tony Spears, hello Retronauts crew. I am of the opinion that Metrovania style games are the best fit for a slew of different games from the indie side of things. The Metroidvania style is a lot more flexible than it's given credit for, and because of that, it's easy to see why so many games can kind of fall into the category so easily. If you were going to remake a game as a Metroidvania, which would you pick? I would personally like to see a game like Monster Rancher done in the style. Super Mario Bros.

There's already one of those. Super Mario World. That's a really hard question, because it's tough to think of a game that's not already in that genre. that would benefit from all those elements like, you know, leveling up and inventory stuff and character customism. I have one. I have one. I would redo Super Metroid as a Metroidvania and give it the ability to have you gain experience points and levels

every time you kill an enemy to get stronger and stronger and stronger earlier in the game if you want to. I don't think I want an experience system in my Metroid games. Yeah, I think that's part of the, well, I'll get to it, But I think that's part of the appeal of those is that the thing that I realized about RPGs, like JRP style games, that holds through, like, with everything from Final Fantasy to Pokemon, is that if you're patient, you can't be bad at them. If you are patient enough to sit there and grind through, and this also applies to something in the night in the Igomania games, you can just get powerful enough to bestride the earth like a mighty colossus laying waste to everything. in your way, which I like. But I think part of the experience

of Metroid as I have played it is that you have to be skilled at using all the tools that it gives you. I mean, Super Metroid is probably in the top three of my favorite game, so I wouldn't actually change it. Kind of joking.

So, what would I want? Chris, did you answer? No, it's really hard to think of one. Okay, as the host, I'm throwing it to you. You have to answer first. Geez, I'm just looking around the room now. Altered beast? No.

Altered base to the game. Oh, actually, Middle Gear Solid could be kind of interesting. Like, Mark of the Ninja did Metal Gear Solid stealth as a 2D platformer. So you throw in, like throw it back to Metal Gear Solid and you go back to the structure of the original Metal Gear Solid, where it does take place in a single environment that's totally open. There is backtracking. Like at some point you have to go back from. late in the facility to a space pretty early on.

That could be actually pretty interesting. And, I mean, what else is Konami going to do with Metal Gear? Turned it into a zombie survival game? I mean, seriously. I've got my answer. And again, I think this is something that I talked about on a previous one. Arkham Asylum has so many Metroidvania elements of exploration and getting new gadgets to unlock new areas that I would really love to see a, Batman game that was done like that and also good.

How about a 2D platforming Dragon Warrior spinoff? I'm not surprised they haven't done that. There is a top-down action RPG spinoff called Rocket Slime, which is so good. It's so good. That was what made me a love Dragon Quest again. I bought that just to play it on an airplane. Sorry, I bought that just to play it on an airplane back in 2008. I think the way forward Brave and the Bold game, which is like not a lot of people, I think, play it.

But both the Wii and DS versions of that game are like super good. That's more of a brawler, isn't it? I didn't think it was a Metroidvania. Yeah, the Wii one for sure. But the DS one has like a lot of really cool platforming elements. And at one point Batman has turned into a gorilla, which is. very fun. And so like that, like that aesthetic and that attitude and like the ability to unlock different things that I think would really work well in the Brave and the Bolt style because

it's so gadget heavy. Right. Would would be really fun. They did the same thing with their Thor game, didn't they? Yeah, the Thor game is also really good. Yeah. And they have an adventure time game that is Zelda 2. Like there has never been a game more Zelda 2. Even Battle of Olympus. No. No. Adventure time. Hey, Ice King. Why'd you steal our garbage? That is by far the Zelda Tuist game that ever Zeltitude. You've got a rude Zelda toad. Pretty much. So from Kevin Bunch, I find early Metroid-style games to be either incredibly frustrating to revisit or fun but flawed.

But at the least, they all seem to have at least some good ideas gleaming in the darkness. On the genuinely cool side of the scale, Sega's zillion on the master system married Metroid's exploration with impossible missions' room pseudo-puzzles, and ended up a stronger game than either of those. Wow, brave and bold. Yeah. I only wish it weren't so annoying to jump over those damn minds or that the game included some sort of save or password system. And then there's, wow, Zelda, wand of Gamelon on the CDI. It's nonlinear and built around solving basic puzzles and revisiting areas as you find new items progress. Once you power up Zelda a little, it even gets kind of fun. Actually, getting to that point, however, can be incredibly frustrating, given how shoddy the hit detection is in CDI games.

though in some measure of questionable mercy the game lacks a failure state it's the little things you hold on to when cdi games are in rotation well that was the most iconic iconoclastic letter that i ever iconoclasted this guy has interesting taste and i would have to say that i think having interesting taste is much more interesting than going along with the crowd in terms of definition yeah so i i had that wand of gamelon game before i i hate sold my cdi collection in 2001 on eBay because it was so depressing that even try to play any of those games. You kept Hotel Mario, though, right? No, I wish. Well, actually, I didn't even have that one. I had two Zelda games and like a giant stack of other games. None of them were even remotely playable. Some of them were about, you know, encyclopedias.

I don't even remember what I'm getting on to here. Where are you getting on to? That you think that was an interesting letter? Yeah. I mean, he's got cool taste. I mean, the thing is this billion. you know, by popular consensus is not better than Metroid, but he thinks it is, and that's just fine.

He does. I don't agree. Yeah. And that's okay. But it's an interesting opinion. It is what it is. I mean, yeah. Maybe he grew up with a Sega Master System. I only played Metroid later. And he's like, this is, Metroid is a huge zillion rip-off. You know, maybe thought that. That could be. It would very well be.

Anyway, so, whoops. Close my notes. Why would I do that? You don't need notes for this, Jeremy. Anyway. We don't need notes. Let's just jump to Super Metroid. Chris, it's your turn to talk.

All right. So last time I was on here, I mentioned that I had never played Super Metroid. And I think both of you were scandalized by that fact. You could even hear the scandal. We slapped you, I think. Camera noises. But last week, I was in Target. And every time I've been in Target, I take a walk to the electric.

section. You got a copy of Super Metroid there? I sort of. Yeah. Oh. They had four S&ES classics in stock. So you bought all four to scalp. I bought two.

I bought one for me and one for my other podcasting partner, Matt Wilson. But yeah, I was, it was, I was there in the middle of the afternoon. In the words of Bruno Mars, got to blame it on Jesus. Hashtag blessed. So I have sat down to play Super Metroid for the first time. and I don't know if you guys know this. That games were really good. I had heard that, yeah.

I know this. Yeah, I was surprised because we've talked about this before today, and I don't remember which show was on. This one or the micro that's coming out next week. But we've talked about the idea of revisiting things after experiencing the games or other pieces of media they've influenced. And I honestly wasn't sure if I was. would like Super Metroid

when I was coming to it after playing Fusion, after playing XeroMission, after playing Axiom Verge, which I forgot there was not a virtual console on the Switch. And when I looked to search for Metroid on the switch, Axiom Verge was all that came up.

Yeah. So I've played all these games, not to mention things that I would consider to be more on the Castlevania side of things like Guacamile. And... Guacamile, you consider more on the Castlevania side? I do, actually.

I feel like that is such a Metroid game. I mean, it's, yeah, it's melee combat, but like the whole, like the colored power up, the colored gating system, like green doors, red doors, yellow doors. Missile doors. Yeah, it's all. I just feel like it has more of the, like, actiony feel. Get it. It puts it closer to Castlevania.

Letcher doors, you just that. Oh, boy. But, yeah, like, I wasn't sure if I would hold up or if I would just be playing it thinking, like, oh, this would be better if. but it really is a very good video game I played it for like a couple hours yesterday and then this morning before I came over here to record

I just sat down and played it for like three hours I had to stop playing it to drive over here and not because I was preparing for the podcast but I was genuinely enjoying it so much there's really good like visual storytelling in that game I like the power up system a lot I like that you are able to turn power-ups on and off, which is another thing that you see in Symphony of Night.

For some reason, you don't want to see the names of enemies. Or in the case of Super Metroid, if you need to make a jump that you're jumping too high to actually get, it's fantastic and holds up in a way that I was not expecting for a game that came out 23 years ago. I mean, I don't know that anyone has substantial, improved on the design of Super Metroid in terms of the style of game. I mean, there are games that do some things better, but I don't

think anyone has created a game that in just like every category is absolutely better at doing this kind of game than Super Metroid. Vind, what do you think? I think Super Metroid is one of the two greatest video games of all time. What's the other one? Tetris?

Symphony in the Night. Oh, so... Really? I mean, Tetris is, yeah, sure. Okay, it's up there, too. but no i i would tend to agree with i think super metro yeah it still holds up very well um it had such a sense of depth and mystery and exploration and music and graphics and gameplay and controls and just everything about it was incredible there's all these there are all these iconic moments like the first time you realize this might be a spoiler for you should i say it you go in this there's a tube you're going through

you know and it's water there's water around it and you're normally you're just going through the tube and then finally you realize you can blow up the tube and go in the water and that's like holy crap i just got the super bombs so yeah super bombs yeah pretty excited that is awesome and then there's another part with these little robots that walk around that you can kind of push around and they're sort of lonely in a spaceship like the crash spaceship area or something that was just incredible. Well, and then, you know, if you look at the, like, once you bring power back to the crashed ship, the, uh, the video monitors in the background turn on.

And if you look, you, like, see Metroid images. So you're like, what, how did this ship crash? Did the ship, were they, like, carrying Metroid's and they crashed? And that's how the Metroid's got on this planet? Is that all this happening? Or were, like, they attacked by Metroids? And the game never explains it. So it just becomes this.

It's in an, in, it is an in-electable. mystery. Inelect them. Ineluctible. I think one of my favorite things that's happened to me so far, and I don't think I can stress enough how much of an experience it is playing on the S&ES classic because, you know, like I'm, you know, I'm not completely uncultured. I have attempted to play it like Super Metroid before, but something about playing it

on an emulator versus playing it like on a television with a super NES controller in your hand, it completes the experience in a way that I wasn't really expecting, whether it's just like... I mean, technically the Super Nias Classic is an emulator, but it doesn't, yeah, it's not the like a computer emulator where you're kind of like, oh, it just crashed on me. Well, it's also a, it's a nostalgia machine because, I mean, you have one, too. Do you have one? No.

Well, the cord is so short that I have to sit on the floor in front of my television. And it genuinely has the feeling of it. You know the original chord was a lot longer. It's like probably six feet or more. Not as short as that one. Yeah, it's, I, I can't reach one. But the controller is essential. I mean, as your main interface to the console, it's how you relate to it physically.

Yeah. And if you don't have the original controller, if you don't have the original responsiveness of the controller and the original layout, it's just not the same. Yeah, this is, it's not like playing with a Gravis game pad. Yeah, like, you know, I have like a Logitech that basically looks like a, like a PS2 controller. Yeah. That's more than adequate for most things. Like, I've played, you know, I've popped on, like, some of the Gameway Advance Castlevania's, and it's fine.

But, like, the, for some, something about that experience just completes it. And I encountered the big statue room with, with Cray and Ridley, and, I don't know, the other one. Fantoon and Dragon. There you go. And then you're in the, you get to that point where there's the hallway, where it's basically doing the Bowser fireballs, uh, for, From, who's the green one? Oh, Craig, yeah.

And then you fight like a little Crade. Yeah. And you're like, oh, that's it? Yeah. Who's just a little bit, like, just slightly tougher than the average bad guy for you're like, oh, did I break the sequence? Am I, like, a place I'm not supposed to be? Or that I was supposed to be an hour ago?

And then you go into the next room and you get the real version of the boss. That's an amazing moment that I have not seen that particular trick done that well like I don't know anywhere else like the same thing with the chozo statue boss that happens very early on man that is amazing a lot of this game plays off your expectations

of the original Metroid the chozo boss is one because that statue like it's the first no the second statue no it is the first chozo statue you come across and after Metroid and Metroid 2

you're conditioned to be like oh this this statue is my friend it will give me a power and then it stands up and is like I'm going to kill you those ribs open up and start flashing. Yeah, it's, that was a good mind.

And the, the crate thing also is a callback to the original Metroid. One, in the original Metroid, crate is like shorter than Samus. He's like this little fat lizard who throws spikes. But two, there is a fake crate in the original Metroid. If you go the wrong way, like there's just a crate hanging out. And you can kill him in like three shots. But he's just like a random copy of crate. And if you defeat him, you're like, oh, I killed a crate.

Cool. And you go back to the statue up at the top. of the game and no that statue's not flashing you haven't actually killed him yet so this kind of does the same fake out but in a more direct way and you're still not expecting like little short fat lizard guy to become you know two screen tall dude whose attack spikes are actually platforms that you can jump on because that's how big he is yeah yeah i think it's uh it is fantastic to have that on the same like little i guess it's a console technically like to have it on the same console as

like Super Castlevania 4 which is bad not the best I don't like Super Castlevania 4 I guess this death glare doesn't come across in podcast

I think it's I it's not it's a different take on Castlevania I like it and a good yeah I think it's good but distinct

it could be better it could be more about any game. Well, not something than I could be better. Yeah. It could. But I think it's interesting to see the, the aesthetic of what you get in Supercastlevenu4 and the way that environment coheres, but gets weird. Like the rotating rooms.

Contrasted like immediately, you know, like right next to Super Metroid and see how. how direct an influence it was on Symphony of the Night, where, like, I don't think it's as good as Symphony of the Night in that Symphony of the Night has so much more, like, so much more stuff in terms of inventory and, you know, weird little one-shot power things and

the librarian. But also, like, those little moments, like, so many more of those little moments of that fountain's turning to blood. There's a peeping eye outside the main thing. Like, there's an items that don't look like they do anything, but it makes your sprite one pixel taller. Like, all the little pieces.

Detail. Yeah. But I don't. There's only so much you could do with a Super NES cartridge versus a PlayStation CD-ROM. And Super Metroid does have a lot of that stuff, like the dead guy outside of Cray's Lair. Who has the... Like, with bugs all the eating them. It's terrible.

That's what I'm talking about. The moments, it tells a story without any words, and you're sort of writing your own story. as you play it, as you encounter these scenes. But the thing is, I think Symphony the Night has more of those moments, but I don't think you get those if they don't happen in Super Metroid first. Like going back and seeing that and knowing that it's three years before Symphony the Night, it's the influence is so profound in a way that I didn't really. I knew it, but I didn't know it until I played through.

Like just the, the sheer amount of like, visual storytelling and ideas that you get in both of those games that you don't get in Super Castle. I'd say visual storytelling is important because you're not reading the names of items and things and, you know, whatever. There's no what? Listen, one of the coolest parts of Super Metroid is when you come back to the original Metroid area, you come through it and you go through the place where you killed Mother Brain, you revisit all that stuff where you get those. It's the very beginning of the game. You have been there. Yeah.

It's really awesome. You start by retracing your escape, yeah. That blew my mind when I first played that game. I was like, oh, this is where Mother Brain's case was. Yeah. And then later you find out you can bomb through it and like find a secret item in there. Yeah, that's awesome. Don't spoil it for him.

You're just telling them. And there's a place where there's these creatures who run really fast and there's babies or something. And you have to sort of teach them how to jump up through things. Oh, yeah, they teach you how to do the jump and the flying. And it's totally optional. we don't have to go down there I don't want to There's a super

dash jump where you can like rocket yourself in a direct line and straight up straight up and get out of pits if you fall in and there's also a wall jump where you can like press against the wall

and jump up shafts and stuff and you have that ability from the beginning you just don't realize it the game never tells you but if you fall into a pit the only way out is to do the wall jump and there's these guys who are like They're like a goat thing.

They show you. Yeah. The game doesn't tell you a lot of stuff. In a way that I find... There's no dialogue after the introduction. Yeah. Everything else that happens is... Yes, thank you, Dan. The galaxy is at peace.

Once you get past that introduction, there's no text in the game, aside from like, here's what this item knows. Yeah. You even get... There's a point even in there where you don't know that you can hold a button down to run faster because it's never told you. and that button is otherwise like Why? Right. But once you get to

Dash the speed booster, then it's like, oh, by the way. But you have to know about it beforehand because there's another area you have to get across before you get the speed boost. Is there? Yeah. Or at least that was for me. You got to the speed boost already? Yeah. I've got the Varya. I just got

Superbombs. So I'm very excited. I cannot wait to go play more of it. Superbomb some more things. And that's, you know, per the question that we were just asked, like I think that's the value of going back to a game that is profoundly influential, because if it's good enough, and I think the number of games that are substantially good enough to hold up as, like, an incredible experience, but, like, if that game was new, I would not be surprised. Like, that's how good it is. And I think, you know, you can count those games on two hands, probably.

I did a slideshow about this. I call them perfect video games. Yeah. Super Mario Brothers, Miss Pac-Man, Doom, Super Metroid. I actually put Earthbound on there. I'm pretty excited about playing Earthbound, too. But it's a great game. I mean, you know, those kind of things that are always going to be good,

no matter what, just the way they were exactly presented to begin with. Yeah. And Tetris, you know, Game Boy Tetris, probably pretty good forever. Yeah, I am glad to be in the I have played Super Metroid Club now. Congratulations. High five. also it's worth noting that Matt Wilson told me we were talking about it he was like oh that's my favorite video game and I was like really I was kind of

surprised about that because again I hadn't played it and I know there's there's so much that you would think would have iterated on it and improved on it in the last two and a half decades he was like no no no that game is like perfectly designed and he's right the peak of Metro except for zero mission we were talking about a little bit It might be. I'm really wanting to revisit Zero Mission now because it's been, I know I played all the way through Fusion. I can't remember if I got Zero Mission. Does that on advance?

Yes. It is, yeah. Super Metroid is just, it's a masterpiece in game design. So it's hard to top that. I mean, it's just really hard. We haven't really talked about what makes the design of it, like in terms of structure so good, though. And that is a big part of it. Like, yeah, the atmosphere is great, the little surprises.

but, you know, the way the power-up sequence perfectly meshes with the world design and opens up new boundaries for you as you become more powerful. Like, that's really, to me, other games did that, but to me that is the heart of Metroidvania is as your character becomes empowered, you don't just become stronger in combat, you also become capable of going new places, of seeing new things. And this is the game that does that. I would say better than any other.

Like every weapon you get, it allows you to find, like to access new areas, to reach new places, whether it's obviously the high jump boots do, but then you have, you know, the super bombs that don't just open up the yellow doors, but they also will clear out areas that you didn't know you could clear out before. And they will reveal other hidden secrets. It is weird to say this because, you know, it's created, but you get the weapons at the perfect times. Like, they don't give you anything even a little bit too early or late, at least up through the super bombs, because I don't know what comes after, if anything. But it's built, for me anyway, in my experience of, like, literally playing it for the first time today.

you always feel like you might have gotten into the wrong area. You always feel like you're just not ready enough. And for a game to maintain that feeling for hours at a time, even as you're getting improved weapons, at what I was kind of surprised is a pretty rapid rate. I'm not sure how long the game is. It's not that long. I have maybe a total of four or five hours into it.

And I feel like I'm progressing and getting power. up at a very quick rate, but I'm still always feeling like I might not be prepared for the next thing to come around the corner. One really great trick that it uses is that when you enter a new area, you kind of commit to it. And most of the time, you can't backtrack until you get the power up you need. Like, I'm thinking specifically of when you drop into a big chunk of like lower brin star and you kind of drop down a shaft and you get to a place and you're like, I don't know if I can go here yet but you have to because

if you go back and try to get out the route you came in, it's a tall shaft and there's just like those little dudes floating back and forth and you need the ice beam to freeze them, but you don't have it yet. So you're like, well, I don't have any choice. Like this is a dead end. I have to go forward. So it forces you to figure out like what is the

next step I have to take. And for me, you have the thought of like, oh well, okay, I got the high jump. Is that it? Like, can I jump on top of these guys? And then it's like, no. It's like, well, I need, you know, I need the baria to get any further into this. Well, didn't they do the freeze to the guys and go up the corridor and Metroid, the original Metro? Yeah, they did.

But here it's used more intelligently. It's not just used... It's not just used to access new areas, but that's also used to sort of serve as a barrier to keep you from backtracking and going out of a place where you need to be. Because that is a risk in these sort of open world

games is that if you get someplace and think, oh, this isn't the right place, even though it is, and you go back, then you've got this entire world that you can roam around being lost. So Super Metroid is really good about giving you that sort of

subtle guidance. Like the creator's hand is always kind of at your back and saying, this is where you go. It's actually a pretty linear game, but it doesn't feel like it because it creates the illusion that it's open. But once you go past certain points, it's sort of a point of no return until you

get the correct power up and can backtrack. That's kind of part of the puzzle of each area is a new item you get to help you escape it. It's not... It's not... It's a Zelda dungeon, so you get a new item every dungeon. It's not feeling like you're railroaded as much as it's like you have, like you, you have this idea of, well, I, you know, I got to go forward because there's no turning back, which is a different thing from feeling like they're making you go forward. Right. And then later in the game, when you get to the meridia, the underwater area, there's actually one part of it that's underwater and one part that is sort of above and it's more like sandy and rocks. And you have a lot more freedom how you get through that area. And ultimately, you need to get the gravity suit so that you can travel underwater and jump freely like you would when you're above ground or above water. But it doesn't

really give you as much guidance. Because at that point, it's like past the halfway mark in the game. So the developers are like, you know what you're doing. You just need to like figure it out on your own. So at that point, they kind of take off the training wheels and you're free to go about and make your own mistakes. And you know, like, there's a lot to do in that area. And so you kind of have a sense of like, this is where I need to be, and I can get around, but I don't know exactly where I need to go in here. So it's a different kind of exploration. It's not so much like, what am I doing here? How do I move forward? It's more like, I have so many ways to move forward, which one do I go with? And then when you get to the sort of like the final area before

the end, the layer where Ridley lives, that's pretty much just like a loop. So you go in, you go down, you kill them, you come back up. But, you know, the game feels different in every space. And that's one of the frustrations that I'm going to talk about on the micro episode about Samus Returns is that it doesn't have that feeling. Like there's no variety between like upper Bryn Star, lower Ridley's Lair, Meridia, like each of the wrecked ship. Like each of those areas feels really distinct, not just in terms of color palette or visuals, but in terms of like how you travel and maneuver and solve the mystery of that space. That's something Super Metro does incredibly well. Like everywhere in the game feels distinct. And even though you're

doing the same things, like you're doing them in a different way. And there's like even an area where you're traveling around by using the grappling hook over these pits that just, you know, it's one space where you're really doing that in a sort of focused area. And then, you know, after that, you get the space jump and you don't need to do that again. But they make use of all your tools. One thing that I think Castlevania has always done, going back to Castlevania 1. And honestly, even in Castlevania, too, is creating a cohesive environment. That's one of the real indications of the thoughtfulness in the first Castlevania, that you are moving through a castle and that you see places that you later encounter.

And I feel like Super Metroid, even though it has like the long elevator shafts that separate one area from the other, does that really well in an interesting way that you're going from, you know, a relatively, you know, sterile, like lab environment to, you know, the molten, like, lava section. And it doesn't feel like that's just, oh, this is the fire level. This is the water level. Like there's indications of a cogent ecosystem in a way that. between them. Yeah. Good transitions. In a way that's really, like, thoughtful.

And I am enamored with. Great. So I think we probably ought to wrap this episode up. There's still other stuff we haven't gotten to, but there will be another Metroidvania episode or three. So we'll talk about those at a future time. But I think, you know, this is probably a good stopping point. Metroid is kind of on everyone's minds these days because of Samus returns

and because of the Super Nias classic. So it's good to kind of like stumble. stumble across it and talk about it some more. But we'll save the rest for a future engagement. Game Boy stuff, Super NES stuff, TurboGraphic stuff, if such a thing exists. Master System. There's a Mega drive game on it. There's like two or three, yeah, say a CD.

So we'll hit those and maybe Symphony the night next time. In the meantime, I think we should wrap this up unless you guys have some final thought. Death is but a door. Time is but a window. I'll be back. Wow. That was weirdly deep. That's from Ghostbusters, too.

I got it. That seemed deep. You fooled me once, though. Vigo's final words. I just hope everyone finds someone coming to Super Metroid for the first time in 2017 to be interesting rather than infuriating.

I think it's interesting. I think it's probably more valuable than me writing or talking about it yet again. Certainly said enough about that game, but having a fresh perspective on it is great. So I'm glad you had the opportunity to experience it recently. Yeah, that's actually a...

I guess we should let you go so you can play some more of it. I'm excited. It's a bonus to see someone stumbling on the joy of Super Metroid for the first time. It's really great. Yep. Okay, so this has been

Chapter 3 of the Metroidvania Chronicles of Retronauts. As usual, I'm Jeremy Parrish, and you're listening to Retronauts, which you can download on iTunes, on the podcast One network, on the podcast one app, or at Retronauts.com.

I, Jeremy Parrish, can be found at Retronauts. on Twitter as Gamesbyte on YouTube. Look for Retronauts Video Chronicles. And of course, Retronauts is supported through Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. It's how we pay our bills. The ad you hear, they give us a little bit of money for our bills, but it's really supportive listeners like you who keep us going. And there are cool rewards and bonuses for those of you who subscribe. So I would recommend it. Three bucks a month. Get you cool stuff. More than that a month. Get you even cooler stuff. but I'm not going to push my luck here.

So, Benj Edwards. You can find out anything you want to know about me at patreon.com slash Benj Edwards. Like your bank account number? Yeah, Social Security and Mother's Made Me. Perfect. Also, I have an announcement. I'm starting a new podcast called Retronautical. That's about vintage boats.

Okay. No, it's actually called The Culture of Tech. Our first guest is going to be Steve Wozniak. Next, Chris. You can find me. Is that a joke or not? I can't tell. Which one? The first one and the second one? It's not actually going to be called retronauticals, right?

No. Okay. All right. Well, get luck with your new podcast that isn't infringing on our trademark. Yeah. You can find me at the dashisb.com with links to all of the comic books that I write, the columns that I write online. You can also find me on Twitter and Tumblr as the ISB, T-H-E-I-S-B, and at your local comic book store with books like SwordQuest, Ash for Somieve Darkness, Headpool, Bad Blood, Guardians of Galaxy annual. Man, you're versatile. Yeah, I am, and I should be hired to write more things.

I agree. If I were a comic book publisher, I would absolutely hire you. Yeah, me too. Thank you. I'm not, though. So if this is the third chapter of the Metro Advania series, is this the marble gallery or the chapel? I think this is the outer wall. Okay.

I don't know. Miss May Pass. Yes, mist may pass. If we get the jewel of open, maybe we can make it to the PlayStation next time. Actually, this is a very small and close space, so please don't pass any missed. Oh, gosh. Anyway, thanks guys for coming in. We'll reconvene before too long to talk about more of these games.

In the meantime, Chris, enjoy some Super Metroid. And I'm going to go finish Samus Returns. I've got to do it. Join us again either this Friday or next Friday. Maybe it's like in two weeks. I don't know, some Friday soon for a Retronauts or Micro dedicated to Metroid 2 and its remake. We're going to go to the maths with that one. Take it to the cleaners.

In the meantime, check us out again next week for another full episode. That'll be awesome, I'm sure. Bye. Thank you. The all-new Toyota RAV-4 asks, what if? What if your ride was refined and rugged at the same time? Introducing a car that's got style and substance to spare. The All-New RAV-4 Limited,

featuring a sophisticated, muscular new exterior and available options like a premium JBL audio system and panoramic roof. The all-new RAV-Ford Limited. Toyota, let's go places. JBL and Clarifier register trademarks of Harmon International Industries Incorporated. The Mueller report. I'm Edonoghue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be

released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others.

The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue. Thank you.