Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 127: Listener Mail 2017

Episode Date: November 27, 2017

Often, our episodes are packed so full of stunning facts and dangerous takes that we rarely have time to give you, the listener, a voice. Hence, our annual listener mail episode: your yearly chance to write in and ask us our semi-expert opinions. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Dave Rudden and Chris Antista as the crew runs down the best Virtual Console releases of 2017, and answers your burningest questions.

This week on Retronauts. Ladders, we get ladders, we get snacks and snacks of letters. Hello, everybody. Welcome to yet another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackey. And today's subject is listener mail. It's our annual listener mail episode. I do one of these a year, mostly because as much as I would want to include your letters in my regular episodes, there's never enough time. And you know what, frankly, sometimes Daddy needs a break. Daddy's got two patrons to feed. And sometimes listener mail takes a little pressure off of Daddy. So let's see who else is here today. Who's across the table from me, as always? It's Jeremy Parrish, and I'm wondering what my familial relationship is here. Your Uncle Jeremy? There could be two daddies. It's a progressive world we're living in. There was a sitcom about it.

It was famous. Who else is here today? I'm a male listener, Dave Rudden. And who else is here? A shame to announce he cannot read in the listener mail episode, Chris Antis. You can't read? I cannot read. Well, it's a good thing I'll be doing all the reading in my delicious voice.

So, yes, it's our listener mail episode. And normally, I've done quite a few of these so far. far one a year since we started, I believe. And in the recent years... I love doing these. No research required at all, just whatever's in your rattling around in your brain. But when I first started doing these, I would do a retro roundup for whatever year it would be because retro roundups were a thing that we would do in retronauts in the early years.

Hey, what's on virtual console this week? But then it turned out that things weren't on virtual console. Yes, scorched earth. Not the game scorched earth, but literal scorched earth. But this year, I decided to do one because a lot of things kind of snuck out. on to the Wii virtual, sorry, the Wii U virtual console, the 3DS virtual console, some surprising things. So I do want to go over a few of those first, and we can all comment on them if we know anything

about them or can recommend them. But first, I want to point out, big news is coming. The Wii Shop channel will close on January 30th, 2019, and the last day you can add Wii points is March 26, 2018. And I swear to God, everyone in this room must have some, like, remainder of Wii points. You need to find a way to start. spend the rest of those before, or add enough to spend the rest of those before March 26th of next year.

That is the graciest grace period I've ever heard my entire life. So conveniently enough, if you go to Retronauts.com, I put together a list of 17 games that are more or less unique to We Virtual Console that are definitely worth getting, things like Castlevania Dracula X Rondo of Blood and Super Aresonk. Games that would cost you, Super Aresonk. Games that would cost you hundreds of dollars if you bought them for a Retroveno of Blood. system that have not shown up on any other virtual console type service. They're only on Wii.

They didn't come to 3DS to Wii, you, to switch, whatever. So go to the site and check that out because there's some really great stuff that, you know, it's still worth having your Wii for. And you can play those on Wii U in the Wii emulation mode. So they'll continue to carry on with you. I could never get that done. That article was a big help because I still have, I have 500 Wii points that they never transferred over to any other system.

And it's like, I don't know if they will once that time is up. You can buy one. I feel like it's illegal that they would. One in a yes game? Yeah. And it's like, which one, though? I've already bought like 30. I think Euphoria might be 600, though, because it was an import.

Yeah. And that's the problem. Yeah, like, I've had a couple people suggest like Castlevania for Herbrographics. And it's like, oh, well, that's 600 points. Then I've got to add 500 more points. Exactly. One hundred points in my. Man, I forgot that was just 600 points.

That's the dilemma. 600 points for that game. That's crazy. I think I might have like 200 points rattling around and my. We wallet. I have to just find a scientist to tell me what is the best way to spend that amount by adding a different amount to it.

I'm not putting any more money to that system. How much hope we all spent on this? I swear, Jeremy... I spent a ton than we were initially. And then I don't know, when I got my Wii U and I couldn't transfer anything over, I'm just more bummed by this whole thing that like the virtual console. It's going away forever. I think it's the end of the

virtual console. But I think you can, you'll still be able to download the games that you bought for a while. You don't know that because like what happened two, three years ago is everything third-party game was on the Wii Shop channel was hosted by GameSpy. When GameSpy went down, everyone just said, I'm not hosting this.

We're not going to pay to host this game. It just went away. It did go away. I don't know if this means you can't download things you've already purchased. I don't know if that's what this entails. I'm guessing that yes, it says the Wii Shop Channel will disappear and you have to go to the shop channel to download things. So, re-download.

Yes, get some SD cards in that thing and just download everything. It's going to take a long-ass time to re-download. Just watch Mario hitting a coin block a lot for that. So, yeah, that's just some news. But I did want to get into some of the Wii U virtual console releases. Yes, they're still happening in 2017, and some notable things came out. Like a ton of N-64 games came out for the Wii U virtual console.

Yes, exactly. They struck when the iron was right in hot, right in their faces. So let's go a review of these. Star Fox 64. These are all games I would totally recommend. I only pulled out the ones that are definitely worth playing. Star Fox 64, yes, fantastic game. It never gets better than that for Star Fox.

It is the peak of Star Fox. I hope it gets better at some point, but I really doubt it will. Harvest Moon 64, a fantastic Harvest Moon game, kind of what Stardoo Valley patterned itself after, if you're interested in seeing the roots of that game. F0X, one of the best F-Zero games, the first time... Fantastic. Is it the first time Sega took over for Nintendo? It was still Nintendo.

The first 60 frame a second with randomly generated tracks. This game was awesome. This game is really cool. Yeah, these games are always way too hard for me, I can respect how fast they are. Go back. Randomly generated tracks? Yeah.

I didn't know that. It's a roguelike. Yeah, it wasn't all of them, but there were certain modes that would randomly generate tracks. And GX improved on that, but I don't see that ever getting released. I think their soundtrack is too big. But this one was really, really fun. Interesting. I feel like it was more synonymous for the series, but there was tracks where you kind of race on a snake.

You could go on any side of. Wasn't my battle twos? on a tube. Not racing on a snake. Racing against a snake. Oh, you're a racers. Yes. I love F.0X.

So that's another recommendation. Another one is something that I need to freaking get around to playing, and that's Ogre Battle 64. The only good RPG. When that comes out, it's all over just like two days ago. I had no idea it's really coming out. It's all ogre, Chris. It's all ogre.

Yes. I don't know. Has anyone played this game? Because it's weird that the Ogre Battle in the Tactics Ogre series are weird enough, but it's strange that this game ended up where it did on the N64 to an audience that did not even probably want it. I'm sure the two RPG fans who didn't buy a PlayStation were just holding out for one good RPG, but...

I only remember working out of FunkoLand and that being one of the rare N64 games that you'd be a top dollar for. You would give somebody actually what the game was worth to them instead of nothing. And why do you think they dumped all these out? I don't know. Actually, something interesting, Chris, is that even more surprising than all these N64 games, hitting in 2017, is that Konami released 23

Turbographic 16 games, 23 in 2017 for the Wii. Sounds kind of like it's over. I think a contract is expiring or something. I think so. Yeah, but there's a lot of garbage on this list. There's a lot of mediocre games. Some of I would recommend are things I've talked about in the past, Erzank and

Bonk's Revenge. Go back to our Bonk episode. I was going to speculate the N64 mini classic. That's what this is. You think so? Positive. I'm positive. I think that will kill the virtual console, it's not too different from my dad's best of albums. That's what we're getting every year. We get a new

best of album featuring all our old favorites. And it's worthwhile to license hard to find stuff. You know what? After the S&ES classic, I think anything is possible because I assume Nintendo would never, could never move on past 8-bit nostalgia, but they finally did, God bless them, 10 years too late, but they still did it and they deserve

credit for that. And we were talking about an N64 Classic Mini, like many other people, but like there's not a lot of dependable first-party Nintendo 64 games. They have to reach out to third-party people. There are a lot of dependable third-party. Yeah, but they need everybody they can. So if everybody's dumping their stuff on the virtual console last minute,

it's probably because we're now going to be in a little console future. It's like there's a little Atari joystick over again. Yeah, we're going to finally have a, if there is a Nintendo 64 classic, there's no way that you can make the controller smaller than anything. Yeah, it needs to be big and awful. The size one console future. Well, that's, I wanted to give some advice to people, If they're still somehow excited about the S&S Mini, I hope you got one,

everyone's, well, just get an emulator. You can say very easily, shut up. Shut up. Hey, you're talking to me. Shut up because, like, when I was a little kid, I was too poor to buy a first-party controller. So the thrill of playing those games on first-party controllers, because, like, I think into the late 90s,

I had to play on, like, little dumb, asky Pelican crap. So sorry. It was awful. And so this is an immaculate first-party recreation. of those controllers, two of them for $80. And they come with 20 games. It's something I never could have got myself back back back. And also, the thing about the Super NES Mini is you take it out of the box and you plug in the electricity and the HTML and you turn it on and it works.

Exactly. It's not like an emulation system where you're tinkering and setting up. There's no out-of-the-box solutions. It's not the hard to emulate. I was juxtaposing that experience right with doing the destiny raid where because of who I chose to be, I physically can't do one part of the rate. my body doesn't work in the game. Whereas, oh, here's a bunch of a games that released immaculately with no updates that hold up fine. I'm going to play this instead of destiny.

No, I mean, emulation is not difficult to do. But if you want, like, a simple plug-and-play emulation solution for your television, this is how you're going to do. I agree. But I say plug a PC into your TV and the world is your oyster like me. I'm living the dream, everybody. I'm in the future. Sounds like you're not enough of a nerd, because if you have an available surface, this is like a laptop. I'm almost out of surfaces.

I'm way out of surfaces. More Turbographic 16 games. So I mentioned Arizona Bonds Revenge Revenge Revenge. Bomberman 94, great bomber man. Devils Crush and Alien Crush. Great pinball games. And I'm going to say a big maybe to Newtopia 1 and 2. I've never gotten around to playing those games.

They are the Zelda clones for the TG16. Anyone in this room have you played these games? I think I bought Newtopia 1 on Wii virtual console. Yeah. Is that the one that has like, it could be six players or am I thinking about something? You're thinking of something else. Yeah. There's a Zelda clone.

Like double dungeons or something like that. Probably about the destiny really. This is even more of an explicit Zelda clone in that you are a total link style dude. Play a character named Clink. Clink, yes, in the screen scrolls as it does in Zelda. You move to the side of the screen, everything kind of shifts over. So 3Ds Virtual Console. We're recording this on October 1st, 2017.

This could change, but it won't. The only 3DS virtual console release for this year on the 3DS is Pokemon Gold and Silver. And I would say I would recommend these are the last Pokemon games I played through all the way. They also have the entire first game, the first game's map snuck into it, thanks to Satori Wada. He did that himself with his masterful programming skills. So, yeah, that is basically the one Game Boy release on 3DS virtual console this year. That's it? That's crazy.

I checked and I was like, that really is it. It's over then. Yep, yep. They're closing the doors. It's weird because 3DS is the platform that Nintendo is still supporting. It's still an active going concern for them. And they don't seem in any hurry to let it die. Whereas the Wii U is, you know, it's beyond dead.

Like, you can smell the scene coming on it. It's funeral as long ago. Yeah, and yet somehow that's getting the virtual console releases and... I don't know how your behavior is, but in terms of new games, this Switch has replaced the 3DS in my life. It comes with me wherever I go. I play it in bed. I played on airplanes.

I did have to, like, remove a good cake of dust off of my 3DS for SMS returns. For me, there's too many good 3DS games still coming out, and I wish they would just be Switch games so I could cut the tie completely. but it's like, no, I still have like five 3DS games I need to finish and there's still more that are coming out and I think maybe by 2019 I will be living a 3DS free lifestyle but I've also, I also have like thousands of dollars worth of digital software on that thing too so I can't get rid of it. But yes, everything should be on the switch.

I think it's established by all of society that everything that ever could exist should be on the switch. Although I will say that I have felt that way for a long time, but now that I'm playing Etrine Odyssey 5, I'm like, you know what, there's still some experiences unique to do dual screen systems that just wouldn't be the same on Switch. You know what? And I would like for the 3DS to have a successor. I was playing the Wii U version of the Windmaker for a podcast and I'm like,

oh, I like this dual screen, you know, menu system. It actually removes the, you know, the need to actually go to a menu screen. So, yeah, you can't do that with a switch. So maybe not everything. Do we know that you can't do that with Switch? It doesn't seem like they bother to do that with anything. I mean, you can, you only have one screen on a switch. Yeah, you can't do dual screen gaming because to play it on a TV, you have to dock it.

Sure. Where's the screen. Dumb, stupid question. It works as a touchscreen. Yeah, there are games that are handheld unit only, like, because they are touch-based. Yeah. But there are no games, like, it's not physically possible to have a dual screen. It would be cool, but it can't happen.

There are also some games that you can play vertically, right? Yes. Yeah. And they really need to release a vertical grid. Sort of Sandy. Yeah. The Namco Museum, I think you can do that. A lot of the hamster games, the arcade archives.

Like, Strykers 1945, two, I think, does that? The ones are they doing all the NeoGeo ones? I really, yeah, they're doing NeoGeo and also the Nintendo Arcade. I really hope that Punch Out has a vertical mode because if it doesn't, it's going to be, I already can play that. That's like playing a DS game on the Wii U, which is awful.

There's no, there's no comfortable way to do it. You can either play with like two tiny screens on your Wii U game pad or just not play it at all. You should try playing with, you know, the double screen approach. Play Yoshi's Island DS that way. where the two screens are connected. I tried doing that. Like, I have to hold it. You have to hold it in this, yeah, very special way.

It's ridiculous. You might be able to do that. It's very hard to do. It's dumb. You don't want to do that. You can suspend your Wii U gamepad from the sky, maybe. I'm trying to think. Maybe I can make a peripheral.

It's far too late for that, Chris. So talking about Nintendo's... Yeah, Wii U peripherals. That's a boom market right now. It's Switch. So for the Switch, now we're talking about the Switch, the one virtual console game, it's not even a virtual console thing,

but it's the version of Mario Brothers for the arcade. It's fine. So stupid and weirdly incredible at the same thing. I mean, I don't want to look a gift horse in the mouth of this one, but I feel like they spent like a decade giving this game away for free eight times. Yes, it was not the original arcade Mario Brothers, but in every Mario game for the Game Boy Advance, they would just give you Mario Brothers.

Even in the first Mario RPG game for the Game Boy Advance, so like just have Mario Bros. It's fine. And how often do you whip out your Game Boy Advance games to play Mario Bros? Every day. I mean, no, this is. Well, you're the one person who does. Was that the arcade version, though? No, it was an upgraded version of the NES version.

But I don't know the story behind this, just weird urban legends. Like, Nintendo's been the most unkind to its arcade generation. Right. And that's what makes, to me, this arcade arcade thing amazing. It's really kind of strange that in order to have Nintendo arcade games, you have to get them through a third-party publisher. Yeah. But, hey, they are actually doing it, which is a change of pace from the past 20 years of Nintendo. It was, what I had heard is that there was, they had some dispute over the boards that

some other company needed to. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, we've talked about that on retrospect before. Is that what's going on? There was a contractor, Ikegami Sushinki, who did the programming work on their early games, like Space Firebird, Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong, Jr. was done by Nintendo, but it was adapted from Ikegami's work. They did Popeye.

Basically, everything prior to Mario Brothers was done by Ikegami. and rights were very fluid back then. Like the exact rights of digital code had not been nailed down. So Ikegami was like, we own the code to this. We created it. So it's ours. Nintendo was like, well, we created the concepts and the artwork, and you guys just did contract work for us.

So we own it, sorry. So that was in the courts for like 10 years, almost. And finally, well, until finally there was a ruling that basically came down inside saying no code is copyrightable. And at that point, it was like, oh, Ikami won. So Nintendo's settled out of court. There's no word on what the actual resolution was, but I'm guessing that the resolution was that Ikegami owns it and Nintendo's just not going to give them the satisfaction of licensing anything that they worked on.

So I don't think we'll ever see Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., definitely not Popeye. That's crazy. Skyskipper. Like all those... Hot skyscipper. I would love to see Skyskipper. I would love to see Skyskipper just because I've never laid it. It doesn't look like a good game. But it's like Miyamoto Sprite art, you know, that high-resolution style that Popeye had. So I'm all into that. But I think it's great that Nintendo is finally getting these arcade originals out. Mario Brothers, the arcade version is the best version of the game,

and it's never been publicly available outside of Arcade before. Yeah, that is the cool thing. I mean, I would rather see them launch with a huge virtual console selection, but giving us a game we could not have gotten before outside of emulation is pretty cool. And did they have some sort of arcade initiative on the Wii? I vaguely remember there being something like that. Nintendo games. There was

virtual console arcade that Satoru Iwada announced at a keynote speech in 2010 at Game Developers Conference. I was right there

watching it. I was like, finally, they're going to give us Donkey Kong. And no, it was techno games and Konami games

and Capcom games. And not very many of them. At least in America. It happened for like three months and then they dropped it and never revisited it again. I think this sad reality

and I was talking to somebody about it, that virtual console sales really tapered. off, and I don't, we were talking about that on 30, 2010, I believe that the Wii had the weird, it launched like days before the iPhone

when the iPhone, that in like, the Wii, like a couple weeks. No. Was it around the announcement? iPhone was 2007. 7. Yeah, Wii was November 2006. So when the iPhone, like, I guess Microsoft's a better example, because they had that like whole arcade

room. Like, you'll be able to buy Centipede for five and a half dollars. And then the iPhone came out like every game's 99 cents or free. Yeah, and that whole thing cratered. The iPhone App Store didn't launch until 2009. Until that point, everything had to be done in HTML 5. Everything, like, if you had an app on iPhone for the first two years, it was done through the web, through the web browser. I know that Microsoft Game Room was launched post, you know, iPhone game boom.

I remember that being just a huge thing. Yeah, I came along later. I think when the Wii U virtual console came out, they were asking $8 to $10 for games that were shorter than experiences, you get free on every other device you owned. and that that's, it's not that these were bad games. It's not that there's not an audience for digitally available virtual console games. Their pricing was awful. Yeah, but they had two years on the market before iPhone gaming became a real thing because I was covering iPhone games when they first started.

But the games on Wiiware didn't come out immediately. Oh, no, Wiiware was later, but virtual console was there at launch. Virtual console, they had like 25 games on launch there. And that's when I paid for all of them and reviewed them. That's when I spent all my money. But like, I did not fall for that with Wii. Like, I'm not paying. The pricing was not competitive enough, and they also, it was oddly hidden that the feature,

the ability to play old games, you had to sort of dig for it. It was not as obvious as it should have been to people who bought it for Wii Sports and probably would have wanted to play Mario. There are executives right now who are baffled over the S&ES classic selling so well. The virtual console did so bad. I mean, I even, I think on the Wii U menu, when you go into the Wii U e shop, you scroll down, and virtual console, like, half the time I see it, it's like an image of Toon Link or something, where it's like, that's anachronistic right there.

It's like, I don't think of old games when I see that version of Link that you put there. Yeah, it's not communicated very well. So moving on from the Switch, I pulled out a few things for the PS4. Basically, the up-res Steam version of Final Fantasy 9 is on PS4. Play this version. It's great.

You can speed up a lot of the battle loading times that were a problem in this game, and they may look as good as it possibly could look, and it's a great game. It's the creator Hironobosakuchi's favorite Final Fantasy. It has the same cool things. features that the Final Fantasy 7 re-release had where you can, I think you can turn

off random battles, you can have achievements, right? I think so. Sweet chivoos. Oh, no, there are because one of them was to skip rope a thousand. That's right. Yes. For all you mascus out there, if you want to get that platinum, get ready for that kind of fun. It came with a great dynamic theme that I saw

on your piece for. I half bought it for that and half because it was five bucks off the first week. Okay, now I have to buy dynamic themes. I'm all about that. It's the classiest thing I've seen in a while as far as dynamic themes. Play the song that plays when you turn on the game? No, you just get like the doit, doit, like that when you move around. As you scroll around through the menu.

So other PS4 releases, retro releases, there's a lot of them. A lot of them aren't very good. I picked out a few that could be good. Maybe you're interested in them home. It's Code Veronica X. I think Code Veronica has age very badly. Even the guy online, I know, whose name is CVX Freak. I think he's changed it since them, Alex.

Alex and He'll now CVS freak. Yeah, at least Resident Evil revelations too free. Some cheap prescriptions. I think even the guy who named himself after Code Veronica has kind of changed his mind. So you're welcome to like it. You're welcome to enjoy it. I recommend going back to it and seeing how it's age. I think out of all the Resident Evil games.

There was a PS4 sale at the GameStop yesterday, and I looked at. There are six Resident Evil games on PS4. I think you get the entire series on the version. I can imagine. Yeah. Like in a box. So, like, just wait. It'll probably be available.

Yeah, and anyways, this is sort of the bastard. Virgin Evil was outsourced, too, which can be playing a lot of the problems with it. It's not all right. It is weird. And Star Ocean 3 is all right, I guess. It's got a really bad plot twist. I feel like Star Ocean has really gone downhill since the second game. And the most recent one is okay, but three I had a lot of problems with. It has one of the worst plot twists in a game.

I don't know if the, I guess, skip ahead. The statute of limitations. The twist is it isn't an ocean. That's right. There's no ocean. Oh, my God. They're not even really stars. They're burning balls of gas in space.

I think we spoiled this in our trots before, but please skip ahead like a minute. This twist is everything you've done up to the point in the game where you discover this, which is like 30 hours, you discover the world you're in is actually an MMO. No. And you escape the MMO to do things in the actual real world. And your characters have no problem with their entire life being alive to that point. It really upset me, and I think I stopped playing it after that. So that's StarOcean 3.

You can enjoy it. I do not. I spent good money for that game, and I bought the damn guy, too, because you need it. Other stuff I want to mention that aren't retro releases, but they are retro-related. I want to bring up one game, at least, golf story for the Switch. I don't know if it's going anywhere else, but if you miss the RPG elements of the Mario Golf games from the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance versions of those, get this game. It's basically what Star Do Valley is to Harvest Moon.

It's people picking up where the developers live. left off a decade ago. So Golf Story is not developed by Camelot? No, no, it is not developed by Camelot. Camelot actually, I don't know what Camelot is doing since they made that Golden Sun game. Was it 3DS? I hope they're performing penitents. Yes.

I don't like the game with Sun series. Were they not one of the developers that was put on a lot of those 3DS three-past games? Maybe not. They could have been. The last game I think they did Mario Golf in like 2012 or 2013 or 2014. Code store. Did they do the most recent Mario Tennis?

They probably did that. Because that was last year, two years ago. But that I had that dumb story of like, I went to a Wendy's. When a Nintendo game just sent in my code and forgot all about it.

I think like I come back to my house one day and I'm like fired. I got fired and I open my mailbox and this is like pre-Amazon, like pre-opening games on Amazon. I just opened. They didn't notify me. It's like here's a battered copy

of Mario Golf. for GBA. The mailman played it for about 20 hours. And I was like, what is it? I don't want to play a golf game. I hate golf and people who play it. And I pop it in and just like, this is amazing. This is one of the, I love that game so much.

I mean, I have no love for golf playing it, watching it, or the people who play it. It's a giant waste of space. I love video golf, especially when you wrap an RPG around it with experience points and equipment and characters and stat growth and golf story is all that stuff. And then I played up until a recent 3DS Mario Golf. I still love that series because... Yeah, the golfing is still good. I just wish they would incorporate more of the stuff around it. That's really fun.

One other thing I want Jeremy to talk about because he hates it and he wants the developers to all lose their jobs. I'm kidding, of course. That's Samus Returns. Jeremy, you have some mixed feelings about that. I'd like you to talk about them here. I'm putting you on the spot. I've only played a bit of it. I can see where your thoughts are and I can see, you know, why you would think that.

I don't know if I agree with you yet, but I want you to talk about this game and how it makes you feel. feel. I mean, I really enjoyed it at first. It's a really nice looking reinvention of Metroid 2 that brings the mechanics up more to snuff with Metroid Fusion. And it's very action-oriented. I'm not crazy about the fact that so much of combat is based around enemies that have these aggressive attack actions. Yeah. It's almost like a rhythm game. There's a peri to it in a peri system. But it's not like a real, you know, like Bayonetta-style melee combat system. Sammas has one which is basically an instant QTE when an enemy starts to attack and once it starts to lunge at you, you swat it and stun it and then you can kill it in a single hit.

They should have went full platinum and had a slow motion happen after that. That would make it even better. It doesn't bother me as much as it bothered you, but I haven't played enough of it yet. The thing is, it really starts to wear on you when you get further into the game and you want to start exploring more and backtracking and you have to do those stupid QTE actions every time you see an enemy. I mean, you can't shoot them without, like, making them vulnerable with a pair of it. Yeah, like, even when you become more powerful, it still takes quite a bit of damage to destroy an enemy.

So you really find yourself being forced to do that, and it really breaks up the flow. But what really bothers me about the game is that the design of the world has been made really, really monotonous. It's super dense, and, like, they've turned the whole thing into a very, convoluted, like, you know, puzzle, platforming, find your way around, use your powers to get through this, which is very Metroid. But the thing about Metroid is that the real Metroid games have sort of an ebb and flow to that. You have moments of, like, you go to a room and it's an intense puzzle and you have to spend

some time figuring it out. But then you go to the next area, it's like open and you kind of get a breather. This game doesn't ever give you a breather. It's always puzzle. It's always, you know, like navigating through twisty, see. sinuous tunnels. It just, it, it needs, I don't know, it needs a little extra touch to make it, you know, stand up with the classic Metroid. Would you say it's, it's very well made?

It's more playable than Metroid 2 Game Boy then? Yeah, I mean, sure. But, I mean, that game has, it's like, it traded one set of problems for a different set of problems. This one is very, very tedious and toilsome. I watched a great video. It's kind of frustrating. I'll link to this video in the notes for this episode on the blog, but I watched a great video today from the YouTube. channel the Game Maker's Toolkit, I believe it's called, and he basically compared how

another Metroid 2 remake and Samus Returns both interpreted the original game. They both get some things wrong and they both do interesting things with the original design. So I guess there's no 100% pure way to play this game, but I would check out both versions if you have time. Yes, AM2R, did I say that right? AM2R, people say, oh, Nintendo Sees and Assisted that. It's on the Internet forever. They can never get rid of it. Nintendo waited until it had been released. to C&D it, which to me says they could, they had 10 years to kill it. Yeah.

They could have killed it at any point. They waited until it was out and in distribution. And that was one of like 14 Metro 2 remake projects too. I think they forgot. And then like they remembered, oh, we're making the same thing. Why don't we thought this happened? I really think they had to take, you know, the necessary steps to protect the integrity of their copyrights and intellectual properties.

But they didn't want to like actually crush the creator of the game and send all of his work to be for nothing. So they let the game come out. I really feel like they let... I think they waited until after the game had launched and then they killed it. So then people, you know, it would be trickled out and would pass around. It's the second time I'm on record for yelling at Nintendo. Like, if you're not dealing with this property or doing anything with it, leave it alone.

Why did you do this? And then, oh, Sam is to turns. That's the piece of the puzzle. What was the first one? Like, someone had archived Nintendo Powers. Oh, right. You're literally doing nothing with this. Don't punish this student.

And then, like, a month later, volumes of Nintendo of Power are announced for sale somewhere. I forget without. Oh, really? I had no idea. I don't know they're selling Nintendo Power. I thought there was, like, some book collection or some hardback volume that was selling Nintendo Art that had somehow incorporated it. I had no idea about this. So, we're going to take a quick break, and then we'll move on to Listener Mail.

The Serial Killer podcast, hosted by me, Thomas Weiberg Thune, is the podcast dedicated to serial killers, who they were, what they did, and how. Join me as I sit down bi-weekly to bring you, dear listener, into the dark land of serial killers. murder and psychopathy. The show goes into graphic detail on the most infamous and lesser-known serial killers from around the world, with each episode covering one unique serial killer. So far, the show has covered serial killer superstars such as BTK, Jeffrey Dahmer and the Yorkshire Ripper, and lesser-known killers such as Elias Abuelazam and Anatoly Onoprenko. Be advised. This show is not for children as it takes you deep into the twisted world of ultimate evil. You can find me exclusively at podcast.1.com or on the new podcast 1 app. Also, don't forget

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Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. So we're back, and I want to jump right into another question. And this one comes from Daniel primed, and he says, as new generations enter the gaming community, many younger players have taken an interest in games before their time.

These players approach retro games outside of the cultural context of the times in which the games were created and therefore bring different perspectives to the games that many of us older players grew up with. What do you think these newer players offered to the niche of retro gaming and how have they changed your understanding of the games of your generation? I think, Jeremy, you have a lot of young relatives that play games with you and stuff. Can you talk about what their reaction to retro games is if they play any of those? So for the most part, the kids in my family, they range from like age, the one's a game from like age seven to age 15, 16. The older ones mostly just want to play current games.

Like there's a 12 year old, I think, or 11 who just wants to play Destiny and Halo. They all like Pokemon. They all like Minecraft or Terraria. The only one of my nephews who really likes retro games is the youngest one, who's seven. and he's drawn to them because he loves, loves, loves, loves, obsesses over Minecraft. I've heard that. And he sees Pixel Mario, like I have the Pixel Mario Amibo and the Pixel Link Amivo. And he's like, oh, Minecraft.

So now he like, he sees these games as like the precursors to Minecraft because everything's blocky. That is great. We sat down one time and he wanted to build a Minecraft recreation of the Pixel Link Amibo. So we sat down and spent a couple of hours building a pixel link. But whenever he comes over, he either wants to play Minecraft on my Wii U. That's like the only thing that happens with my Wii U anymore. He plays Minecraft on it. I think Brett had a story.

He was wearing a Mega Man shirt walking on the street and just a little kid just points at it and yells Minecraft. Or he wants to go down to the office and play Duck Hunt. And then when he gets bored of playing Duck Hunt, because it's simple. You point at the screen and shoot and ducks die. And when he's done playing Duck Hunt, he just wants to like cycle through all my ROMs. And he's gotten old enough that he reads now. So he just, like, looks for interesting names and starts with that. Bubble bath, babes.

What is this? No. I skip past those. But he's like, mystery quest, that sounds really interesting. It's not actually a good game. I was like, I've never played mystery quest. So we're experiencing this together for the first time. So that's great.

But, yeah, I don't know what he necessarily brings to retrogaming, if that's the question. Yeah. But I think it's great that, you know, there is this touchstone in Minecraft that, that causes people, you know, younger kids to say like, oh, I see the, you know, the connection there. I see the DNA in a way that older people wouldn't necessarily see because we saw games evolve from 8 to 16 to 32 bit to, you know, HD. So he sees, you know, just the direct, like the shortcut, point A to point Z. If you spend a ton of time in Minecraft, people build shrines to all these 8-bit game characters, which makes kids want to get interested in this. Who is that?

He watches Minecraft, you know, like let's players on YouTube all the time. So I don't know what he sees. Hopefully nothing horrible. A lot of swastical. But, yeah, that's like that's a real strong connection. And I feel like he's going to grow up liking and appreciating these older games without necessarily realizing it. I do worry if, I wouldn't say worry, but I wonder if, like, yeah, younger gamers, if they'll have any sort of nostalgia or want to look back at, like, the. PlayStation N64 sort of Saturn

period, but like before dual analog controllers came around and made that sort of accessible, like, I think you could put some PS2 games in the hands of like a kid today who plays Destiny and Halo and like, oh, you'd understand this, but for the PlayStation 1, especially, it's like, well, a lot of these games have control

schemes that are way outdated. Yeah, like every game had to reinvent 3D movements. Yeah. You love Destiny. You're going to love code name Tinka. Oh, boy. That's why opening up the S&EAS Classic Mini, those aren't games I've been capable of revisiting

that often, but like, these controls are real tight, you understand this in a second. The one game that holds up worst is the one game that tries to be 3D. The Kirby? Yes. Kirby, Kirby course. What's that game called? Kirby Dream Course.

That game's awesome. That game is awesome. That game is awesome. We played it for five minutes on a street. You have no idea what you're talking about. But Star Fox 60, or Star Fox 2 has that like 3D control system that Mega Man Legends

did where you like turn with the analog or the shoulder buttons. Yeah, it's pretty rough. Like, it's really amazing what they were doing with the tech there. But I'm kind of glad Nintendo waited until Starvox 64. It was a good idea. From viewing GameRars from as long as I have in bees, wax, and otherwise, I'm also a big film nerd.

And I know a ton of big film nerds. And none of them would go back even two generations in film, let alone three, four. But I see most people who enter in the gaming landscape, working on a project. like Ducktails is a good example of that because that's not only held aloft by a great game, there's people who get into video game music discover Ducktails even if they're 20.

Like they'll go to that game and like Ducktails has an astonishing it is left an astonishing footprint on multiple generations. In a way I don't think I've seen a lot of films do as a result of that. So I think it'll be really interesting. I think a real fan of games will

go back way further into a mediums catalog and fans of movies and books. I don't know. They all hold up pretty okay. I don't know. There's only so far you can go back in games versus books where you can go back to like the 15th century. You can, but like, I don't, like, having tried to read like raw Shakespeare, I'm like,

this isn't really possible to enjoy. Like, I need annotations. I've read Chaucer. I was going to say that the can't enjoy it, but I've read it. The Canterbury Tales is like tennis for two of literature. Let's move on. That was too smart of a comment. So Fight Club says, I feel like Retronauts is the only place I can ask

without hearing keyboard and mouse shouted at I'll do it, Fight Club. So I'll ask you, what is the greatest controller of all time? It's okay if you believe it is a keyboard and a mouse. I will say, every time there is a new dual shock, I'm like, this is the best controller ever. And they keep making it better. So I think my greatest controller of all time is the Dual Shock 4. I just love how it feels in my hand.

Yes, yes. Pro dual shock 4 is different. It's even better? The grips are better. It has a light window for a, like, if, you know how there's a different light on your... Yeah. You, as a player, you never see that. because it's facing away from you.

It's there to put a distracting light on the TV when you're playing a game. So now you can see it. It's better in every way. Interesting. Anyone else, Jeremy, do you have a favorite controller? Or what will you say objectively make a pronouncement from the mountains, the greatest controller of all time? Objectively? Yes.

Use science and math to figure it. I know mine. Organomics. I mean, I... U-Force. If 3D is not a consideration, 3D gaming, then the Super NES controller. It's very comfortable, yeah. It just feels great.

Yeah, especially with the divvets in the X and Y. I like that a lot. Yeah, like that's the one way the American Supranes was superior. Those divots, those were great. But, yeah, like the dual shock line has always been great. Kind of hard to top that. I have a bizarre affection for the Saturn controller. I was going to say that, too.

Because I've always had a tough time with multi-finger claw grip of two buttons at the top of a controller, but I had a great time putting the middle of my thumb on that B button and hitting everything with ease. other than fighting games, I really like the Saturn controller. I think the Saturn controller, like, when Street Fighter 4 came out way back when on Xbox 316 PS4, they had these... The fight pad. The fight pads, which are literally Saturn controllers, I mean, very close to Saturn controls

with all six buttons right in the front. When we were playing Super or Street Fighter 2 Turbo on the SNAS classic, I forgot for a second, like, oh yeah, they put Fearsen Roundhouse on the L&R, and it's like, that's not. It just didn't work for me, and like, during the Saturn era, when they were still, you know, finding games were plentiful. It was like, oh, well, this works better than the others. Yeah, I forget. I played Tomb Raider on many systems, the old school one,

and I've Saturn as the best control scheme. I'll stand by it. That's quite a, quite a, I guess, an accolade for the Tomb Raider, the Saturn version. Worst controller, he didn't ask this, but I want to answer this around the table here. I will say, Sega Dreamcast, I hate that controller with a passion. I'm talking about the core coming out of the wrong side of the controller, and the way you hold it, it's like two, 90 degree angles instead of just being spread outward

like you would naturally hold your wrist. It's just like you have to be locked into that thing. Anyone else? Worst controller. Something you actually used. I mean, there's some really bad controllers. I mean, you could say in television, but you've never, you've never played television. This is great. We just mentioned it. I'm sorry, Jeremy. We just praised it. PSP. PSP is the worst controller.

It hurts. It hurts to play. It can be pretty bad. Ask a Monster Hunter player what the claw grip is. It's something that you physically can't play the game anymore because of how hard it is. Cloglip. Clog lip, yes. A horrific boss. What's the, what's the controller that's like a phone? Is that in television or anything like that you get engaged?

I mean the... It looks like a phone. It's like got a dial on it and much of buttons on it. Yeah, it's in television. And ColicoVision was similar, but it had a stick. Those are all terrible. Yeah. Dave, did you have a worst controller or do you agree with the dream cast?

Yeah. I mean, as much as I played it, it was like, I mean, I like the VMU part of it, but that was about it. And even those, it was like... It also screams at you when you turn it on. It's like, give me batteries. Yeah. And for some reason, like, why is this still running off of my watch, batteries when I turned the console off 10 minutes ago.

I think it's barrowing from the power of the console or something like that. So no one's going to go after the Duke? The Duke. Why did they call it that? It was like the name of one of the developer's sons. Oh, okay. Did you see that's coming? Apparently he had like a giant one.

Was it a large son? There's enough affection for it now. It's making a comeback. And there's going to be a Xbox one edition of the Duke because I believe if you're younger and you're an Xbox player from birth, you deserve your Rob the Robot. Yes. Well, I just remember the Duke control of working really well for Halo. It did, yeah.

And then, like, playing any other, like, I can't even remember any other original Xbox launching games, like Star Wars Obi-Wan or something. Brue. Brue Force or something. Like, they were just. Brute Force, sorry. Speakers. Yeah, they did not work well with the Duke. And, like, yeah, when the Xbox one, what, they call it the controller S or something.

I forget what they actually called. Yeah, it was cool. Yeah. They better keep the black and white buttons, the most essential buttons on any controller. I have no idea. I want to give a shout out to the Xbox 360 controller because it was really good. It just every time I pick one up now,

I feel old and it's sticky for some reason. Yeah. But it was a good, it's sturdy. All of them still work. That's what I play everything on Steam with 360. Did you buy Galgun? Galgun, what? You don't want to buy you guys.

I think, yeah, lost in the shuffle of how, like, a big a glob that you do controller is, it was the black and white buttons, which were like the tiniest bean-shaped thing. Like, just slightly bigger than a sesame seed, I remember them being. These are supposed to do important things. I feel like the designer was like, these buttons look rather sharp here.

Yeah, if there's anything I just like about the PlayStation 4 controller, it's the options and share buttons. Yeah, those are terrible. Which are just these tiny little things at the top that I've, I mean, they never really do anything important, but it sucks that. I want options to be start as God intended. Enough of those options crap. So next letter is from the 1-6643 who says, is there anything stopping an imitation console that plays old CD games like Sega CD, PS1, 3DO, etc. Is there something with the emulation or the hardware that would stop? it or is it lack of demand?

I mean, there's nothing there that would stop it from happening. I mean, I played, I've been playing PS1 games on my, like, Nexus tablet. They're just all, you don't necessarily need a CD with that data on it. It just, I guess it's, does Sony want to do that? Does Sega want to do that? I don't know. What does everyone else think? Dave seems to have an idea.

I mean, just the PlayStation 1 emulation, it's such a gambit. I mean, when you're talking about, like, the most popular games, they'll likely work, but we do a lot of streams of games where, where, oh, we didn't realize, like, two levels in, everything just completely falls apart. There's no one to write to or call to fix it. Nobody really cares about Congo, the Saturn. Why isn't Independence Day working?

Yeah. I will say, for as much as I emulate things, PS1 emulation can be kind of touch and go at times. There is a much better... Do you guys use PSXE or PSX Final? Use PSX Final. It's a much better one. But I think if Sony released a little box,

they could figure out emulation. I mean, they already kind of do it. And I just don't know if the demand is there. I don't know if the rights are there. The rights might not be there. I mean, Sony doesn't really own a lot of their own, like, software, I guess. I love that. If you go back and look at a PlayStation commercial, PlayStation, this Christmas, Laura Croft's Crash Bandicoot walkout as if they somehow represent Sony.

Which they did for a hot second. Yeah, all the things you associate with Sony are not owned by Sony really, PlayStation. So I guess you would, there would need to be demand and there would need to be an agreement. but I don't see this happening anytime soon. I think Nintendo let their copyright lapse on either the design of the NES or the guts inside it. I think you mean the trademark? The trademark. I have no idea what I mean.

The patent expired on. But yeah, patents expire. That's just what happens. That's how God intended it is. That's why you can buy USB controllers of the NES and SNES one. I use those all the time. So eventually anybody will be able to make one. Conceivably, yeah.

At least just the guts. At least like the actual shell and everything in it. The little thing that used to be in your PSA, So Jonathan says, I know it's a hard topic to talk about, but will you guys talk about the Famicom clones that came out of China and Eastern Europe slash Russia during the late 80s and 90s? It seems like such a weird topic to discuss, even if there's so little information about them. Oh, yes, the Nintendo Blad.

It plays all five days. The dendie. Superior in every way. These things were vital for mall kiosks. I will say that. Without them, they would not exist. So I think that they're a good thing. When I worked at software, et cetera, in the early 2000.

There was one of those kiosks, like, 20 feet away. I was like, why is nobody stopping this? Yeah, those things were the Galapagos of clone consoles. Yeah. Like, they just thrived there, and it was an ecosystem, and they evolved, and they migrated and reproduced. It was amazing. They were huge, and it took Nintendo too long to respond. Like, it took them at least five or six years after I started seeing them to actually have their own.

We're not even talking about NES Classic. We're talking about things like virtual console, way for people to play these games. NES Classic arrived like 20 years too late in terms of competing. with these things. But I have never played them. I think the history is so like black market and not recorded that I don't know what you would talk about really. Yeah, I think the letter is asking not so much about the things that we saw here in the U.S., but actually how those survived and thrived in, you know, Taiwan, in Russia and China. Because, you know, into the 90s and beyond, Russian kids played Dendi, which was their Russian fans.

Famiclon. Famicom clone. That's what game systems were called. Like kids here said Nintendo's. Russian kids said dindi. So it was like a really, that was kind of how video games thrived there for a long time. I know like these off-brand Nintendo Famicom clones. But I can't speak as an expert to any of that. I just know that it was a thriving scene. And, you know, people are constantly finding these weird new versions of the NES that they never. knew existed. And there are some websites that kind of chronicle some of those. But you know, it's there's no no like official documentation. There's no official system. It's all

you know, it's black market. And he's all, it's better in every way. These still exist too. A friend of mine lives in Hong Kong and last time I visited her or she visited me in America she brought back a Famicom clone, a handheld one with a bunch of weird, weird shit on it.

A lot of legit games, but a lot of like what the hell is this. And I have it. I should have brought it with me here. My buddy from Brazil was saying something similar that due to a lot of Brazilian tax laws, like if you're not going to build a company and a factory in the country, you don't get to make stuff. So older stuff stays relevant longer so you can be walking around a nice metropolitan area of Brazil.

And that's just Mega Man X. Hock and cell phones. Like, he's that recognizable still. God, so weird. So next letter comes from Seth, who says, I came of age in the 32-bit era. My first system was the PS1 in the Travelers Tales, a Bugs life game. We were just talking about this game, it might

have come up on Lasertime or VG Apocalypse. Like Brett was talking about how much this game sold. Yes, and Toys R Us. It's the greatest hit. And that it's, if you have a PSP, a Vita, a PS3, and a PS4, you have access to Activision's bug's life. It has been preserved for all time. Thank God. How the hell did that

happened? God, yeah. The perfect time for that game, I guess. Yeah, Brett said he worked at Toys Us for like five years. He never stopped selling that game his entire 10 year. So going on with Seth, he says, the release of the SNAs Classic made me think about the hypothetical N64 classic, but the games of that era, particularly in the visual and control departments, have an age as well as their 8 and 16-bit counterparts.

How do you see nostalgia of the N64 PS1 Saturn era reentering the market? Will we see more total remasters like Crash Bandicoot, or do you think it's worth to try and emulate these games as they were warts and all? I think if you like that new Crash Bandicoot game, it's because it's a lot more than a remaster. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of fine-tuning there. I think what I'm seeing with some games. They're not doing it with a lot of games,

but we just talked about the Final Fantasy 9 release on PS4, the Final Fantasy 7 re-release on PS4 and Steam. They're doing as much as they can to these games to make them presentable to erase issues that were related to the old hardware and that are not on the new hardware. But I think these games require a lot more cleanup, a lot more options to make them accessible

to people who did not grow up in this era. Yeah, the low-resolution and last, lack of filtering and lack of proper perspective correction on PlayStation made those games sometimes just turn into these indecipherable mass of pixels just shimmering around. Everything is made out of a waterbed. It's really, yeah, it's really hard to go back to those games. In some cases, not all. There's still some PlayStation games that hold up really well.

But a lot of times you're like, what am I even looking at? And it was especially common with developers who tried really to push the bounds of artwork and create really detailed visuals. the system just didn't have the resolution. Like, if you were to play the games upscaled, just the original models, you'd get a lot more detail. Yeah. The PS2 kind of did that with the texture filtering option

for backward compatibility, and it made a lot of games like, oh, this went from being, like, indecipherable to kind of nice. Like a Vagrant story? Vigrant story was fine as it was. Yeah. But, yeah, like, there were definitely, oh, Klonoa was one.

Like the sprites, I couldn't figure out what the sprites were supposed to be in Clanoa, but then they added the texture filtering on PS2, and I was like, oh, now I see what everything was supposed to be. Somebody posted a picture of Otto Modalista, like, upsampled, and like, this is the most gorgeous game you've ever seen. That was GameCube and

PS2. I think it was just PS2. It was pretty sure it was GameCube also. But it was that era. Yeah. So it was a later generation. But still, yeah. Upresed, like a mofo. I'm trying to, what was the question? The nostalgia from that era, do you think it will

age as well? How will people interface with it? Well, the only thing. that you were blessed with if you grew up in that era and I say blessed if you had a most everything during that era got like five sequels and it's still going like everything I can think of I played on the PS1

I played a modern version of so it's just strange to go back to like Tony Hawk 1 Final Fantasy 7 like I had no interest in doing that. I do think if there is in 64 classic it'll be way fewer games like maybe 10 at most because for one thing they're longer games

but also like that you've got to find 10 games that you can learn pretty quickly. And I think the rare replay, I think that showcase like a bunch of N64 games. And I think like maybe one or two of them are like still playable. Yeah, Nintendo didn't make that many games for the N64 compared to their output on other systems. I think they just spent so much time on Mario and Ocarina of Time. They'd have to make the mini without Banjo Cazooey, Blascore, Jet Force, Shemini. They lost all of their rare support.

So that'd be a hard sell. I mean, as someone like me who looks at these old games, this is not the, the mass market consumer attitude, but I like looking at them to see, like, the, the shortcuts they had to take to make a conceivable 3D world, like, oh, this element is 2D, or they made this thing made out of more polygons and this out of less. I like seeing the actual, like, artistry that went behind the creation of these graphics. Whatever Tomba is. Whatever Tomba is.

Tomba is actually 2D, so that has aged well. But I think, I don't know if I said this before, but I think the RPGs do age the best because they're not dependent on things moving fast. They're slower pace. Frame rates, yes. Although Final Fantasy 9, thank God, they fixed a lot of problems with that game. It's much more playable now. But I do want to see more of this era of games come back,

but I don't know what format will take. And I think people just would rather remake them than, you know, show us these ugly 3D games. But there are a lot of sprite-based gems from that period. Oh, yeah, yeah. They came out of Japan. We got to call our buddy Greg, see if we'll stream more with us because we were trying to play Mad Panic Coaster,

one of the most insane games I've ever almost gotten good at. That is a weird... It runs up 60 frames a second for some reason. A weird wild game. Beautiful. So Greg says, what are some key added to a retro game when it is re-released. fine line between preserving the feel of the original game while also making it more palatable to a modern

audience. Safe states, I'm assuming, are a given, but what else? Do you like releases at all for the option of old graphics and new graphics? What else? Rewind. Rewind. Yes. I actually prefer that to safe states. It's more of, there's less chance of you fucking up and making a safe state

in the wrong place if you constantly can rewind. And is Disney Adventures, Disney Afternoon Collection rather? Is that the only retail release with that rewind function in it? No. Rare replay has it. I think Mega Man Legacy has it. So Legacy does have it. I thought it did. I don't think the first one does. The first one doesn't. And the second one doesn't even have save states.

The second one doesn't have save states? Or maybe it does have save states. But there's like some features missing. It's kind of weird. That's a bummer. I mean, I think when it comes to RPGs, I know these are just, they're kind of just ports of the PC version. But what Square did with 7 and 9, Final Fantasy, like that you can basically fast forward through that game is pretty great. frame skip button. Yeah, you can turn off encounters. You can like always give.

With 7, I know there's like a button just like, oh, you get healed up and you have all your limit breaks. It's like, well. The win button. Yeah, basically, yeah, a win button, but at least I can experience the story of this if I hadn't before. I do say safe states are a given. What actually bummed me out about the first version of virtual console was safe states were like the honor system. It was more like a bookmark. It's like, this safe state is good once.

Yeah. You can use it once and then you're screwed. I'm glad that Wii you embrace the more unethical version of safe stating. I'll go back to this as many times as I want to. I don't know. Did you say yours? What's your must in a retro release collection? Configurable controls.

That's good, too, yeah. A wealth of display options. Because some people want game graphics stretched all the way out to an HD screen and it's terrible. It's unfathomable. I don't want that. Okay, but I don't. Don't force it on me. Does those Mega Man games let you do that?

Fill your entire 60 by 9 screen? I think they give you a mild. They used to give you it. The other collections would give you a mild widescreen option, but it's not recommended. I mean, the, yeah, the Wii U virtual console when it had DS games. It did allow you. It did let you do a lot of stuff with them. All of them are bad.

No option works. This Nest Classic mini is just like, no, you can't make this widescreen. You're not allowed. I call that out of my review, and people are like, but I want to do that. And I'm like, well, you probably like snuff porn, too. I don't want to know about that. I'm sure that I would like to zoom in a little bit at certain points. But, like, I couldn't believe in.

And it was like, no, as they appeared, that's all you get. I think on a hardware level, your TV can do that. You can tell your TV to zoom in on the image if you have a good enough TV. Actually, I had a crappy TV before I got my new one. And it even let me choose, like, how do you want to view this image you're looking at right now? Do you want it to cropped or 16 by 9 or whatever? But, yeah, I like that. It's cool if there is new art on a game.

I like what they did with the Monster World game, whatever, which, whatever one that, that is, like forget which one, Dragon's Track. Dragon's Traggins Trapp, yeah. The real release of that is that game. With the push of a button, you can go between Art Styles. And the Monkey Island Remakes did that as well. That's, that is the one game where the flipping

between art styles makes a difference. It's really weird, but the added animation makes it easier to pick up cues and gives you a better sense of control over your movement, because it has a very like... Oh, and Monster World. Yeah. It has a very sort of fixed jump arc.

And I find it really hard to control myself in the original version. And even though the graphical swap is exactly the same, like same tech and everything, same physics, it just feels different. It's really interesting. That's a great example of, you know, that little embellishment working in favor of the game. Yeah. And I'm a big fan of art. I really love old ads. I love old flyers.

I love old original art. The Disney Afternoon Collection, I don't know if I hope Retronaut's audience picked it up. something in there that I have literally never seen before, and I assure you I've seen almost everything there is to see about this game. The original art that was rejected by, I believe, Disney, you'll see it in the Disney afternoon collection. It's the

DuckTales, a rejected cover art that looks like Mega Man Famicom. Yeah, it's got the KGina Pune style. Yeah, it looks, yeah, it looks totally consistent with Capcoms art. I saw that when I was flipping through that and I was like, this is amazing. It's the first time you've been able to see that. It's not like something you put on the package. It's got Ducktail characters doing the Mega Man fingers. Yeah, it's awesome. Whenever I

unlock a piece of production art in a new game, I'm like, why did you even tell me this? I will never look at this. But with retro re-releases, I'm like, I want every box. I want every concept art you can find. I want every piece of key art you can dig up. I want all of that. So I'm on board with you guys. embarrassing 80s commercials. Please give

me everything. That was like, this is a retro release. That's a retro release. But the PS2 there was Activision Anthology. And like, this was like right before, you know, video on the internet was popular. There was YouTube to find these things. But I'm like, wow, there's a commercial for ice hockey with Phil Hartman. This is the most

amazing thing. On the disc? You're right. Yeah. He's on a PlayStation disc with the first time since Blasto. Yeah, Blasto was not a good note to go out on. Look forward to our Blasto episode when we run out of ideas. So here's our last question. The final question of this episode of Retronauts, the listener male episode for 2017. It's from

Justin, and he says, do you think there are currently any release video games that will have an impact 100 years from now? Which ones? And why? I'm sure there will be a year 2100, Chris Kohler, that goes back to play all the 90s square titles, but will the majority of gamers have any idea of what games are like today

or even back in the 80s? Will they even care? Are we doing this all for nothing? Are people going to know about us in the future, Jeremy? Nope. We're all dying and the mass die out. We're all dying the mess. We're all dust in the win, right? Is that how it works? I just have a feeling that no matter what you're... There's a mass extinction event coming soon, so it doesn't matter. That's right. There will be no future.

But how do you feel about how games will age? I mean, I assume the way we interact with games will be different in 100 years, but will these things just be in a museum as a curiosity? Well, yes. We look at old machinery and things like that. In a PSVR helmet, that's what we'll be using 100 years in the future.

Will we still have controllers? Yeah, we'll be staring into a PlayStation I camera that's sold separately. I see. It's part of the future. Can it read our minds? This is what I want to know. I think that, you know, we've kind of reached a point where technology and media haven't stagnated, but they don't advance like they did in their formative days.

It does like eating its own ass quite a bit. sure so you know you still read books from 300 years ago you read Moby Dick or whatever and it's still you know aside from the parts about whaling that you don't care about it's still you know totally readable we listened to albums from 50 years ago Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band is still a great record I imagine people are still going to be listening to Sergeant Pepper's 50 years from now I wake up every day list of my susa yeah I don't see why why people wouldn't you know still have some way of playing Super Mario Brothers

or Minecraft or something a hundred years from now. I think it's totally feasible and reasonable that we're not going to reach some sort of have some sort of massive leap forward in technology that's going to render every form of media that exists right now. Executive order, I'm taking away the internet.

Emulation is illegal. He's going to look into my ROM download history. I'm going to be at the Hague soon, everybody. I take great. It makes me smile. and feel really good inside. I love pop culture and I love things being preserved and it's October here.

And I like that when you look at famous Halloween monsters, you're looking at books from the 19th century, made into movies in the 20th century, almost forgotten as pop culture characters now, but popular for over a century. And now it's October when we're recording and they're just going to parade them all out. They're synonymous with the genre of scary.

And I think I like the idea of Sonic and Mario and Mega Man is like the Wolfman, Dracula, and Frankenstein of the entire gaming medium. They might not have games. Their companies might not exist, but they could... Mega Man's not going to be there. It's going to be Steve. Steve from Minecraft. That's right. His name is Steve. Yeah, I do, I feel like

Mario will be like the mascot for the medium, yeah. He's Mickey Mouse. He really is. Yeah. No kid is, no child has seen a Mickey Mouse cartoon, but they can recognize Mickey Mouse. Actually, there's a Mickey Mouse TV series running now that it's... I meant to a real Mickey Mouse cartoon, not like the count all the shapes cartoons. No, okay.

Okay, never mind. Go watch Run Away Brain. It's the best Mickey cartoon that Disney will not show you because it's on Laser Times Facebook page until Disney finds it. Now they will. Great. Now I'm accessory to this. The horrible crime. Oh, do you have something that said?

Just that Roy Disney is one of our favorite listeners. Oh, thank you, Roy. A sponsor. Thanks, Roy. Michael Eisner, go fuck off. So, yes, this has been the last question for this listener mail-up. So thank you so much for writing in. I got everybody's letters.

I'm pretty sure if I missed yours. I'm sorry, but I still love you. So to wrap up, I am Bob Mackey. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. Of course, Retronaut is sponsored by Patreon. Everybody who gives us this podcast pays for everything we do, the equipment, renting the space, renting storage at this space, having people come in, giving us their time.

We appreciate everything you give to us. And if you want to give to us and you don't give to us, one of the incentives is for three bucks a month, you can get every episode a week ahead of time and add free and at a higher bit rate. That's a great deal. That's a great deal, I think so. And if you give to us, we can do even more great stuff in the future.

So please go to patreon.com slash retronauts. There are more ways to give than that. There are more dollar amounts to give than that if you want to get other neat things. So please check us out. Even a dollar a month would be amazing. That's a great little tip to say, good job, guys. So, Jeremy, where can we find you? You can find me at Retronauts.com doing Retronauts Things.

I'm very retro-nautty. And, of course, I'm on Twitter as GameSpite and on YouTube on my channel, Jeremy Parrish. Check that out. It's really tough to find. Doing videos about Game Boy and NES and Super NES and so on and so forth. And Dave. I'm at Dave Rudden on Twitter, and I, I do a whole ton of work at laser time.

Yes, but one thing I want to point out in particular that we do at laser time, which is in relation to a question that was submitted on retronauts.com, Jason X, this was a question for Henry, but Henry's on the episode. But he asks, if Henry's on the episode, the fans are dying to know, was the Montreal screw job of work, which means this is a wrestling thing that a controversy in 1997. So I'm going to say, just pick up 30, 20, 2010. In one month, we're going to be talking about the 20th of first. of this thing in wrestling where a wrestler who was on the way leaving WWE had his title taken

away with him without him knowing in the middle of a match. It was the Montreal Screwjob. Montreal ScrewDrop. Okay, famous moments. Chris, how about you? Yeah, Lasertime, Latestown, Podcast.com, is where you can find all our shows or videos. We streamed, I think we streamed at least five games we talked about on this show. Mad Panic Coaster.

Now's the time. Including the entirety of the S&ES classic. Oh, and you know, here's something I did that was really unpopular, little mini-documentaries for all the games in the Disney Afternoon collection. Those are great, yeah. Almost nobody watched them, so big bummer there. But hey, if you like those games, then you can check those out. And we do a show, Lasertime, it's topic-based.

I believe this being October, we're going to have a lot of Halloween-flavored stuff, including a brand-new show, a seasonal show, an Elm Street nightmare, where my friend Lizzie Kwavis and I will go through every single Nightmare in Elm Street film in order and do a wonderful little podcast. It's great, I love it. Kind of like what Bob and Henry and I do with Talk. Simpsons we're doing with Friday the 13th. Excuse me, Nightmare on Elm Street.

Friday 13th is a game we keep streaming. That's really good. Bart, do you want to see my chains on Hockey Mask? Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. We'll see you then. And call her number nine for one million dollars. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of...

Uh, Rita, Rita, you're cutting out. Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast, nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, report should be released next week when he will be out of town.

I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Main 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. James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral.

It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.