Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 131: SEGA's arcade history: Into the ’90s

Episode Date: December 25, 2017

Jeremy Parish, Ben Elgin, and Benj Edwards convene to discuss SEGA's arcade legacy one last time. But they fail! SEGA created so many groundbreaking classics in the ’90s that this episode only covers about half of them! Oh no!

This week in Retronauts, it is the 90s, and there is time for Sega. Oh, you guys. everyone, welcome to another sparkling episode of Retronauts. Retronauts East. I am Jeremy Parrish, and with me this time, no surprises here. It is... Ben Edwards. And... Ben Elton. And we are, well, I was going to say wrapping up our Sega Arcade History series, but I don't think that's going to happen. I sat down to make a list of all the games Sega released in the 90s. I thought, oh, we can, you know, their outputs slowed down. We We can hit this all in one go, but then in putting the notes together, I realized, just based on how Retronauts East usually goes, it ain't going to happen.

I mean, I had a salad at lunch, and I thought, I can eat this all at once. But then I got halfway through and realized, I'm done. I'm going to have to go with another session. So it's just like the podcast. It's the Retronauts East salad. And we're all eating that salad right now while you speak. We are not. That's weird.

No. That's really strange. no so we're not eating salads but we are going to talk about Sega so in our previous episodes we talked about Sega's let's see their arcade history up through 1985 then the games of 86 and 87 I want to say which means there's a lot happening those two years and then most recently 88 89 and 90 so that takes us up to the 90s because remember technically a decade doesn't begin until January 1st of the year ending in one. Oh, you. Oh, me. But it's true. So we're sticklers for semantics here. Right, Benj? That's right. That's right. We know it. We sure are. Staying out of that one and the

Metroidvania one. That was me blinking. Yeah. So here we are cruising into the 90s, talking about Sega. And, you know, I didn't think I knew that many Sega arcade games from the 90s. But my God, there's so many of them. And they're so monumental. This is like a decade in which Sega was basically saying, Hey, everyone, let's change video games and we'll lead the way. And I don't know. Like, if you just look at the console history of Sega, you're like, okay, yeah, they made some good stuff. But if you look at the arcade history of Sega, especially in the 90s,

it's like, how is this company not currently ruling the industry? The answer is a lot of really bad decisions along the way. But divorced of those bad decisions, you have some amazing games. And we're going to talk about them in the next. next 80, 90 minutes of podcasting. So put on your clean pants. You're going to need them. It's going to be a crazy, sloppy ride.

I don't know what that means. Don't cut that out, please. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do. It's what we Day All right We We know the exact

I don't know the exact release dates of any of any of these games, just the year. So this is all kind of out of order. I basically just went down the list at killer list of video games and said these games are interesting and important so we're going to talk about them. So there's not really much of a chronology here and it's okay. We're just talking

about the 90s as a big old lump. Remember the 90s? They were great. And I feel like they were kind of a homogenous slab. Like once you got past the hangover of the 80s, everything was just kind of extreme and it was that way all the way up until like

I don't know, September 11th, 2001. Yeah, something like that. Something like that. So we have the decade preserved in acetate slab, and we're going to look at that. So let's begin by talking about Spider-Man. This one did not define a genre, even though it was maybe trying. Yes, this is an example of 90s Sega taking an established genre and saying, let's put a spin on it. And there are some interesting kind of collisions between ideas here, but it does not seem like that good again.

No, so they took two genres in one is sort of the thing here. So it's a brawler sometimes, and then it's also a zoomed-out platformer sometimes. The zoom-out is important because then you get the super-scaling effect that Sega was so known for. There's a lot of games, a lot of their 2D games in the 90s use that zoom-in, zoom-out effect, which is kind of cool and kind of gives it some depth, but also it's just really violent against hand-drawn sprite art. like it is a it's a it's a it's a real pixel murder yeah it's brutal squashes them it's like hey you thought this beautiful hand-drawn sprite art looks great well what do you think about it when the pixels are zoomed to 1.7 times their scale it's gross

yeah and this really has the feel of someone's tech demo that for some reason got to go ahead into a game they're like not just a game but a game bearing a major license but they're like look what we can do with this scaling we can scale between the standard scale of a brawler with these big old sprites and the standard spoiler with a platformer that seemed out and we can go from one to the other isn't that cool and we'll just make a game of this and they did and it's it's kind of there and it's

doesn't look very impressive really yeah so this game I feel was Sega's response to Konami's X-Men game it's the same concept it's a four-player simultaneous Marvel Comics based game but you know X-Men that was easy you got a team you put six characters in there

players choose was there a six-player version? I think it was just four players max. Yeah, there's six. Was there? Okay. Yeah. So, so, you know, you've got X-Men. They're a team. But Spider-Man, he works alone. He's solo. No one trusts him. No one loves him. Except the Black Cat. So she's here. But then you also have Hawkeye from the Avengers. Yeah. And Namor, the Submariner, who doesn't like anyone? For some reason.

Yeah, it's, it kind of feels like the good licenses were, you know, snatched up by Konami or Data East. because Data East had Captain America and the Avengers. Oh, yeah. And so Sega was left with Spider-Man, which is a good license, and then a bunch of other random characters. And it even kind of shows in the enemies you fight in this game. You've got Venom, you've got Scorpion, you've got the Green Goblin. Okay, those are all, you know, traditional Spider-Man foes.

But then all the MOOCs are from the Hellfire Club. Those guys are X-Men nemeses. What? And then the final boss is Dr. Doom. He's the fantastic Fores villain. It's such a weird... Sloppy. Intellectually sloppy.

Yes. There's no rigor here whatsoever. No, it's just like a really weird kind of... Here's the character licenses that Marvel was willing to give us, put them into a game, and make it interesting. I think Spider-Man is neat, actually. I'm surprised that this was a Sega game. I remember playing this either in the arcade or just on an emulator. about 15 years ago when MAME was sort of a new thing.

And I enjoyed playing it. It feels like playing a comic book, doing it co-op with a friend. But as far as the scaling stuff, I mean, that's sort of vulgar, you know, like we were talking about. Wow. I was going to go that far, but sure. Yeah. But, you know, it's neat. I mean, at the time, I can go back to thinking about playing the X-Men game or the Captain

America game or this game. and just, it's such a richly illustrated comic book, comic book world that you can play in. I think that was its chief value as a game, you know, just that, you know. Yeah, I mean, the character graphics and especially the cutscenes really sort of capture the look of that sort of late 70s Marvel vibe, they kind of carried into the early 80s. Like, the cutscenes, they're not animated, but they do, like, you know, changing angles and stuff, and it really kind of feels like Spider-Man and his amazing friends. You know, the character mix is different.

There's no Iceman. There's no Firestar. Who even is Firestar? Instead, you have more, like, established characters. I guess Iceman was wrapped up with X-Men anyway. Yeah, and you do have good detail on the, on the sprites when you're in the zoomed-in brawler mode. And you get these good, nice comic book-lucky sprites. Yeah, they're really big.

Yeah, yeah, they're nice. Although Namor is very large and very kind of naked and it's a little terrifying. Well, he always is. I know. That's his thing. That's why Susan Richards is like, I love you read, but my heart will also be with Namor. Because he's largely naked. He's big and mostly naked. He's got little wings on his feet, but he's not White Wingfoot. That's someone totally different in the comics.

Yeah, anyway, the scaling, I don't think it's ever really done as well, or like as effectively as in the very first stage. You, you know, go through the MOOCs from Hellfire Club, and then you face off against Scorpion, and then you like punch Scorpion out of the way and Venom pops out. and you beat up Venom. So it's kind of like, wow, all the bad guys are here. And once you defeat Venom, then he kind of hobbles over to this big pile of black goo that's like the same stuff as suit is made out of. And it absorbs into him and he turns into a giant venom. And so then there's like a huge venom kind of fighting you as you climb scaffolding.

And it's like it's kind of like a what the hell? The Angley of comic book video games like the Hulk. He turns 50 tall. Does Hulk really turn that big? Yes, ridiculous in that movie. He fights a giant radioactive bulldog or something. I get the Hulk movies mixed up because neither of them are that great. I like, I mean, the first one was neat, but just crazy.

It was definitely done from a vision of someone who wasn't thinking about comic books. Except, you know, he had that, like, crazy, the edit style where the, like, the comic panels slid in and stuff. So it really, yeah, it really captured the feel of a comic, but then the story was, like, its own thing. And it has Jennifer Connolly and the guy from, what's that guy's name? Sam, the guy with the most... Yeah, Sam Rockwell. Yeah, Sam Rockwell is like the general one of his names. That's pretty cool casting.

Sam Elliott, though. Sega should have reached into the future and got that license for this game. Right, if only they've been thinking 13 years ahead. Those fools. Anyway, so, yeah, that's all kind of to this side. Oh, yeah, and then I do appreciate the fact that you're fighting Dr. Doom, but the first time you beat Dr. Doom, he explodes, and you're like, no, it's a Doombot. There are some nice nods. Like, whoever put this together,

put some thought, I think, into kind of making the best of the game and the license in a way that would be true to the comics, even if some of the crossover connections are weird. I guess Namor versus Dr. Doom kind of makes sense. But it's, you know, it's not Namor and Spider-Man. It's just called Spider-Man. It's just called Spider-Man. Yeah, I don't think Namor and Spider-Man ever crossed paths in the comics as far as I remember. probably did. I mean, but not frequently.

No, it wasn't like a team up. I don't know. Like, Namor fought Fantastic Four a lot and Johnny Storm and Spider-Man were pretty good buddies. So I could see some sort of, you know, like let's fight.

Oh, why must we fight? We are friends. That kind of, I don't know. Anyway. That's how the Spider-Man, the amazing friends got started.

They wanted to have Johnny Storm and Iceman, Spider-Man, but they said, we need a girl. So they made Firestar. Yes. Exactly. I'm just guessing.

Anyway. So, yeah. Actually, there was some sort of like weird license issue where in the Fantastic Four cartoon they couldn't use torch, Johnny Storm. So instead they had Herbie the robot or something? Yeah, there was another human torch that was earlier owned by a different company. Timely comics. Yeah, or something. They had the original, the Android human torch from the 40s.

Wow. It is also, incidentally, I noticed last time I watched Iron Man 2, I think. there's actually a reference to the original human torch in the World's Fair, which is kind of cool. I love all these little Easter eggs and nods. And this game, getting back to the original topics, it does have some of those little Easter eggs.

Even though it doesn't make sense for the Hellfire Club members to be fighting Spider-Man, it's still kind of cool. I'm like, oh, I know those guys. They didn't just, you know, come up with random punks. I mean, there are some random punks in the game. Don't get me wrong. But there are also characters that you're like,

oh, yes, I've seen these people in the comic books, usually getting sliced apart by Wolverine, whatever. Okay. So, that was Spider-Man. And what a crazy game. They're mildly amazing. They're somewhat impressive. But now we go on to a pair of games by Sega that was, boy, I don't know if I'd call them amazing, but they sure are interesting. Even weird or gimmick. Yes. Okay. So, did you guys ever see these games in the, in the occasion? So we're talking about Time Traveler and Holocleum games that presented themselves as like magical holography. It's actually just a mirror-based trick.

Quote, unquote, holographic display, which is actually reflecting your display onto this translucent curved surface. So it makes it look like it's floating in space. And there's really nothing too complicated going on. Yeah, it uses that same sort of reflective ghost imaging that... Pepper's ghost. What? There's a magic trick called Peppockus. A famous stage illusion where you have a half-silvered mirror.

Oh, okay. I was going to say that fighter pilots used to get their heads-up display on their helmets, but yes, that also. I will accept that as well. I've heard of that one, but sure. But yeah, it's basically using just a reflective trick, kind of like Virtual Boy used a reflective trick, to come up with some sort of illusory gimmick that seems

really different and far-fetched and crazy. It looks like the display is floating in the middle of this sort of little dome thing that's on top of the arcade box instead of the screen. I'll recount my encounter with Time Traveler. The year was 1992. I don't know. I was in Gatlinburg. This all goes back to Gatlinburg every time the arcades.

And I walked up to the Time Traveler machine. I think it costs like a dollar when everything costs 25 cents. And me and my brother finally decided, hey, maybe we should put a dollar into it. and we immediately regretted it because it was really hard to play and hard to see and I wasn't impressed. It just seemed like it would be cool like the future, but it wasn't

I don't think it worked out that well. So the actual game here, Time Traveler, was basically a live action QTE game. Right. I mean, if you want to get down to it, it is a fancy new presentation format for Dragons Lake.

That's all it is. And Rick Rick Dyer, the guy who created, you know, designed Dragons Lair as a game, not Don Bluth who did the animation. Like, this was his, I guess, his big project for the 90s was, let's do the same thing, but instead of doing, you know, laser disc cartoons, let's do holography with full motion video. It's such a, it is such a product of its times. I mean, it's basically like, you know,

Sillowood was becoming really big, FMV-based games in multimedia, on computers. Like, this was kind of the dawn of that. So, of course, they would take, you know, that idea and say, well, if we want to do this in the arcade, we need to make it more spectacular. Like, Dragonslayer is now something people can do at home. So we have to come up with some sort of gimmick to make this stand apart. Do something you can't do at home.

So they came up with this display concept, the fake holography. And it was really impressive. I remember seeing this at, you know, my local Putt Putt in the sort of the back of the arcade area where they had the consoles that you could rent out for like 20 minutes at a time. And I never played it because it cost a dollar. And I didn't have that kind of money. I was like, I would rather play, you know, Ninja Warriors or something four times than play this once because it doesn't look that good. But it's really cool looking. It's neat. I think I pretty much only watched other people play it, which is hard to do because

it's kind of the display is oriented towards where you're standing. I just remember it being sort of dark. It felt like peering into a well. yeah i mean very much because you're projecting you're projecting on glass so you can't get that much brightness back off of it um so it is very dim and kind of floating there in a small little space um but it's also like looking at it now it's kind of super uncomfortable because it's all this it's all this live action full motion video and the premise is you're this like you know old west dude going around time traveling and trying to survive but so you go back to yeah so

you've got your six shooters and so you end up like going back to like caveman times and you have these poor little live-action cavemen walking up to you, and you're just shooting them in the head with your pistol, and it's like, yeah, that's... And then there's a bunch of Native Americans you shoot, and then there's robots you shoot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Obese cavewoman and some other...

I just, I know this from watching the YouTube. Yeah, it's just not great from a modern perspective. Yeah, I mean, even not accounting for the fact that QTE games and the Dragonsler style are not that fun, really. And it's a really... expensive kind of buy-in to learn basically press buttons in this order, press the controller in this order. And there was a randomization element to this. Like the scenarios, there were like three scenarios per time setting. Yeah, I would like mix up. So he would randomize them. So you couldn't

just, you know, master it by memorizing the button presses from start to finish. You had to adapt. But yeah, the, the content, in addition to the concept, boy, I'm having trouble with my words that salad really did me in um yeah like it it's it's very yeah i think uncomfortable is the word to go for but kind of cool in an interesting sort of weird this was a thing that happened sort of way definitely memorable like i never played the game but i still remember it just because it really did stand out yeah so i'd say as a cultural cultural achievement it's not very good yeah that's my verdict so i read in doing research that this game

was making like a million dollars a month or a week or something for a while, but it was a very short-lived, like, you know, it was the candle that burned at both ends or the fake holography that projected at both ends, I don't know. It did something at both ends.

I don't want to know. But, yeah, like, I think there was a pretty quick drop-off. Once the novelty wore off, people were like, oh, this looks neat, but it's not good. So, almost immediately, Sega came out with a conversion kit called Holocene, which is like a colosseum, but holographic. Wow, it's a portmanteau.

Great. Thanks, Sega. So this was a completely different game from Time Traveler, but it used the same technology, and the idea was that it was a fighting game. And, you know, this was the dawn of fighting game. Street Fighter 2 came out in 1991. So, you know, it was kind of right there. I would say it was like trailing behind Pit Fighter more than, you know.

biting off Street Fighter. So maybe that's why it kind of sucks. You have four characters to play as, and they all have very limited movesets. There's not that much difference between them. It feels very clumsy. Pit Fighter, I think, is a good touchstone for this game. I think Holocene has a contender

for one of the most obscure video games of all time. Just based on the technology, and it's just a game no one has ever heard of or played. It has a cool name. Yeah, I never saw it in a while. Yeah, I saw a time traveler, but not Holocene. Or if I did see Holocene, I was like, whatever. Yeah, I never saw it, you know.

But this did not use digitized, like, film graphics, right? Yeah, it was pixel graphics. It's, you know, basically just imagine a completely generic, kind of mediocre one-on-one fighter, and then imagine it floating in a dome, and that's what you got. On a black background, essentially. Yeah, no background because it's on the translucent screen. So Sega was definitely casting its line. far and wide, hoping for a bite.

I think if you want to look at a better attempt of the fighting game genre that they came out with, again, 1991, 92, so right around the time Street Fighter was first hitting and making its ripples, you can look instead at Golden Axe, oh, wait, no, we're getting ahead of ourselves. You went ahead and skipped out of duel. That's right. Okay, so I guess it wasn't that event. Let's talk about Golden Axe the duel.

We'll go out of order here. Okay, that was a little lighter, but, yeah. So this is another, like, this kind of combines the, the, scaling of Spider-Man with the fighting of Holocene and no fake holographic technology or QTEs. It is a one-on-one fighting game starring Golden Axe characters. But the only Golden X characters I really know are Axe Battler and Gileas Thunderhead and what was like? Sonia Sonia, Sonia, Sonia Blade. No, Sonia, Mortal Kombat. No, that was Gileas. No, that was Gileas's I don't know. The lady. I can't remember her name. I'm sorry, lady. You're very pretty and I think

you're cool. So don't take it personally. She has awesome magic. She does. And she has a really cool sword, which is very impressive. Okay. This is going nowhere. Anyway, so. They're in this game. So they are in this game. Yeah. There's other characters. Tell me more about this sword. Details. It like kills people and stuff. So one of the weird things about this game is that it keeps the Golden Axe magic system, even though you're in a one-on-one fighter now. And every once in a while, those little imps that you all know and hate from Golden Axe will run on the screen. And if you fight them, you can get magic bottles out of them. And that's how you do your special attacks in this fighting game while the fighting game is going on.

So that always seemed kind of weird to me. I'm not really sure. I haven't spent time with the game. So I'm not really sure how well that worked in practice. But it seems like a weird choice for a fighting game. I don't think I ever played this in the arcade. I feel like I saw it one time. Maybe I did play it.

But it was, there was a neat, a little period of time after Streetfire 2 where I was actually excited by interpretations of other series turned into one-on-one fighting games. I thought that was kind of cool. And then it got old really fast. Yeah, there weren't a lot. There was what this and Double Dragon and a couple of others, but it didn't happen as often as you might think. I mean, didn't they? I mean, eventually they made like, you know, Smash Brothers. Well, that was, that was way later.

I mean, there's a Turtles one-on-one fighter. Turtles. Yeah, tournament fighter. Yeah, a tournament fighter from Turtles. There was a one-on-one Pac-Man battles. No. No. No, you're just making things up.

Tetris. Tetris. Head-to-head fighting. Tetris, yeah. Actually, the L-block guy is overpowered. So one of the interesting... Sorry. One of the interesting things about Golden X, the duel, is that it's an early weapons-based

fighter. There weren't... That's true. Many of those. Like, people always talk about weapon lord as being by Namco as being like the first big weapon based fighter, but that was in 1995, I want to say, 94. This was before that. So Sega beat everyone to the punch and got no credit for it. Yeah. And of course, you know, like

the final boss is golden axe and he uses an axe and he's golden. It's actually very literal. And I guess it kind of like doing a weapons fighter kind of fits with the scaling camera thing they were doing because it gives everyone more reach so there's a little more a sense of scale and spacing.

You're not always as close in as you are in other fighters. So that maybe puts sort of their scaling tech to. It's a little bit of good use there and that you can zoom out when you need to. Yeah, like we, you would see that sort of scaling technique done a lot in other games later. Like,

Samurai Showdown had that. Samurai, I think so. Yeah. And then there was Out Foxies. Did you guys ever play that? That's probably worth a micro episode in and of itself. Out Foxies is I want to say it was by Taito. It could be wrong, but I think Taito.

And it was like a four-player brawling game across kind of like these platforms. It was like Smash Brothers, minus the Nintendo characters, four or five years before Smash Brothers. Wow. It's like out-foxies. I've only ever seen it in Japanese arcades and like, you know, retro arcades where it's just kind of like sitting there by itself and everyone's like, what is that? Nanda. But, yeah, it's an interesting game. And this kind of does that same sort of thing

without the platforms, but it kind of gets to that like, hey, let's have a fighting game with a dynamic viewpoint. And of course, Sega would explore that in other ways with Virtual Fighter, but we'll talk about that later. We'll get to that whole set. But before we talk about that,

which is coming up actually pretty soon, I do want to talk about Golden Axe's Revenge of Death Adder, which I got out of sequence. That is Golden Axe 2, basically. and I realized watching videos of this and researching about it that I've never played it or even seen it. Yeah, I don't think I've actually played it. I think I'd seen it a few times.

But, yeah, I mean, it's pretty much more golden axe. It is, but like one of the playable characters is a centaur woman. Yeah, there's a centaur woman. She's not in the duel, though, is she? I don't think so. Seems like she would be really overpowered, just turn around and kick people in the face and they die. Yeah, no, it had centaur. And for some reason, the dwarf is riding in a barbarian's backpack.

yeah well like you know the the vehicular element becomes its own thing the weirdest thing is that the centaur lady can ride mounts can she i never she does um the videos i was watching one of them she like punches a dude off a like a giant praying mantis yeah the praying mantis and then she hops on the praying mantis and when she rides on the mantis her body morphs so that she becomes just a human oh okay that's so it's not like it's not like a horse riding on top of a mantis with a person grafted in the front of the doors, which would have been very difficult. No, she, like, she metamorphoses into a standard, you know, just a normal human, uh, so that she can ride a mantis.

So there's some weird stuff going on in this game. Yeah, the mounts in this one. I think they felt like they had to, you know, everyone loved riding on the dragon and riding on the little, little tail flippy thing in the first one. So they felt like they had to like keep going and outdo that. So there's like a fire breathing mantis and there's a giant scorpion that makes electric sparks from its claws. and there's a lot of weird, cool stuff in it.

And there's other, like, interactive things, too. Like, sometimes the enemies will, like, bring up this little, like, trebushet and, like, shoot rocks at you. And you can actually, like, take command of it and shoot rocks back at them. Wow. Yeah. That is bonkers. Yeah, there's a lot of weird stuff.

And this also does the screen-scaling thing. Like, I guess this was Sega's thing now. Everything has got to zoom in and out. Well, just, yeah. So it sort of turns the level 90 degrees sometimes and goes into the screen for a little while. What? Well, it doesn't have. Actually, it doesn't rotate.

It's not like voxels. You, you, no. So you're going along side scrolling, but then you get to a point where you have to walk into the screen instead, and it scales stuff towards you and sometimes has boulders running down the screen at you as you're doing it. Right. So it's like Thunderblade or something. Yeah.

Yeah. You just turn and go into the screen for a bit and then continue on to the side. And they were really trying to come up with some. They liked this tech. I mean, it looked really nice. Well, I mean, it's like, clearly their heart was set on the third dimension, but but it was hard to express that with their, you know, model or system 16 boards. So I guess Golden X 2 is kind of like where one of those places where what they could do with that technology sort of reached its natural limit.

And you end up with a very strange game. I need to sit down and play this sometime. I didn't even see the parts where it scales. I thought it was like zooming in and out, but I guess not. Yeah, no, yeah, you just, you just, it's just these short little segments, but yeah, you're traveling. traveling into the screen instead of along the side for a while. I've never played it. But you're in good company.

My brother wrote a song called Centaur Girlfriend a long time ago. Was it about her? Yeah, I was thinking I need to show this game to my brother. He said this female centaurs don't exist, but he rides around on a centaur girlfriend. It's part of the lyrics. So I don't know what a female centaur would be called. Well, a centaur. Yeah.

Well, she's in this game. She's kind of cute. So, yeah, probably like, well. That's all I got to say Nothing important Anyways All right, so we talked about the limitations of 2D technology, and that's okay, because now we're into 1992. Yes.

When Sega said, the hell with the second dimension, let's go in on polygons, and kicked off the Virtua franchise. I guess it's a franchise. I mean, the games aren't really connected, and there are games that use the same kind of technology that aren't called Virtua. But it was kind of, I guess, like an umbrella, an umbrella brand. and Aegis to combine all these games, to bring them together and make people say, Virtua, I know what that means.

That means floaty polygons. Yeah, so it's interesting. They wanted, so they knew they wanted this 3D tech, and they actually went and talked to people at NASA, because NASA had simulators, 3D simulators that they were working on. And so evidently the people that developed this new board for them, went and talked to those people and kind of put together their minds

and decided to come up with some hardware where they could use this in the service, games. And they did it. And they made the Model 1 board. Right. And that was headed up by Yu Suzuki and AM2. Arcade. What does AM2 stand for? Arcade

amusement machines. I don't know. I can say it's funny. The idea mechanics. Yeah. The Model 2 board was not the first 3D board. The first 3D board was Namco's.

Yeah, Namco had one before this. I can't remember what it, but it came out. It launched. in like 1987, or 1988. We talked about it on an episode that's coming up that we recorded recently, and I cannot remember what it's called, but that was 1980.

What game was it? I don't remember. Well, so Namco had a 3D racing game winning run. Okay. Which is probably like the, how come they didn't call it Pole Position 3D? Failure of branding. Yeah. Missed opportunity.

Yeah, no, so Namco had a 3D racing game, and Atari also had one. They had hard driving. Which was just like a driving game. It wasn't really racing. It was Very slow. And they were both fairly hard. It was. It was very difficult.

But they were fairly clunky, like, slow frame rate and very, very simple 3D, like kind of Star Fox level locale. By 1992, you also had games like Stun Runner, which were much faster and more exciting. But there was still something about Sega's presentation. It's the most important thing I can say about the Virtue of Games is just the frame rate blew me away. I mean, that was incredible. Incredible. We had seen kind of Polygon games before on, you know, even on home computers up to that point. But they were extremely slow and jerky. And when I walked into an arcade and saw Virtual Fighter for the first time, it just blew me away because it was so smooth and fluid. So, yeah, this first game, Virtual Razor, here is my note. Speed, resolution, and frame rate made all the difference.

These games were much faster, especially, like, Virtual Fighter is kind of a slow-paced fighting game. But Virtual Racing, like, it felt breakneck speed. Like, it was just so fast at the time. And the scenery and environments, like, go up and down. It was kind of, like, outrun, but so much more immersive. Yeah. And it did have, like, this kind of high resolution. it did have this kind of high resolution

wide screen format that just really like pulled you in and again yeah like you said 60 frames a second so it was like super smooth and even though everything was flat shaded polygons just like very simple blocky shapes it didn't really matter because

it was going so fast it was so silky smooth like it was like nothing else that anyone had ever seen it compared to the earlier stuff it also had it was also getting some more polygons in there so even with the flat shading it had a lot more detail than the really early 3D stuff. So yeah, it was just really impressive. And this was actually, I mean, this was

the very beginning on this board. It started off as a tech demo for this board as they were developing it. Like, can we do this? Can we make a game out of this? And then the answer was, yes, do it. Make it a game. And it was great. I feel like Virtue Racing has aged very well just because of the frame rate thing. It's still

really playable. And it's incredible. And super arcade friendly. So the way this came, you had, you had an upright cabinet. You had sit down two player versus cabinet. And then you had the deluxe cab, which was another sit-down one, styled like an F-1 car that had force feedback. I believe in both the steering wheel and the seat. Wow.

So it was this very immersive experience. And then any of these could actually be hooked together. They had this little fiber-optic connection. You could put up to eight players at once. So you could have these eight cabs or these eight F-1 sit-downs run along the back of your arcade. I had never seen that in person. That wasn't amazing. I did see, I don't think I saw it with the sit-downs.

but I did see at least somewhere in the four to eight range of cabs hooked up once in an arcade. And it was definitely, you know, a centerpiece for the time. That must have been just something like the sit-down linked cabinet. That's got to be something that only showed up at Sega centers, like their amusement centers. There was a game. That would be so expensive. Oh, yeah. Final app twin I saw hooked up in an arcade two or three of them.

I think it may have been twin first because you could hook two machines together. But I've pretty sure I went to an arcade with four, you know, this was two. 2D Sprite racing, like, together, which is, it was impressive. Yeah, and they did this. I think Daytona USA, which we'll get to later, did the same thing. And at least one, I think they actually had this option for both of them. I forgot, I came across it somewhere. I hadn't seen this in person. But there was an option where you could have basically like an announcer set up. So someone could actually, like, call the race as you had eight players racing and do it like a sports broadcast and with like an extra screen up above like running highlights. I think it's interesting that for Sega's first 3D racing game, the style of racing they went with was Formula One as opposed to, you know, something more like the rally car driving of Outrun or stock car racing or something along those lines.

They went with F1, which is like kind of big in Japan, really big in Europe and just like, you know, an empty fart here. Like no one, no one in America really cares about F1. It's one of those weird things that I've kind of stumbled across as I've been researching things for Game Boy and NES. I'm like, there are so many of these F1 games and they rarely came to the U.S. But this was, obviously, this one hit everywhere because it was such a big technological lead. It was so impressive. No one cared what the car looked like. So, yeah, it's interesting that they went with F1, as opposed to something that would be bigger in the U.S. market, which was a really huge market, maybe the biggest market at the

time. But I guess they were... Like I said, it was originally the demo for their new board, so they may not have even been thinking that far ahead when they started it. It may have just been thinking about the local market. I mean, and, you know, everything you know, Suzuki does was kind of a pet project. So maybe this is just more of where his passion was. I'd like to say something just about the technology of the 3D that I think I remember,

which is that the Virtua series used, you know, square-shaped primitives, I think, instead of triangle polygons, which were common later. So there was a point when they were trying to translate these games to other consoles or even PC translations. And it was tricky because they were quadrilateral. Split it all into tries. Yeah. Yeah. The Saturn used quadrilaterals.

So these games, I guess, would have been a natural fit for Saturn. Yeah. But then after that, every other console seemed, I think, used the triangle. There's a term for that. I don't remember it right off hand, but the triangle-shaped primitives. Yeah, there was no. there was no rule at the time in the early to mid-90s

that triangles were going to be the polygon of choice for everyone. I mean, they make sense because they're the simplest polygon. But, you know, people tried quadrilaterals. They tried, there was that one game engine that used spheres or circles. And everything looked all kind of rubbery

and round naturally. You know, voxels and other things like that, people tried. different things and for whatever reason they ultimately went with triangles. Yeah, I think it's just, it's part of the distinctive visual style of the Sega games. It's those

square shaped. Yeah, definitely blends a certain aesthetic that sort of carries through. So basically once virtual racing came out, it was everyone's day at the races, it was all, not all triangles all the time or all polygons all the time, but basically half their output from this point on. increasingly, you know, more than that after a few years, would be polygon-based 3D games. So all of a sudden, like Sega, the company that did cool, awesome things with sprites, started to make fewer and fewer games with sprites and superscalers because, you know, as much as those looked great and were very distinctive, they were also old news.

And that's not why people were going to arcades. They were going to arcades for the newest and hottest and freshest games and experiences and visuals. So, yeah, from this point, a ton of these games are polygon-based, starting with Star Wars Arcade, which I'm very sad. I never actually saw in the Arcades. I saw Star Wars Trilogy years later, but not Star Wars Arcade. I only am familiar with the 32X conversion of the game. Yeah.

Yeah, I feel like there might have been one of these at Disneyland at some point in their Star Wars section, but I'm not entirely sure. I have the 32X version. I've played that. That's cool. But, yeah, the actual arcade. So I don't know that I've actually seen it in the arcade either, but it was an impressive setup. So you had this two-seat console, basically, and then this separate 50-inch rear-projection display. So this huge, huge-ass display.

And then it was designed to be played, like a design with two players. You basically have one person piloting and one person being a free-roaming gunner. So, like, what was that? Oh, crap. I can't remember what the game was called. Lucky and Wild. That was a game where one person drove in the other shot, but it was like a 2D kind of outrun-ish sort of shooter game. name.

Yeah, could you play this solo? You could, right? You could, like, pick to be one or the other. Yeah, so, like, but you can only, but when you're solo, like, you can only fire where you're flying, so like Star Fox or something. So you fire at the center of the screen while you're flying. So you can play it that way, but it's, it's sort of a different, it's a much restricted experience compared to when you've got someone who can actually shoot at the whole screen.

But Ben, canonically, X-Wings are single, man. Yeah. one-man snub fighters it's true uh so why is there a second person in that's only for y-wings and for b-wings ben you have to ask sega it's very this is very upsetting to me cancel the podcast just cancel it this is why they lost the license this is why it's with EA now they're like what are you what are you asses doing they made a second one after that's true um so yeah like it is it is very impressive looking um i i like the fact that the first stage of this game you know going back and watching videos

of it. The first stage is a trench run, but it's not the Death Star Trench Run. It's a Super Star Destroyer trench run. That's the second stage, I think. Is that? Yeah, because there's fighting tight. You have to, like, take down 20 TIE fighters in space. I thought that was all part of, like, the first stage. It was like, flows one and the other. I think it all runs together, yeah. It was kind of structured, like, the original Atari arcade Star Wars game. Yeah. Just like with, you know, polygons as opposed to vectors and new setups. So, yeah, you start by fighting tie fighters, but you, like, fly into a fleet of Star Destroyers. So, yeah, then it's just kind of like, once you've hit your targets, you've destroyed 20 Thai fighters,

then you segue into the Super Star Destroyer Trench Run, which is pretty much exactly the same as the Death Star Trench Run in Atari's Arcade or Atari Star Star Wars, but it's with a Super Star Destroyer. Because why not? Yeah, why not? Well, because they want more stages. There's going to be the actual Death Star Trench Run. And then when you blow up the Superstar Destroyer, like, breaks into triangles, starting with the back. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the old classic disintegrations. No, no planetary explosion rings here. No, no, it was before that time. But, yeah, so you do. Before the special editions. Before the dark times. So, yeah, you shoot down Thai fighters, and then you do a superstar destroyer run, and then you shoot down some more tire fighters, and then you do the second death star into the superstructure deal. Because this is all Return of the Jedi.

you've got Akbar giving out your missions. And I strongly encourage everyone to find Japanese footage at this game because Akbar in Japanese is kind of terrifying. So good. No, it's so great. He's like your stern fish uncle. Yeah, he's pretty great. I have one of those.

No, actually, Akbar is great as the droid voices that are terrifying in the Japanese one. They're kind of squeaky. Someone came on over the radio at some point. Yeah. Like C3PO. What does he sound like? Don't look at me here. I'm not going to sit here and pretend, you know, Japanese.

Oh, you might as well. No, no, I'm not going to trap me. It's a trap. There you go. You got it out. You got it in there. All right, all right. All right.

One last look at a 2D game before we take a break. That is Outrunners, which, you know, the sequel to Outrunn, as the name suggests. But it feels kind of like a product out of time. I mean, this was going head-to-head against virtual racing. Obviously, it's a very different kind of game, but, like, you know, this is a more impressive adaptation of super-scaler racing. But would you really look at this and then look at virtual racing and say, no, I'm going to go with the one that looks like it was made six years ago.

Kind of a tough sell. Yeah. I mean, nowadays you can sell it because, you know, the early 3D stuff just looks like really clunky old 3D. Well, this is the sprite stuff is pretty. But at the time, yeah. Contemporaneously. Like, there are a lot of good arcade games that went badly overlooked in the 90s that hold up a lot better now than some of the early 3D stuff, but they were overlooked because they weren't 3D.

Stuff like Outfoxies. That game was really cool. But, yeah, like, no one really knew about it back then. And so it's been this kind of crazy little obscurity in the corner of video game history. Outrunners is kind of the same way. Like, people don't really seem to know. Like, if all the Outrun games, I would say this is probably the least best known, the worst known. The worst known, I guess, if you, if you will.

The worst, best, least known. Exactly. Yeah. Precisely. Thank you for your position in language. I've never known. I've never known of this game. Yeah, no, I didn't know. I mean, it is outrun, but way more insane. Like, you have, I think, six different cars to choose from.

And it uses the same branching path structure for its roads. But the roads that you, like, the path you travel is completely impossible. You start out in San Francisco and you can, like, drive. on a bridge over the Pacific Ocean to Hong Kong and then you drive over another bridge into Kenya. Like, this is one road trip

where you end up in Kenya. Did these bridges take you through the stratosphere? Yeah, you've got the world's greatest engineering achievement going on and they're just driving off around it. It's like Tesseract raising. I don't know. This game does not really fuss with realism. It's just like let's come up with as many cool settings around the world as we can

and depending on the path you take, you'll see different continents, and in between there are some little spans of bridges, and they're very efficient bridges. Which is fair, because, you know, if you handed me the out Ryan engine and said, you know, here, make some new weird, cool-looking stuff with it. Sure, that sounds like a good direction to go with that.

So yeah. If you're looking to buy a car, you're probably familiar with terms like MSRP. You might even know what it stands for. But what does it actually mean? The same goes for invoice, list price, dealer price. It's enough to confuse anybody. All you're really looking for is a price that actually means something. Introducing true price from True Car.

Now you can know exactly what you'll pay for the car you want, including fees and accessories, before you even get to the dealership. True Car dealers will show you the true price on cars like the one you want, all from the comfort of home. And how do you know if your true price is a great price? Because True Car shows you what other people paid for that same car you want. And your certified dealers know this, so they set their true price competitively, so they can win your business.

So when you're ready to buy a new or used car, visit True Car to enjoy a more confident car buying experience. Some features not available in all states. Can't get enough golf for! Podcast One is the new home of Golflandia with Matthew Wiley. Every Monday, all season long. Tune in to hear Matt Talk prediction. tournament recaps and interview guests from in and around the world of PGA and Eurogolf. He'll even talk business, branding, and family life because it all relates to golf.

Download episodes of Golflandia every Monday exclusively on podcast.1.com, the new Podcast One app and Apple Podcasts. Geico presents unhelpful home improvement how-toes. A slippery bathroom floor can result in expensive hospital bills. So today, I'll show you how to a serious fall by filling your bathroom with thousands of plastic balls. Just nail a piece of plywood across the doorway and dump in 2,000 multicolored plastic balls. You could try to protect yourself with a bathroom full of plastic balls or you could get liability coverage through the Geico Insurance Agency.

Visit Geico.com and see how affordable renters insurance can be. I'm going to be able to be. Wow, it's us again. And what better way to kick off the amazing second half of this podcast than with a discussion of maybe the single most important game to show up in this entire episode. And that is Virtua Fighter. Virtua Fighter.

Fighter. Or Bacha Fighter. Vita. Yes. So this kicked off an entire genre pretty handily. This was basically the first big... So this was 92. 92, 93.

90, yeah. So like a year after Street Fighter 2 basically sort of said, hey, this is how you do fighting games. Sega came along and said, hey, this is how you do fighting games in polygons. This is the future. Yep. And it's pretty much defined the genre.

So it's got all the things we think about having in a 3D fighting game today. Well, not all of them, but a whole bunch of the standard things. Yeah, no panty shots. No panty shots. That's a big part of them now. But, I mean, so the basic setup. is similar to a two-de fighting game where you have, you know, your two guys, you're one-on-one, you got your special

moves and so on. But then you're in this 3D space, and so you've got a ring, you can ring out people, which is kind of new. And then it really solidified a whole lot of things that are just completely standard now. Like when you knock someone out, it does these replays from different camera angles, because

you know, now that it's 3D, you can do that, and it looks cool. So you get these, like, CAO replays, and you get special wind pose of animations, and just a whole bunch of the things you think of coming as part for the course in a 3D fighter. Yeah, it's more dramatic, cinematic approach to the fighting game. Yeah.

The, you know, the camera zoom in and out that kind of happened and abused pixel art design in other fighting games could just happen naturally here without any degradation because you have polygons that, you know, you can move the camera around a little bit and break away from the flat 2D plane. You can zoom in, you can, you know, change your perspective from high low or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, I mentioned earlier that this game blew me away the first time I ever saw it.

I actually remember what the room looked like when I first saw it. It was so memorable. Like the orientation of the game near a window and the wall. And it's just strange because I just approached it from the side and I said, oh my gosh, what is this game? I think, I feel like me and my brother had been looking at mortal combat around that time as the pinnacle of fighting games. Was that contemporary with this?

Exactly. Yeah. That was 92. Very close. Yeah. So this was just like a year later. And we saw a virtual fighter and like, whoa, this is the future. We got to get one of these when we started an arcade in about 20 years.

We never did. It's been 19 years. So, oh, no, wait. It's been 24 years. Oh, so I still have time. Everybody. Just a lot you blew it. And it did represent like a very different direction from sort of where the 2D fighters have been heading.

Because the 2D fighters, that was sort of a, that was sort of a, that was sort of a established at this point. And so you had people going for like more extreme, you had more violent like Mortal Kombat or you had people just trying weird stuff. And so this sense, the hook is, look how cool this is in 3D. In other respects, it went very much back to basics. And you had characters with more realistic fighting styles. You didn't have, you didn't have blood. You didn't have a lot of like over the top special moves. It was, it was much closer to the things that people could actually do. Yeah, it was couched more in the terms of real martial arts.

Yeah. And, you know, there were some elements of realistic fighting styles in something like Street Fighter, but they got really fanciful really quickly. Well, Street Fighter was drawing from, really from movies, from the martial arts tradition in East Asia. And so you had a lot of stuff that originally came from styles, but was very over the top for a movie setting.

Right. So people flying across the screen and then, of course, fireballs and things. Whereas this, this was much more, much stuck much close at actual styles. And I think a lot of that was the influence of the lead designer, who was Sayyichi, who, if I can do a momentary cross-episode promotion, we're going to be talking about more in a mini because he went on to do some other fighters for Square with Dream Factory. And he also directed Tekken 1 and 2. And you can really see this influence going through all these games where he's drawing from real-world fighting styles for his characters. I definitely remember the thread that goes from Virtua Fighter to Tekken. I remember thinking when teching came out, it was like Virtua Fighter.

I didn't know they were created by the same. Director, he went to Namco to do that after he was at Sega. Very cool. Yeah, and you could see other companies, other developers, trying to do the things that Virtual Fighter did in 3D with the limitations of 2D technology. Like the very first King of Fighters, and I think before it, Art of Fighting, tried to adopt the idea of three-dimensionality

by having planes of action where you're, characters could jump like yeah they could sidestep projectiles and that sort of thing but it never quite worked whereas this it made sense it wasn't you know something that had been sort of superimposed on an existing concept it was just a natural extension of the idea that you are fighting in a 3d space so of course you have somewhat you know some some limited range of 3d maneuvers this wasn't a fully 3D fighting game like you didn't have free movement through the arena but um you had more you know, more ability to kind of move within that 3D space. So it really did kind of break the fighting game out of the limitations of the second

dimension, obviously, I mean, in a natural sort of way, but in also a very like fluid and visually impressive way as well. It also seemed like this was really a kind of damn breaking moment just for 3D in general. Even though it came after we had virtual racing, which is very impressive. but it seems like that kind of stayed within its sort of subgenre of racing games. Whereas here, now that you had convincing 3D characters, everyone else in the game industry was looking at this and saying, wow, we can do stuff with characters in 3D that looks good.

I mean, it looks very primitive to us from today's perspective, but at the time, it looked convincing, and we can do all kinds of stuff with this. And so I was reading that people in all kinds of different companies were looking at Virtual Fighter, and that's when they decided to really go all in on 3D. And in fact, evidently, the people who were developing the PlayStation at Sony after the deal with Nintendo for the Super Famicomicon CD fell through, they were looking at this and saying, we need to go all in. We can do 3D characters. The people behind Tomb Raider were looking at this and saying we can do a 3D action adventure. And this just sort of opened the floodgates for 3D character-based video games.

Yeah, and it's not like the idea of 3D graphics hadn't been floating around already. What did the Jaguar launch? That was like 93. Yeah, 93. So that was, you know, that was 3D capable hardware to a certain degree. On the Amiga and the Atari ST, there were many polygon-based games that were mostly like a first-person tank or a plane or starship or whatever. Yeah, there weren't very many that were characters that I recall, you know. Yeah, it takes a lot fewer polygons to make something that looks like, you know, a triangular plane or a square tank.

than So, I mean, yeah, you had The game tank was how old was that A long time before this, but Yeah, well there's a, I don't know, there's just, we mentioned hard driving. There's, and there's a game called IRobot, I think that was 3D polygone.

Yeah, so people have been doing stuff, people have been doing stuff where you could sort of, in a situation where you could get away with extremely low poly stuff. And there's a lot of genres where you can make that work. I mean, again, Star Fox, you know, back on the S&ES, hardware, obviously, with some extra chips. But you know, you have spaceships built of really

low polys, and that kind of works. Right. But yeah, you have the complexity of these characters and the incredibly smooth frame rate and the high resolution. And again, it's something that sets the game apart. And no competitors had been able to match that. So obviously, this was a huge deal. I mean, this game was kind of a landmark. I didn't spend a lot of time in arcades at this point, so I didn't really spend a lot of time with Virtua Fighter, but I was definitely aware of it and definitely aware of, like, the fact that, hey, this was, uh, this was pretty much the future of games. It had a ways to go, but this would be where everything would be heading in the future. Um, and, yeah, let's see. I fortunately missed out on the Genesis conversion of

virtual, Virtual Fighter 2. That was the, yeah, it's awful. It is absolutely wretched. It totally misses the point. Yeah. So we're out. Wasn't there a 32x version of virtual fighter? I think so. I don't know if I have that one. I have virtual racing on 32X. Which is really cool. And there was actually virtual racing on the Genesis that had a V what is it, VFX chip or something. It's the only one. Yeah. And it costs like $100. Yeah. Yeah. The conversion of virtual games to home hardware was kind of the like the benchmark that Sega set for itself with a

Saturn in the dream rest. And that's where a virtual fighter actually found a home. It became, it actually wasn't in Japan, I think. But in the U.S., it was a pack in Saturn to sell it. It made me want a Saturn. I didn't get one until later, but I wanted it just to play a virtual fighter. I'm thinking the U.S. home conversion of virtual fighter was refined over the Japanese.

Wasn't that correct? I feel like the very first, yeah, the very first virtual fighter that came out on Saturn was kind of like, if I'm remembering right. And then the revised version, like Virtual Fighter. Well, there's a remix version That came out later that had So the original Virtual Fighter is almost entirely flat shaded polygons I think there's texture on the character's eyes

And that was it But then it was only Within like a year after Virtual Fighter come out A bunch of more games started coming out That actually textured polygons And suddenly Virtual Fighter looked kind of old next to them So they actually re-put out a remix version That basically textured everything

So you had textured backgrounds And more texture on the characters Yeah, I have both of them, I think. I got on with my Saturn. You could get the remix for cheap or a reduced price when it came out. If you had the original one.

Yeah, if you had the first one. I feel like it played off Virtual Fighter 2 technology at that point. Yeah, I mean, Virtual Fighter 2 obviously also used the text. So moving on, another, another Sega film license, this one kind of, uh, I don't know, it's Alien 3, The Gun. The Gun. And there were a handful of Alien 3 license.

games. I really like the one that probed it for Super NES, even though I recognize in hindsight it has a lot of design issues. It was still pretty engrossing, kind of exploratory, mission-based, a little bit ahead of its time in some ways. And it really captured the aesthetic of the film, I thought. This not so much, though. It's a strange, you know, first-person gun game. It's a very frenetic light gun game. So you're going through these corridors and environments at pretty high speed, and it basically just throws aliens at you. It's sort of, I feel like it's a, you know, front of the arcade spectacle kind of game. And it's a sprite-based game. It's bright-based.

It's back to super-scaler stuff. But, yeah, it does have the super-scaling because you're moving through quarters in a first-person perspective. And I feel like, I don't know, I didn't actually manage to read up. I didn't see how it was made, but it looks like digitized assets maybe. I mean, it kind of... Yeah, they're definitely digitized. It looks like you got, like, alien models that have been photographed and digitized. Yeah, yeah.

You have basically, like, every kind of alien that had existed in the films to that point, including, like, the dog alien from Alien 3, you know, chest bursters and facehuggers and everything, like, those all come flying at you, but they're all like the same digitized images. So everything starts to look really fake, really fast. It's just like cardboard cutout city. So you just get so mad at it, you just want to shoot them all. I guess. And it's like super like spraying alien blood everywhere.

That's basically most of the games. It doesn't, it's just like there's so much happening and none of it seems to have any weight to it. You know, if you compare this to Virtua Cop, which we'll talk about it a little bit, this is just like, just the screen is full of things to shoot and there's no real substance to it. I feel like the high, yeah, the high speed light gun games, we're kind of scaling light gun games, we're kind of going in this weird specialized direction like this and the much later

on the list, we've got a Jurassic Park licensed one. That's the same sort of thing. It's just this hyperactive, throw a million things at you as fast as possible. and it's just the spectacle of having all this stuff splashing over the screen. Well, this was around the time that, you know, you had Revolution X and you had Terminator 2. Like, those were really big games.

So I think Sega was kind of looking at those and saying, we need to do that. Yeah. And they decided to do it with an alien game in which there's literally just like one alien, oh, two aliens, if you count the one that's inside Ripley. Oh, in the movie. Yeah, in the film.

Like, it is not a movie full of aliens. There's one. It goes back to the original. original alien. It's just, you know, in a scenario where no one is able to fight back against it, so it's just kind of slowly picking them off. It's much more of a horror movie, like a

character drama, than it is an action movie like aliens. Although this game does begin in the Sulaco. So, you know, the crash to Sue Laco, you have to fight your way out to get to the surface of Fiorena 478 or whatever

the planet's called. I don't But, yeah, I mean, it's a liking game, so it needs a million targets. So you're a Marine versus a million aliens. It has very little to do with the movie. It's Alien 3 side story. Alien 3 Guideon. Yeah, I guess. This is just one of those, yeah, this is one of those alien license games that really

cheapens the concept of the xenomorph. Not quite as badly as Colonial Marines, because nothing will be quite as bad as Colonial Marines. But definitely it's no alien isolation. Let's say that. Next up, Daytona. USA, another really big one. This is a Sega's second polygonal racing game, but it's a very different kind of game than virtual racing. Yeah, so it's essentially the next gen for their 3D stuff. So this was the Model 2 board following the Model 1 board, so essentially more

powerful. And now they could like fully texture map everything, put a lot more polygons on the screen, and still have it running at 60 frames per second. What year was this? 94. We are up to 93, I think. This stuff moved really fast. Yeah, this game feels to me like the true successor to Outrun because it's so gloriously loose guide and colorful and bright and vivid

once you had all these texture maps. I mean, it's not the same as Outrun. I just mean like spiritually. Sega Rally Championship is more like the successor to Outrun in a lot of ways. Whereas this is kind of in between. It's not as limited as virtual racing. It's not based on Formula One,

so it's not as structured. But at the same time, it's still not as open and, like, go have a racing adventure as outrun. Yeah. So it's kind of, it definitely gets there. It's closer. This was stock car racing. So you had, and it gave you, gave you some choices.

You could pick, like, manual or automatic transmission. And it had some different modes. You could do checkpoint style racing. You could do versus head-to-head racing. And like I said earlier, like virtual racing, you could link up up to eight cabinets and do these big multiplayer races with it. And it also, it's just like the additional polygons, they put all kinds of weird stuff in this. So it had all kinds of weird secrets.

Like the tracks had these interactive elements that you wouldn't even necessarily know about, but you can actually interact with by weird things like hitting the start button when you pass them. So the, yeah, this is wild. I never actually saw this in action in the arcade, but I was reading on the beginner's track, evidently at one point along it, there's actually a slot machine. And if you hit start button when you're passing it, it'll actually run. slots and like if you get 7-7-7, you get 7 seconds added to your lap time. Like, ridiculous things like that are like sprinkled through the game.

It's got all these weird Eastery. This is a classic to me. I still seen this sitting in arcades up to the present or randomly. I mean, the other thing I read is it was. I played it years and years after for some reason. It was evidently one of the higher grossing, highest grossing arcade cabinets of all time. That makes sense. Everyone had this, yeah.

That backs up what I just said. I didn't just make it up. But, you know, Daytona USA, there was a neat, even a neat version of it on the PS3, not too long ago. They just did a sort of like a straight remake of it that you could download and it was just really fun. Cool. It's still, it's just this, you know, same sort of blocky graphics, but it's just really cheerful and fun and smooth. It's just really well done. I mean, it's still low poly by today's standards, but with all the texture mapping they had it now, it actually, like, it still looks pretty good.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. You go back to Virtua Racing and you can appreciate it. but it clearly looks old because it's mostly untextured. Whereas at this point, you're getting some really, you know, nice aesthetics. Yeah, I think a big part of it is the design of the cars themselves. Like the sort of the famous car in this game is sort of like powder blue and red. So it really just has like this, you know, sort of visual style that really pops. It really catches your eye.

It's bright. Yeah. like you said, blue sky, thing that Sega did so well. And it brings that into the polygonal realm. Whereas virtual racing, you know, looked really impressive, but didn't have like a strong color scheme or visual identity besides, you know, polygons. Whereas this game definitely has that Sega aesthetic that you associate with the company. Yeah.

It feels like a true Sega game. And this gets got the voice, Daytona, you know, a Sega voice. That has the Game Over song. Yeah. I don't remember how that goes. It's like, game over, yeah. There's also evidently hidden songs in it. Speaking of weird secrets, evidently, there's some combinations of initials you can enter in the high score list that, like, unlock secret music.

Like, there's an old virtual racing track in it, and there's some other tracks you can unlock that way. That's cool. Yeah, I feel like this is probably a game that we could do an entire episode on if we knew anything about racing, which I don't. But I'm sure someone who is, like, super into racing games, we have a lot to say about this game. We should play it again a lot, and then we'll come back and talk about it. Yeah, but I still can't speak about racing as an expert, whereas, you know, someone like Jazz Ringnell could be like, oh, well, let me tell you about racing and go on for an hour, whereas I lack that ability. Now, if you want to know about Star Trek, I'm your man. That's based on NASCAR, isn't it?

It is, yeah, stock car racing. There's a place up by Falls Lake in our city, which is called like Rum Runner Hill or something. You know, like, that's where NASCAR got, was born, I think, in the state where there were, uh, the moonshiner was running away from the cops. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I did not know that. So they started driving in circles and the cops were chasing in the circles.

And the Yakety Saxx played. It was great. Well, there's actually also one of the oldest NASCAR, uh, speedways is right by my house, the Okanichie speedway. It's a hiking trail now. Wow. Yeah, that's it. That's it. Hillsborough.

Yeah. And there was another speedway right at the corner of the belt line and falls of the noose. that used to be there before they built the Hilton. This is the NASCAR podcast now. Yeah, NASCAR. But I think it's neat. I mean, there's a lot of history here. Yeah.

And I know none of it. So I'm incapable of saying anything. We're at the heart of NASCAR. Apparently, I had no idea. Well, now it's down in Charlotte now, which is why I avoid driving there if I can. So you have to end up in a race. There was some sort of game event at NASCAR in Charlotte. And after I moved out here, I was invited to that.

And I was like, thank you. Thanks, but you don't want to be anywhere near there. I don't want to be anywhere near there. So another of Sega's 3D games, the next one we'll talk about, is Virtro Striker, which actually it's soccer and therefore I'm also incapable of saying anything intelligent about this. But, you know, I feel like this at the time must have been sort of a revolutionary game also because it is soccer, but now it's 3D. The camera moves down into the field. The players have animations. And it's not just like little repetitive sprites moving around.

There's, you know, there's immersion and there's action in the heat of things. I don't know. I'm assuming that people who play soccer and love soccer were like, I know a little bit about soccer, but I don't really know this game, unfortunately, very well. Yeah, I am not a big soccer slash football video game fan, so I can't speak to it much. So we know nothing about it, but it's 3D and it's soccer. Maybe it was popular in Japan or Europe or something, you know. Yeah, I'm not really sure.

Well, I mean, obviously the big soccer franchises are big there now. I don't know how well Virtua Stryker went out. And there's no way to know either. We're locked in this room. All right, so let's take a side detour onto a very strange little game that feels like it would be kind of an evolutionary dead end for Sega, but Nintendo would pick up the thread like a decade later and say, hell yes

and that is puzzle and action tantar which was the first of the puzzle and action trilogy but they're all kind of the same thing but they're basically mini game collections weirdly enough I had no idea until I was researching me this episode

I've heard of tantar but I didn't realize that it was a spinoff of Bonanza Brothers but I looked at the visual style and immediately I was like wow that looks like Bonanza Brothers was it made by the same people and so I looked it up and it is in fact a spinoff of Bonanza Brothers where the main characters are, like, instead of being thieves or whatever, now they are, like, doing an art heist.

They're actually detectives now. They've had a heel-face turn. And you're actually, like, trying to stop criminals, a jail gang, you know, and their stripes and everything. There's like five of them, and you're trying to stop them by playing competitive minigames. They became, that's part of their plea deal. They became snitches. Yeah, I guess. But, yes.

If you help me, you'll let you go. Weird, blobby, cartoony style that we saw on Bonanza Brothers that you don't really see anywhere else. And it's like this kind of mad magazine-looking, kind of low-res aesthetic going on. Yeah, but this game is just like a visual hodgepodge. It is like... It's all over the place. Stylistically, there is no coherence to it. But that's kind of the point because it is, you know, it's basically Wario Ware 10 years before Wario Ware.

So, like, I wish I had known about this game a lot sooner because it's pretty wild. And, again, like, all the games are competitive. So it's not just that you're playing, you know, a micro game. You're playing a micro game against either another player or against the computer. And doing things like trying to inflate balloons. And I didn't even write down the stuff that you're doing. It was like a rock, paper scissors thing. A maze and some sort of, you know, just where you match puzzles.

Yeah, the most interesting. Puzzles together. Yeah, the most interesting one I saw. was this kind of like geometry logic puzzle where it's like if you take this shape and subtract this shape from it what do you get and you have to pick from these options this like kind of visual reasoning thing that's the kind of stuff they asked me on tests when I was a kid yeah it like the cat test it has that feel to it that like general like ability to to figure things out test kind of thing going on skulls is junk a yonker is a young man

yeah oh god I don't get it but you know this whole thing is obviously I mean the The people who developed those tests played this game a lot. Puzzle and Action Tent are... Or vice versa. Maybe the people who developed this game were like, I got to get this cat system stuff out of my system. I got to exercise it from my... Does that guy who makes the Professor Leighton Puzzles figure into this somewhere?

Maybe. I don't know. I have no idea. But yeah, like this game apparently came to, I think, Saturn. But I don't think it came to the U.S. I don't think there was ever a home release in the U.S. I don't know if there was ever a home release in the arcades either. This might have been something that stayed stranded in Japan. So it's one of those things that...

It's fun. I've heard mention, like, people talk about it sometimes, but I knew nothing about it until I actually sat down and said, I need to be able to talk about this game. So then I watched videos and read about it and was like, this is crazy and amazing. And there was something kind of similar on Sega CD called Switch. Not to be mistaken for Double Switch,

which was a completely different game for Sega CD, but Switch was called Panic in Japan. Or maybe it was called Panic here and it was called Switch in Japan. I think the other way around. But that was also, like, like a very sort of surreal, goofy, uh, micro game collection. So Sega was kind of dabbling in this for a while. I like that there's so many obscure cult Sega games that no one's really heard of.

You can just dig into this forever. And maybe that's what we're doing. We are digging into this forever. Let me tell you about the rest of your eternity. You can do a lot of episodes on this. Yeah, this was going to be our final Sega episode. But I can tell you, we've got a happened. we've got at least three more here

maybe two more I don't know but Sega just has an arcade legacy they're crazy The chain is chafing my leg Jeremy Try lotion One All right. After that, that little side diversion into goofy, digitized photos and sprites and microgames, let's move back over to the Virtua series and talk about Virtua Cop, which is I'm thinking probably the, would it be the second?

most popular virtual game or with that third? I mean, Fighter is definitely the most. What about racing? Racing's up there, but I feel like virtual cop lasted for quite a while. Yeah, up into the Dreamcast area.

I was never a fan of the light gun games and arcade. Especially this one, like, it's kind of, you know, it's just a pretty slow shooting gallery sort of deal. And again, you know, of course, back in then, you know, having your shooting gallery in actual 3D was novel.

Um, and so, yeah, it allowed for dramatic camera pans. Like, this game did a lot of the things Alien 3, the gun tried to do, like, you know, give you these environments that you're moving through very immersively, um, give you this kind of cinematic viewpoint, but it did it in such a, like, in a more measured and enjoyable way. Yeah, yeah. Maybe too measured. Like, I can see where you could complain that this game is way too slow-paced, but, um,

I, I think that's okay. It is more of like the classic, you know, police simulator because it's virtual cop. But you have enemies that you have to shoot and then you have civilians that you have to avoid shooting. Hogan's alley. Kind of, yeah. Very similar. But instead of just being cardboard cutouts, they're running around and making, you know, like escaping from banks and driving around on vehicles. There's this targeting radical thing that's so iconic about this game.

I think they featured it in the advertising even. This is, you know, the bright circle with the triangles and stuff, and it zooms in and it changes. And that's what I remember the most about this. Yeah, basically the idea behind the reticle is that each enemy is kind of like they, when they appear on screen, a reticle appears around them. And it starts out blue, like a big blue circle. And it zooms in closer to them. And it turns green and then yellow and then red. And once it turns red, they fire at you.

So you have until the color changes to take them out. And if you don't take them out in time, then they shoot it. you and you lose a life. So it's kind of like what time crisis would do. But I really, like, I can't play this game after playing time crisis. Time crisis I actually played first. So Virtual Copas always seemed very sort of dated to me. And, you know, the Sega Namco rivalry, I've always felt as actually a much more turbulent

rivalry than the Sega Nintendo rivalry. Well, in arcades, definitely. Yeah. Like, those were the two big giants and they were always doing the same kind of thing, virtual fighter techon. Rolling Thunder Shinobi and then Virtua Fighter time crisis. But in this case, I really feel like time crisis, especially starting with two, just does a much better job of it. And the thing that time crisis adds is, there's the time element, sure, like that's the gimmick. But the real

element that it adds is the ability to duck behind scenery. So it's a cover-based shooter. So it creates this extra element of skill and planning. Like, is it good to duck out now and take a shot at an enemy, or should you hide behind cover? Like, if you hide behind cover too long, then you run enough time. So there's this real tension to it that is lacking in virtual cop. More of a more of a back and forth between you and the enemies as opposed to virtual cop where it's just, well, these guys are kind of slow to start shooting at you. Sounds like a crisis to me. Well, I would say virtual cop is okay, but definitely not my favorite.

There were definitely both presences in arcades for a long time. You would have the virtual cop series and the time crisis series most big arcades and we'll probably have both of them but cool people have always played time crisis still time uh virtual cop was way way better than the next game which is Jurassic park which is very much along the lines of alien through the gun yeah it's just hyperactive super scaler uh dinosaurs everywhere it just it looks terrible it's ridiculous like it's yeah so it's one of the it's in the in the very hyperactive like gun mold where it's just throwing a million things at you a second, and it really makes no sense with this license.

Like, you've got this herd of 50 triceratops that you're blowing away with a machine gun as they charge at you. Right, because that's so true to the movie, you know? Oh, the dinosaurs that we have created have gone wild. Let's murder them all. Yeah. That's not really what the preservationists scientists were going for,

but okay. I will say that they revisited Jurassic Park a few years later for The Lost World, and that version, that sequel, holds up a lot better and is a lot more fun. It's less hyperactive and sort of like just what's happening here. It had a great sit-down cabinet that was kind of like a, you know, like a Jeep that you would drive through the jungle in. And yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it was a lot better. Yeah, it was really good. I remember seeing that one. Cool. And not this one. And there's a

reason for that. Yeah. This one, like I never saw this in arcades, but man, I would not want to play this like the game. Now it looks terrible. Virtual copy. is definitely the way to go more measured, more sensible everything has impact and meaning like each enemy you have to take on seems carefully staged and thoughtful

as opposed to just like have some sprites in your face. Dinosaurs! Dinosaurs are cool but yeah it should have been just a bunch of Jeff Goldblum rushing at you and you get to shoot him. Watch the gun, please. How's a good one?

Oh, so a different kind of Virtua. Yes. Next up, not Virtua, Virtual. Virtual. Cybertroopers Virtual on. Bat's on. I admit I've never played this game, but I know lots of people who love this game. It's not really my kind of game, but it looks really cool.

And, yeah, why don't you talk about it? This was a big cult thing, especially in Japan. Like, not a lot of it made it over here. It was very rare over here, but it was huge in Japan. Um, so it's, uh, 3D arena fighter essentially. Um, so you have these big environments you're and you're in mecca, uh, is the hook. So, so you have these 3D mecca. Um, and it's got this really unusual control scheme. You've got two joysticks. Um, so it's kind of this tank scheme where you can go both forward, both back to moving a direction or you can go one for one back to spin

quick. Uh, but then there's extra things tacked onto the control scheme like moving both joysticks out does a special thing, moving the both in does a special thing. You can jump and dash. And then there's a lot of ranged weaponry, and you can also do close-in attacks. And it was really the first 3D Mecca combat game to take off. And so, yeah, not surprisingly, people were really excited about this in Japan, where Mecca had been a thing for a long time. And so it had a huge following there, got some sequels, got, it was one of the very very, very very few games that got ported to Saturn and that supported their network system for Saturn. I forgot that Saturn even had a network.

Yeah, Saturn had an online network system. I'm sure it was incredibly clunky as everything was back at that time. Sure, why not? But you could do versus virtual on over the network. Yeah. I wanted that so bad. Are you talking about the net, what's that called net modem thing for the Saturn? Yeah, I forgot when it came out in America, the modem.

You could play Duke Nukem. 3Duvert or something. I have one. Did you have to use Duengo? I don't know. I don't remember. I didn't get a chance to play it when it was active, but I, you know, I bought the modem later. I did play X-Band, games on X-Band on Super Nintendo, which is a whole, you should do a micro on that because that was crazy.

I was just thinking, actually, we could do a whole episode, a whole episode on online gaming technologies for consoles and PCs. It took a while for it to get good. I've got a lot of experience with that, so it would be fun. talk about. But this game I've never played virtual on. I've heard people talk about it, but it's just too foreign.

Yeah, I was going to say two Japanese. It is very much like this is, you know, very 90s Japan. It's very nice. If you were a big fan of Gundam or Gellian, maybe not going to be a million. But it does, it has a nice character designs. It doesn't

license anything. It doesn't even riff too closely, I think, off any particular things. It really goes its own direction, but it has this very colorful cast. You know, it looks like a fighting game cast. You've got, you know, larger guys and smaller guys, and more agile guys and all that kind of thing.

But they're all very colorful and kind of have a lot of personality for a robot, you know. Well, and, you know, it does the arena. Some robots are very dry. Yeah, like it really plays up the arena thing. This is one of the first arena fighters, if not the first. Yeah, so you've got to give you, like a 3D space to fight in. So you're not just fighting.

against another robot, you're also making use of the environment and, you know, putting buildings between the two of you and, like, construction cranes and crates and things like that. You've got a lot of maneuverability. There's, like, various, there's dash moves that you can do. And so, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of positioning and tactics kind of in it. Yeah, you would see this idea played up a lot more over the, you know, like the next five or six years in games like Air Geist, which we'll talk about it a little bit. Powerstone was a big one from Capcom. Um, there was also, what was it called versus VS?

Um, there were, there were a couple, maybe Gekido. I can't remember. Um, I know there are a couple of PlayStation fighting games that try to do this very badly. That's my least favorite genre, arena fighters, so I know nothing about it. Power Stone was good. I played Power Stone. I mean, that was like, I'm a dreamcast. Great.

One of the big successes of this today is there's a Gundam versus series, um, which again is in Japan and occasionally comes out over here. I think there's a new one that's supposed to be coming out in the U.S. on PS4. Probably. I kind of don't keep track of a Gundam, but... Cat would know. Can we call Cat?

Yeah, Cat would know what it's coming out. We should phone a friend. But they are very much the same idea that started back here with Virtual One and that you've got these big arenas and a lot of maneuverability, a lot of long-range attack options, that sort of thing. I'm actually kind of tempted to crack out my phone and call Cat Bailey right now. You're like, hey, we're on a recording. Retronauts is there. When has Guntherus is coming out? Let us know. Let's not do that.

Okay. But yeah, yeah, like Cyber Troopers, Virtua on, virtual on. Definitely one of the more interesting and memorable games of the era, even though this is not one that I've been into myself. Yeah. Again, it was very rare. It was very rare to find it actually in the U.S. in arcades. Like, I think there were a few, you know, probably in San Francisco. Yeah, people who were really big into importing at the time, like James Milkey is a huge fan because this was very much. his jam right here, like an import game from Sega, very sort of niche and stylish and fun, colorful, and also competitive, like, yeah.

Yeah. The people who were into that kind of thing, like, were really into this game. Yeah, and so actually I was in, I did a summer exchange program in Japan when I was in college, so this was back in the mid-90s. And one of the guys I went with, like one of his Holy Grails when we went, was he was going to play the hell out of,

of virtual on when he found some in some Japanese arcades, and I'm pretty sure he did. And we never heard from him. So, we move on to two different motorcycle games, one that is very good and one that I, yeah, let's talk about the bad one first. Let's talk about, if we must. Let's talk about Manx TT. No, just kidding. Let's talk about cool riders. Cool writers. This game, I had never heard of it before, and reading about it, I can find no really good information about it. But watching videos about it makes me feel like I had been dropping acid without realizing it. It's bizarre.

It's got these weird digitized graphics, which people got in their head was a good thing every once in a while. Yeah. So it's 2D sprites that are digitized? Yeah, I feel like this is an attempt to compete with Road Rash. But instead of being like a competitive racing game, it's more like just a weirdest hell racing game. It has all these strange digitized graphics that are just kind of thrown together.

It's a very mishmash visual style and doesn't make any, it has no cohesion. I found a review from Sega Pro Magazine, October 1995. Does it give it like a two out of ten? It says 46 out of whatever, but that's pretty brutal. The block quote thing is, scenery is made up of slabs of graphics, which look awful. Yeah, pretty much. They're big, what do they call that? The poll quote.

The poll quote is that it doesn't look good. Yeah. Someone tried and it didn't really come together. I never played it. It looks fascinating there now. I want to play it. It's fascinating, but I don't know if I...

Just fascinating. It's good. Like maybe you should drop acid and play it. Maybe. Possibly. Would you ever... The cybermorphs of Sega racing games. Cybermorphs not that bad.

No, never mind. That's the famous story about game fans. Someone putting, uh, dropping acid into the company coffee pot and the reviewer played Cybermorph and wrote this like detailed detailed review about how you could like

see the people in the little house as you flew past waving at you and it's pretty crazy. It's great stuff. That's funny. Check that out sometime. Cybermorph acid. It's worth of read. So the question is why would you play this when in the same year from the same company we also had Manx TT?

So the one thing that cool writers did was combined some weird as hell motorcycle racing with the outrun structure. It has the branching paths. That's about it. Manx T.T. on the other hand, really feels like, or at least looks

like, the sort of virtual version of hang on. It's like a very fast-paced energetic motorcycle game. And it gives you a first-person perspective and really plays up

the advent of polygonal graphics by sort of embodying the lean element of racing, of bike racing. So the horizon is constantly like rotating back and forth. You know, if you play super hang on, like if you play the 3DES version of it with the simulated arcade cabinet, you get that same effect where it's like tilting back and forth, pitching as you as you lean into a turn. Well, this does that already, even without a cabinet or without a like a sit-down cabinet by giving you a so like this this rotating horizon which you can do very easily in polygons so it gives

you this really impressive sense of speed and that that immersion that you want in a racing game it's like i admit i have not played the game but just watching it i'm like man this game would be so cool to play on a big screen you know like a 30 inch monitor and an arcade especially with a sit-down cabinet but even the stand-up would be incredible yeah and the sit-down has the motorcycles you actually sit on and lean into. I think I saw pictures of it on it. Okay. Yeah. But, you know,

someday there's going to be an awesome Sega arcade that has every one of these and we can just go there and play them. Yeah. But, yeah, and it's like, it's more like Daytona and that you've got all these lush textured everything and bright colors, and it's another one of those sort of blue sky.

Yeah, I mean, this is like, I'd heard of Mengstiti, but didn't realize until researching for this episode that it's another Sega racing game, but yeah, looking at it, it's such a Sega game. I mean, it really does feel like why did they not call this Hang-on 3-D? Like, it's

such a descendant of Hang-on. Yeah, it's named after, like, the Superbike or something that you're riding on pretty sure. So at this point we get to like 94, 95, and we start to see actual sequels to some of Sega's big 90s games. There's Virtual Fighter 2, Virtual Cop 2, and then Sega Rally Championship, which isn't really a sequel, but does feel kind of like the next Sega racing game. So Virtual Fighter 2 is, you know, like as with so many fighting games,

it is a refinement of what came before. It looks nicer. It, you know, has a little more developed play mechanics. It has like two new characters. And then it has the final boss, Dural, who would be kind of like a key figure in the company's internal legacy. that was the original code name for one of the models of Dreamcast. There was the katana and the Doral. The Doral was named for the final boss of Virtua Fighter 2, who was like this shiny, metallic, reflective, like a female body form without a face or a personality,

but she could mimic any character's moves. So fighting her, like, you never knew what style you're going to have to face because she could use any character's skill set. Which, again, can you tell the Tekken 1 and 2 guy was involved here? Is that a teckin thing? I don't like that. Yeah, there's a character in most of the teckon games that can do that. It's like the queen piece in chess.

Do it? Anything you are. The queen piece cannot move like a knife. Yeah, I can't move like a night. I just thought of that too. I take that back. But also, they're probably showing off. I'm ashamed.

It's okay. Their new textures and stuff. So, again, I had everything textured, which got backported to the original version ofider. You can't do the en passant. Damn. And I'm sure the shiny final boss was again showing off, you know, some new texturing technique that they developed. Oh, yeah, like metallic reflections. Like, yeah, yeah, that was, that was a, everyone wanted to do that.

Remember how there was a power up in Super Mario 64? That was literally just like Mario turns into metal and everything's reflective for 30 seconds and then it stops. Yeah. Like everyone was like, check out this cool effect we can do. It's so crazy. Yep. And of course, now that we actually know how, hey, we've seen more like raycasting. in actual reflections and transparencies in games.

We look back and we're like, oh, this is just a lot of fakery. Like, you look at Doral, you look at Metal Mario. You're like, but it sure seemed, it sure seemed cool at the time. It's like the blinking tag in HTML. It's exciting when the first came out. Oh, God, I forgot about that. Why did you bring that back? Stop.

Blink. Oh, no, not the big tag. All right, so also there's Virtua Cop2, which is more of the same, but the environments are a little different. It's more like an urban setting, more in closed spaces. It's a pretty interesting game, but it is still like Virtua Cop. So therefore, not as good as Time Crisis. And definitely not as good as Time Crisis too, which, let's be frank, is an amazing game.

It's awesome. And finally, Sega Rally Championship, which is, again, like the third of these 3D Sega Racing games. And this is more of the sort of Outrun-style game, as opposed to, you know, racing around a track, you know, it is a rally championship. So it's kind of based on like the Paris-de-car rally or something along those lines where you are going from one place to another. That's just, that's crazy. Oh, well, as opposed to a track-based game where you're driving in a circle. Well, you're still going from one place to another.

You're going from one place to the same place. You're literally driving to the same spot. You got a lot of scenery in this game. Yes. Scenaries. I remember this. There's three tracks and three cars. This game is kind of notable because it was the first game designed by Tetsu Musiguchi, who you don't really associate with racing games at this point. You're like, there's no trippy, weird techno music in this game. But everyone's got to start somewhere. Yeah, I was talking to Jeremy earlier. One of the things you find researching a lot of these old games is that everyone who today we think of as this auteur who has like this thing they do, most of these guys just started out, you know, as work-for-hire, so we're working on whatever needed doing. A lot of them at Sega, yeah. And, you know, it took a while before these guys found the thing they do really well

and have a unique take on. And then, you know, once that's established, the company's like, okay, yeah, you go do that. Yeah, Hideo Kojima designed a game about a penguin running through Antarctica first. Yeah, I was just, you know, I can't remember what all he did. It was, like, super mundane. For a thing on my log, I just realized that, discovered that Ego, the Castlevania guy, started out doing programming on Toki Meccae Memorial, the dating sim. And all of them did a super hang-on clone, every single one of them.

At some point in their eyes. Yeah, let's see who else. Goichi Suda wrote character profiles and story endings for FirePro wrestling. Actually, that seems like, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I got that. But yeah, it's always fun to kind of see where these guys started when they've started to develop their own personalities. their own sort of game aesthetics.

And I don't know, like seeing Tessia Musiguchi's name on a game like Sega Rally Championship. And you can go back a few months ago. I did an interview with Musiguchi, which is now a podcast. You can listen to that and he'll talk more about how he got a start in Sega. But seeing his name on a racing game is kind of like, I don't know, like if Yoko Taro, the guy who makes Neer, like started out doing, you know, like mascot platformers or something. Yeah, that's perfect.

Exactly. It's just kind of like, huh, okay, sure. Everyone's got to, you know, get their foot in the door, I guess. Although, I don't know, Res, you're still moving down a corridor. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. We'll move into the final segment of this episode. There's still a lot of Sega to talk about. But we'll talk about like just two or three more games. More fighting spinoffs. Fighting Vipers.

This was the, I would say, like, their attempt to kind of do 3D and also give it personality like King of Fighters or Street Fighter to kind of, you know, create an interesting cast of characters with more outlandish moves. Yeah, less realism. Right. Yeah, it's virtual fighter. You have like, you know, the craziest thing you have is like the drunken master, basically. Yeah, yeah. Whereas fighting Vipers is way more outlandish. I believe there's a Daytona car as an unlockable.

Oh, is that in this game? I remember that. I think it was this one. Wasn't it this one? It was on one of those games. I remember seeing a magazine. The Japanese release had Pepsi Man as a guest character. He didn't make it over to the U.S. release.

I feel like this was the one where you could unlock the Daytona car and it would like hop around on its back tires and punch you with its front tires. But just, you know, that's sort of my relationship with cars. Just them hopping up and punching you in the face. Yeah. This introduced a few new things. So it had, um, the stages had walls on like. like the early 3D stuff, which was just sort of this platform floating in space.

Now you had walls and you could like bounce characters off it or knock them through it with a finishing move and that sort of thing. So that was kind of cool and something they got picked up by some later 3D fighters. And then it also had this armor mechanic, which didn't really get used much after that. But the characters had- I thought that was last Bronx. Okay. This one had armor.

There was, there was regularly, you could break a character's armor with certain moves and then they would take more damage after that. Okay. And there were a few characters from fighting. Vipers who kind of transcended the game, I think. Was it Honey? Yeah. Yeah, I feel like there's a couple of characters.

The Daytona Car. Yeah, the Daytona Car definitely went on to... He went out to star in a racing game. Yeah, game over. Yes. Well, no, I've lost my turn of thought. Way to go binge. Well, you're welcome.

That's why I'm here, man. Then it had the Sonic spin off. Yes, there was Sonic the Fighters. Which evidently was originally, like internally, a joke mod to fighting vipers. So it's pretty much the same engine, you know, some Sega, I didn't get a name of who it was, but some Sega engineer, you know, wrote Sonic into this engine and they said, sure, do that as a game. So there's a whole game that's Sonic one-on-one 3D fighting with Sonic characters, and it's pretty much the same mechanics as fighting vipers. They've got the armor changed into, like, usable barriers. So your block move put up barriers

And you had a limited supply of them But you could also like trade them off for special attacks Which was kind of an interesting mechanic But beyond that It was pretty much just a mascot fighter It was the mascot fighter until Smash Brothers came along That's true. I mean there wasn't really anything else in this Yeah, I can't think of anything that would have been comparable

Turtle Tournament fighters I guess In 2D But this felt special because it was Sonic You know It was Segas mascot doing this thing Yeah, and it was kind of weird for the time. Like now, you know, now Sonic's in absolutely anything and everything.

But back then, you know, Sonic was the platformer. What's it doing in this 3D fighting game? That's kind of strange. Turtles already fought people with weapons. So Sonic was more of a strange juxtaposition of battling. You do knock rings out of your opponent, though, just so you know it's still Sonic, I guess. All right. And then there was Sega's maybe their first ever Christmas game, Die Hard Arcade.

So then there was diehard arcade, which I, again, I haven't played, but I'm very familiar with this game. I've read a lot about it and seen videos of it, and I always hear people talk about it. It was not actually a diehard game when it started. In Japan, I was called Dynamite Deca. And I don't know why it picked up the diehard license, but it totally worked. I guess they, like, I think, I think this is one of those cases where they made a game. and we're like, this game is going to be the video game equivalent of diehard. And then when it came to the U.S., Sega of America was like, this game should just be diehard.

So they got the license for it. And they added it. But, I mean, it starts out with you infiltrating a skyscraper from the top level and working your way down. And like every setting in the game, like, does seem like it came straight out of the original diehard. Up to the fact that, like, when you infiltrate on the roof, you, like, go over the side. It's just like the way

it does it is so die hard. And you fight as, I guess, John McLean or DECA, if you want to be. And it's really interesting because if you watch through to the end of the game or play through to the end of the game, your outfit becomes

more and more tattered and torn up as you play. Like every stage, there's new damage to your outfit. Just like, you know, John McLean was constantly getting bruised and bloodied and just his outfit was all wrecked up by the end of the game or by the end of the movie. So you start

out with a police vest and camouflage pants and by the end you're in like a tattered wife beater and these torn pants that are like ripped up to your knees and yeah it's just like full of little details like that. It does some kind of weird stuff. Like every once in a while there will be what amounts to quick time events

where the game action suddenly shifts to a first person point of view and you like rush at enemies and you have to press certain button combos just right. And if you don't do them, then you, like, stumble and fall and the enemy gets to fight you. But if you do it right,

then you, like, close-line the bad guy and take them out of the action so you don't have to fight them. But it's mostly a brawler with occasionally these weird sort of first-person, quick-time event sequences put in. And then, you know, it does kind of go off the rails toward the end. Like, you work your way

down to the lobby of the Nakatomi building, and then you somehow end up way back high fighting a robot. So it kind of, At the end, you're like, you guys just kind of ran out of ideas, huh? But, and then, like, the final boss is this old man. I don't know if it's supposed to be Mr. Nakatomi or Nakajima or what was his name, Nakatomi?

Oh, actually, no, Nakatomi wasn't his name. I care what his name was. The elderly executive who gets shot by the bad guys. Homs Gruber. No? I was going to say, I think that's probably when the die-hard license ran out. The robot came in. No, I'm pretty sure the next...

The die-hard movies have gotten more and more ridiculous and off the rails. So I'm pretty sure, like, the next die-hardt movie will invite robots. Die-harder and die-hardist. We haven't gotten to die-hardist yet, but I hope... Like, that's the ultimate superlative, so that means the series will be over. Oh, no. Like, final... But, yeah, it definitely seems like...

It definitely seems like in the original development, it's like, so, okay, obviously they're applying the virtual formula to, you know, what else can we apply it to? let's do a brawler and whoever made this was just fans of diehard probably it seems extremely likely yeah pretty much uh so i guess finally let's just do one last game and that's gunblade new york which is kind of like virtual cop but also kind of like thunderblade you don't have any you're in a helicopter you don't have really any control over where the helicopter goes but it kind of turns it like you're sitting in the the gunner seat I guess and fighting enemies

on rail's helicopter yeah yeah so it's the worst kind of helicopter it becomes it becomes sort of like a cinematic shooter where you get these really dramatic camera angles and the screen is constantly canning around

so it adds kind of like this sort of an immersive visually impressive element but also it also what's the word it makes it a little more unpredictable challenging no not terrible do you actually know what you're talking about this point okay yeah no it makes it more challenging because you know the the shift the

viewpoint is shifting yeah you got to sort of keep track of where the enemies are and what your kind of helicopter right is doing so we can do the next one in 10 seconds okay the next one go virtual fighter kids it's virtual fighter two only everyone is cheebies little yeah super deformed cartoon kid guys. And other than that, it's pretty much just virtual. Yeah, I don't know why they made this game. I don't know. Like, I saw someone, I like the reviews of it, basically said, this would have been a great extra in Virtual Fighter 2.

But instead, it was released as a standalone like $50 game for some reason. Maybe they thought it would bring in younger players. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, that's bizarre. I think that kind of is a footnote to the whole scheme.

Anyway, so that takes us through like 1994, 95. We got to halfway through the 90s. That's pretty good. There's still a lot more Sagan to cover. I really thought we could get through the entire 90s. Another solid episode in there. He's got like 10 pages of 90s stuff here.

Yeah. And that's not even getting into the new millennium. You got to get stuff like, what's that guy called? Space Harriers. No, Planet Harriers. That game was great. I never got to play it, but it looked great. You could be like a nurse flying around with a giant syringe,

blasting enemies with a syringe. That's weird. That's great. I love that. Inoculate this. Exactly. See, so much for the anti-vaxxers. Eventually, we'll hit where it's no longer retro. What's the cut off for that now?

That would be, by the time this comes out, 2008. Oh, God. I don't think we're going to go that far, though. There's a point at which, I guess maybe when Sega kind of like dissolved into itself, maybe that's where we cut off. But hopefully, one more episode, and then we can move on to other arcade giants, because there's so many more to talk about. There's Namco, Data East,

Taito, Capcom, gosh, probably some Americans, Atari. Yeah, like, there's a bunch of people making video games in the past. We can talk about them. We've got to get through Sega. We got to, we got to, we got a, we got a, we got a, we got to pay tribute to them.

All right. So, thanks, everyone, for listening again to us discuss the history of Sega and the arcades. I know we keep doing this, but there's just so many games to cover. What can you say? They were legendary. They revolutionize the video games industry.

So there's a lot to say. And we are going to say it by God. So check back in a few months. We'll have another one of these. And hopefully that will be the end of our Sega marathon. And we can move on to other topics. In the meantime, this has been another fine and dandy episode of Retronauts. I have been Jeremy Parrish.

As usual, you can support Redronauts. Retronauts on Patreon. If you want us to continue making podcasts, that's great. Check out patreon.com slash Retronauts. Or you can just listen to us for free. Find us on iTunes, on the Podcast One Network, on the podcast one app. Go to Retronauts.com, where we post not only podcasts, but also other things that are very important and very worth your time to read because we're cool.

You can follow us on Facebook and Twitter as Retronauts. Retronauts, and you can follow me on Twitter as GameSpite. That's where I'll be. Why don't you guys pimp yourselves? Ben, we're going to go with you first this time. Oh, no. Out of order. We're going to switch things out of order. Yep. I'm so confused now. Okay. I'm on Twitter as Kieran with two ends. K-I-R-I-N-N is me there. And I also have a occasionally relevant to this podcast, retro blog on Tumblr as Kieran's retrocloset.tumbler.com, only one N in Kieran there. or I'm also on Kieran Blur at Tumblr if you want just my random crap instead of the retro stuff.

That's where you can find me. Yeah. And I'm Ben Edwards. I just started a new podcast to compete with retronauts that will reign supreme in 2018. No, just kidding. It actually has no crossover whatsoever. It's called The Culture of Tech. You can listen to it at The Culture of Tech.com.

First guest, Steve Wozniak. Second guest coming out tomorrow, I hope, is Richard Garriott of Ultima fame. And everything I know about podcasting, I learned from the master. So Ben Elgin. So basically you're hanging out and your podcast getting really drunk. Yeah, it's fun. Actually, there's some stories already. I just, that's going to be saved for Patreon supporters.

So if you want to hear about Benj getting drunk. Yeah, patreon.com slash Benj Edwards to support my work. Of course, I really recommend doing the Retronauts Patreon. because it's really cool to get the episodes commercial-free. Anyway, thanks for listening. All right. Thanks, Ben. Benj.

I messed myself up. I went backwards, and now I'm confused about which one of you is which. It's terrible. I mean, you both have names that start with Ben. You both have beards. We look exactly the same. White guys. Such a confusing, monotonous world.

Anyway, that has been it for this episode of Retronauts, and we're going away now, so goodbye. You know, I'm going to be able to be. My new 499 sourdough patty malcombo with two types of melty cheeses is the perfect comfort food for the uncomfortable things in life. Like guys named Ronald, there's just something about that name. Try my 499 sourdough patty malcolm. Only a jack-in-the-box. Limited time only price and participation may vary, small fries and small drink.

The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving

of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week.

Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. 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.