Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 139: Television Games

Episode Date: February 19, 2018

Over the years, we've covered plenty of games based on animated TV shows, from The Simpsons to Tiny Toon Adventures to Animaniacs. But this week's episode of Retronauts focuses on a much rarer specimen: video games based on live-action TV shows. And, given that live-action shows are usually constrained by some sort of mundane reality, they don't always make for the best adaptations. But they're still fun to talk about! On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Henry Gilbert, and Chris Antista as the crew explores this particularly misguided brand of classic game.

This week on Retronauts, video games killed the TV star. Hello, everybody. Welcome once again to yet another episode of Retronauts. I am your host for this one, Bob Mackie. And today's topic is TV games. That may sound broad, but I assure you it's extremely specific. Before I go on, let's find out who's here today. Who's right over here? It's me, Jeremy Automan Parish.

I'm going to transform into a car midway through this episode. Okay, we're going to clear out some room here, people. He's a regular, what was the kid cartoon to turn into a car? Turboteen. Turboteen. Okay. Was that a puberty metaphor? We'll talk about it later.

It probably was. Who else is here today? King of the Back Nine, Chris Antista. Back nine. That is the back nine order you get when you're 13 episode pilots is successful. I learned all about that through mystery science theater. That's exactly what I know about it. It didn't get the back nine in season nine and ten.

So it was a huge, huge problem. Who else is here today? Well, hey there, little buddy. It's Henry Gilbert. Hi. Henry's going to hit me with his head if I screw up. So that's what's going to happen. I think I'm somebody else now.

Go make a radio out of that or something. So we've set the tempo for this episode. And this is a very specific episode. topic is TV games. And every time we gather together for a session of retronauts to record six episodes or five episodes in this case, I like to do one episode designed to make you dumber. We like to educate you, but every once in a while I like to put information in your head that shouldn't be there. And this is going to be a survey of weird games. We've done celebrity games. We've done food mascot games. This is going to be TV games. The episodes I'm invited

on have become very clear. Chris, you're here to punish our brains. But in Japan, all games are TV games. That's true. But in our case, so the TV games means it's based on a TV show, not a cartoon, not a game show, or not Star Trek. Because we could easily make an episode about game show to video game adaptations or Star Trek adaptations. Oh, it's going to be multiple Star Trek episodes. I'm sure you'll do that. But in this case, it's going to be games based on TV shows that are game show Star Trek or cartoons.

And there's a lot going on here. And the reason I chose this is because most of these games are inexplicable. Like, why would you do that? Why would you make a game out of this? In some cases, it'd be like, oh, yeah, you can make a game out of this, but you made the wrong game. So, yeah, and I brought Chris here because, of course, he runs laser time, and it's dedicated to salvaging the horrible past and figuring out what is good and what is bad and what should be held up as something to mock in a joyful way. One last spotlight for the garbage we all seem to not be able to forget. I did a Tiny Tune show with you.

I've been running around all day saying Tiny Tune Adventures for your N-E-S, because that was the commercial for the Konami game. And that's the weird, wonderful distinction I like to make with games like this. Because these games, we have glorious video games based on TV shows. Buffy for Xbox, pretty good. The Simpsons game. The South Park games, if you, look, you don't have to like South Park. They are great representations. They are faithful to a thing I don't really enjoy.

But most of the time, it's just a merchandising division. It's no different from a beach towel or anything like that. But they do occasionally get their celebrities to be involved. these are not those right right I mean we'll be going over these in chronological order I chose that arbitrarily but now that I think about it this is a way to explore how things become more faithful over time and how the property is treated differently in the beginning we're going to see like this has nothing to do with anything this is just a shameless cash grab and the future we'll see like no these stars were involved the writers were involved and so on so you might have you like I've been trying to find for a long time what was the first TV show to live action TV show because that's a much tougher thing to develop a game around to get its own game, and as far as I know, you might have found it. Yeah, I think so. And I thought the interesting statistic was video games were turned into a television show before a television show

was turned into a video game. Very, very technically. That's true. And what I also like about remembering these types of games, same with the food mascot ones, which is like, no one owns these anymore. No one, they can't be remade, they can't be repackaged and resold. They're just, they're

lost. Also, no one wants to. No one wants to. There's no value in these games today. I mean, Well, this research exists because there's one or two maniacs out there per game. Someone did a long play in this. I love that. I love someone loving something terrible so much. And ultimately.

I'm welcome to part 33 of my Air Wolf for N.S. long play series. Oh, God. This is a Family Matters board game. This time we're going to do advance rules. No Urquil's on the first role. So, yes, this is mainly, I mean, mainly this is an excuse to talk about the source material, as with the food mascot games, as with the celebrity games. But yeah. But I really liked how you put it together.

because I do get bummed when I look at these are a lot of Western shows made into games because Japan has been pretty good about adapting its shows whatever kind of show into a game. Yeah, I should point out these are all American properties. I'm sure there's a lot of Japanese shows that were adapted into games and I'm unaware of.

In English. Yeah. Like if you were, if you had two seasons of a show in England, you probably have a Sinclair ZX Spectrum game out there. Are you being served strategy RPG? Yeah. Yeah, like there's a young ones game. I left that off of our list because I'm like, I don't even want to get into what the young ones is.

I don't want to read about it. They're un-revisible, the games. Yeah. And I love the young ones, but the games are really, and sometimes they're written by the people who wrote the games, but they're very text-heavy, very, it's not a great joke delivery system, the Z-X. I think I can say that about angering anyone.

The Father Ted Schmupp is not going to be on here. So let's get into it right after this. Dibbley for... So our So our So, our So, our So our first game on this, a magnificent list,

is the A-Team, which was actually unreleased. It was designed to come out in 1983, but as we all know, all of us retronauts know, of course, that's when the great video game crash sort of hit critical mass. And it was developed by Howard Scott Warshaw. That should be a familiar name if you know your Atari 2,600 developers. He developed Yars Revenge, E.T., which is not a terrible game, which has a terrible reception and Raiders of the Lost arc. He has a little redemption arc in the Game Over documentary about the burial of the...

This story is pretty interesting. He's in it a lot because, like, he went from being the star of the company to, like, can you make an E.T. game? And he does this cocky 80s gesture. Yeah. I can make an A.T. game anytime you want it, sort of burned him. And it was video games ended up being his one of four careers for him. Yeah. It's unfair that E.T. is viewed as the worst game ever.

It's like, it's not the worst game ever. Plan 9 for Matterspace is not the worst movie ever. You can dig a lot deeper than these properties. It's just symbolic. That became part of the accepted nerd canon. Yeah. Sean maybe it's why we talk about these games because they come with an expectation.

If Yars Revenge sucked, who would care? I don't watch Yars every night and eight o'clock. But E.T. was the movie that everybody was in love with, a bunch of money was sunk into it. So it's probably better to say it's the biggest disappointment in game history. Yeah, it's symbolic of failure because of the burial. It was not the only game buried in the desert, of course, but they made too many based on like this is a huge movie,

but the Atari audience was not there anymore. But if this was coming out in 83, like A-Team was relatively new. Yeah, it's like 81? That's true. Actually, so a lot of these early 80s, I was born in 82, so a lot of this shit is a mystery to me. I never really watched The A-Team. It's so boring. It's an 83-87 ABC series.

And you've seen references to this on Family Guy, of course, probably. That's where you're most familiar with it. Or the Bradley Cooper remake. Yeah, there was a remake with Liam Mason. I saw that. Is that a movie like... I love it when a plan comes together. Is that a movie like the G.

Joe movie that no one remember has actually happened. Pretty much. Yeah. I rediscovered it when I was doing research. But yeah, this series was 83 to 87 on ABC. It's about Vietnam War veterans acting as soldiers of fortune. In the opening narration, they were arrested for a crime they didn't commit. They did the Milaim massacre.

They explained it later. They actually are innocent, but they escape from military prison and now they're like guns for hire. And don't forget that one of the characters is like the peripheral character, Murdoch, Howlin Mad Murdoch. He's always isn't an insane asylum, but he just kind of gets out whenever he needs to, and he flies

their plane for them. Was that like Ronald Reagan's open door policy on a insane asylum at the time? Okay, so this is politically correct, I think, in this case. So, um, this game was actually a re-skin of the game Saboteur. So I think in a last ditch attempt to save

not the recent saboteur. No, not the 2009. It was like, we got boobs. Yeah. Was that it? And Nazis. Booms and Nazis. They had an unlock code to show you boobs. It was a pre-order bonus. A pre-order bonus.

We live in exciting times. We have the internet. Booms are free. But anyways, yes, it was a re-skining of a game called Saboteur that did not come out. They're like, we can salvage this idea. Let's get the A-Team license. I want to think either it was just hopeless or they couldn't afford it by this point or they just threw in the towel completely because this never came out in either form. But it is a very awkward re-skinned of the Saboteur game in that you play the floating head of Mr. T.

It's B.A. Baracus. B.A. Baracus. A. Yes, he can fire bullets, lasers, and lightning out of his eyes, and there's three different phases. So you're basically saving the world from evil forces trying to blow up everything with a nuclear weapon. And this is a very, very bizarre game. Do we need to explain who Mr. T is? Mr. T.

I kind of feel like we do. I don't need a fool who doesn't know T. He was like, you know, kind of the same bodybuilder movement as, like, Lou Friigno and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Like, his claim to fame was he was a really big guy. He had a Mohawk, and he wore gold chains that symbolize, like, slavery and oppression. Did you watch Mr. T. Be somebody, too? I did not. He explains that in his motivational one-hour special.

Be somebody or be somebody's fool. Although he calls them chainses. Yes. But that was back when, that was back before, like, every movie star now is a giant royd monster and stuff. Right, it was unusual then. But B.A. Baracus was different then. Well, Mr. T is different because Mr. T is more famous than any character he's ever played. Yes.

That's why I called it Mr. T. Yeah, he's a clubberlang. He didn't have clubberlang cereal. He didn't have clubberlang cereal. Mr. T. It wasn't, yeah. And Peewey Herman eats Mr. T cereal in the beginning of

Pewey's Big Adventure, yes. Mr. T. Main event in WrestleMania 1. Yeah, yeah, actually, he was like a Hulk Hogan figure in that he was a strong man bodybuilder, like a macho guy, but he was also very wholesome. Like, you know, stay in school, drink milk, be nice to your mother. Eat your vegetables. Yeah.

But, like, also more famous for being him. And we've sort of lost that kind of celebrity, I think, beyond our Jersey Shore days, maybe into our Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian days. Yeah, but Mr. T. was... Yeah, but they're not wholesome. Whenever I try and do that research, like what? B.A. didn't show up naked with a champagne bottle on his butt. He made it legit. He broke the Internet in different ways.

Back when it was just an idea in Al Gore's mind. I have terrible memories of the A team because I was really, I was like zero years old when it was on. And it's really boring in hindsight, but a lot of shows are. I revisited it because one of the few videos I made that anybody ever liked for the later times YouTube channel was one about the redemptive powers of Lego dimensions where just part of it seemed like this giant. Here are a bunch of games that sucked in the 80s, these beautiful properties like ET, Beetlejuice, Goonies, and A-Team, all things that got wasted in the medium. No, no. No, you're a big fan of Goonies? I just can't, I'm not a fan of the Gooney's game.

But another shot at a decent game, that's also a Lego game, and that's not for everyone. So there was an A-Team expansion for, as I mentioned. The only reason I, because I think that might have been based on the Warner Brothers movie property. Yuck. And you can't tell the difference in Lego form. The last chance for Lego Dimensions was like, well, if we can just get everyone over 30 to buy this, the kids didn't buy it on the first volume. Let's just get everybody over 30 to buy that. And it just seemed neat.

These products that should, these things that should have made for great games like the A-Team. I mean, come on. But even the show is mostly guys sitting around talking. Yeah, well, that's in the eight. They had a van. They had a kick-ass band. In this A-T-A-team game, they shoot guns more than they ever did in all episodes combined. There were lots of guns being fired and no one ever being hit.

So let's explain this game. There are three phases in this Atari 2,600 game. So the first phase is enemies approach and run. and they try to make it to this rocket on the right side of the screen. You basically have to shoot them before that happens. And if too many make it to the right side

of the screen, then the rocket goes off and the game is over. Very phallic movement, the rocket slowly moves up and up. It's kind of like a rupeer tap or whatever the way you're playing. Like guys are coming towards you. You've got to like bat them away.

So phase two is bizarre. You have to fire lightning bolts out of Mr. T's head at the villain of the series Decker. And when you fire a lightning bolt, it bounces downwards below him to warheads that are coming by on a conveyor belt. So you're trying to shoot the lightning bolt at Decker.

So the timing is right. So it'll go down and hit a warhead. So it's a very bizarre thing. I don't know why Mr. T is shooting lightning bolts. I don't know why Decker can reflect them below. Are you sure this game is re-skinned? Decker was, I think, a colonel in the army. So it was probably reflecting off his birds.

Okay. That can't happen. And then phase three, you fire lasers out of Mr. T's head at a helicopter, and that is where the launch controls are. But yes, originally intended to be a game called Sabator. starring a robot who's tasked with stopping a secret alien base on his planet from launching a warhead.

That makes a lot more sense that a robot can conceivably fire lightning bolts and bullets and lasers, not Mr. T. I mean, Mr. T is strong. He could beat me up, even in his 60s or 70s, but there are no lasers coming out of him. He believes in himself, and therefore he can shoot. Yeah, like, confidence is the true laser.

If you want to be somebody, no one else saw this. I know about it actually. I know about it through his website. My friend had it on tape with a bunch of really violent Woody Woodpecker cards. Wow. Missed the 80s. The deep cuts.

I just want to plead, if you want to have a negative comment about me in this episode, and I'm going to try and make it happen, please have an avatar of Mr. T from this game, because it is the biggest spright. It is just like, I mean, the robot sprite and saboteura is an entire body, but the 2,600 lack the fidelity to conceivably make Mr. T in huge body form. So it is just a very crude version of his head with the chains, with the Mohawk. Still recognizable. It's recognizable, but it's bizarre just to be a head.

You could get only one body part of Mr. T in a game. I'd go with the head. Or the biceps. But this was like the prequel to zombie nation for NES. The game in which you are a flying samurai head. There are very few games where you are flying heads, and this is one of two or three. Is there a third one? Wait till you see my Zardos mobile.

Oh, no. Oh, God. That's a license you could probably get for free. Baron-Machausen. Oh, man. So, okay. These are all patent-pending people. Do not steal them.

Yeah, for real. Don't jump on my Munchausen. Our next game. game is even more inappropriate. It's MASH, 1983. Suicide is painless. It really is, but MASH is painful to play. It is based on the insanely popular TV series, which ran from 1972 to 1983 about the Korean

War, and that series was based on the movie of the same name from 1970. Now, this was at a time, like, it was basically pre-cable, and at the time when there were more TVs watching broadcast television than ever in history. So the MASH finale was the most watch. watch TV event of all time in America and it will continue to be that for the rest of like our history. Scripted TV event, right.

I'm not counting Super Bowls or 9-11 or anything like that. The death of Princess Dime. Yes, but I mean, in terms of scripted TV, it is the number one with 50 million viewers. And actually two of the games on this list are based on two of the

most viewed TV moments of all time. Wow. So how would you rate this? Which would you say is more painful. MASH the game or after MASH the TV series? I'd say anything involving, I know it's an acclaimed series, but as a kid who watched a lot of reruns on TV, like, so I watch all of Gilgans

Island, all of I Love Lucy, all of Gomer Pyle, all of the Andy Griffith show, every like TV land thing. The second that I heard that MASH music, I was just like, where's the remote? Where's the remote? It just seemed like the most depressing. I could just feel the on-wee, even though I didn't know what that word meant when I was eight.

It's in the first second of the game just, did, da, da, da, da. A few notes. Not even that many notes, Chris. They can't make it that. It's like, we just gave up. Yeah, MASH was symbolic of like kid time is over. Yeah.

It was always on at like 10.30 at night. It was like, oh, I should be in bed by now. And if you're a fan of Channel Drift, and that's channels who lose their meaning. Is this that one, sci-fi? It's Sundance Channel. Robert Redford's channel to celebrate independent film, the Sundance Channel. They're having a marathon this very week. I guess the Robert Altman thing opens.

the door to it, like, based on the classic Robert Altman film. It doesn't explain independent film channels. Popular sitcom of all time. That's 70 show marathon. And I, as a 20-year-old, I get it. MASH is really good. I'm sure it is, but just like it seemed like the last thing I wanted to watch. It wasn't about hillbillies. It wasn't

about people on an island. It wasn't about like... That song was like, go play outside. Or go to bed. Like, that's what that song meant to me. Because it was really popular. Deservidly so. It's very, very good. It is, it was subversive because they were definitely talking about Vietnam. even though they weren't allowed to be, and saying, you know, it's the Korean War.

You can't tell because we never leave the tents. We don't actually go to battle where the medical unit who services people. So you get to see the chaos that war brings. And there's a lot of heavy-handed stuff like that. Well, they do bring in Korean soldiers sometimes who are injured. One of them was the longtime author of the G.I. Joe comic series, Larry Hama. Really? Was he moonlighting as an extra?

Korean soldier injured. It's pronounced Korean people. If you're pronouncing it Korean, you're being a little abrasive. have to ask you to stop that. It's just like saying Italian. Italian. So, yes, this game is very simple being a 2,600 game, although it has a weird and very atonal hook to it.

So in the first part of the game, you compete with another helicopter, either the AI or another player, to pick up as many wounded soldiers as you can. And you're trying to avoid this tank that's firing at you. So that's pretty interesting. Phase two, it's like this weird version of operation in that you're pulling shrapnel out of bodies

using what looks like a serving fork. And instead of having like little, holes for the shrapnel. It's like a little maze starting at the edge of the body. And you're like maneuvering the thing through the maze and pulling the shrapnel back out of the maze. People are irritating stick. It kind of does play like that. It in a very, very, very basic way.

And you just had to see this, you have to enter the thigh of this poor man. And then you miss it. If you touch the side, then the screen changes colors like, m'r. And he dies of sepsis. It was a baby. So, yeah, that, I mean, the. Like, they had to take advantage of the huge, like, again, MASH, number one thing viewed ever, scripted TV in America. I looked up in contrast, like, what is, what is the most watched scripted thing after that?

And it's, I think, it's said. Is it cheers? It doesn't count. Undercover boss is the most watched thing that's not a sporting event or funeral of this decade. Friends had, I think, a third. Wow. The finale of Friends, and the finale of Everybody Loves Raymond is the only thing. that I think any of us have lived through.

No, for real. I got like one third, one third of the match audience. It was one of the most watched shows ever. Everybody loves Raymond is crazy as it is. Everyone really did. The context of it being like, was it 77%? 77% of people who owned a television watched the MASH finale. That seems nuts.

My parents did. I remember. Who were the 23% though? They were drunk. This is the next Atlanta. Expoise. Looking back. Really angry Korean war vets.

Yeah. They're going to light of me. They're only a 3% who ignored MASH and became Trump voters. Oh, and I think this might, I wanted to find something nefarious about this. Because at the time, and we know this because we do, we played a lot of terrible commercials on our show, that Alan Alda was the spokesman for Atari at this point. It had a five-year contract. That's right. To essentially, as Alan Alda is a fascinating dude, and he pretty much only did PBS shows and really fun cameos at.

after this, but he seemed to like the Atar. And you see him in the commercials, it's tremendous. It's not just the video game system. You can, you get, word processor, it's true. It's dynamite. You got to try it. I prefer George Plimpton's take on television. But he's always been big on education. He was,

I didn't, you can't find any commercials where he's talking about it as a game system. It's every other peripheral and other thing that it does that list is the show don't care about. You can write your grocery list with this. One day you'll plug it in the phone. I don't know. It's amazing. I really hope nothing comes out about him.

No. Like, let's be, please. We're months away, so we never know. But if that happens, I will edit this out. So I was hanging out with Bill Cosby. We were talking about my Woody Allen movie. No. Oh, God.

Produced by Harvey Weinstein. Oh, my God. A ton of Woody Allen movie. This is going in a bad direction. Let's talk about our next game on the list. It's called The Dallas Quest from 1984 by Datasoft. Again, I was born 82. Dallas was huge.

This is the number, I think, number two. tour number three. Number three, most viewed scripted TV of all time. The JR stuff? It was the resolution to who shot J.R. So I think kids of our era, meaning people in their 30s, know this best from who shot Mr. Burns. So a parody of one of the biggest TV events of all time, where JR Ewing in Oil Barron in Dallas, Texas is shot. And then the resolution. We found out it was the baby. It was his assistant or something. I don't know. I think it was his assistant. I don't know. I don't care. I confused this with Dynasty all the time, which I've never seen also. Dynasty was a spinoff of Dallas, I think. I thought Knox Landing was. They also brought back

Dallas again a few years ago. In the same universe. Yeah. Right before the actor who played, J.R. died. They, like, they were filming. Larry Higman died? I think so. I did not want to tell you this way. I was going to tell you after the show. I didn't know. Is he one of the bewitched husbands? Maybe. I think so. But yeah, so Dallas ran. I didn't even know this from 1978 to 1991. This show existed in the 90s. I was not aware. This was not on my radar as a nine-year-old boy, but the Dallas Quest is a text adventure with some rudimentary graphics. It's actually more of like an advanced text adventure in which you are given a description of the room you're in, but you also see a picture of it. And then there is a list of things you can interact with on the screen. So it'll be like door, window, desk or whatever. So it was excruciating the wall. It really is. This is the weirdest game that you dug up for this.

I've never heard of it. And I watched parts of the long play that you linked to. And it's just weird. Like, there's a part where you're in a barn. Yes. Like, that's where I jumped in and it said, your friend the owl swoops down and devours the rat. I'm like, what that?

And then I jumped ahead. And there's a stampede of cows coming into. Yes, that moment. And the guy says, blow bugle. And all of a sudden a lullaby starts playing. And it puts the stampede of cattle to sleep. Yes, blaring a bugle will put... Playing a lullaby.

So, yeah, this is so totally not Dallas. No, it really isn't. But this was written by Dallas writers, the story, which I imagine they gave them like a two-sentence, like logline or whatever and called it a day because this has nothing to do with Dallas. Sorry, Henry, go ahead. Yeah, well, and also that they made it with like four colors. Like, it's very brown game. The cows are in a stampede of blue. Yeah.

It was 1984, to be fair. By the way, yes, Larry Higman died in 2012 while being in the one-season return of Dallas, and he was not on Bewitched. It was I Dream of Jeannie was his show. Dick York and Dick Sargent were the husbands on it. I didn't want to quote Wayne's World on the show. They all came up together. They also a nip-tuck. Oh, very randy older man.

There was no nip-tuck game, thank God. So the plot of this game is Sue Ellen Ewing, which is Jarrah's wife. She sends you a detective on a hunt for a map to a South American oil field. field in order to gain some leverage over her husband. Basically, that's where this game leaves Dallas behind, and you are like in a jungle with cannibals and monkeys and things like that. And I believe J.R. appears to try to kill you at some point in the game. But thanks to Frank Sefaldi for helping me discover this game.

I think he brought it up on a retronauts maybe like 10 years ago. But I, again, someone had to make a Dallas game. This was so frigging huge, especially who shot J.R. So someone had to take advantage of the Dallas fire. This series would go on for seven more years after this game came out. I think it's really smart that they made this a PC adventure game and not like an Atari game or something. That would not have worked. No, they needed all the text.

I think that's maybe what got the writer into, too. Like, no, this text, we can finally have all the wonderful, like, wit and intensity of their dialogue. The crackling dialogue. Yeah. Another thing listeners might know Dallas from is if you watch the Too Many Cooks, classic. Oh, yeah. The part when the Eagle shows up, that is the opening of Dallas that they're parodying there. Too many cooks almost three years old now.

I can't wait to go back to Florida and show things like that to people who won't get it. Who are you? They'd stop watching halfway there. I swear in the trailer for the new Jumaji movie, the guy who's the murderer and too many cooks appears in it. Oh, wow. I'm glad he's getting work. I'm glad he's getting work. So our next game is Air Wolf, based on the 3rd.

TV show of the same name, which I have not seen, but it's about a helicopter. And starring Ornus Borgnine, you know, of Marty fame. It was his victory lap after the black hole. Oh, really? Okay. I guess it was his recovery lap. Sorry, that took me a second.

After the black hole. From here to Eternities Orrinus Borgne? I just watched Marty and the black hole within the last three years. Marty's great. And Marty's great. He gets his heart cut out by a giant red robot. Yeah. Well, then I'm a big 20,000. That's just a make a 20,000 leagues under the sea in space.

But with the big red robot. The big red robots. That ends up in hell. Is it Vincent or Bob? The big red robot is Maximilian. Maximilian. Vincent is the shiny robot.

Yes, he's the way. Oh, Bob is the one that is a on the station. It turns out that the black hole broke the bank at Disney. That's, I'm quoting fanboy, of course. Airwolf, if you're exactly my age and me, you'll know from

you watch cartoons on USA's Cartoon Express. And that was kind of the one of the only cable channels that had kid offerings. It was a Nickelodeon. It had the like 70s Hannah-Barbara offload, like the New Pebbles and Bam Bam Show. Yeah, a bunch of things that were stupid things that were cars and Scooby-Doo. Yeah. But Air Wolf had the distinction of like it, it jagged, if I can use that as a verb. It didn't do very well on networks, but people loved it, and it did well on syndication.

So USA bought it. I see. and made the last two seasons of Airwolf. And I remember... USA was around back then? That's right. USA up all night. Up all night.

I prefer USA up all night. It's got booms. You had two different hosts, depending on your mood. But yeah, this is actually... There are three distinctly different Airwolf games. Some of them are extremely basic. The arcade original is just a side-scrolling shooter. And the Famicom game is just a direct adaptation of that.

And the arcade game is so simple that there's not even any, like, music. it. But the Famicom game has music, and it has a, all the boss fights are done from the first person perspective, which is not good. I got dizzy watching that stuff. But at least it's, it's something inventive. You know, at least they tried. Battle Toads would rip that off. And then Yoshi's Island. Oh, man, let's not even talk about Battletoads. It's another episode. Operation Wolf. No, it's not. But there's nothing particularly Air Wolf about it. It's just like, it's going to be any helicopter video game. But I will say the NES game made by a rotten developer being software.

They made Back to the Future NES. That's all I have to say. But they did make Shadow Run. I don't know how they made Shadow Run for the S&S. It was some sort of devil sorcery. Somebody sold their soul to make that game because that is not up to... That's what I said. Yeah, exactly. I would bet they just freelanced it out to somebody better.

It was contracted, yeah. But the NES game is actually a first-person flight simulator on these extremely small maps. All you're doing is going to one location on the map, picking up prisoners, and going back to your On the way, you're shooting out other aircraft, blowing up airfields. But it is a super, super rudimentary flight sim done at the best the NES could handle. And, I mean, in 1980, sorry, 1990, I guess it was kind of impressive as a kid to be like, I guess I'm flying in helicopter. But now it's just like, well, there's either flat ground or ground at like a 45 degree

angle either way. So just like, that's all the perspective you're getting out of this game. Yeah, when I look to NES works and my journey ahead. head, those NES first person flight sims. I have one coming up soon with Top Gun. There's a lot of those fill me with Anwey and Dread. Want to borrow my U-Force man?

That's the only way to fly. But yes, like in a lot of these games, they're just like, you know what? We just need one song. Let's just get one song. So the Airwolf theme is the only song you hear. It's okay for a theme, but I demand more than one song in a video game. I am the airwolf.

I don't. It's very similar to Knight Rider, actually, the Airwool theme. Air Wolf and I I tried to watch this show. Bernard 4.9 is my pilot's friend. It is, it was so boring to a young

man. I could not stand it in again the USA seasons. They had to use stock footage. Existing footage of the helicopter shot in previous NBC seasons because they couldn't afford to show you the reason you're watching. Those shows were hard for me to watch as a kid do because I did not understand

the difference between a movie I saw on TV and TV. I was just like, well, it's all just TV. So if I saw like an edited for TV movie that had action all the time, and then A-Team would come on and be like, well, okay, time for action all the time. Like the last thing that was on. Instead, I didn't understand a TV budget had to be dealt with. Wasn't Airwolf just like a rip-off of Blue Thunder?

Yeah, perhaps. Which was about like an F-14 or something. Yeah, I think that was a movie that had like Cuba Good and Jr. or something. I don't know. I wanted to bring up the merchandising thing at the top because everything other than Dallas that we've talked about so far is coming out when the popularity of this thing is way done. Oh, yeah. It's how little people considered the medium of games. They are ringing the last bit of relevance of this product, of this franchise out into the video game system.

Can we make any more money in season four? Well, these game guys ask for something. I would say more than half of the entries we're going to talk about, these games came out like the last season of the process. In this case, yeah, the NES version came out in 1990 and the series ended in 87, so I guess it was just like it was big in syndication and people were still thinking about Airwolf. I think you see more care in cartoon games because that's someone trying to take advantage of something they know isn't going to be popular in two years. So let's strike with the iron's hot. That's why these, I don't know, the terrible legacy of licensed games is right here in front of us. It's unfolding.

We're going to be able to be. I'm going to be. And so. So our next game is J.J. and Jeff. The PG-16 classic made by HudsonSoft, released in 1987 in Japan, in 1990 in America. And surprise, surprise, this is nothing to do with people named JJ and or Jeff. It's actually an adaptation of the TV show starring a comedy troupe called Kato and Ken. I believe it's Kato and Ken's TV Fun Time or whatever is how you translate it.

This was all about USA-based shows. This game came to the U.S. though, so I wanted to include it. So let's talk about the game first. It's made by Hudson Soft in 1987, and it is basically Adventure Island, but with different characters and different enemies. You are, you're jumping and using melee attacks, which is different than Adventure Island, but you're collecting fruits. All the bosses have the same body, but different heads. There's four stages per world, and all the world's fall in a very basic things like city, sewer, cave, clouds. There's not a lot of variety there.

But the big difference is the original version of this game is based on this extremely popular Japanese TV series. And this TV series is the basis for America's Funniest Film Videos, which is a fact that I had no idea. In fact, they're directly credited by the producer of America's Funniestown Videos because their comedy show had a segment in which people would send in their home movies, which in case you didn't know, the unfortunate stereotype behind Japanese people is like, oh, in the 80s, they take all these pictures. because they have all these cameras. So camcorders were huge in Japan and really taking off before they did in America. So everyone was filming everything. And this comedy show took advantage of that. And that is where this idea came from that eventually became probably one of the biggest shows in America, I think.

That is cool and interesting knowledge. Yeah. I had no idea. It seems like one of those things that anybody could think of, but you know, think of who would be the first person. Like, yes, send us your home videos. We'll put them on TV. Yeah. Yeah, especially when the game just looks like Joe and Mac go to the 80s and do cocaine.

It really does. Wasn't the Japanese version way more scatological than the American? It is. I'll get into that in a second. I want to talk about Akato and Ken first because I watched a video about them and their history. It's very interesting, and I'll try to link to it on our blog. If I can remember, I'll do that when I'm editing this. But they came from a comedy slash music troupe known as The Drifters, and they actually opened for the Beatles at Boudicon when they came to Japan.

When the Beatles came to Japan, the country of Japan was like, if you want to play here, a Japanese act needs to open for you. So, of course, because they opened for the Beatles, they did horribly. They bombed horribly. But Kato and Ken were performing before the Beatles did at Buda Khan. Wow. Yes. And this game is actually based on a segment of their comedy show called Detective Story, in which they would play capitalist detective. So this game is based on that segment.

There's like 300, like, installments of that. that segment. I watched a couple of funny clips of that, one of them being chased by Freddie Krueger, which really was Robert England in the Freddie Krueger costume. It's important to note, Henry, that American celebrities showed up on the show because this was like pre-Utube, who was going to see this? So the clip I sent out to you guys, there's one part with Leslie Nielsen and one part with Freddie Krueger played by Robert England. And I've seen, I've seen Robin Williams on this show as well. And it's not even that, but that Leslie Nielsen, he was being Frank

Drebben. Like, Frank Drebben shows up and there's a joke where he pulls out his what he thinks he's going to pull out his police badge, but instead, it's his picture of Chibi Mariko Chan. Oh, that's great. Then popular kids show and

then the guy's like, oh, what's that? And I feel like Leslie Nielsen's delivery was a little jet lagged in that performance. Yeah, they're barely being like coached through these performances. Rob Mullins is just doing crazy improv in front of these guys. But, yeah, it's very interesting.

So this kind of feels like the Japanese equivalent of the Muppet show where you would have celebrity cameos, often in character. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I've never seen any other Japanese sketch comedy show. I don't know if they're all like this. But, yeah, these are all, like, broken up into different kinds of segments which be regularly occurring installments throughout the series. And I believe it was a weekly show, I want to say.

Like, a lot of Japanese shows are even, like, anime. But as you said, Jeremy, there was a lot of scatological humor cut out of this game. In the American version, birds still pooped those perfect poop emojis on you. And I'm so glad the poop emoji has taught Americans the perfect form of poop. The Japanese cartoon poop is the perfect poop iconography. It is. You really just got to nail that hip motion, though. Yes. It's hard to pull off and realize. Sorry, Henry. But, so this was 1990 in America, and we had not yet entered the, the edgy, red and stimpy era of cartoon.

So a lot of the scatological stuff was cut out. I want to believe it would be left in in a few more years. Have you played the... Does that mean someone had that much faith in the gameplay? Like, at the core, this product is wonderful. I think they just didn't want to raise any eyebrows with parents' groups or whatever. But they eliminate the source material. Yeah.

They remove the charm and... They remove the poop as well. Some of the charm is there. So in the original game, when you play as one character, the other character will show up in levels and try to, like, fuck with you because they're jealous that you're going on this adventure and they're not. So when you run into them, they'll be, like, peeing on a lamppost or pooping in the bushes. The characters are still making those animations in the American version. They just edit out the pee and the poop. So we don't actually see what they're doing.

But it's clear that they're peeing and pooping in the American version. But we don't see the – We don't see the evidence. I don't know. Or that. I mean, that that can happen too. But that is what they cut out. And the farting.

Like, there is a fart attack in this game. They change it to a spray can attack. It sprays like a brown fog. So it's better have been a really good game. That was my wrestling hand. The brown fog. The brown fog. But, yeah, like, going through this game, even in the American version, there's lots of specific references to the Japanese series that just come off as non-sequitur jokes to an American audience.

Like, things, I'm sure the localizers had no idea or references. And I feel like this is one of the more thorough attempts to re-skin a game. I mean, before this, we had, like, Dragon Power and Chubby Cherub, those weren't as extensive as the work I'm seeing in this game. I don't know if you guys have any thoughts on that But I really give them credit for the Working on new faces for all these people too Who are based on real people And they had to just completely make up a new face

And also that they I guess they really did just have faith in the Gameplay of it Or they were desperate That's it Oh I mean the yeah The turbographics needed all Or sorry the PC engine

PC engine needed all the games in America It could So they'll take whatever they got. And I have to wonder, I mean, NEC did not have a ton of money to throw around at the time and they were not doing well in the U.S. But do you think they reached out to any other real celebrities? This could have been like a Bill and Ted game or something, you know? I thought we're big mystery science theater 3,000 fans.

And like that movie gets imported overseas with local comedians. Yeah. You know, like write the jokes. It seems like you could have done that. Honestly, they could have found any local comedy duo in 1989. eye, and he'd say, like, why don't we just make you there? Dean Martin. Dean Martin and Bronson Pinchot. What were the comedy duos?

What if it was the perfect strangers guy? He could have done an Abbott and Costello game. Well, actually, the YouTube video I was watching, the guy who was hosting it said, like, why wasn't this Bob Sagitt and Dave Cooley? They were both, like, hosting America's Funniest blank shows, and they were both on Full House. Like, they could have been great. And one of them looks like Dave Cooley. The guy, the blonde guy does look like him, so. Oh, yeah, he was doing America's funny some people with Jackalope.

I mean, Daisy Fuentes. Originally, Arlene Sorkin was his co-host. Really? Yes. Oh, my God. Yep, yep, yep. No longer doing the voice of Harley Quinn, unfortunately. But, yes, that's the bizarre world of Cato and Ken.

We'll do one more before our break. Of course, we have nightboats, the crime-solving boats. Actually, Night Rider, the crime-solving car, released by Acclaim. And this is obviously based on the TV show, the same name. It was David Hasselhoff's first rise to fame. I don't know if he was in anything before this. The Nick Fury? movie? No, that's like

96. I'm sure he showed up on the love boat as like a guest or something or fantastic island or something. Was he already a pop star in Europe at this point? Was that later? I think it was later because he did play on the Berlin Wall. Remember he has a funny, small appearance in one of the new season of mystery science

theater movies? Oh, it's like a bit part of Star Wars ripoff. The Star Wars ripoff. Star Crash or something like that? Yeah, Star Crash. Oh, you're right, you're right, but this was his first huge claim to theater. Oh, yeah. For sure. As a kid, this was one of a few live action shows like a tolerate. This and Dukes of Hazard.

Yeah, like Airwolf, there was the promise of a cool helicopter that never delivered. Almost never came. Night Rider, there was always a car doing cool stuff like it could flip its license plate to trick people who were like, oh, it must have been another black Camaro that I was looking for. And even then he was talking. The car was talking throughout the whole show. Michael. There's no need to, my man. So, yeah, William Daniels later played Mr. Feeney in Boymeet's World.

He played Kitts. David Hasselhoff played Michael and the car talked and solved crimes and was sort of like Speed Racer's car and a bunch of gadgets in it too but it was a 1982 to 1986 series it didn't last as long as I thought it did. Doesn't that seem so short-lived

for how long people have talked about Knight Rider? When I'm looking at all these shows it's like 80 episodes, 100 episodes outside of... Well, they brought it back a couple times. There was Night Rider 2000 in 1991 I want to say. And like a 2000 show or maybe a 20-time show.

When I moved here 10 years ago and I only remember reading about it because Will Arnett was supposed to be the voice of Kit But because every car had to be a Ford and he did V.O. for Chevy commercials. I made a terrible mistake. He got kicked off the project and replaced by Val Kilmer. I'm like, well, Val Kilmer's more important than Will Arnett.

I mean, you ask him first. But he's not famous as a voice. It seems like you don't want to really work with Elkimer. But he's someone I would pay Will Arnett to call me, Michael. Yeah. But I feel like every time they try to make Knight Rider thing again, I'm like, you guys misunderestimate the nostalgia for this. Like, there's not as much as you think. It really isn't.

Yeah, there's not a lot, too. But this game is a first-person driving game. It's sort of like Rad Racer with guns. And it's like you could easily put a car spright on the screen. It would be the same experience. It would be better because it's really weird. Like the viewpoint. Yeah.

The entire dashboard. Your car is enormous. It's like as wide as the road. Yeah. That thing on kit, the like HUD with like the little thing going back and forth, the light going back and forth. That could be the car on the road, but it's not. And you basically just drive around.

You shoot at cars. You shoot only the red cars. Only the red cars. But at the end of every stage, there's a semi you face off against. Sometimes it escapes. Not just a semi. A black semi. It's Goliath.

Goliath? Goliath. Driven by the other David Hasselhoff. This is the best part of the show. It is canon. It is canon. Jeremy knows Nightrider Canon. Goliath is the truck that was sprayed down to the special treatment that they used to make kit invincible.

It was driven by... But it made him evil. Well, it was driven by David Hasselhoff with like a go-euvre. T. No way. And it was the man that they based Michael Knight's identity on when they gave him surgery to change his identity. And he's like the evil son of the man who created the Knight Foundation. Oh, my God. And he's like, he was like working with African dictators and was put in prison and then broke out. And yeah. I didn't know what a rich tapestry this knight writer was. There were two nemesies for Kit within the series. One of them was Goliath the truck. The other was car. A-A-R, which was like a silver Camaro. Oh, my God. Wow. And there's some great story stuff happening here.

I had no idea. Jeremy is such a font of information about my writer. Me neither. I was exactly the right age to be in love with night writer. You were what, like in seven or eight? Yeah. That's perfect. Seven, eight years old.

That's perfect. Yeah, I mean, I have a lot of... A little car with an eye. I have memorized a lot of bad things from that era, too, so it don't feel bad. But unlike the Airwolf game, you never hear the awesome Night Rider theme. It never shows up. We interviewed David Hasselhoff. That's right.

That's why I wanted you here, Chris. You talked to the Hasselhoff. We did. You hassled him. It was like three weeks after that drunk on the floor, Wendy's thing. Eating cheeseburgers. Yeah. And it was for that Wii exclusive Ready to Rumble sequel.

Because he's in it. He's in it. And we edited the shit out of that interview because he keeps, he's like on a loop. He just keep. And then he got really mad at us. But I remember trying to, I went and played this game trying like, I got to find the 8-bit Knight Rider theme to bring the interview in. I played it for hours. doesn't exist. It's not in any YouTube video. It sucked. And this is a theme I think that's going to be creeping into this game. The fact that people have to buy rights to individual elements of a property. Like, you have to buy the music rights. You have to buy the likeness rights before there was not as much attention paid to that.

And if you want, one of the funniest things you can do for yourself is go look up the covers of all these games. Like no actor was paid at all. Oh, yeah, just the car. The MASH one is particularly hilarious. Because it's just a helicopter, right? It's like this person has never seen MASH. It's a bunch of people running out of a medical tent like, let's get him. Well, we had that in, we talked about in the Bart v. Space Munes, too, that was the only one that they paid for the Danny Elfman song. Everybody else was like, I'm not paying for that. We already paid for the Simpsons license. Yeah. We paid for the song, so we'll use it over and over again. So we're going to take a break now. We'll come back with some Alf knowledge.

See you then. 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, and 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

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talents, then we deliver them to you right into your ears. But I get it, we're not all superheroes. That's why we give you their blueprint so you can live what you listen. After a thousand interviews, learning five languages, and getting arrested in a country that doesn't even exist anymore, I'm now more ready than ever to introduce you to the Jordan Harbinger Show. Listen free to the Jordan Harbinger Show, available on Apple Podcasts, Podcasts, Podcasts,com, and the Podcast One app. And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote.

Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry. That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Bad network got you glitched out of luck.

Switch to Boost Mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free phones. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. We are back to talk about what Chris Antista is destined to talk about for the rest of his natural life. Alph. What?

Yes. Alf is a series that burns super hot, super fast, and then no one wanted anyone to do with it. That might have been the 80s in a nutshell, looking at the dates of all these shows. Four years. Cocaine is a hell of a drug. Yes. So Alf is a series that ran on NBC, or sorry, NBC, I think, from 86 to 90. Then they tried one TV movie in 96.

Then in 2004, he had a six-episode talk show on TV land where Ed McMahon, was his second banana, and you can see on Ed McMahon's face, this is the last thing I'll do before I die. Dear God, what did I do? I sat next to Johnny Carson for 20 years. I'm sitting next to Alf right now. So Alf is about an alien who lives with the family. He can't

leave the house, and antics ensue. And they eventually made a game out of Alf because you could not avoid alf merchandise in the 80s. He was on everything. Stickers, T-shirts, everything, glasses. How is this not a Boia baseball game? Boia baseball? Boia baseball. Yeah. It's the

the official sport of the planet Melmac. Again, Jeremy must, this is like a secret well of information, you know? Unbelievable. It's, uh, yeah, it's from the cartoon. Alftails, uh, yes. Yeah, I watched. Bia baseball is like baseball, but you play it with a fish. With a fish, I knew it.

I knew it. I know it was like booyabase. I watched every Elf episode of the cartoon went more than I saw the sitcom itself. Really? Yeah. Well, sitcom got syndicated and ran in our town like forever. I watched several episodes of it, but this cartoon was on way more often. And I liked the cartoon. more because you see his legs and he was having

fun on a space planet instead of... In fairness, though, it was like the bad version of Galaxy High. It had nothing on Galaxy High. Well, and also, though, in the second season, they're like, it's fractured fairy tales now. No, it's... Those were simultaneous. Those were simultaneous? Half and half.

It had two cartoon series. Jesus Christ. So the Alf Cartoon proves why a video game of the sitcom is a bad idea because the sitcom cannot leave the house for basically budget reasons. It was a very expensive show. They had to build like puppet-friendly sets with like, what do you call it? Like puppet

wells or whatever. No one had really done this. They had to, the stage is essentially seven feet taller than it looks on television. So the guy who puppeteered Alf could hide underneath. Yeah. And I never... The executive producer of the show. Paul Fusco, Paul Fusco. People love me. He wants to bring

Alf backs constantly, but nobody cares. And it always weirded me out to see Alf as a little person in a costume with just like a dead head like we talked about the Christmas special in 30 2010 uh last year and that it's where a girl mistakes him for a toy and since they have to take him out of it yeah since they have to take him out of the house like it's got to be a little person yeah in the suit a lot more uh and it's it's it is very strange to see yeah and in the show like alva's constantly just behind the couch like a hundred and one jokes about eating pussy yes I don't

know if Al ever got that PG 13 but that was actually in the TV show. Yeah. I bet... Maybe the cartoon. The creator probably wanted that joke in every

episode. Yeah. But Alf... I'm flattering behind the scenes clips out there of the creator with the Alth

though. Yes. But the main joke was Alf was sort of just like a body kind of John Candy style

character. He should be wearing a Hawaiian shirt. I think he is in the cartoon. The first episode I drink eight beers. Is really?

Yeah. They say tone it down. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, when Al he's like, what a T drink beers? He got hammered.

Why can I? When Alf began his voice was like, Yeah, he seemed very cigar smoky. He didn't put up with any shit. I'm tired of all of you asking these questions. Then he got real high, I'm a kid thing. People love me.

Once they found out kids loved it, it was just like, let's re-engineer this to be more kid-friendly. And they were right. And, like, I don't know, watching something on television and be able to go into a store and buy something about that. It wasn't as common as you'd think. I'd have to be really old. And Alf was a phenomenon. I had a little Alf doll. Yeah, from Burger King.

Burger King. I loved all those Alf toys from Burger King. Came with four albums, like individual albums of Al's songs. And it was my own album. I didn't have my own album. I will edit in the touching love song to Ronda somewhere in this episode. But there are at least two Alf games. There were some entertainment games that don't really counts.

Did the album have Willie's rendition of Saturday nights all right for fighting? That guy played the role a thousand years old. Chris, you're going to be shocked to hear this. I think he was just in his early 40s playing the role. But he was just like prematurely aged. Like that 10 years afterward, those pictures of him, I'm out here smoking crack and making out with these guys. Don't tell my wife. That really did happen.

You can watch a video of him. It was him and his, uh, him and his male buddy picked up a homeless dude to then have a three-way together. Oh, this is really. This is like way darker than I really intended. You didn't know this about the Al-Dead? I'm sorry I mentioned Willie. My point was, I only know what was canon. My point was Alf, that's a young man's game, picking up homeless men for threesomes.

So maybe... Willie's doing it well into the 90s. Maybe Willie looks so old because of his crack habit, is what I'm saying. Yes. Oh, why do I have a seven-year-old and an alien? Well, my favorite story about him on the set

is that he was... He hated the show, hated doing it, couldn't stand anybody on it, very tired of doing it all the time. When they filmed the final episode, he pre-packed all of his things. He filmed his last scene, and he immediately went to his dressing room,

picked up his bag, and went to his car, and drove away, and that was it. He was like, I am done. None of them are in the movie. No, no. So this segment is getting a bit randy. So I want to talk about the actual games.

So the first game was called Alf the first adventure. It is a bad Pac-Man game. Not worth talking about. Just a big Alf had actually not eating cats. Is he firing lasers at B.A.? No, no, nothing like the... He's actually running from cats when he should be eating them. I wish it was a Pac-Man game of him eating cats.

But that was... He always talked a big game about it. eating cats, but he never did it. No, no, no. And that comes through in the next game, too. Yeah, the second game is a bizarre mess that I am happy to say that Chris has live streamed the entire thing. We completed it.

There are two games like this in this episode. So it is basically a bad adventure game that is patted out by a nightmare open world where death is around every corner. Yeah, open world with like, let's, they don't even stage is like 14 different screens. Yes, yes. There's only a couple things you can do and you can do it wrong. and they'll make a joke at your expense. If you buy a book,

Oh, the elf book, right. If you buy a book at the bookstore, what you've just done is spent more money than you'll ever be able to get again and you will not be able to buy vital things to finish the game. Actually, if you buy the book, the game ends. You have to restart the game. Yeah, because it's something they seem,

we can't keep playing after this. Like, why don't we just end the game? It'll be hilarious. So a good joke on your free time. But, yeah, if you actually look at the list of things you have to do to beat the game, it's basically 10 things. But those 10 things are patted out by just, like, cars that are driving across the screen.

That's this weird cave that's connected to your basement in which you have to hit bats with a thing of salami. And the hitboxes are just like all over the place. And the bats never stop. No, no. And this game has no sound effects and like two songs. And the point of the game is to fix your ship and go home, which is like, why would, I mean, you don't want Alf to leave the Alf house. It is a great. It ends the show.

Yeah. It is a horribly off model moment, though, when you finally earn that victory. his head is sticking out of the spaceship in space, mind you. Alpha's dead. Bigger than his whole ship. But I just love this as part of the war. It wasn't for the best, but Sega playing that dirty game of like, we're going to compete against Nintendo by reaching out to Western licenses to make terrible games exclusively for the Sega systems.

And I remember there being a Rambo game for the master system, but Alf, Alf was like a head turner. Like, I'll have to consider which system I get twice. I think they had Alf exclusivity. You want to believe this could have been an NES game. It feels very bad NES game-ish. Yeah, yeah. I want to think, like, if they could make an NES game out of this, they would have because it would have sold a lot. In between 87 and 90, like, peak NES years, it could have been a huge hit for an NES game, and just as bad.

Yeah, but that's how Sega continually got my number with Disney games and Spider-Man. They just lined up those licenses. George Foreman and all my favorites. Every single time. But it's worth noting that Lucky the Cat is an item in this game. But it is not a consumable item. No. You're lucky to chase away a rat.

It's keeping you away from the cave in the basement. It's a bad adventure game in which if you have an item in your inventory, you hit the button. If you're in the right spot, it will be used. And in that case, you use a chase away rat. But it's like a very bad adventure game where you do 10 things, but again, you must survive the nightmare gauntlet of the open world to do those things. It feels like a poorly optimized demo for a bad adventure game. Yeah. If you know what you're doing and, God,

speed if you can still remember that. Please watch the laser time play through. You guys made it to the end. You can finish this in like 30 minutes. Like, it's just running back and forth and collecting the right things. It's really dumb. I think the long play might be 12 minutes or 16 minutes. Oh, no, no, that's right.

I have plans someday. Okay. The definitive Alf long play. That's a summer game's done quick right there. You could be the one guy who can own Al. I'll be streaming from an adjacent building unofficially. So our next game is one of three bizarre Konami license games. It is Roller Games, which you might be thinking, what is Roller Games?

That's just the thing Konami made up while I say no to you, sir. No. First of all, this game has Radis-Hell music because it's Konami in the late 80s, early 90s, sample drums, fantastic. Second, this license has been lost to time. It's basically Roller Derby meets WWF Wrestling. It is the best. Wrestling was experiencing a huge boom in the late 80s. Maybe Henry might know more about this.

Is that an accurate statement? Yes. That was a huge time for wrestling. We could be here all day if I explain this. Yes. But Hulk Hogan's a big breakout star. Alka Mania was running wild. It was.

And there was a long time previously that wrestling was like a just a sport. I won't say a real sport. And lots of people wanted their own WWF because USA had it on lockdown. And so some people did glow, gorgeous ladies of wrestling. Turner started up WCW. And then here we get into the roller. Derby. Because of you, I spent the most time looking into this. Isn't this

fascinating? I mean, they wanted the WWF behind the scene storylines paired with Roller Derby. They teamed up with a roller derby company that had existed for three decades. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So like the people you're seeing doing the roller derby are as professional as a

roller derby person can get and have been around for a long time. But then they also, the clip you sent us that's the first episode. It's only 19 minutes. Watch it. It's amazing. He's like, and then we have this corkscrew course, which it's a figure eight. And then, of course, in the case of a sudden death, the live alligator. Yes, someone brings out a live alligator.

And they talk about the live alligator. This has been a very controversial move in our party. Live alligators could mean certain death in the middle of a sudden death. We don't know if this is the right thing to do. But, you know, it's so funny and so gloriously 80s. The one way to make roller derby merge thing is the threat of death by alligator live. And then they tease that to show a roller derby character. Who can...

It's like an alligator whisper. This only lasted one season. I don't... It seems like the craziest... There's no justice in the world. Yes. This should have went on for years and years and years. But when you play roller games for the NES,

the teams you see are teams from this franchise. The characters you see, like the announcers in this game... There's those 80s people in the world. Yes. Like, everyone in this game is a caricature of a real person. Everybody has a puffy mullet and a mustache. And bizarrely, so there are three different versions of this game. Two are by Konami.

There's an NES game, an arcade game, and a pinball game. The NES game is like this weird post-apocalyptic double dragon-style game that is very little to do with the actual sport of roller derby. I loved it, actually, because it reminded me of a Konami beat him up like TMNT, especially like even in the color palette-wise of the N-EAS version of TMNT. It's more like Batman Returns, with ramps and jumping and stuff. But it was an isometric one, and then you'd get, you'd do, you would do all this isomestic racing around, and then you'd stop in a square area and then just beat people up, do the beat-em-up stuff. And then it's over. It's like, okay, back to racing.

But it was an interesting way of them doing the arcade beat-em-ups. They always did. Konami did, had that template, but somehow was able to graft on racing around on roller skates as these hot roller skate ladies. Yeah, and that arcade version, what is it doing exactly? Because it's the most jarring. It's like a... It's cool, though. It's using sprite work to fake 3D

like the superscaler technology. Yeah, it's not faking 3D so much as faking, like having a camera rotating in the center of a circular ring. So it's like a carousel view. I don't know exactly how it does it because I'd have to see it in person.

It's very impressive though. It's a neat trick, whatever it is. It's really cool because, again, that what they did, how they made this extreme was a figure 8, so you would roll faster and you could break through and like cross over with people. But the arcade version is semi-authentic to the sport.

It's not just randomly beating up people. With a fighting game in the middle. Yes, yes. The camera perspective is a really interesting way to approach the idea of a circular rink. Like, video games always have to compromise that. Do you do, you know, like in a racing game, a top-down view where you have to change your orientation? Yeah. Or do you like excite bike where you're technically racing in a loop, but you never actually turn.

You're always just going in a straight line. This lets you go in a straight line, but the background is. always spinning around you. So it does actually seem like you're going in a circle. It's extremely clever. I'll give it that. And I played a lot of the pinball game in my time in the local arcade fun in pizza. They had this game.

What they have there? Fun and some pizza. The pizza wasn't very good. But I played a ton of this pinball game. And only in recent years did I realize like a roller games is a real thing. It's a real license. It was a real, quote unquote, sport or sports entertainment. I knew the NES game.

I had no idea. That would be older to me because when I think of roller games, like that kind of roller, you know, derby sort of thing, it's like 1970s for me. Yeah. It's not late 80s, early 90s. Yeah. It's really just like a thing out of time. Watch these clips because they're, I've seen real roller derby. It's impressive.

It's a skill. They really went full wrestling with it because it looks like they really hurt one another because they'll, but they're also wearing a lot more padding and you can, look closely. You'll see mats like all over the place. Someone's clearly going to take a dive right over there. but he's still doing it at 30 miles an hour like hooked to another man A lot of this is on YouTube And it's all fascinating of a sport

Quote unquote sport that was never meant to be But like someone believed in this enough And Konami this is like one of three misfires In terms of like let's bet on this As the next big thing Again we talked about the Ninja Turtles game I don't know how Konami knew The Ninja Turtles was going to be popular

That could have potentially been a failure for that Yeah I don't think they did Yeah Ed and Roller games could have been bought in the same pile of licenses. Yeah. I think they got lucky. Like, someone pitched it to them.

They said yes. And wow, they're forever associated with the best games representing like the turtles. Like the composer once told me speaking in English for a moment, why ninja? Why turtles? That was the existential question about that license. The composer of that game? Yeah. Oh, wow.

The N-N-S game. Excellent. I didn't know that. Why did you make the best overworld theme of all time? Nothing will beat it. Also, thanks to the license, this is probably one of the very few NES games that would be, with you play as a woman. Yeah, that's true. You could be a kick-ass woman in this game.

Like, it's a double, it's a rare double dragon game where the woman is not abducted at the beginning. You can fight as the woman. That's a good point. So our next game is another one by Konami, another misfire in terms of licensing. It's Mission Impossible, the 1990 game based on the 88 to 90 series. Now, that's what I had no idea about. No one remembers the first series. No one remembers the series.

We only know the five going on six movies. No one remembers the TV series, the original? They don't remember anything except for the theme song. The theme song and the self-destructing message thing. I know Martin Landau was in it. Yeah, but can you name a character? Can you name a plotline? I mean, it's no man from uncle, sure.

True, but I feel like there are some iconic things that are memorable about the series, but it's not like a very memorable series in general. It lucked out with the Lalo show. Shiffran theme for sure. For sure. Yeah, it's an excellent theme. There's a great rendition of it in this game, but this is based on the failed reboot, the two-season reboot with Peter Graves.

I'm Peter Graves. I tried watching an episode of it when it was first running and was like, nope, I'm bored. Yeah, it looked pretty cheesy and bad. So I felt when Nick at night got the rights to play it again, I can finally see this show that, like, everybody references this message will self-destruct in five seconds. Yeah, when the Tom Cruise movie came out and they, like, kill off the entire IMF within in the first five minutes.

I'm like, yeah, okay, that's good. You don't care about this. Someone had to explain that, because, like, Emilio Estevez is in there, and he was in, like, a Mighty Ducks movie, like, a year before that. Yeah, he gets killed the first five seconds. He was fairly big at that point. So it was an intentional thing they did to tell you, like, this is not the television show. Yeah, Jim Phelps was, like, the protagonist of the original mission,

or, like, the guy who ran the IMF. Okay. So it was, like, the big twist was, like, the guy who you love because he was the kindly leader of everyone was actually twisted by the fall of the, the Cold War and it went bad. This is a re-evaluation of Mission Impossible, which I never thought I do. Yeah, so like the IMF was the group that, you know, did the crime solving. So I don't know if the characters in the movie were meant to be the actual characters

in the TV show. I don't think so. But the idea was like... This is not what... This ain't your daddy's mission impossible. Like, got to clear the books. So it's all about Tom Cruise and Mr. Scott, whatever his name is. Yeah, I mean, ultimately the movie series is much bigger than either TV series.

And are they on five movies? Are they making the fifth movie? The sixth movie is in the work. It's the one, it's the reason Henry Cavill's lips sucks in Justice League. And all of them except the second are actually pretty good. Yeah, I've heard they're all very good. The fourth one is astonishing. Is that the Brad Bird movie?

Yes. It's really good. I thought three was the Bradbird movie. Three's JJ Abrams. Oh, okay. Because Tom Cruise can get anyone he wants. And two is John Wu, John Wu, J.J. Abrams, Brad Bird. And his friend who does Jack Reacher movies.

Oh, cool. But that's an insane amount of people. So even though the life. license is lackluster. This is a very ambitious, but ultimately way too hard game. Is it really lackluster? Really? I mean, this specific series. Yes, this reboot series. Except in Lego Dimensions, where it's done pretty well. But it's all, but that's the movie license, right? It is the movie. Yeah, I'm talking specifically this reboot late 80s series, Obition Impossible. So this game made by Konami borrows a lot from Metal Gear. You have a top-down perspective with semi-complex stealth gameplay where you're using different items and different abilities to maneuver around soldiers. Impossible. Pack open doors and things like that.

In fact, when you travel from floor to floor, the perspective shifts from overhead to a side view as you go down the stairs or go down an elevator. So clearly, people at Konami liked Metal Gear and wanted to do more with the ideas of Metal Gear. Yeah, but this has that top-down view that has, like, pure top-down view that has only ever been done well by Hot Mine. I call that Miami. Bill Lambier Vision. Combat basketball. This has that problem where everyone is really robotic and turns like a tank. And Metal Gear, like, you don't have that.

You turn and you move immediately in that direction, but here you, like, have to rotate a little bit. Yeah. Like a twin-stick shooter? It's really awkward. The broad-shouldered, like, an overhead view is so bizarre. But, I mean, so in this game, you can play as and switch between the three extremely memorable main characters of this 80s series. So we have Max Hart's Hart. He's got a gun attack and can blow up things with bombs.

Grant Collier. He can punch. He is sleeping gas and he can hack locked doors. And, of course, Nicholas Black. He is a boomerang. And he can disguise and. self as the enemy. These are all pretty cool things, like three different characters, three different abilities. It's fairly non-linear and involves a lot of puzzle solving and a lot of mazes.

And it's basically sort of like the Zelda II cryptic hints kind of game where it's like people will tell you poorly translated things. You make what you will of them to make progress. But this game, I played it on live streams before for I think one-up and U.S. Gamer. It is absolutely brutal in its difficulty. There are so many things that will kill you in one hit so many traps that will kill you in one hit. And you can't rescue killed playable characters. You have to restart the level to have all of them

available. And some of them are necessary to finish the level. Like if you lose a guy who can hackook him indoors, you might need him later in the level. You'll have to restart. And there are so many things that will just kill you instantly. This is such a Konami game. Like all the other things you've mentioned, that multiple character thing is, you know, something they started

with TMNT. And then did again in ContraForce, which was going to be called, I think, Contra 4, but then they said, no, that's a bad idea. Whoa, those are the names of the characters in the show. I just thought they were made up for the game. Max Hart. Yeah, they're all very of their era.

Exactly what they make up in 1988. Just bland nothingness. This game has a really cool idea, but I feel like Konami games of this vintage were made with the idea of commenting the rental market because this game feels like you think you can beat this in a rental. Well, fuck you, buddy. Because Konami notably made many changes. to games in this time period, like, especially

Castlevania 3, which is much, much harder in the U.S. version. I think Jeremy will attest to that. Is that true? They took away Grant's default ability to throw daggers without using hearts. And like saving between stages and stuff like that, like passwords between stages? No, you get that in... There's something

involving health, too, where... You... Enemies deduct variable health. Yeah. Whereas in the NES version, like, enemies deduct three points, then four points, then five points, depending on the stage. Whereas in the Femicom version, like weak enemies always take off like two points now. Right, right.

And that was a change directly made to combat rentals and the rental market. I feel like this game is like... Yeah, taking away Grant's default throwing daggers is a huge loss. Once you've played the Japanese version and played Grant, you're like, he's the best character. This game feels like down with Blockbuster the game, basically. Like, you must devote your life to remirizing every sprite in this game to know where every instant death trap is or you will never make progress. I have not finished the first level of Mission Impossible. It is so, so difficult to do.

Even with Save States, it's frustrating. So I cannot recommend this game. And I don't know if the series it's based on was ever, like, remembered fondly or ever released on DVD. No one. I bet it was released on DVD and the DVD-TV boom. No, in 2004, they put everything on DVD to sell it. That is true. Are you looking at this up, Chris?

And I would not be surprised if when one of the movies was coming out. They're like, somebody said, if we just put a Mission Impossible DVD on a shelf. You know, you're so right. I can see the 60s series, but I have trouble imagining the 80s series came back. 35 episodes. So it went longer than a season. Wow. So is it on DVD.

Let's go down to the local dollar tree and find out. It is available to watch on Amazon. Thank God. So we can see Nicholas Hardin Action, finally. It's private the first episode right now. Forget about this next entry. Yeah, for real. Oh, this next entry.

Let's go on to the next entry, which is The Adventures of Gilligan's Island. Now, I can attest that I kind of love Gilligan's Island. I watched these series front to back like maybe three or four times over the course of a summer or two. Only complain during the black and white ones. Yes, yes. There was a black and white season. So this game is a bizarre. I call it an eco-like.

Is it Iko or Eco? I always forget. It is Iko. Eco, that's right. It's an eco-like by human entertainment, a very interesting developer. go back earlier in the year we did an episode on their game Monster Party which was a lot of fun but also

troublesome in some ways there is interesting stuff going on here and that it is weird it's a very weird game it's like Fetch Quest meets Mays meets escort mission and that you're playing as a skipper it's the only game where you play Alan Hale Jr. A huge part of the UI

is dedicated to a dialogue box unfortunately there is not much dialogue but they had the idea of a sitcom in mind like these characters must make jokes They don't make a lot of jokes And none of the jokes are funny Gilligan won't shut up Yes

Gilgan will not shut up And they're always talking to each other Like I said This game is a series of fetch quests That are all time So each level out of the four Has a time limit Of course they're $15

Hurry five left in stock So yes We've now determined That Mission is available Get it while it last folks Nope I just bought it Damn it There's only four left

There's only one. No, this is one left in style. Where was I? There were four levels each made to be like a different fake episode of the series. Each level has a different time limit to it. And you must go back and forth between different characters, delivering objects to them and making sense of their clues and suggestions and things like that. And it is very frustrating because you're paired with Gilligan, who will always tag slightly behind you. If you leave him beyond a screen, you have to go back to get him.

He will fall into quicksand. He will fall into pits. He'll fall into rivers. It is a very frustrating escort mission. It's like, I don't want to actually live the life of the skipper babysitting Gilligan. It's not a good time for anybody. You know now why he hates Gilligan so much. You're like, yeah, I hate you too.

It is living the Gilligan experience. This was made by human entertainment, right? Yeah, published by Bandai. So it's like the same people who made Monster Party? It is, yeah. And Fire Pro Wrestling and Clock Tower and things like that. Yeah, but I don't think it was necessarily the same staff as those. Oh, no, no.

Thinking like this is contemporary with Monster Party. It is, but despite this game being bad, there are neat ideas in it. Like, they're not implemented well. There's one, there's like four songs in the game. And oddly enough, I'm... Now, so, but not that one. That is kind of in the game. It's close enough, but I'm a Marianne guy, and you should be.

But there is no ginger in this game at all. And I want to have Mr. Howell. Mr. Howells in the game. They're all in it except for Ginger. But I want to say that the actress who played Ginger did not. like the show, did not like being associated with the show. Maybe her likeness rights were too expensive, or she turned them down. Sort of, yeah.

There were two of them, right? They recast her in one of the movies. I think about Globetrotters movie. It's a different ginger. There were like three TV movies in the 70s, right? Yes. Escape from Gilligan's Island? Yeah, Escape.

Rise of the Gilligan's Island. Yes. Planet of the Gilligan's Islands. But I just remember as a kid seeing interviews with the Gillians people, they'd all be together except for Ginger Tina Louise Tina Louise would do separate interviews from everybody else because she was

she seemed to be it was like when you see Frank Gorshin would only do interviews separate from all the other Batman actors because I remember as a kid Frank Gorson appeared on a radio program to advertise a regional theater production he was in

and his rule ahead of time which they revealed later was you cannot ask me about Batman. And it's just like, well, then why the fuck you even even? I'm sure he's sick of it, but still. But anyway, Ginger, I think, was not, she was on the outs with everybody. And they all should be mad that they all were

mad. They didn't get any money from the show. They got their per episode appearance fees when they made the show. But the show only really made money in syndication, and none of their contracts had syndication royalties. So they all got fucked. They got to see

Sherwood Schwartz make millions. and millions and millions and millions of dollars off Gilligan's and they never made it. So that's why Alan Hill Jr. was in the giant spider invasion. Yes. And they got they got syndicated after three seasons, three 1950 seasons of course with like 50 episodes

or whatever. 20 episodes a month. Yeah. It's just incredible. But I mean, I'm astounded that my other theory was maybe Ginger was too spicy for an NES game of this vintage. Like the Bucksomebe. I don't know. In light of things that have been coming to the public eye lately, I wonder

if she had an unhappy experience. She might have had a bad time I'm upset too. Quite possibly. Yeah, maybe we'll find out between this recording and the airing. He made a pass but with a coconut. It's never right. It's never right. But what astounds me about this, I was thinking about the 90s. This is a 1990 game.

Out of all of the TV shows that were revived into semi-ironic movies, this never got one. It feels like it could have been in the works forever. I can't believe Chris Elliott was never cast as Gilligan. Oh my God. That's perfect. That's so perfect. Chris Elliott and John Goodman. That works. I mean, he was friendly. They were on Roseanne. They've acted

together. And it's perfect casting. Thanks. That's what I'm going to be doing is my next career. A 60-year-old Chris Elliott can play Gilligan. I would have traveled back in time and cast people in sitcom remakes in the 80s. When I get depressed in the pop culture business, it's because I feel like I'm this close to needing to explain Gilligan's Island to people under 30 years old. Yeah, really. I mean, which was just so ubiquitous everywhere. Everybody knew what this was. And I'm sure if they made a movie, it would be like the Brady Bunch movie where it would be like vignettes of the most memorable parts of the series. And it's like, you guys have all seen these before.

You guys all know what these are. So actually the very Brady sequel half implies it's connected to Gilligan's Island. Really? I forgot about that. Because the, it's got to Hawaii. The cheeky curses. Well, it's not just that that the husband, the dead husband of Mrs. Brady, he in that movie is. said to be a professor

and that he was lost on a trip. And so they just think he's dead. So the plot of the movie is a guy pretends to be her ex husband, thus invalidating her marriage and she's not a Brady anymore. But then that guy was just faking it the whole time. But maybe her real

professor husband is alive just trapped on an island somewhere. With Marianne, so forget about it. He's moved on too. I just, every joke you can make about it is so hack and comedians have been making them for 40 years. This was like the basis of most stand-up comedy action in the 80s, I think.

But it was only three... It was only three seasons, and a professor can build anything. And, like, the last 10 episodes just feature a car. Like, made out of bamboo and coconuts. It's a car. And that 800 people had been to that island. Yes. One of them would have said, hey, on this island, there's some people here.

It's so silly, it's wonderful. They usually alienate all those people by the end, so they're like, you guys can die on this island. And I remember seeing Nintendo Power this game was coming out. And I was unironically, very, very excited. I excitedly rented this, loving Gilligan's Island. Like, wow, they made a game out of this old show that I love. That was canceled before my, listen to before your father was born. Yes.

Yes. I saw the last joke in the game is that they can make a wish to leave the island, but then Gilligan stupidly says, man, I wish I had an ice cream right now. I could eat a mountain of it. And then Gilligan, D.S.E. Do you see what happened to the island? It's a mountain ice cream. The show didn't have that budget, though.

So only in the game can you see a mountain of ice cream. Our next, the property, our next game is another weird Konami property, which I find inexplicable, the Lone Ranger. This could be one of the best licensed games on the NES because it looked like a good game. It is, okay, so this is the most inexplicable license we're going to be talking about today. The Lone Ranger TV series was not being replayed in the early 90s. I never saw it. It was from the 50s, I believe. There are like 30 serials.

There's a radio show. It is a TV show for sure. It was a TV show in the 50s. Based on the radio show, there was no reboot project in the works in the 90s. And the latest thing that we had is the 2013 movie with Johnny Depp. Really good. Everyone loved it. I'm sure it will go on to have many sequels like Pirates of the Caribbean, right?

But, yeah, this game, it feels like a mix of many Konami games of the era. It has like the Zelda-Light feeling of Go-Amon, and it plays a bit like Castlevania, except you have a gun instead of a whip. You have a lot of conversations with people in towns and in Tucson, Arizona, and in Laredo, Texas. Yeah, it really jumps around. And that's quite a trip. Yeah. And there are first-person dungeon sequences with shooting in them. So if you have a zapper, you can use that.

If not, you can move a crosshair around. So there's a lot happening. This is a very, very ambitious game for a lone ranger license game in 1991, a very, very late NES game. And someone on Twitter pointed out, this game feels like a spiritual sequel to Konami's Getsu Fumaden, which is a sort of a very Japanese, Castlevania-ish game with, like, Yokai and stuff in it. Have you played this at all? Also closely connected to TMNT. That too, yeah. I think it was like the same engine, basically.

And also the composer, Maizawa, composed for both games. Yeah, this game. So there's like a big crossover connection here. Like Mission Impossible, like Roller Games, this game features like the Konami sound team at their 8-bit finest. And the William Tell Overture in this game feels like ripped right out of Perodias. Like this is the arrangement they would make for Perodias that series. Like this game has such good music. I think I want to put all the music from this game in this episode.

It is so, so very good. But I don't know anyone who played this game. I never saw it. But just going through the let's play, playing the ROM, I'm like, man, this is such a quality game. I wish it didn't have the Lone Ranger attached to it. This could be anything else. It's just a Cowboy. There's no Lone Ranger specific things in it, really.

I completely ignored it because it was a Lone Ranger game. And I have been trained to assume it's based on a TV or movie property. It's going to be crap. I think we talked about it before the show. Lone Rangers feels like that property that's been foisted on all of us. And, like, Dad, are you a fan? No, I don't know what this is about. It's like a curse that's befallen all of man.

Yeah, did you know that the Lone Ranger is connected to Green Hornet? It's owned by the same people. And actually, in continuity, the Green Hornet is a descendant of the Lone Ranger and inspired by him. Seth Rogen is related to the Lone Ranger. They've attempted that in a recent comic book reboot. That was pretty all right, the Green Hornet one. And I didn't read the Ranger one. It's too boring.

I just can't. This also, Konami does something in this game they did in at least two other games of the era. They sneak in a Japanese as Hell stage into the game where it doesn't belong. So the last or second to last stage in this game is a samurai castle. That reminds me a lot of the samurai TV set in the Simpsons arcade game and the Samurai stage in the Ninja Turtle's arcade game N. So it was very Konami move of the time to be like, we were putting a Japanese as hell thing in this game for American kids to freak them out maybe or to make them absorb our culture in some way. It's all a secret conspiracy. The Lone Ranger meets the last samurai.

Yes. But, yeah, play this game. It will never be licensed. It will never come out in any virtual console format. But it is such a cool, weird, very, very well-made Konami gem that is just escaped most given the time it came out and given the license. I feel like this game did not get a fair shake and just watching it and playing it. I'm like, man, this is such a quality game.

So, way to go, Konami. Making the most out of the Lone Ranger. So our next game, technically it is based on the movie, but is actually, It has more to do with the TV series. It's the Adams family, made by those great guys at Ocean. And, yeah, this is probably one of their better games, to be fair. So there are two versions of this game. There are many platforms, but the 8-bit version is different than the 16-bit version.

Yeah, yes one looks like shit. It's much worse. The Super N-E-S-1 looks a little better. We talked about this with Fester's Quest, just finally having that revelation, like, there was no Adam's family movie. That's true, not yet. You're this big of a fan of the one or two-season Adams' family. show. If you're wondering why we didn't mention Pester's Quest, we did an entire episode about it last year.

That was featured on the AV Club. It was that good. So go back and listen to that one. But this game is much better. Not much better, but it's notably better. But it's so Sean Aston from, or John Aston, sorry. John Aston, right. Yes.

Very different. So the Apev versions really quick. Father of Justice for Bob. Yes. The Apeb versions have some light adventure elements and they're really more of like a microcomputer action platformer game where it's like every screen has like a label on it and Super NES is the same way. It is more based on Super Mario World though in terms of how it plays.

Like you're not picking up items to use on other items like Maniac Mansion. You're just more like run from right to left. But the one thing I noticed about this game and we're talking about likeness rights earlier is that it feels like they got the likeness rights to everybody but Raul Julia because in the NES game and the 16 bit versions of this game, you will see the. the portraits of all the characters. And it's like, oh, that's Angelica Houston. That's Wednesday Adams.

Christopher Lloyd. And it's like when you get to Gomez, that is not Raul Julia. That is not John Aston. That is some weird, like, if they made it version of both of those guys. He was saving his likeness rights for the Street Fighter movie game. That's true. They were in that. But I don't know what happened.

I remember, so the Sprite looks just like John Aston. Like, he has got that toothy grin. And I remember in the Nintendo Power magazine, seeing. a preview image of this. And remembering it because it's like the Sprite is different in the preview version of the game and the beta version or whatever you want to call it. So I feel like there was some sort of Raul Julia likeness rights debacle that they could not work out by the time the game came out.

So instead they stole John Aston's likeness or bought it for much cheaper. And who's still with us? I was shocked to find out. I bet John Aston was right there going like, I'll end it, whatever you'd pay him, I'll take half. And both depictions of Gomez are fantastic. They're both different, but I love John Aston and I love him. Royal Julia. They're both like very, they both know what to do with that role. And I always

prefer the Adams family to the Munsters. Oh, yeah. They're funny. I didn't used to until the movies. The Monsters was the Beatles to the Adams family beetle. The monkeys to the, oh, forget it. I get it. God dang it. Jeremy's falling asleep over here. But this game is pretty interesting and that in both

versions, it's a semi-open world-ish game of the era in which you just start in front of the mansion and you can go into the mansion, you can go explore the grounds. You can go look into the various rooms, which open up in the different levels. Games weren't really like this at this time. Platformers weren't really like this at this time.

So I feel like for as not great as it is in construction, there are some cool, like, fundamental ideas at work. But ultimately, it is an ocean game, and they can only be so good. The hitbox is all wrong on the NES one, and there's so many times in the long play I watched. It's just like, no one would know a death. That platform is going to disappear. You gave no warning. And it was really just about like, can you collect a million dollars? Then you can open up the cage that Morgana is in and then pop on the heads of the two guys who kidnapped her.

But it fits with the both fit with the movie storyline of them losing their fortune. In a bit, yeah. I mean, slightly. Yeah, but the TG16 game, which I didn't include, is falls a movie exactly in that you play The Lawyer. What? You don't play any family member. You play, I think, Dan Hayeda. Dan Hadea.

Hadea, yeah, you play as him. Robert De Niro Light. I think he is the villain of the movie, too. He is the villain of the movie. So you play as him in the TG16 version of the game. This actually happened. It's real. I'm not kidding.

There's a Dan Hadea sprite. There's a Dan Hadea platformer. Oh, my God. The dad from Clueless, right? Yeah. Yeah. So first husband of the first wives club. Really?

Okay. Of course. It's a classic movie. Make my word for it. So we're running out of time. I'm going to get through these next two games really quick because they are classics. So, of course, we have

homie declown. I never heard of this until this moment. Yeah, wow. 1993 by Capstone Software, this is so not remember. There is one YouTube video online. It's not even a full play-through. But you can play this

for free on Archive.org because all that DOS archive stuff happened. I assume Capstone gets no money and good because this game is garbage. It's so strange, though, because it's like a scum game. And there's actually some thought put into some of the graphics. Some of the animation is really nice.

There's some well... It has the same font. There's some well-made things about the game, but it's a lot like Elf and that it's like... It's an adventure game where you have to do ten things to win, but in between those things is like a nightmare world of instant death and horror. It's like the top-down parts of TMNT, or really it's like Fester's Quest. Yeah.

Except on a PC, so it doesn't scroll smoothly. It's like you see the screen redrawing eight blocks at a time. You can't see the danger that's coming towards you, in other words. It looks really awful. But the adventure sections, like, if I didn't know better, I would think, oh, it's like a scum game based on homie the clown? What? Yeah, Capstone bought a lot of licenses to things. There is a Wayne's World Adventure game, too, in this fashion that they made this game.

And someone explained a living color to the kids. It was a 90 to 94 series. Very rival. A fantastic sketch comedy show given, I would say, A lot of creative license. You've probably heard at least one of us on Talking Simpsons talk about, well, The Simpsons got a really good deal from being an early show to Fox. Keenan Ivory Wayans, director of the fantastic I'm going to get you suck a kind of got that same deal to make his own sketch show. And it seems like the studio didn't interfere because they were doing stuff I'd never heard anybody say or do on television before.

Yeah, I mean, going back to watch clips of this, there's stuff that's just like this could not be on TV and probably shouldn't have been back then. It was on Fox, wasn't it? Yeah, it was on Fox. They had a looser play with things. Yeah, they hung their hat on that. And, like, it was rude, ribled. And I don't know that there was another black sketch comedy show before in living color. Not really.

And we should point out to the kids and younger people that Fox made a name for it. It's like, Fox is an institution now. Fox is just like a regular network. Yeah. They made a name for themselves by being, like, edgy, like married with children. There was a time when the Simpsons was edgy and dangerous and threatening America. And the fucking president name dropped it as a problem. Well, on Fox would...

Murphy Brown and Bart Simpson. Yes, the Republicans' greatest enemies. Well, and Fox would take over the local syndicated thing for two hours at night, and that was it. It didn't even have, it didn't have a late-night talk show. And it didn't have news either. Boy, those were the days. Many people you might know got their start there, Jamie Fox, Jim Carrey, the girlfriend, square, the woman from square one, she was on the show.

Oh, yeah, one of the fly girls was Jennifer Lopez, uh, all the Marlon, uh, Marlon Kim Wayans. Did we say Jim Carrey yet? Jim Carrey, yeah, yeah. Okay. Jim Carrey, please watch that Jim and Andy documentary. It's so cool.

Uh, and most notably Damon Wayans, the breakout star, the first person to leave the show because of characters like Homey the Clown. Yeah, I think he was the breakout. Because we discovered that, that he has like an in-canon reason. He's such a dick on Talking Simpsons. We never knew this. Oh, you're right. Homey the clown.

has been arrested so many times and is on so many court-ordered community service that's why he's there entertaining the kids that's why he doesn't want to be there that's why he hits them over the head with the Yeah I mean the joke it's a one joke character but it's fun to watch where

How we don't play that? They want him to perform a clown trick and he just will hit them and be like I'm not going to make a fool out of myself He's just like a surly ex-time He's also like you think I'm going to bend over backwards for your white ass tired of that shit

B'all me don't play that Some of the sketches age well I think that's the one... It's better than handyman. It's the... Oh, God. Oh, yeah. I actually, I watched some of those just out of morbid curiosity because I watch them as a kid.

I'm like, dear Lord. There's almost nothing redeemable in there. And I'm positive, Blank Man was a Handyman movie until somebody said, guys, we got to soften this. We cannot do this. But Homie was also created by Paul Mooney. Yes. Very comedian. And so was the first sketch was written by him.

And that's what disappointed me when I watched the gameplay. I was like, oh, okay, a homie, the clown game. It'll be about him hitting people with his sock the entire time. It's an action game, right? Like, no, it's just conversation. No kids. He should be hitting children the entire time. That's what the game should be.

And the closest you get to homie being homie in the gameplay video I watch is that, he has comebacks, which he will then say as a clip of dialogue, though. He has like three comebacks. I think there's also the vocal clip of Homie Don't Play that, like the actual voice clip of it. Yeah, it's one of the comebacks. I feel certain it's not Damon Wayne. so someone online can be the master of this game because no one has written about it no one has made a whole play-through video of it no one i think we are doing the most work about this

game that anyone has done in the history of calling to you bob the games press but turnouts dot com you have CMS access oh my god homie the cloud a definitive guide but i want to mention capstone they were a very bad pc developer they made this game i want to tell you what they moved on to after after failing at gaming games they became a corporation that would provide VR tours of under construction condos via the build engine. So they would make you a Duke Nukem 3D map of your future home. So imagine this

but not extruded 2.5D. Exactly. It's like, why is there a gun in front of me at all times? Can I interact with the toilet? I've got balls of steel. I wonder if you could actually break the toilet in this. Your assy. So for obvious reasons, this business venture did not last long, like building

your condo out of the build engine. Interestingly, there's another company's name on the title screen and it escapes me now, but it's I want to say it's not sign-app software, but it's something along those lines. So I looked it up because apparently they're like the developer or publisher of the game and they don't credit themselves with this game. It doesn't show them on their resume. Well, homie, the clown has lost a time, so I think they're safe.

The reputation is safe. No, we've dug it up and now they're going to be excommunicated. Take that. So our final game for today is Home Improvement, Power Tool Pursuit. Bull. 1994. Okay, Home Improvement. Doing the Simpsons and Talking Critic, Talking Simpsons and Talking Critic, we again

rediscovered just how big Tim Allen was in 1994, 1994, 1995. Home Improvement was the number one sitcom. If you think The Simpsons was big, when Home Improvement was number one, the Simpsons was like number 40 in the ratings, number 30 in the ratings. In 1994, Tim Allen had the number one TV show, number one book, and number one movie. Wow. He was like. Santa Claus.

He was about to be in Toy Story, too. And Toy Story 95. So, like, these years were good to Tim Allen. He is now the crankiest billionaire alive. But this is, like, Tim Allen, everything he touched her into gold. So, of course, someone had to make a home improvement game. And Imagineering did it. The people behind Bart versus the Space Mutants, those great game designers.

They finally did it. And Bart meets Radioactive Man. So you could tell how good the people behind this game were. Chris, you stream this game on laser time. Because Dave. liked home improvement enough to have rented this a couple times as a kid. I will admit, I watched probably six seasons of home improvement.

No, no, me too. Like 100 plus episodes I've seen in my lifetime. But it was in hindsight, because we just because of your recommendation, Bob, I watched the Dana Carvey documentary. That's so good. Yeah. They talk about how being that close to home improvement both raises profile and sunk its same. Same with the critic. Yeah, same thing happened with the critic.

And because everybody was watching it. And I remember fondly more everything around home improvement than I actually remember just home improvement. But we played the game. It's what Dave coined, since we play a ton of shitty license games, an airplane hanger game. I like, I love that terminology. I don't know if he came up with it, but like the idea, it's just a giant airplane hangar, throw shit wherever you want.

Yeah, there's no rhyme or reason to it. I feel like even, even quote unquote, good games like Earthworm Jim have the same sort of design philosophy. Just like there's no, I can't tell where I am or where I'm going or what direction I should be moving. Just collect everything. Am I supposed to collect an item? Yeah, yeah, dude, just collect an item or something. It's somewhere in here. It's somewhere.

You'll find it eventually. You'll love it. You'll have a great time. And a good platform action game design is something that was really sort of created in Japan by the Japanese. And they kept their inscrutable secrets hidden from foolish barbarians of the West. Like we just European and American games of that era, platformers, were not good. They're the worst, dude. There was like no art to.

They just wanted to make a big space. Like, well, we made a bigger space. than this other space. It's very artless. And in fact, like Tim Taylor in this game controls a lot of Earthworm Jim and that he has a variety of weapons. He fires in various directions. And this game was actually, so Imagineering is a bizarre story. I feel like, I feel kind of bad for the developers.

So it is basically two notable 2,600 developers, David Crane and Gary Kitchen, failing to adapt to modern expectations of what a game should be. So we keep seeing this happen with Imagineering's games. Maybe it was a budget issue. But I think really they just did. didn't know how to make a more complex game for a different audience. Because it uses like the concede of tool time being in a studio that you're in a studio with a bunch of other productions. So that's why you have a prehistoric level. So Tim Allen is killing people in dinosaur costumes with chainsaws in this game.

This does happen. Yeah. And in fact, this is one of, I wanted to point this out because it's the only place you'll hear. This is one of two game boxes with Richard Karn on the cover. So Richard Kahn? Yeah, Family Feud. So Richard Kahn plays Alf. He's on this, and then 10 years later, the Family Feud Box.

Yes. And I should say I get to look like this because my girlfriend's childhood crush, Richard Carn. More flannel. I can totally live up to that. You need workboots and flannel. I'm halfway there. And hide behind a fence. That's Wilson.

Never, oh, was that that? That's Wilson. I don't think so, Tim. You don't know your home improvement can and Jeremy. I sure don't. You know your night writer, though. You return that Mission Impossible DVD. Don't come at me with your, yeah.

The entire series. I'm going to confess, I did not actually. buy that home. Oh, damn it. You ruined it. Oh, fine. Just buy it. I'll suck it up.

Give it away. Sacrifice $15. We'll all sign it and then send it to one lucky fan. Maybe it will be you. What a terrible price. We'll just leave it on Peter Graves' grave. Someone's going to get this at Midwest Gaming Classic. Yeah.

We'll sign it all. Yeah, it's going to be great. So, see us in Minneapolis. Is that where it happens? No, that's in Minnesota. It's not Wisconsin. The other place in Milwaukee? Yes, Milwaukee.

No, Milwaukee. I should go to that. Just as good. We've been there like two or three times. You were there? We get my girlfriends from there. I should totally go. Well, if you show up in one of those M-Towns at the right time, we might give you a copy of the bad Mission Impossible series.

We might put it in Homey D. Clown's sock and hit you over the head with the band. We could do that, too, pending any lawsuits or anything. We'll talk to our lawyers. I don't think so. Milwaukee don't play that. That's okay. We're saving that. So we didn't get to some games.

This was a delightful mess. I love looking at bad, weird games, especially uncovering things for people like Homey D. clown and the Dallas Quest. But yes, thank you so much for listening. I'm sort of out of energy. Let's have everyone else tell us who they are and what they do and that'll go last. So, Jeremy, how about you? I do this. This is

me. I'm Jeremy Parrish. You're taking responsibility for this episode? No, not this episode, but this podcast, Retronauts, I'm, that's what I'm doing. The Retronauts business, all the stuff around the podcast. It's, yeah, that's me. On Twitter, you can find me as GameSpite talking about retronauts and also

complaining about politics. And I'm also going to complain about the fact that I didn't get to mention the one game I really wanted to bring to the table for this. Let's do it now. All right. So there's an Game Boy game that is really weird but good called Cyraid. And it's this bizarre sort of platform puzzler where occasionally a giant moon walks out from a door on the side of the stage and stomps around and causes the blocks that you've dissolved to regenerate. It's really weird, but it's kind of good. in Japan it was called Bacoretsu Senshi Warrior, which means exploding soldier warrior.

Excellent. It's a great name. But, okay, so this was an original Game Boy Black and White game released in 1990. But 10 years later, the same publisher, Epic, reissued it for Game Boy Color and took away the original title and characters, which was like a science fiction theme, and replaced them with a children's variety show. called Ohasuta, Yamachan, and, I want to say Rodney. It was like a Japanese, like the main Japanese host of the show, which is still running, by the way. The guy's no longer the host. No exploding soldiers.

No exploding soldiers. Okay. But like the game was completely the same, but it was like the Japanese co-host. And I think an African-American, like guy who was his, I guess, a regular on the show. at that point. So Bob Sap? Yeah, it was, no, he's like kind of this, it was more Urkel looking, actually. Okay.

Kind of nerdy and scrawny. It's just really weird that this thing, this specific game was re-skinned for a children's variety show on Game Boy Color. Wow. It's one of the most bizarre things I've come across on Game Boy Works. When will that be on Game Boy Works? 20-30. Yeah, the 30s, for sure.

Is this, are you going alphabetical? Chronological. So Game Boy Color, that's a ways away. So did you get your plugs out? I don't recall. I said GameSpite. Game Boy World. Oh, yeah, Game Boy World.

Yeah. Okay, cool. Game Boy World, yes. If you want to know more about Cyraid, yes, that's right. The source material for this game that I just talked about, check out Game Boy Works on YouTube. And it's C-Y-R-A-I-D. I will tell you more about Cy-R-R-A-D than anyone else on the planet.

I am the definitive expert of that and Hayankio Alien. Oh, yes. You can find out what we're doing over on Lasertime. I think I recently did a show I was really proud of where we tried to find the worst review of the most critically revered things in the universe. It's a good one. Who said the shittiest things about Star Wars rated at the Lost Ark Portal, Mario Odyssey? And again, please don't call them and harass them. That was not the goal of our show.

But Lasertime picks a different topic every week. We just passed her Christmas crap. So did I have any reviews show up in that? No. I'm disappointed. Which, do you, can you think of one you might have hated the rest of the world was? Yeah, Ultimate Ghost and Goblins, or ghouls and Ghosts or whatever. Zenogears.

I don't know. Game it four. History proved you right, I think. It did. I don't remember how much I like that game. So, from 06, the PSP game? Yeah. Yep.

Man, it's been a while. It was but. But there's that, later time, we do different topics all the time. Oh, you guys were on for Looney Tunes. I believe we will be, yes. There'll be multiple episodes where we'll do a ton of Looney Tune tune stuff, including on our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash Lasertime

where we're examining all the references in Looney Tunes and we talk to who I consider the leading animation historian in the universe right now, Jerry Beck. If you like Tibur McGee and Molly, and I assume you do,

you'll love the episode I'm on. Yes, yeah, hopefully, you can check that out, Lasertime Podcast.com, which also hosts a bunch of other shows. 30, 2010, where you look 30, 20, and 10 years ago to the past of that week.

Holy shit, Jeremy, if there's a better resource for finding the release date of games in 1987 and 88, I would love to know it. You have to shake Franks of all, Aldine Hill falls out of his pockets. There's the, it's very, very hard.

But we try and... If you want, like, American releases to the week, you're not going to happen. It's never going to happen, right? That info doesn't exist. We keep peppering them around. And then I love it. Our comments are like, this game didn't come out. I'm like, we know.

Like, it came out whenever it got to your city. Whenever the truck showed up. Whenever the truck showed up. It was toy distribution, not electronics. Yeah, so I love talking about that stuff. But it's our anecdotes, plus re-looking at things that came out 30, 20 and 10 years ago of that week. and I'm finally glad we were past it, probably whenever this episode comes out,

Titanic. I got to re-watch Titanic and see if that held up. Is this worthy of being the best movie of the decade? Oh, yeah, we're in 2018 now. And it turns out, kind of. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's justifiably good. But that, Invingia Game Apocalypse,

our video game show every Monday, kind of retro-y, but talk about a lot of new releases too and a little top-five feature in every single show. And if you wanted to support us and keep us doing this full-time, patreon.com slash laser time, I'm done.

Henry. Hi, I'm H.E.N.E.R.Y.G. on Twitter. And you can follow me there for all my political thoughts if you can't get enough of them from Jeremy. But most importantly, I host Talking Simpsons with these two jerks here. What? Chris. Yes, not Jeremy, but Chris and Bob. We go through every episode of The Simpsons from the beginning.

And we are, I guess, in season seven maybe when this episode post. Yeah. And also, though, we are supported by Patriots. We go to patreon.com slash talking Simpsons for tons of exclusive is the most important one I'll talk about right here is we did an interview with Paul Provenzano who is an executive producer on early Simpsons video games

and he gives us tons of insights into what it was like working on licensed games for TV shows with first acclaim and then he worked for Fox Interactive and he told us stories not just about Simpsons video games but about X-Files video games about aliens games And the fantastic diehard trilogy. And yeah. I love the diehard trilogy.

Great interview, too. We learned a ton of stuff there. That's on patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. Hello, I am Bob Mackey. I've been your host. And look forward to my Boss Fight books entry on Homey DeClown coming in 2019. I will publish it by myself. Don't tell the Boss Fight's book people and they'll get in trouble.

I'll get in trouble rather. And you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And if you're listening to this, you should know that Retronauts is Patreon-supported. If you want to help out, go to Patreon. dot com slash retronauts for just three dollars a month you will get every episode a week ahead of time without ads and at a higher bit rate and i think that comes out to like 50 cents a podcast and i think we're at least worth 50 cents a week i mean i at least at least i am so please if you can afford what are you implying about me uh jerry we'll talk later jeremy i'm fighting with you but

if you want to give to the show we both get the money if you want to get to the show go to patreon dot com slash retronauts and you get a lot of bonus stuff the the week ahead of time episodes are a huge incentive, but there's stuff on top of that. If you can just give us a dollar a month, that'd be good, too. But the show is fan-supported. We appreciate every penny we get. So thanks so much for listening, folks. We'll see you next week with a brand-new episode.

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What's in your wallet? What's in your wallet? Capital One Bank USANA. 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.

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.

weight 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.