Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 148: Namco's Arcade History

Episode Date: April 23, 2018

Jeremy, Chris, and Benj take a comprehensive journey through the catalog of an arcade legend: Namco. From their humble beginnings through mega-hits like Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Galaga, it's wall-to-wall coin-op classics up in this episode. This is the first of a series of Namco retrospectives and covers the years 1978-1982!

This week in Retronauts, are you going to Namco my way? Hi, everyone. Welcome to yet another episode of Retronauts. We keep doing these. You keep listening. it's great. I am Jeremy Parrish, and with me this week, we have Benj Edwards. And Chris Sims or Puckman, as I'm known originally. Only in Japan. And, you know, they did release some merchandise under the name Puckman. The game originally did ship with that name, and there is a cabinet, an original

Puckman cabinet at NAMCO's headquarters in Tokyo, or there was. I don't know, they moved the buildings a couple of years ago. I haven't been to the new one. But the old one had it in the last. lobby. And if you tried to take a picture of it, this old man would come out and say, please do not take photos in the lobby, except he was said in Japanese. But in a way that you understood, he meant, don't take photos in lobby. It's, it was a very, a very, just of anything, basically, very quintessentially Japanese experience. Really enjoyed it. Anyway, this week, we are talking about Namco. So we have done over the past, God, a year or so,

a history of Sega's arcade games up into the late 90s. And I think we still have one more Sega episode in us, but I thought we would shift gear. Yeah, we do. Yeah, we do. You love Sega. Yeah, I do. Yeah.

I'll have fun with that. But I wanted to shift gears and focus on another legendary arcade-making, arcade game-making company? Yes. And that would be Namco, yes. Do I feel? On Sega, yeah. We're going to talk about Sega today.

Namcoe, I've always kind of seen as Sega's rivals in the arcade space, Nintendo and Sega, you know, were very infamously rivals in the home gaming space. But I feel in the arcades, really the greatest arcade games of the 80s into the 90s, they came from Namco. You know, once you get past like the sort of Atari crash, if you just want to talk about games coming from Japan, unaffected by all that those shenanigans around Atari then yes it's hard to come up with better than Namco and Sega

yeah I have an observation related to that point which is that when I was a kid we had an Atari and all my favorite Atari games it turns out later they were made by Namco and I had no idea I thought man Atari makes the best games Pac-Man you know pole position you know

dig dug oh man I love those Atari games and then it turns out they were just licensed from Namco Yes, because Namco didn't distribute in the U.S. Galaxian. I love Galaxian. Yep. So we're going to talk about a lot of these games. Again, like with the Sega episodes, this will be spread across a few different parts

because there's just so many games, so many great games to talk about, that we would do them a disservice by, you know, just rushing through them. So we want to take some time and cover a lot of games this episode, and then a few months later we'll get back together and talk about some more and just kind of stretch out, be very languid, you know, kickback, sip a nice tea, mint julep, enjoy some Namco games.

Anyway, to begin with, I was going to say we should talk about the history of Namco, but there's not really too much to talk about. The thing that kind of surprised me, which I guess I knew, but when I was researching this episode, is that Namco was actually kind of a relatively late entrant into arcade game making. When you look at Sega or Atari and a lot of other companies, even Nintendo, like they were making games in the arcade games. in the early to mid-70s, whereas Namco's first game was 1978, and they really, you know,

that was just one game. They didn't really kind of get serious until the 80s. Like, I just feel like they're a company whose legacy of arcade games is so rich that I feel like, oh, yeah, they've been around forever. But really, they were kind of late getting into the business. I have a question. Go ahead. Is Namco a compressed version of a long Japanese name?

Yes, it's, I want to say, Nakamura, Nakamura. amusement company. Company, yeah, cool. And the story goes that the founder, whose name I totally forgot to put in the notes, I just left to blank here, early history of the company. Yeah, Nakamura-san basically started an amusement company which consisted of like a single, like, coin-operated ride,

you know, like a coin-operated pony or something on the roof of an apartment's building. a department store in Tokyo. And from that, he managed to build up this entire amusement vending company through the course of the 60s and 70s. And then as video games inevitably became the wave of the future for coin-op amusements, then they got into video games. And if you look at the earliest games Namco made,

pretty much all of them for the first year or two were designed either by external companies or by a guy named Toru Iwatani, who, of course, you probably know as the creator of Pac-Man. So he was like their main designer. They started out pretty small. But, you know, just the quality of the games that they created, the personality and just the addictive quality of their arcade games

turned them into a giant in short order. And so, you know, Namco, I think, is better than any other company at celebrating and republishing. It's arcade catalog, the Namco Museum series. We've done an entire Retronauts episode on. And that was, you know, at that point, at this point, Namco Museum is actually retro. It was like 1995 on PlayStation. But it was, in a lot of ways, the first really serious compilation of arcade games.

It was, you know, five volumes in the U.S., eight volumes in Japan, just packed full of arcade games and, you know, artwork and history. Heritage. Yeah. I love that. They really get it, and they publish Namco Museum games for pretty much every platform, including Nintendo Switch most recently. I like that because it's kept their games very fresh and current because they're timeless. Like, the best ones, like Pac-Man, are just absolutely timeless.

So there's no reason why you can't still play Pac-Man today, you know, and have it be just as good as it was then. Yeah, especially if you, you know, play the Switch version and have a vertical grip to hold the system in. I've heard about that. Yeah, man, that thing, that's a great idea. Yeah. So Namco, like I said, they do a great job of keeping their sort of legacy in circulation. And every Namco Museum volume has a different lineup of games. There's usually going to be certain standards there. Like, there's probably always going to be a Pac-Man game. You're probably always going to get Gallagher and Dig-Dug. But beyond that, they kind of vary things up. So there's always a different mix. And every time a Namco Museum volume comes out, people are like, oh, it's another Namco museum museum. Yeah. Okay. Well, here is a Namco Museum that allows you to play classic arcade games on a system you could not previously play them on before. Why is that a bad thing? Okay, so you're tired of DigDug, but on the other hand, now you can play DigDug on Nintendo Switch or on Xbox 360 as opposed to not being able to, so I don't really see the downside there. And a new generation of people can play them too and appreciate the fundamentals. Yeah, and even if it's, you know, like elementary kids who are coming to it and saying, oh,

this game looks like Minecraft, because everything's blocky. Okay, you know, I'm going to take it. That's fine. Like, there is, with the best of these games that we're going to talk about, and there's some really great ones in this episode's list of topics to discuss, there are some games that, like you said, you know, they're incredibly fun to play even now, just as the way they were back then. Like, you know, pretty much any time I go to an arcade show or to a classic games convention, I stumble across a copy of DigDug, you know, an arcade unit of DigDug.

and I play it because it's really fun. And, you know, I'm a little burned out on Pac-Man, but Miss Pac-Man I can always play Galaga or Galaxia. Galaga. Galaxine doesn't hold up so well, but Gallagher is so good. Gallagher is one of those timeless games. You see it in every arcade. Also, now, for the last 10, 15 years,

it's been part of a, like, a combo machine with Miss Pac-Man or something, you know. Class of 82. Yeah, there's a whole lawsuit about that. with the Ms. Pac-Man guys, because, you know, I wrote that big article about Miss Pac-Man a few years ago, interviewing the creators of that. And Namco is using Ms. Pac-Man without their permission, without paying them royalties and stuff. It's a big story. Interesting.

Anyway. Miss Pac-Man is not within the purview of this episode. Yeah. Although, actually, I guess it should be. I'm not sure why it didn't come into my list. It's not technically a Namco game, but it, you know, sort of became back-borded into it. Yeah. Yeah, we'll talk about that.

when it comes to that. But we have had a full Pac-Man episode, so we don't need to belabor the point with Pac-Man, Miss Pac-Man, too much. There are so many other Namco games worth celebrating. And instead of talking about how we should celebrate them, why don't we celebrate them?

So if you set the way-back machine for 1978, Namco made a single video game. This was the year of Space Invaders. But because this was the year of Space Invaders, people hadn't started ripping off Space Invaders. I guess, you know, this actually constitutes a 40th anniversary episode for Namco's arcade games. so I didn't really think about that but hey great timing us way to go we're awesome yeah so the one game Namco produced in 1978 was called Gibi and it is kind of like a pinball game

and also kind of breakout and this was pretty much what you saw with pinball video games back until like 19 I don't know when did Bill Budge create the pinball construction kit was that 82, 81? Yeah, 83. Okay, so 83 somewhere. I think it was before that because a Nintendo... Oh, no, I think it was 83, because Nintendo published pinball for Famicom in 1984.

I mean, EA started in 83. And they published that game. So it's one of their first games. Right, okay. Yeah. So Bill Budge's pinball construction kit was the first... I would say the first video game, pinball game that you're like, oh, it's pinball. Before that, though, they all used, like, simplified physics

and were about breaking balls because, or breaking bricks with a ball, not breaking balls, because, you know, Atari's breakout was kind of a big deal. And so I guess they were like, well, moving ball on screen, pinball, breakout.

It's the same thing, right? Yeah. Atari actually made a home video pinball. You know, they did some video pinball video games, at least two of them in the 70s. Yeah, but they were like... Super not good.

Super chunky. And also, but they did a home video pinball that I have a console. It's like a dedicated console, and I swear it has that breakout element to it where you move a paddle, as in a flat paddle-like breakout, instead of two flippers,

to keep the ball in. Or maybe I'm just misremembering it. Right. So this, Gibi is very much a product of its time in that it is a black and white monochrome game, and it is technically considered pinball, but it does not play like pinball. ball. And I think the limitation on effective pinball video games at the time was trying to get the

ball physics to work, not just collisions, but just the idea that you would like flip a ball up and it would, you know, have the effect of gravity on it. And so you don't really have that in video games until a little later. So until then, it's like simple gravity where you just have, you know, momentum on the balls. And so they fly and bounce around and try to break bricks. I really like the idea behind this game. Because I feel like, it's one of the easiest impulses in early video games to understand that they would try and use video games to replace pinball tables because pinball machines are, you know, they take up a lot of space, they are difficult to maintain if something breaks. But pinball video games never quite feel right. Occasionally they do.

But I can see why they never really took off in the arcades because you could just play pinball. You could just go over and play pinball. And that's more satisfying. Yeah. But I like the idea of combining that with breakout, because breakout is the thing that video games can do very well. So, yeah, this one was an interesting idea. I played it for the first time today.

And a very interesting idea that I wish was not from 1978. Right. Well, I mean, they would explore this idea again pretty quickly, as it turns out. But I do want to kind of explain how it's set up. You have a table, quote unquote, table. which is a screen that like the top part of it is lined with bricks and then the sides are lined with bricks and then there's like the middle sort of well where you you have flippers and you're trying to keep the ball from falling into this well but on either side of the well you also you also have two gutters where you don't have any way to block the ball from going in there so you have to be careful not to flip the ball into the gutters because then you lose a ball but then there are also there are also two channels above that where some bricks are located so you have to it's it's really challenging to get the ball into those channels by like kind of angling it off some some inclined banks and shooting up into those channels without losing the ball in the gutters. So it's a challenging game,

even if there's not a lot to it. And let's see. This is a, yeah, so this is a black and white game, but it did have a color overlay. And because it had just a single screen layout, they were able to get very specific with the sort of design of the acetate. You know, you had space invaders with the color bands of acetate. So as invaders descended, they changed colors. Here you don't have anything moving around the screen except the ball. So you have some spaces where there's like a little bumper, like a little rubber band in the center of the screen that's blue.

So there's just this one space where the acetate overlay is blue. And then the bricks are all different colors. So when your ball goes in there, it changes color. But aside from that, everything is pretty static in terms of color. so it gives the illusion of being a more advanced game than it actually was in terms of tech. Yeah, that's really neat

that they did the anesthetes back then. That's clever. I love tricks like that to get around like hardware limitations. It works surprisingly well. I mean, I grew up in an era

where those kind of games were not still in the arcade, really. We played full color video games, but when I've gone back into an arcade that actually has the original space invaders, and I think Berserk used

to overlay and things like that, they actually, you know, it's a good experience. It's satisfying. It doesn't, it just, it seems, it seems like it's some kind of cheap trick or something, just thinking about it from a modern standpoint, but it actually works. But yeah, overlays were pretty common. I mean, you had all sorts of overlays with like the Fairchild Channel F and television, like different, different ways to kind of trick you into thinking, oh, like, there's more happening here. Odyssey One had an overlay. Odyssey One and Vectrix. Those are the only ones I know. I thought the Fairchild also did. No. Okay. Well, you know,

than I do, so I will take your word. Damn right. Yeah, I have seen a handful of arcade games that are black and white, but I don't think I've ever played one with the actual acetate on it. I've played just like standard space invaders in black and white. Yeah, the, maybe it was just so effective.

The illusion was so powerful that I didn't notice. I didn't think about it. Yeah, like, I do like the fact that, you know, modern Space Invaders' conversions will try to imitate the, the acetate overlays, and including sometimes, like, the Super NES version, has like some registration errors with the acetate. So there's little areas where the colors overlap that deliberately have like kind of blended colors, like someone didn't put the acetate on the screen

very cleanly. I like that's touch. It's, yeah, in the case of Space Invaders, there's a bottom, there are those like, you know, craters on the bottom. And it's really colorful. And it does add a dimension to the game that they couldn't produce with the graphics hardware of the time. Yeah, this doesn't get quite that sophisticated, but, you know, it is very much kind of working to the best of the tech that was available

at the time. And so that was it for 1978 for Namco. It was a very modest beginning. But almost immediately, Toro Iwatani put together a sequel to Gibi called Bombi, which was pretty much the same thing. It had a more elaborate layout and the color was more granular in terms of the overlay. It had better sense. sound effects as opposed to just like one kind of like the dying cow well no actually it wasn't dying cow Gibby just like had the pong ball hitting sound like the ball

collision sound whereas Bombie sorry is a much wider array of sound effects more like space invaders and it also has some more interesting visual effects like when the ball hits a bumper the bumper will pulse it'll become bigger all of a sudden

and then go back to its normal size but otherwise it's pretty much the same thing and almost immediately they came up with another sequel to Gibby called QDQ which is a much like this is the first one where you're like oh they're starting to do something different have you guys ever played QDQ no well probably on maim a long time ago

but is this isn't one of these I was mentioning earlier it replaces flippers with a pong like paddle at the bottom Doesn't one of these do that? I think it might have been QDQ. Now that you mentioned it, crap, I don't remember. They all kind of blurred together in my head. But this one is a lot different because instead of just having bricks at the top and along the side,

it gets rid of the bricks along the side, and it replaces the bricks at the top with like these. I mean, they're bricks, but they have, instead of like a brick texture on them, they have pictures of monsters. And when you clear away all the pictures of monsters, then an actual little monster named Walkman, who looks a lot like Pac-Man, comes out.

And if you hit him as he's walking slowly across the channel, you'll get bonus points. And then the bricks will reappear. Yeah, so there's more personality to this. I think it ran on color hardware, am I thinking here correctly? I'd have to go back and check. But yeah, anyway, it has like all these colorful, cute monsters.

and the screen layout is a lot different. Like the bricks at the top, instead of spanning the entire top, they're broken by a channel. So there's like a left well and a right well that have separate bricks for you to break. And then in the middle, this channel has like monsters that appear. And if you can shoot the ball up into the channel, then you will hit the monsters and get bonus points for that.

Sounds like an arcanoid precursor. Yeah, I mean, the monsters don't come down to attack you, but you can kind of see where maybe tight. got the idea for Arkanoid by looking at this and thinking, yes, what if monsters in my breakout? And so, so yeah, like you can kind of see some ideas here that would find some, some, some, you know, some further examination, exploration, whatever, iteration in the future. Yes, purchase. That's good. So that's Q to Q. Next up is Galaxian. And Galaxian was Namco's big breakout hit.

And I've been talking a lot. So one of you guys is going to talk about Galaxian. Galaxian is great It's a Thanks okay great So 1980 Yeah just kidding 1979 it says here

Is that no No I was saying we're moving on Oh okay moving on yeah Galaxyin was one of the first color arcade games At least mainstream ones And it was a space shooter where Well by color you mean color monitor

Not just like color overlay It actually had color graphics Yeah color monitor Of course there was color gotcha I think was probably the first one by Atari as we've learned through Ed Fry's doing some research. Anyway, and I think Galaxian had the innovation of those little clusters of ships dropping down at you. Well, first, you're kind of bearing the lead.

This is Namco saying, time to rip off Space Invaders. But instead of just doing the same Space Invader game that everyone else is doing, they were like, let's make it great. It feels like the sequel to Space Invaders. Like, it takes everything that was good about Space Invaders, which, you know, is still a very playable game 40 years later. And it speeds it up, makes it a faster-paced, gives the enemies more distinctive characteristics. It's a really fun game. Yeah. Galaxian, you say it's like the sequel to Space Invaders.

It's better than any of the sequels that Taito made for Space Invaders. That's true. They made Space Invaders, and then they made Space Invaders in color. And then they made like super space invaders, which was harder. They just couldn't get it. They couldn't break out of the space invader formula where you're sort of locked with a shield and stuff. There's something about it where it's, you know. And Galaxian, I think, was really the first game to say, let's take this concept and speed it up and make it more dynamic.

And that's really what Galaxian does. It's a faster game by far than Space Invaders. Like your ship moves really quickly at the bottom. The Galaxians, the enemies themselves. move back and forth across the screen. They don't go as far when they move, but they move back and forth much more quickly. And they don't descend as they move. Like the column of enemies always stays at the same level, you know, the same like coordinates, vertically speaking, on the screen. And instead of moving down as a group, what happens as, as Benj was saying,

they kind of peel off and attack individually. Yeah. That's a, it was a cool innovation. I played this port of this on the Atari 800 as a kid. Actually, it was on a 400, because we had one that my dad let me set up in my room, and it was on a black and white TV. And it was just so exciting. It had pulsing music, not music, you go, do-d-d-d-d-do-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d- and it was really ominous and cool. And it's a good memory, but, you know, I didn't play the actual arcade version

until probably 10 years later after that, and I was slightly disappointed, because I like the Atari version, but interesting. Yeah. Yeah, it was like one of the important things about the game is that it just made space invaders feel more dynamic. You mentioned enemies swooping down, but the only time enemies shoot at you is when they're descending.

Like the formation, the ranks at the top of the screen, they don't fire at you. So instead of, you know, being like where the invaders are constantly dropping bombs from their columns, the Galaxians only shoot at you as they swoop down to attack. So it gives you less time to react to their attacks. And it also means like bullets are moving in more unconventional, unpredictable patterns. You have to dodge the ships coming down too so they don't crash into you.

Right. It's like the birth of the bullet hell game, you know, because as much as it feels a little more forgiving and not quite as inexorable as space invaders in a lot of ways, like it does. fill up parts of the screen with shots, and it hymns you in in really, like, thrilling ways, honestly. Yeah, because it moves so much more quickly, the game, I think, has, you know, it affords you the luxury of being able to chew through more enemies more quickly. So, you know, Space Invaders, it takes a while to get to the second round and to the third round.

Galaxian, you get there really quickly. And so, you know, in the same amount of time, if you're playing for, for like three minutes or four minutes, like you're going to feel like you got further into Galaxian because you're going to take out more formations of enemies than you would in Space Invaders. Yeah, in Space Invaders, you do have a sense of existential dread as these,

they're coming down toward your base on your moon or your planet or whatever, and it's really kind of scary and ominous, and they're marching across the screen, getting lower and lower and stuff. And Galaxian feels like you're more in control of us. You're out in space. you're in a spaceship, you're loose and free and dodging and fighting and aliens. It's really cool. Yeah, but because the enemies are more dynamic and more vicious, then, you know,

the game still does go through, you know, a quarter pretty quickly. You just feel like you're doing more in that time and you're having a more exciting time. This was designed by a guy named Koichi Tashiro, who I don't know that much about, but he made a very good Space Invaders clone that really was a breakout hit for Namco. And I think really put Namco on the map and you don't never seen Namco do much with like Bombi or QDQ, but Galaxian is still a part of the company's legacy, like the Galaxian flagship, you know, the two really colorful ships that sort of hang out at the back of the ranks of the enemy formation. Like, those are icons for Namco. They show up in all sorts of games. They show up as bonuses in Pac-Man. And you can, like, get them on bottle caps

and key rings and stuff in Japan. Like, Namco really loves them. And they are kind of iconic to that game because, again, you know, Galaxian was the first game, or one of the first games, to have a color monitor. And as a result of that, like, you could have more detailed sprites, more colorful sprites, not just like single color slabs of screen, but you could have individual characters that had a lot of different colors within them. And the flagships really take advantage of that. They're very bright with primary yellow, red, blue. So they really stand out and they have an iconic design that you recognize immediately. And so this is just like a really key part of Namco's history. I think whenever I think of Namco games, I think of colorful. That's the first thing that comes to mind.

Colorful games. They're really colorful and bright primary colors that are attractive, candy, like video game candy. The jolly candy-like graphics. Yeah. Well, because a lot of times they're putting those really laser-bright colors against that black background, you know, like they do with Pac-Man and Miss Pac-Man. What did you say?

Elixir? Laser. Laser. Laser bright, yes. Pierce your eyeball. Yes. Very bright against black backgrounds. Correct. This was also a very important piece of hardware. The Galaxian board was cloned by lots and lots of people. Namco used it in some other products,

but lots of people cloned to the hardware and made their own knock-off software on it. Including Z80 It might have been or 8081 or something But even Midway ripped off the

Galaxian board for its Pac-Man I want to say Baby Pac-Man One of the bad Pac-Man games that Midway made without Namco's approval That was a

That was a galaxy board I mean the good ones were made by General Computer Junior Pac-Man and Miss Pac-Man. But if they did another one, I don't know. I think the computer part, the video game part of Baby Pac-Man is, or Pac-Man, whichever one has the pinball game in it. Oh, yeah.

That's the, that's Baby Pac-Man. Okay, that one's garbage. Okay, yeah. It's running on... That doesn't have a very good reputation. No, it's not a good game. Yeah. I played it last year at Portland Retro Gaming Expo, and it's a piece of crap.

I saw it once in person. But it's running on Galaxy. hardware, which is part of the problem. You know, just a year into making video games, and all of a sudden, Namco has its breakout in Galaxian. And they follow it up with Ketai Takara Sagashi. Everyone loves that game, right? Yeah. It's my favorite.

I love diver. Yeah, I don't think I'd ever seen this game before I started researching this, but it's a monochrome game, so it's kind of a step backward right there from Galaxian. and you control a diver. It's kind of like almost like a precursor to frogger and that you're trying to get from one side of the screen to the other, but then you go back up and you can only go one direction at a time. So you're diving into the water and there's just these endless streams of sharks that come at you and you have to like descend into the water to get treasure without getting hit by sharks

and then it pulls you back up once you get your treasure to go to the boat and the sharks are attacking again and that's it. There's a bit like that in Sword Quest Waterworld. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. You're swimming through the sharks. Interesting.

So that one's not great. There's another game they made in 1980. Actually, 1980 was not a great year for Namco, aside from one game. But 1980 also gave us King and Balloon. I love that title. Which a great title, but I discovered this

on the Namco Museum Encore for PlayStation that only came out in Japan, which was full of interesting games I'd never heard of before and I mainly got it for Rolling Thunder because I love Rolling Thunder so I started poking around

and seeing all these other games I was like King and Balloon, what's that? Well, it turns out it is basically a Galaxian clone and its claim to fame is that it has voice samples so you control like two little guys

moving a trebushé back and forth across like the floor of a castle and there's these like a formation of dudes with balloons who swoop down and attack you and they try to get past your treboshae to get to the king

who is scurrying back and forth underneath your treboset and if they get him then they swoop away with him they fly up in their balloon and try to take him off the screen and... Can you rescue him?

Yeah, you can shoot the balloon down and then he'll drop back and he's like, thank you and if he gets captured he's like, help, help, help. And I can't even imitate him because it's like super squeaky and annoying. Yeah.

And if you let him go off the screen, then he says, bye-bye. And that's this game's claim to fame, is that it has, like, some very simple voice samples. I don't think it's a very fun game, but maybe I'm wrong. Yeah, I think I've played this on, was this on one of the Namco collections? Is that what you just said? Yeah, it was on Encore. Okay, I feel like I played it. It might have been one of the more recent ones, too.

I've lost track of what's on which Namco collection. Yeah, I don't know which one. There's probably a guide to be written there that would be helpful. I just love that title because you don't have to ask what that game's about. No, it's about a king. King and balloon. Actually, there's multiple balloons. It's mini balloons.

Balloon is plural in this case. It only takes one. Only takes the one. Yeah. Well, in Japanese, there are no plurals. So if it's Japanese title, it could be multiple kings, could be multiple balloons. You don't know. The other...

Something to explore in the reboot. Right. The other sort of unknown game from 1980, like one I'd never heard of is Navalone, which I think is supposed to be Navarone, but you know, who can say? And this is a monochrome shooter that's kind of interesting because you have like a patrol boat that circles the left right sides of the screen and the bottom of the screen and you can move back and forth. And you're shooting at a pirate base in the middle of the screen and you're waiting until like there's kind of a barrier, sort of like around the MCP in the Tron game. And when the barrier opens up,

you can shoot the pirate and you win. There's not a lot to it. It sounds kind of like Starcastle in a way, aren't you describing? Yeah, yeah, kind of, yeah. But this has a rotary controller in the arcade, do you think? I've never played it in the arcades. So I didn't, I didn't look up the hardware.

It's weirdly iconographic where the, like the pirate base is a skull inside a box. There's a skull with an eye patch on. It's like it would be on a scientific. calculator. Yeah, unfortunately, the reference I'm going here, system16.com does not have photos of a hardware. It must be extremely rare. I wonder if this was even released in America. I doubt it because otherwise it probably would have been retitled Navarone.

Yeah. That is my guess. Anyway, so the thing about these games is they were, maybe except King and Balloon, they were developed outside of Namco by like third. parties. So Namco, I guess, put all of its eggs in making one game for itself for 1980, a game called Puckman. And you know this game. Chris, why don't you talk about Pac-Man? Pretty good.

Uh-huh. Yeah, no, you're a little dude to Maze who eats dots, and you have to run from ghosts. And there's a lot of ways to interpret that. Yeah, that's a pretty ambiguous description. You're a head, kind of a head. You're a circle. Circle face that you're a... You're a circle that opens and consumes.

And does this. You can't see what I'm doing little posts. You don't do that. Only on the side art. Only on the side art. But yeah, like this game, this is the definition of elegant in its simplicity. It moves really well. Like, it feels good to play.

I think there's a very good reason why this became what it is, which is a foundational video game. It's the Err-Maze game. Yeah. The very beginning of that. genre, really. Well, you know, besides Hayankyo Alien. Yeah, but I don't know. It's true.

You think Pac-Man ripped off Hayanko Alien? I don't think it ripped off. I mean, it's a top-down. It's got inspired by. I mean, that Hayanko Alien came out to like 78 in Japan and it was pretty, it made its round. It was in the arcades. I would definitely think that, you know, like

Toro-Yotani and the people he worked with to design Pac-Man were like, oh, this is a cool idea. Let's do something with this. So Hayanko Alien is the Ur-A-Mazion. game. Exactly. It inspired everything else. Yes, okay.

I'm glad we could settle in that. But yeah, Pac-Man is definitely none. They're all aliens. Okay. Is Hayankyo ghost a thing? Did you know there were monsters? They weren't even ghosts until 2,600 Pacta. True.

Really? And they were only ghosts in 2,600 Pac-Man because the system couldn't handle that many sprites on screen at once. Yeah, so they flicker and are translucent. I actually did not know that. They're maze monsters. It's crazy. Wow.

Mind blown. Yeah. We really don't need to belabor the point with Pac-Man because, you know, we have, not you and I, not the three of us, but Retronauts has put together an entire episode dedicated just to Pac-Man. So if you want to check that out, please do. That was probably like two years ago. So I guess it was somewhere in like episode 60-ish, maybe 50-ish. I don't know. I really wish it was possible to go back in time.

Well, yes. to play Pac-Man without the context of, like, Miss Pac-Man, of the games that iterated on it and improved it. Interesting. Yeah, I would love that, too, because the first one I ever played was Miss Pac-Man. Yeah, same. Because Miss Pac-Man is a better game. Yeah, so it is.

But all of the things it does are just, like, you know, more varied maze layout. It's faster. More dynamic ghost patterns. Yeah. I would love to experience Pac-Man not having that in my head. And not knowing that you could, like, shoot him with a slingshot and make him sad. Can you do that?

That's true. You can. But only in Pac-Man, too, the new adventures. Okay. Yeah, so anyway, Pac-Man was obviously a huge hit. Like, Galaxian put Namco on the map, but Pac-Man was the point at which Namco was like, we actually own the map now. The map belongs to us, and you can borrow it sometimes if you'd like.

It was the biggest arcade game ever to that point, bigger than Space Invaders. Space Invaders didn't hit the pop single charts Like Pac-Man did Not in America Space Invaders was huge in Japan But Pac-Man was huge in Japan And also in America And also in Europe

And also anywhere that arcade cabinets appeared People love Pac-Man It's also really self-explanatory It is Like you can It's very well-de- There are no action buttons Your only control is the directional lever

Which moves you in four directions And it's very intuitive because you're in a maze, which is all orthogonal, so you can only go in four directions. And they even drew little arrows on the... That's true, they did. So, yeah, it's as simple as can be, but there is a lot of complexity that emerges from it,

and the sequels become even more complex, sometimes good, usually not. But I feel like Namco has figured out in recent years how to build on Pac-Man in a context that makes it interesting and new, and that's like through sensory overload, with Pac-Man DX. Oh, I love Pac-Man D-X.

I love that game. Yeah. I have a small Pac-Man story. Okay. Which I can't share anywhere else because this is my only shot. I've already done the Pac-Man episode. I'm here. Go for it.

Anyway, there's a, you know, at the end of Pac-Man, there's a famous kill-screen, they call it. Screen, 256. Yeah, 256. You've got a kill-screen coming up, if anyone's interested. Yeah, I don't know what that's all about. But anyway, so. It's my favorite line from King of Cullin. Oh, sorry.

Yeah, that was a weird reference. Sorry. So 256, you know, an 8-bit integer has 256 positions, so it flips over and it screws up. And for Wired Magazine in 2009 or something, they wanted to do like a video of the kill screen for their new iPad app that they were doing at the time, and they needed somebody to make it. And so I had to figure out a way to get to that level, like get so good at Pac-Man that I could play through at least the stage before. it and get to it. So I had to memorize that pattern, that famous pattern. And I played it all day and all day memorizing the pattern until, well, first of all, I got a safe state from somebody on the internet up to like the couple stages before 256. And then I just sat there and memorized

it. And I really, I don't know why, but that process made me love Pac-Man in a way that I never did before. Huh. Whereas I feel like if I had to use that kind of discipline to master something so rigid, I would learn to hate it. Yeah. It's interesting. It's weird because I'm not a rote type of pattern video game player kind of person. I hate games where you have to memorize a pattern to be able to get somewhere and you don't really have to

in Pac-Man, but you can memorize a certain pattern that gets you through every stage without getting killed. So that's one of the things that Miss Pac-Man fixed. Yes. Right. So anyway, Pac-Man don't want to belabor the point. Great game. Massive hit. Just, you know,

everyone knows what Pac-Man is. Everyone knows what Pac-Man is. It was, you know, it's in a stupid Adam Sandler movie. And everyone's like, oh, yes, it's Adam Sandler and Pac-Man. I know who this Pac-Man guy is. Who is this Adam Sandler, he is? Anyway, so that was Namco's big hit, but at the time, they thought there was going to be a different hit, and that was Rally X, which is actually kind of a similar concept of a game, but it's less simple, less self-explanatory, more complex, which I guess makes sense if it's less simple. But, I mean, like, there's complexity, both in terms of game mechanics and in terms of actual, like, physical design of the game.

So RallyX is a maze game, but instead of, okay, so Pac-Man, I've kind of come to realize over time, is a game about dominating territory. Like, you are eating dots. You are claiming that territory. You see that in games like Crush Roller and that sort of thing, where you're actually, like, painting the screen or, city connection or something like that. Pac-Man, you're like unpainting the screen by eating all the dots. And once you eat the dots, that becomes like your territory. So your goal is to cover the entire screen while avoiding the monsters. Rally-X isn't about that. Rally-X is a maze game where you're just trying to collect some flags that are scattered around the screen. It doesn't matter how you

get there and how much of the screen you cover. You just need to collect the flags. Pac-Man is also interesting because by default, Pac-Man is defenseless. Pac-Man is helpless against the maze monsters unless Pac-Man eats an energizer, in which case he briefly turns the table. In Rally-X, your car has the ability to lay down a smokescreen that will debilitate other cars. So you have an action button to control that with, whereas Pac-Man just passes over the energizer and automatically gets the power up. Also, Pac-Man, you see the entire maze at one given time, whereas Rally-X scrolls, which is technically impressive for the time. It free scrolls in every direction. And on top of that, because it's such a big maze, you have an on-screen radar.

There's a mini-map on the side of the screen that shows the location of all the flags and your car and the enemy cars. So there's a lot to take in at once. It's actually really sophisticated. And, you know, Namco was like, look at this thing we put together. This is really advanced and really cool. Like no one has made a game for arcades this sophisticated yet. and yet it's still a fun action game. This is going to be a hit.

Well, it wasn't because it's just not as intuitive as Pac-Man. It's not something you can just immediately pick up and be like, oh, yeah, I get it. And also it doesn't have the same personality. Pac-Man has these, like, cute little monsters, a little yellow guy who's just a mouth, and then the little colorful monsters with the big eyes. And the eyes are great because they show which direction the monsters are going to move in. But they also are expressive and give them personality. Rale X's top-down race cars.

And, you know, it looks nice. But it just doesn't have, like, charisma. Every one of its sophisticated technical achievements feels like something that makes the game worse. I wouldn't say that. Because it's got such a big playing field that you can't see it all at once. So they have to put the mini-map on there. But that means that you don't have enough space like you do in Pac-Man to see the ghosts. You don't have enough space to see the other cars coming.

The other cars can come out of nowhere. Well, that's why you have the mini-map. It shows where the cars are. But it's difficult to pay attention to both of those things at the same. I agree. I think that the design works. I think, you know, like part of the challenge of RallyX and its sequel, New RallyX, which is almost exactly the same thing. I think the challenge there comes from the fact that you have to kind of keep an eye on the mini map and say, okay, I get a sense of where the cars are in relation to me. But what you can't know exactly is

which direction are the cars going to enter the screen from. Like, you know, you're in this maze. So you don't know exactly like which channel, which row the enemy cars are going to come from. So you're always on your toes. I think it's a fun game. I just don't think that it is as good as Pac-Man. I think it's a little more complicated than Pac-Man. And Pac-Man works because, again, anyone can play it. Anyone can grasp it immediately on site. And that really works in Pac-Man's favor. I think Rally-X might have been more successful a few years later. But in 1980, what people really needed was a game that they could just pick up and it was as intuitive as Pong. Like, Pong, you get it. There's a ball. There's two paddles. Okay, you know what you're doing. Here, there's a maze. There's four

monsters. Okay, great. RallyX, you have to kind of play around for a little while to be like, what am I doing? Oh, smoke screen. Okay. I think the attract mode is an essential element to RallyX. So you're like, oh, I can blow smoke. I think I like RallyX. I think it's fun. But yeah, Chris has an interesting point about every complication it adds, detracts from the basic Pac-Man formula. But, you know, it's a different game with a different audience as a result. It's, but I find it fun. I think it, they treat it as one of their classics on those collections. Yeah, no, I mean, it is a, it is a good game.

Like, I will make a case for it. But, you know, I think, I think part of the appeal of Pac-Man is that Namco is like, we need to make a game that will appeal to women. Well, they made a game that appeals to women and to men and to children and basically to everyone. Was that the original idea behind Pac-Man? It was one of the ideas. I don't think it was like they said, we need to make a game for women. but it was definitely something in their minds.

Like, we need to make a game that's colorful and has personality. But, you know, like... Yeah, Awatani, however he pronounced the name. You know, I think he said he was purposely trying to attract women to the game. Interesting. And didn't he say something like it's the eating element? Not that this is politically correct or anything, but this is, he said that women like to eat.

So, wow. I didn't say that. He said it. Well, that is kind of a cultural thing. Like, I know I've mentioned this on... Yeah. I've mentioned this on the show before, but in Japan, like, desserts, eating sweets is a very feminine thing. Oh, yeah.

Like, there is a brand of pocky desserts called men's pocky that is okay for men to eat because it's like bittersweet chocolate. It tastes like guns. It is specifically designed, like marketed to men to let them know, hey, it's okay. okay to eat this, dessert's not just for ladies anymore. But, you know, like for the most part, even like in the Middle East, that's a cultural thing or Africa. I was reading about somewhere, yeah, in Africa, you know, one of those countries they have, it's not common for men to eat sweet. So when they came to America, they were freaked out that everyone bought ice cream. Men were just going to ice cream shops because it was a really feminine sort of weak, emasculating

thing to do for their culture. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely, to some degree, a perception in Japan. It's not like men don't ever eat dessert, but it is considered more of a feminine thing to do, eating sweets, candies, ice cream, fruit, that sort of thing. This seems a good market opportunity for American companies, though, if they want to make some masculine desserts, like, I mean, he was saying, could taste like car exhaust. Right. Mmm, taste like beef jerky. Yeah. It tastes like copper. Dirt and farms. No, I think what you want is, is a dessert. It's like a wolf. That's Old Spices thing

An entire wolf in your mouth I think what they want is a dessert that tastes good But looks like engine lube or like wolf hair or something That's even worse than tasting like Snickers Extreme Let's say you just bought a house. Bad news is you're one step closer to becoming your parents. You'll proudly mowed a lawn.

Ask if anybody noticed you mowed the lawn. people to stay off the lawn, compare it to your neighbor's lawn, and complain about having to mow the lawn again. Good news is, it's easy to bundle home and auto through progressive and save on your car insurance, which, of course, we'll go right into the lawn. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, discount not available in all stages situations. New to Podcast One, the producer's guide with Todd Garner. Join Todd as he interviews the biggest names in Hollywood, like Adam Sandler. We drove down there and my brother's like you have material. I said, what do you mean? Rebel Wilson.

I couldn't interact with these people. So I put on this American accent, pretended to be American. And Ila Fisher. I just wrote a passionate letter explaining how much I wanted to be a clown, begging them to accept me. Download new episodes of the producer's guide with Todd Garner every Thursday on podcast.com.

The Podcast One app or Apple Podcasts. All right, so we made it up through Pac-Man and Rally X. So now we move on to the post-Packman era of Namco's history, except you're like, oh, everything is going to be great now. No. You still have to make it through a couple more black and white games. Well, one more. And, like, coming after Pac-Man, this monochrome game just feels so primitive. Like, I can't imagine people said, well, you know, I could play Pac-Man, but maybe I should go play S-O-S.

So S-O-S is a very primitive, vertically scrolling shooter. Maybe, I don't know. Was it the first scrolling vertical shooter? When was Zevius? Zevius was 1992. It's later down this list, as a matter of fact. The 1980s. In 1980s, sorry.

82, yeah. So this is 1980. I don't know. It's hard to say what was the first, because there are so many obscure arcade games. I mean, really, like, what is a vertical scrolling shooter? Like, the difference between this game and Galaxian is that, like, you get, I don't know, there's somehow, even though Galaxian's Starfield and the background scrolls, you don't get the impression that you're, like, moving vertically.

Like, you feel like you're stationary, whereas this game, you do feel like you're constantly scrolling, and it's just like the enemies are scrolling past. Anyway, this game is a very simple vertical shooter where you control a plane, and there are enemy planes coming, and you have to shoot them without being hit. And the enemy planes don't shoot at you, which makes it very kind of limited. But the challenge here is that you have to prevent enemy planes from getting past you. and when 100 enemy planes get past you, it's game over. That's it. Your quarter's gone. It's like stampede on the 2600.

Yeah, kind of. So there is like one sort of gameplay element of interest, which is that every once in a while you'll see an SOS symbol at the left or right side of the screen. If you fly over there, it will decrement the enemy counter by nine. Decrement. That's such a good word. Isn't it?

Yeah. So like if you, as long as you have nine or more enemies that have passed you, it'll take you back nine. So if you've passed, like, nine planes have passed, it'll take you back to zero. If 99 of past, you'll be back to 90. So that's your fighting chance because there's no way for your ship,

which moves very slowly. And also you have to be careful not to be hit by the explosions when you blow up ships because those will also kill you. So it's kind of challenging in that sense. It's a very slow, pokey game, but I guess, you know, like there weren't a lot of vertical shooters, so I could kind of see this being okayish, but still next to Pac-Man, man.

Was there any story reason for it to be? Was it like, oh, this is a daring nighttime raid? I think it's that there were a lot of planes flying past you. Okay. And you had to shoot them. That's fair. I think that's the lore here. Because I know that, like, Night Driver on the 2600 was like, oh, yeah, it's nighttime,

so everything can be a little less clear. Well, we'll talk about Night Driver a little later when we get to pole position, because I think the two games are relevant to one another. But that has nothing to do with this game, which is just like a weird... It's like a 1942 prequel? Yeah, pretty much. These are realistic planes, right, in this game? Sort of like...

Sure, as much as you can be realistic in a monochrome design. Yeah, but I mean, the shape is like it's not a spaceship or something. No, no, no. It's definitely like a World War II type bomber shooter game. Anyway, so, yeah. Like I said, it feels like, if you will, a blip on the radar, a weird, regressive game. Anyway, after that we go on to Tank Battalion, which feels kind of like an update to combat in a sense. It's one player, but you are a tank in a top-down maze, and there's enemy tanks that appear,

and you have to destroy a certain number of enemy tanks. But while you're doing that, you have to defend your home base against enemy tanks. And your home base is a little eagle at the bottom center of the screen. and the interesting thing about this game is that the walls are destructible yeah that's sort of a first I think yeah maybe not a first but again like early something you don't see a lot

I will throw your observation back in your face which is it's hard to say what was the first but definitely an unusual element the first we know of in this room right the first that comes to our minds at this moment yeah tank you know combat was based on tank a key games title developed by Atari Yeah, and so this is kind of

the next step of that. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, Namco has been in love with this. There was a game for, like, a 3D game called Battalion Wars, and there's another game that was on the Switch Namco Museum Collection last year, and I totally forgot what it's called. But it really feels like the next generation version of this, like a 16-big version.

I don't remember what's called. But I also feel like the idea of being in a top-down brick maze and being able to break through walls sometimes. I feel like maybe this is where they got some inspiration for Tower of Duraga a few years later. I don't think we'll talk about that one on this episode, but there's a little bit of something there. I feel like it. Honestly, this feels like a really interesting iteration on Pac-Man because you've got that, you know, one-screen maze. You're moving around it.

There's enemies, but they can shoot and you can shoot and you can destroy the maze. Like that's, that seems like if the plan is not to just speed Pac-Man up and make better patterns and different layouts, like it seems like this is, where it could have gone, like to branch it off and to, yeah, to more, give him more action. Give Pac-Man a gun. Yeah. Pretend like it's 2003. If it were an American game, they would have given Pac-Man a gun.

Yeah, well, that's called Shadow the Hedgehog. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't really see this as being part of the Pac-Man lineage because, like we mentioned, you know, there are direct precedence to this with tank and combat. And I really feel like this is, you know, in the way that Galaxian builds on Space Invaders, I feel like Battalion is an attempt to build on those games. But it's just not as interesting as Galaxy and or Pac-Man. I agree.

I think it's a tank progression. Last all. Okay, so we've talked about Pac-Man. That was, like, the big hit in 1980. And I feel like everything that you saw from Namco starting in 1981 and beyond really leaps off of the big jump in game design. Yeah, I mean, really. But, like, I feel like Pac-Man took everything to a new level of visual fidelity and appeal and style and really kind of created a Namco vibe for the games that they created. And, you know, you had stuff like SOS and Tank Battalion that were kind of like, eh, in 1980.

But in 1981, like, everything from this point out is really cool and really interesting. And it doesn't always work. Like, I don't think Libel Rabble is fun and it's very confusing. but at least it's doing something interesting. Libel what? Libel rabble. I know I played it, but I... Those liberal rabble rousers.

That's what it's short for. So, 1981, first game on the list is Bosconian. I don't know exactly what the chronology of, you know, games within each year are. I'm going by System 16's list. But, you know, alphabetically, Bosconian comes first,

so by golly, that's good enough. Isn't this like a chocolate drink? That is Bosco. Yeah. Also, Betty Boop style cartoon character. And the password of J. Water and Seinfeld is his passcode or something on his ATM? Remember that episode? No.

So anyway, Bosconian is kind of like RallyX in space in a sense. It's a free-roaming three, not 3D, but a free roaming space shooter where you can move in all directions across this looping map. And there's a mini-map that you have to keep your eyes on. So it's more complicated, but I feel like it works better in Bosconian than it did in Rally X because instead of being a maze chase, you're flying around through like open space, trying to take down enemy spaceships and enemy space stations. And that's actually the goal is to shoot down enemy space stations. And that's all you can see on the mini map. You can see your ship and the relative positioning of the space stations, which there can be as few as two per level and as many as like eight. and the space stations are very distinctive.

They're these hexagons. And at each vertis of the hexagon, there's a pod. And you can destroy the space stations by blowing up all six pods. You have the ability to move in eight directions and fire in eight directions. Actually, when you fire, you fire forward and backward at the same time, which is really cool. It gives you like this sense that you're not totally overwhelmed in space. But because it's so fast moving, you kind of have to be able to shoot in two directions at once. But you can either destroy a space station by taking out all six of the pods on its vertices

or else there's a channel down the middle of one axis of the space stations. And inside of that there's a core and there's like a gate that opens and closes. If you can fire into that channel, you know, like the Death Star, you'll blow up the core and that'll take out the space station in a single shot. So that's kind of the idea there. And it's pretty simple to explain, but it's very fast-paced and very challenging, and each stage becomes more complex. The mini-map doesn't show small enemy fighters, so you never know when enemy fighters are going to appear on screen, which direction they're going to come from. Some of them are like simple and just kind of poke across the screen.

Some of them are very fast and will chase you. Some of them shoot at you. So there's always like the sort of question of as I'm shooting down these space stations, what about these guys who are trying to shoot me down. There are also things you have to avoid like asteroids and minefields. Yeah. I like Posconian. Yeah, it's a really good game. It's really good. It's an advanced

a true advancement on the formula of space shooters and because it's multidirectional and you are exploring this world off screen and I feel gypped that we didn't get some cool home ports of this in the 80s because I never played until... We didn't get them here.

Yeah. That's why I mean we. We. Oh, you Americans? Americans. Yeah. Not nerds in general. I'm not, yeah. I'm not a man, international man of the history.

You're the PC collector. You should have the X-68,000 version of Bosconian, which is incredible. Yeah. I got to play that last year at... Remember the collecting episode where I talked about domestic things that I could find for $10? You're scared of Japanese game systems. I understand. They're expensive and they have a lot of kanji.

I love them. I wish I could get them. Some of them are red. The sharp systems are so beautiful. like the X-68,000, which had an amazing Port of Bosconian, which, as I was saying, I got to play last year at Long Island Retro Expo, and the person who had the system set up had like this amazing, sharp, custom-built,

like, bespoke designed for the X-68,000 stereo system. There's like a decoder and speakers. And the soundtrack for the 68,000 version of Bosconian was composed by Yuzo Koshiro, and it is amazing. And this game just looks and sounds so good. It's a 1981 arcade game that was probably published on X-68,000 in like 1988,

89, and I would have paid money for it at that point because it's just like, you can just like feel the explosions in your bones. It's so good. Now I want to play it. You should. I wish I had a 68,000. Like if I were ever going to buy a Japanese home computer,

it would have to be a sharp X-16,000. Those things are phenomenal. With all the fixings and the Trimmons. All the trimmins. All the trimmins. All them trimins. As down as I was on RallyX, I think Bosconian takes all of those ideas and...

Makes them better. Makes them better. Like, it takes all the complications that RallyX added, but makes them so that they're fun, like, it moves as fast as RallyX. But because you're not confined to that maze, when an enemy appears on screen, you get the really nice thrill of, like, dodging around them and flying through enemy formations. And being able to shoot forwards and backwards at the same time. means you can do really good like almost bombing runs on the ships. There's a lot of

really cool stuff here. The mini map works really well because there's a lot of empty space where you can blow up a ship, dodge around an enemy, and then you have a moment to check the map and see where you are. You're not looking at two different things at once. And just because it's empty space on the mini map doesn't mean it's empty space on the screen because there may be a minefield

there or tons of asteroids to worry about. And you can clear stuff out to give yourself breathing room. It really works really well. I was surprised I had not heard of it before you sent out the list of games we were going to talk about Jeremy, because I hadn't, and I was not a big arcade guy. The first time I played it was on a Namco collection.

Yeah, this was one of the first ones they put on their museum series. I think it was on Museum 2 or 3. Yeah. The PlayStation A or the M. Not the trademark. That didn't come to America. Yeah, the trademark. Was there one of those? Yeah, that was encore. That was Japan. Oh, okay. Wow. So there was like a case

that they came out with where you could put them all together. But again, this was only in Japan. So you had all six of them, Namco trademark. The coolest thing is you could go to Pacman's house in the manual room or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, that's all kind of to the side. But yeah, Bosconia is a game that I think tends to be overlooked. And it is a lot more fun than people might give it credit for. Despite its sort of its age, it's vintage, it's very fast-paced and very, like it doesn't feel unfair. There's a lot happening. And it's tough, but you can get far enough into the game, you know, on one quarter that you're like,

oh, I'm making progress and then keep playing. And it's not going to play exactly the same way every time. By the way, there's something weird about this name, Bosconian. I wonder where they got it from. Do you have any idea? On my vintage computing and gaming blog about five years ago, I did a post that's like real-world places that sound like Namco arcade games. There's like a Gallagas, Spain. It's like a Boscona, something.

like Yugoslavia and like a Pac-Man Peru stuff. It's like, they sound like places. Interesting. Yeah. I did not know that. Look it up. It's not that funny. I wanted it to be funny, but it's fascinating. You know what I mean? Well, you tried. Yeah. I'll give you a sticker for that one. It started when I was, I don't know why I was searching for one of those game names and, you know, maybe I did it in Google Maps by accident or something.

and search for Pac-Man and Google Maps or Google Earth, and you'll find something. All right, so Boscoting was good, but you know what's really good, like beyond really good. Actually, maybe a perfect video game, and that's Gallagher. And I think Gallagher was, in its own way, as important for Namco as Pac-Man. It wasn't a hit on the same scale as Pac-Man, but the thing about Gallagher is that it showed that Namco wasn't a flash in the pan. Like, Taito never really followed up on Space Invaders with a hit of,

that scale, like a game that made people be like, oh, yeah, Taito, those guys are monsters. Everything they made after that was fun and original and inventive and enjoyable, but nothing was just like a, you know, blow your mind kind of game. Whereas Namco's Gallagher, like, that was the real deal. It said Namco is serious business. This is something that was a rarity back then, which was an arcade sequel that really felt like an expansion on the concept that really took a game into new directions instead of just giving you more the same but harder. Gallagia is very much a sequel to Galaxian, but wow, it's just better in every respect. I don't know. I feel like I've talked a lot about Gallagher through the years, so I'm going to give the floor to you guys, so it's

not just me gushing about Gallagher. I've never played Galica. Really? He's lying. He's lying. He's a lying lie that lies. I don't know. I came in here and haven't never played Super Metroid. We've all got We've all got blind spots. That's true. No, Gallagher is great. I just wish, I think, didn't we not get a port? No, we didn't get the Galaxian port on the NES. That was only in the phone.

We got Galaga. Demons of death for NES. Yeah, I like that. Thanks to Bondi. It's a good port. Yeah, I mean, Gallagher is probably the second highest selling arcade game of all time in its original run after Miss Pac-Man. Really? Yeah, I think something like that.

Pac-Man is two. Maybe Pac-Man is number two in Galaga's three or something. But it's also, obviously, I've been a persistent fixture in arcades and truck stops and drugstores and whatever. Wherever arcade games are found ever since. And it's neat because, you know, it's more fluid and the sound effects are great and it's colorful. And it has challenging bonus stages, right? They're just called challenging stages. And it keeps track of your stats when you die, how many shots you've made and hits and things like that.

and the controls are dead simple. It feels like a Pac-Man kind of thing where it's just left and right and a button to shoot. It's probably that way with Galaxian, but I don't know if there's really Galaxian in the arcade, actually. I don't think I have, maybe once,

but I've played Galaga endless times. Well, you mentioned that Gallagher is more fluid than Galaxian, but what you really have to mention is that the enemy formations are much more dynamic. And Galaxian, it's like Space Invaders. You start out, there's just, this wall of enemies hovering above you. But in Gallagher, you start out,

and the screen is blank. There's nothing above you. It's just space. And then these formations of enemies start to swoop in. And then from the other side, the enemies swoop in, and they have these kind of interesting

curly cue formations. They're very elegant. And the thing is, you can shoot them as they're doing this. So you can greatly shorten the time it takes to get through a stage by destroying enemies as they come onto screen.

And if you can kill an entire line of enemies as they're entering the screen, you get bonuses. Yeah. And later in the game, you know, after you beat a few stages, enemies that are swooping in in their little chains of attacks to form the formation at the top of the screen, they start peeling off and dive-bombing you. And, like, in every stage, you know, there's something new that's happening. After, like, one or two stages, some of the enemies, like a little red guy,

will suddenly mutate and turn into three enemies. Like, he'll change shape. and it'll turn into three enemies the same that'll come down at you. And if you can get all those, you get a bonus. And the flagships here always swoop down. No, no, actually, they don't always swoop down. They usually swoop down with two other ships.

And if you can get them, they give you a bonus. But now the flagships take two hits to destroy, and they change colors when you hit them. And they turn from gray to blue. But yes, that's the thing. That is the crazy part about Gallagher. There's a strategy where you can sacrifice a life to double your firepower.

and put yourself at greater risk. But you become so much more powerful. And if you want to get extra points and rack up the numbers, that's what you do. Yeah. So I think it's, is it the mother ship thing that comes down? Yeah, it's the Gallagos ship itself, the gray and yellow ship. And he puts out little waves. Boss Gallagher.

And it sucks up your ship and it says ship captured. And then you have to shoot that ship again that's got your ship behind it without accidentally shooting your own ship that's been captured. And if you shoot it, then you get to. Your captured ship is reclaimed, and it drops down, and now you have two ships side by side. But the thing is, yeah, you have to be careful not to destroy your ship by accident as it's on a diving run. You also have to be careful not to shoot the captor ship when it's in formation, because if you shoot the mother ship that has captured your other vessel, then your other vessel never comes back down, and it just turns into an enemy, and you have to destroy your own ship. And you lose a life when your ship is captured.

Yeah, you do. Like it actually... You lose one of your ships. Yep, it takes one off your count on the side. So you're giving up a life. But if you can get it back, then you have double firepower. But, you know, you're a bigger profile. Like, it's harder to dodge it to me ammunition when you are a double ship.

And that's something that's also really notable about Gallagher is that the bad guys fire their missiles a lot more dynamically. Like they have this kind of arc to them where it's like they're dive bombing you. And it's very subtle. It's like they have momentum. Yeah. They sort of follow the momentum of the ship as they release them, like they're spinning. and then they release it. Yeah, so if it fires while it's moving kind of, you know, in a downward arc,

then it's going to move straight at the, at the, toward the bottom of the screen. But if the ship is kind of turning and, you know, starting to curve back upward, then the missile will kind of lob over to the side. So you have to be mindful of all these things. I would say it's the fluidity of the alien ship things, creatures, that makes this timeless because it just, it breaks the grid. You know, you're always dealing with like a, a grid world in a video game up to that point where everything is stuck in a sprite

chunk of, you know, eight pixels or 16 pixels or whatever, and they move like in a grid formation or whatever, and they're stuck. But these ships, they fly and they smoothly, you know, just, it's insane. I mean, it still looks modern today. Yeah, it holds up really well. I think that's why it's a classic. The graphics are very simple, but they're very colorful and detailed and it has yeah like you said that fluidity that that that gracefulness in the motion and the sound effects are great yep i mean that's just that's a big thing i like about it is the sound uh the feel of that the satisfaction of the sound and there there is something so satisfying about taking out an entire challenging stage yeah like if you have the the two ships

paired up together and the enemies come down the center of the screen and you just blast them as they're coming down and they're gone so nice yeah like it's just a very sad satisfying game. Chris just watched a video of it. Yeah, I'm watching a video now. Now that you know what Gallagah is. Yeah, what is this? Galaga?

Galaga. There's a Galaga Spain. I'm telling you. You should go there. I really love the theatricality of Gallagher. Because, you know, like, Jeremy, you've written pretty frequently

about, like, opening levels and how the first thing you see in a game is very important. Like, partially because you're going to play it over and over. But the way that first wave of enemies comes on the screen and does that loop

and then gets into formation it might as well be like a title card saying the same Space Invaders it's really great and I love that there's so much like instant

dynamism and an instant contrast between the way your ship moves because you're you know your left right shoot and then the enemies come in and they're outclassing you instantly so much

and you can see the the differences in what you're dealing with. It's really well done and really well set up. It is a good game. It's a good game. Yeah, and the ships, I mean, the alien creatures are rotating and stuff as they're spinning around really fluidly. It's amazing.

I think it's also worth noting there's a really good comic based on Gallagher. There was a short time when Namco was doing Shifty Look. And those are gone now. And I have no idea why or where they went. But the Gallagic comic was by Ryan North, Chris Hastings, and Anthony Clark. And if you can find it in any form online, it's really good. It's really fun. All right, so the next game...

Okay, I guess I lied. I said all the games from here on out are awesome. Okay, there's warp warp. I can't really speak much to warp warp warp. It's not one of those that Namco puts on compilations. Warp, warp, warp, warp. And it's one very primitive-looking. It has that sort of flat style that, you know,

predates Pac-Man and Gallagher. And also, it's really complicated. Like, the concept is very sort of abstract. So you are a little guy, and you are traveling by way of one of two warps, hence the name, warp warp, warp, you're traveling by way of these warps between two spaces. There's, what is it called, Space World and Maze World. And Space World, sadly, is not the Nintendo Games conference that they used to do in Japan. It is just like this big open area where there's nothing except you and two warps in the

center of the screen and enemies walking around and you shoot the enemies. But then you can jump into the warp and it will take you to maze world, which is very sort of not quite Pac-Manish. It's a much more rigid and simplistic maze than that. But you can't shoot enemies here. Instead, you have do use time bombs that you place and they explode in a cross, it's very similar to bomber man. And the thing about this is you have the ability to determine the fuse, the length of the fuse on your time bombs by holding down the bomb button. So the longer you hold down your button, the longer it will take for the bombs to explode. And as your bombs take out enemies, they become more powerful. So you gain the ability to cover.

more space with each bomb that you place, but it also, you know, you run the risk of blowing yourself up. So there's some interesting ideas here, and I feel like Hudson looked at Bomberman, or looked at Warp Warp, and we're like, yes, bomber man. But I don't think it's all that fun. This was a pleasant surprise for me on Maim when I was, you know, I've been a fan of Namco games for a long time. And when I first set up a maim, you know, the emulator set up in the 90s, I went back through all the Namco games I'd never played. And Warp Warp was one of the ones that I was surprised by, and I think I enjoyed it a little bit more than some of those other obscure games we talked about.

There's actually a sequel to this called Warp Man on the Famicom, which is really neat. I think I really liked that game because I was just looking it up and there's a picture of it. And what do you think, Chris? Have you ever played this? I have not. But I'm looking at it right now And it's It is weird to imagine this coming out

At the same time as Gallagher Yeah It's not as fluid obviously You're stuck going up down left right You're shooting monsters And it reminds me a little bit of Wizard of War And the fact that you're just a man overhead Sort of but you see the side of the guy

While you're moving Up down left right shooting monsters But you're not in a maze I mean you mentioned that it's that it's weirdly complicated, Jeremy, but it's tough to figure out what the point is. Right. Yeah, that's what I mean. It's kind of like

one of those Atari 2,600 games, like Raiders of the Lost Arc, where it's a little bit abstract and doesn't explain itself well. And you have to kind of tinker around with it to figure out what's happening, even to a degree like Rally X. Have you played Warp Man, the sequel on the

Famicom? It's a good game, I think. I think. Is it the Mappyland to WarpWorps map-y? Yeah, I think so. It's got better graphics, and it's a top-down thing, and it's sort of like bomber manny, I think. I'm just basing this on an image I just looked at,

and I was like, oh, yeah, I like that game. I remember that game. Oh, so you have played a new game. All right, well, I will look that up next time I'm in Japan. Warp Man. I think I may even have the cartridge on the Famicom. Because the Namco cartridges have a distinct style. Yeah, they all came in these, like, fancy VHS tape style

boxes. Really? I don't have any of the boxes, just the cartridges. The boxes were the selling point for those. They all have like unify, yeah, they're expensive. Even something like, you know, Namco Golf Classic, really? That no one cares about. Like you find those all over the place and they're still expensive. Like what? 65,000 yen? No. I don't know how much it is. 65,000 yen is like 650 bucks. Yeah. No.

It's a good golf game. It's not that good. Anyway, um, so yeah, Warp, I think, is the end of the weird throwback Namco games. After this, it's all good, as demonstrated by DigDug, which is not all uphill, that's all downhill,

down underground. Under the hill. Under the hill, like Mr. Baggans. So this is actually a Hobbit. Lord of the Rings. This is a Lord of the Rings game. Yeah. You're fighting the ballrogs and the Pookas.

If there was a Hobbit game in the early 80s, would you be surprised if it involved an air pump? Yes, actually. It was a, the Hobbit game in the early 80s was a text adventure on ZX Spectrum. And I don't think it had an air pump. Sorry. That makes me sad. Maybe you could hack the ROM to replace like Gandalf's hookah with an air pump. So we just...

Zorke had an air pump. Maybe that's what you're thinking of. So, so cruel to me, Jeremy. I thought you're just going to say... What, no, the Hobbit game was very much in the same mold as Zork. Yeah, text adventure. But he's saying, you know, they should have made it like dig dug, like a dig-dug rip-off, where your photo bag is digging underground, killing Balrogs, and pumping up.

You know, okay, yes. That's absolutely the kind of game they would have made from the Hobbit. In the early 80s, and honestly, it sounds a lot better than what Peter Jackson did of the movie, they get with the book. Yeah. Dig-Dug's great. Dig-Dug is amazing. Like I said, anytime I see it in an arcade, which is pretty often because it's one of

those ubiquitous games, I always play it. I remember playing it back when it was brand new in 1982. I remember playing it. I am old. I remember playing it last year in 2017. Wow. That was 35 years difference, and it's still fun. It's a great game.

This was one of my brother's favorites on the Atari. This game has musical walking, which I love. Yeah. Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, like that. Right, yeah, but the soundtrack plays only when you're walking. It's like those shoes that, you know, from Aikwood that Philippe had. Instead of saying, you are a special boy, it just plays the dig-dug theme. I really, I love how weird it is, because all the games that we've talked about previous to this are pretty straightforward.

spaceship fights space guys, boat fights pirates, eat desserts in a maze while being chased by monsters. Even when they're strange, they're still straightforward. Dig-Dug is weird. Like there's an air pump that you have to use to blow up monsters. Well, first, it's a game where you are digging through the ground. This is kind of the cool thing about the game is it's a maze game, but you're making the maze. You create the maze, and it forces.

the monsters to chase you through the maze that you create. I mean, they can warp across the maze, but they have to pause and transform into like a ghost form to do that. And then they can move slowly through the dirt. But otherwise, they're kind of bound to the paths that you create,

which is a really interesting inversion of what they were doing with Pac-Man, where you have this sort of pre-defined maze where the monsters were chasing you around. Now the monsters are like chasing you through the maze that you define. And you have the ability to turn the tables

on them immediately. It's an empowering game. It is. Like you can, when they're chasing you, you can turn around and go wham and hit them with the air pump and tap the attack button a few times and they explode. It's so gruesome too. And you can even, yeah, like when multiple enemies are chasing you, you can hit one with the air pump

and stun it by inflating it once and then turn around to break the connection and then turn around again and get the next guy in the line and destroy him. So you can like juggle multiple enemies. And if you're really good at this game, like you can have a whole bunch of things chasing you and not get caught. And what about the rocks you can get them to drop on?

And there is, there is naive gravity in this game. Like, it doesn't affect anything except the rocks. But if you move the, remove the dirt right below a rock, the rock will go, and then fall, and it'll crush anything underneath it, including you, but also including the monsters. But the monsters are smart, and they realize that. Even in the very earliest stages, when the monster is, like, underneath a rock and you dislodge it, the monster is like, oh, crap, and it scoots out of the way. So it's really hard to get monsters.

And if you can get a whole bunch at once by like, you know, getting them to chase you up a shaft or something that you drop a rock down, you get a ton of points. And it feels very, very well earned. You're like, yes, I'm smart of those stupid monsters. Yeah. That's great. I also love the fact that the monsters get scared. When you get them down to just one monster, the last monster in the maze will almost always make a B-line for the exit. It tries to get out through the top of the screen and run off the side.

So you have to catch it before it does that. Yeah. The dragon always scared me as a kid when I was playing. this because it would start teleporting, you know, into your tunnel and shoot you with its fire. The dragons can also, those are called Fygar, by the way. They can also shoot their fire through dirt. So even if you have like two tunnels adjacent to one another, even if you're in a different tunnel than the Fygar, it can still breathe fire through the dirt at you and kill you. There's only two kinds of enemies in this game. Throughout the entire game, you can go through dozens

of stages if you're good enough. And you're only ever going to see Fygar, which are dragons that shoot fire and pukas, which are little red guys with goggles. Yeah. And they don't really do anything except chase you. And there's the hobbits. There's the hobbit. You are the hobbit. You are Tysohori, the Hobbit.

Okay, cool. I've always wanted to be a hobbit. But, you know, the stages are, they're denoted by flowers at the top. I think that's a cool touch, a little touch, you know. Well, and also the dirt that you're digging through changes color. And I like that the dirt is, like, different colors according to its strata. Yeah. Awesome.

yeah well it kind of throws you back to you know older games with the acetate strips but instead of you know the color being defined just by acetate strips it's you know within the the hardware so it just creates this very colorful vibrant game even though it's you know there's only a few colors on screen at once it just has like pacman and like rally x this really great use of that color though those limited palettes to make you really feel like oh i'm in in this like really thoughtful vibrant world have you played dig dug too I have. It's really weird. I love it. I love that game. We actually did an entire episode on DigDug, so I'm probably just repeating myself here. What about, is Mr. Dew a rip-off of Dig-Dug? You know, I'm not sure what the relationship between Dig-Dug and Mr. Do is, but they are very similar. And then you have Mr. Driller, which actually is related to Dig-Dug. And then there's Digger on the PC that later got ported to the PlayStation 3. And don't forget Boulder Dash.

Boulder-Dash, yeah. But, you know, Boulder-Dash, you're not, well, I guess you do just some digging. Yeah, you do. But then it's, yeah, it's got like the physics on the, the boulders. Yeah. But I feel like Mr. Do is a lot like it. You can shoot. I agree. We should ask someone at UPL, which no longer exists, so we can't do that.

Okay. Time travel. Yes. Anyway, so yeah, like Pac-Man, we have created an entire episode on DigDug, so I don't want to belabor the point. And, oh, actually, the time is kind of getting away from us. So, I don't know if we're going to make it through 1982. I was hoping to get through 83, but here we are, like, halfway through 82.

There's just a lot to say about Namco's games because they're also good. Why don't we talk at least about pole position? Because this was another hugely influential, hugely important game, this time in the racing genre. And Chris, you mentioned Night Driver earlier. And Night Driver, I think, might have been the first game to attempt to give you a behind-the-car perspective on racing. But that was way beyond the bounds of what the 2,600 could do. Yeah. It was also an arcade game.

Oh, was it? Yeah. And in fact, it had an overlay of the hood. your car in the middle of the screen. Okay. And you're driving through the little pylon. But yeah, creating a convincing 3D road was

way beyond the capacity of hardware in like 1978 or whenever a night driver came out. So what they did was they just gave you like the road boundaries as defined by little lights that would kind of scale and move past. And that had to do it for the illusion of driving through 3D space.

And other than that, racing games were either top down or side view or maybe isometric. Like, you know, you had grand track, which was very sort of bird's eye false perspective. I think Namco made a racing game, first person racing game that was projected film. It was called F1 or something like that.

I think that was later, though. In the 70s? Oh, like an electromechanical machine? Yeah, an electric mechanic. And Atari did it in the U.S. marketed and released it. That may have been their first relationship with Namco because they distributed that. weird F-1 game.

You sit in this giant molded cockpit thing that looks like a F-1 race car. Right. And it has projected film of something. Yeah, but that wasn't a video game. That wasn't an electromechanical game. It's not a video game. Whereas, like, trying to create that illusion of being in, you know, in the race down by the car as the road spans out in front of you and zooms up with perspective and

foreshortening and everything. Like, that was just beyond the ability of computers to render. until pole position came along and it didn't just do that it did it with a sense of incredible speed and fluidity and that's really the big deal with pole position is all of a sudden

you were in the race car like you were actually floating right behind it but you had an F1 racer driving along tracks the tracks shifted and turned and twisted in accordance with the actual layout of the race track that you saw in advance It was actually based on a real racetrack,

which made it the first video game to use a real track layout. I didn't know that. Yep. And, yeah, like, it's really hard to explain the impact this game had. But at the time, it was just like, holy crap, I can't believe how fast this game is. You had a steering wheel and a gas pedal. Yeah, and it was like... And it was like...

I can't believe this blazing fast speed. And we talked about Outrun last year in our Sega episodes. like Outrun would not have existed without pull position and it was an expansion on that concept but Namcoe did it here and all of a sudden they were like they made this technological trick possible and created an immersive

3D style racing game from behind the car perspective that really was convincing. What's funny is Nolan Bushnell wanted to originally make a racing game it was one of his first around the time he signed a contract with Bally and develop Pong

instead of a racing game he was supposed to do and he wanted to make something kind of like this but it was just technically unfeasible in 1972 to do something like this and I think that's fascinating

so that means just the idea in general had been floating around as something people wanted in an arcade game for a long time and this achieved it very well incredibly well

I think this had like two or three processors in it it was like three PCs strapped together it was like there was a lot happening with that this game, you know, the tech to make it happen, but it was worth it. It has the fluidity of Namco games and the feel, the sound, the music, the everything that made Namco, so the games

so polished, you know, they had that finish to them. Yeah, I don't feel like... Racing games were going to look like this for the next 15 years. Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean, you talk about it being influential, like F0 looks like this. Yeah. Until 3D polygonal, however you pronounce it, you know, racing games, they all pretty much looked like pole position. And it's so fast. Yeah, that's the thing is, like, if you just watch it on YouTube and you only get a 30 frame per second video or you emulate it and it's not really like performing at the proper speed, you don't get it. But to have this on, you know, like a 16 inch monitor blazing at 16 or 60 frames per second, 16 frames per second, 60 frames per second, just like the road streaking past you and the stripes on the side shifting back and forth. Yeah, it's awesome.

I mean, there's a stand-up. I think it was, they had a sit-down. Yeah, I've only ever played the stand-up. But I've played the stand-up in arcades, and it is amazing. Just the feel of having a wheel and a pedal and a shifter and the sound of the rumble of the engine sort of when you're driving. Oh, and don't forget the explosions when you hit a billboard, because I sure did that a lot. Yeah, that's the thing I don't like about pole position is if you hit another car, you tap it,

you explode into a giant fireball, and it's really unforgiving. But it does really make me want Marlboro's and Pepsi. Now, pole position had just the free spinning wheel, right? It didn't have any feedback on the wheel. Yeah, that would come much, much later. Yeah, I remember just stomping on the pedal at Aladdin's Castle, the arcade in the town where I grew up.

It's, I can't believe how fast it is and how, like, the background moves. the striping at the side of the road moves at different rates when you get close to it. It's really, really well done. Yeah, and this game was a huge success, and much like Pac-Man, it inspired a Saturday morning cartoon. I don't know if you guys ever watched that,

but it was very speed racer-ish. Yeah, I saw it. It has a great, like, early 80s new wave style theme. That is so primitive in my mind. I must have been, like, one or two, but I remember it. In the dark to the zone.

Pretty soon they'll be off on a mission Hydrofoil mode, roadie Hydroboil engaged Dan I remember watching the cartoon We love pole position the game that we had on this game that we had on our Atari was amazing But there's a good a port, arcade port on those

handheld TV games done by Jask or, no, Jacks. Jacks specific. Yeah. Jacks specific. They, um, there's one where you turn the knob of the joystick. It has Miss Pac-Man built into it and it's blue. And it just has a really good adaptation of the arcade pole position on it. It's really smooth. Interesting. Anyway, I recommend it.

All right. So we're going to, we're going to wind down. We've got two more games to get through to the end of 1982. We can do this. First, there's super Pac-Man, which we're First, there's Super Pac-Man, which we covered in our Pac-Man episode a couple of years ago, and I don't really have too much to add to what we said there. Like, Super Pac-Man is a weird game. Like, this is, if Gallagow was Namco saying, we are here to stay and we can follow up on great ideas,

we've even better ones, Super Pac-Man was Namco saying, uh, what? Yeah, it proved they couldn't really improve on Pac-Man very well, because they did PAC Plus. Well, General Computing did. Yeah, but they did. They made his Pac-Man, and it was badass. But it's awesome.

Yeah, no, it's bad-ass. It was the Karen Allen of Pac-Man games. It was a lady just as awesome as the hero. Yeah. Well, Miss Pac-Man is great, but Super Pac-Man is a cool game. I really like it. Really? Yeah, I love it.

Tell me why it's good because I... It has a speed button. Okay, but I never really got it at the time, and now that I do get it, I don't think it's good. It flows. It has a flow to it. Sure, there... Explain this flow. Well, there are walls that block you off, and you have to get keys to open the gates to get through.

But if you get the Super Pac-Man thing, you can just blast right through them. You push the speed button, you go twice as fast, and you can just mow through the ghost real quickly. And it's really satisfying. So I have this in a Jack-specific handheld game, too. It says Super Pac-Man is blue. It's really comfortable. And it's a great adaptation of the arcade game. Yeah, but here's the thing.

I feel like this fundamentally changes the nature of what Pac-Man is by putting these gates in the way and forcing you to acquire keys and basically a certain order. Like, you have to get a certain key to open a certain door. Yeah, the keys, it's not obvious which key. It changes the flow of the game. Like, Pac-Man, you know, the original Pac-Man, I miss Pac-Man, are all about, like, moment-to-moment decisions. You know, the ghosts are closing in on me from this direction.

I need to go this way. Whereas this game becomes more like, well, I need to go over here and get this key so that I can open that door. You can get trapped, too, in those corridors, which feels restrictive. Yeah. They're the green power pellets that make you supersized

and make you huge and you can blast right through the doors with your super speed. Are you super-sized or are you flying over the maze? Because when you... You can go through them, kind of. But there's one where you can get the power pillow and be big and just eat everything and blast through it.

Yeah, but I think the idea is that you're like flying when you, like, that's why you're big is because you're closer to the camera. Well, no, if you look like when you get the super palettes, the ghosts distort like they're seeing them from an angle from a bum or something. has occurred to me because you can, if you're just big, you pass over the ghost. You don't eat them, but I think you can go through any door you want on your bag and collect all the keys as fast as you can. I just, I like to play it.

I don't know why it's satisfying to me. Okay. Well, I'm glad to know someone enjoys it because I really don't. Well, if it didn't have that thing where you get bigger fly or whatever, it would be a terrible game because you'd be locked trying to get these keys being stuck in corridors, little edges. But even so, it stops being a game about. taking over territory and just becomes a big game about collecting some things. It's more like Rally X than Pac-Man.

It's different. Let's just say. That's a very diplomatic way to say it. That is a dubious understanding of how depth works. Yeah, I don't want to see. Chris is watching a video of it. I love how you get huge. That's awesome.

I think it's telling that I don't know if I have ever in my life seen Super Pac-Man, like a machine in the wild. I saw it. I haven't seen it. I see, you know, I see Pac-Man. I've seen Miss Pac-Man, obviously, Pac-Man Jr. Like, I've seen those all over the place. I don't know that I've ever encountered a Super Pac-Man, like, in, like, arcade machine. I mean, it just doesn't that good.

I may have seen it once, and I didn't like it back, you know, when I was a kid or something in Gatlinburg. But I first really started playing it on that Jack-specific hand. held. And there was a port done at Atari for the Atari 800 that's very, very good. And it was never released until like 2000 something. Somebody found the prototype. And it's somebody sells a cartridge of it. It's really good. I like the speed, the size of the, you know, Pac-Man stuff. Okay. They're interesting ideas. Yeah. I think it's underrated. It's probably one of the most underrated games. That in Professor Pac-Man. No. I don't think. All right. Your loss. I don't know.

B. B. B. B. B. B. B. Okay, so we're going to wrap up to

the first era of NAMCO games. by looking at one of my personal favorites, a game that I've always loved, and that is Zevius. Zevius. Zevius is great. Zevius. Zevius is not the first vertical shoot-em-up.

That might have been that 1942 style game, whatever the hell that was called, SOS. Or maybe not. I don't know. The idea had been around, but this feels like the game that really takes it to the next level. So Zevius is you, a little ship. you are the Solvalu and you fly around and you shoot. But the thing is you shoot two different types of weapons.

You have the zapper. No, wait, the blaster that flies straight up the screen. It's just, you know, guns. You take things out of the air. But you also have the zapper, which is a bomb. And you have a little crosshair reticle that's always a certain distance in front of your ship. And that shows where your bomb is going to land. So you're taking out enemies in the air and on the ground at the same time.

And they're, you know, they're flying at you. There's tanks and stuff that move around to the ground, and you can't collide with those, but they'll shoot, you know, projectiles at you. So you have to watch out for those. But there's a lot happening in this game. There's hidden stuff in the scenery. The background is constantly scrolling. And it's just like this kind of simplistic landscape where there's roads. And the tanks and stuff on the ground will actually follow the roads, which is really interesting. There's enemy emplacements, guns and stuff like that. Then you fly over forests, water, et cetera. Like, it's constantly cycling through new scenery. Eventually, you pass, like, NASCAR lines. It's crazy. It's a really, really cool game. Yeah, I love it. It's neat.

It's fluid. It's got that Namco feel. It's got that just the completely new dimension of having a scrolling background that's a stationary scene you're passing over. In other words, you know, because it's there. It's like it feels like there's a world you're flying over. And you can bomb it, and there's that two-dimensional play. And isn't that what you want?

in a world is the ability to bomb it. It's such a casual side. You know, there's a really fully realized world. You can bob it. It's a video game. That's what you do. You're not wrong. Yeah.

Like this game, I played it when it was brand new, and it blew my tiny mind. Like, lots of games I played back then blew my mind because a lot of games were something new and different. But this one, I don't know, it really, really resonated with me. It feels like a step up, like a real notch up kind of game. that could have come out in the, you know, mid-80s or something. What years is this? 82, yeah. It feels ahead of its time.

It feels a couple years ahead of its time. One of the things that really kind of makes it feel that way is it's speed and not just of, like, your ship and the enemies, but the projectiles you fire. Okay, I know it's just really stupid thing, but you start out firing a double shot from the very beginning. You can't upgrade it, but it's always double. So it's like when you capture your ship and. Gallagher, when you take it back your capture ship and you get the double blaster, it feels like such a huge upgrade. Well, that's how you start in Zevius.

So there's this great sense of empowerment right from the start. But I love that the game knows how well you're playing. And the longer you play without dying, the tougher the enemies that starts to throw at you. And there's different waves of enemies. And the enemies also don't want to die. So when they come onto the screen, when they, when they show up in the same vertical line as you, they'll peel away and they have this great animation.

This was the first game to use pre-rendered computerized graphics. Wow. So those enemy ships, they're all kind of geometric and very smooth-looking. And they have these great animations where they like peel off and rotate

and it's all very fluid and there's so much of it happening at once. There's also those like weird tumbling like squares, just like these gray squares that flip through the air and you can't destroy them. But they're really cool because they have these multiple frames

of very smooth animation. I like the discus kind of, those discus kind of things. They remind me of those, what is the shotgun thing? Or you say, pull, and you shoot. That's skiing. Skeet shooting. Yeah. Clay pigeons and stuff.

I don't know. It always reminded me of shooting clay pigeons because I used to do that when I was a little. Just kidding. I didn't. Oh, you didn't? No. You know, I thought it would be a great joke. But people probably really do do that on there.

But, I mean, you've got a little bit of a southern accent. People are like, oh, yeah, he probably has a lot of guns. People think I'm from Connecticut for some reason. From Connecticut? Yeah. I don't think that. I'm thinking Boston. Boston.

Boston. Yeah, you love you, Chowda. Chowda. So, yeah, anyway, another cool thing about this game is that it has a boss at the end of every 16th segments of stage. There's no, like, discrete lines into break up stages. But basically, things scroll through 16 zones. And when you get to the 16th, you fight Andor Genesis, which is this giant, like, what is it, like an octagonal pyramid? and even though it appears to be like a spaceship flying around,

the only way to destroy it is to drop a bomb into its center. And if you can do that, and it's like shooting tons of bullets at you. There's all these bullets flying at you while you're trying to do that. It is bullet hell. I don't know. It's just a really fast-paced, interesting, cool-looking game. I feel like the boss battle is a huge innovation, too, in a space shooter.

I don't know if there were any before this game. So I want to say, No. Gradius was 1986. 85-86. 1942 was 1984 was 1984. That was a hard one.

Yeah. There might have been a boss and a space shooter before this, but none that I ever played. I mean, Zaxon was 82, same year as this, and it's a different kind of shooter, but you do have to fight Zaxon

at the end of the maze. So I guess in that sense... A Zemius sets this template that was copied over and over again. Yeah, like there's a... Big boss that takes up most of the screen at the top, and it's shooting just bullets and bullets and bullets at you. And, you know, people talk about this game, and they're like, oh, that game's not very good. Like, I don't like Zevius.

I think it's boring. And I just want to, like, slap them. Yeah. I want to reach out through the computer and be like, no, you're wrong. What's wrong with you? It's no Tiger Heli. It's no Tiger Heli, and that's good. Yeah, I don't like Tiger Heli.

But I like Zevious. I don't know. I've never heard anybody who doesn't like Zevious. Oh, yeah. I see people say that a lot online. Really? It just baffles me because it's such a great landmark. They don't appreciate their forefathers.

And yeah, so this game had quite a few sequels. It had Super Zevius, which was more of the same, because that's how they did sequels back then. But then it had 3D Gplus for PlayStation, which kind of turned everything into a cinematic 3D polygonal shooter. Wow. There were, I want to say, Grobda was a game where you controlled one of the tanks.

It was like a tank combat game where you were one of the bad guys. I don't know. It's just great. The audio loop that is, I guess, what counts as the soundtrack here, became like very popular for electronic music remixes around that time.

Like it showed up in some music that was published and popular in Japan. Don't forget the 3D remix. Yes, that's where I was about to hit. The game was remade for Nintendo 3D. back when the system first launched and they were like, what if we remade retro games

with 3D graphics? And I think Arica was the developer on this and they said it was really hard to actually make it work because they had to go in and do a ton of reprogramming to actually separate out the planes.

But I really feel like this was the game that made people who actually took the time of day to try it to say, oh, like I get it. Like this, you know, the 3D depth thing works really well for this game because you get her sense of, you know, there's stuff on the bottom, there's stuff above. It's really cool. Yeah. I like that. I bought that 3D remake and enjoyed it quite a bit.

And now I own a 2DS so I don't get the benefits of the 3D. Whamp, warp, warp, warp. This is not one that is on the Nintendo Switch Manamco Museum collection, but I wish it were because it's a vertical shooter. Yeah, maybe volume two. grip that someone is making. Yeah. Can't wait to get my hands on that. That'll be so good.

All right. Anyway, so that takes us to the end of 1982 and also to the end of this podcast. I honestly did not expect us to talk this long about the first three, four years of Namco's existence. But they just made so many great games and so many interesting games, even at the ones that they made, weren't always good. I didn't get to talk about Phoson. You didn't, but we'll talk more about Namco games in the future.

You've got to get to Tower of Duraga, damn it. I warned you, Namco is one of my favorite game publishers. That's fine. I love... High quality stuff. I love Namco, and I love the fact that, again, they keep their old games, many of them, in circulation. Oh, yeah. So it's easy to remember, like, what did I love about this game?

Because it's right there. And if you're one of those people who thinks it's bad that Namco republishes their games, you're completely wrong and you should feel bad. Namco is awesome for keeping classic games alive for people to, access to be able to play without having to pirate them without having to be like, I need to find maim and download a ROM. No, you just buy Namco Museum. It's right there on pretty much any system. Yep. That's awesome. And a lot of these games still hold up really well. A lot of them, you know, they're very popular. They were very popular back in the days. So when you go to a

convention like Midwest Gaming Classic or Portland Retro Game Expo, like they're going to be there and you can play them in like, I'm the original hardware. And it's such a great experience. So, Yeah, I love Namco. I'm not afraid to say it. I'm not a mainstream video games press journalist anymore, so I don't have to pretend to be objective. I love Namco. So there you go. I love Namco too. They're all right. Oh, get out of here. I want to marry Namco. Who are you, you person who... He's Christian. Who says bad things about Namco? Tell us where to find you on the internet. I just thought it was all right. I didn't say it was bad. That's the same thing. Look, I'm here to I'm here to stand for Foson. All right. Chris, James, where can we find you on the internet? You can find all my stuff at T-H-E-I-S-B.com. That'll have links to all the columns that I write around the web, the podcast that I do, and the comic books that I write that you can also find at Amazon or at your local comic book store. Read Darkhawk, everybody, when it comes out for the Infinity Countdown crossover.

And I'm Ben Jedwards. You can find me on Twitter at Ben Edwards, where I'm always making dumb jokes and recently repairing old computers as I... Repairing or setting on fire. Yeah, some of them catch on fire spontaneously. there's a lot of excitement. I feel like mostly your Twitter feed now is like photos of smoke. Yeah, and I chiseled the glass

implosion screen off a deck monitor recently. That was fun. So vintagecomptuting.com. Also, uh, Patreon.com slash Benj Edwards. And finally, I'm Jeremy Parrish, and I co-host Retronauts, which you can find at Retronauts.com on iTunes on the podcast one network,

and which you can support through Patreon at patreon. com slash Retronauts, where for $3 a month you can get a week early access to each episode at high bitrate quality and with no ads. That's awesome. It's a good deal. So anyway, you can find me personally on Twitter as GameSpite. And I've been writing about Star Trek videos, Star Trek episodes at gamespite.net. People love that. So yeah, video games and stuff. They're good. Come back next week and we'll talk more about it. video games. You love it.

Hi, it's Jamie, Progressive's employee of the month two months in a row. Leave a message at the... Hi, Jamie, it's me, Jamie. I just had a new idea for our song about the Name Your Price Tool. So when it's like, tell us what you want to pay, hey, hey, hey, hey, and the trombone goes, blah, blah, blah, and you say, we'll help you find carbon options to fit your budget. Then we just all do finger snaps. We'll acquire goes, statements coming at you, savings coming at you.

Yes? No, maybe? Anyway, see your practice tonight. I got new lyrics for the rap break. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, price and coverage match limited by state law. The Mueller report. I'm Edonoghue with an AP News Minute.

President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall,

becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do.

suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Edonohue.