Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 168: SEGA's Arcade History - The Finale

Episode Date: September 10, 2018

The end is nigh! Sort of. Jeremy, Ben, and Benj return to look one last time at SEGA's classic arcade legacy, exploring their coin-on megabits of the late ’90s. From Virtua Fighter 3 to Crazy Taxi, it's like crib notes for the Dreamcast era...

This week in Retronauts, this is the end, beautiful friend, the end of Sega. I think this is episode 163, 164, something like that, maybe 164. Anyway, I don't usually know the numbers on these because of the way we record. So who cares? The important thing is that this is Sega Episode 5, which would be the Empire Strikes Back, I think. And I, of course, am Jeremy Parrish, returning as usual for one of these Retronauts East podcast. And also with me here, we have... Returning for the first time in a while.

It has been a while. This is Ben Elgin. And also returning for the first time in kind of a while. Month or so? Ben Edwards? Has it been just a month? It seems like it's been longer. A couple months.

Maybe it's May. I don't know. Actually, I guess for listeners, it hasn't been that long because we just had the Indiana Jones episode go on. Oh, yeah. So I was just with you guys. Yeah, like, yeah. They don't know about our production woes and details. It's all the same.

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Okay, so anyway, this episode, I hope, is going to be the final Sega episode. We've done over the course of the past year and change, we've had four different episodes chronicling the history of Sega's arcade development. It was supposed to be like two episodes, but the way things go these days, that never quite, yeah, things stretch out a lot of Sega. And that is okay. People seem to enjoy these episodes. So I'm happy to regale you with Tales of Sega.

But I would like for this to be the last one so we can move on to other topics. There's so many other companies out there who made and are making arcade games, like Taito and Data East and we're doing Namco already. There's some other companies. Atari. I don't know. So we can move along to them. So we're going to finish up Sega this time by God,

even if that means we have to give these games short shrift. Anyway, so jumping in, I think we left off where were we last time, guys, 1995? Yeah, we got through about that. It was the Saturn era, I believe. Yeah, I mean, the last episode, we had a lot of, you know, 2D games. We were getting into Model 1, Model 2, and the move into 3D polygons, the Virtua series. This episode, as Ben pointed out, while, you know, before we were recording, there aren't any 2D games in here.

No more Super Scalar. It's all, it's all polygons at this point. Except Columns 3. And even that, is that, is that sprites? Is it pre-rendered sprites? Yeah, I think it's 3-rendered. That might be the only one if we actually do talk about it. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Let me cut that one up. None of the fun Super Scalar anymore. Those are cool, but they have gone by the wayside. Super Scalar was great. But we do have some letter. from listeners to tell us about these things. And so we'll dig back into the past and some fun memories.

But to begin with it for this episode, I think we should just jump right in and start with one of the heavy hitters, which is Virtual Fighter 3. And we really probably should have a full Virtual Fighter episode at some point, because I am not qualified to talk about this series as an expert. Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah. I get that it's important, but it's, yeah, you know, I was, I was one of many people who got into, you know, some of the Namco fighters and, of course, like Capcom stuff earlier on. You know, the virtual fighter series was one that was always out there in arcades and looked kind of cool, but was not one I super got into. But three is definitely where it started looking a lot more like a modern 3D game. So it's a, this sort of move to the, to the Model 3 board that we've been talking about, the move between virtual fighter 2 and 3 is where you see. stop looking at these things and seeing this is cool because it's new, but really you have the feeling that you're just looking at a bunch of polygons to getting the feel that you're

actually looking at a 3D scene with nice textures. And, you know, the polygon count is still not high by modern standards, but it's enough that you don't think about look, you're looking at a bunch of triangles, really. I feel like that's Virtua series undoing is that it was Virtua for Virtua's sake at first. It was like some of the first three polygonal games. How do you say that? Polygonal? Sure.

Yeah. Yeah. And that was cool. You could just call it Virtua Fighter and it would be fine. But, you know, virtual, it doesn't have any personality to it. It could be anybody. It's just a bunch of random people fighting together. You do lose a certain aesthetic that you had with the low-poly stuff.

Everything starts looking as good as Virtual Fighter 3 within a few years of its release. Then it's sort of like, what's the differentiator there between the, you know, is it a storyline? Mortal Kombat has its whole mythology and everything. Street Fighter 2 has its own thing. Virtua Fighter 3, I just can't picture anything. I can't agree that Virtual Fighter doesn't have any personality. I mean, I think the appeal of the series for a lot of people is the characters and also the very specific combat style, which is unique.

Like, I mean, other series such as Tekken and Dead or Alive kind of use similar mechanics to Virtua, but they're not exactly the same. And again, I can't speak to it as an expert, but people really love some of the virtual characters, and they definitely show up throughout Sega's games from this era. And even now still, like you'll see

what's his face, the main dude. Yes, Akira. And like, I could not name one of the characters. I can't name one of the characters. I can't name one of the characters. You get a few of them. Vanessa. Yeah. It does have. Kings and Tekken. Yeah, Kings and Tekon.

It does have a very grounded feel, too. I mean, like, so, like, Tekin also was drawing from real world martial arts styles, but it's sort of, Tekken really pushes it as far as you can in terms of going over the top with it while still being based on a real style, where the Virtuous series really seems to have kept it pretty grounded, you know, there's nothing like super flashy, obviously no, like, magical things or weapons or anything. It's a stick to the basics kind of, kind of system, which gives it a bit of a niche there. I would say technically in 96, the, the graphics are very good.

I mean, yeah, I mean, for a 3D fighting game. I mean, yeah, you're talking about how it lost something. And yeah, sure, like you missed those like flat-shaded polygons, the blocky character models that were so distinctive in VF1 and 2. But like, that's as good as 3D graphics could be at that point. Whereas Virtual Fighter 3, you know, it introduced the Model 3 arcade board and it was as good as arcade fighters could look. And it did lose that, that sort of, you know, distinctive visual style. but I don't think it could have kept with that visual style

and people would have cared. I think it would have been a huge mistake. Now we look back and we're like, oh, that's so retro, that's very charming. I love that low-poly look. But at the time that that's just one step away from the cutting edge, people just look at it and say,

oh, well, that's not cutting edge anymore. Yeah, I think it absolutely makes sense for the time. It kind of loses something now because we've crossed a threshold where, like, the graphics almost hold up it no longer looks like an explicit retro style. And so now it just looks like, you know, the graphics are pretty okay.

But of course, they're not anywhere near modern standards. I feel like the worst game graphics. No game graphics look worse than the games of one generation ago. Yeah. Like, it's hard to go back to a PS3 game now or an Xbox 60, 360 game now, because it's like, well, it almost looks as good as a current system, but it's not. And, you know, once the HD generation rolled around, it was really hard to go back to PS2 graphics.

But now I'm kind of starting to come around and be like, oh yeah you know that kind of fuzzy blurry look that's got some charm to it so you know I think you need just like a little bit of a break from from a certain technological style so so yeah like Virtual Fighter 3 had to look like this and besides again this was like super cutting edge this was the model 3 hardware ran on a power PC based 603E which was the same same processor you saw in Macintosh computers so this was you know like the the the arcade board was the equivalent of a multi-thousand-dollar home computer at that point. And it was actually better than a Macintosh because it wasn't just the Mac's, you know, PowerPC system. It also had a 68,000 running the audio CPU and it had a separate visual processor that was like custom built. So, you know, the GPU was boosting the performance over the stock 603E. So you had like, very expensive cutting-edge system that was, you know, right up there, not with like an SGI workstation or something, but it was kind of getting there. So I'm sure these, these cabinets were

like several thousand dollars each, like five or six thousand dollars. Yeah, more than that probably. But yeah, and it definitely looks good. I mean, I mean, like it's, it looked extremely good for the time. And it still pretty much holds up as a, as a nice looking, you know, 3D render for the time, yeah, for its context. And it introduced, it introduced a lot more things than the earlier virtual fighters. So we had like these complicated arenas in here that have like different levels and obstacles and things. And actually like watching it in action, which hadn't done for a while, it reminded me a little bit of Bishita Blade just in terms of having this real environment.

Now it's not, it doesn't take it to the extent that Bishita Blade does. And it's still ultimately arenas that you can ring out of, but they're much more organically built. So like I liked the like kind of island beach stage where you're on this like sandbar and you can actually go a little ways out into. the water and then like kind of hiding under the water there's a drop off that's the actual ring out. But yeah, just like it looks more organic than the earlier iterations. Right. And you look at the character models. They're very detailed for their time. They have, you know, some attempts at flowing fabric and things like that. It's definitely primitive. But if you compare that to what was also considered cutting edge for home computing at that point, 1996, you got Quake. And Quake sure

does not look this good. I mean, Quake has its own aesthetic, but it's very blocky. and very kind of dark and greeny. And I think it focused more on, like, light sourcing and things like that. But, like, there's no computer that could have made, at the time, that could have made Quake look as good as Virtual Fighter 3. Yeah, Quake usually ran at 320 by 200 at that point. Yeah, this was high resolution, 60 frames per second, silky smooth, very detailed. Like, if you saw this in the arcades at the time, which sadly I never did, but I just know, you know, contemporarily, like, if you had seen this in the arcade, you would have been like, What?

Yeah, it looks really nice. I feel like I saw it in the arcade one time. And I thought, wow, it's really technically amazing. But, you know, I was never turned on to the characters, sort of. I never really got to the storylines. It looked really nice, but it just wasn't one I was super into. Yeah, Virtual Fighter is not my thing. But I can definitely see why it has a hold on gamers of a certain age,

because you compare this to anything that was happening at the time. You know, 1985, you had Soul Blade, Soul Edge by Namco. It did not look this good. It took a couple iterations to get there. Yeah. And it also looks like, again, none of us are experts, so I'm going to be kind of talking out our butts here. But it looks like it has a lot of interesting technical systems going on. Like just watching this in action, you can see like people doing parries and like catching the other opponent's limbs and chaining into a throw and that sort of thing.

Yeah, it's very complex. But, you know, reading about this on site's like Hardcore Gaming 101 to do research. they describe it as, you know, also very approachable. So it seems like it managed that very tricky balance that people love with fighting games of offering depth, but also accessibility. And there are some systems like the uneven terrain causes dynamic changes in how your characters face each other and how their moves activate. So that's, you know, that's pretty high-level stuff. So not only did it look good, it was also very complex. So, I mean, that's a big deal.

All right. the list is Sega Super GT, which is also known as Scud race, which is a really weird name. Because when I think of Scud, I either think of disposable assassins or I think of those disastrous missiles that were... Iraqi missiles. Yes, that were used... Were they Iraqi missiles or were the American? No, they were Iraqi.

They were the Iraqi ones. Okay, I couldn't remember. I just remember that they didn't work. Not very often. I guess back then the American military's equipment did work. It's now that it doesn't. Yeah. Well, Scud stood for a sport car ultimate.

Drive in Japan. That's where it came from. That's such a Japanese acronym. Yeah. But at the same time, like Scud is not a word that is

native to the Japanese ear. Yeah, so well... So it seemed like this one was kind of all about the licenses. So you had the four cars you could choose from

were a Ferrari, a McLaren, a Dodge Viper, and a Porsche. And like, those were the only cars. So you just had those four, but they were all like super well-known things.

Yeah. And it really seem to focus on it. Like, one of the things I noticed looking at this is that when you're doing a race, you have the actual, like, company logo for the car you've picked, like, permanently plastered down in the corner. I don't know if that was like... Branding thing. Yeah, I don't know if that was like, you know, a demand of the licensing or if it was just something they decided would be cool because people were into these brands. Interesting. Yeah. So, yeah, this one is a little bit obscure because unlike most of the games on here, it was never ported to a home console.

Right. It always was stranded in the arcades. And this is actually, we're probably going a little out of order on these in terms of release, but this was a Model 3 Step 1.5 game, and the Model 3 came out in like three or four different iterations. There was Model 3, Model 3 step 1.5, Model 3 step point, or 2.0.

There might have been another one after that. There was a 2.1, I think. Yeah, each of them pretty significantly boosted the abilities of the platform. They were a little bit faster in terms of processing power, but the GPU was better, and they had like

the capacity to hold 50% more RAM than the previous iteration. So, yeah, so this was a damn good-looking game, apparently. Another one, this is another one that I've never seen in person. But just going by, you know, footage of the arcade game and emulated versions of it, it looks pretty nice. Yeah. I can see people would love to play it in person. Yeah, yeah, I've not run into this one in the arcade either.

But, yeah, it definitely looks good. You know, it has some pretty faithful renditions of the, famous cars that are in it. It's got those, one thing I know is looking at, it's got those Sega Blue Skies going on. So some are just nice, pretty to look at outdoor tracks. So back in the fighting vein, another 1996 brawler from Sega was Last Bronx. And this was actually, if you kind of want to get a sense of the sort of favoritism given to the Virtua series, this was a Model 2 fighting game. So it wasn't nearly as advanced as Virtual Fighter 3. But I think the Virtua team was the team that did the hardware development on the model boards. So it, you know,

it kind of makes sense that they would be like, well, we made it. We get to use it first. And then everyone else kind of tagged along behind them. So this one, you know, Model 3, you have basically like Dreamcast level graphics at that point. Whereas Model 2 is like, well, it's Sega, or Sega Saturn. So it's a chunkier, blockier game. And this game actually did come to Saturn, I think, in both the Japan and the U.S. It definitely made it to Europe because there's a great retrospective by Kim Justice, a retronauts contributor, that she published a few months ago, that goes into great depth on it for like 20 minutes.

You should definitely check that out. But I feel like this was Sega's response to Soul Blade or weapon lord, if you will. Yeah, weapons based, but just never really caught on outside of Japan, which is a shame because it looks interesting. and it's another, like, plot-heavy fighting game. But in Japan, it was, I wouldn't say a jug or not, but it definitely caught some traction because it was created,

I feel like it was created more than most Sega games for a very specifically Japanese audience. Like, it's very heavy on story, and it was presented as a sort of multimedia concept before, you know, companies like Square Nix were doing, their polymorphic content. It was created as, you know, I guess maybe along the lines of capital,

Com Strider, where you had tie-in manga and radio dramas and all kinds of stuff like that. And there was a movie. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. And the whole concept behind the story, I haven't really dug too deeply into it, but it's basically like an alternate reality where it's like Japan, Tokyo, which is where this is set. It has like real world locations that if you've been to Tokyo, you're like, oh, yeah, there's the 109 building in Shibuya and that sort of thing. It's set in Tokyo, but it's like an alternate reality where when the 80s economic bubble collapsed in the early 90s, like basically in this version of Tokyo, everything just went to hell.

So it's like street gangs rule and, you know, it's still like this glittering city, but it's also kind of hellish and everyone's fighting each other with weapons. Yeah, it's sort of semi post-apocalyptic. Like there's not actually, you didn't actually blow everything up, but it's still all gang more bare. Right. I mean, you still got the 109 building. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so there is a lot of narrative here And I feel like some of the characters from the series Have some traction over there

Like, you know, you see these characters on in Sega products Even though like no one in America really remembers them that well Yeah So yeah, it's one of those things It was just like a disconnect between those two markets Yeah, that's the way I feel I was I keep, I looked at some of these on this list And I was like, why did they keep making these games

that are just sort of a little bit different. A lot of fighting games, a lot of racing games. But they mean a lot more to the Japanese market, you know, than the American one. Right. And, you know, that's fair. I mean, that's their home market. So you can understand why they would be wanting to do that. So also sort of on the fighting front, but in a different way, there's Spike Out,

which is a 3D brawler. It's more like an update to Streets of Verbal. rage or final fight, but it attempts to do that in 3D, which a lot of companies were doing at this time, and none of them did it very well. Yeah, so this one, again, this isn't one I ever ran into, but unlike some of the other ones on this list, it's, I don't feel like it's one I actually want to run into. I was looking at some playthroughs of it, and it just comes across as extremely tedious. Like there's some other, I mean, 3D brawlers, not necessarily my favorite genre to begin

with, but there's some other ones we'll get later on the list that look like they executed it with a lot more interest. one just seems to, you know, it dumps you into a room and then it just throws waves and waves of MOOCs at you and you're sitting there punching them with the same sound effects over and over and there just doesn't seem to be a lot of interest to it. It does throw bosses at you at some point and then you like have to, you know, get to the exit door and hit it in a time limit. So, you know, it throws a few twists at you, but it seems like kind of the epitome of tedious brawler when I look at. I mean, but like all the 3D brawlers of this era were kind of the same way. And in fact, around this

time they published Final Fight Streetwise, Capcom did, where they took Final Fight and were like, it doesn't really work as a 3D brawler, so let's just make it a fighting game. And it was also bad, but at least they kind of recognized the, you know, that the genre wasn't quite there yet. But I look at things like Fighting Force and, man, I can't even remember what else. Just like all these sort of kind of boxy, generic, boring brawlers from that era. And this is kind of in the same vein, but it does seem to be so. somewhat well regarded, and Sega has occasionally revisited it. I think kind of the sheer

ambition of this thing is what sort of sold it. Like, originally it was designed to be a 16-player brawler. Eventually, by the time it came out, it was only four players, but it was like a one-person per cabinet brawler. It wasn't like X-Men or Teenage Mutant and Turtles or something. And because it was 3D, that made sense. So everyone would be in a separate cabinet when they were linked together, which was kind of something Sega was starting to experiment with around this time. And this would allow each person to use a 3D perspective that was centered behind their character instead of having to wrestle with a camera. So everyone kind of had their own viewpoint. And you could issue like really simple commands or messages to each

other. And you had the freedom, you know, within those kind of boring boxes to roam away from your other fighters. So, you know, in that sense, this is, it was doing something that 2D fighting games had not been able to do. And 2D fighting games, like, you've got the screen and that's the space that you can occupy. But because this was two linked, or, you know, up to four linked cabinets, each with, you know, each person with their own camera, you could, like, spread out to the four corners of a space and take on enemies there, or you could, you know, come together and team up and fight together and strategize that way. So I feel like it was trying to compensate say, for the limitations of the design,

or maybe the design was limited because of the ambitions behind the game. But in any case, it's like, I can see that it almost worked. It's another one of those games that I've never seen in person because where do you find a spike out for a person setup. Yeah. But to me, this is like the absolute bottom of the American video game market in 1998. Wow, the absolute bottom. Well, like, yeah.

You know, home consoles were where all the innovation was happening in American video games at this point. And PCs, first-person shooters were ruling, you know, the American mindset in video games. So, yeah, this is not a good time for American arcades. It's not a good time for arcades in general. You know, DDR would come along in a couple of years. I can only speak for American ones. That's the thing. See, I had no idea what was happening in Japan.

They kept making these games, so there must have been. better than here. Well, it does seem like the link aspect was one of the good things to come out of this. Because, I mean, we've seen that with racing games before, right? Where they have several cabs linked up for a racer, but not so much with other genres. So kind of branching out that concept is, it seems like something that came out of maybe this game or at least this era. It's a cool idea. It makes me want to play it. I love co-op games, you know, so. I got a feeling we could find some better ones. Well, the game did get kind of a port or follow-up on Xbox in 2005, and for all I know, that's actually supported on Xbox One backward compatibility.

It may not be, but it did come out in the U.S. It's called, crap, what is it called? Oh, I forgot to write it down. It's spike out like revenge or something. Spike-in? It's not Spike-in. No. Okay. Spike Spiegel. Sadly, no. So one, it would be great if you could fight like Spikes. That would be more hot. It seems like a volleyball game. Spike out.

Oh, okay. Yes. I feel our American, you know, it would be a volleyball. There might have been a game called, like, Spike-Dol. I don't know. Super Spike-Bee. Yeah. All right, so one last fighting-ish game, and that is All Japan Pro Wrestling from 1997. And we're getting to a point now where we can look online and we can find archived reviews from websites that were running at the time that these games were published. There was an IGN review by Craig Harris.

I'm like, man, is this like, are we getting into the present day or is it just that I'm old? Because I'm like, I know Craig, yeah. So seeing this import review by him from 1997, I'm like, oh, but this is a game that ran on the Titan STV board, which was something that, an idea that Sega would follow up on with Dreamcast to great effect. But the Titan, the idea was, it was pretty much the same thing as the NeoGeo MVS AVS, where you had like the beefed up arcade version of a home console. And I think Capcom had something along those lines. It was like the PlayStation hardware, which, you know, that had Strider 2 and a few other games on it. The Titan, I think, is mostly known for being where Radiant Silver Gun got its start. Beyond that, I don't really know.

This is a wrestling game, and it's based on All Japan Pro Wrestling, so it's real characters, licensed imit likenesses. It has a couple of virtual fighter guys in there, but I can't speak to it because I don't follow Japanese wrestling or wrestling. Yeah, it seems like, so it seems like this was the start of a trend. I think we'll see a few times in this list. where with the newer hardware, the virtual series technology was getting to the point where you could make it look like

real settings, recognizably. And so there's several of these virtual spin-off titles that went for basically for having, you know, putting real people in the game, having them take place in real places and just going for, obviously, at this point, the technology wasn't photorealistic,

but it was at least recognizable. So you could have stadiums that people would recognize characters that people would recognize. And so that's where this was going, just taking the virtual fighter technology and adapting it to a real scenario. This is a Titan board, though.

Right, right. I thought you said the virtual fighter series is all model one. Well, yeah, yeah. This is a Saturn tick. That's true. I guess I would just go off the fact that there's some virtual fighter characters in this. There's clearly some of the same people working on it. And so they're just taking those ideas and moving them in a more real world direction with some of these spinoff games.

Yeah, I mean, I think the pipeline. from Model 1, Model 2 to Saturn was pretty well defined internally at Sega so it was no problem to you know take that learning and put it on the Titan board I'm covering for you here Ben

yeah well I'm no expert at this I'm just you know done five podcasts just kidding in any case looking at this 1997 wrestling game from Sega

we've come a long way from Apo if you remember that one from the very first one where it was just like little chubby spray guys who just kind of bumped up against each other. Superdeformed. Yeah.

Yeah. So this is going for, you know, moves based on real wrestling moves. And like that most of the characters in the roster are actual wrestlers except for the few Virtua Fighter X-Patch, which is really kind of weird. So you've got all these real world wrestlers and then you've got like wolf with his like-face tattoos and whatever.

But I guess they kind of wanted that crossover appeal in there. All right. Let's move on to the light gun games. And Lost World Jurassic Park is a game that I have seen in arcades. I don't think it's actually that fun, but I know a lot of people love it. My sister is a huge fan of it. It did have that like safari jeep

that you could climb into and two people could sit up to each other one. So this is a game that by sheer coincidence, I actually played all the way through last week because they have one of these at... Are you preparing for the show? By coincidence. Yes, I was.

Yeah, so this was at quarter horse bar in arcade in Durham. They have... So it doesn't have the sit-down Jeep cabinet. It's just a stand-up one. But they have lost World Jurassic Park, and it was on free play that night, so I played through the whole dang thing. It looks pretty dang good. So, like, the humans in it are still, you know, very blocky, low-res affairs that just look like these kind of ragdolls. But the dinosaurs actually look good. They hold up. Are they Jurassic Park

quality graphics? They're not Jurassic Park quality graphics. Oh, the lies. You know what it is? It's the frame rate that's always so smooth on these. Yeah. So, yeah, they've got. The Model 3 games. So, yeah, this was running on a Model 3 board. It had like 100,000 polys at 60 frames per second. And most of those pollies were put into the dinosaurs because that was the draw. They wanted them to look good. And they still hold up, I think.

The dinosaurs look good. As a game, you know, it's kind of your usual frenetic, fast-paced light gun game, like you're on rails. And it's just throwing dinosaurs at you about as fast as it can. It's pretty fun. The bosses are kind of variable. Some of them go down and quick, and some of them are just enormous damage. sponge is, like, clearly designed to munch you through quarters. It's like most of the dinosaurs during the levels, you just have to shoot them and they go down.

The bosses, you get, like, little sub-targets peppered on the dinosaur's face or something, and you shoot a few of them, and then it comes back at you two seconds later. And, yeah, towards the end, it just gets really tedious. Like, you would have had, I mean, I would have had to put, like, $20 into this game to beat it if it wasn't on free play. But, but it was an okay time, yeah. Yeah, I mean, tedious seems to be kind of. the way light gun games were designed. I feel like Namco was really the only company that did something meaningful and different

with light gun games. As much as it's fun to, like, shoot a screen in the arcades, like, being able to duck behind cover in time crisis made for a much more interesting and entertaining game than something like this, whereas just like, you're there, you're shooting, keep pulling the trigger. Yeah. Yeah. Like that to me is not that interesting. But I guess that's kind of the genre.

Yeah, there's a few power-ups here and there, but yeah, it's basically shoot them before they get you. I'm pretty sure I've played this at an adventure landing or Chuck E. Cheese or something, some kind of place before. I know I've played Jurassic Park Shooter. And, yeah, it never captured my attention. It's something we sort of played. We'd play a couple times in the arcade and then say, okay.

The other little bit of trivia about it is apparently ILM and them did not act. actually give Sega very much to go on in this. They had an early film script, but didn't have access to any of the actual models. So they had to model all their own dinosaurs. And in fact, a bunch of stuff got changed in the movie later. So there's a bunch of scenarios and dinosaurs in this game that aren't actually in the movie at all. Is there a scenario where you use acrobatics to defeat a Velociraptor? Not really. There is the other gimmick, which actually really pretty much just serves to make things more tedious, is in some of the boss battles. So if you're doing two player mode, you know, you have your two characters

shooting. And in some of the boss battles, the dinosaur will come and grab one of the two characters and pull them into the screen. And then that character can't shoot. They have to like mash the start button on my cabinet while the other player tries to shoot the dinosaur to make them let go. And it's interesting the first time it happens and then it happens 20 more times. And yeah, that's great. Okay. Stop grabbing my buddy. Yeah, pretty much. So speaking of games where you shoot things that are coming at you over and over and over again, There's also House of the Dead and House of the Dead two from 1996 and 1988, respectively. And this was kind of the same thing, except it was like they said, why don't we take the light gun genre, virtual cop, and put it in Resident Evil?

And that's what you got. You've got horror and zombies and really, really bad English voice acting. Oh, it's so bad. It is the, like, worst B movie emoting you have ever heard. Yeah, I don't know. Honestly, I feel like I'd rather shoot dinosaurs, but that's just because I'm not that integer of zombies. Yeah, zombies aren't interesting.

Also, the other thing about this game is it's just, it's because, I mean, it makes sense because of the genre, but it's really dark, which seems like a bad idea in a flashy arcade setting. Right, yeah. I guess maybe that's what people liked about it was that, yeah. I mean, if you're in like a darker arcade, I can see that making sense, but if you're in like a, you know, like a put putt or something, that's bad. Yeah, be hard to see.

But I guess the one interesting thing this kid is. this game did was to give you dynamic pathing based on your performance in a level. Like if you perform certain tasks, you would go through a different route, like going through the back of the mansion to enter it instead of the front. But that's pretty much it. Otherwise, it's just like zombies come out, you shoot them. I guess I could at least give it a little replayability. If you've been through it, you can try to see different things.

Yeah, House of the Dead would give us a much more interesting spinoff in a few years. For the moment, it was pretty much just a zombie. So we've been talking about all the crazy new things Sega was doing in the mid-90s, but what about the old things? Let's visit a couple of old familiar favorites. First of all, there's Columns 97, which was, you know, columns. It's columns. But in 1997.

So... It wasn't the 97th sequel or 96. Sadly, no. Just like Super Mario 64 was not actually the 64th Super Mario. I don't know. I would be surprised if there were 97 versions of columns at this point. I wouldn't maybe 97 different platforms. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. But yeah, it's columns. It's got shiny pre-rendered gems in it. Yeah, I don't think it's aged that well. Like the pre-rendered gym graphics with the heavy outlines, they just, yeah, I mean, it's, I guess it was impressive for the time, but now it just looks like every sort of cheaply made GBA game that came out and, you know, from 2001 to 2006.

That's true. Yeah, so there's this 90s aesthetic that just boils down to look at our shiny rendered things. I don't even know if I could call it an aesthetic. It was just like what people did. It was an aesthetic. Retro-exthic. I kind of like it, but I never... It's deliberate.

Yeah, well, you're saying it's just a slapdash thrown together, a bunch of pre-rendered stuff. I guess it wasn't. I mean, what happened was Donkey Kong Country came out and everyone was like, yes, that! So they did that. Pre-rendered graphics. And I could kind of see why they did that, because, you know, the gyms here are transparent. or translucent, so you can, like, see the back sides of them as they spin. So that's, you know, okay, I get it.

It's, you know, showing awesome stuff that, no, not alpha channel. It's like, you know, they rendered it to do that because it would have been kind of crappy looking if they'd actually done alpha channels. Yeah, no, they wouldn't support that. I don't know. What are the channels anyway? Transparen't. Do you really want me to tell you? I'm just kidding.

Okay. But it's columns, yeah. I don't even like columns very much. I would rather play a different falling blocks game. But I guess they were covering their bases because they also had Sega Tetris in 1999. It's jumping ahead a little bit. But this is Tetris and everything's polygonal. There's like, you know, the wells that the blocks are falling into are tilted a little bit so you can see their sides.

But not in a way that's distracting or going to affect how you play. And then there's a silly monkey. Monkey that hits the lines with the hammer. And then it goes, tutter-trak. Or something like that. Triple. Double. Oh, he's actually saying works.

Yeah, he actually says like single, double, triple Tetris when he smacks the lines away with this little hammer. It's good. Yeah, so to explain this, when you create a line, instead of it just vanishing in this Tetris, there's a monkey who has a mallet and he waxed the side of the well and the cleared blocks fly out. So I guess, and he's like a, you know,

3D polygon monkey, so. I think he's pre-rendered. It looks pre-rendered to me. Is he? Everything else is polygonal, though. But maybe my memory is faulty. Sorry. It could be.

but yeah like in the backgrounds you have the backgrounds are kind of fun yeah like some of the backgrounds it's like oh it's crazy taxi yeah it's got well so they have this whole these whole like threed scenes just kind of playing out in the background and usually it's just something scenic but then like every like every so many lines you clear it transitions and it doesn't just like wipe it does this weird like animated transition from one background this one back yeah this one isn't pre-rendered at all i remember now yeah no that's all real time definitely yeah yeah real time because it'll do things like you know you'll be in some desert and then suddenly it'll flood it and you're in an underwater scene or whatever and

So that's kind of vaguely amusing, but for something to have in the background for Tetris. All right. So one last one that I feel kind of puts a cap on the era. And that's, did we talk about virtual on last time? I'm pretty sure we briefly hit the original virtual on. I feel like that's something that you have memories of and therefore you talked about it. Man, I can't remember if we said anything about it. But there was a sequel, Oratorio Tangram.

Yes. And this was an AM3 hitmaker game. And it's like, I don't know. you describe it. I mean, it's a one-on-one arena mecca fighter, basically. It's very, I think it's very focused on, on dodging in motion. You have a lot of dashes and stuff you can do. And it's very, I didn't, like, I was aware of it at the time, and I never got a chance to play a lot of it. I had a friend of mine who played it in Japan. But yeah, so you have, you have these various sets of mecca, lots of long-range weapons. It seems.

seems to be very much about, you know, getting a few good clean hits. You can do a lot of damage when you actually connect with your opponent. But you're in these very large arenas with obstacles and things. And so you can do a lot of dodging in three dimensions because they can all do air dashes and things. So it's really about just kind of setting up and trying to get a few good hits in. And then there's also when you're playing through an arcade mode, you have occasional bosses too, which will just be these huge enemies. I was like comparing it to like in Gundam, you have the mobile suits and then you have mobile arms. armors, which is basically just something that's huge with immense firepower. And so it becomes a kind of shoot the core, kind of, you know, dodge the patterns and shoot the core kind of a deal when you're fighting the bosses. Did this sequel come out in America at all? Because it doesn't seem like it with that title. I don't think of it. I love the title.

It's a great title. But no, I don't think it ever launched over here. gibberish. I don't know what a tangram is, but an oratorio is like an operatic recitation. They have a way of combining different words and surprising. and creative ways. What is a tangrum? Well, there's those puzzles with the shapes.

Isn't it a space? Yeah, shape. So it's like puzzle opera? Puzzle opera, yeah. Space opera? Okay, sure. But puzzle opera sounds like another Japanese game title. Right?

Yeah. All right. So I kind of feel like with that we've sort of hit the end of the Saturn era. And we get to 1998, and now we're in Sega's Dreamcast era. So if Saturn was, you know, that whole model one through Model 3 era was kind of like figuring out, what are we doing in three dimensions? The Dreamcast era where we moved from Model 3 to Naomi, that was more sick of being like,

let's just go crazy. And maybe it gets down to something, you know, what Benj said about how arcades weren't doing that well in the U.S. And maybe they weren't doing that well in Japan. I don't know. It's hard to say, but, you know, the economy wasn't a downturn there. So I feel like they were basically saying,

let's get crazy and see if we can get people to come into our center, or game centers, because Sega owns its own arcades in Japan. So they could kind of do whatever they wanted as long as it brought in people. So I feel like this was an age of experimentation and just like, you know, you're kind of getting to the end of Sega as a first party. And I feel like at this point, they were just like taking any idea and saying, let's go with it. Yeah, whatever makes money. I think it's the most exciting era of Sega.

Like I'm talking about them throwing stuff against the wall, but not in a bad or a stupid way. It's not, it's not like they didn't know what they were doing. It was just like they were willing to try things and the results were always, almost always, just like, no one was making games like this. They were delightful. They were to the late 90s, what Nintendo is now. It's just like, wow, I can't believe someone's making a game like this. Like the next game, base fishing or sorry, dammit, bass fishing or get bass. Bass, bass is not a fish, bass is. Let's kick some bass.

Like, this game is really well known because it came with, like the arcade cabinet, came with a rod and reel controller that they actually turned into a home accessory specifically for the Dreamcast release of this game. And people were like, I wonder if I can use this fishing rod accessory to play other games. So you have people like playing through Soul Calibur entirely with the fishing rod. Like, that's just ridiculous. And it's the sort of kind of goofy emergent stuff that came out of the work that Sega was doing this era. The Dreamcast era is so, so rich with ideas.

Yeah, it's like a fun. I've used this term before, a Cambrian explosion of video game ideas, like, just so many different avenues taken. And that's why the Dreamcast is so exciting and fun, even in retrospect, because there are all these weird peripheral, so many weird and interesting different types of games to play. Right. And, yeah, so we're about to dive into all that. And this base fishing game, it's really great. Okay. Okay.

Now, I play it on the Dreamcast and it's fun, but I said it looks like Virtua Fighter guy goes fishing. Yeah. Because he's really, he's very blocking. Well, this isn't a Naomi game. This is a Model 3 game. So he's still a little, not quite a, not quite Dreamcast level. But, you know, people look at the Dreamcast and they're like, that was Sigga's best era. And it was, but most of those games actually started here in the arcade and then ended up coming home and they'd get like new features and stuff.

But, you know, Sega was still arcade first and they were coming up with their craziest ideas in the arcades for coin-ups. So, yeah, bass fishing is a great example of this because it's not like fishing games were a new idea at this point. There were all kinds of fishing games. But were there fishing games that had like this hyperactive feel? with, you know, butt rock metal guitars and, like, hyperactive camera angles that were constantly changing, and the voice was like, you got one. Yeah, that's why I'm saying. This is, like, virtual fishing kind of, you know, or, like, racing, virtual racing fishing.

Yeah. Oh, a big one. Yeah. It's got this, like, intro reel that has, like, like, the, um, the lure cam where it's following the lure through the water and it's all very exciting with the fish darting at you. Yeah, I mean, fundamentally, it's just a fishing game, but they put everything into it. It's like the Daytona USA theme song of fishing games. It's more like the Daytona fishing.

Go fishing. So I haven't had a chance to actually play this and just watching a, like, watching a picture like, I have a hard time seeing how you keep up with it. Like during the actual fish catching, it just seems so hyperactive, like with the fish going back and forth all over the place. I'm not sure exactly what you have to do with the control. Well, I think you just kind of like keep your eye on the actual hook and everything. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. So I think it's just, you know, presentation. It's not actually affecting the game, like the play, the mechanics. It's just like, whoa, you got a fish. Oh, my God, what's happening? But it's got the bombastic Sega aesthetic to arcade aesthetic on a fishing game. Yes. And yeah, this is a classic. What can I say? I don't even like fishing games. But man, this game is just so crazy. Yeah. I mean, I just, yeah, I love that Sega was just, let's take a fishing game and make it insane. I love that. Speaking of Daytona, they also came out with a sequel to Daytona, Daytona, 2. And the original Daytona, you know, I think that was a Model 1 game. It was like simple, chunky polygons, very colorful, very lovable, you know, the blue skies thing again. Whereas this was a Model 3 game, and man, it looked good. And on top of that, it did, it achieved what Spike Out dreamed of,

and it could link together 16 people to race against each other. That's bonkers. Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, you see that sort of thing in arcades now. Like, that's kind of a thing with games like, you know, the Gundam card games and Lord of Arcana and things like that. Like, there's a lot of games like that now. But at the time, linking all these cabinets together, like, that was just bonkers. And again, this was another instance of Sega taking advantage of the fact that they owned arcades.

Because, like, Taito's arcades, we're not going to buy 16 Daytona USA. What does it cost to buy 16 days? Is that 100 grand? Yeah, right. But when you own the arcades, who cares? Just bring them in. So, yeah, I feel like this was definitely a centerpiece for Sega's homegrown arcades in Japan. And I can't imagine there were a lot of USA arcades that had 16 linked Daytonic two cabinets.

But yeah, and it's definitely trying to be, I mean, as the original was back when it first came out in the whole 3D concept was new, it was trying to be an eye-catching kind of centerpiece. So it's got now, like, with all the horsepower they have in and out, it has these ridiculous. track decor. Like there's a track that goes through an amusement park. So, you know, you're going under this huge pirate ship and then through a haunted mansion and through an ice level and a fire level all in the same track because it's just this big theme park. Right. So it's like Mario Kart with real racing stock cars. Yeah. Well, you know, the Sega racing games, I love the Sega Sonic All-Stars Racing and the Transform sequel. I love those games because they take all these themes from these games.

We're talking about and turn them into those kind of levels with all this crazy stuff going on in the background. There's a there's a house of the dead level. There's not a fishing level that I know of. There's, you know, they've got the egg, Billy Hatcher, you know, Samba, all this. Anyway, it's really cool. Yeah. So I feel like, you know, from what I've read about this, and again, I'm not a racing expert, but it seems like this game is pretty much the same as the original in terms of mechanics, but has more drifting. And I wonder if that was their attempt to sort of like catch up with a ridge racer and be like, okay, there's the ridge racer thing. And that's stodgy, but you can be wide. and crazy, and also do Ridge Racer gameplay. I don't know. And it still had a crazy theme song,

but they had an American sing it for the U.S. version of the game, which I really feel like it was the same guy singing it in Japan as saying the original Daytona song. And, like, he just put a heart into it. And I feel like they were really just like slapping him in the face by replacing him for the localized version. Exactly. But did you notice when he sustains that note,

Daytona? It's actually the same sample repeat over and over again. Sure, why not? The same memory. That's fine. That's okay. That's so awesome. Oh, the other thing this racer did is that it allowed visible auto damage,

which was kind of a big deal for a while. Like Grand Turismo, it took years before GT. Actually, it has GT. I think it has added actual damage decals. That was like, I think it was Auto Modalista by Capcom. That was kind of a big deal. It was like, you can do Grand Turismo style racing, but you'll show damage on your cars. And licensers were like, but are pretty cars.

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All right. Another follow-up, Dynamite Cop, which is Dynamite Deca 2, which is Die Hard Arcade 2. And this is another brawler, which I think does the thing a lot more successfully than Spike Out. Yeah, this one just looks a lot more fun just because it, like, cranks up the crazy. And that's, you know, in keeping with the Sega theme of this era, yes. Yeah. Yeah. So you've got, you know, you've got all kinds of weapons you can pick up in this all the way up to, like, rocket launchers.

And then just the enemy designs are just completely insane. And so you're fighting pirates, right? And it's clearly this modern... It doesn't take place in the Nakatomi Tower. It takes place on a boat. On a boat. And it's clearly supposed to be, you know, modern-day pirates attacking a modern-day cruise ship. And yet the first guy you plunk down next to is wearing this, like, old-timey pirate hat, right?

And it just gets weirder from there. You have, like, you know, people in, like, turtle shells. And, like, you end up fighting a giant octopus at some point and just, like, over-the-top at every possible opportunity, basically. You started trying to rescue people on a cruise liner from... modern day pirates who have taken it over, and then you end up like riding a torpedo or something to their base, their island base, and then you fight through their base. And then like the mayor's daughter is there. And at the very end, she's like, thanks for helping. As a special treat, my father will give a prize to whichever of you is the strongest. So then you have to beat up

your partner. Yeah. Yeah, that's a little weird. Yeah. But I mean, that's kind of the game. But yeah, this is definitely like the sequel to Die Hard Arcade, but it has nothing to do with Die Hard 2 or 3 or 4 or five. It's just its own thing. And I didn't check to see what hardware this was on, but I'm guessing Model 3, probably. It has a very PS1 aesthetic. Everything's kind of boxy. And like, when things explode, it's a sphere. I love that. It's so like, it's so of the era. Like, you don't see anyone doing that anymore. Yeah. I did that in a project in grad school in 90s. Yeah. See, there you go. Very much of the era. And also, the main character, even though this is not called diehard, the main character's name is Bruno Delinger. So this

literally is the return of Bruno. So how, how deep does this Bruce Willis connection go? Anyway, yeah, like this game's just wacky. And, you know, again, it's, it looks and seems more fun than spike out because it's not just empty boxes. Like, you're not only fighting through interesting environments in terms of the, you know, the window dressing, but there's actually stuff within the environments, like staircases and, you know, obviously. in the middle of the room. They have to fight around. There's more weapons that fall.

So it's, it feels more like, you know, it's less technologically advanced than Spike Out, but probably more fun as a game. Yeah, I'd say if you're going to subject yourself to a late 90s 3D brawler, this is probably the way to go. Does anyone have anything to say about fighting Vipers 2? I do not.

Never played it. Oh, yeah. I mean, I took a look at it briefly. So we talked about Fighting Vipers in a previous one. It's got this armor-breaking system. Other than that, it's pretty much just a 3D fighter. Like, one of the things that... The armor breaking here makes for some really weird character designs.

Yeah, that really bothered me on. What is that why? The character designs are... Yeah, the character designs are incredibly over busy. And a lot of it is because they've all got the second layer on. But they all have, like, the second layer in a contrasting neon colored or whatever else they have going on. So, yeah, the character designs are just really hard to look at. There's a girl with a teddy bear strapped to her back.

I was wondering what was going on there. I think that's her armor. Yeah, and that's just the... The armored teddy bear. It's a cyborg teddy bear if you look. It has like a cyborg eye, like Zintroti Commander Britae. There were some weird stuff going on in Japan, 1998. But, yeah, they've all just, they've all got this some kind of armor,

and so it's all just like very over-grebebled character design in neon colors. It's just hard to tell what you're looking at. Yeah, it doesn't seem like this game was super well received at the time. I found a few contemporary reviews, like one from Eurogamer, and they're all kind of like, eh, this was for the home port, so maybe the home port sucked and the archer. The arcade of a game was cool, but again, this was one that I've never seen in arcades, so I can't speak to its quality.

It definitely was colorful, though, but not on the Sega way and more like the Quake Way, where everything's just like, oh, my eyes. Yeah, yeah, it's just kind of neon all the time. All right, one that I have seen in arcades, and I think everyone has seen in arcades, is Star Wars Trilogy Arcade, which was basically, we did a Star Wars episode a while back, and we talked about this a little bit, but let's talk about it again, because... Yeah. This is the only one we've actually played in this whole list.

I've played a couple of these. But, yeah, like, I don't know. Someone else talk about it. Well, I have a vivid memory of going to the NC State Fair around 2000, and they had like an arcade booth there on the dirt floor that had a bunch of arcade games. And I saw this thing there, the deluxe version, which has a 50-inch monitor, like a rear projection TV or something. And it was the first time I ever used to force feedback joystick because it has this sequence where you can fight Darth Vader

with a lightsaber which is really awesome but I don't think you get to play it instantly so I didn't get that far in the game. Yeah, that was later on. Or you could select, can you select the path that you go on from the beginning? I don't think it has to take you through the trilogy. Okay. And there's like two of those lightsaber like basically kind of just QTE events really.

Yeah, go to the left. That was redundant. But, yeah, they're kind of cute. I mean, it's an interesting concept that you're using this joystick to be a lightsaber. It's basically a quick time event. But, yeah, there's like one against Beauvais, like, you have to deflect his shots. And then there's the one against Vader. I would have loved to fight Vader with a forced feedback joystick.

But I didn't get that far. But I remember playing it and thinking it was neat, but it costs like five bucks to play it or something. We should maybe back up because this is mostly, like the lightsaber is a special event, but this is mostly an on-rail shooter. Yeah, most layer shooter. It's very much like Star Wars by Atari, just done up with fancy polygons and very nice looking graphics. Although, I would say not as nice as the Factor 5 games for, like, GameCube. They're like, those look better.

There's a 32X Star Wars arcade port that's really good. There was, yes. Maybe that's how they got their foot in the door for this one with that conversion, because it is kind of strange for Sega to licensed. Star Wars. Yeah. Like I'm thinking, and I can't remember. a whole lot of official license. I mean, they had Moonwalker,

but that's because Michael Jackson loved Sega. So, yeah, like, I don't know, you know, having this from Sega is kind of weird. And it's also kind of weird that they basically were just like, oh, let's do the Atari game, but prettier. But there you go. Yeah. Well, it also kind of changes the focus a little bit,

because at least one of the previous Star Wars Arcade ones was the one where you had the two-player mode where someone was piloting and the other person was shooting, which was interesting, but I guess maybe it probably took a little more to get people together to actually put a lot of quarters in that. So it may have been an important. It's also not an authentic X-wing experience. Well, it's true because they're single.

Snub fighters are one-man vehicles. With droids. So someone could be the droid. Oh, right. So just like hang out and what the droids do? Yeah, they just like tweak things. They navigate. They get shot.

They tell them stuff, yeah. Through the little screen. Yeah. So this didn't have that. It was a one-person on-rail shooter. But then, yeah, it looked really nice. all right so back into crazy town there's typing of the dead which might be the craziest and in a great way the idea of a light gun game where you're not killing zombies with light guns but rather by typing

words of them is so weird I don't know why someone thought this would be a good idea to have an arcade game with like a quirky keyboard attached two cordy keyboards even so you could two player it but it's It's so great. There is a precedent for this style of game. There's master type and other games for the home computers where you shot aliens by typing what was written on them. But not done in a horror theme. No.

They weren't zombies from the house that did. Yeah, this is a setup that would get me to play a zombie game. But there was a cabinet with two cordy keyboards side by side, which is insane. I would have loved to see that in person. feel like that was just a disaster waiting to happen like someone spills their drink into it I'd like to know what they made those keys out of like they must have been indestructible

mechanical keyboard ever made out of ballistic plastic or something plastic yeah it's also I think this also slots into into a sort of subgenre in Japanese arcades of the cabinet with the really gimmicky input methods and you get so you get like there's the one that was not that long ago whether you like

literally flip the table right and there's like you know some of the one I'm about slapping someone's ass or something. Oh, yeah. The ass slapping game. It wasn't about slapping. It was about poking. Poking.

Oh, was it a concho game? Oh, man. Well, the cool thing about the typing of the dead is you could play it on the Dreamcast because Dreamcast had a keyboard for this web browser. Didn't have a USB port? No. It just had a keyboard. Oh, no, it just had a keyboard.

Yeah, yeah. That was like the Fantasy Star Online keyboard, and you could also use it for typing a dead. Or for the web browser. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had a mouse, too, the Dreamcast mouse. But the coolest thing is then. you could play Quake 3 with the mouse and the keyboard on the Dreamcast

with a VGA connection and the network and everything is awesome. Yeah, so played a really great game. But why not just play on your PC if you're going into that much trouble? Because it's... I never mind. Why am I asking this? Because you can do it. Yeah. Because it's possible. Because you owned a Dreamcast but the cool things. They had the servers up for Quake 3

for a long time. I don't know if they still do, but I remember playing it around 2006 or 7 online at the Dreamcast multiplayer. Anyway, I'm talking about Quake 3. Quake 3. Sorry. I digress. Who published Quake 3 on Greencast?

I don't know. Cool. I have no idea. All right then. Software. I don't know. So that was Typing of the Dead. Next, there's Virtua Tennis, which is a franchise that's actually still around.

I think there was a Virtuit Tennis just a couple of years ago. Oh, sir. And, you know, this was pretty much a tennis game. Like, it's not that different from 8-bit tennis like Nintendo's tennis for NES and Game Boy. But because it has. has 3D graphics, the viewpoint is low to the ground and a lot more immersive. So it feels very fast-paced. And, you know, other people tried to do this before Virtua Tennis and didn't do a very good job of it. There was a camera what was called, but there was a launch PS1 game

that was by Ubisoft, I want to say, and it was extremely terrible. I swear we talked about a Sega tennis game before. Wasn't there an earlier one that wasn't Virtua Tennis? There might have been. I actually do not remember. It's just weird. I don't. I've got, maybe I have a false memory, like in the Saturn era or something. This is another one of the ones I was thinking on when I was talking about them doing these virtual spinoffs that are going in the more realistic direction. So, again, realistic looking tennis players, realistic looking courts. Right. It was just going for simulating the tennis experience.

Well, I didn't check to see which, but in one region this was called Power Smash. They just dropped the virtual branding altogether. So, there you go. Yeah, this is one they should have thrown some zombies into. I mean, there's probably an unlockable zombie character. Put some virtual fighter characters. Virtual tennis for Dreamcast. Have pie playing tennis.

Yeah, the arm falls off when they try to return. Doesn't sound like a fair contest. All right, so we're going to look at one last wild game before we take a break. And that, actually, there's a whole bunch of wild games. Yeah, I added. Maybe we should, okay, Ben, no, that's fine. Maybe we should take a break now and, like, brace up. before we tackle the crazy stuff.

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I demanded listeners right. And the listeners said, okay. So, from Muteki, I have far too many words to say on the matter to wrap up in a single comment, but I will say this. I'm deeply thankful that with the 3DS releases of the 3D classics archive on 3DS, that we at last had an excellent and faithful recreation of Thunderblade on a home console. While it would have been nice to see a similar treatment for other underserved arcade games from the era like Revenge of Death Adder, I can see it being a bit prohibitive with the way the game incorporates scaling components. with the Switch, I hope, hold out for M2 going along to create more definitive re-releases of these old underappreciated arcade games. That would be cool. Definitely.

I'm going to butcher this name, Luis Antunez. Maybe. Okay. My respects to the devs who were involved in designing the levels for super-scaler games, given that it's much more complex than just laying down tiles on a 2D plane. And I'm amazed at how well these games hold up today. I still feel like Galaxy Force 2 is much more fun than any of the Star Fox entries. Shame we haven't really seen games made entirely of scaling sprites lately.

I'm hoping for an indie renaissance at some point. Yeah, I definitely miss that whole genre. We spent a lot of time on that in the last couple episodes of Sega, but kind of ran its course. But yeah, maybe we'll see someone give it another shot. That would be nice. Yeah, it's funny that, yeah, well, we've had the pixel aesthetic, and then the, now the polygonal, low-poly thing, and then it'd be neat to have a super, super-scaler.

Probably a lot of work to put one of those together. Probably. All right, from Sam Bass, bass, base, who knows? My actual memory of Sega games come from years later and concerns the also quite good MS-DOS port of one of my all-time favorites, Golden Axe. I was poking around in the file folders one day and realized with a little bit of teenage hackery, I could make any of the NPCs a playable character.

I immediately set out to make the in-boss Death Adder playable, because how badass would that be? Turns out not all that badass. Playing Golden Axe with a giant hitbox and painfully slow attack animation turned out to be a distinctly unfun experience. But at the time, I was really confused as to why. This led me to dig deep into how Golden Axe worked and why it was fun, taking extensive notes along the way. I learned a lot. Turns out that not only were Sega games cool, the best ones were also quite exquisitely designed and made one of my first steps toward becoming a professional game developer.

And in fact, Sam wrote in recently about the Indiana Jones episode and shared some, I guess, off the record insights as to why the Super Nias game didn't turn up that great, but he apparently worked at a studio adjacent to LucasArts at the time. That's really cool.

So that's kind of cool. People are listening to Retronauts, and it's great. Yeah, that's great. This is from electric boogaloo. No, it's from Infernal Bandicoot. I don't know why it says Electric Boathe. It's from Infernal Bandicoot. Okay.

So, they say, one of my earliest arcade memories was going to this arcade when I was a kid, and I vaguely remember seeing a two-player racing game with colorful scaling 2D graphics and an over-the-top radio announcer. They made a stark impression on me, but for the longest time, I couldn't remember what it was. It wasn't until the existence of YouTube Longplace that I found out that it was the 1992 system multi-32 game Outrunners, developed by Sega's AM1. division. I was quite blown away seeing how well the super-scaler graphics had held up, as well as the great music by Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Takayuki Nakamura, and Takanobu Mitsiyoshi. Since then, I've played

a ton of well-known and not-so-well-known Sega Arcade titles, the likes of Daytona USA, the Ocean Hunter, Wave Runner, Afterburner climax, and of course Galaxy Force 2, which I mentioned in a previous episode. But Outrunners does have a special place in my heart, and I hope someday we can get a quality port to have it home. Well, other than the competent but underwhelming Genesis version, I mean. P.S, I do want to shout out a Sega game I sadly haven't experienced in the arcades but played through its Japan-only Dreamcast port, the 2000 Naomi title, Cosmic Smash. It's an interesting mix of Virtua Tennis and Breakout, with a minimalistic, futuristic

style akin to Rez with a chill soundtrack and multiple branching paths. I highly recommend people checking it out. That does sound interesting. Yeah, not run across that one. But yeah, man, indie game devs out there should take note of all these people who really love the old Super Scalar games. I can really see it so I could do something about that. I agree.

From Travis Hawks. Although I played many Sega arcade games through the years, my most distinct memories are with the massive four-player Sega Hot Rod. The machine had been at my local Tilt Arcade for a while, but I basically ignored it for years. When Street Fighter 2 came on the scene, it took over everyone's interest, and we were all smitten, smitten, myself included. That is, until people started getting physically smited.

After several fistfights broke out of the Street Fighter 2 arcade machine, I decided I would wander back into the darker, corners of the massive arcade. After rediscovering it, Hot Rod became the focus of my interest from then on. Maybe it was the simple gameplay, the joy of upgrading your little penny racer-sized car, or just that big, colorful cabinet and the violence-free fun I could have with friends and strangers. Whatever the reason, the game pulled me back in time and again. Where is he from? Did he mention it? He did not say. Okay. All right. So this is from normally retro. The saddest part to me is that most of the younger audience won't be

able to play the intended arcade experience for many of these games through emulation. It's like going on VR roller coasters instead of the real thing. I would love for everyone to know true nausea by being stuck upside down on an R-360. Or to span, dip, climb on the mechanically powered Galaxy Force 2 deluxe cabinet. Even the Thunderblade control setup was amazing with a true-to-life helicopter yoke and throttle. Of course, there are still attractions like the Humphers. arcade or outrun cabinet that offer some exciting arcade play with an interactive experience,

but a lot of their earlier designs like the 3D submarine scope and subrock just felt so daring and free of imaginative limitations, which was likely due to the booming economy of the 80s in Japan, no doubt. Thanks for taking the time to give, thanks for taking the time out to give Sega some love. Yeah, it is kind of a shame that the most exposure you get to actual arcade games these days seems like mostly, you know, the new bar arcades that have been popping up, which is great. And you get some funnalled stuff in there, but most of them don't have the

finances to have the really huge crazy cabinets. It's a bad. Space. I mean, they can pack all those little... Yeah, because they're mostly in little tiny, you know, alleyway bars. So, you know, most you'll get some Likon games maybe and that kind of thing, but not the super fancy cabinets. Yeah, there are some games that are kind of like installations

and you have to go to special places to get to those And I will talk about one of those shortly, but we do have a couple more letters. Next one is from Bancel. Speaking of the special installations, the hydraulic space harrier cab was a watershed moment in arcade history for me. I had never seen anything like it in an arcade. And unlike other hyped cabs, like say, Dragons Layer, the game was every bit as good to play as it looked.

I was about eight years old, I think. Playing through the game now, it's easy to see its limitations, but the aesthetics of the dragons still look amazing to me. Another highlight of my childhood arcade going was the bonus game and Shinobi, much more exciting than the game itself, as much as I loved it. Galaxy Force is a cab, I think, deserves more attention than it gets. It is my favorite of the Afterburner

style games, both as a ride and as a game. I've never really thought of these as rides, but I guess they kind of are. Glock is the worst, an expensive gimmick hiding in a below-par game. Playing it on maim side-by-side with Afterburner shows what a step-down it is in terms of

exciting moment-to-moment gameplay. I think Sega hoped that spinning the player 360 degrees would hide that. and on the subject of bad games. Uh-oh, Star Wars trilogy is a mess. Shooting galleries are cheap, and the lightsaber fights end up being bad QTEs. Oh, well...

Give me the shot-down Atari Star Wars Cab from 1983 over this any day. And finally, one last letter, if you could be so kind, Benjamin. All righty. This is from Adam Ismail. Hello, Jeremy. Out of all the topics for retronauts has covered, none speaks to my interest in gaming history more than Sega's arcade lineage. From a super early age, it was fascinated with cars and video games,

so Sega's legendary racing output in the mid-90s solidified both passions. Daytona USA was the first game I ever played, and Sega Rally, Scud Race, and Outrun 2 only furthered the obsession. I'll never forget the episode of Retromats that covered arcade racers a few years back, where one of the hosts called Daytona, the Street Fighter 2 of Racing Games. Whoever it was, they couldn't be more right. That must have been Ray. I feel like that was Ray.

To this day, I've found nothing else in the game. the genre that offers the same kind of pure driving bliss that Sega consistently achieved in those golden years. And yeah, I think that's true. It's been one of the most consistently successful subgenres in all this list we've gone through, like through several of these episodes. There's always a good racing game in there. I mean, you've got you Suzuki, or you had you Suzuki, who loved racing and was really good at wrangling out crazy tech. So, yeah, it makes sense that Sega would be an arcade racing

leader. He also had Tetsuya Mizuguchi working on some of those games. I don't know if he's super into racing, but he's cool. All right, so let's wrap up our Sega journey. There's actually still a lot of games to talk about, but we're going to go through these pretty quickly. A lot of these games might be more appropriate to talk about on a Dreamcast episode because pretty much everything from here on out is a Naomi game. And Naomi was, you know, like the Titan was a basically a souped-up Saturn board for arcades.

Naomi was a Dreamcast, internally speaking, so it was really easy to create ports from arcade to Dreamcast. There are a lot of things here that didn't get home ports, though. That's true, and that's probably because Dreamcast died after a year and a half. I think if Dreamcast had been around longer, we would have seen more stuff like Jambo. Jambo. Safari. We would have seen more stuff like Jambo Safari.

I think that's supposed to be Jumbo, but the ambiguity of UNA and Japanese. Get you Jambo. So this one I've never seen before, but it's like, it's a whole bunch of, bunch of ideas all thrown together in a really unique game. I put down it's a combination of lucky and wild, crazy taxi, get bass,

and Pokemon Snap. Yeah? And if that sounds like a crazy idea, well, you gotta see the game. So you're a dude in a Jeep driving through a nature preserve and you're on safari,

but you're not shooting the animals. You're trying to capture them so you can research them and study them. So it's like an academic kind of game. It's very, like it's an action game, but it's peaceful. It's not a violent game, which I appreciate.

It seems aimed more at children. Yeah. Our smaller, younger audience. But the mechanics look pretty wild. So instead of like a sensible like trank gun or something, you have a lasso, right? So you're in this Jeep simultaneously trying to throw out the lasso at animals ahead of you. And then once you catch one, they kind of drag your Jeep around in this crazy sequence where you have to keep your, like this is the get bass where you have to keep your line from breaking, right? Like it's a fishing game until you can get a second lasso on them and then you catch them.

And also during the sequence, they're dropping sonic rings at you for some reason? Yeah. Just, you know, gamification. But, I mean, driving around the safari valve or whatever, it's very much like crazy taxi, you know, in Africa. Instead of being in San Francisco, you're, like, out on the open plane and, you know, there's the savannah. There's all kinds of creatures around and you have to, like, basically there's difficulty levels and you say, well, I want it easy. So it gives you zebras. Whereas you say, I want hard.

It gives you lions. So then your job is to capture three of those animals. And, yeah, there was never a Dreamcast port of this, but it did come to DS and Wii of all damn things. Yeah, it's Jambo Safari Animal Rescue. So was that the same mechanics? I feel like I watched a little bit of a video. I saw this segment where someone was brushing a lion's teeth. I'm sure that was added for DS.

Yeah, that was probably a Wii and DS thing. But I think it's probably the main game with extra feature. added to it. So it's not exact a straight port or something. Right. All right. So also public service type games. Ben,

you put two on here, rescue or emergency call ambulance and brave firefighters. What are these? I've never heard of them. Yeah. Well, I was reading the Wikipedia entry for Jombo Safari. And someone had put in there

that they were going to do a trilogy of simulator games on a home port or something. And the other two were going to be emergency call ambulance and brave firefighters. So I had to look those up. So what are they? Well, emergency call ambulance,

is an ambulance driving simulator where you sit down in the cabinet with a steering wheel and you're called to sites where people are injured and then you have to take them to the hospital as fast as you can and presumably with as little damage as possible or something like that. I've never played it, but I saw a video of it. Yeah, this just seems like a Japanese thing. It seems like kind of a poor idea because I watch this and it encourages you to take these off-road shortcuts with your ambulance, which just seems poorly thought out. I guess we should have talked about Crazy Taxi first.

Yeah, because this is kind of a barrier. But yeah, this sounds to me like, you know, basically the emergency vehicle modes in Grand Theft Auto 3 and 4. Or it could be like Crazy Taxi with, you know, people, ambulance people. You got to go to a point to pick them up and take them to a place, kind of like Crazy Taxi. Yeah, I mean, I think this and Jambo Safari came out of Crazy Taxi. It's like the same engine and same concept. But, yeah, like I was saying, in Grand Theft Auto 3 and 4, you could hop into a police car or, or a taxi or an ambulance or a fire truck,

and you would get missions to triple-built on those. And it was just like this little Easter egg that could actually be really addictive. Yeah, basically using these entire games as many games. My city, I think, if you jumped on a little Vespa, you could deliver pizzas. Yes. So, yeah, like, this was before that,

before that sort of, you know, grand, huge, seamless game world style. So each of these little modes was broken out into a standalone game. But yeah, this just seems incredibly stressful to me because Crazy Taxi is stressful enough on its own, and now you've got some guy in the back who's going to die if you run into too many things. Sure, why not?

No pressure. I like to play it, though. It looks neat. So what's up with Brave Fighters? Well, Brave Firefighters is sort of like a light gun game, but they had giant simulated hoses, or at least the nozzles, and you'd pointed at the screen and spray water at fire.

And I think it's an on-the-rail shooter type thing where you go through a burning building and you can play two players at a time and there's a giant hydrant in the middle for aesthetics. So this is not, okay, you know, I have seen this and it is not in any way related to Burning Rangers. Yeah, I don't think so. It looked fun, though.

I would totally give it a go. Yeah, it's a neat idea. It's one of those things where you're trying to attract people to put in quarters in the arcade or tokens, however it may be. And just another wacky idea, which is, I'd love to play it. I'd love to play all these things if I could find it. Yeah, it's got like, give me key controllers,

but it looked like, like watching a playthrough of this, it looked like there was actually some strategy to it because you need to, like, not just put out the fires, but keep them from spreading. So, like, you know, if the fire is going up some curtains, you want to put that out first before taking care of the bulk of it on the floor so it doesn't catch a other thing. It looked like it could have some depth to it.

I don't know. I haven't actually had a chance to play it. Okay, let's keep talking about their simulation games. We'll jump around a little bit. There's a game called Airline Pilots, And I'm pretty sure this is, this is what I was referring to earlier. I think this is the game that they have installed at the cradle of aviation museum in Garden City, Long Island, New York, which is where the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo takes place. And it's like this museum, you know, a flight, they have like an actual NASA capsule there.

It's a really great museum and really fascinating. And they have this video game, but it's like $5 to play it. And it's like this huge, like actual airline size. you know, airline cockpit size booth that you can sit in and it's got this like incredibly complex. I mean, it's like steel battalion but for

flying a plane. And it seems it has three monitors at panoramic view. Did you mention that? I did not mention that in my notes but yes, you're right. I forgot about that. And it just seems so complicated and expensive and it doesn't seem like an arcade style idea because it

is very, very methodical and slow. It's like a real, you're a real plane flying simulators. Yeah, like, I feel like, collect the rings. Right. No, this is, this is not the get mass of flying. And that's a whole huge genre on PC. There's this whole kind of sub-eco system of incredibly realistic flight

simulators over there. It seems like this kind of snuck its way out of there into a huge arcade machine. Also, Sega, around that time, I saw online, I was looking at a list of Sega's games. They made a very realistic driving simulator for driving schools or something around this time. So they were doing a lot of those kind of things. Well, yeah, the simulator format for arcades in Japan, I think, was really sort of popularized with Dencha de Go, which is a train simulation where you're driving, you know, you're controlling a train going from station to station in Tokyo, and you have to, like, stop just on the line and so forth and keep your speed right. and like that I think really appealed to the train otaku who just like obsess over the individual cars

and like it was a chance for them to get in the train and the passenger or the the driver conductor yes his seat another simulator Tokyo bus tour and this is yeah this is the same same sort of thing I think

bus tours is more approachable than airline pilots but but the concept is the same and I feel like these owe a lot to Denchadego Yeah, that series is still around. I think it finally got localized a few years ago, didn't it? Like on 3DS? Something that came out. Yeah, I think there was a 3DS one.

Like of all things, yeah, that's immersive. Sure. Well, there are, yeah, I've seen a lot of very realistic Japanese train simulators. I don't know what they're called. There's one game called A Train on the PlayStation. Yeah. I don't know if it was. That's by the same company, Artink, that does, didn't you to go?

Amazing. Okay. So, also realistic, we have Zombies Revenge. zombie revenge, sorry. And this is, you know, a very, very authentic, true-to-life 3D brawler in which you are punching zombies. I was just doing that last night. Yeah. Anyway.

Take your mom. Okay. So my attempted humor fell flat. So I feel like this game is built on the bones of Spike Out. It seems like a very sort of similar presentation, but the areas are a little smaller and, you know, there's more stuff to do. So I guess it's more, like, a dynamite cop in that sense. but it does have that 3D view and so forth. And this was actually started out as a spinoff of House of the Dead.

And you can definitely see that. But instead of being like a shooter, it's a punching game. But you also have a lot of firearms. So then you kind of get that, oh, yeah, yeah, okay. And like when you pick up a gun, it has, you know, like it's six bullets. So it's very limited ammunition. So you definitely get the House of the Dead perspective there. But to me, the interesting thing about zombie revenge,

is that it was a Naomi title and I think it was one of the games that had VMU support in the arcade so you could like transfer data like you could save your character data and then I think the home version for Dreamcast had support for like your arcade saves I could be wrong about that but I know they did that with a few games

that's really cool kind of like the NeoGeo memory card thing yeah I mean definitely like that take into the next step that's awesome yeah I mean you're you're totally right to compare it to NeoGeo because again Naomi was very much like in the A-V-S-M-V-S dynamic. I can never remember which one is which. Yeah, I can't either. The A may be arcade, right?

It could be, but it may mean whatsoever. It may mean advanced. Yeah, this one, it seemed like the focus on picking out firearms gave it a little more variety, at least, than like, spike-out. But on the whole, I think I might still rather probably typing of the dead. I'm going to kill zombies. Yeah. Better to type out your frustrations.

All right, we're closing in on the home stretch here, guys, I think we're closing in on the home stretch here, guys. I think we can do this. We can get through the end of the 20th century for Sega. We're almost there. All right. So next is, oh, well, Crazy Taxi. Yes, it's the game that we keep referring to. I feel like this was exactly. Taxi. Yeah. This was kind of like the Dreamcast breakout hit alongside Soul Calibor. Yeah. Yeah. It was definitely big back in the day. I didn't have a dreamcast while I wasn't playing it there, but I have played it in the arcades a few times, including I sat down in this one last week too. And it's, yeah, it's,

Yeah, playing this game, like, with an actual steering wheel and pedals is not easy. It's tough. It's very, very touchy controls. I never thought about that. Yeah. Yeah. I just played it on the Dreamcast. I got that one.

I had no idea as an arcade game. Yeah, so it's got, so this was actually one of the other big ones they had at the place I was at. And it, yeah, it's got a steering wheel. Does the arcade version have Dragulo? I don't remember. I don't know. I only played, I only played, like, one level in it. But, yeah, it's just, it's super touchy.

really easy to oversteer on the steering wheel and it just, I mean, I imagine if you spent some time where they got used to it would be better, but just trying to jump in and like get people places fast. It's tough. It's really easy to just end up, you know, driving yourself into walls a lot. Or maybe I just suck at it. That's entirely possible. One of my favorite things about crazy taxi on the dreamcasts. I have no idea if this is in the arcade or not, but there's a, there are these bonus games. And one is where you go down a ramp, really steep ramp and you try to jump off as far as you can and make it. I found that fun. I played that more than the real game. Yeah, I think that was mostly in the home console.

Yeah, I feel like this series was, or this game was Sega's answer to the Rush games by Midway, like Rush 2049, San Francisco Rush, et cetera, where it was just like ridiculous, crazy scenery, lots and lots of, you know, ups and downs and hills and stuff. I love those games. Manic driving. Whereas this did that and then it said, like, okay, let's, instead of taking you and putting you on a, you know, a racing course through the city, let's just let you drive through the city. So it has kind of like a working network of city streets and that sort of thing.

And I really feel like it's kind of the midpoint between the Rush games and Grand Thiefd Auto and crackdown and, you know, just sort of open world games that have working city structures to them. This doesn't have quite that. But, you know, once you play it, you start to get a feel for where you need to take turns and where you can find shortcuts. And it really, it really, I feel like rewards repeated play because you get to know. the environment's a lot better, much more so

than it's like a standard racing game where it's like okay, yeah, I know this is going to be a hairpin You memorize the one trip. Right, yeah. There was a definitely an early iteration on all those open world concepts that would blow up into a whole genre and too much later. And then you'd get like sorry, you'd get like Burnout Paradise and that sort of thing which really just like totally

take a literal approach to this and say let's make it a cross-country driving open world game. Yeah, I love that. But there was a game called Driver around that time that was sort of more open. You went around the city doing stuff running from the cops. But yeah, they said,

driver and GTA were kind of, yeah, they had, yeah, like GTA, there's some, some incidental dialogue in San Andreas

where they're making fun of reflections. Oh, really? The driver developer. Yeah. But yes, this, I feel like this,

you know, it was a more pure game. It stayed out of those wars because it was literally just like, fun arcade. Here's a guy with green hair who drives a taxi badly. You are him

or you are this girl with, like punk hair, and, you know, it was kind of like before Jetset Radio, there was crazy taxi. It was one mechanic, just do this and like a bunch of variations on it, yeah. I love this, the Sega aesthetic we talked about is just, it doesn't have to be gritty and realistic. It can be fun, fun, and arcade. Yeah, I mean, this was, this was...

Colourful, yeah. This game was very much them sort of digging into, like, extreme sports aesthetics, you know, that were popular with the era. Games like cool borders and that sort of thing, like, yeah, like, yeah, like, Like all of that, you know, the very late 90s, you know, play it loud kind of advertisements from Nintendo. Like the characters in here were very much that. And again, like I made fun of Dragula, but that song was in every video game at this time.

And this was the one that sort of started it off. Everyone was like, oh, we got to get Dragula just like crazy taxi. And it has, you know, like the kind of like the way Git Bass has its announcer saying, whoa, a big one. Whereas this one is just like the same guy but mean. I don't know I really like this game It's a lot

You know It feels very limited now Now that you have games like GTA Where you can do crazy taxi Within the setting The context of something much bigger But But there is a purity to this experience

At the time it was It did feel liberating and open And fluid and wonderful It was really great Day after day Your whole life's rack The powers that be Just bring down your egg

You get those specs You can never leave He's got to speak of a man Yeah, out your feet So back off the rules Back up the chocker Kind of at the other end up in to stay alone Leave me alone

I feel like I don't want to be control So I won So I won Kind of at the other end of the spectrum You have Samba de Amigo Which is Sega's answer to the rhythm craze

That was popular around the time games like Parapa the Rapa and Busta Groove. This was their take on it. And because they were making their own arcade games, they were like, we don't have to just do button presses. We can go crazy. So they found the most physical instrument they could, which was Maracas.

And so this is a game that kind of prefigures all the Wii motion control games that would come along, where like the position and placement of your Maracas in time to the music, you guys can't see me, but I'm playing this right here in the first. recording studio, my God. We can back you. Oh, bonus. Jeremy's gone at it. Yeah.

Exactly. Actually, I'm really terrible at this game. For some reason, the home version of it, like, my height is just at a point where I kind of fall between two of their sets. It's like, how tall are you?

There's like four settings, and I'm right in between two of them, so neither of them ever seem to work for me. That's the excuse I'm going with for why I'm terrible. Now you know how Paul Jeremy is. This is one I always felt like I was missing out on because I had, you know, back at that time, I had PlayStation and I didn't have a dreamcast. And so, you know, I got into DDR at some point. But I always wanted to spend some time with Samba de Amigo and none of my friends actually had a dreamcast. So I didn't get to do it. And before rock band and guitar hero and their ridiculous plastic instruments, you had the Samba de Amigo Maracas for Dreamcast, the Maracas controllers that came in this big long box. I owned them. And then I moved cross country and it was like, oh, what do I do? carry these damn maracas across the now I did eventually get the uh

tico notatzyg and a little mini controller that was also fun but but not quite I remember uh Samba de Amigo or however you pronounce it being very well received at the time yeah yeah people liked it and stuff I never played it though I still haven't played it I need those Maracas I've got the fishing controller I've got all kinds of weird things I should tell I should tell the arcade in Durham that they need to get a Samba de Amigo machine that would be that would be fantastic. I don't know if this did this cabinet actually make it to the U.S.? I've never seen it? That's actually a really

good question. This seems like one of those things that was just like installed at Sega Arcade Center. Yeah, I don't know. But I don't know. Probably someplace like Galloping Ghost in Chicago has it. Oh, I'm sure someone imported it, even if it was Japan. But yeah, it's of course, you know, given the name, the Maracas, it has a very Latin theme to

it. I think the main character is like a monkey and sombrero. But it's not the same monkey and Tetris, Sega Tetris. It's a different monkey. It's a more likable monkey. Yes. This one doesn't have a hammer. No, he has Maracas. And, like, the music has definitely a sort of, like, Latin salsa feel to it, but it's not just, you know.

Although, one of the big ones, like, Sampa Dijanero is actually by some, like, German electronic band. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's not just like they only have, you know, musicians from Latin America. Just, like, there is definitely that sort of vibe to it. You know, I think the home port might have been a little more broken out. But it's stuff that has to work for Maracas, you know. Anyway, I like this game even though I'm really bad at it. So let's see.

We're going to wrap up now. Just a couple of games. Do we care about Star Wars Racer Arcade? Yes. Okay, tell me why it's good. I've seen a video of it and it looks like fun. That's all I know. You don't care that much then.

You didn't go hunt down a copy to play. No, but there's no, it's not, you know, there's pod racing at home. I don't think it's the same exact game, though, is it? Yeah, I... There's one on the Nintendo 64, and there's... Right, and that's definitely not a Sega game. The light control gimmicks sounds interesting on this, But I've definitely never seen it in action.

One for each jet. It was basically kind of like tank control sort of deal. Right. And then Sebalba like breaks off the control. Yeah, you only got one. Got to use a stick and replace it. Yeah, no, never seen that one in action. It just looks like a lost, totally forgotten, interesting, neat arcade game.

At the time. One of the few good things to come out of episode one? Yeah, exactly. I wrote this in my Nintendo 64 forgotten games about the pod racing game, which was that or no battle for Naboo or something, is that at the time we hated everything that we, being me, that is, the royal we, we hated everything that had to do with episode one because it was terrible and it, you know. Anyway, so we, you know, I looked down on all those games and looking back,

there are actually some good games that came out of it, and I think it's worth three considering them. Let's see, Alien Front. What is that? What is that? You added that. I don't know about this game. It's 2001. You've gone too far. We've gone too far. Go back. All right, you put it on here. We talked about Tokyo Bus Tour, though, right? It's a big blocky arcade cabinet.

And Alien Front is like Alien Front online on the Dreamcast, but not online. It's alien front offline. Okay. It's got two cabinets. What does it have to do with Tokyo Bus Tour? I just skipped through Tokyo Bus Tour really quickly. We talked about that. Oh, I see.

Yeah, we're talking about Alien Front here. Sorry, I'm looking at this. Keep up with us, buddy. Yeah, sorry. Tokyo Boastur. But so Alien Front, so it says this is also vehicular combat. So how does that work? Yeah, I never actually played it. Sorry. Okay.

I swear I have Alien Front Online. This is out of bounds anyway. So it's like twisted metal but in space. No, your shame is going to be recorded for posterity. I've played Alien Front Online one or two times on the Dreamcast, but I didn't have the online portion. So you've played Alien Front is what you're saying. Well, I just don't remember what.

It's just alien front. The thing is, this is 2001. By your own definition. Yeah, you know, I don't remember things from 2001. What? The whole point of this podcast is remembering things from 2001 or before. Kind of is. Oh, my God.

I'm telling before, fine. After 2001, nothing, blank. It's like. Should we just talk about Monkey Ball instead? I guess. Man. We're going to send you out of here on the bus tour. Okay.

All right. Yeah, let's wrap up with Monkey Ball because I do feel like, it's also 2001. Well, Monkey Ball, kind of like crazy taxi. is one of those games that it speaks to the post Naomi era, the post Dreamcast era. Monkey Ball I don't think showed up on Dreamcast, did it?

I think it made its debut on GameCube. This was one of the games that... Super Monkey Ball. Yeah, Sega was like... Yeah, they were already done with the Dreamcast. Yeah, like, let's be Nintendo's buddies now because we bombed it. There are three obscure games

I made note of that are interesting. Just to mention quickly, magical truck adventure is a two-player hand-cart pumping game where you actually have those like an old gimmick controller like train cart where you you know I don't know what are they called

up one side down the other hand car yeah like a hand car and you're racing I guess I only saw a picture of the cabinet that looks crazy that's from 98 Ocean Hunter underwater light gun game with shark heads as your guns dirt devils looks really cool and off-rard racing game

had one of those when I was a kid and we used it to like clean up messes that's exactly what it's like at this point was that the prequel to Dust Force yeah but why didn't we talk about dirt devils I mean I had no nothing about it but it looks awesome it's like an off-road Sega I went with like games that I was at least somewhat familiar with for this so this is not a comprehensive

podcast I apologize that's fine we had time to mention them real quick right yeah well we just did so now let's go back to Monkey Ball because we were talking about that before you got I thought you were done with Monkey Ball. No? We just, I was warming up to it.

I was saying it's, you know, it's emblematic of Sega's post-Dreamcaster, the post-first-party era. This was one of the games that became sort of, I feel like it's really associated with Nintendo platforms, and that's really weird for anyone who's been following Sega these past five episodes. Although it's also sort of like the monkeys themselves hit this kind of mascot level where they just show up in whatever at this point, like on all platforms. all companies. Right. But the concept behind Monkey Ball, and it's worth mentioning that the designer and director of Monkey Ball was Nagoshi.

What is his name, Takehiero Nagoshi? I can't remember. But anyway, he's the guy who does Yakuza. He was this kind of goofy-looking nerd guy at the time he made this game, and then he got into Yakuza, and now he's, like, super fake tan and wear sunglasses and has his hair buffaunted. Anyway, so

if you look at Monkey Ball Negoshi and Yaku Zinoguchi, you're like, is that the same person? But this is basically like marble, Marble Madness 3D with monkeys, or less. Or those, those like tilt games. Yeah, the labyrinth, the labyrinth games where you tilt the, yeah. Yes.

I mean, the title is so literal, you are a monkey in a ball, a spherical, like a clear sphere. Collect the bananas, go in the holes. Don't forget to mention the banana-shaped joystick on the arcade cabinet. Tell us all about it, Venge. It's a joystick. shaped like a banana.

Does it control differently than a normal joystick, or is it just like... I think it's just a joystick, but I've never played the arcade version. I have Super Monkey Ball, and I really enjoy it, you know. That's a good game. Yeah, what's great about it? And what do you love about it? Well, it's a simple game. It has simple mechanics, so it's easy to learn, difficult to master.

Always good. You mean a moment to learn in a lifetime to master? That's not the Othello. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, it's exactly like Othello. Yeah, but I mean, this really did become, like, a sort of a running thing on Nintendo systems. We haven't seen one of these in a while, but for a few years in there. There was a Wii one, Banana Blitz, I think.

I think there was a DS one also. And I think it's shown up on non-Nintendo platforms, but, like, no one cares about those. It's just, it's Nintendo's monkeys. Yeah. They're cool. I was about to say, didn't the monkeys show up in Metal Gear Sal? But that was the ape escape monkeys, wasn't it? Yes, that was apescape.

Totally different. Yeah, so I'm sorry, we broke. into chaos. I don't know where we're going here. It's to be expected. But we're done. We're not going anywhere. We've made it to the end of the century.

Yes. So this is, ending in circles. This has been it. We've made it through the 20th century with Sega. That was a lot of Sega arcade games. It was five episodes worth and we still didn't cover everything. But I think we did a pretty good job.

I think we hit the highlights. And even though we haven't necessarily played all of these games because a lot of them didn't make it to the U.S. And a lot of the ones that did didn't necessarily make it to where we live. Yeah. And some of us didn't necessarily go to arcades. Yeah, I mean, I went to arcades from time to time. One of the things that do in this whole sequence of Five Podcasts has made me realize.

So I was one of those guys who never owned Sega's consoles. I never had Nintendo's and then I had Sony. So I never thought of myself as a Sega person. But going through all these old arcade games has made me realize how much influence Sega's output still had on my gaming, even though I never owned their hardware. You know, I would see it in their arcades and just like the things. things they pioneered and the genres they delved into just affected the whole scene throughout all these eras. Did it make you feel like you missed out on it at all?

I mean, some of them. There's definitely some of this stuff I would like to go track down and find, yeah. It makes me want to play more of those like Saturn ports, arcade ports and stuff. Yeah. Well, like someone was saying, hopefully. I'd love to play me some Radiant Silver Gun. Yeah, hopefully M2 will keep bringing out good ports of some of these for us on some on their Monarch.

Yeah, I mean, they are about to kick off their Sega Ages. series and that's not just arcade games but there definitely are arcade games one of the first games that they'll be bringing is GameGround which we talked about and forgot to mention by name a while back but game ground is very cool and because it's on Switch it will support the flip grip

so if you are one of our Kickstarter backers you'll be able to play this game in handheld mode the way God and at least you say get AM Lawn or whatever intended with a vertical aspect yeah pretty much It's also, I think, going to have, like, the rare three-player version that was only, like, seen in a few places. How's that going to work?

I don't know. I mean, it'll be networked, I guess. Okay. Or, I don't know. Maybe it won't. Maybe it'll just be, like, three people, like, you put it up on the table and you get, I mean, joycons are, you know, you can do, like, for a system. So, yeah. I can see it working.

Yeah. Cool. So, anyway, yeah, the Sega Ages series will encompass everything from Master System through the latter arcade days, I think. Wow. So, yeah. Hopefully, you know, they'll just put out one of those every few weeks for years to come. That would be great. I want them to do the obscure games, like magical truck simulator.

You know, I think a lot of the ones that are based on very specific interfaces, we probably won't see. It'd be cool if they release this big white wee peripherals again, all those different rackets down. Okay, so now I'm thinking Nintendo Labo, like, build a fishing rod out of cardboard. No, that's such a good idea. There you go. We need a partnership stat. Build a fire hose out of cardboard. Man.

Okay. Now I love the idea of GitBass for Switch. Yes. Unlab. All right. Anyway, so thank you, everyone. Thank you, everyone, for your patience dealing with us as we've kind of bumbled our way through 20 years or more, actually, of Sega Arcade history. And I apologize if we didn't give sufficient due to your.

personal favorite game, but I think a lot of these will break out into, you know, standalone episodes, such as, you know, we've got to do a virtual fighter, a virtual racing podcast at some point. I just feel like it's important. But we should get experts to talk about those instead of three crackers in a room. This is, we call the studio the Cracker Box. That's why it's so crispy. That's right. And we're good in soup. So. And what about a Star Wars racer arcade episode? You know, we've done some Star Wars episodes. I guess we have really gone into the racing games, but just like making sense of out of episode one. That's a future episode right there.

We did, we're going to do a, we're going to do, we're going to do, you heard it right here, folks, a phantom menace podcast. I want to be in on that. Ben is going to be on that. Ben is looking kind of nauseated, so maybe, yeah, maybe a Chris Sims job. Anyway, so yes, thanks for listening. This has been Retronauts, our final look at Sega arcade games, at least until like, you know, five years from now when we can talk about a whole new batch of them. And I am Jeremy Parrish.

You can find me on the internet at GameSpite on Twitter and at retronauts.com, where I post stuff and publish. And the Retronauts podcast is also there. You can also find it on iTunes or on the podcast one network. And Retronauts is supported through Patreon at patreon.com slash Retronauts. Your support feeds me, and that's important. It also feeds these guys when they come to record with us. That's also important. So thanks for your support.

And I'm hungry. What? We appreciate it. We should have eaten your whole lunch. It's just a metaphorical hunger. Oh, I see, I see. An emotional hunger. Ben, where can we find you on the internet?

I am on Twitter at Kieran, K-I-R-I-N-N. Still post there pretty regularly. I have a retro blog, which has been sadly neglected this year at Kieran's retrocloset.tumbler.com. Only want to end in Kieran there. I hope to get back to it at some point. I still got a whole bunch of Legos in a closet to post. and I'm Benj Edwards

otherwise known as the deadly towers guy and I Is that how you're going down in history? Yes Is that the hill you're going to die on? The tower you're going to die on? Yes. Yes.

Hang on you, alien man. Also, so you can find me at vintagecom which I don't post on much recently but I'm going to get back into it now because I just moved and things are settling down and the culture of tech podcast,

the culture of tech.com and you can find me at Benj Edwards on Twitter. All right. Thanks, everyone, for listening. We'll be back in a week with a full podcast from the West Coast. That's exciting. The President's Day Salehackle at Mattress Firm has been extended. It's your last chance to take home a free adjustable base with your qualifying mattress purchase purchase.

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Valled at participating locations only. For offer details, visit mattressfirm.com slash sale. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House his 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 a 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 showing. shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.