Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 171: Namco's arcade history, part 2

Episode Date: September 24, 2018

The Retronauts East survey of Namco's arcade legacy continues! Jeremy, Benj, and Chris tackle the coin-op doldrums of 1983-1985 while dreaming of more interesting days to come.

This week in Retronauts, the mouse police never sleep. This one follows directly on the heels of Ironman. As promised, we've segwayed, yes. Hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish. And segueing here with me, though not on a segue, it is. Sorry. All right. Sorry.

Ben Edwards. Uh-huh. And Chris Sims, here to talk about how Pac-Man is a Metroidvania. Sorry, Jeremy cracks me. You're wrong. You're wrong. So, yes, we are going to talk about Pac-Man, but not about Metroidvanians. No, sir.

There's none of that this episode. we are talking about the golden silver age of arcades and the games that Namco created in 1983 maybe through 1987 but I'm guessing not because that last episode went way too long

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and save 20%. Join the ultimate DC membership today at DCUniverse.com. But anyway, we have previously covered the early days of Namco, starting in their sort of weird and not very well-known black and white games from the 70s, and all the way through their big hits of 1980, 81, and 82. And now we're getting into an era where maybe the hits aren't quite so great. I feel like there's a story here that, you know, Sega and Namco have always been kind of positioned as rivals in arcade development. You had other big companies making arcade games like Data East and Taito, but I feel like Sega and Namco have always been kind of like the two big names in classic arcade games. in, you know, coming from Japan. You know, I think we learned with our Sega episodes that they started out okay and took a while to kind of find their voice.

But in like 1985, 86, Sega became Sega, and that was amazing. Namco, I think, was Namco pretty much right out of the gates. Pac-Man, Gallagher, Zevias, that kind of thing. And now we're getting into sort of some doldrums where things in the early 80s, mid-80s, mid-80s, not so great. There's some good stuff here, but there's also some very bad stuff. And some very, like, what are they doing stuff? And so I'm, yeah, I'm curious to hear kind of at the end of this, what you guys think of

this era of Namco games, because some of these games have been collected in compilations, but a lot of them have just been left to die. And this is a company that is very, very proactive about preserving its classics and republishing them. and keeping them in circulation in some form. So when games like these don't show up on any compilations ever, I feel like that means something. So anyway, I've been talking a lot.

What do you guys think? I think it makes a lot of sense that there is a kind of fallow period for Namco. You think they were letting their fields lay fallow? Well, I mean, what do you do after you make Pac-Man? Actually, you know what? Plant-Corn. I think saying that this is a fallow period is fair, because around 1983, 84, Namco was starting to look to home game development.

They made it big on Famicom. They were one of the first third parties to support Nintendo, and Pac-Man was a huge hit for them. Tower of Jerago was a massive hit for them on Famicom. So I think they were starting to look toward home development and say, oh, yeah, we should do stuff on game consoles. So maybe that is why their arcade development sort of suffered by comparison. That's a great turn of phrase.

Well done. Thank you. No, thank you. No, thank you. I don't know what was going on internally in Namco, what happened with the development teams and whatever. I feel like this is like they may have hit those early hits unexpectedly, and then they're just sort of like, how do we follow that up? Like, we accidentally create three or two or three incredible games that are just blockbusters. And so a lot of these next games, they're trying to follow up on them in some way.

way or another. And, you know, I don't know if they're trying to recreate the success, but they're sort of iterations of those earlier games. Yeah. And I think the way that they iterate on those things is really interesting as we'll see going forward. All right, so let's just jump straight in and kind of pick up on the last, really, of the sort of classic arcade Namco franchises that we didn't touch on last time, if I'm not mistaken, and that's Mappy. Did we talk about Mappy last time? I checked back through the previous episode and I did not hear it mentioned. I feel like we've talked about Mappi's friends. We have. I mean, Mappi's dear to our hearts, but in terms of professionals speaking on a podcast, I feel like we have not yet touched on this. I think we stopped at Zavius last time. I thought I mentioned it maybe briefly last time. Maybe you mentioned it, but we haven't given it a proper discussion.

And I do feel like Mappy is one of those cases that you were talking about, Benj, where they were looking at their previous hits and saying, okay, we need to build on this. How do we do that? In this case, I think they were building on PAPE. Pac-Man and saying, like, what if we did Pac-Man, but also Donkey Kong? And so you have a game that is a side-scroller, but also a maze chase, which, you know, that, there was some precedent for that. There was Keystone Capers from, I want to say Atari in like 19-Activision. Oh, was that Activision? Yeah. Okay. And then there was also, you know, there was a, oh, God, what was it called?

The Hanyanko alien-style side-scrolling platformer. Deadly Tar Sh. No. It's from, like, 1980. It was by UPL. God, I can't remember. Anyway, it was an early platformer that predates even Donkey Kong. And it's kind of a trap-em-up and you're not jumping.

Yeah, what platform is it? It was an arcade game. Okay. Yeah, boy, that's an obscure one. Yeah, I should know what the name is, but it's totally escaping me and I'll remember it after we're done recording this podcast, and then I'll be angry at myself, and then people will write in to tell me, oh, that game you were trying to think of, that you did think of, like, months ago.

Just, okay, anyway. This is my demon. This is my burden to bear, okay? Demon in a podcast. Yes. Anyway, just talk about Mappy. I need to stop making my mouth move. I probably first played Mappy on a NAMCO collection.

Was it on the first NAMCO? You know, I don't know exactly how the breakdown of those games was, but it was definitely on, it was either on one or three. It was also on, yeah, I think I played one, two, and three maybe. And it was also on that the first plug-and-play TV games joystick, which is really good. I mean, it was really well done by Jack Specific. And it had MAPE on it. I'm pretty sure.

And I love that game. I want to say that that was one of the, you know, the Game Boy Advance NES classics in Japan? Those are called Famicom Minis. And I feel like that was one of the releases for Famicom Mini in Japan. Was Mappi? Yeah. Wow. They must have loved that.

I remember writing about it for some reason. for OneUp.com in the very early days. So that would have been 2003, 2004. And that's the only reason I can think of. But anyway, yes. So they have republished this game. It is considered one of their core classics. Yeah, all I know is that you play as a mouse

in a police uniform, I think. And you run around chasing cat burglars, maybe. Good play on words here. Yes. Well, the villain in Mappi, in the American version, his name is Goro. He's a cat named Goro. He's got forearm, so rip your spine out.

No, but in Japan, his name is Niamko, Niam being the sound, Nya being the sound that cats make, and Namcoe being the company, so he's Niamko. That's pretty good. Pretty good. Why wasn't he called NAM meow in the American version? Niam. Big missed opportunity. Miaoco.

I don't understand Mappy, like on any level. I have a very difficult time wrapping my head around it. You saying that it's like Pac-Man but also Donkey Kong really... Doesn't make any sense. No, it made me understand it more because I hadn't considered it like that. Okay, so Mappy is a side-scrolling game. No, no, no, no, I'm saying like the, it is kind of, like, you get into sort of the weird obscurity that you see in, like, Super Pac-Man, where there's, like,

these concepts that I think the developers had these ideas in their mind, and they didn't, like, the games were just too abstract, too limited at the time to properly explain. So it's a side-scrolling platformer, and there are, like, these gaps in the floor that you can drop down and then use trampolines to bounce to other floors. So you change levels in the maze, not by climbing ladders, but by dropping and then trampolining up to the level you want to go to. But then there's, like, these things chasing you, and to stop them, there are doors you can open. You, like, slam the door into them. And there are also microwave ovens, and you can send a microwave oven beam at the cats. They're trying to rob a museum and stealing art.

There's a lot happening in this game. I don't think it holds up as well as Namco wants it to. I find the iconography very disjointed and confusing. Well, this is because it's a Japanese game. All this must mean something to Japanese culture that we don't understand. Doors, microwaves, cats, anthropomorphic mouse is... I feel like we have doors, microwaves, and cats over here. Just not together.

They're not all jumping on trampolines together. Ideally, not together. You really don't want to put your cats in your microwaves. together. I do think what's interesting to me about Mappy and putting in the context of Pac-Man meets Donkey Kong is that the next few years, like the early 80s output of Namco is like sitting in on the brainstorming session for what they're going to do with Pac-Man next, except every single idea that was thrown out was made into a game.

Yeah, pretty much. Because it's like, okay, well, what if there was a second Pac-Man who followed you around and took the cherries? And, like, what if, what if Pac-Man was Mario? And what if there was a... Like, what if Pac-Man was a mouse chasing cats? It's all... You can see them iterating on the same idea in different ways.

And, like, what if Pac-Man was in a castle? And it was Tower of Duraga. It's really interesting, but I think it leads you to places, like, Mathy. I know it's a core franchise for Namco. I don't get it. Yeah, this game has some very, very enthusiastic fans, as I have discovered, when I've written negative things about it. So people really love it.

So it must connect with people on some level, like really strongly. I'm just not one of those people. Maybe I came into it too late. I will say this. When I hooked up, you know, that joystick for my kids when they were really little, like when my oldest daughter was three, I think I let her pick any games you want on there. She loved Mappy the most, and she actually played it and really enjoyed it. So something about it resonates.

It definitely has cute characters. and the basic action is fun. It's just kind of strange, and I feel like it's very similar in spirit to Pac-Man, but not as good. And, like, again, it clearly was a big hit for them because not only did they follow it and have, you know, continued to republish it,

you also had a lot of games that kind of tried to be basically map-y. There was a Game Boy game that I covered on Game Boy Works, which you can see on YouTube, called The Tasmanian Story, which was by Pony Canyon, and that was actually based on a 1983 game that they developed, or 1984 game, it's extremely similar to Mappy. Like you have the multi-tiered platforms and you have the trampolines, and when you're like jumping on a trampoline, bad guys can't hurt you and you're collecting stuff. So clearly this sparked off some sort of like, you know, this clone saga of other people

making games like it. I feel like Mappy is building off some sort of. cultural archetype that we don't have in America because it just doesn't make sense to us I think our games that we like it seems like it has no rigor no intellectual consistency to it just just a weird mishmash of stuff

cats, microwaves, mice, trampolines, police you know, multi-level platforming if you want to talk about mishmash we're going to get to Gimpe Tomitin that is a wacky But my greater point is that this think about American games that are like pitfall is based on the idea that you are familiar with

like Indiana Jones. Somebody already knew or a solo adventure going through a jungle. These are ideas we're comfortable with culturally because they're repeated through our culture, through movies and whatever and stories. And so I have you know, I've encountered weird Japanese games

that make no sense to me, but then they have these ancient mythology of Japan that has weird stuff to us. I don't think that's what's happening with this though. I mean, it's like it's pretty obvious. You know, cats and mice, in this case, the mouse is a policeman. So he has to arrest bad cats, but of course, cats are more dangerous than mice.

They're deadly to mice. Well, maybe they start with the cat burglar thing, and then they're like, okay, the police have to be mice. I don't know if that phrase actually exists over there. So I feel like the characters themselves, I get it, it's cute cartoon characters. It's just like some of the stuff like doors and microwave ovens and art. Like, why is all of that happening? Trampolines, what? So.

So, yeah, it seems lacking intellectual consistency. Yeah, I don't think there's a cultural thing before it. I think it's just like they threw a bunch of stuff together and we're like, what can we depict with, you know, what graphics we have here. But, but, you know, Mappy, again, became sort of a franchise for them. Mappy itself never came to a console in the U.S. that I'm aware of. But on NES, we did get Mappy land where they took Mappy and put it in more of like a Mario style platformer. And then if you jump down the list here, let's go ahead and just talk about the sequel, which is hopping Mappy. And that is, that is. is a giant, what the hell game. Even more confusing. This is one of those games where they were just like, yeah, we're not going to do anything with that ever again. I think it did show up

on virtual console in Japan, but that was it. So how do you even describe this game? Mappy on a Pogo stick, hopping around, sort of semi-isometric. Yeah, it's like the Zelda three-quarters top-down view. And I get, okay, Pogo

stick, sure, Mappy is about jumping. But in this case, everyone is on a pogo stick simultaneously, and there's, like, no maze to it. It's just you're in a big open field, and mice and Mappy and Goro are hopping around on pogo sticks. And you have to hop on their heads, but, like, not everybody's heads can be hopped on. And there's items, but sometimes the items hop. I don't get it. I like, I, I, I'm, I'm, this game, the. background cycles between like like daytime sunset and night so looking at this game is like

traveling through time it's like dissociating like you can find you you feel like your life is passing you by it's like and mappy never stopped hopping and you're like has mappy been hopping for 36 hours what nightmare hellscape is this i thought you got to say 36 years or something has map he been hopping his whole life what is time yeah Since birth, he came out hopping. Right. So, yeah, that was a 1986 game, and I feel like that really does kind of get to the point of like... I figured it out.

He's hopping mad. I was trying to figure out if hopping mappy was a pun on hopping map. I don't think so. So hopping is apparently like just the Japanese term for a pogo stick. It's the hopping. Okay. Hoping goo. So it's, yeah, it's Pogo Mappi.

Does Mappi mean something? The word Mappi your name? Okay. That makes sense. I mean, one of the common writer fours' abilities is called hopping, and it's a pogo stick. Right. Yeah. So, yeah.

So I think it was just like they said, well, you know, the original Mappy was about jumping on trampolines and trying to stop mice from stealing or cats from stealing art. So, you know, the side-scrolling maze, single-screen arcade game, that doesn't work anymore. So let's do something different. And that's what they came up with. And that's Namco in the mid-80s for you, right there. Head scratcher. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little weird.

Someone, okay, so finally one note on Mappy is that someone added a note here to my notes that says, this is the music that plays in my nightmares. Was that you, Chris? That was me. How does that music go? I can't even, like, I can't remember it. I just, I don't like you. No.

That's the music of everyone's dreams. I'm not going to stop. That's a beautiful dream. No, I don't. It's a dream full of dinosaurs that belch bubbles. Yeah. And they drink martinis. Come on.

Yeah, the music in Mappi is bad. I don't know, even Bubble Bobble seems more intellectually consistent somehow than Mappy. I don't know why. I mean, Bubble Bumble Bumble just leans directly into just full-on fever dream. Yeah. And it just owns the bizarreness. And that's cool. Okay, so a game that has maybe more intellectual rigor to satisfy you, Benj,

Pac-and-Pow, yet another sequel to Pac-Man that yet again is not as good as Pac-Man. The only good Pac-Man sequel was actually made by Americans. It was Macon. Yeah, it's true. It is very hard to improve Pac-Man. It's a very simple concept that was done very well. It's done perfectly the first time. So the only way to make it better is it gets different mazes.

Yeah, Miss Pac-Man perfects it. That's fine. But it's pretty much perfect. It's still classic. Yeah. And so you're stuck with this idea where they keep trying to change it. And like, again, this is what if there was a second Pac-Man in the maze with you? It's very...

Except it's not a Pac-Man. It's more like a ghost. It's a pal. Yeah. Well, it's not even your pal because the ghost is named Miru. I don't know. I guess it's pal. in America but the ghost like one okay miru pal whatever wanders around the maze kind of on his

own her own and grabs items and then takes them to the ghost house where you can't get them like the the zone in the center of the screen where the ghosts materialize she takes them there and she drops them off so you can't get their points so you have to like intercept her and get the the points get the items from her if you want those points okay so basically what they've done is taking paceman they add a bunch of stuff that makes no sense at all, and they release it. Well, this feels like... As cards, they're shooting, there's...

To me, this feels like a sequel to Super Pac-Man, whereas the maze is very sparse. It's not full of dots. There's just like some stuff scattered around the maze, and there's lots of locked doors. And instead of getting keys to open the doors this time, you're flipping cards, and that causes the doors to open somehow.

I think... I think the thought process here was, what if we could make Pac-Man competitive? And so they added a second. second, like something moving around the maze competing with you for points, but it's still a single player game. Right, yeah. So there's, you're not competing against someone. It kind of

feels like they were fumbling toward Pac-Man versus that would come 20 years later. Yeah. And would need Shigeramiyomamoto to say, oh, here's what it needs to do. And they just, they were like, well, we have this idea and we know what we want,

but we don't know how to get there. And they didn't. And it took 20 years. Yeah, it's very, it's very weird to see try and improve on Pac-Man over the course of the games. Why didn't they just try a game where you could play as the monsters to begin with? It took Shigeramiyomimoto to come in and say, why can't someone play as the monsters? Yeah, I mean, I thought that the first time I played Pac-Man. Not that hard.

I could be Shigura Miyamoto. You could. You look a lot like him. Thank you. And you have that youthful pluck. So anyway, yeah, I would describe this as a who asked for this take on Pac-Man. Yeah, it's a weird, it adds a weirdly oppositional element that goes beyond the ghosts, which, and the ghosts are so perfect in their simplicity, you know, it's, it's a weird, again, every idea that they brainstormed was made into a full-on game. Sometimes I have dreams that involve, like, Pac-Man games that have, like, these massive mazes, and they're always bad, and I'm always like, this game is so bad.

It's just because you can't, you can't mess with the original design of Pac-Man. You can make it better like Ms. Pac-Man, but you can't change it, otherwise it stops being good. And it took them until Pac-Man versus and Pac-Man-C-E in the new millennium to finally understand that. Otherwise, you have stuff like Pack-and-Pow. Are you sure you didn't work at Namco? What's up? Are you sure you didn't work at Namco in the 1980s? I'm positive because I would never, I would never make one of those dream games real because those are bad games, even my dreams.

I'm like, this sucks. Professor Pac-Man. Professor Pac-Man. At least that had... That is the weirdest thing. Yeah, it's weird. It existed, though. Yeah.

I think that's if for... Oh, no, there is one more Pac-Man game. Actually, why don't we go ahead and jump ahead to that? Because Chris, I know that you love Pac-Man. And I will say that of all the Pac-Man sequels developed by Namco up until, like, 2003, this is probably the best. It's a kind of rough game and could stand to be revisited and refined to be modernized. But considering that it is a platformer, side-scrolling platformer,

that predates Super Mario Bros. It's pretty damn impressive. It really is. So we're talking about Pac-Land. The 1984 game. 1984 is Pac-Land. It's skipped over a couple of games. It is clear to me at this point.

There's a lot going on here because they clearly have recognized that Pac-Man is a brand, right? And Pac-Man himself, for being a circle with a missing triangle of various sizes, is a beloved character, question mark? Chris, this is based on the cartoon. Yeah, it's based on the cartoon. You realize this, right? Oh, no, I put it in the notes. Okay, thank you. Yeah.

So you get... You're making it sound like they were like, what if Pac-Man were a guy? But no, they looked at the cartoon and said, let's take this American cartoon and base our Japanese video game around America's interpretation of Pac-Man. But recognizing that Pac-Man is a brand with a beloved character, question mark, leads you to the Pac-Man cartoon, which is Buck Wild. Have you done an episode on those? Buck Wild. The Pac-Man Cartoon. Not Buck Wild, the obscure milestone comics character.

I feel like that is one that Bob has led, and I can't say for certain, because I know we've done a bunch of Pac-Man-type stuff. We've done, like, Christmas Comes to Pac-Land or whatever. I don't know if we've done the... I love Christmas Comes to Pac-Land. But anyway, yes, we have definitely touched... I do. We have definitely touched on the Pac-Man cartoon to some degree. You know about how the first episode of the Pac-Man cartoon is about Pac-Man trying to stop the ghost from killing the President of Pac-Land?

The Pac-P President. The Pac-President, yeah. See. It was like the Pac-Chure. He's a debut show. Yeah. He's a member of a political action committee.

Oh, come on. That was a good joke. Damn it. So one point I'm going to interrupt, Chris, that just comes to mind about Pac-Land is that I, when I first played it, I thought it was a rip-off of Super Mario Brothers, you know,

because you see it. I can understand. They threw Pac-Man in a side-scrolling platformer. But why did they give him Space Invaders controls? I hate you, Pac-Man. It's weird. But it turns out, no, this predates Super Mario Brothers. And, in fact,

Super Mario Brothers may have been a rip-off of this game for all I know. There's this fluid. scrolling and jumping and platforming and secrets and stuff you can reveal, which is amazing. And although there's a fairy, I think, at the end of every level that gives you some kind of ability that you use in the next level.

And she's also from the cartoon, right? The fairy? I don't know about the fairy. I do not remember the fairy being in the cartoon. Yeah, it's been a long time. Okay. I don't know. I've thought Santa Claus was the only humanoid figure they encountered. It's possible. Yeah. It could be that the fairy was

totally made up here. And the fairy looks nothing like any other character in Pac-Man. she's like a Disney. She looks like Sleeping Beauty. She's like she's totally complete or maybe Cinderella, I don't know. But anyway, she's just like normally proportioned human and very detailed

compared to all the Pac-Man sprites. Like that's one of the things that really stands out about this game is that it has this very like animation-looking art style where it's like lots of, you know, characters with flat colors and black outlines. And then the backgrounds are kind of backgrounds are kind of weird. They're sort of

isometric and sort of not. So there's like this weird element of abstraction. And then the fairy comes along and has a hundred colors. And then, yeah, and she's like in this field of flowers. It's extremely like detailed and busy. That you get you by jumping through a hole in space. Yeah. Like a flut and tesseract.

Sure. Yeah. This game's weird. Is he jumping into video land and suddenly becoming part of Kid Video? Is that what's happening? That's what it looks like. Uh-huh. I think.

So we've got the MCU happening for video game cartoons, just not for video games. I think it is really. interesting that they like clearly you don't make Pac-Man and not realize that it is the best thing you've made right it's like Pac-Man is certainly you certainly don't rake in hundreds of millions of dollars and not realize oh this is a this is a great thing so they keep trying to do different things with the Pac-Man brand that you know the the long and winding road that leads to the Pac-Man too is kind of starting here but it's so weird to look at this and try and figure out what they're thinking.

The power-ups you get are hats and boots, which I love, because those are the two things Pac-Man can have. He's a head with legs. He wears in the cartoons. Yeah. I think it's the idea of traveling through a stage, then going into this weird ponchalist Monet painting. Monet or Manet?

Well, there's two artists. There's Monet and there's Manet. Yeah, I know. Which one was, which one am I thinking? If you're thinking of pointillism, that was Sarat. That wasn't even one of them. Oh, well, okay then. Yeah.

You're thinking of impressionist. It was abstract and Manet was more, not abstract, but yeah, it was impressionist. And then Manet was more like a naturalist that kind of painted a lot of figures, lots of naked women sitting in the grass. Yeah, that's what this is. That's my kind of painting. And then you travel. you go in there and then you commune with this higher being and then you travel backwards through the stage you just went through,

which is a really interesting mechanic. Yeah, I mean, Bungi totally ripped that off for Halo. I refer to it as the inverted castle of Pac-Land. It's the library. It's definitely like the Halo library. It's really interesting. And also, like, it's another one of those games where each level, the background has changed.

So it starts in daytime, and then you get some. sunset and then you get night. So there's this weird time progression. There's a lot of weird ideas in this game. It's really ambitious. And I've never made it this far, but looking ahead at some videos, there are stages that are basically you're traveling through a hidden, like, obscure area and you can only see like a limited distance. It's kind of like a bonus stage where you have to like just make it through a maze. And they use, you know, like a foreground background layer. So they cover up the screen with a foreground layer, except where a power. Pac-Man's, you know, like his Conavision is, and then you can see the platforms ahead of you

and you have to kind of find your way through this maze, which you, you know, you can't see the entirety of it. So it's, there's a lot happening here. This is the other thing is, I've mentioned this in the notes for some other game we haven't covered yet, but there's a lot of these games where they put so much work into it, so much detail that most people never saw because the game is so hard. I actually have played Pac-Land, I swear, a hundred times, I never saw. the ferry one time. I never got to the

ferry the end of one stage. So I had no idea there's, you can turn invisible and get boots and jump higher or whatever I find, yeah, do all this stuff. I mean, geez. They put a lot of work into this. They did. And then they hit it behind really, really difficult game. Wanting quarters, I guess.

There are also like ghosts driving cars because ghosts themselves are not scary enough. They need to have cars and airplanes. Yeah. Yeah, the idea of like guys driving cars and a side scroller as a hazard. That's a very Alex kid. Like Sega totally borrowed

from Packland when they made Alex Kid. We've discovered Packland is like the Genesis. It is. But it never showed up on Genesis, which is really weird. Yeah, it should have. Pac-Man 2 did, though. It did. But it had like a mouse interface. I don't remember. No, it was a mouse, but it was mouse-esque. Packland's fascinating.

It is, it does, it is not fun. And it still keeps the element of collecting energizers. And if you find an energizer, you can devour the ghosts, the monsters, and you can get more than 1,600 points because more than four a period of time. So you can keep going, 3,200 points,

6,400 points if you're good. It's like a revolution. It's the score chase, my God. I also really like that the levels, the demarcation between the levels is a giant billboard that says break time, which I think we need in this room. You need a big break time sign.

lights for when it's break time and pretty pretty girls. I was just going to say I think this is like the most important least understood game we've probably ever talked about that I can No, we've done Yankee Alien. Other than that Thank you.

Hey everybody, it's Bob. And if you listen to one of my other podcasts, What a Cartoon, you know I love Batman the Animated Series. In fact, it's so good, we decided to start the What a Cartoon podcast with one of the best episodes of Batman the animated series, Heart of Ice. In my opinion, there is no better interpretation of Batman. Take that, Christopher Nolan. And in fact, I can't wait to watch all of Batman the animated series in HD on DC Universe. What is DC Universe? You might be asking? Well, it is the ultimate DC membership created for Disney. DC fans just like you. DC Universe is the only place you can watch original DC series like the all-new live-action Titans, premiering in fall of 2018, Young Justice Outsiders, Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, Stargirl, and Harley Quinn, and those are all coming in 2019. And new episodes will be available weekly, so there's always something new for you to watch. DC Universe is thoughtfully curated and has a regularly refreshed library of digital comics, with over 2,500 modern and classic titles.

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All right, so let's dial back the time machine from 1984 to 1983 going way back in time to talk about Foson, which was a really strange game, according to my notes, that never left Japan. It involves molecular science. You were trying to capture molecules to recreate a pattern that you're given in advance while avoiding roaming atoms. It's strange. It's a really high concept kind of video game. Like, it's, you know, they're basically saying like, hey, it's molecular chemistry, the arcade game.

That's unusual. I mean, it's more like just pattern matching. It is. But I mean, the presentation of it. But the presentation of it, yeah. I actually really liked this game. I played it for the first time after we brought it up when we did the last NAMCO episode, and I found it to be shockingly enjoyable. I think this could be like a mobile game today that people would play on their phones constantly.

So when you played this, was it on a collection or did you just like emulate it? I just got it on the emulator because it looked interesting. And yeah, it's really, it has a, it's shallow, but it has a very interesting set of mechanics where you can each kind of of stray atom you pick up for your molecule is added onto the outer layer of whatever angle you hit it at. And if you get the wrong one, you basically have to fire off atoms in rotating order, which occasionally sends you back to just having the core nucleus. And so there's a lot of dodging, collecting the thing you don't want to get in addition to dodging the bad things. It's really interesting. I thought it was super fun. I'd never

heard of it before. I have never played it, but you speak highly of it, so maybe it's not so bad. Yeah. If Namco just wants to drop this one onto the old app store, I think they could do it. I feel like this was probably on the first Namco collection. And when it came out, I was like, what is Foson? Or one of them, one, two, or three. I know if there's five of them, right? And then they're NAMCO. Right. And there's a, there's a trademark in Japan also. Yeah, there's an museum encore. Extra one. That was where like the good stuff. stuff was. Yeah, I don't know. I had never played Foson. I have never played Foson. I've watched videos of it, and it's kind of hard to get rid of my head around, but I will have to check it out

now that you've spoken highly of it. I think looking at it won't, like, you'll get it immediately if you're playing it, but I think like it is probably the most boring thing in the world to watch. Right. And good puzzle games often are like that. Yeah. So I guess that's fair. Why are all those bricks falling? All right. So that was the end of 1983. And now We'll go back to 1984 and talk about one of the big ones here, although only in Japan, really. And that is the Tower of Druaga, which is one of Namco's really big games. Maybe the last, like, super huge, classic game on this entire list. And Tower of Druaga was basically Namco's attempt to jump into the action RPG genre.

We're at the same time that Falcom created Dragon Slayer. You had games like Adventure and Venture in the U.S., and this was Namco's attempt to take that and apply it to a sort of Pac-Ban-style maze chase and make it an arcade experience. And it's huge and ambitious and really complex for an arcade game. And it kind of amazes me that this was published because this really feels like the kind of game you play at home. Yeah, console game. Yeah, and I think that accounts for why it was such a big game. game on Famicom when it came out. This was one of Namco's big breakout titles in the

home space because they published some other home ports like Pac-Man Galaxian. But then Tower Draga came to Famicom, I want to say in early 1985, and there wasn't anything else like it on any home console at that time. And this was a game that I think really was extremely well-suited for home play, because it is so huge. And there are so many secrets. And it's so taxing and demanding that, you know, in the arcades, it's like, this is a 60-level tower that you have to climb. And it's full of secrets and really difficult. Yeah. How the heck were you ever see all that stuff?

Right. This is the one I was talking about where you, it's, there's so much content buried behind that difficulty level. I could not believe when I watched the YouTube video about it recently, all the stuff, every one of those levels has its own artifact with its own effect. And they all build up. Yes. You've got these crazy enemies flying at you. And geez, I can't believe they threw all that in here. That is the wild thing about this game is that it is a 60 level maze. And again, it's in the style of Pac-Man. But the mazes are a little bigger than Pac-Man mazes. They scroll somewhat. And every level has a secret contained within an item that Gilgamesh, the hero, can collect. But the thing is that each secret is revealed in a different way. All 60 stages have a secret that is hidden in a different way. than every other secret in every other level.

So you have to figure out not only like what is the secret of this level, but you have to figure out what is the secret to find the secret. And it's always going to be different. It's like kill three enemies. Okay, that's easy. Hit a wall? Sure. But then you get to really obscure stuff.

And it's like kill, you know, only this one enemy in the stage. How are you supposed to know that? Well, obviously, you're not going to figure it out your first time. This was really a game built around the communal aspect of arcades. where people would share secrets and say, well, you know, like sell strategy guides. I mean, strategy guides existed in Japan

in a way that they didn't in the U.S. here. Like, you know, in the early 80s, you had Jeff Rovin books on, you know, how to get high scores of Pac-Man or whatever. But in Japan, they actually had, you know, full strategy guides. I think beginning with, yes, that's right, Hey, Yankyo Alien.

There was, there were like magazine guides, you know, written on strategies and that sort of thing for, Hayanko Alien in the 70s, and that led to this kind of cottage industry of video game strategy guides, standalone guides dedicated to a single game. So Tower of Duraga was built very much around that sort of sharing and conversing about games, like, you know, sharing secrets the same way that Mortal Kombat did 10 years later in America. Like, what are the, what's the, what's the combo to perform the fatality? That was fun. That was exactly what Tower of Duraga was pulling into, except

in, you know, the context of a role-playing game. Yeah. I'd like to... The one thing I'd like to say about Tara Jaraga the most is it struck me how similar Zelda is to this. Oh, yeah. I cannot believe... There's even these wizards that teleport around and shoot beams at you and stuff.

And, I mean, there is... There's no question that Zelda is inspired by this game. Oh, yeah. Just like the Pac-Man, Pac-Land, Super Mario Brothers connection. I mean, Nintendo must have been looking directly at Namco. works and saying how can we iterate on this or bring it home? Namco was a superstar in the Famicom. Their games were

in some cases selling better than Nintendo's own games. So yeah, I have zero doubts that Nintendo was looking at what Namco was doing and saying like, what are they, you know, how are they having all the success on our platform? Let's copy that. And I feel like in, you know, both of these cases, what Nintendo came up with was much, much better than what

Namco came up with. But there's still something to be said for Namco getting their first and pioneering doing something really cool that had not been done before. Yeah, I think they pioneered them and Nintendo kind of perfected them, you know. I feel like Tower of Draga is to Pac-Man what Super Mario Brothers is to Mario Brothers. Like, it takes this very simple kind of setup and basic idea and then just expands it into a whole different genre. I don't think Tower of Durga is as good as Super Mario Brothers.

Sure. And I certainly don't think Mario Brothers is as good as Pac-Man. but I feel like the expansion to 60 levels, 60 secrets, here's a bunch of stuff going on, different enemies. That is exactly the kind of expansion that you see going into, you know, taking that single-screen adventure and then exploding it into whatever eight times four. It's epic.

32 stages. Tower Draga was hugely influential, not just on Zelda, but if you look at series like East or, hide lied that the same kind of control mechanic where Gilgamesh is not a link style slasher sword kind of guy. He has a sword and a shield and your shield is up and raised if you're not attacking and it can block projectiles from enemies. So in order to attack, you have to lower your sword and you can't slash with it. You put it out kind of slowly and then you walk forward. So you're like holding out your shield and kind of defenseless as you approach an enemy. So it doesn't lend itself

to like super fast actions and reflexes, which I think is not really fair because there are a lot of enemies who materialize and warp around and it's really hard and not entirely fair. I found that really frustrating about this game.

You expect it to be like Zelda where you're just hitting it and hitting, but yeah, you have to play in a different way. Yeah. Like it is much more like the East's hide light style

where you're kind of running into enemies and you have to hit them at just the right angle otherwise you take damage. So it's pretty challenging in that way. But this game was so, like such a huge hit.

And it continues to reverberate through Namco's catalog. I think it was, was it? Tales of Destiny. One of the Tales of Games had its own Tower of Draga where you took, you know, the core mechanics of that game, of the Tales game, and traveled through a recreation of the Tower Draga. Maybe it was Batankaitos. I can't remember, but it's definitely shown up. And then, you know, they've made a lot of sequels. like this entire series

that follows on from Tower of Duraga and I kind of fall in love with it with Nightmare of Duraga for PlayStation 2 which I don't know if you guys ever played I think I have that actually that was a that was the roguelike

adaptation and that was my introduction to rogue likes and it was really hard and I really liked it it's cool though yeah I found that at a used game store about 10 years ago

and I was like wow what is this and that game played it that game also keeps the you know each stage has a secret. And in the Japanese version, there's a little hint that you get for finding the stage. And they didn't bother to translate that for the U.S. It was just like out of

their budget for localizations, so they didn't bother. So the American game is much, much harder because you have no idea how to find the secrets in that game. But I still like it. And actually, why don't we jump ahead to 1986, I think? Where is my flux?

Yes. The Return of Ishtar, that was one of the first sequels. Actually, I think it was the first sequel to Tower of Draga. And you can really see a difference, you know, just in two years, of how game presentation and design has changed because Tower of Duraga is this very sort of dense Pac-Man-style maze, whereas Return of Ishtar is expanded quite a bit. There's, you know, the maze is no longer just like two screens large. It's now huge in scrolls in many directions, and there's a lot more space to navigate around

enemies. It's not quite so punishing. You move more quickly. And the concept of Return of Ishtar is really cool. So Tower of Duraga has you climbing a six. level tower to fight Duraga, the evil demon that has kidnapped the Princess Kai. So at the end

of the game, you rescue Kai. Hoorah, Draga is defeated. The return of Ishtar has you traveling back down the tower, all 60 levels, kind of like Packland, actually. And this time you are playing as Gilgamesh the knight,

and also as Kai. In fact, Kai is the main character, and Gilgamesh is like a companion. The second player can play as Gilgamesh, but the screen is always centered around Kai, which is kind of a strange design choice. But you can also play single player and kind of activate Gilgamesh

as like a support character from time to time. So it's a really interesting concept. I wrote that it's maze-like, but not in a Pac-Man way. So you can definitely feel the influence of you know, kind of other games that had come along since Tower of

Duraga in this one. And the co-op element is pretty interesting. I feel like it's maybe kind of getting to what they wanted to do with Pac-and-Powl, but failed, and it's getting closer to it. I don't know if they quite pull it off, but it's getting closer. So it's a pretty interesting game. Do you guys ever played it? Maybe.

I don't remember exactly. That is the confidence I love to hear. Ishtar. I have not. I just watch videos because I find games in this vein, like, honestly, up to and including the original Legend of Zelda, I find very frustrating to play. Zilda, I think, is, you know, more fun for me because it's a little more action-oriented. Something interesting occurred to me, which is that if Tower of Juraga is influenced by Pac-Man

and Zelda is influenced by Tower of Juraga, then Zelda's actually a Pac-Man game. That's like saying... That's why there's fairies. They took the fairies from Pac-Land. It's all making sense. Where does the Illuminati come in? I feel like I've got the red strings on the board behind me. Okay, so, also in

Okay, so also in 1984, you have another very influential Namco game, though I think one that is not quite as beloved as Tower of Duraga, and that is Dragonbuster. You guys ever played this one? It's been on a bunch of their collections. I think it made it to NES. Yes. So, great.

Then why don't you talk about it? Because I've been talking a lot. I think that it's frustrating. I wanted it to be awesome. And the first time I ever saw this is probably on a Namco collection or something. I thought, wow, it's great. It's an action RPG sort of side view of a person instead of top down like Tower of Draga

and you're slashing and you're doing interesting strategy movements. And then I'm like, the other thing is I was thinking, Zelda 2 is definitely inspired by this. So there you go, Nintendo. Well, I feel like Dragon Buster inspired a lot of games. If you look at Raston Saga or Rigar or Wonderboy 2 and Zelda 2, like all of these sort of side-scrolling fantasy sword-based melee combat games

really feel like they took a lot well I guess Reagan's not sword-based It's a discarmor but whatever in your heart is a sword like all of these games kind of feel like they came out of Dragonbuster and I feel like around the same time just as Tower of

Tarragga showed up around the same time as Dragon Slayer I feel like this showed up around the same time as Xanadu, Dragon Slayer 2, and they have a very similar style. So it's kind of interesting because you have Falcom on the PC side and Namco on the arcade side, kind of doing the same thing in different ways. Like Namco being on the arcade side, put together games with quicker action and much more impressive graphics, even though Chris, I see you wrote that Dragon Buster has arguably one of the worst sprites you've ever seen. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. Wow. That's pretty strong. I think it looked, look, I think the game itself is like, you mentioned in the notes, it's like cheap and difficult, like very, it is really cheap and hard.

But that was in terms of like the design, not so much the graphics. Yeah, the, no, I think it's a tough game to play. I hate the way it looks. Really? Yes, I, the head is weird on the sprite. So it looks like his head's on backwards when he's walking to the right. His, the attack action looks really weird. It actually, um, the attack action is.

is very close to what we're going to see much later in the extremely weird Genji and Hekei clans. Yeah, don't bring that up yet. It's a whole other thing. With the weird windmilling. I do not like the way this game looks. It's tough to play, and I hate looking at it.

I can sympathize. There are a lot of those sort of janky animations that are just not that great. Yeah, but I mean, you have to look at what else was coming out in 1984 in arcades. And compare this to that. And you're like, this is advanced. baby steps. This is transitional, but come on. Compare this to like, what else was there in

1984 that even compared to this? Nothing. Dragon's lair? Come on. That's not fair. Look. I guess 84 was an arcade lull. It was a real lull before. I think the, I think the graphics in Kung Fu are much better because they're much more representative. But that was also based on Jackie Chan. So of course it's going to look great. Naturally. But I, like, I honestly, think for as much as they did a lot of innovative stuff, I kind of think that's why be a common commercial statement.

I kind of feel like bad graphics are a Nemco trademark. Wow. Okay. Like Gallagher looks good. Yeah, Pac-Man, that is a real, real stinker. Well, look, yeah, Pac-Man is very representative. Perfect. But look at Pack-Las.

What is he representing? He represents a circle. Okay. With a missing triangle of various sizes. But look at what happens when they try to To make Pac-Man into the side-scrolling character They're using the designs from the show, obviously, which are bad But the design that they have in Pac-Land is not a good translation of Pac-Man

But I'm telling you, like in 1984, people were not making games that looked that good. Yeah, I think, you know, if you look at it from a historical point of view, I agree with Jeremy. But retrospectively, I agree with Chris. Chris, which is that looking backward, these games look terrible. You can't have it both ways, Benj. I can't. There's more than one part of Bench. It's a many spectrum.

Wow. You have layers like an onion. Yeah, I am. I just hate the way this game looks so much. I think. Enemies, like the backgrounds are nauseating. He should just go take a sledgehammer to an arcade and get this over with. Just catharsis.

Okay, well, what I will say, in Dragon Buster's defense is that it is a proto-metroidsvania game. Yep. You're getting into the idea of a world that exists as a place. This is a game that has multiple paths to the end. So basically each stage consists of multiple subsections.

And you choose which subsection you go to from an overhead map. And it's linear. Like if you go from like point A to B, you can't go back to point A and then go to point C instead, you have to move on to point D. So it's whatever a route, but you kind of commit to a route and there's branching paths, and the further you get into the game, the more complex

the paths get. And at the end of each path, in each stage, there's ultimately a castle where a dragon waits, and you have to go fight the dragon because you're busting dragons. That is what you do. You're a dragon buster. And busting makes you feel good. It does. This is

also a human whipping things with your arm, with a weapon in your arm. You have a sword, but yes, it works like a whip. I feel like this is a, you know, a precursor to Castlevania. Right. Well, I mean, this is a precursor to bloodstained. Sword or whip? Why not both?

Okay. So anyway, there are some good ideas here, and it was a super influential game. And also, it's not a lot of fun to play now. Yeah. It's also kind of ugly. Terrible. But it's very important. But you know what?

It's a good game. And that's gapless, also known as Gallagher 3. I don't know what's called Gallagher 3 because there was no Gallagher 2. But here we are, Gallagher 3. I could see if they called it Galaxian 3, but Galaxian 3 is a different game. Mapy was Galaga 2. Okay. Anyway, gapless.

I think that's like GAGA plus, okay? So this is the game that puts the shoe on the other foot in space. You are the little Gallagah fighter. You're flying around, by which I mean sitting at the bottom of the screen, moving lunch and right. And there's enemy formations that appear at the top. You know, it's got that Space Invaders galaxian thing going on. They'll swoop down in formation and attack you. But this time, the enemies don't capture you.

No, this is Soviet Russia and you capture the enemies. That's how it goes, right? yeah something like that in soviet russia you capture enemy there you go so yeah that's that's the entire concept here you know that the idea in galaga was the galaga the galaga flagships could come down and they could steal your fighter and you sacrifice a life and oh my god it's terrible they caught my fighter but when the galaxian galaga whatever it was called that had your fighter swooped down you could shoot it and reclaim your fighter and then you had double firepower well this time you don't have to sacrifice your ship because you're like, no assholes. Now I have a tractor beam

too. So when the bad guys come at you, you can capture them. There's some limits and restrictions on this. But then you force a little bug ship to be your friend. You're like, you have to fight the bad guys now. Go kill your brethren. It's pretty dark. It is extremely good. It is an extremely good mechanic. It is. That's just humiliating to those bug creatures. Bugs have no emotions. Are you All they care about is, like, vomiting honey, I swear. I saw a praying mantis crying. Well, I mean, they pray, so they're very sensitive. I haven't played a lot of hollow nightlies.

No, I was playing this not that long ago, and the shooting sound effect just grated at me in such an insane way I couldn't play it anymore. There's something about it. Were you playing on, like, a collection or on an emulator? An emulator. Okay, sometimes emulators have some issues in sound. You're missing a channel or something. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't remember this having grading sound effects. But I do know that it is still pretty challenging. I love this, though, because it is, it's, again, it's taking this thing that worked super well, which in this case, Gallagher. And then tweaking an element of it and reversing an element of it in the way that they keep trying to do with Pac-Man. But in this case, it really works. Yeah. It's a really, it's a fun. inversion of the mechanic.

And I don't know if there's actually a limit to how many ships you can capture. There's a video that I linked here that you guys watched, I hope, where the person was clearly using a cheat code because enemy projectiles just passed right through his ships, but he has like five enemy ships linked up beside him. So he's basically just like this wall of death destroying everything. But I don't think it's really possible to do that in the game. I did watch that video and I was wondering, I was like, wait, is it permanent? Like, they can't be killed?

He was extremely cheating. It was, like, pure up's cheat code. Because it's pretty great. But, like, that's a fun reason to use a cheat code right there just to have five alien servants destroying their own brethren because they want to blow up Earth and that's not cool. And no, you've got the, no, you've got the army that goes all the way across the screen. All right. So, anyway, I can't say that every sequel to a GALA, to a Namco Classic was a great sequel, like Superzevius.

I have no idea what makes this different than Zevius. It is as far as I can tell exactly the same game. Do you guys know otherwise? It's like super, like it's above it in time. So that's why they call it super zibius. No, I came to the same conclusion. It's what is so super about this? It's something that's lost on us at the moment.

Okay. So there might be something to this game that I'm missing, but I've played it and I'm like, It's Zevius. Maybe it was on a different colored arcade cabinet. That was different controls on it, maybe, different configuration, you know. More NASCAR lines, I don't know. We're just re-released.

Yeah. Okay, so that was not a, yeah, that was not a good follow-up or meaningful follow-up to Zevius. But Grobda, on the other hand, is very interesting because Grabda is a game in which you play as one of those little tank. that drives around on the ground in Zevius that your main character bombs all the time but this time instead of being just you know cannon fodder to die you are the hero and you are shooting bad guys

even though you're also a bad guy it's very confusing yeah it's kind of like it's kind of like aon flux that episode where it's like following the perspective of one character and the character kills another character and you follow the character that killed them no I can't get past the name of Gromda that's a deep cut

it is but do you remember that episode? I do not remember that episode. Okay, it's like it's following a character around through this battle, and then they get killed, and it shifts to the perspective of the person who killed them, and it keeps doing that throughout the episode. That sounds like a very good gimmick.

It's a pretty great episode. I feel like I've seen that. Probably, because it probably blew your mind, and you were like, this is amazing. This is just like Grobda, man. So that's what's going on here. This is the Peter Chang cartoon of Zevius. So what's the deal with the name Grobda?

Yeah, I was going to say you figured out Gaplos. The tank is just, the tank is called a grobda. You know, it's backwards. It's adborg. That would have been a lot better. I mean, that is, that is like you are trying, they tried to assimilate you through commercial products. So it's like life in 2018? Basically, yes.

We have nothing meaningful to say about this, obviously, because it's, I don't know about the grobda's, the gapluses, and the grubda. Well, Grobda has been on a couple of collections. It's, it's not a timeless classic, but it's okay. and I think it's Zevius connection. And by the way, this was what I was talking about with the MCU connection with Namco, because they have all these games like Zevius that have these kind of running storylines through them.

There's the whole Mr. Driller universe. I swear to God. We did a whole episode on it. It's crazy. Well, how does Mr. Driller fit into Grabda? Is he driving a tank? But he does fit into Baraduke, which is later. Okay, cool.

But anyway, yeah, so Grabda is like, it's kind of like combat, you know, for Atari. or the tank game in Tron, the tank mode, in that you have this tank, it can drive around and shoot in eight directions, and you have a very, very weak shield that can very briefly protect you against enemy fire. And you have to watch out for shrapnel,

because when you blow things up, they explode. And if you're caught within the circle of the explosion, that will destroy you, too. But you can create, like, chain reactions with enemies, which is cool. So there's kind of some good stuff going on here. it is a pretty repetitive game like I've played the first few stages of it and then I've watched a video

all the way up through stage 99 or whatever and it's all pretty much the same except harder so not a lot happening is this the one one of them I thought would be good as a twin stick shooter like if you could move in one direction and shoot in the other but apparently you can't it's just a single thing and you can

lost opportunity yeah I don't know about that one I've never played it in the arcade I've only played it on collections So I think it's good at that. a lot of the Scribble Knots Unmasked Remake, a game where you solve problems with the help of DC Comics stars like Batman and Wonder Woman. So needless to say, I'm totally ready to check out DC Universe and get a better handle on all these heroes and villains I'm dealing with.

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DC Universe is only 799 a month, or better yet, you can grab an annual membership and save 20%. Join the ultimate DC membership today at DCUniverse.com. I also can't speak to the question you've raised in the next game, moving on to 1885, which is SkyKid. Chris, you want to explain why you can shoot the happy dancing women and turn them into pink poop emojis. I would love to have someone explain this to me. SkyKid, first of all, it's a full-on war game where you need to bomb enemy encampments, which is a much darker theme than a SkyKid. Well, and on top of that, the SkyKid is. actually a bird. He is a bird flying a biplane. If you look at the character art for the characters

here, are you sure it's not just bad art? No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm sure he's not a goat. The official, like, art in the manual, SkyKid is like a blue jay or something wearing a bomber jacket and a helmet. And then all the bad guys are also animals. But they're like, you know, anthropomorphic animals. They're furries. I guess that's a better concept than what I thought this was, which was just a child soldier? That's how they got out of the darkness, I think. They said, okay, it's all about bomb and stuff and destroying enemy encampments. Why don't we just put animals in it instead and it'll be great?

So you're flying around. You've got to pick up a bomb and then you take the bomb somewhere and you drop it and murder a bunch of animal people, I guess. And then you get to a place where you need to land and there's these three like happy dancing ladies to indicate where you need to land. And you can shoot them. How do you know that? Why would you ever shoot those ladies?

I didn't shoot the lady. They're like, they're super happy that you're landing safely after completing a mission. That explains the pink kid. I was merely a witness to this literal war crime. But yeah, then they turn into things. There's a sequel to SkyKid where they turn into cats. Sky Goat. Skygoat.

Where they turn into cats. I don't know what they're supposed to be, but they look like the poop emoji, but pink. Do they talk like Patrick Stewart, though? Oh, why? Jeremy, would you remind me of the existence of the emoji movie? We have to remember that there are worse things to come out of Star Trek The Next Generation than the Beverly Crusher Candle, Sex Candle episode. I love that episode.

I would watch the Sex Candle episode 60 times in a row before I would watch the emoji movie once. There are worst things. I love that episode. I don't know why you're always picking on it. It's the greatest episode all time. It's like a romance novel. It's like super, but they solve the problem. don't they?

So it's like good. That's okay. Don't they? Yeah, they're saving somebody. We got like really sidetracked here, but I will say that I hate that episode with every fiber of my being. I make fun of it because that's the only way to make the hurting go away.

It might be the worst episode of next generation. It's the worst episode of Star Trek. It might be. But people are like, I don't know, turn about intruder pretty bad. But, you know, something like threshold, people are like, oh, it's the worst Star Trek episode ever. No, I don't care if. Captain Janeway and Tom Parris turned into lizards and had babies.

At least it was consensual. Okay, it's cool that gets McFadden gets a highlight episode. It's bad that that's her highlight episode. Oh, okay. Directed by Jonathan Frakes. When you look at that way. No.

Yeah, it was one of the Freaks episodes. Two takes freaks. So, man. No, I enjoyed it. I'm sorry. This is totally... I think we might be done with Namco. We got to talk about

Metro Cross. Nothing in Namco is as bad as, what was that episode called? I don't even know. Just the sex candle episode. Yeah. Beb's family has been having sex with a ghost for 600 years. Metro Cross is fun.

Metro Cross. Weird. All right, yeah, so talk about Metrocross, because it's a, it's really a game ahead of its time. It really is. It is, it is like an iPhone endless runner that came out 25 years before those existed. Yeah. That's pretty great. With a weird, like, running men.

Like, it's like they hurt the title of the movie, The Running Man. And Noah was said in a dystopian future where someone was doing something for the entertainment of others. And they were like, got it running. Yeah. They accidentally set it in a vending machine where you're jumping over Coke cans. That's the really weird thing. Yeah. It's quite good.

My main experience with this is watching the two-part Games InterCX episode. Two parts. Two parts where Arino is very frustratingly bad at this time. Yeah. He will not go for the ramps. It is a really tough game. And watching YouTube plays of people who know the game really well is amazing because they've, like, memorized where all the jumps are. So this is a game.

It's auto-scrolling. You are a little dude running, and there's like these patches of blue on the ground that'll slow you down. And then you can jump over them, either by jumping or by hitting springboards that'll fling you over them. You have to collect blue Coke cans and jump over red Coke cans. I think there's supposed to be something else, but they look like Coke. Got to get that Pepsi. avoid the code. Yeah, right?

Newburgh, North Carolina's own Pepsi Cola. So that's pretty much all there is to it. It's just like a game where you're running a whole lot. And it's okay. Later, you get to ride a skateboard. Oh, I didn't know that. I've never made that part. I saw in advance of the videos that people were playing.

This game almost got a sequel on Xbox 360 and PS3. I interviewed, oh gosh. Hideo Yoshizawa, the director of Kloa and Mr. Driller, back in 2011. And I was at Namco's offices. And so after the interview, we talked for like an hour, he was like, I want to show you something. So he like booted up a PS3D bug and he played this like, you know, 3D version, basically like a remake of Metro Cross that was going to come out. And it never did. And I've always been disappointed.

That never happened. So I got to like play this game that never came out like a crazy Why would they do this remake of Metro Cross but it happened I guess the question like why would they do this is they didn't do this Was it going to be like a dark reimagining like that by any commando game It was not it was not Bomberman Act Zero It was it was just like a super happy cheerful Dark it's beer cross that happened to be that's right

It's Jol Cola These cans are blood cans That's in beer This is funny enough, isn't it? It is funny. But no, it was just going to be like... That's the re-reimagining. Right.

Yeah, it was just going to be like a super happy, cheerful reimagining of... Not even reimagining, just remake of MetroCross, but they never followed through with it. Does Netco have like a big mobile gaming presence in the way that Konami has moved to the exclusion of everything else? Well, they certainly haven't moved to mobile gaming to the exclusion of everything else. but I think they do pretty well on mobile. Because, again, I feel like this game, like, again, it's an endless runner from the mid-80s. Like, it could absolutely,

and it honestly looks good enough that it could be, I know I said bad graphics for a trademark, that was an exaggeration, but this game could just be like on your phone now. Like this in Foson, I think, would be very easy, fun games to have on mobile. So you like the two weirdish NAMCO games? I really do.

Weird games are great. I know. Who doesn't love weird games? That's true. That's the Sega episodes. It's all about it. Yes. So we'll kind of wind down.

I know this is a pretty short episode, but in fairness, our last episode was way longer than it was supposed to be. So if you average them out, you're getting just the normal amount of content. So let's talk about a couple more games, Motos, which, Chris, I think this is also a game that would work really well as a mobile. In fact, it's not a mobile game.

Well, yes, it actually did come out on iOS, but Modos is basically recreated as a mini game in the world ends with you. I don't know if you ever played that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, like, that pin battle game, that is Modos. So you are like a little thing. bump into other little things and try to knock them off a platform. It's just like a simple physics platformer.

It kind of reminds me of, you know, those little octopus dudes in The Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past, where you're like on kind of, in the tower of Hera, where you're on all these floors that have holes in them, and there's these little, like, shelled octopus things that come after you, and you hit them and you, like, cause them to bounce into these pads, and then they'll fall off, or maybe you'll fall off. I was trying to figure out why this was stressing me out so much, It's because it reminds me of the Tower of Hara.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like the entire Tower of Hara was turned into a video game that stands alone. I've also played in Mario Party. There's a bunch of, I swear, every Mario Party game has a mini game like this. Mario is on a bunch of beach balls or something, Mario and all the friends. And you have to knock everybody else off. And it's just a one stick kind of game. I think Modos is a great example of something that could exist as a standalone game 30 years ago.

And now it's like, well, there's not really that much to it. Kind of like Metro Cross. It just needs to be part of something that's bigger. Yeah. I actually really like the jumping mechanics in this where you can shatter the tiles and how you can like, there are certain enemies that will chase you to try and knock you off. And if you jump over a gap, like you can lure them into eliminating themselves, which is really fun. Like I think there's, again, not a whole lot of depth, but some good.

touches to the Tower of Hara Battle. All right, so now we should talk on, maybe, maybe wrap this up by talking about the Nintendo versus Unisystem. Are you guys familiar with the versus unisystem? No. Yes. Binge, why don't you talk about it a little? I don't remember.

So you're not, you're not familiar with it. Yeah, well, is it the one where there's two screens on either side? Is this the red 10th one? That's one iteration of it, yes. Let's see. I don't know. I think if it's the one I'm thinking of, then you have two sets of controls and two monitors, and you can play either a game where both characters are on the same screen at the same time,

or each character can have their own view. You know, each player has their own view on the game, which is really neat. And I think there's a wrecking crew one that I've always wanted to play, because I swear you can play two players simultaneous on it or something. I think so, yeah. Anyway. So the versus unit system, the idea there was that it was Nintendo's version of basically like the NeoGeo, but before the NeoGeo, it was kind of the Data East Deco system,

where you have a standard piece of hardware, in this case based on the Famicom, the NES hardware. It's like boosted NES hardware, slightly stronger, better picture processing unit, etc. But pretty much an NES. And it's in the arcade and you can plug and play with cartridges like, you know, to different boards, I guess. So kind of a precursor to the Play Choice 10 where you can swap out a game. So like you have tennis for a while and people get sick of tennis. So you take out the tennis and put in wrecking crew and then slap new labels on the side of the board. So mostly these were Nintendo games, but third parties did get involved. And so you got these

quote-unquote versus versions of NES games from third parties that didn't always have a versus component to them. Like there was a versus Castlevania, which was not two-player simultaneous. It was just Castlevania. Sorry, the red tent thing is the versus dual system. Right. The unisystem is an upright. Yeah, an upright thing.

And yeah, I guess it's like an NES in the arcade. And some of these games were really different, like balloon fight. If you've ever played versus balloon fight, which you probably haven't because it's pretty uncommon, but it is going to come out on Switch pretty soon, at some point, hopefully. That actually, like, has multiple level screens that scroll up and down, kind of like pinball. So some of these games were really different. Versus Excite Bike is a completely different game than the NES game.

Namco's games appear to be pretty much straight ports. There's versus SkyKid, which is SkyKid. Except the ladies turn into cats. Except they turn into cats. There's Starluster. which is basically someone said it sounds not safe for work

that was how we binge that was me sorry it's basically a first person space shooter with very primitive graphics and it looks like star Raiders

the logo on this one is impossible to parse yes versus Battle City which is a combat style tank game wow there's a lot

of notes on here that someone added it yeah this is me I said that it looks like if Rickett Ralph was exposed to the horrors of modern warfare because it's all like

the levels are like bubble-bobble levels that you just tipped over and built a city out of so it's all smashing through bricks but they don't ever really look like cities in the way that they're occasionally in the way that bubble bubble will have levels

that look like the whale like this game does stuff like that I get it and there's also levels with rivers that you can't cross that I thought looked like if you were playing Frogger as a tank which would be a very good idea

That would be cool. Tank Frogger. Yeah. Frogger the Revenge. Frogder. Nice. And then finally, versus Super Zevius, which, okay, this is the NES version of Super Zevius, an arcade game in the arcade. So you could play Super Zevius, but you could also play the worst version.

Hey, what do you want to do, guys? That's weird. I still don't understand it. They just keep adding things. on to the front of Zavius and hope it's a new game. Versus, super. All right, so finally we're going to wrap up 1985 in Namco and this podcast by talking about Baraduke, also known as Alien Sector, which is a part of the Mr. Driller extended universe, expanded universe. Baradook's like that big dog, right, and his owners can't really control him and he's always getting up and stuff chasing the moment.

Baraduke stars none other than Mr. Driller's mom. Kissy. She's a space soldier named Kissy Who flies around and rescues little happy guys You say, I'm your friend, though Wait a minute There's a woman in a space soldier suit Fighting aliens

What does that sound like? This is a year before Metroid Yeah, so there you go Nintendo taken Namco I figured this one was alien inspired Right? Like it almost has to be Given what you're doing

And the kind of look at it Maybe, I mean, I mean, by this point, Alien was six years old, and aliens wasn't out yet. This is 1985. So I don't think it is. I think this was part of a general trend in Japanese games to say, like, hey, why don't we put a pretty girl as the protagonist instead of a dude? And it took a long time for Americans to catch on to that. I actually think it's, like, very progressive for 1985 to be like, here's a mom.

We've talked about this to a degree on the podcast where you have stuff like Letta and, And a few other things, like anime from the mid-80s, where it's like, hey, here's a girl. Oh, her armor exploded. You can see her boobies now. Okay. So kind of jumping on that, but without the boobies. It does seem like a woman in a full hazmat suit with a flamethrower is that going from that to Wonder Momo is a bit of a step backwards.

Yeah, definitely. So Baraduke, you are kissy. You are flying around. You have basically are taking a journey through these different sectors of space. and each stage is maybe like between two and four screens large, and you have to fly around and liberate aliens from capsules and save them. But you have to be careful because some capsules you shoot, they might give you a weapon upgrade,

but some of them release these little like Pac-Man monsters that will chase you and you have to blow them up. I thought they looked like if Pac-Man bonded with the venom. It's like, yeah, it's like Pac-Man with bangs. Yeah. How do you know she's Mr. Driller's mom? it is part of the fiction well actually no

Mr. Driller Drilland brings it all together she shows up in the parade at the end of the game like it is it's part it's the I swear to God it's canon no I believe you I just remember where all this is explored dig dug and they had a couple of kids Atari and Pac-Man

Atari and Taiso and Taiso Hori is Mr. Driller Well who's who's Ataru That's Mr. Driller's older brother who is basically the Racer X of Mr. Driller. He wears a scarf and he's very sullen and doesn't want to hang out with his family.

Okay. I'm telling you, the MCU, like the closest video games have ever gotten to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is the crazy backstories that Namco has invented to tie a bunch of their games together. No one else has bothered to do that. Well, I mean, you say that,

but you're basically talking about the amount of characters that exist in the Mario saga that are chronically connected. These are games. These are games that Digdug, Baraduke, Mr. Driller, these had nothing to do at each other. If you unite Metroid, Zelda, and Mario Brothers into the same universe and marry them. It's very different from Mario World.

It is still a Mario game. It is undeniably a Mario game. So if Mario and Samus had a baby, who would it be? Let's not talk about that. That's really, that's disturbing. It would be Link, obviously. Link, there you go. It'd be a Splatoon Squid Kid. If Namco made it, they would do that.

Are the Splatoon kids, Metroid's? I don't believe so. They're squids, not Octopi. Oh, they're from the Mario game. But there are the Octopus creatures. Are they Metroid? You know what?

Let's, we'll talk later. I think maybe we're done here. I think it's time for this to end. This travesty of a pod. No, it's been fun. We have certainly gone off topic. Anyway, so that takes us through 1985 and getting into some kind of weird territory for Namco. It's not going to get any better next time.

Well, no, that's not true. It'll get a little better. We've got Rolling Thunder next time. Yeah, I'm talking about Rolling Thunder and Wonder Mommo. Those will at least be things to talk about. Yeah, there'll be things to talk about. So it's half good. Anyway, so this has been our second look back at Namco. Next time, we'll talk more about the games for longer. This was kind of a short episode

because, like I said, we went too long on the last one, and you guys need to drive home. And it's 420. Yes. So let's get going. Guys, where can we find you on the internet? I'm Benj Edwards. You can find me on Twitter at Benj Edwards, where I'm currently building and selling custom-made artisanal joysticks, like the BX-80. And the BX-90, which I just purchased.

Yeah, the BX-90 for the N-S and the BX-95 for the Genesis. And I'm still, I just keep making new weird ones. Anyway, I also run vintagecom. I blog. And Chris, you can find pretty much everything that I do at T-H-E-S-B.com, including comics that I write, like the Army of Darkness comics and Marvel Comics, like Infinity. Countdown Darkhawk and Infinity War Sleepwalker. And you can also find other podcasts that I do, which are many. And they are all linked on there. All right. And I'm Jeremy Parrish doing Retronauts. You can find me at Retronauts.com.

And Retronauts is at the Podcast One Network and on iTunes and so on and so forth. Listen for us. Listen for us, yes. You can also support us through Patreon. Get these episodes a week early at a higher bit rate with no ads for only $3 a month, which is like, I don't know, 40 to 50 cents per episode. I think that is a pretty good deal.

Like, what are you going to find these days that cost 50 cents? A Frosty. That's it. And that's a limited time-only deal. Whereas Petri-Patri-Patri-On, that's forever. Frosty doesn't have any Chris Simpson. That's why it's a bad chance.

If it does, there's a problem. We had a problem back at the factory. Are we going to get Blizzards? Is that the plan? I don't think so. Anyway, so yeah, thanks for listening. and we'll be back in a week with another episode because it's what we do. That's how we pair.

Thanks. Everyone, this week's look back at Namco's arcade history just happens to coincide with the release of the Namco Museum Arcade Pack, a new switchcard that contains both Namco Museum and Pac-Man versus. And it just so happens that Bondi Namco was kind enough to give us a few copies to give to you. Want to win one? All you need to do is follow Retronauts on Twitter. That's at Retronauts. Then send us a tweet about your favorite Namco Arcade memory, making sure to include the hashtag Retronauts Namco. You have until Monday, October 1st to enter.

We'll pick the five most interesting submissions to win. So enter today. With Domino's week-long carry-out deal, you can carry out large three-topping pizzas, and now, medium three-topping handmade pan pizzas for $7.99 each. It's fantastic news. Cut. Puns? You mean pans? Calling all panatics for two layers of cheese on crispy golden crust.

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

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

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