Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 197: Konami on MSX

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

Kurt Kalata and Rob Russo of Hardcore Gaming 101 join Jeremy Parish to explore the alternate reality version of Konami's legendary run of NES games: Their extensive MSX home computer library. From Metal Gear to Nemesis, it's all familiar, and yet... not.

This week in Retronauts, Mama Loves Manbo. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm still at Long Island RetroGames. Gaming Expo, and I'm still here in a hotel room with these guys. Art Klaudev, Hardcore Gaming 101. Rob Russo of the Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast. And I think I forgot to introduce myself. I'm Jeremy Parrish. My goodness.

Oh, thank you. And I think everyone is confused for a minute. I was wondering why he led us in this hotel. Why? He said there was candy. So, yeah. Our last recording was kind of sad. So we're going to try to cheer things up by talking about something that is near and dear to

these guys' hearts, and something that I wish could be near and dear to my heart, but I don't really have a lot of experience with it, because it is the Konami library on MSX, the MSX platform. And I'm familiar with Konami. I think we're all familiar with Konami. I think we've all agreed that we're not going to talk about the current state of Konami. We're going to try to keep this positive. We're going to talk about the wonderful days of the 80s, the salad days, as Rob calls them, back when Konami was fertile and fruitful and prolific.

They were like the prince of video games, you know, back when Prince was alive and recorded like a new song every day. That was pretty much Konami. That's a great comparison. And all of them showed up on MSX. Every day, a new Konami game. I mean, seriously, like, I guess the MSX had a pretty long life as a platform, especially in Japan, but we're talking like nearly a hundred games here.

That's a lot of games. I mean, even if you have, like, a full decade in there, which I don't think they did. That's a lot of games. So that's Konami on MSX. Yeah. This is a short episode. No, yeah, so, like, I know you've talked maybe a little bit about the MSX on the show, but just like... A bit, but we can go into more detail.

Why not? This can be MSX plus Konami on MSX. Yeah, I mean, their histories intertwined. because Konami was like jumped on board as soon as it was possible to jump on board the MSX. So MSX stands for either Microsoft Extended Basic or for machines with software exchangeability or maybe it stands for nothing at all. Kazihiko Nishi is kind of the father of the platform. He said he named it after the MX missile. So I think the point was just that it sounded cool.

And it does. MSX kind of just rolls off the tongue in a way. It doesn't need to mean anything. So it's kind of like, it's interesting because it's not really, I mean, we tend to think of things as like, oh, it's a platform. But it is, but it's not like a type of computer. It's a standard. It's a standard.

So the best comparison would probably be the CDI or 3DO. Comparisons usually work better when people know what the... I think people listening to this podcast are at least familiar with the concept behind 3DO and CDI. We've had episodes on those. platforms or standards, as the case may be. So the idea basically was that instead of being a device that people bought, it was a kind of device that people could buy. That was a really bad explanation. So yeah, it's not like there was a company that owned MSX. Right. Just like,

you know, in the mid-late 80s in the United States, computer market kind of became, it was all about, like, you know, IBM compatible PCs, which is not something IBM wanted, but that's the way it ended up, where it's like, it's just this kind of a set of specs in a way. And that's really, it is kind of a brilliant idea at the time. So this is when the Japanese microcomputer market was really kind of flowering, the earliest kind of stages where it was moving out of the hobby zone into like not really a household like you know appliance type thing that the computer is now it's just something everybody has but it was becoming more popular and like yeah i would say the msx was not necessarily in terms of the business model but in terms of the place in the household

what the spectrum was in the uk or the common ore 64 was in the u.s it's not a perfect comparison but that is roughly the sort of niche that it maintained It was never as big, I think, as the PC-88, but we'll get to that. So, like, the idea was basically to create a computer standard based entirely off-the-shelf parts, which allowed anyone who wanted to kind of pay for the license to put MSX products out there to kind of manufacture their own computer and quickly enter, like, this rapidly expanding market. So it's, I mean, it has some architectural similarities to some consoles we know because it used the Z80. Yeah, it's pretty similar to a Kaliko Vision, like a more powerful Kaliko Vision, basically.

Yeah, the SG-1000 was pretty similar to that, too. The SC-1,000 was a Kaliko Vision. Yeah, they were like the same thing. But this was similar, but more capable, more versatile. Yeah, there's a big hobbyist market for Kaliko Vision, like, homebrew cartridges. And they're these guys that, they put out conversions of MSX games. They don't run on them natively. You need to buy this thing called a Super Game module, which I think it expands the RAM and adds in a sound chip.

But, I mean, that was something that was built into the KlicoVision spec anyway, because they had the Atari module, like, plan from the start. Yeah. So it was, it's very similar to that sort of capabilities. And this turned out to be, I think, crucial to why Konami had such an early presence on it, because Konami was trying to expand at this point from its arcade games to, you know, like home platforms. And most arcade games, I think, I think all of theirs would have used, like, Z80 architecture. It was very easy. And that's why, by the way, like, of course, not a lot of. third parties would jump on the Famicom right away is because it was using the 6502.

Yeah, 6502, which is more like a Commodore 64, which is not like a dominant or popular. It was the same as the Apple 2 and the, not the VIC-20, the, yes, anyway. Yeah, you can listen to the, I think you did an episode on this. I told her a lot about this. Just because I've talked about it in the past doesn't mean I remember the specifics right now. Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a. It was kind of a joint venture between Microsoft and Aski Corporation, who were the kind of Microsoft's distributor of some kind in Japan. And Askey Corporation, I think, was responsible for bringing wizardry to Japan.

That's correct. Yeah. Because you just recently talked about that with Robert Woodhead. That was a very good episode. Oh, thank you. Everybody should listen to that first, if you haven't. Listen to all of them. Yeah, they're all good.

That was a – but, yeah, so, like, you know, they eventually, I think, got the hardware simplified, like the manufacturing. process to where it's like it's just a board or something. I don't know what they called it exactly, but it was all like on one slab in a way, all the stuff you needed. And they got made pretty cheaply. So yeah, I mean, it's, you know, so Bill Gates apparently, allegedly did not like this idea or was not crazy about it because he felt like it was drifting too close to working in Microsoft dealing in hardware, even though it wasn't. And he may be the reason. And he may be the reason why it became a standard rather than, but I don't know for sure. But that account for why it didn't really have any traction in the U.S.?

Partly, I think. There's other reasons. Or do you think the market just didn't like that. I think it was probably, people seem to believe that it's just too much competition. And it was also outdated, I think, by that point. By the time it could have come over to the U.S. I think there may have been like a small release here, like super small. Yeah, I know that there was some U.S. presence for the MSX, but.

but it didn't do much. It was put out by some very 80-sounding company. I can't remember exactly. It was like telemetrics or some crap like that. So it just, it was choked out of the market before it even started. And the same thing I think in Europe, like Europe already had microcomputers that were doing pretty well. It was good.

There was more success for the MSX in Europe than there was here, that's for sure. There was different parts. Like, I know, I believe in Spain it was very popular. But between that and the ZX spectrum, they had, I think, pretty similar specs. So you had games that were released on both platforms. Yeah, I mean, you got the impression that it could have been a contender, but it just wasn't. But it has this crazy legacy of video games. It kind of like, it lived on, as we said, like the standard sort of expanded.

There was MSX, there's MSX, there's MSX2, which is, like, more powerful. You know, it can do, put out better visuals. And like two or less than... It can scroll. Yeah. Kind of. Kind of. Yeah.

There's MSX2 Plus, which came later, TurboR, which I've heard about, but I don't really know what the distinction is. There's not too many games that use the Plus and TurboR stuff. Yeah, and the platform was somewhat unique in the computer space because it could accept games on both discette and cartridge. And Konami predominantly published cartridge-based games. I think cassette tapes, too. That was another reason why it might have not done so well had it been brought over to the United States in a serious way, is we were already moving away from cassette-based data storage because it's a terrible, terrible idea.

Well, there weren't that many computers here that accepted cartridges. I mean, there was the TI-99, 4A. The Atari 8-bit did. Yeah, the Atari systems, but it was pretty uncommon. You didn't see a lot of it. Yes, I mean, that's another thing that's like they had the cassette tape thing. I think they very quickly moved the discettes, but that was what it started out on. I have one MSX game that is on cassette tapes, but most of them I think on cartridges.

I think it's a similar reason why we never got like a data recorder for the NES. It's just like at that point, it's like, what are you doing? We're not doing this. No cassette tapes. I don't care how much you like your excite bike track. It's not going to get saved. So, yeah, like the MSX, just going backwards a little bit. It was announced at a June 12th, because this is Japanese information, so you have the exact dates.

Of course. So it was announced at a June 12th, 1983 press conference. And the first... Do you say 1928? Oh, I thought I said 1983, but I could have said it. I heard 28, but yes, 83 makes more sense. It was a wood-powered computer. and you threw wood into the stove and computed stuff.

It was the first computer at home powered by the difference engine. Literal touring machine is what it was, yeah. So I think the first PCs that were released using the standard were both released in October 1983. So there's the Mitsubishi ML8,000, and the Sanyo MPC10. And at this time, there was already, you know, in Japan there was already the PC-88, which is NECs, computer. Yeah. And that had been out since December,

1981, and Sharpe's X-1, which I don't think was super popular. There's the Fujitsu FM 7, but I don't know. They were both released in November 1982. So not really that interesting to know,

but it's just to give you an idea. So it was like a year late to this party. Yeah, the only time I ever really see Sharp come up is when occasionally conversions of Nintendo games would show up on Sharp, weird trademark connection that Sharp and Nintendo shared with the family computer platform. Yes.

And so, like, I used to always see stuff like golf show up on Sharp X1, and I'm like, what the hell? So knowing about that whole trademark thing finally made, cause that to make sense to me. I was like, okay, I understand now why you see these random Famicom ports. But otherwise, there just wasn't that much stuff happening on X-1. Yeah, it doesn't seem like it's really lived on. I'm sure that it's like an enthusiast scene in Japan because there's an enthusiasm. you've seen for everything over there.

I don't think it would be replaced by the 68,000, the X-68,000, and that was a way more impressive computer. Yeah, it's an amazing computer. I don't think that side of this Nintendo stuff, there's much that was really unique for those platforms. They're all just, like, most of those ports of PC-88 stuff. Right. Like, those architecture was sort of similar, whereas the MSX

was very much its own sort of thing. Right. And all of those computers, I think, use the Z-80, except for the FM7, which didn't. But, so, like, it was uh canami was went in on this about as early as you can go in on it um so and this came at a critical time for canami because like between 1978 i think maybe is their earliest

games it's kind of they did some like i think like a lot of companies started with just ripoffs of other games they're like space king which is space invaders did they do balloon king or was that that was an amco yeah there's a lot of king and balloon king and balloon oh i knew it was a more awkward title than that hey delivered on its promise um it had both a king and a balloon actually it had many balloons yeah so they're early hits for like frogger scramble puyan time pilot tutuncom and track and field gyrus rock and rope that wasn't i said they're hits their hits they're hits oh um and almost all these coinups i think were published outside japan by different companies like stern gremlin

centurrie sega famously did uh well sega and gremlin were kind of in bed together anyway Yeah, too in common, I guess, would probably be the first Canami game. That and Super Cobra, because I had that from my Atari, 2,600. Years later, I realized those are Canami games. Oh, was it published on the 2,600 by Konami? No, they were Parker Brothers, I want to say. Yeah, I think so. So that's the next thing I was going to go to is that they were already very early on licensing

any game they could out for any platform that would take it, and it was always other publishers. So now, I don't know for sure, because all the resources would be in Japanese, and that's not exactly my language. But I think their first published, their first effort to publish home versions of any of their games would be December

1983's Antarctic Adventures for the MSX, which is the, like, it's where the penguin mascot comes in that you see in a lot of, like, parodious things. And that's, but that game is,

I know the Famicom version better, which is probably the first game that released on Famicom too. Oh, it actually might be athletic land, according to this, which was also, like, it was released in December 83, which athletic land is a pitfall ripoff, generously speaking, which actually might be kind of known to some people because they actually made a cabbage patch kids game for the Kalikovision. And they took that and turned it into athletic land here.

And then they re-released cabbage patch kids once they got the license for Japan. And I think I remember hearing that that version is extremely expensive because I don't know if that license even really existed over there. I guarantee you there's a grown man somewhere who's. paid lots and lots of money. There is, I have this little book here. It's called The Legend of Canami. Can I mean, do this satsu. I don't know.

It's published by this website www. matronet.com. And I don't know if it's still in print, but it has a listing of every single thing that Canami put out for the MSX. So it's its first code here is athletic land, an archaic adventure. Yeah. Monkey Academy, which is, I guess, some learning game, Time Pilot, Frogger, Super Cobra. I think it's like, yeah, internal, like, the product codes. I don't know that those co-responds exactly to the release dates.

It's close-ish. They probably had a few ready to go out the gate. So, yeah, anyway, like, it didn't, you know, Konami didn't start publishing on the Famicom until 1985. And by that time, it had already published at least 19 games for the MSX. So it's, and I think a lot of that comes down to, Konami wanted to develop the, their ports themselves as much as possible maybe. I don't know for sure.

But they definitely wouldn't have had people who were familiar with the NES. 6502 architecture. So that may account for the delay because I think Hudson got in a little bit before that.

Maybe not. On Famicom? Yeah. Yeah. Hudson was the first third-party developer for Famicom starting with

I want to say nuts and milk. Yeah. Can I mean he's won the float runner. There's a bunch of the initial run of third-party publishers. They also got more favorable deals

for a while. and I know Kadami was definitely one of them. Canami worked those licensing deals to Nintendo like a boss. They really, they released a lot of games that you wouldn't expect Konami, given their humble beginnings, just a few years earlier, to be capable of. They expanded quickly, and the NES was definitely good to them, the Famicom, because unlike the MSX, it had international presence. It was all over the world, and so the games they published there, had a much larger market to expand into. Right.

And I think that the MSX and other computers, Konami, kind of, in some cases, would treat kind of like a farm club to, like, pull talent from in a way. Not always, because sometimes, like, you'd think that the games were developed first than the MSX, like Vampire Killer, actually came out later,

maybe a month later, and it was probably developed concurrently with the Castlevania. Right. But then you have, like, Metal Gear, which famously started on MSX, but which version was that they got a sequel right away? It was the NES version because it was a much bigger market.

It shipped in Japan and the U.S. and sold much better than the MSX version. It sold really well in the United States. Even though it was garbage compared to the MSX version. Yeah. And I think that that might have been stuff like that happening is probably what made Konami think, you know what, we're going to launch this alter games label that's totally us, but not us. And so we can get around Nintendo's like, you know, what is a five game a year limit in North America

or something like that. And what they ended up doing was taking computer. ports from like Commodore games a lot of times. There's like a defender of the crown. Yeah, there's Kings Quest. They actually had an American publishing division that did a lot of not only ports of their own games. Like, you know, there were, you know, ports of metal gear and in Castlevania and Contra and stuff. But they also, like, they actually put out, what was it called, Revolution, the company that made Broken Sword. Their first game, Lord the Temptress, they actually published that. There's a couple of other strange other things

that they did. They even did like Batman the computer game. Yeah, you get the impression. I don't know for sure. The history is kind of not very well written on this, but I have a feeling that's kind of what their thought was. It's like we don't have an MSX like platform. You know, we can't, we don't have that to build on. We don't know what's going to. That's like market research right there, you know, is what that could be. And they just don't have it. So they, what they did is they just went to like other computer games that were popular on our microcomputers and did that. So. You know, I feel like kind of 1985, like spring 1985 is like when Konami that we know and love, like the golden years of Konami. That's when they really started. Yeah, because when you say that there's 100 games on there, there are 100, but they were also doing like out of the list of some of these games. Magong, Hyper Olympic, Hyper Olympic Field 1 and 2, Circus Turley, which is an arcade port, hyper sports one and two, hyper rally, tennis, golf, baseball. Like there's a lot of just like racing games. Oh, yeah, I'm not saying they published 100 original creations on MSX, just that in total, their MSX releases came to about 100. It's like 90-something.

And that's, you know, that's a lot of games, regardless of how many of them were created specifically for MSX. How many of them are, like, really interesting? I mean, there's a couple of unique titles. We don't have to talk about all 100. Yeah, we don't need to. Like, well, I first was exposed with the MSX because once my computer, it was. was able to get to the wider internet, I discovered MSX emulators. And so with that, I found vampire killer and Contra.

And it was like looking into an alternate Nintendo universe, which I was super excited about. But around that time, they also released MSX compilations for the PlayStation and Saturn. Like the Saturn one actually had like 30 games for it, which for some reason, I don't know how it ended up in electronics boutique. So when they cleaned it out, I picked it up for 30 bucks over here. There was more than one of those. there were, I think, three volumes of Konami MSX antiques?

Yeah, but the Saturn one is all three combined. Oh, okay. So it's pretty much everything. And, I mean, I think that up in Babbage's for like $10. Yeah, yeah, the same thing. That was only MSX, the original, the MSX two ones,

which I think more pre-pro familiar with like Metal Gear and Vampire Kill and Contra, those are all MSX2. But most of their shooters were original MSX. Which is crazy. Yeah. So, like, yeah, like, I think, Like, you look at May 9th, or I almost did it again, May 29th, 1985 is when the Gradius

coinop was released and like Russian attack was released shortly there after that. And their games just got more complex at this time. And you see this on the MSX outputs. Like in 1986, they released two games based on the Goonies, one for the MSX, one for the Famicom. And although simple, the games are very clearly, I think, designed to be played at home. And there, there's like branching paths and stuff. Though, ironically, I only ever got to play it in the arcade.

Yeah, the Famicom one was only in the Play Choice 10. I called Nintendo to complain about that one. Was it that or was it versus Goonies? It was called versus Goonies. It was the same thing. It's exactly the same as the Famicom game. Which is really a shame because that could have, I think it just, they missed the market. Because by the time they could have put it out in the United States, it was just too primitive. Yeah, well, I mean, they had Goonies too.

So why go with the primitive one when you can bring over the second one? Yeah. But it's a really good time lane. Yeah, it's good. The NES one is, I think, holds up pretty well. Yeah. Whoever put the notes here on the Goonies for MSX said it sucks. Okay.

That wasn't me. That was me. It was not me. Sorry, I just copy these over from my personal notes and they included some too many personal. Okay. Yeah. So, like, it has like little adventure type elements. There's branching paths in it.

But it's mostly infuriating. But it is a much more complicated game than their previous MSX games. And I think it's a good kind of place to start. And that was released in December, 1985. After that's a nightmare Yeah that's another big one So Majo Densetsu Although the Japanese box just says nightmare on it

Yeah And that was a It's another one of like it wasn't their first scrolling shooter Like previously they did an arcade game Juno first And then there's a Sky Jaguar which is a like Zvious type of game That was an MSX one And Nightmare it's Is Sky Jaguar like Sky Links?

You know the Transformer Never mind Sorry was a different kind of Yeah, me too. My mistake. But you know about Nightmare because you're the only Majo DeTetsu fan I know. Yeah, so Nightmare, the original one is, yeah, it's kind of weird. It kind of reminds me of what was that game?

Kings Night. Kings Night, yeah. It's kind of like that. Kings Night. It's better than Kings Night. Yeah. I don't know. I mean.

But does it have a mobile game revival to tie into Final Fantasy 15? I think not check and mate. It probably did. I mean, it seems to be fairly well remembered like as a computer game in Japan. Yeah. Even, like, a lot of these MSX games of this era, they came out in Europe, too. So there's people that like it over there. I mean, it's a, I mean, they at least came up the good title.

Nightmare spelled K-N-I-J-Rash-T. Yeah, that's a great pun for, like an English-language pun for a Japanese company to release for a Japanese game that only is made in Japan, only sold there. Well, it was sold in Europe, too, I think. Oh, yeah, yeah. But it's weird. We'll get to it. But, like, the one that was only released in Japan still said Nightmare 3 on it,

even though nobody would have known. It's weird. But that game is cool because, again, it's an overhead shooter, except you're this little magic wielding knight. Populon. Populon. And you get all sorts, like, your shield is an actual shield. You get all sorts of magic spells and throwing knives that are weapons and sort of like a, like, I guess, Grecian mythical setting. Yeah, vaguely. I mean, Grecian, but also like clearly Middle Ages. Yeah, just a mishmash of fantasy stuff. It's weird. I mean, and it gets even mishmash here later. But yeah, so that's like, that's another, you know, fairly sophisticated game.

And that wasn't MSX only that one. Yeah, January 1986. Because some of these other stuff is Twin Bee. Penguin Adventure, which was the sequel to Antarctica Adventure, which also was never ported away from it. That was much later. But yeah, that's like, that's, yeah, it's basically, it's weird because it's still the penguin adventure where you're, I mean, the Antarctic Adventure, where you're just like

a happy penguin, like running along like a path and jumping over seals and jumping over crevices. Yeah. But there's also these RPG elements. Yeah, it's like you can drop. Like, before there are these holes you would drop into and you would just, like, lose time. And this one there, some of them that are secrets, that there's, like, a shopkeeper underneath that you can take the fish that you would get to buy things. And one of them, I think you actually need to do to beat the game.

There's all sorts of warps. It's a very, like, for something that seems simple, it's a pretty complex game in that way. There's lots of hidden stuff. And that was, that was Kojima's first game project. Yeah, he was definitely involved with that. Hideo Kojima designed penguin adventure. I thought there was a little bit of inappropriate humor for a penguin adventure game. It's really weird for the penguin just wet his pants like that.

The photo mode where you're just like zooming in and creeping on the girl penguin. Oh, yeah. It gets weird. It gets weird because it's penguins. I always get to confuse the binary land, but they're not really, that's Hudson side. Yeah, that's, yeah, you keep doing that. You keep conflating Hudson and Konami, but I guess they were kind of, kind of similar, and then they became the same company, so. Yeah, blue and pink penguins fallen in love, you know, that's, yeah, now that, yeah, then they became the same company. You know, there's some other animated film.

It wasn't remotely involved with Konami, but it has those similar penguin styles, and I can't remember the name of it for the life of me, but it's sort of like goofy, goofy, but also not. And, like, the penguin is a salary man. He's just getting drunk or something. Yeah. Are you thinking of a Gretaiko? No, no, no. This is something from the 80s, like from around that same time. Like, somebody asked me on Twitter, is like, so was this related to Canami or, like, a beer mascot?

I'm like, I don't, definitely not related to Canami. I don't know. I have to look up to see what they name of it. There's footage of it on YouTube, if I could remember what it was called. You got me. Yeah. So the same month as that game was released, there was vampire killer, which I'm definitely not the person at this little table to be discussed. Oh, I was psyched to see that game.

I mean, it is definitely much worse than, uh, than Castlevania, but it's, uh... It sure is interesting, though, huh? Yeah, it is an interesting game because they were... Yeah, one of the things, the MSX was not very good at scrolling, which was weird because one of the things that Kanami did so well was shoot-em-ups, and there was a whole library of both ports and original and heavily altered versions of the shoot-em-ups they made, even though the scrolling is so bad, it's only in like, I don't know, eight or 16-1. pixel increments. So like every second is scrolled. Yeah, it's like a tile at a time. It's a

pixel based. And it's a, yeah, they're very difficult to play. So there's those sort of games instead they use flip scrolling. So with that, they decide to make it a little bit more adventure, RPG, and open-ended. So it's sort of like if they took the original Castlevania and rearranged it in that way, where each level, instead of just walking back to forth, there was, you know, like goals, there's a currency system, there's all sorts of secret stuff to find and they sort of carried forward some of those elements to Castlevania too when they did that one yeah that was I think one of the more like it's it's a problematic game just because it's not very well balanced the controls are weird um but um it's got the same

rad tunes though yeah it does have a lot of interesting ideas to it compared to something like contra which is just it's like didn't really convert very well James banana was working overtime that month um yeah so it's like Like, that's probably the first MSS game I ever played. It's probably how I learned about the MSS. Yeah, it's the same thing with me, too. Yeah, it was either that or the original Metal Gear, around the time Metal Gear, Solid came out, and I was like, started to read about it.

And wait, there's, what's Zanzibar land? What? Huh? So, yeah, you know, these connections to beloved properties that we got in America, that we never saw these other facets of them. Vampire Killer is definitely an interesting sort of, a little side note to Castlevania, but I don't think it's nearly as good as the original Castlevania.

Like, that's just such a beautifully constructed action platformer, challenging, but never really unfair. It gets a little, a little, like, punch you in the breadbasket toward the lead-up to the Grim Reaper. But aside from that, I think it's a really nicely balanced game that requires mastery, but the MSX version, not so much. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of something that Castle. Castlevania's struggle to do a lot of times.

Like sometimes later games could be sort of, it's just a little bit too difficult, you know, or it's a little too easy. We're a little too easy. But it's interesting to see the adventure elements were kind of with the series from the beginning. You can't, like, you can take away the adventure elements and you can have some good platformers,

but there's, you know, you can't say that they weren't kind of there from the beginning. And I find it interesting that the Famicom DIST system version was so, it was released first and that it was like, so different. They were done. I think, you know, some person conceptualized it and then two different teams kind of just made their own, you know, adapted to the hardware that way.

I kept hearing the stories revised about which one actually came first. I think it just ended up, like, the FamComptus system just ended up making it to market. Yeah, I mean, I really feel like with so little difference in the release dates. Yeah. They were just in development at the same time. It doesn't make sense for a company to say, well, we made this one game, but we're going to hold on until the other version comes out first. No, they don't do that.

It happened a lot, especially as publishers like Konami and Capcom sort of got a grasp on what the Famicom market really needed and wanted. And so they would do things like develop like two versions of Strider. Yeah, right. King Kong was the next one that came after that, which was like King Kong 2, I should say, which is based on the movie King. I forget what it was called the American title. Was it just called King Kong or was it like King Kong Returns, maybe? King Kong returns, I think, was its actual name. And that's the sequel to the Charles Groden King Kong from the 1970s.

70s where he climbs the World Trade Center? Yeah, there's, you know, it's not, yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on there. Yeah, that was, they made a Famicom and MSX2 version. Those were both completely different games. Yeah, in the... Is that like, one of them has the subtitle of like Megaton Punch of Anger? Yeah, Akari no Megaton Punch. Yeah.

Yeah, awesome. That is awesome. And that one, that's like, you play, but the MSX one is weird because they made a King Kong game where you aren't King Kong, right? That's the one, yeah. Yeah, so on the NES, the Icari no Megatong Punch, you know, that's, you play as King Kong, which is what everybody wants to do. Nobody's like, I want to be the guy who's

next to King Kong. Nobody wants to be that guy. It's like, but they did it on the MSX and it's, I mean, it kind of I've tried to play it. It's sort of an adventure game. Yeah, it's got stuff. Again, it's more, I guess more suitable to a computer than the brawl and punch and grill a smashing action of the Famicom one.

I like that idea, though, so much better because you really, like, you're supposed to sympathize with King Kong. And that's what, like, the game is like King Kong, like, gets his revenge on these, like, jerks and the premise of the Famicomondent game to make any sense it's just like you were smashing guys that they came out of not quite

that game reminds me of Rygar for some reason like the overhead scenes it's a great great game and I wish we would have gotten it but we didn't so yeah I mean that's you know when we're talking about they actually published Kuberts for the MSX but they changed the character of Kubert

that's kind of missing the point yeah I know he looked completely different why would they do that I don't I guess I don't know if the original Keybert was ever released that way. I'll have to bring up a picture, which obviously the people in the podcast can't see, but...

I'll describe it. Yeah. At least possible. So, yeah, next on the list that you have here is Maze of Gaglius, which is the sequel to Nightmare. But it's a totally different kind of game. Very different. And it takes place right after a nightmare. And I think it's just like probably one of the best games that Konami put out on the MSX.

What do you think that looks like? Like, it looks like, it looks like Bonk and Slimer had a baby. I don't know. It's weird. I don't know why they wanted to change that because that's, oh. Didn't resonate with Japan. It's extremely gross. Weird.

Yeah. So, like, Maze of Galleus is like, it's a, it takes place right after nightmare. Um, so you are Populon and his, is, uh, lover Aphrodite. And the evil Bishop Galeas, uh, is a wizard, a goat-headed wizard who, uh, steals, goes into the future and kidnaps their baby who hasn't even been conceived yet and hides them. Wait, I've read that episode of, or issue of X-Men. Uh, he gets the techno virus and comes. back as cable, right? The baby? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Galliast is a busy, busy goat wizard.

But yeah, it's weird that that would happen about the same time. That's about, that was an 80s plotline, right? Yeah. So it's like, it's weird, but that's, that's, if you can go into the future, I guess your ransom possibilities are wide open. You know, like you can, it's like, you will not have this. So they have to rescue their unborn, unconceived child. And it's kind of cool. So it's a, it's a side, well, it's not scrolling exactly on the MSX, but it's a, it's a, it's a platform. former, like an adventure game. I mean, if you want to understand this game, play La Moulana. Because La Moulana is extremely inspired by Maze of Galeas. And it's, you know, it's different. It's modernized, but very much in the same spirit. There's a lot that's very oblique and opaque about this game. There's, you know, a lot of stuff you have to find in sort of arcane ways and a lot of really complicated stuff to explore. I haven't played that much of it, but it's, it's, it's very definitely like you can see that especially the original version of of la mulana which was done in a in an msx visual style was heavily inspired by this so i feel like it's it's a really

valuable curio for that fact alone i think that's what kind of has made like created a little bit more interest in it because it seems to be one of the i feel like i could mention like maze of galley's to people and have like a one in ten chance of somebody recognizing it which is pretty good, you know, like if I went down to, like, the convention floor or something like that. It's, yeah, it was also released in Europe as Mase of Galleus. And, yeah, it's like you're exploring a castle. It's like a Metroidvania type thing. And, and there are little stages that are built into the castle that you have to find and unlock. And there's like, you know, it's kind of Zelda-ish, too, in a way. The cool thing is that you only have two lives and those are the

two characters. And you can switch back and forth between them. And there's interesting stuff happening where I think one of the characters can reverse direction and jump, I think, and the other one can't, but one of them has like a kind of a short jump, I think. I know that. And that becomes useful because it makes certain platforming challenges easier. And there's like a little bit of a strength difference too, I think. But the interesting thing is like you have to, if one of the characters dies, the other one can go rescue them by going to like death's shrine.

and bringing some salts or something to death, and death will resurrect your lover. So there's another game coming out, I guess, late this year, next year called Astellon, Tears of the Earth, which is a kind of a modern-day indie game developed by the guy who made Castle in the Darkness a few years ago, Matt Cap. I played that a little bit at Bitsummit this year,

and it's very much in the maze of Galea style, and especially in the fact that you have like three or four characters that you can control, and each of them has different abilities. is, I think, three characters, and there is the death element to it. So, yeah, like, when you die, then you have to make a deal with the devil or Satan or something like that. So clearly, this game has had kind of traction and stuck in people's minds for a long time. Yeah, there's weird stuff.

Like, you can get health, like, there's no health power-ups. You have to go to certain rooms in the castle where if you stand in the right spot, like these little pixie dust will, like, appear in corners of the screen. And if you don't move, they'll, like, after, few seconds, they'll congeal into a ferry and you can catch the ferry and get your health restored, I think. It's, it's very strange, and it drove me nuts trying to figure out where they were. But it's really crucial to get those. And there's what mapping us for, maybe. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of quirky things in there, too. Like, when you pause the game, the characters,

like, sit on a toilet, like, just waiting because they're like, that must be what you're doing. And one of the interesting thing is, is it uses the keyboard, the fact that an MSX would have a keyboard in front of you. And so each, like, sub-dungeon, it's kind of like Zelda where, you know, the dungeons are divided up and aren't connected to each other. And in order to complete a dungeon, you have to investigate, I think, tombstones that are littered throughout the dungeon, and one of them will have incantation on it, which is always a Hebrew or Hebrew sounding word, and that's the name of the boss. And you've got to type it in, and the boss's layer. And that's what makes the boss. appear. And this led to a really bizarre discovery. I could not figure out where they came up

with these names because they sound too, they sound too obviously Hebrew to be like, why would a Japanese game developer do this? But they turn out, they come from a like 15th century grimoire, like a black magic handbook that itself was basically copied a translation, a not so good translation of a Kabbalah text. And so the names of angels and demons that you're supposed to be able to say as spells are all from, I think the book that they used it from is called The Wisdom of Solomon or something like that. And you look through it and all these names appear there, one form or another.

And also throughout the book are Stars of David all over the place, which are associated for some reason in Japanese games with magic. And I think that's why. I think that somebody must have been publishing either excerpts or something of this thing. And when people were making RPGs in Japan at the time, it just became a source book. And it just happened. It so happens that the maze of Galleys people took it one step further and actually used the names of the angels as the monster names. It's very strange.

And I'd never thought I'd say I was researching 15th century black magic, but here we are. There must have been somebody that was a fan of this sort of keeper of stuff because the third matcher of Densetsu game was called Shalom. Right. Yeah. And by the way, it still has ostensibly a Greek classic Greek theme. Like Aphrodite is the name of the girl character and all that.

And it's a mishmash? Yeah. And yeah, it does some interesting stuff. Like one of the cooler tricks is that there's a, I think, in one stage, one dungeon, and your controls are reversed, and you have to go back into a previous dungeon and get a magic tome, and that will fix your controls.

And one of the guys on our regular on our podcast, Satanga didn't know that, and he actually finished that dungeon with the backwards controls once a long time ago. I mean, I guess if you're emulating, could remap, but... He didn't. No, he really didn't. He thought it was supposed to be that way. He's like, that's the way I'm going to play it.

And that's what he did. Wow. Crazy. That's one of the we're weirder things that's happened while we've been doing the show. but um and there's other cute stuff i can't remember it's the msx version or if it's both versions but um if you go into a shopkeeper's store and buy something if you go into the shopkeeper's male and you go in as aphrodite you'll get a discount and vice versa for the for the female shopkeepers

um so a little cute things like that but it's a it's a it's one of the it's a game that's definitely playable today um especially if you can remap the up button to like a jump button on your control pad that makes it much better if you can't or you don't want to the Famicom version is a kind of a reworking It's called It's not really called Maze Galli It's called Daimashikio Gallius

Which is like great demon bishop gallius I don't know It's like the sprites look different And the mazes are different And there's a few changes But it's like a very playable game too It's a fan translation out there That's really good

There's a couple of these also got fan remakes Like the MSX Goonies got a fan version. The MSX version of this game got a fan version, too. Yeah, they're definitely some of the better things Konami put out. But if you want to learn more, you can pick up, what's the book? The Concher and other Konami classics, which mostly focused on Contra, of course, in Ganbury, Gomon, and most of the Famicom Library. But we stuck in stuff on all three of these games. Right.

And, yeah, so I wrote that one. It's one of the few things I've ever started and completed for hardcore gaming one-on-one besides the podcast. It just, that takes up all my time. But I'm really proud of that one, and it was fun to play through. So after that, I think, July, so that was April 18, 1987, July 13th, 987. That's Metal Gear. Yep.

Yep. I've heard of that game. I have, too. It's so familiar. I just don't know what it is. I can't put my finger on it. Well, it was called Acumaggio Dracula in Japan. Part of the first of the trio, the first capital.

Castlevania games and shows a series of intro routes. I think we got a copy and paste error in the notes. Yeah, that's a full responsibility for that. Maybe we can talk about Metal Gear without notes, although maybe we don't need to because we've covered it extensively on this podcast. That's true. But that's where it came from. Yeah.

Suffice to say the MSX version is the version to play. It's available to play in the HD collection, which you can play on PS3, Xbox 360, and Vita. Yeah, the Vita. Did it come as a bonus on snake eater, like one of the snakes? Yeah, that's where it's first started off substance. That version was released in Europe, but I think they cut out a lot of text. And even like the Famicom version, I remember hearing the way it was the way it was because it was poured in an extremely short amount of time. It's crazy that that was such a hit.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, it was a really cool game. It's like the legend of Zelda meets G.I. Joe. It is a, it is an adventure game that happens to kind of look like a. shooter when you first glance at it. And there's a lot of substance to it. It's very confusing in the American version because of some of the changes and alterations and poor conversion errors.

But the premise, you know, you are a soldier who starts with nothing but your fists and you have to fight your way through this enemy fortress by using your wits by finding tools and weapons and communicating with your allies throughout this base. That's really cool. And, you know, it's focused on stealth rather than confrontation. So, although that's not as good in the NES version because of some of the poor design, like the lines of sight are not as careful and thoughtfully designed as on MSX, but, you know, the fundamentals still come through. Yeah, they added and changed a lot of stuff to the Famicom version, and the stuff that's original to the Famicom version is the worst part, which is, of course, is like the game opens up with that part in the jungle, which is very badly designed. But the stuff that's consistent with the MSX game is generally pretty good.

Yeah, no, it is. But, you know, you see lots of things. Like I said, the lines of sight are a problem. The MSX version, until you get to the very end of the game, there's always a way to move on to a screen without being seen by enemies. And you have to use the binoculars to look ahead of screen, but you'll always be able to find, like, well, here's, you know, here's a little corner where they're not going to be able to see me so I can sneak in,

watch their patterns, and figure everything out. The NES doesn't always let you do that. And there's a lot of places where there's just literally no way to get onto a screen without being spotted. So it kind of breaks one of the fundamental principles of the game. But despite that, I still feel it has merit because it is fundamentally at its heart a really great game. Before the Wii Virtual Console went down, they had Metal Gear 1 and 2, which I think

is if you want the classic way to play it because it runs in 240P and looks really nice. Wait, on American? No, the Japanese. I was going to say. But I think what I noticed is that in the Nintendo one you could walk underneath cameras and they wouldn't see you, but it doesn't work like that in the MSX one. Like they, if you try to do that, they'll always see it. No, you have to find ways around it. Yeah.

And there's some, like the MSX one, like you can beat up enemies with your fists and they'll drop, like, rations and ammunition where they don't do that in the Nintendo one. And they kept, oh, they don't. But that happens in Snake's Revenge. Yeah, Snake's Revenge. Snakes Revenge actually implements a lot of the stuff that was missing from the NES port of the original games. not secretly, not that bad a game. It's okay. Yeah.

So, I mean, yeah, you already, if you already did a Metal Gear episode, I don't think we need to go much further into it. Yeah. Similarly, there's a bunch of, like, the shoot-em-ups, but we were here last year, almost exactly a year ago to talk about Gradius and Peridius and, yeah, Space Mambo. I don't know if we touched on Space. I don't think we talked about it. That's why I started with the, yeah, the Monbo. Yeah, that was all the ones were MSX, except for Space Mambo was MSX too. And again, scrolling was a real, real issue for.

for the MSX. So any game that could scroll kind of smoothly was like a technical masterwork. It's sort of like playing as a shooter on like a dot matrix printer. Yeah. It's just like, you know, it's just giving you line by line what's happening. So that game and I think a game from Hertz called Psycho World that had smooth scrolling. There's a couple of the games that were like that. But Space Mambo, it isn't quite as smooth as the Nintendo, but it still looks really darn good for an MSX.

I think it's one of the games that supports the MSX. too to make it slightly smoother but even on a like a standard thing it still looks pretty good. Do you want to talk about it? I mean that's one of their later MSX games. It's one of the last ones, yeah. Yeah. So I mean that's kind of like that's sort of like let's make a shooter that's for the MSX and

is really really good. It started all out on the MSX right. There's no other versions of it. I believe that's correct. It's on the virtual, was on the Wii of virtual console, but not anymore. The name is Space Manbo but I think it's supposed to be Mambo like Mambo and that's

That itself is a weird name for basically kind of like a relative of the sunfish, I believe. Yeah, that's what they call it over Japan. It's a cool looking fish. And it's another example of fish inspiring cool spaceships and shooters. Yeah, there's not too much else to say about Spaceman, but it was unique. It started off as a port of the arcade game Thundercross, which also never got a real port. And it just sort of morphed into something original. And I guess it's not really as unique as, as Gradius.

It just has a cool graphic style. It has cool music. It was a nice thing to do for, I mean, it came out late. So it's December 21st, 1989. That's really pretty late. And that's a great gift to people who are still trucking on the MSSX. Yeah, there was that, even some of the Japanese sources I've read, they were actually a little bit confused by Kanami still supported the MSX for such a long time after. Yeah, after they started doing the Famicom.

They're like, this is, this stuff is clearly outdated. Why are you guys still making stuff for this? It must have been profitable for them. Yeah, it must have worked. And plus, you know, MSX didn't have the licensing fees that they had to pay. Yeah, that's the real. What you're seeing here is why there's 100 Konami games is because licensing fees, we dirt cheap on the MSX. And that's a great way of sometimes it doesn't work, you know, like sometimes it does.

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I think the next big game after Metal Gear I have is Ushas. Yeah, I don't know anything about Ushash. I've tried to play that game a lot, and I never could get into Ushas. It's one of the games is like, please, I need to cover this game for my website, but I want to play it. It's spelled U.S. with the, what is that, what is that called, like a squiggly-s-s-squiggly, a little thing underneath. What's it called? A diacritic. yeah maybe yeah that it's probably

it I don't know but it's got a little circumflex I think yeah it's got the crazy thing that you can't reproduce on a keyboard easily yeah so and so it came out November 1st 1987 I have this my date I remember it it's sort of like another one those temple exploring games again like maze of galleus yeah like Mola Malan is except you're these two brothers named Witt and Kless see if I can find out of American boys wit and Kless

I did play Shalom for the the book that we you're talking about. That's the third nightmare game is weird because it starts off in the real world as you're this kid showing off, I think, to a girl about this brand new MSX game called Shalom. So you put it in there and then you get sucked into the game world. And the first character you meet is this talking pig that sort of like berates you but also becomes your friend. So then you start wandering around this world and then you meet like Populon and Aphrodite and all the character's in the original game. And it's more like a, it looks. It looks sort of like a Zelda game, but it's structured more like an RPG.

It's structured more like an adventure game. Was the girl impressed in the end? I don't remember. Does she go with them? I'm sure I remember it at some point. I mean, one of the reasons I write about video games so much is because I have a terrible long-term memory. So I need to remember. What happened back to this?

I forgot to bring a copy. I actually played a fair bit of Ushahs. I know something about it. I should tap you to write about it. Yeah. I'll be late. The accent mark is called a Sedilla, by the way. Oh, that's right. And it's an unvoiced fricative.

So Shah is out of S. So Ushas is, I believe, some kind of Hindu deity. Oh, yeah? Well, they're all manifestations of the same deity, but, you know, they refer to them as different. An avatar. Yes. So it's sometimes referred to as the treasure of Ushas, although I don't think that's really its official title. but you can look it up

more easily that way it's just not a Japanese 8-bit video game title without a yeah a possessive in there their titles it's so hard to figure out what Konami's MSX games

are really titled because they'd sometimes include the alternate English titles on the same box so yeah like it's it's like I said similar to Gallius you've got two characters

with slightly different abilities Witt and Kless they have guns one of them as one of us gun the other one punches things and they go into these different temples separately. The two forms of self-expression in the eight-bit days.

That's true, yeah. Those are the two things you can do. And, oh, well, and jumping. That's kind of an art unto itself. You can get, you know, collect coins and improve their stats. And if one of them dies, the other one has to go on without them. It has this weird emotion mechanic where you can only fight the boss of a dungeon if you're feeling the appropriate emotion. And you change emotions by collecting conji inscribed plaques, even in the European release.

Right. Why not? that's a really yeah I was looking through that I didn't realize that was that that that game when I was flipping through that book but it caught my attention because those portraits are really nice yeah like the emotion portraits but the idea that you have to like be in the right mood to fight a boss is kind of weird like oh I'm just not feeling it I think I'll let him rule in the and the sprites have I think little different animations for each one so like there's like I don't know what the nervous sprite or something so as you're once you get in the right emotion you'll be kind of tell because he's like little like sweat drops comical sweat drops burst out next to his head. And things like that. And it's kind of, it's not really as clever as the way Goliath summons its bosses, but you got to give it to Konami for trying something different. And there's a fan patch for this game that cleans up some stuff, fixes a couple bugs, and changes those kanji characters into like little, cute little, you know, like symbols, yeah, that work internationally. Yeah, international types, yeah, that's right. So it's a really hard game.

At least it was for me. and controls kind of clumsier than Gaglius. And it's a good-looking game. It really is. Yeah, it's one of a handful that they never got ported back to on the Famicom. Who knows has they ever even tried to do it? I don't think it, I never had anybody talk about it and speak that highly of it. Yeah.

So April 28, 1988, 1988 is Perodius. Wait, you skipped over Shalom. Oh, I started talking about Shalom. Oh, yeah, yeah, let's do that. There's a little bit of discussion. Yeah, well, the other interesting thing about that is that the boss fights, they're very kind of varied. I wish I brought the book with me because, again, I forget it. But I think one of them is like a breakout type of game.

Okay, that's different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were like much, much different because I don't think there's any much real combat when you're walking around. It's not like Zelda where there's like bad guys you need to fight. Like, it's mostly just walking and talking to this person and that causes a trigger of something else. So that was like the only action part of that game. Just buy my book. I swear I remembered everything back back there.

It's hard to retain this. Don't ask me. Ask the book. Available now at Amazon.com. Even the expert doesn't remember. Yeah. So like it's, and that one I think has a fan translation too. That's fairly complete.

Yeah, that's how I was able to play it. Because this book barely has anything about it because it's probably written before. You need to know Japanese to really play that game if you're not just going to blunder around. Or like Spanish or whatever languages was released in in Europe. Oh, it wasn't released in. Europe. I thought it was. Okay. Shalomna. Oh, Shalom. Yeah. I'm thinking, I'm still thinking of Ushas.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that game says, it doesn't even say Majo Dinsetsu on the front. It says Shalom, Nightmare 3. And Shalom is, I mean, there's another Hebrew word, you know, that can mean all kinds of things. But I think it's used kind of idiomatically as a greeting and a salutation, like, or like a goodbye, right? You can say Shalom. It's like kind of like aloha.

Yeah, that's a weird one. I don't know. I don't understand why they chose the nightmare series. They just go crazy directions with it. And totally fourth wall breaking. It's really goofy. Okay, so now Perodius. I know you have a Perodius episode, too, but it's kind of interesting that it got its start.

We do, but we can talk a little bit about it here. I mean, it's a nice antidote to Ushas and Shalom because you don't need to know Japanese to play this one. It's pretty universal. It's a weird penguin shoots things in space. And it's the penguin from Antarctic. Yeah, it was, the penguin from that is Populon. It has Populans in it, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right.

Then they have Taco, the Octopus, and I think Goaemon was in this one, too. The Octopus is supposed to be the star, because I think the title is Perodius, Tacoa, Chiquis. Yeah, Octopus saves the universe or something like that. This was actually the origin. Like, some people refer to the Arcade Prodeus. That's one is called Perodius Da in Japanese, and that's actually the second one. Yeah. So it started here.

It's a completely different game. Again, why on the MSX? Yeah, there's just like a team of people. I guess that was their shtick, and they just didn't tell them to stop. So that must have been the first time where they had to make the music and they just like couldn't get it done in time. So they just put in like, you know, yeah, all the, uh, yeah, that was, uh, something. The composer was, uh, Hidunori Maizawa.

And, uh, he told me when I interviewed him, it's been like 10 years that, uh, like, they just didn't have the time to do. the music. So they were like, let's go public domain. Yeah, why not? So it actually works really well having, having stuff like the can can in there. It's like so, you know, and Bach and whatever, it's just so ridiculous and it helps give the series its personality. So yeah, it works. And it's one of the, you know, one of those compromises that turned out for the best. Yeah. And it's, you know, like, it's, it just shows you like the longevity that, that, the MSX games have had for Konami, like you, this proides games on all kinds of platforms.

And oddly enough, there were no Y, Y, Y World games for MSX, which seems like... Like, the closest one, there's this Mahjong game, which was sort of, I use crossover from all sorts of Konami stuff. Something no Maja Sushi. That was like one of their 10 mat, Mahjong games. Yeah. There must have been some kind of law in Japan at the time. Like, you must put out a Mahjong game. All software developers.

I don't think it was a law. I think it was just an easy way to make some money. It's like kind of solitaire. I mean, you know, if you want to appeal to... an older audience, like parents who buy the system for their kids, well, hey, look, there's Mahjong. Your dad can play it. Your dad probably doesn't want to play Perodias, but Mahjong, sure. Strip Mahjong, definitely.

High no Maja sushi. There's the Moai Head, there's Pantaro, Poplon, Goamon, Venom from the Greatest Games, a little snatcher. There's even Aphrodite. Oh, yeah, Aphrodite. It's crazy how often they pop up, and there's a synodon. Yeah. Yeah, somewhere between there and. And Konami Crazy Racers, Populon Aphrodite shuffled off this more, I guess.

I don't think they're in that one, yeah. Next big game I have is Snatcher, which actually was, I think, technically it was first released like two weeks earlier on the PC-88. That was one of the few games that was actually on the PC-80. I don't think Kenami did much. They mostly did constantly write out on the MSX. Yeah, but that's a big game that's had a lot of staying power. Yeah, it's one of the few games they would put on disk, too.

that's actually one of the big things they did with this was the SEC sound expansion chip and there's some of the shooters like what nemesis 2 or great it would be a gradius 2 and i think go for no you bow episode 2 which is also nemesis 3 they had this this cc sound chip with the original gradius also not quite yes i just i just put together liner notes for ship to shore is Graddeus 1, 2, and 3. And the Gratius 1 collection is the NES version and the MSX version. And the MSX version is enhanced by the SEC. They reissued it on a compilation on diskette. Yeah, yeah. And you could pop the discette into the disk drive and the cartridge, the SEC cartridge into the ROM slot, and it would give you enhanced music. And it sounds much, much better

than the NES soundtrack. Yeah. It does not think that, because that came with Snatcher. Because Snatcher, since it was released on disk, it had a separate cartridge that was just the SEC chip. And that, that disc compilation that had that Twin Bee and, like, two other games. games, they use the SEC chip. But the original cartridge version of Grady's didn't have that. That reminds me. There's something else, like a couple other weird things Konami did on the MSX that

happened kind of before the area we're talking about. But one of them is they put out their own, like, game genie versions that work just for their games, right? Yeah, there was a games master where it was a cartridge that you would put into the second slot. Yeah. There was actually a whole bunch of crossovers where you would put another game into another slot and they would activate some sort of cheat code.

Right. For example, like Mazigalias has several, like you put in. I think one of them might be Graddeus, I'm not sure. But there's a couple different ones that you put in other Konami games in the second slot and it will unlock little cheats. There was some, one of those shoot-em-up games where you needed to put another

Canami game in if you wanted to see the real ending. It was either Gradius 2 or Salamander one of those. It was really But that's something that they kept alive on DS. There were a few Konami DS games where if you had a related

GBA game in the first slot slot, or slot two, then you get extra stuff. Casillvania Don of Sorrow had that. Oh, yeah. Or, sorry, Ari of Sorrow. No, Don of Sorrow. I can't get them all confused. There's another episode on that stuff, too.

Yeah, probably. But yeah, Snatchez, that was, because that was the PC88 version used FM synth versus the MSX one, which uses this SEC chip, which again, like, the Canemry was really big on those sound chips because they had the BRC6, which they used for Akamajo Densatsu, and, and, and, and Madara, I think, were the only games that really used that. Then there's the VRC 7, which La Grange Point used, which was FM synth. It's the FM, the VRC7 was in Lagrange Point, which was Famicom only, and then the Japanese version of Tiny Tune Adventures.

Which didn't use the sound element. I think I read that they just had a lot of extra chips. So they were just like, well, it has these advanced ROM capacity, or like graphics capacities, capabilities. So they used it for that. And then the American version, I think, used MMC5. Yeah, there's, um, didn't they do, did they use a weird chip in the American? They didn't use the VRC 6 for Castlevania 3.

No, it was MMC5. It was one of the few games that used it. There were like seven games, I think, that used MNC5. But yeah, that's, Nintendo of America didn't allow people to put games on their own custom ROMs. So they came up with ROM sets or, you know, mappers that were very similar to the things that were powering the special cartridges in Japan. Konami could have put out so many more games outside of Japan for like a Famicom especially. And I always like wonder why they didn't use Ultra Games for that.

Ultra Games was really more for their American-focused releases. They did a lot of stuff where they would like license Defender of the Crown or pirates or, you know, Kubert. Ultra Games was really meant for like, here are the games that are four Americans. of the stuff Americans are going to like, whereas the Konami label was still more of their, like, these are the games from Japan. But it's a distinction that wouldn't have meant anything to consumers at the time. They wouldn't have been like, oh, this one is marketed to us because most people didn't even think about there being other versions of the game.

Yeah, I think it was just a way for them to kind of get the best of both worlds. Like, the best of their games from Japan came over under the Konami label, and then they had the other label. It was like, here's stuff that we're not going to release in Japan, but that this audience might enjoy it. Yeah, I just feel like instead of releasing like Defender of the Crown or like Bill Elliott's NASCAR, whatever, they could have gone for like, you know, uh, King Kong or they could have, um. Yeah, but that would have cost a lot more the license. Or, okay, so they could have done, um, what's that one? Uh, that's very similar to the first Ninja Turtles game, but it's like a Japanese. Yeah. That would have been. But that's so Japanese in nature. Whereas Bill Elliott is much more American in nature. Well, okay. The comparison might not be perfect. No, I'm just saying like, admit. I'm saying it's easy for us to say, well, how come we didn't get these cool games?

But you have to look at it from the corporate perspective, which is like, we're working in this market, what's going to sell over here? I think it would have sold like hotcakes, though, because it's like people love that. I mean, you sold a game called Ninja Gaiden and it flew off the shelves. Yeah, but it was just like the movie. Didn't you see the ads? I mean, I'm just saying like, Getsu Phumma, anyway, we're not talking about that. But like, I feel, I always lament like that Konami didn't put out more. There was plenty of it.

They could have maybe ported snatchers. to PC. I mean, they could have ported Hino Tori without having to pay for the license because nobody would know what it was anyway. Yeah, they could have changed it as like, Harvard. Okay, that was something that we glazed over. They had the license for the Tazuka manga, Hino-Tori, and they put out a Famicom and a MSX2 game. They're both completely different games. Yeah, of course they are. The Famicom version, or Famicom game is, I think, pretty good. It's got this block-creating mechanic. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. And then kind of reminds me of Legacy of the Wizard playing as Zemn.

Yeah, exactly. Except not as oblique and impossible. And the MSX2 version is sort of more like a nightmare and that's an overhead shooter but like the level sort of loop infinitely and you need to find like an exit to jump to a different pathway. It was very weird. Yeah.

It was good. Hey, I had a question. One of you guys might know this. Like why does the PC88 version of Snatcher like that just the graphics on that like the pixel art looks so much better than the MSX version? MSX2 didn't have a very high resolution. Yeah, PC801 was high-res, so it could display kanji. So they just, like, it had a low color palette, but high pixel resolution.

Yeah, it was like 640 by 200, I think it could do. Oh, okay. And I think MSX was only 256 by 192, like the DS. Yeah, it was, so it wasn't, so you look at Snatcher and it's, the text is very hard to read in the MSX version because it's all, like, smudgy. That's, some of the, my favorite pixel art is in those, like, PC, They look so awesome. Well, the 9801 games are what were

that really took off because then you had you know high resolution plus high color level. A lot of them was still only 16 colors but it was still more than

but they did all kinds of stuff like there's that one I don't know what game it's from but it's like a girl looking out a window at like a futuristic city scape with something flying past

and it has this transparency effect because the graphics are interlaced it's like it's kind of like linticular. Like the girl looking through the window is on every other line. And then the lines in between are the blimp image. And they're constantly cycling back and forth between that as the blimp flies past. And it's just like the artistry and those graphical adventures are so amazing on Japanese PCs. But, you know, obviously MSX didn't have the chops to pull that off.

Although when it came to Snatcher, Snatcher was famously unfinished because there's supposed to be three acts and it just finishes on a cliffhanger at Act 2. And instead of making a sequel, they made SD Snatcher, which is a goofy reimagining of the entire game as an RPG, and also it actually finishes up the story. Right. And then they kind of brought it all together for the Sega CD version. Yeah, the Sega CD version, I mean, it wasn't quite the same, but the same basic plot is what they did for the Act 3 of the PC engine and Sega CD and all the other subsequent

versions. Yeah, the only other games I have that we haven't talked about, or that we, that I think I found notable, were Space Mamba, which we did talk about. And then, and Metal Gear 2, Solid Snake, which, and that was probably their last big one, which was at least July 20th, 1990. It's also, it looks like we should just do a full episode on that one. It looks like the largest game. It's the only one in this book that says it's 200 or 50012K.

It's an amazing game. Like, they did that on an MSX2, seriously. It looks gorgeous. It's crazy. Like the character portraits, the game graphics, the amount of text, the size. the size of the maps it's wild like you can you can see why they didn't really

stray too far from that for middle gear solid because it's like it is the pinnacle of a bit game design right there it's really crazy the plagiarism and the uh yeah it's just a brazen theft and brazen theft and a great game is yeah it's it's so cool

I actually like this I find the MSX versions where it's like Sean Connery and whatever and like Stallone and stuff to be like kind of endearing. Yeah. Well, Snatcher also copied a whole lot of stuff. I'm sure Mel Gibson shows up somewhere. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of it.

Like, they had to, they couldn't go, they milked everything they could out of the MSX. I think it's kind of, is there any games I missed? I mean, sure, there's plenty of games. Well, there's games, but nothing that really, really, really matters. I think that was pretty much. Kings Valley, we didn't really touch on. I never really played much of Kings Valley. Yeah, those are very much in the sort of pseudo.

Metroidvania style. I don't know a lot about them. I think they're kind of like single screen. I want to not like load runner, but maybe they remind me sort of like, I don't think they're puzzle games. They look sort of like Solomon's Key and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of game.

There's a fortune-telling game. Who cares? Of course there is. Yeah, the last game. I mean, although like I was mentioning before we started recording, I was in Spain a couple years ago and there's this little like, you know, ride-on kid sort of cabinet, you know, where you just sit in a car, and there was a television screen that had like an ancient,

ancient-looking game in it. That was clearly from the 80s. And I found out that that was actually licensed from Canami, and it was running on MSX hardware. So the only other interesting detail I know about the MSX is that it kind of had this weird double life in the Soviet Union. And I can't find a lot of information out about this, but apparently it was introduced there by the creator of the standard. And it had some life in educational institutions.

I don't think it was definitely wasn't in people's homes because they were like lucky to have heat in some cases. But it had this kind of other life over there, probably, you know, later in the 80s especially, it was probably a pretty pretty sophisticated computer for what they had. So that's, it's not the one that Tetris was made on. Yeah. I think that one was actually made out of wood and screws, but no, it's, it's, it's, it was probably better than that one, to be honest. It was a higher spec thing than whatever that was. There's a couple of, of games I just download and play real quick because I thought they sounded interesting even though they really weren't.

This one came called Mopey Ranger, which is sort of like a Pac-Man clone, except you're a mice and a canoe. So you sort of have to run around and pick up these little things, but like everything is like, because you're on a river, like they flow in a certain direction, so you move faster if you move with the flow and slow if you don't.

So you have to avoid enemies and you can sort of push rocks, which is one of these games that seemed like it was interesting and maybe you just sat down and play it for one or five minutes, it would be cool. It seemed just kind of over-designed. I thought. There's another game called Pipples, which is sort of a simple scrolling shooter where you're going to like a flower field or something in these different paths. He's sort of hop between as you

shoot guys. I mean, there's something really major that we haven't talked about. I mean, there's an alter port of contra, which we said wasn't very good, an alter port of Gamby. Gomon, which was, I think, better than the family comfort. Yeah. I think, you know, just sticking with the good stuff is a good way to wrap this up. And I positive podcast about kind of, you know, an alternate reality of video gaming that we didn't get to experience in America because so many of the games we're talking about, you know, being from Konami, they have a feel and a sound and a look that's very familiar, but they just,

you know, they represent an appeal to, I think, a different market than they were shooting for in the U.S. So there's a slightly different mentality to a lot of these games. So it is kind of like, you know, looking into the mirror universe and like, whoa, Simon Belmont has a goatee. Is he evil? Yeah, that's exactly how I would describe it. It's kind of like this weird, like, shadow console compared to the NES, at least for Konami games. But also, like, we didn't talk about it, but there's other like, you know, Hudson and to a greater extent probably other big developers for the MSX, comparable to Konami. For the MS.

They're all smaller companies, like Baltic. did stuff for the MSX. I know Crystal Soft, they may have been the other, you know, T&E Soft, other sort of companies that sort of went under as it went on. Falcom mostly supported the PC-88 in that standard, but they did a couple of MSX games like Dragon Slayer 4, which is Legacy of the Wizard. So anyway, I cancel that.

Yeah, I mean, I really feel like Konami was the heavy hitter for MSX, and it clearly did well for them because they kept doing it a long time. So God bless them. Yeah. And I'm sure, you know, that has a lot to do with, you know, why the company endured so long because they did have this extra fan base that, you know, were like, well, all I had to play was Konami games, so I love them. I don't know. Yeah.

I'm just saying that. You know, it's, it warms the heart. Warms the gamer heart. The little cockles are feeling nice and toasty right now. Yeah. All right. So that is, I'd say it for our look back at. at Konami on MSX.

And this is a weird, weird length for a podcast. It's too long to be a micro and too short to be a full episode. I feel like I'm done. We blew it, guys. We really messed up. But thank you for regaling us with tales of these somewhat familiar yet esoteric video games from our friends at Konami. Maybe they'll bring them all back as reboots.

Once they all show up, Aphrodite and Smash Brothers, believe it. That's right. That would be great. Hey, they've got enough sword characters as it is. That's right. Let's bring, and we need more ladies than Smash Brothers. That's true, yeah. Smash sisters.

Right on, folks. All right. So, guys, where can we find you on the internet? Tell us about yourselves and your projects. What should we buy that belongs to you? Oh, my gosh, commercialism. Hardcore Gaming 101.net, Twitter, HG, underscore 101. We published books about stuff.

Canami, I love, because ever since I discovered the internet, I wanted to talk about Canami stuff. So a lot of these games are featured in the unofficial guide to Canami Shur. shoot-em-ups and the Contra and other Canemi classics, which have the King Kong games in them and all the nightmare games in them. Most of the other stuff is the Famicom Dissystem, which they also supported very heavily. And again, it's also looking into like a lost history of the sort of stuff that they did. Got that book I'm working on All About Space Manbo.

It's about Space Manbo plus all the sequels that never were. I do the podcast. My name is Rob. I do the HG 101 podcast. I'm on Twitter as at GC9X. And our podcast is the top games podcast where our listeners nominate games and then we rank them compared to other games that are already on the list. Don't nominate bad games, but do listen.

We do two shows a week. And finally, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me here on Retronauts at Retronauts.com. On iTunes, on Podcast 1, et cetera, et cetera. Retronauts comes out weekly, so listen to it weekly, or, you know, download them and hoard them and listen to them in a big batch. They're always timeless because we talk about old video games. They're not getting any younger.

As for myself, you can find me on Twitter's GameSpite and, you know, other places on the internet. And Retronauts itself can be supported, if you would like to hear more of these podcasts in the future, through Patreon. Patreon.com slash Retronauts. We ask for $3 a month. That's all it costs for you to be able to listen to these podcasts a week early in a higher bit rate without advertisements, which I think is a fine opportunity for you. So please support us and you'll get something out of it. That's our deal for you.

Anyway, we're done talking about Konami games. For now, join us again next time for probably future discussions of Konami games because they made some good stuff back in the day. All right. Thanks, everyone. The President's Day Salient Matron's Farram has been extended. It's your last chance to take home a free-adjustable base with your qualifying mattress purchase, up to a $699 value, absolutely free. See what customers are raving about, like Breckett and Maryland, who loved the value she got

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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.