Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 200: The 2019 Years-in-Review Revue, Pt. II

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

Continued from episode 191! The whole Retronauts East gang gathers once again to complete their look back at the years that have come before—the most notable gaming (and pop culture) events of 1989 and 1999.

This week in Retronauts, we wait for the juices to start flowing. No, that's terrible. Oh, Lord. This week in Retronauts, whatever. Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode, I think, 200 of Retronauts, unless the plans change in which case, boy, is there egg on my face. But here, once again, I am Jeremy Parrish. And here, once again, invading my home, sitting in a small room, in an uncomfortable, cramped quarters. We have a bunch of dudes. Ben Edwards? Ben Elgin. I'm Chris Sims, and I'm ready to party like it's an unspecified year. Okay. Well, we're not going to party like that year. Oh, wait, actually, maybe we are. But you didn't specify. So I don't even, uh, I can't keep up with you this morning. Wow. We'll get that.

Okay. So it was my idea to record a little earlier than usual. And so we're all going to blame this. It's my fault. It is. It is your fault. Also, it's really cold outside. So you guys just got to give us a second to like shake off the like ice coating. Yeah, we all have, we're all like actually, you know, reptilian. So we're, uh, we need to bask on a rock in the sun. in order to get going. Anyway, this episode is a continuation and, oh, God, I hope the conclusion of the last episode that we all recorded together, which was the years in review for years ending in nine, because the gimmick is, it's 2019 now. So we look back 10, 20, 30, and even 40, no, 50 years this time. Wow. We went way back in time. And that's why we didn't finish up

the first episode, also because we have trouble staying on track and gets distracted often. Yes, we do. And so we're going to we're going to wrap up by looking at the rest of 1989 and 1999 and maybe even 2009. If that doesn't happen, so be it. But this is this is where we have to draw a line under it because otherwise it's just going to be like a year's worth of episodes and then we'll roll into 2020s episodes. I don't want to do that. I want to talk about some other stuff. So without further ado, let's let's get going. And if you haven't listen to that previous episode, you should. It's up on retronauts.com and on iTunes and so on and so forth. You can check it out. It's called Years and Review. And you can tickle your ears with all

kinds of information about the moon landing and other stuff. And we're going to roll right into talking about the moon landing, the natural successor to that by talking about the moon theme. Actually, I don't know if we're going to be able to. right into talking about the moon theme. We did, Chris and I and Bob and was, was it Nina on that one? Yes. The Disney Afternoon episode. Yeah, that's right.

She was on that because she did the artwork. Wow. And that was only two weeks ago. My God, I'm senile. It's been a couple of weeks. Yeah. And it seems so much longer. But yeah, so there is an episode coming out soon, I believe, in which we discussed

the Disney afternoon. But it is germane to 1989 because that was when the Disney afternoon line from Capcom made its debut on NES. And I don't know. I feel like maybe we should work up to that. Maybe like, I feel like Nintendo NES has a big footprint in all of our, you know, childhood brains. So we should build up to that. Because it was a big year. I mean, that was where the NES really was just like everyone had one. Taking off. Looking at the list of everything, it is a huge year for NES. So why don't we we talk about, let's talk about NEC, because they also had a big year that year, but it wasn't

as big as it should have been. Poor NEC. Well, and all of us over here were in the NES fever we were just talking about, and then, you know, there was the Genesis competing with it. And we'll talk about that, too. We'll talk about that. But like, so, you know, over here in the US, the NEC was really this kind of third string. What even is that on what was the NEC? You keep saying NEC, but what is that? What, what are we talking about? Turbographic. XVI. Turbographic 16. Yeah, so it had these like Bonk ads and we saw them, but, but, but this is before Bonk. It also, no, it had like China Warrior ads. Bonsaventra came out this year. Here is a very bad game with stiff animation, but the sprites are you. Mario can't do this. I have a story about China Warrior. I think I've mentioned before, which is that, well, I should step back and say that we got a TurboGraphic 16 when it was pretty much new. My brother, one of my brother's friends had

one for some reason. He was like, you've got to check out this. What the hell was the pack-in game with that? It was like, keep courage and alpha gems. It was based on some anime. It's a terrible game. But the graphics are cool. It had lots of colors.

And I think his, my brother's friends, the whole reason for getting my brother to buy one was that he wanted someone to trade games with because no one else had a TurboGraphic 16. So my brother starts selling our NES stuff. And like great games. Super Mario Brothers 2 and all this stuff. And I actually, after my brother got a TurboGraphics 16, I sold my copy of, I traded my copy

of Super Mario Bros. 3 for China Warrior. And I always say that was like the worst thing that ever happened. That is a really bad trade. I mean, I remember when I was a kid, I traded an original Commando Snake Eyes figure for something that wasn't anywhere nearly that good, maybe like major blood or something. And that still burns in my soul, but that's not like trading Super Mario Brothers. There's three for China Warrior. Yeah, at least Major Blood is pretty cool.

He's got like a rocket gun, and he has to wear armor on his arm, and he can't bend it. He doesn't have swivel arm action grip. Does he, does your armor? Did your blood figure have the dog tags? Dog tags, yes. Because that is a dope touch. Like, Major Blood has murdered. You guys should start a G.I. Joe podcast.

I don't know about that. I can say that there are some great games on the TurboGraphic 16. Absolutely. So the history behind the TurboGraphic 16, we've talked about it. it before. But it's important to note that it was called the PC engine in Japan. And it was actually pretty big over there. It did pretty well for itself. And you have to kind of understand the context in which it launched in Japan because it debuted in Japan in 1987, which is two years before 1989. Yes, that's easy math to do. But the makeup of the market at the time was very different.

Like Nintendo's Famicom was actually kind of losing steam, the equivalent of the NES. They launched the disk system to kind of prop it up. Sega hadn't launched the Mega Drive or Genesis over there yet. So it was kind of like this, you know, impressive, new, powerful system, not quite actually 16-bit, but a very, very powerful 16-bit system that had some really good-looking games on it. Lots of very faithful arcade conversions. It really kind of spanked the NES.

And there wasn't anything really to compete with it on that level. And so it did fairly well for itself, but, man, two years later, it was just a, like, coming to America so much, which was with such a delay, it just was a completely different market. And it just didn't stand a chance. The TurboGraphics 16 was not a 16 bit system. It was not. It had, I have been lied to for the past 30 years. No, do the math, dude. It's just like the Jaguar. No, there was like a 16-bit component in the graphics processor. I can't remember the exact details off the top of my head, but it runs on an 8-bit chip. So it is not a proper 16-bit system, but it does have 16-bit components. And so that was the sort of unethical stretch that the NEC Hudson marketing used in the U.S.

And it didn't quite work because there was an actual 16-bit system that debuted like pretty much day and date with the turbographics. Like the Sega Genesis came out here like the same month as the the turbographics. And it just like, you know, look at China. Warrior versus Altered Beast, they both look really cool, but one of them actually plays okay when they are then does not. Although the Genesis Board of Altered Beast isn't that great. It's not great, but it's better than China Warrior. That's true. But yeah, I think like everyone, you know, all the school kids who were willing to jump ship from the juggernaut that the NES was in this country to something with cooler graphics, they all went to the Genesis

except for Benj and his one friend. Yeah. And that sounds like coercion to me, honestly. It was his one friend and then he was just kind of dragged along in their way. It was my brother's friend. I was actually, I was really surprised to find out that Benj had one because I've long had this theory that no one actually owned a turbographic 16. No, I've known a few people. Everybody just had one friend who owned it. Like I had a friend. No, that was the master system.

I had a friend in school when I was a child because this would have been like what when I was seven or eight. And he had a turbo. Girl X-16 and would always tell me about Splatterhouse. And I remember... Wasn't that the prequel to Splatoon? Yeah. It's a secret ending.

Okay. Amazing. And I remember being fascinated by it because I had seen, you know, ads in comics. And I'd seen ads in comics for Bonk, too. Like, Bonk had this two-page, like, comic strip style ad that made it look really good. But I remember hearing about Splatterhouse and being like, wait, there's no blood in video games. Yeah. Because all I had played was.

And yes games. Not just blood, but viscera, too. Yeah. They had an edge. Like, there's a great pinball game called Alien Crush, which is one of our favorites, me and my brother's favorites. And it had, you know, gory, crazy alien kind of stuff going on. It wasn't exactly bloody, but it was freaky, like, you know, the alien movies.

And I could run off a list of some of the cooler games that we had real quick while we're talking about it. Go for it. I mean, we're really just talking about 1989 here. Well, I just. And the launch. Okay, so termed past, and then we can talk about the... Because we may never talk about this again. That's not true.

That's not true. The PC Engine was a great system. The TurboGraphics was horribly mismanaged and mistimed in America, but the fundamental system was very, very good. Yeah, I mean, there's tons of amazing stuff out in Japan out on PC Engine. And even, they're great American games. Like Alien Crush, Blazing Lasers, Double Dungeons is really cool. It's a co-op first-person dungeon crawler game, which is like something you never see anywhere

and not even in that time and Bonk's adventure is great I always wanted that but I didn't get it till way later and Final App Twin is one of the coolest games around because it has an adventure RPG mode where you can wander around and battle guys by racing them and power up your car like an RPG

and there are other great games but yeah TurboGraphics 16 I think it's very underrated in general at least half of those games were actually 89 so we're still on top of it yeah cool yep yep Yeah, Bonks Adventure is kind of weird to me because it's a fun, cute game, but it's so very Japanese in style. Like, it has just like a really, really deep visual roots in manga and anime. Whereas, you know, they tried to put that up against Super Mario Brothers, but Super Mario Brothers has a much less Japan-specific look to it. Like, there are definitely Japanese elements to Mario.

But, like, on the whole, you know, he's a guy from Brooklyn or whatever who, punches dragons in the mushroom kingdom. So it's not really tied to as much of a place, whereas bonk is like this very super deformed kind of cartoony guy. And, you know, like you bonk his head into a dinosaur and the dinosaur cries big anime-style tears. It just like, yeah, America just wasn't ready for that yet. Do you think that Bonk's adventure would have done better in America if it had had a pun name like the Japanese version did? PC Gengen?

P.C. Gengen? Sure. What would that, what would that pun name be? I don't know. Turbo. Terbontics. Turbonk. Turbonk's adventure. I don't know.

What year was Bonk? I swear it was after the launch. I think it was just late 80. They could have positioned it as a side story to Blazing Lasers and called it Blazing Lascao. If they had... The idea would be to go and create Kay paintings. If they had launched the Turbo Graphics 16 with Bonk's adventure, venture instead of Keith Courage, it probably would have done a lot better in America.

Because Keith Courage is such a terrible, terrible game. Yeah, I don't know that I've never heard of Keith Courage, but it was the pack-in. There was a big marketing push for Bonk. I know that because there were like TV commercials too, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and Bonk was a very successful series. And, you know, eventually once the turbographics went away and the PC engine died off,

Hudson, the creator of the series, started making NES and Super NES and Game Boy versions. I don't think there was anything on Genesis, but all of them had puns. Like, you know, PC Genjin means PC Caveman in Japanese. And the system was called PC Engine. So they just kind of kept rolling with that. And so when it went to Nintendo's Famicom, it was FC Genjin. I can't remember. There's a whole bunch. And then there's like Air Zonk, which is like Denjin, which is like Electric Man. And it's set in the future. So yeah, like it's a very cleverly named series if you speak Japanese, which kids buying turbographics in the day didn't. So they had to go with Air Zonk, which, you know, fair enough. But there's also the problem that Bonk in

Britain is slaying for having sex. So that gives it a whole different subtext. Probably a lot of very disappointed British gamers. Right? Like, I don't want to have sex with this chap. Anyway. Why me? So, so, yeah, so kind of the sad, along with the, uh, the, the, uh, the, the Atari Links, like the really cool system that came to America in 1989 and promptly failed to do much of anything. Wait, one more thing. It had a CD attachment. It did, but that came later.

Well, they advertised it from launch, even though it was coming later. Yeah, because it debuted in Japan, I want to say, in 90, and then launched here, I think, in 92, so it was maybe 91. It was probably earlier in that, like 90 in America, because it was out, and I wanted one really bad, because it was going to be my first CD player. Oh, actually, yeah, you're right. It debuted in the U.S. in 90 and in Japan in 89. Yeah, there you go.

And we had a whole episode about that, about how you weren't on it. But talking about the history of CD-ROM games, Fighting Street, aka Street Fighter, was one of the, if not the very first PC engine, like CD-ROM games, specifically designed for CD. Yeah, I wanted that so bad. Yeah, it was very expensive, but you missed out on East. East 1 and 2. Everyone loves that.

I wanted that too. Didn't be. Anyway, yeah, so we'll talk about PC engine more various times, but unfortunately the turbographics itself failed to really account for much of anything. On the other hand, the other big Nintendo competitor to really take the center stage in 1989, kicked lots of butt. Not right away, but it did okay. And that was Sega's Genesis, which was their follow-up to the master system,

which was like a thing that existed. did. And like the Trubrographics, there was one kid that you knew who had it. And so I think everyone got like side exposure to the master system, but not to the point where you could actually get an infection from it. It was just like, it was like

it was an inoculation basically. Yeah. So it didn't do so well for itself. But the Genesis, Sega just got everything right. They had amazing marketing, a fantastic lineup of games, excellent tech under the hood, they just, like, they hit on every, every mark. And by the end of the

generation, they had basically gone from owning about six or seven percent of the console market to pretty much having parity with Nintendo and the Super NES. So that's, that's very impressive. Did we talk about, I feel like we talked about the Genesis advertising campaign last time. Did we? Where, yeah, if you go, like, specifically in comic books. I mean, that's entirely possible because I talk about that. all the time. It's like my main topic of conversation in life. It's bananas. I did that article on Polygon, where I went back through

all of Amazing Spider-Man and pulled out the video game ads to talk about them. And you hit 1989 and it's like, before that it had been the big like, here's a real challenge from Parker Brothers or whatever. And then 1990s, all of a sudden it's like this screaming face

and it's like, the genesis will ruin your mind. And it gets very, it's like, oh, the 90s are about to get here. The walls are splattered with your blood as you play Sega Genesis and your body explodes. You don't play Sega Genesis, you suck. Like that's, I don't know how they got that sound into the print ads, but they did. They did.

That was the advent of the Sega scream. But even putting aside the marketing, like, they made a great case for buying a Sega Genesis straight out of the gate. Let's look at the games, the launch lineup. There was, we're going in a really random order here, but okay, Hertzogs-Zvi, which was produced by Technosoft. Yes. Technosoft, the same people who would go on to make the Thunder Force games for Genesis, which are excellent. And if you haven't picked up the Sega Ages, Thunder Force 4, you ought to. But it was kind of a high, Herzog's Vi, did you guys ever play that one?

Kind of. Ben, I feel like that would be kind of down your alley. I only played it later, since I didn't have a Genesis till 96 or something like that. And I didn't play Herzogs Vi until I probably had to research the history of RTS games for an article or something. Yeah, because it was a really early RTSN. Yeah. So I remember it. I think you, you know, this is like, you shouldn't have me talking about this because it's going to be really nebulous and poorly formed.

But I remember sort of two ships, at least you're moving around. You're comfortable with your strengths. Yeah. I mean, there's like, I was reading the retronauts reviews and it said, Benj always comes unprepared, contributes is very, little. And I'm like, yeah, of course. That's right. That's what I do. It's what he gets paid for. So it's neat. It's a cool pioneering game. That's about all I can say. Yeah, I feel like it took the basic concept that Will Wright sort of came up with for Radon Bungling Bay and did a lot more with it. So it's like a shooter, like a shoot-em-up, a top-down shooter. But instead of being like a forced scrolling game, you have free-scrolling throughout the world. And so you are like trying to claim territory and basically sort of cultivate emplacements and industry in manufacturing so that you can, you know, fight off against an enemy army. And so, yeah, it's very much a proto-RTS that sort of takes place with, you know, instead of having just like a cursor to move around, you control a fighter ship pretty much.

So you're kind of an active participant. I haven't got a chance to play it, but just looking at it. it really seems like it's definitely on this through line between just top-down shooters and actual RTS games. We're sort of evolving in that direction. It was ahead of its time in terms of the market for consoles

wasn't ready for that kind of complexity in America. Yeah, I mean, even PCs didn't do anything like that. Like Dune 2, sorry, Herzogsvai is actually German for Duke 2, but Dune 2 by Westwood Studios came like 1992, I want to say, and that was kind of where the RTS really took form. But before Dune 2, there was Duke 2, and Technosoft was really leading the way. And I can't remember if that was published by Sega in the U.S. or Renovation or who.

But in any case, it's definitely gone down as one of the sort of notable titles on the system that maybe wasn't fully appreciated at the time, but was pretty significant. And I imagine we're going to see a Sega Ages release of that, because Sega did buy the entire Technosoft library, I believe, and that's why they published Thunderforce 4 as a Sega Age's titles. So I bet they're going to revisit that because I feel like it is a game, kind of like game ground that is just like, wow, they were doing this in the 80s, like way ahead of its time.

Yeah, no, it's completely overlooked, something amazing. I wouldn't say completely, but largely. I would say it's not that well-known. I actually had heard of it back then and stuff. I think EGM talked about it and, you know, being cool. But sushi X doesn't really seem like a Herzog's vibe, but what do I know? And it's name dropped in Adele the Funky Homo sapiens song. So hey, well, there you go.

That's kind of a name. Also in 1989, Fantasy Star 2, I feel like, have we? We haven't had a Fantasy Star episode yet, but we will one of these days. Anyway, a pretty significant RPG, very ahead of its time, very like doing stuff that Final Fantasy would do a few years later before Final Fantasy did it. Yeah, I feel like this is one of the games that at that point in my life I would have been really into if I had had a Genesis, which I didn't. Right. So I hadn't actually played it. But, but yeah, I think it would have been my jam.

Unfortunately, Genesis, yeah, I would say the platform did not really live up to Fantasy Star 2 in terms of being a great place for playing RPGs. So you had the Fantasy Star games and a handful of other RPGs. But yeah, it's not really, that wasn't really the core strength of the system. The core strength of the system was more like action games. and sports games, and that's because Sega put an X-68,000 chip inside of it, which is, you know, the same thing they were using in their arcade boards. We talked about this in the Sega arcade episodes, but it was basically like, here's the junior version of the games you're playing in the arcades.

And some conversions acquitted themselves better than others. I think Thunderblade was one of the, or Super Thunderblade was one of the early Genesis titles. And speaking of Sega arcade hits, we got Moonwalkers. on here, which was a, that was one of the things that I actually knew about because I'd seen that in arcades. And that I was kind of jealous of the Genesis people getting to play at home, right? Because it just looked so cool in the arcades. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was pretty much your typical brawler, except then you had Michael Jackson in it. So it's not being typical that way.

Also, Alessday her to the bedroom, she was drunk down, yeah, also Aleste 2, which is a shooter by Compile. And as part of the whole Aleste family, which is a shooter by Compile, and as part of the whole Aleste family, which is how would you describe the Aleste games? They're top-down shooters and they're dynamic. They have dynamic difficulty. So the better you play, the harder the games become until you get to a point where you are no longer playing that well because it's destroying you. Yeah, this is one I never really saw a lot of. It's got that, it's still got that sort of, you know, alien-derived look to it.

You're doing all these, you know, Geiger-esque backdrops and stuff. But I don't know a lot about the gameplay on it. I've never been a fan of vertical space shooters that much other than like blazing lasers. They're really good on the Nintendo Switch when played with a flip group. I need one of those. Can I tell me a very good joke about Aleste? Aleste too, of course, is also known as Beleste. And then, of course, 30 years later in 2018 would lead to C-Leste, which was a really good game.

Have you been workshopping that over there? Just like for the past 20 minutes, I've just been thinking about it. Guys, I've got a good one. Just hang on. I just really wanted to talk about Celeste. It's very good. That's all. So maybe we should segue this through since we're all flailing.

Oh, you forgot to talk about Alex Kid. What do you mean flailing? Alex Kid? Alex Kid's cool mascot character? He's got so much attitude. Yeah. He's got two D's. I hate all the Alex Kid games.

Full disclosure, Jeremy is currently drinking from a Sonic the Hedgehog mug, and I wish it was an Alex Kid mug. Yeah. It should be. Everything you pour in there turns into poison. it's like the false grail. I would immediately turn old and wither into dust.

Holy. But yeah, Alex Kid was another thing that was just really not playing to the strengths because, you know, they were going for their whole loud vibe here. And then we've got this thing that's really just sort of pulled back and in some ways more directly comparable to Mario, but it just kind of looks like a duller Mario. It's a strange game. I've never been able

to really get into the... Yeah, and the mechanics are weird. and the whole look is kind of toy box kind of deal. They're all terrible. All the Alex King games are terrible games. They really put the system to work on that color-popping technology and forgot to make a good game. I feel like they were great in 1983 kind of games.

That would have been groundbreaking back then. They're great on the master system, but not really. But then after Super Mario Brothers came along, you can't just release things like Alex Kidd that's like, oh, like jerky and, you know, like, And you know what I mean? Like the controls aren't great. I don't know if there's momentum in that game or anything.

And don't you die easily. Like if you just tap something. Yes. I don't know. Alex Kid is extremely fragile. Yeah. So I feel like they just aren't very good, honestly. I feel like there's someone up there who could make a, like, just offer a passionate defense of the Alex Kid games.

I mean, like the weird combo of mechanics that has going on, you know, I can see someone being into that. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know why they kept making them. Somebody in Japan loved the punishing difficulty of him, maybe, or something, and they just kept making it. I don't know, but once Sony came along, that was the last you saw of Alex Kidd. Yeah. They said, well, you know what?

People actually like this game because it's fun and interesting and appealing. And Alex Kidd is not. Oh, Chris. You and your sour face. Hey, did you guys hear that I dropped a really cool 1989 reference in there when I talked about the false grail? You know what came out that year? That's right.

It was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I appreciate it. There were actually a bunch of really kind of significant pop culture movies released that year. I feel like, yes? Oh, I'm just waiting. I'm waiting. Yeah, I just feel like not even movies, but I just feel like there was a, the media that year had a very, I don't know, like it was very closely tied to the same sort of youth age people. What am I, what am I trying to say here?

The cultural zeitgeist. I didn't want to say youth culture because it killed my dog. And I don't think that's fair. There's a very funny bit if you watch the Weird Al movie, UHF, if you watch it with commentary on, where they talk about why, you know, a lot of reasons why UHF was maybe a huge failure at the box office. But the main one was that it came out the same week as Last Crusade and Batman. Yeah. That was. Yeah.

I did see them in the theaters. Yeah, also... It's a good movie. It is. I think it's held up pretty well for the most part. Except for Victoria Jackson, but... Yeah, that's good. What about, didn't Ghostbusters 2 come out in 89?

Maybe, but I try not to think about that one. But it was exciting at the time. Yeah, until I saw it, and then I was like, hmm, okay. But yeah, like, Bobby Brown in it. Yeah. Not, is he actually in the movie, or is it just his music? He has a little cameo thing. Does he?

Okay. My kid wants one of those. Where do I get up? is too hot to handle. I don't know if I have ever seen in my life a bigger and more prominent marketing campaign than Batman 89s. And I have lived through multiple Star Wars movies. I mean, do you remember the Last Jedi or the Force Awakens?

Because that was everywhere. It was big, but I remember being a kid and just seeing the Batman symbol everywhere. It seemed bigger to you at the time. But I feel like marketing campaigns have gotten bigger. God, the phantom menace was like... Yeah. You could buy Star Wars potatoes and stuff. Like, Batman was...

They really put everything behind it, you know? Like, everything you could put behind it. They did. That was... That logo was on everything. I would say Batman was the first big, sort of modern media campaign for a movie to promote a movie, like to turn it into an event. Because up until, you know, I had Star Wars and stuff like that.

And then there were lots of sort of notable movies that happened throughout the latter 80s. but then Batman arrived and they were just like we're going all in on this and they yeah you're right they put everything into it it was everywhere on like happy meals because it's such a kid friendly movie the cereal that came with the bank yeah and video games of course so like a kid friendly movie where Batman just murders countless people but you know 1989 was the point at which you know it was kind of like peak generation X like early adolescence yeah um and so I really feel like that is a big part of why we saw that because, you know, marketing companies and, and publishers and everyone, they were starting to kind of realize like, hey, there's, you know, the economy is good and kids have money. And if we can get them to convince their parents to buy stuff, their parents will buy stuff and we'll make a lot of money that way. And so, yeah, so you really started to see this, this move toward a different approach to marketing that it sort of evolved throughout the 80s, but it definitely culminated in 89.

with Batman and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Indiana Jones in The Last Crusade and Ghostbusters 2, I guess. Was that 89? Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was. TMNT, I think, is a really interesting case. And Millie Vanilly. That was 89, I think.

You know, Eastman and Lair create TMNT at their kitchen table in 84. And it's a joke because they're doing, hey, what's the most popular thing in comics so that we can make a lot of money? Well, there's X-Men and there's Daredevil, which are comics about Teenage Mutants and Ninjas. So they do this thing as a joke, and then they kind of make it a serious comic that's really dark. I mean, like, Shredder, you know, commits suicide with a hand grenade at the end of the first arc of Ninja Journals.

And then 87, it becomes the animated series. And at that point, it becomes, I always define it as, you know, you can mark out these eras in pop culture, or at least for, you know, people around my age, the way we perceive things. And it's like, Ninja Turtles is this inescapable pop cultural franchise. It's the most popular thing in the world until 1993 when Power Rangers comes out. And then Power Rangers is ubiquitous until 1998 when Pokemon comes out. And then that's, you know, that's the ages, for me, ages 5 to 20. Yeah, actually, you're interesting about 87 era there.

I know this is not 89, but that's sort of when the whole first wave of, like, like He-Man and G. I. Joe sort of petered out. Yeah. Transformers, too. Transformers, like that early 80s stuff. And then it all kind of gets consolidated in Ninja Turtles. Well, and video games. Yeah.

And video games. Yeah. I mean, I very much transitioned from like collecting transformers to collecting Nintendo. This is, you know, speaking of kids with money, this is when I was putting my own because my parents, when I was growing up were very skeptical of this whole video game thing. So, you know, they didn't buy stuff for him. But they were going to let me spend my own money. So, you know, I saved up and bought myself.

in NES, very shortly before this, which is a lot of the reason that all that Genesis marketing kind of bounced off me because I was invested over here now. And so we should, oh. I have a whole thing about how Teeny Shoot and Ninja Shirtles is the most important comic book in history after Action Comics No. 1, Fantastic 4, number one. But we will get into that another time. Hmm. So you are two badgy

Power To you are too badging How are to be How are to be a huge Intipers a tail They're the heroes for In this day and age Who could ask for more

The crime wave is high With bugging's mysterious All police and detectors are furious Because they can't find the source Of this legally evil force This is serious So give me a quarter I was a witness

Get me a reporter Call April O'Neill So, yeah, we should actually talk about the video game part of this because it is all sort of inextricably tied together, especially the TM&T part. But first, we should talk about just the fact that Nintendo was on top of the world. Like, this was peak Nintendo up until, like, the Wii DS era. And even then, like, even though those were, you know, top selling systems of all time, they didn't have nearly so much at the market share as they commanded at the pinnacle of the NES era. 1989 was, you know, they had like 90-something percent market share in the U.S. Yeah, and, you know, I said earlier the Famicom had flagged out around this time,

but the NES was just starting to really catch on and become like the indomitable force that it really was. And you look at the lineup this year and it's fantastic. And Nintendo was doing so well that they didn't just have one system. They had two because in 1989, they also launched the game game. boy. And that came with kind of all the crowd pleasers that kids loved on NES. You had, you know, in the first few months of the system's life, you had not only Tetris, which was a big deal, but you also had Super Mario Land. You had a Castlevania game. A Final Fantasy game came shortly after that was a tie-in to the big push that they were making with Final Fantasy over on

NES. There was a Bugs Bunny game. There was all kinds of stuff. So, you know, Nintendo just kind of basically said, let's leverage our strengths that we have on, on consoles and turn those into a handheld market. And it was also a monster. In fact, the Game Boy remains one of the absolute, like, top two or three best-selling game systems of all time. It was that big. I believe it.

And I mean, part of that's because it was around forever. Yeah. It was. But also because it was just like, it was just there. Yeah, it was just like a thing that everyone, bought their kids because you were like, well, these kids were taking a long car trip and they're going to be loud. So let's shut them up with a Game Boy, which, you know, get them a couple of games. It's cheap. You have batteries run on that thing forever. So that's our pacifier.

Yeah, we talked about this when we were talking about some of the other portable systems that came out afterwards and they were, you know, so much more powerful. But one of the huge things was the Game Boy would still outlast any of them for ages, you know, if you just needed something to keep going. Tetris, I mean, the original Tetris on the Game Boy is still fun and still playable today. I mean, it's just as great as it ever was, even with the murky screen. And there's something cool about the Game Boy that a lot of people forget is that it came with earbuds, which is like one of the first. It was a stereo system. Earbud releases.

The little red and blue. Yeah, the red blue on the earth is really cool. So let's talk about some games that came out on NES in 1989. Here's a list. Mega Man 2, Ninja Guidon, Tetris, A Boy and His Blob, Dragon Warrior, Power Glove, Avengers of Lolo, Dragon Quest, or sorry, Double Dragon 2, the Duck Tales, the River City Ransom, Mindel Palace, who put that there, the Zelda Game and Watch, that's not even a Nintendo's NES game, and Willow, which...

Mendel Palace is good. I like Willow. Mindel Palace is good, but it's not exactly like, you know, massive mindshare. It's not a hit, but I feel like if people don't know about Mendel Palace and you go back and play Mendel Palace, you'll be very pleasantly surprised. That was an early game freak game, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So it's the origins of Pokemon. Yeah, it's one of those. Actually, was that their first game? I believe it was, it was Quinti in Japan. Quinti, what's the name, Satoshi? Tobiashi Maru. No. A game freak guy.

Satoshi Taijiri. Yes. Yeah. I believe it was not his first game, but like his first major game because he had won that contest when it was a kid. And it's really interesting to think about, I've seen interviews with him. I think it was the big special Game Center CX episode where he talks about his game design philosophy being based around verbs. And so, Pokemon is based around trade and catch.

And fight. Kill. Faint. And Mendel Palace is based around the verb flip. So what can you do with flipping things? And it's a really clever puzzle game. And I am genuinely shocked that we've never gotten. super Mendel Palace or like

Mendel Palace DX you know it seems like a very simple and obvious thing that after the success of Game Freak they would have re-released you know they they don't aside from Pokemon they don't tend to revisit their idea as much they come up with a new idea and then they

move on to the next thing like they have a game giga wrecker that's coming out it's been out on Steam for a couple of years but it's finally coming to consoles and it's not like anything else they've done and if you look at drill do which we just recently had an episode about. It's not like anything else they've done.

If you look at Pulse Man, that's not really anything else like anything else they did. So, yeah, that was, that's just kind of Game Freaks approach, like one and done and then Pokemon to keep the lights on for everyone, basically, for Niantic and Nintendo and the Pokemon company. They're very good games. But, yeah, go back, like, if you are an NES fan, if you're a puzzle game fan, go back to Mendel Palace if you haven't played it, and I think you will find it to be highly enjoyable.

Yeah, Bob, I know Bob is a big fan. He, one of the first things he wrote for a publication that I ran was a piece on Mendel Palace. So he can, he could probably speak better to that. If we do an episode, we'll have to have him talk. Mendel Palace is a terrible name for that game, though. Yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of video game names that tell you nothing about the game.

And I think Mendel Palace is one of those. We could call it Quinty, but that doesn't really tell you that. Quinty also doesn't. It should be called flip something. Flipy. Flipers. Flip palace Flip palace

Flip grip I'm glad they didn't call it Flip grip I don't know where to begin with all these NES games That's like such an incredible Let's work our way up So Willow

You guys did you ever play the NES version of Willow? I had Willow I didn't have it but I played a little bit I still started up every once in a while just to listen to the music because it's so cool

and haunting and interesting The music is really good That's essentially a top down action RPG similar to a link to the past but it does actually have RPG elements where you can level us

yeah so it's neat and it's underrated and it's incredibly difficult in some places you have to have a lot of patience with it and get the skill down of how to swipe the guys with your sword

and all that stuff but it's a great I think it's a great game I think it's really underrated and it's just a little too difficult sometimes I remember playing it through the whole thing while cheating as a kid just so I could experience it because of all the neat music. And it's very atmospheric.

It has a really dark palette, but it's, um, it, it, uh, I would say an earthy palette. Yeah, earthy palette, because, you know, the limited color palette available on the NES, but it made good use of that. And, uh, I always felt like it didn't really have to tie in with the movie at all, uh, even though it does, to some extent, you know, it's nothing at all like Capcom's arcade version. Yeah. Which is like an action.

It's a side-scrolling platformer with RPG elements. But this is more Zelda-Crystalis style. And it has a really interesting mechanic that you still don't see very often where there's like levelgating on the things you acquire. So you can get better weapons, but you can't actually use them until you hit a certain level. And so you have to, you can't just like go get the best sword and then, you know, immediately kill stuff.

You have to level up to that point. Yeah, it has a little LV or whatever by the sword. Kristallis. It's great. It's a neat game. Everybody should try it out. I remember reading about this in Nintendo Power, and looking back, I feel like it's endemic of one of the really interesting factors of the NES being absolutely dominant at this point in time, which is that if you were going to have a pop culture sensation, it had to have an NES game. Yeah. Which is how we get bizarre license games, like Platoon, for example. Who wanted that one? Yeah.

But you get all of these weird Nintendo games based on just whatever people were trying to make big at the time. Yeah, and it's always interesting to see. You know, you farm it to some company to make, and sometimes you get just some license garbage. And then sometimes it clicks and you get something really interesting. What's neat about Willow, it's one of those rare things that's, it surpasses, perhaps even surpasses the movie in quality. I mean, I like the movie, but it's been a long, I don't know if it would hold up at all. It's been a long time. It feels like it was developed by a Japanese company to me.

It was. It was Capcom. Okay. So I don't remember who it was. But man, if you farmed your license game out to Capcom, you were, the odds were pretty good. Yeah. Yeah.

See, also Duck Tales. Yeah. Which was done by, we talked about this in the episode, but like the Mega Man 2 crew, basically. And it feels like it. It looks like it. And it sounds like it. It's amazing that that company put out Mega Man 2 and Ducktails in the same year.

Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we don't even need to talk about Mega Man 2. But if you guys want to, go ahead. It's quite good. I mean, yeah. It was one of the first things I bought after. The music stood out for me.

Music resonates with me, I guess, because I'm a musician. But even before I was a musician, I loved the music of Mega Man 2. Like, isn't it Snake Man in that? Or is that? No, that's Mega Man 3. That's 3. I don't remember the best stage of Mega Man 2, but it has great music. It's Wiley Stage 1.

Okay. But, yeah, it was also. So it was, yeah, it was one of the really early things because I came into the NES with Super Marvel. there's too, which was just 88, right? So, you know, I had been jealous about all the other school yard kids having their N-E-S for a while and then came in. And then we hit here 89 with all these great things coming out.

And Mega Man 2 was fantastic. And also became, ended up becoming like my first experience with franchise fatigue. Because like, right, because I was like, this is great. And I bought Mega Man 3 and it was great. And I bought Mega Man 4. It was, eh. Yeah, keep going. Yeah.

But for the early bits here. I do feel like there's a pretty big drop in quality, especially when we get to five and six. Like two and three. Six is underrated. Two and three are like stellar. And four, I think, is fun. But five and six, those come out like, I think X was either out or in development then.

And I feel like that's where they were paying attention. Six and X are pretty much concurrent. Yeah. And I don't think even Capcom had much faith in it because Nintendo released it over here. Anyway, we've done Mega Man episodes. And we've also done a Ninja Guideon episode, but it's been a while. We could talk about Ninja Guidein. the game that played just like the movie.

Wow. What's the third level of that game like? I think you've seen it. I mean neither. But the music is great in that one too. See, the third stage is, that's not the, oh, that's the one where you start to see the birds.

The eagles really start coming after you in stage three. So the one in the cliffs? Yeah, you're in the cliffs and everything. Oh, is that stage? But I have seen stage three. Yeah. But nothing past it. Have you seen the castle cut scene where you like stand and you,

look out in the horizon and there's a castle. I don't. Because that's... I know I got to the birds. I'm making a little rectally around a lot. I've seen that one a lot. Just a girl. Get out of here.

I actually just did a live stream of this and played it for the first time in ages. And I was really surprised by how effectively my muscle memory from when I was a kid served me because I was like, yeah, I'm probably not going to make it past this stage. And then I would make it past that stage and be like, wow, okay. I got all the way to the, I got all the way to the very interesting. of the game. But at that point, I was just like, I'm so tired. I'm so old and so tired. I don't have, I don't have the wherewithal to do this for people's entertainment. So I had to call today. But yeah, it's really a game about learning patterns and rhythms. And once you get a sense

of like, basically, once you memorize, like, there's going to be a thing come at me right here and I need to scroll past it or I just need to ignore it and jump past it. Or I need to pick up this weapon and then activate it a certain time. It's a little, it's a little, it's a little prescribed, I think, but once you kind of get into the rhythm of the game and you're willing to kind of approach it on its own terms, it's very fast,

very fluid, the controls are extremely responsive. It is well designed despite being hateful and punishing. It's like a fair, hard game to me. Because it's very difficult but it didn't make me frustrated. Yeah, there's a lot of older NES games

where they're really hard and it's because they control like crap. And you're like, I want to do things, but somehow the game is not interpreting the buttons that I press to make it do that. But there's also, if you, if you know what to do and you, you can press the buttons and the right combos, it's going to do exactly what you tell it to. So when you screw up, it's because you screwed up. Yeah. And there's a lot of, I think we've talked about this before in other context, but there was a lot of this game design philosophy in this era of it was okay for games to be hard in a way where you just had to learn the game. And because again, I think this was an era when a lot of

us were like, you know, kids saving up our money and buying one game and then spending a lot of time with it. And so, you know, an arcade-style game, it's not actually that long. And so the way you spend a lot of time with it is for it to be really difficult, but difficult in a way that you can get better at it. And so there was a lot of this design where you just, you know, you have to learn the enemy placements. You have to learn where the weapons are and you slowly get better and get farther in it. And I feel like that doesn't fly as much today in the area where, you know, people can save state or where you just expect to be able to pick up things. on the fly and not have to really grind and learn it.

And I don't know how, like, I don't think I could do the grind to learn game so much today. Like, I just, I don't have the time and the patience to sit with one game playing through the same level, you know, 50 times over until I master it. But, but back in this context, that was okay. Yeah. You know, I picked up this one game and I learned it. Like a holdover from the punishing elements of arcade games where they just wanted to kill you for quarters and then it adapted more to the NES where you could memorize the stages and

get through them. And there was very little media competition back then, like you're saying you had one game and you played it for months and stuff. Yeah, there were four channels on TV. Yeah, so and one of them was PBS. Come on. But, uh, that's not, that's not exciting for a kid. It's great. I'm glad it exists, but it was, speak for yourself.

Okay. Aside from Sesame Street. No. 321. Oh, yeah. Three to one contact. Yeah, three to one contact was awesome. Anyways. I just want to say about Ninja Gaden or Giden is the, wasn't it the second stage I had the rain pushing you around? No, that's something to get into. Ninja Guyton, too.

Okay, darn. Well, that was my favorite. You're getting it all conflated in your brain. Yeah, sorry. I was really hoping beating the messenger would make me retroactively better at Ninja Guideon, and then I went back to Ninja Guideon, and I feel like Celeste would make you retroactively better at Injia Guidance. Celeste makes you better at every video game.

Right. So there you go. I mean, that's very much in the same philosophy, but kind of modernized, and so you don't have things like Lose at the Final Boss, and you get sent back three stages. That's so. Time we made a stand To shake up the views To the common man

A love train Lots from coast to coast DJs the man We love the most KGB, QGV Squeak and clean It's smashing the hope Democracy is the headline

Since you're free to choose There's ain't on your face And money shoes One of these days They're gonna Truddy the cruise Yeah It's somewhere

The same thing is about the world when we're still in the world talking about a boy in his block Yeah I actually that was the last thing I wanted to talk about

from 1989 because I feel like it's the first significant and innovative Western designed game to come out for a console

following the Atari crash. Yeah, it feels like a PC game in a lot of ways. Do you think that's a fair just or characterization? I actually never thought

of it that way. But yeah, since it's a David Crane Crane game, the pitfall guy, you know, Activision alum. It's very much like the next step on from Pitfall, too.

But this time, the core of the game is not just like run around and find treasure, but it's actually, you know, solve puzzles with the tools you have at hand. It's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, me and my brother had a blast at this game because we had to, I think, I think you have to figure out what color being does what at first. And it wasn't listed out. Maybe we didn't have the manual because we rented it. I think, I think it tells you for some of them, but not all of them.

If you, like, maybe you have to discuss, it's been a while since I've played it, but I think if you, like, use a jelly bean, maybe this is just the Game Boy sequel, but it'll, like, once you figure out its effect, then it'll say it when you bring it up, yeah, it may do that, but there is ladder, rip your rocket, honey hummingbird, coconut, coconut, yeah, it's, it was, it's really cool. Yeah, there are all these jelly beans that do different things when you feed them to your blob, and then your blob turns into a tool. or some kind of object that helps you get past a puzzle and progress in the game. And it was delightful in terms of being a sort of depthy NES puzzle game, when there weren't a lot of those. It wasn't all action-oriented. You actually had to think, and it reminded me of a PC game at the time. I mean, yeah, it was, you know, it was by someone who kind of grew up with the,

or, you know, developed his game design shops. on Atari and then switched over to C64. So I feel like that that mentality really kind of carried over into Crane's console work. And it wasn't always successful, but I feel like in this case, it is a really interesting game. It has some flaws, but I think it holds up pretty well. And it's interesting to explore. And it is very much a game about exploration. Yeah, and it almost feels like there's some, and this may be the wrong term because it's such a loaded term these days,

but like some kind of open world elements to it in that you can do things like, you know, jump off something and glide through several. screens and end up in a different part of the game, which is the sort of thing you expect in a PC game, but was very unexpected on NES. Yeah, it's a game. Other games didn't work that way. It's a game that rewards experimentation and sort of like figure it out on your own. And it's, it can be really ruthless and cruel.

Like, it's very possible to be doing very well and then get to an unfamiliar area and experiment and, wow, you're out of lives. Game over. Start from the beginning. I think you can also use multiple solutions to the same problem, I think, if you're creative, which is something like, emergent property. It reminds me of scribble knots later where you could do different solutions to, you know, a problem, something like that. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I'm, I really like

a boy in his blob, although it has a lot of problems. And there wasn't a good follow-up to it until the, until way forward took the license and turned it into more of a concrete puzzle game. Isn't there a wee? Yeah, that was 2009 by way forward, which is really kind of a different game in a lot of respects, but it did a good job of distilling the concept into something that was a little more friendly to contemporary audiences. And also, there was a hug button. Yeah, you can't feel bad about that. Hug the blob. And that's it. That's the only thing that button does. I love it. Yeah. All right. So we need to... Wait, River City Ransom. Did you ever talk about that on the podcast? We have talked about that on the podcast for sure. It is a, it is an action RPG.

Yes. Actually, we need to do a Kunio Koon episode at some point. Or just like all of that. Renegade. River City Ransom, those crazy sports games, are all part of the same family. And there are some people who are very, very obsessive and kind of annoying about it, but they are good games, and you should not let that, you know, hold that against them. All right. So let's wrap up 1989 by just kind of mentioning some of the important games that appeared on PCs. Most of these would appear later on consoles because there started to be less of a kind of obvious division between consoles and computers at this point.

I mean, there definitely was a division, but there was a lot more crossover starting in the early 90s. So you have, why, there's Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade. You know, we should do an entire episode about that movie and the games. Okay, great. So let's see. Over in Japan, Dragon Slayer, the Legend of Heroes, which is a series that is still ongoing. The third Trails in the Sky or Trails of Cold Steel, I can't remember. I can't keep track of all these spinoffs, but that was just announced for the U.S.

It's coming out on PS4 this fall. Wait, I didn't even know that was connected to Dragon Slayer. Yeah, it's Dragon Slayer, Legend of Heroes, Trails in the Sky. Okay. It's got a lot of subtitles. There's a lot of branches, a lot of layers. Yeah, that whole family. It has nothing logistically and in terms of mechanics to do with Dragon Slayer.

It was just, we went through this in the Dragon Slayer episode, but basically it was like, there was a guy. I can't remember his name, Kia, something. God, damn it. Anyway, he created a bunch of RPGs that had some like loose spiritual similarities, but that's really the only connections there. And it became kind of a running franchise for him. Let's see, Shadow of the Beast. You guys, do you ever play this?

It's not very good. I don't like it. But it is beautiful. This is the kind of game that computer shops would just put on their Amiga at the front of the shop and just let that run the attract mode. and you would stop and you would be like I need to own this computer because it is extraordinary. It's just this amazing

animation. Oh, this is the Prog Rock album cover. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's developed by Cynosis and Roger Dean did some of the artwork and the logo. So yeah, I've seen it exactly like you say, you know, in a shop window. And it's not a fun game. It's not a fair

game, but it's beautiful. It's like, yeah, like, I always kind of conflated it in my head as a kid with Altered Beast, but they're very different games. I think it's wildly overrated. Oh, it's not a good game, but it looks extraordinary. But people on Amiga love it. It's like their baby, you know? Shadow the Beast. You bought that game, and you convinced yourself you liked it because nothing else looked like that at the time.

It was just a tremendous achievement in graphical design. Just gorgeous. At the other end of the spectrum, you have mind sweeper and solitaire. Very, very sort of fundamental, ugly even games, but very addictive, very playable. Maybe among the most played video games ever, I would argue. I say 1990 after him, why is that? Because there have been, I don't know who put that there, but. Because they came out with Windows 3.0 in 1990.

Okay. Yeah, so they aren't 89 games. What? Well, they probably... Yeah. Were they just distributed differently? I don't know. No.

They just... That's when they came out in 1990. So we jumped a gun on... Why didn't you just delete them from the list? Because I thought I was giving you a chance to remedy it. I put 1990 in the parentheses. Jeez. See, this is it.

Yeah. Okay, there we go. I think we should do an entire full episode on Microsoft Solitaire. That would be cool. And rank all the cardbacks. I mean, I've said many times... that those are two of the most important games of all time. But anyway, how about Prince of Persia?

That was the real, like, I saw that in Windows Store Windows, and they were advertising the graphics because of fluid animation and VGA graphics. I saw that in Babages. Yeah, we've talked about that one on the Macintosh episodes. Yes. But, yeah, it has, like, okay, so between Prince of Persia and Ninja Guiden, you basically, and I guess Indiana Jones' Last Crusade, you have video games saying, like,

hey, I think we can figure out how to do this movie thing. We can be movie-like in different ways. With Prince of Persia, it was the animation and the staging of the stages. Wow, that sounds really stupid. Staging of the levels, Ninja Guide in, it was the cutscenes. And then Indiana Jones was like, here's a story that you're working through. And there's different pathways. Wow, crazy.

Oh, yeah. Yep. There was a really good. Is that what you're talking about, the adventure game in the last guy? Yeah, that was a good one. And what about SimCity? SimCity and Populous. Two sides of the same coin.

And kind of related to Herzog's Vi, honestly. SimCity emerged out of Radon Bungling Bay, which was, we'll write sort of proto-R-T-S that Hertzogs-Vi, I don't know if it was based on it. But it definitely, it had to have been like somewhat inspired by Raden Bungling Bay because that was a pretty big game on Famicom. Yeah, I feel like you're right about that. Yeah. Anyway, we are not making very quick progress here. So why don't we take a break for just a second and then come back and wrap this episode with a brisk journey through 1999? Harry Truman, Doris Day, Ren, China, Johnny Ray, South Pacific Walter Wichel, Joe DiMaggio. Joan McCawley, Richard Nixon, New York, South Korea, Maryland, Monroe. The Rosenberg's H-Barm, sugar,

Apan, John Brando, the king and I, and the catcher in the ride, Eisenhower a vaccine, England's got a new queen. Hey, Retronuts fans, be sure to check out John Taffer, No Excuses, on Podcast One. The best-selling author and entrepreneur behind Bar Rescue is not taking anyone's nonsense, and he's telling it like it is. And this week he's joined by the president of the UFC, Dana White. Check out John Tavern, No Excuses every Tuesday on Podcast 1 or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

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because Domino's large three-topping pizzas and medium three-topping handmade pan pizzas are $7.99 each. It's pandemonium. Bandastico. Carry out only. You must ask for this limited time offer. Price's participation and charges may vary. Somebody wants told me the world is going to roll me.

I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed. She was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her thumb in the shape of an L on her forehead Well, the years start coming And they don't stop coming Fed to the rules And I hit the ground running Didn't make sense

Not to live for fun Your brain gets smart But your head gets dumb So much to do, so much to see So what's wrong We're taking the back streets You'll never know All right, it's time to move on to 1999

And I've just got one question for you Do I make you horny, baby? Oh, I'm sorry They're a bad thing, actually I know, but we just had to get the terrible thing out of the play. Austin Powers, too. Yeah. But you know what also happened that year?

The Matrix and Star Wars, episode one. So, you know, I decided to watch the Clone Wars before it gets delisted from Netflix. So I've been doing that while I exercise over the past few weeks. And I thought, you know, before I start doing that, I should go back and revisit the Phantom Minus and attack of the clone to kind of like set the stage for it. And Vanden Minus is a really interesting movie. I don't think it's very good, but it kind of falls into the same category as Metal Gear Solid 2, where it's deeply flawed and yet very forward thinking, like very, very like, I kind of feel like George Lucas maybe despite himself was, was on to something. Like in 1999, 20 years ago, everyone was like a movie about trade.

embargoes. Who cares? And now we're like, wow, so there's a neoliberal government that's being rotted from within by a, like a petty tyrant with a grudge who is using fascism and war to tear this, this, this, you know, longstanding empire apart. And his primary tool is a guy who's basically like a creep to women and an angry, uh, man child who's not used to never getting his way, who lucked into a position of great power through, uh, basically winning the lottery of his birth. Okay. Yeah. I, I, I, you know, modern sensibilities. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, it's resonating a little bit. I will say this. That's the only things I liked in that movie. Yeah, the phantom menace, um, when I, I think it's a horrible Star Wars movie, but if it were something

else. Everyone would love it, I think, if it were a different franchise. Well, like a cult. You know what I mean? Like, Chris is looking at me like with death eyes. I feel like I stepped to a parallel universe when I wanted to go get some more water. And now I have no idea what's going on. It's not good. You see what I'm saying. Yeah, it's not good. We're trying to cut it some slack. Also, that it's fundamentally a movie for babies about laser swords. And it's boring. Yeah. Well, if you took away the baby stuff, like the laser sword, that's okay. But the like the anything to do with gungans and jar jar like it's just so tone deaf yes yeah if it was a

completely different movie it'd be great no there there is it's an interesting movie and there is some good stuff to it but in any case uh it definitely did not hold up to the scrutiny that everyone placed on it because it was so hugely hyped up it was the uh the first really like take over the world kind of marketing campaign i would say since batman 89 like a decade building to this. And Lucas was really building. He got divorced and was like, I lost all my money. So I'm going to bring Star Wars back. And we're going to start by remastering the old movies and re-releasing them in theaters, which hadn't happened. You know, you didn't see theatrical re-releases that much anymore at that point. And all of that culminated in The Phantom Minus. And they did a great job of selling it.

Those early trailers were so evocative and intriguing. And we were like, we've got to finally find out what's the deal with Darth Vader and the Emperor. And then we saw that he was Jake Lloyd. And I'm I'm sure Jake Lloyd is a great person and was a nice kid, but just he was not directed well. Let's say that. Nothing in that movie was directed well. So static and lifeless. I consider myself an empathetic person. Mildly so.

I have never had, I don't know if I've had sympathy for anyone as much as I've had sympathy for Jake Lloyd. Yeah. Who's jeepers Christmas, that poor kid. Poor guy. No, I mean, he's like 30. Yeah. No, there was good stuff in that movie. next ones, but they both, they needed more editing and more directing.

And more rewriting. Even Princess Leia couldn't save the script. Yeah. There was, yeah, there's, there's definitely potential in those movies. Anyway, I didn't mean to get off onto a sidetrack because that is what this podcast is about. Is there anywhere else in the internet? People can go to hear people talking about all the flaws with Star Wars episode one. Is there anywhere else?

I don't think there is. I've looked. Okay. Well, is there anywhere with people? Try to use a Google. Oh, okay. It's very handy. Is there anywhere with people who actually kind of like them?

Yes, actually. There are. I've been asking Jeeves, so. Oh, that's it. Yeah, I would stop using, I would stop using Likos and Alta Vista. They're not much help anymore. Yeah. That's 99.

Actually, did Google start in 99 or was that 98? 98. Okay. Yeah. So we don't have to talk about Google and how it's become. But, you know, Altavista was still around. The evil employer. All right.

All right. So meanwhile. Also, the Matrix, which was kind of one of those movies that came out of nowhere and became the monster hit that satisfied people when Star Wars let them down pretty much by word of mouth. It was drew heavily on the graphic novel and movie Dark City

and drew heavily on Kung Fu style Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, wirefu. Yes. Also drew heavily on Wi-Fi. It did. It did. Just think how different things would have been for Neo if he'd had a little Wi-Fi router

in the back of his brain. but yeah like it was very um it was very of its of its time like it was very zeitgeasty i i rewatched the matrix my wife and i had like a kiano ruse film festival left here so you should have invited me oh it would have been good holds up yeah talking about uh bromsters dracula the matrix point blank point break point blank is hey more no that's that's a that's a game series i think it came out of 99 also. Yeah. I feel like the Matrix is, was like the,

is the 21st century version of Die Hard in that it's like every action movie that came after it was trying to be it. Like, it's super, super influential. Well, you know, interestingly, that's also true of the Phantom Minus, even though people hated that movie supposedly and it was widely decried. That is the movie that gave us the ubiquitous, goddamn CG armies facing off against each other

and nothing really matters because it's just like huge things fighting. Yeah, like I don't care. I don't care about your battle droids and your gungons. I don't care about your Wakandans fighting whatever the hell

Thanos is throwing at them. Like just show us the characters we care about dealing with each other. The Chittari. Okay, there we go. It's okay. It's okay.

Anyway, I'm saying like that that movie is responsible. It has a lot to answer for. Yeah, because you really saw that kind of take off with Lord of the Rings, but it started with the Phantom Menace, and I hate it so much. I would even see that at, like, work, I would go to the Sigraf Graphics Conference, and every year there would be someone demoing a new massive battle simulation, like, technology for, like, the next several years after this.

You know what the only good massive battle has been? It's been the Battle of the Bastards and Game of Thrones, because it was all just real people except the Giant. It was like they actually got all those people there, and it feels real. And because it focuses in on important characters. is doing important things while something's happening around them. As opposed to like a big battle happening. And then elsewhere, there's other characters doing other things.

And who cares about that big battle? It's just there. It's just like texture. Yeah. I can think of better texture. Like houndstooth or, you know. Prince of Wales plaid. Yeah.

Maybe instead of making pixels by each other, we could write some movies. That's my thought. That'd be great. Anyway, so those are kind of the big. pop culture juggernauts, that had an Austin Powers too, that happened in 1999, and they're the backdrop for a lot of video games, but the makeup of the industry was very different than in 1989. You had Sega also launching a system and not becoming a massive juggernaut that challenged

everyone, and they deserved to. The Dreamcast was Sega's heart and soul. It had great things. They put everything into that system and its software. and it just I loved it. I love the Dreamcast. Me too.

I mean, I admit that I'm not like, the games on Dreamcast are not really, for the most part, down my alley. But I still like just love all the imagination and all the hard work that went into those games. Because I look at those and I'm like, you know, most of those aren't for me, but I can see that they're great. And I can see that, you know, if they had found the right audience, that system would have been huge. I think we've talked about this. before, but the thing I love about the Dreamcast the most and miss

about it the most is it was Sega's voice. The way they voiced their games, the way they designed the logos and the style, it had Sega style that was completely unique to Sega. It came out on that system and I really missed it. I wish they still

had a Sega system where everything was Sega like, you know, in that Dreamcast way, the Japanese sort of way. And it was great. I pre-ordered it on Amazon. This was very early sort of Amazon pre-ordering kind of stuff And got it on, you know, $9,99, something like that And boy, it was awesome

I played Sonic Adventure like crazy So I had a good launch title I loved Crazy Taxi And Crazy Taxi was the game I played most until Skies of Arcadia came out Yeah, I had that too, that was cool I don't think I got one when it came out When did Spider-Man come out? I never saw Spider-Man

I want to say that was 2000 Yeah, I think I got one almost specifically to play Spider-Man because it looked so much better on Dreamcast than it did on PlayStation and Tony Hawk 2, which Tony Hawk 1 came out in 99. But that was my Dreamcast thing. And then I went back and got Space Channel 5, which was a 1999 release or 1999 release. And I love Space Channel 5. I think Space Channel 5, by the standards of rhythm games is not in-depth.

It's just, you know, it's basically Simon, but with anime. But it's so fun. And Michael Jackson, Space Michael, thank you. And Space Michael, yes. And the soundtrack to Space 905 is that. That's fantastic. Beautiful. Like, there was a real, we talked about that Fantastic Four game that had that kind of funk soundtrack.

In the late 90s, there was a big, like, weird revival of, like, 70-style. Yeah, like, I mean, it's just, you know, the 20-year thing. You know, you had bands like D-Light and I can't even remember who else. Oh, does D-Light have anything to say on those facial five? I don't know. Were they in that? Oh, no. They sued.

Oh, right, right. That's right. Because Lady Miss Keir thought that Ulala was based on her, uncredited. They lost that lawsuit, and that is why you don't hear a lot from D-Light anymore, unfortunately. But the groove is still in the heart. Yeah, but not of the court. Like the main thing was a Mexican flyer, wasn't it? Yeah, which is like a 60s funk track.

Yeah, there's an interview I did with Tetsuya Musiguchi, the producer and director of that game. That was about a year and a half ago, but it's in the Retronauts archive. So check that out. He talks about, you know, just getting Mexican flyer in there and like the fact that you never got to meet the composer of it, which is very sad. But it was that, yeah, that really set the tone for that game. I had the sound, like I bought, I think I bought an imported. Japanese version of the soundtrack like two discs or something

and the last level soundtrack that starts off with just like it's all a cappella and it just starts off with the rhythm and then the more people you save like the more people are joining into that the last song I still find that like genuinely moving it's fantastic

like it's Space Channel 5 rules super hard I'll second this yeah I came into it later I didn't have the dreamcast but so I eventually got the part one and two port on Sony um but yeah it's just it's just so much fun like it's like it's very simple but it's just got this joy to it i've never played it you should it's really fun it's really i don't like i'm not good at rhythm games like i enjoy them but like i never beat elite beat agents so there

are cheat codes in space channel but i i ended up because of the simplicity and because it was very easy to time everything to the music like on the beat uh i like 100% it Nice. Like, Spacetional 5. Like, I had space, like, I was on fire for the whole time. I really, but I played it over and over because I love the music. I love the design. The, I think the last appearance in my life of Apollo Smile, the live action anime

girl, wherever you are, hope you're doing well. But yeah, I love Spacianna all five. All right, Benj and Jeremy are looking at us like we got to move on and stuff. Yeah, I was getting messages on my watch. I don't know about Bench. I get messages. It's, um. You get messages from the future

Yeah And also Sega Dreamcast did not do so well for Sega And it's a shame Lots of lots of great stuff on it That's true That was when I was jealous of Because I had you know

There were 3D fighters on Sony And they did not look as nice as Soul Calibur Yeah I mean I picked that one up and then played it And it was like oh this looks great But I guess I'm just not into fighting games anymore Yeah I picked up a Dreamcast on launch day Kind of on a whim I was at Compiose if you remember that

And they had a bunch and I was like okay and I bought it and then the same day the same day Final Fantasy A came out and that's what I played for the next two weeks. I'm a bad, bad Sega fan. But I'm also a bad Nintendo fan because the N64 was kind of the thing

that Nintendo was doing, that in Game Boy Color in 1999. And I was having a hard time connecting with games like Mario Party and Super Smash Brothers and Pokemon Snap and Mario Golf Donkey Kong 64 You know Hybrid Heaven Castlevania

Superman 64 Why did we put that on there It's important Yeah I just like the N64 I had some good times With a few of the games on there And it just kind of otherwise

failed to connect with me And you definitely saw that That sort of reflected And the numbers Because you know The NES was I think like 50 million units sold And the Super NES was like 40

And then N64 was more like 25 million sold. You started to see this really big drop-off. And I was part of that. I jumped ship from Super Nintendo to PlayStation. The whole generation it was dominated by the PlayStation anyway, right? Yeah, I mean, a bunch of Japanese developers jumped ship from Nintendo at that point.

Square, of course, being the huge one. Well, I mean, N64 was basically not quite a non-entity in Japan, but it did not do the numbers. Like the Super Famicom and before that the Famicom just dominated Japan more than any other system. But N64 was like,

And everyone gravitated to Sony. It's a weird console. They made mistakes like not going with optical media and having a bizarre controller shape that's sort of intellectually confusing. Just like, why am I caressing a stingray? What's happening? Yeah, I mean, it's a great controller if you actually use it,

but I think it's got that sort of elevator pitch problem where if you look at it and you've never played it for, you're like, what the hell is this? I think that's part of what they were going for with it. I think they were trying to be, like, so sophisticated and futuristic that you'd be like, what's happening? I mean, you look at the same time, you had Virtual Boy, and its controller was kind of forward-thinking, but also a little weird, because it had two D-pads.

And, you know, a few years later, you'd get dual analog controllers, but that didn't really exist at the time. So people were kind of, like, figuring out, how should games work in 3D? Yeah, that's true. I wish they had used, like, the Virtual Boy dual control setup on Instagram. 64 because it would have made better use of it. But instead you had, you know, playing first-person shooters and using like the face buttons to strafe, which, oh, yeah. The thing that intrigued me at the time being a, being a computer graphics geek who was in college when this stuff was happening is the fact that the Nintendo 64 was basically like a Silicon Graphics Workstation.

And like the menus for it were literally an SGI demo that like I had running in a computer lab somewhere, like almost exactly the same thing, just adapted to their thing. And so like, that was cool. But, but then all these games that I wanted to play were over. on PlayStation. So I didn't actually buy one. I played, you know, I played all the way through Mario 64 on my sweetmates game. Yeah, I would say by 99, I was sort of souring on the N64 in general. I loved the N64 just because of the earlier games like O'Koreen of Time, which was 98, wasn't it? I don't remember. So, and, you know, Mario 64 and stuff, but I wanted so badly to love, like, say, Donkey Kong 64, for example. But that was just a collect-a-thon slog.

I was really disappointed with that. You'll never get the kids' votes. Mario Golf is like, okay, whatever. Mario Party was cool. I enjoyed that, but it broke your sticks because it had too many rotating games. Or the sticks broke your fingers. Yeah, but everyone was complaining you wear out your stick because there were so many things where you had to rotate it rapidly.

And it's Super Smash Brothers, what? That never went anywhere. I have a conspiracy theory about that. Not a conspiracy theory, but this is my weird theory about N64. I feel like... I was wondering about the tinfoil hat you've been wearing. I feel like the N64 was directed as... And I don't remember a lot of the marketing for the 64

because I, you know, I am a Nintendo loyalist. I've been there. I've owned every Nintendo system. And I have a weird hatred for the Genesis that did not extend to the Dreamcast because I also love the Dreamcast. But, you know, I had the 64 and a Dreamcast, you know, 64 and a PlayStation,

GameCube and a PSA. too. But I feel like the 64 was built to be a multiplayer console because if you look at that list of games, I mean, there's four controller ports, and if you look at that list of games, it's Mario Party, it's Smash Brothers, it's Mario Golf, it's, it's, and when you think about the big hits on the 64, the wrestling games were a huge deal. They built the system with four controller ports. Like, no system had that before that, that I can think of four controller ports built

into the console. Like, that was unheard of. It was definitely the dorm room system. Yeah, there were a few. And then you look at the... What? Atari 5200. That is a count. No one wanted that.

But then you look at the single-player games. And I'm the weirdo who doesn't like Mario 64, O'Karena have time or Matar's Mask. Like, I just, I don't like them. I'm glad you, everyone else does. But like, if you get past those, and again, part of that is because of my motion sickness. Yeah.

But, you know, you look at the other single-player games and it's it's donkey cong 64 it's quest 64 it's castlevania it's superman 64 there's meanwhile on on play on play play final fantasy seven for 80 hours yeah that's when i got into jrpg's for the first time the castellvania game on the nintendo 64 is horrible i was so incredibly disappointed by that game horrible just a mess plus i mean we had already had symphony of the night so after symphony night came out that was like thinking about games like everything should be like this from now and because it's so awesome. But then you go back to the Nintendo 64 and you've got a little like crayon colored guy

struggling to jump around a 3D mansion. It's just not the same, you know. It's so weird that Cynthia Knight is such a masterpiece and then like the, the like major console games. Like obviously Cynthia Knight had plenty of successors, but the major console games are like, I mean, Lords of Shadow is okay, but it's a completely different. One, two, three, four, five, everybody in the car. So come on, let's ride to the liquor store all up the corner.

The boys say they want some gin and juice, but I really don't want her. Billers like I had last week. I must stay deep. Because talk is cheap. I like Angela, Pamela, Sandra, and Rita. And as I continue, you know, they're getting sweeter. So what can I do? I really bad you, my lord.

To me, learning is just like a sport. Anything fly It's all good Let me Jump in the trumpet A little bit Yeah, but you know Nintendo could look at this

And say We don't care That you don't like Our N64 games Because you know We've got We've got Pokemon Golden Silver

You little assholes And those games Sold a lot of copies And Pokemon Yellow also I guess Golden Silver only came out In Japan in 99 But like, you know

As soon as it started to show up At trade shows And that sort of thing In Japan the American press was all over it because Pokemon had launched here in late 98 and was immediately a massive success. So, you know, we had like a year and a half of Pokemon gold and silver on the cover of magazines

and, you know, extensive blowouts because people, you know, they knew kids wanted to know more about Pokemon. Yeah. And the famous Iwada, like the 12 flavors of Satoriu Iwada, like rearranging the codes that they could fit all of Kanto into gold and silver. like imagine imagine at the end of Mario 2 you had to play through Mario 1 again like it's but backwards it's a really

really good game and the improvements that it made over the you know red blue and and did yellow come out in 99 here? Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like yellow you know you had Pikachu which was great but the improvements

that the Gen 2 games made in addition to like setting the standard of, oh, hey, we're just going to introduce a bunch of new ones. Like, oh, do you have them all? Great. Here's 100 new ones that you can get. Like, brilliantly executed with golden silver, I think. Yeah, there's different genders for Pokemon, day, night cycle. There's a lot of, a lot of stuff. Breeding became a thing with genders being introduced.

So a lot of really good stuff. Yep. So that was kind of Nintendo's saving lifeline. But, man, how are we going to get through all of Sony stuff in the 10? minutes we have left to record. Good Lord. Look at all these games. 1999, Sega, that was, you know, as 1989 was for the NES, 1990 was, 1999 was for the PlayStation. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was indomitable. There was, there was nothing bigger in the world. And it's, it remains one of the absolute best selling systems just like Game Boy, because, like, everyone had a PlayStation. It was cool and fun and interesting. And wow, the library. Look at this.

Yeah, I mean, you had both all the developers converging on it, and you have, you know, weird quirky stuff coming out of Japan, making it over, too. And so just, yeah, and then, and Sony was like, let's leverage the inexpensive nature of CD-ROMs and sell these weird quirky games for half the price of a major blockbuster title. So people will be, like, intrigued and say, well, okay, I'll pick up Parapa the rapper for 20, 30 bucks. Why not? I'll pick a Bushido blade for $2030. Incredible crisis. Yeah. So, I mean, just the list here, Silent Hill, finally.

Final Fantasy 8, Ape Escape, Pursona 2, Legacy of Cain Soul Reaver, Resident Evil 3, Rayman 2, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Crash Team Racing, Valkary Profile, a bunch of Armymen games, Tomb Raiders, Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis, Medal of Honor, Incredible Crisis, Silent Bomber, 2, Kodelka, Grand Chorzmo 2, CronoCross in Japan, Vibribin in Japan, The Miss Adventures of Tron Bonn, Chocobo's Dungeon 2, Chocobo Racing, Air Guites, Final Fantasy Anthology, Saga Frontier 2, Spyro 2, 2, Spyro 2, there's other stuff, but good Lord. And I think was 99 when they introduced the dual shock controller? Yeah, because Ape Escape. So that was where you finally got a proper modern video game controller with dual analog and haptic feedback.

Oh, yeah. Although I think the first one was the... The dual analog. Yeah, didn't have vibration. Yeah. And that was 98, but no one picked that up. Yeah, it was very short lived. There weren't any games that made use of it.

Like Ape Escape was the first game that really... Wasn't it? They had this analog, like, flight stick, dual flight stick controller for some kind of robot game or something. That was their first analog controller for the PlayStation. There were a couple of games that used dual analog, but nothing really took advantage of dual analog until Ape Escape, which was kind of used to launch the dual shock. Yeah, I'm just saying, though, I think that the original dual analog controller before the dual shock was like their scaled down version of their big joystick thing. That's what they're aiming for.

And then suddenly you could apply that to so many other games after that. I haven't seen that one. The first dual analog that I know of is the same as the dual shock, but it looks very slightly different and doesn't have the Rumble built in. Like the dual shock is just a better version of dual analog. Yeah, that'd be a picture of it. I mean, certainly analog controls existed before this point. You mentioned the Atari 5200, and on PCs you had all kinds of crazy analog flight sticks.

I bought a, what was it called, a Thrustmaster? Such a great name, wow. Just so I could play dissent, and I was still no good at it. But, you know, just the fat. I also used it for like X-wing and stuff, but. This is what I'm talking about. PlayStation Analog. I didn't realize those are analog.

Yeah. Wow, okay. So I think it's designed for flight simulators. Probably like Ace Combat. That's a two big full-size joystick. I vaguely remember that thing. Well, nobody in America had it. I think it was just a, you know, gosh, I don't know what.

games. Okay, list of games. Ace Combat 2 and 3, Apescape, asteroids. I mean, this is like analog games. It's just any of the analog games. Yeah. All right. So, let's pick one game apiece here from this amazing Sony list and talk about why it's amazing. Chris, I think that's going to be Tony Hawk Pro Skater for you. Yeah, Tony Hawk was huge for me. Like, as a kid who was really super into like skateboarding culture and like looking at all the catalogs at the boards and stuff but had the athleticism and coordination of someone who really liked video games like this was my way of experiencing skateboarding and I the first Tony Hawk game is was fantastic for its time and then there were like five good games that came after that and then nothing

else. Nothing else came after Tony Hawk's Underground, too. I don't think. No games released. But the idea of, that's the first game that I can remember having, like, real songs in the soundtrack. And maybe it was Tony Hawk, too, but, like, you're playing that game looking to public enemy.

Like, that's so cool. Like, it felt like a, yeah. Like, it felt like that late 90s, like, cool team culture to still into a video game. I went to parties. I was, I guess in 99, that was my last year of high school when I graduated, and so I went to some parties in high school where people were playing that, or after high school, or somewhere around that time, and they were all like,

oh, man, this is so awesome, Tony Hawk Pro Skater. I wasn't into that scene, so. Yeah. Also, it was a good game, though. I also really liked the simplicity of building the controls the way they did, where you had, you know, one button for Ollie, and then button for kick flips. And kickflip related tricks, button for grab tricks, and the triangle was for grinds, which made sense because it was like a little arrow pointing forward.

And depending on which direction you were pushing and for the grinds, like what your orientation was, you would do different things. And so you could have this incredible variety of stuff, which in turn led to the, you know, the ridiculous high scores for doing varieties of tricks. Like, it was a really engaging game to play that encouraged you to play it in a specific way that was the most fun way to play. play it. Like, you couldn't just, you know, kickflip, kick flip for like three minutes. You had to, you had to do cool stuff. And that philosophy eventually would get way out of hand. But at the time, like, Tony Hawk, Tony Hawk 2, choice, choice games. Tony Hawk 3, I think had Spider-Man. So that was cool. Radical. She's into superstitions, black cats and blue dogs. I feel a premonition. That girl's going to make me fall Good, why don't you tell us what your top game on the

PlayStation's new stuff. All right, so man, what's to do here? There's lots of good stuff, but you know, we all know about Final Fantasy 8. So let's go down to the smaller stuff. I could talk about Incredible Crisis, which is just this incredibly weird collection of video games, but I'm kind of drawn to Misadventures of Trondon. Okay. So we'll do Tron bond because this was so, sort of a spinoff of Mega Man Legends.

Which was a spinoff of Mega Man? Which was a spinoff of Mega Man. And I actually didn't pick up Mega Man Legends when it came out because it just looks, you know, it didn't look like it was. That cover did not sell itself. The cover didn't sell it. And it just like, you know, I saw some videos and it just, I wasn't sure Mega Man in 3D was really going to work. You know, at this point, I've gone back and I like it. But it was kind of a hard.

hard sell. But then we had Trondon, and there was just, you know, it sort of took the same engine, but put it in, it's not trying to be a Mega Man game anymore, trying to be its own thing. And it's this collection of stuff. And you've got this cool, like, you know, pirate mechanic girl with her army of little robots that you can do stuff with. You can throw them at things and have them attack it or throw them into little holes and have them grab treasure for you. And it just keeps mixing it up. You know, it's got these different mini games. It's got, it's got box games, but they make sense because they're kind of in this port sorting like cargo. And and it's just it was it was different from anything else that was out there at the time you know it was it was in this whole genre of exploring what can we do with a 3D action game but it just tried a lot of cool ideas at once and unlike a lot of the good good games that were like going out on a limb trying weird new 3D ideas this one worked for me it's just a lot of fun so if you get it is it do we have a good way to access to trombone now it's on ps n it's like six bucks yeah which is a lot better than buying it on ebay for 250 right exactly so yeah if you have

never tried it out and that didn't interest you at all. Go pick it up for six bucks on PSN. It's a lot of fun. Okay, my pick is Crash Team Racing. Really? That's the only game out of this list that I played for more than an hour. Did you not own a PlayStation at the time? Chrono Cross.

I liked that game. Yeah, although Chrono Cross didn't hit the U.S. It didn't so, yeah. I did, but I was still in love with Symphony of the Night, so I could not get over the crappy polygon graphics of the PlayStation, like those 3D games are just so jaggy and I had I was still using a TV from 1983 that was passed down to the family so it looked like crap on the TV anyway so I just I couldn't get into that kind of thing but I sympathize with that crash team racing was it's a very good Mario Kart clone for the PlayStation and it plays well and the tracks are well designed and it's really fun and that's why I think I played that game more than a lot of these other games that I probably tried a few of them you know you know you know so Sorry. Grand Tourismo 2 was cool, you know.

But it was also hard because it was a simulation game. Yeah. It wasn't arcade style. It's not meant to be playable. It's meant to be like a discipline that you take upon yourself and learn to master it through Zen or something. I don't know. It's really strange. I can see that.

Yeah. So actually, I am going to talk about Crona Cross because I did play it and beat it in 1999 because that was where I was at that point in life. That was a huge game for me. just in a lot of ways, but... And I remember it on Tusty Fraud. Yeah, like, it was just an enticing-looking game. It had this beautiful graphical style, and the music was incredible. And I don't know why, but I just fell immediately in love with Chrono Cross, and I imported it,

and I forced myself to play through it with my very, very meager Japanese literacy, despite the fact that it is an extremely sort of abstract game. And, you know, I actually figured out what you have to do to get the true, ending. Once I beat it, I was like, you know what? I feel like that thing that was happening during the final battle was something that ties back to another thing that I remember, but I don't remember the specifics. So I put out a call for help on like a forum or something, and people were like, oh, yeah, yeah, you need to do it in this order. But I did at least, you know, kind of like deduce my way through the game. And I wrote a fact on it. I remember you getting us all hyped

40 or before I came out. I was such a bad person. But then that was my first professional video games gig too. Like game stop, GameSpot. Actually, I think it was videogames.com at the time. I said,

hey, we need someone to write a guide for Krono Cross Forest. Can we just republish your guide and we'll give you this amount of money? And I said, I'd feel kind of weird about just like giving you a thing that I did for free and getting paid for it,

but I could rewrite the guide for you. Which was stupid. I should have just said, okay, yeah, I'll take the money. But I had this, like, weird sense of ethics. I don't know. It was dumb. So, yeah, so that was my first paying video games gig. And just, like, through personal circumstances that set me on the road to where I am now, which I guess is good.

So, yeah, Kronos is also a good game, but very sort of controversial. Definitely not what people expected from a KronoTriguer sequel. But I love it. Anyway, so PlayStation, wow, it was big. It was everywhere. It was inescapable. To wrap up 1999, we're just, oh, we're going to skip 2009, sorry. I will say that for the first time, Nintendo had proper competition in the handheld space. No, just kidding. But there was a really, there was a really cool handheld game. Handhold systems released in 1999. In Japan, there was Wonder Swan, which was the final creation of Gunpei Yokoi, who created the Game Boy and Virtual Boy and Game Boy. camera and all kinds of cool stuff. Game and Watch. He was a great guy. This was for Bondi. Bondi. Bondi. Bondi. There was a game called Gun Pay, though. That was a tribute to him. And that showed up on, it's been on a bunch of systems, actually, PSP and DS and so forth. The Wonder Swan launched as a black and white system in 1999 as a competitor to the classic Game Boy.

And by that point, Game Boy Color had launched. So a few months later, they were like, ah, just kidding. We're going to do a color version. And as in K, launched the NeoGeo Pocket, which was also launched as a black and white competitor to the original Game Boy in 1998. And as in K said, just kidding, here's a color version. And I love that system. It is a great system with great games. I do too. I got it back then.

Yeah. So I was excited for sort of a viable competitor to the Game Boy sort of thing. And it has a really cool stick. The clicky stick. It's like a clicky, tiny fighting stick that I did not know because I never had a NeoGeo CD. but apparently it's a sort of descendant of their Neo-G-O-CD controller that's sort of a miniaturized fighting stick with clicky, you know, direction. So how long do you get out of the batteries on the pocket color?

Oh, it's, I don't know. Is it pretty good? Yeah. That's pretty long because it's not backlit, you know. And it has a backup battery for, like, it saves your time. And your calendar, it's got a horoscope built into it. You get your fortune every day? I didn't have one in 1999, but here's what your boy was really into.

in the turn of the century was the Sega Dreamcast and the Neo Geo Pocket color I swear I bought an NGPC I don't know if it was the day before they announced they were discontinuing it

but it might have been that week and I was like oh sweet, cool but I did like it it's also kind of a cute little system I had fun stuff on it It had probably what I think was the first Sonic game

that wasn't on a Sega console Is that true? Like there was a Sonic 2D Sonic game I'm pretty sure Sonic Pocket Adventure was the first non-Sega Platforms Sonic game Yeah and it was

It was a cool game I played that a lot I think it was developed by Dimps Who did the Sonic Sonic Advanced games And a few others Yeah I played that and I played

The cool thing is There's a Pac-Man Pac-Man port there for that And which ordinarily Would not be that exciting But it came with this little Restrictor ring that you could place into the joystick

to make it four-way only. So it was an easily lost little piece of red plastic, but yeah, it turned to the clickie stick like eight-way into a four-way, and it made Pac-Band really good. That little detail, that little detail of foresight and the thought they put into that design is incredible. That just, you know, it's amazing that you can do that.

That system deserved better, and it would have done better, but S&K was bought out by a Pachinko company, Aruz. And they said, Wow, you've got this little system with these great LCD screens. You know what these would be amazing for is our Pachinko machines. So they killed the video game line, the Neo Geo Pocket Color line, and they basically took those parts and used them for their Pachinko system.

This is like so evil. It's really terrible. S&K went through some tough times after the 20th century came to an end, and they eventually have righted themselves. Is Pachinko fun? No, but it's addictive. No, it's straight up gambling. Yeah, it clicks the same part of your brain that works for, yeah, slots.

It's a slot machine with more blinky things and, like, actual physical, like, little ball bouncy things going on. The illusion of some control over the direction of balls. Yeah, Pachinko is kind of a recurring villain in the entire history of the video game industry. I mean, like, we keep losing things to Pachinko, but anyways. This was one of the most heartbreaking. The NeoGeo Pocket Color was amazing. And someday, someone is going to consoleize that or come up with like an HDMI out or something. And I'm going to do NeoGeo Pocket Color Works.

Awesome. Damn it. That system is so good. And there are a lot of them are fantastic. It's about 80. And at least a tenth of them are Pachinko games that I will do in one episode. I will build a joystick. God.

No way Call my end No riding from No no Call my head Go running I'm the caboose of the wrongdoing You produce

The wild tail Of a tornado Running loose I kick the chair I'm the cyanide That snatch your life Why you got for air The echo

Aco, Aco That boomer rains To hurt your loved ones So are we got a really quick Keep PC in that Okay so yeah To wrap up 1999

There were some important PC games Descent 3 is not important And EverQuest, however, is very important. One of the first big MMOs right after Ultima Online. Homeworld, which is important because, yes, sing a song for it. Mugan is extremely important because it's like the Dojin kind of fan game modding scene applied to fighting games. And it was one of the first sort of big, it was created like an independent, like an almost like an emulated scene.

emulation kind of thing like throw your favorite characters together from any fighting game. It could take like resources from other games, you know, assets and turn them into like fighting game characters they can face off against each other.

And it's still around, right? It is around, but it feels like these days we have such ludicrous crossovers in officially licensed fighting games on all sides that it's almost redundant now. A friend of mine said on Twitter that day, he was like, hey, remember Mujan? I think it's just smash now.

Yeah, well, it's smash. And there's other things that, yeah. Let's see, Amacron, the Nomad Soul, was important because it gave us David Cage, the vicage, but also it gave us David Bowie in a video game officially, which is that is cool. Which was pretty awesome. I mean, he may not make good games, but David Cage has at least good taste in, uh, in, in, in, androgynous musicians. We'll give him that. Um, System Shock 2 was extremely important. Uh, maybe not in terms of sales, but in terms of like design and innovation. Um, we need to just have a system shock episode someday.

And Myth 2 Soul Blighter was important because it would erase your system. I want to... So this is actually... And blight your soul. I'm going to pull rank I don't have and talk about this for just a second because Myth 2 is what I was on the Macintosh side. That is what I was playing for all of 1999. So this was a strategy game from Bungy.

It's what they did in between back in the day when they were doing marathon, their early 3D shooter. And when they got merged with Microsoft and started doing Halo, they did myth. And it was, I felt, a really groundbreaking strategy and tactics game. You know, it didn't have, it didn't have the building. It was just you had the units at the beginning of the map that you were going to have and go and kind of micromanage them. But I liked it a lot. And if anyone wants to hear more about myth, bug Jeremy to let me do a micro on it.

I think, yeah, I think we should do one. Because there's a lot to say about it, I think. But it was good times. And Myth 2 was sort of the refinement of the formula. It came out very tail end of 98. And I started running tournaments with it and stuff in 99. It was a good time. All right.

And finally, arcades actually kind of came back to life. Thanks to Beat Mania and Dance Dance Revolution, each of those games got their second iteration and started to make their way over into American arcades. And all of a sudden, arcades became a place that people wanted to go again. That was kind of cool to go to because you could show off for your friends and, like, do crazy dances that you made up and acrobatics and stuff while you were playing DDR. There was also some other stuff.

Street Fighter 3, Third Strike was, you know, is kind of considered like the pinnacle of that franchise in a lot of ways. Really? And yeah, really, absolutely. People like Street Fighter 3 that much? Third Strike. Third Strike specific. Not Street Fighter 3, not Street Fighter 3 Second Impact. But third strike is considered like peak 2D fighting.

Yeah, it has some amazing sprite work in it. But also just like the- I don't know. Where were you? I probably just blew it off because everyone blew up Street Fighter 3. apparently you were playing crash team racing I was playing old Nintendo games still collecting retro games

and finally the notable thing for 2000 or 1999 in arcades is that Billy Mitchell perfected Pac-Man or did he yeah yeah he did he actually did that one yeah that was for real

don't forget Jambo Safari that crazy Sega yeah we talked about that in the Sega arcade episode so we've done so yeah there was a lot of stuff in 99 it was a good year and then in 2009 everything happened let's stay here for 10 hours no we have to go away now nope this is this is the end beautiful friend we'll we'll revisit in 10 years and talk about 2009 in the context of another one of these episodes so please look forward to that retronaut's episode like 2000 I don't know whatever it is

Anyway, thanks everyone for bearing with us and your patience as we ramble disjointedly about history in a very sort of disorganized way. It's very exciting. I'm glad you could be here with us for us. With it with what? With it for us. With us for it. Yes, that's it. You know what?

I've got low blood sugar. We need lunch. It's definitely lunchtime. Let's wrap this thing up. Hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish. You're listening to Retronauts, probably, unless you gave up a little while ago. You can find Retronauts on the Internet. Look for Retronauts.

We're on Podcast 1 for a little while longer. You can support us through Patreon and get episodes a week early, patreon.com slash Retronauts. And we publish like, you know, every Monday and then every other Friday. So that's very exciting. Yeah, guys, where else can we find you on the Internet?

I am Benj Edwards. And right now I'm building joysticks at BX Foundry.com. By the time this episode comes out, my new website should be up with a shopping cart and stuff. So you can find me on Twitter at Benj Edwards. And Ben? I'm Ben Elgin.

You can find me on Twitter at Kieran. That's K-I-R-I-N-N. My retro closet blog is kind of on haydust at the moment. I'll let you guys know if that gets resurrected at some point. I don't know that I have anything else to plug right now. I can plug my day job. If you need a desktop milling machine, check out Bantam tools.

I do need one. Well, there you go. All right. Perfect. I'm Chris Sims, and I'm really looking forward to coming back and talking about how, according to Jeremy Parrish, Bayoneta is retro now. I'm sorry. That's the law.

I don't make the rules. No, I'm excited. I'm looking forward to it. No, actually, I do make the rules. Okay, never mind. You can find me on the BAB website as at the ISB. You can also find all of my stuff at T-H-E-S-B.com. That has links to all of my podcasts and all the fun things that I do. I also wrote a bunch of colleagues in 2018. Don't have anything yet coming up for

2019 that I can talk about. But if you would like to hire me to write something, you boy has time. So, hit me up. And apparently Assassin's Creed 2 is retro now. That's also terrifying. Yep, it sure is. 10 years. That's the boundary. So anyway, I'm sorry we couldn't reinforce her since mortality this week, but hey, there's always the future. So please join us again next week for another episode and we'll be back talking at you soon. I'm slipping through the trees Strangling on the breeze

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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.