Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 202: Listener Comments Catch-Up

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

It's been six months since Bob's last listener comments episode, and plenty of feedback has built up since then, practically screaming to be read live on the air! And in this episode, Bob and guest Henry Gilbert will be doing just that: reading and responding to various questions and comments (left on the Patreon and Retronauts dot com) on topics as varied as BioShock, Pokemon, Wario Ware, the PlayStation 2, and more! Plus: A song about Lou Albano that may surprise you.

Hello, everybody, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackie, and who is here with me today? A loyal commenter Henry Gilbert, hello. And we are here in the Retronauts East slash West Studio. It's the Eastern Studio of the Western part of Retronauts. So we're in Berkeley, and this is where we record Talking Simpsons and all that stuff. But the other Retronaut Studio is now sitting empty, probably full of spiders right now. Who knows what's happening in there? But for this episode, I wanted to catch up with some listener comments left on the Patreon and the blog at Retronauts.com.

So I don't normally build in time in my episodes to read listener questions and comments because there simply isn't enough time. write too many notes. So I think twice a year I want to do this and catch up on listener comments and questions that are left behind. And we did this last in July. And I believe that was episode Micro-91, back when we did micros. But micros were not popular because they were called micros. People did not download them as much. And now we don't have that problem. We just call these Retronauts episode, whatever. If you skipped a thing because it was a micro, you probably missed an awesome episode with me in it. And you should really listen to it, people. We did so many good micros and guess what? They were all an hour long. They were not micro by any sense. We went into that thinking, we'll make 15 minute episodes, but you know how me and Jeremy are. We do way too much sometimes. We overdo it, but it's all good. But I wanted to point out a few things before we start. So we just passed our 200th episode of Retronauts. Hooray! But technically, of this run, this post-2013 or 2013 and not independent run, I think we've done probably 300 plus. And then if you add up everything we did before one,

up, or during one up, rather, we are at more than 500 episodes. Wow. And in case you don't know, those are all online, go to archive.org. You can listen to our entire back catalog. Don't judge any of us by what we said over a decade ago. We're all much better people now and smarter, too. It was a different time. It was.

I mean, that is ancient in internet times to do anything before 2010. It may as well be like the, you need a philosopher's stone to read it to something. Or the philosophers, don't you mean the Rosetta Stone? Yes. No, I mean a thing from Harry Potter. That's what I mean. I was thinking of Double Dragon 3. That was my problem. But, yeah, actually, I'm coming up on my 10th anniversary of being on Retronauts. I think it was May of 2009 that I called in from my grad school office to be a guest, and I talked about Majora's Mask. Major's Mask, wow, what an interesting first topic.

It's a very Bob Mackey topic. My first topic was the very Henry Gilbert topic of pro wrestling. Oh, that's right. That was the first one. you were on? I believe so. I believe so. It was me and Dave and Michael Donahoe. Yes, who's now in Japan. Selling Japan's things. But yes, so yes, I've been either ruining the podcast or making it better or keeping it at the same level for 10 years. You can choose. You decide. You've been doing great, Bob. And I don't just say that because you were the first person to invite me on restaurants after I had wanted to be on for so long. I extended the olive branch to the future

US team. There was bitter infighting between us and them. So I didn't know any of those people when worked on one up because you guys were all the way out in south san francisco oh yeah we were sorry when you said future u.s i was like the u.s team in the future i completely forgot that you worked for a place called future for like eight years well nobody knows the name few even the future brands loved talking up how they were future and no one who didn't have a paycheck from future had heard of the name future like they uh they had no clue how to handle their brands and still don't It turns out there are no magazines in the future. I've been there.

But I want to get started. So we're going to start off with the Bioshock episode. Let me tell you, I got a lot of negative feedback on that one. And strangely enough, conversations about Venezuela started popping up in the comment section. And let me tell you guys, if you start off by saying, what about Venezuela, you've chosen poorly, as I said in the last crusade. That's a really bad starting point. I am very tired of hearing about Venezuela, I think, and especially because then it turns into like this weird argument of like,

well, then what about Scandinavia? Venezuela, Scandinavia. It's just like, you know, socialism is good at the end. That's my side of it. You're now listening to the pro-socialist podcast. And so, of course, we're not going to be the biggest fans of Bioshock. Politics, well, Henry, you were not on this episode, but I believe, so Gary Butterfield was on it, our friend from Watchoff for Fireballs and DuckFeed.tv, he's been on a lot of our

podcast here too. And just to refresh you, I think our opinion on it was that there was not a lot really said about socialism or objectivism. It was really just a fun theme and fun ideas Ken Levine was playing with, but he was also playing with a lot of other ideas. So the argument was not as strong as what we remember from Bioshock. I mean, there's something there, but it's more like, oh, this is a fun toy to play with, but it wasn't the point of the game overall. And that's just our takeaway from, and you can disagree with that. Oh, that's absolutely how I feel. In 2007, I also was not a, I was more politically active than a lot of people in the games press, but I wouldn't call myself that political. But I also, in 2007, seeing a video game that even mentioned the

ideas of Randinism versus, uh, exceptionalism versus communism versus, uh, the Pope or whatever, I, it was interesting. But I think it's pretty similar to what he, people actually decried with Bioshock Infinite was just like you have all these ideas you're hanging them up here but you don't particularly engage with them or give you an answer really you're just like well it's up to you to decide like I kind of want you it feels a little cheapish to bring up these ideas and then step away. Yeah I mean ultimately I think AAA gaming is a very conservative medium because they want as much money as possible. Yes and it's the same with big movies too they don't want to scare anyone away so I feel like giving a facile treatment to things

like objectivism or racism or Marxist revolts like in Bioshock Infinite. Ultimately, people are going to read the wrong things if you don't really say anything. Yeah. And if you're going to say everyone's as bad as the other people and who's to,

that's like saying, is that he? Well, I think Bioshock Infinite's main argument was all choice is bullshit and you should why even make a choice. It'll all be wrong. Very centrist before that started poisoning the world. Well, the real message at the end of Bioshock Infinite,

spoilers for Bioshock Infinite is, Ken Levine hates making video games It doesn't want to do it anymore Well it looks like he stopped doing that So it's all fine now He got his dream He's literally drowned by his creations At the end of it

He's just like I'm free I don't have to make Bioshocky Free to lift free weights And think about screenplays But yes, Ken Levine ultimately We said we wanted him to make another game We're waiting for those micro games He talked about

We want to see him prove himself But still no games from Ken So where's the games? Hey Goober Where's the games? It's been a long time it's Bioshock Infinite, which also took a very long time to make.

And the last thing I'll say about my Bioshock hot takes before we read these is that Bioshock 2 is the best Bioshock game. Oh, yeah, I believe so completely, both in terms of gameplay and story. Again, it's been 10 years since I played it, but I remember liking it the most. It actually like has a heart and empathy and understands how a human would feel

instead of just like these ambient arguments bouncing around at each other. Like, you know, Andrew Ryan is just this like, asshole and so is atlas they're both just like monsters who murder tons of people and you're like supposed to i can't believe people think andrew ryan like uh thinks it's a great moment when he's like a slave obeys it's like you just saw him string up the carcasses of all his enemies that he just systematically exterminated this is not a cool guy yeah totally well meanwhile

bioshock too they introduced like lamb who's another uh ideologue but you She presents a more moral vision. I actually like Lamb a little more than others. But the real core of it is a father trying to find his daughter amid all this chaos. And the connection between a actual Big Daddy and a little sister that gives reality to just these concepts that Ken Levine's game had, I really love that a lot to actually feel something for that. And also the DLC sort of was pioneering in the walking simulator genre. and it predates dear Esther even so what was that Minerva's Den?

Manerva's Dan made by the future creators of Gone Home who would just leave 2K Marin and start making it on their own I know that's that's really cool I sometimes feel weird using the term walking simulator because it's an invented pejorative term but we took it back

us adventure game fans I think so I love walking simulators I mean it's a category on Steam that you can look up just as like an official genre. But let's get into the comments for BioShok, and Joe Blow says, I think it is fair for irrational to leave their critique of where objectivism

is at because it has ultimately kind of been laid bare ultimately as a cult of personality for Ein Rand at its time by a lot of right-wing intellectuals and post her death. It is just baby's beginner libertarianism with more simplified morals and is more self-centered. One might say it lends to having a special snowflake mentality.

And Joe Blow, I admire your optimism about the world, but things like the Iron Rann Institute or whatever it's called still exist. They still have a lot of people going around giving bad speeches about these values and unfortunately this way of thinking has not

ended. There are a lot of pundits and right wing grifters and people like that who really just operate on these selfish principles and as much as I wish that it's like oh yeah this is obviously just monstrous behavior or bad values or bad morals. They are still extremely popular and people

make a lot of money espousing them for sure. The cult of personality thing is funny too. because I, Ayn Rand very much wrote awful books about the power of individualism, which is really, I read as an argument for just pure selfishness, a defense of selfishness. But she wanted to be like, no, you should be yourself. But when you're actually in like a roundtable with her

and it was supposed to be this exchange of ideas, she was number one and you're not supposed to disagree with her. She did not cotton someone being more individual than her in a group like that. Read about her personal life. It's terrifying. She sucked. Could you get this next one, Henry? Sorry.

Blue Wacky said, Digital Foundry Retro has just been doing a series on watering games. And something you only really touched on briefly is the magnificence of the visual design of the first Pioshock in particular with its underwater elements. While unfortunately I didn't get to experience it first in-game thanks to trailers and demo videos, the opening of the game when you swim to the surface was fairly mind-blowing for me at the time. in terms of graphical fidelity. Having assumed that the whole intro was a pre-rendered cutscene, and the opening Bathisphere descent is a moment of magic.

It's too bad that much of the rest of the game unsurprisingly funnels you into enclosed tunnels and structures, but the settings of both Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite really set them apart for me. They build a world wonderfully. They really do. The intro is one of the best ever. I do recall reading, I believe it was in Harold Goldberg's book. about making video games that a whole chapter is about Bioshock.

And they talk about that intro came in late. Like only really late did they realize we need, we got to start better. This needs a bigger intro. And they actually got to be delayed months and get lots more money from 2K to get that intro. And it was worth every dollar. The game,

I was going to buy Bioshock no matter what. This was right before I got into the games press. When I downloaded the demo, on the 360 before the game came out and just saw this amazing intro of a crash landing and just being pulled into this world and then being chased by murderous, crazy

people. It really pulled me in like nothing else before. And that's a walking simulator that opening too. It really is. Actually, it was not that uncommon at the time even for the opening of an FPS to have a non-interactive segment where you're just looking around as it takes you

somewhere. And that was very much, like, the really, really early DNA of the walking simulation It's like, why can't we just have an entire game like that, where you're just sort of being led along without any real, like, mechanics or anything like that? Why does the action have to start in half-life or half-life, too? Why don't we just keep experiencing things and having people talk to us? Yeah, and I think, so I played this 11 years later after it came out, and yes, I was playing the HD remake, of course, in 4K, but the setting is still amazing, and I wish they were able to do more with it. Of course, it takes a lot more energy and work to make a convincing, you know, room in which the ocean is outside than it is to make a lot. of hallways and rooms where you can't see the ocean outside. But in those times where you can

just look outside and just see water and fish, it's really cool. And again, it is still a very unique setting for video games. I don't think there's anything else like it. So Zachary Adams says BioShok was really important to me and still is for reasons that don't paint me in the best light. Uh-oh. Okay, here we go. I grew up a hardcore Republican, but in my 20s I started to question a lot of the foundations of the party after the Iraq invasion. Like a lot of people in that age group, I ended up becoming a staunch argumentative libertarian for almost a decade, and Bioshock was a big part of making me reconsider when I finally played it several years after its release.

As shallow as the game's critique of objectivism feels, at the time I encountered it, it cut through my mix of arrogance and naivete to really make me consider the worldview in a way I hadn't before. Dumb as it sounds, the thing that really made me set up and take notice was one of Bill McDonough's audio diaries, where he says, he can't hire decent help because the only people

willing to relocate to Rapture believe they're above fixing toilets and seal bulkheads. It was the start of me re-evaluating the beliefs I'd been raised with, the ones I'd adopted as an adult, and the beliefs of those around me, I thought were incompatible with my own. And that's an interesting takeaway. I like that. Yeah. No, there are some good lines in there. Definitely. I like that one that reveals why. I do like the idea, at least as somebody who hates objectivism, that rapture is horrible and doomed from the start because it's an objectivist paradise. Like, that's why it's

fucked. So I do like that as just as a core critique of objectivism. Though even when you ask Ken Levine about that, he seems to be like, well, maybe it's not that. That's up to you. Could you just commit to saying your things about something like, fucking I know, I can't stand that. But that's

definitely, oh, sorry, Henry. No, no, no, but still, it's a good critique of objectivity in that way. That's like one of five audio logs that has actually something to say about the one of the themes in the game. And I agree, it's totally like in rapture and especially with objectivism, you're like, I'm going to be the leader, I'm going to be a brave individual forging a new path in this world. It's like, well, someone has to fix toilets. Someone has to clean up vomit. Someone has to, I don't know, take out the trash. There's lots of jobs. Someone has to become a big daddy and have their like brain melted. Until robots do all the menial work and then there'll just be no jobs. So up next we have Sega Pico and Henry was on that with Sam Lighthammer and want to grab this one, Henry? Yes. Mutiki or Muteki. says, I once used a pico that a neighbor had. I remember little about it. I seem to recall that all

the books that it had reserved the last couple of pages for that Mario Paint, MS Paint style creative interface. It was at least definitely a step up from wacky worlds, which had come out earlier in 1994, likely as a means of testing the feasibility of a concept of the pico, even if it was obviously inferior to something like Mario Paint as a creativity suite, due to how lockdown it was. It was the first entry in the kid-friendly Sega Club label in the U.S. Even if the presentation was minimal. Boy, that was a long parenthetical.

Oh, my God, that was a long parenthetical. I just realized where it started. I actually figured the Pico Bina would have been manufactured by a completely different third party. While Yamaha had made some Pico units of their own, particularly odd since Pico lacked any Yamaha sound hardware, unlike the Genesis Saturn and any number of arcade units, Sega Retro puts the beena down as being made by Sega Toys, which is the organization that was responsible for a lot of the original PICO manufacturing and were also apparently responsible for making the Sega UFO catchers.

Despite the name, they're apparently not a direct Sega subsidiary, though they are owned by the Sega Sammy Holding Company and are treated by Sega Proper as a third party generally. Boy, I did not, in my times I've been in Japan, I've gone to some Sega arcades, Sega owned or at least labeled arcades, and I've played with those UFO machines. I would not have thought they were made by technically a third-party company that is also called Sega toys and owned by Sega, sort of. I think that's why there's so many UFO catchers in Yakuza games. Oh, yeah. Just because it's a Sega, they're just advertising Sega things you can do in the real world. If you went to actual Shinjuku, you could actually play these.

the people who operate the Sega UFO catchers that I've interacted with in Japan are always very friendly, ready to move a toy a little closer just to give you another chance to drop in another 500 yen on stuff. I think the next time I go back, I'll try it. I do consider it a form of gambling, so I don't like to do it. It's not a religious thing or anything. It's just like, I could just buy that toy. I've thrown every trip I usually throw about $20 into one, but I regret it every time. The biggest regret of mine was, I really wanted this one, Persona 4 toy, and it seemed so close to getting it. I must have spent 1,500 yen on it. Then I go to the next door hobby shop that just has it for 1,600 yen. And I thought, what am I doing?

That's why I like going to anime conventions and classic gaming conventions where people will actually open all the blind boxes and just sell you the figure that's in them. Like, I want the Monkey D. Luffy one, or I want this one or that one. And you could just have it. They do all the work for you. That's nice. So Andrew Bamer says about the Pico. Oh, so we talked about books on this episode and we're like, do people still read books? Do children rather still read books? Are these a thing that kids know about? So Andrew says, books are still totally a thing with kids. I have young kids and they both love reading. Way to go, Andrew. Worked as a children's librarian for a while. And children's books are some of the highest circulation in the system. Now I'm a writer in the middle grade and young adult markets are still largely print. Young adult less so as kids start to read on tablets, but Scholastic has the middle grade, elementary. entry to middle school, mark it by the balls, and it's mostly prints.

Even when they move to tablets, there are lots of readers who get their fix on sites like Wattpad or by trawling the free offerings at Amazon. So, interesting. I had no idea. It's good to hear that children still hold thick pieces of paper or collections of paper and flip through them. But the earlier and earlier it gets normalized to give kid that tablet, that'll be the death of it. I mean, I say a lot of things of like, well, I'd never have children. but if I did, which is all just like bullshit, until you actually have a kid. It'd be perfect angels. But if I had a kid, I would have a lot of trepidation about handing them a tablet.

Because when I've seen kids like under six with tablets, I guess there are no more shut off than I was constantly staring at a television as a kid. But I feel weird looking at it where they just are like tap, drag, tap, drag. It feels wrong. I don't know. It's funny because I think earlier in the year, maybe middle of the year, I don't know when it was, but there were all those articles written about, like, the generated content for children, just like generated by computers and how evil it is and stuff like that. And after that, that's all I see kids watching, like, 9,000 variants of the Finger family and that Johnny video. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, the Johnny videos.

The Shark one. Telling lies, yeah. The Shark one is actually just the music video, I'm pretty sure. Oh, it's an actual thing. Yeah, it's actually made by humans, not just like, what was? What is this baby searching for? I mean, again, when we were kids, I would have been the same person.

If I could have watched just the opening to Transformers 500 times in a row, I'd watch it that way all day. I'd do that alone in my apartment. That's great. So up next year, the PlayStation 2 episode number 172, and Henry, you're up next. Gutszant says, or Gutszant?

That's the director of Goodwill Hunting. The launch wasn't particularly strong, and they had problems to fold it. and they have problems to meet full demand due to the complex hardware. The Dreamcast had a fighting chance due to this. While I love the great variety of games, the PS2 was very difficult to program for and the hardware wasn't particularly reliable at first. Even when MGS2 and other system sellers were available,

the PS2 remained difficult to program to the point that Shinji Makami decided that Resident Evil 4 should be on the Nintendo GameCube. Had Xbox Japanese Division not been incompetent, they would have gotten the game and could have more closely competed with the PS2. Even Square was forced to beg Yamauchi for the chance to develop for the

GBA despite being partially owned by Sony at the time. Only much later programming for the emotion engine became easier. I'm going to say it might be a little unfair to call the Xbox Japanese Vision incompetent because no one in Japan wanted

the Xbox. Not a single person. You could not sell it. Nothing was a system seller. You could put a picture of Bill Gates holding a hamburger on the poster. It wouldn't even sell. They did that. They did that. I love that picture of him with the hamburger. Yeah. I miss those days of that billionaire, though he's still around. What am I say? Yeah. But it's like kind of retro. When you see Jeff Bezos, when you see Bill Gates, you're like, he's not sexy and send a dick pics like Jeff Bezos. He's not like a Dr. Evil looking figure. I know, right? Jesus. But anyway, yeah, you know, that Xbox, I remember OG Xbox, their

biggest push was they got Sega, but they could only get some Sega like they could get Red JetSat and Panzer de Groon. Sega GT. Sega GT. Yeah. Weird stuff like Valkyrie, gun Valky Oh, right. It's good because

the controls are bad. That's what I've heard. Yeah, I think it wouldn't be until the 360. I feel like every Xbox for the first year or two they will spend real money to attract Japanese. companies developers. But then when the sales are so low in Japan, they're just like, no, we won't do it.

No matter how much you pay us early, we're still not going to make this exclusive thing of the Xbox. The only times they've ever been really able to do it is when they just straight up pay for the entirety of a game from Mist Walker to make it for them. And they stop doing that even. I mean, that's a lot of money. That's why they killed true fantasy as well. Oh, you're right. God, yeah. I just feel like Xbox has no identity now and that's best for them. them for real it's just the thing you play games on and if you buy the games on pc guess what you can play them on your xbox i think that's how it works why and xbox lives coming to nintendo switch somehow i don't really understand oh man if i was able to download my xbox 360 games onto my

switch that would be so cool like the downloadable ones man all my xbox games is goal will be a lot more worth it to me because i literally i in the last year i have not turned on that xbox one except to watch the cartoon network app because it's not on the ps4 i've i've thought about getting rid of mine. I think it's been over a year. My parrot turns out on by accident, so when he's walking around. That's easy to tap that button. It is. He loves tapping consoles. So up next, we have Omni Smash who says, speaking of the network adapter, you guys also briefly discussed the release of Final Fantasy 11. There was some debate over whether it launched first on PC or PS2. I had a mild obsession with the game leading up to and well after its release.

The long wait for the delayed North American launch was excruciating. It launched in Japan on PS2 and PC in May of 2002 in November 2002, respectively. The North American PC and PS2 versions release wouldn't arrive until October 2003 and March 2004, respectively. I ended up getting Final Fantasy 11 on PC rather than wait an extra six months. All this is to say that my PS2's network adapter turned out to be a pretty big waste of money. I played SOCOM quite a bit in the late summer of 2002, otherwise my network adapter was good for collecting dust. I think the last time I used it was for the demo of Killzone, which I tried for 30 minutes before promptly removing a disc for my console and throwing it in the trash. Wow. Well, I think our PS2 podcast was full of

strong Killzone opinions. Yes, yeah. I am not a Killzone fan at all, so I agree there. I feel like they just had to launch that in America because they promised it. They said it would come, so they didn't want to take that back and lose some consumer trust. I think the hard drive actually had less use than the network adapter. In 2004, there were a bunch of network adapter games, like even a Ratchin and Clank online game. But the hard drive was really just for Final Fantasy, and boy. You know, the Xbox really was ahead of the curve on play PS2 there, but I think in either case, whether you had a hard drive or the internet really usable on it, until America's

online infrastructure caught up with a real ability to play, it couldn't be, you could get it with the PC cuckoos, but you couldn't, for a thing you attached to your TV, it wasn't mainstream enough yet until really the 360 finally hit that sweet spot. Yeah, Xbox was smart from the very beginning with the original Xbox Live where it had a system level identity where you log in with this identity. On the PS2 it's like there's a

proprietary login for all of your games. It's up to the publisher to have servers which is still kind of true today. But it's all on the publisher to set up their own online system where now they can rely on working through the Sony network because you pay to play online now even if you you don't have to buy a modem but you still have to pay

to play online. Well, you're talking about Japan with the Xbox and that was also another difference there like it is Japan has always been slower to embrace that kind of online infrastructure than Western developers have. I think they finally get it but I still think it's treated as like you may as well have it. Yeah the switch I feel like they're just finally doing it the way they always should have. Well that's because they just

it should have been at launch but the system launched I think like a year before they thought they'd launch it. It still feels like it's not done. Oh, it's not. I mean, you can't watch Netflix on it. No. And there's no night mode in that thing. I mean, it's weird. They have this thing, this is so tangential, but so you can change the theme of your

switch to one of two things. It's like white or like reverse colors. So if you reverse the colors, it turns the background black, but all the other colors are reversed. So everything, just like this hideous weird, like, rainbow of like vomit pixels. That's pretty insane. Yeah, like I demand night mode on everything, even

during the day. I can't look at these probably colors anymore. My eyes hurt too much. So Justin Jungles said about the PS2 episode, the Wii also had similar issues where it would have to be sent in to be fixed. If you got to launch Wii like myself, there was a pretty good chance

you would be unable to play Super Smash Bros. Brawl because of the type of disc used. I had to send my Wii into Nintendo for them to update it before I could play the smash game I had been anticipating for months. It was horrible. Also, Zoolander has the

DVD menu. I think Dodgeball is a pretty good DVD menu too. I looked up the Zoolander menu and it is pretty funny. By the way, I hate Zoolanders. Oh, come on Bob. It's a VH1 movie. It's so funny. I feel like, I think I've said this before on all of

our Zoolander podcast, but it's like that character was not ready for a movie. We need more that character. Like, prove that character works. I feel like he's like, this character's so great. I play the handsomest man on the earth. And I kiss all the models. Yes. Yeah. I, you know, what's But there's so many, like, great meme moments in there.

There are good jokes in it, but, boy, I just, it was too much. Like, Will Ferrell is so good in that movie. The Ben Stiller character, a little of that goes a long way. I think that's for most Ben Stiller things. That's how I feel. Well, I heard this opinion recently about, like, why this was on the podcast, The Ride podcast about Muppet Vision. And they said, like, why, okay, never mind.

I watched the video about that, not the podcast. They're like, why are the Muppets, the Muppets work as a five-minute segment of something you see on the internet or they appear on a talk show. Why do they have to be a movie? Why does Will Ferrell have to be a movie? And it's because that's the ultimate version of entertainment in the system we have, even though it's not the best way to see. I, you know, I can watch Holmes, him be Sherlock Holmes for like two minutes in a sketch. The funnier or die was that was the purpose of funny or die. Those sort of ideas. But you don't get as much money for that. Yeah, it's true. It's true. One thing I wanted to say is that, yes, Justin is right,

I believe the Smash Bros. Brawl disc was dual layer. And at that time, the initial whee's were getting to be a few years old, or at least over a year old. So I think I believe mine was having some problems reading it, but I didn't have to turn it in for, you know, get the drive refurbished or whatever they did to it. But yeah, that was a big problem online for a while. Man, I feel pretty lucky I didn't buy a Wii until 2008 because I literally couldn't walk into a store and buy one. And I didn't want to make any plans. I was just like, I just want to walk into Target and buy it. Can I do that?

I don't wait in lines for things anymore, even back then. So up next, we have an episode called The Many Voices of Mario. That was a lot of fun, Henry. You were on that with me. I love talking Mario history. I think I like doing this so much that I want to do a similar episode about Sonic this year. We're less attached to Sonic, but it's still fun. Like, I believe Julio White, he is the ideal Sonic voice.

He is for higher people. What are you doing? He should be at least that nasal from now on. He's got a giant snoot. I just have a big snoots. A pointy snoot. So number one, so user Sean Paul Kearns linked me to an NRBQ song called Captain Lou that I'm going to put in this episode. It's a lot of fun.

I had no idea. I'm only familiar with NRBQ because Mike Scully, showrunner of seasons 9 through 12 of the Simpsons, loves NRBQ, and he put them in the show like four times. And they'll be taking care of business. They certainly took care of Scully. Scully took care of their business by licensing their songs. So they're going to get some money. It was the other way around. Their business was taken care of.

So, by the way, Gutsan is going to pop up a lot in this episode because he left some of the best comments. If you want to be like Gutszance, leave comments at Retronauts.com. We're on the Patreon if you subscribe to the Patreon. But Guts is going to talk more about Lou Albano, and he says, for me, Lou Albano will always be the best live action Mario and my favorite Mario voice, a true Italian-American voice. I even prefer his voice over Martin A's due to that life experience that evokes that's missing from all the other voices.

Excellent explanation about the wrestling business by Henry. and how it played perfectly for Albano's role as Mario. I'm now even more interested in Albano's wrestling career. I enjoy Roddy Piper's and Sergeant Slaughter's appearances in the show. I also like Mario's first Japanese voice. I think the great mission to rescue Princess Peach is better than all the Mario animations, even if it's a little weird and with somewhat inappropriate theme songs. And I confess that I like Mommy Yamaseh's songs and voice as Peach.

It did leave a legacy, though. From my understanding, Princess Peach's current appearance is based on her design in this film. And you might be right. Well, she looks kind of bad on that Mario Japanese cover for Mario 1. As imagined in 1 and 2 and in Shigeru Miyamoto's original drawings of her, she is as short as the toads because she's the toadstool princess, so she's just a little thing. I don't know if she's supposed to be read as a child or as a just small woman

or maybe what Miyamoto originally imagined a female toad would look like. or Miyamoto put no thought into it because he just drew a cover to put a game out that he thought of it. It's kind of a wonky-looking face. I'm looking at it now. Yeah, and so they then decided to make her more of the traditional Disney-style princess,

the kind who would lovingly lord over the toad people for years to come. Dictator for life, Princess Peach. But they did not keep Luigi's weird colors in that movie. No, I think that movie is silly and fun. I mean, I love 80s kids' anime look. going to find no bigger fan to me. So I, and also the bar is very low for animation, for Mario.

Who knows what Imagine Studios will do for Mario if they're going to bring him up. Hope they don't screw it up. Get Lord and Miller on that project. That's a great point about Albano though, that he's just like real. Well, because Mario was invented for the guys of Albania's generation and they don't exist anymore. Italian-American immigrants of that age, like they don't exist anymore. but they don't really

that's not the immigrant class then and so Martin A I think it's good he went into a cartoony Italian voice yeah the Mickey Mouse of Italian Americans because otherwise

like it'll just come off fake and Albano comes off is real because he's a road-hardened like big guy who smoked a ton of cigarettes and those guys don't exist and Martin A does a lot of gruffer Italian voices too like Walloigi and Wario so he gets those out too

But up next we have Luigi's Mansion episode 179. Henry, can you grab this one? You're on this one as well. I was on that one as well, and it's guts santa again. The story actually makes sense because the portrait ghosts were captured by EGAD, and the booze were the ones that freed them to take revenge against the Mario brothers. That's why they are different from the others. Something that I think me and you were just like, how come there's boos and not boo ghosts? There's two different kinds of ghosts in this world. Something the dark moon ghosts don't have much in personality, which the portrait ghosts have in spade. They might make little sense, but I always love to imagine the lore behind them. The point of beating them as well as possible is to get the best pearls to earn more money, get the best ranking, and then the best mansion at the end. This is easier in the hard mode. It's a similar mechanic to the first Wario Land. A good point. And we know we

need to get the best mansion so that Luigi can fulfill his destiny as Rosalina's father. What is that? I honestly don't know that. I thought you would know, Henry. Luigi is Rosalina's father. That is one. I've heard a lot of Mario fan theories out there, but not that Luigi is Rosalina's father. I've never heard that. That's weird.

I don't think the ages match up. I mean, she's from space, so she could have, some wormhole could make her come from a different timeline. Is she in the new Smash Brothers? Yeah. Okay, good. She was in four on the Wii U. Oh, you're right. Okay, cool.

Everyone is here. The roster is so huge. It's easy to, well. And I unlocked her in Switch. I was like, awesome. Finally, Rosalina. Oh, wait, now I played us here on the Wii. I completely forgot about Smack Brothers 4 Wii.

Yeah, I mean, the Switch replaces all previous. Don't think of any other Smash Brothers in your memory. It's just all that. It's that. It's the perfect version. But, okay, so I'm glad there is more consistent. Gus Sance is very nice to keep up with the continuity of the Mario universe for us. I'm just wondering where the original portrait ghost came from.

You know, EGAD captured them. I mean, they seem to be actual people. who just died and were haunting his mansion. Ultimately, I want to know where those people came from because you are, there's a dead baby in this game, if it's true. I think there's portraits of people that just came to life. That's what I think it is. Okay, so not a person who's still alive, but portraits of people that came to life as operations.

And like in the haunted mansion, there are portraits that sort of, in the Disney's haunted mansion ride. So on the real haunted mansion ride, the portraits come to life. I don't know if those are, like, I don't know the story behind the haunted mansion because apparently there's merch for the haunted mansion ride where there's a main character that I never see

because whenever I go to Disneyland which is rare it's dressed up with Jack Skellington stuff so I never see that character but I want to know are the portraits in the haunted mansion portraits of people who died in the mansion or whatever because the lore is again

like you're the thousandth guest with 40 other people in the room I believe that old lady or sorry the floating head lady awakens all the ghosts I think that's part of it which I love her speech Like that's so cool, her floating head.

It's a fun ride that at first is terrifying and then it's like, no, no, we're having fun here. It's funny that I think, we're talking about Disneyland now, by the way. I don't know why, but if you go on all the old rides, and I was just there a month ago, and I went on all the really old rides that I never went on before because they're all for babies, but it's like those rides are designed to scare children. They had a very different idea of what a ride should be in the 1950s and 1960s. It will scare you, number one.

I went on a scary ride like that as a child And it really freaked me out My scary rides were not for me then Just, oh, it's dark And a thing popped out I'm going to die That's what my little brain thought Mr. Tota's all about driving and going to hell

Well, I learned my lesson Not to buy automobiles I never have But when he's on a seat Everything's all right To look at the Louer Our battle With a man of thousands

faces I know we be going places I'm going to stick with a guiding light Captain Lou, Captain Lou, Alvado Lou, don't worry because he's figured in Captain Luke, Captain Lou and he's got your teeth like a written tin Captain Lou, Captain Lou, I'll battle

with a man of style you better not cry you better not shout i'm telling you what dracula dracula is coming to town So up next, we have Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon Games, which Henry was not on, surprisingly. Episode 181. You should have had me on. Henry said, get those women off the show. That's what he's always telling me. I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

So Psychobabble says, the Latin American experience of both of these core shows is very much different since, and this still puzzles me, we got both shows largely uncensored and fairly faithfully adapted in the early 90s. I also felt like I had to justify watching Sailor Moon in the last years of elementary school, and specifically remembering deflecting the mock comments of a classmate by telling him that quote, well, they get completely naked when they transform. So there. I feel like animation aside, I have to defend Crystal for trying to be a more faithful adaptation of the manga. And the manga is a bit more of a disappointment for someone who love the original anime since it's vastly a more dramatic and sometimes violent series. And that is from Psycho Babel. And check out our What a Cartoon on Sailor Moon R we just did, the What a Cartoon podcast. You know, I had, I got to hear some interesting things about Crystal

since we put out that podcast because I didn't love it when I watched the first few episodes and I'd heard from the Sailor Moon fans who are women the same age as me they also were like, I don't like Crystal, I'm not watching it. It sucks. So I thought that was the accepted idea of Crystal

that like among actual Sailor Moon fans, which I'm not like a real Sailor Moon fan. But then I got to hear from a lot of people that were like, no, Crystal's the best one. I love that they brought back the heavier themes and elements of the manga into it. It's good that there, I guess, there's a faithful adaptation of the manga. Like, the original will still exist and still be the most beloved, but it's cool that they were able to do it again. Yeah.

Although I like the more slapsticky, wacky, original version. That's still super melodramatic and violence. Yeah, I like, I just can't, I can't turn away from the goofy silliness of it. I do love that. I miss the 90s. That's the motto of Retronauts. You're up next, Henry. Oh, boy, this looks like a mix-zine talk here, which is a very special to me.

Natalia Kusoga says, God, Jeremy bringing up Mick Zine gave me incredible, gave me horrible flashbacks. Those were some of the worst localizations I ever read. I remember showing an issue to a Japanese friend who couldn't stop laughing at the way they would badly redraw parts of the comics. Sometimes for censorship, like in prayer sites, I'll talk about that in a second. but sometimes for no apparent reason at all. It always struck me as a bunch of people who didn't really like manga all that much just messing around with the source material

for their own entertainment and selling it to suckers who didn't know any better. So I pulled this one because I know that you have experience with Mixene. Oh yes, yeah. I was day one Mixene subscriber. I got a whole year of Mixene. I mean, as presented at the time in the mid-90s, to a young wee, it was very interesting to me

because you hear about how cool comics are in Japan. You pay four bucks and you get a telephone book-sized thing of comics as opposed to $2 getting you 20 pages of comic books in America. So that was like, well, I want to see that kind of thing succeed here. I'd love to see that. And Mixene was one of, if not the first presentation of that in America. And they had a lot of... Sailor Moon was their big get.

on it. Although they also had Parasite, which actually was my favorite comic in the book. But the problem was that they didn't know what audience they wanted. And other than Sailor Moon, they got manga that were really meant for older, aimed at an older boy market in Japan. But they wanted to sell it in grocery stores and on the regular racks at comic shop. Next to Archie. So if, say, in Parasite, a character's arm turns into a penis. Like, they can't do that. So many children are just ripped in half in Parasite. It's gloriously violent.

Total, like constant murder dismemberment. Yeah. Honestly, I'm shocked that it got to come out at the time when dismemberment especially was so frowned upon in Japan. It was actually just before then. Oh, okay. It's from the late 80s, early 90s. So if it had come out in like 95, it would have been no more topping off arms and headspeople. Which is the entirety of combat in Parasite.

Parasite, I love Parasite. It's so good. The manga is so good. And James Karen ripped it off. He sure did. But yeah, so Mixine was just full of, like, constant changes to all these things to try to localize it more. It was such aggressive localization. But it was that or nothing at the time.

Yeah, it takes what you can get. Yeah, they, well, if I was, if I was an American editor who didn't really understand Weebbs, I would think like, no one wants to read the name Usagi a hundred times in here. What even is that? I guess it translates to rabbits. So everyone just calls her bunny. Just call her bunny. That's it. And we liked it.

yes well i mean i i liked it but now it's like how did i live through watching just fuzzy real player subs of dragon ball poorly streamed uh i just don't know how he did it and all the flip manga i read oh i think another reason i got mczine was because i was uh really excited for the potential of the sagan saturn game magic knight ray earth and it had magic knight ray earth in mxene as well and yeah actually the flipping was annoying too in retrospect especially for parasite where the entire point is that is his hand is one hand and he has to change everything about the comic

so it can be the opposite hand in the flipped version. We should point out that if you like manga and anime, well maybe just manga, check out the Shonen Jump app. It's really good. And for two bucks a month, you have access to the entire run

of like, what, 40 manga series, including Dragon Ball. Dragon Balls, Z, Dragon Ballo Super, Naruto, one piece, all of one piece. Yeah, all like 94 volumes of One Piece and still going.

you like... And newer books like Dr. Stone, too. Yeah, I mean, even digital manga is like seven bucks a volume individually, and that's how I've been buying it. But for two bucks a month, you get access to all of that stuff. And you know what? And My Hero Academia. That too, yeah. And Bakuman, one of my favorite comics about making comics. Even if you don't want to read it, just get the app and pay two bucks a month. They deserve it for just giving us that treasure for so cheap. God, I hope it lasts. I salute you, my master's it's Shown and Jump. So up next, we have the Holiday Special 2018, which we did the episode, Holiday, Holiday,

hijinks from the original Pokemon anime. Ah, yes, good times. And our Japanese correspondent in Canada, Nina Matsumoto says, this is all about Japan and Santa, which stuff I didn't know. They do tell children in Japan that Santa will bring gifts to good kids, but I don't think it's as heavily enforced. About the number of reindeer, in Japan, Santa is commonly depicted with just one or two reindeer, and if there are two or more, they often all have red noses. Santa's other reindeer aren't common knowledge because the night before Christmas isn't a thing in Japan. I imagine it's hard to translate to make it rhyme nearly as well. And while there is an official Japanese version of the song, Rudolph the Red Nose Rindier,

it doesn't include the intro naming all the reindeer. It's simply called the Red Nose Raneer. No name mentioned. It just says everyone laughed at him, not indicating that everyone furs to other reindeer. Wow, Savage. That's even harsher than classic Rudolph. The world laughed at Rudolph. And since the Red Nose Rinder isn't named, I guess they decided Santa only uses reindeer with red noses, of which there are many.

I mean, that makes Santa a better person in it, too. He's like, everyone laughed at this reindeer with a red nose, but I need your help. And not that he's saying, like, the shitty guy Santa is in the Rankin' Bass classic. You'll come in handy, freak.

Yeah. I'm so disappointed in you, Blitzin. How dare you bring this freak here? And then later, he's like, I need this help with some freak. Get in here, freak. I love all of Dana Gould's commentary on this that film. Call that a

penis? That's a freak factory. I don't know what it is, but he has a lot of bits on the how terrible the moralization is in that movie. Wasn't it sucky this last Christmas that then became the new thing that the culture warriors were defending? It was? It kind of became that.

I miss this. People were saying the same shit that's been said for a decade by snarky dorks like us came more to the service And people say, Rudolph's actually shitty, and they treat Rudolph really badly. And so then the counter argument to that from conservatives was like, oh, so they're trying to take away Rudolph now too. You just want to destroy everything.

I've heard comedians making these jokes for 17 years at least about this hacky special. That's still fun to watch. The songs are great. It's maybe gives a bad message to children, but adults could still watch. They were kids of the 60s. They were ruined anyway. And Defight, also a correspondent from Japan. says, the blackface issue is as yet unresolved here in Japan, but I feel that the push against

it is rising. A comedian who made it big, imitating Obama, quit using makeup because he heard it upset people. And a couple of years ago, an activist slash writer living in Yokohama managed to create a stir when a blackface act was advertised on a Fuji TV special, so much so that the special was canceled. On the other hand, director Takeshi Kitano remains a popular TV personality who has zero qualms about wearing blackface whenever he feels like it. There's been a lot of blackface in the media lately, in the news lately. Yeah, boy, everybody loved blackface at some point in time. That is interesting timing on that comment too. Yeah. As far as the Japanese version of that goes, it is hard. I can only see it as an outsider.

I mean, I would think a guy of Beat Takeshi's established notoriety. does just, if he shows up in blackface, you respect that. You're just like, well, you are a respected entertainer. I guess this is funny. And you just wait for him to die and hope that it stops after he's dead. I mean, again, we talked about this on the podcast, so we in America are not holier than now.

We invented blackface. We invented mistralcy. It was one of our first forms of pop culture in America. And Japan likes our pop culture, and they gladly accepted it without the context surrounding it. I was just thinking about it. We might have talked about this on the podcast, but like, out of the three late-night TV hosts, everyone but Colbert played a blackface character on TV.

Jimmy Kimmel played Chris Rock. In the 90s. Look at those sketches. It's kind of shocking, actually. It's incredible. And Jimmy Kimmel played Caram alone. And so, like, this is a common thing. Like, even Kitts in the Hall had a blackface character with Mark McKinney played.

Eventually, he stopped doing... They did a sketch in there about how they should stop doing the jazz man. Exactly. And why he's like, well, look, this is why I like the jazz man. but he also, he stopped playing it without facial, without anything on his face. That's true, yeah. But it's still, it's, you know, yeah. Or I also heard another, everyone's favorite funny man, Billy Crystal.

Oh, right, right, right, right a lot. It's, uh, yeah. One of the funniest things I've ever listened to is, uh, the podcaster radio host, Tom Sharp. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. He listens to the Billy Crystal. in his jazz man voice talking about Katrina in the aftermath of Katrina

a very serious topic but his made-up jazz man character apparently suffered through it too and he's doing a full performance as this that he's like this is for you New Orleans he's stealing Hurricane Survivor Valor and also doing like a minstrel show

at the same time nice awesome not in costume or anything And it's just, as Tom Sharpley calls it, it's vocal blackface. Well, what's his face even made of these days? Can makeup stick to it? Have you seen Billy Crystal? It's just, yeah. So, and then in the last month, we found out everyone in Virginia wore blackface in the 80s, apparently.

Yeah, it was totally cool. I don't understand. I mean, I grew up in the South. I did not understand blackface as a child. I didn't know. You just see it occasionally because, like, somebody forgot to edit an old, uh, bugs Money cartoon. That was how I was introduced to the idea of Blackface actually as a child

growing up in the south, which was the, I forget the name, I think it's like Yukon Bugs or something. It's the Bugs Bunny one where Elmer Fudd is a Mountie. Right, right. And at the end, Bugs Bunny is about to be put to death and they firing squad and he says, do you have any last

wishes? He says, I wish I was in Dixie. And then they start singing and it cuts to them all in full minstrel get up, singing that song and I was just like, what the, what is this? And my, my poor mother had to explain to a child what blackface was and how bad it was. I mean, ultimately for me, a completely painted face freaks me out, like clown style. And when it's racist, it's even worse. So get

away from me. I think it's just a primal fear in my brain that comes from somewhere. Who knows? But it was seen as a tradition. You could find, I mean, this blackface stuff, it's interesting to have another talk about it, as we always do. But it's, but it's, You know, bamboozled is a really great movie about it that I don't think was, at the time I thought, boy, is this too harsh or is this too obvious in its depiction? And now I'm like, nah, not harsh enough, not bad enough. So up next, we have Warioware. A lighter topic. Episode 192, no blackface there.

And Blargg says, WarioWare Dute Yourself is like Little Big Planet in that I spent hours watching all the tutorials and then never created anything. I did download a bunch of user-created levels. It was a fun little community. Someone figured out how to circumvent the time limit, meaning microgames could possibly last forever. The We Shop also had Wario Wear DIY showcase, allowing you to play the fan-made games without owning a DS. For what it's worth, Wario Wear Gold

does at least rework the graphics for the games it does repeat. And e-shop games do go on sale. I bought Majora's mask for half off a few years ago, and that's true. I think only in recent years has Nintendo embraced actual sales, not like, we'll give you 8% off. Yeah, they're getting closer to like, okay, 40, fine.

Will you accept 40? That's a good deal. They're getting a little better. The indie games, they actually get close to Steam-like sale levels of like 70% off, which that is impressive. I would think Nintendo wouldn't want that. If they're not willing to go that low on their own games, they wouldn't want an indie game to be that low. Yeah. I just want to see something similar to this, which I think we talked about on that podcast.

You were on that, correct? The Warrior One. We talked about how Mario Maker is the series. spiritual successor to Made in Wario. So right now there's no outlet for that because the Meverse

is shut down. So all the functionality of that game is stripped bare. You can't upload levels. You can't rate levels. You can download some levels made by Nintendo people.

I don't know, but the community is no longer there. And the Wii e-shop is gone. You can't even play that DIY Mario game anymore either. Yeah. And then the 3DS version of Mario Maker,

I can't believe that that was released the way it was. It's like, why don't we take the most interesting thing out of this game? That'd be pretty fun. It's like, no, no. Somebody will pay for this.

Well, the DS needed something, Bob. Yeah. And Nintendo doesn't really want to make... I believe right now, Persona Q2 is the only 3DS game that has a scheduled release date in this fiscal year. We're recording this about a week before it goes live, but the prediction is, and I agree, like Chris Kohler said as much, that the new smaller switch that will likely be happening will be their replacement for the 3DS. And I welcome our new Switch smaller overlords Because, God, that thing is hard to take with you on trips And very easy for people to steal with their guns

I still like playing it portable as it is, though Maybe they'll sell me more on this new version of the Switch Which I'm certain will come because Nintendo re-releases a thing every two years Let's make it two screens and a clamshell I definitely want a clamshell Yeah, it needs to be that I agree So here's one that Henry wasn't on Princess Tomato in the Salad

Kingdom. This was commenter Nina's first episode as a guest, and she'll be back very soon, if not before this episode goes live. So Nathan Daniels says, given the subject matter, this episode's fantastically done, art is rather ghastly. Is cucumber standing on her kin? And Nathan

also says, I haven't played this game, but I wanted to mention to Bob that the I know nothing line might also be from Faulty Towers. The bellhop is from Barcelona, and he's always saying that. That said, I haven't seen Hogan's heroes, and it's possible that the Faulty Towers line is itself a reference to Hogan's hero.

So I'm here to break it down because we're old pop culture super nerds. So number one, yes, the cover art for this episode is very ghoulish, but in the game itself, they are vegetable people, but they also grow vegetables

and fruit to eat. So make of that what you will. They also drink wine, which is like drinking mummy juice if you're a great person. I mean, we're mammals who eat mammals, so what's really the difference, man? Get off your high horse, Nathan.

But I will say, so in the scene I'm talking about in Princess Tomato, on that episode where you go to this bookstore to find out where the resistance is because you're fighting this evil dictator. Again, it's very, very militaristic, very Nazi-ish themes and stuff like that in this game. Maybe very, very fascist themes. I wouldn't say Nazi themes. But you go in the bookstore, and for some reason, this guy has a German accent. And when you talk to him, he goes, I know nothing. That's obviously, obviously, duh. We've

all seen Hogan's here. It was obviously Sergeant Schultz who, like, I see nothing, I hear nothing. I know nothing. That was his catchphrase. And that was also the catchphrase of Manuel from Faulty Towers, which I respect John Cleese as a comedy writer, and that's one of the best sitcoms on the planet, Faulty Towers. He would not be referencing Hogan's Heroes. Absolutely not. No way in hell. I refuse to believe that. They just have similar catchphrases. I find it hard to believe like the Cambridge educated John Cleese would be like, time to reference my favorite shows as a, what, 18-year-old, Hogan's Heroes? No, that's not going to happen.

But there's a great episode about Germans in Faulty Towers. It's been about a decade. Yeah, I loved that one as a kid. Is that the one where he gets sort of high on something and he's trying to avoid asking about the war? Don't talk about the war. Don't talk about the war. Then he eventually is goose stepping right in their faces. Yeah.

Oh, so good. Good times. Good times. All right. So, we're on to the Dragon Quest 11, which I also was on. Boy, is Henry's greatest hits here. But I was really glad we got to do the Dragon Quest 11 one because I just had a so much information

I had nowhere else to talk about Dragon Quest yes and I'm glad we did it and by the way since that episode was recorded I finished the game with the first real ending and I'm going back

to get the second ending I finished at 116 hours which I did almost everything you could do at that point so yes I stuck it through and I did finish the game and now you have the equal of another video game

to play in the post game oh god let me be Kingdom Hearts 3 first so superstar gut to sand again has this to say I'm glad Dragon Quest 11 receive the Retronaut's Breath of the Wild treatment. I hope that Nintendo continues to help Square Inix with a westward push for Dragon Quest

and that the rumors about Erdrich Roto appearing in the next DLC character in Smash or True. Oh boy, I hope that's true too. I also wish they released Dragon Quest 10 in the West if they are successful in generating interest in the series. DQ deserves to be at least on the level of Final Fantasy in the West, and I hope that Square Annex manages to do what Capcom did for Monster Hunter after several tries. I don't share Bob's

views about Sugiyama. I'm more in line with the Mercado Bro's analysis of his work in particular about the composition part. The in-game implementation might not be that good, but from my understanding, he normally isn't

involved in that part. I believe Dragon Quest 11 was a return to basics after experimenting with Dragon Quest 9 and 10, so perhaps the music implementation was by design. After all, they were able to do it for Dragon Quest 8 in the American PS2 version and the Japanese 3DS version. If there was any restriction from Sugiyama,

it probably had to do with a future orchestral collection. But I'm guessing it's more likely that the dual 3DS PS4 release had something to do with that aspect. So the Marcato Brothers, I believe it's Super Markado Brothers, a podcast. So I had no idea about that podcast, but apparently it's good. Actually, we don't really know. This is all just conjecture, but I still feel like the choice to make the music sound the way

it does in that game was a choice. It was a choice that I'm sure any sane person on the staff was like, this sounds bad. Nobody walks away from that game and thinks, that's a good sounding game. So that was a choice possibly made by a higher-up, possibly Sugiyama or one of his assistants. I think there was no accident that it turned out that way. I like that theory about

the parody between 3DS and PS4. I could see that they're like, well, we want this to sound the same. We can't make him to look the same. I've heard 3DS games sound a lot better than that PS4 music. I mean, the game is also supposed to have a

very throwback feel to it in a of ways so maybe that's the artistic choice i'm i should have just made chip like eight bit chip tunes then or something i mean bob i do still agree with you that like it's like i feel most likely that sugiama has a very old school way of thinking that he wants to sell his record of the orchestral version which you get in the collector's edition but he doesn't want those sales hurt by being in the main game i can see it as being as pig-headed as that but i mean sugama uh it's hard to think he has any good qualities about it now because he's kind of an old asshole from what I've read about him. And he's also, I wouldn't trust the business savvy of a 90-year-old man. It's like ultimately,

how many CDs are you going to sell? Come on. And you know what? Again, no matter what these people do to try to hide their music or try to not let you access their music, just go on YouTube or anywhere. It's there. It's all there instantly. They don't know about YouTube, is it on Nico Nico? Oh, no. Probably not. Well, I think, though I do agree with this. I really like the first half of that comment too about how you know they want more Dragon Quest

Nintendo helps with the westward expansion Dragon Quest is getting more exposure in America than it has in a long time right now and that's good

but I do feel like Monster Hunter I guess I never thought Monster Hunter World would hit as big as it did like Capcom revealed it is by and large the highest selling monster

I've ever done I'm so happy about that the Witcher event just launched which I got to play we got a lot going on this weekend got to play that before I leave. And new expansion coming out.

So yeah, Monster and Our World really worked. And they might need to do a little more to modernize Dragon Quest. I don't know if they'll ever get to do that, though. I'll tell you what, so Kingdom Hearts 3 just came out, and I've started playing that for a future episode. Spoilers, there'll be a Kingdom Hearts 3 episode pretty soon later in the year. But after playing Dragon Quest 11, I feel like even more impressed by how much they modernized that game, because Kingdom Arts 3 is a thoroughly old-feeling game in every way.

It is not like Final Fantasy 15, and it is not like Dragon Quest 11. It is a 2006-ass game. It's a PS3 game. It's a PS3 game. Like every menu, every step you take, every cutscene, everything in the game to design, just it feels so old. That's not, you know, a complaint or anything. It's just they, he didn't care.

The director did not care. He's like, I'm making my game the way I want to make. It is very much of the early 2000s, like, 9 million mini-game collections RPG. Well, and same with the engine it runs on too. I mean, that's what's another impressive thing about Dragon Quest 11 that they seem to finally get the message like, you know, Unreal makes games look

really good. What if we use that? What if we didn't make our own engine every three years? Crystal tools, come on. I highly doubt Dragon Quest 10 will ever come here because its day has passed in Japan, and if they don't care about it in Japan anymore, they're really not going to put all the work into an online thing

here. And I also think after FF14 had its struggles, that had FF logo on it, like them trying to launch MMO here with a brand that still isn't that popular in America? I don't see that happening. Somebody was saying, it's one of the comments I didn't include what someone was saying in the comments that after the release of 11 in Japan, like a few months after, there was a commercial with like a bunch of sad people upset that they finished Dragon Quest 11 and there was an ad campaign for 10. Like come back to 10. We've got things for you to do in 10.

Like come play 10. So apparently they were saying 10 is a lot like 11 in its design. Oh, it is. I mean, the testing ground for 11 was 10, from what I've heard from folks who played it. I didn't play it. I mean, I'm going to play 11 again. If the switch version has the 2D mode that was in the 3DS version and that gets localized, I will play 11 again, even though I put 125 hours. I loved it. At the same time, yeah, I played 160 hours and I had to stop myself from playing the rest of the prolog? No, sorry, epilogue. I think, I do wonder what the future of Dragon Quest 11 will be, or after Dragon Quest 11 will be, because they really do put like a period on the end of the sentence, and it almost feels like Yuji Hori is saying goodbye to his era of Dragon Quest, and then, Dragon Quest could be anything next time, but I bet then they say that now, but when they start making the design doc for Dragon Quest 12, they're like, let's play it safe. I feel like is what they're going to say. God, I just, there's so many questions I want answered by the epilogue, like, what are those little blobby guys? Oh, you'll get it, Bob. I had to wait 120 hours to find out. So our last comment is from Zachary Walton, who has the real answer about Sugiyama.

He said in a recent interview, Sugiyama said that video games have to sound like video games instead of using orchestral scores. It's probably BS, though, since he's also a board member of Jazz Rack, the Japanese music rights organization. They are super stingy and litigious,

so it tracks he just doesn't want orchestral music that he can sell being available in a game to rip. It was ridiculous that the orchestrated Dragon Quest 11 score was available in a two-cd-pack with the U.S. Special Edition, but not in a game. JazzRack and Sugiyama even had the gall

to tell people they couldn't stream or post videos of Dragon Quest 11 with the music, like anyone would actually want to listen to it. Exactly. Well, I mean, you still, many websites are still supposed to not post any picture of Dragon Quest 11 that doesn't have a copyright of Square NXS slash Bird Studios

slash I think of some other company underneath it. That's crazy. It's a fucking screen. Yeah, you know what? I can't stand what ruins my immersion in a game. When I'm playing a game and like a scene starts and all of a sudden a big disclaimer pops up, like, you can't stream this. Turning off streaming for you.

It's just like, I'm trying to watch something. And you know that it's on YouTube right now. It's not like they prevented it. It's just, it's silly. Also, the ideal way to listen to your license music is not watching a stream with someone talking over it. and sound effects being played during it. Like, no one is doing that.

I mean, it's just, it's a very musty, old vision of music. Like, they, if you were used to such control that you could tell people, like, say, on a TV show, what they could play of your music, and then you just see hundreds of young, millions of young people sharing your music, however they feel like it on YouTube, that would be very upsetting if you were used to a certain level of control. So I get it, but also get out of the way, old man. Yeah, we're living in the future. Why have such great orchestral music that you can only hear on a CD?

And I have that fucking CD in my box over there, the collector's edition. I cram that podcast full of the orchestral music. I put more music in that episode than I normally do, just to give a middle finger to Jazz Rack. Jazz Rack's kids send you a cease and desist real soon, but. They'll never find me. So yes, that was our listener comments. Catchup episode, look for another one, probably in the summer. It's fun to respond to you guys.

You always have great comments. And again, if you want us to read your comment and respond to you, please go to Retronauts.com and post a comment in the blog post. We actually don't get that many, for how many downloads we get. And same for the Patreon, too. So I'm sure you guys have lots of stuff to say. Hopefully not complaints. People are usually very nice, except about Bioshock. But actually, I should point out that...

In Venezuela, you couldn't even talk about Bioshock. No. They take away all my shocks. But Gary Butterfield of Watch Off for Fireballs, I believe he's going to be having a Bioshock infinite episode soon. And I think he's got some things to say about that game And I can't wait to listen to it So check his podcast out too So thanks for listening again folks

This has been Retronauts And I've been one of your host for this one, Bob Mackey And if you'd like to support Retronauts And get every episode a week out of time Add free and at a higher bit rate Please go to Patreon.com slash Retronauts And for three bucks That can all be yours

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and we love Patreon and all they do for us so please go to patreon.com slash retronauts and I do also a ton of other podcasts with Henry. Oh yes, that is true. So this is a dual plugging here of myself. That's right, me and Bob do two. Count them two weekly animation podcast for your ears. You can listen to me and Bob do Talking Simpsons

our chronological explanation of the Simpsons from the very beginning. We are in season nine now, nine. Episode 200 is coming soon, and we have What a Cartoon, which we have done for almost a whole year. Each week, me and Bob go through a different animated series and a specific episode for your listening enjoyment, and it's a ton of fun. One of my favorites is the G.I. Joe one we did with Retronaut's co-host, Jeremy Parrish. And Jeremy is also on the episode about The Max, the series The Max. Yeah, and I hope to have them more in the future. And also, you can hear those podcasts on all your podcast listening devices, Talking Simpsons.

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We're better for you, lower in calories, and we'll last you an entire month. Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter at H-E-N-E-R-E-Y-G. As for me, you can follow me on Twitter as Bob Serbo, and that's it for this week's episode of Retronauts. We'll see you next time, folks. I don't know. I'm going to be able to I'm going to be. And so,

you know, I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to be. And so I'm A.

I'm I don't know. I'm going to be able to be. I'm not. I don't know. I don't know. Thank you.