Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 212: Namco's Arcade History, Pt. 3

Episode Date: April 8, 2019

The Retronauts East crew continues their ongoing survey of Namco's legendary arcade output through the ’80s, tackling classics like Rolling Thunder and Pac-Mania as well as obscurities like Marchen Maze.

This week in Retronauts, we're Hopping Mad for Namco. Hi, everyone. I am Jeremy Parrish, here with Retronauts in the Retronauts in the Retronauts Which apparently is a thing now, according to Ben Edwards, who's sitting there across the room for me? Wow, guys. Introduce yourselves. Who's here? Ben Edwards. Oh, yeah, I just mentioned you. It's also known as Deadly Tower number two. That's where you did. You're the Twin Tower?

The window, man. It's a deadly tower. I'm looking at them right now. Right, right. And Ben Elgin, sliding into the Namco version over here after doing Sega earlier. Are you sliding into the Minchies? Yeah, I think so. Isn't that who Mapi fights? Might be. But yeah, I miss the early Namco. So I'm kind of coming in midstream here and we'll see how it goes. Right. I couldn't remember who had been on the previous episodes and it would be so much work for me to like jump on the internet and Google it for like 10 seconds. So welcome. Welcome to the Namco discussion. I'm sorry that you missed the really cool formative stuff.

Well, there's some fun stuff in here. Yeah. This is this is where Namco gets wild and crazy. And no one, no one does wild and crazy like our fourth chair. Hi, it's Chris Sims. Do you mind if I run to the bullet? room real quick? The bullet room. Is that what we're calling in the bathroom now? Yeah. Because I have to jump over a railing to get there. All right.

Yes, we're going to be talking about Namco. We have done two of these episodes already. We've talked about the early, early days of Namco. I think it's two, right? Two previous episodes? It seemed like it was five years ago. I know, man. Well, I put these notes together back in like October.

Yeah. And then we've done other like things came up like, you know. Well, we had to double up the end of the year. Right, right. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it didn't help that the years and review episode ran way over. We talked too much. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, today's notes, this episode and the other one we're recording,

we're prepared back like six months ago. So if we seem a little rusty on these topics, it's because we deeply researched these half a year ago, and now we've forgotten everything. So take a trip back in time with us six months to explore the world of NAMP. from 1986 to 1988

Where were you guys in 1988? I was 10 So, elementary school. In 1986, I was 4. So I did not. not know what video games were yet, because that would only happen later. Your parents sheltered you?

Yeah, well, I got a Nintendo after I tried five. By age four, these days, kids are like Fortnite pros. They've made $100,000 streaming on Twitch already. They've already gotten in trouble for saying bad things on Twitch. Oh, yeah, they've already, like, revealed themselves as racist. Four-year-old has already had the issue of public apology. Exactly. It's a different world.

Okay. But yes, I was picking up my Nintendo. somewhere around here. Like, Super Mario 2 was like 88, right? Yeah. Yeah. In, yes, in America? Yeah.

Yeah. So that was about this era. Yeah. Yeah. In 86, I was 5. 88. I was 7. That's wildly different.

Every year of your life is, you know, like 10 year block when you're that age. Right. As opposed to now where you just, like, live by 10 year blocks. Yeah. Yeah. Every five seconds, is it 10 year blocks? I don't know what you guys are about. I live my life a quarter mile at a time.

Yeah, I meant the opposite of that. Anyway, so 86, I probably, I probably, probably saw NES for the first time at a friend's house. We played Atari 800 games a lot at that time and 2,600 games still before we got an ES, I think in 88 probably. So that's about where I was. Yeah, for me, 86 was where, you know, I got my NES. And I think a little bit before that, we got a Colico Vision, Clico Adam, after those things were cleared out for $10 because no one wanted them. Oh, yeah. I still don't want it. And I got A couple of them.

But the tape drive, the daisy wheel printer. You know the tape drive, I mean, if you turn that thing on with the tape in it, it could wipe out the tape or mess it up. Yeah, good times. Probably not a lot of us were hanging out in arcades a whole lot yet at this point. No, like, arcades were very vibrant in the first half of the 80s, and then you got to the second half of the 80s, and they became noticeably less so. Yeah, but a few of these things you could find hanging out in, like, restaurants and stuff.

So I know I've seen some of them, you know, Pizza Hut, Shaky Cheese. Yeah, I feel. for me, my encounters with arcade games around this period of time was mostly at pizza places or at like putt-puts. Yeah. Because, you know, friends, like a couple of times a year, I'd have friends who had birthday parties at putt putt. So their arcade area never got smaller, even after the golden age of arcades kind of

imploded. They just kept putting new games in. So stuff like this. You know, this is around the time that Atari games split away from Atari Corp and started and making really, really influential groundbreaking arcades, like the American arcade scene, really kind of came back to life around this time with stuff like Rampert and Gauntlet and, I don't know,

APB, whatever the hell, Rampage, you know, Midway, Williams, they were doing really cool stuff. 720, Granny and the Gators, maybe not Granny of the Gators. That was one of the hybrid pinball video game along with Pac-Man, Baby Pac-Man, Jr., whatever the hell it was. Man, Jr. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway. That was baby Pac-Man. Anyway, so most of my arcade memories from around this time are of those American games. So I feel like almost all of these games are games that I discovered years later, mostly thanks to stuff like the Namco Museum collections for PlayStation. It was just this huge and creatively vital period of time in video game arcade game design that just kind of slid right on by. So I'm glad we can take the time to revisit. But, yeah, and as we were saying before we started, but Namco does, like, go back and mine these properties,

even though a lot of them were almost just one-offs, but you'll still see this stuff pop up in, like, you know, theme song remixes and little cameos, and, you know, some of this stuff was in Smash. Yeah, I feel like they really got into their own history during the PlayStation era, because not only did they do the Namco Museum collections, they also, they started just making references

to their old games. Like in Ridge Racer, you'd have the Pac-Man labels on cars and graphics and decals, which culminated in Ridge Racer type 4 with a car that was actually shaped like Pac-Man and drove around with a do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. It was kind of amazing.

I've never unlocked that one myself, but I've seen videos of it. And to me, that just further cements the fact that R-4 is the greatest racing game of all time. But you also had stuff like Kloa, who had a little Pac-Man, on his hat. And you had, you know, this is when the PlayStation era is when Mr. Driller came around and they were like, let's do something with DigDug and turned it into this entirely complex soap opera

storyline and so on and so forth. So yeah, I really feel like Namco did itself a great service by acknowledging the fact that it had, you know, it had a glory day that was different than its current day. Like the company still makes great games that sell really, really well. But it recognizes is like this was a previous phase of our life and people still love these games and they were important and informative and we should continue to celebrate those and very few people, very few companies do that. Nintendo does it and that's Sonic or Sega maybe to a certain degree, but Namco is pretty unique in that regard and I think it helps sponsor or inspire episodes like this, podcast like this. Yeah, very few companies have that kind of legacy, the Nintendo, Sega and

Namco. I mean, there's a ton of Japanese companies that do in the art, like Taito, but they don't really do that. I guess that's because Square Inix bought them and they're like, we need our pretty boys killing monsters. What's the best Taito game, the bubble, Bobble? Space Invaders? I mean, that's so old. It's not even, you know. But it was huge.

Yeah, it was formative. But Namco had like one after another, after another, after another really cool games for a while. All right, smart guy. We'll do a Taito series and we'll see where you stand. There's also, you know, like the Darius games. They did Raston Saga. They made a lot of games that were pretty big hits. It would be nice if Konami acknowledged that they made video games.

Wouldn't it? Yeah, that'd be great. At some point in the distant past. I think the last time they did that was with that the collection of games for DS, which was kind of cool, even though the DS wasn't, didn't have the right resolution for it. Oh, yeah, I remember that. Yeah, it was like Konami classics or something like that for DS. It had like, it was developed by M2.

This is totally off topic. But, like, you could bring up arcade dip switches on the bottom screen and you could use the DS stylus to, like, change the dip switches and settings on the arcade games. It was just, yeah, it was one of those, like, even though the DS wasn't the best platform for that collection, they really just filled it full of love. And I want them to come back, come back, Konami, do that again. You have so many great games that have been lost. And some of them show up on arcade archives occasionally. Put some people on Switch, you cowards. We're going to be.

So, yeah, just to kind of wrap this discussion of Namco's love for its legacy, before the podcast started, we were talking about Shifty Look, because Chris was, instead of socializing, he was watching the Wonder Momomo anime. So what's all of that about? You have opinions about Shifty Look. I do. Because I actually know. knew a bunch of the people who were involved in Shifty Look. Corey Kassoni, who was one of the editors, I think maybe the main actual editor at Shifty Look, although don't quote me on that. I had worked with him a little... Too late. It's on Wikipedia.

I had worked with him a little bit at Ony when the first graphic novel that Chad Bowers and I wrote together, Downset Fight, was coming out. It was released by Oni. And it was really impressive that they did Shifty Look and got the creators that they got. The Gallagher comic is incredible, if you've never read it. I need to read that.

Well, it's Ryan North, who people might know from dinosaur comics, the Adventure Time comics. He has an amazing ability to pull a lot of content out of almost nothing whatsoever. Yes, it's drawn by Christopher Hastings, who you might know from The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, and also is the writer of Gwempool for Marvel and various other things. And the colorist on it was Anthony Clark, who you. you know from Nedroyd and from also multiple collaborations with those guys. And it's a really, really fun comic. Does it get into the like whole space century thing that Namco did with like the very complex

narrative around Gallagher? No. It's focused on these two girls who figure out that when the Gallagher spaceships are blown up, they make, like they blow up into pixels and you can construct your own. spaceship from them, and then they go fight all the Gallagos invaders. So it's like the gummy ship? Yes, I guess. I don't know.

If you don't know what a gummy ship is, you're in a better place than I am. Yeah. I don't know. So I'm doing great. Well done. What is Shifty Look? I was going to say, yeah. We should back up for a second. Shifty Look was the name of Bandai Namco's Initiative. Initiative, I guess.

It was ShiftyLook.com, and they did a bunch of... McFiry came out and said, I want to talk to you about the Shifty look initiative. It was 2012, and they did a bunch of comics online that were just based on properties. And they did a ton of them, and none of them are up anymore. There was Mappie, who was like a disgraced, retired cop. Yes. And there was a Catamari one.

There was a Clono one that I know Jim Zub wrote. There was Rolling Thunder. I think so. Yeah. There was Rolling Thunder, which was written by Jimmy Palmieri, and I got mad because I really wanted to pitch Rolling Thunder, and I never got the chance to. And I think I could have done something really good. What year did this happen?

2012 to 2014. Okay. And they were all designed to be finite web comics. Like Gallagher, for instance, has a beginning, middle, and end. And then 2014 comes, and they're like, okay, we're done. And part of what they had attempted to do, according to, like, the official press release, was just raise awareness of these brands and maybe give them an opportunity to relaunch them in new forms, which is what happened to Wonder Momo, which got a bizarre five-episode OVA, I guess,

if you can call it an OVA when it's released to YouTube, an OIA. I mean, it's original video animation is the thing sometimes. It's video and it's animated, so, and it's original. Yeah, it's like five, six-minute episodes. And then there was a way forward Wonder Momo game that was tied into that that was... Was that like a web game? It was mobile. Okay.

So no one has played it that I know. It does seem like a good and fit in a way for way forward because they, they kind of brush up against that kind of skeviness that's in Wonder Momo sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good style fit for them. And 2014 it ends. And then by 2015, it's gone.

It is like Shiftylook.com doesn't have any of it anymore. So, like, surely someone archived it all somewhere. I mean, maybe. Not, and don't call me Shirley. Namco didn't. Yeah, I know. Like, there were plans to do printed versions of some of the stuff, because I know Udon, which is the company that you might know from doing, like, the Mega Man art book, Phoenix Wright Art Book, The Street Fighter Comics. They did, I think, two paperbacks.

They did a Bravo Man. The Katamari was printed, wasn't it? I have no idea. I thought the Katamari one was printed once. I mean, it may have been a brief run. I don't know. But there are all these. like kind of, you know,

a hundred page Namco comics that they just completely took off the web. And I have no idea why. I don't know. Like, you'd think those would be available in some form,

but it's been five years and... It costs more money to make them available than they would generate. So that's why they haven't printed them. You know, that's the story of everything out of printed them, but they already had them online.

Yeah, but... And they own the rights to it all. So you wouldn't think it would be a product. I mean, look, I know nothing about contracts of those guys were working again. I never got to pitch. I would have written a great one were terrible, by the way. No, they were good. Well, some of them were good. I didn't read all of them,

but I know that Gallagher was actually really fantastic. I read the Katamari one. It was cute. I mean, it's like the cousins interacting this stuff. Yeah, I mean, what are you going to do with Katamari? Yeah. I mean, you have all the cousins and you have them do stuff. Get into the horrible backstory of the king. No. But again, you know, the people that they had working, like Jim Zubber at the Klonel and he's doing Avengers now at Marvel. Uh, Ryan North's two or three-time Eisner winner for Adventure Time and Squirrel Girl. Like, they, like, they could very easily get an audience for these if, but, you know, again, I have no idea what the, what the contracts were.

If there were, like, rights issues, I'm sure they will work for hire. Well, you're raising awareness right now. Maybe someone listening. Yeah, put them back up. Like, or do, put them on Gum Road or something. I would pay, I would pay a Gumroad download fee to read that Gallagher Comic again? Alas.

So why don't we go ahead and actually jump into talking about the games? I can already tell we're not going to make it through this list of games. There's some good stuff towards the end, too. Why don't we start in 1986 with the game that definitely did not get a shifty look comic? Genpei Tomadin, or the Genji and Hekei clans, which I guess that name was kind of retrofitted into it with the PlayStation museums, wasn't it? The game never came out in the U.S. in the arcades, and then they stuck it on that compilation and we're like,

this is what we're calling it. I think. I don't know. Everything about this game is weird. I don't understand what this game is about, why it exists. I'm glad someone created it, but what were they? How high were they? It really does not look any fun to play at all, unfortunately. But it also looks like kind of three games shoehorned into one. Right.

It's very weird. Yeah, it's like a horror game and an action game and a hack and slash. Well, I don't even. It's got like, yeah, it's got like three. different viewpoints. So there's like, there's like this side-scrolling stuff where you have these big sprites that almost look like, they almost look like flash animated kind of deals. It's weird. It's not something you see back in this era. But they're like, you know, they're big and detailed,

but move really jankly. And then you've got like these top-down sections with these tiny little, like super undetailed sprites. And I have to wonder, did like three completely different teams of people work on this game. I don't even know. I mean, in the context of the time, this was, you know, right around the time that Japan collectively was awakening to the appeal of role-playing games. This was the same year that Zelda came out and that thing, oh, yeah, Dragon Quest, that's right. So, you know, so everyone was starting to be like, well, we've got more space for our video games, more memory space. So we can do more stuff. What should we do? We should make it role-playing like. So they started doing that multi-format, multi-focus thing.

And how do you take an RPG and make it? into an arcade game. They'd already done that with Tower of Drauga, and that was a big hit. So I guess they were thinking, maybe we should do something along those lines with this game, too. And I don't know that it was a success, but it's definitely one of those just like bizarre fever dreams that you get from some Japanese games of this era. Like a zombie nation by Meldak for NES. Do you guys remember that one where you're like a giant samurai head flying through modern cities blowing some up? that one. I didn't know that's what it was called. Yes, that's one of the most expensive NES games now.

You fight the Statue of Liberty, right? I, you know, I've never played it because it's one of the most expensive NES games now. But I remember seeing screenshots of it in Nintendo Power being like, what the hell? And this game gives me that same sense. Like, it is, it's set in medieval Japan, and you play as, I guess, a samurai warrior or something. Except it's actually set in, like, hell most of it, isn't it? Right, but I mean, but I feel like, you know, it's set in hell during Yeah, yeah, it's medieval Japanese hell, yes.

Exactly. Definitely. Jigoku. I feel like we talked about this on the last episode of Namco, too. Did we? And hopping mappy, because we made a bunch of jokes about hopping. We made a bunch of jokes about hopping mappy, but we didn't actually talk about this. I don't know.

It's been so long. We mentioned, if we talked about Genpei Domiton, Tomoden, I did not, don't remember any of it. I know we mentioned it, but. I don't know. Do you know what that means, Genpei Tomodon? I don't. Den means legend. Yeah.

Okay. There you go. It's the legend of something. Yeah. Not Zelda, definitely not Zelda. My one exposure to this, like I had never actually played the game, but the music made it into, I feel like it was an early smash or something. For some reason, I don't know why. But like, but the title theme for this game is like literally 10 seconds long.

And so I had this like package I had downloaded of like all the tracks from the, from this smash that someone had patted out to like three minutes. just by looping them. And so this one would come up and it would be these 10 seconds over and over up. Like, oh, God, skip, skip, skip. So that's my memory of this game is skipping the theme music because it's really short. Yeah, this is one of those games that just plays up. It's the fact that it is set in, you know, like Japanese folklore, Japanese tradition, mythology, whatever, by just covering every bit of the screen with very Japanese-looking

things from, you know, Kappa Demons to bamboo trees to a score counter that increments in traditional like Japanese kanji as opposed to Arabic numerals, which I don't know if you guys ever read Legends of Localization by Clyde Mandolin. He's a friend of fan gamer, but he recently wrote a piece about how when people translate Western games into Japan, they make the mistake of thinking everything needs to be turned into Japanese, but you know, English and Arabic numerals and so forth have always been part of video games. back in the earliest days of games, there wasn't space for kanji or pictograms or pictograms or anything like that. So that's just become part of video games. So when you see a

game that deliberately makes the stylistic choice to use kanji for its score counter or whatever, it stands out. Like it has to be a deliberate thing. If you do it casually, you're like, oh, here's my sci-fi game set in, you know, 24th century space. And you go too far with the localization players in Japan are like, what the hell? But if you, you know, have something set in ancient Japan or feudal Japan, and then you use the stylistic choice, and that's what they do here. The Keo Yuga-Katai games, I don't know if you guys have ever played Keo Flying Squadron. They do that too.

You don't see it very often. You see it for just for like medieval European stuff too, like a lot of the early Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy stuff. Like I remember when I was in Japan with a host family, I had the sheet music for them and they were helping me translate the tracks. And a bunch of it had, like, archaic forms in there just because it was supposed to be of medieval, you know, castles and that sort of thing. That's a neat bit of information I did not know until I listened to Retronauts. I'm happy to share other people's writings and learnings with you.

The thing that I wrote down about this game was that this is what people in the 90s who didn't play video games thought video games were. Because it's, like, Mario doesn't make any sense. We all agree on that. But it has its own internal logic. Yeah. This game does not. This game is just things on the screen. We talked about the internal logic thesis before among ourselves and other episodes.

Like, what makes a nonsense game makes sense, you know, and what's just total mess. Like, there's a scene in Rumble in the Bronx where Jackie Chan hands the kid what is very clearly an empty game gear, and the kid starts playing it immediately after getting in his hands. And anytime something like that happens or you see people on TV like, playing a video game and nothing's connected. This is the game I imagine they're playing because it is capital letters video games to me. Yeah, it really does feel like the kind of thing that someone would just bash together

for, you know, graphics for an imaginary video game in a 90s movie, for sure. Like gleaming the cube, gleaming the game cube, that's it. Yeah. I've never played this. I cannot imagine it as fun to play. It doesn't seem like it looks super janky. Yeah. But I do highly recommend if you want to experience this game,

there is a two-part episode of GameCenter CX that is quite good. Yeah, that series doesn't give you a lot of two-parters, so you know this game is something special. Yeah. Unless you're Donkey Kong country, in which case you get three parts. See if you can get through that one. All right, so next up is Hopping Mappy. And I know we did talk about this a little bit, but let's just put it down.

This game is also really weird. Yeah, I think we did talk about this last time. The note that I made on this one was incomprehensible. Yeah. Like, why is Mappy always hopping? It seems like pure hell. And it just looks like a mini game that someone decided was its own entire arcade game. The only thing I remember about talking about this was that we decided that maybe

Hopping Mappy was a play on Hopping Mad. Maybe. That's why they chose that word hopping. And then they just built a whole video game around it or something. I don't know. That's what I remember from episode. So, two, you know, 10 years ago. It does the same, like, background day, night cycle that happens in Pac-Man 2, which makes it look

like Mappy is hopping endlessly for hours. Packland? Yeah, Pac-Land, that's it. For hours and hours. Yeah. So this is, like, Animal Crossing, essentially. It's got it. Sort of.

No. It's like if all you could do in Animal Crossing was play those mini-games on the island, forever and ever. Yeah, so I guess, you know, after Mappi was a disgrace to the police force, this is the hell he was relegated to. He is also in Jikoku. Apparently. Anyway, I don't want to belabor the point, but hopping Mappy is a really weird game. And I feel like it kind of speaks to the sort of weird divide that Namco had in the late 80s,

that they were making these really sort of advanced looking games like Gimpe Tomiden. And then you also had games like Rolling Thunder. These were very sophisticated looking games, very advanced. But then you had stuff like Hopping Mapy, which feels very sort of primitive early 80s arcade. You had Toy Pop, which is even more, it's like super dated. I can't believe this game came out in 1986. It's like my notes say Pac-Man meets Pengo. And yeah, you're like these really simple little top-down block graphics in your

walking around, kicking and shooting stuff. Yeah, that was the note I had, too, that it seemed like, it seemed like there was just kind of this expectation that no matter what else was going on with your cutting-edge arcade stuff, you would have at least a few games that are just these top-down maze puzzles because, you know, because Pac-Man's a classic, because they're other, and you're just expected to have that in your catalog, kind of, that you have these just 2D, simple-looking puzzle games. I can't remember what I said about Hoppy Matt.

Everything I knew about it, I forgot already. This is really, this is a swimmingly. great, the preceding episode. All right. So I will say that when you have games like Hopping Mappy and Toy Pop, you might think, wow, Namco really lost the plot. But then you have Thunderceptor and Thunderseptor 2, which are like, this is the kind of game where you look at it and you understand, oh, this is why Namco is their greatest rival is Sega, because they were both kind of sniffing the same cocaine and creating the same kind of, like, crazy out there technological experiences. Thunderceptor, I wish I had known about a little sooner because about a year ago,

I did a Super NES works episode on Hal's Hyperzone for Super NES, which is a game that, you know, it's like a first person, or not the first person, but it's a third person behind the ship shooter. It's kind of like F0, except, you know, with the ability to move up and down in addition to side to side. And it uses that Mode 7 effect for the racetrack in F0, but it mirrors it. So it's like you're always flying down these like tunnels, I don't know, like these kind of narrow passageways and you're sandwiched between rocks and water and I don't even know what else. And it was a very technically impressive and kind of fun, but not that great.

But I wish I had known about Thunderceptor because this is that game five years early. and actually more fun. Yeah, I mean, it's basically, it's basically just a, you know, a tunnel shooter. You've got this constrained space that your dog's always moving forward, but it's got an interesting graphical style going on with, like you said, you've got both a ceiling and a floor, but then it's open to the sides, and they've got these, like, cool, like, sort of pulp retro SF backgrounds going on there. So I don't know, like, as a game, it didn't look like it had a ton going on.

There's not even, like, really bosses. There's just bigger enemies at the end of the level. but it's got a really cool looking style and it'll grab you from across the room kind of thing Yeah I mean this is very Are there any home ports of this game? Because I've never seen them Probably for some Japanese computer

I wouldn't be surprised If it's on the X68,000 It seems like the kind of game that they would put on the X68,000 This is the kind of game I would love to play If I had a home port But I feel like the consoles at the time weren't sophisticated Oh no there's no way a console could have done this I mean, like I said, this was something that you saw imitated on the Super NES five years later.

Yeah. And even then, that was kind of like eye-popping, like, wow, I can't believe my home console is doing that. That's crazy. Yeah. But yeah, it very much is kind of a space harrier, sort of after-burner-ish kind of thing. It's not as impressive as those games. It doesn't have that sort of, I don't know, there's something about those games. They're so fast-paced and they're so visceral, almost to the point where they're not even playable.

Like, you just feel like you're barely hanging on. In fact, there is even a game called Hang On that uses the same tech. How about that? Yeah, when I said to this, I felt like I didn't feel quite as drawn to it as I did to all the Sega Super Scalar games. They just seemed like, like, you know, they were faster and had more going on. But this does do interesting things with its own style that you couldn't do with the ones that are strictly superscaler that are using just the sprites for everything. Because it has the more complex backgrounds and the Mode 7 stuff going on. It's technically not Mode 7, sir.

Well, no. But I know what you're doing. That's the shorthand for the effect. Yeah. It's funny. I think that's a conversation in and of itself. Like how this very specific technological feature of one kind of hardware has become just like shorthand for a visual style. It's very interesting.

I guess that's the credit to Nintendo power in their propaganda. Yeah. Yeah, probably. Buckle up and face the sparks. What is this a reference to? That's what it says between missions. Oh, does it? Oh. I've only looked at Thunderceptor 1. Because they're kind of the same game. This is kind of like Galaxy Force. Actually, it's a lot like Galaxy Force. Like Galaxy Forces kind of toned down Uncle, I guess. Something like that. I mean, Galaxy Force came along a couple of years later. So it's way more impressive, way faster. There's a lot more moving around and scaling and stuff. But the overall vibe is kind of the same. And Galaxy Force 2 is basically just Galaxy Force, but better. I think Thunderceptor 2 is pretty much the same thing.

This is making quarters. Let's just make more of it. So another sequel from 1986 for Namco. And this one, I think, is more focused and sensible than hopping mappy. Like, I don't understand why hopping mappy is. But the return of Ishtar is a sequel, the sequel to Tower of Draga. And I think it's pretty clever and makes Tower of Draga more playable and less punishing. and also adds a co-op element that I think is really cool.

So when I say it's a sequel to Tower of Duraga, I mean literally, like Tower of Druaga is about Gilgamesh, the warrior, climbing to the 60th floor of the tower and rescuing the princess key or Kai, sorry. So the return of Ishtar, you have rescued Kai, and now Kai and Gilgamesh have to go back down those 60 floors and fight their way down. Of course, these floors are now

different, but you're playing together with two characters, and it's kind of like a big maze, but there's more scrolling. You don't have to see everything on the screen all at once. It's not as dense. So there's more freedom to run around and explore and make your way down. It's really, I think it's a really cool game. Is there any other game that does that, like, picking up the moment the previous game ends? Like Half-Life 2, Episode 1. Okay. You actually start from the ruins of the Citadel Base or whatever that you infiltrated at the end of Half-Life 2. I mean, at a stretch, there's the, you know,

the Richter segments at the beginning of symphony. Fair. Yeah. Yeah. I feel a few games have done this. That's just a prolog. Yeah. But, you know, and Wonderboy 3 did that first. The beginning in the

final stage of the previous game, fighting against the boss and then advancing from there. Okay. I just think that's a really cool idea, and I'm kind of surprised you don't see it more often. Yeah, I feel like if we sat down, we could name some games to do that. Half-Life is definitely the one that, the episodes, because you start out with just like the zero, uh, zero force gravity gun or whatever it's called and zero point. And, um, you're like superpowered, but you like gradually lose all your stuff as you fight. And then you have to kind of rebuild yourself over the course of, you know, this very short sort of one-third length game. Metroid two doesn't do that. Metroid two does the end? Uh, Metroid, I mean, all the Metroid games are self-contained in spaces. Okay. So, yeah, you don't really get that.

Okay. I just think it's neat. It is. I think it's a great concept. And I don't know if anyone had done that before. Surely someone had. Oh, yeah, the Zork games do that. But that's because they started out as one game that had to be split up for space reasons.

Well, those aren't video games. Those, as Bench will quickly point out. It all depends on how you want to find it. Well, I mean, Zork Zero has graphics. Zero is a video game. Well. I'm just kidding. Yeah, I don't care anymore.

That's the attitude that I want from our retronauts. Well, we should not do these sessions before lunch anymore because I'm really hungry. Are you hangary already? Coffee, buddy. Yeah. Coffee. So. All right.

So do you guys have any thoughts on the return of Ishtar? I don't know. Like watching it, it seemed like with this like, it's seemed really zoomed in on these big Macy levels now. And it seemed like it'd be hard to navigate, like, until you. you've played it enough to know what's where. But I don't know. I was just watching a play-through, so I haven't tried it in person. Well, I think it's great that they don't just make Kai, you know, like a helpless

damsel tagging along with you. She becomes integral to the experience and like a co-partner with Gilgamesh. Yeah. So, you know. I love co-op games. Yeah. It's such a great thing to throw that in there. 1986 was kind of the year of lady empowerment in Japanese games.

You had Samus Aaron. You had Wing of Madola. You had a few other games where ladies took the lead. Athena, I guess Athena, yeah. I don't know if Wonder Momo counts either. A little borderline. Now, the opposite of female empowerment in video games comes with our next title, which is Rolling Thunder, which is a great game, but definitely falls, relies on the kidnapped lady, losing her clothes progressively between stages as incentive for you to. make it to the end and beat the bad guys.

But you're fighting Piccolo, which is interesting. Yeah, the bad guy pretty much looks like Piccolo from Dragon Ball. Yeah, he's like this green guy. But the rest of the game entirely looks like Lupin, and it looks so cool. Well, Lupin fighting neon Klansmen. Everyone, all the bad guys are like KKK. Yeah, it's actually... Yeah, like they look like Miyazaki goons, actually.

Which makes sense because Miyazaki directed a bunch of Lupin. Yeah, when is Castle of Cagliostra? That's a good question, because this does it. It's the mid-80s, right? Castle of Caleoaster was like 1979, 1980. Yeah, so that had been around. It was an actual movie.

That had been around already. Jeez. Yeah, this, I mean, these definitely seem to be drawing from, like, some stock Miyazaki designs. I mean, they've also got the kind of hooded look of, uh, Cobra Commander. And I think that overall look was based on a French character. There's, there's a G.I. Joe comic where Cobra Commander, like, someone goes to a costume party.

and the Joes are like, oh, my God, it's a Cobra Commander, but it's actually someone dressed as like, Il Fantolm or something like that, like a French character. That's interesting. Yeah, he's like basically wearing a Cobra Commander outfit with the hood and everything, but he's costume to someone else.

Yeah, love it's the more like kind of European influence side of manga designs with this tall, lanky characters, again, like Lupin. Yeah. Yeah, that was striking to me when I played this game. This is one of those few games on this list that I played in the arcade because it was, you know, I've mentioned Gatlinburg, Tennessee, many times that we'd go there on vacation and they had lots of arcades. And this is one that really caught my eye because it was big and beautiful. The sprites were big. And the guy was, you know, more realistically proportioned

than some of the squad. He has an aim binge. He's Albatross. And like the animation of it is just gorgeous. Yeah. Yeah. This, the way, okay, this game rules. It has a It's problems, but it also rules. I love the- The problems are pretty modest, honestly. Just the way that Albatross moves is really good, and there's obviously a lot of emphasis on

how he moves. He does like a Spider-Man pose when he jumps, which is really cool. And I love that animation of him, like, one hand on the rail, hopping over to jump up and down on the two levels. I also love that he that when you press the shoot button, he gets out his gun, shoots, and then

puts his gun away. It's the samurai. tradition. You never, you never, you never just run around with your sword. You draw it and then sheathe it. Yeah. But yeah, he also has kind of a, like a 60s spy guy sort of thing going on, like very man from go. Yeah. Well, I was going to say like man from uncle, like Ilya or whatever his name was, you know, with kind of the turtleneck and everything, not wearing a suit jacket like James Bond, but rather kind of a more streamlined look that, you know, would actually be feasible to run around in. He's got the shoulder

holster and everything. So to Chris to me, we should maybe say, like, what kind of game this is and how it actually plays. It's a really cool game. It's really cool. So it's, you know, side scrolling, waves of enemies kind of thing, going through the, going through levels. I mean, this is, this is another Namco versus Sega thing.

This game is Shinobi. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. Except you don't have a melee attack. So you have to watch out for bad guys because if they come up close to you and you don't shoot them in time, they'll take off half your life. But you have the same multiple level kind of thing going on, so you'll often have like a lower root in an upper root and sometimes a foreground route in a background route where you can go behind things. And yeah, like Chris was saying, the way you like vault between levels, just over railings and stuff, it just looks so cool.

Also when you like gutshot dudes and they like fall over holding their... Yeah, they'll crumple in different ways. The sprite work is really impressive. Also, if you never played this game but you grew up with an NES, code name. Vyper is this game, but not as good. Codename Viper is very good. Codename Viper is very good. Okay. Codename Viper is more beatable than Rolling Thunder.

That's true. Rolling Thunder turns into a giant asshole in about stage four, and at that point, you realize, oh, Namcoe doesn't like me very much. It wants my quarters. Well, and then if you get through that, it loops eventually and gets really mean. It's harder. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, one of the things this game does is you get to the end, but the end isn't really there. You have to do the whole thing again in,

remix mode. Thank you, Albatross, but our Lila is in a different enemy fortress. That's a great development technique. If you don't have enough budget to finish the game, you just make one of the stages incredibly hard that no one can pass it. They never see it. That's actually not a good development technique. But it's also doing the thing where

you're reusing and mixing the same assets. It's horrible. I just don't want anyone to take the wrong ideas away from this podcast binge. Would anyone really listen to what I just said and think I was being serious? I think so. You're very difficult. Absolutely. People people listen to this show for development tips all the time.

Man, sorry, guys. You have so much more influence than you realize. It's been giving out bad advice as jokes for years. So here's the secret. You do the same level again, but twice as many enemies and also lava pits this time. I guess I just mean that it doesn't look as cool as Rolling Thunder, codename Viper?

Viber, yeah. Although Vipar is a much cooler code name than Albatross. Albatross, bad codename. I mean, that's the big ship at the end of Bionacom. Yeah. What is that telling you? Yeah, one thing we mentioned or forgot to mention is that you can duck into doorways, which is what the bullet rooms. Chris was referring to at the beginning.

Love the bullet rooms. There's rooms in the game like doors, then you can duck into them. But the ones that have the bullet logos on them are, say, bullet will either give you a refill for your handgun or the, I think the ones that say arms will give you a submachine gun. Machine gun refill. That's like 50, 50 bullets to it. I just love that the bullet rooms are clearly labeled, and I love the design of the bullet room sign, which I wish, why can't I go on FanGamer and buy that right now? And, you know, I feel like this game borrows a lot from elevator action, which was a Taito game, by the way. Yeah.

And that also had the doors that you could duck into for, you know, helpful purposes. Well, yeah, even if there's not bullets there, it's a strategic element because you can avoid attacks that way and jump out and kill somebody. Yeah, I feel like the doors had a little more tactical purpose and elevator action, honestly, because when the doors opened, it would block an enemy bullet. And so you could kind of duck away. And also you had to go into doors to complete the stages, the red doors. Here, basically, if you go into a door to hide from enemies, they're just going to hang out outside the door, like walking back and forth. So there's no way for you to get out without taking a hit. So you can kind of screw yourself over. It does make going into the bullet rooms or the arms rooms, you know, kind of a, uh, a risk reward thing where it's like, well, I could upgrade my machine guns, but then some KKK guy and a neon yellow mask might walk around outside and, you know, bump me off as soon as I get out. So what's what's the, what's the play here? And I do like how all the, the, the enemies are color coded by uniform. And each, each different color of enemy has different skills and tactics. It was very thoughtful of, uh, gal, what's the guy's name? Uh, I forgot the,

The villain's name. Uga? Aga. Gall-Uga. No. No. I want to say Gar-Laws, but that's the name of the area that you travel through in Rigar. I messed up.

The bad guy. I was never good at this game, but I would play it every time I went to the arcade. Because it's very satisfying to play. It just, it feels good to play this game. I have a point to make about this, about the hoods and things I was just thinking about, which is depersonalizes the enemy. me to the extent that you feel okay just mowing down hundreds of them. Yeah, we talked about that in the Raiders of the Lost Dark podcast.

Nazis are okay to kill. Yeah, and this is something like that where they feel more like the Foot Clan kind of. I know they were robots in the cartoon or whatever, but it's something where you don't see their face. You don't see them suffer that much. I know they double over whatever, but generic cultists. Behumanizes them. So, yeah.

Are they even human? I mean, I don't know. Who knows? Galbra. Galbra, that's his name. He's like this green. alien dude. Like I said, he looks like Piccolo. I don't know how he's a lot. So yeah, these guys may not be, they may not even be

human. Cool. Just like the fecagoons. Yeah. Well, then you get things like lava dogs and stuff later, so there's definitely monsters running around here. Oh, yeah, yeah, and the giant bat dudes who like swooped down and are pretty much impossible to shoot. And the Zartans. The Zartan is a named character. Yeah, but

there's dudes who like turn invisible. And then they come out of the walls and they're all weird. So alien called this. He killed the Hardmaster. Or did he? Thank you. I'm going to be able to be. And we're back to let you know we can really shake them down.

Starting with Wonder Momo, we've moved on to the year in 1987, and a powerful peach has begun the... I don't even... Help me here, guys. Mommo means peach. I don't know. It does. It does. Help me out.

It's a superhero peach. Wonder Moma. But not to be mistaken for Momo Tar. who was also a superhero peach. I don't know. Okay, so superhero peach. Yeah, but a superhero of folk herodom. Okay.

Okay, so Wonder Momo. It's this strange little beat-em-up, basically, where you're literally on a stage playing this schoolgirl who can do this Henshin transformation into a superhero, but you're just walking back and forth. So the stage area is like, I don't know, three screens wide, maybe.

And costume goons come at you, And then there's these sort of Tokusatsu, like, monster bosses. But it's very much framed as being this kind of low-rent stage play thing, which is a thing that happened. You would have these, like, Tokusatsu live-action productions that would go on in Japan, you know, like, you know, at amusement parks or at a theater or something. Yeah, it's like TMNT on ice, but, you know. Yeah, it's kind of that kind of. Not as big a production. They still do them at malls to, like, promote the new shows.

You'll go see, like, a little live action. They'll do little live action Tokusatsis. The thing with the new Power Rangers or whatever. The new Super Sentai team, I suppose. Yeah, and so it's sort of recreating that, like, budget stage play. Like, it kind of looks like everyone's just in costume and his props and stuff. That's fascinating premise. Yeah, and it just keeps doing this.

I notice the audience down at the bottom of the screen and some of those things. They're sort of cheering or on a shing-go. I mean, that's basically what Beautiful Joe is. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, it's definitely what. of those games that, like, as you learn more about kind of Japanese pop culture, then you start to realize, oh, that's what this is about. Because the first time I played this, you know, 20 years ago, I was like, what, what is this? What are you even doing? Yeah. It's sort of hard

to tell what the point is. 30 years ago, I would have been like, what? What? They actually released this in America with a dedicated machine, Wonder MoMA, in an arcade? You know, I'm actually not sure. It was definitely on a Namco Museum collection. Yeah, it's been imported to a bunch of your home systems and has come out. I forgot 20 years ago, it's like, sorry, you're old and we're dying. That was okay, yeah. Just like, yeah, 20 years ago is like a couple years ago. And this is the property that Namco has gone back in mind a lot.

It was in Shifty Look. It got the anime that Chris was talking about. And it's just like the theme song for this has shown up in a whole bunch of places, too. Even though I don't think there's been any other. There's never been in like a proper sequence. Like, Namco's never done anything with the game itself. But, you know, Momo herself is a very, you know, she has a lot of personality. Like, the game does have a little bit of skeviness to it where she tends to flash her underwear more than is probably proper for someone her age.

But at the same time, like, the game opens up with a parody of the MGM, you know, the lion thing. But she, like, pops up and she yawns. It's very cute. Like, she's a very charmingly drawn and appealing character. And she's got that Rumiko Takahashi. Yeah. Yeah. So, like that, the fluffy hair 80s manga character.

there's this whole sort of subgenre like of anime and manga from back in that era which is like has this like slightly skeevy edge to it but it's also cute and good natured you can't really hold it against it and it's all very tame compared to later stuff right like there's definitely no wifu collecting in wonder moment it's not like a modern mobile game it's very circumspect about a torniness i have a hot take okay oh dear this might be controversial i feel like wonder mom either needs to be way less horny and more cute and, like, fun, which is kind of what I think they're going for in Wonder Movo, or needs to, like, go way to the other end of this game. No, we don't want, we don't want Wonder Moma to go Valus X. And be like, and be like Bayonetta, where it's horny to the point of being kind of hilarious. Like, if they're going to do a parody, then they should go all out with it. Yeah, but, you know, Bayonetta is probably twice Wonder Momo's age. No, no, I don't think she should be a teenager if they do that.

I do want to, sorry, I did leave that. out. That is a necessary clarification. Thank you, Chris. Then she needs to, either she needs to be a teenager and be cute and funny, or they need to also ban on her. I honestly just think, like, put some bike shorts on her

and we're good to go. Yeah, and you're thinking about this from our current context. Like, there was not the context to do Bayanetta back in the 80s. But there's also, like, the dudes in the crowd who are trying to take upskirt photos over, which is, like, the worst part of the game, I feel like. Also, the most realistic. There's a lot of that going on.

it's it's it's skeevy enough to be uncomfortable and the cuteness doesn't balance it out there's an imbalance is what I'm saying so either go with one or the other I like Jeremy's solution put some viker charts on her and it all be fine yeah but but you know that aside like it is a fun and interesting take on the sort of belt scroller you know like kung fu this is basically the same thing as kung fu master or um bad bad dudes versus dragon ninja or you know vigilante etc etc in the actual gameplay you're mostly like kicking and punching these goons until you manage to power up and then when you power up you have an energy ring that you throw but you have to catch it when it returns kind of deal yeah it's like yeah but you have to catch it when it returns because it can fly off the stage if you miss it and then you are reduced to doing ultraman things where you do the cross beam with your form yeah yeah it's it's got all the little toksatsu tropes but yeah I think that like the magic hula hoop is kind of Wonder Momo's thing. That's like her signature

gimmick. And then like you play this long enough, you get like weirder and weirder bosses and then eventually you get like a rival magical girl Oh wow. I've never made it that part. I've made it like a few stages. I mean, I haven't played that much of it, but I watched back months ago, I watched YouTube of this for quite a while kind of skipping through until different things eventually started to happen because it does get very repetitive. But then every once in while

they'll throw something new at you like this rival magical girl that comes in. Yeah, it's weird to think about this as being a Tokusatsu parody That's obviously like Ripping on Common Rider Riving on Ultraman But it's, what is this, 87? So it's

Five years before Sailor Moon. So it doesn't have any of the real Mahoshojo stuff, which existed at the time, but wasn't, you know, Sailor Moon kind of codifies a lot of it. It's, yeah, it comes before a lot of our current context

for magical girls. Yeah. It's a very kind of prototype of that sort of thing. Yeah. The anime, the 2014 little anime I was talking about, I don't think is worth watching, really. It seems very, here's a property. Well, I like that each of the stages is represented as like a volume and chapter of a manga.

So like the game ends at World or Volume 4-4. And when the screen, when you get your game over screen, she's like wearing a towel on a curtain that goes up. Either less or more. I'm with you there. Okay, yeah. Less, I think, would work. I think less would be better. Do you know what the, like, little names of the episodes are?

Because I can tell, I can't read Japanese at all, but I can tell that they have the, the format of, like, a Tokosatsu title where it's like, something, something, something, something, something. Are they kanji or not? Because kanji are going to lose me, but. Oh, I couldn't tell you. Yeah. Oh, yeah, it's all in like super-dinch kanji. Yeah, well, yeah. Dense.

Nope. we're not going to be any help for you there. It's probably like, fight, the alien invader attacks. Yeah, I'm sure it's that kind of drawn-out episode title thing, but... No, I mean, it does have that structure where it's like, it says something, exclamation point, and then there's sort of something that is spoken and less excitedly. Alien's attack, Wonder Mobo's very hard day. Yeah, that sort of thing.

I'm sure that's what it is. I feel like we right now in about 10 minutes can plot out a better Wonder Mo game than Wonder Romo. Where are you on all this, binge? I think it's interesting that you're criticizing the, I don't know, the sexiness of this game or something. I like to look at things as period pieces that are not judging them from a current historical point. Like our current standards and mores. No, at the time, I would have been like, oh, that seems kind of weird. Yeah, so, yeah, so that's a good, that's a fair point.

Even back then, if this was really out of there, like if my parents had been playing it, they would have said, no, don't do that. Yeah, so that's something worth mentioning. I just don't think it's enough of either direction to be funny. Yeah. Or it's clearly being a parody. And I like the parodical elements. Like, you talked about the MGM opening. That's like a really cute, funny bit.

But, like, the game's not good. And it's, you know, aesthetics aren't enough to make the game better to elevate it, I think. Was it imitating a style that was popular in animation at the time or anything like that? I mean, the whole thing is very much of the time. You know, the, like, broad, like, sex comedy was kind of a thing. I see where it was just a little bit skeevy. Yeah, I mean, this was concurrent with Rhonda one-half, pretty much. Yeah, that sort of thing.

And, you know, it doesn't look great from today with the upskirt shots. She even does a split kick, two-direction split kick, which is really funny and weird. And, like, she goes like this and kicked out. Right. Well, she, like, just holds her skirt down when she does that. Yeah, but it's still, like, it's still such a. I don't want to get hung up on talking about a young girl flashing her panties. That's not what for you know. Yeah, but this is it's defining characteristic.

You know, this is the upskirt panty game, essentially. There you go. Okay, well. You don't have to like it. That's just the way it is. We didn't make this game. You don't have to like it? Yeah.

That's just the way it is. That's, I said it, yes. Okay. It is of its time. Well, let that be the last we say about it, we'll say about WonderMomo. Namco's release list is Yokai Dochuky, which recently got a fan

translation of Shadowlands, and that's what we're going to call it. This, to me, looks like it is supposed to be based on an anime, but I guess it's not, but it looks like Ge GeGeGe No Kitaro or something. It's definitely got that as a thing. It's very much that sort of

like creepy kid in a Japanese yokai horror kind of universe sort of thing. Yeah, there was kind of very codified set of like Yo-Kai designs and aesthetic that a lot of things draw from. And it seems like this is

just generically that. Yeah, it's one of those weird games that, you know, when I first encountered it however many years ago, I was like, what is this is weird and exotic and strange? And I think nowadays kids would be like, oh, hey, look, it's the hopping umbrella with one eye. I know that

guy from Yo-Kai Watch. Yeah, from Yo-Kai Watch, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting that you know, things like this have become, I I feel much less exotic to Western audiences because this sort of imagery, even though it is so culturally specific, has, you know, trickled out more into other, into, you know, into media and other countries. But it's got, yeah, it's got some weird ideas. Like you said it has this like kind of adventure island feel because you're just like always going to the right collecting things. But there's a little bit more exploration that there's, you know, some split paths and then there's these shops and it's got to stomp on frogs. like Mario squishes a gumba.

I just saw that interview. We did that to frogs? Oh, my gosh. Well, they're probably demon frogs, so I guess that's okay. I think a really notable thing about this game is the layout. It's got a weird interface. Yeah, the active part of the screen is only the bottom half of the screen. The top half is, like, stats and a weird little mini map that doesn't, it's more like

the Castlevania mid-like between inner level map than anything else? It looks very much like that. Do you think the hardware couldn't handle it more than half screen or something? I think it looks really good, I think. Yeah, I think NAMCO's hardware was totally capable of pulling off a full-screen game. But I think this was an attempt to kind of do the Adventure Island thing. This also kind of catches on to the same concepts and stuff that you saw with Capcom games at the time, like Black Tiger, where you are on an adventure. But, you know, even though it's kind of like a simple arcade brawling.

action game. There's shops and stuff. There's a, there's a currency and economy. Yeah, and there's parts where you jump up and get into a shop and you're at the top of the screen and so the stat stuff just slides over. Yeah, it scrolls the whole interface. I thought that was really cool. So this is a Nintendo DS game.

It kind of feels like a you could be. Yeah, you could easily remake it that way. Have any of you played this? Because it looks fun. No. No, I've only watched it. It's got a lot more shooting than Adventure Island does. It looks neat.

it's got like a charge shot so it's kind of this weird in-between slice like an in-between a runner or an explorer but it's also got shooting and charge shots and I don't know it's got a lot of stuff kind of shoved into it you'd have to really hate frogs to play this guy this is a game that really it's one of those games that looks like it could be on the e-shop today yeah you know yeah I can see that I think it's also good thing no yeah okay there are there are lots of there are lots of cute little sort of retro platformer action games that show up on eShop. I mean, you could dump this right onto Switch, too, yeah. Yeah. But I think it's also worth mentioning that this game feels like a spiritual successor to Dragonbuster. Yeah, yeah, Dragonbuster.

The Namco sort of proto Zelda 2 kind of game where you were running through and you had like a branching map and doing that same sort of thing. It didn't really have so much of the economy and stuff, but this feels like the next step of that, but instead of going for a Western fantasy milieu, it goes for, uh, you know, more jikoku. We've had a lot of, we spent a lot of time in Japanese hell in this episode. Yeah, I mean. What was going on at AMCO in the mid-80s?

It seemed to be a big thing for this period. Wait, someone, there's, there's some notes on here and no one's reading these off. PC got blessed by a large naked lady in a pond for some reason. Yeah, that was, that was, I was watching the play through and that was one. So there's several things like, are we talking like the, uh, the Zelda Lefairies? It seemed to be something kind of like that. I wasn't sure quite what was going on. But so, you know, there's these places where you can split off into a different path and hit the top of the screen. And usually it's a shop. And this one was, and it was actually on the mini map, too. That may be an actual use for the mini map that seems useless most of the time. But it showed this lake. And so the guy split off and kind of went back to the left for a little bit and got to this lake. And there was a large naked lady bathing in the lake. And she like sprinkled some stardust on it. I'm not even sure what good it did. But this was going on. at Namco. I don't know.

It's a strange misappropriation of the Arthurian legend. Yeah. All right. So also in 1987, another sequel. And this one's weird. I've never been able to get into this one, even though I love the franchise. That is Pac-Mania.

The first attempt, I guess, to take Pac-Man into 3-D. I mean, I guess Super Pac-Man kind of attempted to do the 3-D with Pac-Man flying over the maze. But this is more like, it's not isometric. But what's that called? I think it's close to Issa. Do you know the word for it? When it's just tilted instead of being...

It's kind of isometric. Yeah, but it's not... It's not technically, yeah. But it's sort of higher up flattened. When it's skewed instead of actually being rotated. Oh. I can't remember the word. Anyway, it's isometric-ish.

There's a technical name for it and someone's going to post an angry comment on the messages. Back when I took drafting class in high school, I could have told you. But that was a long time ago. I should do an episode where we get as many things wrong as possible in one thing. That's all of our episodes. But anyway, this is, I think, actually one of the first. things on this list that I actually played. I'm pretty sure I ran into this in like a pizza restaurant somewhere. I love this game. We've talked about before, I swear. Yeah, probably somewhere.

Was there a Pac-Man episode? I remember seeing this, actually for the first time in like, it must have been like 1991 or 92. It was, it was much after, like, a long time after the game came out. But I still, I was like, wow. Pac-Man's one still around and two, he's like in 3D net. Yeah, so this is like everything has this 3D rendered aesthetic. Yeah, everything has 3D rendered ecstatic, like Pac-Man and the ghosts are very round and, like, highlight. Shiny. Yeah. Yeah.

And you can jump, yeah, which is weird, but it's this weird, it's this weird floaty jump. I could never really get the hang of it. Yeah, it's hard because it, yeah, you've got to time it just right. It's hard to tell when you're going to come down. You can try to jump over the ghosts, only some of the ghosts can jump two. And then it just starts throwing more ghosts at you. Like, I saw it get up to like eight or ten ghosts at one at a time. Yeah, and this is much harder than classic Pac-Man because you can't see the whole maze at once.

So it's really hard to keep a beat, uh, on the ghost. And this is something that I've addressed in, you know, talking about stuff like Game Boy, Pac-Man, and that sort of thing. Because when you take away that information, the ability to see everything around you, it gets really hard. I mean, I think this is a big part of why Pac-Man was more successful than Rally X back in 1980, because Pac-Man, you could see where everything was moving, how things were moving. Rally-X, you had to, like, look over to the radar, which was a really cool innovation at the time, but it just wasn't as, like, immediately intuitive as being able to just follow your character around

and kind of see the enemies out of your peripheral vision and know where everything was. Yeah, and so like this being zoomed in and having the more ghosts, it trades off and you get much more frantic and less strategic action, I think, which, and you know, it was an interesting direction, but I think it makes it not as enduring as the original setup.

I feel like this is the game that should have been called Pac-Man 2. Because it definitely feels... It's iterating on the design. But it's more like Pac-Man 3-D. I like the board with the Lego block kind of... Yeah, this is a cool aesthetic going on. This game blew me away when I first saw it. I must have seen it pretty close to its release.

And either at an arcade, I know I played it later at the Gatlinburg arcades and stuff, I felt like this was one of the games I could play and sort of be good at, even though it wasn't good at some other games. And I was young. I mean, this was six when this came out. So games were hard. and I love the fact that you could jump over the ghosts which you couldn't do in the regular Pac-Ban

it felt like a way out when you were cornered or something or stuck. I don't know if there are any dead ends I can't remember if there are in this game but you know it could be trapped between two ghosts coming at you from two different directions and jump over one of them and the aesthetic, the visual aesthetic looked so sleek and futuristic at that time

was incredible. Yeah, this was before you really saw pre-rendered graphics. But even though this wasn't pre-rendered, it had that sort of glossy, like, light-sourced 3D look to it. I mean, are you sure it wasn't it? It could have been a rendered sphere that it was right. They did some very limited rendering at the time. I don't think so. I mean, yeah, it was really early your ability to do it. But Pac-Man is basically a sphere, so. The whole, like, pre-rendering graphics thing was really, like, a big innovation that rare pushed with Donkey Kong Country. Right. But that was when you could really do, like, actual, you had the computer horsepower

actual characters as opposed to just geometric shapes. I mean, you could render geometric shapes a long time ago. They took the logical extension of Pac-Man was a disc in the first game. It's a circle and say, okay, we're going to take this into 3D. He's a sphere. And what do spheres look like? They're rounded on top and they're shiny. And then, okay, the ghosts are flat.

What do they look like when they're in 3D? They're like, they just like spun it around. I mean, all they had to do was take the old Pac-Man board game. Did you ever have that? Yeah, but I had that. Yeah, the little ghosts were like little cylinders with jaggy bottoms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the Pac-Man was a puck.

Oh, yeah, yeah. The Pac-Man was a puck in that one. He wasn't a sphere, yeah. Well, because he didn't want to roll off the board. You had to be able to like, yeah. Yeah. No, is this the game that codified that instead of having, like, Western cartoon eyes, Pac-Man has dead black eyes like a doll's eyes?

Dead eyes. I don't, I feel like. I think he has black eyes. There were a lot of renditions of Pac-Man back in the day. Everything from, you know, the Namco style with the big nose and the little Pac-Man eyes. There was, like, the waddly thing. Well, and then there was, like, the Atari 400 version, I think, where he was, like, a guy with a suit and a fedora. He just happened to have a big yellow head.

That was the one that was also, like, oh, it's very exciting. There was also the one that was canonized in Bloom County. Are you talking about the artwork for him? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the cover art. There's one. Atari 800. Oh, no, he's the marathon.

Yeah, he's the marathon runner. about the guy running, yeah. I love that. Yeah, there is one where he's wearing a fedora, but he's like a lanky humanoid. There's also the weird like waddly yellow blob monster

that was in the art for one of the games. I feel like it was on our arcade cabinet or something. Yeah, he's like a teardrop shape and his little feet facing in different directions. And red eyes.

Yeah, I don't know where that came from. The fedora is from Pac-Man's YouTube videos about how Miss Pegman is killing the games industry. Okay. That wasn't out back then, I know. But, I mean, this is what happens when your character is just a circle.

It gets interpreted a lot of ways until you have later games that nail it down. Although now, oh, sorry. I'm just going to say, if we're wrapping up on Pacmania, it's just, this is, I think this game is completely underrated. It's better than people. I mean, it was definitely well-produced. It kind of depends whether the game plays clicks. Okay. It's self-consistent.

It feels solid. It has a good premise and concept, and it executes it well, I think. even if it's difficult. So that's why I feel like it's a good, solid kind of game. I have this weird thing about games. Like, it has to feel good for me to want to play it. Like, I can't even describe it. It's something where everything comes together.

The elements are cohesive. The graphics are good and they make sense. The sounds are good. You know, this game, I know the music, I can't even recall what the music is, but the music is cool. It has some fun remixes of the original background series. I think it's a solid game that's underrated. in terms of like it was competently produced

and made and everyone forgets it and they don't really play it. So that's what I'm saying. I definitely felt like it was well made. It's just, it's kind of a question of whether the jumpy Pac-Man and gameplay clicks for you or not. For some people it did.

I mean, my biggest frustration with it is just how limited the field of view is. Like I just, when I play Pac-Man, I want that sort of, it's almost like, it's not instinctive, but it's just like horrific vision you can see. It's like a holistic view of everything.

I want to see. how the things are moving around, even though I'm not very good at predicting patterns, at least being able to see, are all the ghosts over there in the corner, or where am I going? I think this is why he had to be able to jump to get out of... But then you got the jumping ghosts, those little bastards. Yeah, that's when the game gets really hard. Yeah, it's more twitchy and more reactive and a little less strategic than the original formulation. You know, I actually, I remember I saw this game at the same time that I saw the Empire Strikes Back game.

or no, Return of the Jedi game, which was not what I expected. I was expecting another, like, Star Wars arcade game, you know, vector art shooter, but instead, Return of the Jedi is like an isometric sort of shooter with speeder bikes and stuff. And so both of these games are kind of lumped together in my mind. I will say of the two, this holds up better. Wow. Conversation, cool. We're done with that.

So next in 1987, and I guess that's wrapping up, 1987, is Dragon Spirit. It, which is another game that I never saw in arcades, but did see on NES. Yeah. But I think it was a two-person shooter in the arcades? I want to say it was. I think, I feel like it was a co-op shooter. This game was really beautiful and maybe you want to play it. I think I played this in the arcade.

So tell us what is this game, Benj? It is a top-down shooter, but instead of a spaceship, you are a dragon. And I think you can shoot fireballs out. out of your mouth. Or mouths. Mouths. You can get two mouths if you want. It's a two mouth kind of game.

And it has a layering element with backgrounds, according to my show notes. And it's very metal. The whole game is very metal. I think I wrote that. I wrote that. But I agree. Like you're fighting these. It's got this aesthetic to it that's just like, what are some cool medieval weird things

we can throw in? So you're fighting like fire breathing dragon dinosaurs. And then later you have like dinosaurs. dinosaur ghosts. Yeah, I mean, this is like, this might be the first shoot-em-up that its origins can be traced to the side of a van. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's weird that you don't see this more often. Like, every top-down shooter is an airplane or a spaceship.

Yeah. I don't know how many dragons, two-headed dragons fighting dinosaur ghosts I've ever seen. You can occasionally get those. There's been a few, but yeah, not as many. The side of the van thing is an interesting comment that I think other people won't understand. What? Everyone knows Ban art

They know It's a 70s kind of thing Well you'll know You'll know if you're next to Jeremy in traffic You got that airbrushed hyanko alien Yeah exactly It's what keeps my white van from being quite so creepy So

The other game Who made legendary wings That was Capcom Yeah that's the other shooter Where I always remember It's not a spaceship And that was cool And that was co-op I think

It was just on that NES. So maybe Dragon Spirit wasn't co-op. I don't remember. I'm not sure either, but... But, man, it looks neat and sort of fantasy elements. Yeah, it has some interesting gimmicks for a shooter. Like, he's got, you've got, like I said, it's got, like, kind of these multilayered backgrounds, and sometimes they move. So there's some stages where, like, there's cavern walls that kind of close in on you and you have to avoid them and that kind of thing going on.

There's also, like, dark areas where you have to evidently, like, collect power-ups to replenish your light source, and that just looks kind of annoying. I'm not sure. I have never played the game that far. Well, yeah, again, I was just watching a play-through. I saw that happen. Someone wrote jazzing up with joy. What is that? I think that was in the ending text after you beat the game.

Something about jazzing up with joy because everyone was, the whole kingdom was joyful that you had beaten the evil dinosaurs. But it's metal, not jazz. Well, I don't know. Someone skipped the memo. But it also, it's about the power chords you don't play. But it also, yeah, so I did watch all the way through this game on YouTube because it also had this thing that ties back into what we were talking about with Namco really enjoying its history, that there is actually a literal history of Namco games in the credits of this game. Oh, yeah? Like you beat this game and it scrolls through like old Namco games saying, remember this cool old stuff we did?

And this was only 1987 even. My goodness. By the way, you can get another, a third head, so it's a three-mouth game. Oh, there we go. You don't get a third head, though. The flames just become bigger. You got, you're two heads. I'd see three heads.

There are three heads? Some of these pictures, yeah. All right. The ones that are flashing up in my brain. I'm definitely not looking at this. The reliable narrator. No, those are two heads. I don't want anybody to go into this game being like, I love games where you have three heads.

I don't want anybody to be disappointed. That's all. I think that's fair. All right. So another shooter that's a little more standard fair, although also very familiar. I guess I would make it standard fair. What am I saying? Oh, right, it's Gallagia 88. So I guess that means we're on to 1988. My goodness. It mixes it up, too. It does. It's not just normal Gallagher.

And this one is, this one's great because it's one you can play on Switch with FlipGrip, which, not to toot my own horn, but that's a great way to play it. And it is like a fancier version of Gallagher. They, they really, they spend some time trying to figure out, how do we build on the Gallagher thing? And you got some games like gapless and so forth. And you're kind of like, I don't know about this. But Gallagia 88. it's just, it has the basic premise of, if I'm not mistaken, I forgot, it's been, it's been a while, but, um, I mean, you're still fighting the alien bugs. You can still get your ship captured and get it back to have multiple ships. And you can have triple ships now. Yeah, although it sort of melds into one big ship when you get through, but you get this triple shot going on, which looks really useful. No, I started talking and then I just like, my brain frozen up, but I couldn't remember, is this the one where you can capture enemies, but I think that's gapless. Yeah, no, I know. Whereas this is, this is a little more standard. You can triple up your own ship, but like the thing that this, so it's so the like the mechanics of your ship are still pretty much the same, but the thing that this mixes up is kind of the levels. You start out going through these standard Gallagah levels where, you know, they come in and waves and form up at the top. But then like you do a bunch of those and eventually you start to hit, you hit these longer scrolling levels where it's basically a scrolling shoot them up suddenly, only with Gallagher enemies. And it's kind of funny. And they kind of do like a combination of the flight formations and the ranks at the top of the screen. It's a really interesting sort of midway point between that. Yeah, you'll like her. So you'll run into sort of like bits of Gallagher levels while scrolling through this longer level. And then it does fun things, like have like a bunch of teeny tiny ships come into a formation that looks like a pixelated version of a big Gallagher ship. And like they threw a lot of cool things in.

I kind of like it. Yeah. And the art style is, you know, I said that Dragon Spirit was very metal. And this is very not metal. It's like everything is a balloon animal. Everything is all rounded and colorful. This is like Pac Mania. Yeah, exactly.

It's got all this, like, shading to it. So it gives you, like, this kind of cute take on Gallagher. Although it's still very challenging. It looks adorable, and then it blows you up. Well, and then there's the bonus stages with the that's galactic dancing stages, which is, like, every once in a while I throw one of these in. It literally says, that's galactic dancing. And then it comes in with some weird background music.

Like, the first one is, like, carousel music, but then there's one that's like a waltz and one that's a march. And it just throws in these formations. that are clearly, like, doing these choreography routines where, meanwhile, you try to blow them all up for bonus points. But although it's kind of, it's kind of got this bad incentive in that, like, if you blow everything up too quickly, you don't get to see some of the, like, choreography, but. So blow things up slowly. Yeah, but then some of them get away and you get less points. This had a, didn't this, wasn't this on turbographics or PC engine only? Yeah, it came out as Gallagin 90.

Okay, I wanted that. Because it took a couple of years for them to compile it. Yeah, I wanted that. the computer were so slow. By the way, you can play Galica 90 with the BX-88 joystick today. There you go.

So it's not just a flip-grip thing. It's really great. Flip-grip will let you play it vertically. Yeah. Mine will let you play it normal, horizontal. And I'll write you a story about it. Yeah.

What do you do, Ben? etch things with a milling machine. Yeah, with milling machine. Sure, I can etch some, yeah, we can do that. Perfect. All right. So we've really got just a full suite of options available here for Gallagher 88. But it is a great little game. Yeah, like the other thing that reminded me of some of the like kind of beefed up. So it had some of these beefed up kind of like pulsing fleet formations in it, which here's where I was doing in 88. It reminded me of Salarian, which is the old Mac riff on Gallagher. And I actually looked it up and these were basically contemporary. So they were basically just going in some of the same directions at the same time. Yeah, I feel like this, you know, the classic shooter, classic arcade shooter done cutely was a thing that happened sometimes.

You also had Taito create Return of the Invaders and Attack of the Lunar Loonies, where they basically took the Space Invaders characters and made them, I guess, goofy space invaders work. Yeah, one of those, I think it was, I want to say Attack of the Lunar Loonies was Tito based on Space Invaders and was super cute. But I know there is a super cute space invaders. Yeah, it's really kind of the primal origins of the cute them up. Right, and then you had stuff like Perodius, which was grottious, but adorable. And then Twin Bee just started out super cute. We had another one of those later in the list, too. Yeah, yeah.

There's like magical chase and other stuff, you know, just these adorable shooters that are also, by the way, hard as hell and will destroy you. Don't let your guard down. It's all alive. It'll ruin your life. So actually it looks like the next game on the list I didn't put a date on it But looking at the YouTube video That's right

Actually it looks like this was from 1987 So we skipped ahead a little bit But this is called Blazer And it's very strange It reminds me of That tank game Yeah the tank game And I can't remember what it's called

Isn't it? I don't know there are a lot of tank games There are I realize now they all kind of blend together There's a Konami one, isn't there? What's that the... It's like a free roaming tank warfare game presented

in the style, the not isometric but the other style. Oblique. Obliq projection? That's it. That is the word you're looking. I don't have to go back and edit that in. Although I thought this one was more just to that email. But you go like this game has the oblique projection.

I record it later with a cold Yeah, it has the same sort of presentation as Xaxon, including the sort of dimensionality. But, like, that as a tank just feels really weird. Yeah, well, you know, Namco also kind of did the shooter world as a tank thing with Grobda, which was one of the tanks from Zevius. But instead, the game, I think we talked about that in the previous episode. You were, like, one of the tanks from Zevius, like, going around, shooting stuff. So it kind of puts things on the other foot. Like, you know, here's the little target guys you blow up that are on the ground. Now you have to be them. How do you like that?

Yeah. How do you like them apples? It's also kind of the, it's kind of the opposite way of so you have your, you're scrolling shooters like Zavius and stuff where you're shooting things in front of you, but also bombing targets on the ground. And this flips it around. So you're this tank on the ground and you're shooting things in front of you on the ground. But then there's also things flying overhead and you have to like lob shots up to hit them, which seems really awkward to keep track of it gives you like shadows under the flying enemies so you can kind of track them and it seems like it's actually pretty forgiving on the hit detection which I think it has to be because otherwise it would just be impossible to keep track of trying to shoot the things overhead while you're

driving around in this tank right and according to my notes which I compiled a while back but I'm willing to believe myself this game was only released in Japan and has never been compiled on any collection I had certainly never seen it before so it's maim or nothing for you pal if you want to play laser yeah this is a deep cut it is as far as Namco games goes. You do sometimes become a helicopter. You do. Oh, right, right, right. You flip it around and become a cophunter thing, actually. Yeah. It's just

like life. You become a helicopter. It is just like life. I mean, if life is like Yoshi's Island, then absolutely yes. Yeah, I'm a helicopter. Isn't that what Forrest Gump said? Life is like becoming a helicopter? Yeah, like Yoshi's Islands. You always become a helicopter. We need to eat lunch,

man. I guess so. So moving on the next game, the next surreal game. Yeah, speaking of deep cuts, the next game is called Quester. Arcanoid, and I had never heard of this before I started putting together this list. I was skipping over that one because it just looked like arcanoid. It is literally just arcanoid. I want them to have like an event based around this game and call it Questers Fest. But I want to talk about the next one because it actually looks cool.

Yeah. Come on, that was good. It wasn't bad. It was awful. Okay, yeah, let's talk about March and Mays. March and Mays is a cool game. This is a 1988 game. and it's also isometric or oblique projection, whatever the hell.

I think this one's actually isometric. I don't care. I don't know. This one, yeah, this is one I had never seen before, but looks cool and I kind of want to play it now. Yeah, it kind of, it's kind of a combination of the last two games we talked about, Gallagia 80 with the cuteness and Blazer with the isometric combat. But you're like, you're like this little girl, Alice and like shooting marbles at things. And like this, the, like, aesthetic of this reminds me of marble madness, because you've got, that you've got these like isometric like floating tracks like over this distant background

and there's lots of the fact that there's lots of marbles rolling right because basically everything shoots marbles so that kind of helps the comparison um yeah you know there was um was it libel rabble one of the previous namco games we talked about that also had oh you weren't there that episode do you guys remember has it just describe it and i'll remember it it's kind of like this but not isometric libel rabble libel rabble yeah i want to say that's the one was. I don't remember. I don't know. This game is weird. Yeah. It would all come back to me. But March and Mays,

this game looks incredible. Yeah. It's never seen it before my entire life. It's a gorgeous isometric, I guess, 2.5D platformer. Yeah. Kind of with a shooter element to it. It looks, yeah, so there's a lot of enemies you're trying to roll your marbles over them, but it also looks like it really ramps up the kind of platforming challenges

pretty quick because you end up with, like, moving platforms and, like, rotating bars. You've got to jump over. And it sort of expands from being a very linear track to being a more, you you can go different directions and collect power-ups for your marbles kind of thing. It looks like a lot of fun. It looks like it's got a lot of cool ideas. So you're a girl and pig tails.

Yeah. You're chasing after a rabbit. Yeah. There's this white rabbit that gives you advice sometimes. So that's why it looks like a drug trip. Yeah. It's true to the original text. When I skimming through the second level has the Salvador Dali melting clocks background, which

is pretty weird. Well, so when I skip through a long play of this and it actually gets, it kind of doubles down into the Alice, but even weirder, and that, like, the Red Queen is some kind of robo-alian by the end. You're getting these weird alien backdrops and fighting, like, robots and stuff. Isn't that how it worked in X-Men also? Could be. That's the, that was the original Alice in Wonderland manuscript. Lewis Carroll was intending it to be a robot. I think Jabberwock was actually like an Eldridge god for another dimension, yeah. Yeah, so there's a lot of questions called Arkenoid and Wonderland.

But yeah, this game, you know, from what I've played of it, manages to avoid the pitfalls, literal pitfalls that sometimes plague isometric platformers. I feel like it's very good about giving you visual cues about where you need to be. There's really great use of shadow and kind of positioning and relationships between objects. So it's not like Landstocker where the game is kind of a hit or miss crapshoot where you're like, I got to jump now. I hope I'm jumping at the right time. I can't tell because there are no shadows to guide me. Is it a continuous scrolling game? You're forced to scroll or do you go forward?

No, I think it follows you. Yeah, you're under your own power. Okay, that's better. Yeah, but like I said, like the layout of the levels has got, it's this very marble madness look. So it's really clear what you're jumping on because it's just this floating, kind of abstract course. Yeah, it's called March and Maze.

So you're, you are scrolling around a lot. So it's not a forced scrolling shooter. for sure. That's cool. Yeah, if you... Any home ports of this? Anybody know on anything? I didn't write that down.

I want to say that it has been on something at some point. Of course. Yeah. I know that's really helpful. Look this up at home, kids. If you can find it play. No, we'll look it up right now. Oh, well, all right.

It is on the PC engine and X68,000. Well, that's nice. And it was released on virtual console, maybe not for the U.S. All right. Well, I'll try it on the PC. engine. Yeah, all the, all the dates here are Japanese only. So it's never been released in the U.S. Anything we can create a Japanese account on and get it off their virtual console? It's too late now. It's we virtual console. Of course. Yeah, you missed your target

opportunity. Well, maybe someday. I bet the PC engine version is not very expensive because I never hear people talk about it. And you hear people talk about games that are expensive because they need to lament it. eBay says, oh, here's a PC engine who card for 33 bucks. Cool. Not bad. Hey, it just sold. Chris? That's weird. It's gone. Not too bad, but they should still put it on Switch because it looks like a lot of fun. All right. Also, from 1988, the exact opposite of March and May's Splatterhouse.

Do we need to talk about this that much? We've had an entire episode on Splatter House. But if you guys have memories of Splatter House, please. What a great name. What an amazing title for a game. It was, you could get it on the... TurboGraphics 16, and that was a good reason to get one of those instead of at Nintendo because he couldn't play those kind of graphic games on the consoles. Yeah, my friend who had a turbo graphics when I was a kid, like, his whole thing was learning it's gut splatterhouse. Yeah. Yeah, this, the aesthetic of this game is not really

my speed, but I get that some people really love it, that Uki, spooky, gory, horror kind of thing. Yeah, like there are literally guts dripping all over the stages. Like, that's, that's its thing. Well, I feel like, I know, I've played Splatterhouse 3 on the Genesis is my favorite one in this series. That one's really different. It's kind of like an exploratory, like find your way through the house sort of thing. It has different elements to it. This one is a very straightforward hack and slash. This is like a beat them up. Yeah. I mean, this is like, this is pretty much Wonder Momo, but instead of playing, yeah, I'm serious. Like in terms of mechanics, it's pretty similar to Wonder Momo, except that instead of being like a cute little teenage

girl, you are a horrible dude with muscles and a Jason mask. Probably no one wants to see his panties. Yeah, and it's obvious... Let's not go there. An obvious play on Jason from the Friday the 13th series. His name is Rick. He wields a two by four weapon in a basement.

Among other things. Yeah, you can pick up like a cleaver in this and like slice things in half with it. I love that this game is very clearly based on the premise of, okay, but what if you were Jason? And also Jason was the good guy. Yeah. Yeah. It's very... It's It's three leaps of logic away from...

Isn't that they're a movie like that, like Jason in Hell or something, where he's sort of the protagonist? I don't know. I don't like scary movies. I don't like Jason X, though. Jason X is extremely good. Are you sure it's not Jason 10?

Pretty sure it's not Jason 10. I'm just checking. Yeah, this game also is kind of based on a... There's a little bit of lovecraft to it. Like, you go into a mansion, and you start out in the basement, and you just, like, descend into a grizzly and grizzlier version of hell.

For my money, the best Splatterhouse game is Juan Pacu Graffiti for Famicom, which is the cute, fun little parody game. One of the bosses you fight is an alien from aliens that very cutely pops out of a dude's chest and starts... It's saying, hello my baby, hello my honey.

It pretty much is like the space balls gag. Yeah, for sure. Splatterhouse is neat because it had the gall, the, I don't know what, the temerity, to go into being such a graphic, like, dial it up to 11 graphic game with gross, monsters and goryness and things like that. Yeah, I mean, I kind of feel like they, this was kind of the same through line that you had with, you know, these games that were set in Gikoku, but instead of being said in like Japanese hell, the hell of Japanese folklore and mythology, it's more like,

scary Hollywood movies and gross out. And, you know, the whole body horror thing in video games was kind of a big deal around this time. You had stuff like Life Force and Abadox and that sort of thing, where it was just like, how gross can we get? And this game, with this game, Namco was like, we are going to get all the gross. We are going to get the most gross. Yeah.

And I don't think they were quite as crass as, you know, chiller, but it was, it was up there. It was definitely pushing the limits. I feel like this was designed to anger, tipper gore. Yeah, I think it was designed to push some limits. But I think it's a new game. It's a beat-em-up. It's got this theme. If you like this kind of theme, then it's your game.

You know, if you like beat-em-ups and you like crazy horror movie, grotesqueness, you know, which by modern standards, it doesn't even really look like that based on what we can render now. But, you know, it's still at the time, it was. Yeah, I mean, what do you guys feel about the Splatterhouse relaunch from like 10 years ago by, was that by gas-powered games? Yeah, I don't remember if I played it. I remember it existing. Didn't play it.

It looked like it took itself too seriously. Yeah, yeah. Because for me, Splatterhouse is not necessarily in the vein of like a Friday the 13th or a nightmare on Elm Street. It's more like evil dead or army of darkness where, you know, a guy gets punched and 18 gallons of blood shoot out like that. And maybe that's because of the way it by necessity looks on a video. game where things are kind of...

Exaggerated. Exaggerated and a little bit silly, like, because you're walking through this house and it's sewers forever. Yeah, I mean, it's still stylized. Like, it's got all this, all these guts and gore, but it's still, it's not, like, ultra-realistic. Yeah. And I think, like, all the...

Because the monster designs are genuinely creepy and weird and gross, but I feel like that gross out aspect of it, again, like, lends itself to something that's more horror comedy than what you get here. That's funny because that's a time... I'm Picklerick. fighting through the mansion. I think that that's more of a like a retrospective point of view because at the time I didn't feel like it was a cute take on gross things.

Probably not. It looks like it based on what we see today, you know, like it's not as realistic as it maybe could be. But the guy's a little chunky proportion, weird kind of stumpy looking guy. But I also remember the comic book. book ads for Splatterhouse that were very, like, again, because they were running in Marvel comics in 1988, like, we're also very kind of cartoonally drawn, cartoonishly drawn. Cartoonishly. Cartoonally.

Yeah. All right, we'll look at one last game before we wrap this up so binge can eat and also I can eat. And that is Assault and Assault Plus, which for some reason I thought I had played before, but then I sat down to do the research for this episode and realized, I've never played this before. like this is a Super NES mode 7 game four years, three years before the, two years before the Super NES launched in Japan. It's ahead of its time is what I'm saying.

Kind of like Thunderceptor. This is like the kind of game you would be seeing on Super NES a few years later and Namco got there first, planted a flag in it, and then abandoned the kingdom. Chris, you have something to say. This is awful and I hate it.

You have motion sickness. I have motion sickness. Oh, yeah. Why would you do this? This is the work, because what it is is you are in a tank driving around. It's a

solipsism simulator. Everything revolves around you. It rotates while your tank remains static. I hate it. It's so bad. So it's like, yeah,

so another thing on Super Nintendo, Contra 3 did this for bonus stages. And Brandish did this kind of, not with the smooth scrolling because it started out on a PC, which

that's a whole other story. But yeah, the idea of like you are always true north and everything spins around you, is definitely a thing you would see in other games. Yeah, it's kind of weird and disorienting.

And so it scales, so it's got, like I said, it looks exactly like Mode 7 in that the main gimmick is there's this big background that's being rotated and scaled because you can also like hit these jump pads that send your tank flying up in the air and you can mortar the enemies farther away from you, which seems like a useful thing to be able to do. But it does it with the same scheme of just scaling the background constantly.

I can see why this. give you motions. Oh yeah. I mean, I bet it's not so bad if you're playing it, but if you're just watching, you're just like, it looks cool though. I have never played this and this is, it's a crime because this is really incredible looking. Yeah, I mean, you know, we're comparing to mode seven. And like I said, there's this whole, uh, eschatological discussion to be had there. But I, I'm really impressed because, you know, the hardware here is also good at rotating the sprites that appear on the map. You don't really, like, when you, you, have the rotating stages on Super Nias, I feel like they were a lot clumsier about the way Sprites rotated along with the backgrounds. It was only hooked up to the background. Right. Yeah. The Moose 7 was just for one layer of the background.

Yeah. If you wanted to really rotate something else, you had to make it into a fake background and do some trickery. Or else do some sort of rotation with the Sprites through drawing them at different angles. Or else use a Super FX chip 2, or Super FX2 chip like Yoshi's Island did. I'd like to point out that if you're trying to

visualize what this game looks like. When they're saying Mode 7, it's not like Mario Kart where you're looking at a plane, like a tilted plane that's scaling and rotating. It's a straight top-down view of a flat stage that rotates around you as you move. Yeah, I mean, it's, like we said, it's Contra 3, the bonus stages from Contra 3. Only more so. Yeah. Way more so.

Konami should be ashamed. They were one-up three years before. Is there a home port of this anywhere? I do not think so I saw did show up on one of the Namco museums So there's a version on PlayStation Yeah I was gonna say probably

You know it wouldn't have been possible On a home council for a while after it came out Yeah So this fell into a gap Like the NES gap I guess Some of them came out before the NES And so they couldn't have like Good home ports

Even if they were possible And then some were like so advanced That they came up before the Super NES And the Genesis and stuff so they weren't really possible in their second. Yeah, I mean, 1986 through 88 saw, at least in Japan, the debut of the PC engine, the TurboGraphic 16, and the Sega Mega Drive, or Sega Genesis. So, you know, we were, even on the home front, we were moving into the 16-bit consoles at this point,

or 16-bit in the case of turbographics. You did air quotes. I did air quotes. Everyone could see it at home. It was in my voice. There's a camera in here. that's a secret. So, yeah, so, so definitely, like, you know, arcade hardware is always a step ahead of home hardware anyway or was back in the day.

So, yeah, so the stuff was, was pretty hard to reproduce at home. And they were really experimenting with what they could get away with with arcade boards. And I don't think it was quite as impressive as what Sega was doing, but it was still pretty damn impressive. I agree. Well, excellent. Okay, so I think we will wrap there. I think there's room in us. There's energy in us for one more Namco episode. I don't want to, you know, drag it out. But, you know, there's still some cool stuff that they produced in the years to come. So we should definitely touch on the highlights in a later episode. I'm having trouble forming sentences now and actually pronouncing words. So to me, that is a sign that we need to break and have some food. My body is requiring calories. It is definitely lunchtime. So that doesn't do any good for you, the listeners, but I promise that when we come back and record another episode, I will actually be using real human words again.

It's very exciting. So, guys, video games, huh? How about that? There were some good ones. Crazy. Some of these I want to play. Chris, you seem muted about video games. I'm also ready for lunch.

Okay. In conclusion, Namco is a land of mini-contrast. So, yes, everyone, thanks for listening. to this latest iteration of our Namco series Namco Volume 3. Maybe we should do 5 and each one should get a little letter on it. Maybe spell out Namco.

I think that's a great original idea. They could borrow that idea from us, honestly. Yes, so I am Jeremy Parrish, and you have been listening to Retronauts in case you were wondering. Thanks for listening. Thanks for tuning in. You can listen to us every single freaking week on whatever podcasting

service we end up joining. We're not sure yet at this point. But we'll be on iTunes and other places. So listen to us there. Or you can support us on Patreon. Get your episodes a week early with higher bit rate quality and no advertisements. That's $3 a month at patreon.com slash retronauts. I'm not going to hard sell you. If you like this show, it's kind of an all over the place sort of show. But if you love rambling discourse about old video games, by God, do we have a podcast for you come support us? Anyway, you guys, what's up? Let's go backwards this time. I'm Chris Sims. you can find all of my stuff by going to

T-H-E-I-S-B-D-com. That has links to all the other podcasts that I do and comic books that I write and other things that I write online. And I'm a freelancer. So if you want me to write something, if you've got that Rolling Thunder license, holl at your boy.

Look me out. I'm Ben Elgin. You can find me on Twitter as Kieran. That's K-I-R-I-N-N. Most of my other retro projects are kind of on hold right now, but maybe after I actually get some lunch some of them will come back we'll see yeah and i'm ben jenwards right now i am making my living building bespoke artisanal handcrafted small batch organic joysticks for retro game consoles including

virtual boy Sega Saturn uh everything uh super nintendo genesis atari everything anyway bx foundry com, B-X-F-O-U-N-D-R-Y.com is the domain, and you can find me on Twitter at Ben Jenwards. I can vouch for his sticks. They're very good. You owe me a couple still, though. So anyway, thanks everyone for joining us. Thanks to you guys for joining me. Thanks, Namco for making video games for us to talk about, and some of which we openly dismissed out of hand. Take that. Anyway, we'll be back again in a few days with a Friday episode, probably. If not, that'll be next week. But definitely, we'll be back next Monday. Look forward to it. Oh, my God. It's going to be great. Thank you.