Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 227: Console Roguelikes through Mystery Dungeon

Episode Date: June 17, 2019

The second part of our journey into roguelike history sees experts Jason Wilson and John Harris join Bob Mackey and Jeremy Parish to explore the protoplasmic origins of the genre's console renditions through the near-perfection of Shiren the Wanderer.

This week in Retronauts, please enjoy our roguish charm. Hi, everyone. Welcome to an episode of Retronauts that is coming to you from the Retronauts. I am Retronaut Jeremy Parrish. And sitting here across the table from me is another Retronaut. Hey, it's Bob Mackie. I'm back down to level one again. Oh, I'm sorry. How did you die, Bob? It's a dangerous out there, Jeremy. It's neighborhood. It's getting worse. I think you were laid low by a cold, right? Yes. Very sad. Very sad. And also occasional retronaut contributors sometimes. Hi, it's Jason Wilson from GameSpeed. How are you all doing? And finally, on Skype, we have a newcomer to the Retronauts Fold, but by far the greatest expert on the topic at hand that we have on this episode, none other than John Harris.

John, would you like to introduce yourself really quickly? I don't, am I that great an expert, really? Well, we are talking about roguelikes. And so without question, you are hands down the most proficient and knowledgeable person about roguel. likes that I can think of. You wrote, I'm not going to talk about it. You talk about it. Tell us about your credentials.

Give us your bona fides. Well, I wrote App Play for five or six years, I think. I still technically I'm writing it, but much more slowly now. Yeah, and what was App Play just for those who aren't familiar with it? It was a column on Rogue Likes that went on Game Set Watch, I think maybe 2007. so forward, or maybe, I don't know, it's been, it's been a while. But I ended up doing it for quite some time, and I don't really know what the effect of it was, but people seem to like it.

I mean, to me, it's kind of the definitive online treatise and, you know, explanation of what roguelikes are and how they work. It's not really based so much in the history of the genre as it is in the execution, the mechanics, the interesting interactions that you can have with such a complex concept of a video game. And your column was fantastic at explaining that. And it launched and ran right around the same time that Mystery Dungeon for DS came out. And so that was, you know, I had kind of a passing interest in roguelikes before that. But then your column, you know, really hit me around the same time as Sharon the Wander.

and pulled me in. And so I can say the effect is that it probably led to this episode, if nothing else, because, you know, it's rogue likes have become an object of fascination with me, even though I'm terrible at them. Yeah, but I guess I'm okay at them. I mean, I've ascended at NetHack a few times, but I've beaten Sheerrin's ultimate dungeon on both the versions. And I can't even beat the bug on Table Mountain. Oh, yeah, well, in the original, the superintendent version, you could just throw a scroll of genocide at it and kill it.

Oh, well, okay. A scrolls of genocide? Oh, my God. Yeah, it's kind of not a, it's kind of an improper name, but actually, I think it was a scroll of sealing in the DS version. Okay. But it's called, there's called Scrolls of Genocide in the original rogue hack and net hack. Right. Yeah, you read one, it wipes one entire kind of monster out of the game.

Yeah, and that's exactly the kind of interesting convolutions that emerge from the roguelike genre. We've had an episode of Retronauts about, I don't know, probably like half a year ago, where we had a conversation, you know, really built around the origins of the genre, and it's kind of pure expressions on personal computers. For this episode, I want to talk about console roguelikes. And this topic comes to us as a request of patron. Andrew Duff, who specifically wants us to talk about Azure Dreams, which is one of the more interesting console roguelikes to come out of the 90s back when there was still kind of a lot

of experimentation but within sort of the formal structure of the rogue like, as opposed to the modern day rogue lights that you see now, like dead cells and Spalunky and things like that. We're not going to talk about those games, like anything that kind of goes weird and came after or, you know, Spelunky and Beyond. That's a topic for another time. But What we are going to talk about this time is, you know, the sort of the question of how do you take a convoluted, complex, intricate system, you know, genre designed around the full extent of a very specific kind of PC, including the PC keyboard, and turn that into something that can be played on, you know, a two-button controller in the case of something like Fatal Labyrinth or, I guess, Dragon Crystal, I guess is the better example. Like, that ran on Game Gear. And making it readable on a screen. Yeah, like, how do you do that?

How do you boil such complexity down to hardware that was not designed for that sort of thing? Like, you know, when strategy games and role-playing games come to consoles, they have to make so many compromises. And so the question is, like, what compromises do roguelikes have to make in the transition to consoles, and do they still count as roguelikes? I don't want to get, like I said, too much into splitting hairs and, you know, semantics. But there is kind of a question, you know, because a lot of people are very stuck on very specific rules for what defines a rogue like. And, you know, that does become a question. Like, you know, there are some people who don't consider Sharon the Wanderer a true rogue like because there is some persistence within the world, even though you have, you know, perma death of a sort, you lose all your levels and you lose all your equipment and so forth. But because it fudges that a little bit

Some people are like, well, no, that doesn't stick with the Berlin description, the Berlin rules, so it's not real. But NEDHAC has persistence between games, and it's definitely a roguelike. It's got bones levels. Character dies. There's a chance, depending on what level you died

on, that the next time you have a game that gets to that level, instead of generating a random level, it will load in the level that you were on when you died. and your character's ghost will be hovering over the pile of his stuff. Most of it will be cursed, but it'll still be there. And whatever it was that killed him will also still be there.

Right. And that is exactly why I don't really like semantic arguments because people will, you know, they'll wiggle around and say, well, that's different because, so I don't want to do that. I just want to talk about, like, I, you know, I really enjoy these games. I find them fascinating. I find them vexing, but they're very, very enjoyable to play. until you know, until you die a few times and have a really, like, great run that ends badly. And then you're like, I don't want to touch this again for another year or two.

And then the other thing I think would be important to talk about once we establish that basis. How do they improve the roguelike from what the PC started? Right. Yeah. You know, I think this is kind of a jumping off point to basically give a quick recap of the rogue-like, you know, and John, if you don't mind, I'd love to have kind of your description. Because, you know, Bob and I especially have already been in an episode talking about roguelikes. So people know our opinions. What is, in your opinion, what constitutes a roguelike? What makes the genre interesting?

How did you become a fan, an aficionado of the genre? Well, I realize that's a lot of questions. Sorry. Yeah, sorry. I try to keep them all in memory, but my short-term memory is a little flaky. So if I get too far off field, let me know. Okay. The term rogue-like originated, you know, because they're games like Rogue.

We know it's the Unix, an exploration game, and basically just an ad hoc term, a whole bunch of games that were a lot like Rogue, and what were limited by those dumb terminal output devices. So they all looked very similar, so it was obvious then what a Rogue-like was. If you played Rogue, you could pretty much just go ahead and get started with one and not have to learn half the keys. It could just go. And there wasn't really any question about it until they started appearing on other platforms,

like PC, of course, Super Nintendo and things like that. Let's see, I got started. I had exposed to them at a cousin's house. They had an IBM PC, an 80-86 machine. Ooh. Until then, all I had was a Commodore 64. And one of the, they didn't even have a hard drive, but they did have a nice selection of games on a three and a half inch disk. Actually, I think it was three and five and a quarter.

And one of them was a PC rogue, which was widely pirated. So it was a version, I think it was a hacked version of Epic's Rogue. Pics licensed the original rogue from its creators and tried making a go of it, selling it for various computers. and I think the widest exposure the original rogue got for a while was when people pirate it hacked the message into it I think saying public domain

and just made it available that way and every time we would go on like yearly vacations to our cousin's house by cousin's house and I would spend almost the entire weekend playing rogue and over the course of several years of playing

it that way two weeks at a time eventually I managed to get to the ambient of Yindor itself but not beyond that. Okay wow so you cut your teeth by cheating and going over reload you know backing up save files and restoring them

that way but yeah the PC Rogue is still a particularly difficult version of the game yeah anyway okay what else did you ask about well that was pretty much it um yeah I kind of you kind of hit on everything But I noticed in the notes you did add a few interesting entries that we didn't talk about in our previous conversation, like Larn, Advanced Rogue.

We did talk about stuff like Adam and Dungeon Crawlstone Soup, but yeah, I'm kind of curious about the, like, Larn and Advanced Rogue. What can you tell about those? Larn is great. It still seems to have small but dedicated toward of community even now, but it's kind of hard to find a good copy of it. there's a version on Steam for a few dollars but I see it's got some gameplay changes there's a version called that's X-Larn

there's a version called NetLarn that I don't know if it's still being updated there's U-Larn which I haven't even tried In any case Larn is particularly interesting for one thing it's kind of variable difficulty when you win the game

the game records that it increases the difficulty the next time you play is that the more times you win the harder it gets and also later characters after a win they get taxed by the game

by the Bank of Larn the LRS the LARN revenue service based upon the money that you took out of the dungeon the last time you won and you have to pay that tax off. I've never gotten that far, so I've never seen that.

Larn is a game that it's got like a lot of subtle influences. Even NEDHack has a Larn reference. If you get a scroll of mail in a game that's not like set up for mail, if you read it, it'll say it's addressed to the

finder of the eye of Larn. Which I think is a reference to the tax system, I'm not sure. But there are other interesting things about the game is that there's two dungeons, and neither are very large. The larger dungeon is 10 levels, and it's a traditional sort of rogue-like dungeon, you know, with an escalating difficulty. And the other dungeon is the volcano, which is filled with demons and dragons, and is absolutely lethal to most players. And the way you play the game, remember correctly, is at the bottom of the main dungeon is the Eye of Larn, which you can sell to the store for enough. money to buy a lance of death.

The lance of death kills all enemies in one hit. You use that and you take that into the volcano dungeon to beat it and find the object of the game, which is a potion to cure your daughter of dianthoritis, which is like some evil disease that

she's got that'll kill her in a certain amount of time. Don's got a time limit. It's not like a food-based time limit where you have to keep finding food in order to keep playing. But it's a thought is a, you have like 300 mobiles, whatever those are, to win the game in. And you can find scrolls of time warp that will give you a little extra time.

But, yeah, it's different for a lot of different ways. It's definitely got a unique flavor to it. So that's the reason why the second dungeon exists in Larn? It's because you're trying to save your daughter? Yeah, yeah. Okay. That's really interesting. I feel like that's a good jumping off point to start talking about console rogue likes because, you know, that's a rogue like that you just described that takes some liberties with the core concept

and doesn't try to be slavishly rogue. It says, let's, let's, you know, give some structure to this. Let's, you know, throw in some changes. And I feel like, you know, that's really a necessity when you bring this genre to other platforms, more limited platforms. So I feel like I don't know if, you know, developers took any lessons specifically from Larn. But they certainly, I would say, you know, took some. of the same applications and said, you know, we've got to change things up. We can't be

too beholden to the rigid rules that people expect from roguelikes. We have to, you know, we have to make this an adaptation so that it fits the platform. Well, yeah, well, I mean, I don't want to like downplay consoles too much because there are some sort of strengths for roguelikes on console as well. Oh, yeah. One of the thing is that Rogue Likes being turn-based they don't really require

a lot of console power to simulate them. Basically, all the calculations the game has to do are in response to things that you do. Everything's turn-based.

So it's not being an action game, you don't really have to worry about slowdown that much. Which is a problem in Super Nintendo because it's got a kind of underpowered processor. Enemy AI, although there's complexities to it, you know, it's generally easy to figure out what an enemy

is doing each turn. It's either wandering around looking for you or approaching you or hitting you. So enemy AI doesn't really have to be that complicated. I mean, it doesn't have to do pathfinding much. Yeah, I feel like a lot of the

complexity of rogue likes comes not out of, you know, like the real time things that are happening as you move. But it's more like the systems that are set in place. And once the developers have set that, kind of like that engine in place, then it's just sort of things, you know, following those rules and taking them to their natural outcomes to the fullest extent of what can happen. Yeah, that's what you call emergent gameplay.

Hmm, I like that. Yeah, yeah. You take a whole bunch of rules and they all interact in interesting ways. It's harder to come with really interesting intersecting systems. like that than you'd think. NetHack is kind of renowned for it, but really, if you think of, when you play

NetHack, that doesn't really come into play that often. Most of the game you're just playing and whacking enemies. It's those occasional times when an enemy does, like a gnome gets generated with a wand of death or

you kill a cockatrist and it leaves a corpse and you think, that thing turns turns me to stone when I touch it, what if I put on a pair of gloves and wielded it? Which is probably one of the more entertaining experiences you can have in a computer

game, really. Just leaving a trail of surprised-looking monster statues in your wake. But the dev team saw that coming. So if you're carrying a cockatrous corpse and you're carrying too much other stuff and you go downstairs, there's a chance

that you'll drop the corpse clumsily onto yourself and turn to stuff. own that way? I think that's totally fair. I have a scar on my arms from when I was working in a pizza place and dropped a bunch of hot pizza pans on myself. So, yeah. It's okay. I recovered. I didn't get set back to level one. I lived. I used to work in a dominoes. I could understand that entirely. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I'm sympathetic to the adventurer who dies by dropping a cockatress on themselves. But, yeah, like you say, you know, NetHacket

more infamous and more interesting opportunities are sort of edge cases. They're like very extreme, rare use cases that the developers, you know, kind of built into the game based on feedback, based on, you know, watching players play different versions of the game. And it's been in development constantly for, what, 30 years? Yeah, but aren't edge cases what make a merchant gameplay so fun in so many different genres? Sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, the saying among NetHack fans is the dev team thinks of everything.

Right. Yeah, the people wrote them saying NetTAC contains everything but the kitchen sink. So in a later version of the game, there's a new dungeon feature, lo and behold, kitchen sinks. Yep. And that's kind of like a sort of cliche thing about NetTAC. I mean, there's a lot of other interesting things about it in that. So obviously, you know, consoles have a different life cycle, you know, especially the 16-bit days, the 30-2-bit days, there wasn't the opportunity for that kind of feedback and development cycle.

And, you know, the way a free-to-play game, like NetHack, can sort of live in perpetuity and evolve and change to match what the players do and, you know, kind of adapt to these emergent scenarios. So everyone kind of had to get things right from the start, you know. And so the question is, like I said, you know, how do you take something so complicated, a game, a genre where you're kind of expected to use the entire keyboard for commands and turn that into a, you know, a game that works on a two-button controller or a six-button controller and still has that complexity and still feels essentially rogue-like and doesn't feel too limited, doesn't feel too frustrating. feels just frustrating enough. It seems very challenging. Well, I think... Go on. You first. Oh, I mean, I don't know.

I've been talking a lot. Bob, what do you think? I'm waiting until we get to the later rogolikes because this makes me realize how little I actually know about retro gaming all of this discussion. You know lots about retro gaming. Not this category, but I think my general theory is for roguelikes, like with most things,

Japan made it better by bastardizing them. So I first encountered them. My first experience was with this very weird release. It was a Torneko game for PlayStation 1. Last Hope. And I kind of want to go back to that now because I didn't really understand it at the time. But that might have been like one of the first major releases for like the Chunsoft rogolikes. Yeah, that was the first time that a Chunsoft roguelike, the mystery dungeon games, came to the U.S.

And that was a passion project. One of the localizers on that, I can't remember who it was. Doug Densdale, maybe, he's posted on the Something Awful forums talking about how Enix was like, we're not bringing this to the U.S., and they said, no, no, you've got to bring this over. We will sweat, blood and tears to localize this and make it work. And, you know, tie it in with the, you know, Dragon Warrior 7 is coming up. We got to release that. We got to build hype for it.

So they poured energy and, you know, for very little pay, little money. as they say in Final Fantasy Tactics, and it was a passion project and pretty much got, you know, overlooked or pooh-poohed. People were like, it's a stupid RPG. You die and you lose everything. I don't want to play that. Yeah. Superbode Mystery Dungeon had the same problem. That might have beaten Torneco to the U.S. I can't remember. I think Torneco came here first, but they're both cut from the same mold. And I remember a reading in game magazine, especially, I mean, the topic kind of in today is as your dreams for this episode. In a way, it's like the anchor for everything. But I remember reading in magazines, like, it would get low scores. Like, I get my level reset every time I go to this dungeon. What is the point of this game?

Like, people just didn't understand that basic idea of the rogue like where you start over from scratch. Yeah, one of the reasons I don't want to talk about Spalunky in games that came after on this episode is because I feel that was a watershed moment for, at least in the U.S., for understanding among, you know, console gamers, among sort of mainstream gamers, of understanding what this genre is and what it's about. Because I feel like everything up until that point, while there was, you know, an increasing appreciation, increasing, increasing understanding of mystery dungeon games and other roguelikes, still they tended to be reviewed very poorly. And people would say, well, this is frustrating and stupid and bad. And it was only once that was kind of recontextualized in a different style of game that people started to say, oh. And so, you know, you see fewer mystery dungeon games now. Like when you see a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game, in the early days, those were pretty much raked over the Coles and reviews, and now they're reviewed very fondly. Like, they tend to get pretty good scores.

Well, I think there's a couple things going on there. You know, part of the success for Spillinky, to me, I always thought was PS Plus. And the fact that, you know, people who subscribed to it got free at one point. I mean, that certainly helped, but, I mean, it was out on Steam first, and then it came out on Xbox 360 indie games. I mean, I have to feel like the Xbox 360 release. of Spalunky was really the watershed moment where everyone was like whoa, what's this crazy thing? It looks like

a Mario kind of style platformer, but I keep dying, but it's really fun and I want to keep playing. And wow, I can do all this crazy stuff with a shotgun. What is happening here? It's so wild. And the second thing I think is starting with the Xbox and moving to the Xbox 360

you had more PC only gamers who were starting to get back into console gaming from when they had started to say with Atari or a television or maybe even any And once you have those people who have, you know, maybe they've dabbled in Rogue or NetHack or something else, and now they find things that they like to play that are on, that are on consoles, you know, I think that could have also helped to it, too. But I want to kind of dial back here.

The first game that I've always considered, huh? Oh, sorry. I just wanted to give John a chance to speak because I know he was wanting to pipe up, but we kind of talked over him. That's okay. I remember when Balunky, I mean, was a freeware game on PC. Right, yeah, yeah. For me, that was when it hit it, at first hit it big, but, you know, it's hard to beat free of the price. But it was kind of, you know, not, it was really when it was released on Steam, I think, that it first hit it big, and the Xbox 360 version definitely helped.

Now, you know, people always talk about rogue likes on consoles in the context of, you know, the Super NES and the PlayStation, the first PlayStation, and, you know, definitely from Japan. but I've always argued that the first console roguelike was actually in 1988 2 on the Intellivision. The Advanced Dungeons, the Advanced Dungeons Game, Cloudy Mountain. Very simple game, but for the time was very different, you know, because it had procedural dungeons. That was something that you didn't see on consoles before. You know, you only had one weapon. He had arrows. Those were limited.

But the whole dungeon was in darkness. And as you moved and unveiled it, it would show off more of the dungeon. But, you know, there would also be sounds of the critters that are living in the dungeon. And in that darkness. And it would be like, oh, you know, is that a snake? Is that a spider? So there's kind of a hunt the wampus element to it. There is.

There is. And hunt the wampus is kind of like a... Almost. A offshoot. Well, it's not so much an offshoot. it predates it predates the rogue like it predates rogue by many years

I mean if you look back at Wumpus on the original Vax systems or whatever yeah oh yeah it was like what in the early 70s something like that yeah so Hunt the Wampus you know for TI 994A that was the first thing I played it on yeah I think that was like 1981 or so in 1982

but it was based on Wampus for PC and that was kind of cut from the same cloth as you know adventure colossal cave adventure but with this kind of like, you know, randomized element, you don't know what the maze looks like, you don't know where the Wumpus is going to be. So, you know, these things all kind of tie back.

You could also, you know, I like to kind of put a pin in Wampus as sort of like an early inflection point for survival horror games because you're so limited. Yeah. And you know there's something out there, but you don't know. It's like a horror. Yeah. It's really, yeah, like it's one of those er games.

And I feel like, yeah, Cloudy Mountain. is very much kind of in that same name. It is definitely an er. It's definitely an er-rogly. And so it kind of played with that. And that the next AD&D game on the television, the Treasurer's Timorand, kind of goes from that and is more building on, oh, it's like a console wizardly.

Wizardry. You know, you've got a 10-tier, 10-level dungeon. You don't have a party, but you definitely have that first-person viewpoint. Was it the dungeon procedurally generated? Not that I remember. Okay. So it was more of a traditional, like, wizardry club. Yeah.

Yeah, but then he kind of fall off a cliff from there. And part of that is because of the video game crash. But, you know, you never really saw that on Atari. Actually. Oh, you're wrong, apparently. Remember the Star Pass Supercharger? Right. That sold, they sold Atari games and cassette tapes.

They had a game called Dragon Stomper. It doesn't have, I mean, it has. the overworld is the same each time but there's randomized aspects to it their enemies are randomly placed and the items you find are done in like

the rogue-like ID style you have to figure out what they are it doesn't have procedural dungeons but does have a couple of other roguelike features that's very interesting and helps it be replayable okay Jack and Stupperson a great gear

get a chance to play it I've never heard of that. I've heard of it, but I didn't realize it's import. Yeah, it's foundational. Another thing about it is that it has sort of like a traditional, almost a RPG-ish combat model

where combat is done in its own special mode and you take turn trading off with monsters. And unlike Dragon Quest, you can actually fight multiple monsters at once. Hmm. Interesting. This came out in 1982, correct? I don't remember the year, but that would be about the time.

Yeah. All right. So, yeah, like Jason said, you fall off a cliff for a while. And I don't know that there were any Famicom or NES or Master System games until quite a while later. Like 1990, that dabbled in this procedural generation and that sort of thing. And maybe it's just because the hardware was too underpowered. John, in your notes, you wrote that, you know, one of the big barriers that console roguelikes come up against. is just the limited memory capacity,

not in terms of storage space, but in terms of RAM and how much the computer can track it once. Oh, yeah, Rogue likes, I really, I mean, how much, I think, yeah, the NES has two kilobytes of RAM. It's tiny, yeah. Yeah, and sometimes cartridges would include extra, but you really need a good amount of RAM to just sort of to hold the state of the dungeon.

A procedural dungeon, you can't just read it off of a ROM chip. You have to have enough RAM to hold the whole dungeon because it can be different each game. You can't hold it in read-only memory. It has to be writable. and another thing is that it really helps from a programming standpoint if you can code in C when you're click on with the C

you can create data structures like link lists that allow you to a lot more easily have multiple things in the same space like NetHack you could have hundreds of items and sometimes you do it's in the same space Like if you've killed a bunch of soldiers coming out of a room, all in the same space, all their equipment will pile up into like an epic stack.

A stack like that wouldn't even fit, itself fit in the memory of an NES. Right. Console games, at least from that era, really like statically allocated memory. So you have a sort of space in memory for what can be in a spot. And that way, you're always using this amount of memory. You don't have to allocate more memory off the heap. And if you do that, then you might allocate too much and run out unless you're really careful with how you use it. Right.

And that's one of the things, the mystery dungeon games do fairly well, actually, just being able to use memory efficiently like that, I think. All right. Well, I think we've done a pretty good job of setting down the basics and answering kind of the fundamental question here. So now I'd like to start talking about the actual games that we want to focus on this episode. episode. We never did get around talking about the controllers though. Well, I think we're going to kind of come across those things as we talk about how these games, you know, what they represent, how they worked.

And so I think it'll kind of emerge organically. It'll be emergent. We've set down the structure and now we're going to, you know, dynamically come across these use cases. Yes, that's it. We're on theme. Works for me. All right.

So the very first to my, like as far as I can, you know, find through research, et cetera, really the first sort of traditional rogue style take on this genre in a, on a console. And, you know, this, I could be wrong. In classic gaming, in game history, in game research, there's always a predecessor. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm drawing a line just for the sake of this conversation. and based on a lot of research that I've done, you go back to 1990

and you find Fatal Labyrinth by Sega, which came out in Japan as a Sega Net download. It was a very limited download system. And the reason the game came out as a rogue-like, took the form of a roguelike, is because SegaNet was so limited. And they wanted to give people an RPG experience because that was all the rage in Japan at the time.

That would work with a. download service. So instead of giving them, you know, something on the scale of fantasy star with lots of story and, you know, cool dungeon graphics and cool enemy graphics and cutscenes and that sort of thing, they were like, well, no, why don't we do, why don't we take the Vax approach? So with that game, was that more of a test of how this kind of a game would work or was it more of a test of their service so that they could offer a download game? I don't think it was a test. I think it was just like we have this service. we want to give people compact experiences, you know, like that don't take up a lot of memory

and then won't take a long time to download that'll fit into the download cartridge or whatever service, you know, device they used. And so basically to do an RPG, they said, we've got to do it as a rogue-like or a roguelike-style game, which is kind of like a roguelike-like, I don't know. Anyway, the point is that's how it kind of emerged in Japan. And when it came to the U.S., we didn't have Ciginette, so we got it as a cartridge. But, you know, originally, I really feel like this game launched in the form that it did and sort of kicked off the whole console rogue-like style was just a technical limitation. And that's fitting because, you know, those rogue and all the games that appeared on VAC systems along with it were based around the limitations of their technology.

So it feels very appropriate that consoles kind of, you know, this genre kind of came from the same place on a different platform. Yeah, I actually played this game in its entirety a few days ago. I ran it back in the day once, and it put much time in it. But I got to play all of Fatal Labyrinths about three days ago. I was up all night doing it. And it's a nice little game. It's fairly solid. I'm not sure if the dungeons are randomly generated.

But I think the dungeons are stored in ROM and you get them in a random. order or from a selection of dungeons that include in the cartridge. Right. And that would make sense. You know, like you said, there is a lot of limitation in terms of memory on consoles. So giving people, you know, like, say, 50 different floors and they get to see 20 of them in a game and they don't know which order they're going to appear in and because, you know, it's sort of fog of war and you don't see what the floor looks like until you explore and you

don't know where you're going to appear on the floor. it creates the impression certainly of limitless variety and an ever-changing game never the same way twice. It actually gets a little bit of advantage from this as well

because by offering pre-made levels you can put some interesting situations in there that can just come up. Like one of the levels in the game is just one giant room

that fills the whole map. I've never come across that one Dachy NetHack and Rogue do that sometimes just as like a special case that occasionally comes up they call it the big room fittingly

and when it happens in Fatal Labyrinth when they come across the big room there is always that oh my God moment just right then and it's really a great moment in the game

because most of the game you end up tackling pretty much the same way. You take it room by room. You make sure you're not too damaged when you enter a new room. You keep good track of your

resources and just use them when you have to. But when you come up with a big room, you've got to go all out. If you don't, you're just going to die. All the enemies are going to come after you at once. So you really did at that point have

to rely on the stuff you found up to that point and just do anything to survive. I always called the big rooms, the Jason Dye Rooms. The what? The Jason Die Rooms, because I would always, it seems like all my runs would end if I would ever find a big room. Did you look into the people who made the game, Jeremy, when you were? I didn't put their names down here. I looked into it and they're, you know, just some folks at Sega.

I was just looking at it now, and it is basically the three guys who did Sonic the Hedgehog. Oh, okay. So maybe it was you. Gingaka, he was known at the time as a legendary programmer. Maybe it was like his technical know-how that made a console road like possible. Yeah, he was a programmer. Okay, well, there you go. Yeah.

So it was like the artist or Sonic the Hedgehog, also the level designer, and the programmer all working on this game. So, you know, I have a question about the graphics because I've never seen this game. Is it using, you know, the set of asterix? No, no, no. It's graphical. Actual graphics. You know, a monster looks like a monster.

Yeah, and that's something we should. We haven't mentioned, but we probably should. that, you know, PC roguelikes, because they started out on Vax systems, which were Asky, you know, displays only, they used Asky characters. But once they jumped over to consoles, that was not going to fly. Certainly people have made some, you know, like homebrew roguelikes for consoles that use Asky. But, no, even from the very beginning, they have a graphical element. It's very simple, you know, it's kind of like that forced perspective, three quarters top down, that the Legend of Zelda uses, where you're kind of seeing it from on high, but also from, you know,

in front. So there's like a little bit of, you know, the bottom wall of every room, like you can kind of disappear behind it and things can disappear behind it. You know, you get that sort of thing. And that makes it a little bit difficult to find pathways because you may not realize, like, oh, there's a gap over here. Like you can see where there's gaps in top walls, right walls, left wall but on the bottom wall you can't see that so you have to like

actually get up close to it so it adds a little bit of extra a little bit of extra effort to the exploration my dirty secret as someone who loves rogue likes is I prefer those to have graphics over

the ASCII text oh yeah me too aw nothing wrong with ASCII we're just we lack imagination I can't see a big D as a dragon it's just a letter D for me

oh for me it's just because my eye like has gotten so bad over the years. So let's talk about some other things that Fatal Labyrinth includes. I mean, it's a very simple game. Like it starts out with some people at the edge or the like the mouth of the dungeon and they're like, goodbye and you go into the dungeon. But then, you know, inside the dungeon, it's basically just floor after floor of, you know,

procedural generation, but fog of war. And like you're revealing a room at a time. Everything's connected by hallways. There's very simple monsters. It's all turn-based based on the player's action. So you act and the enemies, the monsters, get an action at the same time. But it also, you know, it brings forward some other kind of surprisingly... I'm sorry I missed that for a second.

No, there was kind of like a dead space, so that's fine. Oh, okay. But yeah, it brings forward some, you know, I think some fairly... intricate elements from the PC like use ID it has stamina which John I see you call food clock yeah

basically it's one of the things a lot of road likes to force you to progress through the dungeon instead of just staying in one place waiting for random monsters show up and just grinding and building up your level that way

you have to keep searching you have to keep exploring new levels because it's the main way you get more food, which you have to keep finding in order to survive. Fatal Labyrinth actually tends to give you a lot more food than you really need for that. Yeah, and you can get overstated pretty easily. Yeah, and that slows you down, and it's a good way to die. Now, Chuck, did the food element come across just because you're saying, you know, as a way to keep you moving and put a clock on and not die,

or does it come from the old-fashioned Dungeon Dragons rules where you had to eat and you needed to keep track of, well, it was suggesting you did. It's really kind of both, really. In Rogue, it's definitely, they use that aspect of D&D to kind, they brought it into the game for that purpose. In NetHack, food is a lot more common. You can eat dead monsters.

and it's more a way of gaining like special powers than just to keep you exploring and there are other ways you can make food in fatal labyrinth it doesn't really work very well as a thing to force to keep exploring because you always have to find so much more food than you need I think it's mostly used in that game

one to you know sort of punish players who eat too much I get just one of those little, one of those tiny little things you have to know to win the game. It's just like every player gets bitten, gets killed from overeating like once, and then they never do that again. If only we could do that in real life. Yeah, but also, when I played through Fatal Labyrinth, I got the level 29, and I found an armor called the Lombada armor, which I didn't know what it was. I figured I'd try it on, and it was cursed.

And it completely emptied my stamina counter. It put me into starvation immediately. I mean, I hated that. Is the Lombata armor cursed? Yeah, it's cursed. So you can't take it off? You can't just take it off unless you read an uncursed scroll. Wow.

Even if you do, once you've taken it off or once it's gone, your food clock, your food amount is still zero. and yeah I pretty much died from that I went ahead and reloaded a safe tip because I you know for the purpose of this I wanted to like see the whole game but it was a really kind of a dirty trick to put right on the next to last level yeah that is that is kind of harsh yeah yeah that's rogue likes where you you got to you got to roll with those kinds of punches right

And the food clock stamina goes hand in hand with another element that Fatal Labyrinth brings in, which is regenerating health. That's a kind of trademark, you know, you rest and your health recovers as long as you have, you know, some stamina. If you're starving, then you don't recover health automatically. It doesn't regenerate, and you die pretty quickly. Yeah, actually, you tend to, most games have you slowly lose health once your stamina runs out. Okay, double whammy. Fatal labyrinth, it's more the lack of healing that gets you because your health gets really high by the end of the game, and you're only losing one hit point every few turns. Out of six or seven hundred hit points, that's not such a big deal.

but you're not healing and the monsters are continuing to wear you down so that's why you really that's really why you need to keep your your stamina up in that game and not wear Lombata armor no yeah

but yeah the game does have a lot of other elements like status effects special monsters oh you made a lot of notes about what the monsters can do armor destruction permanent max health decreases paralysis confusion, blindness.

Yeah, so they put a lot into this game, considering the limitations of it. Yeah, they really put a lot of thought into it. I think they must have played a bunch of classic rogue-liked and got ideas from them because many of those abilities are kind of mirrored, like permanent max health decreases that come from the vampires from rogue. There are monsters that divide when you hit them. I think that comes from Moria.

On the whole, it's, you know, it's a very simplistic take on the genre, but, you know, considering the limitations and considering it, it was out there kind of as the first, I feel like it's pretty impressive. And it was on a cart here in America. It was on a cart here in America. And for the longest time, I got it mixed up with Fatal Rewind, which is a very, very different kind of game. Totally different. But, yeah, eventually I kind of got it straight. And it shows up a lot on Sega collections. It's on the most recent Genesis collection.

Really? I'll have to check that out. You can play it on Switch and, you know, take it on a plane with you and it's, you know, got rewind and stuff like that. So if you just want to save Scummit and beat it cheaply, you can do that and see the whole thing. And it's, you know, it's less frustrating that way, but also less exciting. So you kind of have to decide, you know, what, set some limits for yourself. Like, I'll do this once if I get the Lombata armor or something really cheap like that. But, but yeah, I don't know.

Like, I feel like it's not. game that people would necessarily want to play constantly over and over again these days, but it is worth playing just to experience it and say, like, oh, wow, they really did get a lot in here. And was that the only one that appeared on the Sega? On Genesis? Well, no, we're going to talk about another one. But what's interesting about Theta Labyrinth is that they created basically like a semi-sequel,

kind of a remake. It's essentially the same game with one twist called Dragon Crystal. That showed up on Master System and Game Gear, and that was a couple of years later. and that's available on virtual console for 3DS, if you want to check that out. But it's basically the same game, but you have a dragon egg that you carry with you, and eventually it hatches into a dragon and becomes a companion character, which I'm sure there were some PC roguelikes that did that before. John, you could probably speak to that.

Yeah, hack and net hack of pets. Okay. Oh, go ahead. They start to get it with a cat or dog, but you can gain more pets as you play. In fact, that's one sort of effort Every time your pet and net hack Kill the enemy It gains the maximum hit point

Oh nice And if you start the game with like a puppy or a kitten Once it's gained enough hit points that way It'll promote like into a small dog or a house cat And then it can promote again to a large dog or large cat But that works with if you befriend other monsters during the game you can do that with a lot of different enemies and the best thing to do it with is with a dragon

if you find a dragon egg and you hatch it then you have a dragon following you around and you can build it up to like level 30 throughout a long game if you can keep it alive that long which usually doesn't happen because it's net hack come on to be serious right so anyway yeah Sega

Sega got kind of led the charge here and then Jason you asked if there was another Genesis game that did this, and I'm going to say yes, although it's more of a game that we would talk about in the Rogue Lights episode, because of where it happens in the timeline, 1991, it was such a game ahead of its time and so dramatically different and daring and innovative that I want to call it out here, and that is Toe Jam and Earl from 1991. And this is one I would never have really, like, I played it back of the day and was like, I don't get this game.

But then, you know, I read John your app play column about Tojam and Earl and was like, oh my God, okay, I didn't realize, but this goofy hip-hop action co-op game about like eating, you know, chili dogs and farting in space, like that's actually a rogue like and I just didn't realize it at the time and now I appreciate it. But maybe this would be a chance for Bob to step in because I feel like this is a game you like, is it? Actually, I don't have a lot of experience with it, but I came to the same realization as you did about 10 years ago. I think, like, the Jungian collective, we all understood what a rogue like was about 2008 or 2009. And I really wanted to like this game as a kid, but like a lot of people who played it, you're like, what is this? What am I supposed to do? Why do things happen seemingly for arbitrary reasons? So for me, playing it, it was just sort of like poking at all the different parts to see, like, how they would react.

And that's the same experience I actually had with a lot of these games before I treat. understand the point of roguelikes and the purpose of what you're supposed to do. But I'm glad they were able to stay treated of their vision with the remake because, as you have in the notes here, and I played the other sequels because I felt like, well, the second game is an okay platformer, but it's just, it's not the same game at all. And the third game is just bad. Nobody wanted that. But now they can make it again.

They own the characters. And it's coming back at the perfect time, kind of at a bad time, because there aren't now with too many rogue likes. Right. But it's cool that we can appreciate it now on, like, more platforms now that we know what it is and how to play it. Yeah, Togam and Earl is a game that, like I said, you know, at the time, I think a lot of us were just like, uh, and it definitely had its fans, don't get me wrong, but, you know,

I just didn't make the connections. I didn't understand what was happening. But now this style of game is sort of like this, this, you know, action game that glancingly blows with the, you know, the, the rogue-like, it's so much more common that all of a sudden it's, you're like, oh, they were just 20 years ahead of their time. Now I understand. They were, they were, they were visionaries. Yeah. I actually, you first. Oh, no. I mean, that's, that's, that's really as much as I have to say. I feel like you have the right to speak up here because you were the one who enshrined it, really. Back when I first played Tudgeon Mineral, I had actually played the original rogue. I actually saw it for what it was back then. Wow. And, yeah, and that, I thought, oh, my God, these people have played Rogue too. And back in college, I actually sent a fan letter, an email to Greg Johnson about the game.

I don't remember where I got his email from, but I got a nice response from him. It was very nice. And they said, and he admitted that they had played Rogue back in college and filled the beans. as far as it's the inspiration in that regard. But it's a great game, and one of the nice things about it is, first, it's not ultra hard. It's difficult, but it's not like Spalunky, where you get the feeling you have to gain a few levels as a player just to survive it. Finishing Todry and Mineril is doable for most people. It might take you a few games, and I think, you know, it has a nice niche there in that it's a lot more accessible to just ordinary.

players. You know, you actually have a chance at this game. And also, it's two-player co-op, and that's tremendous. That's something that's still visionary. There are just very few co-op rogue-likes or roadlights out there. And it's just so much better of a game with two people. There's just so many extra things. You can share your presence. If you're both in the same screen, they affect both of you at once. And you can both explore levels.

in different directions than half the time to finish each level and you can even explore different levels at the same time. It has a dynamic split screen. The game is really made for two people. And the recent

update, they really capitalized that. Now you can play like four players at the same time. Yeah, it's, anyway. So if I can interject here, like to me, one of the most interesting things about this game that really breaks

from roguelike rubric, I guess you could say, is that it's not a game about combat. It's a game about avoidance. You can't really do a lot of fighting. There are some special instances where you can get a weapon or something that will briefly help you gain a one-up on the, gain a leg up on the enemy.

But for the most part, you just want to avoid bad guys. And they're not even bad guys. They're just weird. They're just doing stuff that's harmful to you. They're earthlings who don't understand why there are aliens looking for crashed ship parts on their strange floating islands in space?

I always like to imagine that the islands are out that floating because to aliens, that's what Earth looks like. But yeah, it's very nice like that. I like that kind of pacifist

vibe to it. Isn't it also one of the first roguelikes that tried to tell a more ambitious story? that previous game's had? I mean, does it really tell a story? You're basically, there's like an intro, and then you crash, and then you just have to find your ship parts. Yeah.

And that's, I mean, that's not much more complex than going into the dungeon to look for the amulet of Indor. Yendor. Indoor. Yendor. Or Indoor. You can blow up the Death Star. By the way, Yindor is Rodney spelled backwards. Yep.

That was a very popular. popular gimmick back in the with like wizardry and everything Wordna and Trebor Andrew and Robert and see there is one thing in and Toja Mineral that sort of speaks to a story

if you manage to win the game the ending is actually an explorable level back on your home planet and you can go and you can talk to all your friends there and they'll all congratulate you on winning the game so it does that to at least to, you know, that

there is a kind of milieu there. It's not much of one, but. Actually, I don't think three dogs are in the game. No, I was trying to remember what kind of food they do have. Yeah, they've got fudge cakes and ice cream sunda and pizzas, but there's also

bad food, like moldy cheese. Right. And in the new game, there's a character who can eat the moldy food. Yeah, that's one of their special powers. Every character, okay, Earl. Yeah, everyone has a special perfect. You know, I'm going to be able to be. accounted for and the, you know, Sega, like, how did Sega become the leaders in the space?

People don't really necessarily think of Sega as like, oh, yeah, they're the go-to for RPGs. And yet, here they were revolutionizing roguelikes on consoles. But that's how it goes. However, to me, the whole shabang really took off and really got it start when Chunsoff stepped in. And as a spinoff of the Dragon Quest games that they had developed for Enix, decided to, take Dragon Quest into the roguelike direction and came up with a game called Dragon Quest Torniko No Diaboken, which means Torniko's big adventure. Or if you were an NES gamer back in the day, Talloon's Big Adventure, or Tornico Taloon, whatever

you want to call him, he's the chubby shopkeeper from Dragon Quest 4, the family man who gets caught up into the action and goes on a big quest as a... companion of the hero or heroine, and this is his game. This is about him. And it's really kind of brilliantly conceived because Tornaco's chapter in Dragon Quest 4 is basically him going into dungeons, looking for treasures that then he can sell, that he can then sell in his shop. And so this basically takes that concept and says, let's really make a full game out of this. And instead of going with the Dragon Quest style traditional turn-based combat, let's make it a roguelike. And I talked to Koichi Nakamura, the president of Spike Chunsoft, who was, you know, the guy who founded the company in the first place last year to talk, you know, we talked about 428 Shibuya Scramble, but I also wanted to talk about the origins in the mystery dungeon series.

And he did not go into this as a fan of rogue. It was actually someone on his team who was like, this is what we got to do. We got to make one of these. And they had already, you know, Chunsoft had already and, you know, Eugene. Horry, the co-designer of Dragon Quest, you know, they had already taken the graphical adventure and made it simple and workable on consoles. They had taken the role-playing game and made it simple and accessible and playable on consoles. And so this was kind of the next step for them.

This was taking the extraordinarily complex rogue-like genre and bringing it faithfully to consoles, but also giving it accessibility. So, you know, you put the Dragon Quest style on it. with a Kera Toriyama designs and a lovable character that you know and hey the first monsters you're beating up it's slimes and there's a big green dragon

somewhere in the dungeon that you're going to have to fight but first you know you get to get herbs and you get to have Kimmerawings and et cetera et cetera so they you know all these familiar talismans

and iconography and designs but still it is a rogue like and you know they did carry over a few things from Dragon Quest like if you find a certain item then when you die you will lose you won't lose all your money, is that correct? I think when you die normally, you lose half your gold, just like in Dragon Quest.

But, you know, you can find like something that functions equivalent. Yeah, the safe. And it's kind of the equivalent of a bank in Dragon Quest where your money will be safe for one death. So, yeah, it's really kind of a brilliant idea. Like take this very intricate genre and give it a face that people will enjoy and that will appeal to people and be approachable, and that's where we end up with the Mystery Dungeon series. Now, I had a question about this.

Sure. Did they choose Tornaco because his mechanics and his backstory lend to the gameplay, or was it because he was just a beloved character? It was partially because of, you know, the character's arc and the nature of his quest, but also, you know, Nakamura said that, like I asked about this, and he said, you know, it wouldn't be appropriate

to have the Dragon Quest hero like the main character venture into dungeons and die because that's not what they do. Like that's not their story. But you take a character like Torniko who has kind of a smaller scope to his world and you know

it's more appropriate for him to do this sort of thing. Like I think Ujeehori was very adamant that it not be, you know, the hero character but be kind of a supporting character and I think Torniko just lent himself to the concept. Even though he's a fabulous. man. He dies. Well, he doesn't die. He gets sent back to the beginning. You know,

Dragon Quest characters always have that kind of, they have that divine intervention looking out for them. So instead of, you know, just going back to the king or to the end with half his gold missing, he got sent back with half his gold missing, and also he was back at level one. And all his

treasures that he had found, those were gone. But, you know, it still fits. It's great in that game when you die, actually. You get a little cutscene or the monsters are just taking your, unconscious its body out of the dungeon, just plop, throwing you on the ground. Yeah, it's not so much that they, like, they want to eat you or kill you. It's just like, get the hell out of our home.

These are our treasures. Exactly. That's hilarious. I love that because it fits the character, too. Yeah, so it also puts kind of a more whimsical face on the roguelike. So, again, it makes it very approachable. But the great thing is, like, I've been talking about how it's approachable, how it's whimsical, how it's lovable, how it's, you know, familiar and iconic.

But at the same time, this is still a legitimate, rogue-like game. It's challenging. It's big. It's complex. They put so much into this. They really captured the spirit of the PC games, even though the Super NES controller, again, you know, has like six buttons. It's got four-faced buttons and two shoulder buttons. And I guess you can count the select and start buttons.

But, you know, there's a lot of limitations here. And yet they made it all work. You know, you use like the, I believe, I want to say you use. one of the buttons like shoulder triggers maybe it's been a while since I've played this to force you to move diagonally yeah you get like forced diagonals

and you can hold another button to just like point which direction you want to face in without moving so you can face an enemy and throw something at them without wasting a turn there's so many wonderful little things this is

like the beginning of the mystery dungeon engine and you can tell that they must have had an epic design session coming up with it because they got so much right. Well, yeah, the lead designer on it was just

someone who really loved Rogue. I mean, he really was passionate about it. It's a labor of love, you can tell. And there's so many little touches, like if you're standing over an item, for one thing, if you hold a button down when you're standing,

when you walk into an item, you won't automatically pick it up. But you can stand over an item. And what's more is, if you look through your inventory while you're standing on an item, there'll be a third page. That's just the item at your feet.

So you can interact with an item without picking them up that way. And it's just they got the interface down so well. You mean, they basically ended up using this for like all the later mystery dundering, at least all of those

that I've seen. But they got so much right that they could do that. Can you imagine what implementing this must have been like on the Super Nintendo? You can't code and see. You have to use assembly. Writing a full of it

really, it is the programming feat on the same level as the original rogue. I have no there's no limit of my respect for what they did with this. But doing it all in assembly, it must have been infuriating. How long did it

take them to design it. How long do they take it? I don't know exactly how long they worked on it. You know, I think they had a little bit of time to get it right. Dragon Quest games come out when they come out. And that wasn't so much the case back then. Like, they were on a pretty regular schedule. But after Dragon Quest 5, the pace of Dragon Quest games really started to slow down.

And I think, you know, it became important for them to say, like, this is our flagship. This is really important to us. We have to get anything that says Dragon Quest. We have to get that right. We can't just rush it out and hit the deadlines. So they probably had a little bit of wiggle time. And I think, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, they were working on some visual novels at the same time. I care.

Otorogiso or something like that. It's a really complex name in Japanese. And this was kind of like a thing they were doing at the same time. So, you know, I think they were able to kind of go back and forth with it. and you know also chunsoft was a company founded by a programmer so they knew programming like they they could do great programming that was their forte so the complexity of the game isn't that surprising considering that Nakamura started the company based on you know based with money that he got from winning a contest for programming games so yeah I feel like it was a kind of natural evolution but also a brilliant one and as John said they got so much right and included so much in this game. Yeah, I think, I mean, this game would go on to, this game would write

the rules for console, ruglikes, but mostly because Chunsoff made 90% of them or their engine was used. I mean, they made the Pokemon games, right? And they made, they make all the mystery dungeon spinoffs? If they haven't made them, they've at least, you know, lent the name to them. Yeah. And, you know, all of them

used the same set of rules. Like, even Chocobo's dungeon. Yeah. That's further down the list, but... Yeah, I mean, we can go through a list, here before we jump into Sheeran. But, yeah, eventually Chunstaff stopped having a relationship with

the Dragon Quest series and Heartbeat took over after Dragon Quest 5. And so Chunsoft spun Mystery Dungeon into its own direction and created their own original character and that was when it really excelled. But they also said, hey, let's

pedal this out. It worked with Tornako, so why couldn't it work with other characters? So you have, I've probably missed some here, but there's Chocom Mystery Dungeon, there's been at least two of those. Was there one on Wonder Swan? I want to say there was. But there's

definitely one on PlayStation and then one on Wii that showed up recently on Switch and PS4. I think we got the second Chokebo's Mystery Dungeon on PlayStation and there was a first one we never got. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was that. The one on Switch is

my kid's first exposure. Okay, nice. To a rogue like. Not a Pokemon. Interesting. No, no, no. Because I'm just starting to expose them to the more complex types of games now. My six-year-old doesn't get it, but my nine-year-old kind of does. Yeah, it's the right age, yeah. So, yeah, there's also the Pokemon Mystery Dungeons, which by far are the most successful and popular of the Mystery Dungeon games just because it's attached to Pokemon.

But to me, these are the least interesting because they're really, really story-heavy. They take away a lot of the Permadeath element. like they do fun things within the Pokemon context. Like every character gets four special abilities just like in the Pokemon games and your characters can evolve and grow and level up. But having that persistent leveling up does take away some of the fundamental like,

oh, crap, I'm going to die. But once you get through the story, then there's a whole lot of post-game dungeons that do have the more traditional rogue-like style. But you've really got to play a long time before you get there. These games go on and on. People do love that.

when I reviewed the first Pokemon Mystery Dungeon for AtPlay I think I never got as many comments on one of my articles as that one. Because I didn't really review, you know, give the game

a good review because although there are supposedly all these great extra modes, you have to play so long to get to them. Yeah, that main story mode is a slog. If you don't really care about the story, And, you know, not being in elementary school, I don't.

Like, they're very, they're very definitely written for kids, and that's great. But for those of us who want a little more sophistication or maybe just no story, it's tough. Yeah, that's also what got me with the later Mystery Dungeon game, which is getting ahead of myself. But anyway, I'm just an old fogey. Well, yeah, but it's also important to remember that, you know, you need that sort of game to bring in new people. especially when they're young and to expose them to something and maybe give them into it and then they just progress as they grow up and it's also important to remember that not everything has to be for us yeah I know I just would have wished there was a question at the beginning have you played these games before great we'll unlock everything for you now yeah instead of like tell us about your personality and we'll make you a random Pokemon yeah like give us a useful quiz well that that's so many games for me me. I just, the worst sort of an option, like, yes, I played a video game. I know what a controller is. I can save me two hours, please. Yeah, it's a little frustrating. But, you know, I'm not going to,

I'm not going to shit on the Pokemon mystery dungeon games because they, they serve a purpose for a younger audience, and they're great, and they have a lot of fans, and I really respect that. But it's, it's kind of tough to, you know, when there's something like Sharon out there to play a Pokemon, like if you're older and more seasoned. But that's fine. Actually, so one of the other, Dungeon games, one of the other spinoffs, licensed spinoffs, is actually my real entry point into the roguelike genre, and that was Nightmare of Druaga for PlayStation 2, which was a tie-in to the Tower of Druaga, the Namco Arcade game from 1984.

It was a really big deal on Famicom in Japan in like 85, 86. And, um... Oh, God. The Tower of Drouaga. I mean, it was a natural transition, I would say, to becoming a rogue-like. But it was a really interesting game. I got, I was just kind of handed this for review for OneUp.com. And I was like, what the hell is this?

And I started playing. And I don't know why, but for the first time a roguelike clicked with me. And it's weird because this game is, I would say, the most hardcore of all the, the licensed, Druaga spinoffs. It's really challenging. And it's extra hard in the U.S. because Namco was really, really apathetic about localizing it. And every floor, just like in the original Tower of Dragha,

every floor has a hidden treasure. And in the Japanese version of this game, every floor had a clue. You could press the select button, I think, and a clue would pop up and would say, like, you know, here's a hint for, you know, the hidden object or item or treasure in this floor. The American version did not have that. So you really had to just luck into finding these things.

I did not beat this game when I reviewed it. I'm not going to pretend that I did. I reviewed it without having finished it. So what? It's a really interesting game and just balls hard. But I don't know. There was just something about the atmosphere and the unapologetic like, hey, I'm going to destroy you and you're going to like it. I really respected that.

And it really kind of opened up my eyes to the genre. So, you know, when Sharon came along a few years later, I was. really open to it. I have an admission to make here. I've never played this game. I've always wanted to, but I've never had the opportunity. I think you could probably pick it up on eBay for like four bucks. It's not a game that's in high demand.

But, yeah, I'm pretty sure it's pretty cheap these days. So, yeah, hunt it down. I think it's interesting. I think you will want some sort of translation of like a fact or something to give you hints that we're not localized. But that is out there now. You've called it interesting twice. What makes it interesting?

It interested me. I can't put my finger on it. It was just intriguing. It was different than anything I had played before. It was not what I was expecting. It was engrossing. It was difficult. It was unapologetic.

It had like a certain density to it in terms of mechanics and sophistication. And yeah, like I just was really drawn into it. So how does it differ from? from the previous console rogulex we've talked about, now that you've played those older games? It wasn't cartoonish. Like, I'd played, you know, various things like Azure Dreams and Chocobo Mystery Dungeon and so forth.

And they just all seemed very, like, whimsical and lighthearted. And this one is very dark, and it has, you know, like very moody music. It kind of reminds me of brandish for Super NES. Not in terms of maybe the visual palette, but in terms of just the atmosphere. So more Diablo than Chocobo. yeah but it's not it doesn't have like the western like heavy metal rock cover artwork you know airbrushed devils as diablo does it's it's not that dark it's got more of like an anime sort of style to it i i don't know and then the enemies are weird there's like hydras and stuff that like move around and they wobble at you and it's just it's strange okay so i i can't put my finger on it you know sometimes a game just like it connects with you in a way that you can't really describe.

There's something ineffable about it. That's how I felt about Kingsfield the first time I played. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that's a pretty good comparison, actually. Like, you know, that definitely kind of led to the Dark Souls and Soulsborn series. So, yeah, there's just that kind of inexplicable, ineffable appeal to this game for me. And I don't know if anyone else liked it, but I did. Well, one nice thing about it at least is that in the,

original Tower of Draaga in the arcades. There were no hints at all. Right. It's just, oh, it's like, I could and have in the past gone on for hours about Tower of Draga

and just, it's formidable inscrutability. And that was part of the appeal. That was part of its success, I think. You know, sneaker net and sharing things, the playground and so forth. But, you know, nightmare of Duraga wasn't supposed to be quite that impendent.

impenetrable. It was supposed to be a little more upfront about the stuff that's hidden. But it wasn't, not here anyway. So one more I wanted to mention is Etrian Mystery Dungeon, which there's actually two of them, but it looks like the second one is going to be the only Etrian Odyssey game that will not be localized into English. Because I don't think the first one did all that well. No, it didn't. But, you know, Etrian Mystery Dungeon is, as you can imagine, an Etrient Odyssey-based Mystery Dungeon.

engine game. And if that sounds like two great tastes that taste great together, we're friends. This one makes the most, in my opinion, changes to the rogue-like format. It really, it takes a lot of liberties to make it more Etrian-like. And it kind of comes in closer to the, like, the Pokemon style. But it's not as forgiving. And it takes the FOE element, you know, the roaming super bosses and adds those to the dungeon. It also takes the dungeon mapping

and adds it to the element. The floors are always randomized, but each dungeon that you go into has a structure that as you explore, that structure becomes like the layout of the dungeon. In terms of how the floors are related to each other, so each time you go onto a floor, the

actual layout of the floor is randomized. But there's like a branching structure, a pathway from floor to floor that is always consistent. And there are certain floors where you can build forts and you can have a party, like you have not just four characters, but an entire guild. You can set a party to like man the fort. And so then these FOE's come out of the depths and they, you know, they're up

there to attack the town and you can stop them at the forts and they will be drawn to the forts. Which is just such a fantastic tweak. Yeah. It's really interesting and really different. And it's also really complicated. I, you know, had a game in progress back when I first came out. and loved it, and then I went back to that file to do some more play, and I was like, this was about, you know, like four or five months ago, and I was like, oh, no. What in God's name is even happening? I don't remember any of this. This, what is this game?

It's just like there's so much, but it's interesting. So, you know, we've talked about this before. You know, one of the things I love about Etrian is all the different classes, and I want to play all the different classes, develop all the characters, hence the reason why it takes me three or four years to get through one of these games. And you have that here, but you have that. this added strategic layer that feels like it's coming out of a strategy game

when you have to build the fort. And you don't see that in any of these games. It's something that's completely different. But it also lets you design those characters that you want and play with those classes and give them something to do. Yeah. And you can have

it's a lot of the traditional Etrian classes. So you can have a dancer in your party who is just like buffing your team as you play. And you put them in the back ranks so that they don't go up against the bad guys and hopefully they don't die and they're very fragile, but they're making your team stronger and giving you, you know, like extra strength and extra, you know, turns or whatever. So it's, yeah, there's a lot to this game and it's,

it's a really interesting adaptation. I'm really sad the second one is pretty definitely not going to make it to the U.S. They're both on 3DS. But, you know, I don't know that the second one actually added anything essential to the mix. I haven't played it, but there is a lot in the first one. And, you know, if that's all we get, so be it. At least we got the one. Bob, did you play this? I did not.

There were so many entry games for the 3DS. I kind of stopped playing them, although I know five is very good. So for the 3DS, there's what, 4, 5, and then remakes of 1 and 2, and then Mystery Dungeon? Yes. Okay. And the last game. And there's also Persona Q. Yeah.

And I was going to say the last game for 3DS, I think that will be released ever, is persona Q2. Oh, there's also Etrien Odyssey Nexus, the final game in the Etrien Odyssey series. That came out a few months ago. Okay. But, uh, yeah. That's a lot of Etrian. Q2 is like going to be, I think the final like package 3DS game is coming soon.

It's already out. It's out. Oh, okay. Well, okay. Well, then it's over. Well, my copy showed up, but, but Amazon was shipping it out early. Okay. It's kind of weird.

But yeah, they shipped it in a like an envelope and it's a, you know, deluxe box. So it got crushed. I'm like, thanks, yeah. Yeah, but I feel like there was, they're, they're, they're more Etriene games than any other series on the 3DS. I don't know about that, but there's certainly a lot. Yeah, it always seemed interesting to me, but

I sort of was just suffering from too much Etrient. And those games are very long. They take me a long time to finish, too. So I think I was still playing through four when Mystery Dungeon came out. But it looked very interesting. Yeah, we have Etrine Odyssey games for years. What's amazing is you know, for me, you know, I haven't touched my

DS in years. And I don't know if I'll ever go back to it. But I can see me holding on to a three-day AS and keeping it powered just to play these games. Yeah, for sure. All right, well, we're kind of running alone on time, so we're not going to make it all the way through this list. We're not going to make it to Azure dreams, I'm afraid. So Andrew Duff, I apologize. We will cover that in another context at another time.

But we do need to talk about Sharon the Wanderer before we wrap this up, because you can't talk about console roguelikes without talking about the absolute greatest console roguelikes of all time. You got me into this one. Yeah. John, I know that for you, the first Shiren is the best in the, like the best console rogue like. For my vote, it's Shiren the Wanderer 5, which was called the Dice of Fortune and the Tower of Fate in the U.S. I think.

It's a very complicated and ungainly subtitle. In any case, it's on PlayStation Vita, I think, was it X-Eat or someone brought it over, and they did a great job with it, and I love them. What was it called? Sharon the Wanderer, the dice of fortune and the Tower of Fate. Oh, when you said that, I thought he said, Diso. The Diso, yes, yes, go and everything is a dollar. It's a great savings.

No, anyway. So, yeah, John, I'm going to give the floor to you so you can explain why Sharon the Wanderer is so great. And just to give a little context, Sharon the Wanderer was the sequel to Tornaco's Big Adventure, but without Dragon Quest characters. Instead, Chunsoft took out the Dragon Quest and completely created their own world, which is kind of set in a sort of like medieval Japan type setting with villagers. And Shiren is a wanderer, a ronin, like a samurai without a master, and just goes out exploring. And he meets people along the way. There's towns. There's, you know, stuff like rice balls.

It's all very sort of set in traditional Japanese, a traditional Japanese set. a traditional Japanese setting, but not necessarily in Japan. Anyway. I love this game. Oh, and then you think it's one of the best console roguelikes. I think it's one of the best roguelikes, period. I think it could hold up well against things like Hack and Adom. It's just that good.

There's an episode of Roguelight Radio where me and Keith Bergen basically talk about this game for like an hour and a half. all just on its own. We don't have an hour and a half. We have about 10 minutes, 15 minutes, but let's see what we can squeeze in there. The thing about the first Torneco game is that although it has a great engine, it's fun, to my eyes, having played Rogue and NetHack a lot, it seems a little lacking. like there's there's uh the monsters aren't as interesting as they could be Sheeran is the game where they made the monsters as interesting as they could be there's just so many great monsters in the game there's the radish monster that throws

uh confusion herbs at you there's the the great chicken which is like a powerful martial arts master but when you get it low on hit points it demotes into just an ordinary chicken and runs away from you at double speed and deprives you of your experience points That's a fantastic quest, I like that I'm trying to think back There is a samurai monster

That when you kill it, three turns later Its ghost appears On the space that you killed it Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, those guys The ghost isn't hard to beat But it runs away and finds another monster and if it does, it promotes it into a much more dangerous form.

Gellotin mages that not wands that do random things with you and sometimes the random things are helpful. It's just so much in this game the items... I'm just trying to find a place to start. It's just... How about I ask you...

How about I ask you a question, John? The thing that proves that the Chunsoft people have played hack. in NetHack, because the shops work exactly the same way they do in NetHack. A shop in this game is actually a room in the dungeon

with a shopkeeper standing at the door. And to buy something, you go in, you pick up an item. When you do, the shopkeeper stands in the entrance, but you can't leave until you pay for the item. But if you could find a sneaky way to get out of the room

without paying for the item, then it's yours. But, okay, people will also call the cops on you and the level will fill with guards and attack dogs and you're probably going to die but still there's just so many weird strategies

and things you can do in this game it's just a tremendous amount of fun and it's balanced just right you think it's impossible when you first play it but after you play it a lot you realize okay I can get

through these first levels pretty easily now but then the next level is come your obstacle, the wall you can't climb until you climb it, and then the next levels do, and it's brilliant. I love this game so much. The DS version is also great, but if they toned it down a bit, it's not as wonderfully random. There are some items that never appear in the early dungeon, for example. If you find an armband, of Farsight, then, like I did one game, like, on level two, it reveals the locations of all the monsters in the dungeon for the rest of the game while you're wandering it. And it's a tremendous

advantage, but even with that, you're still probably going to die. But you never, I think, find armed bands of Farsight early in the D.S. Virgin or things like that. It feels a lot less chaotic. Now, the chaos is why I love the game so much. Now, John and Jeremy, when Chon's up set out to create the world for sure. Did they purposely make

this this quasi Japanese medieval realm and given a little bit of a backstory to it

to help get players into it and to make it their own after you know dumping off the dragon

quest? Yeah I mean they wanted to create their own character and I don't know exactly why

they went with medieval Japan but you know it definitely gives the the game of very sort of unique flavor. Like, I can't think of any other roguelikes that are set in a

sort of Javanesque you know, milieu if you want to say it like that. That sounds really pretentious. Isuna is. Oh, that's right. Yes, yes, that's right. Yeah. Isuna, the comedy ninja roguelike from Atlas.

Is that the one that's like comedy rogue like soccer? No, I don't think so. It's Isuna the Legend of the Unemployed Ninja. It's like a ninja girl who's basically trying to find work

by going on explorations. It's a little goofy. It's not as good as Sharon by any means. I tried to like it. I just couldn't get into it. Sharon on Super NES had a really unique feature because it had a battery backup. The game saved your progress

after every single turn. So like everything you did, was permanently recorded. It meant you could, you know, suspend your game pretty easily. But it also meant there was no way to save scum. Like, it didn't matter what you did. You, like, every action was sort of set in stone, which was pretty clever, I think. I love that about it, too.

Great use of that battery backup. Yeah. It also has a high score table. Every time you die, your score goes up on, like, an arcade-style scoreboard. Right. Right. So one of the things that I find most interesting about Shiren, and I talked about the persistence earlier and how some people react poorly to that and say, well, that makes it not a real roguelike. But to me, that's what makes it wonderful, is that Shiren himself is your classic model of a rogue-like protagonist. When you die, you go back to the beginning of the game, and you are set back to level one. You lose everything that is in your possession. there are a few exceptions like you can get a certain pot, a jar

that will break when you die and whatever was in the pot the jar will be preserved but otherwise no Sharon just constantly resets but the world around him doesn't the world around him that he explores

I mean yeah it's a dungeon game but there's a town at the beginning there's some towns and other sort of locations along the way and there are a characters you meet in the dungeon and events that you can do, and these things carry over from one session to the next. So, you know, early on in one of your first dungeon dives, you're going to meet maybe or you, a woman who is like, hey, can you help me? And then you put her in your party

and she makes you blind and she steals some of your stuff and runs away. And you're like, wow, that's horrible. But you'll keep bumping into her. And if you keep, you know, interacting with her, eventually she'll come over to your side. And so then the next time you've find her in the dungeon, she'll actually team up with you and she'll blind enemies and make the game a little easier for you. There's a Pakeji, who calls himself Sharon's brother. I don't think that's true, but he's like this big, dumb guy, and, you know, you can get him in your party and he's pretty useless, but the longer you work with him, the more

powerful he becomes until eventually he's useful. And you'll meet people who have shops in the various towns. and if you help them and take these side quests and if you give them money to help, you know, rebuild their restaurant or whatever, these places will become permanent fixtures on your quest. So when you play through the game in later, you know, iterations, you'll have these extra assets there to help you, available to help you, and to make the game a little easier for you.

And there's warehouses where you can store your stuff. That means you're not taking it into the dungeon with you and you're not using it when it's in the warehouse. but when you die, that stuff is still in the warehouse. So, you know, you can say, for example, there's like a blacksmith who can upgrade weapons and upgrade armor and you collect money as you go through the dungeon and then you take your sword to the blacksmith and you upgrade it,

then you stick it in the warehouse, you die, you go through another run, collect money, you upgrade your weapon again. Eventually you can have this, like, incredibly powerful weapon waiting in the warehouse for you. now when you die eventually carrying this weapon you'll lose it but it's going to give you a lot more vitality and carry you a lot further away because you have this super powerful weapon that you've been building over several playthroughs and it's going to give you a huge advantage in the next portion of the game and I like that adds a little strategy too how many times do I want to buff it before I take it out and start using it because when you lose one of those oh my God it's just like I don't want to play this game ever again it feels so demoralizing You've put so much effort, like literally dozens of hours into this little quest of making this one sword stronger, and it kicked ass until you got to the big bug at the end of Table Mountain, and it destroyed you. I'm not speaking for personal experience here or anything. Yeah, it's, you know, there's just so much to this game. I love it.

I've got a story about that. Yeah, let's wrap on this story. The yes version, I figured, if you win the game, you get to go back and keep all your stuff. And usually, when someone wins it, she, in, and they do that the first time, then suddenly the game is a piece of cake because going through the first levels with in-game tier equipment, it's easy, and you can just keep building your equipment that way by winning the game over and over again consecutively, and each time it gets a little easier until working through the whole dungeon, it's like nothing.

but the game actually has some secret things if you get a certain kind of weapon to level 99 if you manage to prove it 99 times then it will become a new special weapon you can only get that way and there are also pots in the game that you can use to meld the abilities of different weapons onto a single weapon

so by doing this over and over you can get an ultra weapon that's level 99 and has all these abilities and can like hit three monsters at the same time and it's and it's kind of fun to do that I mean but I did that once

and I had beaten the game like 20 times and had gotten this weapon to its ultimate form and I was fighting an enemy and I forgot that this enemy was the kind that can knock an item out of your hands uh oh and so I hit it and he hit me

and the item went flying back and I heard a sound like a monster being hit and I thought because when an item gets knocked out of your hands it's thrown backwards as it's been thrown

by the enemy not by you no by me but the problem is if you throw an item an enemy and it hits the item is destroyed Oh, no. I turned the game off and I didn't play it since. Yeah.

If it makes you feel any better. The game was still in that state when my DS got stolen a few years ago. Oh. Well, if it makes you feel any better, not about the stolen DS, but about that kind of like, oh, crap, how did that happen? I mean, even Koichi Nakamura said, like, that was his experience with the game. Like, he, you know, had the armband of throwing or piercing or whatever, uh, that let you, uh, throw through objects. And he had a jar with a bunch of like really great stuff in it that he had been keeping. So he threw the jar at the wall. And it just

flew right out of the level. And he was like, oh, yeah, I guess that's a thing that happened. So, you know, the producer of the game, the guy who helped create it, uh, like that happened to him, too. So it's, that's what this, this kind of genre is about. And that's, that's, that's part. of what makes rogue likes so appealing. So we need to wrap up. But, yeah, like, to me, the sharing games really do sort of represent the pinnacle of what this genre is about in the console form. And, you know, John, I know you haven't played the fifth sharing game for Vita, but I highly recommend it because it does so many of the things that you love about Shiren 1, and it doesn't bog it down with story. But then it adds new elements.

Like there's a day-night cycle. And as you venture into the dungeon, eventually it starts to turn dark. And then night falls and different enemies come out or enemies become stronger. And like you're kind of debilitated a little bit because of the darkness. So it's suddenly like you think, oh man, I'm really kicking ass. I'm great at this game. I'm really like, I get roguelikes. And then it turns to night and you're like, oh, I'm going to die horribly.

And if you can make it till the morning, great. It becomes a little easier after that. But, you know, the game, the night tends to fall right around the time that everything starts to escalate in difficulty anyway. So it, you know, it's like one of those kind of training wheel experiences. And then it, you know, it takes off the training wheels and it gets hard really fast. And like you have to really understand the systems and really be able to accommodate for the sort of rule variations that emerge when night falls. And then on top of that, there's, there's all kinds of extra stuff in the main town. There's, you know, the traditional Sokoban puzzle dungeons. There's, like, training dungeons and special puzzle dungeons where you have to solve, you know, like complete this dungeon and do this thing with only these resources. There's just hundreds and hundreds of, you know, little extra stages that you can explore and things to do beyond them. The first year had those, too, but only had 50. Yeah, like, there's, there's so much more in Sharon Five.

And it's just, it's a really great game. So I think it's still pretty affordable on Vita. I think you can even buy it digitally for like the normal price. Was there a D.S version? There was, but it never came to the U.S. It's such a panel. Oh. Alas.

I'm just happy that any version of it at all came because it's so good and I would have been really sad if we never got it. We never got Sharon 4, which was also over D.S. Oh, well, this is a good reason to get one. Now, is Spike Chunsoff going to continue making sharing games? I'm sure that they will. make another one. I mean, I asked Nakamura, like, is there, you know, is there anything in the works? And he said, you know, every time we create a sharing game, we think, this is it. This is everything we can fit into one of these games. But then we come up with new ideas and realize, oh, that wasn't. So then that's when we make a new game. As of now, like we feel, you know, Sharon Five is, you know, that's everything we can come up with. It's all of our ideas. But there's always the possibility that we'll have some new ideas and we'll need to make a new game. So.

So I would say at some point they'll revisit it. Spike ChuneSoft is putting a lot of stuff on Steam and the ports have been really good. I think they should put Cheer and 5 on Steam because it's the perfect environment for Rogue Likes. 100%. I think that game would just sing on Steam. It would do so well. And the last game they put on Steam, Zuckai Zero, was a best seller for the last month. Oh, really?

No one is talking about it and there's like not even a game fact about it. So I figured no one was playing it. I don't play that one. It seems really interesting. So for April, it's one of the top... It was in the top 20 of bestsellers. Oh, that's great to hear. I'm really enjoying that game.

Yeah, Spike Chunsoff makes great stuff. They do. Which game is this now? Oh, Zonky Zero. Zonke Zero last beginning. And John, if you like rogue likes, you like this. Yeah, it's more wizardry-ish, but it has... I like wizardry.

There's, yeah, I mean, I'm just saying, like, it's... There's something about it that does kind of scratch the roguelike wizardry itch. I don't know exactly what it is. There's a lot of, like, inner locking... systems of like hunger and fatigue and hit points and food and all kinds of interesting. Lots of stuff to poke at and play with. Whoa. But anyway, that is all we have time to say about console roguelikes.

And we like literally only made it halfway through our discussion. So I apologize to patron Andrew Duff who requested this topic but wanted us to talk about Azure dreams. We didn't make it there. But I promise we will revisit this topic and we will discuss Azure Dream. Azure like it. Yeah, okay, anyway, so thanks Andrew for requesting this topic and we'll be talking some more about it. And then we'll do a final rogue-like episode or episodes about rogue lights, such as Spalunky and FTL and God knows what else.

It's a burgeoning genre. But anyway, yeah, I think we kind of hit like the bases here and there's still a lot to be explored. So we have more to discuss on this topic. Stay tuned. Someday we'll get there. In the meantime, John, thank you very much for coming on to this episode and talking about roguelikes and your love for them and your knowledge of them. It was a lot of fun. Good. I'm glad you had a good time and don't think, wow, I'm never talking to those assholes again.

We'll definitely get you on again sometime because, like I said, we still got a lot of rogue-like stuff to talk about. Jason, thank you also for coming in. Oh, thank you. I always have a lot of fun here. Bob, you're always here, so it's so big deal. Tractually obligated. Anyway, thanks everyone for listening. This has been Retronauts.

I'm Jeremy Parrish. You can find me on the Internet. Look for me on Twitter as GameSpite. That's my most reliable place for dad jokes these days. You can also find Retronauts at Retronauts.com on Libson, on iTunes, on many, many podcatchers. Well, not iTunes much longer. Oh, I'm sorry. Apple Podcasts, whatever the hell.

It's places where you download podcasts. we're there, except podcast one. And you can also support us through Patreon and get every episode a week early and a higher bitrate quality with no advertisements at patreon.com slash retronauts. That's three bucks a month

and it gets you cool stuff. Even more than that a month gets you even more cool stuff like bonuses and things like that. So check that out. There's even a tier where you can request episode topics and we might end up doing two episodes for you because we're so talkative.

So I'd say it's a pretty good deal. Anyway, that's us, and why don't you guys talk about yourselves? John, where can people find you online? I am on Twitter as At Rodney Lives. I also have some things available like a collection of app play on Itch Io, if you search Rodney Lives there. And I'm on YouTube and Twitch occasionally, but not just random stuff. All right.

And Jason? You can find me at Jason underscore. Wilson, all lowercase on Twitter, and at Gamespeat where we're prepping for E3 and then a summer of, who knows what. Summer of fun.

Oh, I forgot to mention... Oh, no. Go ahead. No. I have a fanzine that I am working on, which is extended play. We do about all kinds of things. Rogue likes, but also old arcade games and such like that. The secrets of bubble-bobble,

for example. Yes. It's completely free, so go look for extended play and download it and enjoy it. Awesome. And oh, I forgot about the videos that I do. Virtual Boy Works and stuff like that. Go to YouTube and look for my name, Jeremy Parrish with 1R. And Bob, finally, let's wrap this up.

It's me, Bob Mackey. I'm on Twitter. Is Bob Servo. I have other podcasts. You can find those all at the Talking Simpsons network at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. The two podcasts are Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon. And if you like Retronauts, Jeremy's been on a few What a Cartoons. You might want to listen to those to get into the show. Not lately, though. We'll have you back, Jeremy.

It's been very, very busy. But Jeremy was on G.I. Joe episode and our episode about The Mac. So if you want to break into What a Cartoon podcast, we explore different cartoon every week. Check those out. But again, it's at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And those are free podcasts. Just find them wherever you download podcasts. And that's it.

We've just run out of our food clock. And a gust of wind is blowing us off the stage. So it's back to level one for us. Thank you.