Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 282: Gaming in the Year 2000

Episode Date: March 2, 2020

In the not-too-distant past, the year 2000 used to signify the far-off future. But time makes fools of us all, and this mythical date has transformed into a distant memory, just as all years are destined to become. This week, we examine Y2K's fascinating gaming landscape, where the primitive Game Boy Color could compete with the cutting-edge PlayStation 2, immersive sims and life sims were new genres, and the Dreamcast still looked like it stood a chance. On this episode, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, USgamer's Kat Bailey, and IGN's Zachary Ryan as the crew soaks contentedly in the End of History where nothing could possiblie go wrong. Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get exclusive episodes every month, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon.

Retronauts is part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. For more information, please go to greenlitpodcast.com. This week on Retronauts, we turn our computers off before midnight on December 31, 1999. Hello, everybody, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I am your host for this one, Bob Mackie, and today's topic is video games. In the year 2000, in the year 2000. So that reference is if you're between the ages of 35 and 50, and I hope you get it. Jeremy, do you understand?

what's going on now. Was that Digitizer 2000? No, that was Conan O'Brien. Oh. The future, Jeremy? Yes, we're talking about the future year. Oh, you didn't get either, Kat. I didn't get it.

No, I got the record. Oh, I wasn't sure if you did. I was being physicians. Okay. So, Zach and Jeremy and I are the cool kids. Cats. Sorry. You got a few things to learn about that. I guess I got to leave.

It's okay. But yes, today's topic is gaming in the year 2000. We normally do a single wrap-up episode about the last 10, 20 and 30 years. we normally do that. Once upon a time we did that. Yes, a long time ago. And now I'm a wordy bastard. And my episodes always go way too long.

So we did 1970, 80, and 90. Well, I remember, like, way in the past, we used to do every five years. Yeah. And somehow we got all of that into a single episode. I don't know how it happened. But I think just more things keep happening. We do get wordier and windier as we get older. So we're going to do just one episode of Y2K.

And then, Jeremy, you have one about 2010 coming up. You're the street fighter. Too soon. It is too soon. But yes, 2001 seemed like the distant future. There'd be jokes about products called the blank 2000, because 2000 was this year, this unattainable year. But now we're 20 years past it. And 2000 is just so ancient and innocent now.

And just going back to do research, I just feel like a skeleton man here in this room. But, yeah, I want to ask everybody around the table, just set the context. And you will reveal your age in some way by doing this. But, like, where were you in 2000 is what I want to know? And I also want to know, what did you do on that New Year's Eve when the world could have ended? And my story is very sad. So I could have the saddest worst story of all of us. So don't worry about that.

Let's start with Jeremy. What was your year 2000 like, Jeremy? And what was your new years on that faithful night? I was an office drone working at an office and my first job as an adult after college because I'm old. And that was pretty much it. And my fateful New Year's Eve, I don't remember. You don't think I did anything. Did you, like, try to find bottled water?

Were you loading your rifles? Okay. But I also didn't really, like, I didn't really have any friends who lived in the city still. So they'd all moved out after college. Where were you living? Abilene, Texas. Okay. And I was before you moved out of Texas then.

Yes, I left Texas because of the year 2000 and the election. And I said, I got to get the hell out of this place. It's awful. because that was the year that democracy was actually suffocated in its death, and it's taken, you know, like two decades for the death throws and the thrashing to finally stop. But that's when it happened. And I said, this is not the place for me. So I got the hell out and moved to liberal California with a quick stop on the way

and extremely liberal Flint, Michigan. Yes. Home of Michael Moore, right? Yes, absolutely. I watch Michael Moore movies to be nostalgic about the places I visited as a child. I'm like, oh, Otto World. I remember that. the Flint waterfront.

That's great. I remember that rubble on the corner there. I come from Youngstown. It's worse. Well, at least you can drink the water there. That's debatable. We'll see what happens to my body in the next 20 years. I drank a lot of Youngstown water.

Zach, where were you in the year 2000 and New Year's Eve? Year 2000, I was a freshman and sophomore in high school. I think that this year was probably like, I could not have been more video game e. this was around the time that I was like obsessively reading every video game magazine I could cover to cover over and over again and I was just like so plugged into all the consoles and was like lived and breathed video games that year for New Year's I don't know I was 13 14 years old yeah so I I assume that I probably was just like watching movies at a friend's house on New Year's but as a younger person did you have Y2K hysteria were you like secretly wishing like yeah the end time? No, I think it was one of those things like you hear about it on the news, but it just completely flew above my head. It was just like, oh, that's something that adults need to worry about, not me, because this is an era where I didn't have a computer, none of my, I didn't live digitally anywhere. Your PlayStation wasn't going to shut down. Yeah, it was fine.

It was the 90s, so you just always assumed everything was going to be all right. Yeah, exactly. Oh, by the way, this is Zach Ryan from the IGN. Here I am. Kat Bailey from Yoskamer. I forgot to do introductions up front. I was too. Too focused on Conan O'Brien's amazing comedy, and it just distracted me so much.

There's a lot to cover in this episode, so I get it. We're just rushing to the end. Katz, how about you? Year 2000, where is a young cat Bailey? I, too, was in high school at this time, and this was the year that I got back into console gaming, because I got a PlayStation this year, and that's when I discovered Final Fantasy 7, and I realized that the PlayStation was actually a pretty red console, but I'll get to that in a minute. As for where I actually was, it was about the same thing.

time that I had discovered a writing group on the internet and I became very good friends with them. And this writing group would be on a Yahoo mailing list and we would send, we had like this running story going. We would just go back and forth like writing prompts from one another and we would hang out on IRC and talking to one another. And what was the old messaging platform from 1990? ICQ. I see Q. Uh-oh. Yeah. Hanging out on ICQ. And I I remember sitting on the computer chatting with all of them as it was ticking down. But, you know, we were in the Midwest, so it had already happened in our before on the East Coast, so nothing happened. And much earlier in, like, Australia.

Yeah. But still, I think everybody was just kind of sitting here going, is everything going to blow up? You know, because the way the media was talking about it, it was like the entire world, like it would click over and just everything would shut down and then everything would burst into flames. And then it would all be like Mad Max or something. It was conspiracy by the jerky. industry to get us to buy dry meats, I think. As for me, 2000 was a terrible year. I turned 18 and I went through my first breakup really early in the year. And then I went through a huge horrible event where I lost a lot of my friends. So I was really miserable and alone and working

my first job. I took a semester off of college because I just was in a bad state. So I started college in 2001, very depressed, a lot of disposable income. That is, you know, pure gaming time right there. The depression and gaming go together like peanut butter and jelly. And I played so many video games. I played a lot of the PS2 during the launch. This is the summer, like a lot of games are being fan-translated online, playing a lot of those. Like, I think this might have been the biggest year for me for gaming and the worst year for me, like, emotionally, I think, as a young person. But, yeah, I turned 18 this year and did a ton of gaming.

And 2000, I think, worldwide, the last good year ever. I mean, 2001 comes and it all. It all went downhill in November. It's one hell of... It was doing all right until 9-11 happened. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was one hell of the tobogging ride downhill after 9-11.

Yeah. I forgot to mention my gaming aspects of 2000. Oh, please, yes. I think that was the last year that I played video games for fun and not for money. And it was the first year that I landed professional work and got paid a shit ton of cash to write two strategy guides for GameSpot on Chrono Cross and Skies of Arcadia. and I am talking like fat stacks of loot, like a monthly salary to play those two games

and write about them. We're pre-crash days, right? The crash happened immediately after. Because they overpaid you. Yeah, well, they were like, man, we really love your work. We'd love for you to do more of these. And then the crash happened, and the guy who hired me was no longer with the site.

And then everyone started paying a dollar for people to write thousands of words. Back when media companies still had budgets. Yep. I remember reading about, or one of my first, favorite podcast was with the old editor of Vanity Fair, I think, who had been an editor for a long time, and he told all these wonderful

stories about old media. Oh, yeah, this was the era of Carrie Bradshaw writing a monthly column about her shoes and then having an apartment. Yeah, I was going to say, all to herself in New York City, full of, like, Vera Wang. How dare, do they bring that series back? There were

two movies, and the second one was so bad, they said no more. Okay, because her lifestyle is unsustainable in a turn of wage. Sorry. Cynthia Nixon, who played the red, she is the redhead. Miranda. She ran for something. She's a big socialist.

Yeah, she's like super leftist and ran in New York City. She didn't win, but I think she kind of made a splash. So hopefully that's a career for her. Because one, it seems like she seems like a good person to be in politics, and two, no more sex in the city.

It's good for all of us, all of humanity. Improve it all around. I want to talk about the culture of 2000, providing more context. I mean, this could be an entire podcast, not even a retronauts about video games, but But just thinking about the year 2000, the dot-com bubble hadn't yet burst.

It was just about to burst. I was there for the very end of it. It was amazing. Lots of money for all. Certain kinds of people got more of it, of course. Technology and Internet was exploding on incredible rates. The future was incredibly bright. And we were really at the end of history period of America and other parts of the world where it's like,

well, we figured everything out. Now it's just good times forever. Because, you know, Clinton's going to hand the torch to gore and then Democrats forever. and then money all around. And even if we disagree with Republicans, we can still talk and shake hands and stuff. But things change very, very quickly. It's all Golgo 13's fault.

Yes, exactly. It's Golgo 13's fault. He sniped the hanging chads and Bush won. Yes, this is the era of the hanging Chad joke. And it was bad for comedy after that. But Quintessential 2000 show is West Wing, a show where I think it was in its first or second season at this time. And one of the early arcs was,

what are we going to do with the budget surplus? Like everybody's arguing about all of this stuff. We're going to put all this money. And there's a line from the vice president who's like going, that internet thing, it's here to stay. Yeah, the West Wing is a very cute show now. I like watching it. It's a little bit of nostalgia. Unrealistic.

It's the idea that an important conversation can actually change someone's mind. That is pure, pure fiction in my opinion. But it was huge in 2000. I think that it was like one of the biggest shows on TV. TV, if not the biggest. Yeah, it started in 99, and it's funny because it seemed like a liberal fantasy during the Bush years. Like, what if we had a different president?

And I think that's when it really took off that show. But that definitely is like an end of a history style show when it started, for sure. And if you want to see just how much things change, you just look at the West Wing and how it changed right after 9-11, it was like somebody flipped a switch. I would say 2000 was West Wing at its most charming and naive, I think. I think so, yes. And I want all of our listeners to count the amount of it. times we mentioned 9-11. It's going to happen a lot on this podcast.

Well, I think anybody of, like, of a certain age, you know, is just going to naturally point to that because it's basically our Kennedy assassination. Oh, yeah, like on a global scale. So social media does not exist. Zach Ryan does not have a job in this world. I'm sorry, Zach. That's okay. The internet is mainly a series of personal pages and fan strikes. And forums. Yeah, and forums. Yeah. I mean, there are tons of forums, not just like Reddit is the one forum, Twitter is the one like chat page. There are still big sites like IGN and GameSpot, but Toasty Frog is one of them, one of the

Titans. Heavy hitters. And they're still the biggest sites because they started in 96. They had the head start. They have a huge platform, and they are still the biggest sites. But Jeremy, you had a website in 2000 and a fairly big website compared to, you know, your geosities or geocities. I've never heard anybody pronounce it that way. I've heard people correct me saying geosities.

They're like, what? I want to make both sides of the aisle happy with that. pronunciation. That's terrible. Hey, listen, I'm just trying to make everyone happy. But you ran a fairly popular website. And I also want to get Sean O'Reilly in here, Sean Baby, at some point to talk about. Sean's site was much more popular than mine. You still had a popular site. I mean, it was like 500 views a day, which I guess was like most of the people on the internet at the time. In my heart, it was punk. It did okay for itself. What happened was in actually 1999, I imported the, I think it was Legend of Mana.

or it was a Squarespaceoft game that came with a disc that had a playable trailer or playable demo of Chrono Cross on it. And I came home over my lunch break when that came in and ripped all a bunch of video and captured a bunch of footage and screenshots and music and wrote up like what it was to play this demo. And it took me like two hours to do this. I have no idea how I pulled this off in a single lunch break. But I uploaded it all to the gaming intelligence agency and was like, I'll give this guy to you guys, but just link back to my site. and all of a sudden I went from like 50 views a day to 500 and it never dropped and just kind of I think at my peak my site was getting like 3,000 views a day, which was at the time pretty decent, but that was probably like 2003 or 4.

Interesting. I know that this is a weird memory, but I know that you ripped the music from the Krono Cross demo CD and I burned. I ripped the music, you mean I like stood in a corner and just let it play and recorded it. Well, whatever you did, I burn one of those songs of the first CDR I burned. So that's a weird memory. I just had. I don't know how that popped up in my brain. But yeah, you had a website, but there were still, like, the internet was still very, very primitive. There's no Facebook.

I don't even think there's, like, live journal or anything like that. There was open diary. Open diary. Okay. What was that? It was basically proto-live journal. Okay. I was definitely using those kinds of tools around that time, and I think I got into live journal a year later. So I think, like, this was a period where more and more people were getting the internet. People were on those 1900 or 198 modems or whatever. But still, there were plenty of people who simply did not have computers. Yeah. Yeah, AOL is still like the way

most people got online to. So many coasters. Being on the internet was an inherently nerdy thing still in 2000. And so naturally I spent all my time on the internet. And even though there weren't social media sites, I think sites like GeoCities, GeoCities, they were grasping towards that because the way the site was set up is like everybody lived in a neighborhood and you had an address in your little city. It didn't really shake out that way. Like people found other ways to connect with each other, like link exchange. And there were websites that were just like, here are a list of links to websites about this topic. Yeah.

Web rings too. Yeah. I mean, I already mentioned IRC and ICQ. Like I had a group of friends that I had never met at this time that I hung out with and considered to be like some of my best friends, you know. And I guess that was the early social media and we would stay up. We'd be up at 3 in the morning chatting about various things. And I think that was a pretty important thing, you know, like a formative thing for me at least, because these were people who shared my interests, which I did not know anybody in my school who really shared my interests. Same here, yeah.

And that I could identify with. And when you're on the Internet, a lot of your kind of anxiety went away and everything. And like I said, it was more innocent time, I think, for the Internet. Oh, one thing I forgot to mention is what I did on Y2K, and I was just tweeting about how sad it was where I was on, this is not why she broke up with me, by the way. I was on the phone with my first girlfriend, and I was on the phone with her throughout Y2K that New Year's Eve, and I was playing Brayfencer Musashi. That's what I was doing on Y2K New Year's Eve when I was 17. So there you have it. It could be sad depending on your interpretation, but she was fine with me playing video games while we were on the phone.

That's not why we broke up. I think anime was really taking off at this time. Uh, it was a bit of, yeah, yeah, Tsunami was a thing. Yeah. People were watching Gundam Wing. I remember around this time. Jeremy shaking aside, people like it, Jeremy. A lot of women who like to write slash fiction were watching Gundam wing. If you're in it for that, sure. Yeah.

I was in it more for like the story. I didn't say that it was good. I'm just saying that a lot of people were watching it. Yeah. It was when Gundam actually kind of took off in the U.S. for the first time. Yeah, for some reason, the stuff from the 70s didn't really click. I know. It just didn't resonate.

And I was like, I'm just so confused. I don't know. This is a year that one of my friends got very well-known in school for drip-feeding a bunch of us Evangelion tapes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because they weren't readily available. Nobody really knew how to find them, but he would have, you know, like two episodes on a tape. And, you know, he'd give them to you and then be like, when you finish those, come back, I might have two more. So we watched it piecemeal throughout the first, you know, semester of my freshman year.

Wow. Did he charge for this or just? I'm sure that he charged some people. I think you just had to go to Suncoast Video, and that's where I got mine. Yeah. But those were $30 there. They were expensive. Suncoast Video was in Stockton, and that's at least a 20-minute drive.

I was a full-time employee. I had header to burn. I was making a good sweet $30,000 a year, baby. The kids did not have Crunchy Rollback then. You're making that chrono cross-guide money. Oh, I'm not even counting that of my annual earnings. God, thanks. Speaking of publishing money, there were magazines galore.

Yeah. Magazines were still like the prevalence reading entertainment. because no one really had... I mean, people had Internet, but the high-quality features were all in magazines, the best writers were in magazines still. And Jeremy, like, at the time, one-up in EGM, there was a bit of a rivalry there at that website.

I remember people talking about where it's like... One of the launch until 2003, though. Right. But, I mean, between the two staffs, it's like, who are these Internet people? Why do we have to do podcasts? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's stuff like NextGen.

That was my, definitely my preferred magazine at that time. I think 2000 is when it went from being Next Generation to NextGen. and never recovered. The quality of the writing was higher than a lot of different magazines. It didn't talk down to me. It didn't have that Nintendo Power kind of quality where I was talking to you

in a very juvenile kind of way. And it was really smart in the way that it looked ahead of trends. I remember that in 2000, it was already predicting that the Dreamcast was doomed. And that really... How dare they?

It really stayed with me because sure enough, a year later, boom. I mean, how much of that is being prophetic and how much of the Dreamcast being doomed is from people saying that it was doomed from the outset. They're probably looking at the Japanese market. Yeah, of course. EGM was a huge booster of the Dreamcast.

Yeah, I remember. I was actually, funnily enough, going back and reading through some old EGMs just recently from 2000, and it was just wall-to-wall dream cast coverage. They were all in on it. Yep. That's really funny because John Davidson is now at IGN.

Is he? Oh, I didn't know this. I had no idea. I'd wonder what he was doing these days. Yeah. What's he doing there? He is... See, the new Pear Schneider?

Yes. Yeah. Oh, what happened to Pear? Pair's still there. Okay. The pair is the old Pear Schneider. Oh. Yeah, Pear oversees like a totally different team now, but...

So you've got like the Germans and the British. Yeah. Sounds tense. But no, it's funny because like reading, I was such an EGM kid. Like, I would read EGM cover to cover over and over again every episode or every issue every month. And so it was really funny because, you know, John came in to interview with IGN. a few months ago, and it was like, I opened the door and saw him sitting there and close it and turned around. I was like, that John Davidson? But yeah, he was like a huge dreamcast

booster. I remember reading so much of his work. Yeah, and that was the time when EGM went from being kind of like this, you know, thick rag full of just, you know, whatever they could throw on the page to actually being pretty smart and considered. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's the peak of EGM, honestly. Like going back through. Once I started writing, it was all downhill. I had a I got two articles in before I killed it. Me too, actually. I had a pretty low opinion of EGM in the mid-90s, actually. I was like I just didn't like the reviews. I didn't like how it was just wall-to-wall.

Like, they cram so much in. And then in 2000, really beautifully laid out, really strong coverage from Japan in particular. So, yeah. That's the British influence, that beautiful design. We have all those issues, almost every issue of EGM, you know, at the office. And sometimes I'll just... You're welcome. Yeah.

Sometimes I'll just walk by and grab an issue. And, like, yeah, you're absolutely right. This era of EGM, the magazines are like an inch thick. Like, they're just, like, stacked with the information. And, like, was it 2001 that they got the special Amano art of Final Fantasy 10? Yeah, they did multiple covers. Yeah, that was gorgeous. Shoot.

James Bill can, we'll talk your ear off about it if you ask him. So Amazon.com. They stopped just selling books in 98. But up until that point, they just sold books. But I was going back through my Amazon records. which go back to 2000. And until, like, 2004, I was only buying books on Amazon. So Amazon wasn't this thing that gives us all, everything we need, like food and groceries and, you know, cameras that watch porch pirates and things like that. Amazon was just mainly known as a bookstore in 2000. 2000 was definitely the first year of online commerce for me.

I was buying stuff on Amazon at that time. My first debit card, my first bank accounts, my first real job. It was my first online thing. And it was kind of scary because you're always, don't put your money. your credit card into these stores, they're going to get hacked and stolen. You're like, oh, I'm taking a big risk doing this, you know. And you didn't really think that stuff would actually show up. And then it does. And it's like, whoa, it's like the first time you ever got into a lift. And you're like, do I really want to get into this car with this total

stranger? Yeah, my whole salary just about went to, man, I can't even remember the name of the site, but it was a DVD site. And I would get like DVD Empire or something. I would buy like three DVDs a week. Oh, yeah. Like just tons of movies. was like, wow, it's good quality video and it's so inexpensive and it can just be mailed to me because I can't find these anywhere here. And so, yeah, that was my salary. I bought a lot of, there were a lot of weird, like, third-party DVD selling sites. It sold things for, like, I don't know, like a dollar over profit or like a penny over profit. Like, here's a DVD for like 1735 or something crazy like that. I bought a lot of things from those kind of sites. Yeah, and DVDs really took off

in 2000 as well because he had Phantom Menace and The Matrix both. The Matrix was the first DVD that I owned. Yeah, and they were like these beautifully craft, like gorgeous menus, beautiful box sets. Like, they felt like a prestige item that you wanted to buy. So we also, we still had cell phones. There were not really smartphones at this time. I did not have cell phone. I did not have one until 2006. Wow. And I will say they were, that is pretty late. And I don't know what I did before then, honestly, but I think I was just a stubborn standout. But cell phones are mainly for making calls, and I am not one of those people who's like, why don't we talk to each other anymore? I'm so glad that we can just text each other. And if a phone call comes in, I feel like

it's an emergency now. If I take a phone call, like somebody is dying, somebody is sick. There's an emergency. Like, that's the only time I ever talk on the phone, or if I call my mom. I promise this is, I will try not to mention these people that I was hanging out with in 2000, but now you would just text your friends on the internet, right? At that time, I would buy phone cards and like call my friends who were in Michigan or California or whatever because I mean otherwise you're racking up major long distance charges because long distance was still a thing yeah yeah I got my first cell phone in 2001 and it was an analog only cell phone like it couldn't connect to digital networks and the screen was like LEDs kind of like calculator style single line readout it was it was great

but I bought that because I started a long distance relationship and at the time uh cell phones did not ignore area codes and they were still like area code based and we racked up like a $2,000 phone bill one month. That was the point of which we were like, oh, that's bad. Let's figure something else out. This was the time when Europe and Japan had such better cell phones than the U.S. And so some friends would come back from Europe or Japan with a like a mobile phone that they would just buy in a shop and you'd be like, wow, look at how futuristic it looks. This is amazing. This has a kind of camera in it. It has a color screen. I went to Japan for the first time

at Christmas of 2001 and the phone technology there just seems so amazing I went to like the Sony shop tower in Osaka and they had you know like robot dogs and things I was just like oh my God all my cartoons were right this is the future holy crap Japan really understood texting was just the ideal way of communicating with people you're not face to face with just like here is the most essential

information there's no hi how you doing how's the weather you know all the small talk that will guide you in and out of the conversation maybe I'm just being like George Costanza about this, but I hate all that stuff. Yeah, no, no. I remember, like, hearing someone had a Metal Gear Solid codec ringtone, and I was watching them talk and how just like they kind of tuned everything out around them after they answer the call. I was like, I get Metal Gear Solid now. I see why, you know, in the middle of battle, you can have a conversation and everything stops because that's how it works in Japan. I understand. I want to talk about the state of consoles in 2000 before we go over the different

game releases, which will be like the main course of this podcast. So, like, let's talk. Let's talk about all the consoles existing in 2000. It was very interesting because there was a lot of really high-tech stuff and mid-tech stuff and low-tech stuff all existing together, like Game Boy Color, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, N64, Neo-Geo Pocket Color. These were all like such different forms of technology, all peacefully coexisting, in some cases, dying. But we could talk more about those things later. But PlayStation, I think 2000 was a very good year for the original PlayStation. some of the best-looking and best-playing games came out that year.

And it also helped that in terms of the PS-2, which was also out in 2000, there were some massive hardware shortages, which meant the PS-1 got a stay of execution, essentially. Well, a lot of those PlayStation 1 games, thanks to PlayStation 2's backwards compatibility and faster load times and graphical smoothing technology and stuff, like they found a second life on PlayStation 2. It took me forever to find a PlayStation 2,

and when I did, the only game that I played on it was Vagrant Story for a long time. Final Fantasy 9 was another one. Yeah. Because Sid had loading problems on the PS1, but on the PS2, it was markedly better. Yeah. Yeah, I think when I got my PS2, I was playing Mega Man Legends 2, Final Fantasy 9, Harvest Moon Back to Nature, like, all of these really late PlayStation 1 releases on the PS2. Because the PS2 launch, which we'll talk about very soon, not super great, unless he likes snowboarding, and I did for about a week. Oh, Fantavision.

There are some Fantavision diehards out there. So, yeah, PlayStation, the original PlayStation, doing. Really good. Like I said, my first year actually owning a PlayStation. It was a good year for a PlayStation, especially if you need to catch up. Well, I was such a Nintendo fan girl up until that point. And I was like, no, PlayStation, whatever. And then I got to actually get a taste of the library on that thing.

And it was a moment for me. I was like, wow, games have come so far. Playing Metal Gear Solid. I mean, I was on the Metal Gear Solid episode for Retronauts. That was a mind-blowing experience. That was the first truly modern gaming experience I, felt like I really had on a console. And I felt like the PlayStation was still pumping out these games that had top-end graphics,

like Final Fantasy 8 and Metal Gear Solid, whereas the N-64 felt very long the tooth by 2000. We could talk about N-64. I would say after post-Occarina of time, it was like, well, the door is shut. Let's find something else. What was on N-64 in 2000 besides Majora's Mask? In Japan, Paper Mario. Yeah, but that was 2000. one here.

Kirby was 2001, wasn't it? I think that might have been 2000, yeah. Conquer's Bad Fur Day was one of the last one of the last ones. 2001, there was like a late Tony Hawkport. I mean, yeah, after 98, there was nothing super great on N64 outside. They put StarCraft on it for some reason? Yeah, that's right.

I forget when that Doon ports. And it needed the RAM expansion packs. So it had Rogue Squadron came out in 2000. Oh, yeah. Right around the same. No, 99, my bad. So it's late 98. early 99, Rogue Squadron came out.

Yeah, it was a really good looking game on the N-64. It was Banjo-Tui 2000 also? Banjo-Tui, I believe, was 2000, yeah. I did not put it on my list of notable games because it's, my opinion, not notable. I'm not a Banjo-Kazooie hater either. I like the first one much better. 2000 was the year that I got a Nintendo 64 because a friend of mine was moving and didn't want his anymore.

Oh, cool. And he literally was just like, here, here's the Nintendo 64. So, like, I have fond memories of Nintendo that year because I, I, that was the year that I got to jump in and play Super Mario 64 and Ocourade and have time and Majora's Mass. Like all these, well, I say all these, but the nine games that I've missed on 64 up to that point, I got to play that year. So Mario Card and Smash were mainstays. Yeah. The smash came out in 99.

That's right, yeah. And it was a big one for my group of friends in school. Like we would get together after school and we would all be playing. And just the idea of being able to play as Link versus Mario, that was the playground argument that, I mean, I still have those moments where I'm playing Smash where it's like, wow, I'm playing as Link fighting Daisy in Star Fox. Yeah, it's pretty bad, yeah. Yeah, I guess Smash Brothers was the one post-Occarina standout Nintendo game. I mean, there were good games after that, but I feel like Nintendo immediately was like all of our resources are going to the next thing now because we need to salvage what we have here.

So that was in 64. I have a similar story to you, Zach. I got mine in 2001. I never had one. And I think I gave my friend like a very small amount of money because he just never. touched it anymore. So I did a ton of catching up in the early 2000s, like, buying all the super cheap and 64 games

because nobody wanted it up. So the GameCube hype started in 2000, right? Oh, for sure. The 2000 space world was where we saw that infamous Okerun of, sorry, a Zelda trailer that seemed to suggest the dark and edgy game queue. Yeah, the sizzle reel, which was just like, well, here's a

render of Link fighting Gannon. Yeah. It's a Zelda 2 looking link fighting a shiny knight, right? So I would go on IGN and I would download these postage stamp size videos to watch clips of that space world demo or Final Fantasy 10 the hype for that was in full swing

at that point. Yeah, 2000 was when Square announced Final Fantasy 9, 10, and 11 and 12, right? All at once, or I guess 9 was already known. About that time. It was 10, 11 and 12 all in one dump. It's like, here you go, they're all coming from different people. They're all totally different from each other. Look forward to it. And the first image of 10 was this beautifully, beautiful CG version of

Una, doing the dance. Yeah. And this was the same year that Spirits Within came out. Yep. That was 2001. 2001, yeah. But there was also the hype around Spirits Within.

Yeah, because we were all like going, oh, man, Spirits Within. Like, there was that promo image, I think, of just the eye. And they're like, this is from the movie. Look how gorgeous it is. Look at this old man with wrinkles. Yeah, the old man face was really how they showed off a lot of tech. I hate it.

Rubber ducks and old men. It's disgusting. Yeah. Yeah, in 64, I mean, not a miserable failure, but not a great thing for Nintendo. And they're moving on from it. Game Boy Color, Jeremy, where do you think the Game Boy Color is in 2000? We're a few years out from it. Yeah, it launched in 1998 at the end of the year.

And 2000 was a pretty strong year for it. Wario Land 3, Metal Gear Solid. Yeah, there were some ports of, like, NES games, like Ghost and Goblins. There were lots of, you know, kind of unique games, interesting, like, weird interpretations of console games that had to be kind of powered down. My heart really was with NeoGeo Pocket, though, because NeoGeo Pocket color was so good. It had been in the U.S. for about a year at that point, and it was really hitting on stride right before Aruz took over S&K and pulled the rug out from under the feet of the Neo Geo Pocket and said, actually, those screens would be great in Pachinko machines.

That's the end game of any game company. I was so into what they were doing with Neo Geo Pocket Color and Game Boy Color that I killed off my website and relaunched it as a site dedicated to 2D gaming, specifically focused on handhelds. I was like, I'm going to cover all the news and all the releases of 2D games, and it's going to be amazing, and no one actually came to the site. So I said, okay, never mind, I'll go back to doing the old way and my site recovered. I was reading that in high school to make you feel old. I'm glad someone read it. It was like 100 people that's at a 500.

It was kind of a bummer. No one to care it except you and me. But, yeah, those systems, yeah, there was a lot going on. Obviously, people have better memories of Game Boy Advance because it was more impressive and more of the games people wanted to see. Game Boy color was pretty long in the tooth at that point,

which is why NeoGeo Pocket was so appealing. Also, Wonder Swan had come out toward the end of 1999 in Japan, so I was importing games for that and being like, have all these cool handheld games that Americans don't know about. None of them were really great, but it was kind of cool to play like a super shitty version of Mega Man that couldn't make up its mind if it was horizontal or vertical.

You know, I love that. It's great stuff. I had disposable income for the first time in 2000. I was working at a fast food restaurant, KFC. So I upgraded from my vacuum tube Game Boy with the missing battery cover to my Game Boy color. And that was the first time I discovered that screen resolution was a thing. Oh my gosh, everything's not blurry anymore. This is gorgeous. And games can be in color.

This is very cool. Obviously, I was all in on the Pokemon craze around this time. I was going to say, I had my Game Boy Color with me at all times during this era, and I had friends who were only saying that the NeoGeo would blow it out of the water and that it was stupid that I should be so devoted to this little machine, but I loved my Game Boy Color, specifically for those games. So Pokemon Cray's was dying down by 2000. The Pokemon, the movie 2000, came out because everything had to have a 2000 after it.

It was exciting. Well, it wasn't as big as the first. Not the first movie, yeah. But then Golden Silver came out that year. A lot of people would say it's the best Pokemon. It was the grand finale. Game Freak thought, this is it. We're just dumping everything we can into this game.

And they famously had to do programming tricks just to fit the contour region into it. And it was a pretty remarkable thing to come on in the Game Boy Color at that time. I thought the story was that they had to get Satoro Iwada to do programming tricks just to make the game. work, and then he did such a good job that he was like, let's also include another game. Yeah. Let's get the previous game in there. The most famous bit of golden silver-eyed wager, the pit.

Oh, yeah. It feels so big. What a surprise. And that was not advertised, right? No, no. It was a wonderful surprise. That's back when they could still surprise you. Yeah, I was playing a ton of Game Boy Color around this time.

I remember taking it with me on my first trip to the Bay Area in the fall of 2000. I was visiting a friend out here. And I was playing it so much that I was lightly scolded by her, like, stop playing your Game Boy. She didn't understand how good Warrior Land 3 is We're still friends But yes, Warrior Land 3 amazing game We'll talk more about all the notable releases after the break

Other consoles we have Let's talk about the Neo Geo Pocket Color Jeremy What was your experience with that Because it lasted in America for less than a year When I met my pals in college I thought it lasted a little longer than that It was officially less than a year

I looked at like the launch And then the official discontinuation in June of 2000 It was less than one year Yeah, that's insane That's heartbreaking Yeah I don't know I was really into the idea of the Neo Geo Pocket because it looked really impressive.

The black and white model of the system never came to the U.S. And they pretty much immediately said, whoa, and reissued it as a color system after like eight games come out on Japan. But yeah, it was a great little system. It, you know, had really impressive horsepower and good, good quality graphics. The fighting games on it were kind of the bulk of the library of really notable games, but it had a lot of other stuff, especially if you looked over. overseas. I felt like it was a really premium handheld gaming experience, and there were really

great versions of things like, you know, Pac-Man and Crush Roller, like classic arcade games, but then also unique sequels to Metal Slug. They had Metal Slug First Mission and Second Mission, which added kind of an exploratory, you know, multi-path element to the games. There were some RPGs. There were some adventure games. You know, I think something like 35 or 40 games came out in the U.S. total. And that's a pretty solid library for one year. Do you know what the market is for these? Because whenever I go to retro gaming conventions, that's like three times a year, they're expensive now. I guess some certain games are very cheap because I remember going to condensing like here's a box of like these two games.

Well, I mean, yeah, like there's definitely some games that are very inexpensive, especially if they're loose. But if you want like the good stuff complete in box, you're going to pay for it. Like gals fighters, the fighting game starring only S&K's female characters plus Iori dressed in drag was. you know, it kind of undersold and for a long time no one cared but now it's $500 or $600 complete inbox. So there we not be a NeoGeo Pocket Color works.

Oh, I don't know about that. I happen to work at a publisher whose president owns the entire NeoGeo U.S. collection. You got the connection. Yep. That's awesome. The insider connection. So it is definitely something I want to do

maybe when the analog pocket and its dock comes out and they jail break it. Cool. But yeah, a great system. I really have a lot of fond of. to sport and actually went back last year kind of in anticipation of maybe doing some sort of video works project within the future and started buying some of the games. There are no videos on these games online. You made the only ones for like US gamer, I think. Well, it's because it's

really hard to find actual capture gear for the system. The only way to capture it officially without emulation is to use something called a K2 board or K1. It's a special developer board created by S&K and there are very few of those and they are very expensive. But I think there are methods becoming available soon that will allow video capture. So expect to see more actual footage in the NGO games, pocket games. So let's talk about the Dreamcast. We skipped it to talk about other things, but Dreamcast had a big, huge push out of the gates in 99, very exciting time.

I think it was immediately, the enthusiasm immediately died when the PlayStation 2 released in Japan in March, and people were like, this looks better, there are, you know, there's DVD playback. We talked a lot about this in our PS2 episode, by the way, so I'm not going to rehash it all, but I think just the mere existence of the PS2 really destroyed the Dreamcast. It wasn't like Shenmoo. It wasn't just one thing. It was, the competition was just too powerful, I think. I could not have loved or have been more devoted to my Dreamcast. I sold my first guitar and did every odd job that I could find. Did you get at launch? Yeah, the previous summer to make sure that I

had enough money for the Dreamcast when it dropped in September. And I think I was the only one out of my friends that had one and really cave a shit about it. You know, like they thought the games were cool, but they were not interested in, you know, jumping on the bandwagon like I did. And I was devastated when everybody was like, oh, but the PlayStation 2 is so much better. Look how much better it looks.

Look how games that are coming out for it. And it was like, I eventually got a PlayStation 2 also. But to me, Dreamcast was like looking into the future. You know, like I remember playing Code Veronica and watching that opening cutscene and thinking like, nothing will ever look better than this. Like, this is it for video games. So caliber as well. Yeah. Just the mere novelty of going online and downloading free new content. Or playing, playing like Fantasy Star online. That was, I, you know,

I wasn't a PC, yeah, I wasn't a PC kid. So, like, the idea that I was playing a game with other real-life humans, you know, across the nation was like, mind-blowing to me. But in 2000, piracy was such a thing. Oh, God, yeah. And that was when, you know, I'd go to a land party and my friends would be just swapping burnt discs because everybody had a CD burner at this. point. So they're passing around PC games that they burned, Dreamcasts that they burned, games that they burned. When I went to college the following year, I see somebody like playing Dreamcast and I go, oh, you have a Dreamcast. I'm like, sure, do you want any of the games? I got them all right here. Yeah. But yeah, the Dreamcast could not withstand the power of the PS2, which

is still the highest selling console of all time. I don't think anything will ever beat it just because of when it was released in time. The DS missed it by this much. By like a million, right? It's like 151 versus 150 million. I couldn't believe it was that close, yeah. But like nothing will beat that either. There will be no...

The PS2 was around forever. Yeah. They were still making games for it in Japan, like, and selling well in 2010. Yeah. Go back to our PS2 episode from, I think, like, 2016. We talk a lot about that. And I guess the last thing we have to cover console-wise before we take our break is, or portable-wise, rather, is the band.

die Wonder Swan color, which debuted at the end of 2000, but no version of the Wonder Swan made it to the USA. Jeremy, do you have any knowledge of WonderSwan? I feel like if anyone is in the room that is a WonderSwan expert, it would be you. I don't know if I'm an expert, but I definitely know about it. Out of all the people in this room, you are the expert. The weirdo. You know, we had an episode dedicated to NeoGeo Pocket Color and Wonder Swan a long time ago. I forgot. Yep. But basically, WonderSwan was Gunpeyokoi's successor to the Game Boy. It was a higher powered version with a bigger screen, bigger resolution. It had a really interesting, not ambidextrous design, but it could be rotated.

So you could play games that were vertically oriented or horizontally oriented. It was designed to be very inexpensive. It sold for like 50 bucks originally, the black and white version. It was very much kind of the lateral thinking of season technology that Yokoy was so big into. And unfortunately, he was killed before he had the chance to see the system launch. but Bondi published it and they launched it with a game called Gunpei which is a puzzle game named

in his honor. It did pretty well for itself in Japan. It wasn't a huge monster hit but because it was Bondi they had just an enormous slate of licenses to work from so basically any anime license you can think of it was on there. So much Gundam Evangelion. Super Robot Wars

This is where Square went to because they did not like Nintendo. Square had a tantrum. The first time I heard about it was the Final fantasy games run. I'm like, what is this Wonder Swan thing? Yeah, the Game Boy Advanced Final Fantasy 1, 2, and 4 that we got here. Those are adaptations of the Wonder Swan remakes of those games. Yeah, so Squaw was on there. Lots of third-party support. Capcom also. A few others. Namco, there was a unique Clonoa game on there. Like I said, there was Mega Man and it was terrible.

There were a few Mega Man games for the color version, one of which was adapted here, the battle chip challenge, which is like a game that you don't really play, just like say, hey, robots do this stuff, and maybe like 30 minutes later, you find out if you won or lost. There was a, yeah, platformer, yeah, just all kinds of stuff. It was kind of a neat little system. By the end, there were people really pushing it to its limits. There was a sort of semi-officially game release called Judgment Silver Sword that is basically like a kind of an homage to Radiant Silver Gun. And it really, it's extraordinary. Like, it's amazing to see that and think, wow, this is running on this little, like, puny gameboy style handheld.

But that also sells for, like, $1,000 now, so tough luck. What a diverse and wonderful ecosystem of games, like, of different consoles. You think about now. I forgot the coolest thing about Wonder Swan. There was a homebrew project called Wonder Witch, where you, that's where Judgment, Silver Sword, and a few other games came from. But there was also something called Wonderborg, which was like a little, it was a little, no, it was a little robot.

Motherborg. Yeah, yeah, it's a little robot. you could use the Wonder Swan to control. So it was like a little spider robot. That rules. I like that. Yeah, it was great. There's also the birth control or like pregnancy test game that Kelsey Lewin from the video game history foundation discovered.

Just all kinds of strange stuff. Yeah. No, Kat, you were saying, sorry about like how like vibrant and weird the ecosystem was. Yeah, no, for sure. Because, I mean, if you look at it today, you have these well-established players and good luck trying to break in. So just the fact that you still had S&K. kicking around. You had Bandai going, make a handheld console.

Why not? You had Sega making the Dreamcast, and you just never knew where new game hardware was going to come from at that time. And just looking at the big old list of consoles, there's just so much innovation. And it wasn't just a Dreamcast. It was stuff like the NeoGeo

Pocket Color as well. I kind of feel like it's the spirit of the early 90s where there were so many people trying to get into the business and create systems. It was kind of that same vibe. except that in this case, all the systems were kind of good, as opposed to in the 90s where most of them were actually very bad. It feels like people had a clearer sense of what made good technology, good games.

And so it was a really fertile time, as you said, like just very diverse and interesting. And it kind of didn't really matter where you put down your stake. Like, you were going to have some good games to play. And Kat wanted to talk about PC as a platform for gaming, which I neglected to put down here in our list of consoles. But I was doing a ton of PC gaming in 2000, and it was. Yeah, it was a very interesting time for PC gaming as well. Yeah, I was going to land parties pretty regularly in 2000.

I was never doing that. It was more like solo games. We were playing StarCraft. We were playing Quake 2. It was definitely a time that PC games were changing a huge amount because if you look at the classical era of PC gaming, it was defined so much by strategy games and RPGs and flight sims. And it was in around 2000 that that really, really was beginning to change. Isometric RPGs were starting to go away, flight sims were dying. FPS was taking over in a huge way, especially online FPS. Like they had had their formative moment in the mid-90s, but by 2000, games like Quake and Counter-Strike and everything, those were the games that people were playing.

And even, like, StarCraft was dominant at this time, but RTS is a thing, like after having such a rich amount of time in the late 90s, was also kind of dying a little bit. Multi-player gaming, especially, Kat, like you mentioned, I knew people, like everyone owned Doom in the 90s. I didn't know anyone who actually played online or had a death match. In the year 2000, I knew a ton of people were playing Counterstrike and Quake 3, I think, was that? Unreal tournament. Yeah, like that was the new way to play these games, not like a solo campaign in an FPS. Yeah, and this was about the time that Space Combat Sims, as we know them, they died as well, RIP.

And this was such an important inflection point because this is where console gaming and PC gaming which had previously been so very separate, started to come together, and you would really see the reflection of that when the Xbox came out a year later. And then ports of StarCraft, N64. Woo-hoo! The best way to play.

So after the break, we'll talk about the best games of 2000. StarCraft 64 will not be included. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and if there's one thing my detractors can agree on, it's that I'm incredibly pretentious. That's why I've launched Alexander's Ragtime Band, a podcast about the most pretentious music on earth, progressive rock. Join me, James Eldred, and Elliot Long

here on the Greenlit Podcast Network for a deep dive into the most pompous rock music ever made. From ABWH to Zep. In this quarter, on the Greenlit Podcast Network, Chris Sebs and Matt Wilson. And in this quarter, VHS Audities,

confusing animation, and modern not-so classics. Plus snacks, movie fighters. We watch movies and beat them up. Hey, Chris, what's the War Rocket Ajax podcast about? Well, Matt, if we were smart, it'd be about murders, but it's actually about comics. War Rocket Ajax, it's not about murders, but it is weekly on the Greenlit Podcast Network. So we're back and we're going to talk about the

So we're back and we're going to talk about the men. many, many notable games in 2000. And there are a lot of them, and I was pretty ruthless about my choices here. Of course, I left some out. And if you have your own favor that's not on here, please don't yell at me. Just kindly put it in a comment somewhere, and I will gladly accept that. And I also want to note that some of these are the Japanese release dates, just to be fair, to call them 2,000 games if you're worried or confused or concern.

And you think some of these came out in 2001, well, they were released in Japan like eight months earlier. So technically, they are 2,000 games, because that's when they came out first. So these are 10 or perhaps 11 big games. I forget how many I actually put down here, but I narrowed it down to around 10. The first big game happened in early January of 2000, I believe, and that was The Sims, which we did an episode about, I think Jeremy did an episode about that in 2008 was the last one. I think that's one. I'll take your word on that one. I wrote it down here, and I think that's when it was about the release of the Sims 3.

So we are due for a new Sims episode. Okay. But huge, huge, huge game. We just did an Animal Crossing episode. We recorded it. I'm not sure if this will go before or after that. Before. Before.

Okay. You've heard that already. There will be a Sims one in the future. Oh, no, no. This one's going up first. Okay. Never mind. You'll hear it in the future.

But I do want to say, like, it was interesting how around that time we figured out, like, the things we want to do is simulate the mundanity of life. Like, let's make an ideal version of life and put it on the screen. I think the reason that the Sims really stands out is it was around this time game developers were going, women, how can we get, women to play video games, forgetting that a lot of women and girls were playing NES. And they were putting out these very gendered video games that were, you know, for women, quote, unquote, and weren't selling well. And they couldn't really figure out why these lines weren't picking up.

And then the Sims comes around and gets such a huge proportion of women who are like, wow, like, this is a really neat game. Like, this really speaks to me. And it was like both men and women. And it's like, turns out if you don't pander. to women, you know, but you make a game that's not just guns, violence, blood, spaceships. It wasn't gender, like, it was not a gendered product. It didn't come in

a pink box with, like, all women on the cover or whatever. It was just like in all ages, all gender game, and everybody, everybody loved it. And it was a hit just on the PC. I don't think it came to other platforms until maybe 2002, 2003. Like, there was a PS2 version

of it. But do we have Sims experience here? I know I played a lot of it, especially when I was depressed teenager in 2000, like, okay, let's live the life I would rather be living in the Sims. I didn't get the Sims because I was just like... Exactly. I was like, why would you play this game? It was funny because, like, not having any experience with any kind of simulator prior

to the Sims, I remember the first time that I saw anybody play. And actually, to your point, the first person that I saw playing this game was a friend of mine who was a couple years older and was just like this punk rock dude, but was obsessed with the Sims. And I remember watching and play it and been like, why? What is, what, why is this appealing to you? I don't understand it, yeah. The dark humor was definitely a thing because of all the ways that you could kill your Sims horribly.

But he wasn't even about that. Like, he wanted to have his Sims flourish. You know, it was very strange. I was like that, and I did see all the jokes. Like, why do you want to, like, water the virtual lawn and, you know, pay the virtual bills? I'm like, I don't know, but I can't stop doing it. It's just like, it's very addictive. But I talked about it on the Animal Crossing one.

It is like the Sims is like the perfect meritocracy of what life should be. It's like you work hard and you benefit from it. there are no outside external forces that will affect your life that are unfair or arbitrary. And if they are, you know, in the game, you can bounce back from them. It's just like it's the way the world should be, which is why it's very satisfying to play it. Yeah, you decide you want to be in a relationship and you just talk to them and suddenly you're friends. Right. Exactly, yes.

Or you can just like, you can work up someone's like love meter and fall in love with them or whatever. Just like it's a very like mathematical meritocracy. It's like it's the way the world should work, damn it. But it doesn't. Except for the love thing. That's creepy. People should love you on their own terms. Not if you give enough gifts like Harvest Moon style.

To Kat's point, I would say that the Sims is really the genesis of casual gaming that we think of today. Like, it didn't really exist before that. But, you know, when they release this game that appealed to everyone, including people who didn't normally play video games, it really caused the industry to stop and say, whoa, what does that mean? And, you know, other people created games kind of in the same vein. But you have to give credit to Nintendo for seeing it. saying, let's launch entire platforms around this concept. And three years later, four years later, we got the DS.

And two years after that, we got the Wii. And those were really built to appeal to the same audience that said, I don't like video games, but let's see how my sim is doing today. And maybe they can have some woohoo. Woohoo, that's right. I think that it was also a watershed moment because so before that, there had been missed. And the discourse at the time was you had a lot of hardcore PC writers going, frothing at the mouth and saying,

Miss, it's not a video game. What the heck is this slide show crap, right? But then Will Wright puts out the Sims. And, of course, Will Wright's a giant. And everybody, including, like, everybody had to step back and go, okay, I have to take this game seriously. Yeah, he was not a newcomer. And I think it helped that in 2000, I want to say,

I don't have, like, math in front of me, but I feel like the PC had penetrated the most, like, normy homes, the most, like, middle American homes when that wasn't the case with Miss. Like PCs were being sold by Dell and Gateway very affordably. More people had PCs. Flavorful IMAX from Apple? That's true.

Although... When Mist came out, PCs were still $3,000. Yeah, yeah. And you can get your cow spotted box sent to you with a computer inside and immediately start paying the Sims in 2000. So it was a good time to be alive. And that's why this was a mega hit on the PC before it moved to other platforms. So the next game in the list, I included because Kat is here.

I don't personally think it's one of the best ten. games of the year, but it's very important for the franchise. And it's Pokemon Stadium, which I believe is the first time Pokemon were rendered in 3D for a video game, correct? Yeah, I remember sitting on Serrabee, I want to say, or some other Pokemon site and looking at these tiny little screenshots of Pokemon Stadium. Was Serraby around back then?

Yeah, they were around by like 1999 or thereabouts, and just going, wow, this game looks amazing. Look at these incredible 3D Pokemon, because it was such a large leap to go from these static sprites on the Game Boy to what they were doing in the N64. And I just, I had to play it. I had to have to play it. And in Japan, the original Pokemon Stadium, when it came out, didn't even have all the Pokemon.

They put out another one that did have all of them. And then that was the one that was ultimately released here. And it was such a big push. It was everywhere. It was in Blockbuster. They had the, the Pokemon themed N64. And that was maybe the last truly big push that N64 made. But on Acts of the Blood God, when we were talking about it.

talking about the N64 for our console RPG Quest series, which you should go check out. I was also commenting, like, it really spoke to the status of the N64 because it was effectively getting the crumbs of Pokemon, whereas Pokemon was the biggest on the Game Boy. On the N64, it was just a spinoff. It was an adaptation. It was a companion piece. Yeah, but that would also be true for GameCube and we and Wii and you. Yeah, yeah.

It wasn't until Switch that, you know, where there no longer was a separate portable platform that Gamefinitely said, all right, let's just put it over there. coincidentally, the Switch is one Nintendo's most successful console in quite a long time. Do you know why the first version did not have all the Pokemon? Was there a real recent? Memory limitation. It was hard to animate them all. It just, there's so many of them. Much like women, Pokemon are hard to animate. I understand why Stadium's dead, because it is pretty redundant at this point. I never played Stadium. It was cool.

Is it? So you would have this expansion pad. You'd plug your game in. You can import your characters. Oh, that's cool. And it had a Game Boy Tower where you could play the game at, was at Dodrio Speed, which was very fast. Oh, neat. And Pokemon was a very slow game at this time. So it was really nice to be able to do that. And then it had special battle challenges, which effectively was kind of like endgame content. So you'd be fighting these high-level monsters in a way that you couldn't have in the game.

And it was a fun challenge. So it was mostly like just the battle segments. Yeah. Like if you were really into battling, stadium was the game for you. That's really cool. Pokemon Stadium, an important game, not just a cap, but I think this was, um, Pokemon had proven it was more than just a fad because Pokemon Golden Silver came out and it sold like, uh, you know, almost as much as red and blue sold in America.

So it was clear like, this is not a flash in the pan thing. Pokemon had like teeth and it was going to be sticking around. And I feel like these games like Pokemon Stadium and Golden Silver this year really prove that Pokemon would last. We could just talk about a golden silver because it is very important. important. I mean, it's a sequel. Is that one of the 10 games, Bob? I just added it now. Editorial control because it made me think like, yeah, that was a very important Pokemon entry. And I think, I mean, Kat, you're the expert here, obviously, but

Golden Silver was not just proof that the Pokemon franchise would be around forever, but it was such a huge improvement, not just in terms of, you know, adding new Pokemon, but the first game is just like barely holding together at the seams. But this game is just so much a more technologically sound, I think, as a game, and obviously it has a lot more contents. It was in color. That's true. It added so many features. It added the day night cycle.

It added breeding. It added 100 more Pokemon to catch. It connected with the original red and blue, which was really cool. And so there were reasons to go back and forth between the two. You can import your entire collection. That was amazing. It was one of the few Pokemon. to actually be a true sequel in the sense that it advanced a story.

And so it made, it did a lot to make it feel like a much more cohesive world. And then, of course, the end when you go and go back to the contour region, you get a nice little, you get a nice little story to wrap it up, and you get to fight a lot of the old gym leaders. You get to fight blue in the ruins of Sinabar Island, where the volcano erupted, and then you find red standing at the top of the mountain. It's like the great grand finale. And in a lot of ways, like, Pokemon could have ended after that

because they kind of hit the reset button a couple years later with Ruby and Sapphire. And a lot of people were mad about that, including me. I was one of them. Yeah. So Pokemon, Golden Silver, I did not get to it right away. I actually picked up Crystal a couple years later. But, yeah, wow. I mean, still, there's a reason that people still have such strong feelings.

We put it on our top 25 RPG list over on U.S. Gamer. because I think it's the best one. It's my favorite for sure. I liked red and blue. I played red. And then I loved golden silver. And I just thought all the new Pokemon were so cool. Like the designs were so cool.

I love the idea that you could breed Pokemon together to create more powerful Pokemon. Like the layers that it added upon that original game, because that original game is pretty basic JRP stuff, right? And then the second game is there's so many more layers and such a better game. I mean, just having breeding day-night cycle stuff and timing-based events where, like, you was like, I'm playing on Wednesday, and this shopkeeper, who isn't normally there, is here today. That's awesome. I love the calendar and real-time stuff in that game. It's so cool. And they took that out in Ruby and Sapphire. That bothered me. Yeah. So it was like a technological downgrade as well.

Yeah. I hated that part of Ruby and Sapphire. Let's move on to the next entry. Actually, Pokemon and Golden Silver was on my list. It's just at the very bottom. But it sold 23 million copies compared to Red and Blue's 30. million copies. So still not bad. I believe like after the Game Boy Advance entry, it just sort of plateaued for the next like 15 years. So it didn't, it never

kept going down. So it's nice to see that. It's still like thriving. The next entry is there will be a full episode on this. I did a retronauts of micro about this a long time ago, but this deserves a full episode. Legend Zelda Major's Mask. It's one of those games that was hated for a long time. And

I thought I was the coolest hipster in the world because I was the guy who liked it. I was the guy who liked it. I was the I wrote about it in the press. But now everybody loves it, and that's fine. I accept that. It was your Final Fantasy 8. It really was. Yeah.

But now... It's like when... It was your Hanyan Gaelian. In the early 2000s, when you said you liked the Pinkerton record better than Blue. Exactly. Exactly. That's a very good comparison. We all know Pinkerton rules, and it's a very good album.

Oh, yeah. Just love it. It's the best. Hey, come on, cats. I'm not really a fan of the Pinkertons. Oh, well, we're talking about the Weasher album. Oh. Yes.

Thank you. But yeah, like the Windwaker. I feel like this game has also been redeemed where it's just like, it was even more unpopular than the Wind Waker because there were people who liked Wind Waker, but I feel like I was the only person I knew who got this game. And I feel like only with the existence of other rogue-ish games, people understood or came to terms with the idea of like, here's a game where you have to start over. Like people could not get past that for the longest time. They got angry at this. They got angry at Dead Rising. It took until, I think, the popularity of rogue likes for them to be like, okay, I understand this now. It's not that much of a setback. It was Spalunky. Spalunky and Dark Souls in a way, I think. And it was such a departure from the usual Zelda formula that people are like, I straight up don't get this. So wait, you become a DECU kid?

Right. You become like all these things. Like, what's this timing-based stuff? This isn't Zelda. This is like some weird thing. It's really alienating up front. It's like you're not the link you like. You have three days to figure out what to do next and you have really no freedom. You're stuck in this town for this first loop. I played this game

back to back with Ocary and of Time because I got the 64 so late in the cycle. So I played those games back to back, and going from Ocarina to Majora's Mask, I didn't know really anything about it. I wasn't prepared for what kind of game it was. And like you're saying, like the game opening with you playing as Young Link, I wanted to be Adult Link, like Tough Guy Link. So that was a bummer. But the further I got into it, the more I was like, oh, this is doing really different, really cool stuff. But I also was not an internet kid at the time.

So I had to figure out everything through, you know, talking to other people that I had played it and trying to figure out like just trial and error. And so it took me forever to play through Majora's Mask, but it's one of my favorite Zelda games. It's awesome to hear. I really hope Breath of the Wild, too, is just a total swerve, unexpected. I hope so. Like, reusing a lot of Breath of the Wild assets to do something totally different. I think there's a lot of Zelda fans that feel that exact same way. It occurs to me that that game could come out this year because it's probably going to be based on a lot of reused assets.

I'm banking on it. It could be like the 20th anniversary. Hey, remember Majora's Mask? Well, it's back, but even weirder. Yeah, Breath of the Wild, I guess it's three this year. So they've had a lot of time to work on it. But yeah, Major's Mask, it got a fairly good 3DS remake, and I think that could be the ideal way to play this. But the original is available on many different platforms.

And I think people have accepted it now, and they understand why it's cool. I'm glad to see that. I think it above Ocaryne of Time on our Zelda list. You did. A U.S. Gamer. Oh, awesome. I like U.S. Gamer. You were part of that decision.

I can't remember. What was that, like, five years ago? It was like five years ago. Okay, yes. But I'm sure I was part of that decision. I think it's a better game. I think that that 3DS remake has helped Majora's Mask earn a higher place in the Zelda Pantheon because I think a lot of people had written it off at first and then came back to it later

and we're like, oh, yeah, this game is actually really good. A lot of people were like, Ocura in a Time has an age as well. And so people are going back and reconsidering Majora's Mask, I feel. The thing that I think is really interesting about Majora's Mask is that it's kind of emblematic of a quiet failure by Nintendo, which was the Nintendo 64D., which Majora's Mask was going to be one of the flagship games on that thing. And it did ultimately come out in Japan, but it never got released here. And then a lot of games that should have been on it, Majora's Mask is one of them.

Mother was supposed to be on it, but ultimately never came out on it. So, yeah, Majora's Mask is like one of those kind of weird artifacts of something that most people have forgotten at this point. It didn't help that this and, like, Mega Man Legends 2 came out in the same week as the PS2. It's just like the PS2 obliterated everything in its path and nobody cared about anything else but that. If you didn't had that, you were just jealous that other people had it. But so yeah, Major's Mask, great game. Up next, Dicatana, not memorable in any way. It's a interesting mess, but I think this one represented the real tech bubble hubris of Y2K era.

It really did. And it was the downfall of the rock star developer, which I guess we kind of have that now with people like David Cage, but in a different context. It's like they're the auture, not quite the long-haired. Ferrari driving, you know, Gen X cool guys. But Warren Spector was also working for them and he made DSX. He was like the Dillon of their rock star

group or like the more foxy guy. The George Harrison. There you go. The sweater vesty guy who actually got his work done at Ion Storm. The John Ball Jones. Exactly. I'll take your word for Jerry. Well, Warren Spector, I mean, both John Romero and Warren Spector had huge visions for their respective games

and how they were going to change their respective genres. The difference is that Warren Spector could actually execute on that vision, and it was actually pretty remarkable what he managed to accomplish with DSX ultimately. I also feel like DeSX flew sort of under the radar, whereas Daikata was put out in front of people as like, this is the next thing for first-person shooters. I mean, the hype was insane. We see a lot of it even more so today, I feel like, where things get hyped up to a point

that they can't possibly live up to. And Dai Katana, I think, was one of the earliest examples of that where it was just like everyone was advertising this game or talking about it. in a way that was like, this will change what we think about the first-person genre. And it just didn't. And it was a bad game. And John Romero was pulling in these rock star developers, as you were already saying, like War Inspector. And they were getting these glowing, kind of glossy magazine profiles and mainstream gaming and mainstream media.

And so everybody just, of course, Taekontana is going to be a giant hit. How could it not be? Right. I'm going to be a bit of a troll here and say, Our Generation's Daikatana is Bioshok Infinite. Interesting. And that Ken Levine went away forever, and I got really high reviews at the time, but I feel like it has aged badly both in game design and what it's trying to say. The difference is that DiCatana was a wretchedly bad. That's true. At least Infinite is a competent, like, the little throw shooter.

The first half of Infinite is really good, and then it gets very bad. Yeah. Whereas DiCatana was just from the start where you're killing rats in a soar, and it was obvious that already, I mean, half-life had come up. the year before, a couple years before? 98, yeah. Yeah, so FPS had already moved so far beyond what Daikataa was offering that it was just kind of an embarrassment, especially after those very infamous ads. Well, it was delayed forever, too, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was kind of development hell. Yeah, yeah, for like, it was in development for like seven years almost, I think. I meant Dai Katana. Oh, yeah, that too. Not quite as long. Yeah, both were in development hell. T-shay. And kind of destroyed their developers in a way.

Sadly, there was no cool Game Boy Color version of Bioshock Infinite. That would have been awesome. At that time, there'd be like a DS port or something. No, no, 3DS, I guess. 3DS RPG version of Boucho Finns. I would play that. So up next, we mentioned it earlier,

but DeusX, so massively hugely influential, it created the immersive sim genre or the 0451 genre named after the password you put in in Deos X. But this led the things like Bioshock and Dishonored, Prey, and the other DeuSX sequels were very good human revolution and mankind divided

and this also in a way invented the walking simulator genre because Minerva's Den, the Bioshock 2 DLC, is kind of the first walking simulator and then that was a genre too so DeuSX really created two genres. Yeah, in that game I just remember being in the training area

and having my legs blown off and having to like crawl my way like The Terminator. It was not an experience I had ever had in a first-person game at that point. And the way that it managed to weld together RPG elements and also with a first-person shooter kind of thing and stealth and what a game. Geez. Up next is Diablo 2, which was the king of loot-based games before all games became

loop-based games. Now, every game involves loot in some way because they're all hyper-monial. monetized, but Diablo 2 wasn't like that. And people played this game a lot because fans had to wait 12 years before Diablo 3, which is still kicking. But yes, I don't have a lot of Diablo 2 experience. I don't know why I wasn't playing this game, but I know everybody loves Diablo 2. Land Party Stable. Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. And people were really angry at Diablo 3, I think, because they were so used to playing Diablo 2. Well, Diablo 3 was a much stripped down game that had a very bad end game in comparison. they had to do a gigantic reinvention of Diablo 3 to even come close to matching Diablo 2. Oh, yeah, and like eliminating the store? Well, they got rid of every one of Diablo 3's innovations, quote unquote, just to go back to Diablo 2 because people are like, what are you doing? Nobody wants a real money auction house.

Sorry. Diablo 2, I think, is really interesting. I did an oral history on it, actually. Oh, that's great, yeah. On a U.S. Gamer. And at the time, people were very salty about Diablo because it's emblematic, I think, of the giant shift that PC gaming was undergoing at that time. because you had a lot of hardcore old-school RPG fans

who had grown up with like the Bard's Tale and stuff going, this is not an RPG. RPGs are term-based. They are not this clicking crap. I don't know what you're doing. But if you look at like what David Breivik was doing, he was like one of the main designers on Diablo 2, like he was hugely influenced by roguelikes,

one of the most PC of PC genres in the creation of this thing. And I think RPGs as a genre owes a huge debt Diablo 2, which is why I put it on my list. I participated in many a Diablo 2 land party. Oh, cool. And really, really loved that game despite the fact that I wasn't a PC gamer. And I remember begging my parents to buy a new PC because my old PC, also Adele, was just too old to run Diablo 2. And I wanted desperately to have it at my house.

That was me and DSX. Yeah. They're just like, yeah, couldn't convince them. I think I'm the only person in this room, unless Jeremy has it. I have never been to a land party. Really? No land party for you either? Not really.

Not that I can think of unless you count packs where there is a land party, but I did not. You were just adjacent to one. Yeah. I've never been to a land party. I have very fond memories of loading my heavy, heavy monitor into my car in the middle of the dead of winter, trying not to slide on the ice on my driveway to get my tower over. And then we had these wannabe 17-year-old network engineers going, no, no, you're not connected to the lamp party. Allow me to just screw up your bios on your computer.

We'll fix all of this. You're taking your life in your own hands cat with this land parties. I stayed safe. But when it worked, it was awesome. Oh, my gosh. I was jealous of those. Another game in 2000, came out here in 2001. Dragon Quest 7, way more of a thing in Japan.

They were not used to waiting five years between Dragon Quest games. And because of that, this game really needs to be played, understanding the context of the time. They are making up for you waiting five years, which is why this game is so slowly paced. And even though the 3DS version is a much improved version of this, and I played through the whole thing. It is still a very long and slow game.

It's meant to be a game that you just chew on for a long time. And I took pictures of me beating the game and I put them on Facebook so I can remember the mistakes I made with my life playing that game for 130 hours. Because every time you think it's over, it's not over. It has so many fake-out endings, I swear to God. But it was made for people in 2000 who were waiting five years to play this. And it was so hyped.

And the PS1 version is an incredible mess. and the 3DS version is like the most ideal version to play this. And the fact that even came out here with all the text that it includes is crazy. Like, there is a picture online of the bookcase that houses all of the Dragon Quest 7 text in Japanese, which means fewer pages. So all of that was translated into English. And I'm guessing they made no profit. So they did this for Dragon Quest fans. I think that was one of the games along with Torneko, The Last Hope.

Yeah, yeah. That was kind of done as a passion project by the translation team at inix. They were like, we believe in this. We'll, you know, take it on the chin and do whatever we have to to get this out in the U.S. And I don't think that that sacrifice was really appreciated at the time by the audience that was like, what the hell is this game about a fat guy who keeps dying? Yeah, that's true. And actually, I talked to one of the translators of this game for U.S. Gamer.

I have a feature there called Tales from Localization Hell. Jeremy Blowstein, who worked on a lot of translations. He talked about just the sheer hell of translating Dragon Quest 7, how nobody had context for anything. Japan wasn't in touch with them like they normally are to help you work through a translation and give you context and give you videos of things. It just didn't happen then. And that is why the translation for this game, the original PlayStation 1 release,

is so just rough and bad. They did what they could, but, and it's just an ugly, ugly game in its original form too. It is such a non-year-2000 PS1 game. It looks like a year 1996 PS1 game. Maybe even like 1995, who knows. It's just not good. It was a deeply unfortunate thing because JRPs were, you know, roaring in 2000. And I am not, I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I'm one of those people who saw screenshots of DQ7 went, you know, and just moved on with my life.

You were right to do so. If they had put out something like DQ8, but, you know, for the PlayStation, I think it would have gotten a lot more attention. Certainly I would have picked it up. Well, I think there's a reason that heartbeat the developer on that went away and we got level five instead for the future games. And it's a pity because DQ4, 5, and 6 were so great. Especially DQ6 was such a great game on the SNS and such a technical showcase and everything. And it really felt like the series at its peak. And then 7 just gave up a lot of its momentum.

And that was a huge missed opportunity, I felt. It's funny that the Super Nintendo game that came before it looks better than the PlayStation game that came after it. You're not wrong. It's ugly. Let's move on to another game that came out in Japan in 2000. Shenmoo. So we just did a Yaks episode this weekend, this recording weekend. We talked about how that is like the legacy of Shenmoo is here is the version that is actually marketable that people want to play that has like cool violence and sex and drinking and a dramatic story and an interesting main character.

Shenmoo had really none of those things and I'm pretty harsh against the game. but people care enough about this game that there is now a sequel officially a third game that I've heard nobody talk or tweet or write about but it exists. Have you not? I have not seen a single tweet about this game. So I know we're talking about the original

Shenmoo, but I feel like Shenmoo 3 is the most dichotomous game I've seen in all my time of reading about games because people either love it or like this game is awful and it feels like it came out in 2000. I thought that's what they wanted. I thought that's what fans wanted. Fans of Shenmu, myself included, I would probably be very into it because as a kid, as a 14-year-old in 2000, the idea that I could essentially cosplay as like a just a Japanese dude, like living in Japan was so intriguing to me.

And I remember showing my parents like, look, you can open these drawers and see what's in them and go over here and put these shoes on. And my dad would just be like, what is your problem? Go outside. What is your deal? Look at this convenience star. You didn't really need to get Zachary some friends. You didn't get the sims, but you suddenly got into Shenmoo for, I mean, it was still like a mundanity simulator. I'm just like, it's just like the different location?

I was such a weeb. I was so interested in Japan because at this point, you know, all of my favorite games were Japanese RPGs. And this was like, oh, this is, at the time I could never even fathom that I would have the opportunity to go and visit Tokyo. And this was an opportunity to like almost be there. You know, it was so nearly tangible to me that it was like, oh, this is what life is like there, you know. They're always looking for sailors. And black cars.

Also, the Sims did not have forklift driving. That's true. Or quick time. That's true. It was lacking all those things. Shenmoo seemed like the ultimate realization of the game that we wanted, you know, a fully living, breathing world that we could explore at our leisure. And so to actually get that was hugely exciting versus a game like the Sims,

which was very much of the SimCity 2000 DNA. So we thought of it in those terms versus what we got was Shenmoo. Well, when you talk about the hype cycle, like there was not a game on Dreamcast that was as hyped as Shenmu before it came out. You know, you know, you Suzuki was telling us this is the first of a nine-part series and it's going to be this huge expansive story and, you know, this real deep simulation of, you know, small town life. That never goes well.

Yeah. And Dreamcast, the Dreamcast was at its peak. So, Zach, have you played three? Have you ventured there? Do you still retain your love for Shenmoo? So when I started at IGN in 2015, I had this idea that I wanted to do like a let's play series

where we would play through the original and I started playing it, I picked it up and started playing it again and I was like, oh, this is terrible. I could never sit down and actually play through this again. It has not ageable. I couldn't get into it when I bought this

when I was like 18 or 19. I just thought like, this is just very, very dull. There are good let's plays of it online if you want to like to watch a playthrough, but this game also has never been more playable. Like within the past 18 months or two years, maybe there's been very good HD ports of these to like everything. So for the first time in almost 20 years,

now you can play the whole series. I am interested in going back to it because I've just recently started playing the Yakuza series. Oh, cool, cool. Yeah. But also, when you have Yakuza, like, why would you go back to this game? I totally agree with you.

I know Shammu fans might think that's unfair, but I feel like that is just like, that is what it always should have been. Like, there's so many more compelling things about that series and those characters and the gameplay that just is not there in Shenmoo. I was quite mean about Shinmu 3 on Twitter. Were you? The fans were not happy. Yeah.

Yeah, there are fans and, you know, it's okay to like a game. I am not a big fan. Breakdown! Next in our list is Final Fantasy 9, that people are just like, oh, what is this? I don't like this. I don't care about this. Really? I bought it day one. I was so excited.

I did too, but the perception was like, oh, the PS2 is out. Who cares about this? Who's this weird monkey guy? But it wasn't out yet. It was. I mean, not in the U.S. No, this came out in November. PS2 came out in the U.S. in October.

Why am I thinking of this came out in the summer? Maybe you played it in the summer. I bought it day and day. There was the summer of adventure, but that was not part of it. Yeah, that summer adventure happened in 2000, but this came out in November of 2000s, right after the PS2, and I feel like, like, I was there day one, I pre-ordered it, I was playing it, I finished it before

the year 2000 was over, but online it was just like, yeah, this is weird, who are these gulflings? Is this the dark crystal? The dark crystal has never been cooler now, by the way. And there was like a penny arcade about it, like a joke about like, what was nine about again? Does the guy have like a monkey sword or something? It just was like people were just very just strange about this game. I have no idea why.

It's because there wasn't the same level of Final Fantasy nostalgia in the U.S. as there was in Japan. Yeah. And it was so dependent on that nostalgia. Yeah, I think that, you know, they advertised it as like the crystal is back and they were taking the series back to its roots. But American fans, the series roots were really for seven. We like the ones that didn't have the crystals. And also, yeah, another big problem is that Square Inix started to put down localization guidelines, and so much of Final Fantasy 9 is dependent on references to previous Final Fantasy games, but because of the changes in localization, they didn't line up with what had come to the U.S. before. So you have like, you know, on NES there was a volcano called Mount Gergu, but in Final Fantasy 9, the same volcano is written, you know, it's the same in Japanese, but it's written as Golg in Final Fantasy 9.

So, you know, it just like, it kind of flew past us because, you know, Square was in the process of saying, like, let's, let's, you know, kind of standardize and retool how we localized Final Fantasy games, but that was the wrong one to do it with, unfortunately. Also, they were pushing that engine kind of the limits. Oh, yeah, yeah. When I bought that game and started playing, I was like, wow, this looks worse than Final Fantasy 8. Yeah, it's, there's too much going on there. I will agree with that. I don't think the game is dependent on those references, though, Jeremy. Not dependent on them, but it leans on them heavily.

It is, but I also feel like it was unfair to the American audience because it is really leaning on Final Fantasy 1, 2, and 3, and 2 and 3 had no American release at that point in time, so those were lost on us. But outside of that, I think it is a very touching and emotional story, a great soundtrack. I think Eumont's last hilarious soundtrack and funny too I think it's the funniest final fantasy Yeah But this has like in the past 18 months

Really good ports to things The PC version is very very good There are super good mods for it That like make that shitty generic font go away And give you a nicer more old school font and improve the backgrounds and stuff But yeah it's it's super available now

And there will be an episode about this I think this year for the 20th anniversary Nice yeah It's also I just replayed it when it came to Switch Oh cool was really impressed with how much A, I remembered, and B, how much I still loved it. I'm really amazed

at how well Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9 have aged, actually. Yeah, me too. I went back to 7, not too long ago, and I was like, wow, this is actually really good. I'm really enjoying this game. I've caught a lot of shit on Twitter for talking badly about Final Fantasy 7, because I think it's a game that's very of a time and place.

Oh, it really is, yeah. Yeah. But I have heard that sentiment from other people, like, people that are going back now in anticipation for the remake and saying, like, Wow, this game really holds up. And imagine an era where the cadence of a Final Fantasy was you got one in 97, one in 99, and one in 2000. People are like, wow, this was practically an annualized series. They're really cranking those things out.

We didn't know how good we had it. Yeah. Oh, God. How long did it take 15 to get here? 10 years. Yeah. And where is 16, I ask you? Where?

Not. I want to find it. It's called Final Fantasy 7 remake. That's true. It's true. Just start remaking them all. It's fine. Last big game before we get to our lightning round of 2000 games is Counterstrike.

I have zero knowledge of California. If we do an episode, I really need an expert in here. But I know how important it is. This is the first official release. Unfortunately, I got into multiplayer gaming with Left for Dead. I never touched multiplayer stuff until Left for Dead. Does anyone in this room know anything about CounterStrike at all? Nope.

Nope. It emerged out of Half-Life. We all failed you. But I totally understand how important this is. And I'm sorry that I couldn't do a lot of research on Counterstrike. But there will be something about early FPS games, competitive ones on Retronauts in the future. I know it's an area that we need to cover. The genre.

Yeah, it really is. CounterStrike still being played today. So we've got about a little like 10 minutes left. Let's do a lightning round of just like the other games that came out in 2000. I will name them. We can spend about like 30 seconds on the meach. Warrior Land 3. Amazing.

Go back to our Waryland episode. I will do a full episode about one of these games in the future. But any other thoughts on Warioland 3 going around the table? It's nifty. It's nifty. Nobody else. Okay, it changed. It changed Wario.

That was Waryland 2. That was Waryland 2. Okay, then never mind. Wyrland 3 was the only other game where you couldn't die with Wyrland 2. Chrono Cross, it made Jeremy's life. Yep. Define him as a human. Summer of Adventure.

The end. No, H.D. remake, weirdly enough. No, I wish so badly. There's, like, Square 32-bit RPGs are, those are my games. Like, those are the games that I love more than any other games. And I wish so badly that Square would put out a collection or remaster some of these, like, lesser-known. Well, not even lesser-known, but, like, lesser-loved RPGs. Parasite.

Vagrant story. know vagrant story is on your list, but like these, these, brave ends or Musashi would be cool. That's like, you know, more action RPG. But yeah, I, I loved Chrono Cross. I hadn't played Chrono Trigger when this game came out, so I didn't really get the criticisms of like, oh, it doesn't live up to the legacy. I thought it was a beautiful, really smart, fun RPG. I think people would like it more now because they don't have Chrono Trigger five years before to think about how the game doesn't really, you know, follow up too much in a satisfying way. I'm allowed to stand on its own.

I think people would like it more. Mega Man Legends 2, amazing game. Totally. And Misadventures of Trondon, also amazing. Both not playable in any format currently. Oh, they're on. You can play Station Network. Yeah.

You can buy them. Yeah, they're 6 bucks each. Oh, you can. As opposed to like 250. You know what? I own them, but you also need to have a PS3 or a Vita. Yeah. I replayed Tron Bon on my Vita probably two years ago, and that game is a home run.

It's so good. It's so good. Just brilliant. We need another one. Not available on modern platforms, though. Nobody knows what that game is. I still visit her Vita. It's not.

Yeah, like, I feel like I've mentioned that game probably a couple times a year, and so few people are like, oh, yeah, I love that game. I guess I need to make an episode. It was the primer for Legends 2 that fall. So Vagrant Story, really cool, weird, possibly unfinished game. They're released in the Summer of Adventure alongside Legend of Mana and Threads of Fate, a big, like, summer of RPG-ish games for Square that year. Yep, I bought it at launch.

Got to a boss that I literally couldn't damage, and that was the end of me. A lot of people got to that turtle, I think, was the first, like, do you understand how this works? Because it's very complicated, yeah. This could be remade into a very much more playable game, although I did somehow finish Vakran's story. I don't know how. So I just want to say that I think everybody remembers Vagrin's story fondly because A of its connections to Final Fantasy Tactics and B, because it was gorgeous. But people don't remember the box puzzles or the extremely finicky combat. Yes.

This is one of my favorite games of all time. Like, this is like a top five game for me, and I've replayed it pretty recently, and I still think it's amazing how it holds up and how many systems are happening at any given time and how forward thinking it is. And I cannot say, no, I think Yasumi Matsuno is a genius. Like, I think he's a brilliant director. Very cool. Should be revisited. Paper Mario, this is where the series debuted. So Paper Mario debuted in Japan in 2000.

I think it's funny that we're like, well, nothing came out on the N64 after auction. in time. But, like, we've just listed quite a few good games. Paper Mario's one. And also Day Catana. Oh, yeah. And 64. But yes. Weird ports. There will be a Paper Mario episode in the future. We just did a Mario RPG when everyone loved it. So I'll talk more about these games. I played all of them. And I do like some of them. This is not coming back because of Fire Amblem. Fire Amblin has taken over intelligent systems. They will only make those games until we get sick of them. Then they can make other games. Mario needs wifos. He does. He only has the one. Oh, I guess Daisy, maybe.

Maybe when the tanks can marry The advanced wars can come back Yes, marry the tanks, marry the planes So just make it happen Series that had their beginnings in 2000s Hitman, Rainbow 6 and Time Splitters Hitman still around Rainbow 6, I don't think so

Oh yeah, Rainbow 6 siege Oh man, I'm out of it. It's a competitive sport, it's big in e-sports That's why... It's enormous, yeah. One of the biggest games. Boy, I'm out of touch. Okay, well then let's move on here to what my embarrassment. Before we do,

isn't it time for new time splitters? Oh, nah. You're not a time-splitter's fan? I mean, it was fine for its time when it came out in PS2. I feel like it was a good stand-in for better games that would come along. Totally. It was sort of like, oh, we need something to play. There's a new time-splitters, let's play it.

I think it's like a really nice, like, B-plus game. If it came out, everybody would be like, wow, new time splitters, and everybody would play it for five minutes and then go play other shooters that are better established. It's the perfect time to re-release one of them and see what happens, I think. Sure, why not? Put it on the switch. Metal Gear Ghost, Babel, or Babel. Or just Metal.

Metal Gear Solid. Metal Gear Solid, Ghost Babel. Did we do an episode about these, one of these? We talked about them, but not super in-depth, but this was a really cool, basically handheld adaptation of Metal Gear 2 for MSX with a completely new story, like an alternate reality version of Metal Gear, like a parallel timeline to Metal Gear Solid. Yeah, just really impressive for the hardware. Yeah.

And really well made. I couldn't have been a bigger Metal Gear fan at the time that this came out. out, and it was so cool to me that you could do so much of the stuff that you could do in the PlayStation version in this game with like portably. Four buttons. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's a, I think it's a really underrated game. Other things, Western RPGs like Ice Wind Dale and Baldrgate, too.

I am not super into these games, but I know they're super important. I didn't want to mention them. You can play them now on modern consoles. You can. That's true. And on like iPads and stuff, right? Yeah, they just got re-released. American McGee's Alice.

So, yes. You want to talk about another refugee from the Idsoft He sort of had his downfall with Bad Day L.A., like a famously bad game that no one really talks about anymore. A famous joke on the Internet, American McGee. This game got a reboot in 2011, and I don't know what the state of Alice is now. But the idea of like, what if Alice in Wonderland was like fucked up? It's really boring. Yeah.

Well, at the time it seemed pretty cool, but then, like, Tim Burton kind of ran that concept into the ground and it's no longer cool. That movie made like a billion dollars. It's like one of the highest grossing movies of all time, the first Burton, Alice in Wonderland. It's like in the top three. I saw it, and that was the moment at which I said, you know what? Every movie now ends with just this massive, murky, CG battle. And why do they do that with Alice in Wonderland of all goddamn things? I hate this.

They did that with Twilight, too. It was a terrible movie. Everything has it. Yeah, that was the point at which it really stood out to me. It was like, maybe not everything needs to be Lord of the Rings. Maybe we could just have Lord of the Rings be Lord of the Rings, and other things could be themselves. I think they did that with the Nutcracker as well. There's like some epic fantasy nutcracker franchise that had one movie and then failed.

But we have two more games to mention, or either three. We have Harvest Moon Back to Nature. The advanced version of Harvest Moon 64, it's important because this is essentially what Stardue Valley is based on this game. It's taking this game. It's the Harvest Moon fan's favorite game, and it's expanding upon what it does. Harvest Moon, or sorry, rather, Star Doe Valley just sold 10 million copies as of this recording. So clearly this really helped people find something that would work in a future indie game. And I was a big fan of this game.

We also have Marvel's Capcom 2, which is famous for its amazing soundtrack. And there will not be a three until like a decade later. Yeah, like 2010. It was so gorgeous. Yeah. Very pretty. I don't like the backgrounds as much as I do in one because they are not all sprite base. Well, they moved to the new chipset, and so they had the 3D backgrounds.

Yeah. But they also had Tron Bonds, so winner. That is true. I think, like, to this day, there's not a game that looks like Marvel versus Capcom, too. I think that's one of the most gorgeous, like, sprite-based fighting games. It's incredible to look at. It was, like, the end of Sprite-based fighting games, and that's so pretty, so pretty. And the last...

Oh, yeah, they're going to take you for a ride, which I'll put that in here somewhere, I think. Everyone loved it. And finally, the most important release of 2000 was Incredible Crisis. My favorite game of 2000. HD remake that, why don't me? But yes, that was the year 2000 in gaming. And by the way, up front, 20 years ago, I was a little snot boy. And I was like, actually, the Millenniums in Y2K1, it's 2001.

No, you were one of those people. There was no year zero. But you know what? I realized like, oh, that's why no one liked me. I figured it out. So don't be one of those people. To wrap up, this has been Retronauts. Thanks so much for listening to our fine program.

If you want to support the show and get some extras, please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. If you sign up for three bucks, you'll get every. episode a week ahead of time and ad free. And if you sign up for our new $5 tier, you'll get an exclusive Patreon exclusive episode every other Friday for just five bucks a month. And those will only be on Patreon. We'll have some free previews of those in the free feed if you're interested in knowing what the topics are once they go on Patreon. But yes, any thing you can do to support the show we can appreciate. And that is at patreon.com slash retronauts. Let's go around the table. Zach. Yo. Please let us know where we can find you and what you're up to later.

Sure. I'm at Zachar ISD on Twitter, and you can hear me almost every week on Nintendo Voice Chat. That's IGN's Nintendo Show. Thursdays, episodes usually drop around 3 p.m. Awesome. And Katz. Hi, I'm Kat. I didn't realize how formative 2000 was, really, for my games taste. But you can go on for like another two hours. I know. I mean, we didn't even get to talk about ValkyProftile. Oh, yes. Oh, I'm sorry. You showed me your phone and said Valkyri Profile. You have 20 seconds. Go. A Valky profile was a gorgeous failure of a game

that really cemented my love of RPGs and I don't think it holds up extremely well today but the sprite-based art is beautiful I thought it had a great finale I thought it had some really clever mechanics and I desperately desperately desperately wish for either an HD remake or for somebody to release it on a freaking online store already

stop bearing at Squar Enix. It's about time. And if you want to hear more rants about like that you can follow me on Acts of the Blood God which is my RPG podcast. You can subscribe to us and all of the podcatchers we come out every single Monday.

I'm with Nadia Oxford. I work over at US Gamer. That's my day job. And my Twitter handle is the underscore catbot. Jeremy, how about you? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite.

My name is Jeremy Parrish, by the way. That's important. You can find me on YouTube chronicling the history of NES and Game Boy and other systems. I just look up NES works or Jeremy Parrish or whatever. I'm there, and you can also find me doing stuff for limited run games online and offline, cool stuff, kind of like what I'm doing here at Retronauts, but for limited run games.

And as for me, I've been your host for this one, Bob Mackey. I'm on Twitter as Bob Servo. I have other podcasts, by the way, and they're all at the Talking Simpsons Network at patreon.com. Slash Talking Simpsons are wherever you find podcasts. The podcast, of course, are Talking Simpsons and what a cartoon. If you go to the Patreon at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, you can find lots and lots of bonus episodes. But as for us on Retronauts, we will see you again soon for another episode later. We are one.