Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 302: Star Trek The Motion Picture & Mega Man Battle Network

Episode Date: June 1, 2020

Star Trek! Mega Man! These topics have nothing in common! Please enjoy two unrelated segments as Jeremy speaks to Diamond Feit about the very first Star Trek movie and its games before chatting with Nadia Oxford about very first Mega Man RPG.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, the human adventure is just beginning. Hi, everyone, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, and we are once again under pandemic protocol, and that means

it's just me and one other person on the line, but it's a cool person on the line all the way from Kyoto, Japan. Introduce yourself. Hi, Osaka actually. It is. Oh, sorry. It's okay. My name is Diamond Fight, and my oath of celibacy is on the record. That's phenomenal. So, fortunately, your Dalton pheromones won't be affecting anyone during this next hour. But yes, hi, we are talking today about a movie that I really, really like and that Diamond apparently kind of likes. I don't know. Where do you stand on this film? Well, first of all, I think we should establish right off the bat that you and I are not older than Star Trek, but we are older than this movie. We're older than all the Star Trek movies as it happens.

Yes. But once you're older than the first one, the rest are automatically younger. Exactly. So this is a podcast about the first one, Star Trek, the motion picture. So for me, I didn't see this move. I was too young to see this movie in theaters. so I probably saw this one on home video maybe or maybe on television in the 80s and by that point I had seen of course this wasn't my first Star Trek but it was like I had seen some Star Trek before and I saw this and I was like this is this is a lot and really takes its time and you know by that point of course the sequels had been made and the sequels are a lot more energetic and you know violent and so I think for a while this movie, in my mind, had kind of a really slow reputation. But, you know, rewatching again for this special episode, I kind of got into it. I really, you know, I really locked in. I put on my best pair of headphones, watched on my TV, which is, you know, a lot bigger

than in TV I had when I was a kid. And, uh, I got into it. I really got into it this time. Yeah, I feel like this is a movie that really needs to be seen on the big screen because it is, it is filmed for the big screen. And, yeah, I don't know. I've never disliked this movie, even when I was, you know, a teenager really getting into Star Trek and everyone was telling me, oh, the odd numbered ones are bad and the even numbered ones are good, which is generally true. But this is not a bad movie.

It's, it definitely takes its time. I think it goes for majestic and sometimes kind of ends up more like bloated. But despite the fact that it could use some trimming in some places, I still feel like in a lot of ways, this is probably the purest expression of kind of the idea of what Star Trek was. And we're talking about it this week, one, because, you know, we've been going back over the past couple of years with retronauts and talking about influential movies, like pop culture type movies that intersect with video games. And even though Star Trek the motion picture or Star Trek in general are not nearly as influential as something like Indiana Jones or Star Wars, there's still a lot. lot to be said in terms of video gaming about this movie specifically. I think it is the single Star Trek property to have inspired, or at least to have had the most video games built around it.

And that has a lot to do with kind of its pop culture status at the time. And also the fact that this movie launched at the end of 1979, which was really just about the time that video games were becoming sophisticated enough and visually detailed enough that you could actually have a recognizable game based on the idea of Star Trek. And I think it's important to say the idea of Star Trek because the video games released around the motion picture have very little to do with the motion picture. In fact, I don't even know if they feature Viger at all,

which is kind of the point. They do feature a lot of combat, which is interesting, because there is less combat in this Star Trek movie than any other Star Trek movie, and yet it has the most combat-based video games. No, no complex simulations here, sir, no thank you. So, yeah, it's a little weird, but, you know, video games were still very much in their infancy at the time. And so these two things kind of are intertwined. And Star Trek, the motion picture, was a really big deal in 1979.

I am just barely old enough. Wow, that was very kirk of me. I'm just barely old enough to remember the sort of media promotions built around it. You know, this movie was the inspiration for McDonald's very first ever Happy Meal. It was a tie-in to Star Trek the Motion Picture. And I did have one of those Happy Meal boxes as a kid. And I remember it had like comic strips on the side, you know, like a four-panel comic strip. I think that was created by the same people who created the daily newspaper comic that ran for several years

starting around the time that the motion picture came out. So that was kind of, I think really my first introduction to Star Trek. And you mentioned seeing it on TV most likely. That is probably true because when ABC TV got the rights to this movie, it was a big deal. Like they aired it, I think the first time they aired it was without commercials. And it was the expanded version, which basically, had all the deleted scenes added in and made it even more bloated. But, you know, at the time, like, hey, this is a big movie that was in the theaters. And here it is longer with all the

stuff you didn't see in the theaters. And you don't have to watch any commercials. It was a, it was, you know, a pretty significant deal. Like, back when there were only four or five TV stations in the world, you know, like in the country available, you know, that made a big difference. So, So, yeah, Star Trek the motion picture, maybe not a big deal for you, the listener, but a big deal for the human beings of 1979. Well, kind of because the entire 1970s was kind of this slow, gradual burn into an explosion of people, you know, acknowledging that Star Trek was good, you know. I mean, Star Trek, the original show ran from 66 to 69, nice. And, you know, it was canceled. And, you know, the story at the time was, you know, well, this show doesn't have his.

good ratings as the other shows, which, you know, it didn't, but it's also, like, it also, by every standard possible had great ratings. So throughout the 70s, you know, there was the, there was a cartoon show, and there were conventions, and like, that was a, but that thing, I say convention now very commonly, but like, no, there were conventions and no one did that. You didn't have a convention for a TV show, let alone one that was off the air. And so throughout the 70s, you've got this, this burning movement, you know, to bring back Star Trek.

Star Trek is good. We want more Star Trek. And then, you know, they sort of, the studio kind of flip-flopped, like, oh, this belongs on TV. We should, let's just make a new TV show. But then, you know, they see what happens. Like, well, maybe we should just make a movie. And they go back and forth on this. And eventually, you know, at the very end, December, 1979, this is a big holiday movie. This movie comes out.

And so, you know, the push for this leading up to this, this was a huge thing. Yeah. Yeah. In a sense, you could almost consider this the first crowdfunded movie. That's not, that's not really true. But this movie would not have existed without fans. And the impact of Star Trek fans on the franchise has been pretty well documented through the years. But Star Trek as a whole, up until, you know, the movie started succeeding in the 80s, it was basically something that a handful of people willed into existence. Gene Roddenberry really believed in this idea. his wagon train to the stars TV series. And the studios were like, eh, but then, you know, Lucille Ball stepped in. And she, her company, Desilu Productions, really played a huge part in bankrolling the TV series and making it happen. And even then, CBS was like, eh, and they kept cutting the funding, you know, the budgets. And that's why the third season of Star Trek is so very, very bad.

It's because they were basically running on half the budget that they started out. out with. So, yeah, the five-year mission ended up being truncated to three years, but people who watched it really enjoyed it, basically there was a very clever arrangement made to send this TV series into syndication, and that kept it. They put together really compelling syndication packages, and basically every UHF or I guess VHF station in the country ended up buying those packages. So Star Trek was always, there were always reruns on well into the late 80s of the original series, you know, before cable TV.

In the New York area, like, you know, on WPI Channel 11, like you would, you could count on, you know, Star Trek would be on a lot. You know, the old Batman show would be on a lot. Like that was like your go-to syndication channel for me. Yeah, there was, there were different stations that would run it too. I seemed to remember like one station where I grew up in Lubbock, Texas would run it in the afternoons. and then a lot of times it would come on maybe on a different station after the evening news

or not the evening news but the late night news so you'd have like the late night news and then mash and then Star Trek so yeah it was just always out there and you mentioned the animated series and that was something that was very cheaply put together and Roddenberry kept pushing for a sequel and they were going to make another TV series

and most of the scripts for the TV series were recycled into early episodes of the next generation. And the next generation would never have happened. If this movie hadn't come along, actually that's not true. This movie kind of almost scuttled the entire franchise because it was very expensive. It ran way

over in production. And it was the fact that they basically said, we'll give you $10 and some string to make the wrath of con. You can make one more movie, but you get no money to do it. And it turned out to be amazing. And that pretty much rebooted the franchise right there.

But this movie, even if it didn't live up to expectations and definitely didn't live up to investor expectations, it represented something big. It was the power of fans pushing through their conventions and their fanzines and their slash fictions. I mean, Star Trek fandom was way ahead of the curve. It was the internet before there was internet. And, you know, the enthusiasm that fans, you know, like, I think some of them are even kind of elevated, like Bo Trimble was a, she was a huge factor in the series Garfield and Judith Reeve Stevens, I believe, were also really big in like Star Trek fan fiction. And then they ended up writing Star Trek novels that were published by pocketbooks.

And then they ended up writing and overseeing, I think, the fourth season of Enterprise. Like, they were consultants on the fourth season of Enterprise, which is a great season of Star Trek by any standard. Oh, yes. So, you know, this was kind of the elevation of fans and in showing like, hey, you know, pop culture can be influenced by the people who consume it. And it doesn't always have to be bad. It doesn't always have to turn out like Rise of Skywalker. So Star Trek the motion picture, like I said, a pretty big deal, but you have to kind of watch it in the right context to appreciate it.

The right context is 1979 in a theater having watched Star Trek only, only having consumed Star Trek through fuzzy reruns from the 1960s, possibly on a black and white television because color televisions were still very expensive. So probably on like a 13 inch black and white TV. Maybe if you were, you know, your family was doing very well, like a 17 inch color TV. That was, that was a luxury. And so all of a sudden, here are all the people you know and love, but they're big and it's, you know, wide screen. And this starship enterprise is huge and majestic. It's, you know, that little model that you always saw kind of floating above a styrofoam planet before. Now it's all of a sudden like, this looks like a real spaceship. This looks like something, you know, it's got details, it's got texture. It's got lighting inside. It's like you get a sense of scale during that extreme. lengthy docking sequence, which I love because I love the design of the ship. But the whole point of that was basically to say, like, hey, it's the Enterprise. You love it. Now here it is. And the audience was kind of, you know, in that scene where Kirk and Scotty are circling the Enterprise, they're

really meant to be stand-ins for the audience. Basically, that scene was saying, you've waited for this. Here you go. And now, look, it's the Enterprise bigger than ever. Now let's go have an adventure. And then the adventure turned out to be them standing around a lot in pajamas talking about a bald woman. So maybe not what people really expected from Star Trek, but still, like I said, kind of, kind of a pure expression of the Star Trek concept, because there is no combat. The conflict is all ethical. It's all like, you know, trying to cope with the concept of this massive alien existence that thinks and, and processes. things in a way that is alien, literally alien, to the humans on the enterprise.

So if you can get past kind of the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the parts that are a bit dull, right here you have kind of the thesis statement on what Star Trek is supposed to be about discovery, about learning to accept and understand the things that we don't know, and to do it without, you know, firing a single photon torpedo. Well, they shoot that rock. That's it, though. They do, they do. But that rock is not the, is kind of incidental and is one of the scenes that could easily have been cut from the movie.

Yeah, yeah. There are a lot of scenes that I feel like they, they definitely add to the splendor of the thing. And usually they do have some sort of payoff later. You know, for example, there's a, you know, the reason they have this long, lengthy docking sequence is also because it's in, at least in the, movie, the context is, oh, well, the enterprises, transporters aren't working properly, which is then demonstrated in a scene which is just pure nightmare. It's just, you know, someone beams up and two people beam up and it doesn't work and they are horribly mutilated.

And because they lose a person in that, in that accident, then they're down a crew member. So later on when Spock appears out of nowhere, it's like, oh, Spock, you can do this thing, right? Thank you very much, Spock. But it's like, you didn't need to have all this stuff on screen to get that part of the story, but everything in the movie does eventually lead to something else, you know, like even the weird scene where, yeah, they enter a warp drive for the first time and all of a sudden they're in a wormhole. It's not a deep space nine wormhole. It's some sort of just

psychedelic, orange, gold wormhole and everyone starts talking really, really slowly. I mean, this scene may have been made for like the pot smoking crowd. I don't know. But firing torpedoes. Yeah, it gets slower and slow. And, yeah, there's a whole thing where it's like they're going to shoot the phasers. Like, oh, no, don't shoot the phasers. It's got to be four-ton torpedoes. They use a four-ton torpedo. They blow up a rock.

And they have a conversation later. It's like, why do we use the four-time torpedoes? And it's like, well, because the phasers wouldn't have worked and we would have all died. And it's like, it's an important scene because it shows, oh, Kirk is back on the ship after years of not being on the ship. Maybe he's out of his place a little bit. Maybe he's a little too gung-ho about being back in charge. but it's like, did you need a long scene about shooting a rock to get to that scene? I don't know that you actually did.

But everything does connect eventually, slowly. Yeah, you mentioned Kirk having been off the Enterprise. So this movie happens 10 years, was produced and launched 10 years after the TV series ended. But it was actually, I looked it up chronologically in the timeline of Star Trek. It's only meant to be four years later. But in that four years, they've completely rebuilt the enterprise. I don't understand the logistics of that. Why not just make a new ship?

But it's like everything about the ship is the same except different. Like it's more streamlined. The chunky pylons that hold the warp engines are now kind of swept back. And the warp engines instead of being round rocket ships, they're these kind of narrow lozenges. it's a much, it's a beautiful ship. Like, it's one of my favorite science fiction vehicle designs of all time. And on the first movie, especially, they treated it with this kind of iridescent paint that apparently they had to get rid of for the sequels because it made filming and lighting the thing

really, really hard. But it just, it brings out so much depth. And it's, it's one of those rare studio models that you look at it and you actually, like, when you see it on screen, it really does look like it is, you know, 800 meters long or whatever. It's, it's a really, really great-looking ship. But in the process of remaking the ship, they changed a lot of stuff around. And so literally, Kirk is out of his depth. He's become a desk jockey. He's an admiral. Isn't he? He's an admiral in this, right? Yeah, he is his rank of admiral. But as soon as he gets on board, he says, I'm the captain now. So everyone just calls him captain again, which is a little strange because in subsequent movies... That's a military thing. But in the letter movies, even though he is, you know, even though he's in charge of the Enterprise and two and three, he's still admiral. Kirk, everyone calls. him admiral, but in this movie, no one calls him admiral after the opening scene. He's like, no, he's captain now. That's Captain Kirk. Yeah, I think if I'm not mistaken in the military when, you know, the basically the commanding officer who is running a ship is called Captain regardless of his rank. So it's not like formal captain. It's just you are the captain of this

ship. But yes, it's interesting to kind of to go back to this after the Last Jedi, after Star Trek Picard, which is about, you know, the iconic heroes of the past, having gotten older, having moved beyond in their life, and having lost their way, because that's exactly what the narrative here is. Kirk allowed himself to get corralled into a desk job as an admiral, a flag officer, as opposed to, you know, the bold Horatio hornblower in space, always having an adventure, always mixing it up with sexy green ladies and putting his fist together and doing a double fist punch against rock. monsters like that's what Kirk should be doing not not paperwork and this movie is about him kind of finding his way back and he's kind of an asshole about it he uh he comes in to the ship that you know he's basically said oh this uh guy will decker he would be a perfect replacement for me so then he comes into the enterprise he's like actually will uh you just got demoted to commander and i'm the boss now so i like you but i don't like you that much and yeah he basically

makes mistakes and blunders his way through in the movie is kind of a growth story for Kirk and basically him saying like, I've got to get over myself. I've got to, you know, kind of find who I was and not, you know, leave a lot of human wreckage in the wake. And he does kind of leave some human wreckage, but that's sort of by choice on the part of the wreckage at the end. So I guess it's okay. But I don't think you get Star Trek 2 without this movie because Star Trek too is him kind of contemplating his mortality and saying, I am getting old, but I think this was kind of, you know, where that first becomes evident and he's just not willing to admit that maybe he's, you know, not cut out for this anymore. So, yeah, the way, the way this handles

the beloved hero coming back and not being necessarily as great and noble and heroic as we remember him, you know, this is kind of one of the first science fiction pop culture stories like that. And we've seen that again, repeated in in some other series and some other productions lately. And I feel like they always, like the fandom always responds badly to it. They don't want to see the human side of their heroes. They don't want to see that their heroes can be, you know, can be failures, can can lose sight of what makes them great. But I think that is part of being human. you know, it happens to the best of us. Like, we get older and our priorities change.

And, you know, this movie, kind of like The Last Jedi and maybe not quite so much Picard, is really about like saying, oh, I need to get back to what I was. I need to remember what it was that inspired me and what I really believe in. And I do feel like by the end of the movie, you get that. And, you know, it has to do a lot of it with him strong-arming McCoy back into the crew, Dr. McCoy, and basically Spock stepping in. to take care of the misshapen meat that the original science officer was going to be, or that ended up, like, the original science officer ended up being.

Yeah, it's almost strange how, you know, you do have this, one of the reasons the movie starts so slowly is the fact they have to start to get everyone back on board the ship, and that takes some time, and everyone has to get back the same place. And you do have sort of the only two characters in the ship who are wholly new characters are this guy who was the captain until Kirk replaced him was Will Decker and this other character

who is called Ilya and they're the only two new faces because they bring back a lot of old faces like Majel Barrett who at this point was already married to Gene Roddenberry you know she's back as now Dr.

Chapel there's a scene during that horrible transporter scene the person operating the controls is good old Yoman Rand I don't know what a rank is they don't say it out loud but like they brought the actor back. So there's a whole bunch of returning faces in this movie. And here are the two new faces. And when the movie's over, those two new faces, they're the ones who are gone.

You know, you could call them red shirts, but in fact, no one wears any red in this movie. No, this is finally, finally a colorful, you know, big screen Star Trek. Let's make everyone wear neutrals. Oh. Tope and beige and gray and silver. Yes. It's, yeah, it's, it's, it's really awkward. I got to say, you know, you mentioned the model. The model of the ship is beautiful. beautiful. I love the interiors of the ship. This whole, you know, every, every set on the ship looks like every lounge that was built in the late 60s, early 70s that I ever went into any college dorm. Like all these sets look so familiar and so cozy to me. I just want to chill out and just lay down on that shag carpet they have. It's all so incredible. But then contrast to that, these uniforms, I just don't, I don't quite understand. I get a jumpsuit. I understand the utility of a jumpsuit. But they have like this big. big black that I go into like it's like a belt buckle but they have no belts like what is that and depending on the angle depending on the angle you know if you are you know if you're male presenting and then you're wearing this outfit on the certain shots in this movie you get a really like your package is just fully on display and it's really uncomfortable to watch and it must be uncomfortable to wear we get to see a lot of human adventures here yes yeah so it's just it's so strange I can only assume that there's a you know maybe just so Someone thought, oh, we got to make it more modern, but it's like, okay, but you can still, colors are okay. It doesn't have to, I mean, you know, and then, of course, it went even further with the subsequent movies where everyone's wearing this sort of, you know, this one piece kind of maroon thing, but I don't know, I guess that worked out pretty well.

No, it's two-piece. They wear black slacks with it. All right. But it's like that point, everyone's wearing the same color. Like in this movie, you still have like some sort of divisions that are wearing different colors, but the next bunch of movies, everyone just has the same outfit with some different, like, you know, I think this, the, the, the, the strax. is a different color or whatever. So they're getting more and more uniform in their uniforms. But this movie, that's one of the weirder things about this movie, honestly.

And it ends with, you know, a big space, a metaphorical space baby, not a literal space baby. But kind of, yeah. I feel like this movie was informed in a lot of ways by 2001. Oh, yeah. I mean, the interiors of the Enterprise remind me a lot of, like, the Howard Johnson in space, like the Moon Howard Johnson at the beginning of 2001. and definitely the space baby thing at the end and the whole metaphysical element of it.

Although you say that at the end of the movie there's no more Will Decker and Ilea, but they do live on through Will Riker and Deanna Troy because all four of those characters were sourced from Star Trek Phase 2. Decker and Ilea and also the science officer who was beamed in horribly were all going to be crew members of the Enterprise

in Star Trek Phase 2, the TV series from the 70s that never happened. So, you know, basically, Ilya and Riker were brought in for the movie and become key characters here. And basically they wipe the Vulcan science officer just completely off the table. But they do use that character. But that character was created specifically because they didn't think they would get Leonard Nimoy back for the TV series. So... And he almost didn't do the movie either. That was...

Right. That was a limited edition, too. Yeah. Right. But when he does come back, they're like, well, we've got to get rid of that guy. So let's do it as messily as possible. There's definitely some creative choices in this movie that I don't think anyone would make again. But at the same time, you know, it still was a pretty big deal to have Star Trek on the big screen. And, you know, from the very beginning, even before you get to the Enterprise, there is a sense of like, hey, this is, this is Star Trek, but it's like you've never seen it. Because you start out with Klingon ships.

and they look reminiscent of the ones in the TV series, but they're much more alien-looking. They're more detailed and more ominous, more threatening. And then you see the Klingons, and they look way different. They're not like people in yellow-faced Foo Manchu outfits. They have these huge forehead ridges, and the interior of their vessel is like very darkly lit, you know, with like red lights. It just looks very ominous and alien, very,

It looks, whenever I see, like, movie Klingon ships interiors, I think that looks really humid, like incredibly humid. Like, that is like Florida on a bad day. And, yeah, so right away, and they're speaking a different language altogether. It's very guttural and harsh. So right away, Star Trek, the motion picture is like, hey, remember those guys that were kind of goofy and silly, but Kirk got really angry at them in the TV series? Well, look at them now. They're really scary. But wait, there's something even scarier out there.

just wipes them right off the face of the map. Oh, but, you know, it's an equal opportunity destroyer. It also destroys a star base. And, uh, they're one of the good guys. They're, they're, they're just out there monitoring space and they still get wiped out. And by the way, one of the guys in the star base was also going to be a phase two actor. So he got a very brief chance to be in Star Trek after the TV series was wiped out. So this movie is just like, basically erasing everything from Star Trek phase two. It's like, yeah, that's never going to happen. Well, I mean, in essence, the movie itself is sort of a brief capture of what would have been phased to in the sense that the entire story came from a script that I think Roddenberry started with or rewrote at some point, which was about an alien being coming to Earth and we recognize it as God, but it's actually just an old machine, which, of course, producers didn't like that because, like, you can't make a movie about God being some weird alien machine. Yeah, the working script title was The God Thing.

Yeah. And the movie we ultimately get is basically from what would have been a pilot to that series which never happened, which is why this movie, I mean, it does, you know, on the plus side, it feels like Star Trek, you know, they do have these conversations. The end of the movie is straight up. That's the kind of conversation they would have at the end of every episode, you know. The three main leads are on the bridge, having a quick chat. And it's like, all right, then we're flying off to a new destination. Let's go. Like, that's how every episode it ended.

And that's how this movie ends. So it's like, this does capture some of the camaraderie and some of the, you know, ethical quandaries of the show. But it also does really feel like a very long episode of television, which I think explains why, you know, fans, I think most fans at the time were into it. Certainly it did very well at the box office, not as well as they hoped, but it did very well. But I think mostly critics were kind of like, this is Star Trek? This is your big motion picture, you know, for December. Like, this sure is a lot of just quiet contemplation looking out the window. Yeah, I mean, it definitely stood out against, you know, Star Wars, which was kind of the thing that made this movie happen.

Yeah. After years of trying to get Star Trek rebooted, restarted, Roddenberry was finally able to push it through at Paramount because Paramount was like, whoa, the kids like space and lasers and stuff. And we've got that right here. It's all, you know, there's a world baked for us, characters that people love. Let's do this thing. And this was not a Star Wars movie. This was, again, much more like 2001. It was much more philosophical, much slower-paced.

And, you know, it wasn't filmed by an avant-garde director like Kubrick, but it was filmed by someone with an amazing reputation and history, legacy, Robert Wise. And, you know, he's the guy who filmed The Sound of Music. And you put some other things down to the credits. the day the earth stood still. Yeah. That's very contemplative science fiction right there. This was a guy with a fantastic reputation.

He already had Academy Awards. You know, Sound of Music, West Side Story, the day the earth stood still. He edited Citizen Kane. Like this was a veteran director, a very well-respected director. This was their prestige film. Like this, again, December, I don't know if this was the first big December release, but it's certainly, to me, if you look back, it seems to be the turning poor. Or they're like, oh, you've got to have a big procedure movie come out in December.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so Wise, you know, brought a sense of esteem to the movie. And he definitely films it expertly, you know, even though there are some scenes that just go on way too long. Like the entry into Viger could stand to be about maybe one quarter of its length. You mentioned in the notes, you see at the beginning of the movie, lots of long close-ups of the enterprise, which give you a sense of the enterprise scale, just how huge it is. And then, you know, that's contrasted later in the movie by the Enterprise inside Viger, where the enterprise is tiny.

And it, you know, really gives you a sense of scale. But I don't think we need for the Viger entry to go on for like 10 minutes to say, oh, yes, it's much bigger than the enterprise, especially because it doesn't even really give the actual sense of scale. Like at some point, they're talking about Viger being like three AUs across. That's like, that's incalculably huge. You can't even compare the. Enterprise with that. That's three times the distance of the sun to the Earth. Like, that's insane.

That's way too big. Like, that's nonsense. Like, it just stops making sense at that point. So, you know, whatever they were trying to do by, by having the Enterprise slowly pan over the central Viger ship and then turn back around and flying into the clouds is just kind of undercut by the script. And just, yeah, like, I definitely could see some fat that could be trimmed in this movie it's a tricky it's a tricky thing they try to set up because they do want to make vajers seem impossibly large and impossible like there's no fight like at no point does anyone on the enterprise even contemplate how do we fight this thing because they realize there is no possible way to fight this but you're right in that it is in fact it's so big because at first it's just a big

cloud and i think the cloud is what they say is like gigantic and once they go into the cloud and they go to the ship then the ship is not quite as big as the cloud is and once they reach the earth the cloud is gone and it's just a ship but because everything is so big because everything is you know by comparison to the enterprise you know the enterprise is a very small represented very smallly on screen and vger is this massive thing around it vger is so big you don't really get a sense of what vger even looks like you know and i feel like one of the strengths of having you know all these beautiful models and having the ships fly around is like you get a sense of where there's what's happening and what's going on and here's our ship and here's the other ship but in the case of

Viger, Vecher's just so big. Vigers everywhere. I mean, at some point, they go inside it, but they're also above it, and, you know, they go through this big sort of aperture that opens and closes, and they keep saying the word orifice, which may laugh a lot, but really it's like, so where are they inside it now? Because eventually they just fly away, and the ship kind of self-destructs, rebirths, blows up, and it just, were they in that? Did they escape through a porthole? Like, it doesn't, you don't really understand because it's so big. because it's so weird, you kind of lose out on the feeling of what even was Viger, aside from what, at the heart, which is kind of a, that strikes me as a very super Gene Roddenberry idea.

It's like, oh, the alien was basically our own technology all along, coming back to meet us. Yeah, I mean, you definitely see echoes of some of the original series here. Like, the fact that Viger is the Voyager space probe that, you know, was found by an alien civilization and rebuilt into a sentient creature, or a machine creature, basically, whose entire purpose was to catalog and discover things. That's cool. But we kind of saw that a few times. And even the design of the core Viger ship and the sheer ferocity and the power of it is kind of reminiscent of,

this is it the doomsday weapon that's just, or the planet killer thing. It's just like this big tube with, it also has an orifice at the front. and that's where, you know, one of the other enterprise-style ships, the camera ship it is, flies inside of it and explodes with the mad captain. I think that was Captain, I think that was Decker's father, actually, now that I think about it, Matt Commodore Decker. Oh, gosh, you're... Could be wrong, but...

You're right, that was the same name, the same name. Holy crap. Yeah, I'm just remembering that. But, yeah, so I think you see a lot of ideas that were new-ish, but not actually that new, and they were trying to make them, you know, just scale them up to say, hey, we've done this before, kind of, but it's way bigger now. Isn't that cool? Eh, and it's okay. I think, yeah, I think the movie tries a little too hard in places and drags on in some places like Kirk showing Ilya, the Ilya robot when she's taken over by Viger or recreated by Viger, like how to play chess or whatever and, you know, people hanging out in the wreck deck.

like it's okay but but these all go on a little too long but at the same time i still really love the vision of this movie i love the the visual style of it but also the the spirit behind it of there's something dangers out here but if we can just find out what it is we can disarm it and not even you know not destroy it we can basically satisfy it and make it feel like oh you know there's there's more to reality that i knew and humans are part of the equation. It just, it feels very, like, it's the hippie-dippy thing that Roddenberry love to do. There's also a lot of the sex thing that Roddenberry loved to do. Like, he had some, he was a horny guy. Yeah. I've, I've read about him. And I don't know if

you've read the novelization of Star Trek the Motion Picture, which was like co-written with Alan Dean Foster, probably mostly written by Alan Dean Foster, but it goes into all this stuff about new humans and like transhumanist stuff that isn't, you know, about like leaving your body behind, but just basically about, like, having a lot of sex with people. And that, that is, that is, like, extremely Roddenberry. And I'm, we still got a little bit of Roddenberry in the future, in, in future shows, like Deanna Troy was extremely Roddenberry, at least in her, you know, kind of where she started, which was space cheerleader with deep cleavage.

But, yeah, like this movie, he kind of was pushed back and, and they said, actually, you know, let's, let's, let other people have some creative say into your idea, Gene. Let's balance us out a little bit. But yeah, so there's some stuff in here that it's like, oh, yeah, that's Rodbury. Yeah, because one of the characters, you know, we talked a lot about Will Decker. We didn't really talk much about Ailea, and Ailea is a very strange character. She shows up, and everyone says, oh, she's Delton, which everyone turns their head. Oh, my God, she's Delton.

And you see her, and she's basically a bald woman. I mean, she's a very attractive bald woman, but she's a bald woman. She's gorgeous. Yeah, she, sadly, the actress, Persis Combata, passed away very young, like I think of the 90s. Yes. So she, yeah, but she was, she was a pretty big star in India, actually. If you ever, like, look at her IMDB page, she was in tons and tons of movies, but very few in the West.

But, yeah, if you're a mistress. Yeah, she's, she's just a gorgeous woman, like hair or no hair. Yeah, but like, she comes on board the bridge. Everyone sort of turns around and looks at her like they're stunned to even see her there. And, you know, my little joke at the beginning of the beginning of the, the episode. Like, that's what she actually says out loud. Like, that's not just some conversation you have later on. Like, oh, we're getting to know each other. And by the way, I'm, I'm celibate. It's like, no, no, this is how she introduced herself. Hello is my name. And by the way,

I am, I'm celibate. It's like, hello. What? What? Yeah, it's like when a child molester moves into your neighborhood and they have to go around and knock on everyone's door and say, oh, by the way, I have a record. Keep your kids away from me. Yeah. And it's unfortunate because, you know, they clearly set up right away that she and Decker have a pack. because he went to her planet at some point. And this helps Decker get in touch with the robot Viger probe version of her when she appears later. But you don't really get a sense of what Ailea was supposed to be or who she was supposed to be. The director's cut adds a little bit more to her because, you know, if you recall at one point during the scene, something burns Chekhov.

I forget what it is, but Chekhov burns his hand. And he screams out loud. It's on the Viger, like their initial probe. He like touches the controls. trying to take control the ship back from Bejer? Yeah, it's something, yeah, something about there. And he burns his hand, he screams out loud, and they call the doctor to the bridge, and the doctor's supposed to cure, you know, treat his wounds, and that's it.

But in the director's cut, Aaliyah goes over there first, and she just, like, puts her hand on his shoulder, and she, like, calms him down first. And then the doctor actually does the medicine part. And you're kind of like, oh, so is this, like, is this Diana Troy? Is she some sort of, like, empath? Is it, like, is she controlling emotions? like what is she doing here but you don't really get it you know that's unfortunately they spent so much time on the you know the ship scrolling they didn't really talk about

who's this new character and why do we care about her because eventually she is essentially killed or derez or something i don't know the the way vger destroys things it looks a lot like the the laser in tron that it sort of takes you away piece by piece so like yeah she disappears and we kind of assume she's dead but then she comes back and she's a robot now But, you know, when when Spock goes inside the Viger thing and he sees inside Viger and he realizes that he's seeing everything the Viger's ever seen, he sees her in there. So like Viger, like, collects things and like takes them and they're like internalizes them. And at one point, the Ilya Probe thing says that she's going to like record all the data of the people on the enterprise and just save them as data, which and not like the robot data, like as actual like like bits of information. data. And, you know, Will Decker is understandably concerned about this because he doesn't want to

just become, you know, data and a data bank. He wants to stay, you know, being a dude. But, yeah, so it's, it's one of the things that is kind of fuzzy in, like, what, what exactly, who was Aaliyah? What happens to Aaliyah? Why is she now on the ship? Why is she wearing a skimpy little bathrobe thing? I guess, you know, the answer, Gene Roddenberry, but it's just, it's, there's so many things that could have, you know, they could have been a little clearer. They could have had a little more depth. But there is a nice mystery. I've got to say, there is a constant sense of mystery that goes on, which I do appreciate. And, you know, it's not until you actually see the probe and everyone says out loud exactly what happened. You know, it becomes clear. Oh, it's actually

the Voyager 6, which I had to look it up, by the way. In reality, there were only two Voyager missions, one and two. So this was them sort of, you know, forecast the future. I was like, oh, well, someday, they'll surely be a sixth probe. Surely, you know, our expansion to space to just keep going, going, going, and no disaster will stop that. but it didn't quite work out that way. Right. Yeah, it was that optimistic future Star Trek likes to do more optimistic than reality. But I miss that.

I miss that. I do too. You mentioned Picard at the top. You know, I don't want to get too side track, but, you know, Picard, there are a lot of fun things in Picard, but it really, it very much isn't optimistic. You know, it's almost, it has a real dark, you know, undercurrent. It's like, well, I didn't get it right. And it turns out a lot of people died because of this mistake. and this person murdered someone because they were brainwashed,

but they're not going to go to jail because they helped out the robot people in the end? I don't know. Yeah, yeah, that's television these days. I liked that show, but still, you know, it kind of pains me that at this point, we do have two concurrent Star Trek series that are running, and both of them are just, you know, they don't have the, the, that spirit. Yeah, Star Trek is kind of caught in, um, at the moment seems to be caught in

kind of the same storytelling idea which is like, you thought the Federation was good, but actually they're bad. But actually they're not really that bad. It's just there's some bad elements. And our heroes have to take out the bad elements. Okay, well, we've seen that over and over again now. I think there are probably some more interesting stories

to be told. That and like the AI singularity. I think we can move beyond that as a primary storytelling hook also. So let's do some new stuff, Star Trek. Or maybe some old stuff. Get back to the old stuff. that'd be okay. Yeah, I enjoy the current stuff, but I do miss, you know, the spirit of classic Star Trek and the spirit that's here. Like, this does seem, you know, very, it is a very ominous film in places. But the, I don't know, there's never a sense of like, oh, you know, the system is working against our heroes. No, the, the heroes are out there, you know, with the full support of the Federation. It's just, you know, they're the only ship in the quadrant or whatever, as always. So they've, you know, they've got to solve it on their own and then they get cut off from the federation until the very end.

But, you know, it does seem like, you know, everyone's, everyone's a good team. And that's kind of why Jerk Kirk stands out here because he is kind of a fly in the ointment. And really, it's McCoy is crankier than ever and Spock is more surly than ever. And, you know, everyone just seems to be kind of an exaggeration of their worst selves. And all of them find that. You know, find their normal selves, you know, the selves we recognize, again, by the end of the movie, but it takes a while. And, you know, if you're going to do conflict that way and say, oh, yeah, things are bad and, you know, the heroes that we love, they're in the middle of this bad stuff. To have that sort of like a, you know, the conflict be sort of a natural evolution of the characterization and have the resolution be a natural result of the characterization, that's sort of. strong like that works as opposed to oh yeah here's a you know a secret romulan society that you've never heard of but actually have been controlling things for the past 200 years uh and they're kind of bad but there's only six of them so it's okay i don't know like yeah anyway that that's why

i like this movie because you know the the conflict is ultimately not about who's strongest not about who has the most evil scheme it's just coming to a better understanding not only of the unknowable, but also of human nature and about, you know, our, our, our protagonists' own nature and what they really think is important. Yeah, and there is a sort of a, there's a parallel there between Viger and Spock in the movie, besides the fact that, you know, they're literally connected at some point, like communicating it in some way that we don't quite understand. But the fact is that at the end of the movie, you know, Viger basically has to accept a human element, quite literally accept a human being element. and then, you know, discover something new about itself. And when we see Spock in the movie, Spock is all about, he's trying to purge the last remaining elements of his human self,

his human emotions. And so when he comes on board, he's talking, he's got a very robotic quality when he first comes on board. He's talking very rigidly. But when he connects with Viger and when he has this sort of revelation, he's laying in sick bay. He sort of smiles a little bit and he sort of acknowledges that, oh, he should have realized that there was more to,

you know, more to life, basically. And by the end of the movie, yeah, he's sort of back to his old stuff where, like, yeah, of course he's being logical, but he also has, you know, he's got a little something extra to it. So you see that sort of thread line go for both, you know, essentially the hero and the villain. I don't know, Viger is actually a villain, but like the challenge they overcome. They both, they kind of both parties agree that, you know, a little bit of humanity is a good thing. And then, yeah, you actually get that quote at the end of the movie, which I think was in the trailers too, you know, The human adventure is just beginning.

Did they actually say that? It's written on the screen at the end of the movie, yes. Ah, okay, okay. Yeah, I was like, that does not strike a chord with the dialogue, but yes, that's right. It is written on the screen. So that's the movie, very optimistic, very humanistic, very much about solving problems through peaceful resolution and coming to a better understanding of the other and the self. And that's not at all what the video games were like. The video games were all very shooty.

So why don't we talk briefly about the video games that were inspired by this? One of the very first licensed video games actually came from Star Trek the motion picture and came for the very first handheld game system. So probably very few, if anyone, listening, very few people of anyone listening to this episode have ever played this, but it's Star Trek phaser strike on the Milton Bradley Microvision. Which itself was a very new system at the time. I believe it came out in November. It launched in 79 also.

Yeah, November 1979. So it was a very new product. And this movie came out within a month of that. And I'm not sure the exact, I mean, again, video games is error. It's hard to tell, release, exactly release dates. But at some point in that window, you have the microvision, which isn't last that long. You have a movie. You have a game which ties into the movie.

And then apparently at some point, they lost the license or didn't want to pay for it. I don't know. But eventually, Star Trek, Phaser Strike, just became Phaserstrike. But either way, it is very much, it's a fair, I mean, the microvision, the screen was just not even like game and watch level. It's just, it's like it's blocks. You have moving blocks and you have blocks, you shoot at the blocks. And I guess the moving blocks are supposed to be a Klingon ship and your blocks are like a gun in placement and you can choose one of three guns, kind of like missile command, but really you're just shooting at one target that goes back and forth, back and

fourth. And then the game ends and, you know, it gives you a score and you keep playing it to try and get better score. That's, that's really it. Yeah, it's hard to express just how simplistic this game is. The microvision had a 16 by 16 monochrome screen, just black and white. That's it. No gray. And yeah, like you said, there are three gun emplacements at the bottom. Only one appears at a time, depending on which button you press. And the microvision, the way it was built each game like the cartridge had its own controls built into it so each game had its own specific control scheme with buttons specifically made for that and the the buttons are basically like left emplacement middle emplacement right emplacement and that's it and yeah there's just these

little like angled guns they fire a beam the left and right ones fire you know diagonally across the screen and the middle emplacement fire straight up and the targets that you're firing at are just four by one pixel blocks. The Tetris blocks. Yeah. Well, not even that. Yeah, I mean, basically, yeah, they're the eye block, but sideways. And they're just moving across the screen and you just have to choose which emplacement to use to fire and hit these things.

It's, um, yeah, not great. There's not a lot to it. I guess it was, you know, moderately entertaining in 1979 when the idea of a handheld video game was exciting and different. And hey, it wasn't a Milton Bradley or Mattel electronics. sports games, so that's something. I mean, this would have blown my mind in 1979, that's for sure. I mean, at that point, I had definitely played our, I had played Atari games and I had played, you know, little handheld, like, things that made noise.

But, you know, if I had something like this where there were, there were actual images moving on a screen, yeah, it would have thrilled me. But I can tell, given, given the cost and the relative obscurity of the microvision, it never really took off. So, yeah, I can't admit. I never saw one of these. I still have never seen one of these in real life. Also, in 1979, we had Bally's Star Trek pinball machine, which is kind of a, I think,

I think this was made for the original TV series, because if you look at the Enterprise on the main playing field, on the main table, it's definitely the TV series design with around nacelles and the very sort of lumpy UFO-looking upper hull, as opposed to the more sleek version with the pill-shaped nacelles in the movie. But at the same time, you've got movie uniforms on the top. If you look up this pinball game, you'll see there are versions of the back panel art where they are wearing the 60s costumes.

So I think this pinball, as the movie's production went on, I think this pinball game maybe came out and maybe it was circulated a little bit and it was like, oh, this is Star Trek because you remember Star Trek. But then someone said, hey, there's a movie coming out. What if we make this thing look like a movie? and then made new art for the panel. But really, yeah, it really is kind of just Star Trek pinball that just happened to be, well, it's changes one drawing.

And now it's, now it's movie Star Trek. Yeah, I'm looking at the table art again. And I realize that the Klingon cruisers, there's three of them right behind the Enterprise. And those are the TV style, the, what is it, D7 cruisers, the silver ones with the long skinny necks as opposed to the more, you know, raptor-like green vessels of the movie. the more intimidating Klingon ships. So, yeah, clearly, I don't know if this was designed around the idea of, hey, let's launch it alongside the movie, assuming that the movie was going to look just like the TV series or if they just had a Star Trek TV pinball game in development and it just happened to coincide of the movie. And they were like, oh, my God, let's redo that panel art really fast. Okay, we're done.

Because they don't even change the poses. If you look, if you look at both versions, everything's exactly the same. It's almost like a dress-up doll that has painted a new, new outfits on them. And McCoy is so muscular and heroic-looking. And O'Hura is so fragile behind strong James Kirk protecting her, because that's very true to the TV series. But of course, that's the whole thing, though. Yeah, if it was actually made for the movie,

they would have put in the, you know, the quote-unquote sexy character in there somewhere. But instead it's like, oh, we just need a woman because it's pinball. You got to have a woman on here. Which is a woman? O'Hura, okay, there you go. put her on there. Yep. At least she's clove.

Yeah, so I'm not a pinball expert by any means. I can't speak with any knowledge about the quality of this table. But I have seen it around from time to time. Like, you know, you visit someplace that has like a vintage pinball museum or just old tables around. You will still see the Star Trek table at times. Oh, it's even got Star Trek written in the old TV typeface as opposed to the more angular version of the TV logo or the movie logo. So, yeah, definitely kind of a weird little crossover, I guess, between eras. But, yeah, I'm just watching it, and it looks like a pinball table with stuff that lights up and things you hit.

There's some flippers. Oh, a little ball moving around. Yep, that's pinball all right. Which is funny because I'm sure there's many, many Star Trek pinball tables at this time. But after this movie came out, I would guess the later pinball machines probably threw back to the 60s version of the show anyway, because that's like, that just had more, I think, nostalgia appeal to more people. Because I definitely played one as a kid that was not movie related. It looked like the 60s, you know, with the bright colors.

But it wasn't this one, I think. Well, yeah, I mean, you have to remember that the TV series was in constant reruns for decades. So, yeah, there's a lot of us affection for that era of Star Trek and those particular designs and everything. But, you know, it's still pinball. So it's just kind of like your, you're, you. you're hitting the ball around, aiming for targets, trying to get score or multipliers, and that sort of thing, like on any pinball table, and they just so happen to be Star Trek themed. More notably, I think, more interestingly, are the Star Trek games that appeared in the arcade

and the Vectrix around 1981, 1982, and the arcade game was made by Sega, and I'm not sure about the Vectrix game. It was probably just a first-party game on Vectricks. But both of these are kind of first-person space shooters, vector-based images, and both the arcade and, of course, the Vectrx. And you're spending a lot of time blasting Klingons. Yeah, I mean, in a way, it's very similar to the, I guess, was that Atari, the Star Wars game that came out around the same time?

Yes. Yeah. In that, you know, you have the vector graphics. It's basically, you know, shoot everything you possibly can. But, of course, in Star Wars, the movie ends with shooting everything possible. Whereas in this movie, yeah, there really isn't, there's almost no shooting at all. But, hey, I mean, I got to say it looks, for a game of the time, it looks how I would want a game to look. You know, you're flying through space.

The ships, at least unlike the microvision, these ships flying at the screen, they do look like the Klingon ships. Like, they do actually get the look of the ships right. And yeah, there's Klingon ships, there's like a mother ship. And there's also like a different ship, but I guess it's like a star base or something. And you usually actually line up with that and then sink with it. And then you get more fuel or more energy for your weapons or something like you don't want to shoot that thing. But that's basically all there is. You're just you're shooting and then you're not shooting and then you're shooting some more.

And eventually the game ends and you get your high score. Yeah. So these two games have almost nothing whatsoever to do with the movie. But they do kind of have a spiritual parallel to the movie in that they're both a realization of a Star Trek concept that had been around for a decade. And that is, let me check, I wrote his name down, Mike Mayfield's 1971 Star Trek text game, which of course was not a licensed game. It wasn't commercially released.

It was created for, you know, mainframe computers, for Vax type systems, you know, distributed computing on universities and places like that, where people actually had access to computing resources in 1971. But he created a text-based game. We've mentioned this on the show before. But basically, you were given kind of a readout of like, here's, you know, the different places in the galaxy, which sector do you want to go to? You would warp to a sector.

There might be planets to explore there or a star base to dock with and refuel. or there might be Clingons, and you had to engage in combat with Clingons. And again, that all took place through text. So kind of like with Lunar Lander, which started out as a text simulation, and then was recreated into a vector-based game by Atari in 1979, you had this 1971 text-based game kind of loosely built around the idea of exploring space and the enterprise that Sega and

I can't remember who made the Vectrix General Computing or someone like that. They basically took that concept, the idea of traveling to different sectors, fighting Klingons, docking at a star base, and turned it into a vector action game. So, yeah, it's, you know, you don't really get a lot of the spirit of Star Trek there,

but it does have a legacy behind it. And it was, it's kind of interesting because just as, you know, fandom kind of kept Star Trek alive for so long and has really been influential in the revival of Star Trek, this kind of fan-made video game was sort of adopted and canonized by companies making games based on Star Trek once games were capable of looking like, hey, here is a Star Trek thing. And I just think it's amazing when you look at the history of Star Trek games,

there are so many that occur throughout the 70s in different formats, you know, text-based computer games, tabletop RPGs, all these, you know, and things that I think, most of them unlicensed, maybe one of them, you know, circulated with Star Trek name,

or they took the name off when they realized they couldn't legally distribute it. And just, yeah, fans were making Star Trek stuff all the time, and then here it is, the movie comes out, like, oh, well, now here are the actual commercial Star Trek games, and it's like, well, what do we have to do? we, what are we working with? Well, I guess we got some, some Clingons. We got some phasers, right? Yeah, go for it. Do it. Yeah. So kind of some loose

interpretations, but, you know, that's still a pretty healthy number of video games built around this movie between 1979 and 1982. You didn't really see that until, you know, around 1982 or so when you started getting games based on Star Wars and you got Atari's arcade game and you got the Empire Strikes back. But even then, it took a while for a single movie from Star Wars to have as many games based around that single movie as Star Trek the motion picture did. So it really kind of gives you a sense of kind of what a notable event in pop culture, the motion picture was, even though, again, its reputation isn't necessarily the best. And a lot of people find it kind of tough to love these days. It was, it was notable. It was, it was

it was a big deal on a lot of levels. And I mentioned the happy, you know, the fact that this is where the happy meal came from. Like the very first happy meal was, you know, a set of, I think, four different happy meal boxes based on Star Trek, the motion picture. And I've forgotten about this, but you linked to something at the Henry Ford Museum, a board game at McDonald's that was designed to promote the movie. Yeah, it was a very simple paper board game, like almost Candyland-like, where you just, You're moving, you know, characters around a path and, you know, depending what, unless space you land on, you move back or move forward or you have to miss a turn or something. It's extremely simplistic, but, yeah, it's, it was literally four kids. And it's also worth pointing out that unlike most movies, you know, certainly most Star Trek movies, this was actually rated G when it first came out.

Like, this was, this was a big catch-all, let's all go to the movies, you know, even though some elements are kind of scary. Like, this is literally a G-rated movie. literally for everybody, and it was, yeah, at the time, sure, bring your kids and watch this movie. I can't imagine bringing a kid to this movie, honestly, in any era, but for me as a kid, I guess I was kind of into it, but yeah, I got a lot more into the more energetic ones. But at the time, this was, this was their big move. And at least, according to the featureettes, I'm not sure if this is true, but it said this was the first ever movie based on a TV show. I don't know if that's true or not, but they

They say it is. Well, no, that's not true because there had been Doctor Who movies, you know, with Peter Cushing. I feel like those were in the 60s, weren't they? That's true. Yeah, he played a character named Doctor Who, not The Doctor. He was Doctor Who, but he was facing off against the Daleks, and that was the mid-60s. So whatever source you were reading, it's just typical Star Trek fans trying to disregard the existence of Doctor Who. I say, why not be both? Why not be a fan of both? It's a big world. There's space for

the American View, the heroic adventure, and the British view, the odd eccentric, condescending alien guy. I apologize for my Doctor Who erasure. Oh, no, it's not your fault. You were simply reporting another person's claims, but I'm glad we were able to debunk that. Yeah, and so there were a few board games released separately. Looking at the Star Trek McDonald's Happy Meal board game is definitely firing up a very old memory of mine I remember seeing this

this happy meal and having this board game and I would have been like four or five at the time so I could read at that point but I don't think I really understood what I was reading so yeah

I definitely remember looking at this board game though wild oh man this is a journey into the past so I've never seen the other board games though the Milton Bradley board game came with little plastic enterprises there's four of them it's primary colored enterprises

it's great one of them is command one of them is science one of them is operations and I don't know what the green one is what the hell is a green uniform I guess that's the Romulans I don't know Yeah, so anyway, I don't want to belabor the point too long,

but suffice to say, there were a lot of games based around Star Trek the motion picture. And again, it did bring back Star Trek, and it nearly scuttled Star Trek right there. at the very beginning, just because it took so long to produce this movie and was so expensive, ran over budget. We were talking before the show began about how Robert Wise revisited Star Trek, the motion picture, toward the end of his life and released a director's cut for DVD that was released, I think, in 2001 or so. Yes. And to my thinking is by far the best version of that movie. It cuts out some of the fat.

It adds some stuff. They finish up some scenes where the effects hadn't been completed and weren't able to be included in the original movie. And tragically, they very short-sightedly only mastered it in SD, all these new effects and computer elements. So there are no, from what I've read, no HD masters of this version of the movie existing. So all the Blu-ray releases, all the HD releases are the older cuts of the movie, which is a damn shame because when you watch this director's cut. It is much, it just has better pacing. It really feels like, oh, it's kind of the perfected version of Star Trek the Motion Picture. I can say, though, I've been watching this movie this week to prepare for this show, and I've been watching it on iTunes. And if you get

the version on iTunes, you can choose between the theatrical release and the director's cut. They're both included. So you do get that option. But yeah, because of the, I didn't know the time, but Since you explain it to me, yeah, when I watch directors, I was like, this looks a lot different, just, like, image quality-wise, and that explains it. It wasn't, it wasn't optimized for an HD TV set. No, it's a shame because the new sets and effects and environments and stuff that they added, it's not nearly as egregious, or not egregious, but not really, not anywhere near as like, whoa, it's in your face as, you know, the remastered TV series or the next generation remasters. but it just kind of subtly adds to the film and they manage to kind of maintain visual cohesion with the older effects

and it just feels very complete and satisfying. I would really love to see them revisit this and remaster it and reissue it on some HD format although I would be willing to forego that if it meant they would remaster Deep Space 9 and Voyager in HD first. Oh, the dream.

The dream. But anyway, yeah, we were kind of all over the place on this conversation but hopefully people who are listening to this have seen Star Trek animation pictures so they know what we're talking about.

If not, go watch it. It's an interesting movie. It's slow in places and I think you need a certain investment in the classic TV series. But I don't know, there's some good messages here, some good ideas,

some weird ideas, but you take the good with the bad and remember this was the late 70s. So, you know, we hadn't had Reagan yet. It was a different. era. Yeah, I would caution anyone against making this their first ever Star Trek thing. So without, you know, if you're going to watch this and you don't know Star Trek at all,

you probably need to, you should probably watch something else first just to set your, get your mind ready. Certainly, it is certainly not my favorite two. The next movie is my hands down, my favorite Star Trek movie of all time. And I hope we find excuse to talk about that someday because I love that movie. I can watch it on a loop. yeah i um my wife asked me recently like what is your favorite movie ever and i had to think for a while but i really think it might be star trek the wrath of con it's just such a phenomenal movie like yes i i am a star trek fan and have been since i was a kid but there is there is depth to that movie so yeah i'll um i'll try to contrive some excuse to uh to talk about it on retronauts

but uh you know i'd like to visit a lot of different star trek properties throughout the the course of the show. So I know some of the Retronauts East people are fans. So maybe the two of us could get Chris Sims in there sometime or Ben Elgin and have a three or four way conversation about some of the classics of Trek. And, you know, as long as there's a

video game angle, I feel like it's relevant. So Star Trek the Motion Picture, kind of a big deal. Kind of not. But definitely a part of history and had some fair impact on history, video game history and kind of tied into video game

passed. So, yeah, I'm glad we had this discussion. And it actually, I thought this was going to be like a 30-minute conversation, but it is, in fact, a full episode-length discussion. So there we go. Well, I'm just happy to be here. And I'm, well, as long as we didn't hit the movie-link discussion, I think we're okay. No, but the director's cut is coming out soon, the special ABC edition where Chekhov just screams for 10 minutes in the middle of the show. All right, Diamond, please tell us where we can find you on the internet. and the kind of things you do and the stuff we can do, listeners can do to support your work. Well, my main thing is writing things for retronauts.

If you are a Patreon backer at the $5 level, you can read my weekly column this week in retro where I write about something that had an anniversary during the last week. As of this recording, I've written some stories this year about Marvel versus Capcom 2. I've written stories about Star Trek Voyager. In fact, that was the first column of this year because Voyager turned 25 this year, if you can imagine. Yeah. And it only took me 23 years to get around to watching it.

But yeah, it's a really fun thing that I really enjoy doing. So if you support Retronauts on Patreon, then you get to read that. Of course, I do write some of the things for Retronauts. I actually write a monthly column where I just collect any particular interesting crowdfunding initiatives that might be related to retro gaming or even just, you know, gaming in general,

if I think it's appropriate. And, of course, in general, I'm on Twitter. I use the Retronaut Twitter sometimes. But if you just want my Twitter, it is Fight Club, like my last name, F-E-I-T, and then Club, like Club. Right. Excellent. So as for myself, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite.

You can find me writing stuff for limited run games, also doing their podcast. Also, hopefully soon I'll have some videos out through limited run games. So just the kind of the usual sort of stuff I do here at Retronauts, but not for Retronauts. Mysterious. And of course, Retronauts you can find at Retronauts.com and on your favorite podcatchers.

And you can support the show by subscribing to us, get early access to episodes each month. You get one week ahead at a higher bit rate quality with no advertisements or promotions. You also can subscribe at the $5 per month amount to get biweekly bonus episodes on Fridays and of course Diamond's column and there's some other stuff we're doing giveaways and things like that exclusively for that tier so check it out consider supporting us

your your support is especially valuable to us in these difficult times of pandemics and people close to us not being able to work because they own their own businesses and are not essential so yes your support is awesome and we appreciate it, but even if you find yourself strapped for finances because of these difficult times, that's fine. Retronauts appears weekly every Monday at Retronauts.com and on your favorite podcatchers.

So you can listen to us no matter what. In the meantime, I believe it's time to aim for the second star to the right and go straight ahead until morning. I'm doing the Vulcan Salute right now. Live long and prosper. We're going to be able to be able to be. We're going to be able to be able to be. Welcome to KATHLEEN SULLIV.

Casual Magic, the show where we explore the fun side of Magic the Gathering. I'm your host, Shivenputt, and each week we delve into everything from casual format to explorations of creatures and card types to interviews with designers of the game. At Casual Magic, we believe that it just isn't magic without the gathering. Come along and play. Hi, I'm Ray, and this is my friend Alex. Hi. And we do a show called Norman Whoppers.

Some call it corn, we call it therapy. We're adults with the virility of men. Want to hear us read snack food copy and talk about Japanese chips? Bad! Join us every month or so on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Matt, I've got a great idea for a podcast. You and me, we watch movies, right? And some of them are kind of bad, and so we make fun of them.

But maybe some of them are good. Chris, that's a great idea. Let's do it. And eat snacks. Movie Fighters, an original idea on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I'm Jerry Parrish. And this is another pandemic protocol episode, which means it's a couple of different conversations stitched together into a full-length episode. These two conversations have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. I don't even know what other conversation is going to be combined with this. one. That's how unconnected they are. So, who do I have here, disconnected, but still connected through the internet, through the power of the net, to discuss this week's topic.

You have Nadia Oxtor from US Gamer and the second half of the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast. And thank you for having me in the year of our lord of this quarantine. You're very welcome. Thanks for being on the show in the year of our quarantined lord or whatever it is. So this whole, you know, me being remote from everyone and just having one-on-one short conversations about things has kind of opened up the floor, the field for retronauts topics to be able to tackle things that might not, you know, bear a full episode on their own, the things that might not, you know, support a full conversation that I might not be able to find enough people to have a full conversation about. But, you know, smaller topics that can

support 30 minutes of chat between friends. And that's what we're doing this week. We're talking about Mega Man Battle Network, which I really enjoyed, and I know you really enjoyed, and I don't know a lot of people our age who really enjoyed it. So there you go. Yeah, we're definitely getting to the point where it is one of the retro Mega Man series, and that makes me feel really, really strange because I think I was already around like, gosh, like 2021 when it came out. Yes. I won't say how old I was, but I was definitely. more than a teenager, but I still enjoyed it because it was an interesting take on a series that I'd loved for more than a decade. And it's nearly 20 years old now, which is terrifying. But it was

fresh and different, kind of the Pokemon thing, but in a totally different way, a totally unique way, that really helped it to stand out from all the Pokemon want-to-be games that were launching around that time. And I actually feel like even though I don't know that many people who really talk about Mega Man Battle Network. I feel like there are probably more people who are big fans of this series than of the original classic Mega Man series.

It's just that all the old people who love the classics are really loud. We won't shut up. But, you know, Battle Network launched around, you know, it was in the week of Pokemon, and it was one of the first games,

you know, the first RPGs for Game Boy Advance and ran throughout that entire platform's life. So I really feel like, you know, some of those games sold more than a million copies. There's got to be like a pretty huge fan base out there that's just waiting to be heard. So I'm expecting this episode to be one of our best performing episodes ever. And you look at the numbers years later and say, huh, that was the thing that happened, wasn't it? Because you're right, the Mega Man Battle Network series definitely has its fans even now. There is a game that's currently in development. Shoot, I wish I could remember the name

off the top of my head. It's something Eden. It's in, I don't know if it's alpha or beta right now, or even if it's out, but it's on Steam right now. But Eden is a Mega Man Legends thing. That doesn't make any sense. It really is, isn't it? We're not exor respecting Canon here. But Eric, who's our senior news editor at US Gamer, he is definitely younger than I am, and he enjoys this new game very much because it is basically using Battle Network's very unique battle system, and you will occasionally find games that, particular indie games, that use that

kind of 9-by-9 grid battle system where you select skills or magic or items and whale on enemies with them. It was definitely a very unique system for the time, and it kind of still is. Yeah, you know, I feel like Mega Man Battle Network, as an adult when I first played the game, because it came out way too late for me to play it as a child. I had a hard time with this story to the point that after like about five or six hours into Mega Man Battle Network 3, I said, you know what? Peace out. I'm done with this series. It's just too stupid. Man, the core, like the game mechanics are so good. They are so good. I hate that it's wrapped up in this like brain dead story. But I realize, you know, it was designed for

kids. It was, it was meant to be beloved among nine and 10 year olds. And I don't begrudge at that. Yeah, yeah. I would love to see, you know, a little more, you know, not grim and gritty or anything, just less pueral take on this series. Yeah, I agree. And it is actually funny that you say, oh, it needs to be, you know, maybe something a little less, maybe nothing like really grim and gritty or anything like that. But then you kind of go right to the core of Mega Man Battle Network, the first game's concept. It literally stars a dead baby.

That's true. Yeah, we should talk about the sort of the central consensus. seat of Mega Man Battle Network. So basically Battle Network takes place in an alternate timeline from the other Mega Man games. Like all the other Mega Man games are connected. Mega Man

begat Mega Man X, which begat, what was the order? Zero and then... Was zeros and then Legends? Yeah. No, it was actually zero, ZX, and then Legends. Right. Okay. So Ledges is the far future. We'll never see the resolution of kind of thing. You can tell that Mega Man Battle Network

was not part of the core. or Mega Man Canon because it actually has an ending. There is resolution for all the characters and a finale to this entire storyline. They actually wrapped it up. So that's very different. It wasn't, you know, like, just keep making sequels forever. I think the only other series that did that with Zero Series wrap things up. Oh, that's true.

I guess there was a sense of finality at the time. But even that, I guess, you know, ZX carried forward zero. And I suppose Star Force carried forward battle network storyline. but I don't finish. Yeah, we don't have to acknowledge it. Yeah. But yeah, so the idea was basically, instead of Dr. Light getting into robotics,

he got into internet development. He was like, Facebook is going to be big and I'm going to beat them there. And so all the Mega Man robots from the classic Mega Man series become basically standalone applications. I feel like this is kind of, the whole idea of like basically

characters being apps was very sort of forward thinking. It was. Programs didn't really work like that back then, but now they kind of do. Like you've got Siri. There wasn't no Siri back then. It is actually a little bit frightening how forward thinking Battle Network was at the time. I remember vividly playing

that game and Fireman, as you say, was an app and he was a bad guy and he was controlled by a bad guy. And he set Land's house on fire or something like that with the aid of Fireman because this particular oven that Land's mother owned was connected to the internet. And I'm like, what kind of stupid appliance is it connected to the internet?

And now we're hearing about people who hack into their refrigerators to get on Twitter because their mom's grounded them. Yeah, because people are like, oh, well, you know, I need to know when my eggs are going to be in need of a refill because I can't just look myself. I need to check on my app. So, yeah, now everyone's homes are wired. I wonder how, you know, everyone being in lockdown for months at a time is going to affect the value, like the appeal of smart appliances because we're not away from home anymore.

We're always at home. Yeah, yeah. But then you don't have to get up and like chuck on your own. You can just sit your ass on the couch and stay. That's true. Like, oh, what do I need to have someone deliver for me now? Yeah, so it is kind of an interesting, forward thinking sort of game, also kind of stupid. But basically, everything that happens in the world of battle network takes place online.

Everyone is always too online all the time. And they have their little EXE robot pals who are actually programs to do tasks for them and also be their friends. Yeah. So basically, Dr. Light, who here is Dr. Hikari, the original inventor of the internet and the apps and so forth was Tadashi Hikari, which means in English, right light. So there's kind of a joke there. Like, is a doctor right? Is he Dr. Light? They localized it both ways.

And so this basically just, yeah, this is like, yes, he is. He's Dr. Wright. He's Dr. Light. The answer is yes. But anyway, yeah, he still had his rival, Dr. Wiley. Dr. Wiley, I think, wanted to be a roboticist, but it just didn't work out. So he's stuck in a world of applications that he never asked for. And so he's still the bad guy.

Yeah. He's very mad about it. He's quite the boomer to go for what the kids say these days. Exactly. So basically everything takes place on the Internet, Instead of running and jumping and shooting, you are instead navigating the internet, like a virtual reality space, and engaging in combat with viruses and enemy executables that you have to fight. And it goes a little far. Sometimes you really have to kind of hold your nose and suspend your disbelief because it's like Lan, the protagonist, is a little kid who controls megaman.exe.

and he goes up against, you know, adult villains who are trying to do nefarious schemes through the internet and they'll stand like next to each other and battle with their internet robots. Yes. And like at any point, these evil men could just like reach over and snap little kid's neck. But they don't.

They're like, oh, no, he has defeated my virtual assistant. Yeah, so I must cower and retreat. There is actually a great scene in I think it was three where Lan is off to rescue someone. one and he's, you know, in the room with the bad guy and he just says, Mega Man attack and he throws his pet at the guy who gets knocked out, and that was actually great. Okay.

I approve of that. That's funny. Yeah. But it is still kind of a dumb, it takes some liberties with common sense, let's say. It does. It definitely does. It's definitely, as you say, a series for children in the age of Pokemon when people resolve their differences through their, you know, pets, quote unquote, and instead

of punching each other in the face. Right. But at least with Pokemon, you understood because it was an actual creature in the physical space with you. And like, if the bad guy tried to reach over and snap Ash's neck, then, you know, Dragon Knight could bite his head off or whatever. So there was that element, whereas here it's a little goofy, but that's fine. But what's really goofy is, yes, the connection between the protagonist's land and Mega Man. And I'm going to let you explain this because I'll probably just get angry if I try. It was, it was definitely a decision that they made.

They certainly did. I thought it was kind of cute in a way. The way to explain it is Lan was a twin, an identical twin with Hubb, who died as a baby of some sort of heart disease. And his soul was transferred into a pet, for lack of a better term. And this is something you learn at the climax of the first game. So, yeah, I was being literal when I said Mega Man is a dead baby this time around. Yeah, and so this kind of creates an additional contrivance in that everyone who has like a digital assistant buddy, like they're just, you know, virtual friends. But in the case of Lan and Mega Man, they are more than that.

how their bodies are linked or something. So if Mega Man is destroyed in the net, then land will also die. It seems a little, like they tried a little too hard there. Yeah. If you die in the game, you die for real. Yeah. But it raises the stakes. So Mega Man can never die. He can never be defeated. Otherwise, you've got a little dead kid. It's really terrible. You got two dead kids at this point. Yeah, right? So it really, you know, forces you to play the best you can. But fortunately, playing is a lot of fun because, you know, aside from some kind of fussy details that I'm not a big fan of, like the fact that running around the internet is

very confusing because all the passages kind of look the same and there's a whole lot of random encounters, the actual act of, you know, navigating the internet and fighting viruses is really fun. It's a great, great combat system. It is. And it's interesting in many ways because it takes a lot of the classic Mega Man villains that you remember from the old days. Not just the Robot Masters, but even just like the Metars, for example, have been modified to kind of attack on this 9-by-9 grid system that's more turn-based than anything. And I really appreciate seeing these old Mega-Man enemies being turned into something new for new generation.

Yeah, the combat system is great because it's a kind of a turn-based RPG, but it's still action. And as you said, it takes place on two nine square grids, three by three grids adjacent to each other. So one half of it, you know, one nine square grid is Mega Man's, and one half of the grid, the other nine squares, are the enemies. And you have basically battle chips that you can equip under your character. And your turn meter basically is a little meter that rises at the top when it maxes out. then you can go to your menu and pull up the special combat chips that you have equipped and say, like, this is the chip that I need to use here, and it's got to have a special attack. But there's also special features, you know, there's healing. But then there are also

abilities that manipulate the field itself. And these work both ways. The villains can have them and the good guys can have them. And there are a lot of enemies who attack by like cracking panels, which reduces your maneuverability or even by taking squares out of your grid. Like, there are some enemies who can take an entire column of your grid and then take another, so you are stuck moving in just three squares, and that makes it really difficult to navigate. Yes. There are several boss characters in particular. I can't remember which particular boss it was from the back of my head, but they would, I think it was Protoman. Sorry, ProDMan EXC. They would take up one column, and then they would take up another column, and then they would have a slash attack that

could get basically cover the last column. So if you did not deal with Protoman properly, he could take you out pretty easily. Yeah, he would just back you into a corner and slash you without even giving you a chance to retaliate. The one good thing about the battle system, though, well, a good thing about the battle system is that your special attack chips are not your only form of offense. And, you know, it's a Mega Man game, so you're still shooting your little megabuster. So basically the meter, the turn meter to use battle chips is it's kind of like the special weapons that you acquire in the classic Mega Man games. Like you have them as a limited resource. You can only use them once per

turn. But in addition to those chips, you also just have your buster and you can move around and you can power up your buster. You can, you know, upgrade it so that instead of doing one point of damage, it does two or three or whatever. And I think, can you do chart shots on the first game? I know later games you can. I can't remember specifically, but I think you could. You could require the ability, and that would actually be really, really handy if you were up against some, just some mooks. You didn't really feel like bothering with chips, and so you would just

power up your buster. Powering up your buster not only would let you kind of breeze through those easy battles, but it's a good way to soften up really tough enemies before taking out your battleships and wrecking them. Yeah, and basically the faster you completed a battle, the more

officially you completed a battle, the better the reward you would get, you would get more zinny, the official Capcom currency, It is, yes. But also better chips. Like, you know, enemies would drop chips after battle. So basically, the better you performed, the better your weapon outlay would be. So there's a lot of strategy to it. Surprisingly, even though it looks really simplistic, like here is, you know, 18 squares and three or four characters. What's going to happen here? But no, they can get really tactical. And yes, the boss battles can get really, really tense. They can. Yes. And it's funny you mentioned tactical because, It's a lot of like Pokemon in that regard, again, where you look at Pokemon on the surface, you're like, oh, this is pretty easy. And he can't play it so that your enemies go down quickly, et cetera, et cetera. But if you're playing against another person, and you could play Battle Network against another person as well, you could get some really intense battles.

I actually once watched a tournament where one competitor took down enemies. According to his fan character, he called himself Plagued One, and he would use poison chips to his advantage. and it was really interesting to watch him at work. But, yeah, bosses in particular got pretty nasty. Even the first ones, like Gutsmen, was a good tutorial of how to deal with bosses in battle network because he could do a lot of what we mentioned before, that is, smash up panels, rob us of our maneuverability, and as well as rob us of good waste counterattack. Because if a panel is broken in front of an enemy, a lot of your own counterattacks are crippled in the same way.

Yeah, you have different kinds of attacks. Some of them will like fire across an entire row or something, or some of them actually send you zipping across the field to briefly appear in the enemy's field and attack them directly. And yeah, when they take out spaces in front of them, it nullifies those attacks. And so it limits your possibilities and, you know, forces you to either find alternate abilities. Like, you know, if you rely on weapons with a splash, attack, you know, you can't, you can't count on those anymore. So, so yeah, they, they force you to kind of keep on your toes to keep a really diverse tool set on you. It helps to kind of know what you're up against and, you know, kind of what you need to do. But, yeah, it was definitely vital to keep a, you kept your chips in binders and you had to make sets of binders to, to kind of tailor your battle strategy accordingly because, you know, let's say you were up against a rather slow boss like Gutsmen, who tends to stay in one spot, but will shadow your panels. You know, you have to account for all of that with your battle strategy.

But then, let's say you go up against, there are many, many, many bosses in Battle Network that move very swiftly. So these slower moving attacks that you have for Gutsmen, they won't do you much good against these swifter bosses. Right. Yeah. So it's just constantly really making the most of the battle system. The later games would get even more elaborate with battle systems with like elements and different forms you could use. But the core of the battle system appears here. And it's really, really strong, really compelling. And it even translates, I think, pretty well into action. There were a couple of action-based spinoffs, one for GameCube, one for Wonder Swan that, they had some problems, but they were actually okay. Yeah, I know what you

mean. Kind of interesting. We had, we had the GameCube one. Yeah, we did. The Wonder Swan, one I wouldn't really recommend, but like kind of taking the core Mega Man element, the shooting and the jumping, and then adding the sort of timed battle chip feature to it. It was, you know, needed a little more refinement, but it worked. It did. Yeah, so it's a very flexible system. It is. That was, was that network transmission? I can't remember what it was called.

Yes. Okay. So I'd never played the Wonder Swan one, of course. But as you say, I was actually surprised at how well the GameCube. one worked in many ways. You're right, it did need some additional polish. But the core concept of using chips in a more action-based environment, it worked quite well. Yeah. And like I said, there's a lot of different ways to kind of build out Mega Man. And something I really appreciate is kind of like you mentioned earlier, you do have these kind

of standard MOOCs who you have to fight. And the further you get into the game, the more complex they become. And some of them use like misdirection and, uh, you know, kind of special tactics that force you to kind of rethink how you approach the battles. And they kind of serve as, you know, they're like training for the boss battles, which are the kind of the big, the big showcases. It's nice that this game is very lenient. It lets you save anywhere you want, which is good. And you recharge all your energy after each battle. That's right. I forgot about that. And that's something, unfortunately, they abandoned in the subsequent games. Yeah. So you never have to worry about really getting stuck in this game. Like, as long as you're scrupulous.

about saving pretty frequently, you'll never get to a point where you're like buried deep in the net and you're like, oh, God, I can't get to an exit point. I'm stuck because, you know, you can kind of work your way back to an exit and charge up. Yeah, lost in the net, how horrifying. That is actually the one real flaw of this game. You mentioned, you kind of touched on it before, but the encounter rates are pretty crazy. And most importantly, the internet itself, as you said, It was quite hard to navigate because it was so similar and it had levels piled on top of one another. And I can't even remember if there was any kind of a good map in the first game. No, there wasn't.

And, you know, actually if you look at maps of the game, like people pulled the graphics and ripped the maps and put them together, the game's not actually that big, but it feels huge. It feels huge. Like, it's so monotonous and kind of sprawling and confusing. And there are so many random encounters to sort of trip you up and make you lose your bearings. that it just feels like, oh, God, it's going to take me forever to get through here. It doesn't help that, you know, you get to, like, the power plant, I think it is, with the Leckman. Yes. And there's, like, all these switches you have to turn off, and so you have to kind of backtrack and go back and forth.

And all those time you're fighting random encounters. It just gets kind of tedious. They definitely improve the maps of the net a lot in subsequent games. Yes, they did. Two picked up a lot of what was wrong with one and really, really polished it up. I'd say it's the best one in the series because of it. But, you know, despite these flaws, there is a lot that I think is very compelling about the way the world is set up. You know, as you kind of play around it, it does that sort of Dark Souls thing where you

unlock shortcuts and that sort of thing. You can jack into basically any machine that you find in the world. And a lot of them are just self-contained and there might be like a little robot you can talk to inside or you might be able to find, you know, health boosts or something like that.

But a lot of times you'll go into like someone's computer and their computer will be connected to the internet. So basically by going into their computer, you can set up a shortcut for yourself and make it easier to navigate the overall net. And, you know, this game was designed by a lot of the people who worked on Mega Man Legends. And the network, the way it works, it reminds me a lot of the underground, the sort

of subterranean spaces of the original legends, where it seems like, oh, you're going down into these little self-contained buildings. But, you know, once you acquire like the drill and stuff, you discover, oh, wait, I can actually, you know, drill through these walls. And suddenly, I'm creating shortcuts and getting around. and, you know, it's all one contiguous space. And the net is a lot like that. It really is.

You're right. And that's a good comparison because Legends, the first Legends game did that. There was the whole sprawling network underneath you that you could open up slowly and surely. And that's actually a very satisfying little bit of gameplay. And I'm sorry they got rid of in subsequent Legends games. I don't think it's, I don't think it was ever gotten rid of in subsequent battle network games, though, thankfully. Yeah, I mean, you say subsequent Legends games, but there was only one. There's only one.

And it took place on a lot of different disconnected islands. So, you know, not much you can do to avoid that. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, the spirit of legends is definitely here to the point that one of Lanz's school friends, Yai, this kind of like strange young girl who appears to be balding. She's got like male pattern baldness. Yeah. Yeah.

She's actually like her design is the same as the girl on in Mega Man Legends 2 on one of the islands who does the quiz game. The quiz. The first time I played this game, I was like, hey, it's the quiz girl from Legends. And it turns out it's like the same character designer. The planners were like the event planners on Legends. So it carries forward a lot of the same kind of like Mega Man, but an RPG, except this is actually much more, I would say, explicit about Mega Man as an RPG than Legends was. It was like Mega Man is, you know, an action RPG in kind of the Zelda-ish vein, whereas this is just like, it's Pokemon time.

Pokemon time, get your monsters, let's go. So do you have any favorite memories or moments of the original battle network? I realize, you know, as I said, it does kind of get grindy, but I still feel like there was some good moments in the game. There definitely was. I had a huge crush on Iceman's operator, Dr. Fois. Still do. I think he's cute. But, yeah, that was always kind of fun.

But otherwise, I'm a little bit ashamed to say. say that when I first played the game, I eventually got it legitimately, but I first tried to play a pirate version. And they had, um, they had some good piracy protections back in those days. I just remember, uh, you would get locked in a certain part with, uh, one of the teachers and something about the map was even more screwy than it is in the legitimate game if you can believe it. So I actually couldn't progress, but yes, I eventually bought the game legitimately and, uh, played it that way. Hmm. Interesting.

Yeah, that was, the GBA was interesting because it's the only, I think, or the first system ever to get an emulator before the system actually came out. Yes, it was emulated in 10 seconds. Yeah, so that was kind of rough. But the whole appeal of the GBA to me was, it's portable. So even if I couldn't see the screen, I still was like, I've got it in my hands. That was a thing, yeah. With the GBA, I feel like it didn't really get, it didn't find itself until the SP. Yeah, that's definitely for sure.

But this was, you know, very much a portable Mega Man RPG. It was really designed around, you know, even if the areas sprawled and the encounter rate was too high, it was really designed around like these little kind of standalone moments and quick sessions, you know, play for a little bit, then save the game, then come back later, like just pick up exactly where you were. That was really nice. And it did have a lot of postgame content. I know, I can't remember exactly what all it had, but there was like a star system. when you beat the game, if I'm not mistaken, like you got a little star on the title screen, yeah. Yeah, yeah, so you're right.

It was definitely great for a pick-up and play Mega-Man RPG, as you say. And it was, yes, well-formatted for the handheld format because we were just talking about the GBA screen being dark as hell, and that made action games extremely difficult, but it really wasn't an issue. battle network because you weren't doing so much running and jumping. You were strategizing and shooting. Yeah, I can't seem to find any information online specifically what is carried over when you beat the game. But basically there's a lot of them, I think starting with this

one, there were hidden areas that you could access. And so it really encouraged you to keep playing after you beat the game. I don't know if it was this one or Battle Network 2 where the soul of base was like floating through the internet lost? That was two. Base EXE. He was pretty badass. So I think that was a post-game battle that you could take on. And that was quite a challenge, as I recall.

But yeah, this one does kind of remind me compared to the rest of the series of the original Mega Man, in that it's a shorter game by far. It's you know, there's much less content to it and the mechanics hadn't quite been worked out, but you can still

see the shape of some really good ideas. You can, yes. And, you know, it even ends in a conflict in Dr. Wiley's castle, which is shaped like a skull for nobody's little reason. What else do you need, really? Yeah, exactly. So I feel like it was a good start to a series that, honestly, I'm surprised Capcom hasn't done more with it because it was a juggernaut for a while. There was a TV cartoon. There were comic books.

There were toys. Like, I think. It was pretty big, yeah. Once they started doing the, the sports. versions with three and coming out with like, you know, multiple colored versions with unique content in each. And then like the, uh, the refined, you know, revisited version. You know, once they started doing that, those games were selling a million plus copies. And so there's got to be, like I said, a huge fan base out there just waiting for a Mega Man battle network

collection. We've got, we've got zero and ZX and no one bought those games. Yeah. I am actually really hoping for a battle network collection. And I cannot see a world where it will not exist. If an announcement came tomorrow, I would not be surprised at all. It's something I'm just kind of expecting. Because even as you said, the zero and set collection, nobody played those games except maybe the zero games. And apparently the collection sold quite well. So I can imagine a battle network collection, there are a lot of people out there who have a lot of nostalgia for battle network. And maybe even it wasn't like front and center in their memories and nostalgia the way Pokemon was, it was certainly there.

Yeah, this definitely didn't have kind of the same hooks as Pokemon where it's like, oh, you want to collect all the creatures and fight alongside them as your little cuddly friends, whereas this is like you want to blow up a virus and use its data to create an attack that, you know, appears on screen for one second and then goes away. So it does kind of miss something of the Pokemon appeal there, but just in terms of battling in combat, it was great. And it even had a crossover with Boktai, so that automatically wins it a play. in my heart. Yeah. I forgot about that. Yep, good times. So yeah, definitely a series that's due for a comeback. I do appreciate the fact that Capcom did put the games on Wii U virtual console, but of course, no one owned a Wii. No one had a Wii. Exactly. So again, missed opportunity, but its time is going to come. I feel like Battle Network Collection for Switches. It's just such an obvious idea that they've got to do it, even if they break it into two. Like do one through three

and then four through six. That's fine. That's fine. That's fine. Whatever. Do whatever. I'll I'll take it. I'll take a Capcom. Just telling you. All right. Well, that's actually all there really is to say about the original Battle Network, I think. It's not that substantial a game, but it's just had such a great combat system. Like, that really just makes it so playable. It really does. And frankly, we were talking earlier about how the game was ahead of its time in many ways. So if there was a collection or there was a new game, it would really kind of feel at home. And the battle system, it's not like it's aged badly. It's aged perfectly.

well. So, yeah, I'm ready for more whenever Catcom is ready. Yeah, I mean, it's not like anyone has taken this idea for the combat system and done it better. So, yeah, it's still kind of a standout unique system. And I don't necessarily know that they need to make a sequel to this or, you know, another Star Force game. But, you know, I think they're games that should stay in circulation. I agree. Maybe they can even localize the, what was it, the DS remake of Battle Network. Oh, I forgot about that. Yes, I wouldn't mind having that. It was a remake that kind of crossed over with Starforce, I think.

You're right, yes. Kind of a weird choice, and they didn't bother to localize it, so no one even bothered to know about it. Like, why would you? Clearly. But, yeah, it was out there, so that'd be kind of a fun extra for a collection. So get on a Capcom. We're doing your work for you here. Chop, chop.

Because ideas are the hard work, you know, it's not the actual programming and porting. No, that's something. I got to sit here and think. I mean, God. Exactly. Yeah, I don't do that for free, so they better appreciate this. All right, Nadia, thank you very much for your time for taking a stroll back through the network of memories and talking about a game from a very, very long time ago. Good God.

Absolutely. So, Nadia, where can people find you on the Internet? On the Internet, I am Nadia Oxford on Twitter. That's all one word. Again, I write for USGamer. That's USGamer. and I am the second half of the Acts of the Blood God RPG podcast where we talk about RPG's new and old Eastern and Western

and as you can imagine we are quite busy now because of a certain remake that recently came out so please read our stuff Are we calling The Witcher 3 a remake? Is that what we're doing? Absolutely, I am so stoked for this. More Gerald, please. Yeah, so just I'm actually quite enamored

with Final Fantasy 7 remake at the time of this recording. Still need to play it. but I will at some point. You should. Yeah, I'm curious to hear your thoughts. I hear it's pretty good. And also, the ending is wild and not what anyone expects. That's Squarespace off.

Yeah, so I mean, you know, as much as Final Fantasy 7 was inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion, if this remake series is actually the rebuild of Final Fantasy 7. That's what people are saying. It goes in wild directions like the Evangelian movies. I'm 100% there for it. Yeah, exactly. So you'll probably have a good time. All right.

Great. Thanks again, Nadia. I will talk to you again soon for more of these podcasts. Just you wait. Please do. Thank you.