Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 356: 1991 - The Years in Review Revue

Episode Date: February 9, 2021

The Retronauts East team gets together to continue their conversation about the games of a few decades ago. This time, Jeremy Parish, Benj Edwards, Chris Sims, and Ben Elgin focus specifically on the year 1991, when a bit of video game history was made. Cover illustration by Shaan Khan.

Good news. You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To check out the dozens of other great shows on the network or to join our growing podcast family, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, it's the ones, the other ones. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts episode 356. I'm Jeremy Parrish, feeling about 356 years old. And this week, joining me from our recent excursion into the original ones, where this doesn't make any sense, we have on Zoom because we're not. not allowed to interact face-to-face with other humans. That's very irresponsible.

Don't do it. Let's see. Let's go alphabetically. Actually, you can't really do that because you've got two names that are almost the same. Let's go alphabetically by last name. So that would be, wow, even that's close. That's also close. All right, we got it.

We have a winner by a hair. Who is that? Yeah, that's you. Yeah, okay. Hi, I'm Benj Edwards, your favorite retronaut. Everyone's favorite. And also another favorite coming soon after him in the alphabet. I'm Ben Elgin.

That's right. Ben Elgin, if you two, if this were school, you two would have desks next to each other. And Ben, you would be sitting behind Benj and you could like throw erasers and stuff into his hair. And he'd never know. Awesome. He'd be so. Is there a Zoom function for that yet? I don't think so.

I don't think so. But there's probably like an Instachat filter or not Snapchat filter, Insta chat. Yeah, that's right. That's Jeremy. Looking, looking all 356 years old. knowing his technology, what the kids are using these days. And finally, sitting way across on the other side of the room, safely away from eraser chunks and from the teacher's glare, we have.

Everyone's least favorite, retronaut, Chris Sims, is here. Well, okay, so we've got the alpha and omega of popularity going on here. And bringing up the middle, it's me. So anyway, yes, a few weeks ago, we had an episode wherein the four of us talked about the annual years in review review. And I structured that very carefully so that we could get through the whole thing in a single episode.

We would stay on topic, on point. And yet, and yet, here we are doing a second episode. Why? Because we didn't manage to get it all in. And it's kind of my fault. There are so many things. At some point I realized. So many things, Jeremy.

That's right. At some point I realized, like, there's no way we're going to do justice to 1991 in the short amount of time remaining. So let's just keep going with 81. But now we have a full, let's say, hour and a half to talk about the year 1991 in video games. And there was a lot to talk about. So we're going to talk about that.

As always, this is an annual thing we do where we look back. It used to be every 5, 10, 15 years. But now Retronauts has been around so long that it doesn't make sense to do every five years. No, now we're on to once every decade. So what was video gaming like a decade ago? We've already talked about 71, 81. There wasn't a whole lot happening in 71, but we still talked for like half an hour

about the three things that were happening in video games in 1971. And then 1981, where there was lots of cool stuff. And now we travel forward in time one decade, and the video games industry is bustling. It's actually, whoa. Dang, I'm bustling alive. It bustled right here in the studio.

Yes, it was a bustling industry. For one thing, it was actually an industry at that point. There actually was a business built up around video games that wasn't just like, hey, go to the local camera shop at your mall and there's some stuff you can look at behind the counter and maybe

play some little blip men. That's very exciting. It was a thing. It was robust. So, this week we're going to talk about that. If you want to catch up on what we talked about previously, that was episode 347, which was like a month and a half before

this episode, so not too far back. But this one, by golly, this is going to be a humdinger. And then Bob is going to do a 2001 episode. And I guess that means we need to get together at some point, or I need to get together with someone at some point to do 2011. I don't know how much you guys know about that. But it seems only right to give context for a decade ago. But that's, I don't know, I'm not know if I'm ready to devote an entire hour

and a half of discussing the retro gaming of 2011. That just seems, I think we've hit the threshold. And now are things that don't feel like they should be retro at all yet. Yeah, right? Like, I still haven't finished my save of Skyrim. My play-through of Skyrim from 2011. So it, I feel like I've got to do that before I can talk about 2011. I've just been playing Skyrim.

Skyrim 10 years ago? I'm afraid to say that is correct. Cheapers Christmas. But this is not a 2011 episode. This is a 1991 episode. Comfortably retro. Yes, comfortably retro, comfortably numb with our retroness. Anyway,

Anyway, so 1991, where were you in the year in 1991? Let's go alphabetically again. Ben Jadwards, where were you in 1991? Were you playing video games in Gatlinburg? Yeah, probably. Yes, I knew it. I was 10 in 1991, so let's see. I can't remember if I got a Super Nintendo that year in 92,

but I was probably deep in NES gaming at that time. And it was just before I really got into PCs. and things like that. So I was doing most of my gaming on NES, and I had a Game Boy, I think, at that time. Mm-hmm. And it was just before, you know, we had an old Atari, we still played everyone.

So I was before I started collecting retro gaming stuff, like that was a couple years later. So that's where it was. All right. Ben, how about yourself? Yeah, so 91. I was a freshman in a high school. So I had just escaped the hell pit that is middle school.

So that was great. And I was definitely hyped up for Super Nintendo and saving up all my allowance pennies to buy myself one. Depending, well, we'll talk about exactly when it came out. But yeah, I was definitely, definitely on board that hype train. Looking forward and playing all the amazing 16-bit games on it. And finally, Chris Sims. Let's see here.

your boy was in South Carolina. It would have been nine years old. I would have turned nine that August, which means I was going into fourth grade, which means that was the year that I drew a faithful recreation

of the Ducktails NES box art. We had a school project to draw what you wanted for Christmas, and so I folded the paper in half and I drew like a gift box on the outside, and then when you open up, there was ducktails on the inside, which is one of the most clever bits of sequential storytelling I've ever done, I think.

Very cool. And finally, I was, gosh, I guess I was in high school playing NES games, looking at the super NES and thinking, boy, golly, if only, sometimes borrowing my friend's Sega Genesis and saying, this is cool, where are the RPGs? Actually, I didn't care about RPGs. I was like, where's, where's Mario? Why isn't Mario on here? Yeah, and that's about it.

I think I played Battletudes that year and beat it and said, I'm never going to do that again. So that was when I learned to turn your back on bad things. Anyway, so yes, lots going on in the year in 1991. And basically at this point in video game history, you had multiple viable platforms. You had computers, and they were starting to consolidate around, you know, the DOS standard. You really didn't have the sort of galapagos effect that you had with 8-bit systems in the 80s. C-64, Apple 2 were really on their way out. The Macintosh was becoming a non-starter.

They would still stick around, but no one cared. There was not much going on in the UNA. Yeah, yeah, I'm not. I owned a Macintosh, eventually. But it was not the place to go for mainstream gaming. The Mac ports usually came later and were often compromised. Yeah, you had Game Boy, you had the NES, you had the Super NES launching, you had the TurboGraphics 16, you had the Sega Genesis.

Did I mention that? I don't think I did. In Japan, you had the launch of the game gear that would come the following, no, actually it was the American launch, that's right, yeah. You had the mega CD launch in Japan. So, yeah, there was also the PC engine or the, you know, Turbo Graphics Duo, the Turbo CD. Yes, that's what it's called. And, you know, elsewhere game manufacturers were beginning to ramp up to create all kinds of CD-based platforms that no one

wanted, like the CDI and the 3DO. And, you know, things were about to get crazy. So a lot happening in 1991. Not all of us had infinite money. In fact, I think none of us did. I hadn't figured out that cheat yet. It's called Be Born into a Rich Family. family. And yeah, so we had to kind of pick and choose. And so at the time, I only owned an NES. And it kind of sounds like most of you were sort of in the same boat where you had one or two systems. I had a, we had a turbographic 16 at that time, too. I forgot. That was supposed to be our upgrade from the NES. But I just kept playing the NES because, you know, better game. You had a sibling who loved video games also, right? Yeah. My brother.

dad love siblings. Your dad love siblings, yes. Also, your dad love video games. He didn't really, actually. He didn't have the patience to play them very much. My mistake. But he'd like watching us play them sometimes. Like, you thought it was cool if we could do it. But, yeah, my brother bought a Turbographic 16. Basically, when it was kind of new, I think he saved up money for it or something and her traded in a bunch of NES stuff that I was, that I regretted trading in. Yeah, the sibling factor is very important. back then. My brother helped, you know, go in split 50-50 on the NES hardware. And then he bought like two games. He bought MLB and he bought hoops. And then decided, eh, I don't care. So the NES kind of became mine. But it meant there was only the buying power of one person purchasing games for that system. So it limited the library. It was just my allowance, not his. Yeah.

I think we had given up on, well, my brother had given up on the NES at that point. And I had traded in Super Mario Bros. 3 for China Warrior, which is my great tragedy. Yeah, good pick. The whole time. But the sprites were so big. It must be good. It's crippling muscles and everything.

It was great. So Super Mario Bros. 3, I remember borrowing it for my friend over and over and over again because I just wanted to keep playing it. Like, he'd bring it over and spend the night, and we'd use the game genie and beat it while we were floating and stuff. It was fun. Good times. I think the Game Genie launched in 91, didn't it?

Was it 92? I think it was 91. Yeah. I loved that. So that transformed everything. Yeah. Oh, God. That was my favorite thing ever.

Yeah, so anyway, with this episode, we're going to do like I had intended to do with last episode, where each of us talks about one piece of hardware, and each of us talks about three notable games. But first I'll go through the list of games, notable games for the year. This is not a comprehensive list. It is an alphabetical list of things that are interesting. and we can each say one sentence about. There was the Action 52. Are you guys familiar with that?

Yes, but only from people making fun of it on the internet. Right. So here's the one sentence rundown. That was an unlicensed cartridge from... I don't remember. The Cheetah Men folks. Anyway, its whole gimmick was that it had 52 games on it on one NES cartridge and it cost $200. And all of the games were terrible.

but it did have Cheateman. Active enterprises. Active enterprises, that's right. I wanted it bad because I saw an ad for it in like EGM or something. It said, you know, 52 games. So I think I asked my mom to buy it for me, like mail order, but she never did. There you go. It's probably just as well.

That would have gone down with China Warrior with you in your dark memories. All right. Act Razor, which was originally one of the games I was going to highlight, but not enough people are talking about signed up for Sega stuff. So I nobly sacrificed my opportunity to talk about how great Act Razor is again. Instead, I'm going to talk about Tojam and Earl. So Act Razor, anyone have a one-sentence thought? Yeah, I had Act Razor near launch, and it just blew me away, like the soundtrack, especially.

Oh, they just... Wayo Records just put up pre-orders for the soundtrack. By the time this episode comes out and probably be too late, but actually, I think they keep their records in stock for a while. So it is one of the great video game soundtracks and, yeah, available now on CD and vinyl. Yeah, I think I go by that. Actraiser is the only game I ever beat on the Super NES through emulation. The only one I ever played through the whole thing, I think, because I didn't have it. And I think I was in high school, and Super NES emulators are new, and Actraiser was just a whole game I happened to download, and I thought it was great.

So it was fun. Yeah, that's interesting. I think the only game I ever beat on a Super NES emulator, like the only. only Super N.S. game was Final Fantasy 2, aka 4, which I had gotten to the final battle of on a rental and never finished. So I was like, I'm going to do this. But then I realized, eh, I don't really enjoy emulating games that much. There's just something off about this. So, yeah, that's my snobbish opinion. I've always felt that way. It's something, it's just one of those weird things. It's like there's a flag in my brain or something that's

not fulfilled when I'm using emulation. I use it all time for references and stuff, but not for playing that much. Adventure Island 2. Did anyone play this? I've heard good things about it, but it's one I've never had the chance to play. Yeah, I rented it when it came out. I'm pretty sure. I loved all those Adventure Island games, but never owned them for some reason at the time.

Yeah, I remember seeing it in stores, but it's not one I ever had. It's just neat, a platformer with more features than Adventure Island 1, I think. Pretty much. All right. There is another world, also known as Out of This World, which was a pretty ground. breaking game at the time with the use of polygonal graphics and rotoscoping and fancy effects like that, very cinematic, very punishing, very cruel, but cool. It's one of those you have to see it in motion because it's all about the low polygraphics,

but it's all about how they move. The frame rate's good, I think, isn't it? The frame rate's okay. I mean, I guess it depends on the platform you play on. It was originally an Amiga game, but it made its way to like everything, including consoles, where it was pretty choppy, but still impressive. developed pretty much by one guy, Eric Chahi. We've talked about, I think we've had an episode on another world, so we don't need to

belabor it. But a very influential game, kind of in the Prince of Persia vein, but taking it to the next level. I think I rented it on Super Eniass, and it was just so difficult. I didn't get into it. So I'm going to skip over the things people have put their names next to so we can talk about them in greater depth. But there is jumping ahead to Battle Toads. Anyone have angry memories about this one? Absolutely.

All right. Let's hear it. Chris, you've been quiet, so you get four sentences. Yeah, I didn't know anything about 71 or 81. So Battletoads was so appealing to me because, A, it's, it was pretty clearly like a riff on Ninja Turtles, which were still pretty huge in 91. B, they had like comics that ran a Nintendo power that were all about how cool Zitz, pimple, and rash were. Sheepard Christmas. And like the game looks good. Like the big, you know, punches, the big boots, like the foot that turns into the boot and everything.

It's a good looking game that's so appealing that is, like, should not be that hard. It is for babies. It is clearly for children. Why is it so hard? Because it is from the British microcomputer gaming heritage and therefore does not believe in playing fair, being completable. Um, like I said, I beat it once and I feel like that was just sheer luck. And I realize I should never go back and try to do that again. I'm pretty sure I rented it and I don't think I ever made it more than like halfway through.

I love side scrolling beat them ups. Like I love a final fight. I love a streets of rage. Uh, but even today I am wary. Like I was looking at streets of rage four, uh, like yesterday. And I couldn't figure out why I was so reluctant. to buy it because it looks good and I've read good reviews and I was like oh it's because of battle toads it's all because of battle toads it scarred you because i got so excited and rented it and uh when

you when you gave blockbuster five dollars there's a lot of money back then in those 1991 days you had to play that game all weekend and if you if you hit a wall you hit a wall yeah it was perhaps literally in this case that uh speeder bike stage was a lot of hitting walls oh The worst. We could do an entire episode on Battlethoods at some point. I guess we probably should. But anyway, next is on the list is Bible Adventures, another unlicensed game. There were a lot of these back in the day.

This one slipped beneath the radar, I think, by being a Super Mario Brothers two clone starring Noah. And I think the idea there was Wisdom Tree said, Nintendo won't sue us in America if we wrap ourselves in the Bible and they were right. If anybody wants to hear a full-length episode talking about Bible adventures and other Wisdom Tree games, episode Nintendo 64 of Apocrypals right here on the Greenlit Podcast Network.

Wow, nice. Check out. Well done. I did a slideshow about religious video games at one point, and this was one that I said was cool because I bought this. I think I bought it, you know, at a used game store just out of curiosity. I thought, wow, this is really neat because you can pick up animals and toss them in your ark. Oh, what?

Somebody got the power. So that was God's wrath. Anyway, another unlicensed game on the list here, Bubble Bath Babes, which was developed by... The opposite of Bible Adventures. The opposite of Bible Bath Adventures. I like that. Yes.

Next will have Bible Babes. Bible Babes. This was a part of a... a suite of semi-erotic video games released in Japan that a company called Penizian decided to release unlicensed in the U.S. And I actually never played this game, but I did see it because they had it at my local rental shop right next to all the other video games, like as a rental. It was a, you know, I grew up in a very conservative city.

So it was very strange to me that there were these three bubble bath babes and the other ones hot slots and peekaboo poker I think was the third one yeah I don't know it was weird why they were in your store because you were in a conservative place probably but they weren't behind a beaded curtain or anything it was just like right there right there

at Hastings right next to super warrior brothers three it wasn't alphabetized very well bubble bubble bubble bath babes surprise which one is which kids try them both see what your mom thinks it's a puzzle game isn't it where you arrange bubbles into

Yeah, and there's like a woman in the bath in the background. Yeah, I mean, was this still, was this still the era before the ESRB? Like, there was a whole period where retailers had not figured out the video games had more than one audience yet, I think. And so stuff was just kind of all shoved together. Yeah, the ESRB was still a couple of years away. Nintendo hadn't thrown Sega under the bus quite yet for a night trap. All right, moving along, there was Aya the Beholder, a first-person dungeon crawler based,

I believe on the Dungeons and Dragons license. It would almost have to be. I'm pretty sure beholders are a D&D thing. They are, this is the Coast intellectual property or TSR and intellectual property at the time. At the time. There's F0,

the futuristic racing game. It's one less than F1. Do you know how old I was when I got that? I was about 43. I was in my 20s when I got, oh, it's F0 like F1. Are you saying, that's real. You're not just making it up.

It's a pun on F1. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Well, I just got it at 39. Benj was today years old. Yeah. But yeah, I had F0 back on my Super Nintendo when I was in high school. And it's really, I know, I was about to say the only racing game, but I did also have Mario Kart. But, yeah, F0 was the one, like, semi-serious racing game that I actually got into back in the day, or really ever. I honestly feel like it's probably, in my experience at least, like the best racing game of its era, not just because like the racing is fun and exciting and fast, which it is, but like also it has characters and obviously we found out a lot about Captain Falcon over the years and how good he is at punching.

But we never really learned about Dr. Stewart or Pico or Simari Goro. There are quote unquote characters, but nowhere in the actual video game. only in the manual. They exist entirely and ancillate. It's like Ewox. You never hear their name on screen, but everyone knows that they're an Ewok.

Everyone knows that there is a samurai goro or whatever. Mr. EAD. All right. Next up, Final Fantasy Adventure. Secretly a mana game. Mana. Manna. Apparently, it's localized as mana now.

Sort of mana is what the remake was called. We've talked about this on the previous episode, so we can skip on ahead to Game Boy Wars, which, you know, was the 8-bit version of Advance Wars, which was actually the portable version of Famicom Wars. I did not know that. Yep. By the way, F-Zero was the bomb.

He didn't give me a chance for my sentence. Oh, okay, there's your sentence. What do you think of Game Boy Wars, Benj? I've never played it, but I've tried Famicom Wars once, and it was really neat. I wish we had it in America. I mean, it would have been really cool. Yeah, so it's a strategy game developed by intelligent systems, close personal friends of Nintendo for Nintendo systems and basically is a turn, like a side-based

military simulation where you control units and they get into battles and destroy each other and you can upgrade and so on and so forth. Pretty straightforward, like a very sort of stripped down take on the hex-based PC strategy simulation that was very kind of popular at the time. but, you know, a pretty good, a pretty good, uh, consolized interpretation of that genre. And it's all very like cute, rounded cartoony machines of war going at it. Yeah, they're so adorable. You just want to pinch their little cheeks while they're dying, uh, in mass. All right. Next up, Lagrange Point, which never came to the U.S.,

but is notable for being the technical highlight of the Famicom catalog in Japan. Does anyone want to jump in? explain why. I've heard the name, but it's escaping me. Oh, okay. I guess I'll monologue about this for force and inches. This had Jeremy Parrish written all over it. Lagrange Point was a Konami game that made use of one of Konami's special Japan-only mapper

chips that enhanced the capabilities of the super or the original NES, the Famicom. And everyone knows about the VRC6 that was in Castlevania 3 in Japan and gave it like all these extra sound channels. So the soundtrack was great and there was better animation. But LaGrange Point went a step above that and put an actual FM synth music chip in the cartridge. And so the soundtrack for this game actually sounds like basically a Sega Genesis game kind of blended with NES sounds. It's very, very complex. It's like, I want to say there's like 20 sound channels or something.

It's some crazy number. But it's a turn-based role-playing game, very fantasy star looking, very much in that vein. nothing really amazing or spectacular but the tech trick behind the soundtrack is crazy and I will to my own horn and say that I wrote the liner notes for the Lagrange Point

soundtrack release from ship to shore phono which is probably out of print at this point but I'm sure they will republish it someday maybe I don't know anyway very impressive the VRC 7 chip that it included was only used in one other game which was

a tiny tune adventures game in Japan that did not make use of the special sound chip. And so when it came over to the U.S., it was just a normal NES game. The end. I think that's why I never played it, because it's probably not, it didn't work on emulators or something at the time when I was trying a bunch of games. And it probably doesn't work on the flash carts because I don't know if they support, I don't know if EverDrive supports you guys at this point, support all those crazy mappers.

So it would have the expansion audio for sure. Yeah, I've got to try it out then. Yeah, definitely. It sounds great. It is, you know, there's a fan translation for it, so it's worth playing. That's awesome. Yeah, this is weird. That's one of the few really cool, weird Japanese NES games and our Famicom games. I've never really tried. I don't know why. Well, there you go. It's your fault. Jeremy, I'm blaming you. It's me. I suck the oxygen out of the room. All right. So, fortunately, the next guy we're going to talk about does not require oxygen because he's a robot. His name is Mega Man 4. That is his name. He gets a new name in every game. Like, Mega Man 2 starred. They tore down the original Mega Man, just dismantled them, and built a new one. Mega Man 2.

That's why the games are called what they are. Anyway, Mega Man 4, in my opinion, probably the worst of the NES Mega Man games. But you may have different opinions. No, I think 4 was pretty much where I burnt out on the NES series. I don't think 4 is bad. I don't know that it's terrible. But yeah, I had, I guess I started with 2 and I love 2 and 3. And so then I picked up 4 and I was like, eh.

it's okay and I stopped buying them five and six were the ones that definitely gave me the like oh we've stopped trying sort of feel which I think is it is not coincidental that I believe definitely for six and I think for five like X was out at the time already but I think four still pretty decent like I think the bosses are cool I like pharaoh man a lot as a design I think he's pretty cool so all right well I I disagree, but that's okay. If Mega Man 4 introduced the charge shot for the series, where you could hold down the fire button and Mega Man would charge up a superpower beam, which kind of gets rid of the whole point of changing weapons. And also, they hadn't really balanced the game around it. So you basically spend all your time just like standing in place, charging up a shot, shooting an enemy, destroying it in one shot.

Otherwise, it's really kind of tedious to play. It's still tedious that way. It's just tedious in a different way. And also the sound of your blaster charging up knocks out one of the audio channels. So it like diminishes the quality of the music when you're charging. So I have issues. I have issues. Wow.

All right. I gave up on at Mega Man 3. That's when I stopped Mega Man. Mega Man. Mega Man 6 is actually very good. But Mega Man 4. Nah. Yeah.

I wanted to buy that so bad. But my brother convinced me not to for some reason. He was like, no, buy China Warrior. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, probably he was like, turturb graphics man is the way to go. All right.

So also another robot in space, Metroid 2, that lady Metroid. Metroid's not a robot. She's such a cool automaton. She's like she could be in a near game. Yeah, unfortunately I missed this one. I had Metroid and then, of course, Super Metroid a little bit later.

But I actually didn't have a Game Boy at the time it came out. So I missed it. Didn't we have, didn't we do a whole episode on Metro? 2? I was on return. Not on Metroid 2, but we did talk about Metroid 2 in a Metroidvania episode and in a Metroid episode. It's been

discussed. Yeah, I don't like it that much. I had it when it was kind of new, and I didn't like the animations and stuff. It was tricky. Okay. I don't know. On the PC side of things, there was Monkey Island 2, Lechuk's Revenge,

which is not a game that I've really spent any time with playing, but I've certainly learned a lot about it. as I've been assembling the retrospective book for the Monkey Island anthology that limited run games is putting together. And I've, I've, I basically feel like I could finish the game with my eyes closed at this point. It's been very educational. But, uh, I know Bob is a huge fan of this game and has put together an episode dedicated entirely to it. So listen to that episode dedicated entirely to Monkey Island 2 and get yourself learned. Did you guys play much of this one?

No, I didn't have a PC. I mean, I'm sure I got a Mac. port eventually, but it was always, like, late. Well, fortunately, Bob is here to pick up our slack. I played the third one, which is, that's curse of Monkey Island. Curse of Monkey Island. Jeremy, did the episode where we play the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, did that ever get released? Yeah, that was a patron exclusive.

Okay, good. So if people have seen that, they know that I hate adventure games. I hate them so much. so the uh like what i i went back and played monkey island one and two after i played through three and i was like oh without like the voice acting and like the cute cartoony uh like animation style i do not like this as much like i can i can respect it but uh it was it was not for me and that's fair i'm more of a megaman two and three kind of person than a monkey island two kind of person But, you know, that's why, like I said, Bob picks up our slack.

So, hooray. Anyway, Parasol stars, sort of a spinoff sequel-ish sort of thing to Bubble Bobble, kind of spun off from Rainbow Island. It's a game where Bob and Bob are little fat kids, and they have little fat umbrellas, and they shoot little parasols around. I never really quite got this game. What's this game? What's up with this game?

It's all about avoiding rain with parasols. No, is that sun? I think they're multi-purpose Okay So what you're saying Is you don't actually know What the game is about I've played it

You know But it's not I play it for like two Five minutes Something like that I've got a There's a good port On Atari ST

If Parasol stars That play everyone's while It looks really nice But So you do know what it's about Yeah Don't you shoot rainbows Or something out of your parasol

That's rainbow islands Okay Then I don't know What it's about Okay This was a good conversation All right. Let's jump ahead to Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom and Adventure Game for Japanese PCs and NES by Hudson, which we've actually had an entire episode on. So you can listen to that. But if someone has opinions and wants to talk about Percy, then that is by all means, do it. I mean, yeah, this became a lot of memes, although maybe only on one message board. But yeah, you've got this sidekick Persimmon, which is basically the game's way of talking at you through an NPC.

see as your what you're sir cucumber i think you're a knight that's a cucumber trying to rescue the princess tomato uh but yeah your squires this little persimitin and he basically tells you what you're supposed to be doing as you go through puzzle solving and then every once and a while between episodes he drops all your stuff like and i'm pretty sure this was just like the game's mechanic about of like not having to have a huge inventory and getting rid of things you don't need anymore but it just comes off as your sidekick being annoying and incompetent so it is it is uh rife with humor potential, perhaps unintentionally, there. That's as good a description as I can possibly muster for myself.

All right. I love salad. You love salad? I love salad, yeah. You murderer. You can't believe you're eating all these adventure game heroes. Jumping ahead, there's Streets of Rage, which, again, we've done an entire episode on with, let's see, that was with John Linnaman and Stuart Jip.

earlier, I guess, at this point last year, 2020, but a great fighting game, kind of Sega's answer to final fight for Sega Genesis and influential both in terms of gameplay and design and in terms of music, because once again, that guy, Yuzo Koshiro of Act Razor fame, who we talked about earlier, pumped out some jams for this one. Yeah, that's like immediately what I think of with Streets of Rage is just Kosheros soundtracks. It's still, the themes are still resonant even today. This game is fun to play with one of my BX-95 joysticks.

That's right. I've got two of them just to play co-op streets of rage with my kids and it's really fun. Awesome. Yeah, I was never a Genesis fan, a Sega guy. I think we've talked about that before in my weird childhood to anti-capitalist feelings about the Genesis. Yeah, there was some weird classism going on. I remember. Yeah. And look, I know it's fake. I know it's all in my head from when I was a nine-year-old. But this is one of the ones where I have to admit, like, yeah, this, as much as I love Final Fight, like Streets of Rage is, it's better. Like, it is a more refined and more enjoyable game, I think. And I also only trust my fists because I know the police will not help me. That's not actually in the game, unfortunately. That is a meme that was.

But it's true It is true But I thought it was a real thing And I posted about it And then people were like You know, that's not real And I thought Well, that explains why I don't remember

Ever seeing it in the game But it's not like I was paying a lot of attention To the story in Streets of Rage I was just punching people on aliens Well, there are these streets And you're very angry Can I, I want to say one thing about the Genesis That may, I don't know, Chris

If you never liked the game pad on the Genesis, you know, the control pad, I don't know what they call it, but I never really liked Genesis games, but it turned out that I didn't really like the controller that much. So when I built my own joystick, the Genesis took on a whole new life because it's really good controls all of a sudden. Yeah, I don't know why, like, three buttons side, like in a line, that's a weird setup, right? For NES person, yeah, but otherwise. I mean, like, unless you play it, like, where you have your fingers on the buttons and some of your...

Yeah, if you play it like an arcade board, like, where you're hovering over the buttons, it makes more sense, but... Yeah, actually, that's the way I play with, like, my arcade joystick. I've got a finger on each button, so it does make more sense that way, I don't know. What do you do with your pinky? Just let it sit there, kind of. Hmm. You don't stick it out like you're digging tea. Both an arcade and bench's boxes are some...

I mean, your boxes are pretty substantial size. So, like, it makes more sense to have your whole hand over it than to, like, hover your whole hand over a little console controller. Yeah. All right. So there's streets of rage. And speaking of rage, there's super ghouls and ghosts. Everyone's favorite series, right? I heard it was real hard, so I didn't buy it. Okay.

Chris, this seems like the kind of game you would have played and been very angry about and then would have an anecdote about how angry you are. No, you nailed it. But that's it. Did I give away the story? Damn it. In the same way that I love Castlevania, but I have never beaten Castlevania one because it's difficult. Like, I never got into ghouls, ghosts, and or goblins. It's too hard, and then they make you play it again.

They do. This one at least has a double jump. Who made you play it again? Satan. The game. It just keeps going out. Satan makes you play it again because it's a, you know, it's a double jump. a trap devised by Satan. It's an illusion.

I did recently get, I bought Battle Princess Madeline, not realizing how much it was exactly that game. Satan again. Yep. But it's cute and fun. It looked pretty so. I liked looking at it in Nintendo Power and not

actually playing it. The story of Battle Princess Madeline being that the designer like played ghouls and ghosts with his daughter who's like a little kid and she liked it so much that he made her like a version of it. That's a really sweet story

except for the part where like I'm sure she enjoys it. I can't imagine an adult making me play that game as a kid. I would have had a nightmare, but I imagine I am not as good at video games as today's kids with their fortnights. I have

toyed with the idea of whenever I ground my children from video games because they're playing them too much and they don't do their schoolwork or something. I'd say like, here's an Atari 2,600 and a couple cartridges, this is all you get to play. I haven't tried it yet. What's the most, what's the best

punishment game? You could, like, Battle Toots might be a good one, I think. Yeah, goals and ghosts or whatever would be pretty, you know, gosh, those games are so insanely frustrating to me. I like that, Chris. Beat the Turbo Tunnel or no dessert for you. All right.

So we need to move along. There's Tecmo Super Bowl, which is like Tecmo Bowl, but it's more super. People still play this and tweak it for current players and rosters and stats. Amazing. People are such nerds. And sports people are the biggest nerds of all. Don't deny it.

How did they get away with that name? Tecmo Super Bowl. Yeah, because you can't like, like, the NFL is really protective of Super Bowl. Yeah, I think that was before the NFL got really protective. Yeah, this is 1991. things were different back then it was the Slightly Wild West and speaking of Slightly Wild West

there was Teenage Mutinyia Turtles, Turtles and Time how about that for a segue? Yeah, where the turtles could actually fight through the Wild West. Yeah, that was a great one. I love Turtles in Time. It just looked really, really good. It was like super bright colors in your eyes all the time

and then it just had like fun extra mechanics like the ability to like throw your enemies like into or out of the screen. It just did a lot of fun things. Great game. Really good. That is so cool. Like the first time you see it in, in 1991, like, throwing a dude at the screen. Like, that's so cool.

It is. And then they made a boss battle out of it, the mechanic, which was also just a cool idea. Well, you know, Battle Toads has that, too. That's true. That's true. It did happen in Battle Tud. But it's less cool. This game doesn't hate you is the difference.

That's true. It's true. I mean, it's a quarter muncher, but you can keep popping in quarters and eventually beat Shredder and Krang and, I don't know, Baxter Stockman. Let's see. Rounding things out, there is Treasure Master, a mediocre NES platformer that had a gimmick, which was not part of the game. The gimmick was that if you could beat the game and jump through some certain hoops, you could be entered into a contest to win some sort of enormous cash prize. Did any of you actually take part in this madness? No. No. When I bought the game used, you know, many years later, I was surprised to learn that that. That was part of its thing, because I didn't get the box or the manual.

And I just, I think it tells you on the first screen or something about the contest. So crazy. Really kind of limits the lifespan of that game. Like, oh, well, what's the point of playing it at this point? Yeah, the game is terrible as far as I remember. I said mediocre, but maybe it's terrible. It is terrible because I don't remember anything good about it. That's what my memories are sour.

It has been a long time since I played it for like three minutes on an emulator and said, okay, I'm done. So I don't remember the specifics. But yes, the meta game was the most interesting thing about it. And finally, there's Turrican 2, a game by Factor 5, I want to say. Very, you know, huge, huge kind of Contra-esque game, very popular in Europe. Never really caught on here too much, but the Europeans do love their Turricans. And, you know, I can understand because they only got Probotector.

They didn't get Contra. all right so that is our brief survey of notable video games for 1991 we're going to take a quick break and then when we come back we are going to talk about hardware and more significant games although you guys we didn't restrict ourselves to a single sentence so now we're going to have to jumble it up what's wrong with us I don't know I don't know but we'll find out after the break Thank you. Hi, Stu. Hi, Luke.

Do you fancy doing a podcast, covering every segment of every episode of the beloved 90s cartoon Animaniacs? No, I hate Animaniacs. Join me, Luke, the Warner lover, and him, Stu, the Warner Resister, for Animani Chat. Covering every segment of every episode of the hit 90s cartoon Animaniacs, as well as its many spinoffs, including comics, video games and the movie. Not to mention the recent reboot, it's going to be explaining to the max. Oh. On Apocry Pals, we talk about the parts of the Bible that a lot of people skip over Like the wizard battles, the angel jacuzis, a goat full of sins, 500 drunk elephants, and a man named Porky Party.

And yes, that's all really in there. All this and more on Apocrypals every other week on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Hi, I'm Ray, and this is my friend Alex. Hi. And we do a show called Norman Whoppers. Between us, we're as old as four RPG protagonists. And now Alex will give us a funny anagram for the name of the show. Big old knockers.

Join us every month or so on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Take a time machine back to before the world went to hell around the year 2000. The 80s and 90s were so rad. The movies, the music, the TV, the games? That's what I want to talk about. If you're cool enough, join us and listen to less than 2000. Because that's all we talk about. Adam and Chad live less than 2000.

All right. A break, by golly. Amazing. Now we are back, and we're going to talk about the hardware of the year, 1991. And we're going to start with the Links 2, which Benj wants to talk about. Yes, excellent. This is the second version of a console originally released in 1989, which I'm sure, did we do a 9s episode? I guess we did. It was two years ago. It has a 6502-based CPU of 160 by 102 screen resolution, which is super tiny. It's like a postage stamp. California Games, that's a pack-in game, and the links is the world's first handheld game console with a color LCD display, the original one. It began its life as a handy boy and engineering project at Epic's, the game developer, and then Atari bought the technology and release. it. And the length two was slightly smaller. It's, it is a lot. It's significantly smaller.

Okay. Yeah, I mean, I have both of them. And I guess it's, yeah, it trims off a lot, but it's thicker, which is weird. And it has a slightly better screen. The funny thing is it adds a stereo headphone jack or the original that didn't. And I don't even know if the game supports stereo audio that much has a power LED and the original didn't. The cartridges are easier to insert. The first one had a door that you had to open and then you put it in and then this one you just slide the cards in the back and I think it was launched at a $99 price um this still links too and so with a new marketing campaign and the battery life is an hour longer than the original at five hours supposedly and under yeah the links had extremely variable battery life it depended how

ambitious the game was because basically the the hardware had theoretically unlimited Sprite pushing capabilities with its blitter. But basically the more it did, the more sprites it pushed, the more power it consumed. So if you were playing a game that was really, really sprite intensive and did all

kinds of scaling and stuff, like, probably like blue lightning or something, it was just going to destroy batteries, whereas, you know, playing this Pac-Man was going to be like whatever. Yep. Six AA batteries, so a lot of batteries. And I, you know, I got a link's kind of

When it was still kind of new, as someone who called my BBS sold me their links just through the mail, and I got a link. I bought Ms. Pac-Man, and I got had Rigar and Batman returns or whatever, and it was pretty neat. All right. Well, I have a links too, which has been modded by McWill so that I can capture video from it. And I'm looking forward to a day when there is a different option available, such as the analog pocket, because it's kind of a cumbersome system. And also, when you play a vertically oriented game, because the screen could switch its, you know, orientation, or the, actually the screen didn't, but the system was designed to be ambidextrous, sort of. Playing that when you're outputting to an LCD screen, difficult. Not a fan. Yeah.

Anyway, the Links 2 did not turn around the Links as fortunes, and the system would basically cease to be a factor in the gaming market in 92, 93. but it was a good try two years late but Atari is saying oh this is actually what people want from a game system yeah

oh well the extremely low resolution is just crazy on that thing there's a serious lack of detail that's surprising even for that time I mean not for 1989

when it came out I mean the color of screen was expensive any resolution but I think that was a really big limiting factor in my opinion of the game games on that platform.

Yeah, you know, it could push a lot more sprites than Game Boy or Game Gear, but they were kind of shrunken down. So, you know, everything has compromises. And making a great portable system is the art of finding proper compromises. In fact, I had signed up to talk about the Mega CD, but I'll talk about the Game Gear instead, because that is the year that it launched 1991 in the U.S. and Europe. And to me, the Game Gear kind of represents Sega looking at both the game boy and the links and saying okay we've seen what works here we've seen what they do well

and what they do badly let's find a happy medium and so the game gear is a pretty good compromise kind of a midpoint between the low spec game boy and the higher spec links it has the exact same pixel resolution as the game boy but instead of being a monochrome greenish gray screen it is a full color screen in fact it is uh internally it's the the sigga Master System, but with a beefed-up visual, like a video system. So I think the Sega Master System had a maximum of, like, 56 colors or something, and Game Gear can do 256. I don't, those aren't the exact numbers. But basically, it had a much larger palette of colors to choose from and can display more games at a time, or more colors at a time. But it was possible to kind of cross-convert

Game Gear and Master System games. And a lot of the later Master System releases in Brazil and Europe, where the system kind of thrived and maintained its popularity actually started life on Game Gear and then were converted over from Game Gear to Master System. But at the same time, you also had early Game Gear releases that were conversions of Master System games. And instead of being, you know, when you get an NES to Game Boy conversion, it was always kind of rough.

But when you ported a Master System game to Game Gear, it usually turned out pretty well. like the system launched with Wonderboy or Return of DrenCon, if you are playing the American version. And it's a really solid conversion. It doesn't really feel compromised despite the lower screen resolution. So a really good system, in my opinion. And weirdly, you know, I've started covering all the other portable systems besides Game Boy on my YouTube channel. And Game Gear is the least popular of these.

I really figured it was going to be Links. but the links videos actually get a lot of views. They do better than Game Boy, whereas Game Gear is like, anytime I post a Game Gear video, I know my view count is just going to plummet. I'm going to lose subscribers. It's like people really,

really don't like Game Gear for some reason. It's bizarre. I thought it was much more popular than that. I can't figure it out. It's weird. The Game Gear, I never knew anyone who had a Game Gear ever. I did. Well, I know you now, but I didn't know you back then.

It doesn't count. well tell us about it it was bad it's not a great system I mean the obviously the battery life is infamously awful but even like the games that I had

were not fun like they they felt like to me as a kid and I'm sure that this is an unfair comparison but it is how I felt when I was kid there was no functional difference between playing a game on game gear and playing like a tiger electronics game in terms of like how enjoyable it was. It's just one was in color.

Man, I can't get behind that. Again, to me specifically, when I was 12 or whatever. I say like I had, you know, a few years ago I bought a McWill modded game gear. I think I sold it to Jeremy, but you did. And then I sent it to someone to have another mod applied to it. The USPS lost it. Very cool. Oh, my God.

Goodbye. Extremely cool waste of money. Yep. Yeah. There's a lot of systems that I never want to let go, but I was willing to let go of that. So that's all I got to say about the game gear. Like, I hoard everything but game gears. Oh, man, what is up with people's hate for the game gear?

It's not a bad system. I don't get it. All right. Whatever. Sega just released a little series of micro game gears that are in scale with like the mini Sega Genesis and the mega mini NES system and turbographics and everything. Which is a ludicrously tiny.

It's ridiculously small, pretty much unusable, but I bought all of them because they're so stupid. It's just such a dumb idea. I love it. And it still takes eight AA batteries. No, but they do take double A batteries. They don't have an internal battery, even though they have a USB power port. You can play it plugged into USB power, but then if you unplug it, then you have to use a double A battery or AAA maybe.

Wow. It's kind of weird. But, you know, one of them, you can buy a screen magnifier for it. And it actually does, like at that point, you know, it does feel kind of usable when you have that magnifier on there. But it's just goofy. I love it. Yeah, so you get like a power pack and a magnifier, and you can recreate the full, like, Game Boy add-on experience here. Yep. Yeah, so I did not know anyone who had a game gear back when they were viable. But when I was in college, this was probably a couple of years after it had effectively reached the end of its, maybe a year or two after it reached end of life in America and no one was really making game gear games. There was a girl I was seeing like dating. And one night we were just kind of sitting around. And all of a sudden she busts out a game gear with Sonic. And I was like, I feel like I don't even know you. Where did this come from?

She was like, oh, yeah. 20 minutes into game gear and chill, and she gives you this look. Pretty much. It was a surprise, not how I expected the night to go, but very, very, just memorable because I was just like, I had no idea this person was secretly a Sega nerd. All right. Anyway, also in 1991, the Mega CD, also known as the Sega CD, launched in Japan. That was a very good add-on, one of the few good add-on peripherals ever for a video game system. didn't fare too well here but the Japanese side of things

they got a lot of really good games and then finally Chris J Sims tell us about the Super NES it's great I don't know if you've heard of it I have heard of it yeah it's great

it was good I don't think there has ever been as big a shift in what games could be than going from like an NES to a Super Nias. Like, even going to a PlayStation or on down the line, like, I honestly feel like there's not a ton of difference between, like, a lot of games that were on PS3 and, like,

a lot of games are on, like, PS5 right now, right? Like, obviously, there are, like, qualitative differences, but it's not like, oh, this looks better. The Superanias, it had mode seven graphics, y'all, mode seven. That's six better than mode one. it's like getting one of those was like mind boggling uh because we've we've talked before and again i i believe this is something you know about jeremy but like super maria brothers three is pretty good uh and and holds up even today but going into like super maria world from that is wild it's so much more game like even in just how like big the individual levels are like going back to Mario Bros. 3, I think people often forget

how short those levels are. They're really great, but a lot of them are, like, tiny. The Mario World Levels are massive and have multiple exits. Yeah, Mario 3 levels are like tapas, and Super Mario World Levels are meals. Yeah. That's the perfect way to describe it. Thanks. And then, you know, you get, like, there are games on

Super NES that are still, like, they still feel good to play. Like, like, Link to the Past, I think, is still a really, really, really solid game. There was obviously, like, a little bit of, not every game is good, but I feel like a lot of the big games that are even a little disappointing are disappointing because people weren't sure what to do with it.

Like, I wrote down that I wanted to talk about Super Castlevania Four, which I think is not a great game, but I feel like its failings are because they just, they had too many options. they were like, well, we can do, like, we can rotate levels. We can have you swing the whip around. And then they didn't like build the rest of the game around those new ideas. Well, I feel like Super Castlevania 4, and I guess we're shifting topics now,

because this is another one you signed up for. I feel like Super Castlevania 4's biggest failing is that it wants to be something new, but it also wants to be classic Castlevania. And they didn't do a great job of reconciling those two things. things. So you have like the traditional power-up scheme where you can get these sub-weapons. But at the same time, Simon Belmont is way bigger. Like his sprite on-screen is bigger. He has the ability to whip in eight directions. And because he's bigger, his whip has more coverage of the screen. So for the most part, the sub-weapons are pretty useless because if you want to hit something, you just whip it. Just like

Devo said. I mean, his whip covers like half the screen. Whereas in, original Castlevania, it's, you know, a quarter of the screen at most. So, you know, like I'm saying basically the radius it can cover around Simon. And it was only in, you know, left or right. Whereas here, it's eight directions. If you see something, you can just go whoopsh and destroy it. And so why do you need the subweapons? It just feels like they said, this is what Castlevania has to be. But what if we did it new? Oops, didn't quite work. I feel like the inherent, since we're talking about Super Castlevania for, I feel like the inherent problem with that game is that they went backwards with it, right? Because it's essentially, Super Castlevania 4 could have been the first Castlevania game.

It's very straightforward. It's got that same premise. You're a Belmont in a castle going in for Dracula with a whip, right? Like, it is just the better, more polished version of Castlevania 1. Whereas if they would have continued on with what they had done in Castlevania 3, with, you know, the multiple characters, the different routes, you could take. I feel like that was where Castlevania wound up going. Like the best parts of Castlevania 2 that never worked in that game and the best parts of Castlevania 3 give us,

well, and Metroid and Zelda, like give us the modern, you know, Metrovania formula. And I feel like that's the biggest failing is that they just made the better version of Castlevania 1 instead of making Castlevania 4. Like I never think of this as Castlevania 4. I always just think of it as Super Castlevania, because that's what it is. Yeah, in Japan, it was just called Akamajo Dracula, which is the same title as the first game on Famicom Disc System. It just means, you know, Demon Castle Dracula. So this literally was presented in Japan as basically a retelling of the first game. And, you know, they did that multiple times.

There was Akomajo Dracula for the Sharp X68,000. There was Akomajo Dracula for MSX computer. And all of them are different. There was Akumajo Dracula in the arcade, which came here as Haunted Castle. I actually did a YouTube video on this a few months ago, and these are all basically Simon Belmont traveling through the castle, Kill and Dracula. And all of them have a slightly different take on it. Aesthetically, this is definitely the most different take on it. But, you know, in terms of mechanics, it just feels a little aimless.

Like, they couldn't quite figure it out. Yeah. If this had come out like today, it would be about Simon Belmont being a sad dad. Yeah, they did that with Lords of Shadow. Yeah, that's true. They definitely did. Yep. What a mess.

Lord of Shadow. All right. So Ben, Benj, do either of you want to stand up for the honor of Castlevania Four? Oh, it's a great game. But Chris's analysis is perfect spot on that it's just, it is like, you know, it's not like a logical progression of the gameplay advances from Castlevania 1, 2, 3, et cetera. but it's I like it I mean it's difficult but classic gameplay you actually didn't play it back today

but I got a chance to play it on the Super Nessini as many and it was a lot of fun it's not it's not a bad game but it's not especially for a it was a launch title right yeah like it

close looks good and plays well but it's it's not what if it was not called Castlevania, we would be talking about it in much more glowing terms. It lets you whip upward. That's my favorite thing about it.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's a fantastic game. It's just not where Castlevania ended up going. But I think there's a segue here into another launch game that I had stuck my name on Gradius 3, which also, which that one actually was, did come out at launch.

And I think that we got a lot of things like what Ben, sorry, what Chris was saying about the Super Nintendo being such a leap over the 8-bit NES that are just, like, there to show off, like, what we can do with this system. And so in this case, it was more like how much of the, like, much more impressive sort of arcade shooter experience can we fit onto a home console now? And I got, I got Gradius 3, I think, near launch. And it just blows you away with, like, these huge, colorful bosses that, like, are filling half the screen and just all this stuff that you can't imagine seeing in a home console game before

that. And I hadn't really been playing shooters and arcades. I wasn't making it out to arcades a lot at this time. So it just, I just remember really being blown away. But it's also a case of like reach slightly exceeding grasp in that like the game has horrible slowdown in a bunch of places because it's just, it's not willing to compromise on trying to shove as much of the arcade onto to this new console as it could. Yeah, the slowdown that this game suffers from, basically any time an enemy appears or shoots at you, the screen just kind of slows to a crawl.

And I think it kind of maxes out in the level with the bubbles that you're shooting. That was, you know, there's different theories about why so many early Super NES games had that issue. But whatever the case, someone by the alias of Viter Vitellia, went through a couple of years ago and basically reprogramed the game to take advantage of the advanced

SA1 mapper chip that Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Super Mario RPG ran on which is basically like the chip has a super NES chip like processor on it that is about five times as fast

as the actual super NES hardware so it like it can do all these things that the core hardware can't and it turns out that if you take away the slowdown in Gradius 3 it is an unbeatably difficult merciless punishing game it is so crazy hard so the sodom is actually a benefit it's a it's a secret feature that we never knew about But yes, there are actually quite a few Super Neos launch games on this list. So let's kind of bundle those together.

There's also Final Fantasy 4, which you have near your name next to Ben. Yeah, so Final Fantasy 4 was really kind of a turning point for me. I hadn't been, I hadn't been super into console RPGs before then. I had played like a friend's copy of Final Fantasy One a bit. it but hadn't really got into it because a lot of that game is a little aimless if you don't already know it. Final Fantasy 4 was amazing.

It was one of the first games we got to really focus on character stories and it all seems a little cliche now with the bad guy turns out to be related to the good guy and there's someone else pulling the strings and there's a lot of like telegraphed sacrifices and all these things that have been cliches now but we hadn't seen, especially in the U.S., up to that point

And so just like, and even though it was stripped down a bit from the Japanese release, just the depth of the systems and the characters and the world was just huge compared to anything we'd gotten in the U.S. at that point. And this is what really sucked me in and made me an RPG fanboy and a square fanboy for decades. So I will say that we had seen things like this in the U.S. But not on Nintendo systems, on Genesis. Fantasy Star 2 did a lot of this.

same, like covered a lot of the same beats as Final Fantasy 2 slash 4 a couple of years in advance. But the thing about Fantasy Star 2 is that its interface and its combat system, it's just a mess. It is, it is an indecipherable user interface. I hate it so much. Whereas Final Fantasy 4 takes, you know, the turn-based combat and gives it a real-time twist. So, you know. Yeah, this was the debut of the active time battle system, yeah. Right, kind of famously based on F1 races where cars are lapping each other.

Like the little meters that you saw for the active time battle meters in future games were kind of a visual representation of that. But it just made it so intuitive, even though it was a pretty challenging game and it turned real-time or turn-based combat into sort of a real-time hyperactive experience, it just felt very intuitive. It was kind of simple and it just made sense. whereas yeah console or you know RPG interface design was not always a a huge hit back at that time so i'd say that's a big part of what final fantasy two brought to the genre final fantasy four yeah the systems that it solidified just worked so well that that you know final fantasy stuck with most of them for five more games um and lord knows how many other franchises basically copied that set up all right i don't want to want this episode to turn into like hey let's talk about the amazing super nes

because we have a super A&S episode later this year for the system's 30th anniversary. So instead, let's talk about something completely different. Benj, tell us about ZZT or ZZT, if you prefer, if you're British. ZZT. Well, I love ZZT. I played it back in the day when it was relatively new because it was 91. I guess I downloaded it on a BBS or something in 92, probably. And so it was a program by Tim Sweeney, who's the CEO of Epic Games,

but he founded Potomac Computer Systems at the time. It's what it was called back then. And ZZT is an ASCII character-based game where the graphics are just, you know, letters and characters on IBM PC. And the cool thing about the game is that it is not only a game, but it's basically a game engine. so Tim he programmed the game engine first and like an editor and then made the worlds

like town of ZZT and all that stuff in the editor and the cool thing is he included the editor for free with the game even with the shareware version of the game and so people could build their own ZZT worlds and in fact

it was flexible enough it had its own little object-oriented programming language built into the game So it's flexible enough for people to turn, you know, do some genres that weren't expected. Instead of like an overhead sort of action adventure, you know, you walk around. Usually you walk around, you collect gems, you shoot monsters, you collect ammo, and you have torches for light and stuff. But people would use all those elements and the programmable elements to make, you know, weird, like, shooter games and racing games and Space Invaders things in the same ZZT engine. And it's amazing.

And it's cool because Tim later, he went to create the Unreal Engine just to make the game Unreal. And then that became their huge bread and butter for a very long time. Oh, it still is. Unreal Engine 4, I think, is what they're currently up to is, you know, it's kind of the backbone of many, many games. Yeah, and they're starting to use it. And, you know, like the Mandalorian uses its Unreal Engine to visualize things in real time. it's a really incredible product. So all that started was ZZT in 1991.

And it's cool because in 2009, Epic is a local game company for me. They're in Kerry, which is right next door. And I started, I don't know what happened. I think somebody invited me to some kind of local game development thing. And I met the people from Epic there. And then I asked if I could interview Tim about ZZT. And so we did a really cool long interview

and it was published on Gamma Sutra, I think, in 2009. And it's still a really cool in-depth look at the history of ZD-T, why, you know, how and why it was made and all that stuff. Yeah, you're lucky you got in before Fortnite. Now no one from Epic talks to anyone, anywhere. Yeah, they still talk to me sometimes just because I'm like, you know, from the old days. And I love their shareware history, you know.

I mean, Timmo's cool. We email each other. Oh, well, besties. That's great. Yeah. But he's great source. Like, he'll tell, you know, he'll give me a quote about anything. It's really neat.

Like, he last asked him about the Gravis game pad because there was some jazz jacket, grab it tie in with it. So anyway, that's, that's easy T. All right. Maybe you should also talk about Duke Nukem, which was, I feel like it's not really, yeah. I mean, it's, there's kind of, like, there's kind of, like a spirituality between the two of them that's shared. They're nothing alike in terms of games, but, you know, the people who made them would go on to do big things. Yeah, they're connected because, you know, Tim Sweeney was inspired by Scott Miller's Apogee Software. That Apogee

invented a modern shareware model where they provided the first episode of a game for free, and if you liked it, you sent money and bought the other episodes. Prior to that shareware was like, you get the whole game for free, if you like it, send us money. And there was no, like, carrot on a stick to really get people to pay for it. So Scott Miller figured out that model and did that with Cros, which was a Game, Kingdom of Crosse, which was a text-based game, kind of like ZVT. And then Duke Nukem was created, is designed by Todd Rapogel and Scott Miller and Alan Bloom III and George Brousard and all these Apogee guys.

And they were actually responding to Commander Keene, which was developed by ID software and published by Apogee, and was a very huge hit for Apogee and ID software. That was in 1990. And then Scott Miller wanted to do like an in-house, you know, version of that where they owned the whole rights to it. And so they developed their own EGA engine, and apparently John Carmack helped them with it a little bit, but it's not the exact same engine as commandant. and you're keen. And it's like an action platform shooter game where you play as Duke Newcomb, of course, and you jump around and you shoot enemies and collect little power-ups and, you know, Coke cans and stuff that give you points. So it's neat because it started a, as you know, started a franchise that went on to be pretty popular, famous. Yeah, I would say

the tale of Abbeji didn't turn out quite as well as the tale of Epic megagames, but for a while, they were a pretty big deal. Yeah, they turned into 3D realms. And according to Scott Miller, when I interviewed him in 90, I interviewed him in 2009, too, just like Tim Sweeney, because I was talking about shareware a lot back then. Duke Nukeb sold 70,000 copies, which was, I think it was even more than Commander Keen sold 50,000 or 60,000 copies. So it was a really huge hit for them at that time. Yeah, that's a lot when you're like, you know, a kid in your parents' basement making a video game for a little of nothing. Yeah, with no overhead.

The cool thing about BBS is they could just upload it to a BBS and it gets spread and shared by people. And you don't have to have a store presence. You don't have to duplicate. Well, they did duplicate disks and send them out, but they didn't have to print manuals and boxes and put them out in stores. You know, it's like publishing on demand. Like somebody buys a copy, you make a disc, you send it out. It's cool. Thanks.

Let's mix things up. Chris Sims, please. Tell us about Batman Return of the Joker. I have always been fascinated by media that has a sequel in a different medium. And this happens with comics a lot. But Batman Return of the Joker, I mean, very clearly, as it says in the name, this is the sequel to Batman 89. It's the sequel to the movie. The Joker comes back. or at least that's how it's positioned. And while this is not the height of like Batman being omnipresent in pop culture, which would have been like summer 89, it does come in that slight valley between summer of 89 when the bat symbol is like inescapable and then summer and fall of 92 when Batman Returns comes out and Batman the animated series starts on Fox. So this was, like, for me, as a kid who loved Batman and would watch, like, an hour or two of Batman 66 every day and was reading comics, this was kind of the bridge.

This was like the big new Batman media of the year. And it's good. It's really good. I think it honestly holds up pretty well for, you know, an 8-bit side-scrolling action game. It weirdly has, like, a pretty deep roster of villains. I feel like Firefly is in this, right? And I think maybe KG Beast is in it. But it's like a bridge between the movie and the comics, right?

Because it starts at the cathedral, which is where Batman 89 ends. But then you end up going to, like, Joker's secret base, which is the ha-ha-sienda. That's in the comics. That's nice. Yeah, it's a solid Batman game. Like, it's, well, it's a solid game. It's a weird Batman game because he does shoot people with a crossbow, which is not quite Batman's deal.

But it's a really good game, and I think it looks good and plays really well still. It's solid. And then it would be, I guess we would get a good Batman game in, like, 93. or 94 with the super nintendo uh batman the animated series adventures of batman robin game i guess what it was called uh but then it would be a while before archim asylum would come out so uh solid game looks good yeah it was a very visually impressive you had some big old chunky sprites uh you know for the nes s um and it showed up on genesis too where i guess the the big chunky sprites weren't quite as novel, but, you know, kind of Sunsoft flexing a little bit, showing off their 8-bit

programming chops, which is always impressive to see. Yeah. Batman looks good in the game, too. Like, his sprite is a really good Batman Sprite. It feels more like Comics Batman because he's blue rather than black. But I mean, like, I don't think black would have worked, given that that is most of the backgrounds. Right. But I like it.

I like it a lot. All right. So keeping things kind of on the Sega front, I did want to talk about Toajam and Earl. I've put my name down next to Sonic the Hedgehog, but I don't really know that we need to say too much more about that because we've talked a lot about Sonic the Hedgehog. Whereas To Jem and Earl, we've kind of briefly touched on in a rogue-like episode. But I don't know, the older I get, the more impressed I am with Toad Jamm and Earl, just because it's such a game that feels so far ahead of its time in some respects. You didn't really have many instances of rogue-like gameplay on consoles back then. You basically had Dragon Crystal and Fatal Labyrinth were pretty much the same game that Sega produced for a download system for Genesis in 1990, or actually for the Mega Drive.

It never came to the U.S. So it had to be like a randomized game, you know, very compact, very sort of minimalist. But that was pretty much it for the roguelike style, you know, procedurally generated. R-PGs with permanent death and use ID and things like that. And Tojama and Earl has all of that, but it's also, you wouldn't know what to look at it because it doesn't have that sort of rigid turn-based style. And also, it's about like goofy hip-hop aliens crashed on a planet looking for their spaceship parts while they're being harassed by Santa Claus and old ladies with shopping carts.

It's not really your typical rogue-like style, but it is. And it has two-player cooperative action, even though it's real like. So it's a pretty, I don't know, like very forward-thinking game. It was created by Human Nature Studios for Sega Genesis, kind of in partnership with Sega. And it was really just a game. It feels like, you know, the kind of thing that you see all the time now, but 30 years ago, no, you just, there was nothing like this out there. Yes, more like an indie, like a modern indie game takes that sort of, um, Attitude, you know, like silly, whimsical, weird, cool mixture of things.

I never really got into the first one for some reason, but I love the sequel, which is a different genre, basically, Panic on Concretron. Yeah, the sequel is just a platformer. Yeah, I love that game, though. I've talked about it. I had no idea. I had no idea that this game was a roguelike until, like, just recently. This was one I completely missed because, and I think it's because, you know,

just the name of the game, like Tojam made me kind of dismayed. miss it as like part of that wave of like kind of gross out yeah culture stuff which I was not into at all so I just completely didn't pay any attention to it and yeah I just recently found out that it was roguelike and I was like what it was what huh yeah so it's apparently much more interesting than I gave it credit for yeah I didn't realize that myself either until John Harris who guested on our rogue like episodes a few years ago wrote about it I think for gama sutra as part of his like chronicling the rogue like genre series. He had a column that was really, really good. It was like 50 episodes long. It was

very in-depth and detailed. But he highlighted this and said, hey, guess what? This game is a roguelike. Weird as that may be. I don't think it fits the Berlin interpretation because it's not turn-based. But other than that, it's very true to the form. But also, it's funky and weird. It has like this kind of cool like FM synthesis funk sound to the soundtrack. It's, you know, very much about kind of like, I wouldn't say hip-hop sling. It's more like surfer sling. It's just very kind of a goofy, almost non-violent game. Like there is a little bit of, you know, you have to avoid being attacked by old ladies with shopping carts.

But in terms of weapons, I think you can get like tomatoes and slingshots. And that's pretty much it. There's just not a lot of negativity. It's very much the human nature style is human nature studios to be sort of lighthearted and bring positivity into the world. So I'm a big fan. Yeah, I love the feel of the game, all of this, the To Jam games.

There's a weird one on Xbox, two, three, I think. Yeah, and then there was a sequel pretty recently called Back in the Groove, which is very true to the original Toad Jam and Earl. It makes things a little easier. It's got four-player cooperative action. There's more of a persistent meta-game running throughout it where you kind of like unlock things

have become permanent elements of the game, but it's otherwise very true to the original, and it does feel very much like it just fits right into the modern, kind of a contemporary indie landscape. All right. We need to wrap it up. So I'm going to be iconoclastic. And instead of talking about one or two of the remaining really big games we have in the list, like Zelda or Street Fighter 2, which we'll be talking about in depth later in other episodes. Ben, why did you tell us about Puyo Puyo? Puyo. I was hoping you were going to say that. so poyo poyo i got like i got into it for weird ass reasons there was like a shareware recreation of it on macintosh that i kind of became a ringer at in college and like we had tournaments um but yeah poyo pooho is an odd beast it's uh so probably most people have seen it at this point but it's a tile matching falling blocks kind of game um you have your poyos which are these little blobs that think like dragon quest slimes only even rounder and bigger eyes um

falling down in pairs or more depending on the game in different colors. If four or more of them connect, they pop, you can do chain reactions, you can send nuisance blocks to the other side. So it's a fairly standard following block formula, but just like pulled off really well. It feels really good to play. It's very different from, you know, Tetris, which was, of course, the other big thing back in the day.

And it's also got this weird history. It's a spinoff of like this little adventure game. Motto Monogatari from Compile that never made much of a splash but the characters came into this puzzle game to be characters in this sort of tournament puzzle that came to arcades while it was what was it originally on

now I've forgotten MSX Yeah MSX too but the version with all the the versus character stuff was in the arcade and then that came to home consoles and spun off into a million sequels. Eventually was required by Sega.

But the other interesting thing of is we didn't get over here as Puyo Poyo until just recently because other teams re-skinned it. So we had it as Dr. Robotnik's mean bean machine was just Pollo Pollo. And then Kirby's Avalanche is also just Pollo Pollo. And then we didn't really get it here. I think we got Poyo Pop on hand tilts online. like on NeoGeo Pocket Color. But then just recently we started getting Puyo Puyo versus Tetris.

It took like three years for that to be localized, too. It took forever. Yeah, yeah, it took a long, long time, but it finally came out. And it's just a great addictive game. And this is where it started back in 91, even though we didn't see it over here until much later. Did any of you guys played much Pollo Pollo? I like the Dr. Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine version.

It's really cool. You weren't a Kirby's avalanche guy. No, I don't know why. See, that's good. That's good. Get some Sega repping in here. It's not all Nintendo all the time, folks. Yeah, I think the NeoGeo Pocket Color was kind of where I've sort of discovered the series and was like, oh, this goes back a long way, which actually wasn't that long at the time. It was only like eight years.

But what do you know? And then the first E3 I attended in 2004, there was a little like small games pavilion off to the side. and they were showing Puyo 4 or Puyo 5, I think. I can't remember or something like that. I don't know. It was something for like a PC system just kind of off the show floor. And I was like, wow, they might actually localize this. That's wild.

So that was one of the first articles I ever wrote from an E3, focusing on the important things, you know, the stuff that people really want to read about. Yeah. Well, that's why your stuff was always cool. because you did hone in on the really quirky, cool stuff that other people weren't paying attention to. Yeah, thanks. That's just because I was only writing about stuff I really cared about.

That stuff that I could actually drive traffic with. And for some reason, I still ended up being EIC for a while. It was weird. I don't understand it. Anyway, so, yeah, that's a pretty big rundown through 1991. There are a few big things I mentioned, like a... We forgot civilization. Civilization, we did not talk about this episode, but we did have a civilization episode a few

months ago. We've talked about Zelda 3 as a link to the past in depth. See, I'm so old, I still call it Zelda 3. And Street Fighter 2, actually one of the projects I have in mind for 2021 for Retronauts is to do a survey through the Street Fighter series, like chapter by chapter. So there will be a Street Fighter 2 episode, maybe more than one. It may be one of those games that's so big we have to talk about the spinoffes. and the sequels or, you know, the alternate versions separately. But that'll be coming later this year. So look forward to that.

I don't think we need to belabor the point here. And like I said, we will be talking about the Super NES around launch time. There will be an episode on that. And I don't know. We've got a bunch of other stuff planned for the year 2021. So look forward to it. But in the meantime, this was 1991, not 2021. And we may do a 2011 episode if I can work up the will to

talk about Skyrim as if it were retro. I don't know, man. It's really, I've got an existential quandary here. I don't know why 2010 didn't seem so bad, but you get to 2011, it's like Dark Souls 2, Arkham, Arkham Knight, Skyrim. Like, I just, I can't. I can't do it. But it was two generations ago. That was, you know, we're up to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X now. And those were PS3, Xbox 360, so I don't know, man. I guess we've got to phase up to mortality at

some point. It's because these games have been ported to more modern systems. That's true. A lot of games from that. Bastian was 2011. Geez. Bastian? Bastian, yeah. And that's still good ports on stuff. Like, didn't just come out on the Switch not that long ago?

Yeah, I guess that's part of it is that I kind of blame Switch now that I think about it because it is such a like, you know, it's current hardware, but it's kind of like a generation ago spec. So it's a popular place. It's very successful. So it's a popular place for games to be regurgitated. So, yeah, things stay fresh and viable a lot longer than they used to.

It used to be like, well, that games six months old, we're never going to talk about it or sell it again. But that's not really the case anymore, which is good. I think it's good that games are, you know, staying in circulation longer and being ported to newer systems or, in the case of Xbox Series X, you've got backward compatibility that does a great job of keeping basically the entire Xbox 20-year history alive. It's fantastic. So yeah, nothing really to complain about there. But anyway, that's 1991. Nothing I was just talking about has anything to do with 1991. What can you do? Anyway, yes, thanks guys for joining us. This is the way. This has been Retronauts protecting Baby Yoda's

the year 2006. I'm Jeremy Parrish, and you can find Retronauts so many places. You can find us on various podcatchers. You can find us on the Greenlit Podcast Network. And, of course, you can find us at Patreon, where you can support the show by subscribing, getting every episode a week early in a higher bit rate quality with no advertisements. And if you subscribe for $5 a month or more,

you also get exclusive Patreon episodes every other Friday and weekend columns by Diamond Fight, which are also kind of like little mini podcasts now, now that he'd, yeah, Diamond does the reading of the columns. Boy, I cannot talk. That's a good thing I am not a podcast host or something. That'd be terrible. Anyway, so yes, check out Retronauts at Patreon and at other places

and give us a listen to the many, many years long back catalog now. At some point, our relaunch is going to be retro. We're almost there eight years ago. Wow. So, yeah, Benj, where can we find you on the Internet? Oh, probably at Twitter, at Benj Edwards. You can see my craziest, wildest exploits online. What are you exploiting?

Or who? Who are you exploiting, Benj? I see. Yeah, video games in particular joystick people. I just recently built and sold some joysticks for the first time all year, so that was cool. I sold 10 or 11, yeah. So it was neat.

Good Christmas money. All right. Ben, how about you? I'm also on the Twitters. You can find me there at Kieran, K-I-N-N, doing whatever it is I happen to be doing at the moment. And Chris Sims. Everybody can find me by going to T-H-E-I-S-B. That is my website and has links to all the stuff that I do.

I have recently launched a couple of new projects. One of them is a podcast called Every Pind Ever, which is about my wife and I ranking all the ice cream we eat and also just being extremely married. And I'm about to get started with a new little writing project that I am calling Castlemania, which I know that title has been used for something before. I'm absolutely sure. an online retailer called Castlemania Games. There you go. I buy stuff from them sometimes. I am going to be ranking all the Metroidvanias that I play.

So I just replayed Kazim so I can have a nice controversial entry for bottom of the list to start off with. Excuse me, sir. Yeah, sorry, strong opinions. Both of those are going to be Patreon exclusive through Warrockety Jacks, which is a fantastic podcast that's been running for nine years. And it's right here on the Greenlit Podcast Network. All right. And please don't go listen to Chris slamming chasm. It's a very good game.

I love it so much that I put together a 64-page book on it for the limited run release. So dissenting opinions, sir. I have the vested interest in promoting chasm. No, because the sale period has already ended. Limited run has closed sales. So I make nothing from this. It is just a fact of life. Anyway, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite

and doing YouTube stuff on YouTube under my name, Jeremy Parrish. In a couple of months, I'm actually going to start really recalibrating the video work series and talking about Sega's SG-1000 leading up to the master system, which will eventually come even with the NES chronology and then from that point forward, it'll be all systems all the time. It'll be great.

So that's my mad scheme. And, of course, that's supported through Patreon also, but so is Retronauts, and so is Chris. So, you know, there's so many patrons out there. I understand if you can't afford them all. It's totally fine. I'm not going to take it personally. Please watch my videos and share them.

Listen to these podcasts, share them. And just enjoy the fact that the games of 1991 that we talked about. So many of them are still available. to play now. So go play some of them and enjoy them. It will be great and you will love it. All right. Thanks everyone for listening. Catch you in probably like five or six days or seven days. I don't know. It'll be the next time a podcast is up. Yeah. I'm going to stop talking now. Thanks. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.