Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 383: Delisted Games

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

Jeremy Parish, Stuart Gipp, and delistedgames.com curator Shawn Sackenheim convene to discuss... well, delisted games. Inspired by Sony's recent PSN delisting fakeout, we look at multiple digital platforms whose games can no longer be acquired legally. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, Ave, Jim Ryan. Nos Morituriate Salutumus. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish. And this week, we are saluting Jim Ryan as we march to our deaths. Actually, not our deaths. The deaths of many, mini video games. And he's given them a stay of execution. But we know that Jim Ryan is ultimately a cruel God who has no mercy for anyone. And therefore, these games have only received a temporary reprieve.

That's right. We're talking, well, this episode is specifically sort of prompted by the recent kerfuffle online, where Sony said, yeah, we're shutting down basically online support for, you know, store support for every legacy platform we've ever managed. And there was a big outcry, and people said, but wait, you know, there are lots of games that I still would like to purchase. And Sony for once said, oh, well, okay, well, we'll, we'll change that. We won't, we won't shut things down immediately. So those systems, PSP, PS3, Vita, were given a stay of execution, but the question is for how long? And so, you know, around the same time, I got a message from some guy going under the alias delisted games who is like, hey, this is, this would be a good thing for us to talk about on retronauts. And I said, absolutely. And at the same time, our very own store. Jip put together a list of PlayStation legacy games worth purchasing on these

storefronts before they are shut down. So all these things kind of snowballed together and we are hosting or recording an episode now. And this is a very kind of loosely planned episode. I don't have a lot of concrete details that I think we should cover. It's not going to be a very rigid conversation. I would like for this to be more of a free-form conversation, just going over kind of the history of, you know, what we can know of the history of delisted games and what it means for a game to be delisted and why it's bad. And just kind of highlighting some games that would be worth picking up and playing, you know, acquiring in some capacity before they are taken offline for good. So with me, Jeremy Parrish, here on this episode, we have,

first of all, our regular, a longtime contributor, three years now. Yes, hello. I was for a second No, it's just like, is that me? That sounds like me, but it might not be. No, yes, that's me. Hello, I'm Stuart Jip. I have never been delisted, but I feel like I might get blacklisted sometime. Delisting is the video game equivalent of cancellation, although the Sony thing was actually how cancellation works,

where people are like, oh, they've been cancelled, and then they're not actually. It's just a lot of press, and, you know, they make a lot of money off sales because people are like, oh, cancellation. So cancellation doesn't really exist. D-listing does. When you appear across multiple media formats, it's explaining you're not allowed to talk, basically. Exactly.

I have no platform, they say in the New York Times. From multiple platforms. That's right. So, yes. Cancel culture is the same in video game delistings as it is in celebrity life. Anyway, enough with the politics. Who else do we have here on this episode?

Sean Sackenheim, the proprietor of one of the in contention for one of the saddestest video game sites on the internet, I think, delistedgames.com. And it is a fantastic resource that you run, Sean. In fact, as I was putting together lists of games, you know, I was going to sit down and really hammer out, like, very detailed lists of games across different platforms that have been delisted. But then, you know, when I started to do searches for it, the main thing that came up was your site, and it's extraordinarily comprehensive. And, And so I just throw in some links to your site in the notes because you've done the hard work

for me. So thank you for that. Yeah. Thank you very much. It's great to hear. So let me ask you what, just tell me a little bit about the history of the games, the delisted games website and your own kind of involvement there and what motivated you to start doing this, just the history there, basically.

Sure. It started back on my personal YouTube channel. that is now itself delisted, thanks to Google. It was, I don't know, like 2015 or 2016. I was looking through everything I had on my Xbox 360 hard drive and saw a bunch of games that I knew had been delisted and some other ones I found out were later, I found out later had been delisted.

And I was like, you know, somebody should like look up anything about, like, why it's gone. Like, you can, you know, Wikipedia will tell you when a game came out and who made it stories from production, but nobody really, like it ends there. They might say this game was delisted, but then a lot of entries don't really look into why or when it disappeared. And I thought, you know, that'd be an interesting angle to take. Like here's some archival or, you know,

without so much commentary over top of it, footage of games that are delisted and a little, a little frame at the beginning where I typed up a little bit of info about it. And then I kept getting comment after comment of people, saying, where can I get it? And I'd type a reply and tell them, you know, it's, it's on PS3 or it's on Steam. And then like a week later, someone else would comment and say, where can I get it? And I was like, I'm tired of typing the same thing over and over. I'm just going to make a site. That's a good idea. And so that's where it kind of came from.

And, yeah, like the, the idea, like the concept, the phenomenon, I guess, of delisting of games is something, you know, fairly recent. Um, because it's only been really since the advent of digital distribution platforms that it's become an issue. Prior to, you know, online-only, digital-only sales, especially on closed platforms, you know, games were, they would, they would, you know, eventually stop being published, but they were published on physical media. So those physical media, you know, that actual, tangible, possessable thing that held the games, you could always acquire those. It might not be affordable. It might be very expensive, you know, but it would still be out there extant in some

form. Whereas once you get to digital storefronts, that ceases to be the case. You know, you have these products that are only available digitally, that are only available, you know, on Sony's proprietary store, or Nintendo's proprietary store, or Apple. proprietary store. And, you know, they are lord and master of their own walled gardens. They, if, if a game ceases to be available through their platform, then that's it. Like, what do you do? You can't go to a used game shop and buy a delisted game that was never published physically. I mean, that's, um, one of the reasons I started working at limited run games, because they have made taking digital only games and putting them in physical media.

a big part of their mission. And of course, it's not the only thing they do. And certainly, limited run games, their curation efforts are not comprehensive in any way. There are so many games being published every week, just probably, if you look across all platforms, dozens, maybe hundreds sometimes, if you include like iOS and Android. Like, that's a lot of games. And limited run publishes like three games a week. So, you know, there's no way we can even, yeah, No way we can even begin to chip away that iceberg. But, you know, I think every little bit helps. And since I've been working there, they've really made a transition away from, we are only printing like 1,000 copies of this game to we are selling this game for four to six weeks. And anyone who places an order for it can have it. So, you know, it keeps a lot more games in circulation. And, you know, there are more copies of those games out there now. And that's good. But again, it's not even a, at the tip of the iceberg. It's like a tiny little chip off the front of the iceberg. You get a little sander and you can polish it up and no one would even notice.

But nevertheless, you know, it is an effort. And it's good to see that happening with various different publishers who have kind of made this their business. I think that's just one thing I want to pick up. I'm not sure if it's exactly the same. But I think the delisted issue goes back further than you might expect. I mean, the first thing that I can think of, and I'm sure there are earlier examples, is stuff like the Sega Channel, which had games that you could only access while they were available on there. Absolutely. There was an expanded version of this Garfield Mega Drive game that has several extra levels that have never been recovered.

You can't download the ROM. They're just not available because they were only there streaming or whatever for however many weeks, and then they were gone, and that was the only time that was available. So I'm sure there are earlier examples as well with things like bulletin boards, but I don't know them, unfortunately. Sateleview is the thing that always comes to mind. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean, you can trace this back into the 70s and the Plato platform where you just

had this one networked system and everything was kind of virtual access. And like, where are those games now? There's some formative roguikes and other, you know, RPGs on there. But those are basically vanished into the either. So, yeah, it's always been an issue. But, of course, that wasn't, like, Plato wasn't really a commercial concern. and it wasn't something that was sold. Whereas, yeah, talking about...

No, Plato, classic mini. No, afraid not. It would be like a tiny little diorama of a room. It was a quote-unquote mini-computer, which means it filled an entire room. But yeah, like there were on the Japanese Famicom, there were services, like that banking service that only existed.

it online. So, yeah, for sure. Like, this has been an issue for almost as long as there have been video games, but those were pretty much niche exceptions. I mean, there were a few dozen games published on Satellivu on the Sega network, whereas now it's a few dozen games a week. So it's just, you know, like those were those were kind of signs of the future, but now we are in the future and the future sucks. And I remember, you know, early on when I was working at OneUp.com, so it'd be like 2004, 2005, I was always complaining about like, hey, these digital service type games, you know, MMOs and that sort of thing, like, these really suck because if you're a fan of these and you want to go back 20 years later

and play them, you don't have the opportunity. You won't be able to. Like they, they're totally tied to platforms and to publishers and to, you know, their benevolence and, you know, how long can they make a profit off running this thing, and then it goes away. And obviously there have been exceptions, you know, like homebrew servers for certain MMOs or in the case of World of Warcraft, like you can go and buy the 2004 version of Warcraft and play that as World of Warcraft Classic or whatever it's called. But those are, you know, again, exceptions to the rule. And the rule is basically like those things, they're just going to go away.

And I was already kind of spending a lot of time, my energy and effort wallowing in memories of playing video games 10, 15 years past. And just kind of looking forward, I was like, I, you know, what if I can't do that about what I'm playing and enjoying now? That really sucks. And so I limited it. And everyone said, so, who cares? Like, just play the damn game.

So, you know, I think that kind of speaks to the general attitude. like people don't really care about this until suddenly they do and suddenly something they want is gone and then they're like wait a minute how dare they there's indignation but but on the whole it's just like one of those kind of background problems that no one really thinks about it's the you know what what douglas adams called the somebody else's problem field uh you know it's just you don't notice it because it's somebody else's problem right it didn't help that it started out you know the early especially the early console side deal listings were only it's like a game that was really not popular or a licensed game that was pretty bad. And so people, the general response from a lot of people was good, which it's not, in most cases, not good to completely delete a game from history. But that's, you know, kind of that like knee-jerk, popular reaction. Yeah, I think a lot of the first really Yeah, I think a lot of the first really visible delistings happened on virtual console.

for Wii. And they were games that you could still buy in cartridge format. If you went to the retro shop or, you know, you found a really musty game stop someplace. It would still have the cartridge someplace just kicking around or eBay. Like, you know, SimCity or Teenage Mutinyed Turtles. Like, it's not like those, those games are hard to find. Like, you can find SimCity for Super NES pretty easily. They sold like a million copies of TM&T for NES. It's not going to break anyone's hard if you can't buy that, you know, digitally because it still exists out there. Titles, like, it's slightly different, but titles, we wear stuff like the Gradius, California and Contra rebirth games, they've not resurfaced anywhere as far as I know.

And they weren't even, like, bad at all. They were really good. So there's just three excellent Konami, like, M2 throwback games that are just in the ether now. And I don't understand why they haven't packaged them together and put them out, because I'm sure they would do. at least somewhat well. I would buy at least one copy. Yes. Yeah, as a bonus on one of the other eight times

that they've repackaged Castlevania games, they could just throw that on there. When they did the Canami anniversary collection recently, before they announced what it was going to be, I was like, oh, there we go, it's going to be the rebirth games. But no, they didn't remotely show up on that. I was really surprised, to be honest,

because it feels like, but then again, it's Konami, so God knows what they're thinking at any time. Right, yeah. Yeah, maybe they exactly. They can't access it any longer or something. Who knows where it is? No, I don't think that's the case. Like, those are definitely around.

Those are only like 10, 12 years old at this point. And they weren't just held by Konami. They weren't developed internally. They were developed by M2. And M2 is, I think, very meticulous about curation and preservation. That's kind of what they do. So, yeah, I think it's just a matter of companies need to be convinced that there is value to bringing these old games, making them available, to, you know, to keeping them in circulation.

And, you know, limited run does have a relationship with Konami since we're publishing the Castlevania Collection. And I don't think it's spoiling to, not spoiling, but I don't think I'd get in trouble for saying, like, we've tried to impress on them. Hey, there's a lot of really cool stuff in your back catalog that you guys need to resurface. And I don't have anything that, you know, any concrete news or information about that, like if there have been results. But certainly, like, you know, whether or not they're listening, certainly there are people who have, you know, an ear, like a direct ear, a direct line to someone at the corporation saying, this is good, this is important.

So, you know, it's not for a lack of, I think, enthusiasm by the fan base. And there are lots of other publishers that kind of have made their business, you know, keeping old games in circulation like digital eclipse just you know there's a bunch of there's a bunch of M2 is one of them and so yeah it's just a matter of kind of

making the case to the right person and I guess the right person being in the right mood at the right time and saying ah we need to do this yes so you know it is it is kind of there's a lot of gatekeeping like I said the wall to garden is really

frustrating but you know and then it has to lineup with, uh, the first party publishers, uh, you know, because who knows when they'll just decide, uh, we're going to shut off the servers. I mean, you know, when Nintendo shut off its, uh, Wi-Fi service, that cut off access to a ton of DS games and Wii games that had, you know, content that was locked online. Uh, for example, like, if you bought a brand new copy of Dragon Quest 9 at this point, which was a huge, like, you know, it sold four million copies or something worldwide, five million. Um, but there was a ton of stuff. that was time released by connecting to Wi-Fi and by, you know, going online. And you can't access

those things anymore because the Wi-Fi service is gone. All of the bonus puzzles in Professor Leighton in the entire series as well, they're not accessible anymore without hacks, I don't think. Yeah. Right. And so it does a lot of this, you know, things like that where there's stuff on the cartridge that just has to be unlocked online. Like people complained about, hey, why do I have to pay five bucks for this sort of thing? And yeah, that is, that is crappy. Like, It's, you know, literally just a string of code. You're paying five bucks for a string of code that says, okay, unlock this. But the plus side of that kind of mercenary business practice is that that code, that data exists on the actual, you know, CD or cartridge.

So you can at least access it somehow if you, if you hack it right. Whereas stuff that was pushed from a server, like an actual sizable one gigabyte download, like what are you going to do? you know, 10 years from now, when you want to play, I don't know, GTA online. I'm assuming that at that point, they will finally no longer, like, people will no longer be playing GTA online. I don't know. Maybe, maybe GTA5 will still be, like, the best selling game in the world and still, like, coming out for every platform, but.

It might be the only game left. It could be, but, but, you know, like, what are you going to do with all that data that is, it only exists on Rockstar servers and not on, you know, not on the, the, the, the, the disks themselves. So it is a tricky issue. And it's, you know, like I said, the industry doesn't have a huge interest in preserving and maintaining that stuff because they're just not going to make a lot of money off of it. Looking at the lists on delistedgames.com and sort of recent higher profile delistings like, I know it's back now, but like Scott Pilgrim and stuff like that, I mean, license games seem to have a pretty low run in general.

There was stuff like Marvel Ultimate Alliance that sort of came and went and then came and went again. Yeah. So the licensing, on top of everything else that we've talked about, licensing seems to be a massive problem with these games. Yeah. Yeah, it's almost always a licensing thing first. If it's not a developer or publisher shutting down or stopping down or stopping working on a certain platform and just like pulling all their stuff down. It's it's almost always the license of some kind. Yeah. I mean, there's there's also the the element of just a publisher saying, well,

you know, is it worth going through all these hoops, you know, getting something re-registered and, you know, maybe there are licenses to re-up or getting a new ESRB rating. Like, you have to go through a lot of hoops to get something back into circulation. And I will say that there have been some products that we've been involved with at Limited Run where it was really an uphill battle to convince the publisher like, hey, this is good, but we knew there was a demand for something, you know, for those games. And so we also realized that once we kind of, if we are able to get it out there and publish it and able to say, look, people want this. They were excited. They bought it. It's going to open the floodgates. And these companies are going to be more receptive in

the future to saying, oh, we made a big fat stack of loot off this last thing we did. So let's make more big fat stacks of loot. So, you know, I think it's just getting over that initial kind of hump, you know, that proving the case that it is worth doing this, that there is value in it. That's kind of the challenge. And that's one of the things that I know a lot of companies, publishers or like small boutique publishers like Limited Run are are definitely working on, you know, behind the scenes. Just getting past that first initial push.

And, you know, I think with a lot of things, there is. this excited fan base out there, like an audience that's eager to play these things, these great games from five, 10, 20 years ago. And it's just a matter of getting the numbers and saying it's actually worth it. So I'm really hoping that, you know, the work that we're doing and digital eclipse and so forth really helps big publishers to realize, you know, like this is good. There's money in this stuff that is literally just sitting around. not doing anything for us. We can put this to work for us,

and we can make money off of it. What a crazy idea. Yeah, and then capitalize on the success of that and maybe make something new, God forbid. Well, let's not get crazy, but... But yes, I mean, that's always a possibility, too. But just the idea of making certain that games stay in circulation,

and just because the hardware is obsolete, It doesn't mean the game itself is no longer good or fun. It doesn't mean people don't want to enjoy and play that game. Like, you look at something like, you know, I mentioned Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles earlier. Like the arcade games, people still love to play those. People still love stuff like, you know, any of those multiplayer, four, six player, just messy, stupid brawlers. Like, those are eternally popular.

Like when you go to conventions, you know, RIP conventions, those arcade machines always had you know in the the kind of retro arcade areas they always had crowds around them people just wanting to play X-Men or Simpsons or something because they're good dumb fun and both of those did actually come out on the 360 by backbone I think but then they were then themselves delisted so I'm hoping they'll come back at some point but I was surprised to see I was hopeful that that would happen after the that arcade one up version of Ninja Turtles a couple years ago, but it didn't extend out into a new digital release for that one.

I wonder if the current Shredders Revenge, the new one that's very, very similar to turtles in time, might prompt re-releases of some sort, but you never know, unfortunately. I mean, that's the kind of thing, like, that's the kind of game where you can, you can just see them, including the original as an unlockable, but I guess, I guess these days they don't do that. It's like, why get someone something for free when you can upsell? Yeah, a couple of, well, it was just last year, 2020, I gave away a copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Battle Nexus 2

that had an unlockable version of the 1989 arcade game in it. And that's one of the last times I can think of a whole old game being just in there as an unlockable. It would be remiss of me to point this out, and I apologize, because it is a slight tangent, but that version of the game, it's got old, they changed all the music. They changed it to music from the 2003 cartoon. They should never have, I mean, you know, they tried.

A good blessing for trying, I suppose. Right. Yeah, it's playable, but not the real spirit. Not the version you want. It's the version we've got. All right, so I think we've made the case for delisting bad access to classic games good. So I do want to kind of just go through, you know, some of the platforms that have really suffered from this and talk about why and maybe some notable games that are worth pointing out, worth playing, or, you know, grabbing before it's too late or finding some way. Or, you know, just be sad that you'll never get to play them. Whatever.

To begin with, there's iOS. And I noticed that your site, Sean, does not have, it has an iOS page, but it's just like a paragraph that says, yeah, there's a lot of stuff on there. Yeah, don't listen to them. It's only me working on the site. And so iOS and Android, like, Flash, you know, like to keep track of every Flash game that ever happened is just, That's amazing feat. It would take, like, teams of people to keep up with, like the archive project that's going on with Flash stuff.

But, yeah, iOS, I kind of cut it off at consoles. I've always been more of a console person anyway, so that's where I had the most stuff, and that's where I started and kind of spread out into Steam and good old games and epic now. Well, all I know is on my old iPod Touch, when they updated it to 64-bit architecture or whatever it was, I lost access to my copy of the Macintosh game Glider,

and that basically changed me forever. I was very, very depressed as a result, because I love Glider. I love it so much. You don't even know. I don't know what other games there were. I do care about Glider in this case, but, yeah, it was a sad time. Yeah, I would say of all the platforms in the world,

iOS is probably the single platform to suffer from the greatest number of delisted games. And Stuart, you mentioned the 64-bit transition, and that really was a huge kind of cutting-off point. That was 2018 when they kind of put their foot down and said, okay, we've been using 64-bit architecture for a while. And if you want an app to run from this point on, it has to be updated from a 32-bit program to 64-bit. And most programs designed for the 32-bit environment, just most publishers, most developers didn't care or didn't have the resources or couldn't be arced. And, you know, weren't operating anymore. Right. And, you know, I do think iOS is an interesting case because it does kind of raise the question of whether or not every video game is necessarily worth preserving.

Like, we always talk about the classics. We talk about, you know, Castlevania, you know, crap, what was it called, the M2 made, rebirth. A reburth. A reburth. The Adventure Rebirth. Yes. So big popular brands or franchises, big popular platforms, you know, things people love.

That's what we always talk about. Scott Pilgrim. But, like, if you look at most of what comes out on iOS, it is just literally, some of it is just the lowest possible effort garbage. I mean, there are so many games that are just, you look at a bunch of games and they're all exactly the same with, like, some superficial changes in a new name. So it can be resold. And a lot of these are just, you know, link farms, ad farms, almost zero value in terms of gameplay or entertainment. And it, you know, do those things necessarily need to be preserved from the objective perspective? Sure, it's, it would be good to have them, you know, archive someplace just to say, hey, these existed.

But I mean, does anybody really care about like baby doll surgery 2013 if you can't play that anymore? I want my children's children to play Frozen Elsa pregnant. Exactly. So, yeah, it does, it does kind of, you know, I always. just the sheer number of games that are no longer available and the sheer ratio of crap to good really does kind of strain, I think, the limits of this whole conversation. And all the same when it happened to me, because I put off the update for as long as I possibly could, it would prompt me like twice a day, every day, like update this now and I'd be like, no.

And then eventually I did, I just gave up. And, you know, I lost access to probably, like, a fifth of the stuff that I bought and paid for. And the only way I could get that back now would be to get an old device that hadn't been updated and then ignore the updates again. I mean, when it happened, I think even really huge stuff, like the original Infinity Blade, didn't work anymore. And that was a massive game. That was, like, one of the first big iOS games. I think it's been updated since then. But in a way, it's probably one of the more outrageous sort of de-listing.

that has been simply because it was just a case of not only are we stopped, not only we're not allowing this, but you won't be able to play your old games that you may have paid real money for. And there's no way around it besides, well, probably, probably hacking, I suppose, but there's no legitimate way around it, you know. Right. Yeah. Yeah, Infinity Blade is a great example because it was, it was held up by Apple. I remember going to, you know, like press events, some of the last press events where Steve Jobs was alive and, you know, them having that game out there and being like, look at what you can do on an iPad. It's a real honest to God video game. It's legit. It wasn't packed with microtransactions. It was a pay once up front and buy it. This was before, you know, Candy Crush saga and everyone realized like, hey, if you give people a game for free and then, you know, make sure that the design at some point is really broken. So they have to buy, they have to pay micro transactions to make progress once they're hooked. That's a much more. profitable approach. This was, you know, kind of the old, the old model, the classic, you know, package retail model. And as such, it was, you know, a very classic style game. And it was a great

proof of concept for the iOS platform because it was, it was a demonstration that, hey, you could have a console style, you know, arcade style action game that looked great and played pretty good, played pretty well, good, well, yes. And pay whatever it was, 1499 up front. And there you go. You've got it. And, you know, the platform definitely made transitions from there. And the studio behind Infinity Blade chair, you know, their boss, Donald Mustard, basically is the guy who runs Fortnite now. So he has much bigger fish to fry. Like, when you are working with literally multi-billion dollar property, like a dinky little iOS game, you know, as cool as it was 10 years ago, like how much do you really care about that, you know, about keeping it up and running?

So, yeah, it's just, you know, it wasn't a priority for them. And I didn't realize that it had been updated so it does run in 64 bit, which is good. But it really was, you know, a demonstration of like how the evolution of iOS and just the overall transition of kind of the free-to-play, you know, freemium type model, not just on iOS, but also in terms of force. Fortnite success really put the kibosh on this idea of preservation and, you know, the old way of doing things, basically. I remember one of the things I lost access to has just reoccurred to me is the really beautifully done cave ports. I don't know how to pronounce this. Mushshihime-sama Bug Princess.

They're beautifully done touch-enabled versions of these really renowned kind of hard. core shoot-em-ups that were just no longer playable. I think they probably have patched them, but there was just a long time where it was just like, well, that's it. That's gone. That was a, like, $6.99 game that's gone. Donopachi, that's gone, that sort of thing. And it was crazy how it was just like a guillotine came down, and that was it.

It was wild. Yeah, it was a very, uh, Obi-Wan, millions of voices crying out suddenly being silent. Yeah, exactly. It might literally have been millions. Yeah, it's got to be. Probably not millions, but thousands for sure. Well, total, sorry. Yeah, I would...

Just thinking about the history of iOS, yes. It's got to be what, at least two one million apps and games, things you could buy on that store. Each more brilliant than the last. Yeah. It's interesting, mentioning cave, because we'll get to it probably later, but one of the things I did when they announced that they were closing the PlayStation stores as I jumped on the Japanese store

and bought all the cave shooters that were on there. Nice. It's not that many. It's just don't patching, don't patch in. There's probably some more. But, I mean, once they're gone, from there, where else am I going to buy them legally? I have no idea. All right.

So it's really hard to say much more about iOS because it's all just so massive and vague. But, you know, like I said, the platform has really evolved over time from the kind of, hey, classic video games model to the, hey, it's free. the first hits free. Oh, you better pay. Better give us, you know, 10 bucks for your booster, that kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, my account is linked to my wife's Apple account. And she, there was a while where she was playing a lot of candy crush. And, you know, I would get these receipts like, hey, someone just bought, spend $5 on a candy crush pack. And, you know, I'm like, that's fine. If she enjoys it, whatever, how much do I spend on video games? I can't complain. But I just noticed like she spent a lot more on that one game than I have on, you know, any standard

retail release for sure. So, you know, that I think really kind of became the metric for iOS. Like if you can keep just raking in cash from micro transactions and that sort of thing, that's kind of the way the way people measure success on iOS. And, you know, if they make a game and people don't pay the transactions, micro-transactions, then that gets delisted too. Yeah, definitely. If there's no profit left,

you pull it down and move people on to the next one. That seems to happen with a fair amount of anime tie-in, like, gacha games recently. I think there was one that's only been up for six months that's going down pretty soon.

Wasn't that the one that Kiji Inafune had worked on? Oh, that makes sense. I want to say Kiji Inafune. It was someone who was a big deal for a while, and then has been kind of like, oh. And then made mighty number nine. Yeah.

Things didn't go so well. And, yeah, their attempt at a gotcha game. I think it was him. It might have been someone else. But anyway, yes, iOS, it went away. I don't know. I think Apple probably looks at these kind of purges as a benefit to themselves. It's like an opportunity to prune and to,

weed out the crap from the platform because there is so much crap. So, you know, if they have these kind of hard transitions where people are, you know, who are no longer invested in maintaining their game, just let it die and go away, then that means, you know, it just basically like clears out the clutter for Apple. So they, they honestly probably look to delistings, these mass purges as, you know, beneficial. So the thing is, when you're me, then some of the Those crap games are actually amazing. And we lost a dizzy. We lost a dizzy permanently because of this.

We lost Prince of the Oak Folk. I mean, to be fair, it was a god-awful, terrible remake of it, but it's still gone forever. That's another dizzy I'll never get back. You should petition the Oliver Twins about that. You're friends with them, right? Like everyone in the UK knows each other. Yeah, my only interaction with the Oliver Twins was to visibly. upset one of them once and I do feel quite bad about that but I'll save that story for

the Oliver Twins episode when we get them on the show yeah surprise we've brought stewardship the eyes the eyes narrow and they use their twin powers to destroy All right. So moving on from iOS, let's actually save the PlayStation stuff for the end since Stewart put together such a great list of stuff. Thanks, Jeremy. You did. You got paid for it, too. So I expected no less. This worked out so well for everyone But, yes, the Nintendo DS and DSI, I think, are kind of where they're... Did DSIWare launch before WeWare?

I feel like it did, but maybe I'm lying. Yeah. I don't think it did. I thought it was specifically like a play from WeWere. I don't think it did. Okay, you're right and I'm wrong. How sad. Yeah, so honestly, there are...

there wasn't really much released digitally only for DS and DSI, nothing for DS, but DSI, like the whole selling point was like, hey, you can buy games digitally, but they're not the games you want. There was no virtual console. There were no retail games released through DSI where it was all like little mini games. And there were some cool mini games, some pretty good stuff. There was a solid port of Earthworm Gym on there, which is gone now. Yeah, there was some virtual... It would have been in a virtual console if there was one on there, but

yeah, no official, like, retro section. Right. Yeah, I mean, looking over the list, you have stuff like cut the rope, earthworm gym, go series, pick done. No, pick done was kind of neat. I bought the pick done games.

Those were kind of like first person shooters that were also, or not first person maze crawlers, dungeon crawlers. They were kind of like RPG, and I want to say also like kind of puzzle game-ish. It was like pick cross meets a dungeon crawler. It's been a while since I've played them. What?

They had like a really great little animated sprite. That's what I like to put them. Oh, what? There's a Mr. Drilly game on it. There's a Mr. Drilly game on here. There was. And that was kind of, when I interviewed Hideo Yoshizawa,

the creator of Mr. Driller back in like, God, 2012, 2013. It was a long time ago. I asked like, is there a future for Mr. Driller? And he was like, no. no one buys these and the DSI wear a game drill till you drop is pretty much like our final statement like we feel like that has everything that people love so that was it that was the culmination of Mr. Driller yeah though we did get we did get drill land on the switch at least we did we did

we did but but you know he kind of looked at drill till you drop as sort of like the final statement and now it's gone there's no like if you did not buy drill till you drop um your journey through the world of Mr. Driller is incomplete it can never you can never hear the final statement. The one that's really leaping out of me from this list is the legend of Zelda 4th Sword's anniversary, because that was free, wasn't it? They give that away for free. Yeah, it was. They've given it away, I think, a couple

times. Yeah. But then if you didn't... If you didn't get it, that's a fairly... I mean, that's a pretty good game, isn't it? That's the Game Boy Advance. It was packed in with Link to the Past, wasn't it? Yeah. Was that actually a different game? I believe the one that they put on DSIware was basically a conversion of the GBA bonus mode, yeah.

Right. So, but if you didn't get that, then that's gone. You can't get that now. That's not, unless, as far as we know, that's not coming back. And that's, that's a temp hole. That's one of the big two. That's the Legend of Zelda. It's right up there with F0.

Yeah, which is never coming back in any form, ever. Yeah, they said so. They said so. We've already got, what is their current racing game? Oh, right, Mario Kart. I've heard of that one. Yeah. Donkey Kong barrel blast. I mean, you can play as Captain Falcon in Mario Kart, right? Can't you? No?

Can you? You should be able to. I don't actually know. Well, you should be able to if you can't. You can play as Isabel. Yeah, right? The roster update for Mario Kart 8 was... But like, who do we have in our big pile of characters? Who do we have that would fit well into a racing game? The dog from Animal Crossing. Right. In a BMW or Mercedes or whatever was that I added.

She's very much about the luxury brands. She's got her Gucci sweater and everything. Anyway, yeah, so the DSI wear platform is actually, there's not a whole lot that was culled. Let's see, your list is 38 games. And most of these are things like no one really cares. There's a few good games on there, but as someone who was covering DSI in the press

at the time of its existence, most of these games were things I would download and be like, oh, this will be cool. Like, I can't wait to try this out. This seems interesting and fun. And then I would play it and say, oh, this is a kind of mediocre port of a bad mobile game. All right, never mind. And the majority of them did come over to the 3DS, except for they called out specifically 10 titles that couldn't be transferred. And why was that?

Was it just like a, were they just being pissy? I had the list of them. I think it's all, well, one of them, I think, is the browser. The DSI internet browser, of course, is not going to come to the 3DS. That's a great loss. Asphalt 4, so Flipnote Studio, that version, but then they ended up redoing it on the 3DS. So I think they just left, you know, that version behind on the DSI. Let's go off or a version of Oregon Trail, a couple real soccer games, and a couple

Sudoku games. I'm not sure who's behind, you know, the Sudoku ones and the soccer. If it was real soccer, it might have been a license issue with the leagues. Right. Something like that. So basically, like, these are concepts that are pretty generalized, not necessarily things that were like, wow, this was something really unique to DSI. Right, right.

Except the DSI browser. You'll never be able to browse the Internet like that again. I theorize that the reason they couldn't bring that over is because it had some kind of security hole that would let them hack the 3DS. That too. Yeah. Thankfully, the 3DS is completely unhackable. It has never been done and no one has managed to do it.

Praise God. Yeah, so moving on to the 3DS since we talked about that, the list of delisted games here is much more extensive. I'm really surprised there are so many games that you cannot play anymore. And a lot of these are things that I've heard of, a lot of these are games that did get retail counterparts, you know, in various forms, like advance wars, days of ruin. I didn't even realize that was available on 3DS, actually. Was that like a...

Yeah, I had no idea that was digital console kind of thing. What was that? Let's see. It's a good thing. I wrote something about it. It looks like it is only on the 3DS in Japan. Oh, was it Club Nintendo? Yes.

Yeah, because they had on the, I think, think this was probably the US as well, but one of the rewards from the old my Nintendo or whatever it was called back then was Wario Were Touched on the 3DS for some reason. So maybe that was the sort of Japanese equivalent game because that was what the only DS game I can think of that was released as a 3DS app in this country was Wario Where touched, bizarrely. Interesting. Yeah, but looking at a lot of these, you have stuff like Disney's Epic Mickey.

you have a bunch of adventure time games. You have, what else is there? Game Boy games like Tetris for virtual console. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Lego the Hobbit. You know, these are games all, actually, that's been relisted. Mario and Sonic. So these are our games that were, you know, available physically.

So this was just the e-shop versions that were delisted. But then you have a lot of things that I know were not released. physically as well. So when a game is, you know, available at retail, I don't think it's as huge a loss. Like, you can still go out and buy that cartridge someplace. It's still able to get it for sure. Yeah.

I mean, the 3DS version of VVVVV is gone for good now. I believe the proper pronunciation of that title is the letter V six times. Ah, okay. Well, I've decided to change it. I like to say VV, VV, V, V, V. But, I mean, that's a sad loss because that version with the 3D looked really good. Really popped out nicely. And that's gone now for good, so that sucks.

It did get relisted at one point. Oh, okay. Well, never mind then. That was 2016 that I have it, and I don't know that I have searched for it on a 3DS in a while. So I'm not sure if it got pulled again. Yeah. Okay, sorry, February 2018. It left again.

Sorry, it didn't come back. And then it left again. It was probably my favorite version because of that 3D feature. And I think there was even some extra sort of levels in the player levels category in that. Because some of the later releases of that game have stages made by indie developers using the editor. And I think that one included some of them, which was really pretty cool. But I'm not sure if those made it to say the Switch version or the PSP or, sorry, the Vita version. Maybe they did, I don't know.

But they weren't in 3D, damn it. So the most interesting thing on here to me that I was not aware of is Dragon Quest. Like the original Dragon Quest 1 was available for about six months in Asia. And it was available to people who played Dragon Quest 11, beat the game, and entered a spell that appeared in the credits. That's wild. So if you beat the game within that first. first six months, you could get a free copy of Dragon Quest. But that was only in Japan, not here in the US, right, or in Europe. There were a couple of obscure ones on here that I liked, but

they are physically available, so it might not be worth highlighting. But that second Pac-Man game, Pac-Man, the Ghostly Avengers 2, is pretty ambitious because they basically crammed the entire Xbox 360 game version onto a 3DS, so it runs at about 10 frames per second. But it's still pretty fun, and it's basically a full-size console 3D platform on a handheld. I also want to highlight, because no one is ever going to talk about this game anywhere else ever, and it's my duty to do so. That Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game, based on the Michael Bay produced movie, is a genuinely legit Diablo clone.

Huh. I don't know how that happens. It's Activision Blizzard, so I guess that makes sense. Yeah, but it's genuinely good, but again, you can buy those in physical copies as well. Same with Danger of Views, which is a really good Metroidvania. It's sort of inspired by Radical Rescue, the third original Game Boy Turtles game. It feels like that because you basically go around 2D levels with the Metroid map, rescuing other turtles and gaining their abilities.

I should mention that because it's good. Another thing that kind of stands out to me is Etrian Mystery Dungeon. That's the only one of the Etrian Odyssey games that's been discontinued digitally. I mean, they're all available physically, but that one has kind of share. shot up in price in terms of the physical release. So there's no alternative. You can't, like, go online and buy the digital. So, yeah, so 3DS, there's definitely some notable stuff

and definitely some stuff that was exclusive to the digital storefront that's been cold, which is a shame. So moving over to the physical side, We and Wii U, looking at the We list, it is a lot of virtual console stuff. I mean, at this point, like anything that was on Wii virtual console and Wiiware is gone, right? Right. Just totally gone. That's why a lot of these were.

added before that store was shut down. And then there's a page in here somewhere, I think under N, that's just for the Nintendo Wii Shop channel. So at some point I had made Marketplace pages for the We Shop channel and the DSI channel and PlayStation Mobile, Xbox Live indie games, like these whole separate marketplaces or places to buy a bunch of games that on the site at least could not list out every single title that had ever touched it. So it eventually ended up with sort of a we shop channel page for Wiiware and virtual console.

But I think the page that exists now with the individual callouts for 75 Wii games is really valuable because it shows like, you know, before the entire platform died off or was killed, what was actually being delisted? Like which publishers were pulling their support and pulling their licenses, which apparently is like S&K, Hudson and I-rim. They'll seem to be the big one. Right. I didn't know that the virtual console had all the R-type games worth playing on it. That's insane. The Wii Virtual Console was jam-packed.

I never had one until way after it was already basically dead, and I wish I'd gone on there and bought all the games now. Well, you know, one of my biggest regrets, I'm sure I've mentioned this on the show before, is that, you know, I was covering Wii virtual console stuff for One Up throughout its lifetime. And so I was constantly buying games. You know, there were some that I didn't own, but I spent, I would say, probably close to a thousand bucks on virtual console. And then when Wii U came out, I was like, oh, well, I need to take these over to Wii U for sure. And now I deeply regret that because the Wii U, Wii emulation on a lot of the platforms, especially

NES, was really crappy. And the Wii would have been a great place to actually be able to output these games to 240P. Like, this was before I understood you know, any of this resolution stuff and you know, all the work that I do now with trying to upscale and get good RGB quality. Like, the Wii

had that. And I had all of those games on there and I could have, you know, gotten them in amazing video quality. But no, I moved them over to Wii U, a platform whose virtual console was so bad that Kamia, what's his face, Hideki Kamia,

of platinum games, bitches about it. He's like, Nintendo, why is your virtual console so bad? Why does it sucks so much? And it is,

it does, it sucks, it's bad. It wasn't, it wasn't too bad because they did release Doggy Kong 64 on it. Well,

the N64, I think, had better emulation, but the NES and super NES was really bad. And also... Yeah, it was dark and slow and wasn't it based on

maybe the Powell version of some of the games? Am I imagining that? Hey. I don't know, but it looked bad. I think so. I think it was, yeah. I think it definitely was for the Donkey Kong country stuff,

not that you can make Duncan Country 3 any slower. And on, from Wii to Wii was, it was a move, right? You didn't keep them on the Wii also. It was like, we know you're going to give this away to someone or sell it. Yeah. So you can't keep these things. But if you look over at Wii U, like the delisted games are, a lot of them are the same delisted games as on Wii, like the same virtual console games.

But then you also have, you know, really important stuff like Super Mario Maker, which is not, I guess, delisted in the sense that you can't buy it so much as they just don't support the trading and all the, all the features that made that game so amazing. Right. Like the real reason you would get Super Mario Maker is Xized out of there. Yep. And so then it just becomes, you know, like the 3DS version, except without all the, you know, the stages that were pre-made. So why own it? It really, yeah, it really diminishes

one of Nintendo's most interesting and creative projects of the past decade. Like, it was, Super Mario Maker was so good and so revelatory when it first came out. And now, less than a decade later, it's just gone. Yeah. I mean, yes, there's Super Mario Maker 2 on Switch, but it's not the same. like having like that that was that was the game that we you was created for they didn't know it when they were creating the game or when they were creating the system but that was it that was the one that everyone wanted you know the original Mario maker has the um event stages and the different skins for Mario and I think they're gone completely from two and there were so many of them but they felt like there were hundreds and they were all a lot of fun as well and also frankly drawing levels on the game pad was a lot easier than doing it on the switch yeah that's what I've I've always heard is it, you know, it's better in every way on the switch except for, like, actual usability and that content. Well, I have, I had, when I got, again, I got my Wii U very late, and I spent

quite a lot of time on Mario Maker in a sort of Twilight kind of days, and then I was quite excited for Mario Maker 2, and then that came out, because of the transition from, you know, stylus-based touchscreen to finger-based touch screen, though you can obviously buy a stylus, it's still not as good. it's just inherently worse, unfortunately. And the lack of the event stages didn't give me much of a reason to sort of go back to it. So I was, I mean, I was pretty disappointed with Mario Maker 2 in the end.

I didn't have much of an incentive to get into it. One of the, on the Wii U especially is, and this kind of maybe not completely founded information, but I've heard from a few smaller indie developer publishers that at some point, I think it was 2018 to 2019, Nintendo stopped allowing them to renew their license to be a publisher for Wii. So they didn't have a choice whether their game was delisted or not. Even if they wanted to keep it on there, they just weren't allowed to function as the publisher.

I don't know if that's 100% accurate, but I've heard from that same kind of thing from a couple of different people. I mean, it would make sense. They really, that is a section of their history that they really seem. eager to just, you know, leave behind them and set fire to. So I can understand where they wouldn't want, you know, people keeping the platform alive any longer than absolutely necessary. Yeah. And some of them are, some of the people who have lost their game on the Wii U are still

publishing stuff on the Switch. So you'd think it might cross over, but there's something in their way there. So, yeah, I feel like of all the Wii U stuff that was delisted, Super Mario Maker is definitely the most notable and interesting just because it's not, you know, it's not just the game itself, but the entire, like, functionality of the retail version. Like, that game, no matter how you buy it, is just no longer the full game. It's just a shadow of itself. Yeah.

All right. So that's, that's Nintendo stuff. We don't have to go on any longer about them. I did want to talk very briefly about Xbox 360. I was really surprised by how many delisted games there are on on 360. Because, you know, you think of Microsoft as being the one first party that really seems to care about backward compatibility and about maintaining its library. Like, you know, Xbox 1X or Series X is like a big part of that is that you can basically play any Xbox game on it. You can stick a disc from the original Xbox in there and you can play it. And they've really put a lot of work into making that possible and to maintain. that continuity and it's not it's not a trivial amount of work because the architecture of each platform has been so different from the last like the original xbox was an intel chip and then

they switched over to uh i want to say power pc based chip for 360 and then um i i can't even remember what they i mean at this point it's basically like a you know a beefy pc but making backward compatibility compatibility seamless and functional with all those architectural changes and wildly different platforms throughout its history, that takes effort and manpower and energy and resources and money. So, you know, I really... They've got hundreds and hundreds of them working. It's great. Yeah. I really... I respect Microsoft for making that effort because they don't have to do that. They don't have to, you know, say, we're going all in on this. They could just say, hey, you know, our best games, you can play them

and you can play like last-gen games and that's it. But, Even now, like, they're still updating it. They've recently, they've made a bunch of old backwards compatibility games now run at twice the frame rate, for example. They are going back and making these fixes, which I do appreciate. So like Earth Defense Force now operates at like 15 frames a second? Well, actually, Earth Defense Force, even on the, a bit of a tangent, sorry, but even on the PS5, that now runs at, I think, locked 60 all the time. That must be so weird. I need to try that.

It's weird. I hate it. It's not right. It's too hard. It's still plenty, janky. Yeah, I love that whole series. Actually, since the PlayStation stuff came up and been playing through Earth Defense Force 2 on PlayStation TV the last couple weeks. Yeah.

But yeah, on the 360 side, I wanted to add, even before the Xbox 1, there are cases where a game will be delisted or would have been delisted. and the publisher has switched from whoever had published it originally to Microsoft games. So I think they were doing work to take over some of these games, even despite how many are on the site already. I think there would be a lot more if it weren't for someone or some team there, you know, doing that work to keep games online. And in some of these cases, it seems like, you know, the games are delisted on one platform, but it's not like they're gone forever.

Like the Doom trilogy for Xbox 360, you know, those were digital only releases. They were a pretty big deal at the time because, wow, finally, it's the Doom games, you know, designed to be played with a game pad. Like, you're not just kind of clinging it in. It's actually how these were, these versions were meant to be played. And, you know, for those of us who had gotten used to FPSs on a gamepad, it was great to have those games available on the platform that way. and those were really well-regarded versions. And they delisted... Yeah, they delisted these games in July of 2019,

but then those same games were basically immediately brought out on Xbox One, among other platforms. So, you know, there is some continuity there. It's just like, hey, we're not supporting this old version because if you buy, you know, the new platform that has the backward compatibility, you can get the same game just running in current gen, like a current gen shell. Though if you do own those old versions, you can still download them on the series X, but

I don't know why you would want to. I think they might have updated them actually. I think they might have updated them wholesale to be the new versions, because there is really no reason why you would want to go back with the game like Doom. I mean, Doom 2, when it was originally released on the 360 and PS3, they added a new episode called No Rest for the Wicked. And that was then added to the new port eventually. So they have kept a decent amount of continuity there.

Well, I know they updated Shadow Complex to run on Xbox One. And then, like, a few months later, Shadow Complex Remastered was released. And the question was kind of like, why would I buy Shadow Complex Remastered if I can just, you know, play the original game. which looks almost the same. It's not quite the same, but it's pretty similar. So, yeah, like, there's definitely some, I guess, a little clumsiness with how these are handled sometimes. But, yeah, I'm curious, like,

there's hundreds and hundreds of Xbox 360 games that cannot be purchased anymore, but you can, if you own these digitally, the license, you can still download them to play on modern, like the current gen platform, right? right in most cases if they if they're compatible yeah because it's not a one one thing unfortunately there are a lot of 360 games that aren't compatible with the one one of the major ones for me is bangi o whatever the version of bangi o was on the 360 if i got what it's called but i can't play

that on the xbox one or the series x unfortunately that's why i still have my 360 hooked up yeah and then stuff like a game room you know being a service you know within a service being you know discontinued um that you can you still I was able to re-download them at one point. I'm not sure if you still can't re-download Game Room. I would be surprised if you couldn't, because you'd think there would be a big kickoff about that. Yeah.

For the seven or eight people who bought anything through it. I mean, yeah, would there be a big to-do? Because the whole thing with Game Room is, for some reason, no one really cared. It just kind of, like, they hyped it up. I remember going to press events for it. Yeah. Thinking, oh, this is cool.

And then it just kind of, just vanished. Well, I think everyone lost faith in them because the last game pack was sort of data mined, and it had Sunset Riders in it. Yep. And then Sunset Riders did not come out on Game Room, and we had to wait for it to come out on arcade archives many, many, many years later. And I think people were disillusioned with it. Hey, Lassie, what are you doing a well. Thank you, and Friends, is a podcast.

Sequelcast Two in Friends is a podcast. looking at movies in a franchise, one film at a time, like Harry Potter, Hellraiser, and The Hobbit. And sometimes the host talk about video games and TV as well. And now it's part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. Oh, Lassie, we don't need a rescue Timmy. He likes the well. Well enough, I guess. Darth Vader is Luke's father.

Lassie, I told you to lay off the spoilers. And we're back, folks, with another episode of Nasty Labs. Nasty Labs. It's a show hosted by... by me, Kinsey Burke, and my dumb-ass friend, Mark. Nasty Labs. This twice-monthly show about game development, Japan life, being nice to people, and hey, maybe a few other things.

Nasty Labs is a product of Chewai Labs brand incorporated, and now available for three easy payments of 4269, only on the Greenlit Podcast Network. All right. So that's really about all there is to say with Microsoft, unless you want to talk about, like, Steam games and stuff. But that's not Microsoft. That's foul. And the PC platform is kind of kind of in the same sphere as iOS, like it's just so big and so kind of difficult to manage. So, yeah, better to look over at PlayStation and the Jim Ryan Hall of Execution. These platforms are going to die at some point.

We don't know when Jim's broadsword is going to come down on their neck. But at some point, we're going to see, you know, the PSP's head rolling down the aisle, looking stunned, just shocked. Yeah, the PSP is still going. in July. That's the only one they're not saving, I believe. Right. Which means that the PSP version of Prince of Persia

Forgotten Sands is going to be physical only. And it's a great game, so yeah, it shouldn't be. Yeah, so looking over your lists here, Stewart put together a series of articles for Retronauts.com called PSN-100, looking at 100 games that are bound to be delisted from Sony legacy platforms at some point, some soon, some not so soon, but they'll die eventually.

Worth noting this list does skew very heavily towards the old sort of jip quotient of things that I like. I mean, you took input, so it's got brandish in there. I took a tiny bit of it. I took a tiny bit of input, and then I deleted it all to put more Atari games on there. But again, a lot of the games that you listed here are available physically. In fact, I think most of them are. The majority of them are, yeah.

Yeah. There is a game you put on here that is only available in Europe, and I resent that, Breath of Fire 3. Oh, yes. They did not bring that one to the U.S. That surprised me, because when I... Sony of America was like, the PSP is a glorious device full of beauty and splendor,

and it must not be a porting house for PlayStation 1 games that is for the weak and stupid. And meanwhile, Japan and Europe are like, we're okay with being weak and stupid. We'll make some money. That's cool. We love being weak and stupid. It's profitable.

Did the Breath of Fire 3, did it not even get a digital release? No. That's insane. Not to my awareness. That was a physical game over here as well. So that must be one of the more expensive PSP games for Americans to import. Yeah, probably. There were a bunch of PS1 games that,

were ported to PSP in various, like, remakes or compilations, and very few of those made it to the US, like the Gradius Collection did, which technically had Gratius Guidon on it, which was a PS1 game. But one, that game was never released in the US on PS1. So it wasn't just like a, you know, a port of an existing PS1 game in the US. And two, it had all those arcade games on it. So I guess that they managed to slip it through that way. But, and then, you know, you had Symphony in the Night as a bonus unlockable in Dracula X Chronicles, but that was, you know, a bonus in addition to the, uh, you know, the actual like fully remade 3D recreation of Rondo of Blood. So, so that Sony was really, really strict about PS1 games on PSP in the US, which is just infuriating because like, then they, you know, they let you play PS1 classics on PSP later. So, come on guys Yeah but even then

some of them were really weird and you could only put them on the PSP if you downloaded them to a PS3 first and then transferred them over really bizarre really bizarre and so many more in Japan than we ever got here Oh God

I when I first made my Japanese PSN account it was only maybe eight months ago or so I thought yeah might as well have a look and then I went on there and I think there were maybe just under or just over 200 PSN one and PS2 games on the US and Europe ones.

And there are 700 and something PS1 games on the Japanese PSN. And a lot of them are just in English, but they didn't release them over here for whatever reason. So I basically rinsed that, spent all my money and lost everything. But it was worth it because, you know, now I've got the Avengers of Little Ralph on my PS3. Yes. There you go. It's not a great game, but it looks nice. At counterpoint, it is a great game, and it looks nice.

Interesting. That's why they call me the king of debates. Can't argue with that logic. All right. Yeah, so a lot of the stuff that is on this list, the PSN 100, you can still buy it physically, which means you cannot play it on a PSP Go. So, PSP Go owners, you are S-O-L in just a few months. Yeah.

One title that I wanted to call out, I didn't actually play a whole lot on the PSP, but Patchwork Heroes is one that's a digital exclusive outside of Japan, so there's only a retail version over there. And it's a really wild spin, like a story-based spin on the Kicks arcade gameplay of like sawing, you know, cutting little edges out around an enemy. except you're doing it on the side of giant flying airships. And it was just a really cool little game. Yeah, I shout at that one on my list because it's probably the best kicks.

Yeah, it's probably the best kicks clone that I've played outside of, you know, unless we're going into the territory of those ones that have bear ladies and we're not going there. No, not till later. Another podcast, perhaps. That's Retronauts after dark. All right. Yeah, so with PSP, you know, what is notable about these games is that I believe you can basically play all of them if you own them digitally on Vita. So you get a nicer screen and

I guess in theory like a more durable format for them. And of course if you have a PSTV, then you can play them through PSTV on a television and see them, you know, kind of blown up. I've heard the PSTV is quite fussy about what it lets you play. Am I? Is that wrong? Yeah, there's a smaller and smaller number from like PSP that's playable on Vita that's also playable on PSTV or Vita TV. I don't really understand the PSTV. I didn't pay attention to it. Sony didn't understand it either, so you're in good company.

Yeah, the thing about PSTV is that it has a white list, and it's pretty trivial to defeat that white list from what I understand. I've never tried it myself, but I am under the impression that you don't have to work too hard to do it. I tried at one point, and it didn't work, but maybe it was. a newer method. Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately you're just going to have to wait until Sony says, okay, we're done with Vita. We're never going to update, you know, the firmware to do anti-piracy lockout measures. And then at that point, you know, it'll be trivial for people to

just crack it open and not have to worry about their, their hacks being defeated. Because at some point, you know, the platform holder does just say it's not worth fighting against the pirates and against the hackers. So whatever. It's yours, guys. Yep. All right. So yeah, I do, I do want to call out Brandish the Dark Revenant because that was a very good remake of a super NES remake of a PC 98 game that I think in its original incarnation was very misunderstood. But once you bring it into 3D, it becomes much more comprehensible. And the, the PSP version is really good. Very, like I found it very engrossing. And that was only available digitally in the U.S. US. There is a very saucy cover with, yes, in the Japanese version, some very titillating

literally cover art that Stewart pointed out when I recommended the game. But in the US, it's just digital. So it's very chaste. And then the PSP's big brother, I don't know, younger cousin. How, how does this work? The Vita. Ugly stepchild. Yes, the Vita, the benighted stepchild. That's the one.

The console that everyone is always going on about how great it is. And every time they do it, I just look at them until they stop. Well, Vita did have a lot more on digital exclusive games. So, you know, when that is delisted, it will be a bigger loss because, you know, Sony had really embraced digital publishing at that point. I mean, PSP had quite a few, but I think the most notable PS1 digital releases tended to be things like PlayStation minis and PS1 classics. So, you know, with Vita, you did have more games. Lots more indie games.

downloadable, downloadably. It was sort of the indie game, Starling, in a way, because it had all the games like Loftrouses and LaMalana and stuff like that. Lots and lots of good indies on the Vita, which are now pretty much all ported to the Switch, but not Loft trousers for some reason. They have not ported that. Yeah, I think Switch basically came along,

and everyone was like, oh, this is like all the cool stuff we love about Vita, except the, you know, the manufacturer actually likes this platform and it's going to support it. So, yes, everything very quickly made its way over to switch, just about everything. So, you know, so there are, I would say most of the notable Vita digital releases, unless they are from Sony Studios. They are, you know, available to play on other platforms. So you're not totally missing out. I mean, there's stuff like Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, which was released physically on Vita. But, you know, that's not on Switch.

But for the most part, you know, this stuff has been made available elsewhere. So that's good. There is, there's a port of the Wii game Muramasa Rebirth, vanillaware sort of ginger game. And there are three DLCs for that game on the Vita that weren't on the Wii version. There are just new mini games, basically. They play as new characters, I believe, and they totally change up the gameplay. And once that goes down, that stuff's gone. I don't think, I mean, unless it gets re-released on the Switch or something, that stuff's not coming back.

So that's your only chance you're going to get to play that is to buy it on the Vita. Yeah, now that VanillaWare is done with 13th Sentinel, or 13 Sentinel's, whatever it's called, maybe they're going to spend some time porting stuff over to Switch. That would seem like a likely business move to me. I would hope so. But, yeah, when Limited Run games first launched, a big part of the company's business was just bringing Vita games to cartridges because there were so many

really great indie games that were released digitally only and you know those because that was part of the old limited run model where they were like we're only selling a thousand of these or 1,500 those tend to be

a little pricey now on the aftermarket just because they were produced in pretty small quantities but they do exist out there some of them so you know that's good and I think there were some other publishers. East Asia Soft might be one. A few others that released games for Vita in physical format. The Vita, like, manufacturing process in the U.S. is shut

down. So that's the end of that business here. But in Asia, there, Sony is still supporting it. So there are still Vita physical releases coming from overseas. So, you know, not, it's not a total loss yet. There are a handful of Europe only Vita releases. as well. I know that much. Nothing super special, but I know because someone asked me if I would buy them for some collector. But even the relatively mainstream Vita physical games are expensive now. That system seems to be a bit of a collector's dream in a way. Yeah. I know that the Dangan Rompah series, the entire Dangan Rompah series has been delisted from the Vita now, I think, and they're going up and up in price. I mean, you can buy those on the PC, but

They're going up and up in price. Now, it's the only place to get them handheld so far. Yeah. Yeah, Dengen Rumpa to another episode, V3, Trigger Happy Havoc. V3 is one of the most expensive physical cartridges now over here as well. I don't know why, because you can just buy it on other stuff, but I guess not. You know, I think with platforms that have a fairly limited library like Vita, physical library, people want to do the complete sets.

So, you know, this is something I found with stuff like Virtual Boy and NeoGeopocket color. Yeah, NeoGeo Pocket for sure. These are platforms where you look at it and you say, I could actually own all of these. I could have the full set. And a lot of people think that.

And so it drives the price up on the really rare titles. And then people realize, oh, I can't actually have the full set. So it's a little hard. breaking. There was a time in the past maybe 15 years ago where if you wanted a full European Neo Geo Pocket Color set, you could feasibly get it. The most expensive game was Pocket Reversy and that was at the time still only about £100. Yep. Now it's more. Now it's more. Yeah, my boss, Josh Fairhurst, has a nearly complete Neo Geo Pocket Color set, which is one of the

Reasons Limited Run really wanted to publish the Neo Geo Pocket Collection because it's just you know like a personal favorite for a lot of people at the company. He now has a complete set worldwide except Pocket Reversey. It's the only one he doesn't have. Wow. He's like yeah, sometimes I see it for 500 bucks and I just don't know if I can do it. But I think at some point he's going to have to just because it'll it'll bug him not to have the like to have 99% full set. Not not the, get the, that last game. It's really funny to me that the most desirable NeoGeo game is reversy, of all things. Like, that's crazy.

It's not even, they couldn't even call it a fellow. Yeah, exactly. It's just reverse. It's just generic. I lost the Shakespeare license. I don't know. Let me say, I want to just add, what a crazy world we live in where you can buy S&K versus Capcom match of the millennium on your switch right now. It's like six bucks, too.

In fact, that leads us onto the PlayStation classic stuff, but we'll get to that. We'll get to that. Yeah, actually, we're kind of running low on time, because I've got another podcast I need to record soon. I actually think we could do just an episode on PlayStation classics. Oh, for sure. I think that would be good. I think we should just talk about our favorite PS1 games for a while. Well, I think that...

I think you could honestly do a whole episode just about all the cool stuff on the Japanese PlayStation Store that is not available here. And I don't think people realize just what a bounty it is. It's really remarkable. The amount of amazing. Stuff like, I don't know how to pronounce this. Einander is on there.

Einhander is on there. Like Gunners. I asked, I asked my former boss at IGN, Per Schneider, who is a polyglot and his native language is German. And I said, Einhander.

He was like, Einhander. And I said, okay. Now we know. So that's the word from the official source. It just blows my mind every time I go on there. And it's like these games that are all were ridiculously pricey, like Raku Gaki Showtime, that treasure game that had about five copies of it made. And that's on there for like 200 yen or something. You can buy the Memorial, the Sunset Memorial series volume that has gimmick on it.

It's the only way to buy gimmick unless you're buying that bespoke console that only exists for. for gimmick, the gimmick remake that's coming out. Wait, what is that? A bespoke console for him? They're making a bespoke arcade platform for a remake of gimmick. I'm not making this up. I don't know the exact details of it, but it's the only way to get this remake of the game gimmick. Wow.

Mr. Gimic. It's insane. I have not heard about this. You must look into this. See, Retronauts, everyone's learning. Everyone's always learning. That's what makes it such a great podcast. That's what I started it for.

gimmick exact mix is that the one yeah exa arcadia remake an exact mix yeah only for arcades and only for a particular arcade thing i believe like of all of the ways to make this game available again what in the actual hell okay yeah that's exactly right so just get it on ps1 uh with a japanese account is what you're saying yeah and i mean it's the thing is it's not the best emulation but it's that or get the ROM, like that's the only options, or pay a million pounds for the NES version from Scandinavia or wherever it came out.

I just think it's crazy how much stuff there is that you can just go on there and buy that people don't seem to know you can do it. It's not even that hard to make a Japanese account, like that game LSD Dream Emulator. All right, so let's do an episode on that sometime, soon-ish. I guess it would need to be soon, too, since PSP is going away.

Mm-hmm. all right um yeah i mean i i i feel like we've kind of covered the big bases i guess we didn't talk about ps3 um there are some cool things on there but a lot of them you know again aren't digital only or a lot of them aren't exclusive to the platform well a lot of them have been remade yeah one minor thing worth mentioning very briefly is the version on ps3 of castlvania harmony of despair which is the multiplayer california game it's the only one with local game local multiplayer so that's worth buying yeah it's really weird that they didn't

patch that into other versions but it really is the only one that has it i think it's also the only place to buy house of the dead four as well that's digital only i was not aware of the local multiplayer i only played it on 360s so that's uh yeah it's bizarre you can you can just play it the equivalent of split screen you know i mean you have to kind of stay together it's not ideal but it's there all right so anyway this has been kind of a journey through the world of delisted games, games that will soon be delisted, and the general Anwi and despair caused by delistings. Why do good games have to die?

And the answer is because companies like money and old games don't necessarily make enough money for them. That's very sad. So, yeah, thanks guys. Any final thoughts, you know, to fire off before we call it an episode? Oh gosh Buy everything and download it As soon as you can

Just keep everything downloaded You're doing the industry's work for it Yeah Okay Um quick one final thought Just to put the cat amongst the pigeons a bit Sort of throw in a bit of a hot take Why not delist every game ever right now

There we go Think about that Wow So you're doing like the No More Mutants thing But with video games Yeah, why not? Throw it in.

You know, Wondervision's popular. People will get that. All right. How can you follow that? That's the real question. I mean, it would certainly do wonders for limited runs business, but I don't think we necessarily need to go that route. And mine, I'll never stop writing.

It's true. It's your life's cause. And it benefits me in absolutely no way. All right. That's kind of the real, the real like, hey, why not do this? Just doing the devil's advocate. thing. Why not destroy many people's happiness for no benefit to me? The true devilry.

All right. Anyway, Sean and Stuart, thank you both for joining in this episode. Thanks everyone for listening. And if you are listening, you should definitely grab the essential PSP games. Check out Retronauts.com. Look for PS, what is it, PSN100. Is that what you called it? PSN 100, yeah, that's right. Stewart's put together four different list articles, listicles, if you will. And, yeah, the PSP stuff, I think, is the most vital that's going to be the PSP article

and also the PS1 classics. So check those out, make a shopping list, buy the things that you would not be able to play otherwise and savor them. Because even though Sony may not believe in that platform anymore, it's still good and viable and fun if you like video games. games, which you obviously do because you're listening to Retronauts, a podcast about

video games. Unless you've made a terrible mistake. Yes. But if you have not made a terrible mistake, or if you have made a terrible mistake and are like, hey, I kind of think this is interesting anyway. You can find more episodes of Retronauts at Retronauts.com and on your favorite pod catchers, or whatever we're calling them these days. If you would like to hear even more Retronauts, you can subscribe to us on Patreon.

patreon.com slash retronauts where you will be able to, I think for three bucks a month, get every episode a week in advance of its public release with no advertisements, no cross-promotions, higher bit rate quality and sound quality. It's a good, good deal. And for another two bucks a month, $5 total, you also get bonus episodes on alternating Fridays. So that's two extra episodes per month. Three on those weird months where there's like five Fridays. And also you get additional weekend columns by Diamond Fight, which come with little mini podcasts.

So there's a lot of stuff that is only available through Patreon. That's my pitch. There's been lots of salesmanship going on this episode. I'm done. I'm throwing it over to you, Sean. Hey, thank you very much for having me on. You can find more about more delisted games. at delistedgames.com

and I've got all the social accounts and just started a Twitch channel that's going well. And there's always more coming to the site all the time. So take a look over there. Thank you very much. And Stuart. Hello. Yes, you can find

more writing by me on Retronauts. Hopefully now that the PSM 100 is over, relatively normal service will resume, which means look out for some more geck-based articles in the very near future. And they're not even about Gex. They're just like Gex's perspectives on the Sims.

Yeah, that's my new pitch. Yeah, that's stored in a fur suit. Or scale suit, it's a scale suit. Come on now. I'm not a scale you, not a fairy list. Come on. Yeah, but also, if you want to find out more exciting projects that I do, you can follow me on Twitter at Stupacabra.

I do two podcasts. One is Arsylvania, which is about me and Andy Hamilton coming up with terrible, awful, appalling takes that will upset people and then tweeting them about video games I hasten to add. And also anime chat, which me and Luke Fletcher produce, which is reviewing every single episode of the hit cartoon animaniacs, which I hate more than anything in the world. All right. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on Twitter as Gamesbyte. On YouTube is Jeremy Parrish, doing stuff with limited run games. If you bought stuff like, hey, the Scott Pilgrim Limited Release, the CE version of that, there's a book that I put together.

I wrote a little bit for it. But, yeah, helping to do my part to preserve and enshrine video games. The upcoming NeoGeo Pocket Color collection has a big-ass book from me. So you can check those out. And yeah, I think that's about it. So I guess we now march off into the arena to, die at the pleasure of Jim Ryan. Thank you.