Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 455: Bad Games We Love

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

Jeremy Parish, Stuart Gipp, Jared Petty, and Kat Bailey look deep inside their hearts and find that there is indeed room enough for love, even for crummy games that don't deserve it. This week, we discuss the lousy ol' games we love despite themselves. 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 HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.hyperx.com. This week in Retronauts, we talk about games that are bad, which is good, and I guess that's bad. I don't know. Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 455 of Retronauts. I can't actually count that high, so it's a good thing we have a document to track the number of episodes for us. I'm Jeremy Parrish, feebly struggling to count into three-digit ranges, and with me here to shore up my mathematics, we have a lot of people. Actually, we're not

going to talk about math this time. We might be talking about math in the sense of the games that we're discussing are all like one-star games. And yet, in our hearts, there are at least 3.5. Maybe even

4. Yes, we are talking about bad games that we love. You don't have to love them. You also don't have to agree that they're bad. But we are going to talk about this extremely subjective topic, because sometimes you just got to take a step back from an actual legitimate discussion of video game history and just, you know, wing it with some BS for a while. So here, BSing with me, we have, let's go around the world.

So start with the person who is living in the future. Who are you over in England? Oh, hello. I'm Stuart Chip, occasional retronauts host. And when I heard Jeremy was doing an episode about bad games, I knew it was finally my time to shine. I posted to our Discord channel, our planning channel, to say I was going to do this episode. And I just from the outset said, Stuart, I know you're going to be on this one. Like, you would find a way to figure out when we were having the call and somehow hack my Zoom channel so that you could be in it.

So I figured I would just save you the trouble and save me the compromised accounts. and just bring you in. So yes, our bad game expert, Steward Jip, paving the way from the future, but also here in the same temporal realm as myself,

the same time zone. It is I, Jared Petty, professional minion of Jeremy Parrish. Oh, I don't like that. I don't want minions. They're horrible.

They're like servebots, but worse. That's me. Yeah. That's an accurate description. No. I've never heard you say banana, and that's good.

Please don't do that. I won't. And finally, like Jethro Atoll, living in the past. You're several hours behind everyone else. Who are you? Hey folks, it's Kat Bailey from Acts of the Blood God, and I'm looking forward to talking about

a lot of controversial RPGs and license games in this week's episode. Yes, this episode will potentially make people upset or potentially make people say, oh, shucks, those retronauts folks, maybe both at once. But I've asked everyone to come prepared with three, possibly four games that they admit objectively are kind of bad or maybe like

really bad. And yet, we just really enjoy them. We respect them. Or even if we don't respect them, we like them anyway. Sometimes, you know, you just have that seedy friend and you're like, yeah, I know this person's garbage. But they're just fun to hang out with. I don't know. I don't know. So these are the weird kind of person. You probably don't want to look too much into their personal lives. These are those video games. Like as long as you kind of keep it at a superficial surface level, I don't know, I'm going of this.

Anyway, these games, like, they just have bad reputations. And we understand because we are all people who have reviewed video games that, yes, objectively speaking, these things have problems. And yet we like them. And there is no explaining the human. heart, and we are not here to do that. We are just going to tell you what we feel in our hearts, and that's all. discussion. This is not one of those conversations where you have to do any kind of preface or

anything. Like, tell me about your history with bad video games. Because if you play video games, you've played bad video games. No one can escape them. They're out there. They're everywhere. I do think it's important to remember that no one, you know, unless they're trolling, no one sets out to make a bad video game. Sometimes things go horribly wrong. Management, budgets, lack of skill, whatever. You know, things just don't line up. up and a game doesn't turn out the way people intended. But these games, I feel, if you look past the fact that they have bad mechanics, terrible graphics, awkward controls, whatever it is that just brings them down, makes them something so a sane person would say, ah, I'm going to pass on

this. When you scratch below that surface, when you look down underneath the skin, there's a, there's a sincere heart beating beneath. And that's what we're going to do is is try to tear out that heart and show it to the world like Mortal Kombat, which actually is a bad game, but I don't like it. So anyway, I guess I will start just to kind of set the tone. And the very first thing that I thought of when I was trying to contemplate what this episode should be about, honestly, the thing that inspired this entire episode was the game Rambo for NES by pack-in video published by Acclaim in the U.S. It's a mess, and yet I actually really enjoy it.

I mean, you have to have a lot of patience to get through it. And when I put together a video on it last year, I definitely got fed up at some point and just hacked it so I could, you know, like used a cheat code to get Max experience or whatever. It's full of BS. That's just not a lot of fun to deal with these days. But, God, in the context of its original launch, 1987, 88, it's kind of impressive. Do any of you have experience with Rambo for NES? I have a lot of contemporary experience with Rambo for NES. It was a game I played a great deal of as a kid.

I played it after it was brand new, but before it was too old. I actually played Zelda 2 before I played Rambo and was therefore very confused by how they seemed to have a strange relationship and design that I had no context for, didn't understand. And I spent many, many hours making map notes and stabbing butterflies with a pocket knife endeavoring. That is a full, that is a full trench knife. It's not a pocket knife. It is. It's a full trench knife. I agree.

It's a combat knife. But, yeah, I played a lot of Rambo. Jeremy. Anyone else? Anyone else have memories of stabbing flamingos in the jungle? I didn't play Rambo when it came out, but it falls. broadly into that category of licensed movie game on the NES, like Back to the Future or Beetlejuice and that kind of thing, where you see the movie poster on the game box and it looks

so nice and you're thinking, oh, wow, I can get the full experience of this movie that I really enjoyed on the Nintendo Entertainment System. And then you boot it up and you go, this doesn't look like that movie at all. I did some research on Rambo because I knew we would be talking about it. And I was amused to learn that you can throw the kanji for anger at Murdoch and turn him into a frog. I was amused to learn that there are Androids in this game. And I was like, yeah, it's an NES license game, all right? Just throwing random nonsense in there because they're like, sure, androids, Rambo fights androids in this. I think those are supposed to be like automated sentries in the Russian base. So, you know, back in the days when we thought Russians had

a very advanced military, now we know otherwise, that was the sort of thing that seemed plausible. It was the 80s. We were naive. We listened to the red scaremongering. And this is Rambo 2 that is based on, not Rambo 1, because we don't want to make an NES video game about a Vietnam veteran with PTSD. We want to make the one where he goes back to the jungle and is rescuing the hostages. And he's just straight up an action hero now. Yeah, that was a source of much confusion when I was a child because I played Rambo. And a friend of mine had a Sega master's system and Rambo 3. And I was deeply confused about the existence of the video game Rambo 2 for a long time, trying to figure out what had happened there.

Yeah, it's space in reality was actually taken up by the Goonies 2. Okay, that explains a lot. Stuart, what about you? I have no experience playing Rambo, unfortunately, but I do have experience of killing flamingos in the jungle. Yes, but I'm not talking about your real life experiences. We're talking about video games here. No, I'm afraid I don't.

I have never played this, but I would like to offer. for another view, perhaps the androids are a metaphor for the way that the military industrial complex makes sort of robots of us all in a sense, or so with tons of us all, you know? That's my theory anyway. And

I'm here all night. So, so Kat, I have to disagree with your assessment that this is a game like Back to the Future or something that has nothing whatsoever to do with the movie. This is one of those games that actually makes a really

sincere effort to encapsulate the movie experience. And I think that's something that pack in video, a pretty obscure Japanese developer, I don't, I think I used to know what they were connected to, like Victor or something. I don't know. They seem to do that a lot. Like, they also published Die Hard for NES or developed Die Hard for NES. And that is, that is a, just a wildly ambitious game that has a real-time cycle and perspective shifting and, like, dynamic patterns that the terrorists follow and just different actions you can take, it's really just like punching way above their weight class. Rambo isn't quite like that, but with this game, they tried to encapsulate the entire movie story into a playable form. And it does a lot of

things that NES games, like I can say this with confidence because I have gone through the NES chronology beyond this point. NES games just hadn't done to them. that point. You know, there is a small amount of dialogue, which was something that was still pretty new to the NES. But at one point, Rambo is captured, and then you play as his guide that he meets up with Co, a Vietnamese woman, who helps him, you know, throughout the movie. And at one point, you actually play as her and have to infiltrate the enemy camp. And basically, seduce the general, uh, which of course is very like, it doesn't really get into all of that. It's just kind of like you go in, you have to like get a dress and then, you know, a chong

song, basically. And then, uh, yeah, like, you know, where, where I, um, oh, I should know what they're called. It's just like a final. Oh, no. Okay. Aousai. Sorry. Um, so, yeah, so she has to like dress up in an Auzai and then go into the camp and she's not fighting or anything. She's just walking and you have you you know talk to some guards and they're like oh okay you're the general's wife cool yeah cool you can go talk to them uh and then basically that allows her to free rambo from the prison and then it goes back to the normal gameplay but also in the movie she gets killed whereas in the video game you can actually have a like the best ending is if you avoid getting her killed and then like it ends with them you know getting married or whatever rambo and

and co um but the way that you save her that's how the way you should have ended the way that you save her is that you're exploring in the jungle and you see her like crumpled up you know wounded at the waterfall and if you don't talk to her then she lives if you go over and talk to her and express concern she dies the cave story like you go through a sad scene where she dies and rambo's very unhappy showing empathy is going to kill somebody if you just ignore her her lifeless body at the foot of the waterfall, she turns out okay. Important lessons and objectivism. You know, it's this kind of Schrodinger's situation.

I don't know. Like, as long as you don't collapse the waveform, she's fine. But this game is really interesting because, Jared, you mentioned Zelda 2. And, yeah, you have to kind of understand there's like a weird release disparity between the Japanese and American versions of Zelda 2. Zelda 2 came out in February 1987 in Japan and didn't ship in America until, like, December 1998, nearly two years later. And in that time, there were a few games where, you know, the developers saw Zelda 2, were like, let's do that, put together a game and then shipped it

in the U.S. before Zelda 2 got here. So you have Castlevania 2 and you have Rambo. Those are the ones that really stand out of my mind that are just like very clearly taking notes from Zelda 2. But this game beat Zelda 2 in the U.S. by about six months. So I feel like, it ended up being really the first proper action RPG. I mean, you had Rigar, you had the Goonies 2 in Metroid and Zelda, like all of those games kind of experimented with. But this has like leveling. You know, you kill enemies and you get experience points and they float up above their

corpses just like they do in Zelda, 20, 10, 5. Also, sometimes you'll kill a butterfly or a gorilla and it will drop a health potion or a grenade because that's what butterflies do. so you have like an arsenal of weapons that you need to upgrade, but it's non-linear, you're traveling through the jungle. It has a really interesting north-south system where instead of like, you know, in Castlevania, say you go upstairs and stuff to kind of move to different branches of the castle. But this is the jungle. It doesn't have stairs. So there are some places where you can like go down cliffs or something.

But for the most part, when you want to transfer it to a different track of the jungle, you go to one of these little boxes that say in or S. And you press up on it and you'll go to a different area of the jungle, which is very confusing. But you can kind of go back and forth in certain areas. I don't know. It's just, it's very labyrinth theme. There's a lot of interesting ideas. I don't think they're expressed very well. The controls are very clumsy.

And you end up, as Jared said, stabbing things a lot with a really stubby knife because ammunition is pretty limited. But I don't know. Like, they were trying for something here. And I don't know that they necessarily achieved it. But just given where this game lands in the NES chronology, it's kind of ballsy. I'm, you know, it's impressive to go back at it and go back and look at and say, oh, yeah, okay, so there was something happening here. Yeah, it's a lot like, I still, I still enjoy this game.

It's a lot of kid that Chris, I think, where the word, like the hardest parts of the game come early on. It's really grinding at the beginning. And that's just, I think, a matter of tuning that maybe Devere get done or that they didn't know we needed done because I didn't know that much grinding was bad yet. The North-South thing isn't quite as confusing as the Friday the 13th paths, but it's close. If you're not willing to get your graph paper out and make a map, Rambo's just not any fun until you memorize it. So I think that I agree with you, Jeremy, it's full of ambition, it's full of neat ideas. And the second half of the game, once you've got an arsenal of weapons, and it's a much more fun video game. I would argue that it kind of falls apart at the very end.

Once you, so you can go back, I don't know, you have to rescue hostages. That's the whole point of the game, the whole point of the movie. At some point, like, you have to go back and actually rescue the hostages as opposed to just taking photos of them. And you set off an alert. And so the final section of the game is just like Rambo being swarmed by soldiers. And eventually he has to fight a hind D, just like Solid Snake, really. Like before Solid Snake, there was a Hind D. Rambo, though.

So it was more like, oh, ID. And do you have to, like, take down the Hind D all by yourself while soldiers are coming out after you? it kind of sucks. It's really frustrating, but then that's at the end of the game. Congratulations. You know, like throwing grenades at a giant helicopter in an awkwardly stiff combat system. It takes a lot of grenades to take down that helicopter. Russians make them tough. I would simply not have set off the alert. But then you wouldn't have saved the soldiers and they would have died alone and sat in the jungle.

Oh, man. There's a lot to this game. I know what ROM I will be downloading after this podcast and then deleting it within 24 hours because it's against the law. 23 hours, 59 minutes. You're safe. I feel like this is a common theme that we're going to be talking about a lot is the games that aim high have a lot of different systems, try a lot of different things, and don't always succeed. And yet, in failing, end up creating something compelling. I agree. So why don't you walk us through your first pick, Kat? My first pick, okay, I think it's appropriate that you picked a NES licensed movie title. So when I was a very small child, I did not.

differentiate between good games and bad games. I only saw games. Most small children do not. Yes. And when I first got my NES and I believe 1990, we went to the local video games shop and I was able to pick two games. And the two games that I chose were Afterburner and Ghostbusters 2. And Ghostbusters 2 by any measure is not a good game. It is a platformer where you're running from right to left. So it's a little confusing in that regard. The hip boxes are kind of all over the place. There's so much nonsense

on the screen. You aim the slime blaster and you can shoot it in this kind of arc, right? To take out enemies. And you have to know the frames to the single digits to be

able to get through a level successfully. And then in between, there are these interesting segments where you're driving the Ecto 1, but for some reason, there are these huge gaps, so you have to be able to use the accelerator perfectly to be able to get them over them, or you will fall to your doom.

And then finally, there's a level where you're controlling the Statue of Liberty, shooting ghosts as you're going through. And the thing that stands out to me are a few things. First of all, for an NES game, it actually has surprisingly good graphics, especially when it's showing Vigo and he's looking over New York City, and that kind of thing or the opening sequence

where you're seeing the act of one coming out of the firehouse it's like Rambo I think somewhat faithful to the original source material it actually follows the story except for the part

where you're falling into giant gaps in the street as the act of one because you know it's the NES, whatever and the things that stand out to me is I picked it up again not too long ago

and I found it surprisingly still kind of fun to play. I did actually finish it because when you're a small child and you have nothing else to play, you'll just keep playing this objectively bad game until you happen finish it. And I did in the end get through Ghostbusters too. I went into that art museum and I got through it with all four Ghostbusters and eventually took out Vigo the Carpathian. So I'm the only one. I'm the only one who will stand for this game. And I'm not even really standing for it. serve a medal. I feel that there should be a ceremony where the Rebel Alliance stands and

salute you for this, because that is a hard game. It is a wildly hard game. There are these kind of guillotines that are going up and down in these strange patterns. And if they hit you, you're dead. That's it. And they're only a limited number of lives. So good luck. Did you use the NES advantage like they did in the movie? Oh, my God. I wish. But the NES advantage, I did not actually like it very much. But that would have been a theme appropriate, wouldn't it? I have to say, because I thought, I got confused because there is actually another Ghostbusters game that I can think of that is actually somehow like, it's terrible and it's not even this game. But there's also another Ghostbusters 2 game, isn't there, with top down little.

There's the Famicom game by Hal. Oh, it's Famicom only. Okay. Yeah. Right. And well, also on Game Boy. Oh, I see. But the American Ghostbusters 2 for ADS was published by Activision, developed by Imagineering, who were ex-activision people.

And, yeah, they didn't put their best foot forward, whereas, you know, the Hal developed game is actually genuinely good. I played it for the first time a few years ago to cover it for Game Boy Works. And I was like, wow, this is honestly good. I did not know that there was a good Ghostbusters game out there. And that's because my frame of reference was this. I'm going to say that by the standards of license games on the NES, which admittedly is very bad, subterranean bad in many ways. It's not terrible. I mean, it's playable, at least.

It resembles the movie that it's supposed to be. I return to Back to the Future, which in no way resembles the game, the source material and is awful to look at and is repetitive music. I don't know. I'm not going to say that Ghostbusters 2 is good, but I have fond memories of it because I played it so much back today. Kat, would you rather play Ghostbusters 2 on NES than play Ghostbusters on NES?

Oh, heck yeah. So that's a funny thing, because the original Ghostbusters on NES, I mean, it's completely inscrutable if you're playing it. You're like going, I don't get it. Why am I driving this logo around a map? Like, what are these numbers?

Why is this thing counting down? I absolutely love that game. It's a little bit like a, a business sim at the end of the game, you practically have to cheat to be able to get up those stairs. Ghostbusters 2 on the NES looks better

by most measures. I know. I think Ghostbusters 2 is a wildly superior game to the original Ghostbusters than NES. However, it does lack the sampled speech that sounds like this. That was a very accurate representation, Stuart. I am damn impressed.

Been practicing it for years. I've never heard you sampled at 10 kilohertz per second before, but that's amazing. Ghostbusters was a fine game on C64, and the Master System port's pretty good. Gosh, that NES version is a mess. Yes. I added it on Master System, which is why I've got fond of memories of it, I think. But I also had the real Ghostbusters, so the spectrum, which is god-awful, worse than any of the games that we had discussed today. But I should have chosen it, but I didn't because I also hate it.

Well, Kat, if that's all you have to say about Ghostbusters 2, then, Stuart, what did you choose instead of the real Ghostbusters for Spectrum? I think I misunderstood the remit slightly and I chose games that were considered to be terrible that I don't actually think are terrible mostly. Yeah, that's fine. That's okay, is it? Okay, good. Yeah.

Okay, well, my first choice is the original version of police quest in pursuit of the Death Angel for PC and many other systems I expect. Also, my enjoyment of this game does not reflect an enjoyment of the police. I just want to make that clear. I don't know. Sting and Stuart Copeland, they're pretty good guys. Oh, okay, okay, okay. Are we going to do that joke every single time?

We are. Soften the blow. That's fair enough. Fair enough, fair enough. I mean, I did enjoy his work on Sparrow the Dragon, but I digress. Police quest in pursuit of the death angel is in the same sort of, I guess, linear just king's quest and space quest, except in this one you are a police instead of a king or a space. and you have to go about what could be described as a very typical day

as a, and I believe you're, that's a bad that I've forgotten this way, I think you're LAPD in the game, but, but here's the best part. There aren't really traditional puzzles that you'd expect from an adventure game. Instead, it's all about doing everything by the book. It's more like a trainer than it is a adventure game. So these are very well-worn examples, but they're so good that I'm going to say them again. If you don't put your side arm in your whole store, and in a gun locker

whenever you bring a perp and they'll grab it off you and shoot you like instantly on the next screen every time if you don't walk full 360 degrees around your vehicle before you get in it after it's like to check the tyres as soon as you take off one of your tyres

will burst and the game ends if you stop you have to stop at the traffic lights every time obviously that one was less impressive but basically the whole game is just a litany of referring to the book that comes with game that includes all these regulations. The only way to pass is to

maybe not memorize it, but just constantly refer to it, which I think is one of the reasons it has such a bad reputation is that people don't have this book anymore, and they don't want to look at a book. So they don't know how to play the game. That said, I think

it's fair enough to say that it's barely a game and more of a sort of memorization test. There's no sort of reactions involved in it. It's almost all just doing things incredibly method. incredibly slowly and trying not to forget the one tiny little thing that could go wrong that will inevitably result in your death. And while that's true of the other Sierra Adventure Games, at least they're a bit more abstract about it. But here it's just you're doing everything

exactly the way you're supposed to buy the book. You're going to be doing your paperwork. You're going to be taking a shower after every mission. You have to do it all right. Or it's no points, no score for you, I'm afraid. And also, you die more, more less important. What happens if you don't take a shower? I don't think you die. I think you just lack, you may be lacking in points. But then again, I don't know that for a fact.

Perhaps there is a scenario late game that I've forgotten where not having taken a shower will get you killed. Right. The criminals can smell you coming. Yeah, that's a good one. That's actually a really good one. I wouldn't be, I wouldn't put it past them to put that in there. It's very believable that could be a thing.

Am I remembering correctly, Stuart, this game contains a fair amount for its time of kind of adult themes in terms, particularly of violence and a serial killer and things like that? Yeah, I would say relatively it does. The later games get a lot more intense in that respect, and the remake of, is more kind of graphic that they made like, I think it's called SCI graphics, the remake, or maybe AGI. Someone will correct me on that in the comments, along with insults. I had a friend in school that was elementary school that was obsessed with this game and we're talking about it every day at lunch for weeks, but it was mostly about the serial killer murdery themes of the whole thing. He never mentioned the mundane police routine. Perhaps he enjoyed that. I think I read an interview quote once where they said that not everyone enjoyed this game, but everyone who did enjoy it became a police officer.

I'm like, oh, no. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I enjoyed it and I didn't become a lot. But maybe they became the good cops, the ones who actually do everything by the books. The actually good movie version of this is Hot Fuzz, which makes a big deal out of all of the mundane police work that goes into all of these things. Actually, some years ago, I think he may recall that EA made the excellent decision to release Battlefield Hardline. It cops or robbers themed police game, quote unquote, that came out right around the time of the Ferguson riots and all of that stuff.

And I actually went back and kind of explored the lineage of police games throughout the years. I was like, why is it so hard to make a decent police game? And so I ended up zeroing in on police quest specifically. And I did find it kind of fascinating how it was so fixated on the mundane elements of being a cop. This entire discussion has just made me want an Edgar Wright, Lucasfilm game. game now. Oh, heck, yeah. Oh, my God.

That would be amazing. I mean, I think that we can all agree collectively that the best police game is ESWAT, City Under Siege, or Robocop, maybe. I'm a big fan of Ninja 5-0 personally. Oh, yeah, he's pretty cool. He's a cop and he's a ninja. Sometimes you can shoot laser beams instead of shiriken. I feel safer just knowing that.

Honestly, I'm going to prefer a Paw Patrol game, I think. I hate the Paw Patrol. I refuse to it. No. No, I just like the poor patrol. They don't know what they're doing. They're just, how can that organization even function with that many different departments? It's ridiculous.

Does Pat Labor count as a police game? It does, but are, are there any good Pat Labor games? I don't remember there being, there has to be. There has to be a good Pat Labor game out there. Oh, does there? I played a few of them. I can't think of a good one. That's true.

That's true. I got confused and I thought Pat Labor was one of the Poor Patrol characters and I was trying to figure out which one. Pat Labrador. Yeah, that's genuinely what I was thinking. That's genuinely what I was thinking. Yeah. Well, why isn't one of the poor patrol of Mecca or whatever, I don't know? But, yeah, Police Quest is a game that I kind of value for how unique it is even now.

Like, there really aren't that many games like that. There is, like, contemporary stuff like the sim game, this is the police, but even that's not even close to how fastidious this game is. And when you mix that kind of intensity in, with how primitive it all is. It just lends it a charm, I think, that I really enjoy. And none of the subsequent ones have matched that for me. The more fidelity the games get, the less interested I am in them.

Because it's the fact that you are basically ledger suit, Larry, walking around doing all this stuff is what makes it funny to me. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of this one. When I think of detective games or police games, I think of maybe like Snatcher or something, something that's maybe more a high concept. and you're playing a detective in kind of a noir-soaked environment, maybe cyberpunk, maybe more sci-fi. I think nobody really wants to be just a cop, but this was the 80s and early 90s.

So PC games were highly experimental. Oh, what about the Snows game Bonkers? He was a cop. Oh, don't forget Till Concerto, where you were a dog in a mech. There you go. That is your Paw Patrol game. Sadly, it's like $500 now. RIP.

Okay. Okay. So that's enough talk about civic duties. Jared, what do you have for us? Yeah, from everyone's favorite noted game designer turned mental health therapist. I've got Raiders of the Lost Ark by Howard Scott Worshaw, creator of Yars Revenge and E.T. And this is a game that I grew up playing. Again, I had a, I had a 2,600. I didn't know that there had been a crash. I just do got video games, got real cheap, real fast. and I was like, cool, lots of video games for a dollar.

And so, you know, I just bought everything out of these clear it's been as a child or my parents bought them for me because, you know, I could go to the toy store and get a video game for half the price of an action figure. That was kind of great. Raiders is one of those I picked up. And my dad and I played it together a lot. It wasn't a situation where I necessarily needed, like, dad's guidance to get through it. We both understood the inventory system. It uses both Atari 2,600 joysticks, one for inventory, the other for steering indie around. And it is very much a graphical adventure game, a very early incarnation of that.

There are action elements, but it's about solving environmental puzzles in a very abstract Atari landscape. You really have to depend on the manual to understand what the rooms you are. are in R. But if you do that and you put enough time into it, you can without a guide, figure it out. And together, over the course of several weeks, he and I did that and got to the end and beat Raiders and then beat it again and again. To this day, I'll haul it out once every year or two and play all the way through it. It's a game that's very ambitious, very much like the ones we've talked about already. It wants to have a large inventory on a machine that's designed to play Pong in combat with one stick and one button. Their solution is, well,

we'll create a menu system, a visual icon-driven menu system with the second controller. And you spend a lot of time searching through baskets and looking for clues and trying to find hidden doors. There's a bizarre plot. There's a giant spider. There are teens he flies that chase you around everywhere. There's a guy that shoot you if you walk into a store without bribing him first. There are pits full of thieves that will steal your items. You have to find a hidden temple or a hidden room where there's a map room and you have to get there at the right time of day using the clock that you have that literally keeps like little time that passes in real time on your on your screen as you pull it up on your 2600. And you've got to be at the right place at the right time with the staff of Raw to get the location of the Lost Ark.

and you've got to grapple to that cliff and jump off of the parachute to land in the well of souls with the shovel. It's really ambitious. And if you don't have a manual and if you don't want to look up what every abstract weird Atari icon is, it's not fun at all. But it is logical in a way that some adventure games aren't. Like the steps from A to B, once you know what these things are, it's like, oh. Okay. I get that. That makes sense. I have to go down a mesa with one grappling item and up with another. Okay. I got to climb with one thing and descend with another. I can get that. So Raiders is really precious to me. It took a lot of crap for its complexity. Spielberg loved it, who commissioned it. He really enjoyed it, apparently. But it may have been too involved and might have been better suited for a, say, an Atari 800 environment, a PC environment perhaps, or a C-64. so say we all that's funny because when we were initially doing a roundup of like games we want to talk about i i thought of the indiana jones in the last crusade from the nes which i randomly got for christmas one year which one was that though because there were two oh yeah there were two one there was this was the one where you had to pick the cup at the end and if you didn't pick the right cup you would die and the game would be over but it wasn't like the movie, you had to put together the puzzle in Venice first while there was fire coming.

And that would give you a picture of what the actual cup would look like. And then you would have a selection of cups. And I believe it was random to be able to choose from. So you would have to be like, okay, here we go. The controls were very bad for the most part. The beat them up elements were not great. But also, I played that one kind of to death. I'm kind of imagining that

primitive as it was, maybe Raiders of the Lost Ark on the Atari 2600 was slightly better. Yeah, I was going to say, I played The Last Crusade, but I think it was a different game. It was you start in the cave and it's like a platformer and if you hit your head on the ceiling, you lose health. If you hit your head on the side of a platform, you lose health.

If you fall more than about a foot, you lose all your health. Everything that happens kills you. It's amazing. I think I played it on the spectrum. It's one of the best games on the spectrum. veteran, probably, which is sitting a lot. But I'm sorry, it's not the same games, so I should go on about it. Oh, I think indie games, a lot of times fall in this bucket. With the rare exception of something like Fate of Atlantis, indie games are at their best problematic.

Yeah, but even then there were two versions of Fate of Atlantis and one of them was rubs. So, yeah. To return to the Atari 2600, it was kind of before my time, but there were so many games on that thing that, you know, were based on 1980s and 1970s movies. And it was the NES problem of licensed games times 100, where you would look at the box art and you'd be like, wow, look at that amazing, lavish box art. This must be an incredible game. And then you actually put it into the Atari and it's like, boop, boop, boop, boop. And the box art for Raiders on the Atari is gorgeous. It's this beautiful painting of indie. And he's like in red, golden hues, and it looks so great.

And then you pop it in. And to be fair, they do a pretty good version of the Raiders march for that 2600. The 260 sound processor is not great. But they get the Raiders March, not much else. The game doesn't have any. But I mean, unless I don't know if I can recommend a human beings that go on to play it because better adventure games have been made. But if you go into it thinking I'm playing Zork, not an Atari game.

game, you're going to do way better. You're going to have more fun with it. And that's the real approach to take. It is hard as hell. It's very unforgiving, like a lot of early games. And you're constantly tripping and falling off cliffs and dying. But not ET-like. It's much more fair than that. Just stay away from ledges and you're okay. I mean, so many of these Atari 2,600 games, famously you were mentioning ET, like, what, one programmer or maybe one artist, if that, basically cranking away and trying to get these games out in less than six months. Well, it's the same guy. Yeah, this is how he, you know, he, the problem, Spielberg had him do.

I've seen him interviewed about this a few times and Spielberg wanted him to do ET because he enjoyed Raiders so much, but he didn't have the time to spend on E.T. He'd spend on Raiders. He was trying to make another Raider style game with E.T. Raiders is a much better game than E.T. It's really technically sophisticated for 2,600 game. I think these could, my original list was for 2,600 games. And I was like, no, I can't just keep doing that.

Because there's a lot of bad, good games in that platform. The Empire Strikes Backgame isn't considered bad, is it? That's a legit game, I thought. Oh, that's a solid game. For $2,600? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, with the ATATs, and they've got weak spots that disappear and reappear it. That's a really fun game.

The first instance of the Battle of Hoth, which we would return to many, many, many, many times. Yeah, and I never got tired of it. Not even once. Not even this year in the Skywarka saga, Lego Skywarka saga. Make room for huge. and the pulse fire haste wireless mouse. The Alley Origin 65 has a functionally compact form factor, keeping the arrow keys while ditching the numpad and the F keys.

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Haste Wireless. Keep your setup clean and clutter-free with the alloy origins 65 mechanical keyboard and the pulse fire haste wireless mouse. All right. So let's move on to round two, or as video games would say, round two. Great. We've got a fight now?

No, we're not fighting. Oh, thank God. We're expressing our love for video games, even though they're bad. So we're fighting against the tide of conventional wisdom. Well, that I could be. But we are not fighting with one another. No fist lies. So I'm going to kick things off this time by kind of like Jared.

I could have just done a bunch of NES games because I played Indiana. games pretty indiscriminately at the time. And that was kind of where I learned, oh, some video games can be bad. But I don't want to do that. So I'm going to jump ahead to maybe something that's a little bit unfair, but it's a virtual boy game. And just, you know, by its very nature, people immediately assume, oh, it's virtual boy and it's not Wario, therefore it is bad. And this game didn't even come to America. It's called Insmouth No Yakata, or the manner of Insmouth. Huh.

And it is a first-person shooter with procedurally generated levels designed to basically be a tie-in with a film that was only published in Japan, released in Japan based on Lovecraft lore. It's really just drilling down there. It's so, so esoteric. But I played it on Virtual Boy. And, yeah, no, it's got a lot of problems. It's not quite a first-person shooter. It's not quite an adventure game.

It gives you a lot of limitations. But it's really interesting. And I actually really enjoyed it. You have to approach it not as like a Doom-style first-person shooter, but more as like an arcade-style shooting gallery. And, okay, so it has a really interesting structure to it. So you have all these different levels you can play through. the levels themselves have baked in designs. But then there are objects that you have to collect

in each level that are going to be located in different places. And there's like a blue or a white potion and a red potion or I guess, yeah, red black potion. I don't know. It's virtual boys. So you don't have a lot of options. But there's basically not not potions, keys. You have to find keys. And then you have to find a door. And in the meantime, there are horrible catholic monsters coming after you, you know, with like mouths in their stomach and stuff, they're trying to stop you and you have to shoot them, but you have a very limited amount of ammunition for your six-shooter. And so, you know, by the end of the game, you're facing these monsters that actually take more than a single clip to kill.

So you really want to avoid combat, but sometimes you can't. So you have to get a sense of the lay of the land and kind of how each level works. And then based on the speed with which you get through a level, you're given, you're kind of pushed along to the next stage. And it branches kind of like a Darius game or bubble bubble, or puzzle bubble, I mean, where you finish a level and it can go one of two directions. And there's a bunch of different branches. And if you can go all the way along the top branch, you get the best ending. And if you, you know, take more than like a minute to complete each stage, you get pushed down along the bottom. and end up getting the worst ending.

And they're all, I think, pretty bad. Like, the only good ending is if you manage to escape the house without going insane. And every other thing is just, you know, some horrible variation on going mad or being devoured by, you know, a sleeping god or whatever or just never escaping the manner. But it's actually really interesting. Like, it takes about 20 minutes to play through because you have to play really fast. And each play through, there's like 12 stages that you can go through. But there's so many different branches.

And every time you play, you don't know exactly where the objects are going to be that you have to find. And you don't know where the monsters are going to be placed. And the further you get into the game, the more complex of the levels become where, you know, at the very beginning, it's just like a hallway that turns and then turns again. There's the exit. But, you know, by the end of it, it's all these branching paths and doors. And, you know, you have to avoid the monsters, but you also have to go as quickly as possible. You have to find ammunition. it's just it's really really interesting and I don't know if it's good and I don't think most

people would enjoy it but if you go into it with the right frame of mind I think there's something interesting and enjoyable I keep saying interesting because that's you know like it's ambitious it's it's different it feels very much like oh we could do a first person shooter on virtual boy except the tech isn't quite there so let's do something that's almost a first-person shooter. So it kind of becomes one of those shooting galleries where you go step by step kind of through a map grid. And each time you take a step, there might be a monster that comes into view.

And then you have, you know, a cursor that you move around. I want to say it's been a while since I've played, but I want to say you use the right D-Pad on the Virtual Boy's Bizarre to D-Pad controller to aim your cursor, your targeting reticle for your revolver. But yeah, it's just, it's a game I wish everyone could. play at least once and go into it with the understanding that you're not trying to explore this mansion and, you know, like find all the secrets. You were just trying to find the two items you need and get the hell out without dying and try to do it as quickly as possible so you

can get the best ending. I've never gotten the best ending, but, you know, I know some people who claim they have. So, God bless them. You're the only sane ones left. May I ask three very brief questions? Sure. First of, when I think you might have answered one of the word, and I forgotten, I apologize. One, who makes this, who made this game? Anyone I would know? No. The developer, it was, the developer and publisher were

I want to say Inex or IMAX, but not like the movie screens. IMAX and B-top. And they only have like two credits apiece. They're not, you know, you wouldn't have heard of them. It's like my Canadian girlfriend.

Second question, second of three. How much Japanese knowledge would I need to play this game? None whatsoever. Oh, man. There's no dialogue. I mean, there's like an introduction that has Japanese text,

but, you know, who cares? That may be honest. To pretend Kethulu is talking to you in Kthulhu language, and it's all the same. Okay, my third and final question, which may have now been answered, is does this game contain any racism?

No, unless you can count racism against monsters with stomachs in their mouths, which you kill a lot of. But I feel like that's different because they're monsters that want to eat you. And so there's no, there's no negotiating with them. They're just, you know, dreams of a slumbering God that wants to do our humanity. So I think it's okay. Kirby, yeah.

Jeremy, I've only experienced this game through the despicable act of emulation. I want to ask, what's the 3D effect like? Does it add anything to the game? You know, it's one of those games where, you know, it's a first person game, but it's all quarter-based. there are no open spaces. So you kind of get the, like, the 3D effect as you look down the corridor and the monsters kind of pop out from, you know, and sort of exist in a certain space. But it's not that dramatic. It doesn't change the game.

It doesn't affect how you play it in any way. When I was watching, in preparation for this video, I mean, obviously I've never played it, but I watched your video on it on YouTube. And I really enjoyed the video very informative, as always. And watching the video, it made me think of first-person RPG dungeon crawlers and also games like Eye of the Beholder and that kind of thing, especially in the way that you're kind of grid-based movement, the walls with the labyrinths and everything, the monster's coming in. But, of course, instead of having an elaborate D&D-style battle system, you're shooting at them. So it's kind of an interesting game. the kind of game that would never get made again. It feels like a lost prototype for Eldritch.

Have you ever played that cat? No. I think you'd like it. It's kind of a Minecrafty Lovecraft shooter. Oh, interesting. Procedurally generated dungeon. Okay. There's a really great joke to be had in the combination of Lovecraft and Minecraft,

but I need to workshop it a little bit. I always wanted them to do a Call of Duty that had Lovecraft stuff in it, but they're not going to do that. Calla Cthuloo Doody. Calla Cthoo-Cat-Duty. Cadduty. I mean, in Call of Duty, they now have Godzilla fighting King Kong for some reasons. So we're not that far away from it.

Godzilla is basically Cthulu, so yeah. Yeah, there you go. They're both metaphors. Not quite. Godzilla wants us to be better versions of ourselves. Cothulu just wants to devour us. Radioactive Cthulhu. Okay.

I watched some of those movies. And at no point did Godzilla deliver that some. And I can tell you, all he did was smushed up things. You need to watch Godzilla versus Hedra, where he's clearly, deeply disappointed. in humanity for polluting the earth and comes and saves us from the smog monster, but there's this great air of disappointment about Godzilla who's like, you know, I'm not going to be here to save your bacon every time a smog monster comes along. That sounds incredible. Is Tim Curry in this film, and does he sing Toxic Love? That's what I'm wondering. Yes. No.

Oh. Anyway, so if you ever have a chance to play Insmouth No Yakata on Virtual Boy, I recommend it, you're never going to have that chance, but, you know, just imagine. Just imagine that someone brought it back, you know, and republished it in virtual reality or something. I would never confirm it works on emulators, but... You actually already did, but nice try. 24 hours, folks. 24 hours. Yep, 24 hours. All right. Or, you know, what is, what is an hour in when you're trapped in In Smith's Mansion and reality and time lose any semblance of meaning? Don't refer to the virtual boy as Insmith's Munch, Jeremy. When you disappear into that red and black world, you're never coming out again.

You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. So, Kat, what is next? your docket of disappointment. I want to call an Audible because we were talking about Zork earlier, and this brings to mind a certain little PC game that was beloved in our family back in the early 90s. And that game, it came out during the multimedia era. It was called Return to Zork. So when my parents, before my parents had me, they played the original Zork on PC.

They really enjoyed it. So that's why they picked up Return to Zork. We did not get the CD version. we got the disc version. I didn't know they did that one on disc. Yep, they did that one on disk. And it still had the actual videos and the voice dialogue and everything. But the appeal of return to Zork was, of course, the graphics.

It had graphics as opposed to just pure text. And it had a very bad voice acting, but nevertheless it was there. Our entire family was working together on trying to beat this game. My mom, my dad, myself. if we were all collaborating on the puzzles, there was a huge manual called the Encyclopedia for Bazica, which doubled as copy protection, of course, because there was a teacher who would give you a little pop quiz,

and then you would have to enter the answer that she gave you. And if you didn't answer it three times correctly, she would murder you, as tends to happen. In return to Zork, you can kill everybody. But if you kill somebody, you will see a message that says your path to victory is now blocked and they will come in and take all of your items. However, if you drop all of your items

and you can come back and retrieve them so that you don't lose all of them, the reason you need all of your items is because there's a point where you reach a pit and you have to throw every single item in your inventory into the pit in order to create a bridge to get across. So if you don't have one of the items, You won't be able to get the bridge all the way across

and you won't be able to actually beat the game. There's a board game called Survivor, and that is the finale of the game where you play the major villain in this board game, so you have to actually beat them in that. But the best puzzle is the one with Booz Miller, who is sitting on top of a trap door and says, wants some wry?

Of course you do. And we could not figure that one out for the longest time. And eventually we learned that you have to, get the alcohol and you have to pour it out in the plant while continually doing the toasts and eventually he'll get so drunk he will fall off and the trapdoor will open. I killed booze and he fell off and the trapdoor open

but of course I could not continue because I hadn't gotten the keys. So there's like stuff like this. There's also a whole nonsense with there's a plant in the first screen with a vulture sitting over it and you had to dig up the plant because you need that plant to be able to enter a comedy club

that will allow you to continue through the game. If you kill that plant in the first screen, you cannot win the game. And so if you slice that plant in order to get it, it will die, game over to start over. But of course, you don't know that. So it's not a good game by any measure. The puzzles are really arbitrary, really require a guide to mostly be able to get through. But I have a lot of fond memories of collaborating with my family. on this, like one of the handful of times where we were actually bonding together, I guess.

And it's such a camp. It's so camp. It's hilarious. It's so of its time. I would never say, oh, yeah, go back and play Return to Zorg. It's an amazing game. But when I think back on it, I'm like, oh, how warms my heart thinking about all those hours, misspent hours trying to figure out how to get past Booz Miller. That was one of those games that I picked up back, back in the day to use on my amazing power book. I think it was like 33 megahertz. My God, such power. Yeah, I got to like the first screen and said, you know what?

I don't know if this is for me. I liked, I think I might have liked Zork better when it was just words. Yep, I finished it. I was one of those people. I actually finished it. It took me a long time. And then when I was done, I went, huh, that wasn't that good a game. I think it sounds really fun.

I want to play it. Yeah, no, you should try it, or at least watch a YouTube video. Some of the ideas sound really fun, like having to use your entire inventory to create basically, like, you know, a zombie pile up to cross-acassum. Or the final battle being a board game, I love that. But, yeah, the rest of it sounds kind of... I mentioned the comedy club. You have to record jokes from people around the world and play them at the comedy club, and people will slowly but surely start laughing. However, if you just stand in the comedy club, your bonding plant, the thing that you get at the very beginning, will slowly die and that indicating that you're becoming more and more depressed until finally you become so depressed that you die.

And when you die, there is this horrible laugh and it'll show a gravestone sewing the unique way in which you died. And also, don't turn off the lights because the grooves will get you. Well, yeah, I mean, that's a given. It's awfully dark in here. Oh, good news. I checked, and I already owned this game, so it's all good. Everything isn't going to be fine. Can I talk briefly about another game where you can stand?

in the comedy club for a really, really long time. Ledger Suit Larry's 7. Love for Sale. There's a bit where you can go to a comedy club, and the only way to get 1,000 out of 1,000 points in that game is to stand in that comedy club and listen to the entire scripted, terrible comedy routine that goes on for like 40 minutes. Wow.

And then I think you get one point. Incredible game. That's like Desert Bus level stuff. That's great. I love it. I love it. That's why I love seeing. so much they just troll you beautiful but yeah sorry that that's the only i don't know i haven't

played zork so i can't comment on i just wanted to give that little anecdote there so what was your what was your next actual entry steward oh i'm glad that you asked uh i chose diketana the even much maligned suck it down john romero passion project that went through what three engines and uh is widely considered not to be very good in Indeed. My main quorum with the response that this game gets is I think that in modern times, that it's very informed by the disappointment when it initially launched. Now, what I think is possibly worth remembering is that when it initially launched, I think that Half-Life may already have been released,

which changed very much the way people thought about shooters like this. However, nowadays, I would personally prefer to play a more old-school FPS than I would play Half-Life, nothing against Half-Life, but it was the kind of formative story FPS, and it's been better now. I'd rather play, say, controversial maybe, but I'd rather play, say, Bioshock now. Dicatana now, to my eyes, because I didn't play it when it first came out, I only played it in relatively recent years. Diketana seems to me to just be a middling old-school FPS. And old-school FPS is a really fun. Like they have loads of hidden secrets all over the place.

They have really stupid weapons that are just silly. So when I play Diketana, I'm just experiencing this kind of labyrinthane, you know, doom-ish or quake-ish FPS game that just has some flaws. Like, the first level in the sewer is, yeah, it's not the most auspicious start to a game, but I've definitely played worse. The worst thing about it for me is the fact that the dragonfly enemies make a really annoying noise. And when there's more than one of them on the screen, it gets layered over it. So you get to hear this annoying noise at four times of the volume louder than anything else that's happening.

Also, later in that episode, there's a sequence in which 12 of them come out at once, and there's nothing you can do to mitigate it, really. But no, I mean, I just, I play it, and I just find myself thinking, in like, this is, I've actually got to go and look everywhere because I'm going to find things that are useful to me because this is the kind of game that FPS is used to be. And that's not me saying I don't enjoy modern FPSas. I'm just saying that unless you go and look for something specifically designed to be a, I'm doing air quotes, but you can't see me, a boomer shooter, like one of the more, one of the modern old school FPSs that are

specifically made to recall those days. You're not going to find anything off the beaten path, if there even is indeed a beaten path. And Daikata does have that. It's a really expansive like huge number of levels, really long game. One of the other problems with the game at the time was

the fact that the sidekicks that you could get are really stupid. But that was patched out a long time ago. You're not a fan of Superfly Miyamoto? I love Superfly Johnson, please. Oh, Superfly Johnson. Sorry, sorry. I can't understand why you wouldn't have committed this stuff to

memory. My bad. It's okay. I'm good. I just want, I want, I want, I want, Shigero Miyamoto had to have a brother named Superfly. Oh, gosh, yes. That's really all it is.

Yeah, the lesser known, pushed onto the rug, wasn't allowed to develop any games. The Mario to his Mario. Hi, Miyamoto. But these are, these are, like, problems that were solved a long time ago, just shortly, even shortly after the launch of the game. Any version of the game, any version of the game. the game you buy today has been

patched to remove so A, you can just turn them off and B it's not only appearing cut scenes basically and B, the other problem the game has, which is that you used save gems instead of letting you save anywhere. You had to pick up save gems you can then spend.

They've turned that off as well, it's in the options. You can just turn off the save gems system. The only problem with that is it means that when you go to a secret and find some save gems, it's quite disappointing because there's now no use for them. But hey, I didn't say it was a perfect game It was a game that I kind of like

Yeah, lots to it that I appreciate Mostly I just think that it's fine I don't think that it deserves to have this terrible reputation The NCC4 version is not very good I'll grant them that I will grant it But no, the PC game is fine

And I will die on this hill And I almost certainly actually will die on this hill I mean, per usual It was a matter of way too much hype Because of course John Romero started ion storm and the expect he was the guy who he was one half of the partnership that helped create doom and of course expectations were through the roof from it for it and everything

and we all know how we love to tear down creators and such who were at the top of the world and then not but i have all the respect in the world a for john romero who seems like a genuinely cool dude and also he brought a war inspector and say hey do you want all the money here have all the money make something really cool and war inspector went and made dais x so which really is a cool yeah honestly i met i met john romero a couple of years ago he did a talk in in my city uh and there's like a meet and greet and everyone was thanking him from like doom and quake and i was like i'm going to do it i'm going to thank him for diketana but then i'm going to add very quickly i'm not joking i genuinely liked it but i unfortunately chickened

out and just like, yeah. It was, it was overhyped and it was over scoped. He tried to, or they tried, Ionstorm, tried to keep up with the tech behind Quake 2 and following when they were creating a much bigger game with sidekick AIs and a larger number of enemies and bigger areas and more diverse landscapes. And that just wasn't doable, no matter how much money you threw at the problem. And they also didn't have the foresight to do what ended up happening with Half-Life, which was just to mod, the original Quake 1 engine, to do very specific cinematic-oriented things in an illusory version of a huge environment that actually wasn't as big as it seemed to be. And they really just tried to do it all on an impossible schedule.

And so when it came out, it felt stapled together and it felt old. But I loved Akitana. I was so thrilled, you had this on the list. I think it's a ridiculously fun game now, especially post-patch. Like, now that the sidekicks work and it took what didn't work about the game out and made it much smoother, I would rather play PC-di-Katana than most cods or battlefields to this day. And that's a matter of design philosophy, not that modern games aren't good, but those games have more in common with duck hunt than they do with the,

way I like shooter design. I think Daikata might be more timeless than those games because they were so of the moment, you know, they just pushed high technology and everything. And I think he could go back and play Battlefield Bad Company too on PC and have a really good time. But so many of the old school Call of Duties are very much in that moment of when they came out, whereas Dai Katana, I think maybe can be appreciated in the sense of like just pure nostalgia and 90s PCR

shooters. I've never played it, but you make a compelling case. Also, shout out to the Game Boy Color game. Yeah, the game rules, yeah. I think once a decade or so, we get a shooter that is overhyped and overscoped. We had

DiCatana. Then about 12 years later, we had Duke Nukem Forever. Oh, no, you sent the Duke. Bioshock Infinite. Probably in a year or two, we're going to have Metroid Prime 4. I'd love to hear the inside dirt on that one once it actually finally comes out, if it finally comes out. It's not coming out. It's canceled.

It's Nintendo. So they're going to, it's going to be like version seven of the game, development team seven of the game, but they're still going to put it out because they've announced it. No. If you say it's not coming out, then it will be announced immediately after this podcast, finished recording. So you must say it. If you say it, if you say it cynically with the intention of summoning it by denying its existence, that doesn't work. It's, it just doesn't happen like that. Pride Prime 4 dread. That's it. We'll get it in 15 years and that's what it'll be called. Anyway, why don't we move along to Jared's second pick? Yeah. I'm going to, I did a 2,600 for the last one. So let's talk about another not good game that I have a lot of affection for. I think this is one that a lot of people from a certain generation are going to feel a little warmth slash hate for. And that is Dragons Layer, the game that you can hear no matter where you are in the arcade, the most beautiful attract mode of them all. And I'm speaking about Dragons Layer and all it's, arcade-derived forms. I think there are two problems with Dragonslayer. Dragonslayer in the early 1980s when it came into being, or mid-1980s, and Dragonslayer now. Two different problems that feed into one another. When Dragons Layer was new, you're looking at a game with this beautiful

Don Bluth animation and a 50-cent coin slot. And here I am, little five-year-old Jared, and there's a bunch of 25 cent machines around me that I, you know, I can go play Robotron, I can go play Miss Pac-Man, and I can go play Gallagher, and I can go play all these amazing video games, and I'm pretty good at. I can get 15 minutes out of some of these, all right, on a single quarter. I can go to Dragon's Layer, pop two quarters into play this amazing looking game, die very creatively, three times in about two minutes, and walk away very, very sad with all my money gone. But I want to keep playing because I watch, and there are grown-ups. Grownups apparently with pockets full of dozens and dozens and dozens of quarters that are actually kind of good at

it. And they can get like the fifth screen. And I watch them. And I'm like, there has to be a way. For those that haven't played it, of course, it's Don Bluth cartoons on a laser disc. The screen flashes and you have to move the controller in sometimes unintuitive ways. It's effectively a reaction slash memorization exercise. And it's very beautiful and look like nothing else. And in the arcade, it was designed to suck your quarters even faster than most arcade games at the time. It was like gauntlet, just so overtly there for your money, but instead of playing for three minutes, you played for like 30 seconds. On the other hand, is what happens when you take Dragon's Layers' arcade iteration out of the arcade. If you give me unlimited access to Dragonslayer, I can, as I eventually did, master it to the point that I can get through it.

because there's only so much content in this game about animation stuffed onto an arcade laser disc. Not all that much. And there's only five controls, up down, left, right, and sword. And one of those is always the answer to every problem. So you memorize it, you play it, you see all the beautiful animation, including all the stunning, fun, death animations. And then you just kind of play this super duper short game with no real replayability. and you've conquered it like you do in that physical edition for limited run games. But you don't have anything, you know, there's nothing else to do with it except go back every couple of years and maybe play through and realize you still have the muscle memory to get it done.

So it's not good in either sense. It's a practically pay to win on one side in the arcade and then it's extremely undemanding in an arcade setting. But, God, I love it because it's funny and it's gorgeous and just watching all the... It's like a Sierra game, watching all the ways you can perish just horribly. It's spectacular with Turk the Dairy. Okay, I want to shut up and let you all talk about this because I imagine everybody here has a dragons on your store. I have a question about this game because I've always won... I have not played the arcade original.

I've never seen an arcade copy. I've only played home versions of the arcade game. Now, I'm going to sound very ignorant now. And I apologize. But now, the original game did not have the prompts to tell you which buttons you're supposed to press, did it? You had to guess, essentially, or use intuition. Is that correct? You knew you had to press A button.

You didn't know which one. Yeah, because the versions that I have played all will be like the right arrow will appear, like a QTE, basically. Now, that was not in the original game at all. You had to guess, basically. No, you just get a yellow flash, and that's it. I thought that was the case, but I did not know for a fact. The only Dragon's Lay game I have any amount of real time with was the Game Boy version because it's a port of a Spectrum game, so I won't even get into it.

But we should do a Dragon'sler episode if that hasn't happened already, at some point, for sure. Yeah, that Game Boy version is really interesting. The Kalikovision version is super interesting. There's one on the NES, right? They're old. Because I only bring it up because I remember GameCX playing Dragons Slater in the NES, and they couldn't get into the castle. Yeah.

They kept dying as they were trying to make the, and it looked so stiff and really bad. No matter how bad it looks, playing it is infinitely worse. That's a legit, like, that's like a Sean Baby circa 1997 level hatred. That game is that awful. Yeah. I remember seeing Dragons Later in the arcade, but it was a mystery to me because I would be like, wow, what a beautiful cartoon. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing in this game.

I have no idea how you're actually supposed to play it. When you talk about how it's just there to gobble your coins, but nowadays you can just play it on a home system and eventually you'll memorize it enough to you finish it. It makes me think a little bit of beat-em-ups of that era, where from a balanced perspective, a game like The Simpsons or Teenage Me and Ninja Turtles, they're balanced to take your coins.

You're not supposed to get all the way through on one coin. But then when you play them on home systems, you're like, I finished it. Hooray. So think about like a brawler cat. And then it was, it randomized so many of the encounters too. Like you didn't get them over and over in the same game, but you wouldn't necessarily get the same screen when you move for one to the other. So it would be like double dragon, except sometimes like the knock you off the ledge thing

from stage four would be the first screen. And then the next time you play it would be like the green of Bobo is throwing you around like a beach ball. Oh, it was awful. They repeated some of the rooms as well. Did they? I mirrored them. Am I?

Am I? Is that? Yeah. Yeah. Matt. Yeah. I don't actually like or enjoy playing Dragon's Lair. So I don't really have anything to say about it.

I remember seeing people play it. And, you know, I was very young and kind of intuitive like, oh, this isn't really something that I think is worth my time. So, you know, I would watch people play sometimes and be like, okay, yeah, that's kind of cool. He saved the princess. But I just didn't want to do it myself. Like, watching someone else was good enough for me. And then I could go play Moon Patrol or something. Or, you know, Pac-and-Pow. We didn't have Pack-and-Pow. Professor Pac-Man. Yeah, that was money well spent. Professor Pac-Man. Oh, well done, Pac-Man. I didn't realize he was so advanced. He was. Yeah. That's, I think.

think that might be the rarest Pac-Man game. It was not an official Namco release. It was one of those things hacked together by Midway. Anyway, that's for another topic. Did anyone play the Super Nintendo version of Dragon Slayer, which was like a platform game?

Because my favorite thing about that is the password system is its own discriminate level on which it's possible and quite easy to die. So you can get a game over on the password screen. That's beautiful. The best possible translation of Dragon's Lur to a platform game of matchable. Very authentic.

It is very authentic. I mean, Bluth's, you know, trying to have a game on art and sound, but it was a technical showpiece. You hadn't seen that gimmick before. And as a kid, especially a young kid, eventually I learned. But go in and be like, yeah, I can play these games. I love it. I'm really good at. But God, if I could be good at that cartoon game, I know it's possible because I've seen people do it.

And so I would just make the same stupid mistake. but I love Bluth's Disney animation. I love Secret of NEM. It's one of my favorite movies to this day. And so seeing that realized in this interactive format is pretty neat. And that's why I do love this game, despite the fact that it's a vicious nightmare thing that should never exist. Speaking of vicious nightmares, we're going to go into the third and final round of this episode, round of games.

And, yeah, I say nightmare because the sequel to this game actually had the word nightmare and the title. But I'm talking about the original, and that is the Tower of Druaga, which is very fresh in my mind. because I just put together a video about the NES version of it. But no matter how you play it, it's just not a game that plays fair in any way. It's very impressive in a sense and definitely has an important legacy, but I don't know that it's good. So how familiar are any of you with Tower of Duraga?

I've only played other games that reference it, I believe, like Project X-Zone or Namco cross Capcom. But my understanding is it's one of those incredibly esoteric riddle-based games that doesn't tell you how to solve any of its riddles. Not exactly riddle-based. Jared Kat. I've played quite a bit of it. Oh, there we go.

I tried to love it. I tried so hard and failed. How far have you made it legitimately into the tower? Oh, God, like six levels. Yeah. It's about where it ends, yeah. Yeah, about six stages. That's about as far as I've ever legitimate.

I've jumped ahead, and I've played some Quest of Key, but I cannot find, I'm very interested in this one because I've tried to love it and cannot. Yeah, so I found in putting together my video that if you give yourself a hack for the NES, the Famicom version that gives you infinite lives, it's at least somewhat tolerable. Maybe tolerable is the wrong word. It's at least somewhat reasonable. But even so, it's only somewhat reasonable because you still have no idea where you're supposed to find stuff. The way to play this game is with an infinite lives cheat and a guide that tells you how to find every treasure.

Because the Tower of Duraga was created, who was designed by Masunobu Indo, the creator of Zevius, who wanted to basically follow up that, you know, influential landmark, highly important shooter with a game. that used the Pac-Man concept, like the maze concept, to create an RPG. And so it runs on like a variant of, I think, Super Pac-Man hardware. And it gives you 60 stages, each of which is sort of maze-like. It's not actually a maze. It's, you know, Pac-Man-style maze in that there are corridors and passages and the screen scrolls, I want to say, horizontally. So it's actually two screens per stage.

There are 60 these stages, and almost every single stage contains a hidden treasure. But the thing is, there is no way whatsoever to know how to find those hidden treasures. The treasures are hidden behind a different requirement in every single stage. Sometimes the requirement is something simple, like kill a black slime. sometimes it's something simple like walk over the door before you collect the treasure for that stage so there's or the key for that stage so each stage has a treasure hidden and a key that appears and a door that you can open once you have the key and if you leave a room or leave a floor before you collect the treasure you can never get that treasure and some of these treasures are

required uh in order to beat the game you have to have like a sword that you don't actually use in combat, but you collect, and then you can collect the next version of it if you have found the previous sword. And then there's another version of it. And then there's another version of it. And you have to have all of these items. There's, you know, you hit a point like stage 23 or something where from that point on, there's like four stages, five stages that are pitch black, unless you have the torch, which you have to have found several stages earlier. But, you know, some of the, Some of the requirements are things like wait for the timer to run down to, you know, like three seconds before you go through the door. And if the timer runs down to zero, the game doesn't end, the level doesn't end.

It just goes into like panic mode and an indestructible monster kind of like evil auto from berserk shows up and chases you. Some of the requirements are things like pass through enemies without dying three times, you know, face a wall and attack. the wall or like press the south wall or face one direction or cause enemies to appear on the bottom row of the screen. You never know what it's going to be. And there's no indication whatsoever in game aside from one item that you can collect that will chime when you face the treasure. But it doesn't tell you like where exactly the treasure is.

It doesn't tell you how you get the treasure. It's just like, oh, I'm facing the proper direction for you. the treasure, so now what do I do? It's absolutely maddening, but this game was actually very, very successful in Japanese arcades and even more successful on the Famicom when it launched, because there was nothing else like it at the time. And, you know, as an abstraction of the role-playing genre into a Pac-Man-style sword-action kind of game, it's kind of interesting. it's very ambitious, but it's also just really unreasonable. And the reason it caught on is because it became like this cultural thing

where people would play it and figure out. They'd finally say, oh, I figured out what you have to do to get the treasure on level 17. So they'd, you know, pass these notes around. And it became sort of this collective thing that people would share throughout the arcades. And, you know, when the game launched on Famicom, people fell over themselves to publish strategy guides for it. But then, you know, the Famicom game also had another Durwaga where, you know,

you could insert a code at the title screen and there would be 60 different stages with completely different requirements for finding the treasures. So if you were good enough to make it to the end of the game, which you weren't, because you only have three lives and it's one hit kills. And, you know, even if you manage to find the jet boots that make you move at double speed on like the first or second stage, there are still enemies that are just unbelievably powerful. They can, you know, appear out of nowhere and zap you with magic before you have a chance to respond to them. And you can't attack anything without lowering your shield, which leaves you vulnerable. But you have to figure out like, oh, when I lower my shield, I'm actually holding it to my left. So when an enemy

appears and I don't have time to, you know, to put my sword down, I can at least face so that my left side is, you know, defending against the beams that they shoot at me. It's just, It's just absolute nonsense. Like, it's so unfair. It's so unreasonable. But I do feel compelled by it. And every time I play it, I want to make it a little further into the game. But even with cheat codes and a strategy guide, it's still so frustrating past like level 25 or so.

Just trying to get those treasures and, you know, maneuvering so that, you know, the certain things that I need to do happen properly. That's just tear out your hair maddening. Anyway, it's cool. It's tear out your hair maddening. People complain about it a lot, and yet it seems very popular in Japan to this day. Very influential. I realize that insanity seems to be the prevailing theme of my games.

You had the Lovecraft game and then a game that will drive you crazy. I contend that that doesn't sound bad. It sounds like it's intended to be a social game, almost. A lot of these games were back in the 80s, where you go, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do and you're comparing notes and figuring things out and slowly but surely you're making your way through it. Though that said, it does sound quite difficult

even without that aspect of solving puzzles. So, yeah. I think I'd like this game a lot if I'd have been a Japanese arcade player when it was for that three, four months when they were keeping the arcade diaries next to every Geraga machine. Yeah, I mean, the idea that you could sit there

and watch your friends play for hours or strangers and learn a new trick on a certain stage and then get to show that institutional knowledge off and share it in a pre-internet world. It reminds me of, you know, Eldon Ring touches like that little zeitgeist we had there for a few weeks where people kept finding neat things and we were all sharing them with each other like, oh, that's cool. I do love that. Yeah, I mean, the entirety of Tower Draga is like that one part of Eldon Ring where you have

to hit a random nondescript wall 60 times. Which was a bug, by the way? Oh, was it? Okay. Well, imagine an entire game built intentionally around that bug. Sixty of those just, you know, like, what am I doing? Oh, I did a random thing and something appeared. This is hard for me to ask, you've done it.

You're always very eloquent in your descriptions here. You're like, oh, it hurts and it rules. Like, what is playing it now? Because that was my problem is I went back, particularly the NES version and played if you're a bit, I'm just like, I could get a guide and do this, but I can't figure out why to keep going ahead instead of just sort of taking this in stride to something I know a little about, moving on. What compelled you to just keep going? What was it just, what grabbed you there? So there's two aspects to it. One is that you have to take it in the context of what

role-playing games on consoles and arcades and even computers, home computers, were like in 1984 when this game debuted. There was nothing like it. Like, it's a mess and it's unfair, but it's trying to do something that no one had done before. Really? I mean, you know, the kind of seminal action RPGs of Japan, they also debuted in 1984, Hyde Lide, and Dragon Slayer.

Like, these games were all contemporaries. And this had the audacity to do it not on a home computer, but in an arcade. Like, who even thought that was a good idea? It's just, it's bizarre. Like, it's so counterintuitive to do this. And that's really interesting to me, like, to see this kind of steward of innovation happening in such a completely inappropriate place. So, yeah, like taking it in that context, it's meaningful. And two, the game is just really influential.

Like, so many people played it who then went on to design games and said, you know, sometimes they took the right lessons. sometimes they took the wrong lessons. There were a whole lot of games on NES where you just had to do random-ass stuff in order to win. That's not good. But, you know, the sort of grand, epic action adventure, you know, packed with secrets and challenges.

Like, this game really was influential in that sense. Just like, you know, Zevius had been. Like, you read interviews with Japanese developers and, you know, the people who are making kind of big games in the mid-delead 80s. And they're all like, oh, yeah, Zavius, man, I played that so much. When it came out on Famicom, I cried.

Like, it was just that big a deal. And this maybe wasn't quite to the same degree. But it was still, like, you look at this game and you can see, oh, well, yeah, there's the whizrobes from Zelda. They show up pretty early and they just chew you up right away. Okay, yeah, there you go. And then, of course, you know, Namco, I guess three, Namco is constantly going back and referencing this.

You know, I guess I kind of really decided that I was interested in this when I play Mr. Driller Drilland, and there's an entire mode built around the concept of Duraga. It's much easier and, you know, less punishing. But still, you know, it was in Lufia, I think. No, that was Taito. It was, oh, Tels of Destiny, I think, had a dungeon mode based on Duraga. And it just, you know, it shows up. There's, you know, race cars in Ridge Racer that have Duraga decals on them.

It's just one of those games that they keep going back to to kind of, Remind you. And also, you know, Nightmare of Duraga, the sequel, introduced me really to rogue-like games and made me say, oh, I see what this genre is about. It's a totally different game, but it also has, like, you know, hidden secrets on every, on every stage. So, yeah, it's just one of those, like, it's such a nexus of video game history that I feel compelled to go back to it. Also, there's a Game Boy version and a PC engine version that are pretty good and a lot less punishing. Anyway, that's it for my final pick.

Anyway, that's it for me. Um, cut. I guess for my final pick, I will stand a final fantasy game. I've talked many times about how much I love Final Fantasy 8 on here. You can go back and listen to our Final Fantasy 8 episode on either Retronauts or Acts of the Blood God. But I want to highlight a game that came out almost 10 years ago now, which I think is largely forgotten. It was maligned at the time because we were all sick of Final Fantasy 13 by that point. Just wanted to move on with our lives.

As Final Fantasy 13 Lightning Returns, an objectively bad game in many respects, I think. the time elements in that game, for example, make no sense and are very easily broken. And the only reason I don't care about them very much is because, like, oh, you can safely ignore those. It's okay. But if you're not familiar with Lightning Returns, it's a heavily souped up version of Final Fantasy 13,

which you play as Lightning, but you're only playing as Lightning in a variant of the Final Fantasy 13 combat engine. And it's like these one-on-one battles with just lightning. By lightning returns, lightning is a god. She's like a Valkyry.

She's basically Lenneth Valkyrie. She is exploring a world that is falling apart and is sitting at the end of time. It's kind of an open world game, very open-ended. And you can kind of go anywhere you want. There are, I believe, four major kind of plot routes happening.

And everybody is kind of losing their mind because the end of the world is approaching. Basically, I've said before that this is kind of how I would want a modern Falky profile to look like, more of an open world, but still very in the JRP kind of sense, where there's a strategic battle system, not just a pure action system, a lot of weird systems going on, beautiful artwork. And I don't know if I could recommend lightning returns necessarily, but I think it is actually my favorite of the Final Fantasy 13 games.

I would argue that this game actually rules and is not bad in any respect. I think it's great and kind of justifies the whole Final Fantasy 13 thing. It's so, yeah, it really goes a long way away from what Final Fantasy 13 was, which was extraordinarily linear. And, you know, Final Fantasy 13, too, tried to kind of break away from that. But this is just like the exact opposite of Final Fantasy 13. And it's very, very interesting. And you mentioned Valkyrie profile. And this game was co-developed by triace. So it's got that DNA built into it. I don't know if it was speculation or rumor that it started life as a Valky profile, then got turned into a Final Fantasy 13. And if that were the case, I would totally believe it, because

it feels like it for sure. But it's so heavily souped up. And the weird thing is it, it's so far removed from where we were at the end of the original Final Fantasy 13, where, you know, the world is about to end and everybody was immortal at various points. And you're like, wow, what a departure from the original Final Fantasy 13. And it shows how Gonzo that world ended up being and how Gonzo Final Fantasy has gotten in general. It kind of reflects maybe the best in the worst parts of Final Fantasy. But when I was playing it, I was defending it pretty vigorously against a lot of our peers who are like, this game is bad. and I do not like it.

And I think Jeremy and I, whenever Jeremy and I are aligned on a game and we're like, yeah, this game rules. I know that is really good. And if you go back to U.S. Gamer, you can find us doing a back-and-forth article defending the merits of lightning returns at the time. So I'm triggered and traumatized by this discussion. Oh, no. You don't like it?

I had to write a guide for this thing when I was at IGN. And guide writing can ruin a good game for it. you. Yeah. That was me in Fallout New Vegas. Yeah. Yeah. And so like I tried. I love the combat system. I think it's this kind of weird Mike Tyson's punchout meets Final Fantasy thing going on. And I love it. Like it's this rhythm-based kind of combat system. It's so much fun. But God, I hate lightning. And everyone connected with her. And that's not the Final Fantasy 13 thing. That's really this game more reinforced that. I could. to spend. I expected to like her. I came into this game very optimistic and was like, wow,

you're just, you should have been named Vanille for Vanilla. Like, I just can't. She's a very one-no character, not going to lie. But it's old man griping here because I had to write a night for it. There's a lot to love about it. It has a timer. I think a lot of the problem is I have the same problem that the Jen Frank expressed on retronauts a long time ago. You put a timer on a game and make it a prominent element of, and I'm done for. I freak out. I can't play Major's mask without freaking out. And so that's the same deal there. But yeah, there's a lot to love.

I crapped on it a lot. But it's full of interesting ideas. The combat's fantastic. The 13 days thing is really neat. I think it's 13 days, right? That was the gimmick for all the games, I believe. Yeah, I think if Lightning Returns had been named something else, or if it had not been into the Final Fantasy 13 world,

I think we would have fonder memories of it. But because it's connected to Final Fantasy Thirteen and is almost like a fan mod in so many ways from the way that Lightning is presented. There was the whole controversy because one of the developers said, yes, we have expanded Lightning's chest to be able to appeal to our fan base. And everybody was like, so Lightning's not really a character anymore. Lightning's just kind of an empty vessel for people to enjoy.

I guess she has pink hair. But yeah, like if it were a. Valkyry profile or even just a standalone game. I think a lot of people will be like, that was kind of a neat game, but it's tied inextricably to the problematic nature of Final Fantasy 13. You could put a Waluigi mustache on her. That was pretty cool. Hearing about the timer makes me want to play it more because I tend to like RPGs

or RPGs in games with timers like Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter as such. That had a timer, right? I'm not imagining that, am I? Well, not quite a timer, but it was a limitation on how long you could use your dragon power, a demeter. See, I wasn't, you know, the main reason I haven't played this one, because I did play Final Fantasy 13, which is kind of a compelling reason why I didn't play this one actually, but I'd, I was, now, I don't want to, this, I don't know if this is contentious or not. This is not something I'm directing at anyone at all, like, as an actual human being, but I used to use the website NeoGaf to get my gaming news, and they really hated Lightning over there, and I've come to realize that, they actually hated women.

So part of me was kind of like, is this game actually bad, or do you just hate women? But it turns out that if you guys are all saying that she's not the most interesting character and that is in fact the case, then I can acknowledge that. What's funny is, Vanil and Fang are the most interesting characters in Final Fantasy 13. And if I, I mean, Vanil is in this one. I don't remember if Fang is in this one. I don't remember Fang being in it.

Yeah. didn't, I don't remember the end of Final Fantasy 13, but no, like, yeah, lightning is the least compelling woman in her own game. Okay. It's just because I could never be sure if it was actual hate or if it was this kind of. Oh, it's a mix. It's a mix. Okay, it's a mix is in there.

It's a mix is in there. Okay. Fair enough. Why not both? Both things can be true. Yeah. The thing I remember most about the plot of this, the only real plot point I remember, it was the big reveal that you're Chocobo is actually the reincarnation of Odin.

Wow, spoiler's great. Also, isn't it Chocolina? Chocolina the merchant, who is the grown-up version of the chokobo that hung out in Saz's hair. Wow. What a game. Is this the game that has that awesome

death metal version of the Chocobo theme in it? I believe that was 13-2. That was 13-2, yeah. The main reason that I like 13-2, and in fact, the only reason, because I've never played it. My parting shot is that this game redeems Final Fantasy 13. I'm going to, I've got it. I have it on PS3. I'm going to give it a go, I think. It sounds genuinely fun. It's on PC, I think, as well. And it's pretty short. Like, it's pretty accessible. You can play through it pretty quickly.

Should I, is it, is it enjoyable to those who may not have played through Final Fantasy 13 and 13, would you say? I would argue that it stands on its own, honestly, because these characters, like I said, are so far removed from where they were at the end of Final Fantasy 13. It might as well be its own world. I mean, the way that they act. Yeah, they did such a poor job of exposition in Final Fantasy 13 and 132. Like, they'd never really explained what the backstory was for those games. So going into a game in the series where you don't know the backstory, that just puts you

on equal footing. It's, you know, it's a lot. I've tried to play Final Fantasy 13 several times, and I've never been able to get past the sheer amount of just running down a straight line that you do. And I'm sure it's a well-worn criticizes. but it really does get old after the first few hours where all you're doing is literally pressing forward. And Lightning Returns is definitely not that.

There's a lot to explore. There's a lot to find. It's a neat place. There are towns. Does it have the same combat, sort of, or is it totally redone combat as well? Oh, totally redone. Oh, wow.

Very different. You're selling me on this one. Very actiony. Yeah. There's actually a core of, I mean, I guess we could talk about the original Final Fantasy 13, just a smidge as well.

There is a core of fans out there. now who will totally say, actually, Final Fantasy 13 was good all along. And usually when they stump for Final Fantasy 13, they stump for Vaniel and Fang, who are canonically gay, and also the battle system, which admittedly in the original Final Fantasy 13 made for a pretty enjoyable, strictly encounter-based, almost like a puzzle where you had to figure out the different combinations to actually be able to defeat the bosses. And of course, it was quite lovely. It looked quite lovely for a PS3 game. It was like one of the last times that we had something resembling a term-based combat system for Final Fantasy, a mainline Final Fantasy game, RIP. And of course, you know, Jeremy and I think you were probably there too as covering games by that point too, Jared. Like we have all these mixed up feelings at the time. Well, for people who grew up with Final Fantasy 13, there's a not insignificant proportion who are like, actually Final Fantasy 13 was good. So it's a little like the Star Wars prequels now among Final Fantasy fans.

Just like, oh, okay, so we've decided that Final Fantasy 13 is good now? All right, cool. Let the younger generation have their things. They have so little else in this world. Anyway, Stuart, what do you have for the younger generation? What treasures can you bring them that are good, actually? I have chosen for my final pick, one of my hobby horse arguments, which I'm now bringing from Twitter straight into Retronauts, baby. Paper Mario, Sticker Star, aka the first, well, not the first, well, not the first,

the first. Okay, now that I think about it, the second non-RPG, Paper Mario, but Super Paper Mario Mario still had some RPG-ish stuff going on in there. But this game completely, for the 3DS and certainly Paper Mario 6 Star, completely just to choose any kind of XP, low-leveling up. Basically, it is entirely an adventure game that just happens to have some term-based combat in there. And it's often characterized as the combat being pointless because you don't get XP, you can't level up, there's no reason to do it. But the reason it's there is because you have, the entire thing is judged by your sticker album, which is on the bottom screen of your 3DS. As you play the game, you will click lots and lots and lots of different

stickers. And if you run out of stickers, you game over, that's how you lose. You can run out of health or you can run out of stickers. And the fights are there to make sure that you are able to efficiently defeat them with as few stickers as possible, while also not using all your good stickers up because you'll need them for later more difficult battles. So the whole thing becomes entirely about the stickers. It feeds into every aspect of the game, not just the combat. You'll be

applying stickers onto the environment in certain places to create new terrain to use or gimmicks to use. You'll be using stickers or you'll be unpealing toads and things from the environment that's been stuck to it because they've been turned into stickers or peeling stickers off

the walls or to get out of the way of areas that you need to get. It's much more of a puzzle slash adventure slash exploration game than anything that's come in the series before. And what it reminded me of the most is Sierra Games, not because it's obtuse like that, but because it's entirely about thinking, critical thinking, lateral thinking, not statistics at any point. But an example I would give, and this doesn't sound impressive when I recite it, but I was impressed as hell. There's a level early on where you're in the sort of archetypal Mario Pyramid Desert stage

where there's a huge impassable pit. You've been walking through all these rooms full of coffins in the background lined up against the walls and, you know, mummies and dry bones and all the usual Mario stuff. You come to this room with this pit and you're just like, how the hell am I supposed to cross this? I can't use any stickers here. I can't do anything. So you go back and backtrack through the entire level, multiple. times trying to figure out something that will, a switch you can hit that will turn off this

pit or open a bridge up or something, anything, and I found nothing. So eventually I went back to the room and I just looked at it. And I noticed that there's a foreground, in the foreground, there's a tipped over coffin. And that's not actually uncommon. There's quite a lot of them in the level. But this one was tipped over in a way that it was kind of close to the background coffins that you don't even think about. They're just there as decoration. And I thought, man, it would be really weird if you could jump up on the coffin, jump onto the background coffins so that there's no indication you can't jump on them

and walk across the pit. And that turned out to be exactly what the solution is. Just completely hidden in plain sight using the language of a video game to wrong foot you because you don't think you can interact with the background in that way. When you fill every room with these things, you just take them for granted, but no.

And the whole game's just full of clever stuff, or what I consider to be clever stuff like that. boss battles which require you to I find things which are real world objects that you then turn into stickers and you have to figure out which is the correct thing to use to trivialise the boss fight lest you are going to have to do it normally

with lots of powerful stickers which is very difficult people really didn't like this and I think that a lot of it is down to the shock of it not being an RPG so to speak but I still think to this day people aren't prepared to engage with but it actually is.

And that extended to the Wii U game Color Splash, which I thought was as brilliant. The recent one Origami King, people have sort of gotten into it a bit more. And the annoying thing is, it's exactly the same as Sticker Star, but they still won't go and say it's good. It's not fair.

I just want to go to them, and I want to just make them play both games and say, admit that it's good, admit that this is fine, and they just won't do it. I love Sticker Star. I had so much fun. with that game. And I think it's horrible that it doesn't get any love because it's so clearly

a top to Nintendo. I reviewed Sticker Star for OneUp.com and I thought it was great and I was actually really surprised when other people started talking about how terrible it was because I thought it was actually really clever. I thought it, you know, dispensed with things that, you know, mechanics and elements that didn't necessarily need to be there and, you know, just kind of focused on being almost like the service impression of an RPG, but actually being more of an adventure game, being almost like a puzzle game in some ways, and just did really clever things, really amusing things with the concept of, hey, this is, you know, a game about characters who are paper, who exist, you know, kind of as two-dimensional objects in a 3D world.

And it really played that up in a way that the previous games had toyed with. but never fully realized to the degree that this one did. And yeah, I really like Sticker Star. I'm a fan. So I don't know. I think the reason Sticker Star tends to be controversial among Mario fans is it's because it's not a thousand year door. And when they say, I hate Sticker Star or Color Splash, what they're actually saying

is we just want another thousand year door. And you can debate the merits of that. I think that's a little unfair to Sticker Star myself because it means that these Mario fans are just going to slam anything that doesn't, that isn't literally a thousand-year door, too. I think Sticker Star should be judged on its own merits. The main complaint I've seen of Sticker Star is that maybe it's a little easy by and large. Yeah, that was the main critique of that one. Yeah, it must be pretty stupid because I took forever. I remember it as a big, funny adventure game, and I love big, funny adventure games.

So I was thrilled. I had already seen – I don't know if I just wasn't as locked in from the first two Paper Mario's, but I'd really enjoyed Super Paper Mario and Wii, which went some really weird directions. And I liked that, too. So seeing them mix it up with the series was – I wasn't surprised by that, and I was a little surprised by the blowback from the audience. I think it's a great little game. I remember, I wish Nadia were here because I seem to recall that she was not a fan of Sturgar, but she did like Origami King. And I would love to hear why she liked one better than the other, ultimately.

Oh, well, in that case, I'm glad that they're not here because then I would have to maybe defend myself, and I just don't feel like doing that. That's fair. No, you get off the hook. Everyone's on your side with this one's too. Yes. So finally, let's wrap this up. Maybe we can all dog on this one.

Jared, what is your final pick for a bad game that you love? Oh, okay. You know, I've already done 20... I was going to say Superman 2,600. But let's go with battle chess. Battle chess, how many, are you all familiar with it? Yeah, I've played battle chess. I was playing it on PC.

I thought the animations were dope at the time. I think it's on the Amiga Mini that I just bought. Probably, yes. It was on literally everything. It's one of those games that was just ported to absolutely everything under the sun. The Amiga probably would have been the best place to play it. It was on, as Kat said, the PC. It was on the Apple 2.

It was on absolutely everything under the sun, including the NES, which had some real problems running battle chess. But for those of you not familiar with it, battle chess is chess with long, slow animations. You make your chess move and you're a little pawn. This is this little soldier guy or your queen who's this woman in a robe with a crown or your rook, which is a big stone monster, slowly lumberes up to their square. And then the rules of chess play out. It's not like Base Wars 2000 or Archon where you're fighting for the space. You just watch a little predetermined combat play. You know who's going to win.

A lot of them are humorous or have little jokes and effects. You watch this vignette play out on the board. And then it's time for the next move. When that came out, it was so novel that it was really entertaining. It was a perfect... Long ago, there were computer stores, and computer stores needed demos, games that you could run to make a computer look cool. And battle chess is one of the computer-storish demo-ish games ever made. You can stand there in the mall and watch the AI play itself on a loop and watch these animations go, I want a PC.

That wing commander were a great to check those. Shadow of the Beast is another one. Yeah, there are just some games that, like, they were born not to be played, but just to be looked at in a. a store demo. My first exposure to Prince of Persia was, for some reason, it was chosen by Tandy to show off their Tandy 1,000s in 89 or 90. The PC port of that or the DOS port. Same thing.

It looks so good. You mentioned Wing Commander. So it's chess, which, you know, it's chess. Chess is pride and true. It's a proven good game. But it's a slow, plodding version of chess that takes much longer to play than ordinary computer version of chess is. The chess engine in the original battle chess is not very good. And in some versions, it's completely horrific. So it's not a very good chess player.

If you play a two player, which you can, again, you're just playing a very slow game of chess, where you're watching each piece take like a minute. I have a query. And you always have to let the wiki win. And you always have to let the, but that's the appeal, right? Jeremy, you have that. It's the Star Wars thing. You're looking at the hollow table. Expound on that, please, if you don't mind. Oh, no, I'm going to let give the Florida Stewart, actually. Well, I was just going to say, aren't all games of chess slow on plodding?

Isn't that the nature of chess that you spend time thinking about your moves? No, the speed chess with the clock. That's competitive chess. Oh, I didn't know that existed because I don't know. When you said it was a bad chess engine, I was thinking that they'd eliminated rooks or something. They were just like, we can't, we know bishops. No, the AI is just bad, right? Yeah, the AI is just not great.

I mean, I'm a terrible chess player, but even I'm, like, good enough to detect that battle chess isn't particularly great as a chess engine. It just doesn't play a solid game. But that said, yeah, you mentioned Stewart. It's all chess low and plotting most chess is. So take chess and make it a quarter speed and think about how long that takes. And the animations are standardized. Every time a pawn kills a bishop, it's the same animation. But it was a cool animation.

It's so cool. Yeah, Kat, do you remember some of them? Oh, heck. I mean, I don't remember the specific animations. I just remember in the early 90s having a demo for this game. It might have even been the full game because battle chess was everywhere, right? And I'm playing battle chess. And here's the thing.

It was the early 90s. And we didn't really have a lot of better things to do. It wasn't like I was surfing on my smartphone or whatever. So when I was playing it, I did not register that this game was very slow. Now, it would definitely register that it was super slow. I just was really into how cool it looked when the individual characters were fighting, and that was an immediate selling point for me on battle chess, specifically battle chess on the PC. And didn't have different themes, like there was a futuristic theme as well.

You can get, you can get various of them in battle chess. They came later. There were sequels and themes, and there were spinoffs. There was a Star Wars, because that's the most natural. Again, you have the holocaest table. So there's a Star Wars version that it's very cute. You had a few others. And it was fun.

The king was like a jerk. Like he always had a gun hidden in his robe or some other things. So he'd do the Indiana Jones and just pull out a gun and shoot somebody. It was cute. The queen would disintegrate people in funny ways and their skeletons would drop down and cute little Looney Tunes animations. I actually think if you didn't have to buy it, it, that, like, everybody should play battle chess once to see the funny animations.

Then just don't play it again. Go play regular chess. To me, battle chess is a piece of PC games of that particular era. Games, it was kind of similar in some ways to, like, Rebel Assault or Return to Zork, where it was all about the multimedia and the fun animations and everything, because all of that was so novel at the time, right? And you were talking about how Battle Chess was the perfect PC attract mode in a PC store. It's so of its era in that respect.

Were the animations like disgusting and bloody and gory? They weren't especially gory, but they were often cartoonishly humorous. People were reduced to skeletons or dust or they, there's them, if the knights fought, one of the knights would cut one of their arms off, then the other arm, then both legs, and recreate the Monty Python scene. It was real, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like that, but there wasn't blood. It was just cartoon violence.

I would suggest that perhaps they should have been, and then maybe people would have been more inclined to check it out? You could do the whole Mortal Kombat thing, the whole moral panic. I think it sold pretty well. It did real well. Yeah. It's a quintessential Windows game. I think it would have sold 10 times more if it had bloody violence in it.

You may be right. Maybe we were on to something here. Maybe we need to create like... It needed fatalities. Yeah. If you enter the... If you hit the correct key, But then the queen would do something really amazing.

Oh, yeah, just like rip somebody's head off and smash it. That's what I'm thinking of. I'm thinking of chess combat. That was a real thing. But I'm mistaken for battle chess. It was in one of the later Mortal Kombat games. Disregard everything I just said. I do think if anybody's going to look it up and play.

You know, you can just watch the animations on YouTube now, I suppose. But if you want to play it to see them happen as you're playing the game, grab the DOS VGA version or the Windows VGA version or grab the Amiga version. or grab the Amiga version. Those are the prettiest ones. The NES version tries, and it is, that tile-based system was not built for that kind of animation. It doesn't look good. And if you're an Apple II junkie like me and you want to see what happens when you make a 1977 computer, play like a 1990 video game, it's impressive.

I can't believe they did it. It looks pretty good. But, yeah, there you go. Battle chess. All right. So that's a lot of bad video games that we just can't find it in our hearts to do. dislike. So I hope everyone has enjoyed listening to our non-lamentations, our anti-lamentations, our praise, dare I say. I've enjoyed this conversation. I would love to do something like

this again. But this is all we have time for this time around. So you'll have to hear me defend the saga series some other day, because that never happens ever at all. I've certainly never banged that drum before. Anyway, so yeah, that's it. Retronauts, episode, whatever the hell it was, 455 or whatever. Like I said, I can't count that high. And it doesn't really matter because you can just listen to these in any order. My God, it's such a versatile podcast. And it's a versatile podcast that you can find on the internet at your favorite podcatching places besides Spotify.

And also on the HyperX podcast network. But if you really, really dig this show and are like, well, I like retronauts, but what if I had more retronauts than I can get just by going to my favorite pod catcher? Good news! On Patreon, you can pay a little extra to subscribe to the show monthly, and you'll get several extra episodes per month, hosted by me or other people. You'll also get bonus columns and mini podcasts by Diamond Fight and Discord access. And I feel like there's something else, too. Oh, that's right.

The audio quality. It's higher. There's no advertisements or cross-promotions. So really, it's, I feel like a great deal for five bucks a month. Patreon.com slash retronauts. That's my pitch. Now I'm going to let everyone else pitch. Why don't we just go in the same order we've been going in? Stuart. No, wait, Kat. Kat, you go first. Hi, everybody. I'm on Twitter at the underscore catbot. And I also host an RPG podcast called Acts of the Blood God. It's basically the sibling podcast to Retronauts. You can maybe go listen to me, defend Fallout 4 sometime. I would love to talk about that one because, if anything, it's a little bit underrated.

We're also on Patreon, patreon.com slash Blood God Pod, where you get a lot of bonus episodes. And we do an episode every week with my pals, Nadia Oxford and Eric Van Allen. And my day job is over at IGN, where I'm a co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Stuart Oh yes, hello You can find me Also hosting episodes of Retronauts Mostly British-focused episodes of Retronauts

Which are very long And I give some other podcasts I do a podcast called AnimaniChat With my dear friend Luke Fletcher Where we're reviewing every episode of Animaniacs The twist is I hate Animaniacs But I have actually sort of come to like Animaniacs a bit Possibly as a result of Stockholm Syndrome

So if you listen to it, you all hear character development there. I also do a podcast called the Dillcast with my friends Goblet Tula and Gris, where we review every single Dill book comic ever made and slowly go insane because it sucks.

It's awful. And you may be asking, do I make any... That's not one where you're going to come around to it, I think. Yeah. I was going to say that, like, you may ask, do I make any podcasts about things I actually like? No, I don't. Why would anyone? Oh, yes.

Troikaabra. There we go. And finally, Jared. Yeah, I'm Jared, and I make the top 100 games podcast, the laziest podcast of all time, where folks come on and a different guest, every episode, shares a video game that they think is one of the 100 greatest games ever, and then we pretty much just wax effusive about it for 45 minutes. And that's a lot of fun. In addition, I am an oompa over at limited Run games for Jeremy Parrish and over there doing fun things that I really enjoy. And I hope that you'll go to Limited Run and take a look at some of the neat stuff that

Jeremy and others have created there because it's fun when you sell games and music and books and all kinds of neat things. Take a look at it. If I'm on Twitter at Petty, comma, Jared. You know, Jared, I have to say the camera is really washing you out. You don't look nearly as orange as I would expect. Anyway, you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite and doing stuff at Limited Run Games. Yes, that's correct. And also on YouTube and at Retronauts

and various and sundry other places. I just, you know, I'm spreading my joy to the world or whatever it is that I spread. I don't know. Seeds. Sadness. I can't remember. I can't even keep track.

So many things going out there. Anyway, that's it for this episode. episode. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll be back again soon with more things about stuff we love and hate. You never know with Retronauts. It's a prize every time. Thank you. And so. Uh, uh, .

Thank you.