Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 81: Virtual Bart

Episode Date: February 23, 2018

For the fourth time, the Talking Simpsons crew takes over Retronauts to explore the long legacy of Simpsons games. This week, they shine the spotlight on Virtual Bart, which applied the then-burgeoning hype over virtual reality to The Simpsons with mixed results (at best). On this episode of Retronauts Micro, join Bob Mackey, Henry Gilbert, and Chris Antista as they ask the tough questions like "Why is Bart a pig for some reason?" and "Why is Bart a baby for some reason?" Note: none of these questions actually have answers.

Hello, everybody, welcome to another episode of Retronauts Micro. Today's topic is Virtual Bart. Don't ask me why. I'm your host, Bob Mackey. Who else is here with me? Dinosaur, Dino Bart lover, Henry Gilbert. I'll all accept it.

And who else? And who could forget, Dear Pig boy. Pig boy. So in case you don't know, we are the Talking Simpsons crew also, and we do the podcast Talking Simpsons every Wednesday on the Lasertime podcast network,

Talking Simpsons.com. It's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. You probably heard me say that a million times by now, but I'm just pointing that out in case you don't know. And in the past, we've gone over some of the more notable and by that I'm usually mean notably bad Simpsons games and since we did

virtual, I'm sorry, we did Bart's Nightmare about a year ago, I decided let's do Virtual Bart and boy, I think I made a mistake. I made a huge mistake. The famous life of the Simpsons. Oh, right. But this one's weird. It's weird, it's weird.

This one took, I think, took the wrong lessons from Bart's nightmare. It did. More mini games that are worse. Which I'm going to guess because, you know, in hindsight, that doesn't matter at all. Krusty's Super Funhouse is the better game

than Bart's Nightmare where they released in the same year but I'm gonna guess Bart's Nightmare outsold it because it is more Simpsonsie It has Bart in the title And as most of the games did around this time And Krusty's Funhouse could have been any character

It's barely Simpsons related And it was based on an existing game Because to kids the brand was Bart not the Simpsons It was you wanted a Bart T-shirt You wanted Bart T-shirt, you wanted Bart Pajamas, you wanted Bart Beds I wanted to be Barts.

But I think at this point in the show, Homer was the star. I mean, after season 2. 94, oh, for sure, yeah. But, I mean, the premise of the game makes sense, given the time it was made in 1994. We've only just had viable VR home experiences, like mass market VR devices. In 94, it seemed like it was just around the corner. We had barely entered the world of 3D gaming, but everyone just thought VR would naturally be happening before Y2K. We were all using our U-Force and Sega activators.

I was watching lawnmower man on a loop. I know, this is too, I mean, the bar, the apparatus, Bart gets put in in this game, is straight from lawnmower man. Oh, you're totally right, yeah. It's exactly. And we all thought that was going to be the future. Chris, on a separate podcast, was just talking about the community episode that is parodies, this era of VR when people are like, well, instead of opening a window, you'll grab a folder. You'll climb a ladder and yank open a folder and pull out that file. Or you'll get in line in a digital store holding your digital item, yeah.

Which is also in the video game, the Shimigami Tensei spin-off. What was the name of that one? Devil-Summoner? Devil-Sominer? Yeah, devil-sumner. It's sort of like you may have experienced it in both Microsoft Bob, which my parents got, or PlayStation Home, which tried to gamify an operating system. Like, you'll walk into your room with your trophies.

Like, it'll take 90 minutes to load that sequence. Why would I do that? Why would I, well, I mean, that's, that's also why the connect is like, for real dead. It's like, they thought, you'll go to a movie theater and watch trailers. Like, no, I know. They made the mistake of, expecting people to take a lot more effort to do simple things. That's never fun, even if it is novel. But, I mean, that's essentially what this era of VR was all about.

And I can say that I've never experienced any of these firsthand, but in the early 90s, VR was basically just like overpriced arcade experiences. The one game that is the most notable is Dactal Nightmare. To the point where it was parodied on TV Because it was just the VR game You would see in your arcades I never saw it but there's an entire episode of Freakazoid That's a parody of that game

Where Freakzoid and Cosgrobe Are trapped in Dactal Nightmare Wow It was one of the most expensive arcade games I'd ever played And it's so mad scientist-y It's like a helmet you pull down from above So you don't walk but you can turn in real time Yeah I think you're like strapped in with gloves

And maybe even boots I'm not even sure, but it was very cumbersome, and I'm sure it was very expensive. Maybe a listener out there can let us know how much it costs, but that was sort of the VR experience of this age. I don't know if there are any viable home VR units before, like, five years ago, but I just, I can't think of, it felt like the technology just sort of froze for a while or just sort of, like, went on the back burner.

It's odd that the accelerometer, the cheapness of the accelerometer is what led to VR, as we know it now. I was just talking to friends who buy their kids $15 sets that you just stick your phone in and they're VR equipped games and it just works fine. They're technically VR. I've seen that too at, I call it like the Deadbeat Dad section of Walgreens.

That's exactly what it is. Yeah, it's where the toys are that your dad is just like, oh, shit, it's his birthday. That's exactly who gave it to me. You can also get a bunch of panties in a candy cane in case you fuck up with your wife. Exactly, yeah. Just like, oh, boy. And I've seen the home VR things in there too

Of like 50 bucks you get VR Which you know 10 years ago would have been Well 50 bucks you get basically Wii sports It's weird it does work to some extent It's not as satisfying as Oculus or PSVR But it's a fraction of the price It is So yes we've explained the sort of virtual reality craze

Of the early to mid-90s before people sort of forgot about it for a while But so getting into virtual bar I do want to say who made the game Salt Lake City's own sculptured software who made Bart's Nightmare and this game is very much patterned after Bart's Nightmare. Yeah, trying to look at their history. They're just one like

an acclaimed dewboy. They worked on every WWF game for them. Nothing good really. Well, and in the NBA jams they eventually turned into that iguana company. Oh, they're the iguana people. They were, yeah. They claimed changed their name to that. I think there was another iguana studio.

Oh, okay. But you've seen their logo before. Oh, yeah, before Turok. MK1 and two, they're Yeah, I mean, they at least did a good enough job porting the MK games. But it's nuts. They made so many games, and many of which you play and may not like even like one of the Ren and Stimpy games, but it's like, it's almost no original property. The good games they have are adapted arcade ports.

Yeah, yeah. I will say, which I shouldn't even count. There are bad ports, so they had their shit together enough, but they weren't good at making new ideas. This game is an example of that where. So Bart's Nightmare, go back to our episode about it. In case you forget, there's a, there's a, there's a, world that's weird and then you go into these different randomly chosen mini games

and you have to beat them all to get the highest grade and you know win the game this is just like that only all the mini games are worse and there's no interesting hub it's just sort of you're on a sort of wheel of fortune spinning VR wheel and the game is chosen for you randomly or I guess you can you can figure out way to stop it on the one you want but it's still just like there's not even the work

put into making I mean the hub world in Bart's nightmare kind of sucks but it's really cool to play with like all the different interactions you can have, it's neat, and I like how surreal and trippy it is. It's, it, I think that was our conclusion. In terms of making a game that's a dream, it's very effective because it's kind of maddening. Yeah, it actually reminds me of

like how I would compliment Sopranos like, oh, their dreams are pointless, like irregular dreams. It does. Insane deal. There's, that, that hub world in Bart's Nightmare is David Lynchian to a fucking team. Yeah, yeah. Weird saxophones, people speak backwards, frogs kiss you.

It's insane. Though we also talked about, uh, we He talked about this a little with an executive producer on these games, Paul Provenzano, on a classic patreon.com slash talking Simpsons interview. And he talked about how like these games, like a virtual barred among them, were made for hire. Like a claim didn't care. They spent the money on a license so they go to the lowest bidder to make the game so they can make the most profit off of it. The big pay was the license. He sort of implied it's what made Fox want to start its own studios.

so maybe you can wrangle quality. It keeps quality more under control. You keep it inside, and you don't, it's cutting out a middleman. Like, why constantly meet with a claim to tell them, no, pig barn would be drawn this way when you just say it internally. So the plot of this game is even more threadbare than Bart's nightmare. Basically, it is the science fair from Duffless, the season four episode Duffless. Bart wanders through it and goes into a door and ends up the unwitting victim of a VR experiment.

I don't know from who. Martin should have been like the villain in this or something like that or one of the super friends. Not in it not created yet, I don't think. No, they went, not in 94. Frank maybe, I guess. He was around. Yeah, but they didn't think. Or Dr. Marvin Monroe.

It should have been him. They didn't even think that far as to who was doing this to Barre should there be a final encounter or level? There's no time left. No. We got to hit the release week for Christmas. I don't want to jump ahead. You just made a note.

I saw on your notes. This is sort of an end of an era. We're approaching the end of the acclaim era. I think Itchy and Scratchy the game is next after this, but then it sort of goes over to Fox Interactive, right? Yeah, some Game Boy games. This is kind of the last console Simpsons game. This

happened, we came across this because when we, on Patreonocups, I saw like the Simpsons, but on that, we do the yearly wrap up and I try to look up like, okay, what were the games that came out during the season? And in the last one for season six, it was there was Itchy and Scratchee the game. And also

at the very start of the season, Bart's Beanstalk. that was it the games were over I think they let the contract lapse and then Fox Interactive picked it back up

I think in general merch in this era was really slowing down from the Simpsons because it was just sort of an institution I don't remember many books or action

figures or games or anything around the mid-90s only towards the beginning of the aughts did I start seeing the action figures come out

in the late 90s the adult collector got rewarded for his waiting with Simpson stuff all the oh yeah I would also bet a claim

maybe or just most publishers were like, well, the fan's over. The kids bought all of it. They're not going to buy games anymore. They didn't realize how much the adult gamer was into Simpsons. Because that was the cycle of like most merchandising. But the Simpsons was kind of unprecedented in that it was not just for kids. It was for adults too.

But they were still trying to sell it like it was Teenage Mutiny Ninja Turtles. Yeah, they didn't understand. But so the one notable thing about this game, there is one notable thing. It's the, it's the first Simpsons game since the arcade game to feature original voice acting, and I have Homer saying virtual Bart, or do you have it? Yeah. Okay.

Great World Bart! So there you go. Everything else I could construe that they took it from the cutting room floor of an episode, but that is definitely Dan Castling said virtual Bart. Well, if Provenzano told us that, like, contractually, they couldn't take stuff from the show.

They were told they had to get original stuff, so they got that stuff for man. And it's only Dan and fancy doing all the voices in this game because they seem to be the most game in terms of doing commercials and promotional stuff. I think they're just game to do any sort of Simpsons' voice. Yeah, you can hear a little bit of it.

And I really, what I do like about the game, and it still sucks, is the cutscenes, or like these beautiful, stark backgrounds of giant story sequences. And the death scenes are great, and this one actually features two characters from The Simpsons.

That's it. It's a great game over. And then gets a ha-ha. It's a great game-over. Game over should be ha-ha. Yeah, that's true. But other than that it's limited to stuff like this, here's home. I think this is the ending, and Homer jumps in the virtual machine.

Yes, it's not exciting at all. It's not exciting. It's looped as hell. So, Homer. Ooh. Oh! You get free words from Dan. So, okay, wow.

He sounds like a punchout character. I forgot it went on for that long. So, yeah, it is just a stock bitmap of Homer in the VR machine as it rotates via mode 7. Yeah, there's actually two notable things about this, the voice acting and these kind of pretty cutscenes that are maybe like three frames of animation, but it's all full screen, looks like it's from the show. Yeah, the water slide sequences in general where like you go the wrong way and one water slide empties out over the Grand Canyon and Bart just falls out. It's good. There's some funny moments in this game. The animation is good, and there's an intro cutscene and both a failure cutscene and a SSI.

success cutscene depending on how you do. I will note that we'll get into this later. For the baby section of the game, there is no failure cutscene because then they would have to make a joke about Bart a dead baby. Bart is a dead baby, so they smartly did not do that. That's part of the only compliment I have

for this game. The Simpsons at this point has a rich well of things to draw from and make games that of Bart's nightmare is based off of nothing. Yes. It happened to the show for the most part. But the baby section is like, you clearly were inspired with Bart swinging around the clothesline.

Right, from Lisa's first word. Yeah, from Lisa's first word to make a level out of it. And one of the later levels, not the later levels, a tomato level. Like, Skinner does his butt thing in the air? Yes, over under in and out. So let's go over the various minigames there are six. So Bart's Nightmare tried a bit harder, and that's like each kind of minigame was a different experience. With this, it's like, here are three bad platformers, and here are three bad games based around Mode 7 effects.

In case you forget what Mode 7 is, it's like basically scaling still images to make it look like there's a perspective or that you're moving across a landscape or something like that. Yeah, I feel like when development started on this, that the developers were enticed by how cool Mode 7 looked in other early SNS games. The Wings and F0 kind of like came up the gate showcasing that technology. Oh, we could kind of do this, can't we? And so they're real one-trick ponies on it. Yes. I mean, it requires a very careful touch to make these Mode 7 effects. playable into playable games, and they really failed.

So let's go over the different games. None of them are named, so I just gave them stock games. So the first one, in no particular order, is Dinosaur. Oh, wait, do you want to hear from the commercial with it? Oh, let's hear it. Okay, I want to hear this. The guy says what they are. I don't know if these are the official names.

I never got official names. Nobody from the Simpsons, I don't know what this is from. I'm guessing, like, something acclaim would distribute to. It would play in your Funko land? Yeah, so no original animation for it. No, none, and not even a Simpsons voice actor. Let's hear it. Cheapskates.

Don't have a cow man? Bart's stuck in a virtual reality machine and he needs your help. Enter the Jurassic era as Dino Bart. Dino? Base a post-apocalyptic Springfield as Dune's Day Bart. Or deploy your diaper shoot as baby Bart. Heck, who needs reality when you've got virtual Bart? It is a dead baby.

I prefer reality to anything I just saw. I would not want to live in virtual Bart if I could have reality. Hey, this is Jordan Harbinger. I used to host the Art of Charm podcast, but now it's time for something new, the Jordan Harbinger Show. Did you know you can be entertained

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So here are the minigames in no order. So Dinosaur is the first one. It is the worst because you were just this weird, just huge hipbox that everything is attacking. It's kind of like, it feels like an homage to the Flintstones to me because you see all these Simpsons as cave people trying to kill Dinners. dinosaur BART. And most of that involves them throwing projectiles at you from off screen that you can't really dodge. And like most of the platformers in this game, platforming games in this game, it's basically about scaling upwards, these very difficult to maneuver around platforms. It's very, very, very annoying. The controls are terrible. And if you look at like it, there's a dude who does like a non-tool assisted speed run in like 38 minutes. 15 to 20 minutes of it are on this game. A flawless play-through. On the dinosaur one? dinosaur. Dino Bart. Dino Bart. Whatever. But yeah, it is oddly enough

the largest. Every one of these games has like two levels, but Dinosaur feels like it is the largest part of this. Why do they put that much into it? And also, if you're coming, like, Barth's nightmare was not good. And the level where you play as a Godzilla type is not particularly good either.

But at the very least, I want to be a Godzilla bard. I do not want to be an ugly, like, sword of raptor barred with a giraff neck? Godzilla Bart looked, that level looks great. If I showed you a screenshot, like, I miss this game. It's amazing. I would love to be Godzilla Bart.

You wouldn't in nightmare, but you think you would. And this doesn't even trick you into looking good. Yeah, I know Bart looks like it was made in Mario Paint. That's true. It really does. And every Bart transformation is a visual downgrade. And also like a control. It's like everything Bart turns into controls worse than a human.

So, I mean, the premise of the game is he's being tortured by VR. So it's only fair that the game is tortured to play because you're experiencing Bart's hell in the VR world. world. So like all the other platformers in this game you have really no way to attack things that effectively. Dino Bark can swing his tail and there's also this power of you can grab

that can kill everything on the screen. The tail swipe sucks. It's bad. It's hard to tell what you're hitting or when you can hit something and things take way too many hits. And I think I've said my piece on Dinosaur or Dino Bart. Yeah, I also don't like though design-wise that this came out. I feel like they

knew Jurassic Park was huge. so they had to have something in there. Yes. But Jurassic Park also should have taught the world of like, no, dinosaurs like Bart, scientifically their tails didn't drag. Don't draw dragging tails anymore on dinosaurs. And they had feathers, damn it. Come on, get it together.

So next we have a pig. Bart is a pig now, for some reason. And he has to escape Krusty's slaughterhouse with his fellow pigs. And I like how morbid this is. It's a slaughterhouse run by clowns. Yeah. Which is really creepy. I just assume they pulled it from like the Troy McClure video, the food chain.

Vegetarian Lisa would have loved this, but this is like 18 months, a year and 18 months before it. It's really taken from Krusty's brand of pork products. It does fit with that. Custy gets busted. Listening, sizzling, bacon. That's right. But that's a good early Krusty voice. Thank you.

And it also, though, pre-fabricates the pig that Homer will adopt that was almost killed by Krusty in the Simpsons movie. Spider Pig, yes. I mean, no, it's Harry Plopper. This is the Harry Plopper prequel. We haven't gotten to the episode where Spider Pig comes back. I hope to never. So this gets so morbid to the point where if you fail at this game, the ending cutscene is Homer opening a box of corn dogs, and the last one he pulls out is shaped like Bart's head and he eats it. Jesus Christ. He looks at it for a second and he eats it anyways, so. That's horrifying. I swear the cutscenes, the death scenes are funny. This is a commentary on factory farming. Well, I think a corn

Dog is a power-up you get in Dino Bart 2? I think it's the health up in every one of these. Why draw a different corn dog? We all know Bart loves corn dogs based on the famous episodes of the show. So it's more complex in the dinosaur level but in bad ways instead of having these huge stages where you scale

upwards. You still do a lot of scaling upwards but all of the levels are like mazes with doors that bring you to different places. You have to think of the layout and you have to rescue pigs. My least favorite type of platform and with also a ton of moving platform too. And lots of instant death too. Yep. Tons of instant death.

Okay. So, I'm getting mad talking about this, by the way. This is a big mistake and I'm sorry to tell you guys about Virtual Bart, but it seemed good at the time, and I'll tell you I had to delete this episode because I had just finished a day of recording. I was like, okay, time to start on virtual Bart, take some notes. I turned it on and I was immediately so depressed.

I had to, like, guys, Thursday, not Tuesday. I need a day off. We streamed, but I could have told you. The only good thing about this game is the box art. Oh, I played this Back in the day, I know it's bad. I rented it. Box art, but yeah, you played this on YouTube.com

slash Lasertime Network. We did, we did. And it's, uh, we played it, we played, we played, try to play all the games from 1994 in one shot because they're all bad. Oh, real, real bad. Real bad. Bart versus the Jaggernauts, though, might be the worst Simpsons game I've ever played. It, uh, I know the soundtrack is terrible.

It's terrible. It's one, one lick looped over and over again. So the, I think the worst mini game in this is baby. Uh, because for about half of the, this mini-game, and part of it most people will see, the music is a 15-second ice cream truck loop. It is maddening, especially

because this entire mini-game is based around you handling Bart as a baby, which, as we saw in Lisa's first word, he is just a constantly swinging object. You have to have him scale up trees and across platforms and things like that. So it is very hard to control, and again, instant death. If you touch

the ground, Bart craters and dies. It just let me out of here. So you know it's not a dead baby. Oh, he does say, let me out of here? He did in that commercial. I didn't go back and play this level. I just remember muffled screaming when he lands head first. Well, I mean, they at least got the good like four frames

of animation of him swinging. They copied that well. The animation does look good. You can also fire pacifiers, which I could never tell which direction they were going to fire, which is very important when you're trying to kill enemies that are after me in this game. It's too bad there's no one else in the Simpsons who's synonymous with a fucking pacifier. Jesus.

Kids don't want to play his girls. They want to play his bard who's cool. want to play as babies. Yes, yeah, they want to play as the baby version of Bart, which doesn't even look that great. No, it doesn't. He's kind of just a rip off of Maggie, basically. Yeah, I mean, you go, you go through all of the, all of the backyard section, which is arduous, I never finished it on my own, and then you're in a circus with even worse music. That's loops even worse. So let's hear it. Let's hear it.

Ugh. It sounds like better circus music is being played backwards. We're a mad scientist is slowly ripping my limbs off. God damn. I will point out some discontinuity in the baby scene, though. You're chased by what in strollers, Jimbo and Kearney, right?

And as we all know, Kearney was alive for the Centennial, so he would not have been a baby at the same time. That's right. Wow, he's like 40. Though that wouldn't. I don't think they aged up Kearney officially into his 30s until like another season.

Yeah, something like that. Oh, yeah, would have. Ben, I think the first time was in the Lisa Akano class of like it'll be as good as our national bicentennial only Kearney remembers that

really helped prepare America after their water gate. What episode was I sleep in a drawer? Kearney's son. Oh, that was Milhouse divided. It was the divorce. They were talking about like my son took his divorce

pretty well. Anyway, we know Kearney's a very complex character. So enough about the baby. It is the worst game in this virtual bar collection. The only thing That's funny, I guess, is it's the reappearance of Big Chief Crazy Cone.

Oh, wow. Actually, it's called Native American Ice Cream, formerly Big Chief Crazy Cone. They worked in that one reference. That's the truck you're chasing. I'm impressed by that. Bart's Nightmare wouldn't have that kind of joke in it. They would just have like Barney with a pink elephant or something. Pretty much.

I forgot to mention, this is for Simpson's only. Look at the obscure character who pops up in the death sequence from Van Nuark. I know. It's Dr. Jay. Yeah. I don't think it'd been on the show in like two years. Jay Lauren Pryor, who just kind of disappeared after season two. maybe they had no use for him except in a Springfield Elementary

Guidance counselor In a flashback he will say that Millhouse is gay in a few years That's right Let's go on to the So we covered the bad platformers Here are the bad mode seven games So we have Mad Max

You were just driving In no particular direction Across landscape That doesn't really imply Anything outside of just nothingness It's like road rage with no road Yes there's awful Pointless road rage

You need some sort of like landmark or roads to sell the effect and this does not sell the effect because it's just like you're just driving over just a random bunch of like colors and shapes

and towards no apparent destination it has an outline of a road but everybody drives over it it's meaningless to drive off the road the only thing I've played that's comparable to it and I hope Retronauts never tackles it is Atari Carts

The failed Mario cart that Atari made for Jaguar Oh no It has one It has a tempest level and one Atari character but they kind of like bailed on the whole idea

in development of, like, putting famous air quote Atari characters in it? I have to see this. It's awful. It's awful. I mean, also, again, the mode 7 requires a careful touch, especially in terms of where things are around you when you're faking 3D. And this, it's really hard to tell, like,

is that enemy about to hit me? Is it next to me? Like, because they didn't bother making the necessary frames of animation to imply, like, a thing coming towards you or a thing turning the right way. Even if you remember, your, you know, memories of Mario Kart betray you sometimes, but, like, they had, that thing is, like,

how big? It's like in the center of the screen. It's like a it's like cinema scope aspect ratio you're looking at. Nintendo itself couldn't figure out how to make a game run this big in Mode 7. Well, same in the Mad Max stuff. They have to making a track would have been way tougher than what they wanted to put into it.

So just have them drive aimlessly. I will say of the redesigned characters they are my favorites. Yeah, it is kind of cool. I think the consistent look of Bart, especially the intro shot of Springfield, turning into a waste land, a nuclear wasteland, and Bart turning into a, like, OG, Mad Max.

That is cool. I do like that. The cutscenes are neat. And the last, the last cutscene in this, if you win, is Bart comes home to the Simpsons house, and they're all skeletons. He sits down on the couch and all the skeletons fall apart. And we don't see Krusty, but we hear him say, hey, surviving kids. So a lot of these have really dark endings. Also, the Simpsons are straight out of Halloween. Treehouse Par. three, I believe they had the skeletons. I think so. So the next game, the next Mode 7 game is Tomatoes. Again, based on Duffles, based on

Bart throwing a giant tomato at Skinner's giant ass. They got three episodes. Yes. It's like, well, I this is slightly off topic, but I doubt we'll ever do of Retronauts Micro about this one, but I watched, I watched a playthrough, in quotes,

of Simpsons Animation Studio. Oh, okay. There is original animation in it that does not look good. But, like, looped animation of multiple characters, so you kind of paste them together to, quote-unquote, make a cartoon, even though you don't really. But one of the looped animations is an even more indulgent on Skinner's butt, butt-shaking, bent-over situation. He is big-butt Skinner. We all know that. He is thick with two seeds.

So in this game, you basically have to hit all of these students before Picture Day with tomatoes, and they basically just walk back and forth. and it's sort of like a golf swing meter game where you just are a line extends outward from Bart when you hit the button and then you decide when to throw a tomato you can also throw it to the left and the right it's not recommended because it won't really tell you where that will land it will tell you where it will land if you're shooting in front of you but not to the sides and so you basically have to hit every student

and not hit the teachers or wigum or wigum right any adult or groundskeeper willie too or grinskeeper oh no groundskeeper yeah I mean I think in that one it execution, it is least the most like direct. It's like Bart, you don't have to worry about moving around. Bart, just make this, just

check this meter. No, Bart moving around would make the game more playable because you could adjust like where you're throwing and you know, who you're hitting. That sounds difficult, though. Sounds like it'll take work. So that's Tomatoes. The last one is H2, whoa, which is basically... My favorite? It looks the best, but

it's also the most pointless one because it's a game based around memorization in which you are going down the popular H2O water slide at Mount Splashmore and at certain points you're given a choice between two paths some of those lead to instant death. Memorize them and get to the end because

there's no other way to tell. I mean, with H2O I like that in the intro video they steal the gag from the episode of the long line. They just redrew that they put different worst characters in most people that worked on the game I think. That's what it looks like. And you can slide into Homer's taint because he's

stuck somewhere in the slide. There are several homers trapped in the slide. I don't know how, But there are several. Well, you pass by Krusty like eight times. That's true. And Sane's a little helper, too. But it does feel like the template for an FMV game, because it's like, if this was a movie, I could just be sliding around on top of this movie image and it wouldn't really matter.

And it could absolutely, like, it's the one that feels like it could actually be virtual. Like, it could be a virtual experience. If you just take out the Bart Sprite that's sliding around the bottom of the screen, this could just be a first-person experience of yourself going through H-2. It could be like that bad connect game where you could literally buy a raft to inflate in your living room. Oh, Barferoonie.

What did my Grimsafe, for the kid with literally no imagination? I need to be in a raft. All right, so that was virtual, Bart. Again, I don't know if this is a good idea. I hope you enjoyed our chat about it. I just remember playing it a bunch and trying to get into it,

but it is sort of the end of an era for Simpsons games, and I do want to cover. I do want to eventually move on to the later eras of the Simpsons games. But I want to ask you guys, marginally better. There are more highlights, but do you think the game's got better after this? Yes. Well, wrestling sure wasn't.

It's not, not immediately. Yeah. And it is bizarre when you look at that trajectory. I don't know what, I don't know what contract Fox had, but in the year, like, 2002, 2003, they are published by T.HQ, Activision, NDA, making Simpsons games simultaneously. And it's, and they're

all bad. Simpson's games were never going to get better until they got them away from a claim, that's for sure. But Once they started, I think in the PS2 Xbox GameCube era, they started aping other formulas that worked. You do get some pretty decent games. But they're not great Simpsons games. This to me, I get a little misty because it's like it's the end of the Simpsons game I'd want it as a kid.

I didn't really want a crazy taxi rip off with the Simpsons in it, even though it's pretty okay. I wanted a platform. I would rather play it, but I, yeah, but then every time they gave us a platformer, It was like they either could never make a full, real platformer. Or they give you Bart v. Space Munes, which technically is one, but it's awful. It's awful. And you didn't get another platform until, what, 07? Ooh, probably, uh, 2006-O-7?

I mean, there are a few, like, there's like some odd Game Boy color ones and things like that. Like, there's a treehouse of horror game. But, yeah, I mean, they weren't really big on making the platformers after this nichey and scratchy the game, which is barely a platformer. Yeah, it was kind of a bummer. It felt like we never got to see the Simpsons game we wanted in the aband. in that genre entirely. Yeah, and the last real Simpsons game was the Simpsons game,

and I will say it is probably the most, like, just pure mediocrity in terms of a game, but that is still a very high bar. That's still, like, setting a very high bar in terms of everything that came before. A lot of license games can't reach mediocrity. Yeah. I mean, now that is the base level that I just expect. I'm just like, oh, a new Turtles game, well, I expect mediocrity. And then if it can't even reach that, I'm like,

what's even the point? if you can't even reach that with your Turtles game, and you can be satisfied when Platinum games can make a slightly better than mediocre game. I want to see a Platinum Simpsons game, man. I would fucking love that.

I do encourage people that if you find the Simpsons game in the wild, pick it up because it will never exist again. And it is made, it is good fan service. Yeah, the writing is really good. There's original animation. Probably like an entire episode's worth or even more of original animation. It would never happen again because no company would

spend what EA did on a game like that never again. It's horrible it's overly long because it had to justify a $60 price point and it sucks and everything about it sucks. Every play style sucks but it has really good jokes and all

like a new episode like at least one and a half new episodes in there. And I think there's at least three different versions of it. There's the PS3 Xbox one, there's the Wii one which is a different game and then there's the DS one which is a different game. It has different jokes. Yeah. It has different jokes. I guess the last thing I'll say about virtual Bart is that it's

it's basically Bart's nightmare too where they didn't learn anything in many in several ways made it worse and it's that's just very disappointing it the very least it opened up the door to hearing the voices which if they're going to be cheap and not pay

for the song then at least get some voices you're right there's no Simpson song in this as we discussed on the Bart versus Space Meetings retronauts that like in the NES version they paid for the song All the rest, like, ooh, that's all, Danny Elfman and ASCAP, that ain't cheap, nah. That's right, Bart's nightmare didn't have it either, right?

No, they all just have, like, kind of similar, like, dink, dittal, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. This one opens with a 2001 of Space Odyssey reference for some reason. We heard it bum, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I do like the walk through the science fair is pretty well animated for animated sprites on a SNAS. Good spray work. So thanks for joining us for this discussion of virtual Bart's. We didn't hit an hour in the mini. What's that? I know. I know. I can't believe it. We hate it this much.

There's nothing. We can't talk about anything more, please. So thanks for joining us, folks. Your money helps support the show. So thanks so much. If you want to support us, go to patreon.com slash retronauts just for $3 a month. You can get every episode like this one, a week ahead of time, ad free, and at a higher bit rate. It's a good deal. I think it works out to around 50 cents per podcast per month. So I think that's pretty reasonable. And as for me, you can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And please follow us on Twitter as at Retronauts.

we'd appreciate it. Thank you. I'm H. N.I.Y.G. on Twitter, and, uh, hey, you probably haven't heard of this, but we have a Patreon for Talking Simpsons. What? No. Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons where you get every episode week early and at free, where we go through the Simpsons from the beginning. Also, if you're a Futurama fan pretty soon, we're going to be starting up talking Futurama as well, and another podcast. But as I mentioned multiple times on here, even if you are a Patreon person of Talking

Simpsons, maybe you haven't heard our energy. interview with Paul Provenzano yet. I would absolutely tell every retronauts listener to listen to it because not only do you get to hear about making the history of the first Simpsons games but also just the Wild West of third party

licensed publishing in America. He tells the stories of working on Marvel games, WWE Games, aliens, Die Hard Trilogy. The Action Power Hour or whatever it was called. That cartoon, video power? Yeah. The acclaim, Captain N. I think the X-Files as well, right? Yeah, and the X-Files game, too, you'll hear a ton about some classic video games,

which I believe listeners to this care about. I would hope so. How about you, Chris? Well, you know, I like garbage. And if you want overly long summations of pop culture, minutiae, laser time's a good place to go. You guys have been on a bunch of episodes. Probably being a bunch more.

I don't know when this is going out. But just, like Bob always says with Retronauts, it's a different topic every week. Scroll through. We'll find something you like. For sure. Yeah, we also have 30-20-10. It's a look at the world, not just games, movies, TV, music, and news 30, 20, and 10 years ago of that week.

It's a good way to relive, well, if you're my age, my entire life, according to the release schedule of things that I loved. And then there's Fidginem Apocalypse. If you like more up-current talk about video games, all you guys have been on it. We always talk about old games on DGA as well, too. Yeah, but also the new stuff we're playing, but it's a little bit of both. So check those out, Laserdinpodcast.com is your gateway, but of course, it exists anywhere you get your podcast. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you on Monday with a brand new full-length

episode. See you then. And caller number nine for $1 million. Rita, complete this quote. Life is like a box of... Uh, Rita, you're cutting out. We need your answer. Life is like a box of chocolate. Oh, sorry.

That's not what we were looking for. On to caller number 10. Oh, gosh. Bad network got you glitched out of luck. Switch to boost mobile, super reliable, super fast nationwide network, and get four lines, each with unlimited gigs for just $100 a month. Plus get four free five. loans. Boost makes it easy to switch. Switching makes it easy to save. The Mueller report. I'm Edonoghue

with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today

at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his look have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.