Video Gamers Podcast - Bonus Round: Nintendo Nostalgia Lane- Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

Gaming hosts Josh and Paul are back with quite possibly one of our favorite episodes. We travel back to the glory days of video games and break down our favorite gaming memories of the console that changed the world -  The Nintendo Entertainment System. We chat some of our favorite games, memories, hilarious stories and dive into everything that made this gaming console so epic! Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe on YouTube Visit us on the web Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, this is Josh with the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast. Man, this intro's lame, guys. I'm gonna do my own. Hey guys, it's Josh. Listen, Paul and Todd, they're just not competition anymore. And honestly, they're immune to my trolling at this point, so I need your help. Head over to MultiplayerSquad.com, sign up for our Patreon, and come hang out with us. You get access to our exclusive Discord server, where we have an incredible community of gamers just like you and me. We've got memes galore! Plus, you can help me troll Paul and Todd on a regular basis. More importantly, you'll help support the show

and allow us to continue to provide amazing content twice a week. What's not to love? What? Hurry up. We're about to start the show. Okay, guys, do it. MultiplayerSquad.com. Go now.

Before the show starts. Hurry. Ah, it's starting! Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B-A. Start! Hello, squadmates, and happy Monday. If this is your first time joining us, we are the Multiplayer Gaming Podcast, where we get together and have family-friendly conversations about gaming. And on Mondays, we cycle between two types of episodes.

Either it is a deep dive into a specific game, or it is a bonus round episode where we dive into a particular subject. And today, we are recording a bonus round episode. We are going to be covering the Nintendo Entertainment System, better known as the NES, sharing some of our memories as children when it came out, and discussing some of the games that released for it. And also please remember to subscribe and rate our podcast 5 stars. We are also going to be reading some reviews on our show,

so if you can, please go leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps support the show. And it's free. It doesn't cost you any money to do. There's obviously no ads on the show. So the least we would ask is just to leave us a review and help us push toward our 200th review. And we just might read yours on our next episode. So in the words of josh help a brother out man help a brother out mate i will say this since i'm the one that reads the reviews i will 100 read the 200th review uh-oh no matter what it says no matter what it says so good or bad yes good or bad it is getting right on the show so So help us push to 200 reviews. That is a big milestone in the eyes of Apple Podcasts as well.

So it's really going to help us out. But yeah, I feel like you might be the millionth caller or customer. Yeah. And that's just the chance that I'm willing to take. I'm throwing it out there, Paul. Oh, all right. I feel like I need to delete my review and wait until there's 199 and then get mine in there. But all right.

So, yeah, please, please leave a review for the show. And I'm your host, Paul, the Mario of the podcast, if you will, which would make my partner, Josh, the sidekick or the Luigi of the podcast. I can dig it. I'm clumsy. I'm goofy. I don't generally do much right, you know, so. And I can't believe you didn't say, it's-a me, a Paul. I know, right?

It's-a me, Mario. I'm-a gonna win. So we are gonna be diving into the NES today. I thought this would be a fun conversation. I mean, this is a system that is quite old. It actually came out before I was born. No, it did not. Oh my goodness, man. It did, this is a system that is quite old. It actually came out before I was born. No, it did not. Oh my goodness, man. It did. It did. Well, it released in Japan before I was born. But we are going to be diving into

this very old console. And even if you did not play the NES when it came out, I still think you should stick around. A lot of our stories are just going to be personal stories about gaming growing up. We'll definitely keep it lighthearted. I think you'll find it interesting. And we will dive into some of the individual games, including a couple games that I read about today that I had never even heard of. So we're going to be diving into a lot here for the NES. So we are just going to jump in and get started. And to kick things off, I do have just a couple of interesting facts about the NES that I just thought I would bring here to the table. Are these going to make me feel old, Paul? Oh, they're going to make you feel very old. Is it? Okay, great. That's a good guess. Because that already happened once,

and we're only five minutes in. I'm going to bring as many old references as i can so the nes originally released in japan in 1983 a whole year before i was born and it was released under the name famicom i do remember that179, and it sold 62 million copies worldwide, and Nintendo controlled 85 to 90% of the global video game market. So this is a console that was incredibly universal. Almost everyone you knew had an NES at their home. And if you didn't, you surely knew someone who did. And it sold 34 million copies in the US alone. And I did want to give a shout out to our Discord member Phelps, who is one of our Patreon supporters. And he just posted a question in Discord the other day asking, what is everyone's

first video game experience that they can remember? And for me... That was a great question. Great question. I thought that was a great one to ask. And for me, it revolves around the NES. And as I was thinking more and more about my early NES memories, I thought, surely Josh has some stories, I have some stories, so why not do this for a bonus round? So that was kind of the inspiration. So to kick things off, Josh, do you remember how you were first introduced to the NES? Boy, do I ever. So...

You were 17 years old. No, I was not that old. I was, to give everybody, you guys can do the math at home, I was seven when the NES came out. I was at the height of a young kid that wanted to play video games. And then this console comes out and it is earth shattering. And we didn't have a lot of money. I don't even know what $170 back in 1985 equates to, but it's an awful lot of money. That's a chunk of cheddar, as they would say. I remember wanting one. My parents were like, there's no way we're ever buying you guys $170 video game system. I didn't have a job. I was seven years old. It was just one of those things

where we were hoping that one of our friends would get one. So disappointment ensues for a while. I have an older brother, shout out to my brother, Jesse. Like brothers, we were mean to each other. We would fight each other and just all that good brotherly love type stuff. So my brother, his room, we actually built him a room down in the basement. I don't know why we just, you know, we had rooms upstairs, but I guess we figured we'd put him in the dungeon. So if there was a flood, he's the first one to go. Exactly. You know, and that's like, it's like a warning system as well, because he'd come running up the stairs. So anyway, my brother lives down in the basement. I'm home. We come home after school one day. I'm doing something and faintly, I hear this sound.

Okay. And I'm like, what is that? And I start looking around the house. I can't hear any... I can't tell where the sound is coming from. I start listening down the stairs to the basement. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's coming from down there. So I go downstairs. My brother has the door to his room closed.

And like any good younger brother, I sneak up to the door, and I start listening. And all I hear is, boop, boop, boop, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching, ching. And I'm like, Jesse, what are you doing in there? And he goes go go away nothing so he had bought a Nintendo entertainment system with money that he had made from mowing lawns and like doing paper delivery oh man like newspapers you know riding his bike around the neighborhood and delivering papers and he had saved up all of his money and he bought an NES and he tried to hide it from me because he didn't want me to play it. He knew that I would harass him and say, give me a turn. And so to try to keep it from me, he hid it. I mean, obviously I heard it, but that was my very first like seeing one in real life, like getting the experience to watch somebody play one, it was great.

That's some dedication for him to probably even lose out on some time playing and just wait until you weren't around. So Jesse saved up and used his own money. How old was he at the time if you were seven? 13. 13? He was 13. That seems like a lot of money to save up at that age.

Dude, he had a paper route. I remember him getting up at like five o'clock in the morning and like riding his bike around the neighborhood, delivering papers, mowing lawns. I don't know how long he saved up for. Talking about your brother doing newspaper routes, it reminds me of one of my favorite jokes from Mitch Hedberg. He said that he had a paper route and he would either have to go to 500 houses or two dumpsters. I always thought that was funny. All right. So for me, I was trying to think of the first introduction I had to the NES because video games were not a part of my world at all. My parents did not care about video games. I am the oldest sibling in my group, so I didn't have an older brother where maybe it would be on his radar. And my family,

one time we went out to dinner at a family from our church's house. And they were a family that we were pretty familiar with. They had three boys who were all older than me and so whenever they were done with their clothes which were probably hand-me-downs to all three of them then they would come to our house and so i would get these like fourth generation hand-me-downs and this has nothing to do with gaming but as a side note i remember one time they gave me a bunch of hand-me-down whitey tighty briefs and i told my mom i was like i am not wearing these so i was always the very good kid like i never spoke back to my parents or anything but that was the one time that i was like no i'm drawing my line in the sand i am not going to wear these

all right so anyway that was the fogelson family now they had an nes and so we went over there one time for dinner and I remember a group of kids, because there were some other families from church, and they were all huddled around the TV, and they were all playing Blaster Master on NES. And I have that memory burned into my brain. I remember seeing it, having no clue what it was. I did not know what an NES was. I had never played video games. And I remember asking them, like, what was it? And they said, oh, it's Blaster Master. You're too young. It's a really hard game. You can't play. And I was like, oh, all right. And so then I just left and I went to one of their bedrooms to just

go play by myself because they weren't going to let me. Or cry, because that's what I would have done. Yeah, I didn't cry. I didn't care. Like, I didn't know what video games are. I was like, oh, I guess I'm just too little to play it and i just remember this because i so rarely got in trouble as a kid but i went into one of their bedrooms and the kid had a table saw that was just sitting out on his wooden table and of course since i was bored my parents are out chatting in the living room all the other kids are playing games i well, what better thing to do but to play with this saw? Like a real saw. Like an actual wood saw.

A real table saw. A sharp table saw. And I said, I'm going to take it to this kid's desk, and I'm just going to start sawing. Now, I did not mean for it to be, like, vandalism. It was not out of revenge because they wouldn't let me play. I just thought, hey, this is what you use a saw for. So I think I must have been like four years old at the time. And I remember getting in really bad trouble about this.

No, wait, how far through the dust did you saw? I think it was only like half an inch, but it was like a nice long line right through the middle of this kid's wooden table. That is awesome. I bet they never told you you couldn't play NES. Yeah. After that, I had a reputation. So yeah, word got around. Paul will take his revenge. Yeah. So that's the first time I remember seeing it, but I didn't actually play it. The first time I remember playing the NES, I don't know if it was the first time, but it's the earliest I can remember, was when my parents decided to go on a trip. And they left me and my sister staying at a different family's house from our church.

And my parents were gone for, I don't know, it was like five or six days. And it was the first time they ever left us overnight at another family's house. And it was the Davies house. They had an NES system. And I remember just playing NES the entire week. That's all I did. There were no limits on screen time. The glory days. Oh, it was great. They had two boys and a girl. I was right in between the age of the two boys. And so we would play a ton of Mario. And when my mom and dad flew back into town, my mom made my dad immediately go back to the Davies house. And she was so sure

that me and my sister were like crying and waiting for them to come back because we'd want to go home. That as soon as they yelled, Hey, Paul and Miranda, your parents are here we ran and we hid from my parents oh no so my mom sorry ya ya arizona who's one of our patreon supporters uh we flipped it on her where then she was like crying because like we tried to hide and stay longer and for me it was just all about that nes i just wanted more time with it. And I remember my mom, when she reflects back on it now, she says, that's when I realized that I needed to leave you guys more often. It was probably good for us and her to have a little bit of time elsewhere. So that was what I remember as the first time I actually played NES. It was like a full week straight.

So, oh, one other memory from that time. So anyone who's not familiar with the NES, the game system ran on cartridges. And so the console was kind of goofy. It had like a big door on a hinge. You would flip that open. You would push the cartridge straight in. But then you'd have to push the cartridge down and it would lock into place. And then you could close the door or leave the door open and the game would just run fine.

Well, to release the game, you would press down on the game. And then if you let go, it would unlatch and pop back up. Well, one of the kids was playing Mario. I think it was Mario 1 at the time. And I didn't know how the console worked. I just saw it. And so I pushed it down. Oh, no. And they immediately started screaming, saying, don't let go, don't let go. And so I was holding the cartridge down.

Because it would turn off. It would screw up the game. And the older brother, Ben, said, don't you dare let go of that cartridge. You're going to hold it there until I die or I beat Mario. And I remember as a kid being so freaked out because he was older and more intimidating and i was like i'm so sorry i had no idea and i remember holding that cartridge down probably for what was like two minutes but in my mind it felt like a real it felt like an eternity so yeah that was one of the things about the nes with the

cartridges you could push it down and it would still work, but as soon as you'd let go, then it would turn off. Do you remember when they would start breaking and you'd have to rig it? Ours got so old at one point that you had to wedge something in there to hold the cartridge at just the right spot. To make better contact? Well, the up and down mechanism was broken, so it would sometimes randomly pop up and then kick you out of the game. And so we would wedge stuff in there to make sure that it didn't pop up. Yeah, the cartridges would go bad. You'd have the one cartridge that you'd have to blow into and all that stuff.

Yeah, those things weren't the most durable things. Or they were just getting used like gangbusters and just getting worn out over time well and just knowing kids probably dropping them a lot spilling drinks on them yeah they probably weren't taken the best care of yeah that that kind of reminds me i remember i had a laptop that uh the memory went bad and i remember reading on online forums and everyone said just stick in a piece of foam and then put the door over the RAM. It'll just make better contact. And then my laptop worked just fine. But everyone's NES had like jimmy rigged solutions to get it to keep running. So there's either duct tape, foam, you know,

something stuck in there. The door would be broken off. So you'd have one friend whose door was just missing. And yeah, it was funny, man. Those things had a personality of their own. Oh, they definitely did. So you guys owned an NES. We did own an NES. But funny enough, I think I've told this story before, but my brother was not super good at letting me play the NES. And so I wanted to get my own. And I had started saving up money. And I remember one summer, my parents were very much like, if you do work, we'll pay you for it. So I remember my dad, we had to build a trench from the basement out to the street so that we could run some PVC pipes so the basement wouldn't flood and drown my brother down there.

Right. You know? Safety is important. Right. And so it was like, I mean, it seemed like it was 100 yards, but we had to dig this four foot deep trench, like 100 yards from the basement to the front of the street. And my dad told me, he was like, if you dig this trench, I'll help you. I'll give you the rest of the money you need to get a Nintendo. And I was like, if you dig this trench, I'll help you. I'll give you the rest of the money you need to get a Nintendo.

And I was like, absolutely. It took me like three weeks to dig this trench. I'm talking, it was the worst, man. My head blisters over my fingers. I would do this all day long. It was just the worst work ever. I finally completed it. They gave me like the last like $60 or $80 I needed to go.

I was super pumped. My mom takes me to Kitty City, which was like Toys R Us back in the day. And I walk in. This is the best moment of my childhood. And where they keep the palettes of Nintendos is just empty. And only thing left on the wooden palette says Nintendo Entertainment System, like $169.99 or whatever, and they were gone. Oh, man. And right next to it was a palette, Sega Master System. My mom was like, well, how about one of those? And I was like, I don't really want one of those. I want a Nintendo.

And she was like, well, aren't they the same thing? And I was like, I don't really want one of those. I want a Nintendo. And she was like, well, aren't they the same thing? And I was like, I could not. Just get one of those other Nintendos. I think maybe I was seven or eight at the time. I couldn't fathom waiting another week for them to get more Nintendos. So I bought a Sega instead. Oh, you folded. I did.

I bought it right then and there. I mean, it actually worked out well because then we had a Nintendo and a sega so it actually worked out well in the end but it you know i wanted my own nintendo and i just completely caved to like i want it now and bought a sega yeah so i i did that's how i got you know a lot of experience for sega games and stuff like that um and we could trade off that way so it actually worked out pretty well. Yeah. So not to sound too much like the old guy, but like younger kids these days,

like they have video games at their fingertips, free mobile games from, I mean, my three-year-old plays games on our Google home or, you know, on our phones. When we were younger, you had to go out to an arcade,

or you had to be lucky enough to have an NES. And so if you worked that whole summer trying to save up for one, that was a huge deal because you just didn't have access to games like that. And I don't know. I mean, you probably remember, but then it was either your buddies had a game that you wanted to play. Nobody really trusted anybody to like lend them cartridges, like at least not in my friend group. You could come over to my house and play this game, but you're not, there's no way you're ever taking the cartridge out of this house because you'll lose it or you'll break it or something will happen to it. But the other thing we could do is you could go to like Blockbuster Video or where I lived, West Coast Video, and you could rent games like blockbuster video or where i lived west coast video and you

could rent games and they had all the games lined up on the walls but you could never get like the popular games because they were always rented out and you would run into the store remember you'd see like the display box and you'd run in and you'd look and then the box with the actual game wasn't behind it and then you were like no and then you wound up renting some crappy game you didn't want to play. I'm sure I drove Blockbuster employees wild, but I remember I'd always go in and check, and then I'd say, can you check the return box and see if anyone's returned it? And they'd just sigh, and they'd be like, no Mario 3, it's not in there. No, it's not in the return box. But every now and then it would be.

Every now and then they'd be like, let me check. And they're like, oh, yes, somebody just returned it. And then you're like, yes. Oh, yeah. All right. So you guys had an NES and you bought your Sega Master System. And we did not. So video games were not allowed to be bought in our house. I remember my parents thinking that if we owned a video game system, that I would become addicted to them. And ironically, I think specifically because it was withheld, that's why I'm so attached to video games today and have a video game podcast that I help host. I fully support that belief.

A hundred percent. I never got sugar when I was a kid. My parents never bought like the sugar cereal. We never got like ice cream. Like I never got sugar as a kid. And I have the biggest sweet tooth now. I will cram sugar into my gullet as fast as I can because I never had it as a kid. It's so funny how some of that stuff can just backfire on you as a parent. Like sometimes those values will just perfectly translate to your child. And then other times it just goes exactly the opposite way where it's like, yes, I finally have my freedom. I'm going to fully indulge in all these video games now that I can. I tell my kids they're not allowed to exercise. If I see them jog up the stairs, I go like,

hey, slow down. no running in the house. You know, that way one day they'll just be like... Don't you dare eat your broccoli. Yeah, they'll be like Olympians. It'll be great. That is actually very funny you mentioned that because I remember trying to convince my parents for why it would be a good idea to get an NES.

And I had a friend, Marcus, who had an NES and he had a little game called Track and Field. And he had a power pad, which you would lay on the ground. This was like the oldest version of a DDR pad. I remember the power pad. Yep. It had a whole bunch of buttons. And in Track and Field, you would like run on the pad between like, you know, one and two or whatever. And your guy would run and to do hurdles, you would jump and then your character would jump. And I remember telling my parents, this is good exercise. You're always telling me I need exercise. I can do it with this video game. And I, and I was completely serious. Like I wasn't even trying to like sell them on

the idea. Like I was laying out my case and it never took. So that was not a good enough argument to get the NES in our home. But I thought maybe that power pad would be my way in. I've tried the Wii Fit Adventure, the Ring thing, the Balance Board. I've had all of the exercise-y type video games. The only exercise-y type video game that works is my Oculus.

And that's games where I have to like duck and bob and weave and shoot things really fast. And then I'm like, or the boxing game that I have, which will put you on your butt, man, because that game will wear you out. But that's the only exercise slash video games I've ever seen work. Yeah, yeah. And if you're really into it, it really can be really good exercise. It's not the worst thing in the world, but that did not go over well with my parents. So we never had an NES. This might sound a little bit like a sad story, but I just think it's so

funny. And I think I might have told it once on the pod already. But I craved video games so badly that one time we went to an old store that's no longer around called Pick and Save. It got taken over by McFrugals, and now it's Big Lots. So it's the equivalent of today's Big Lots. And they had VHS tapes. They had a whole series called How to Score More Points in Nintendo Games. And my mom would sometimes give me and my sister a budget and we could go pick something out. And I would buy those VHS tapes and vicariously live through Skip Rogers. This is all permanently in my brain. I can hear the theme music. I can hear How to Score More Nintendo points with Skip Rogers. And he would go over like five games. And the advice was nonsensical.

Clearly, this guy didn't know anything about games. You can still watch it on YouTube. It's up there. And it's so incredibly funny to watch now. But it would be like Mega Man 2. And he would give some pointers. And you'd see gameplay footage. And I would just watch it over and over.

I feel like I was one of the original Let's Play watchers. Like this became a thing on YouTube. I was doing this in 1989 just with VHS tapes. Just watching shows about video games. Yep, exactly. I'm sorry, Paul.

And you know what? I thought it was amazing. I loved it. It wasn't even like a sad thing. I'm sorry, Paul. or they were games I never played. But the one thing that did help was Mega Man 2. They did give a couple of pointers. Fight this boss first, because then you can use that power against this boss. And you want to do that because this boss is resistant to whatever else. And some of those things I did remember for a long time. And if I went to a friend's house with Mega Man 2, I could tell them, no, go fight Metal Man first,

because you're going to want his power, you know, some things like that. So I think that's a good transition. Let's jump into some of the NES games. So I know you made a little bit of a list. I'm going to let you just kind of take over this part of the show. Let's just toss some games out there, and then we can just have some conversations. When you think back on nes what's one of the games that comes to mind all right i'm gonna mix it up a little bit um contra since you since you started the show with the konami code trivia how many extra lives did that give you paul depends on which contra the first contra it was 30 it was if was Super C, you only got 10, and they changed the code. It was a different one. Yeah, no, I'm talking about the original

Contra. Yes, you had 30 lives. Which was not enough, by the way. Contra was too hard. How many lives did you get without the code? It was not many. Was it like three or five? It was three. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure it was three lives. And then if you played

two players, so if you played co-op, you'd get six lives between the two of you. And then I'm pretty sure now it's been a long time. So but I'm pretty sure that the lives were shared as well. So if you and I were playing and I died four times, like you were real mad at me at that point because I kept dying and using up the pool of lives. So Contra, man, I just remember playing this game with my friends. This game was so hard, man. Like there's a whole like... Brutal.

There's a whole thing called Nintendo Hard, like Nintendo Hard, because these games back in the day, I mean, you got six lives to beat the entire game. And this game was insanely hard at the same time. One shot kills. Yeah. This was no, if you were Mario and you were big, it would knock you down to small. It was not like that. It was just, if you got hit by any stray bullet, you were dead. Yeah. And I mean, I don't know how, but that man, that game was so fun because one time out of a thousand, like everything would just fall into place. You'd get like the spread shot, which would let you like run and shoot the five bullet spread. Your buddy would have the machine gun or whatever. And you guys would just, it's like, it's like the planets aligned.

Everything came together and you and your buddy were just completely in sync and tearing through these levels. And it was just incredible, man. And that game, for me, was one of the ones that stood out as so much fun to play. You're cheering your buddy on, unless he kept dying, in which case you were like, dude, quit dying, man. We've only got two lives left. Give the controller to Jesse. He's got more experience. I'm so glad you brought up Contra first. I was afraid you were going to bring

up a game I had never played. I really remember Contra having a few things. I don't know if they were the first to do this. Probably not. But I just remember it being really cool. You would fight like you'd have to break down a wall or take down a big machine and it would have a weak spot and you would have to get on the right ledge and lay down and then you could fire into the weak spot and take it down quicker. I remember as a kid thinking that was awesome. And then also some of the levels, it would switch where instead of running from left to right, you'd be running like a way into the screen and you would have to uh avoid like laser beams and things shooting at you so it would actually switch even though it was all a 2d one directional game

it would switch between those two axes and i always thought that was really cool yeah i i contra is obviously an iconic game but man i remember that being so hard. That's why the cheat code was so necessary. And even then, that's the crazy thing. Even with 30 lives, you still wouldn't beat the game nine times out of 10. That's crazy. All right. So here's one. I'm going to throw this out. Let's just change the pace. Did you like Dr. Mario? No, I did not. I hate Dr. Mario. Okay. no i did not dr mario okay there's so many people my wife loves dr mario she we have it on the switch she actually downloaded like a 60 game classic pack thing or something and i'll be in here playing something and i'll hear dr mario music in the other room and i hate that game

i i just i don't like it i don't know why it's just it's a terrible game. I just don't like it. I don't know why. It's a terrible game. It's not fun. They're trying to play on the Mario name, and I think it's terrible. It's Tetris, but way worse. Exactly. There is no reason to play Dr. Mario. I will say there's something very funny about the idea of Mario chucking these pills up into the air, and then you have to move them around. But it never made any sense to me. You would get these pills that had a color on each side. You would try to line them up. I would just rather play Tetris. I think that's way more exciting. I never really got the appeal of Dr. Mario. So I'm with you, Josh. But I think I saw

it was like the fourth or fifth highest selling nes game that's why i brought it up because it's like it's wild very very popular game but i just do not like it at all like i've played it a handful of times and that's a handful of times too many in my opinion i am with you man it's not good all right so game memory i'm I'm going to ask you your opinion first. And this might be out of left field. Can you think of a time when you and your friends went absolutely bananas because somebody did something in a game or beat a game or you guys just were jumping around cheering, high-fiving each other like, oh my goodness, I can't believe like we did it we beat it or anything like that on nes i have to say no and i have moments like that on later consoles but i was just so young and the end the super nintendo came out when i was still pretty young so for me and my friends we were all just a bunch of like five and six year olds

trying to play wizards and Warriors. All right. I guess you guys aren't going to be high-fiving and chest-bumping. No. No. So I can't say we ever had that. I still have this memory. Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! Okay.

Mike Tyson was impossibly hard to beat. And the game... I love Punch-Out!! to this day. I think the game is phenomenal. And if you could make it to Mike Tyson, you couldn't beat the guy. Your reflexes had to be like the cat-like mongoose reflexes to dodge his uppercuts and his punches and stuff like that. I'll never forget being at my friend's house down in his basement. We had a lot of basements apparently back then because they had like a finished basement. That's

where we'd do like sleepovers and stuff. stuff it was awesome but we were all taking turns playing punch out and one of my friends made it to mike tyson and actually beat mike tyson and we went crazy man we were jumping around screaming high-fiving like dude you did it i can't believe you did like you beat mike tyson you know just like i mean absolute just insanity going on i'll never forget your laps with high fives it really was it was probably a like a solid 10 minutes of like celebration going on over the fact that like this guy beat mike tyson in this video game but i i love that game they actually re-released it on it wasn't the switch was it was it the wii u they they re-released it with like better graphics and stuff and i instantly downloaded it and i loved playing it again and it's funny because it's like you start to remember like some of the

patterns oh yeah with king hippo like you'd have to punch him, punch him, and then his shorts would fall down, and then you'd punch him in the belly button and stuff. Oh, yeah. It's funny what you remember from playing these games. The Flamingo Dancer. Yep. Oh, yeah.

What's funny is I did not play Punch-Out when I was a kid. None of my friends that had a Nintendo owned it. But when I took a computer programming class in high school, my buddy Curtis and I downloaded NES emulators. And that was the first time I ever played Punch-Out!! And so that was in, I don't know, 2000 or 2001. And that game held up. It was still super fun at that point.

And my kids have played it. It's available on whether you have like an NES Classic or I don't know what it's called on the Switch, but they have like access to old Nintendo games. And my kids still like playing Punch-Out!! So I think it still has some legs. So you brought this one up, man. You started, you kind of went down this road a little bit, but Mega Man 2. Mega Man 2. Dude, the Mega Man series.

Criminally underrated. Mega Man 2 was one of the best boss fight games, I think, I'll say it, ever made. Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of platformers anymore. I don't know that I have the patience for them. They feel dated to me. I know they've made some really beautiful platformers like Ori and the Blind Forest and stuff like that. I've played some of those. It's just not really my genre anymore.

But Mega Man 2 was so good, man. And it's like you said, you could fight these bosses. You could pick a world. It was like the first, it wasn't open world, but it was the first like, fight who you want to fight. Yeah, choose your path, man. You want to go fight Leaf Man or Wood Man or whatever it is, and you want to go fight Metal Man?

You can. You could do it all. Flash Man, Heat Man. Yeah, but the thing was, if you picked the wrong path, it was insanely hard. Like, almost impossible. It wasn't quite impossible, but it was close enough that if you did the bosses in the right order, like it made the game significantly better because then you could actually, I don't want to say easier because it still wasn't an easy game, but you could really enjoy the boss fights

even more at that point because you'd have the leaf shield or the charge blast, or I don't even, like it's been so long, I don't even remember what all the abilities were. And it was just great to get wrecked by one of these bosses and then go into that boss fight with the right ability. And then it was like, oh, then you just revenge, man. You got to wreck that boss. Well, yeah, that was one of the cool things because every boss was weak to another boss's power. And so if you had the right one, it worked really well. So for example, there was one ability that you could get by killing one of the bosses where it would let you freeze time. the roof, run your way through a little bit of a maze, and then drop down to the next screen.

Well, it was basically, from my recollection, impossible to do unless you had that ability. And so you could freeze it, and then all the rays that would come out and kill you, they would all freeze in place. And then you could run through and drop down. I remember that now! Yes! Because there was the laser beam things that if you touched them, you would just die. Immediately die. Right?

Yeah. Oh, man. And so you didn't have a mana bar, but you had an energy bar. And in the game, you would grab these. It looked like a can of oil is what I always thought. It had an E, and that would replenish your energy. And then you could use these powers. And in my opinion, I think it's the best platformer game ever.

I think Mega Man 2 is just unassailable. I'm the same way. Like, honestly, I think of that game and I just think like, I can't, I don't know that anybody has done it better. Like with the number of bosses, the uniqueness of each boss fight, like that was the other thing is it wasn't like just a boss that was shooting bullets at you. It was, they were vastly different, man. I don't know. That game was amazing. That was like 20XX. Like I played 20XX, which is, isn't that free? It was free for a while on Epic Games. Okay. Yeah. That's what it was. And it was like.

It's a modern day Mega Man, but it doesn't quite have it. No, it doesn't. It's missing something. So, all right. So here's a game. I loved playing this game, but it was the worst game that I loved to play. Okay. Excitebike. Do you remember? Did you play Excitebike? Yes, I did.

And what's funny is I don't remember any point to Excitebike. I just remember running tracks, but you didn't race anyone. Did it even try to beat this time or set a world record? I don't remember there being anything like that. All I remember is you could play and you could do the jumps over the hills and try to land. And I think maybe there was time trials to beat a stage or something like that. I don't know why I liked playing it, but it was a terrible game. I don't remember it having very much substance. But like you, I remember loving it, though. I remember playing it all the time. And I don't know why. I don't know if it was the sound effects. I

don't know if it was just the jumps and having fun going over jumps. Now, if I remember right, it did have a level editor. So maybe it was one of the first games where you could actually like build your own track and i remember me and my friends like making some like insanely big jumps and hills that you could barely get up and if you landed funny like you'd land on the top of a peak and then your guy would wreck and stuff like that i remember us like just trolling each other and doing that but i don't like you know you'd always reckon your guy would wreck and stuff like that. I remember us just trolling each other and doing that. But I don't know. You'd always wreck and your guy would fall out of bounds. He would fall and then it would push his bike off. Yeah.

I don't know what it is about Excitebike, but it was one of those games that I finally remember. But then when I actually think about it, I'm like, why? There's nothing to this game, man. It's because you only had access to like eight games and that was one of the better ones at the time yeah honestly um dr mario i'll tell you that much i don't i i love my wife man but i don't know why she likes that game so much

um all right i mean it doesn't really get any better than a couple of... I'm going to... Three of these games coming up. Super Mario 3. Right. I mean, to me, is one of my favorite older Mario games. Before they got into the 3D Marios and stuff like that. But Super Mario 3, I thought, was incredible. The Raccoon Mario. You got the tail, you could fly.

Oh, yeah. And then that would let you fly above the levels so remember you could i forget which level it was but you could wind up skipping ahead worlds because there was the secret that you could do if you could get the tail and then fly up along the block get that whistle yeah to warp worlds you had down on the white box and you could run behind everything oh man see there was so many good things about that game. Oddly enough, I'm not a huge fan of the original Mario. Oh, Mario 1.

You know, like the NES that came, I mean, it shipped with the NES system. You know, that was the game that my brother was playing and I heard the music. At the time, I remember thinking, like, this game is incredible. But for some reason, it just got old to me fast. Really? Yeah, I don't know why. Like, that's why I think Super Mario 3 is great, because it's like they added enough elements to it, like, so that I was like, okay, this is like a game that I love to play. But the original Mario, I found that I got kind of bored with it fairly quickly.

Yeah, and I think for most people, they would say Mario 3 is their favorite platformer. I actually misspoke earlier. I'm not going to say that Mega Man 2 is my favorite. Castlevania Symphony of the Night, you would probably qualify as a platformer. I like that one more. Butio 3 is so good mario 1 i think is still really good the only problem is that since i always used all the warps to me both of those mario games are only like six or seven levels because in the original mario you would play 1-1 and then 1-2 warping to 4-1 and then 4-2 and then warping to world 8, and just doing those four levels. And so to me, if I ever go back and play those nowadays, when I get to Worlds 5 and 6, I'm like, oh yeah, I forgot there was a whole Ice World. And I don't even know how to play those levels. They're still new to me to this day. They're brand new games.

When I was a kid, yeah, you just always used all the shortcuts. See, that's weird. I was the opposite. I would want to go through all of the worlds and beat it and then on playthroughs after that i'd be like okay i've done that like now i can skip through them and stuff but yeah that's funny so you mentioned castlevania i've never played castlevania symphony of the night and i need to pick that game up but the original castlevania uh-huh i remember when this game came out and i don't know that they're like at the time was there a more like atmospheric game for the india because castlevania like that was that was the thing that made it so great it was very atmospheric and i don't remember which castlevania it was um but my good friend skip rogers taught me

how to play that one castlevania and i remember that you were collecting like dracula's body parts and i remember it as a kid thinking that was really creepy because you would find like dracula's heart or like other relics from dracula and i remember even as a kid just watching that thinking that that was creepy and the levels looked very creepy, even though I don't think I ever actually played it. Yeah, I don't. It's been a very long time since I have played the Castlevania series. I don't remember a lot about them. I do remember playing Castlevania. If I recall, and I could be wrong, and I might even be thinking of like a future Castlevania game here. So forgive me. But if I remember right, one of the really cool things about Castlevania was that you could

get like different weapons and stuff in that game. So as you're exploring the castle, and it's, you know, the platform elements, you had your boss fights and stuff like that. But then part of the thing that I thought was really cool was that through your exploration and stuff that you would get different weapons and that would change the way that the game felt. And in a game that's as old as Castlevania was for a system that's as old as the NES was, that was kind of groundbreaking back in the day. Like, you know, that it's kind of like hearkens to like something like Ghouls and Goblins, youlins, where you started off with the lance, right? Or Contra, where you could get the spreadshot weapon and things like that. But it was like, they were kind of figuring out that adding flavor to the gameplay would keep the gameplay fresh. Oh, yeah. And having RPG elements like an inventory system. But yeah, you could have

the chain whip in castlevania someone called us out on that on our discord server they said that we said that there were no other whips in pop culture other than indiana jones and they're like you're in castlevania and we're like oh of course yeah you know richter having the whip that's a great one but yeah being able to swap weapons in and out having long swords short, short daggers, whips. Yeah, very, very cool. So that series is great. I'm going to pick up soon through the night.

We're playing Terraria right now. You know, it's like, but that's one of those things where I'm going to pick that game up as just a good single player game to play. Because I've heard nothing but amazing things about it. And it would feel really neat to kind of go back to the castlevania world oh that's great okay so i mean we would be remiss if we didn't talk about legend of zelda okay like the zelda games have progressed through the years amazingly i am breath of the wild is the culmination of zelda games to me i did not enjoy twilight princess like at all i remember my wife and i being very excited for that game because we've always played the zelda games together um i mean i thought ocarina of time is still up there in my top 10

games i i can still sing the tunes from that game in my head at any given moment and it's been decades since i've played it um you know but the the original legend of zelda was groundbreaking now that game does not hold up so i will i will preface this by saying it is old and it feels old at this point but back in the day 32 years ago 32 years ago oh my goodness 32 years ago, this game was one of the most complete games in existence, in my opinion, between the exploration, the adventure, the music, the secret rooms that you could find, the boss fights the the story i mean it was just i don't know that there was a more complete game than out there than legend of zelda maybe metal gear the initial metal gear was super super good as well was that nes i can't remember that was nes was it yeah so those two games to me are really kind of like side by side in how epic they were. How funny. Yeah, I did not play Zelda back in the day, but I do remember reading that Miyamoto,

who made the Zelda games, was not happy with Zelda 2, even though I know that one is considered one of the greatest games of all time. Yeah, he still says to this day that it could have been better. Just, I guess, holding himself to that high standard. Man. Yeah, and I think Zelda might have been the first game where you could save,

where it had a battery in the cartridge. Because normally on NES, you would lose your progress. Oh, but that game was too long. Yeah, games like Punch-Out would give you a code, and that way when you played later, you could type the code in, and it would put you back to that level. It was like a built-in cheat. But for Zelda, I know you could actually save your progress using the little watch battery. Double Dragon. I don't know if you ever played

that game, but I love Double Dragon. That was another game that was super fun to play with friends. One of the things that stands out to me in that game was there was friendly fire. So if you were punching, you could accidentally punch your friend. And then that would always, 100% of the time, devolve into the grabbing them by the head and then kneeing them in the face five or six times. And then you would chuck them over, you'd turn around and you'd body chuck them. And then I just, I've never, I mean, Double Dragon always just wound up being you and your friend fighting each other before moving on to the next level. It's funny because when we were talking about this show and then I was like, I love the NES, but I don't know how much I'm going to remember about it.

And then it was funny because it just opened up the lid and all i knocked all the cobwebs out you know and then it was just like dude i could talk about this forever man yeah it's funny how they can just really flood back just because you'll think of a game that you haven't thought about in 20 years and it just immediately comes right back yeah how funny well in the uh last segment of the show here i have just a a brief quiz that i want to give you oh pop quiz hot shot oh shoot the hostage shoot the hostage everyone knows that's that's the answer all right so on the nes system how many games do you think sold at least 1 million copies? It's got to be a lot, dude. There was 68 million NESs sold.

How many games sold at least a million? I'm going to say 20. 75. 75 games sold a million copies. Dude, that's insane success in today's standards. Oh, yeah. I pulled numbers from modern consoles. Did you? The PS4 had 35 and the Xbox One had 31.

So this really just shows the monoculture of NES at the time. You didn't have this split of whether you were PC or if you were Xbox or PlayStation or Nintendo. Everyone just had an NES. So you had 75 games that sold at least a million copies. That's wild. Nintendo's rich, man. Yeah, they made out very well. It's funny to think that a lot of people thought that it would fail when it first released. All right, and then question number two two you actually kind of hinted at this earlier the introductory price was 179 what do you think is the equivalent in 2021 dollars oh man uh i'm gonna say 380 bucks that's a darn good guess is about 433 oh that's not yeah see that's pricey change i mean people complain about the ps5 prices but that's not... Yeah, see, that's pricey, man. That's a chunk of change. I mean, that's your...

People complain about the PS5 prices, but that's what it cost back in the day. So things have not changed very much. Yeah, yeah. It's not as bad thinking about it in terms like that. Dang, I'm impressed with my brother, man. Like, that dude saved up... You're telling me a 13-year-old kid saved up, like, what would be equivalent of almost $500 in today's economy? That's crazy,

man. Yeah, it's pretty good. All right. True or false? When you win a match in pro wrestling, you are welcomed by the message, a winner is you. That's it. I feel like that's a different game. Actually, no. I think, yes, true. That is this game. It is true. That's the one where you had the Starman. Was that that pro wrestling? I loved that game, dude. It has to be, because that was the same timeframe. I just love that A Winner Is You still survives to this day as a meme. I still say it all the time. I'll say A Winner Is You. This is back when a lot of the games were developed in Japan.

They were translated. Didn't always translate it quite right. And so you ended up with some of these little idioms. I forgot about pro wrestling, man. Oh, yeah. Pro wrestling. All right. Another question.

True or false, Nintendo released their own sports games called baseball, tennis, soccer, volleyball, golf, and ice hockey. I feel like that's yes. That's true. Come on, Nintendo. You can't think of better names? I know. If I was looking at Blades of Steel or Ice Hockey, I'm picking up Blades of Steel, man. Of course. That is a way better name. Oh, absolutely. But that was probably the Americanized name for the game, too.

And Nintendo was just like, we want people to know what it is. It's golf. It's very descriptive. Those NES games, a lot of them are literally, you know, Duck Hunt, because you're shooting ducks. You know, it's very literal of what the game is. Yeah, you didn't have any cool names like, you know, Grand Theft Auto. All right. Can you name the NES game that revolutionized cinematic cutscenes?

The NES had the first game utilizing cutscenes. Was it the Maniac Mansion? Is it the... No. I know what game you're talking about. No, that's not... No, I can't think of it. I did not play it but

ninja gaiden wait that ninja i played ninja gaiden a ton but i don't remember cinematic sequences the nes the very first one has 20 minutes of cut scenes the arcade version did not have any they put them in for the nes so that way they could incorporate more of a story that's so we guys were talking. So we have Ninja Gaiden to thank us for. Okay, I thought you were thinking, like, when you said cinematic, I'm thinking, like, actual, like, people, like, movies. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what I mean?

Like, movie cutscenes, not, like, people actually talking. Okay, I got you, I got you. That's what threw me off. Ninja Gaiden was phenomenal. It's actually on my list. I didn't get to it, because that game was hard. All right. ninja gaiden was phenomenal it's actually on my list i didn't get to it because that game was hard all right true or false the nes was originally designed to run off floppy disks um i'm gonna say false i feel like it's cartridge that one is true so i mentioned earlier how it was called the famicom in japan which was a combination of family computer famicom they put those together yeah

so the original nes was a 16-bit machine running off of floppy disks with a keyboard five and a quarter floppies the The Nintendo president said, you know what? The average man does not know how to use a computer. That's going to throw them off. Let's use cartridges and a controller. What a call, man. That little difference totally changed console history. It literally was just going to be a computer.

It would just be computers. Yeah. Yeah. If not for that, dude, that guy had no idea how history making that decision is nowadays. Yeah. I mean, anyone can pick up a Nintendo controller. I mean, it's only got a D-pad, start, select, A, B. Right.

That's all it is. It's not intimidating. Anyone can pick it up and learn. So yeah, what a call. All right. can pick it up and learn so yeah what a call all right and then at one point executives believed that nes add-on accessories were the future of the console how many goofy add-ons can you remember that were developed for the nes okay you had the gun from duck hunt you had the power glove which i wanted so bad dude i'll never forget the commercials for the power glove um you had the

best commercial ever it did they had lightning remember the lightning in the background the kid would be like it was like thor's hammer he had like the imax screen behind him like anyone was like using that at home oh man i wanted that power glove something fierce man um you had the mat for the track and field um and then there's probably a couple i'm gonna say six just to just to over guess there's an entire wikipedia page on nes accessories yeah they developed a whole lot now not all of them ended up making it to market they made a knitting machine for the nes mario knitting this is not a joke. You can look this up.

You can see videos of how it worked. You could design a design on your TV using the Nintendo, and then you would have to move. It kind of looks like an old school credit card machine, and you would move it back and forth, and it would knit the design that you made. And the poster says, now you're knitting with power. now you're knitting with power.

Now you're knitting with power. Wow. This is the kind of stuff, you gotta give them credit for at least being creative. I don't know who thinks, let me use this Nintendo to knit, but this is the kind of stuff that they made. They also have a laser scope

that you would wear on your head. It was a headset and it had a crosshair over your eye, and you could use it for games like Duck Hunt, where you would look and you would move the crosshair to be over the target, and you would say, fire, and then it would fire. Dude, that's pretty revolutionary. That is revolutionary, but Wikipedia does say that it was completely obliterated by reviews because everyone said that it never fired right. Yeah, because I'm sure there was lag back then. Or just anyone saying anything in another room, it would randomly fire.

So apparently it did not work well. I mean, you've got to get... Nintendo still does it, man. Like, to this day. Like I said, I mentioned the Wii Fit Adventure. I mean, the ring. You've got this ring that you squeeze and do all this stuff with. Put it between your thighs and squeeze it.

Yeah, exactly. You know, you've got that. You've got, I mean, the Joy-Cons and the motion sensing and stuff like that. I mean, the Wii that had the motion sensing in the remote. You had the balance board. I mean, Nintendo loves them some crazy accessories. They really do. And the last one that I wanted to mention is the Game Genie.

Now, my kids did not believe me when I told them you could buy a thing that you would stick into your Nintendo and then the game would go into the Game Genie and it would let you cheat. Yeah. And this blew their minds. They could not believe that this existed back in the day. Now, I never owned a Game Genie, but I remember when they came out, and it was kind of like that thing where, like I was talking about with Castlevania and stuff, where it was a way to prolong the life of your games. Because you might know this game, but if you had a Game Genie, you

could mess that game up in so many unique ways and cheat in that game that it would kind of make it fresh again and you would just keep playing that game for a while yeah i i never owned a game genie because i didn't have the old school consoles but i do remember buying my nintendo 64 and i bought a game shark which did exactly the same thing but yeah i remember that always being fun because you could maybe sometimes even unlock weapons that you couldn't find in the game. It was just in the game code and the Game Genie could actually pull that out.

And so you could explore other things in the games, even if they didn't really make it to release. So they were very interesting in concept. Gotta love the Game Genie. All right, well, yeah, that's all I had for you, Josh. Any closing thoughts or anything to say on the NES? What a great system. It really was, man, I know it doesn't hold up to this day.

And there's probably some of our younger listeners that are going like, I don't know anything you guys are talking about right now. This is your history, son. I mean, this is what started the revolution like honestly like i had an atari like before nintendo i i mean you know my family always had computers we had the old school atari then we got like an atari 2600 but there was something about the nes that made it amazing like they they were the first ones to do it right. They were the first ones to have really good games.

I had an Atari, but those games were terrible, man. Honestly, they really were. There were not many revolutionary games. And Nintendo, that's what they did right. Yeah, I mean, they cranked them out. They were fun. There was not very many trash games that existed. I mean, there were a few, don't get me wrong, but the majority of games were fun to play. I mean, it was a golden time to be

alive. Yeah, what an age for gaming. So, you know, thank you for sticking with us and listening to the show. I think everyone who's left listening at this point has got to be 32 years old or older. We probably lost everyone else. They're in nostalgia land with us, though, man. So hopefully you guys enjoyed reminiscing a little bit about the NES. Even though I never

owned one, it was still a blast to play at my friends' houses, and I always tried to get my friends to invite me to spend the night at their friends' houses. And I always tried to get my friends to invite me to spend the night at their houses so that way I could play NES. So hopefully you guys enjoyed spending this time with us. We will be back with another show on Thursday. Just as a reminder, please leave us a review, rate us five stars, write that review up, and maybe we'll read it on one of our future shows. And I think that's about it. So you can find us on social media at MultiplayerPod.

And also, please check out our YouTube channel. Todd, who was not with us here today, has released our first video as of late, where Todd is spending some extra time curating videos for that channel. So you can find that at MultiplayerPodcast. And the first one that he put out is great. He made a little bit of a tutorial of tips to begin in rust. So go check that out and, you know, go give it a thumbs up. And that way we can also, you know, support Todd and the video work. Yeah, he's putting a lot of work into these. And it's, you know, they're going to be

awesome. The first one he did. I mean, it's the first video he's done in a while. I think it came out great. It's perfect for people that might be interested in rust, but I like, how do I get started? Cause I hear, I've heard you guys talk about like how hard it is to get going in that game. And he really breaks it down real quick to just be like, here's how you get your feet under you. So definitely go check it out. All right. We'll see you guys on Thursday for this week in gaming.

And then we will be back the following monday covering terraria so until then happy gaming should i cover like eight more games now paul ghosts and goblins the first playthrough it's all a dream and then you got to do it again oh it was a dream wasn't it i forget people hated that