RETRO REHAB | Ep. 8 - Rare & Obscure Arcade Games | Ft. Video Game Esoterica

[00:00:00] Hey, I'm Jerry. Hey, I'm Aaron. And this is Retro Rehab. Welcome back to Retro Rehab, the greatest collaboration of all time. You know it, I know it, Aaron knows it. Aaron, tell them. Tell them, Aaron. It's true. I promise. Please. Yes, it's true. Can I have a snack now? Yes, you may have a treat. You may have a TREAT. Thank you.

[00:00:39] All right. Well, look, today we are very excited to have this guest joining us. Whether you've tuned in to his frequent updates of the Mr. Project, which I have by God damn it, I've been there every step of the way. Or maybe you've seen some of his other retro videos on his YouTube channel. He is the creator of the YouTube channel, Video Game Esoterica. Welcome to Retro Rehab, Anthony.

[00:01:02] Thanks for having me, guys. And sorry for making esoterica such a hard word to say. I cannot tell you how many times in my own intro, I just shit that up. It's been cut out as like, esosarica. Like it is the first 10 seconds I ruined like eight times. So the fact that you got it right the first time, highly impressed. You did better than I do at my own channel introduction.

[00:01:20] Hell yeah. Look at that. Us experienced podcasters here. Anthony, please plug and promote. Yeah, I guess we've both been doing this for like three years or something or something like that. What does matter. Anthony, please plug and promote anything and everything Video Game Esoterica.

[00:01:44] Oh man. Well, first of all, just thanks for having me on guys. I love chatting about this stuff. You know, anyone that'll listen, I've been doing this for like, God, almost seven years now. I mean, if the channel was a child, it would probably be in like first grade, which is kind of scary to think because I don't have any children that I know about. So if they're out there, maybe they're in like fifth or sixth grade, we don't know. But no, it's been a ton of fun. It's just one of those things like I've always been collecting games, you know, doing this research and preservation stuff. And I figured one day I'm like, well, I have all this stuff.

[00:02:13] And what's the point of having it all if I'm not sharing it, giving it away, making videos about it, just kind of like talking about it. Because the thing in my life is I've got one friend who plays video games and he does not play arcade games. He's mostly like Stardew Valley, which is a fun game. But I have no one in my real life to be like, hey, do you know about this? Like rare as shit arcade board? Everyone's like looking at me like I've got three heads and their eyes are glossing over and I realize time to stop talking.

[00:02:39] So the channel is basically just me like playing free candy van and trying to compel people that has shared my interest into a group of people that like that stuff. So I've always got something going on. Like a couple weeks ago, I was capturing Thunder in Paradise because I'm going to do a full motion video series in January next year. Basically, I try to ruin my own channel by doing that. The things that I'm the most excited about, no one watches. So we're going to be having some Hulk Hogan on the channel.

[00:03:09] Yes. Hell yeah. Hell yeah, dude. I wish you were my friend. Like anytime I talk to any of my friends about video games, they're always like, well, I mean, I play Destiny and like Call of Duty and shit. And it's like, no, no, I don't want to talk about that anymore. I want to talk about Super Metroid. We'll talk about Dolphin Blue. God damn it. Dolphin Blue is so good.

[00:03:34] It is legit good. I've got a Thomas Wave sitting next to me and I was just capturing that and King of Fighters Neo Wave a couple weeks ago. I've been doing a whole arcade storage closet reorganization. And by reorganization, I mean, righting all the wrongs I've committed by just getting new things and shoving them into the closet. Kind of like a backpack when you're six years old. You're like, I can just get more in this thing. I just keep pushing stuff in. So I've been going through a whole reorganization and capturing a bunch of rare boards.

[00:04:04] It's like a serial killer going back to his kill sites and just digging up all the bodies and being like, oh God, what do I have to do with these now? Yeah, it's been pretty bad, but I've mostly gotten through it, but it took forever because what would have been a day's worth of work? I'd be like, oh, I haven't talked about this in like five years. I should sit down and play it. Then I got to find the harness and the cables and remember how the hell I even hook it up in the first place. And then suddenly five hours have gone by and I've made bigger, a more big mess than I started with.

[00:04:31] So for those listeners out there that aren't familiar with video game esoterica, what would be the elevator pitch for your channel?

[00:04:45] If you've never heard of it before, I'll probably talk about it. That would really be the elevator pitch is maybe you remember a photograph of something from some magazine or maybe you played an arcade game 20 years ago when you were out with your parents at a restaurant and you just do not remember what that game is, but you have this vivid memory of something. It's probably on my channel. I get that comment so much being like, I didn't know the name of this game. I played it once on vacation and now you've reintroduced me to it. Now I can, you know, played it on MAME and I'm so happy if you've never heard of it.

[00:05:15] I probably talk about it. That would be the elevator pitch plus a bunch of other stuff. FPGA preservation, spending a lot of money to get prototypes to give them away for absolutely free and pretty bad jokes. That too. I love it when you like chirp people that are in like the Mr. Discord, like in a video, like just a subtle little drop. Oh yeah. If you're on, if you're on discord, especially, and he's going to hate that. I say this one of the moderators, Robbie, I am just brutal with him.

[00:05:45] I have made so many jokes about him and he loves it. It's a game, but he's gotten to the point now where he realizes like anytime he says anything that's like even slightly an opening for a joke, it's like he puts the ball on the T and I just Barry bonds that thing out of the stadium, into the parking lot, through his window in his car. So Robbie, I'm going to send you this link and you can hear it.

[00:06:07] Dude, I've been there for it. Like I, when I started getting into the Mr. Stuff, it was like at the cusp of when in the middle of like the, all the N64 hype stuff and like just being in the N64 dev channel and like watching you guys go back and forth. And I think the first time I ever spoke in that channel, I asked like, cause I knew that the guy that made the N64 core, his name was Robert. So I was like, Oh, Hey Robbie, are you the guy that made the N64 core? And you, you shut that shit down.

[00:06:39] You were like, no, he's not that smart. No, he's just, uh, he's like, he's an awesome guy. He worked on doom, which is probably not why it's a good game. I'm sure it was in spite of him that it turned out good, but I love Robbie. So when he listens to this, I didn't mean anything I said, but I probably meant all of it. We love you, Robbie. Oh man.

[00:07:02] So, uh, before we get into our topic of the day, which is of course we got video game esoterica here with us. We're going to talk about some rare shit, specifically rare and obscure arcade games. And I cannot wait to pick your brain about this. Cause I feel like you have a, uh, uh, a brain that is overflowing with knowledge about these kinds of things.

[00:07:27] I, my brain is so full of arcade knowledge that I will often leave remote controls in the crisper drawer in the refrigerator. There's only so much space in my brain and I've thrown away so much useful information. I still think labor day happens before Memorial day and I'm never going to stop thinking that. So ask me video game questions, not about holidays. What else are you going to eat? What else are you gonna use that goddamn crisper drawer for? I still don't understand what it's for other than storing other shit. Like it doesn't crisp things. It doesn't do that.

[00:07:56] I use it for cheese. That's what I use it for. Just an overabundance of cheese that I have in my house. You buy lettuce, you get lettuce with all the intentions in the world of eating it. Then you put it in the crisper drawer and then you wait for it to rot. You throw it away. Say, I'm not going to do that again. And then two days later, you're back at the store being like, this is the time I'm going to eat the lettuce. And then you just put it back in the crisper. It's basically just a drawer where you put money to disappear. It'll be like, I'm going to, I'm going to be healthy and snack only on baby carrots and hummus.

[00:08:26] And then like a week later, I'll be walking. I'll be walking by my fridge, open up the drawer. Like, hmm, feeling pretty hungry. You could eat these carrots, but I could also be a gigantic fucking slug man and eat four packs of filetheon hot Fritos or whatever. And then go to bed with like filetheon hot Frito powder in my mouth. I mean, I eat what I, when my wife was working a lot, she would have like long shifts. What do you have for dinner? I'm like, I had sink cheese. It's when you eat cheese over the sink.

[00:08:56] So when it, so when it, when it crumbles, it just goes into the sink. You don't have a plate. There's no napkin. So I get it. Like Fritos sink cheese. Yeah. It's a, it's a Midwestern staple sink. Cheese. Holy shit. That's fucking hilarious. Cheese. Christ almighty. Oh man. I am using that one. You're like, I am adopting so much of your, the lexicon of, of video game esoterica after this episode. Let me tell you what. Just like, just like all the arcade prototypes.

[00:09:26] It's all for free. Anyone who can take it and do whatever they want with it. Hell yeah. But before we get into our topic, Aaron. Yes, sir. You know the question. What could possibly be new in the world of retro? My friend. Well, I'll tell you. God damn it. Uh, plug in. Oh wait, whoops. I almost said the wrong thing. I'll tell you what's new in the retro. Plug in. Promote. Oh my God.

[00:09:55] We're professionals. Sorry. Uh, yeah. Mega Man. Holy shit. Yeah. I saw this. Mega Man 3 has now been ported to SNES with MSU1 media enhancement. I, that fucking SNES port looks so nice. Holy shit. I think I showed that to, uh, I mean, I think we showed that in the anti game of the year group a couple of times and. Um, oh, so you're thinking of the, uh, the one that they, they took the Genesis Wily Wars.

[00:10:24] That's the one you're thinking of. This is literally Mega Man 3 for NES, but ported to SNES. That's what this is. It just came out like two days ago. I've seen that. Oh. I, I did a capture of that to this morning for a video tomorrow at four. And my three observations are the dude that does those infidelity absolutely kills it with these ports. They are just insane with all of the MSU one enhancements, all of the new soundtrack.

[00:10:52] And my second takeaway is I always forget that I absolutely fucking suck at Mega Man. Getting the footage for these videos is so hard. It's just like an hour and 20 minutes of me playing just to try to get to one boss because every jump kills me. I'm just like, I love that these exist, but again, just like something like ghouls and ghosts, I'm probably never going to see the credits. I just don't have the time anymore, but that port is so good. It really is. Yeah.

[00:11:19] Like I, I, I think he did the one for Metroid as well, right? Yeah. He did Metroid. And then he, he did another one a couple of months ago. I think it was the original Mega Man. He's in a bunch, a ton of them. It's so hard to keep track of them, but he's been really like hitting them hardly. I think he, it was either him or somebody else. I make it this muddled, but someone just did punch out super Nintendo as well. I think that may have been, is that was either infidelity or another guy.

[00:11:45] I can't remember now, but there's been a ton of ports to super Nintendo this year. I think he's working on contra next. I think is what he was alluding to on Twitter today or yesterday or whenever that was. He made that post. He's pretty much just like doing back to back to back to back ports of these. It's pretty wild. Yeah. I love to see it. And for, for the folks listening, if you don't know what MSU one is,

[00:12:12] essentially what that is, is it's a enhancement to the audio in the game. So instead of the game having, well, in these cases, like the Nintendo entertainment system, chip tune style music, you're getting like actual damn near orchestrated music. Like see, like, is it CD quality? Like, I feel like that Metroid one was like, had like an orchestra and stuff in it. Like it sounded insane. It's a PCM audio.

[00:12:42] So the bit rate wise is as good as, if not better, I think technically than something like Redbook audio office CD. So it's like of the bit rate, probably as good. And then it could do all the like FMV videos as well. There's like full, like road blaster. The like laser disc arcade game has a port on MSU one. Now, so you can play the entire game as an FMV. And it makes, it's just crazy that somebody could imagine this. Cause it's not like an MSU one chip doesn't really technically exist.

[00:13:11] It's in an FPGA code or it's in a flashcard in FPGA. But like people just whole cloth invented that chip. It's not anything that ever like came off of assembly line somewhere. And it's just, I'm always blown away by what people can come up with because as much as I know and do, I'm an idiot compared to like 99% of the people that are doing this mod work. I'm just kind of like, yeah, I pushed the power button. I hit the record button. I start talking and something cool happens. You guys actually make the stuff. Yeah, I know.

[00:13:36] Like we had, uh, we had Jamie, AKA Katrinks on our last episode. And when she was talking about like when she was helping develop the NES core, my eyes were starting to like fold into the back of my head. Cause I was like, I don't know what you're really talking about. Like I'm full disclosure. Like none of this makes sense. I mean, it does. Like I, I guess I get it at like a very, very like topical level. Like I don't, I like, but she was talking about all kinds of crazy shit, which is wild.

[00:14:06] I love hearing it. It's like whispering sweet. Nothing's into my ear that I don't understand. Yeah. Carry the three 48 to the third power. She said she was using math and like a calculator and shit to figure it out. So like that, that's what I'm going. That's where I'm going with this. But yeah. Yeah. It gets wildly complex out there. I mean, I've done some stuff. Like I did some reverse engineering on like Konami security encryption for arcade boards, but that was less like math and more of like a thought problem.

[00:14:35] Cause once you figure out like what the person that wrote it was thinking, once you figure out one solution to kind of how all the data like marries together and kind of like gives the digital handshake to let the board boot, then you kind of realize you understand what that person was thinking. And now knowing how their thought process works, you can work back from that and kind of now guess and break some more of their encryption. It's to me more of like a mental puzzle than it is math. I mean, I'm, I took a lot of math in high school and college and I'm good at it, but I certainly don't want to do it for a living.

[00:15:05] That's for sure. Yeah. Um, you also like speaking on that too, you also were putting out some, some videos and you were giving some updates about kind of messing around with conquer because you know, if you, if you know anything about the mister and the N64 core development, the one white whale of that whole development cycle was conquer 64. And the fact that we got to a brick wall where we just couldn't, couldn't push any more out

[00:15:35] of that poor, poor core, like was just stretched to the max. And Robert was like, that's it. It just, it's not going to work. But then you discovered that the, the, uh, the turbo core was able to run it and you were getting close to like figuring out maybe what is actually making that have those like, um, intermittent crashing. Yeah. So I'm still working on it. I'll have another video. It's already made. I make so much stuff sometimes that I then like struggle to find places to put it, but

[00:16:04] I am still working on it. So if you take the turbo core, which runs the CPU at a higher clock speed, and then you take the prototype ROM of the game, which is like 99% the exact same game. There's like a couple like lines of dialogue that are different, but it is essentially if you played both games back to back, you'd be hard pressed to notice any sort of difference. That game becomes more stable on the turbo core. I've played it from start to finish for the testing and I froze the game exactly three times, got to the credits, which I would consider playable.

[00:16:33] You can beat the game every time anything happens, you know, important in conquer. It sets a safe flag. It saves automatically. So you're really not losing that much, you know, gameplay time if it does freeze, but I've gotten it down to a near to replicatable crash and it all has to do with memory allocation because the game uses basically the Nintendo 64 can have heat memory, which means you got 10 gal, you got a 10 gallon bucket. You got 10 gallons of shit, shove the shit in the bucket wherever you want to.

[00:17:03] There's not like a three pounds of corn allocation and then a five pounds of I ate too many hamburgers allocation. You can put whatever you want anywhere. I am trying to make this funny and dumb it down so it doesn't get too eye glazed. This is perfect. This is what people of Retro Rehab want. It crashes because the heap runs out of memory, which just means there's not a big enough contiguous area in RAM from, you know, address X to Y say for it to write.

[00:17:31] And then it basically is trying to read or write to an address that's already used or allocated. Then it just basically has a two 30 in the morning. I'm drunk at the bar panic attack falls on its face and blacks out. So I'm just trying to figure out with some other people how to change how the memory allocation works so that it doesn't try to overwrite or overread those memory addresses. I'm close, but the first 95% of the work takes 50% of the time. And the last 5% of the work takes the other 50% of the time.

[00:18:00] And we're doing two videos a day in the rest of my life. I haven't had a chance to really get too deep into it lately, but I do have some more findings with some real hardware and that should be out hopefully like Friday or Sunday is the plan. But with me, that might mean a month from now. Nice. So back to the back to the news here. One, I actually noticed this not long ago, but I kind of stored in the back of my brain and was like, I guess that's normal.

[00:18:28] But the PS2 AV cable sag, I was like, I feel like this is maybe hurting this cable. But I guess somebody came out with like a 3D printed remedy that just kind of like clips on to the AV cable and just kind of holds it up so that it's not sagging, which is kind of cool. It's by Kytor Industries. Kytor. That's cool. Kytor Industries. I've always just put a book behind. Just prop it up with a book. What else are you going to do with those books after you finish them, like the Harry Potters and such?

[00:19:00] I did. This one was this was news to me. Like I get it. Cable sag like with Mr. I'm always talking about the VGA cable being like, it's heavy. Don't knock your Mr. off the table. You're going to like crack some solder joints. But I had no idea on the PlayStation 2. But I mean, it makes sense. And I'm glad they're not going to break. It's I mean, PlayStation 2s are so uncommon. We don't want to have to replace them. Right. Yeah, there's barely any in the wild. There's like 10 or 20 or 30 million in the US alone. But yeah, I get it.

[00:19:28] I'm always impressed by this 3D printing thing, too. Like, you know, I'm a filmmaker for a living. I get like how images work when people start turning stuff around and 3D models and like making things in a 3D space. I'm like, I don't know how to do that. And if I did, everything I 3D printed would just be some sort of dirty, dirty thing as a joke to give to my friends. That's what would come out. It wouldn't be an anti-sag cable attachment. It would just be something horrifying. Happy birthday. Here's a 3D printed replica of Wario's ass.

[00:19:58] Here's a flesh column made entirely out of old people's kneecaps. I dude, if I had a 3D printer, I definitely would not be thinking of ways to help humanity and video games and shit. I would just be like, I'm going to make Pokemon figurines and keep them all to myself. No, it's my technology. Yeah, I'm going to make the 50 second polytone. Wait your turn.

[00:20:27] I don't know why people are waiting for turns. Coming kids out of the way and shit. But yeah, so PS2 AV cable seg, no more. Thanks to Kizer Industries. And Blast Wind on the Sega Saturn gets an English translation. And it looks fucking sweet. Yeah, dude. Those shmups. Shmups are so good. So I'm showing the Sega Saturn.

[00:20:53] The ports of the Darius or Darius games, I still don't know how to pronounce it. I'm just going with how Shmup Junkie says it, which is Darius. But they're ports of like Darius G and the other two, I forget their names. They run so fucking smoothly. And like the load times are... What I'm getting at is like the Saturn is so good with shmups, dude. I'm excited for this one. It is awesome hardware for shmups.

[00:21:22] And the great thing like... And I know we've had software emulation forever. But like trying to get a software emulator into the back of a TV. Like an old tube TV is a pain in the ass. There's so many adapters and it's just not fun. Like people have been like talking on my channel being like, I just heard about this shmup like for the first time. And I'm so happy about that. Because so many of these games are like, oh, you want to buy a real copy and play it on like your CRT television? Like some of them are mortgage payment expensive. Like, you know, $800, $1,000, $1,500.

[00:21:48] So now people finally, a little bit late, unfortunately, for Sega's bottom line, are finally discovering that the Sega Saturn in fact does not suck. That this storyline that the Saturn is just a failed console that competed against PlayStation 1. It's so good. It's so good. Especially 2D games. It does 2D so much better. Like it's so smooth. Like if you do a side-by-side of like any fucking Street Fighter. I can't. Whichever Street Fighter game, I guess, was on PS1 and Saturn.

[00:22:17] You do a side-by-side and it'll run so much smoother on Saturn. Now, if you were to take a guess, Aaron and Anthony even, without looking at your computer screens, we could do what we call how much does it cost? Okay. All right. All right. Here we go. I am heading over. I am heading over to our Lord and Savior. Wow.

[00:22:46] What's the fucking price charting? Yes. Price charting. So safe. Price charting. Okay. Because apparently this game is very rare. Blast Wind. Uh, Blast Wind. Are we guessing the price for Blast Wind? Yeah.

[00:23:09] So, why don't you guys take a guess at what new inbox Blast Winds or Blast Wind for the Sega Saturn? Does it have the spine card or no? Because that is a weird valuation thing. Sorry, I'm getting too complicated. Yes. And it's... 300 bucks. Okay. Aaron, what's your wager?

[00:23:39] 301, Jerry. No, I'm kidding. No, I'm kidding. I didn't know his price is right. I would have changed it. No, I'm kidding. I want to say... I want to say 500. Especially new in box. 500. 500. All right. Well, the results are in. Aaron? Yep. You are not the father. I'm just kidding. What? No! Yeah, you are the father.

[00:24:06] So yeah, 528 new is what you're going to pay. Hell expensive now. Yeah. Yeah, and then of course you got that stupid fucking graded is $1,506. $1,506. Money laundering. Let's hear it for graded video games. Fart sound here. What is it? The line from Tommy Boy? I could take a shit in a box too. Yeah.

[00:24:37] Oh God. He was laughing there. For graded games. That was perfect for the Tommy Boy quote. Oh my God. I don't understand some of the prices I see. And I've almost made a video a few times on this, but there's just some, there's some cans of worms. I don't really feel like opening because I have to read the comments. Let me, I'm sure you guys get it for every comment on the channel that somebody sees and they're like, what the hell are that person talking about? There's like 20 in the held comments where I'm just wondering like, what, where does

[00:25:07] this person live? So like money laundering and game grading is just one topic that I just haven't wanted to wait into yet. But, but one day I will, because clearly no one's actually, I hope no one's paying $50,000 for created copies of Super Mario Brothers because I'll sell you a nice one for 20 bucks. Yeah. Right there fucking everywhere. You can go to a nice one. You can go to any garage sale in Iowa and find a pretty goddamn decent shaped copy of Mario three for like $2.

[00:25:36] It might have like a sticker on it that has like a scratch and sniff smelly thing from like grade one in 1997 that has like Andrew's name carved into the back of it or something, but like Andrew plus Maribel forever. No. Maribel. Bradley, Bradley, Bradley just carved in the back. Uh, he even graded, like even graded cards like magic, the gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh and shit like that. That shit's also a scam.

[00:26:05] Like don't, don't get your things graded because like, I don't know. It's just, it's just stupid. Like it really is track the price on like price charting or like any other website and base your prices off the market. You know, you know, uh, what is it? Uh, what in demand supply and demand? Yeah. Don't, don't just be like, Oh, what in demand? It's like a jeopardy question.

[00:26:33] This, yeah, it's just, it's stupid, man. It's so stupid. Don't just, don't just think, Oh, I have brand, brand new mint condition game. Therefore $50,000. Like, yeah, it's. People are getting the same with that. There is, um, there's currently a 3DO M2 console for sale on Yahoo Auction Japan. The person's asking about the equivalent of a hundred thousand us dollars for it. And then people message me being like, is it worth a hundred thousand dollars? I'm like, no, someone's just asking for that.

[00:27:02] Like I can ask $200,000 for one. That doesn't mean it's worth it. Yeah. It's just a number that's imaginary to somebody, but people see that number and they're like, this game is worth this much money. It's like, no, that's what somebody asked you for it. I could ask a hundred dollars for a gallon of gasoline. If you're dumb enough to pay me, I'll take it. But chances are, you're going to go to the dude selling it for five bucks a gallon. It's wild. Like I'm working on maybe a series idea, which I'm calling let's ruin the resale value where I take rare sealed games that have never been opened only because I forgot to open them

[00:27:31] and then opening them on camera and reviewing them basically being like, I love it. Let's just ruin the, I've got a, I love that. I was one of the few people to actually get a copy of Paprium for the Sega Genesis. And I think probably because I had a channel maybe, and this game has been sitting in its cardboard box in my closet. It showed up a week before Christmas. And I'm like, I didn't even think this was ever going to come out. I thought it was a scam and it's been sitting there for like three years. I think on camera, I'm going to just do, let's ruin the resale value, open it up, play

[00:28:00] it, and then put it back on the shelf. Cause I don't collect sealed things. I more buy things with the intention of playing them. And then they stay sealed. Exactly. Oh my God. Please have me on as a guest commentator. Yeah. Slit that. And here he goes. Slit that shrink wrap. Yeah. Take all that shrink wrap off. Throw in the trash can. Pull it up first. Yeah.

[00:28:28] I was getting almost like, uh, almost Hulk Hogan with that on accident. Take off all the cellophane. Yeah. Take the cellophane off brother. And with that, Anthony, I would love to know because we ask all of our guests the same question. What is your favorite video game memory? I saw that and I really debated it. It's, you know, there's a hundred of them, but this one actually is topical.

[00:28:58] Um, I was capturing beast buster second nightmare yesterday or the day before when I was doing my, um, closet reorganization, because I, I'm kind of trying to go through and take some of the rarest games that don't have great captures and do them all now again at 4k. And that's like a perfect Halloween game. But I was out at the X games in Aspen, Colorado, because I worked in skiing for a long time. And I was a coach at the X games and the hotel. Yeah. I was a coach at the X games. You have free skiing open.

[00:29:27] I did like skis films. Like if you, if you ever seen a snowboard film, skateboard film, I did that for skiing and I was a coach for a long time. Shit. Yeah. Every time I talk about my normal life, people are highly entertained because probably I'm way more interesting, probably not doing video games, but the hotel we were staying at had a game room and I still love video games. You know, Carrie, I think, Oh God, what year was that? Was probably like still like Game Boy Advance era. It was like 2006. I can't remember.

[00:29:54] Maybe PlayStation Portable was out by then, but there was this cabinet in the game room beast buster second nightmare. And I'd heard of the hyper Neo geo, but never played it. And I just probably like pumped a hundred dollars worth of snowboards money into the machine. I think I per DM those quarters and I beat it and I beat it and I played it. And that game room was next to a pool. And to this day, when I smoke chlorine, I see beast buster second nightmare in my head,

[00:30:22] the smell of chlorine and a pool and that video game are intrinsically tied together. And it was like a complete mistake. So that's probably like my favorite memory because it's just a really good story. And now every time I walk by a pool, I just want to shoot some zombies. That's so fucking cool. Awesome. It's kind of like with me with like the smell of cigarettes and Super Mario Brothers and Zelda. Every time, every time I see one of those like fast and furious arcade cabinets that we

[00:30:49] only ever have here in Iowa at like Walmart and like pizza ranches, which is like a chain of like buffet pizza places in Iowa. And I think other states, whenever I see that fast and furious arcade cabinet, I always I always think of pizza and I get hungry immediately. It's it's funny how that works. But I've got so many good, you know, favorite gaming memories. Like I walked into a Salvation Army in Chicago like 12 years ago and bought like 40 like mint

[00:31:19] condition PC engine shmups and platformers for like 50 bucks, like $50, like like a dollar 25 a game. And I still have all of them. Like we're talking Parasol stars, a bunch like really good stuff. And it was like a dollar 50. And I was just thinking like, how did these end up here? Who gave them up? Did someone's like angry girlfriend bring them by because he, you know, some dude just played for 20 hours, but like stuff like that. There's so many good memories.

[00:31:46] I like I play a lot of normal games too. Like my wife and I played all the way through the witness from start to finish. You guys ever play that game? Yeah, that's an interesting one. Let's talk about it and not to spoil like the like big reveal midway through the game, but neither one of us saw it coming. We were totally both blown away and we found out that there was like a completely like it was like the inverted castle in Symphony of the Night. You find out that there's like this whole other game that you haven't even known about.

[00:32:14] And that was just like also like who the fuck thought about this? Like brain working at a level that I could never even think of. I'm like, oh, connect the dots. Fun puzzle. And then you find out there's this whole metagame going. So that's another favorite of mine. That's awesome. I try to talk about those games sometimes on the channel, but it's just not what my audience wants. So like I did a series called Philosophical Ponderings where I did like different like high level philosophical concepts and games. And I did the witness. I don't remember what the concept of that was.

[00:32:42] Like Stanley Parable was like free will versus determinism. Like I've done so many different weird things and the witness still playing that game is one of my favorite gaming memories. That's awesome. Yeah, that is awesome. Well, what do you say, fellas? Shall we talk about some rare and obscure arcade games?

[00:33:05] So Anthony, of course, on your channel, even just recently, I've seen some stuff that I was like, I forgot about that. So you're absolutely right. Like your channel is that channel of like, hey, that thing that I forgot about that I put in that one little fold of my brain. You're like unlocking these memories, which is such a cool thing. And one of the things that I've noticed on your channel is like half the time I'm like, oh, that cool arcade game. I forgot about even knowing about that.

[00:33:34] But then sometimes I'm like, I don't know what the hell that is like at all. So the first one I want to talk about, because I found out about this like, I want to say like two or three years ago, my co-host on Super Ghost, Greg brought it up to me. He was like, you ever heard of this Castlevania arcade game? And I was like, no. What? Like, is it? What is it? Like a side scroller? He was like, no, dude, it's a goddamn first person game.

[00:34:03] And you have like a Wiimote whip thing. What the fuck? Yes. So Anthony, you, you did a video on this and do you have that board? Is that, did I understand that right? So it's an, it basically is a computer in a box. So to call it an arcade board is like trying to say that the computer I'm talking on right now is an arcade, you know, box. Once you, once you get to like 2004, 2005, they all become like budget level PCs, which

[00:34:30] are, you know, fun games, but I don't really get to the hardware that much. So all you really need is a dump of the hard drive. But for some games, those become insanely difficult to get, especially if you're trying to source them out of Japan, because there's like this whole cultural IP law thing over there where even sharing something amongst friends that no one cares about, it gets a little like you need to make relationships, you know, get really friendly with people. But it took me a long time to find it. But I was able to find a copy of the hard drive.

[00:34:59] And because, you know, having done some of the Konami reverse engineering, I'm like, okay, we can probably figure out how to make this not look for the security dongle, this USB key that goes into the side of the machine that unlocks it. Or the engineers at Konami left it in the INI file. And all you do is go in with notepad and just change security from one to zero. And it fucking bypasses it. Literally. No way! Yeah, I didn't. There was no reverse engineering of anything. They just left the option in the INI file.

[00:35:26] You go in and you say like, don't check for the security. And the game's like, all right, I'll just boot that. Oh my God. I thought it was going to take months and it took like two minutes. So somebody on my Discord was helping. We got the controls like modified so that it'll like real time read your mouse and keyboard inputs and then inject those into RAM at certain addresses so the game can control it. So now you're like, you can use a Wiimote with a motion sensor bar on your PC and whip just like you normally would.

[00:35:55] You can use a gun for IR. Anything that's a mouse can now be the whip in Castlevania. So I uploaded it. Well, Lance Charlson uploaded it. I got a friend. His name's Blake. And he always makes up different email addresses. And one of them is Lance Charlson, which sounds like Dirk. Lance Charlson! It sounds like Dirk Diggler's like roommate that just got cut out of Boogie Nights. Dirk Diggler. And he loves Castlevania more than any series.

[00:36:24] So when I had to come up with a pseudonym online to release the game, it was Lance Charlson. So now Lance Charlson releases all the rare lost arcade games on archive. So it's not me. I've never heard of it. It's this guy called Lance. He's big into Castlevania. I'll give you a shout out to Lance. Love Stromboli. Great guy. Oh, man. So with that, how is that game?

[00:36:54] How's that play? Is that good? It's actually good. And I was always surprised because there's one, there's an arcade galloping ghost, like maybe 30 minutes away before I am. And they have a cabinet there, but it is always down because, you know, these machines get beat on. No one treats them nicely. But the game actually doesn't suck. It's really good. And, you know, it's not a pachinko machine, which is what Konami just does now. All the slot machines. Like it is shockingly actually a really good game that that I found that other light gun

[00:37:22] game, Akuma Mortis Immortal, which never actually released. Like I thought that was going to suck, too. That's the hard part. Like sometimes you spend a lot of time hunting for something that you think you're going to love and you get it in. And it absolutely is a garbage game. And you're like, why did I think this was good? But luckily, the last couple of releases we've been able to do have been really good. And I mean, I'm the one that releases it. I find these things, but I've got so many people on my discord that help with the coding. Like this is like a band. Like I'm the conductor.

[00:37:50] I know all the people, but there's so many people that know more than me that help me get these things running. So I can't pretend it's just me. I'm just the person who's really good. You just show up. I just make the personal relationships. I find the stuff and then I take it. To a group of people. And I'm like, well, between the six of us, there's one functioning brain. So let's put that train together and figure out how to make this work. That's so cool, man. That's really cool. Another one. What were you going to say, Aaron? I was just saying that's really cool.

[00:38:20] That was the statement? That's it. That was just really awesome, man. Like it's wild that people are taking these like obscure hidden and like just taking all of this cool shit from like video games of yesteryears past and just preserve like cracking into it like a like a safe in like Ocean's Eleven and then preserving it. Like I, I would have zero clue how to do any of this, but I'm so glad that other people are not stupid like me.

[00:38:49] It's so cool. It's super cool. I mostly just get lucky with it. It's just one of those things like it's not even so much like the game. It's just, I don't like being told no. It's like a personality trait in life. Like someone's like, oh, you, that game doesn't exist. It's too hard to find. I'm like, well, now you made me want to find it. Now you made me want to prove that like it's, it can be found. So like, I just love doing that. People being like, that's, it's too hard to find. You're never going to find that. I'm like, oh, well, let me see if I can do it. And been lucky so far, but there's still some games out there that stumped me to this day.

[00:39:19] Like the 3DO M2 version of D2, I think it might be out there. I found a few little files for it, but I chased down like six leads a year. They all go nowhere, but it could be tomorrow that it shows up. It could be 10 years from now. It could have been deleted 25 years ago. But the idea that I can't definitively like say yes or no to something's existence means that I want to like, like Indiana Jones style, you know, the idols out there somewhere. You just got to find the sand, switch it out for the idol and not get hit by the boulder on the way back.

[00:39:49] So maybe next week. The boulder being, uh, being Nintendo's lawyer, the DMC, uh, what are the dudes that like that serve you papers? What are they, what are they called? The dudes that are like, you've been served. Yeah. The process server. Yeah. They've been doing all the DMCA takedowns with AI now. I mean, I mean, yeah, a lot of this last round has been all automated. That's why it's so across the board and sporadic where, you know, Nintendo, like we'll

[00:40:18] take down super Mario brothers or super Mario world, but they won't take down another version of super Mario world. That's up because it's all AI. And I don't really, that's a fun puzzle right now. It's not fun because it sucks for everybody. But for me trying to figure out exactly what's going to happen. I like those sort of like trying to presume and guess at things, but I don't think it's going to get any better before it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. And I think we're going to keep having to go through this. Yeah, I think so too.

[00:40:47] Um, but on a, on a lighter note, have you seen anything on this Sonic, the Sega Sonic, the hedgehog, the arcade thing with the track ball? Oh yeah. People send me auctions all the time for this stuff. Is that thing expensive? I think they're asking like three or four grand for it right now is where it's going at, which I guess for how rare it is, isn't expensive, but it's just not, it's not in my realm of interest and it's just a different version of the game. Like you can go download that game, play it on MAME.

[00:41:16] Like you can play that, you know, title. It's just a different revision that happens to be exceedingly rare, but I mean, three, $4,000 for a different variant ROM for me is just not where I put them. If I'm going to spend $4,000, it's got to have a motor in it or I have to be able to live in it. Or you get the best of both worlds and you get a fucking motor home. I have to be able to eat it and I have to be able to fuck it.

[00:41:44] I, uh, we, uh, so I do, uh, another show kind of solo super pond saga and we did an episode on 2d Sonic games. We actually talked about this one a little bit and it looks really, really interesting. It's got, it's the, the first, um, the first appearance of a fuck. What is his name? The flying squirrel guy. I can't think of his name anymore. Um, yeah. Uh, Ray and they brought them. Yeah.

[00:42:12] They brought them back for a Sonic mania as like an unlockable character. Yeah. So that's cool. Yeah. I don't remember what his name is though. That looks awesome. I'd love to give that a shot sometime. And the art style looks really fucking cool. Is the only difference in the variation for that really expensive one. The fact that it's the track ball version. I can't exactly off the top of my head. I can't remember why that one is rarer than most. It's, I don't, maybe Sonic swore in it. I don't know.

[00:42:42] There could be any number of reasons. Like maybe Sonic muttered something he shouldn't have. I, I'd have to look it up. It's one of those things. Like I played the game. Like I do collect Sega stuff, but it's just like outside of that realm of like remembering exactly what the difference is. It maybe, uh, Michael Jackson touched it. Who knows? Among a lot of other things. Uh, so Hank pilot.

[00:43:07] Um, I just seen this on your channel, uh, maybe today or maybe yesterday. I think this is like a new video for you, but I, as I was, you know, watching your channel, like I do all my lunch breaks, I was like, Hey, wow, this game looks interesting, but it looked kind of clunky too. I don't know if it's like, how playable is it without? Cause it doesn't this one have like the actual hang glider that you're supposed to use. Yeah.

[00:43:35] The cabinet, the cabinet basically has like a triangle that you can like hold on to and shift around. But what it really comes down to is all of those games, whether you're holding onto like a hang glider, whether you're standing on skis and like Sega super G, it is all just analog controls, an X coordinate, a Y coordinate. So it really does actually pivot over relatively well to either an analog, like an Xbox series X controller on your PC or for like most of my arcade racing games, I've just done custom

[00:44:03] modifications to use like a PlayStation three controller. So they're actually very playable. You just, you know, the big appeal to that is standing in front of the giant cabinet and pretending you're hang gliding, but it's just one of those games, you know, Konami made really weird stuff. They continue to make some really weird stuff. And it's one of those, I knew 99 out of a hundred people would not know what it was. And the views 100% reflected the fact that nobody knew what it was. And most people did not care.

[00:44:28] That was a, that was just a dud from, I can tell in the first 10 minutes if it's going to go well or not. And 10 minutes into that video's release, I'm like, there's just some games I should not make videos on, but I can't help myself. The selling point. Do you like hang gliding? And then you just lose half of your audience. Well, I don't know. Cause I mean, there's the, the fuck pilot wings. There's pilot wings. Pilot wings, the, the cult classic that everybody knows and loves.

[00:44:58] Hang gliding that. That's pretty cool. I mean, I love pilot wings. That's like four people. I love pilot wings. That's that. That was the joke I was trying to make, but I failed. What? There's a title makes a series of games in Japan. I don't think they ever come over to the U S. The first one is called landing high. And it is a commercial airline simulator. All you do is land and take off in jumbo jets. And I've always wanted to make a video on that, but I, I just know I'm like, no one cares like then should it go?

[00:45:28] Like the train simulator. I know people get really into that. It's not my thing, but you know, simulated dreamcast. That's been on pretty much everything like then should it go? Like it's been on PlayStation one, the Saturn. It's just like, you're a Japanese train conductor and you have like a train controller and you open the doors and push the button to tell people to be safe. Awesome. It's really simming. You know, there's, there's some fucking people out there that like, we'll put the full conductor

[00:45:54] hat on, get the suit on and sit down with that game and just be like, I am good to go watch the video. Do do. We're going to see what this starts. Dude, they got their little train whistle from the, uh, from the train land down the stream. Oh, that's right. That's Robbie from discord. He loves that. And. He's just always got the train conductor. It's got him conductor outfit on. He just walks around in Texas with a full conductor's outfit on.

[00:46:22] Just ready to talk about then should it go anytime anyone asks people don't ask and he says it. Oh man, dude. Side note though. The, um, all the shit that's on the screen at one time on a landing high. That looks really confusing and like kind of overwhelming, but I'd still, I'd still watch that. That looks, it looks cool. Yeah. There's like, uh, the time there's so much shit on the screen. Holy cow. It's, it's a weird game.

[00:46:51] Like I've played it before just to check it out. It's not my cup of tea, but it would make a fun video. Maybe one day I'll actually like, I don't know, go on eBay and buy a real, I've had this idea to buy a like classic actual fighter jet flight stick to mod that into an arcade setup. But every time I look at the prices, I realized that people collect that stuff and I just not just a $10 item. And I realized I don't want to spend $800 and like an F 16 flight stick. Yeah. One day. Yeah.

[00:47:18] Um, another one too, that I seen recently was jet wave on your, uh, on your channel and that, you know, I, I love wave race. I'm a sucker for wave race. I have not played jet wave. So how, how does it compare to like, you know, the, the better, uh, C do jet wave is like, it's basically Kirkland brand wave race. It's just not, it's not good.

[00:47:46] Like there's fun to be had in everything. Like it, it is competent. You can, it controls, you can get around the course, but like, it's like Konami made a bad photocopy of a good Sega game. And they'd love to do that. Like Konami could make really awesome titles. Like some of their stuff, like solar assault, GTI club code one dispatch, absolutely awesome. Like 10 out of 10 charming, good arcade games. But then there was like a whole other division of Konami, which basically was like trying

[00:48:14] to copy someone else's homework and they just were not good. That is what Kirkland brand is. Yeah. The Kirkland brand game. It's just like, there's, you know, there's no real bad games out there. There's fun to be had and everything, but I've got a soft spot for Konami 3d arcade hardware. It's just like one of my biggest collection points. And I've got some boards in the closet that are objectively not good games, but I love them because they're weird and they're different. And I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't spend a lot of money on jet wave.

[00:48:43] If you want a board, just if you see one in the wild for a 50 cents and say you played it and move on. So I have a question. What would you say is the most rare thing that you have in terms of arcade? Ooh, rarest thing I have is I've got a prototype samurai showdown 64. For a beta cartridge, what they would basically use for location testing.

[00:49:08] Um, and actually Eurogamer did an article on that because it was found in a field in California under a tarp, under a tree. The story is this old arcade operator bought out SNK's inventory when SNK went bankrupt and became SNK play more in like the like early two thousands. And there was like, you know, they produce these test cartridges to like basically beta tests in arcades. It's the only prototype ever to be found.

[00:49:38] I captured it. I shared it on YouTube, but I am going to dump it. It is just 96 ROM chips all on a custom riser board with a custom female mating connector. So I've got to figure out how to get 96 chips red and, you know, preserved without fucking up and accidentally erasing one. So it's been a long process, but that is the probably the rarest item I own because

[00:50:03] it is the only one that has ever been seen, you know, to this day. Like, like the one you have, the one I have is the only one that's ever been known to exist and no one else has ever been able to show a photograph of another one. Yeah. I think that is considered fucking rare. Yeah. And I, the guy got it from, I made a deal with them. It was basically, I paid them basically, I don't know, the cost of like five large pizzas for this thing. Cause I just wanted somebody to have it.

[00:50:33] And the deal was, I will never sell it. And if I do, I have to sell it for the price I paid for him. And I have gotten offers from collectors that are just absurd. Like, like Dubai, like dudes in Dubai who have the same last name as the Royal family. Like they might be like 47th in line of the throne. And I've gotten like offers in the like nice certified pre-owned BMW five series price point. I'm just like, I can't sell the thing.

[00:51:02] I don't want to either, but it's, it gets up there into the sealed graded game price territory for people. But it just, just chilling out next to me in my closet and it'll be there. Until I die or until I finally smarten up and decide to collect things that are smaller and less cumbersome. That's so cool. You know what? That's really fucking cool. That's the whole point though, right? Like you're not in this to just take something and go, oh, this is, this is more money to me.

[00:51:30] It's, it's, you have this piece of video game history that, that was found under a goddamn tarp. It's got a cool shit story. You have the only one that is known to exist. Like the, all that, like, sure. Yeah. Money's pretty fucking cool. But like, I don't know, having something like that is, I don't know. It just, it's way cooler to me that you, you are the sole owner of that one thing.

[00:51:59] I mean, it's a fun thing to have and it's, it's a good game, which is the other nice part is at least the rarest thing I own doesn't suck as far as playing it's concerned, but I just gotta, I think I'm going to run the video either this Friday or next Friday. He's got a psychic force 2012 board in Taito Wolf. It's basically a computer motherboard with a 3d effects card jammed in on a custom riser with a gem edge out. And that was, that's not an easy one to find, but I just got that one in a couple of weeks ago, but there's so much random rare stuff.

[00:52:29] It's like a fucking storage facility. Like what do you, how do you have all this? You keep saying that closet. The closet goes to Narnia and it's like Tetris. It's all stacked up in there. And I had to reorganize it because my office was starting to look a little bit fucked, like an avalanche territory. So I had to go through it. And it's not that it's not that I even own an obscene number of things. It's that some of these arcade boards are the size of a coffee table. They come in a big metal box.

[00:52:59] They weigh like 15 pounds. So it's sort of like one board, like some of them are small and they're jammed, but like right next to me is Operation Tiger. It's on the floor because I need to capture it again. That was another one that took me forever to find, but it's probably the size of like, I don't know, a Mac Pro. Like just think of like a big computer case. It's that size. And then you have like 20 or 30 of those things. All of a sudden it's, it's real creative with the space. Wow. I don't collect anything small. Apparently everything's huge. That's all right.

[00:53:28] That's why I collected for the 3ds and the DS for so long. Cause I just don't have the motherfucking space. I don't either. I, I kind of maybe not officially bought an arcade cabinet at a Godzilla movie marathon over the weekend. So I got to find a place to put that. I should you not. So I just played Beast Busters second nightmare on Friday. The game that I was talking about, the chlorine story. They're not easy to find. They're extremely rare.

[00:53:56] And a friend of mine, his other friend comes to this Godzilla movie marathon and my friend Austin introduces me and he's like, you know, this guy really likes arcade games too. I'm like, Oh, what do you got? He's like, have you heard of this game? Beast Busters second nightmare. I'm like, are you fucking kidding me? I'm like, there's like 12 of these things left in the world. Maybe he's like, yeah, I got one like four or five years ago for like 400 bucks off like an old like bar rec room. Holy shit. So I'm like, like, it's nice to meet you. I want to buy this.

[00:54:24] I'm like instantaneously being like, I know we're here for Godzilla and don't get me wrong. I like Kaiju, but now I want to make a deal on Beast Busters. So I'm trying to, I'm going to need a storage unit. I do not have the space for that cabinet in the house. I'd have to basically sleep standing up like cone heads, but maybe we'll see. Hi, I'm Anthony. Here's my credit card. I just picture like somebody being like really into like Godzilla and like, Oh, this is a really good part. This is the part where Godzilla opens his mat and you're like, yeah, that's cool.

[00:54:54] So how are we doing this transaction? Yeah. So you got Venmo. Yeah. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll talk about that in a minute. But this part in Godzilla, the part when he lights up and then he screams and you're like, that's cool. Fucking Beast Busters though. Like when can I buy it? When can I pick it up? Eventually you just hit pause on the movie. You're like, when the fuck are we doing this deal? When's this happening? When is this happening?

[00:55:22] You're standing in front of the TV with your arms out wanting to fight the guy now. And what he really wants is like, he's been really, he's like, and he had seen the channel that realized he had seen the channel before. I told him the channel name. He's like, oh, that's where I heard of this. He wants a full mister set up. And I'm just, I'm drowning in misters right now between review stuff. I just got a new IO board in for review for like 24 bit color for Mr. Add-ons. Like, I'm just like, oh, you want a mister? Well then basically like open up my trench coat being like, which one do you want? I got this one. I got that one. I got the other one.

[00:55:51] Like there's misters littered throughout this house. I could put a mister in the bathroom at this point in time. Ooh, okay. Play some Secret of Mana while you're taking a duke. That'd be cool. I mean, you can just play it on fucking anything. Your phone, I guess. But that was a bad example. Please continue. I mean, you could play it in your living room and still take a shit. It's just a little less conventional. A lot more clean up. We just bought a brand new couch and it's very, very white. So I think I better be careful on that one.

[00:56:20] No Secret of Mana on that couch. Yeah. I just don't want to be the one that stains the couch first. I'll totally stain that couch. But as long as it's not me who does it first, then I've got immunity. And now I've just basically been like treating this couch like it's a hospital bed being like, I don't want to infect this thing. I'm just going to stand over in the corner. You guys just go in and like grade it every day. You're like, it appears to be a speck of dust today. It'll be destroyed. We've got a dog and a cat. It's one of those things. Like the old couch is like super comfortable.

[00:56:50] But one day we sat down on it and the leg basically just like fell off. Oh my God. It was time. Time. Yep. It's time to spin the wheel of which bodily fluid will make it onto the couch today. And spin it. It's like all. All of the above. Man, I wish I had to do what. Cool. Yeah. Go. Go. You go. You go. I was just, I was going to say, I wish I didn't live in Iowa.

[00:57:19] So I had some like really cool collecting stories. Cause you don't ever find anything other than like what's really popular in Iowa. God damn it. Get me out of this state. Get me out of here. You know, I haven't really like. Get his hand on a mister. I haven't even really like found anything rare in Chicago. It's been years. It's like now, like everyone knows it's worth money. Like, and I'm rare things find me now. Someone will be like, Hey, I got this thing. Do you want it?

[00:57:45] Like now I've become known as the personal, like the home for wayward and abandoned hardware. So someone will contact me being like, I got this thing. Do you want it? And I'm just like, I'm not going to say no, but that's like, once you get to a certain point of being known for taking in ridiculous hardware, then people just like start showing up at your door. Like, you know, the baby slot at the fire department, people are just throwing babies in the slot every month now. Do you guys not have the baby slot at your fire department? Is that a Chicago thing?

[00:58:14] Just throwing babies away? I mean, I've heard of like babies just showing up on the doorstep of a fire department, but not like through a slot. Like there's cram the whole baby through a slot. It's like a blockbuster video rental return. Yeah. Except for babies. This is just a pace as it comes through. You get a fat baby. You're like, God damn it. It won't go in. You're using your feet and shit to squash it in there. Oh, man.

[00:58:42] I don't know what the fuck I was going to say before that, but that was good. Well, it's fine. It's fine. So that, yeah, that is definitely for sure one of the most rare things I've ever heard of anybody owning before. What would you say is an arcade game? Let's see if you can throw an arcade game on us right now that neither of us would ever

[00:59:10] know about potentially that is actually good. Actually good. That's the hard part because I deal in a lot of jank. I feel like at least one of you will have known about this or played it. But one game that I am always telling people they need to play and so many people don't know is Night Slashers by Data East. Oh, that's with ninjas, right? I've only heard. No, it's a horror game, right? It's a horror beat them up. Yeah.

[00:59:39] Vampires, zombies. One of the sprites is definitely Michael J. Fox from Teen Wolf. It is just an awesome game. Or maybe the cliffhanger Edward Randy, also by Data East, also an awesome game. Just one that like people for some reason, Data East made some like as good as Sega, Capcom, Konami, Namco games ever. But they just kind of like always get relegated down a level. But like Night Slashers is just a straight up 10 out of 10 game. It's not cheap, but you can emulate it on MAME.

[01:00:08] And it's just 30 minutes of straight up good arcade beat them up action. Great soundtrack. Great goer. Like just plays the horror angle and the comedy up hard. Like one that I recommend to anybody. These sprites look, that's a, that's a good one. Oh, holy shit. These sprites look awesome. Especially the zombies. Like they're incredibly, like I'm looking at a review of the game on Nintendo life and they have some really, uh, really high res images of them. And yeah, these zombies are really detailed.

[01:00:37] Like you can see their, their ribs and like their intestines kind of falling out. They have like, you can see like their blood vessels and shit kind of hanging out of their arms. That's, you know, if this is on the Mr. It's not on the Mr. No, that's a lot of the data E stuff hasn't come over yet. I've been hoping, but I mean with all these new like clone devices, like Taki Udon's making the clone Mr. boards and stuff. And it Mr.

[01:01:01] Feels big, like as far as a group is concerned, but like it's a drop in the bucket compared to any other platform. Like the play date probably outsold Mr. 10 to one by now. And that's a black and white handheld. Great. I love it. But it's just like one of those things. Like we think we're a huge like group within gaming and we're just basically like minuscule, I'm sure. But the more people that get misters, the more people that start playing them and like helping devs financially on Patreon, like the more cores we're going to get.

[01:01:28] So we're kind of like, I feel like at a tipping point where like people's names that you've never heard of in the FPGA scene before, like developers are going to start probably coming over and making more cores because it's one of those things. Like first you got to like, and all my hardware, I've told anyone that I, you know, real developers that I trust, like if you want something out of my closet to develop a core on, just try not to break it before you get it back to me. And if you break it, just let me know how you broke it so I can fix it. But all my stuff in the closet is 100% available for research. If I know the person, they can have it and play with it.

[01:01:58] But that is not one that's on the... I don't. It's expensive as shit. And I'm going to spend... Yeah, I think it's like $1,500, $2,000 now. And if I was going to drop that kind of cash, it would totally be for a Raston Saga 3 board because that is just my all-time favorite beat-em-up. Dual screen, ultra wide screen, like style, like two 4x3 monitors side by side. And it's just a great game. What is it called? Warrior Blade, Raston Saga 3.

[01:02:28] Oh, I've heard that from Genesis. I have never heard of this. Not like Raston Saga. Yeah. Yeah, there's Raston, which is amazing. Raston Saga 2, which is a flaming pile of shit game. It is terrible. And then Raston Saga 3 is basically righted all the wrongs and is just straight up gold. But it is, again, like $2,000 all day for board. Sweet Jesus. Goddamn. Yeah.

[01:02:55] One of the things that I stumbled upon when I was doing some MAME setups when I had my Steam Deck was this, I think it was like Arabian Nights or something. And it had this like really crazy, it was a beat-em-up, but like it was very much like multi-layered in a weird way. Like, and the graphics were crazy too. I think, I'm pretty sure it was called Arabian Nights. Yeah, that's Sega.

[01:03:26] And the multi-system 32? Right? That's a, the sprites like get like really close to the screen. Yeah. Almost like it was like anime and that, yeah, that, it's not a very good game. It's like the gameplay I remember not being great, but like it was like when Sega was like really big into their scaling stuff. Oh, Arabian Fight. Arabian Fight. It's called Arabian Fight. That's why I was tricked up. I'm like, I'm pretty sure it was Sega. Like I, not to spoil all the channels, but again, I worked really far ahead.

[01:03:54] Like a series that's going to start March of next year. I did a beat-em-up series on like rare and obscure beat-em-ups and both Raston Saga 3 and Arabian Fight are going to be on there. So they're uploaded. I'm just going to have to wait till like March and then forget what I said. That's always happens on the videos. Like people will ask me a question about something. I'll be like, I don't know, man. I got to go whack it and watch it. Six months ago, I made this thing and I don't remember what I said.

[01:04:23] Like very, very far ahead on schedule wise. That's how I am with podcasting. Like that's, I was going to say this episode that we just recorded like four days ago is so good. And I'm like, dude, I don't remember recording that episode. That Arabian Fight game looks super rad. I had a guest on the other podcast like I think two years ago who talked about that game and how fucking weird and janky it was.

[01:04:52] And I'm looking at some really wild screenshots. First off, there's a bunch of like really anime looking screenshots or yeah, really anime looking screenshots of like a girl right up in the fucking screen. And then there's a dude with really long arms. He's really cool. It looks kind of cool. It's a strange one. It's like it's fun to look at. But I would say like the gameplay, like definitely style over substance on that one. But it is like graphically fun and impressive.

[01:05:23] Hell yeah. That's awesome. So I guess maybe we can we can talk about some of our favorite must play arcade games. Anthony, you kind of just mentioned this Rosten game. Yeah, Rosten Saga 3. Rosten Saga 3. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody go check that out because it does look really cool. I would imagine that's available on MAME. Yeah. Works super easy. Just throw the ramen there. Load it up. You're playing.

[01:05:53] Sweet. What would you say are some of your your other favorites? I know that we've heard of, you know, Night Slashers and Rosten Saga 3. And then the was the beast one. Beast Buster second nightmare. I mean, you know, super common. But I can sit down and play a scud race any day of the week for like, you know, I think you're going in for 10 to 15 minutes and then you just sit there for like two, three hours. Like any like any 3D Sega arcade racing game. I can lose half a day to like Out Run 2.

[01:06:24] All of those. Like just some of my favorites. For sure. House of the Dead. Always a classic. Stuff like that. Like a lot of the things I own are probably not my favorite games. I love them because the hardware is weird and they're not stuff that you've heard of. Like if I'm going to sit down for an hour and play a game, which now with the channel and the rest of my life shit, like I don't think I actually play games for fun anymore. I think it's always for content. But if I'm going to sit down and play like an arcade game to have some fun, it's totally

[01:06:51] going to be something you've heard of like a scud race or Daytona 2 or House of the Dead because those are the games I really like genuinely love. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to mention Ninja Baseball Batman. Well, I discovered this like last year and I'm a sucker for beat em ups. So that's why I'm really excited to check out this nice lashes game. But yeah, Ninja Baseball Batman was a pleasant surprise when I threw this on for the first time.

[01:07:19] It just it's so fucking good. And like the art style and stuff. I'm just like the enemy design, the character design. It's not normally a hard game, but like. I don't know. It just felt really, really good to play that game. Which is like totally different than anything else. Like it's I get what you mean. Like the baseball enemies, like the umpire that's like a baseball side. I was like, you wonder like what somebody was on when they came up with this idea.

[01:07:47] Like people sitting around the room, like, you know, eight drinks deep being like, how about we make the game about Batman? No, we don't have the license to Batman. We can't do that. No, we just call it that. But we actually make it about baseballs. And then somebody some other guy just like tape railing a lot of cocaine. He's like, and ninjas. It's a classic. It's absolutely an amazing game. I remember looking into that for a for a Patreon series.

[01:08:15] And they actually have like the dude who currently still owns the license for Ninja Baseball Batman. He has like a comic series going and it looks really fucking cool. Yeah. I forget what the fuck it's called, though. You could probably just Google like Ninja Baseball Batman comic. And it's like current, like it's still going. I'm pretty sure. It's also like a reserve, which Ninja Baseball Spirits is what it's called, but it's based off of like Ninja Baseball Batman.

[01:08:45] That's wild. Which which character is your favorite in Ninja Baseball Batman? Because I always went with the guy with a really long, skinny bat. The big dude, whoever the whoever the big guy is. Like I always go for like it's basically like the Mike Hagar of baseballs. Whoever that guy is in Ninja Baseball Batman is always my pick. I like the green guy. We like the double double bats. That's hell. Yeah. Yeah. He was cool. Shooks.

[01:09:15] Yep. Yeah, man, I'm just I'm such a sucker for a beat him up. Like there's something about them. And like this weekend I was at my buddy's place and he was like, dude, I think we're really stupid. This whole time we've played in these arcade games on Mr. And having to like, you know, put quarters in like assign like a quarter button or whatever. And he was like, you just go to the fucking dip switches and turn on free play. Done.

[01:09:44] Like, I don't know why we haven't been doing this. I'd like the dip switches. We are apparently we are the fucking dip switches. We couldn't figure that shit out. Yeah. But if you turn the free play on, then you don't get the attract mode. Like all that, like preview to try to get you to drop a quarter in a lot of arcade games. When you go to free play, won't play the attract mode or they won't give you sound to that. So you actually lose a part of the game by doing free play. Oh, you actually aren't that you aren't the dips.

[01:10:11] Like leaving it on cleanup is the way to see the most of what the game offers. I mean, it's like 30 seconds, but people are always like, why don't I get the attract mode on there? I'm like, oh, do you have free play on? They're like, yep. I'm like, let's turn it off. So here's a question. When you like, say if you want to sit down with a friend and be like, hey, let's play through some night slashers. Are you just like, you just want to like kind of turn your brain off a bit and just kind of play the game. And you're like, whenever you die, you just hit continue.

[01:10:38] Or do you like set like a challenge at all? Like, I've always wondered how people play these arcade games. Because like a lot of times me and my buddy will just literally turn our brains off and be like, yeah, fuck yeah. Let's just throw a beat them up on. But like, there's not really any challenge, but it's just very enjoyable. If we can beat them up, I'll just play it start to finish. I'll like, you know, coin to feed the thing virtual coins all day long. But like bullet hell shmups are the one genre. Like I will give myself four continues when I'm playing. When I'm out of those four continues, I turn it off.

[01:11:07] You know, I start the game over again. I give myself four to try to get to the end. Because those like require a set of like skills and, you know, reading the screen and fast movements where you actually want to like learn and get better at it. But no, if I'm going to put on a beat them up, I'm just going to minus these zone out. Like every once in a while in a video, if you watch it, you might see that like I stopped moving for like a second in the game. Like if I'm playing a beat them up, my character just freezes for a second. I just like looked at my phone because my wife texted me. So like when I'm just playing a beat them up, sometimes my brain just is completely glossed over.

[01:11:36] And I've noticed that a few times in captures being like, why did I move for four seconds? I'm like, oh, I think I looked at my phone or Twitter for a second there. So I do require those games where I can just like totally mindlessly just like play and not care about it. Beat them up through that genre. Like they always, pun intended, hit. They're always fun. Even bad ones are good. And you can just kind of sit there. That's why I love arcade games. You can sit down for half an hour and get a full game in and feel like you accomplished something. And then get up and do all the other things you need to do.

[01:12:04] Because I am too much of an adult, unfortunately, to be able to sink 12 hours a day into games anymore. Like I just don't have that time. I know. I'm struggling to get through Stellar Blade. Like I managed to get to basically like a little further than the halfway point to talk about. We did a review of it on Super Ghost. And like I haven't touched it since. I want to. I love that game. But like I just I'm like, but retro. Retro is always there for me.

[01:12:33] I could just throw something retro on so quickly and just get so much out of it. So in such a short amount of time. That's true. I don't know. Something about it. Aaron, what do you what do you got for a recommended? Well, a favorite arcade game of yours. I've changed mine quite a bit. But for sure Metal Slug. I'm such a fucking sucker for for running gun shooters. All good. Yeah. Metal Slug. Shock Troopers.

[01:13:02] These are my like kind of turn your brain off and go. Like I guess like Metal Slug kind of requires a little bit of like I guess tactical thinking because you got to dodge bullets and shit. But yeah. Metal Slug. Shock Troopers. I had another one in my brain. Another Neo Geo one. I already forgot it. But um. What the heck else did I have? John. Oh. I'm going to butcher the name. Gun. Gun Burish. Gun Burish. It's like um.

[01:13:32] Like a Gun Bird reskin of like Breakout or one of those games where again I forget the names but it's like uh you bounce a ball against blocks and every time the ball hits a block it breaks it and then you just have like your old paddle on the bottom and you got to keep uh getting to the ball and bounce it off and stuff like that. That's it's super fun. Um. I like that shit. And Red Earth. That's also a really really cool one.

[01:14:00] It's like a fighting game RPG kind of like you just you uh there's like what four or five characters you can choose from and it's basically like you fighting against these big bosses and as you go along you'll gain XP and you can level up and learn new moves. That sounds dope. I don't think I've heard of Red Earth. It's a fun one. The sprites in that game are cute because it's Capcom CPS 3 so like some of the best like

[01:14:30] Capcom animation they've ever done back in the 2D era. It's a fun one. Just like fighting giant monsters. And they've got some cool characters. Like you can be like a. Do you guys remember. What? Do you guys remember King of the Monsters? Oh yeah. I think so. It was King of the Monsters and King of the Monsters 2. I only ever. I would imagine they were probably arcade games as well but I only played the ones on Super Nintendo but that was good shit too. Yeah.

[01:14:59] They were Neo Geo games and this. I can't beat them. They're the AI in that game. They're so cheap on Neo Geo like King of Monsters 2. Like I don't think I've ever seen the credits on that game and that's something you can't credit feed. Like you just like get destroyed over and over again. Yeah. Yeah. I beat that game but with save states. That's the only way that I beat it. And even then it was like I just felt like I had to become the master of save states because then you would just get like completely fucked. But yeah.

[01:15:29] Good shit. My last two are R-Type Leo. I feel like this one is a little bit easier than other R-Type games because those R-Type usually is pretty fucking hard. But R-Type Leo it's short. Not too difficult. And it's actually surprisingly fun. Like the levels are really really really cool. The soundtrack is really great to it.

[01:15:56] And the last one is In the Hunt. Oh yeah. I love In the Hunt. In the Hunt. It's like Metal Slug but Submarines. And it's yeah just super super fun. Super quick. And it plays so so smoothly. Man. Like I don't think I ever occurred any slowdown or anything like that. It's it's so cool. It's a classic one for sure. Hard as hell though. Like that. That's the type of game that I'm never going to be able to beat on one credit.

[01:16:26] And I I try not to do that too much. Or like I don't have the time to try to learn a game to be able to beat it without continues. But that is one where if I was actually spending cores out of my pocket I'd probably spend the rent money on it. Yeah there's there's one level toward the end where you're you're going through this level where there's this constant like there's constantly torpedoes shooting up from the bottom of the screen.

[01:16:46] And there's like maybe like a teeny weeny bit of a gap in between each torpedo and you have to like kind of almost like like tap dodge your way through these like teeny tiny gaps in between each torpedo and make it through. Like there's it's impossible to do it without dying. It's it's impossible. Insane. Have you guys ever heard of I would imagine Anthony you've heard of Armored Warriors. Yeah. It's such a good game. Oh my God. The game is so good.

[01:17:16] Have you heard of that Aaron? I don't think so. I'm going to look it up. It's like a mech beat them up. This looks so good. Fucking sweet. And you can basically like pick up parts of like the mechs you destroy and add them to your mech. You can change out your arms and stuff. Capcom was on fire back in the day. Like they were always like nailing home runs. And it is a fun one for sure. That makes me think of Battle Circuit. Have you guys played that one? Capcom as well. I had that down on my list as well too. Yeah.

[01:17:46] That game is really really cool. I don't think I've played Battle Circuit. It's kind of. You probably remember because like the first boss is basically Elvis Presley. Like you go in and it's like a Japanese Elvis impersonator in like a ring. You would definitely remember if you played it. I don't think I did. And there's. I really don't think I have. There's some really like. There's a lot of cool characters you can choose from to play as too. Like I think the one I always go for is the. I forget what his name is. Like something green.

[01:18:14] And it's just like this Venus flytrap plant guy. It's. Each character has their own cool super moves and fighting styles. And like in between each. In between each level. You can spend your money or whatever to buy new moves. It's. It's rad dude. We got to play that together sometime. Yes we do. Yes we should. Yes we will. Anthony what's another one that you would say is a must play. For folks out there for arcade. Must play arcade. Ah.

[01:18:45] I just had something in my head and it just floated away. What the hell was I thinking? Invasion the abductors. It's. Midway. It was like 1998. It's not well known but it does emulate. It's just like classic sci-fi alien shootout. Like light gun game. But it's got like a great sense of humor. In one level you're going down the LA freeway. And you see OJ Simpson and Al Cowling's white bronco. Go down the highway with you. It's just filled with like pop culture references. This is from the 90s.

[01:19:14] Like Pamela Anderson from Baywatch. Like comes out at one point in time. Like you know not actually her but basically Baywatch. Like it's just straight B movie cheese. Like alien invasion horror like gun. And nobody knows about it. And if UPS gets off their ass and actually moves the package from Florida to Chicago. It should hopefully be here tomorrow or Wednesday. No way. Yeah. Somebody had. Somebody had one. It's. It's broken. So it's a freebie. But I'm hoping it's not too broken.

[01:19:43] Sometimes it takes me 30 minutes to fix something. Sometimes it takes me close to a year to fix it. Just depends on how bad it is when it comes in. But it's a fun like random obscure weird game. But it's just like classic 90s gaming sense of humor. So we'll. We'll. Lance Baggins or whatever his name is going to be uploading that on the archive. That one. That one's available. You can. Oh it's already out. Yeah it's there. You can load it up on MAME today. It's. You can emulate it.

[01:20:11] It's just one of those games that just didn't hit. So not many people know about it. But way more people should be playing it. I feel like light gun stuff. If you don't like light gun stuff. Then don't bother with it. Light gun games man. Like I don't know what it is about a light gun game. It's. It's kind of like. It's like a beat them up for me. But like a little bit more involved. Like you can turn your brain off for a little bit. But like eventually they get kind of intense. Some of them. Not all of them. But some of them do. Yeah it's one of those things like. Everyone knows how to play it.

[01:20:40] If somebody comes over and they've never played a light gun game before. You just hand them the gun. And you tell them point. And you know shoot. Everyone gets it. Like you do. There's no like teaching it. It's not like a fighting game. With a bunch of complex mechanics. And different frame inputs. It's like. Gun goes bang. Point gun at thing. Pull trigger. Bang bang. Like everyone gets that concept. Kids. Adults. I guess like why the Wii was so popular with everybody. Like you could give a Wiimote to like an 80 year old. And be like pretend to bowl. And everyone's like. I can figure that out.

[01:21:09] Like that's why light gun games are just incredible. Because they're like. Instantaneously accessible to anyone. They know how to play them. Hell yeah dude. Um. Well. I think that. That'll do it for the topic. So. Why don't we take a. Quick break. And hear from our sponsors today. And. We'll be back with. The. The closing. And our random recommended games. Alright.

[01:21:40] We all know and love gambling. Right? This whole. The whole United States. Was built upon gambling. Uh. But what if I were to tell you. I don't know. Your kids could gamble too. I guess. Gambling. But for the kids. Just like. For the kids.

[01:22:12] Just like Wu. Chucky. They don't. They don't give you like. Physical tokens and shit anymore. This is like the third Chuck E. Cheese reference for this fucking show. Um. The Chuck E. Cheese. They don't give you physical tokens anymore. You get a card. And you load it up. With virtual currency. Um. But it's for the kids. So. You give them. You slap 20 bucks onto that card. And you tell your kids. Go nuts. And then they can go gamble. Gambling is addictive. But uh. Gambling is addictive.

[01:22:42] But let me tell you. It puts people. In jobs. Okay. You know. And kids don't know what the word addictive means. So it's alright. Well now we have to introduce them. We have to get them addicted to something. Other than just video games. So why don't we marry up video games. And gambling. It's never been done before. Never in a million years. Would anybody have ever seen this. Luke Fox. And this. EA. And all those guys. Uh. Tsenko. Konami. Um. But. Let me tell you. It puts people in jobs. You know that one Squirtle.

[01:23:10] That was like really cool from the anime. That had the glasses. Squirtle squad. Fuck. Yeah. So he wears those because he is so addicted to cocaine. But. Now. He has a job. Working at the Pokemon. The guys are so sensitive to the sun. He has a job at the Pokemon casino. For children. So I mean. That's right. His eyes are permanently bloodshot. God bless him. So he has to wear those glasses for the rest of his life. However. He's there to give the tokens to the children.

[01:23:37] So the children can get hooked on the pachinko machines. But you guys are missing the downside of all this. And I did read this story. It is true. I assure you of this. I did my research like I do with all the arcade games. So you know. With gambling. There's always the fallacy. The gambler's fallacy. That if they just get the house edge. They're going to be able to figure the game out. They're going to end up being able to know they're going to win. Like the guy on. You know. Whammy. Big money. Big money. No whammy. Stop. The guy that gamed. That show back in the 70s. So.

[01:24:08] Psyduck went missing. Because he got caught counting cards. Because obviously. If you are a psychic duck. What do you know that's coming next? The card. I guess. Apparently. Someone took him in the back room. Put his bill in a vice. And they gave him cement wings. And put him in Lake Mead. And he hasn't been seen. So I mean. There's a downside to it. I mean. I'm all for getting kids addicted to something. I've let my nephews play more video games. And when I watch them play Fortnite.

[01:24:37] It's just basically like watching a junkie look for his next fix. But gambling. Exactly. It's like a sports book. I mean. Just give him an app. Let him just go to town. And they're going to lose their money one day or another. May as well be on gambling. It's no different than like. Purposefully letting your kid hang out with a kid. With a kid that has chicken pox. So they can get chicken pox. And get it out of their system. Like right away. Like you want to get them addicted to shit. So that you can have a quick cold turkey. Have him be miserable.

[01:25:06] And little four year old Johnny is like. Mom I don't feel so good. Well maybe you shouldn't have been addicted to gambling. Maybe you shouldn't have gotten addicted to crack. Young brother. It's really easy folks. With the program that we've been offered by our sponsor. You just sit down with your child. Ages one and a half. And up. And you just kind of sit down. And you just repeatedly say. Now repeat after me. Pikachu. Pikachu. Pachinko. Pikachu. Pachinko. Easy. It's like a two step program.

[01:25:36] And within minutes. They're just going to be fucking losing their house. Their future investments. Everything will be gone. And they'll just get it out of their system. They're not going to have any houses. We're all going to be living under tents. Under a bridge one of these days anyway. So we may as well just have craps in the tent. Craps. Baby craps and the game craps. Of course. It's for the children. So you got. You know. It's for the kids. People are shitting in the ball pit. And they're spending all their money. And all the while.

[01:26:05] It's stimulating the economy. In a way that we haven't seen. In the last maybe 20, 30 years. Dangle that Porygon. That they could win in front of their face. Like a carrot. Like dude. You could win this one Pokemon. That you can only win from gambling. You could get it. You could be the one kid that gets this. And they're like. They're like withering away. They haven't eaten for like five days. They're like. Like shakily reaching for the. The pull down arm thing. For the. For the slot machine. They're like. Ugh.

[01:26:36] I mean. They could win that. Um. Yeah. Kids. Kids gambling. They're gonna. They're dying. They're dying. Thank you so much for the sponsorship. Thanks. Dying gambling kids. All right. And we are back. From our word from our sponsors. And of course. It is the saddest. But most generous. Time.

[01:27:05] Of this podcast. It is where we give you. None other than. Random. Recommendated. Game. That's right folks. We are generous lovers here. On Retro Rehab. And we love to give you the games we love. So. Uh. Anthony. As our guest. I would love for you to. Randomly. Recommendate. A game. To the folks listening. Today. I'm sure people that know me.

[01:27:35] Are gonna know what's coming. But. Killing Time on 3DO. Is probably my favorite game. Ever made. It is just. Egyptian Bioshock. Before Bioshock. Ever existed. What? And Night Dive. Just. Announced their. Remaster of the game. Holy shit. And I knew. I knew about this. Like maybe. Four or five months ago. I'm gonna be in the game somewhere. You'll have to find me. Look. Wait. If you go into the graveyard. In the remaster. You can find me in there somewhere. But. I've been for the last. 15 years. Anyone who will listen.

[01:28:04] And many people who did not want to listen. I've said. Play Killing Time on the 3DO. Yes. The frame rate's bad. Just get past it. It is just an. Epically entertaining. First person shooter. That really like. Predicted a lot of how story was gonna go. In the genre. Like. Games are playing in like. The last five or ten years. Like. Just seem like. They're borrowing the mechanics. From this game. It is just that good. And it's gonna be out soon. Maybe next month. Month after that. Steam. All the consoles and stuff. Like. I have nothing to do with the game. I don't make any money off.

[01:28:34] And just. Love the damn thing. Play it. If you hate it. Money back guarantee. You pay me nothing. So you get shit in return. If you don't like it. But. I love the thing. Hell yeah dude. That's good. I've actually never heard of this game before. It looks really. Most people haven't. Really rad. It's a vibe. For sure. It's just something that you've probably never played before. But once you start playing it. You're gonna recognize like. So many different games in that game. That just like. Borrow little elements of it. Mostly on like the storytelling side of things. Like how they kind of like.

[01:29:04] Interactively tell a story. It's. You know. A 1995 first person shooter. With no loading zones. One giant open world map. Where you can kind of just pick your route. Through the whole thing. And kind of like. Get the story as you go. It's like. Way ahead of its time. Yeah. That sounds wild. I'm gonna have to. Mark that down. Check it out. Weirdly enough. There's a. There's a. There's a podcast. In our network. All about. Yeah. The 3DO. And. I'm gonna let them know. About this game. And that's.

[01:29:34] And that you. And you hold it in such high regards. I'm really surprised. They haven't done this one already. I'm going to. You're in the remake. Yeah. Looks like. That's wild. It's just one of those games. I played it. Like at a certain point. In my life. And it stuck with me. And I've. Just been playing it once a year. Ever since. Trying to convince. Anyone. To play it. Now that Night Dive. Announced their. Re-release. The views on that video. Have gone way up. Because when I first ran it. People were like. Yeah. It looks like shit. 3DO sucks. Moving on. Which is the number one. Refrain for 3DO. That it sucks.

[01:30:04] I mean. It's. It's not a Super Nintendo. That's for sure. But it's also. Not that bad. It's kind of bad. Hell yeah. Yeah. That's a good recommendation. My random recommended game this week. Is Final Fight. But. Specifically. For the Saturn. Because. I played through that game. On the weekend. And I didn't realize. How fucking hard. The soundtrack slaps. On the Saturn.

[01:30:35] It's so good. And there's. You know what? There's something about. Final Fight. Like the original. Final Fight. At first. It kind of seems like. A pretty just. By the numbers. Beat him up. But like. I don't know. There's something about that game. It has like a. A weight to it. And it's very like. Hefty. And. It's fucking tough. I mean. We got. To. The very last boss. The dude in the wheelchair. Um. But. I wasn't able to. Beat him. My buddy. Ran out of continues.

[01:31:05] And. It was just me. And I. I got. Totally annihilated. By this dude. But. Yeah man. Final Fight. I don't know. It's a. It's a really good. Beat him up game. That. Is. I think it predates. Streets of Rage. And I feel like. Streets of Rage. Probably borrowed a lot. From Final Fight. And. Yeah. I would say that. Anybody who likes a beat him up. Should definitely check out. Final Fight. And if you can do it. Check it out on the Saturn. Because the. The. That CD quality.

[01:31:35] Soundtrack. And after that. If you want to play a bad. Final Fight game. You can play Final Fight. Revenge on the Saturn. 3D fighting game. In the Final Fight universe. It is garbage. But the. It's. 3D? Most delicious garbage ever. Like if you were a raccoon. This would be. Filet Mignon. Of gaming garbage. It is a. 3D fighting game. Final Fight. Revenge. And it's also like. Stupid rare. I think copies are like. 800. A thousand dollars now. Hold on. You're telling me. I could see.

[01:32:05] Mike Hagar himself. Standing still. Holding his fist out like this. And going. Like. Walking in a circle. In 3D. That would be. 100%. Cool. It's worth $800 Aaron. I guess so. Just for that. I didn't know. Final Fight was on the Saturn. That's. I know it's on like. The Sega CD. I didn't know it was on the Saturn though. Yeah. I didn't know either until this weekend. That's right. There you go. Hey.

[01:32:35] Here's another Saturn game for you. Baku Baku Animal. I think I played this. It's. It's got like. So. I don't know what the official term. Would be. For a game like this. There's like a falling block puzzle game. I suppose. Or like arcade style puzzle game. Where blocks fall from like the top. Or build up from the bottom. Or whatever. Yeah. It's one of those. And it's got like. The weirdest. Like most. 90s.

[01:33:05] Early 3D. Looking. Models for. For animals. And people. And stuff. But it's. It's awesome. It's. It's so cool to look at. So fun. Uh. Basically. Uh. Blocks. Of. Of. Alternating between like animals. And foods. Will fall from the top of the screen. So you'll have blocks for like. Monkeys. Pandas. Rabbits. And then. Blocks of like their favorite food. Will fall down. And if you connect. The animal with the food.

[01:33:35] The animal will eat the food. And then. That's how you clear out your blocks. It sounds really fucking stupid. But it's really fun. Um. And all the while. Yeah. It's got that. The visuals are just really. Really cool. The soundtrack is. Zany. And zesty. Trying to use. Two Z words. In one sentence. But uh. Zany and zesty. There's also a game. In flavor of ways. I haven't played the game. Gear version. I think the moral of the story. Here is uh. The Sega Saturn. Is.

[01:34:04] A good fucking console. It is. And more people need to check it out. It's one of the best. And I mean. People are just finally figuring it out. Which is going to do. Terrible things for the prices of games. But as long as people are having fun. I don't care at this point. I bought the things I want. At this point. I don't have any room for anything else. So. Just keep. My game collection outperforms my 401k. By far. So just keep making it more popular. Numbers keep going up. And one day I'll. Sell it all. Buy an expensive sports car. And wrap it around a tree.

[01:34:34] Just like. Or just go hide it all underneath. Underneath the tarp. Somewhere in California. Yeah. I'm going to leave this life like Paul Walker. Oh. I was going to. I was going to say. Steve Buscemi. At the end of Mr. Deeds. Where he's like. Man. These cars are fast. And then just like. Guns is fucking. At the end. Adam Sandler buys everyone. Ferraris in the town or something. And yeah. Steve Buscemi. He runs it right into a tree immediately. Crazy eyes. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy eyes. Gumballs and Oreos.

[01:35:04] Mr. Deeds. And with that. Anthony. Thank you so much for coming on today. It was a blast. That was super fun. Thanks. Let me waste an hour and a half of your time. On my ridiculous knowledge of things. That I probably should have ever started learning about. Anytime. So one more time. For the people that are listening. Go ahead and plug and promote anything that you want. Just stop over to the channel. Video game esoterica. It is not video game erotica. Some people misspell that. They get something completely different. But if I ever decided to start a new channel. That might be the second one.

[01:35:34] But swing by. You know. I'm always around. I chat with people. I answer every comment. Which can sometimes be tiring. But if you take the time to ask me a question. I will take the time to answer. And do some fun shit. That's about it. Good way to be. Hell yeah. And if you want to support us. Leave a review. Or subscribe to the show. That helps. It's the easiest way to help us out. And it's free. You don't have to do anything. That's right. Leave a little review for us. Or subscribe to the show. Tell us how good we are. You can also find all of our episodes.

[01:36:04] Yeah. Tell us. Aaron. Tell them to tell us. Tell them again. Tell us we're good. Hey. Tell us we're good. Tell us we're good. You can find all of our episodes and more. Over at the superpodnetwork.com And until next time. See ya. See ya.