Eight Man | An Anime Explosion

[00:00:01] Aaron, do you think there's like other numbered men? Is there like a seven man or a five man or something like that? Uh, there's gotta be another one. One man. One man! With the power to one. I am one man and you are two man here on Neo Geo Go!.

[00:00:21] And everybody, we are here to talk about the one and only Eight Man, released on June 7th, 1991, developed by Palos and published by SNK. And Eight Man is a side-scrolling action game based off the manga and anime of the same name.

[00:00:52] Obviously, Aaron, when I was a kid, I had no idea this was a licensed game. I had no clue. I just thought there was a Neo Geo game called Eight Man for all I knew. Because I, from what I understand, this may have aired in the United States, dubbed like here or there, like in the 70s or maybe, you know, 70s or 80s or something. Like, you know how scant anime was back then, right? So who knows? But like, yeah, I had never heard of Eight Man.

[00:01:18] So I don't know, as far as I was concerned, he could show up in King of Fighters for all I knew. So, you know, when I was playing this game, I started thinking, like, what the fuck is Eight Man? Why, of all like manga or anime series, why Eight Man? Why this guy? So I did a little bit of digging on Wikipedia and I found like the coolest fucking thing ever. Okay. So in the manga and anime, Eight Man, he has these powers of like super speed and super whatever.

[00:01:49] But in order to rejuvenate his powers, he has to smoke power cigarettes. Which is like, just the most, the most 1960s sounding shit I've ever heard. Like, would you calm down and have another cigarette? Like, oh my God. He's just got fucking belt with packs of power cigarettes. Holy shit, that's amazing. Can you imagine like, I don't know, instead of like Goku and Gohan going to the hyperbaric chamber,

[00:02:17] they just hella smoke like three packs a day for like a year. Yeah. Dude. Vegeta's just like hella just like puffing on like his power cigarettes, like charging up to blast her ass away. Their throats are just destroyed. Fucking, uh, I'm the prince of all things. Yeah, that's just his throat from chain smoking. Like 16 packs of Marlboro Reds or whatever. Yeah, Kakarot is mine to kill.

[00:02:49] Like literally between takes, they just keep in like the voice actor coughing. Oh man, that's so bad. Okay. I literally wrote in my notes, Eight Man is a badass character. Now he's even more badass. Dude, fuck yes. I mean, I don't know anything else about him. I found like that one fact and I was like, dude, this shit rules. Yeah, dude. Well, as you can imagine, I loved this game when I was a kid.

[00:03:19] Holy shit. I, again, I didn't know it was a licensed game till much later in life, but I did not care, dude. This game was so fucking cool to me. Absolute baller move starting the game by showing like the first screen with the city. Right. And then it gets immediately bombed into oblivion by like all these planes and everything's ruined and on fire. And then you start playing the game. Like, what the fuck?

[00:03:48] That is. That was so cool. It's like, oh, millions of people just died. Go, Eight Man. Like, what the fuck? He's like, I'll be there in a minute. The calm, fresh taste of a Marlboro menthol. A power Marlboro menthol. And then he goes and fights a fucking predator, like right at the end of the first level. Yeah. It's legitimately the predator.

[00:04:17] It comes out of a tube and everything. Yeah. What the fuck? Yeah. It's that's so weird. Yeah, dude. This game, Eight Man is a character in this game is amazing. The I love the cool ass, like power waves from his like punches and kicks. You just jam on the button. And he's just going, ha ha ha. And it's just like throwing these little like power crescent waves of fucking shit. It doesn't make any sense. And I love it.

[00:04:46] And it didn't matter if it made any sense. That's all I needed when I was a kid. And quite frankly, that's all I need now, too. It's still badass. Yeah. And the fucking the I don't know if you notice, but when you pick up when you pick up a power, holy shit, when you pick up a power up, the little sound effect, the play that's just like, hey, man. Yeah. I don't know if that's like maybe that's like the theme song to eight man. Maybe that's like what they sang or something or like.

[00:05:15] I don't know. You know how you know how 60s anime loves are like over the top, like, like almost like Superman style, like songs, you know, like that's I would imagine that it could come from that. Yeah. Eight man. Eight man. Eight man. Yeah. Perfect. I didn't think anything of this at the time, Aaron, but.

[00:05:41] It's kind of weird that this game has a screen clearing bomb stock like it's a shmup. You actually get bombs and you stock them. And when you need to clear the screen of people, it's like, but it's a side scrolling action game until it's not. Because when you start running your ass off after you like clear a section of a level and you do like the auto scrolling parts, that is basically a shmup because guys are coming at you in waves and patterns.

[00:06:10] And it's in there. And it's like I said, it's auto scrolling. So you're they're coming at you this way and you have to punch them that way. And that's where the the bomb move really acts like a bomb. It's very strange that they thought of that, though. Yeah, I didn't think about I didn't think about that until you brought this up. But yeah, now I'm thinking of like Robo Army does the same thing, too. It's got like the energy wave bomb thing you can use. And yeah, now I'm very confused. It's cool.

[00:06:38] But like, yeah, I don't think eight man really even needs that because, yeah, it's got a little shock waves, a little pew pew arms. It's whenever he punches and shit, he doesn't. Yeah, dude, it's so I will never get tired of like doing that. And just I could sit there and jam on the a button and see him punch and kick for three minutes. And then it's like, continue. And then I'm good. That's why I feel like I got my quarters worth just by seeing those animations and hearing those sound effects. Just amazing. I love that.

[00:07:07] Here's something I didn't clock as a kid either, because I don't think I had played R-Type yet. I love that the second boss is essentially one giant battleship because, you know, yeah, some R-Type levels are like that. Usually like the third or fourth level is like, here is one big ass ship. Yeah. Metal Slug does that same shit, too. Yeah. Yeah. So eight man does that. And it's interesting, right? Like, it's like, I wonder. I mean, I don't know.

[00:07:34] These guys have polis what they made before they got in bed with SNK. But like, maybe they're old shmup heads from other companies or something. But I mean, they must be to make something like this. Yeah. Because I mean, other than that, man, I got kind of bored of this game after a little bit, though. Like the first maybe like three stages are pretty cool. But after a while, it's just kind of like, go right.

[00:07:59] The video game like you, you go through a stage like beating dudes up and then you run real fast. And then you to a stage where you run and jump over pits that spew fire. Run real fast. Go to another stage where you run and jump over pits that spew fire. And then, yeah, there's not a whole lot to it. Yeah, the level design is very cookie cutter. Unfortunately, that's like this big game's big downfall. And look, I still like it. Right.

[00:08:27] But like, yeah, it like visually and like things to do and like level design wise, it's not great. They have like two ideas and they just repeat them over and over and over again. Yeah. But, you know, that's what you had to do back then. You had to get them games out and that's it. So, you know, they didn't really have time to do much else. Probably not that that's an excuse. But yeah, it doesn't make for a great like it's not something you want to put more than a couple quarters into. But those couple quarters, man. Woo.

[00:08:57] You got quite a bit out of them. Yeah. You're having a great time. So I think in that respect, like mission accomplished. I mean, they probably didn't expect people to see the rest of the game if we're being real. I mean, that's true. Yeah. They probably just thought, oh, they have like 75 cents. Let's just give them a show for that. Whatever, however long they might last.

[00:09:18] But I will say, though, again, much like Magician Lord, where I was talking about how nothing at that time looked like that, especially like side scrolling action games. I can similarly say the same thing about eight man. Like it was incredible then. And it's incredible now is a visual masterpiece. Almost like I mean it. It is so good looking. And that that alone almost like not almost. It does make it worth playing for sure.

[00:09:47] I wish more people could play this game, though, because it's just the audio visual presentation is off the charts. So just basically based on that, Aaron, I'm going to give eight man a B plus. It's probably generous. I know. But like I really do feel it's such a great spectacle that it's it's worth that.

[00:10:09] Yeah, I gave it a B because it's it's another one of those things where like everything that I like about it outweighs the bad with the bad. Just being that like after maybe three or four stages, it starts to look that like they copy and paste at every single level. But the other than that, I just wish we got to see him smoke the power cigarettes every now and again. But I know why they didn't because, you know, you don't want to impressionable young kids. You don't want to tell them, hey, smoking's cool.

[00:10:39] But yeah, I mean, I would have been the biggest smoker. Dude, I thought eight man was so cool. I would have done any anything eight man did. I mean, there's when I so I made a post on Blue Sky about this whole thing. And someone showed me this clip of I think it was in the 90s or 2000s. They did like a rebooted, like super dark and like nihilistic version of eight man. And like that looks kind of fucking cool. Like now I'm an eight man fan. Oh, dude, I'm kind of I would love to see that actually.

[00:11:09] Damn, maybe we should have done like an eight man anime roundup before we shut on the air here. You know, that's what's great about YouTube is that if stuff is not like currently licensed here, it has no like current distributor, all that shit's on YouTube. Nobody does anything about it. Nobody takes it down. Any 80s and 90s anime you want to watch, it's on there. Fuck yeah. Same with I'm probably the only person that's going to know this reference, but same with the twist of tales of Felix the Cat. I love that fucking cartoon as a kid.

[00:11:40] But it's literally it's on like fucking no streaming platforms, but it's all on YouTube. Yeah, they got someone. I think I wonder if there is like some scant DVDs of something of some time and people ripped them or something because they probably look pretty clean, right? They don't look like they're from TV or something. Yeah. Yeah. It looks like it might have been just off a VHS or DVD or something. All right. Well, that was good. Thank you, eight man. Thank you.

[00:12:08] For bringing me eight eight man. What are we playing next time? Next time we're crossing swords with crossed swords. Fuck yeah. See you then. We're about to Neo Geo go to Arby's for some mozzarella sticks and root beer. Damn. That sounds so good. Yeah.