Hell freezes over … Shane explains why. A brand new awesome interview with David Crane and Garry Kitchen. We look at a great classic arcade title; Shao-Lin’s Road. More GP2x coverage, Bits & Bytes and a new segment; The Live Console. All this and more!
Runtime: 02:55:52
Rant: Hell Froze Over
Review: Live Console
Flashback: Shao-Lin’s Road
Transcript (AI Generated; May not be 100% accurate)
Hello, folks, welcome to the October 2007 edition of retro gaming radio. This is Shane R.. Monroe, your host, welcome to the program. Well, let’s get things started with the editorial commentary this month, entitled, hell froze over. Now for most of you, you already know what’s going on. You’ve been to the forums where we’ve been talking about things in detail. But for those of you who don’t know what’s going on who may be catch the show, or, you know, get it from a friend, we have a lot of people you know, it’s weird. We have a lot of people that do that.
This is a little segue, before I get back into why hell froze over. A lot of people ask me, well, how many listeners do you have? You know, especially when I go talk to a celebrity or somebody want to know how many people get to hear them. And it’s like, I’d love to tell you, I’d love to tell you how many people listen to the show. But we really don’t have an accurate representation. I mean, I keep a download log, of how many people download the show, which is probably somewhere in the 80% accurate range. I mean, right? Some people will start downloading and aborted, or some people will download it twice, once at home once it works, something like that. But I found a lot of the listeners out there, actually find the show from friend. So what happens is, is the friend gets the show, and he gives it to his friend, or a friend’s friend or his roommate, his college dorm mate. In one case, one guy actually dropped it drops it on his college network. And people pick it up from the network and the college. So he’s and I asked him, I said, Well, how many people do you think Listen, based on the feed that you just, but you just dropped down there. And he says he knows at least 30 people that listen to it off of what he drops. So it’s really hard for me to say, Well, you know, this is how many people listen to the show. And what’s really sad is is the show and the website kind of go together. And this is why I’m really against things like podcasting and things like that. I do it on dual screen radio, because it’s a different audience. And Chris was really was really kind of wanting to do it, my co host over there. And Brian never really wanted to do it here. And I kind of vacillate back and forth. What I liked him let lots more people hear the show. Yes, but at the same time, the show was a synergy between the show and the website. The forums are a huge part of the community. This is a community show. In other words, if you’re just listening to the show, you’re not going to you’re not seeing the links page, you’re not seeing any sort of extra goodies we put up. You’re not catching the news, probably. And you’re missing out on this huge community of people that are dying to probably talk to you. So that’s why I say that, you know, while most people already know what’s going on, I’m sure there are a ton of listeners that have absolutely no idea what’s going on. When I say hell froze over. Hell froze over because I got an Xbox 360. There I said it, it’s out. Now, why did I do this? Well, actually, there’s a few different reasons why. And I’ve always been upfront with my listeners, I’ve always told the truth. I’ve always backtracked and said the right things. If I found if I’ve been talking about something poorly, and then I experienced it and learned something different. I’ll be the first one to come back and say, Look, I was wrong. Well, there were a lot of things about the 360 that I was wrong about, and I want to come clean. For those of you who are like, you know, this is a classic show, you’re talking about the 360. You know, I hate when you do this, just skip ahead to the show a few minutes, because I’m not going to talk about it for a long time. But I do want to set the record straight. I do want to make amends. I do want to talk about the things that work and don’t work. And, you know, kind of set the record straight. One of the reasons why I wanted an Xbox 360 was because of Pac man’s championship edition. Now I know that sounds crazy. You know, a $10 shareware game, essentially, which is what Pac Man see is really drove me to wanting to get a 360. And it sounds it sounds crazy. I still, I hear myself saying it. And it sounds crazy. how this all came about, I’ll give you a little storytime people like storytime. I’ll give you a story. A lot of people on the forums were starting to play Pac Man See, and they were having this having a competition in terms of scores. They were talking about how great it was and Chris Womp womp. Brad’s from the forums. My coast had dual screen radio. He, um, he was playing and he’s like, do you know this game is so awesome. I can’t stop playing it. So I said, Okay, listen, I got a friend of mine who’s got a 360 I’m going to go over to his house. And I’m going to try it out. I want to try Bioshock I want to try all of these games that are like you know, this is like, this is the button For the 360, and you’ve got to see this, you got to see that and I wanted to check out the Live Arcade. Because honestly, the Live Arcade sounds a lot more like what I’m into, you know me, I’m in the classic games, I like remakes of classic games if they’re done, right. And I like community, I like the concept of a community of friends. I don’t care about strangers, I don’t want to hop on and randomly play some schmo. But the concept of being able to play with my friends, which is something I really like about the DS in the week,
is it kind of forces you into the fringe the friend mode play? So I said, Okay, I’ll go over to my friend’s house, and I’ll try it out. And I went over there. And I said, Well, let me um, let me see some some commercial games first. So he had a few, a few retail skews over there. And I tried out Bioshock because I tried it on the PC. And I’m going to an okay, video card on my PC. I’ve got a dual core AMD 3800. I think so it’s not, you know, top of the line, but it’s, you know, it’s not too shabby. And I got, you know, $100 video card in there. And so I gave them Bioshock a try, because oh, Game of the Year best game ever Can’t believe in software. Okay, you know, give it a look. So I went ahead, and I went over there. And the first thing I looked at was the Bioshock. And it’s like, yeah, okay, this is like, 100 times different than playing it on my PC. And I played it for, I don’t know, 2030 minutes, I guess, I got to the part where the little girl gets abducted or, or rides off on that big robot or takes that big robot comes and gets this girl. I played up to there. And it’s like, okay, yeah, the visuals are nice. The gameplay is not overly compelling. I really don’t care about the story. And they said, you know, Game of the Year? I don’t know about that. I mean, I can understand why some people like it. But it’s not really for me. And I said, What about the zombie game because that was something that ages ago, when it got announced Dead Rising, was something that I was really interested in, because it kind of reminded me of state of emergency on the PlayStation two, where it was just an all out free for all brawl, where you go and, you know, be the living crap out of people are, in this case, zombies. And I was always interested in it. And so I went ahead, and I checked that out. And there were parts of it that I really loved taking the photographs, especially at the beginning when you’re on that helicopter. And then there were other parts of it. It’s like, Well, you know, the zombie killing was kind of fun. It was cool. You could use all these weapons, but it wasn’t as frantic as I was hoping. You know, zombies move slow, I guess. Right. So there you have it. But anyway, so I looked at that it’s again, you know, I couldn’t buy an Xbox just for this. It’s not gonna happen. So then I said, Okay, now let me see live. Let me see the Live Arcade. So I started asking him questions about how the games were authenticated, and how they’re stored on the hard drive, and all that stuff. And I won’t go into great detail because most of you out there who already have one, or you know enough to know how things work. But I wanted to get the full scoop and the full story. So I fired up. I started going through actually I went through his list of Xbox Live Arcade games. And I played robotron, I played a whole bunch of different games. And I one of the things about robotron that I had talked about in the past was that, you know, classic games in high resolution and high definition graphics doesn’t really make sense because it alters the game. If you have a much large screen and you shoot a shot across the screen, it takes longer to get from A to B. That’s why games like muting storm, the original Mune storm and whatnot, were not appealing to me because while it simulated the type of environment that robotron portrayed, it didn’t really give me the same feeling of action and urgency, because it takes forever to get a shot across the screen. There’s so much area to cover. It didn’t have the same tight close quarter freak out that robotron hat. And I’m happy to say that I was very wrong in the way Xbox Live Arcade handles their arcade classic remakes. First of all, most of them are from digitally clubs. And those of you who are have been big in emulation know that digital Eclipse does like 90% of all the emulation packages out there. They’ve been doing it a long time, and they’re pretty good at it. The second thing is, is last month I talked about the Konami Live Arcade, about how you can play with either enhanced or original graphics. They upgraded the graphics and some of the sounds, but they left the gameplay essentially identical. All of the games pretty much that are on the Live Arcade controller are the same ones that are here. In fact, some of them were like identical to the ones that were there. So games like time pilots, and which I’m going to review later on in the show.
Several of the games were pretty much dead on to their Konami Live Arcade versions. But a lot of the games like robotron all they do is re skin it they keep the aspect of ratio of the pixels the same. In other words, you’re playing with new graphics. It’s got some cool looking graphics got a big R in the background. Very cool. But the gameplay itself and all the sounds the same, which you don’t you don’t monkey with William Sound, folks. That’s what makes those games special. But so yeah, it’s the exact same game. And it’s emulated like dead on even sometimes even when the brains materialize on way for sometimes it slows down a little bit just like the arcade game did. So that’s actually kind of cool that they were able to do exactly what I’ve told them give it the game of facelift. But don’t monkey with the game. And that earned me a little bit more respect for the folks developing for Xbox Live Arcade. Because as I’ve said, with Nintendo time and time again, when companies basically do what you tell them to do, it’s hard not to support them. Anyway, so I started going through his list of games. And then finally I saved Pac Man. See, for last I played Pac Man. See now you got to understand my friends set up at his house is just immaculate. He’s got like a, I’d say probably like a 65 inch. It’s a high def but it’s a projection TV. I’m not usually a fan of projection, televisions, but you know, the way that I was seated, I had a perfect view of the screen. He’s got it all hooked up to these gigantic speakers. So you know, full 5.1 surround. And so for those of you who played Pac Man, see, you know what kind of arm Beyonds the game emits and going through, you know, this beautiful screen and this, you know, all these giant speakers and everything. The game itself is almost surreal. I knew after playing a game or two of it, that I was going to be really hopelessly hooked on the game. And that was the first time since I had sat down, that it really triggered me and said, I might have to have an Xbox. This sucks. You know, I’ve been anti Xbox, I’ve been anti Microsoft. And I still am anti Microsoft. Don’t worry folks, that hasn’t changed. Again, it comes down to the same reason I run Windows. And this is how I i lamely justify my Xbox 360 purchase is the fact that you don’t have to like what you what you’re using to run the software that you want. In other words, I’ve changed to Linux or OSX in a heartbeat. If I knew that I could run every single piece of software that I’ve become very dependent on like directory Opus, there is no directory opens for Linux, there’s no directory Opus for OSX. And there’s no Pac Man championship edition for the We Are The DS. I really hope it makes it over there at some point in time, because a lot of people are missing out what a great game Pac Man see is, in my opinion, almost the quote killer app for the 360. And I know that says a lot. And a lot of people like well, you know, I wasn’t really into Pac Man. I like Miss Pac Man. I like to speed up Miss Pac Man. You know if this is just another Pac Man with different mazes, I’m not going to be into it. This game goes super deep. And we’re gonna review Pac Man see on the show, not this episode, though. Another episode I want to give it proper respect, because it deserves it. But in any event, so that’s kind of the driving force behind what got me the 360. Part of the other reason I was into getting a 360 was because of the week and I know it’s like well, how does that work out? Well, the we has you know, has a virtual console and they sell old console games any es su brainy as turbo graphics 16 neogeo, they sell these games in their Virtual Console. And it’s a lot like live, where you, you buy points, you put your point card online, you download the stuff, they take points away from your thing, and then you own it, you can erase it, you can go to another Xbox and sign in. And you can download the files again. On the we it’s a little more restrictive than that. But suffice to say they have the same sort of system, you buy points, you get the software, and you can play it. And it’s all through emulation. It’s all through, you know, as realistically as possible, they can do it. And sometimes that most of the time that works sometimes fails. But I felt kind of funny. Because I’ve wanted to talk about some of the Virtual Console stuff, right here on retro gaming radio. A lot of people don’t mind if I’m talking about modern consoles, as long as I’m talking about emulation packages, like I’ve, I’ve reviewed midway treasures, Midway Arcade classics, those sort of things because people want to know what they can use if they can use their modern machines for doing this emulation. And you know, legitimately not having to go through name or something like that, but legitimately owning a copy of time pile they can play legally in their conscience or clear.
So I’ve wanted to talk about the wheeze Virtual Console cuz there’s some really great stuff up there. At the same time, I knew the second that I started revealing we Titles we Virtual Console titles someone was going to chime in Whoo hoo hokum How come you’re doing the Wi Fi stuff, but you’re not doing the Xbox Live stuff? You know, it’s a lot better. Yeah, leaderboards and online play and stuff, how come you’re not gonna review that stuff? Well, simple. I don’t own a 360. And I’m more than happy to compare apples to apples as long as I’ve got the hardware. So, I, I look at to myself and say, Look, as a gaming journalist, I have to be able to compare both platforms, and talk about both platforms intelligently. So that was another thing that said, Okay, now to satisfy my greed for Pac Man, see, here’s how I’m gonna justify the purchase. Right? Yeah. You tell yourself whatever you need to get through the night, right. And plus, you know, there were some games that I really, I really wanted to play again, you know, a lot of games like burn, I’m a huge burnout whore. I really love burnout. I’ve talked about that on the show. And, you know, in burnout, it’s all about speed. And I was worried that in high definition that, you know, burnout wouldn’t be as fast as, say, running on a PlayStation two? Well, I was happy to find out that, you know, burnout runs just as fast and in high definition. So you know, it’s one of those things where it’s like, if you’ve got the platforms to choose from, you’re going to choose the one that offers the best gameplay first, then the best graphics. Second least that’s how I look at it. And if the gameplay and the graphics happened to be both better on a certain platform, you know, why not go for that platform? If you’ve got it? It’s not something where you go out and say, Well, you know, I can’t play burnout on the PlayStation two, because the graphics aren’t as good as the Xbox but don’t have an Xbox, I’m not gonna play on the PS two. Well, what the hell is that? You know, so now I actually have a couple of systems that I can choose where I put my money. You know, in the case of, say, The Simpsons game, right? The we version them in the Xbox version look very, very similar. And the game plays right on and I can, you know, it’s probably going to be cheaper for the week. So I went ahead, and that’s, that’s the platform I’ll probably play Simpsons on. It makes more sense, if you have a choice, and not everybody has a choice. That’s why I want to review both we and Xbox Live choices and say, Listen, if you know, here’s, you’re gonna get the Nintendo stuff over here. All of the old classic NAS stuff, which is where a lot of people are at a lot of people, Nas was their first dig into gaming. So that’s important to them, they, you’re not going to get Super Mario Brothers on Xbox Live, it’s not going to happen. And likewise, there are things on Xbox Live, like, you know, some of the what is some of the shareware stuff that comes out over there, that you’re not going to ever be able to probably get on the way. But when we were coming, who knows, that’s a whole nother story. In any event, so I said to myself, look, if I have the 360, I’ll be able to talk more intelligently about it. One of the things that I’m kind of famous for, or infamous for, is, you know, verbally abusing stuff that I don’t own. And you know, that’s a totally fair argument for people to make, you know, you don’t have a 360 How can you bash it? Well, you know, most of my hatred for the Xbox was compliments of Microsoft, I really hate Microsoft. But fortunately, Sony is going out of their way to make me dislike them more than Microsoft. So now, you know, I can fall back on that card, too. In any event,
some of the things that I do want to that was another reason why I wanted to pick up 360. And finally, I had to sell the idea to my family. And let me tell you something, you know, with the amount of crap that I’ve given Microsoft and Xbox over the years, my wife was not real keen, and that’s being generous, was not real keen on me getting a 360 she was in fact, not very pleased at all. And I think she said like, there’s no way I think that was one of her expressions. However, here’s the good news. This is how folks for those of you who are married who are looking for an end the way to work yourself into getting what you want. Eternal Sonata was my Savior. Eternal Sonata is a fantasy role playing game. Very, very beautiful. Very different in terms of it’s not like your standard Final Fantasy gamer, or your standard role playing games. It’s very different, very musically based. And when my wife saw that, I kind of was able to sell her on the 360 Now, those of you who are on my gamer tag list know exactly how much time I get to play the Xbox now that she’s got eternal Sonata. I think she’s logged like 30 something hours in that game. That’s insane. Plus, I bought her the new CSI game. All you got to do folks to get the wife on board, or the kids on board is to find just the right game. I was lucky enough to find that. So now my wife is a huge 360 whore because you can play eternal Sonata on it. Once again, I run Windows, not because I love windows, but because Cuz I love what windows can run for me. Same with the Xbox, I may not love Microsoft. In fact, I still very much dislike Myers I hate him. But I do like what the Xbox 360 will let me run. And so there you go, I’ve made my full confession. Xbox Live has actually a pretty neat service all things considered. And again, I had some misguided information on it. At one point in time, I was pretty sure that it cost 15 bucks a month to use to play Xbox Live. Turns out that there’s a free account and you can do a lot of the things with the free account that you don’t need to pay for it. There’s all sorts of things I would like to repent for in terms of putting the SmackDown on Xbox Live. There are leaderboards and the sense of community. And I know I sound like one of those old people, you know, community. But it’s true for me, my friend, my circle of friends, my community are very important to me. And from a gaming aspect. I will literally get online and play an hour of time pilot just so I can get a little closer to toppling one of my friends scores. these sort of things Hale back to the old days of arcade, I’ve told you time and time again, that the the loss of the high score is one of the hugest blows to video gaming. That without the high scoring without some mode of competition, video gaming is very, very boring. And I’m not talking about frags per, you know, per session I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the old school arcade methodology for running high scores. And live lets you do that with the leaderboards. The achievement thing is something else that I downplayed a lot in the early days. But I want to go on record now is saying that the achievements are completely brilliant, that was the most brilliant thing anybody ever came up with in terms of getting you to continually play games, you may not want to play anymore. You know, I just got the last achievement in Pac Man see. So now I’ve completed all 12 achievements. these are these are things these are little quests that you have to do within a game. To get awarded gamer points, your gamer points go into this big pool. And the points represent you know how great of a player you are how much you’ve been playing, sort of a rating, if you will. So, you know, some of the some of its really, let’s put it this way achievements can be as boring or as cool as the developers choose to make them. And one of like, for example, one of the achievements in robotron is to get past level four, or level 10, or level 20 or level 30. So it’s like, as long as you play long enough, you’ll get the achievement, some of them are a little more dastardly, like one of the achievements in robotron is survived the first level without moving. So you have to sit in one place and shoot only without moving. And you have to live through that. And that gets you you know, 10 gamer points or whatever. So that’s really cool. I mean, that’s a, that’s a cool, there’s certain things like in time pilot, you have to shoot X number of bombs, like 20 bombs, that’s kind of hard. I mean, you shoot bombs in quantity, but to shoot 20 of them, that’s a pretty big number. So anyway, so the achievement thing is, is very cool. And Microsoft forces every developer to include achievements in every game. And I think that’s why, just like anytime you force anybody to do something, sometimes you’re gonna get substandard, some quality stuff. And a lot of games do have, you know, very, you know, make it to level five without dying, you know, whatever. But there are some achievements that are very brilliant, like, one of the ones in Galaga is that you have to shoot a captured ship, you know, ship comes down, catches your ship, you shoot the bad guy, the ship falls down, and you join together. Now you have double firepower, right? We all know that. One of the achievements in gallon is you have to shoot down that red ship without getting the bad guy. And I don’t know how many of you have actually everybody’s actually shot their ship at least once and incur some of your breath. But now try to do it on purpose, much different story. Anyway, so suffice to say that, I’m starting a new segment here on the show, starting with this episode called the live console, Virtual Console Xbox Live sort of a combination of the two. The live console will take one game from each side and give it give you a mini review tell you how much it cost, how much space it takes, especially on the week. That’s important. And any sort of pratfalls you may find with the title. Whether or not it’s a good value value Goodbye, and who’s the kind of person that needs to get it? Is it diehard people only need apply? Or is it something that you know, the general public and appreciate so we’ve got another segment added to show very cool. So anyway, let’s move past the editorial commentary got a huge show. Of course as always, we’ve got some chasing the Chuck Wagon, we’ve got the scotties hardware flashback. And as a great deal, I am going to give you I wasn’t going to I was gonna make you wait till next summer but straight, because I’m running the show late I’m gonna give you a treat, we’re gonna run the David Crane Gary kitchen interview from the last last year see GE absolutely great stuff. As you can tell I was having a great time, I think I’m laughing through half the interview. Very good stuff, you don’t want to miss it. All this bits and bytes, gb 2x update reviews the whole bit, lots of this and more. Right here on retro gaming radio.
This month’s flashback, I’d like to take a look at a game. It’s actually an arcade game. And we don’t usually flashback to arcade games. But this is one that last few months I’ve put a lot more time into. And I think it is really worthy of having its own flashback segment. The name of the game is shale Lin’s road. And it is, at first glance, a very simple action type platformer. The game takes place in various locations, inside of a temple outside of the temple, you get the idea out in the wilderness, and the game plays a side view platform style game, where you jump between three different levels on the screen. And endless bad, seemingly endless bad guys come after you. Now you are, of course the martial arts Ninja, whatever you want to call him. And your job is to clear the level of bad guys. And there’s a little meter sort of my time pilot, it’s a Konami game. So it makes sense. There’s a progress indicator showing how many guys are left on the screen. That or how many guys are left that you have to get rid of before the levels over, you’re allowed to take three hits before you’re down and you get three lives per game on the standard default settings, you have a couple of different ways to fight these guys. You can kick them or evade them. And it’s, it’s very similar to many other platformers in the terms of it’s an endless onslaught of bad guys, you kick them, they go off the screen, they’re dead. But they do throw in some very interesting elements of gameplay that I want to address. In the early levels, the guys basically materialize out of these closets or, you know, spawn spots, monster generators, whatever you want to call them, they pop out and they come after you. Initially, it’s fairly simple, you simply smack them around, you know, one hit kills, boom, they’re dead, you’re all good. Occasionally, one of the guys will kick out a weapon. And there’s a couple of different weapons that you can get on this game. They’re all temporary. They vary in usefulness as well. One of them gives you like a spinning minion is what I call them, something that flies around you and takes people out to get too close to you. Again, it’s one of those things where if the timings wrong, the bad guys can still get you. And it’s not a very shy, it’s a permanent power up. In other words, you only get it for a short period of time. So that’s kind of useful, it’s probably the least useful. The next one is some sort of an energy ball, you pick up this energy bomb, and you can shoot horizontal shots out of both sides of you. And you can basically use it as much as you can inside of that, you know, five seconds or so that you get it. And that’s really useful for cleaning off a large group of enemies, you’re pulled up on the screen. Again, the usefulness of it is rather short lived. Now the last of the weapons, which is the most versatile, and, and you know, inevitably, the best weapon is this sort of throwing mace thing this morning star type thing that you can actually use a couple of different ways. First off, you can strike an enemy next to you just by hitting them with it. That’s kind of cool. You can also throw the item so it’s a it’s a ranged weapon, and it flies through the air it hits the bad guys. Now the cool part is you have control over it while it’s in the air. In other words, you can make it go forward, backward, forward, backward. It’s all horizontal plane, of course, because it is a platform. But you can actually use that very, very well to take out numerous bad guys. And the important part is on later levels you get bad guys require more than one hit. Careful use of this flying weapon will inevitably help you knock out the bad guys a little bit faster. And you can also use it as a jumping weapon as well. When you jump you can actually attack with it in your jump which is also useful. So you have a few weapon power ups and you have your trusty old kick butt that’s really about it hordes of bad guys, a couple of level bosses, there’s level bosses, basically what you do, you play through one level, or two levels of inside the same area. And then you have a boss. And the bosses range anywhere from just your standard bad guys to more intelligent bad guys, bad guys that, you know, can hit you multiple different ways. And of course, there’s all a rhythm to the game in terms of how you jump, sometimes they jump back. As the game progresses, not only do the boss guys get smarter, and better as the regular old standard, you know, military issued soldier, you know that you’re taking out with your kicks, they start to get smarter and faster. And as a bonus, they start to learn how to jump and kick as well. So your gameplay has to start altering as the levels progress. Now, what kind of the game would I be endorsing if there wasn’t some form of greed element in the game, and believe me, folks, the game has the greed element, one of the cool things you can do is you can hit multiple guys with the same hit. So let’s say that the soldiers kind of pile up on each other. When I say soldiers, you understand these are guys running around with no shirt on their little little karate soldiers, not like military soldiers. Anyway, so these guys get together sort of a kind of massing groups. And if you can use a single kick, to kick more than one, you get, like sort of an exponential bonus of points for each subsequent one that you hit. So if you hit one, it’s worth like, you know, 100 points, if you hit one while you’re jumping, he’s worth like 500 points. But if you could hit more than one at a time, and more than one at a time, while jumping, you’ll get a phenomenal amount of points. And that’s where the greed factor comes in. That’s where you’re willing to take the risk for the reward. And in my opinion, the games that offer this sort of path, okay, you can do it this way. But if you’re willing to take a chance, and do it this way, will give you more of a reward. And that’s how the greatest games of all times are, like robotron. robotron, is a perfect example of the ultimate greed game. zookeeper from tayto, ultimate greed game. It’s all about greed with classic gaming. That’s what gives classic gaming some of the edges of on its modern counterparts. It’s all about greed. It’s all about greed. It’s a very well balanced game, it starts to ramp up. It’s one of those games where you feel that the better you get the farther you get. And I know that seems like it should be a given. But there’s some games, it doesn’t matter how good you get, you always seem to get the same distance before the game ramps up too quickly, or something to that effect. It’s very well rounded. And I think that’s a testament to how brilliant The game is. Now, where do you play shailendra? Well, of course, if you can manage to play an arcade version of it great. But chances are more likely you’re going to have to tap one of the Konami collections off the top of my head. Of course, you can play it in Maine, if you are a main person, it is available in Maine, and it’s perfectly emulated. It’s not a lot of hard hardware, folks. It’s not like a neogeo game or anything. It’s it’s small and easy. You can play that on Main on the PC. There’s a gray version of it for the GP 2x on that version of main, and which means I’m assuming you played on the PSP now, too. And also,
you can play it on the Nintendo DS using the Konami classic arcade package, which now I think is going for 1995 which makes it a complete bargain If nothing else, just for shale ins road in time pilot alone. So shale is road Konami a fantastic arcade game, a lot of people have never played it, a lot of people don’t know about it at all. And I think it’s one of those games that very much is deserving of being relooked at by people of the classic gaming era that have never gotten the chance to play it. And for those people who are really interested in a well balanced, well executed greed game, this is just one of my all time favorites. This is like robotron in terms of I constantly find myself over time, coming back to this game to play it again and again and again. And yes, I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I’ve, I’ve I’ve been able to rack up a pretty decent score and get pretty far in the game. And I think I think if you guys give it a try, you’ll really enjoy it. So hopefully this works out for you. Again, that’s Konami shale Lin’s road, and let me know what you think. Sound off on our message forums. In real world comm slash forums or of course, go to retro gaming radio.com click on discussion forums. It’ll take you right there. Tune in next month and we’ll have even more of our flashback segment right here on retro gaming radio.
So, retro gaming radio report. This is the harbor flashback and we were coming to you live from the 2007 Baltimore auction. Just walk around the auction here it is pouring down rain outside, but inside here is absolutely gorgeous. We have this if you can imagine a blimp hangar filled with over 1000, arcade machines, pinball machines, you name it. Right now I’m walking down a row. And on this row, we’re seeing just some some interesting mixes, we’re seeing a lot of multi game machines where you’re going to have say 4050 games using the multi game boards in a machine. These often get pulled from auction at the last moment due to the legal issues. But if it doesn’t happen to be a representative of the company here, they tend maybe to not pull them so much. Coming up on a roll of pinball machines, and I’m seeing a roller coaster tycoon Simpsons pinball party, the new Spider Man, a family guy that is looking good by the way. Let’s see what the price on that thing is. I’m very curious. I bought one of these recently. And they are asking 4120 which is about 120 over the going price which is not so bad considering its auction. We have a street fighter two here. A godly pinball. This is one of the sort of almost forgotten pin balls and wooden down and out low air and pinball history. They’re asking $1,000 for now when I say they’re asking I should mention something here. Right now I’m standing in the buy it now area, which if you’re familiar with eBay is by an owl concept. Same deal, right? where you come in, you can buy it now once the auction starts, these games will go off for auction if the seller chooses. Often they don’t. This is usually a row or someone’s looking to get $3,000 for a asteroid that has board problems. You know, it’s the guy who comes in and is worried he won’t get one and have to throw in a minivan Get the hell out of here. Like I said, right now I’m standing in front of the streetfighter to coach only show anymore and it’s just amazing here. It’s a good shape. good shape game. Looks like it’s ready to go. Here’s an example. South Park pinball right, typically around 15 $100 in great shape. Here’s what a marginal condition for about 25. We have jurassic park here. Moving on down monopoly, the New World Tour of poker Sopranos. Pirates of the Caribbean. There are a lot of new games here at the auctions not all classics. But as I head down the row here are coming up against more classics. Was he miss Pac Man? We see a centipede here. And as you can hear we’re right at the jukeboxes right now. And let’s see we’ve got some classics, some 1980 cd boxes, all in all some very nice there’s a music for you old. I’m going to say late 1960s it’s ami they’re going to ask 1400 for an auction. I think you’d see that for about $500 the by now it’s it’s got its purpose, but you know, we all know what it is. headed down well further. We’ve got some more modern machines. I’ve got a hydro Thunder here. And big buck Hunter. coming around the corner. Oh, we got two classic bands. We’ve got an eight ball we’ve got an evil Knievel evil Knievel. Let’s face it. Well, how many of us listen to this broadcast and how many of us doing this broadcast didn’t have an evil Knievel when they were growing up? Not the pinball machine so much but the stun cycle and you know all those classics. I had the stun cycle and I’ll tell you what this evil can evils looking good. It’s got the new PIN LED, which I’m going to be doing a hardware flashback on that coming up soon. It’s a new piece of hardware replaces the vacuum fluorescent displays with LEDs and are bright the crisp they look as good as the original. With one annoying feature though, and we’ll talk about that in a future broadcast. I headed on down the road some more. I’m seeing I miss Pac Man. Pac Man. We’ve got on the whole the row pins here. We’ve got Congo Star Wars, Flintstones, Black Rose, Doctor dude, Judge Dredd all the you know, the 90s classics and some of the early 2000 classics as well. Not everything here is what I would call a collectible but run around the corner. What do we have matahari next to a centipede. So there’s something for everyone at an arcade auction. And it’s not just some Asha arcade machines. There is always a healthy selection of pinball. I’m looking at 1234 of the pin 2000 machines. Three of them are revengeance from ours, and the other one is the Star Wars now. revenge from Mars. They’re asking about 1000 over the going price and auction I think we’ll probably see it sell for about 15 $100. And if you haven’t played the pin 2000 I did a Passover flashback on that, where I mentioned the history of that and how it was going to say Williams and pinball, and unfortunately due to the bottom line it didn’t but gorgeous attempt anyway. So walking a little more, we’re gonna Baywatch we got Captain fantastic here. This game. It’s a heck of a pan. And it’s an elton john pan. It’s a great game play. If you didn’t have to look at elton john traipsing around, I might own one. We have a strikes and spares here, which is a Gotlieb bowling game. We’ve got NBA fast rake, which is one of the more nifty sports games that was that was ever made. And like I said, it’s not just games here at the at the arcade auction. We got some vendors here. Here we have a neon vendors guys sell some gorgeous neon signs. And I actually have one of these I’ve got the game room sign. And I’ve got the pinball side, it’s a gorgeous set asides. And we’re gonna go over here to sit the guy want to talk to Steven, sir, would you like to do a little short interview about your business here for radio? retro gaming radio, okay, just tell me about what you have here. I’ve actually it was mentioned I have a couple of your signs here. I picked up the pinball one, the larger one with the circle. And the game room. I’ve had them now for you know, pushed on to over over to push on three years. And they they’re just the brightness is something that most people aren’t prepared for. Tell us about your history with neon and what you do.
Well, my name is Alan, and I’m president of a company called neon medics, we’ve been making neon for 18 years. The neons last though I’d say about 15 years each, a lot of our neons are still in working from the day we open. They range in brightness from about 200 watts to about 275 like a 275 watt bulb. But they’re more efficient than incandescent bulbs. And they’re beautiful. They’re beautiful art. Somebody has to hand blow each one of these. They’re hand blown glass. I love it. And we have about 20 of them in our house. And it’s just so much prettier than a fluorescent light or an incandescent light. I fell in love with it. 20 years ago, and I went from chemistry to this and I haven’t looked back. You
know, I can’t blame you. I understand the beauty of them. I’ve got a few I recently restored a Xenon pinball machine, I added a liquid neon tube to the top of it that dances with the music in it. And the response to the speech. I’ve also put some very small, three inch neons on for computer cases around it. And the blues are dead on but I can’t seem to find a good three inch red Neon is, you know, chemically speaking is red and harder to do.
Red is made out of neon where the other colors are made out of argon. It’s not specifically harder to do you just have to find a local shop who’s willing to do it, you could usually find them in the Yellow Pages. Me personally in the genetics, we make neon and sell a specific type of neon all over the country. Our website is www neon for less calm. And you can find lots and lots of nice neon for the home up there. But we don’t have custom bars like you’re looking for. Right.
And I gotta say that they’re prepared signs are absolutely gorgeous would make a great addition, then a game room. Thank you for the interview there. We’ll be talking a little bit later. He’s also got some great clocks I should mention. Now I said the neon signs are when you think arcade and arcane history, you know, why not start thinking about maybe some of the memorabilia that surrounded the arcade. There were a lot of you know, change room machines, which I added one just for the Beyonds I tell you a fellow arcade not in our forums is pretty sharp and adding the ambience to his place. If you look at some of the pictures of his game room, he knows how to take it beyond just a collection of games, something I’ve been working on myself slowly but surely. Right now I’m standing in front of a trauma machine. And we’re going to take a short break as we head on down into the other hall to talk about some of the machines there. And we’re back. We’re continuing to walk down a row we just left the time crisis and the crisis zone which was in great shooters corner on a corner we’ve got some soccer ball machines, some bowling machines, a little bit of skee ball action these years ago for pretty good prices. So if you’re inclined to add a skee ball to your house auctions way to do it. Also looking around here we’ve got about a oh geez about eight dark machines. And these are the ones with the video scoring, soft tip darts compatible with the monitor, of course. It’s actual physical dartboard, that those soft tip darts and it gives you a score in different games, and it’s in the presentation. Right now the roads are building up. We’re up to about 20 rows right now inside the building. And I’m looking at some great games. I’m looking at a Supersonic Supersonic. It’s funny, I mean, right. When the Concorde came out and was hitting big, it was a neat idea, right? It looks like the head of generic pinball developed, slapped on a nice photo of the Conqueror on the back glass and sold it. The game itself has nothing to do with, you know, flight themed, but it’s a neat back class. I wouldn’t mind hanging one of those my game room. We also have a pin bot and other fish tails. You see a lot of fish tails. Those tend to go for a little bit of money. Doctor Who’s they show up as well, Tommy’s. See we got time. Morphin Power Play. These are.
Time Warp is sort of a neat pinball. It’s sort of reminiscent of the old Flash Gordon 1930 sci fi not a bad one to take home. I’m looking at a LaserDisc game right now space Ace, standing proud in good shape with the marquee. I would I’m going to be keenly watching this one. When the auction starts. I’m interested in knowing what it’s going to go for. Moving on down we’ve got some generic 90s games, we’ve got tech in. And we have I think one that I’ll be pursuing is auction we’ve got a Dungeons and Dragons pinball machine. Now one of the greatest pinball is ever made in terms of, you know, gameplay. It’s got some neat features, some more poles and, you know, ball channels, but absolutely gorgeous artwork off of the original Red Book, d&d said, I’m gonna be watching this one closely to see what it goes for. We’ve got party’s own key ball wizard, which is sort of eight ball Deluxe rip off. Or maybe Hey, Bulldogs ripped it off. Who knows. But there’s a lot of similarities there. Back to the Future, this one looks a little haggard, the case is pretty scuffed up. However, the playfield doesn’t look too bad, might be a nice project for somebody to restore. Moving down a little further. And we’re talking about just a lot of games are sitting here not doing anything. And I’m gonna bring that to a close soon. But I just did want to give you a spectrum of some of the machines that are here. For example, lights, camera action, interesting game, lots of blue translucent plastic, and blue LED scoring. real real neat looking machine. I got some minis here, a couple of cabinets, missing control panels. And if you’re looking to build a main machine, you’re going to find some really deeply discounted cabinets and neat accessories at these shows. Moving on down a little further or seeing some more slot machines set up for the pre auction, we’re probably looking at about, I don’t know 100 120 slots, just roughly counting rows and stacks, a lot of wide body pin balls. And that’s the neat thing is, even if you don’t plan on buying, and you come to one of these auctions, I gotta describe the scene for them seen here from right to left, we’ve got tables full of boards, we’ve got rows upon rows of games, arcade games, there’s got to be, I don’t know, two 300 mega mega torches in front of me, which are great bar top trivia games, when there’s this many of them, right. And some of them are a little older, meaning they’re not primary earners anymore, you’re gonna see these things go for pretty reasonable prices, and how it’s just, you know, snag on one of these putting on your bar at home. And it’s a real, real nice collection. There’s about a million Gumball vending machines and Gumball coasters and spiral drop ball whatnots that, you know, sell your candy to you. And again, on beyond, right, it goes well, in your home game room. I’ve seen a whole lot of little just ticket redemption games, things like that. And some of these go for amazing amounts of money, you know, over $1,000. And a lot of them are getting shipped down to places like Argentina, where there’s sort of a form of legalized gambling down there. So you’ll see a lot of foreigners here buying these machines up, throw them on the back of a wagon and hauling. But you also see some of them that maybe aren’t viable down here, go for not much money. So if you want to have something different in your game room, this is certainly a way to go. Bring it to a close walking down the last row here, we’re gonna talk about some of the some of the 90s machines that you know, if you’re looking to get an arcade collecting and you know, maybe you don’t want to spend a lot of maybe looking for a good main candidate. There’s some machines like Street Fighter two Raiden dx, just absolute generic games that, you know, maybe some of you grew up on, and they’re becoming classics to you, although I think we we’ve argued correctly on retro gaming radio that just because it’s old doesn’t make it a classic. But you know, there’s a lot of neat stuff from that era, though, where I’m looking at race driving right now, race driving was one of the more successful early 3d games pretty primitive and choppy by today’s standards. Look like early Pc 3d, if you remember what that was like on s3 verge or something like that they had 3d functionality in name only. But right next to it, we’ve got a wizard of war, which is a great game, Blitz, 99 Marvel superheroes pole position, just head on down the line, you’re gonna see pretty much anything. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say here. You know, whatever genre you’re into Even if somebody else doesn’t think it’s the greatest thing in the world, you’re gonna find it here. And if it is a classic again, as we speak, I’m walking past a miss Pac Man. Well, that’s about a loop of, I would say the outer loop of the show. I haven’t even covered the inner loops. Just looking in deep. I can see a Harlem Globetrotters pinball hotline. We’ve got a black hole over there, solar ride volton, you name it, man, they are all here. They’ve got
air hockey tables, foosball tables, you name it, auction is the place to be. Now we’re going to pick up in a little bit when the auction starts. And we’re going to catch some of the excitement of what it’s like being at an auction, what it sounds like, what it feels like. And we’re gonna see who wins what and maybe a little bit of an idea of what to pay for it. We’ll check back in soon on the harbor flashback on retro gaming radio. And I’m here with Bill rush, co owner of auction game sales. And he has taken over running the company as of this year. He’s basically telling you stories gonna tell you how he got into this business of auctioning sort of what life is like on the road. And this is the other guy. This is the guy that runs the auction company. He’s the one that runs the auctioneers that’s behind the man behind the mic. And this is who you’re dealing with. Ultimately, these are the business practices you can expect when you go to an auction like this. On the let bill take it away bill tells your story.
Hi, how you doing? All right, we we go to different cities across the United States, Winston Salem, North Carolina, Kingsport, Tennessee, Baltimore, Maryland, Richmond, Virginia and a Dallas, Texas area. We’ve been doing sales since the early 80s. Rick Parsons was the original guy that started auction game sales back around 1981 when he was selling Pac Man new in the box. And we’ve come a long way where we average about 800 to 1000 games that every sale and we’re just expanding out and doing some different cities now. And then
when you go to a city, like say Baltimore, right, you guys are doing Shelbyville, is that correct?
marks out of Shelbyville, Tennessee.
Okay, where exactly is that at?
That’s just outside of Nashville.
Okay, cuz I grew up to south of Memphis so I’ve been all through that area Jackson and what have you I can just never remember the the smaller towns. So what is it like for you? You’ve got all these 18 wheelers, the big trucks out there the signs and whatnot. You got to get all this stuff, the paperwork the people to a location and execute an auction. What’s that life? What’s it for us walk in here, fresh and awake at 10 o’clock in the morning. You guys dragon. What what went on before that moment happened.
It’s a lot of work we get in on Thursdays. We start early Friday morning and unload tractor trailers. First thing. None of the equipment is our stuff. It’s all consigned from all over the country. We’ve got people that come from Canada, from Florida from Wisconsin and all over the East Coast. It’s quite a job to unload all their equipment, line it up, get it all tagged in and set up in you know, basically 12 hours. And then Saturday morning we always unload another couple 100 pieces. So we end up with like I say about 1000 pieces of every sale.
Now one of the things that we were discussing earlier before interview is keeping it honest. Some auctions have a reputation problems. You’re certainly doesn’t like I said I’ve been coming here for about seven years now. Never say anything amiss. What do you do? What’s your watchdog? What do you trust and to make sure that the thing goes straight in and people don’t have the problems that other folks have seen
one thing we we’ve always done and that’s the way Rick started it is we treat everybody the same everybody is treated fairly we always take care of our customer. And you know it’s
just the process of following creed. Yeah, yeah. Cool. Now when you get done with this right the night ends late I’ve been out here sometimes well after midnight you got all your stuff packed up what’s what’s the process damn how many people you moving back? How What are you flying back you’re busting back? Do you have to move is this like moving was traveling circuses what’s what’s the situation there?
We have a trailer that we haul our equipment in most time we do drive to all the locations. We have our own security team that is always checking the doors, checking the equipment and so forth. We’ve got all our movers that we take with us so everybody knows how to move the equipment, how to handle the equipment. That’s a big thing. When we unload everybody’s truck. When you drive a truck up here you don’t need to unload it, we unload it, and we’ve got guys that know how to handle this equipment. So we get it off your trucks get it lined up and tagged in and you know we usually buy Three o’clock, four o’clock on Sunday, we’re packed up and head on home. And usually we’ve got anywhere a 10 hour drive to get back home. The weekends we do to sales back to back, that’s a little tough. You get home at midnight, one o’clock Sunday morning, and then you’re packing back up to leave Wednesday to be at the site went for the next Thursday. So it can be a tough week when you got back to back sales.
Yeah, I was in the army myself many years ago. And yeah, I know, the whole deploying an operation by truck. Doing that sort of convoy operations can be pretty, pretty tough on you. So when when you do this here, and now you’ve got these guys coming in the door, let’s say for example, your first time buyer never been to an auction before, right? What guess walk me through briefly your checking process, like what can a buyer coming to an auction expect to do and experience to get ready to buy we do
have a lot of new buyers, it’s never been to an auction. We deal with them. We we tell them how it all gonna work. We teach them you know, what it is to buy a game, how to bid on it. We’ve even had people to request us to sign games, you know, if they needed that. It’s it’s a it’s a process of training people how to do how to attend to sale, and a you know your work with them a little bit and they enjoy the sale, especially to home buyers. They’ve never done this, they’re timid or afraid to get out there and bid. And we’ll put somebody with them sometimes if they if they need to and get them show them how to bid a couple times to get the piece they want.
That’s great. I mean, it really helps out the guy walks in the doors, and be a little intimidated by all these machines, the yelling, shouting, the WPA is going and doesn’t know quite what to expect out of it. Now one final question I want to wrap up with you here. You get to us the buyer, right? We look at it from a different side of the glass than you do. And what we see is sort of maybe three crowds we see the operators are looking for games they can put back on Route make money from then you got the collectors or after a certain era of games. And he got maybe like your local skating rink owner or pool hall place he just wants to stick a little something in a corner vending machine, why have you? Am I missing something? Is that the major categories? is there is there something else going on? And you guys see
pretty much I mean we draw it all on the homebuyers. It’s looking for something to finish off the rec room, like you say the operators looking to update. They bring a truckload of equipment to sell. They go home with a truckload of new equipment. You know, it’s always trading equipment, you always got to keep up rotating your equipment in and out. And this is a good source. I mean, when we have 1000 pieces to pick from and choose. And we’ve got operators coming to buy. We’ve got home buyers to sell, you know, to the older equipment that we don’t need on the routes anymore. And it works out good for everybody.
Our marclay Thanks for Bill, I called you mark. It’s been a long day for me too. I’ve been up since three, four in the morning, had a good drive up here in a rainstorm, just one of those mornings. So again, sorry bail for
me here till probably at least midnight one o’clock loaded trucks tonight. We’ll be back here at 830 in the morning to finish the load out. And Mark will be heading back to Tennessee. Probably by three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.
I appreciate bill I want you to wish Rick the best from all of us. We miss him here this year. Hopefully he’ll be you know, out and about and doing well. He’s always been a good fellow to deal with and I’m glad see it’s you know somebody decent picking up the company there. Thanks, Bill. For Maryland with me here is Mark Davis. He’s an experienced collector veteran warrior of the arcade circuit. He runs a great website called basement arcade calm and one of the things Mark does there is he takes down the prices at auction the prices that games close for. And while there’s a few morons out there that thinks he’s selling these games, he has to put a disclaimer just to turn folks off from asking them whether or not they can buy the game. It’s a valuable valuable service every year I go to that site myself take a look at about the last two to three years print them out single out the games I’m interested in I’ve got sort of a nice little trend going of what games are going to average you know in terms of number of appearance, average price they go for. So it helps you kind of plan out your auction spending. Now you guys have heard me Yak on enough about my auction day what it’s like, you know how our laugh to get up and you know, get in the car and drive down here the truck or what have you. And, you know, we’re going to turn over to Mark here. He’s going to tell us his history, what he does. And you know a little bit about his day and what’s involved with him. And if you become if you take it from being maybe an eBay collector to being a hardcore collector and going to these auctions, this is sort of what your life is going to turn into Mark taken away. Go ahead and tell folks about your experiences.
I’ve been doing this since 97. coming close to 100 auctions I’ve attended and the one today looks on par with most of the other ones. We’ll be taking down prices as well just like we’ve done every other time and Getting you mentioned getting up in the morning, I got up at three to come all the way down here, it was almost a six hour ride. And if you’re going to start collecting at auctions, you want to be prepared. You want to get up early and have an extension cord and a way to get your equipment home at the end of the day. It’s not like eBay, they won’t ship it to you. So having some tools of the trade are pretty important. extension cords I hand truck would be really nice to have, although there are people here that can help you load at the end of the day. But you plan coming to an auction to spend the full day here because some of your best buys will actually be towards the end of the auction, as the crowds sent tends to dissipate and go home or take a break for some dinner or lunch. But other than that, we look like we’re going on target for a pretty good auction here today.
Thanks, Mark. And that’s an important thing that you mentioned there. The preparation, we’ve talked a lot has been some recent discussions in the forums about preparing for an auction, what to look for in the game. And that’s all technical mishmash. So we’ll continue to cover but for right now, we’re talking about the action in the scene here at the auction. And it’s just that’s your life as a road warrior. When you get into these auctions, you’re loading up shortly after you went to bed, you’re coming here and it’s an all day affair. You pull out of here, you know, sometimes midnight or later, I head home, it’s almost 24 hours a day. In some cases. I know it isn’t mine and mark here as well. I’m gonna let Mark tell you a little bit about his website, and how it got started maybe his collection a little bit. And you know, I’ve already mentioned some of the benefits that you know, I and a lot of other guys extract from his labors. Mark wants to tell us what’s involved with compiling all those lists and a little bit about your collection.
Well, like I said, I started around 97 I started basement arcade calm. And it started out with listing some of the games I had collected. I started collecting with a with really one machine. And as this auction, excuse me as this hobby tends to do, it’ll suck you in. And the next compiling of games I got was eight from a local operator I ran in so and from there, it’s just blossomed into over 100 machines and I have about 10 pinball machines as well. And they’re scattered throughout my basement and you can see them actually online. If you go to basement arcade calm, I’ve got webcams for the entire basement. I’ve got some at work, there’s webcams for my office at work as well. And once you start compiling these things, like I said, I got a lot of them at auctions. So I thought after my first or second auction, I realized that the community was missing a compiling of data from all these shows. So I my friend and I actually our Warner of pins and vids comm started compiling data, he would do all the pinball machine prices and I did all the video prices. And over the years Allah has moved on to the GA so he’s no longer with us in this area, so I’ve been doing it basically all myself. So yeah, basement arcade calm, you can get all the prices for a tri state area more or less
appreciated mark, that pretty much sums it up for what Mark does. You know, even if you don’t live in the Maryland DC, New Jersey area, it’s still good guideline prices vary nationwide. You know, we all go through cycles, the the home game room craze is over and all those machines are being pitched for poker tables. And when a poker craze dies, you know who knows what’s gonna pick up then but it has its ups and downs prices go up and down. Don’t get into it for an investment, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Some games you might buy for 1000 might be worth 500 The next year, other games you bought 500 might be worth 1000 best your breakeven. But if you’re like us, you won’t get into these profiteering thing. It’s more of a historical aspect. So that’s gonna wrap it up for this live segment from the 2007 Baltimore auction for retro gaming radio.
This month, we have David Crane, the guy that helped found Activision the guy that developed a pitfall. One of the great early examples of platform gaming goodness and Gary kitchen. The guy that was responsible for Gary kitchens, gamemaker designers pencil, tons of other stuff that you obviously know and love. Anyway, David and Gary, were really cool this year. Another they’re not cool other years, but this year was kind of different. It was more of them. I don’t know a family event in classic Gaming Expo this last year. And it was kind of weird. You know, it’s like you start seeing the same faces at the convention you start. I don’t know. It was weird. I just felt Like I was kind of part of the group this year, you know, I guess they’ve seen me enough. And I’m just I don’t know, I just felt like I was part of the group. And it really gave us a better interview, I think. And this is this is a great interview. I mean, you think that all of the time we spent on David Crane and Gary kitchen before we got everything possible, they could say, not true at all. We’ve got some great news stories and great information. And these guys just simply rock. So yes. And we do ask him the hard question about what the hell is up with wiffle ball for the DS. And well, you’ll hear it all on the interview. Here’s David Crane, Gary kitchen from the classic Gaming Expo 2007. All right, this is Shane R.. Monroe with the classic Gaming Expo 2007 in Las Vegas, Nevada. I am here with two legends of the industry, David Crane, and Gary kitchen. If I have to explain to you why they’re so great. Ben, you’re probably listening to the wrong show. You should be listening to my dual screen radio show. Notice my side plug Scott. So these guys, of course, pitfall and Gary kitchens. Game Designer, of course. gamemaker is legendary. Gentlemen, welcome back. It’s great to see you guys. I feel like you’d mentioned before at the alumni dinner. It’s like family now. You know, at first I wanted to get down in worship you guys, like so many other people here. And now that we’ve been together for a few of these, it’s sort of like, hey, David. Thanks, Gary. It’s so cool to be able to just walk up to you guys and be able to do that. So welcome back to the show. And we’re so pleased to have you.
Thank you. You know, the problem with becoming family is familiarity breeds contempt?
Well, there’s definitely something under that line there.
Let’s go back to where we were being worshiped.
honest with you, I still believe that platform gaming wouldn’t exist without pitfall. Right? So anyway, so now, gentlemen, as the folks probably have already heard in the previous shows, and we’re not going to cover all ground, and once again, I’ll plug the CDs by the old archives, CDs, if you want to hear these awesome interviews. I think we got two hours. But David, almost the same. I think with Gary great interviews, Gary got all uptight about something I don’t remember was a 3d I think it was 3d graphics or something that Gary’s went off on a tangent on and he got very Oh, did I actually,
did I say something? I shouldn’t have said, No, no,
no, no, Gary Goldman said something he shouldn’t have said when he named by name, who put the nudie pictures inside of the rescuers. That’s something you don’t say, you are going to get. Alright, you guys are working out for sky works technologies. That’s the correct name. Right. And you guys are focusing on advertising base games. I would like to take a shot at explaining to my mostly literate audience. What is advertising gaming? And how do you do it? So it doesn’t upset people?
Well, what, what we’re really focusing on is what is now called casual games. And Dave and I started the company 12 years ago, to create games that were fun, approachable. didn’t require a 300 page manual, right? You know, and it’s very odd, actually. And funny, because it’s really returning to our roots. Because a lot of the classic games are really casual games, they’re not Grand Theft Auto, or you need
robots to play pitfall
No, and they’re not extremely violent are aimed at a very narrow demographic. Sure, they were very broad appeal, you know, to large, large markets. And when we found at Skywards, we really started doing exactly the same type of games only doing them online, and free. So if they’re free to the consumer, they’re supported by advertising, right? Same way. Television shows what an advertising. So essentially, we put games online, that advertisers buy, advertising in and around. So MasterCard may put signage within our golf game. Sure, or ESPN may have the signage inside a baseball stadium, and the advertising revenue generated from that pays for the development and hosting of the game. So the consumer gets a free fun gaming experience.
Right? And, and in terms of you mentioned that it works like television and advertising these days. There’s so much being worked around with in terms of advertising, the tivos are letting people skip commercials, people are downloading television or watching them online there. There’s a shift sort of they’re trying to struggle to find out how they’re going to support this stuff with bypassing advertisement, how is that crept into what you guys are doing?
Well, essentially, all the data has shown in the last 10 years that people’s time spent watching television is going down. Time spent either playing video games right here that is going up. So the large advertisers are concerned about the dollars being spent on TV because they don’t know they feel like they’re losing their audiences in at the 40. Now, market that’s dropping dramatically. So, in game advertising is, is we’ve been doing it for 12 years. But it’s been recognized in the last couple of years, by a lot of analysts, people in interactive marketing, as the fastest growing media segment for advertising to 18 to 40 year old males is doing inside the game experience. Now, that’s different than going to a page on a website, and having a banner ad below the game. Because we all know everybody ignores banner ads, you can even block them with software, right? We put the advertising right in the game experience. So if you’re playing one of our stock car racing games, there’s signage as you go around the track. Sure, that makes good sense. Yeah, if you’re playing Dave’s billiard game, there’s a logo on the felt. And there’s a logo on the hanging lamp over the table, right. And that isn’t really a new idea. It’s exactly the same reason why brands are inside Donald Trump’s TV show shown and just being in the commercials, you’ve got to be in the entertainment so that people can
bypass. But now Gary’s explaining it from the standpoint of the advertiser and others. This is why the advertiser is interested in this. The second part of your question was, how do you deal with the consumer not liking advertising? Or what Right,
exactly exactly right.
And there’s a couple answers to that one, we find that
people who get
the game for free, are actually perfectly happy to have advertising and they directly recognize it, maybe because they watch television their entire lives, of course, that they’re getting something for nothing. And so to have an advertising message, they don’t, it doesn’t bother anyone. In fact, some people have actually found it to be more realistic to be driving through the city and see a billboard that actually has a real company on it instead of one made up for the game, you know,
absolutely. But you gotta you also have the other side where you’re in a world war two simulator, you run around the corner of the shredded building, and there’s a Subway sandwich sign up on the side of the building. Those guys don’t subscribe to that. Right. First of
all, those are the problems that you run into and put advertising and console games, and we don’t do it, of course. Okay, that’s a different business entirely. And we are very careful not to make the game the advertising, obtrusive in any way. Sure to first though your description, your example, would break the fourth wall,
so to speak, all right. Yes.
In our case, we well, you know, if you were doing a television show, right now, there’d be a logo in the lower right hand corner anyway,
right? Of course, yeah. Right. And of course.
So yeah, we put in logos we put in logos. And then as I said, they’re not obtrusive to the gameplay. And in fact, it’s actually a very, very nice relationship for both the player and the advertiser. Because the experience inside a game is much more compelling than a banner ad, or just a logo or whatever you’re in, because your finger
trained to ignore anyway,
because you’re enjoying yourself. Sure. So they’re actually getting a higher quality, advertising impression. And the player is getting a free game of high quality.
The thing I find
really curious about since we talked last time, if Nestle comes to you, and wants a ping pong game, and so you’ve got the Nestle brand on the table, you’ve got maybe on the back of the paddles, right, the place you expect to see it, and Nestle puts it on nestle.com to play. What does nestle.com really getting out of that they’re already at Nestle calm, they’re not really being compelled to go to nestle.com.
Well, are they they’re being compelled to come back. Okay, that’s nestle.com. And you see a site about how candy is made and what the flavors are, right? That’s a one time experience. I’m experienced, if you go play a ping pong game that you like, you may come back, you may tell your friends makes good sense. You know, for example, when BMW was launching the x three SUV, they could have run $700,000 in ads on line that said, click here to learn about the x three SUV. Sure. And what percentage click through would they have gotten pretty small or small. They didn’t do that what they do is spend $700,000 ran a campaign that said, play the x three adventure game. And they got probably 10 times to click for that they would have faced and at the site was a game we created for them where you got to drive the vehicle in a mountainous experience. And it was very cool. And they use it as a way to get people will say cuz again, we’re all content, not just marketing speak.
Great course, of course. So what do you guys think in terms of what they call streaming ads? That’s the other thing that it kind of rubs people funny. And again, maybe this is only limited to the console stuff. Maybe that’s nothing that you guys have to worry about. Have you been approached by an advertiser to make a game where they can shift the advertising in the game whenever they feel like it?
Yeah, we do dynamic. We call it dynamic engine advertising. We have that technology. We can Put a game up online and serve the advertising into it with a standard ad server. So that from day to day, week to week, all the elements inside the game even down to the body in a car changing, or the announcer in the baseball stadium saying, you know, welcome to lifesavers, you know, baseball homerun Derby that could change next week to welcome the Ford homerun Derby, we can change any branding element in the game dynamically. But it’s not so much that an advertiser would want to change their branding, it’s more about making it more like television, where advertisers can buy a certain amount of impressions for a certain period of time, right? targeted to a certain demographic.
And it makes no difference to the player, whether we take the code back into the lab and change the art and change the music and change the sound effects and change the voiceover and then put it back online, or whether we make it so it’s capable to feed that in from a server.
I guess, game player doesn’t know. I mean, they just know I played this cool game. And you know, Fox Sports was advertising and come back in two weeks, maybe coke. And what it does for us and for the advertiser is it allows us to measure how many times the game was played, how many impressions they got, it allows us to target the advertising co can come to us and say, I want to own all your basketball games during March Madness, right. But I only wanted from seven at night to midnight. And I only want to target 18 to 40 year old males. And you guys
can do that we can do all that. Yes, that’s very impressive, actually, because
we’ve connected the games into the standard ad serving technology. Online. Gotcha is very sophisticated. It’s been built over many, many years. And it has all those capabilities. So
do you get a piece of that when I as an advertiser, I have you guys make me a game. I’m the company Nestle. And you make the game for me. And I want to be able to ship these advertisements. When I want to ship them, do I come to you? Or can I log on to a web page and upload some new assets? Now
you well you go to your ad agency gotcha. And your ad agency comes to us or work on with us to put the new assets into the rotation.
So it’s not something that end companies, PR person can hop up on a website and take care of you guys.
The answer is they do it exactly the way they buy internet advertising now, right? They go on a website to change their Yahoo campaign, right? They would have to advertise advertising agency go to Yahoo and do a media buy. It’s like that.
Gotcha. Exactly.
Well, and of course, we get a piece because we built built the game out of our own pockets.
And we built this streaming technology.
But then they pay you for them. That’s
how it’s being paid by advertising, by advertising buys. Okay, there are occasions where we’ll do a deal where a company wants a specific game and they want to own it, you know, they want to develop specifically for them. There are all sorts of different deals. But the fact is, if you’re a game player and you’d like playing class, they’re casual games, right online, is the advertiser that’s paying for the next one.
Gotcha. So maybe I totally misunderstood or don’t remember probably from the last time now it’s it’s two
different business. It’s
two, there’s two models that you guys
may come to us and say, I want game around the all star game. And like century 21, homework therapy to see whether, you know, the official real estate company, Major League Baseball, so we licensed for one month for them on their website, a Home Run Derby, put all their branding in it, yada yada, it’s done. Right? That’s different. That’s kind of that’s our licensing model. Our media model is that we deploy games on across the internet. And the first big deployment on a new model is the ESPN arcade. within their ESPN, Salesforce sells advertising. And it gets streamed dynamically into the games. And the advertisers pay for those impressions. The way they buy TV the way they buy TV, right, and then we share revenue with ESPN. So ESPN is almost like the television affiliate. Right? We have NBC in New York, they have an affiliate in San Francisco, that affiliate San Francisco brings eyeballs and they share advertising revenue, we do the same thing. And what we’re doing that with other sites as well.
Okay, so let’s say that you brand like the back of the ping pong paddle with an advertiser, right? How do they can they click the paddle? No, we don’t
have click through within the action part of the game.
Okay, breaks the game experience. We won’t do it.
Yeah, that makes complete sense. So I’m wondering, how does advertiser x that has a has a banner the back of a tennis game? Well,
here’s the explanation. You go into a racing game, you drive a Toyota four runner, right? And when it’s done, and it comes up and says, Hey, your score was such and such your time with such and such. Congratulations on Right is an ad that says, click here to schedule a time to try out your own for runner. And so you put it in places where it makes sense, it makes sense and can ruin the game experience.
So if you find in most cases that you have a multiple advertiser scenario, because like at a tennis match, right, you may see 50 advertisers around the around the field there. How would you from an advertising point of view? How would you get Mazda and AMD and all of those guys properly represented in that sort of a situation? We could do it technology wise, but
it’s not? It’s I don’t think it’s the way that advertisers will do it. Right. Advertisers want to own the game experience. Of course, they don’t want to share with other people. And it’ll really dilute the impact if they do. So. We had a couple of test runs we did, where we had like, the Air Force was advertising on the lane of bowling, right, and there was a sign above the pins, where I think Fox DVD was promoting a DVD release. Sure. But that was more a test, a test. I think, in actuality, a brand comes in the brand says, I want to own that game experience when that game comes up. It’s Coca Cola basketball, Coca Cola is in the arena, you know, there’s messaging all around about that. It’s not over the top too much, right? I don’t want to share with an average day in the real world stadium.
You know, there’s only one Stadium, right? So you would have multiple advertisers, right? in the virtual world, there gonna be a million virtual
stadiums, right? So like, everybody has their own stadium. And that’s pretty cool that you can do that. And that’s your thing that’s working extremely well. Despite the outcries advertising and gaming, you’re it’s obviously working very well for you.
Well, we don’t understand and
well, we don’t get an outcry. There is no outcry
really well, we don’t understand why people focus on advertising in console games. I mean, that’s where all the sizzle is, and all the press short, and we think they’re really missing the boat. because number one, if I spent 60 bucks for a game, do I want advertising?
Absolutely not. You don’t want to hear about Burger King’s chicken fries in lunch, or a final bout two or whatever that was
number two, if I’m an advertiser from Procter and Gamble, if I’m Kraft, if I’m Pepsi, to I want to be involved in a very violent game. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Don’t go anywhere near Sure, though.
Right away. That’s
what’s that three quarters,
at least if not more, and number you got racing left,
statistically, what maybe 20% of the console game experiences are online at any point in time? Sure. 80% of the time you play in a console, you’re really not connected, right? connected, you can’t sell the advertising. Exactly. Everyone’s focusing at this at this console experience. The real opportunity friggin advertising is free games online. But one and a half violent. Number two, you’re always connected to the internet. And number three, they are fun, casual game experiences that are free. So people expect that there’s there’s going to be advertising, there’s no push back. No one has ever contacted us. Our games are played a million times a month. I mean, why no one has ever sent us an email, we get 1000s of emails. We’re anybody who said, Why the hell is there an Oreo logo in
the game? Right? off the know, it’s an Oreo
logo in the game. And that allows you to play the game for sure.
Yeah. Yeah. He said everybody’s focusing on the console game. Didn’t you realize that recently, Microsoft just invented casual gaming online. Okay,
yeah, yeah, you can’t forget those little details like that. So just so that because I think a lot of people might look in at you guys, as the devil because you’re This is your actual business is creating games with ads. But I really want to make sure they understand that it’s not the evil console side where you get the subway thing in the middle of World War Two, or, you know, you pay $60 for a game, and you have to be online before the game will start because they want to be able to push you a new set of ad banners. That’s not what you guys are about. And you guys are not happy about intrusive advertisement inside of the experience. You don’t want to alter the
experience. No. And the reason we have a world class was the clients like Procter and Gamble and Kraft and coke and BMW, is because we know how to do it well, where the games are still incredibly engaging, incredibly fun, no consumer pushback. Sure, because we know how not to go over the top and we have to train the brands. I mean, we’ll have a brand manager coming in and say you want to go or you don’t want.
You asked about you know the Candy Company coming in and wanting to put a game on their website. Sure. The first thing that the brand manager says is so how does the candy bar the main character, the game I don’t understand. Can you run? Does he run through the jungle?
And we say, No, don’t want to do that. And they don’t get why. And you can go online and find 1000 advergames. That’s what it’s called advergames that are just nauseatingly stupid, right? Bran being way over the top. Sure. And people being just downright offended. You play at once you go, Oh, my God, we’re
doing here. We’re not surfing on a Hershey bar ever again. No. And that’s, that’s
not what we do. Another real difficult thing about our business is the brands will go to the ad agency and say, I want an advocate. And the ad agency will say, the guy we hired last summer, didn’t he say he wants took a programming class? You know, have him do an advert game, you know, and it does happen. We have Sure. Hundreds of
I have played video games, therefore, I can make video games. But yeah. And more prolific now. Agencies think that and the 21 year old guy in the back room thinks that
yeah, that’s that’s web design, too. Oh, yeah. You know, let’s not hire a web team to do it. Let’s get Bob from accounting, because, you know, he does web stuff at home.
We were literally I was literally talking, talking to a billion dollar pharmaceutical company. And I was talking to like, a senior vice president marketing, because they wanted to do something with games. And he said, Look, I’ll be honest with you. He said, the CEO of a company has a neighbor. Whose son, the games for us
splicer, isn’t it?
No, okay.
You took me off with a something.
How do you answer that?
You leave with a very canned speech that you try to draw a million times
to explain to them as they say, is a great idea. I said next time, you’re going to do one of those TV spots for like clarity. Yeah, the woman running through the column. I’ve seen TV commercials and I have a camcorder. I can shoot that. So I can shoot that for you.
So he means a lot cheaper in a lot cheaper.
What do you mean quality? Of course, I know how to do it.
Yeah, I’m shot video, Disney. I know what I’m doing. Yep.
And what’s ironic is the game player is a, you know, more difficult audience to impress than the TV viewer.
Absolutely. Hardware demanding. Speaking of which, I had another question from a kind of a geek developing point of view, because I have to get back to this. Because of the ubiquitous nature of computers in general, I mean, the, the web isn’t as closed architecture as a 2600, a colecovision. You’ve got endless numbers of Computer Configuration. And while you got a great container, like Shockwave or flash to work that through, you’ve got the underpowered computers that people haven’t upgraded in 17 years and are barely working out IE six. How do you guys do you guys have a minimum testbed, but you can go to the consumer or to your consumers, I should say, and say look, you want to advergames it’s gonna require mp3 for what you want, you want to afford a 3d four by four truck racing game, you’re gonna have your customers are going to have to have this and if they don’t, they’re not going to get the you’re not gonna see what you see here. When I show it to you. How does that work into your model?
Yeah, now that’s critical. It’s critical because we are selling mass media. And you can sit across from the brand manager for Pepsi, and tell them that only 18% of the people will view the game right now, I’ll tell you an anecdote. When we were first working with Pepsi. I was in a meeting. And they said to me, Oh, we’ve done advergames. And I said, Oh, really what you do and they said, Oh, we did this international Pepsi site that had a soccer game on it. 3d soccer game cools anything. And I had seen the game, folks. It was very cool. And I said, really how, how to do tremendous. They said, any year, we had over 25,000, gameplays. And I said, Really? I said, we did a 3d billiards game. For Oreo. I said that eight hours after went live brand manager called me and tell me it had 100,000 plays. The difference was, ours ran on a four year old machine, right. And theirs required a Cray computer. You know, and that’s the stupidity of it. In fact, I found out later that the company that had done the soccer game, had to configure and ship a computer to the brand manager so he could approve the game because it didn’t work on any in their corporate headquarters.
stupidity or
you’re showing your age of Cray computers actually slower than a two right? I
think my pocket watch right now, right? I missed the old days. Don’t you guys can sometimes miss the old days at all. Come on. I mean, I know you we know. It’s, it’s crazy.
And the problem is actually worse than you even know. Let’s say you During the game of Shockwave, right, while Shockwave runs on the browser, which runs on the operating system, right? So you are layer upon layer upon layer away from what the hardware is capable of doing. Absolutely. But we do have a minimum configuration, but we add, it’s typically a five year old machine. People do actually these days upgrade their machines a lot more often than that, just because they’re gonna do their $200
you’re not gonna budget Cheerios, you know, I mean, AMD falls out. Yeah. Now Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And, and it’s sort of an interesting mindset that they’re still, if you guys had not been, I got to give this back to classic gaming, somehow, my view of my listeners will Lynch me. But if you guys think that you would have that same mentality, maybe that maybe those advertisers that made that 3d soccer game, had never tried to crunch a game and afford a 4k cartridge, and maybe they never understood the concept of
No, that’s exactly right. You’re absolutely right. I mean, we did it without thinking about it. We didn’t consciously sit there in 1995 and say, let’s make games online, because it’s just like making VCs games, right. But we naturally move toward that. Because it was extremely challenging, because of the layers between you and the hardware. So you had to write code that was very fast. You had to bleed a lot out of the hardware, you had to make the games really tiny, because they were being downloaded that 28 eight modem, right? Those are all things we did really well back in 1995.
Right, absolutely. 28, eight modem. And we actually pioneered this whole issue of advertising sponsored games, because in 1995, people were afraid to put their credit card on the internet. Absolutely. Still, our internet was free. Internet was free stuff, nothing else in 1995. So we got away, we figured out a way to put free games on there. And the only way it was a three way partnership, right? We do the games, the advertiser pays for it, the user gets them for free three ways. Everybody’s happy.
So you mentioned just before we get back to that piece, you’ve mentioned before that one of the models that you work with is I’m Nissan, I come to you. So I need a truck game. I don’t pay you you make the truck game. I put it on the site, and then we split the ad revenue is that
no, it’s more, it wouldn’t be nice, I’m coming. Okay, it would be ESPN saying, Okay, got a new offering to my advertisers. Because they’re getting more banner ads, they want to be more engaged, they want to be pushed in the right in God. So you supply content to me, I will sell the advertising and the content. And we’ll split the revenue got it feels like that with Yahoo, with Microsoft network with ESPN, Fox, or media sites that use our games as a way to give a more exciting offering to their advertisers.
totally makes sense to me
Makes sense. It’s really about engagement. You know, the new thing in internet advertising. In fact, comScore is the leader in measuring
has said, we’re going to eventually stop measuring pageviews
and start measuring engagement, in terms of when advertiser is when a consumer is involved with an advertising experience. how engaged are they? How long are they involved in it?
Sure,
is the great trend for us, because the average player of our games is in the experience for 10 1112 minutes. So
unlike a banner where the most important thing about a banner is recognizing it so that you don’t inadvertently click on it.
Right, right. Or being able to right click and hit block ad,
right. Right. It’s even worse. Yeah.
So looking, again, back to the programming piece, now that I got the classic gaming piece, I look back to the programming side of it. I’ve only delved a little bit in Flash and Shockwave personally, you know, I’m kind of old school basic kind of guy. You’re like
the kid next door.
I’m the kid next door. But I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. Yeah, you know, I did that soccer game. I didn’t want to tell you that. At first, because I didn’t want to look stupid. But now you know, you blew the cover. Now, but, but, but looking at it. I mean, it’s a very scripted language. You guys are used to working in like in a cycle level. I mean, it’s it’s people don’t have any appreciation what you guys used to do. But do you find that you have unusual limitations in working with because of those abstract layers? lingo? I don’t even really so call it lingo.
Shockwave you.
Do you find inherently view right in line ansem. In that if you need to
know,
more typical is to use tricks that we’ve developed over 30 years of doing this right to simulate higher level functions and math. We we do gravity with three instructions. Rather than, you know, a floating point calculation. Sure, and things like that. Sure. And if you tweak it, nobody can tell that it’s not absolutely perfect.
You’re not writing granturismo you’re writing an app or game for you know, Nissan truck bouncing around. Right?
I mean, Dave in 1996 or 90, maybe 9798 did the bill you’re game that went on a site called Kenny Stan, I remember I wouldn’t looked at it if we talked to you. Yeah. And after we put that game up. I mean, we had people from Macromedia create Shockwave saying, You can’t write a billiards physics and
lingo.
Yeah. And people were just completely shocked that you could do that level of calculation in that language. And we was insane. And I remember Dave, probably six phone calls during that project, call me up and going, what are we doing this can be done. But he figured it out for tricks, technical tricks.
So often you back in the 2600 days, I would I know the math, I’d sit down with a piece of paper and I say, I’ve got to make this happen. And I’m scribbling all these equations. And I said, well, that that would take the whole cartridge. Particle engine and I work on it for hours and hours and hours, and I break it down to like nine instructions.
It’s so amazing. And I mean, that’s
what you have to do. You have to go
in, or do you know of anybody else that was in that classic gaming kind of thing? They’re doing average gaming now?
Not ever gaming. But But I’ll tell you a funny story. Five years ago, I would go to GDC and if you so much as mentioned free online games, grab you by the back of the pants and throw you out into the street. You know, it’s like you mean those those little games? Well, yeah, we the biggest publisher in the business right a meeting with us and told us that we do great game that’s game x. x rated game that that’s their that was their name for you guys. Don’t do real game for the game hats.
Well, now
GDC the one this year you go there and I’m not kidding. It’s 70% of the shows casual games.
Oh, thank you, everybody. God, that’s
crazy about casual games. So they finally have respect,
which they never did.
Well, and you know, it’s about time. I mean, that’s what the DS I think the DS really had a lot to do with that. And the ways we you please write a billiard game for the DS please? Yeah, right. Literally, I swear you there’s a billiard game. I think it’s underground pool. Don’t quote me. you line up your shot. You hit the ball. As soon as you hit the ball. The screen freezes. And it says calculating.
Oh my god, dude.
When you’re doing the break, you can I think was 18 seconds that you waited I you serious? That’s a commercial, commercial. I might even have a window.
And after calculating it just flashes to the finished position.
No, no, no, it actually does the break at that point. Okay.
Well, you remember you remember when you first wrote lingo 10 years ago? Oh, yeah. There was a slight delay when he impacted to when it spread out on the break. Right. He got rid of it. But it was a monster because of all those
balls all colliding with each other. Right? Yeah. So
maybe it was actually bigger than that. And you
know, and then it’s like, as the ball started dropping, the calculation time got less. But literally you in order to have a good game experience, you’d have to be at the APL and know that I can’t do that.
I can assure you that game was not written in assembly language.
I guarantee it was not either. I was thinking about breaking out Atari basic and maybe writing a new one. Yeah.
But it was written like Fortran
Fortran compiler?
Very well, maybe. Yeah. I mean, it looks great. Once the ball started moving, but so please, if you if you if you’re looking for bad projects, we would all appreciate it. If you can get us a good billiard game, that would be good. That would be very sweet. Speaking of which, you guys have Skywards technologies has done some DS publishing. I just want to get this out. We talked about this guy. Leisha, do we need your mic. No, I’m not playing with you guys. The whole wiffle ball thing. It’s a it’s an unpleasant thing. I want to get out there so that they know you’re not responsible. You know, please, I don’t want you guys blame. There’s this problem in
that you are. And we weren’t the publisher, only the developer, okay.
It’s really making
this conversation. Especially when
I’m so sorry,
the publisher,
and when people have to understand is the developer is completely at the mercy of the publisher, publisher comes in and says I wanted this fast. And I want it done for this much money. And you say to them, if you do that, it’s not gonna be any good. We don’t care. And they said we don’t care. Crap in the bank model. And, you know, you say, Well, look, we can only do what we can do, and we give it 110% effort course and put more into it. I guarantee you we lost money and wiffleball we had to put more money into it than was paid. And in the end that you know, that’s what you give the client what they want. Now, I will say and this is an earth Earth shaking announcement here.
Here we go heard first here, right here retrogaming radio.
Probably not gonna be doing any more DS.
Oh, no. Oh, You guys,
because of that very problem,
because you can actually do your own stuff. You guys can publish your own stuff, but it’s just not it’s not where we’re
focused. We’re focused in our lives that
you know, that makes sense. And I’d rather see you guys excel at what you do. And somewhere not. That’s the problem spread out. That’s evil. I’d love to see you guys’s work on the DS, I think you guys can make like the best stuff on the DS.
Yeah, if we if we focused on it, and we had the the publisher support, put your dollars. I mean, we’re just tired of publishers coming to us and saying, let’s see, it’s March, I just got this property, I need the game done by May.
I can’t even I can’t make
it. You know, it’s just insanity in their business. And and it’s it’s not a money making business for us. We went into it with high hopes that we can just write DS titles. But, you know, they it’s just not a money making business. And we’re not comfortable or satisfied with the quality of the end product, not because we can’t do it. Right. But because the economics and the schedules that are put forth to us, don’t allow us to do did you
do March of the Penguins? The same scenario? You know,
March of the Penguins was an ungodly time deadline.
I know. I did. You know what, though? It’s actually fun. It’s a fun game. And of course you have to compare it to lemmings Let me guess Did you were you basically told it had to be lemmings? No, I really feels a lot like
the property.
Property defines that it has to be lemmings. It has to be a bunch of penguins marching down.
Yes. That’s pretty much.
Well, what
are we gonna do with that? Yeah,
I think the game plan was actually very good.
I totally agree. I was I wasn’t actually getting crap about this when I thought it actually turned out very well. And I saw your name on it. I meant to bring it up.
I read a review of it where somebody complained about the edutainment elements. And that was forced by National Geographic. Yeah,
there’s no control. Absolutely. I mean, that’s, that’s even the dumb thing to even bring up. I think everything else seemed to be pretty solid. I mean, the graphics seem solid, and the gameplay
was solid worked on that. Really, man from I imagine, yeah, acolyte, he heat
engine work on that.
That’s really cool. And so even using you and you guys, don’t, you guys can’t draw on that, can you? In other words, if you build a really kick butt platforming engine for a client, so that would really not be nothing stopping you from making a margin. And while you could do March of the Penguins, but you know, my cockroaches version of the cockroaches and
a hell of a good lemmings engine?
Yeah, you gotta hold the rain to go. Right. You know,
there’s actually a lot of cool technology in that the, I mean, how did you like the backgrounds, trying to remember the ice, just the
whole, the whole, everything, everything was very sharp, that not muddy
in, that was a technology, I had to develop that. I’ve never tried it before, and actually came up with some pretty interesting technology to make that happen. In the size of ROM that we had, it should have looked like Mario. Right. Okay. And instead, it looked very organic, real world very, very good.
I feel platforming. Yeah, it did look like the repeated back. And that’s
another good point, which we didn’t bring up is manufacturing costs around limitation. He just, you know, when a client comes in and says, You know, I want the greatest game ever, but only use format.
One question on that, when, if you guys know the answer is, it’s not that big of a difference between a four Meg and eight Meg game in terms of,
if it’s 70 cents,
and you’re gonna do 500,000 units, then that’s $350,000 worth it? Well, more than that there’s
two businesses in all consoles. And that’s the real front end, where you’re paying $20 million development, you have this huge license, you’ve got some movie star, you know, you’ve got put all this stuff together, right? And you’re selling it at 80 bucks, right? And then there’s the other business, which is a discount business. In other words, a lot of those products came from publishers who said, Look, we’re not gonna sell this thing for more 1995 ever even brand new, right? Okay, now, how’s that? 70 cents look to you? Exactly, because
the margins are so thin, right? Because they have to kick back to the console manufacturer. So they, they, everybody wants everything. We want it just really fast and want it really good. Well, I’m really cheap. We don’t pay any money. I only want manufacturing me six cents, you know.
And you know the old adage about development good, faster, cheap. Choose any two.
That’s actually very funny. I didn’t I had not heard that. The answer. Pick two. That’s good. That’s good. Yeah, I thought I wish I’d brought my March of the Penguins with me. I would have had you sign. I just blew that one off. But that’s very cool. Maybe I can catch you next year on. It’s very cool.
I mean, some trivia on that. Dan kitchen laid out a level
Really? Yeah,
I laid out one level. You laid out one or two levels after doing all the game technology. Bob Smith did all the underneath technology. And we had a whole team.
That’s really I mean, that’s sort of like, it’s kind of like a classic gamer reunion under new eye game. And unfortunately, it was an IP that classic gamers could really care less about, honestly, unfortunately,
as Gary pointed out, you know, we the schedule ends up, we get compressed about the schedule. Sure. And it’s even worse than, you know, we actually come up with a schedule that they can make a game reasonably well in the amount of money they’re willing to pay. I’m sure we can only put so many people on it, so many salaries on it. Sure. And it always takes a month to sign that contract. And then they always want it a month early, because they have to show it to their advertisers. They’ve got to have beta by such and such a date. So March of the Penguins almost killed Bob Smith. I know it almost
right now, right? I mean, he didn’t say to the alumni dinner, but I think that’s what it was, now that I know the truth I’m going to go on.
But for that project. for two and a half months, I got up at eight o’clock in the morning, went to bed at two, I did nothing besides sit at the computer from eight o’clock. Till 2am I get six hours of sleep back in the day the clock for two and a half months, seven days a week. Because that’s the only way to put any quality into the schedule Bob. Bob did about the same way Bob and I were kind of time shifted. So he would finish something I would I would do something I said there’s mentioned problems. I’d send him an email, you know, and he would be working on them while I’m doing other code and
I kind of got a better picture now why you would not want to do DSM it’s just a shame that was obviously a pretty killer team, a killer engine and they got wasted on March of the Penguins, which they say was still kind of a fun game. But see now I’ve got lemmings DS on my homebrew cart, you know, if I want lemmings, I can play lemmings, right, which is unfortunate, but, you know,
it was kind of fun though, making all those the putting all the the personality into the penguins the things that they could do and the jumping and you know, just kind of cute, it’s cute.
I mean, there’s tons of people that you know, would like that. And it’s that’s actually the right market for you guys know how it did? It did find
did it did all right. Yeah, we don’t have exact numbers, but it’s 500,000 something like no idea. No idea. But it did. Okay.
It’s really for a young audience. I have six year olds and they thought it was greatest thing ever to have cute little penguins, and you’re not gonna get a 14 year old plane
now. Now there’s, there’s no bullet proof in that there’s no m&m. See, now there’s your next game, March of the wrappers. And you could probably sell that, you know, you can make them you know, drive buyers whatever,
or massacre of the penguin massacre. Take the engine and modify it a little.
That’s right, make it like postal only with penguin right? By that
the one problem that I had, or one of the many problems with March of the Penguins, but the one that was left unresolved is what do you do? After you’ve gotten the rear most lemming or penguin right through the last puzzle, in essence, and now they’re all just marching to the finish line. In any one of these games, now you just put it down and watch, right? I couldn’t figure out what the heck to do. Well, let
me say that speed up right that you can increase the
speed up. But it’s like, it’s it’s a flaw in the whole game concept. Right is a point at which the game is over. But it’s not yet. The level.
Yeah, the level is complete, but you’ve got to wait for it. Yeah. That’s funny. It’s very interesting. So okay, so what have you guys worked on recently? I always like to ask this to anybody who’s doing current development work. What have you done recently that, man, I’m proud. I mean, obviously, you guys obviously put a lot of effort into whatever you do. You’re quality nuts. And that’s way too rare today. But what is there been something you’ve really had some really good feelings about recently that you’d like to share with us? And then tell us where to go to to play it. Have
you worked on I don’t remember. I don’t remember either.
Well, so you guys, are you asked not in the demo.
I just finished the game two weeks ago.
So I got a notebook this year. I can’t I can’t start or hold everything. Now.
You know, it has to be zelnorm.
Dave, you this killer game. Okay. And it’s, you know, it’s it’s kind of a rare nugget of the game that no one here knows that. It’s a David Crane Rarity named zelnorm zelnorm zelnorm. Yeah. And Dave has said to me that this is probably the most proud he’s ever been in the game. Now what I did is
I called him and I said, Gary, is this what my 30 year career has?
Oh, no. Oh, God. Oh, God. Let’s make sure don’t touch anything. I got we got to get this the first time.
Okay, actually said that. I called him up. I said, how’s it going and the most depressed we’ve ever heard? He said,
Well, I can tell you
is this what my career is? zelnorm is see we have all sorts of clients that come to us for insurance. And believe it or not, we have a number of pharmaceutical clients that we’ve done project for. You know, we put a drug for adult man in a basketball game. You know, I won’t go into any details on that, right? We did a Jeopardy style game for a company that sells like oral health care products, and they used it at a trade show all sorts of these wacky things. Yeah. Well, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world came to us and said, We want to create a game we’re gonna use a trade shows where doctors go right and they’re gonna come up and there’s gonna be a kiosk and his main game and they’re gonna play and it’s gonna promote a new drug called zelnorm. So, it has to be kind of like a space shooter game. Okay, so you know, you look in our catalog in our team and you say well, who has a specialty gaming Lomo they’ve had a had a game that was like gl axions that he created hidden engine was very sexy very cool. When we saw we can use Dave’s blacks in a really cold day and we are having this discussion without wrong project, use Dave’s galactokinase it’s very close we call Dave and tell me like sounds cool. He is my agent. And then we got into it and we started working with the agency on what the game is what zelnorm is and what zelnorm does and Can’t we
just got to be in
the game David’s it’s it’s um, I am so proud of it and words came and described to
me this is a urinary tract infection type drug I’ve got it this
a little farther south diarrhea medicine
ladies gentlemen, the developer of pitfalls. One of the most known and reputed names man in the game industry
right now I was wondering if it was gonna be wanting to increase the volume of the jacket
oh god
okay
we’re good. Just thinking
is to give you a slight he’s gone there were three levels
in the name on its Alan Smithee right the
one of them is
Come on. You guys are killing us. We got to have more is a plant is out there playable right now? No. Okay. Is it going to be you would have to go?
Right down here.
Alright, okay,
let’s get closer. Oh,
oh my god. This is
more serious question. Now what color palette did you work for?
The galaxian portion was actually became very scientific, they had like, there’s this a drug in this be drug in the seasoning that all go together. And that’s how they’d form some sort of an enzyme that you know. So you’re shooting these things and you’re shooting these A’s and these B’s and the C’s, ships and everything. And if you get them all you get to move on and it has this edutainment aspect to that kind of explains the science behind in between each level. It explains that that level wasn’t at that level wasn’t too bad, but that wasn’t enough for the game. So the second level was asteroids with these big round asteroids.
Don’t remind you the old man, the old family vacation Do you know do you guys have asteroids? No, but my dad does.
Get off the toilet someday.
Yes, literally.
I don’t remember what the third level was.
This resolution
there were even four levels. One was a great
fishing Derby.
Fishing Derby.
There was a breakout
where you having to break through to regularity or
becoming a doctor just to play this absolutely.
Is it too late for us?
And then there was there was actually where you’re driving flying the ship and you’re bombing the moon
to the moon
we’re not getting a real product
really a product you can’t make up something that’s good. It has to happen for Dave
they finally said you know I have this little four ology of all my
appointments
with the Alan Smith, the game for you, guys. Oh man,
it’s not available anywhere to play at
least have some screenshots.
The primary use was in a trade show and the doctors would come up and if they played this game, you know, they would be in a drawing or whatever a free drink chitters or free drug, you know, I don’t know. But we also even made it as a CD ROM so that each doctor could carry it home from the convention. So yes, it is out there in the public. Yes,
I write your documents out there somewhere in yellow pages under proctologist when I get back to DC I’m making calls I’m making all the way
firing porting it to the ps3
Xbox right
platform so that
is that I will never forget that phone call that I
claimed was so freakin serious that it needed all that much money Oh
absolutely. I mean going up the we were taking a
little poop nuggets like how the
gray making more brown
black boys clothes photorealistic
isn’t making like nevermind, this is just gonna completely degenerate. You
know, what’s really funny is it was great game. I mean, it was a full galactic, you know, black scene a full asteroids, a breakout. And this this moon suitor. And
always, I mean, all
this kind of a waste because no one other than the doctors and maybe their families and you know, the occasional kid on my face is gonna get to see this thing. Right? Oh, man.
Very funny. So that’s I’m most proud of in the last couple of years.
That’s absolutely great. The poop game The pool is right there. That’s fantastic. If you even list that client. And I mean, you had a client page
is a big, big name client. Man. We don’t list game we do. We list the
client. That’s great.
They love the game. People who played and loved by shirtless oozed with style if you’ll forgive the, if you’ll forgive the broke new ground.
So great.
What about yourself? what’s what’s been running the company? Oh, so you’re, you’re the desk. jockey right now.
The way I do development is if if we have a client come in with a new project, we look at the board of all programmers, and there are no slots empty. Then we go How are we gonna do this one?
time or whatever? on a given day? roughly how many of these projects do you have open just kind of give a global outline of how big you guys in grade six are at the time. That’s
that’s that’s precarious levels of production, pre production testing.
And how much of your stuff is can you know canned engines and stuff you’ve already done versus development?
That’s pretty good. Well, no part of our business is to take a catalogue of video games that we have. And for the the client who doesn’t want to spend a lot of money, branded for them put it on their website, they got a promotion coming up, they want to have a whole web promotion, sending people to their site for the March Madness or whatever. And they’ll use one of our basketball games. Sure, in the actual coding, very little of the code is translated from one game to another,
just you got all the assets, probably tuck on the side and change out and you guys are done.
That’s the case in in the catalog and the catalog game. But for coding, just really personal choice. I can write this stuff so fast. Sure. Like it’s like typing to an author who writes books, right? It’s just comes right out of the head and into the program. Right? So rather than taking something that was tasked some other way and trying to figure out how do I now take all this and make it work some other way? I just read it again.
5050 between catalogue stuff
and on regional stuff. You’ve still David, you still find pleasure in the word?
I guess I must,
you must because you keep doing it. Yeah, well, the paycheck probably doesn’t hurt. But I
have always said that I must have a very poor memory. As we just demonstrated, I can’t remember what I last
weeks ago,
because the end of the project is a killer. I don’t care what product what kind of video game development you’re doing. The end of the project is killer. I mean, there are people have had nervous breakdowns. And you’re working long hours, you’re fighting with the client who wants this change, and you know better and you have to figure out how to convince them that no, you
don’t want to do that. You know,
and it’s a real hassle. And then you finally get done with it. So now you’re done with it. And used to sit here and think you know, I’m never gonna do another video game of my life.
Right, right.
And about two weeks later, you said I’m ready to start a new project. Yeah. So
you guys are super tight coders old school. How do you ever have to get called in to do remediation on a one Dotto release? Or is it you guys just that tight? In other words you? Because I mean, I don’t know what kind of beta team you guys work with or testers, but you put it in front of 15 million people, they’re probably going to find something the other guys didn’t very,
very rarely we’ve done. We’ve probably released 350 online games
in the last 10 years.
I don’t think there have been five that we ever had to redo because of a bug. Wow, our testing is pretty
good. They catch it, our testing is pretty good. But you can also say that a bug once it’s in a release code is now called a feature.
Right? Exactly. Well, it’s works for Microsoft, why can’t work everybody else? Right? So I mean,
literally every time a client calls and says, Why put the game up and doesn’t work?
something on there?
Right? the HTML code? Oh, yeah, we totally can do that. Right. It’s on your back end, or it’s always something to do with
their it or not, I’m sure they believe you every single time you tell them that. Of course, they rush in right overnight it to fix that up.
It’s always right. So we say Oh, we’ll fix it.
We’ll fix it.
Fixed elements in your code, do this, do
this and you’re done. I always just blame the hardware. Right? That’s the old days.
Yeah, blame the hardware. Well, guys, this has been great. I appreciate you guys stopping by I know you’re on your way out the door. And I know
you’re gonna you’re gonna cut that whole segment on on this album game. That
Oh, yeah, we have to take that out. Because my listeners would hate that. Right. You know, you know, poop and fart jokes do not appeal at all to my listeners, you know,
at all.
But I do appreciate it. You know, this is so great to have you guys here. And I appreciate it. As always, you guys are serious. Here’s what you guys are over in San Mateo.
He’s in California. I’m in New Jersey.
I’ve always been you’ve always been over there. Wow, I didn’t I opened
the East Coast office for activation when I joined. Got it. So we’ve always I’ve always been in northern New Jersey, our offices 10 miles from in that. Wow. Life has always been out in the Bay Area. We just work
together technologies. improvements in technology for communication has to be like just a godsend for you guys.
The first game we developed this guy works was 25. Meg’s of source.
And you had to send that over what fortunately,
it went over a 14 four modem
every night.
Every night when I
build I
started when I went to bed, and it would be done by the time he gets up in the morning.
Well, well,
you know, you can say a lot about AOL. But back then they could restart downloads. Yeah.
Start over.
Start over. They could continue a download. They
are punter somewhere.
Now AOL was able to do that. So yeah, that’s great. 25 Meg’s it took all night. Yeah.
Alright, guys, like you. I appreciate coming in. Once again, we’d love to thank David Crane and Gary kitchen for stopping by with us, giving us so much of their time and, and telling you some of the best stories ever to come out of classic Gaming Expo. They might have actually knocked down Howard Scott Warshaw from having the best story. And I know his stuffs pretty wack. Anyway, thanks again, guys. And listen up on future episodes of retro gaming radio, where we will have more great interviews from the classic Gaming Expo 2007. It’s time once again to do a quick update with the GP 2x, the quirky little Korean handheld, open source little guy that brings main Genesis simulation and yes, emulation. Pretty much all the classic gaming emulation into the palm of your hand running on two double A batteries. Life is good. First off, a lot of people write in all the time they post on the forums, where do you get a GP 2x? Well, you’re not going to go to a store and get one I mean, it’s one of those things where you know, I’m sorry, it’s more of a independent homebrew scene kind of product. So it’s not something that gets a lot of shelf space. However, we have had some good luck and good success with ordering from the GP 2x store. That’s the GP 2x store.com and we’ll have a link to it. You can also get to it off a button off our main page, you know how we like to kind of align ourselves with companies that make good products or do good service. And we’ve had a lot of luck with these guys. So we’ve kind of embraced them as our official gp 2x outlet. So if you’re looking for a GP to extra gb 2x stuff, give them give them a look over give them a holler let them know we sent you. So that’s where you can get one that should straighten that out. So what’s been new, as you may or may not have already seen, there’s a new model of gp 2x called the F 200. What is the f 200? How is it different? Why should you care? One of the major gripes about the GP 2x of course, was the joystick not very responsive. Have some people diagonals showed up a little easy. People said over and over again, God, we’d love to have a D pad on here d pad and make this totally rock. Well, the F 200. heard your please. And it now has a D pad that alone may make you want that model over one of the older ones. also added to the F 200 is a touchscreen. Wow, wonder what who they’re working after right? Who are they looking to become? Well, yes, there’s a touchscreen. And there’s a new version of the firmware to use these, these new items. And I understand that there’s a couple of things that get broken inside this new firmware. So you may want to do just a little bit of research and make sure that the products that you want to use are still compatible with this. Otherwise, it’s the same unit, it’s in a white case instead of a black one. But it’s still all the same internals, the same memory, the same hardware specs, everything insides the same. So don’t you may not need to rush out and put your money down to buy another GBT x if you already have one. So far, I don’t think there’s anything overly compelling that uses the touchscreen yet, of course, the D pads are nice as a nice deal, I could definitely see having one just to have a better D pad. But otherwise, if you’ve already got a GB to x, I think you’re probably pretty much set. The one thing of note that I’d like to point out, this is going to be a little short segment here again, I haven’t had time to research as much as I would have liked.
We do there is a really nice GP to x review. And I’ll give you a link to it. That kind of talks about the insides, the outsides and the sort of things that it will play. It’s really good for the non techie person that just wants to get a nice, you know, 30,000 foot overview of the GP 2x. I’m going to give you that. But the one thing I did want to bring up is that main has sort of exploded between both GP to x and strangely enough, the Sony PlayStation Portable. In fact, the two authors have merged their code bases. So now main for both the GP 2x and the PSP, are actually working off the same code base, which, you know, is a good thing if you’re a PSP owner. And, of course, any sort of progress is good news for the GP 2x. Lots more games sample support was put in I don’t know if I remember talking about that. It’s obviously matured a lot. And if you haven’t taken a look at Main, on the GB 2x in a while, I highly recommend that you do. Anyway, we’ll have more coverage. There’s a few new commercial games out for the GP 2x. We’re going to talk about those next month. In the meantime, check out that review of the GP 2x, head over to gay gp 2x store COMM And check out what they’ve got to offer. They’ve got all the cool stuff, you know, they got the value packs and the docking stations. I don’t know if you’ve seen that or not. Now these docking stations now, but you can plug the GP 2x into it and basically becomes a computer, you can plug a keyboard in a mouse, you know monitor TV, basically, it’s like having a pocket computer with you. Of course, you know, you got to take the keyboard and the mouse and everything else with you. But how cool is that? Right? I mean, that’s, that’s pretty cool. That’s that I haven’t seen that since like the old Commodore cd 32 becomes a computer by plugging the s6 one into it, that sort of thing. So that’s cool stuff. Anyway, that’ll wrap it up pretty much for the GP 2x article. I’m sorry, it’s a little bit short this time. But there’s plenty of other content to keep you happy this month right here on retro gaming radio.
This month, we start a new feature called the live console. This is a combination segment covering Xbox Live, and the Nintendo Wiese Virtual Console. And we’re going to be talking about how you can execute some of the best of the classic games. Right on your modern console. This is a segment this sort of a segment is what a lot of people have asked you know, most people don’t have the space time or energy to collect classic gaming consoles. They don’t have the ability to get Mame up and running. They just want to know how can I play the best of console classic gaming right on their modern hardware. And now that I have both an Xbox 360 and I have a week that I can now offer you a split viewpoint on these two products and offer up some reviews of the products you’ll find there in this month. We’re going to look at the services themselves, how they work, what sort of things you can expect if you’re having yet not dived into these services. And then next month we’re going to start on actual reviews of product that we find there. For the most part when it comes to Xbox Live Arcade. We’re talking about the classics. We’re talking about robotron we’re talking about Miss Pac Man we’re talking about Dig Dug we’re talking about the classics that are put out on Xbox Live Arcade Now that doesn’t mean that Xbox Live Arcade is all about emulating classic video games. It’s also about unique, modern, classic feeling content like Geometry Wars and e4 exit, there’s tons of different products are available on Xbox Live, it’s not my intention to cover those particular products. Unless, of course, they are somehow spawned by classic gaming. For example, we’re going to talk about Pac Man championship edition, that is based on a classic video game that’s been modernized. And I feel that that’s an important item to get out. We’ll probably talk about that on the next show. That to me is almost worthy of buying an Xbox for. And that should give you some hint as to how great I think the game is. When we talk about the Nintendo Virtual Console, we’re talking mostly about console games from the past. And yes, super NAS Genesis, turbo graphics, 16 neogeo games. So they serve very different demographics for one thing, whereas Xbox Live produces more of the arcade versions of the games, the sort of things you’d find in main, the Nintendo we produces more of the old classic Nintendo style console games, you also find in 64 games on there. So while there’s a lot of First Person stuff, I’m sorry, first party stuff. On the Wii, you’ll find things like Super Mario Brothers, of course, you’ll find things like Yo, she’s Island, Mario Kart, etc, etc. You’ll also find Genesis titles, turbo graphics, 16 titles, so they very focused they focus very much on different aspects of classic gaming. That alone may decide which direction you decide to take when it comes to choosing which of these platforms you’d like to embrace, for paying out your points. Now, that brings up another point, no pun intended. Both systems work on a virtual cash system known as points. For those of you who are not in the game yet, or who are considering the game. Let me explain it to you. There’s two schools of thought Nintendo takes one Xbox takes another, the we uses penny per point, when you see a 2000 point card, you’re going to pay $20 for it. However, Microsoft had to make things just a little bit more difficult. They sell their points for 80. It was at $1.20 apiece. Yes, it’s $1.20 a piece if I remember, right, I’d have to do the math again. But in essence, you get a 1600 point card for $20. So when you’re looking at how much you’re spending, it’s important to realize that a 400 point game on Xbox Live is actually $5.08 100 point game is actually $10. So while you look at the it’s really easy to look at a Nintendo virtual console game and say, okay, 500 points $5. You have to use a conversion chart to get it on Xbox Live. Now, why would they do something like that? Well, it’s a classic marketing tactic. The lower you make a number Look, the more likely someone is to buy that’s why gas is never $2.70 a gallon, it’s to 69.9 cents a gallon, or why items aren’t 999 instead of $10. It’s a standard marketing ploy to make products look cheaper, and hence, hopefully you’ll buy more. Yeah, it’s hard to you know, Microsoft’s not doing anything that most people aren’t already doing now, in business. But it’s nice to know that Nintendo took kind of the straighter route and said, okay, five 500 points five bucks. I kind of respect them. Now, the next methodology that you have to look at when it comes to points is how do you get points into your system?
Both offer in game, or should I say in console means of getting the points. It’s depending on how you look at it, it’s a little easier to get points in the weed than it is to get it on Xbox Live because with the way you have a point and click keyboard to type in numbers, you know your credit card numbers, expiration dates, things like that. Whereas on Xbox Live, unfortunately, it’s not quite as easy to do that because you’ve got to you know, use your little D pad to move around to the letters and type things in. However, both offer a retail point of purchase which is by the way, the absolute smartest thing, I guess Xbox did at first so they get the kudos, but it’s, it’s brilliant to be able to go into Walmart and walk out with a 2000 point wi card or a 1600 point. Xbox Live card because it lets people give them as gifts, it lets people, a lot of people are still a little freaked out about the whole, give them your credit card thing. So for a lot of people, that makes good sense. Now neither system stores your credit information. So once you buy a set of points, your information is gone to the world, you get the points in your system. And that’s pretty much it. If you want more points, you either have to input a gajillion number card, which is how the cards work, or you have to put in all your credit card information again. Now, I will tell you right now, on both systems, retail cards are the absolute easiest, fastest way to get points in your system, provided of course you go to the store and buy them. Now chances are likely if you go to Walmart or Target or one of these other major stores, you can buy both point cards right off the shelf, which is cool. Now you’ll also find out that just because it’s a Walmart, it doesn’t mean it’s any cheaper, you might get like a four cent break, it may be 1996 instead of 1999. So you may get a few Point Break a few Penny break, but don’t look for a really good deal. Now,
I will tell you that point cards are often available on eBay for someone to considerably less than what you will pay retail. And as a bonus, if you find the right seller, you can also get your your card code sent you over email called Digital delivery. Now I’ve done this several times, I haven’t been burned yet, which is a great thing. However, I do know that it’s likely that you can be burned, it’s e-bay after all. And you know, when you see something that’s way too good to be true, it’s probably too good to be true. So use a little common sense when you shop folks. I know I’ve managed to rack up quite a few points, Microsoft points by simply bidding at the right time or doing a buy it now is just the right person. So keep that in mind. If you need to shave a few points off, then you can you know a few dollars off of your purchase, you can do that if you’re a savvy, eBay shopper. So let’s move along. So you’ve entered your points into the system. Now you’re ready to buy. Both systems offer a virtual storefront where you go in and you can organize in terms of the way you can organize by systems. Okay, I want to see only NDS games only Super Nintendo games, you can order you can order the information by what’s brand new to the system, what’s the most popular on the Xbox, Live Arcade, you can also do something similar, you can sort by genre, you can look at only classic games, which is kind of what you’ll want to do if you’re listening to the show. And you’re only interested in classic games, the classic coin op games, but they like I said they have other content as well. So they kind of have to group things together. So neither one of them really gets a nod in the interface direction. Of course, the live interface is maybe a little bit more slick than the Nintendo Wii interface, but they’re always improving in in the store has been looking better and better. So how does it work? you browse through you find your product. Now here is where you’re going to want to look at the live stuff over the Wi Fi stuff. Every single game on Xbox Live Arcade has a playable demo, whether it’s a certain amount of time, a certain number of lives, how many levels you get to play. Every game has a demo. And I want to reiterate that one last time. And this is something that, you know, I hate to give Microsoft credit but they did the right thing. Every game has a demo on Xbox Live. You can always try before you buy. And the reason I make such a big point about this. You will and I’m waving my hand gennai style. This does not work on me only money. But if you I’m waving my hand saying you will try every game before you buy them on Xbox Live Arcade. I’m going to tell you why in a minute. On the weed there is no such luck. There’s no such option, you do not get to download a sample of Mario Kart. Now what I will tell you is it’s pretty much exactly the way you remember it in terms of exacting emulation that we takes a nod there’s a couple of N 64 titles like Mario Kart, which may not be completely perfect, but I would say 99% of the Nintendo Wii products are perfectly emulated. They are identical to the way you remember them on the NAS and on the super any as on the turbo graphics etc. That’s not necessarily the case on the Xbox Live Arcade. But it’s a it’s a double edged sword. I’ll tell you why. On the way you get absolute perfect emulation with a couple of minor exceptions, you have perfect emulation it is as you remember it, blocky graphics and on now on Xbox Live, Microsoft has done a little bit of nudging to encourage them. And this is not always the case, to try to somewhat enhance the titles, so that they’re a little more befitting of a $350 console. Now, if you were to download, say, Ms. Pac Man, you will find that Ms. Pac Man is in no way, visually or audibly enhanced for the 360. In fact, you get the you get the borders on the sides, you get a vertical orientation. It’s it’s Miss Pac Man, visually and audible speaking. But there’s no enhanced graphic said there’s no bonus sounds, there’s no extra levels. It’s the way you remember seeing it. Not the way you remember playing. And I’m going to get to that in a minute. But on the we what you see what you saw is what you get. And that’s something that’s kind of nice to know. However, they don’t have a demo, so you can’t prove that to yourself. Go look at it both ways. Now let’s give an example of how Xbox Live Arcade handles enhancements.
Now I’m one of those people that believe that you don’t mess with classic gaming. In terms of how it’s played. You can upgrade the graphics, you can upgrade the sound. But for God’s sakes, don’t monkey with what made the game great to begin with. And that’s the gameplay, you’ll find that if you look at time pilot robotron Frogger. You look at all of these classic titles on Live Arcade, and they all feature an enhanced graphics set gyrus. They feature enhanced graphic enhanced sound, but you can always shut it off and go back to the original. These games are also properly formatted and handled to handle High Definition displays. Something that you may find is a little bit lacking in the week. However, here is the major difference in terms of gameplay between the UI, and Xbox Live Arcade. And this is why you should be thinking about these sorts of things. As I said before, on the week, it’s what you saw is what you get. In other words, you remember playing Super Mario Brothers, you remember that hidden mushroom? You remember the you remember the patterns of every Goomba on that level. It’s exactly the way you remembered it. Nothing has been changed. That however is not the same for Xbox Live Arcade. I will tell you right now that I can identify two games right off the top of my head that will help you better understand and illustrate my point. Miss Pac Man. Now, everybody, well, not everybody. If you’re big into Pac Man, originally the original Pac Man, you remember patterns. There’s patterns you can play on Pac Man, it will take you all the way to the end of the game to level 255 of the whole game craps out. Right? That’s a pattern that you should be able to apply in a perfectly emulated version of Pac Man. Same with Ms. Pac Man, I have a pattern on Ms. Pac Man. That Let me clear about three quarters of the level I haven’t completely perfected it. But I can clear three quarters of the level perfectly with the same pattern all the way up to like the banana. Right. same pattern. Same basic pattern works for all the different levels. Imagine my surprise when I blindly bought Ms. Pac Man and found out not only are the patterns all gone, the ghosts have been made about 100 times smarter. The ghosts actually changed directions on their own. Without any sort of triggering. The Miss Pac Man is a game that I can probably rack up 200,000 points on without really getting the sweat broken off my body. That’s the arcade on Xbox Live Arcade. I have trouble getting 20,000 because that’s how much the ghosts have been upgraded. Now a lot of people going Hey, that’s cool, man. Now I get to now it’s a it’s out. It’s more challenging Miss Pac Man. Well, yeah. If that’s what you want. That’s cool. If what you want is the original Ms. Pac Man game. That’s not what you got. Unfortunately, Miss Pac Man was one of those games that I blindly bought. Not trying the demo first figuring it’s Miss Pac Man. How do you mess that up? Well, I just told you how they mess it up.
Time pilot. Well, many people don’t realize it but time pilot has a couple of little anomalies of its own. Many people were building a time pilot. Remember the concept of shoot hunting or parachute hunting, where you can basically sit and play the first level as long as you want. And hunt for parachutist. In other words, if you can survive the onslaught of these guys Getting the enemies getting faster and shooting more, you’ve been sitting hung parachutes and formations until you’re sick in the head. However, as you may have guessed, this has been shut off on the Xbox Live copy. Once the big bad guy comes out for the level, once the blimp comes out in level one, no more parachutes. Here’s the other thing. If you are a very huge fan of time pilot, and you’ve played a lot, you’ll know that the actual screen of time pilots just a little bit bigger than the screen you see. In other words, if you’re if you have a parachute or on the screen, and you move, if you move in the opposite direction, the parachute just goes just a little bit off the screen. And then you double back towards the parachute as till reappear. So it’s kind of like there’s a couple inches of virtual screen around your actual screen. And that’s something that you’ve learned to accept as fact. That means that between the concept of losing a paratrooper while you take out a formation, knowing that you didn’t get back to the paratrooper, because he’s not all the way off that virtual screen, you can’t make that assumption in this game, because it doesn’t work. There is no virtual screen that really, really, really destroys most of our abilities. Those of us who’ve been playing time pilot a long time, it really destroys your ability to use all of your old strategies. Once again, you may say, hey, that’s cool, I get a more challenging time pilot. But in reality, what you’re getting is a modified time pilot. So that’s the school of thought that’s why I tell you, as I waved my hand, well, you think you’re a Jedi. I waved my hand like that, because you should try every single game before you buy it. Please don’t take advantage of their offer. Download it. Let play the demo. Now, that brings up another point on the Xbox 360, provided you have a hard drive, of course, you can download the demo to the hard drive. If you have a memory card, you can of course download it to the memory card, and play it off of that, obviously, the most desired way is to play it off the hard drive. With the Wi Fi, there is really no option for where you store it, you have to store it in the wheeze main memory. And unfortunately,
you know, you have a limited supply of wi memory. And Microsoft has gone on record recently saying they basically have zero interest in putting out a hard drive for the week, which is very disturbing. In fact, I wrote a letter to them personally saying, you know, I think you guys are kind of screwed in the head. Because of this, this is not a smart move for you guys. They expect us to just erase what we’re not playing and download something we do want to play well, that’s stupid. Not when Microsoft and Xbox Live Arcade have already made this a reality another way, and we all like it. So anyway, that’s beside the point. So you download to the hard drive or in the worst case down to the system memory. Once you’ve downloaded the title that appears in your channel menu on the wheel, or appears on your Xbox Live Arcade settings under your my arcade games. You know, it’s pretty much the same deal from there on how you play the game. The difference is, is once again Microsoft kind of made a good choice. And he they required that something called achievements be put into their games. Now, achievements is sort of a love hate thing either love them or you hate them. I kind of started off in the hate category. But achievements have made me there, bitch. Basically, in every arcade game that you download off of live, there’s a possibility of obtaining somewhere around 200 gamer points and those gamer points add to your main points. And your main gamer points is kind of your score your status on Xbox Live Arcade. And also, they also require that every games support some form of leaderboard. Which means that while you when you play robotron, and you get a great score, it goes up on the worldwide leaderboard. A local leaderboard with you and your friends, is one of those features that kind of put the concept of high score back into video gaming. And as you know, I’m a huge fan of that. I’m a huge fan of playing within my community playing my friends. See what my friends have scored. And believe me the concept of pushing that score and the achievements which we’re going to get to in a minute have really enhanced the game play on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s something that you don’t get with Maine. It’s something you don’t get with Konami’s arcade classics on the DS. It’s something that you really only get on Xbox Live Arcade and I think that’s really important for people to take that into consideration.
Next up is how how does the game handle Any amenities. In other words, the achievements as we’ve already discussed, as well as what is the we offer, maybe in lieu of achievements? Well, achievements are tasks, if you will, for each game. For example, in robotron, you can get certain tasks like, you know, beat level, you know, beat level one beat level five beat level 10 3050 100. So you’ve got some really common tasks. Now, there’s also other tasks that are not usually so easy. And you can tell which companies spend a lot of time coming up with achievements in which ones just shoehorn them in their robotron, one of the tasks is you have to finish the first level, level one, wave one, I should say, without moving, you can fire all you want, but you can’t move for the whole first level. And you you can, you can beat it. You know, it’s kind of tricky, but you can do it. And that gives you you know, 10 gamer points or whatever, five gamer points. So in time pilot, one of them is, reach 2000. What is it 2010, whatever the date is reach that without losing a life, or in Frogger, complete the first level in under 45 seconds. So there’s lots of different achievement based things you can do to earn these points. And I’m telling you that it gets it adds some factor of greed into it, you will play the game differently going for achievement points, and you would say going for a score. So that adds some innate value to the game. And of course, the leaderboards and whatnot. And as well as many games offer cooperative as well as competitive play right online. And that’s kind of cool. I mean, if you are a multiplayer sort of gamer, that definitely gives you the nod on Xbox Live Arcade. Now the we offer something that is that may actually be just a tad bit cool. That almost matches some of the Xbox Live Arcade stuff. It features a save state. Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, yeah, but all emulators have same states? Well, Xbox Live doesn’t have one. If you’re in the middle of a game, the best you can do is pause it. And then you have to go back to it or leave the game. If you’re playing a marathon version of Mike Tyson’s, I’m sorry, Mr. Dream punch out on the week, and you want to play some trauma center second opinion, or you just want to shut the machine off and go do something else. When you leave the game. On the way it keeps a snapshot of exactly where you were, when you return to the game, you get to pick off exactly where you left off. For some people, especially people who are more into solo gaming than in community gaming or multiplayer gaming, that alone is worth a lot to them can’t be discounted. It’s very, very good.
So the pricing, let’s talk a little bit about the pricing, some things make a lot of sense. Some things don’t make a lot of sense. Pricing can be variable. That’s something you should really keep an eye out for. Well, let’s talk about the we first. The we usually goes something like this, any s titles are like 500 points, Super Nintendo titles are like 600 points and 64 titles. neogeo titles, some Genesis titles end up being in the 900 to 1000 point range. 910 bucks. I don’t think I’ve seen one more than 1000 yet, more than 1000 points. That’s still kind of pricey. In fact, you know, Genesis games used to clock in always at 600 points. Now they’re starting to put out 900 point games and I’m sorry, you know, nine, nine bucks for an old Genesis title. Okay, souls rare, so it was an important so it was hard to get ahold of, okay. It’s still nine bucks for Genesis title that has no leaderboards and has no online play that has no achievements, you know? It’s like, Huh, then you go over to Xbox Live Arcade. And you see, almost every arcade game is 400 points or $5. Right the same prices in the s game. And they all had almost all of them have leaderboards and and cooperative play and competitive play online and enhanced graphics. You’re sitting there thinking yourself, well, Annecy arcade version, right. I mean, a lot of us grew up in the arcades. So would you rather have the LTS version of Galligan or would you rather have the arcade version of Galaga for the same price? That’s where you got to kind of look what makes more sense. Now, obviously, the first party Nintendo stuff you’re never going to see on Live Arcade. So you’re gonna pay what they ask and you’re gonna smile like a jackass while you do it. That’s their little niche. And that’s how they’re making money. So look at the price Do the comparisons, right? Don’t just buy Galligan the Wi Fi, because it’s Galaga. If you got an Xbox 360, go look at the Galaga that’s available there. It may, I’m not saying the LTS version, the gallaghers isn’t great. Of course, you can get Galaga. 90 on the week that you cannot get on Xbox 360. And that that’s, that’s a got to have it right there. Galaga, 90, turbo graphics 16 game. So that’s kind of a look at how the two systems work, how you get classic games delivered to you how much they’re going to cost, and how they work. Now one last thing that I do need to discuss is, what’s important is how do you control the games now, it’s easy enough on the Xbox 360, you use the Xbox controller. And for example, in robotron, you use the two analog sticks. For like Ms. Pac Man, you can use the analog stick or the D pad. So you have a couple of different options there. However, on the Wi Fi, there are a few more options, most games will work with the Classic Controller or with the original controller, I should say that we note, you can turn on its side and it becomes a Nintendo NAS gamepad. Beautiful for any s games, all of you old NAS people go man, that’s exactly how I remember playing this even feels right. And for those games that require a little bit more like Super Nintendo games, a lot of times you can play it with the wi modes. And they just map the buttons oddly, or you can use the classic gaming controller that you buy separately, that plugs into the wind mode. So you still have a wireless experience. Or most games also support using a gamecube controller, which you can go down right now and buy for like under 10 bucks at your local GameStop. So you have a lot of different options in how you want to play the game, what’s more comfortable to you. And that is a plus that the weed deserves to have pointed out that you do not get with Xbox Live Arcade. So now that we’ve kind of broken the systems down, we’ve looked at pricing, we looked at controls, we’ve given you a good overview. Now, can I give them a rating? Can I say one’s better than the other? As always, folks, software is king. If you want to play if what you want is Mario, you’re going to do it on the Wii, you’re not going to be playing it, you’re not gonna be playing it on Xbox Live Arcade. If what you want are true arcade classics. For the most part, then you’re going to want to go to Live Arcade. If you like original content, if you like stuff ported from the PC, like hamster ball and Mune storm, and what are some of the other ones that got ported. Anyway, if you’re interested in more in
should I say more modernized homebrew stuff, then you’re gonna want to look at Xbox Live Arcade, I really believe that we were when it comes out, which is going to be sort of an Xbox Live Arcade ish sort of thing. With original content independent developers, I think we’ll start seeing the tables level off a little bit. At this point in time, I have to give the nod. However, to Xbox Live Arcade, they’ve been added a lot longer. They put billions of dollars into figuring out how to make it work the best. And as much as I hate to give the nod to Microsoft over Nintendo, I will say at this moment in time that the Xbox Live Arcade has the edge over the wi Virtual Console. But again, software’s King, it depends on what you want, what you need, how you play it, these are the sorts of things that are going to decide how what’s going to serve you better. Now, if you’re lucky, and you’re a we 60 person, you have access to both you can exploit the best of both worlds. But I’m a realist. I know not everybody can afford one or the other for both. You have to pick one or the other. So if you’re in that position where it’s like do I get a we do I get a 360 what’s going to be best suited to my classic gaming needs. The decision is really yours, not mine. Alright guys, that’s gonna wrap it up for this segment of the live console. Tune in next month where we’re going to actually have reviews, talking about a couple of games on these consoles and how they should appeal to you. Alright, folks, this month’s Bits and Bytes is pretty short and sweet. We don’t have quite as many news articles as we usually do. Um, but we’re going to give it the old college try anyway. Okay, first up we have what has to be an abomination to God and to man. elf bowling the movie? Yes, apparently if you enjoy pain and suffering. If you enjoy horrible flash animation, you too can experience elf bowling the movie can Christmas be spared? When Santa is half with brother kidnaps the elves Santa and super elf Lex team up to save the day based on the enormously popular game This computer is start Sorry. I’m just so flustered. I came to talk right? This beautiful computer graphics animated movie is full of pirates, penguins, and legendary heroes and imagined adventure perfect for the whole family. If anybody’s actually bothered to look at this, I’ve got to have you tell me what it’s like, go up to the forums and sound off. I have to know. I have to know. Okay, next up. We don’t normally talk about we stuff all that much. But just as a warning, Walmart has this horrible, horrible little handheld game that looks exactly like a remote. And I posted pictures of it in the forum, if you haven’t seen it already. Just don’t be duped and buying a $10 thing that looks like a remote for your Wi Fi. And find out it’s a little crappy LCD game. Just that’s just totally, totally amazes me. As I mentioned in the GP 2x segment, I’m not sure where that’ll end up being I finally produce it. There’s a great gp 2x review that talks about what the GP 2x is, what it will run and how well it runs it and it’s very well laid out. It’s a nice looking little site that will tell you exactly what you can expect to play when you buy gp 2x. And it’s one of the best, you know, sort of straightforward things that I’ve seen, so I wanted to make sure I’m pointing that out. Here we have from the games Plaza the top 10 Best Selling console games. Number 10 on the list will run through these will no comment as appropriate. Mario Kart 64 sold 8.4 7 million copies. Eight and a half million copies amazes me. Number nine granturismo two for PlayStation one 8.5 million copies sold. Final Fantasy seven for PlayStation one 9.8 million copies sold. Grant the original granturismo on PlayStation 110 point 5 million copies sold. Grand Theft Auto three PlayStation 211 million sold. That’s number six. Number five is Gran Turismo three on PlayStation two with 11 million. Super Mario 64 number four on the list of 11 million Grand Theft Auto San Andreas on the PlayStation 212 million copies sold at number three Grand Theft Auto Vice City at number two for the PlayStation 213 million copies. And now I have a drumroll please.
The game that just appeared on the Virtual Console this week on Nintendo week. Super Mario Brothers three sold eight to 10 million copies 18 million copies. That just blows my mind. There you have it, folks, the top 10 selling console games of all time. Here’s a link to the Computer History Museum for core back issues. Looks like core was a magazine. It has all sorts of interesting stuff in here. From the looks of it. I haven’t actually had a chance to check this out. But it looks interesting to people like ourselves. I’m trying to poke through here and see if there’s anything that jumps out that I want to talk about specifically. But yeah, it looks kind of interesting. Anyway, the Computer History Museum we featured on here a couple of times on the show, and there’s always good stuff there. There’s plenty to see and do. I’d check it out. Here is another site on Game of sutra history of gaming platforms, the Commodore 64. It has sort of a a six page look. It tells you about the production cycle, the history. Basically everything you’d ever want to know about the Commodore 64 is pretty much well summed up in these six pages. Yeah, I mean, if you’re really interested in learning pretty much everything about the Commodore 64 this is pretty interesting, including things like William Shatner wanting to endorse the product. So it’s it’s an interesting read even if you know a lot about the Commodore 64 I guarantee you you’ll learn something new. I was recommended to take a look at the hsdp fan resource site. And, you know, I like shoot ’em up games. I do. I really do. I mean, I’m more fan of the older stuff like Phoenix and what are some of the other 1943 that sort of thing. But some people like the shoot ’em ups were like every square The screen is covered with at least five or six bullets. Me personally, I like things a little calmer than that. But this some shmups the schmuck fan resource site at schmuck tacular calm will give you a link of course, offers up community a fan base community of shoot ’em up games, you’re likely to find something here that you didn’t know about. And I see a couple of screens for some games that I don’t even know about. And some of these look pretty good. So if you’re into shoot ’em up games, shoot ’em up. fighting games, this is probably what you’re looking for. Shoot ’em up fighter games. Good stuff. Ah, yes, yes, yes. Yes.
Minesweeper the movie Now unlike. Unlike the elf bowling movie, which was not a joke. This is a joke. This is a fan made trailer for Minesweeper. The movie is pretty damn funny. It’s not too badly put together either. I mean, you can tell it’s a tad on the cheesy side. But hey, that’s still pretty funny. So definitely check that out. You’ll like that.
Too funny.
Let’s see.
What do we have next? Yeah.
So much stuff to look at so little time. Here’s an interesting little piece of hardware. I know we have a lot of wood, how should we put it some technically oriented people that listen to the show people actually work with real hardware. They put together real arcade boards, that sort of thing. Here is a something called the key Wiz. Yeah, the key was and probably if you’re in the sort of thing you probably already know about it. But it’s it’s sort of like the AIPAC that you can that you can connect. See, let me give you let me I’m not really a hardware guy. But let me see if I can give you a little synopsis of the write up. It’s it’s basically like you use like a keyboard, you can use a keyboard and different disparate controls inside of a an arcade cam, is that right? Yeah, it’s something to that effect. Let me see if I got some good write up on it here. Yeah. Yeah, let’s see here. This is this is interesting focus why I’m I’m definitely wanting to talk about it. It’s a hardware PS two keyboard emulation device. Have you ever used your keyboard or the piece of software on your PC and said, Man, I wish I could hook up some real controls, like buttons or sticks to these switches under the keys. And then after you tear apart your keyboard, find those switches but a couple of pieces of plastic. So basically, this is how you take and build an interface. Okay, now I’ve got it. I got a handle on this now. I’m so well prepared for this show. Can you tell? It’s basically an interface device that allows you to hook up realistic arcade type controls, build your own controls, and interface it with a PC to put in, say a PC based main cabinet. So there you have it. Yeah, whoo. That was harsh. The pocket tears the pocket tears. I think I’ve talked about this one before. Yeah, this is this is a site dedicated to talking about old handhelds from like the 70s. Like, not like multi cartridge handhelds, but standalone hardware, games. That’s kind of cool. I mean, I’ve talked a lot about like wildfire, pinball and Merlin and a lot of those other things. So definitely, definitely check that out. That’s that’s cool stuff. See here, a couple of sites died. Well, I wasn’t looking about them.
Like that never. Never
happens. Right? Here’s another Condor 64 book, it seems like books on the Commodore 64 are very popular these days. The authors Andrew Fisher. And see, he looks very familiar. Yeah, he writes for retro gamer. I thought he looked familiar. So you’ve probably seen his work before retro gamers a great magazine. I recommend that to everybody. This is the Commodore 64 book 1982 99x. And it tells the whole story. It’s got a whole write up on it. So definitely, definitely check that out. I mean, lots of C 64. Fans listen to the show. I want to be sure that everybody gets an opportunity to skip all of the wealth of information that’s out there on the Commodore 64 one of my favorite machines of all time. Okay, next up See, you guys know what I’m going to put out some sort of a formal announcement, I’m no longer going to accept YouTube content for presentation. If you really want to know why you can find out by going to the forums, I don’t want to discuss it on the air. But YouTube and I are no longer friends and I don’t feel like using my resources to help promote them. So if you have a video you’d like to submit, please check out other sites like mega video Vimeo, some of the other sites to see if they carry before you submit it. I’ll just blank any race YouTube submissions with extreme prejudice. So this will be the last time I discussed anything on YouTube submitted for your approval Sonic the Hedgehog prototype based on the ABC cartoon. Here’s a brief clip featuring an unreleased Sonic game that was produced in the United States by Sega Technical Institute. Yeah, it’s definitely Sonic folks. So it’s very interesting to see how some of the the sonic stuff ended up later on in other games. I don’t know. It’s, it’s interesting. So check out that video. Apparently, there’s some hacked levels for Mario World Super Mario World that can be completed without ever touching the controller. This is a this is interesting. Unfortunately, this also has an embedded YouTube link on it. However, you know, in this case, you’re going to get it anyway. This shows some videos of some levels that have been hacked, that allow the game to be blocked, walked through, without any touching in the controller very interesting. I want to know where people even come up with stuff like that. Then again, I want to know how people figured out how to eat a banana, you know, so I don’t know how people decided that coconuts have something useful in them. I guess if you’re hungry enough that you’ll eat that stuff. Real World racer, this is one of those desktop distractions that I thought was rather worthy of being discussed. We haven’t had a good webtop distraction in a while. This game uses this game uses Google Maps of all things to to choose a route to race on. And you bring up a map and then it actually shows. It’s, it’s funny, I you know what I’m gonna let you guys just go in and play it. It’s kind of funny just to um, just to see how somebody has integrated this very serious tool, you know, a mapping tool and created something entertaining with it. So so check that out. I think that’s an interesting webtop distraction. Let’s see. Yeah, there’s not much left in here, folks. Oh, my goodness. Let’s see, what do we have left? Looks like we have. This is an independent developer site called. Let’s see. Tuna, snacks, S and a x. Tuna snacks. This is a retro portal. A portal I’m dealing with retro gaming looks like it’s pretty well put together looks like it has some decent content. So I would check that out and see if they gave me any notes on this one.
Let’s see.
Now,
I didn’t get any notes on this. That’s interesting.
Huh?
Sometimes I get submitted information and I’ll maybe it was this one. We see my notes right line up here. Yes. two games that I should check out according to this. Chicken invaders and chromosome two. Chicken invaders is funny with good quality graphics. While I haven’t gotten to play either one of these either. Chicken invaders. Alright, let’s take a look at chicken invaders real quick here. We’ll see if the screens I’d say trying now let’s see there’s at least some screenshots on say if it looks funny or not. Oh, yeah. This looks, this looks a lot like a phoenix or one of the other shmups. But with a chicken theme. So now, you know Far be it for me to interfere with poultry and fowl video games. So I will definitely give you a link to that as well. You can check it out and tell me what you think. Well, yeah, it really is a short session. I don’t think we’ve ever had a bits and bytes that are in 15 minutes. But that’s really all I got right now to talk about. Fortunately, we have plenty of other show for you. And do again, I think a lot of the problem with bits and bytes is that we talk so much about this stuff on the message forums that you know, especially by the time I get the shows out these days. Yeah, I know. I know.
Now it’s it’s a long haul for me folks, what can I tell you? It’s, it’s been awfully busy here. Alright, well enough of my excuses. that’ll wrap it up for bits and bytes, folks, I feel terrible the 16 minute bits and bytes. But once we get the show out, I think everybody will be happy. So, tune in next month and bait. Remember, Bits and Bytes come from you, the listener, go to retro gaming radio.com hit the Submit news button. And tell us about cool stuff you find online. That’s, uh, you know, that’s how we come up with this stuff. I don’t have time to go find it myself these days. So you produce it. I’ll talk about it. Tune in next time on retro gaming radio for more bits and bytes. Well, folks, that’s gonna wrap up this episode of retro gaming radio. This is Shane R. Monroe, your host saying until next time, keep it Retro.