PixlBit

Notes from the show:

I always noticed how Chun-Li was much less banged up than the male Street Fighters when she lost. When Super came out, Cammy looked a lot more roughed-up than Chun-Li, but Fei Long, DeeJay, and T. Hawk all looked like they'd lost a fight with a blender. Game developers were, and to a degree still are, a bit squeamish about the idea of women getting beat up by men. Capcom edited out Roxy and Poison from the SNES version of Final Fight for that reason, and their other solution around the problem of not wanting to beat up on girls in FF, especially for Poison, was just as much of an "oof" moment, especially now. This despite Double Dragon having Linda as an enemy character. In Punch-Out for the Wii, they originally considered Peach for the hidden bonus fighter, decided they didn't want Little Mac smacking the Princess of the Mushroom Kingdom around, and went with Donkey Kong instead. Over on Mortal Kombat, though, Sonya, Kitana, and Mileena got bloodied and beheaded along with everybody else, while Kitana was the bloodiest character the series had seen up to that point. Pretty much every one of her moves made the blood geysers erupt. Johnny Cage wouldn't do his groin punch on them in MKII, though he does now. 

Ninja Gaiden arcade came out before the NES version, but the two version were basically developed alongside one another. Back then, developers tried to add stuff to the NES versions of their games to make up for the lack of graphical fidelity, in many cases actually improving on the arcade games. The best-known example is Punch-Out!!, which was an interesting novelty arcade game that tried to give you a first-person view with a wire-frame boxer. Since that wasn't feasible for the NES, they gave the NES version a story line, new boxers, Mike Tyson, and their replacement for the wire-frame contender was Little Mac. When they had the technology to replicate the arcade games on the SNES, Super Punch-Out sold far less than the NES Punch-Out. There's a reason why the Wii game took its cues from the NES rather than the SNES. The most dramatic difference was Bionic Commando, which was one of the best-loved NES games of all time and a short, completely busted mess in the arcades.

Oh, man, i thought I was the only one who didn't worship Rare during the N64/PS1 days. Most of their games were prettier versions of stuff Nintendo already did, and they didn't have lot of of unique ideas for gameplay (save for maybe Blast Corps), so they relied on collectathons to pad out their games. I'd have happily traded Rare off for Square, Capcom, Namco, or even just Mother 3 N64, provided Nintendo were actually willing to localize it. I just wanted an RPG that was more competent than Quest 64.

I will eventually get a PS5, but so far I'm not too excited about next-gen systems (I'm not a fan of either Xbox or Microsoft as a whole and havent owned an Xbox following my brief stint as a 360 owner.) Hopefully by the time Final Fantasy XV drops, Sony will have gotten the PS5's supply issues sorted out. Right now, though, I'm having too much fun with the Switch. I'm honestly more interested in seeing what Nintendo does next than I am in the PS5 or XSX/S.

I actually picked up Sega Genesis Classics for the Switch. I was a SNES boy, so a lot of these games other than Sonic are new to me. Right now I'm mostly playing Phantasy Star IV (almost finished it) and Shining Force II. These were hidden gems that got overshadowed by the SNES greats and by Lunar and Lunar 2. 

The last educational game I remember playing was a game called Beginning Grammar that was released for the TI-99/4A, almost 40 years ago (good God.) Kind of amazed this game made it onto the SNES, and I'd never heard of the SNES version before.

I had a school folder that had Mario and Link (designed according to the artwork for the NES game.)

No, this was pirated by my uncle in Arizona. In the case of this game that wasn't a big deal. I'm sure Herr Reiscke and Herr Wiethoff were just happy someone was playing their game. Hopefully they at least got money up front from Atari.

Then, as now, there was rampant piracy, but pirates were based on private dial-up BBSs back then.  Most of my games came on floppies with generic labels hand written in Sharpie. Almost none of them had instructions, which was a bit problematic with games like Temple of Apshai.

The Mario egg decorating kit looks neat. There's so much Nintendo-related merchandise out there now that I wish had been available whwn I was a kid.

The first Legend of Heroes game even got localized for the TurboGrafx-16 CD by Hudson Soft. It's obviously quite rare, but it's out there.

Stage Select: Favorite Game Over Screens

The Game Over sequence in Banjo-Kazooie is definitely one of the best game overs, but I figured you guys would probably talk about it during the podcast and I don't have much to add except that Grunty looks a bit like Posh Spice in the Game Over sequence.

1. Moonfall in Majora's Mask. Doesn't really need much introduction, but I strongly believe that Aonuma's team must have been thinking of the scene in Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor dreams she's at a playground when a nuclear weapon hits downtown L.A, because the last few seconds of MM's bad ending looks an awful lot like that scene, though made slightly more family-friendly. "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?"

2. Ninja Gaiden.  Tecmo literally tries to ransom Ryu Hayabusa for quarters. In the arcade version, he is tied down, with a buzz saw slowly descending towards his chest.  If you don't insert a quarter before the timer runs out, the screen turns red just as the buzz saw reaches him, and you hear Ryu groaning in pain as the screen fades out.

3. When you lose Missile Command, the screen has an explosion that displays the words "The End," rather than game over.  That was a deliberate design choice. The game's lead programmer said working on the game gave him nightmares of nuclear war. While the 2600 version was sanitized to be an alien civilization under attack by another alien race, the arcade version was meant to be a Soviet nuclear attack on the United States. Originally, the cities had name labels on-screen, specifically the names of six cities in Atari's home state of California. Atari removed the names to make the game's objective more personal, to encourage players to see the setting as their own home states and cities. Part of why this was an effective  game over was the fact that you were only delaying the inevitable. In the end, despite your best efforts, your cities, and all human life, were doomed. This sense of futility really comes into play if you run out of antiballistic missiles, at which point you can only watch helplessly as your cities are annihilated. Keep in mind that Missile Command was developed at a time when Cold War tensions were the worst they'd been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. With just five seconds of a flashing octagonal shape on a red background, Missile Command hits home with the point that in an all-out nuclear exchange, everybody loses.

Cage Match:

Two weak games in their series. I'm going to give it to Dante. He could kick Kain's ass. That's Dante's job, after all.

The Trails/Legend of Heroes series is bigger and older than you thought. The first Legend of Heroes game released in 1989 on the PC-Engine CD. In turn, LoH was originally the sixth installment of the Dragon Slayer series, which began in 1983 and includes two NES titles, Faxanadu (based loosely on the second DS game, Xanadu) and Legacy of the Wizard, which was Dragon Slayer IV.

As far as I was concerned, the Game Boy was a technological miracle on the level of the moon landing. My mom was dismayed at how many AA batteries I went through. My birthday present 3 weeks after Christmas when I got the Game Boy was the rechargeable battery back Nintendo made for it. 

Right after Christmas that year, my family flew to Germany by way of Space-A (we actually spent more time at Dover AFB in Delaware than in Germany). My dad was told by the Air Force that the Game Boy would interfere with the navigation of the plane, and I couldn't even bring it with me, so I had to leave it at home. But when we got on the plane, the military flight crew spent the whole flight playing their new Game Boys. I was mad, especially since there wasn't much to do in Dover but hang around the arcade at AAFES, and I didn't have any quarters. My dad actually called the Air Force and was told I could have brought the Game Boy with me, I just couldn't play it on the plane.