SMOKE BOMB! That's right, Diamond Feit is in the room with you and you had no idea until this very second. That's the power of the Ninja, powers I necessarily channeled as host of this podcast about Sega's premier shadowy assassin franchise, Shinobi.
In typical Retronauts fashion, Stuart Gipp, 2025-03-03 12:00:15 +0000 UTC View Post
February 24, 2015: More fun than a moist barrel of fucks
by Diamond Feit
Everyone loves a good fright, right? Whether riding a rollercoaster, sharing ghost stories, or watching a horror movie, I think we all enjoy testing the limits of our comfort zones from time to time. The trick lies in bending but not breaking our tolerance for terror and we each have our own...
2025-03-02 12:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Jeremy: Well, you know how we do. It's a new year (well, new-ish at this point), and that means we take the time to look back across the decades to 30, 40, perhaps even 50 years ago to see what the world of gaming (and the world in general) was like back then. This is a Retronauts East joint, such as Retronauts East exists these days now that all the regulars have been scattered to the winds of other places and, in many cases, conflicting full-time employment. This time around, ...
2025-02-24 12:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Ahoy hoy, listeners! Even if February is the shortest month we refuse to deliver anything less than a full-sized community episode for you, our generous supporters. And look who's visiting the clubhouse this month: Bob Mackey! You know him from such podcasts as "Talking Simpsons," "What a Cartoon," and "Colin Moriarty, I Tread on Thee."
You overstuffed our virtual inbox with comments—particularly in response to last month's community question—giving Bob and I plenty of material to d...
2025-02-23 12:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
At the dawn of the '90s, Maxis had a certified hit on its hands with SimCity: a game that invented a genre, and saw ports to 25 different platforms. So a generation of newly elected mayors-for-life could only ask "What 'snext?" The Bay Area developer tried to expand the Sim brand beyond the context of urban development, but when none of their other releases caught fire, they realized it was time to take another stab at the lightning-in-a-bottle experience known as SimCity. On this episode, jo...
2025-02-21 08:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Jeremy: Not long ago—six episodes, if my math serves me correctly—we delved into the history of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and its impact on video games and pop culture. This time, we cast our net into the adjacent lake and, uh... actually, I'm not sure where this metaphor is going. Probably somewhere with loaves and fishes. Because this week, I've decided to tackle one of the questions I've had tumbling around my skull for more than a quarter-century: What's up with all...
2025-02-17 11:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
February 1985: Cinnamon v. Spice
by Diamond Feit
A recent (as of this writing) dustup about categorizing video games has me thinking about one of the oldest genres in the medium with a name that sounds descriptive but in fact offers precious little information. W...
2025-02-16 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Stuart: Stay with me here. We did the first part of the Golden Axe coverage, right. Then we did the second and final part. And that’s this. Not literally this. These are the words I wrote to tell you about the podcast. The podcast is another thing, with people talking. And you can hear them, and that. Look, surely you get it by now. Even if you haven’t listened to Retronauts before, you must have a basic conceptual awareness of what a podcast is. And even i...
2025-02-10 12:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
February 9, 2010: Welcome Back, Delta
by Diamond Feit
I went through a broad spectrum of fundamental changes in the early 2000s, so much so that my life in 2009 bore absolutely no resemblance to my life in 1999 or even 2004. During this period I found myself slowly drifting away from video games, a shocking statement to make given my current status as a writer an...
2025-02-09 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Jeremy: This is one of those tricky topics where there's a conversion worth having, but it needs to be navigated carefully to avoid a misstep. In this case, the topic is the trend of very lightly armored lady warriors who became almost completely ubiquitous in games from Japan sometime around 1986.
On one side, this discussion runs the risk of becoming a collective leer; on the other, there's a precarious plunge into prim prudishness. I think we managed to ma...
2025-02-07 12:00:13 +0000 UTC View Post
Dear Retronauts listeners, I hope this letter finds you well.
In recent years I've done my best to explore the horror genre more in all its forms, and whenever possible I've channeled that energy into writing my weekly columns and hosting podcasts about horror games. So when Konami invested in a big-budget remake last year of one the company's most famous creations—Silent Hill 2—I knew we needed to talk about it on the program.
However, I also knew that if we're talki...
2025-02-03 12:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
January 30, 1985: There is crying in ice climbing
by Diamond Feit
If there's anything better in this world than experiencing joy, it's sharing that joy with another person. With my work-from-home schedule at odds with the rest of my family, I tend to eat a lot of meals and watch a lot of movies by myself, but that makes those rare occasions where we all get to go...
2025-02-02 12:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Stuart: We did it, gang. By which I mean, all of us. Collectively. We enabled this. We enabled ten hours or so of pure, full-fat Sonic 3 & Knuckles chat. It is, quite frankly, everything I could ever have wanted. I can’t even be modest about it. I won’t! This is good shit, my friends. We did a great game the justice it deserved, and I am proud of it. Thank you for not telling me to vigorously bugger off when it became clear just how forensically detailed we were...
2025-01-27 12:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post
I hope you're ready to kick off Year Three of our monthly community podcast because here's our first celebratory catch-all conversation about what Stuart and I have been playing, what's new, and what you had to say about the show via your comments.
Given that January runs a bit quiet as far as releases and announcements go, that section of the show is on the short side—although I think you'll find I covered the biggest event of January 2025 pretty succinctly via a separate segment I r...
2025-01-26 12:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
2005: A year many say happened two decades ago, this very night. But can the rumors be true? Can the advent of the HD era really be so far in the past? This week on Retronauts, listen in as Bob Mackey, Kevin Bunch, Kat Bailey and 2025-01-24 08:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Jeremy: I mean, it's episode 666. What did you expect?
But even if something devil-themed was inevitable for this particular episode of the show, I hope that you will be pleasantly surprised by our approach here. This is not some low-hanging fruit topic like "coolest devils in video games" [note to self: add "coolest devils in video games to schedule] but rather a carefully researched deep dive into a wide-reaching cultural phenomenon and its direct impact on...
2025-01-20 12:43:26 +0000 UTC View Post
January 15, 2015: He's a box! My boy's a box!
by Diamond Feit
Since the first moment I picked up a crayon and tried to draw the sun, I've always held artists in high regard. It takes real skill to look at a blank page—or an empty screen in modern parlance—and fill it with life. I suppose what I do as a writer qualifies as a form of art, but I don't fore...
2025-01-19 12:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
Kevin: You’re Weak, Get Hungry! A conversation about SNK’s storied Fatal Fury fighting game series (or Garou Densetsu in Japan) is howling its way onto your podcast player of choice. The company is finally publishing a new Fatal Fury after 26 years this April, and that absence is surprising given Fatal Fury’s place in the company’s library during its golden age. This was SNK’s flagship series in the 1990s, when their developers pumped out nine Fatal Fury arcade titles ...
2025-01-13 11:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
January 11, 2005: ¡Un Forastero!
by Diamond Feit
Humanity has yet to come up with an appropriate unit of measure to express the speed at which tastes can change. Movies can open big at the box office but plummet in subsequent weeks, turning a would-be franchise into a flop. TV audiences can abandon a show in a heartbeat, leaving networks puzzled when a one...
2025-01-12 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Jeremy: When patron Jeff Vlasek requested we cover the topic of shopping for video games back in the Before Times*, my ears perked up and I knew that I needed to head up this topic. For you see, friends, I am An Old, a true and genuine Gen Xer who spent his formative years wandering the mean hallways of South Plains Mall, haunting the flip-card-and-tag zone of Toys 'R' Us, and pestering the folks in the Target camera department with weekly phone calls about their latest NES stoc...
2025-01-11 01:39:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Stuart: Happy new year, my friends! Who among us cannot say that they have not experienced the phenomenon captured by Sega’s beef-tastic Golden Axe? I refer of course to sleeping rough beside a roaring fire, beset by mischievous elves that you are first to take your boots to in order to steal their magic power. Yes, we’ve all been there, and no, it’s not a metaphor. It is the commonality of this endeavour which inspired me to go, “Hey, I should do a Golden A...
2025-01-06 12:00:13 +0000 UTC View Post
January 1, 1995: "Sofia Says get on your knees and bark like a dog."
by Diamond Feit
Tell me if this sounds familiar: You've got an assortment of video games in your home or residing in the cloud and even though you have so many you could easily spend the rest of your days playing them, you still look at the latest releases and convince yourself to purchase...
2025-01-05 12:00:07 +0000 UTC View Post
2024: High Hopes
by Diamond Feit
Forgive me for lumping two very different popular beliefs together, but I want to make it clear that I'm neither a religious nor a superstitious person. I grew up in a Jewish household but stopped practicing decades ago in my teens; every year the arrival of Hanukkah comes as a complete surprise. I don't put much faith in fortune ...
2024-12-31 12:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
Jeremy: Good things are worth waiting for! I like to tell myself. And hope that this episode is indeed good, and that it qualifies for "worth waiting for" status. Tomm, Shane, and I discussed the first half of the Metal Gear saga's storyline back in episode 624, I believe, and here just in time for the end of the calendar year we've managed to fulfill our commitment to complete the conversation. Whew.
Is this a comprehensive analysis of the series' plot? Frie...
2024-12-30 12:00:10 +0000 UTC View Post
This past October, Nintendo cut the ribbon on a museum dedicated to their 135-year history of making amusing, well-designed distractions. It sounds like good news, but if you're a fan of the company and not in the Kyoto region, you could be experiencing a near-fatal case of FOMO. Thankfully, four of us found ourselves visiting or perhaps living within Japan in recent months, and now we're ready to report back about the bounty within that nondescript white building. This week on Retronauts, jo...
2024-12-27 08:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Nadia: Ahhh, snow. Soft. Fluffy. Scenic. Smothering. Silencing. Humankind has been at odds with the freezing elements since the beginning of time. There's no escaping winter, not even in our video games! But let's not surrender ourselves to the White Walkers just yet. Join Nadia Oxford, Kat Bailey, and Victor Hunter (all guesting from the Axe of the Blood God RPG podcast!) as they chill (insert sensible titter) and recall the coolest snowy levels in all of retro gaming. They are...
2024-12-23 12:00:13 +0000 UTC View Post
DON'T CALL IT A COMEBACK, I've been here for years—and by "I" I mean me, Diamond Feit, having fully recovered from last month's voice affliction. Don't be surprised if you hear a bit of cracking though; I have a HEARTY laugh in the initial minutes of this podcast and accidentally brush up against my vocal limit.
Stuart Gipp and I are here to wrap up 2024 with a ton of news (thank you Game Awards), a smattering of late releases, and all of your always-timely comments. Be sure to take n...
2024-12-22 12:00:09 +0000 UTC View Post
It's the most mega-ful time of the year-icus! That's right, we've somehow stumbled into the holiday season, which means it's time for the regular trip to the Retronauts Holiday Cabin in Parts Unknown. And since we've covered so many video game-related holiday topics over the last 13 specials, this time around we're doing something a bit different.
Yes, we're circling back to Captain N: The Game Master; it's a cartoon that has nothing to do with Christmas, but one very much designed to h...
2024-12-16 08:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post
December 2004: Huzzah!
by Diamond Feit
Much like two New Yorkers cannot agree what they mean when they say "upstate," we cannot draw a line in t...
2024-12-15 12:00:14 +0000 UTC View Post
Stuart: If you’d like to hear me starstruck and nervous, here’s your chance. Talking to the terrifying Jeremy Parish is scary enough, but I have been a fan of James Rolfe since the beginning and was knocked for six that he even replied in the affirmative to my email, let alone did the show. It’s a short interview by necessity and was easily the most challenging one I’ve held to date—but not because of our James, the nicest chap in the world.
In addition to this n...
2024-12-13 12:00:12 +0000 UTC View Post