Sorry for the delayed post; my weekend was chaotic, to say the least. We'll be back on schedule starting with the next entry!—Jeremy
May 25, 1995: The World Heroes' battle across time comes to an end
by Diamond Feit
Hello and happy June! Well, we hope it's happy.
At least it's starting well, with a fun and lively episode featuring myself, Bob, and Ray talking about a platform that honestly doesn't get enough respect: The Game Boy Color. Even though it tends to be lumped in with the original Game Boy, there's a lot of interesting history—and a lot of interesting exclusive titles!—to be discussed with GBC. So please enjoy, and... say, have we done a Game Boy Advance episode? I feel like we'...
2020-06-01 13:00:08 +0000 UTC View Post
You'll have to forgive the double intros on this one! As often happens these days, this episode consists of two unrelated segments. But both are good, and feature Retronauts mainstays, talking up classics. First, Diamond Feit joins to talk about Star Trek: The Motion Picture—its place in history, its merit as a film, and the games inspired by it. Then, Nadia Oxford and I talk about the original Mega Man Battle Network, which is alarmingly nearly two decades old now. These ...
2020-05-25 13:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostMay 22, 2000: Rare's spiritual sequel to GoldenEye 007 lives up to its name
by Diamond Feit
"Perfect is the enemy of good" is how I always heard the saying, and while 2020-05-24 16:59:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Hey everyone, happy Friday! I know it's a happy Friday, because gosh darn it, there's a podcast about Etrian Odyssey in your feed. If that doesn't do the trick, I don't know what will.
This is another banked episode recorded in The Before Times, featuring myself, Bob, Jason Wilson and Kat Bailey together in the studio—well, mostly. (Jason was apparently prepping for the current state of things and Skyped in.) It's pretty rare to be able to pull together a four-seater...
2020-05-22 18:06:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Our LucasArts adventure miniseries continues this week as we explore the developer's first (relatively) high-res adventure: 1997's The Curse of Monkey Island. This late-'90s release had a lot going against it: the series creator had left the company years ago, the two guys responsible for most of the previous games' humor and design were busy with other projects, and this third entry in the trilogy went for an art style far more exaggerated than what had come before. And somehow, they didn't ...
2020-05-18 07:00:02 +0000 UTC View PostMay 13, 2005: Star Trek's 39-Year Mission Ends
by Diamond Feit
I don't know how I discovered Star Trek; that memory is too old to be retrieved. It might very well have been a 2020-05-17 14:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Folks, I think this episode may take the cake for longest time between recording and publication. It was put together waaaay back in December of 2018, and it's been sitting around on my hard drive just waiting for a suitable opening in the schedule. That opening is... now. A little lighthearted in-studio camaraderie is just the thing for this creative downtime during which we're unable to record together in person, don't you think? I don't know when I'll be able to record wi...
2020-05-11 13:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostMay 9, 1980: Death comes to Camp Crystal Lake and horror is never the same
by Diamond Feit
In writing these columns and revisiting famous works of the past, I've pointed out before that it isn't necessarily the first instance of a concept that captures the attention of ...
2020-05-10 19:01:30 +0000 UTC View Post
We've dreamed of it for most of the 21st century, and now it's finally here: the long-awaited Final Fantasy VII remake! After the original 1997 release put Square on the map for a mainstream audience, a snazzy makeover for this incredibly important RPG existed as an inevitability. And so—after incredible pressure from fans over the past 20 years—here we are. On this episode, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, Kat Bailey, and Henry Gilbert as the crew examines this ambitious remake to see how...
2020-05-08 07:01:01 +0000 UTC View Post
One week from today marks the 25th anniversary of the U.S. launch of the Sega Saturn. Great system, great library... not the greatest launch. To mark the occasion, and to give the system its due despite the corporate missteps that bogged it down, here's a long-overdue episode: The very first tri-region team up between myself and Retronauts regular contributors Diamond Feit and Stuart Gipp. We all have lots of positive things to say about Saturn (if not about how it was handled outside Japan)â...
2020-05-04 13:00:04 +0000 UTC View PostApril 1990: Smash TV mines the past for BIG MONEY and BIG PRIZES
by Diamond Feit
I often contemplate how so many of the standards we accept in video games are purely arbitrary. Arcade machines had dials and trackballs before jo...
2020-05-04 00:18:30 +0000 UTC View Post
A little word of warning before you listen to this week's episode: The audio quality is not as clean as we normally aim for for the Trackball Games segment. I recorded it at PAX East a couple of months ago, but circumstances meant we didn't have a proper isolated recording space available. The quietest place on hand was a seemingly abandoned hallway on the lower level of a hotel... which turned out not to be THAT quiet once some dude started doing a mic check in the ballroom opposite us. But ...
2020-04-27 11:47:08 +0000 UTC View PostApril 26, 1990: SNK creates NEOGEO, the greatest console ever sold
by Diamond Feit
Just as none of us are immune to propaganda, retro game fans everywhere should be aware that we are likewise not immune to nostalgia. There is a palpable comfort to revisiting old things ...
2020-04-27 02:10:39 +0000 UTC View Post
This week's patron-exclusive episode is exquisitely timed to drop on a highly relevant date! And for once I actually planned this coincidence instead of lucking into it.
Today sees the U.S. launch of the can't-believe-it's-happening Trials of Mana remake, and to mark the occasion we've continued our look at the Mana series by tackling the original Super NES release of the game. I've played through the remake now (which obviously hadn't happened by the ti...
2020-04-24 11:48:20 +0000 UTC View Post
It's time once again for another installment of our LucasArts adventure game series with what could be the only podcast episode ever created about the developer's least beloved (outside of Germany) game. Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders might be the LucasArts adventure that's aged the worst, but it's a fascinating case of a game trapped between the design styles of Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island, and one that decided to take an evolutionary path that ended up being a de...
2020-04-20 07:01:01 +0000 UTC View PostApril 15, 1995: MK3 proves the Kombat Kraze is mortal
by Diamond Feit
It's hard to explain or even understand the speed at which Street Fighter II took over arcades in 1991 and then, within a year, how Mortal Kombat leapt into the foreground and seemed...
2020-04-19 17:29:30 +0000 UTC View Post
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the revised approach I'll be taking to podcast production while our ability to meet and record in person is diminished, and here's the first example of the (hopefully) temporary format: A pair of conversations about two very different games from the mid ’80s. First, I chat with long-time Retronauts blog and social media contributor Stuart Gipp about the Alex Kidd series (the good and the bad of it alike), which is followed by a conversation with D...
2020-04-13 14:00:01 +0000 UTC View Post"Diane, April 8th, 1990. Entering town of Twin Peaks."
by Diamond Feit
"The movie is weird for weird's sake and just doesn't make sense. Everyone who loves it is trying to save face and pretend like they 'get' it."
The above quote is from my very own IMDb...
2020-04-13 02:39:13 +0000 UTC View Post
The long-awaited Final Fantasy VII Remake is finally available! To celebrate, we decided to look back on the last time Square-Enix decided to revisit their 1997 cash cow. 15 years ago, the publisher launched Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, a multimedia project mostly focused on their Japanese audience. Of course, since millions of fans were wondering what happened after the game's ambiguous ending, Square-Enix decided to answer this lingering question with a full-length movie headed up by t...
2020-04-10 07:00:02 +0000 UTC View Post
PAX East was the last event we'll be able to attend for a while, it seems; in fact, we were supposed to have been at Midwest Gaming Classic this past weekend, but that obviously didn't happen. However, the good news is that we managed to preserve the moment—we recorded this year's panel, and the sound quality was arguably the best live taping we've ever produced. Retronauts East regular Benj Edwards and RetroRGB's Bob Neal joined me on stage to look back at the history of physical media and...
2020-04-06 14:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostApril 1, 1995: Kenji Eno makes us all hungry for D
by Diamond Feit
Before we begin, a true story: when I realized I wanted to completely discard my birth name, I initially (lol) tried to treat "D. Feit" as my full name. I still use that version in a lot of places as a m...
2020-04-06 02:24:49 +0000 UTC View Post
Here's a little jolt of normality from a very long time ago. We've teased this episode a few times, but I've been holding on to it until we had published the Super Mario Land episode—and here we are: A look at the New Super Mario Bros. games. Yeah, folks... they're retro now. Sorry, I don't make the rules.—Jeremy
Description: Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Henry Gilbert, and Cole Jones bop in time to the music as they revisit Mario's ugliest (but arguably best!!) a...
2020-03-30 13:00:05 +0000 UTC View PostHi all, Jeremy here to let you know about some changes in the cards for the show—including a new patron tier.
This isn't going to be a huge change, but it's a necessary response to the reality of a world under siege by a pandemic, and the long-term reality of how it's going to affect life in the U.S. If you've been with us for a while, you know that the original goal of launching this Patreon campaign back in 2014 was to make it possible for me to travel to San Francisco (and for Bob ...
2020-03-29 18:48:40 +0000 UTC View PostMarch 23, 2000: SNK Invites Us On a Third Close Encounter (Bring Your Shotgun)
by Diamond Feit
Thanks to their arcade/home hybrid hardware system, the Neo•Geo, SNK became famous in the ’90s for embracing the fighting game boom. The platform was responsible for some ...
2020-03-29 15:00:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Sorry about the slightly belated post today! I ran afoul of a technical error. But here we are, with this week's patron-exclusive podcast—and it's a fun one. We dive into the handheld consoles no one else cares about, the ones that can't support their own full episode.
And it's all worth it, if only to wonder what in God's name "Snake Roy" is supposed to be.
Description: Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, and Steve Lin talk about the handheld consoles that don't deserve their ...
2020-03-27 22:15:49 +0000 UTC View PostNote from Jeremy: Sorry this didn't go up on schedule Sunday! The past week has been a little chaotic, as you may have noticed, but we'll be back on track this coming weekend. Thanks for your patience.
March 1995: Namco Asks, "What If We Made Super Snuff Bros?"
by Diamond Feit
It feels like the 1990s was a booming decade for movies about professional killers. Perhaps the flashpoint was John Woo (
It's time for another entry in our ongoing LucasArts mini-series! This time around, we'll be looking at 1995's Full Throttle: Tim Schafer's first project as a solo director, and also the first LucasArts game to blast beyond the barriers of mere diskettes and ship only in the CD-ROM format. Though Full Throttle's design doesn't exactly hold up 25 years later, it stands as a fascinating look at what the multimedia age meant for adventure games, and a path LucasArts explored that ended up being ...
2020-03-23 07:01:00 +0000 UTC View Post
Well. This episode was meant to be a tie-in to this week's release of the TurboGrafx-16 mini. But then that whole "end times" thing started happening, and now the system is delayed until later this year. So instead of serving as a companion piece, this episode is now more of an appetizer.
It's a very good appetizer, however! Ray and Shane join us this week to dig into the history and legacy of the little Hudson/NEC joint venture that could. A good time will be had by all... uh, except t...
2020-03-16 13:12:14 +0000 UTC View PostMarch 8, 1990: Nintendo Writes Itself into eSports History with the Nintendo World Championships
by Diamond Feit
In a lot of ways, I do not envy the children of the 21st century. Kids today are born into a de facto surveillance state, photographed while inside the womb, with their every actions recorded and reported on by well-meaning parents. With an infinite array of media available to them at all times, the days of bonding with classmates over...
2020-03-15 13:33:38 +0000 UTC View Post
