Another bonus video upload, continuing the GTV series—which means, yeah, another set of surreal framing sequences surrounding preview and commentary segments on games both familiar and foreign. You really get a sense of how different GTV was from Famimaga Video here. Even though Famimaga hired ultra-nerd Satoshi Tajiri to weigh in on games, GTV feels more sincerely interested in the medium and its history. There's a bonus retrospective segment on Donkey Kong<...
2024-05-15 00:56:52 +0000 UTC
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Another massive monstrosity of a game! NES, please, I am begging for you to go easy on me just this once.
Honestly, I don't really have Manager Brain, so games like Nobunaga's Ambition sorta slide off my grey matter like someone opened up my skull and applied a healthy coating of teflon. So don't look for incisive opinions about this game or cool super-strats. Instead, you'll have to settle for an episode that is mostly talking around the topic... which, admi...
2024-05-08 12:05:43 +0000 UTC
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Hello! If you happen to be a cool Retronauts patreon subscriber, you know that I've been hunting down interesting game related vinyl and cassette releases from the 1980s over the past few years to include in Retronauts Radio episodes. I'm jumping the gun a bit here, since I managed to hunt down one of the more difficult acquisitions on my must-have list—Capcom Game Music Vol. 3 from GMO records. Vol. 1 is pretty easy to come by in any format, and Vol. 2 shows up a lot on casse...
2024-05-07 12:57:30 +0000 UTC
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It looks like the most recent bonus upload (Gametech Video Vol. 1) wasn't watched by a lot of people, which is a shame! Gametech Video is not your typical game magazine material. It features game previews from 1988, sure, but the entire thing is framed by a one-sided conversation/broadcast of a robotic woman named Sophie and some sort of alien bonobo thing that lives in a cave. It's really weird! And interesting! And, in a happy coincidence, this latest volume features a segment on...
2024-05-02 22:58:33 +0000 UTC
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Hello and welcome to May ’24. Here is an episode about Strider. Well, partially. It's also about some legislative and cultural shifts in America and Japan during the first half of the 1980s that had knock-on effects on all media, including video games, and which explain (at least to some degree) what went wrong with this NES cart. Kind of. I don't quite present an airtight case of cause-and-effect, but it's worth examining things like the FTC's deregulatory era and the fallout of t...
2024-05-01 12:39:40 +0000 UTC
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This past month has been a bit challenging for me, and I've been remiss in posting bonus materials for patrons. I'm going to make it up for you in May by posting far more frequently, beginning here with the first of about 12 volumes of another Japanese Famicom-era VHS-based games magazine: Sony's Gametech Video (aka GTV). It's... interesting. There's a guy in a monkey costume and a woman conspicuously patterned after Max Headroom.
But! Since it launc...
2024-04-30 02:59:30 +0000 UTC
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And with this, the Game Boy launch lineup comes to an end—and there's only one more game for the platform due in 1989, so don't expect much more Game Boy material until, uh... looks like 2026? Sorry. That's going to be a bit of a wait. But, on the plus side, that long-delayed Strider video will arrive next week. Please applaud.
2024-04-24 11:33:58 +0000 UTC
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Whew! I managed to pull this episode together with time to spare in the month, despite how disruptive the past six weeks have been. And I had an excuse to play Lady Bug, which will probably never happen again for the remainder of this video project. So that's nice. Sadly, I have at least one other version of Turpin/Turtles to grind through at some point....
2024-04-21 02:03:27 +0000 UTC
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Two things about this episode, which continues our Month of Game Boy Reprises For The American Launch (a title that truly just dances off the tongue):
The opening section is material I held over from the Game Boy overview because I didn't want that video to inflate to more than half an hour, but consider a continuation of the system overview;
Super Mario Land is great, and Baseball is not.
That is all.
Oh, also—I noticed last night that ...
2024-04-17 11:58:35 +0000 UTC
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It did not sit well with me that my attempt to revisit the Game Boy was wrecked by technical failings. That video should have been a milestone video for this documentary project! So—now that I have a replacement audio mixer in hand, I re-recorded the voiceover track and remastered the video from two weeks ago. The audio still isn't perfect as I'm getting a handle on the workings on the new gear, but it's still an improvement. The overall read is better, too. Snappier and more concise, with ...
2024-04-16 21:00:05 +0000 UTC
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The revisited Game Boy Works (U.S.A. Remix) series won't include many single-game episodes, since I've already discussed these early games in the context of their Japanese launch. HOWEVER, the U.S. launch context for Tetris is wholly different from the way it landed in Japan, so it gets a big 'un. You know how it goes.
2024-04-10 11:40:49 +0000 UTC
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Well, I guess this isn't really a bonus video in the usual sense, but... two weeks from today will be the 10th anniversary of my first Game Boy Works (World) upload. Seemed worth marking the occasion.
2024-04-08 00:54:45 +0000 UTC
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Good morning. First, a couple of apologies are in order. I'm sorry that I did not post a bonus video this past weekend, for those who subscribe to such things; I've been dealing with an ongoing family health concern for the past few weeks, and that situation has absolutely wrecked my schedule and made it a struggle for me to simply keep up with work. I only finished this video yesterday, where I try to work a video or two ahead of the Patreon posts. It doesn't help that this is the fourth hal...
2024-04-03 11:46:46 +0000 UTC
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Piping hot from the NES Works oven, it's a freshly rendered mega-sized episode on a game that totally deserves it. I've pooled all of my resources here: Personal experience, tons of reading and research, conversations with some of the dev staff over the years, magazine material, and lots of archival VHS footage. The result—I hope!!—is a video that explains exactly what Dragon Warrior was, where it came from, how it came to America the way it did, and what it led to. I feel like m...
2024-03-28 01:23:03 +0000 UTC
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Hey all, just wanted to let you know that the weekly Wednesday morning (U.S. time) post won't happen until Wednesday evening or Thursday morning. I'm waiting on one last component to arrive, which then needs to be photographed and placed in the video. I actually ordered it a couple of weeks ago, but the person who sold it wasn't paying attention when they packed it, forgot to include the one component I actually needed in the mailing, and had to ship that item out a few days ago. Looks like i...
2024-03-27 12:17:40 +0000 UTC
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The most notable thing about this video is that I accidentally hit the "cinematic" frame rate feature on my camera and made the hosting segments look about 90% classier than before. Otherwise... it's a video about mediocre versions of games that you know better (and which played better) on Famicom. Please... enjoy?
2024-03-22 23:13:04 +0000 UTC
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I hope you don't mind that this episode goes off the rails a little bit toward the end. It's been a long and difficult few months, and this episode is the equivalent of my falling into a fugue state and coming to naked in the middle of a New Mexico convenience store. Wait, no, that would imply I'm running a drug empire here, when in fact Guerrilla War is all about running freedom and casting down evil empires. Or something.
Anyway. Outro aside, this episode is...
2024-03-20 13:22:32 +0000 UTC
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Well... I finished text and layouts on the Metroidvania Works book this weekend. "Metroidvania Works" ended up being a working title only; the book will be called The History Metroidvania: The First Decade. Probably.
Anyway! The book needs to be copy-edited and proofed and revised, so I won't be posting the full thing here until that happens. But I am happy to share the first 10% of the book for you to look through, including the table of contents so you can get a sense of all ...
2024-03-18 14:21:51 +0000 UTC
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I keep telling myself that I need to get my scripts under control. These videos get longer and longer with each passing year. Remember when I was publishing five-minute weekly videos on Game Boy games that no one wanted to hear about? I do! And now, here we are: Despite my reworking my production schedule to keep video lengths manageable by breaking more individual games out into standalone episodes instead of doubling them up (hence the incorrect episode number citation in the host intro), t...
2024-03-13 13:00:18 +0000 UTC
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I've been sitting on this one a while, and the recent passing of Akira Toriyama reminded me that it needs to go live. It's another in the V-Jump video series; this time a document of the 1996 V-Jump Fest live event, in which the magazine showcased a bunch of upcoming releases from a very exciting time in history. Early looks at Final Fantasy VII! Resident Evil 2! Battle Angel Alita! And a lengthy Chrono Trigger anime!
Remember to turn on captions and ...
2024-03-09 15:35:34 +0000 UTC
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This week we have some absolutely mismatched games: Desert Commander and California Games. One is a very serious war game in which you fight against (or even command) the Nazi's Afrika Korps; the other lets you bop seagulls by bouncing a beanbag off your head. Truly, the NES contains multitudes.
2024-03-06 13:20:08 +0000 UTC
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This video is what they did to promote games back before Mega64 existed.
2024-03-04 03:03:57 +0000 UTC
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Hope you like sweet-ass game music and hard-ass difficulty, because The Adventures of Bayou Billy offers both in spades. It's the game so hard it killed my VHS camcorder.
2024-02-28 12:23:50 +0000 UTC
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Well, here we go. I've had to bid farewell to my trusted VHS camcorder, which recently passed a sort of functional point of no return. Maybe it was just sad about all the mooks in the comments section complaining about my "VHS filter." Well, so it goes. I'm afraid you have to look at my mug in crispy 4K from now on. Sorry about that.
On the plus side, please enjoy this video about one of the hardest-to-find video games I've ever come across. I spent literal years looking for Tutankh...
2024-02-25 02:07:57 +0000 UTC
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After last week's utterly enormous Mega Man 2 retrospective, I wanted to dial things down to a more manageable length for this episode and decided to hold on to the backup title (California Games) for another time. But wouldn't you know it, this still ended up being a pretty long and involved video.
I guess I shouldn't complain that we're in the midst of a patch of interesting and generally good releases for NES, though. Do you want Airwolfs? Because tha...
2024-02-21 13:43:14 +0000 UTC
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Hello, friends—your Sunday treat has arrived. This time, it's a high-quality video rip of a Mario Paint tutorial video, which appears have been produced by APE. There's some really interesting stuff in here—extremely high-quality Mario Paint images and music, of course, and some little snippets that almost feel like someone laying the groundwork for WarioWare microgames. Please enjoy, and activate subtitles to enjoy sneaky tips like "guide the mouse over someone else's d...
2024-02-18 15:37:19 +0000 UTC
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If you subscribe to this channel, you probably don't need me to tell you that I love Mega Man 2. And if you somehow didn't know that, this 25-minute video should drive the point home. You don't need me to belabor the point. Enjoy.
2024-02-14 13:53:15 +0000 UTC
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I've covered the short-lived "idol game" phenomenon here with Teddy Boy for Master System. Now here's further evidence! It's the prize tape that fans received for uploading their completed game stats via Disk Writer Kiosk... 15 minutes of candid B-roll of pop singer Miho Nakayama doing... well, not much? Basically just existing. But I guess that was pretty cool for fans, back in the days before celebrity Instagram and TikToks.
2024-02-11 23:31:40 +0000 UTC
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Welcome to the bulk filler aisle of the NES. These games flesh out the library. They were products that probably made their respective publishers more money than they cost to develop and manufacture. They exist so that NES collectors will have to find them to complete their full sets. And they also have to be included in a comprehensive retrospective series like this. So, here you are. A video containing content. It's what the world clamors for.
2024-02-07 13:23:17 +0000 UTC
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Hello! I barely managed to squeeze this in before weekend's end, but here it is. The first of a few episodes of NES Works Gaiden Casio. This episode took quite a bit longer to create than the usual, since it involved creating new assets for a new series, digging into materials for a new console and its history, and upscaling everything to 4K. Oh, right, I produced this episode in 4K. Given the fact that the PV-1000 had 192 lines of vertical resolution, this is a completely ridiculous turn of ...
2024-02-05 01:33:49 +0000 UTC
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