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Retronauts Podcast Thread

krae_man

krae_man

Master of Balan Wonderworld
Member
Oct 25, 2017
9,594
The collecting episode was really good.

Buyee has really impacted Yahoo Japan Auction prices. No more deals. However more stuff is ending up on there as a result of the higher prices from everyone outside of Japan jacking up prices. There's a couple things I want I haven't even seen once, let alone lost an auction for it. I would really like to complete my Koei Pasogo collection because I'm just insane. I still have 4 games to go...I think.

Seeing the exact same listing on ebay that was on Yahoo Japan the month prior at 4X the price and nobody biting is amusing to me as well.

I've also been slowly pairing down my collection over the past 4 years. I was running out of room and so much stuff was just sitting there. It was strange seeing people open up my Duck Tales 2 and Jack Bros carts to check the boards but I totally understand not just taking my word for it.

Some stuff I did better then okay on since I bought it when things were cheaper AND the Canadian Dollar was at par with the US and now it's 25% lower but retro game prices are in US$. There's also some stuff I should have hung on to. I though I was making out like a bandit selling my copy of Rule or Rose and my Gamecube Component cables for $100 each(double what I paid!) man have those shot up a lot recently.
 
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JeremyParish

JeremyParish

Retronaut
Verified
Oct 25, 2017
538
Raleigh, NC
Glad you liked the collecting episode, krae_man. My absolutely favorite Retronauts episodes are hands-down the ones in which we ditch the script and discuss anecdotes about personal experiences. Alas that lived experiences are finite resources – we have to space them out. But they always turn out well, especially now that I've begun using them as a springboard to bring the community's comments into the episodes through the letters section. That arcade memories Retronauts East from a few months back turned out to be especially great thanks to all the listener perspectives we were able to include.
 
quincognito

quincognito

Member
Oct 25, 2017
444
JeremyParish said:
I have to be something of a generalist due to the sheer volume and breadth of the work I do, and the same holds true for Bob… which is why we always try to bring in guests who know a topic to shore up the gaps in our own lived experiences.
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Y'all have a surprisingly deep bench of guests too (though I guess that's what knowing people all over the gaming industry across 15+ years and two coasts will do for you.)

JeremyParish said:
I mean, there were folks in the Chrono fandom who listened to me talk about how Chrono Cross literally changed my life, and how deeply I love it despite its flaws
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wait i never heard this episode when was this
 
Brian McDoogle

Brian McDoogle

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,927
Retronauts is great, but on the other hand, when can my child call in to talk about Sonic? I think that's what is really missing from the modern incarnation of the show.

(I will forever dream of my Sharkey, Shane, Kohler episode on FFVIII)
 
Biggersmaller

Biggersmaller

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
4,966
Minneapolis
I really enjoyed listening to the Ryan Payton and James Howell Metal Gear Solid panel. It's my favorite series and hearing behind the scenes stories about Kojima is always a blast.

My major complaint is it wasn't 4 hours long.
 
JeremyParish

JeremyParish

Retronaut
Verified
Oct 25, 2017
538
Raleigh, NC
Yeah, it was yeeeeears ago. We'll be revisiting Chrono Trigger pretty soon as a corollary to our game-by-game Final Fantasy run. Chrono Cross and RD will probably show up as a companion piece to that one.
 
jarnet87

jarnet87

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Oct 30, 2017
1,612
It's an episode worth revisiting IMO, I really like the section on Radical Dreamers
 
Bigkrev

Bigkrev

Member
Oct 25, 2017
12,305
Mailbag Call for what is shaping up to be an amazing episode with it's cast....
As we mosey into 2018, Ray Barnholt and Jeff Green will be joining Bob and me this weekend to look back at the years 1978, 1988, 1998, and 2008. What major events took place in those years? What games debuted? How did they shape the future of gaming? We'll be exploring both the games of those years as well as some of the history surrounding them, and we'd love to hear your thoughts on their impact and whatever memories you have of those years of your life!
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My memory of 2008 was the Sega Saturn episode of Retronauts being so good it actually convinced me to buy a Saturn. My Dormmate thought I was the stupidest person on the planet. I sold it 1 month later.
 

Deleted member 17210

User-requested account closure
Banned
Oct 27, 2017
11,569
1988 can vary a lot depending on what region(s) release dates are used. Stuff like the Mega Drive launch, Super Mario Bros. 3, NES Ninja Gaiden, Legendary Axe, Alien Crush, etc. were all 1988 in Japan but later in the West. Miracle Warriors and Phantasy Star being the first JRPGs in English was a big deal at the time in 1988 but these were 1987 games in Japan. Some notable 1988 games in Japan like Snatcher and Star Cruiser weren't playable to non-Japanese readers until years later.
 
OP
OP
Dream Machine

Dream Machine

Member
Oct 25, 2017
13,085
Bigkrev said:
Mailbag Call for what is shaping up to be an amazing episode with it's cast....
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Awesome. I always loved those 5 year interval retrospective episodes because they are great fodder for free-form discussion and personal memories, and Ray and Jeff together should be great. It's always a treat to get Jeff's first hand PC gaming and coverage experience.
JeremyParish said:
Yeah, it was yeeeeears ago. We'll be revisiting Chrono Trigger pretty soon as a corollary to our game-by-game Final Fantasy run. Chrono Cross and RD will probably show up as a companion piece to that one.
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Nice, it's been a long time since since those original episodes, so it will be nice to hear your current thoughts on the Chrono-verse along with Bob's. I actually don't even know if the general internet consensus on Trigger is still " LOVE LOVE LOVE, greatest thing ever!" or not.

Also important: how do I defeat Dario?
 
Balbanes

Balbanes

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,213
GiantEnemyCrab said:
When I try to download recent episodes, they are cut off around half length and have "seg1" in the name. Halp!
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I'm listening on Pocketcasts and I'm only getting half episodes as well. It doesn't say "seg1" in the name, but the episode always ends after "I think we should take a break now." Not really sure why, but it's a bummer. Tonight it specifically happened on Ep. 89 Final Fantasy IV, redux, Micro 58 The Zelda Treasure Jingle Quiz (it breaks in the middle for Jeremy to do some ad stuff, but then ends after the ad) and Episode 93: Castlevania's portable legacy.

Edit: Yeah it's happening to all the episodes from that point on. It looks like it started on Episode 89.. everything else before that downloads fine.
 
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Deleted member 2620

User requested account closure
Banned
Oct 25, 2017
4,491
The Hypercard episode was REALLY good, that sounds exactly like the kind of thing I would have messed with if I had grown up in that era.
 
Lombaszko

Lombaszko

Member
Oct 25, 2017
114
Tain said:
The Hypercard episode was REALLY good, that sounds exactly like the kind of thing I would have messed with if I had grown up in that era.
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Same here! I wish I grew up with a Mac. I remember making choose your own adventure games on a TI-82 so I appreciate what Jeremy was saying about making something interesting out of the limitations you are given. Hypercard would have been a good next step.
 
Balbanes

Balbanes

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,213
JeremyParish said:
Episode 89 was our first PodcastOne episode, so it looks like your app doesn't like PC1 for some reason.
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Hmm pocketcasts was by far the most recommended iOS podcast app when I asked on here and on the old place. I wonder why it's not compatible. I hope there is an easy fix because I'm really enjoying your content.
 
Balbanes

Balbanes

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,213
quincognito said:
Been using pocketcasts without issue the whole time so I doubt that's the problem.
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Can you try downloading episode 89 and tell me how long the episode is?

To clarify, after I download the podcast it shows the correct time (let's say 90 minutes) and then when I hit play they 90 minutes turns to like 47 minutes.
 
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Dream Machine

Dream Machine

Member
Oct 25, 2017
13,085
I usually just go to the website to read the episode write up and then click the direct download to play the episode in my phone browser. I'm such a philistine.
 
Goonopher

Goonopher

Member
Oct 27, 2017
325
The advance feed on the apple podcast app hasn't updated in over a week is that okay? Or has this stopped working for me?
 
JeremyParish

JeremyParish

Retronaut
Verified
Oct 25, 2017
538
Raleigh, NC
This week's advance episode was delayed by my three-day travel and recording weekend schedule. I posted a notice to Patreon a few days ago.
 
imbarkus

imbarkus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,645
Pulled down the Hypercard & Myst episode today. I appreciated the angle and what you emphasized, the technical side. Brought back some memories.

Back in '94 I was working in a call center in Greeley, Colorado for a company called Sykes Enterprises, which at the time handled telephone tech support for Apple. It was a crazy environment right at the emergence of a lot of technology that made Myst a thing. I had a coworker who got really into Hypercard and started making training materials with it which moved him up in the company. Me, I was assigned to tech support for the DOS-compatible Power Mac (6100 IIRC)... a weird beast that actually had both a PowerPC and an Intel board in the same case, sharing ports and with a hard switch between the two. Walking Mac users through editing their CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files to play PC games was no joke, and I didn't end up staying with the company or playing with Hypercard much. What i DID play with is Quicktime, which on some level has to be about as vital to Myst as Hypercard was. The in-house Appletalk network had a lot of postage-stamp movie files which blew my mind, and even some early Quicktime VR stuff (took a separate app to view those IIRC).

Even though Cyan with Myst did green-screen its actor to place them in the Hypercard page, quicktime itself didn't yet have alpha channels in movie files. So one of the biggest "tells" in the first release of Myst that you were about to see some animation with a movie file was to see a square of the scene before you shift into a different color space in a square or rectangle shape. The graphic scenes in original Myst were rendered at 640x480 with 256 colors (by todays' standards if you go back to original Myst and not Masterpiece Edition, it looks really pixelated and awful), and greenscreen actors or animation was placed over perfectly-fitting backdrops of the Myst scene background and then rendered out into the final compressed video... often leaving a clear space for the movie within Myst where suddenly a sqauer of scenery would shift into a different color space: maybe with lighter black etc due to the movie compression.

The QT movie BG color distortion was always your clear sign that something was going to move right there. Of course, all this artifacting was cleaned up for the "Masterpiece Edition" version, which is the only version you can really by through digital storefronts now. It's kind of a meaningless detail I remember about the original, that laid bare the behind-the-scenes magic a bit for me, even at the time.

Speaking of the Masterpiece Edition, I replayed it earlier this year and encountered a bug that seems fairly persistent in this version: in the Mechanical Age, there is a puzzle to allow you to rotate the center tower to be able to reach islands in the four cardinal directions around it, where you get glyphs for the four-glyph code to let you return to Myst. No mater how I tried, I could not get the tower to rotate to the South or the East. After googling, I found the problem to be fairly common across versions, so if you run across it, just look up the answer and save yourself the heartache. There's nothing else but the glyphs on those two islands.

I too, never understood the consistent beef against Myst. I suppose its possible people blamed it for the FMV-craze that came about, all those crummy Sega CD games, etc. At the time, it seemed to me that Next Generation magazine was headquarters for the official Myst Haters Club, though I've never had the chance to find out if that came from Chris Charla at the top or someone else there. ;)
 
xir

xir

Member
Oct 27, 2017
12,549
Los Angeles, CA
DorYe.jpg

Got the same pikmin 2 thingy as bob. I don't collect in a completionist sense, but there are things I want.
I had and lost:
Faselei! - NGPC
Polar Rescue - Vectrex
Sin and Punishment - n64

Still have:
Chase the Chuck Wagon (Atari 2600 with a 34 cents price tag on it from goodwill)
Through the looking glass (early Mac game)
Ufouria - Famicom

Conversation piece collecting is fun, I guess?
 
Man God

Man God

Member
Oct 25, 2017
38,300
I had a rental place call me up when I was 12 or so, asking me if I had switched the room of Starfleet Academy SNES for the Spectrum Holobyte Star Trek The Next Generation game. I had not and they believed me.
 
imbarkus

imbarkus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,645
Man God said:
I had a rental place call me up when I was 12 or so, asking me if I had switched the room of Starfleet Academy SNES for the Spectrum Holobyte Star Trek The Next Generation game. I had not and they believed me.
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Rom? As in ripping it out and swapping the shells? In favor of keeping which one?
If anyone does try to replay the Spectrum Trek game, here's a random scan of my map for the maddening catacombs maze...

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...although Deep Space Nine: Crossroads of Time is the secret best classic Star Trek game.
 
Man God

Man God

Member
Oct 25, 2017
38,300
I rented Starfleet Academy, someone else must have after me and switched it for the TNG game.

Damn autocorrect on my phone. I clearly typed ROM and it got changed to room.
 
Carfo

Carfo

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
1,857
I'd kill for an updated chrono cross episode. I know they did know they did one during the 1up days but a new one would be amazing xD. The collection podcast was a great listen too
 
imbarkus

imbarkus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,645
Man God said:
I rented Starfleet Academy, someone else must have after me and switched it for the TNG game.

Damn autocorrect on my phone. I clearly typed ROM and it got changed to room.
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Makes a lot more sense to me now that I pulled down the collector episode. :)

Good ep. "Full set" collection which seems to me a very advanced form of collecting. Despite having a whole bunch of games Ive picked up over the years, I never really focused in on getting a full set of releases for any system. For me, collecting has been more about "securing access" to games for the ever-growing backlog of shame, particularly titles that are not just "hard to find" but actually renowned for being unique or good or at least worth playing in some way. This leads to some weird permutations in the all-digital world, like tracking discussions in the Steam "Removed Games Collectors" group, or checking out the work Shawn is doing over at delistedgames.com and wondering how/if I can help.

In this way I am like you Jeremy, in that I do crazy stuff like rip open the shrinkwrap on stuff like Class of Heroes 2G, to try it out. Until DVD cases, all the way up through the jewel cases, this manifested as an "I don't care about the box" thing, too. This was also possibly because my wife worked in a Blockbuster at the time, and so I was picking up a lot of rental N64 cartridges used, which was a situation in which you were lucky to even get the book. Also, I hated those big, fragile jewel boxes, leading me to put all my Saturn, Sega CD, and Playstation games into sleeves. I kept all the back inserts, but they're folded (!?!) under the books in the sleeves there:

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Second pic: my oldest boxes have got to be some ratty ones for some RCA Studio II games, which was a console I played with my stepbrother in the 70's when it was brand-new! As the generations went on I found myself narrowing my focus by ensuring I was collecting most significant horror titles that were released. Narrowing by genre seems to be something I see around quite a bit. Third pic above is my first import, from just a couple years ago, thanks to Reggie passing on bringing over Fatal Frame 4 to the U.S. Not pictured, Haunting Ground, Rule of Rose, bunch of other stuff... even though I'll never even be even horror genre complete on PS2 unless I can find a copy of the Gregory Horror Picture Show.

And if I did, would I have time left to play it? Lately I have hit a sort of inflection point where I wonder if I will ever get around to playing (and maybe producing videos for) my library. Lately I also hit 46 years of age, or "the back nine" as I've been calling it. My "day job" is successful and is helping me put my kids through school, and is an enjoyable challenge and learning experience in its own right, but it doesn't leave me much time or energy left over to "work nights" on my own projects. I had considered making videos etc as a fun retirement sort of activity, but that's a ways off. There...uh... turned out to be a supply/demand imbalance, in my inadvertent stereotypical role as "YouTube dude in front of a shelf," too. So in that regard I can never compete with the people willing to put their incomes and lives on the line for that work. This is the Limbo I'm in right now, with this shelf of games.

I did feel like I came up some good insight, though, that ties back to Myst, in my most viewed retro game video about Legacy of the Ancients. The latter (earlier released) game was made by twin brothers John & Charles Dougherty, who started with the Questron series of games on C-64. Legacy of the Ancients was an old RPG that featured an ancient "galactic museum" placed on a planet by other-worldly travelers. Inside this museum were various "exhibits," each of which featured a buzzing, single-hued, static-filled windows, through which you could often instantly teleport to some other part of the world, complete with "tourist info" style text. I swear this had to be at least part of the inspiration for brothers Rand and Robyn Miller creating Myst six years later: a game about a otherwordly island with a "galactic museum" on it, that held books that contained buzzing, single-hued, static-filled windows that let you teleport to distant "ages."

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Mister Saturn

Banned
Oct 31, 2017
308
I think I'm almost done with the Metroidvania episodes, it's been a real treat to hear Jeremy needle at Benj for his very specific criteria of what constitutes a metroidvania, as well as the terminology itself. Please never stop doing that!

Also: Jeremy/Bob, any chance that you will be looking into a patreon-alternative for monthly support of retronauts (due to the recent changes)? I've no intention to drop support for retronauts, as you guys and gals have provided so much for so long, but it would be nice to have a more equitable method of patronage, should one be available.
 
JeremyParish

JeremyParish

Retronaut
Verified
Oct 25, 2017
538
Raleigh, NC
I'm sensitive to the disproportionate burden Patreon's idiotic new scheme places on low-tier supporters, and I'm not happy about it. Doesn't seem like we've lost more than a handful of supporters, but I know I'm open to alternate support streams. I'd like to do more research before committing to anything, though. I don't want to have to ride herd on half a dozen different backer formats, so whichever alternative we set up will need to be a definitive choice.
 
bobservo

bobservo

Member
Oct 28, 2017
98
Good Time Island
Unless something disastrous happens, I'd be against moving everything to another platform, mostly because we would lose a LOT of patrons. A crowdfunding campaign is made or broken by its initial momentum, and "we're on Patreon now!" is a much better pitch than "we've moved from Patreon to some other thing!"
 
Dimmle

Dimmle

Member
Oct 25, 2017
312
As someone who was fighting the good fight on the Nintendo Nsider message boards at 13, I want to reassure Bob that he's doing the right thing by dragging these teenage dirtbag "Celda" hating punks. They were fucking miserable at the time and I hope they've found a light in their lives since.
 
Dylan

Dylan

Member
Oct 28, 2017
3,260
Jeremy I'm curious to know how often you consider the fact that, statistically speaking, probably some percentage of your listeners will be tripping balls on hard drugs whilst listening to any given episode?

Also, it would be cool to go back and talk about games and their weird relationships with drugs. From "Winners don't use drugs!" to "N.A.R.C." to "Touch Fuzzy Get Dizzy", there's a lot to unpack there.

Food for thought or something. Keep 'em comin'.

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p.s. Is there any point to suggesting episode themes here or are you guys working from an endless stack of them already? Froinlaven.
 
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