065 · SKY KID
New to SHMUPs? Read our guide: How To Enjoy SHMUPs →
The world is at war and heavy action is in the air. You are the Red Baron and your good buddy and sometimes flying partner is Max, another ace pilot. But you have to be more than a flying ace. For more NEStalgia as well as show notes and links check out www.NEStalgiacast.com
- Namco, published by Sunset
- 1985 Arcade, 87 for NES
- first game from Namco to allow two players to play simultaneously.
- Mission is bombing specific targets.
- The players take control of the Sky Kids, "Red Baron" and "Blue Max", which are references to Manfred von Richthofen, the famous World War I flying ace, and the prestigious order Pour le Mérite informally known as Blue Max.
- The "A" button is used to control the plane's machine gun and the "B" button is used to perform a loop.
- Occasionally, performing a loop over a billboard will reveal one of four hidden Namco characters: Pac-Man, Inky, the Special Flag from Rally-X (which, like the Galaxian flagship, has appeared in several other Namco games) or Pooka from Dig Dug.
- Sky Kid Deluxe was released only in Japan in 86
- Ace Combat Infinity went so far as to render fully playable 3D models of four aircraft from the arcade game.
- The PlayStation Portable versions of Ridge Racer, Ridge Racer 2, and Ridge Racer 6 all feature a Sky Kid-themed Fiera car (manufactured by the fictitious "Kamata" - and a parody of the Pontiac Fiero).
- The song "Taiko March" in the game Taiko Drum Master includes excerpts of music from several Namco games, including Sky Kid.
- There was even an online Sky Kid comic
- A medley of various tracks from Sky Kid appears in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. The Red Baron appears as Pac-Man's taunt, "Namco Roulette".
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Sky Kid, can two young pilots ward off a whole invasion?
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. And I'm Sean. I'm Sean. Oh, wow. That was, yeah, I mean, suspense. Yeah, to be honest, I feel like it's just you and me now. Yeah. For the long haul. Right. I mean, two weeks in a row. Yeah. So that says something. I did like how you tried to make it sound like you were going to introduce the next person, but you had said you did your lower octave and I'm Sean.
I also like how the back of this box finally addressed a long time complaint of ours where it's like, are we really expected to be one player against an army? And Sky Kid says, yes, it is up to two young pilots, although that's only available in the two player mode. Two young pilots to ward off a whole invasion. Yeah. Um, at least they're not, they're not just waving, waving it away.
Um, but I still find it very unrealistic. Um, but I also do find it annoying that they just assume I have a friend to play this with because I didn't. And yeah, because we refuse to play these games together. Exactly. Um, maybe one day we'll just do like a multiplayer session. Yeah. And record that and upload it to a YouTube as our only YouTube video. And then, and then, but make it a private link that you have to beg for. Yeah. If you send three emails, um, three emails with, uh, your favorite Pokemon, your favorite, uh, hot sauce and your favorite kind of shrimp. Great. Yeah. Usually there's only one kind of shrimp, but I guess there's three cocktail frozen and
baby. Baby shrimp. Uh, okay. This is a, uh, Namco game. Sky Kid is a Namco game published by sunset, uh, for the NES. This is another 1985 arcade game that then comes to the NES in 87. It's the first game from Namco. This is of course for the arcade version. The first game from Namco to allow two players to play simultaneously. What a breakthrough. But unfortunately, yeah, it's nothing new on the NES. Like I'm great for the arcade times, but by this time in the NES, I mean, even in 85, right, there were games that let you play simultaneously. Pong. Yeah.
That's so true. Um, but then again, in Pong, you were just two white paddles, not necessarily like two planes. It's a content, you know, not it's, it's quantity. Yeah. It really is quantity, uh, instead of quality.
And, um, I don't even know if that makes any sense. It doesn't make any sense. It's like, it's just a two player game. Yeah. It doesn't matter. Anyway, that's that. Um, your mission in sky kid is to bomb specific targets. That's about as vague as it gets, but that's really what you got to do in this game. But what's interesting is, is like, you don't have the bombs right away. You can only shoot at first.
Like in real war. Yeah. You don't go on a plane with the bombs in them. You have to acquire them. Exactly. It's a very complicated thing, but there are planes for bombs and then there are planes for shooters and they meet up, they link up, they send the bombs to the shooting plane. It's a whole thing. If you, if you spend time in the armed forces, you would know, but yeah. Uh, okay. Sean, first impressions. Sky kid go.
My first impression of sky kid was, um, all right, we're, we're about to start a mini cut scene of the plane taking off and then I'll take it from there. Um, so the plane started, started to go down the runway and immediately crashed and fell off of the runway, like into just grass. I think a tree, right? Yeah. The grass. And I was a little taken aback. I was sort of dumbfounded actually that it wanted me to take control immediately. Yeah. Immediately.
You have, you have two seconds to, to, to hold the up button on the D pad and it's always going to be close. Right. And yeah, no matter what you do, like it's not a long runway. It is a runway of a few meters and then you're off. Um, so yeah, then you're up in the air and, um, they, uh, the fighting forces, uh, come out and play and it's, it's actually pretty difficult.
Um, it took me a while to realize that I could also, uh, like speed up a little bit and slow down. So I was getting killed pretty quickly. Uh, my first few attempts, um, you have a weapon that can shoot maybe like 13 feet in front of you. Uh, so you gotta get close, which will put you into dangerous circumstances a lot. And your only real way of, uh, outmaneuvering your opponent is to play these, is to like trigger these canned like air rolls, which depending on what button you're holding will put you in like one side of the screen or the other. It's all very, uh, unwieldy. Yeah. You're, you're kind of doing a, um, like a flip.
You're doing a flip. Um, but you'll end up in very strange areas depending on like what button you press. I found myself in the later stages when I would loop. Yeah. It was just a straight loop into another object and crash. Oh yeah. The later stages? Every stage. The later stages? I'm talking about stage two.
Stage one is actually, I'm going to be honest for me at least, it was a cakewalk. It was like, I'm, I'm learning the game. Like after learning to take off the plane. Yeah. After. Yes. I, everybody will experience that by the way. I kind of feel sorry for the people that are going to play this game after the fact of listening to this episode and they're going to know to take control because to Sean's point, it's just kind of an eyeopening experience.
Kind of like if in super Mario brothers, you know, when you go to like the underground part and Mario actually walks into the warp pipe, like in a cut scene, it's like the equivalent of if instead of that being a cut scene, it was just Mario auto walking off a cliff. And then dying, you know, like you feel like the game is, you know, you're like, oh, is this the origin story of the other planes and why I'm the only plane in this invasion?
But no, that was just you failing to control the runway. But again, like this is a horizontal shmup similar to Gradius, but that's where the. You're going left for some reason. Yeah. I think because in Japan they read in that order. Well, yeah, that hasn't changed every other game. I just I was honestly just bullshit. Like, I don't think that that's the actual reason. Yeah, but I have to explain it somehow. Maybe they were just trying to differentiate themselves, too, is the game that goes to the left. It is confusing that it goes to the left. It does feel a little weird. Yeah. And it was a mirror, though. It feels like you're running away. Yeah. Oh, yeah. This is actually a game about about withdrawal. Yeah. From drugs.
And just like a note, too, I mentioned the Gradius thing just just as a way to get you to understand what type of game it looks like. I mean, at the bare minimum. Yeah. Bare minimum. Just Gradius because you can shoot. Yeah. It's not Gradius because there's no other options. Yeah. Like this game looks like it was made in like Mario paint. Yeah. Even MS paint. Yeah. The original Microsoft paint. Like it looks like that. And that's really not a compliment. No, because like I've seen people do incredible things with Microsoft paint. This is not one of them. No, I the only thing that I think has any sort of.
Satisfaction. The only bit of satisfaction that I get out of this game is when I after you pick up the bomb that was left on the side of the road and you drop it on your target, like just like sort of threading that needle and hitting right in the middle. That feels good. But that happens only once in every level. Yep. And it's a very fleeting moment.
So there isn't much about this game that is unique except for like, you know, manual takeoffs and landings. You do have to land as well. Mm hmm. And also like the just about the bomb for a second is you got to pick that up. Sure. The bomb looks very much like an atomic bomb. Yeah. Like it's like it's little boy or fat man fat boy or whatever they call that thing. And like, it's just weird, you know, like it's just like, are we dropping nukes on particular things? Like, I don't know what the story is. I mean, OK.
The one thing about the bomb, though, is the game becomes a little harder when you have it equipped because the button that used to give you a loop with a can't loop with a bomb attached to you. Exactly. The button that used to be the loop button is now the bomb drop button. So you if you weren't paying attention, you could just have accidentally dropped the bomb on a field of grass, which is not the thing you're supposed to do in this game. It's not the objective. Yep. And but you can also go through an entire stage kind of just doing nothing and land on the other end. You could.
I don't know. There are the the A.I. does try and seek you out. Oh, no, no, for sure. I'm saying it would be hard. But it is kind of weird that, like, if you don't bomb the thing in that mission of that, you don't get a game over. OK, you don't get a next one. Yeah. No points for you. So if you don't care about points, this could be a really boring game. Yeah. I and that's why I think that this this actually works more as a game about you have lost the war and now you're just trying to get back from out behind him and enemy lines because, you know, your real point is just to get back home and all of these bomb the the forts and stuff is just like secondary. That's why you get to continue if you don't actually complete your objective.
Got it. Yeah. OK, I think you don't like that idea. No, it's not that it's just more than the more that we talk about this game, the more it just raises questions rather than answers.
Look, there's also like don't forget about those like girls doing the can can that you can shoot and turn them into who knows what. I don't know where they're coming from with any of this. There's also guys that are like they have their what are those the paratroopers? Yeah, they have the parachutes, but they just float up and down. Yeah, they don't they're not falling down.
They're floating in place and you can shoot them. And then there's the Statue of Liberty at one point. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So where are we bombing? Yeah. Sky Kid raises a lot of questions about a lot of things. The Red Baron. Yes. So I'm glad that you mentioned that because that gives us an actual thing to talk about rather than ramble. The Sky Kids are the Red Baron like chibi versions and Blue Max.
Blue Max, which are the references to Manfred von Richtofen, which our audio producer, if he was here, would have known that right away, which is the famous World War One flying ace. And then also the Blue Max is the prestigious order. Poor La Merter informally known as Blue Max. Interesting. I mean, I know the references to World War One Red Baron was just because, you know, if for some reason that's still in our cultural like ID like idea. Yeah. But never heard of Blue Max. Yeah. So those those are things. And then occasionally they're just like depicted as like also birds.
Sure. No, no. I'm for Sky Kids. Oh, they're like they're birds. Sometimes they're birds. OK. On the covers of the boxes for some of the like other versions of this game. No, no, no, no. It's just like now they're birds. And then like other times they're people.
And then other times they're planes with faces on them, which got to got to, you know, say for a second. That's what I thought that it was at first. That you're playing as the plane. Yeah, that you're playing as the plane. And it was kind of like cars, but for planes. And like, just bear with me for a second. If you look up this game, the red plane has like a white line along the side of it, which is presumably for the wing. But instead, it kind of looks like a smile. And then the top half has like there's like a weird white in between the top half of the plane and the bottom half. And that white has like a little streak as well, which could be looked at as two eyes.
All right. Well, I don't have this in front of me. So I think it's a sentient plane. I think I think you play as a sentient red baron plane. So. OK, but so are the people just being used as meat shields that they're floating up and down? Because I know that like, you know, but then the people turn into like panda bears. So it's like when you shoot them, right? Yeah. Does that reveal that they were panda bears the whole time? Maybe everything is panda bears. And then you have like on the on the logo screen, right with the where at the end and start out the logos when you finish around.
Yeah, it gives you your stats. Yeah, then there's an emblem with the bird that I'm talking about from the cover arts of some of these versions of the game. There's a bird there. I don't remember a bird. I remember there being like medals that you like. No. Yeah, the metal show. Oh, I'm talking about the very top center of that screen. There's like a bird emblem. So it's like, what is it? Are they birds? Are they people? Are they sentient planes? OK, I'm going to go with people in planes, but maybe sentient. I just have a lot of questions about this.
And before we close it out, I kind of want to talk. I kind of want to just like follow up on Sky Kid for a second. So Sky Kid Deluxe was released only in Japan in 1986. Oh, not here. Were you? Would you have wanted to play that? No. Good. OK. And then Sky Kid then like completely gets abandoned and then becomes like a part of Namco's like.
Oh, yeah. The rest of their thing like combat combat is like like Ace Combat. It's included all the time in references and Ace Combat Infinity went so far as to render fully playable 3D models of the aircrafts from the arcade game. This is so weird. It's like this isn't even a popular game. What was this? The first time you're hearing about Sky Kid. The first time I'm hearing about Sky Kid.
But like it's we know a lot about modern gaming and I think it's like like Steven Spielberg like put a bunch of Easter eggs like for his like student films. Right. Yeah, exactly. Any to you. Yeah. Why would you do that? Like those are supposed to be embarrassing. Like that was when you were learning. And even Sky Kid going into Ace Combat. That's like putting them in Schindler's List. You know, you know, you just don't mix those things.
The the PlayStation portable versions of Ridge Racer. Why put it? Oh, OK. Ridge Racer, Ridge Racer 2 and Ridge Racer 6 all feature a Sky Kid themed Fiera car manufactured by the fictitious Kamada and a parody of the Pontiac Fiero. So, huh? That's again like another Sky Kids reference. But it doesn't end there. The song Tyco March in the game Tyco Drum Master, you know, the game where you have like the drum accessory. Nope. It's mostly a Japanese thing, but there's actually a Tyco drum game on Switch now. Oh, interesting. That you use the touch screen for. You don't buy the drum accessory.
That includes that Tyco March song includes excerpts of music from several Namco games and you guessed it Sky Kids one of them. Not that the music was any good in the NES version of Sky Kid. I played it this morning, actually, and just not music to my ears. You just still like in your head? No, it's not in my head. I couldn't. Yeah, I could. No, I just remember like playing it and being like, oh, I didn't. I could turn it down. You know, I had that kind of reaction to it. Yeah. But now let's take matters a step further. OK, there is for Super Smash Brothers for Nintendo 3DS and you and probably an ultimate probably an ultimate.
The Red Baron appears as part of Pac-Man's taunt for the Namco roulette. If you do the up taunt. Oh, my God. It's possibly a thing that shows up. And there's a medley of various tracks from Sky Kid in the soundtrack for Super Smash Brothers. They can show up on the on the Pac-Land stage. There's a chance that the Sky Kid medley would play. I cannot believe that this game has this kind of legacy. I know. So much so, Sean. We're not done. This is the last thing, but it's worth it. So much so that there was even an online Sky Kid comic, a web comic dedicated to the Sky Kid franchise.
Is this a fan? This is you would think it was fan. If you look at it, I'll include this in the show notes, but it's not fan made. It has all the copyright info for Namco Bandai and everything. So they are birds in planes. So that's what I'm talking about, though. It doesn't. It never gave that vibe in the NES version. Yeah. But in the web comic, they're birds. Why don't they just fly?
Well, think about it. You need to carry the bomb and you need to shoot. Then hold the bomb. What are birds going to shoot? Hold a gun. The worms that they store in their mouth. Okay, but if they. Okay. If in this alternate reality, birds can fly planes and they can also do other things with their with their beaks. I'm pretty sure that the Sky Kid comics are now discontinued and they're kind of hard to find because they were done on like shifty look, which I don't know if that's still around. That's like a website, apparently.
But I'm going to post an injure link with all of them just way you can read them, because I know you guys need to get that deep lore. I actually feel like we're doing a disservice to our listeners by preserving this game. Yeah. When you find out about these long legacy things. Okay. But like Namco even put other legacy properties in Sky Kid, too. When you perform a loop over a billboard, you got that that Pac-Man. Yeah, Pac-Man, the special flag from Rally X, which is like also in Smash. Yeah. And I think Pooka from Dig Dug. Okay. You know, it's just there's a lot going on here.
And instead of talking about like the quality of the game and the and like the mechanics of the game, we just kind of chose to rant about what even is this game. I don't know. I'm glad that they enjoyed the game. Namco seems to love this game. Yeah. Maybe they just like planes. Yeah. Or birds in planes. I mean, like we know they like planes. They're still making Ace Combat games. That's true. Ace Combat 7. Yeah. Ace Combat 7 is coming out or is out by this time. They all look cool. Yeah. Never played an Ace Combat game. Ace Combat games are pretty sick. Sky Kids is not sick. But let's determine it in the essential games list.
Sean, you have a duty to our listeners to explain whether this game should be on the essential games list. Go. All right. So, you know, we always seem to bring up like the comparable things that you could play instead of the game if we just if we decide not to put it on the essential games list and bringing it back to Smash. I would prefer to play the end title sequence for classic mode shmup over Sky Kid over and over for hours, even though it doesn't have any challenge or any real content. I'd rather play that than Sky Kid.
Sky Kid lied to us from day one. Okay. When the box came out for the NES in 1987, it said authentic arcade edition. It's not because there are people on the cover of the Sky Kid box for the NES. Then another to get versions. There are birds. Then another versions. My head. There are sentient plants.
We don't really know what Sky Kid is. And so I kind of say, can we even classify it for the essential games list? And the answer is, of course, because I've played it and I know it's not essential. It is indeed a game. It is not a game that I would have paid $60 for back in 1987 when I have games like Castlevania, Kid Icarus, Legend of Zelda to play through. Yeah, I'm not certainly not picking up Sky Kid. You know, Gradius is sufficing just fine. Exactly. So it's a hard pass for me.
And hopefully for everybody else, it's also a hard pass. I understand this game has a legacy, but I think at this point now, it's just more fun to remember this thing. I guess. To go back and actually play it. I'm actually going to. I be who it behooves you not to play this game.
So please don't. There we go. And that's all the time we have for this episode of Nostalgia. Join us next time. We're going to talk about another game and hopefully there'll be more people here. That'd be nice. Do we know what game it is? Yeah. Hold on. Give me one second, Sean. You want to stall for everybody? Yeah. I hope that everybody has a great game. Because the next game is Spelunker. Yeah. Spelunker. Have you played it yet? No. You got a week. Do we go down into caves? I believe so. Okay, cool. Mm-hmm. I don't think they just like, you know, the next game after that is Spy Hunter. And I'm presuming you're hunting spies.
I think you hunt spies with a car. Yeah. No, I know that for a fact. I'm just saying like, usually the titles are helpful. Yeah. Sky Kid doesn't help me because apparently you're birds. You know, like they couldn't even name the titles correctly. So that's, you know, that's it. Go to NostalgiaCast.com. Write to me at contact at NostalgiaCast.com. Or else. Go on Twitter. Sometimes hit the search bar and hit at NostalgiaCast to see some cool shit. Or if you don't want to hear from Nostalgia, but you want to hear from me, type in at Esposito Film on Twitter. That's me, Michael Esposito. Let's give him a call. Give me a call. See you later. Bye.
