089 · WIZARDS & WARRIORS

• Introductions
• Development
  • Rare
    • Second Game, first to America before even Japan
    • Rare used to use graph paper and type the data in
  • Acclaim
• First Impressions
  • I can’t believe in just one month a new billiard game has completely dethroned the only other billiards game available for the system.
• Objective
  • The game follows the hero Kuros, the "Knight Warrior of the Books of Excalibur", as he is tasked with saving the Princess from the evil wizard Malkil in the Castle Ironspire with the forests of elrond.
  • Explore levels, obtain 3 keys, have enough gems for the boss fight
• Gameplay
  • Controls
  • Exploration and Combat
    • Unlimited Continues, START RIGHT WHERE YOU DIE!
  • Collecting Keys, Gems, and Boss Fights
    • Is this an early collectathon that Rare will become known for?
  • Power Ups
    • See below Table
• The Cutting Room Floor
  • A map special item is fully programmed into the game, but is unattainable by normal means. Pressing Select will allow you to bring up the map screen at any time rather than just at the beginning of each level. The map will also track where you are in the level. It would have come in handy in the early part of the game, especially in the purple caves.
• Music by David Wise
  • djpretzel: You started writing the main Wizards & Warriors theme when you were still in school, as a means of using arpeggios to suggest a chord progression. Relative to the elaborate soundtracks being composed for big-budget, Hollywood-scale games these days, this theme is relatively simple, yet more gamers remember it (and ReMixers arrange it) than many modern scores. Is simple better?
    • Simple is always better. For something to sound simple, there has usually been a whole development cycle behind it. When I hear a piece of music and think, "I could have done that" – I now think there has probably been a very involved process to hone down the melody to get to the final result. In the early days of video game music, with the limited resources we had at our disposal, the melody was incredibly important. To some extent this has been taken over by other musical elements, that in an ideal world, we would have liked to have used way back when we only had 3 channels to use.
• Sequels and Spinoffs
  • followed by three sequels
    • Ironsword: Wizards & Warriors II (1989)
    • Wizards & Warriors III: Kuros: Visions of Power (1992)
    • Wizards & Warriors X: The Fortress of Fear (1990) GAMEBOY
    • Worlds of Power Book
      • Matthew, and ordinary guy, finds himself in the middle of a quest full of danger — a quest through caverns of fire and ice, forests and treacherous castles, all the while fighting against a wizard with terrifying powers.
      • Also included game hints!
• EGL (Mike, Sean, Joe, Sam)

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• Equipment
• All equipment is found in chests and stay in your inventory forever unless replaced by a higher level item (Battle Axe of Agor replaces Dagger of Throwing).

Name	Description
Dagger of Throwing	Allows you to throw a dagger when pressing B, it's range depends on how long you hold the B button, and how many upgrades you have. It does 1 damage and can be found on the first stage. It also allows you to pick up items by throwing it at the item (does not work for monster dropped items), and breaking acorns or torches.
Battle Axe of Agor	Allows you to throw one of two axes (depending how many upgrades you have) by pressing B. Works like the Dagger of Throwing, and also replaces it when you pick this up. It does 2 damage and can be only found on the third stage. It also allows you to pick up items by throwing it at the item (does not work for monster dropped items), and breaking acorns or torches.
Shield of Protection	Allows you to block certain attacks when facing the attack or projectile when not swinging sword (as this moves the shield). This can be found on the first stage.
Potion of Levitation	Allows you to levitate in the air for an indefinite amount of time by holding Up. While levitating, you can jump, making it possible to reach higher platforms than you could otherwise. This can be found in stage 2.
Feather of Feather Fall	Although the name is a bit redundant, this item allows you to fall at a slower pace when holding Up. This item allows you to not take any damage when falling at great heights by holding up before hitting the ground. This item also allows you reach horizontal distances you couldn't otherwise. This can be found in stage 2.

• Special Equipment
• You can only have one of these items at a time. Containers that they come in stay in the stage, so you may swap the items as you wish. To use these items, use the Select button.
• Name Description Boots of Force Allows you to kick monsters doing 3 damage. Also allows you to open chests that you would normally need a key for. Supposedly the instruction manual says you can also open doors this way, but doesn't work ingame. Cloak of Darkness This item allows your character to become invisible, surprisingly this does not deter enemies at all (lazy coders?), instead it decreases all damage taken by 1, considering all enemies only do 1 damage to you, this item does absolutely nothing good for you. Wand of Wonder This item shoots a freezing projectile that will freeze an enemy for a couple seconds. It does not freeze bosses, instead it inflicts 1 damage. Boots of Lava Walk Allows you ride the moving flame walls, while allowing you to still take damage when walking on lava, strange giving it's name (more lazy coding?). Horn This item reveals hidden doors within on screen when used. The doors will disappear when leaving the screen. It is only really useful on stage 4, as there is many hidden doors. Staff of Power This item shoots 4 projectiles doing 2 damage each.

Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.

00:00 Wizards and Warriors, you are Kuros, the Night Warrior, hero of the Books of Excalibur. Your journey begins deep within the woods of Elrond, where even the wind obeys the supreme wizard, Malkil.

00:29 Nostalgia And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Joe. And I'm Sean. And today we are talking about... Wizards and Warriors. Nice. Great job.

00:44 Sean really wanted to go all in, but I... I don't think he expected it. I'd always be ready for that. You guys clearly did band at some point in your life, because when I conducted that, you guys were whiffin'. That's true. Yeah, I played alto saxophone. It's not a big deal. It was trumpet, you know. You know what's funny? You both look like those instruments. You know what? I take offense.

01:01 I look like a trumpet. What about you? No, no. I play trombone. Oh, you look like a trombone. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think what I meant to say was you look like you would have played those instruments. I get it with that. I still take offense. I think the only other instrument I would have had for Joe was drummer. Hmm. You could look like you played drums. Yeah, trumpet or drummer. Yeah. Trumpets, you know, it's like... That's a very, like, anybody almost. Yeah. It's a trumpet player. I'm just like a nobody. Yeah, I got it. So that's why I added on drummer as like a nice thing, you know. And Sean could have also been like a cymbals guy.

01:33 Cymbals. Just cymbals. Triangle. I think Sean's like a triangle guy. Ding. Guys, Wizards and Warriors. Did you know it was made by a little company we like to call Rare? Yes. Yeah. Rare, you know, makers of Banjo-Kazooie, GoldenEye, Banjo-Kazooie Nuts and Bolts.

01:53 Perfect Dark Zero Hour. I don't even know. List them all. It sounds like one. Battletoads. Mmm. Yes. Killer Instinct. Nice. Okay. It conquers Bad Fur Day. Sure. And the other one. That's true. It conquers Worser Fur Day. Worser. Honestly, that sounds like a good game. It doesn't. So Rare makes games, but we already know we like them because the only other game we've played from them is a little game called Slalom. Don't even mention this. Slalom. Why not mention Slalom? Slalom. Slalom is currently an essential game. It is. It's quite controversial. It is controversial. It was a good game. To make it even more interesting, Wizards and Warriors is the very last game in 1987.

02:43 So next week we'll be doing our best of 87 episode where we kind of like do a whole review of the year, how we felt, what we're looking forward to, and then name our top five games of 1987. We do this for 86 and 85 as well. You can go back and check those episodes out. They're very comprehensive. So get hype. And also, you know, feel free to send in your thoughts as well. Yeah. You know, we always like hearing about what people think of their top five. Yeah. Also, just one thing to throw out there is that we might restructure the essential games list. We've been talking about it a couple times.

03:17 We might rig the electoral college. Yeah. So if you're concerned about the elections, don't talk to us. We can't change them. But if you're concerned about the essential games list, you can write in about that for sure. For sure. But by the time you've heard this episode to write in, we will have already recorded the next episode. You don't know that. Yeah. I mean, he does know that as a matter of fact. Oh, well. But they don't know that. They don't know that. I just don't want them to think we're not listening to them when they write in their stuff. It's a running gag that this show flows. It ebbs and woes between time.

03:49 Yeah. We recorded these back in the 80s. Yeah. This is actually our first time playing them, but we still picked them all up on release day. Right. So Wizards and Warriors developed by Rare. It's their second game and it comes to America before it goes to Japan. Huh. So that's kind of rare. I think that's how it is. You didn't even know. No, I did it like a rare. That's pretty rare. Oh.

04:13 Thanks, guys. I appreciate my... I got like a fan base here. Yeah, that was... Well, this is because we were in band. We were in... Yeah. It was like you yeeted. That's really cool. Cool. And another thing about this game, and the only other timbit I really have about Rare, is that they used graph paper for this game and then would type in all the data. You know who else did that?

04:34 Nintendo. Yeah. They did that for Super Mario Brothers and for Legends of Zelda. Kid Icarus, right? Kid Icarus, yep. So, apparently there were better ways to do it by 1987, but Rare, you know, is a small company at this point. The two brothers are running it. They only afford paper, no computers. Yeah, I'm just thinking like, yeah. Like, that's probably what happened. They sent in the game as a book. They just had probably one computer and they were like, nobody can do that. Nobody can touch that while we're working on the graph paper. It was like a choose your own adventure. It was like, if you want to go left, turn to page 30. If you want to jump, turn to page 50.

05:05 You joke, but there will be a section later that will never sound more relevant than that soundbite. Wow. Feel free to reuse it. Yeah. Acclaim is the publisher on this one. They're just hopping on everybody's boat lately. They seem to be publishing all sorts of stuff. Acclaim. So, that's all I have on the development side. Can I get some first impressions on Wizards and Warriors? I wouldn't say that I felt the same about this game as I do about Deadly Towers, but this felt like a Deadly Towers to me. Not in the gameplay, not in the setting, but it just had this vibe to it that we'll get into later. Great.

05:47 Joe? I was excited to see that it seemed like it was trying to be an adventure that had a lot of different environments and you feel like you're going... I know I've mentioned before that I'm a sucker for that kind of thing where it feels like I'm really going through all these landscapes and getting to the castle and making my way to the castle. And it did seem like that that was what they're going for. So, I was pumped. Yeah. Great. And I mean, how about that opening music?

06:11 How about it? I thought it was great. That was my first impression. I was like, oh... Are you talking about menu music or...? Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you first... I'm not sure I remember it. Oh, it's really...

06:19 Trust me. People love this song. Grammy. I heard about it, but when I booted up the game, I was like, wow, that actually is very impressive. And it's done by none other than... Wow, it's done by none other than David Weiss, who has done a lot of music in all video games, not just rare stuff, but is mostly known for his Donkey Kong Country stuff that people still rave about. So, anyway, my first impression beyond the music thing is also... I didn't get a Deadly Towers feel for this, but I also knew how well regarded... I mean, this is a trilogy of games, Wizards and Warriors, just on the NES, so it is a big series and a lot of people love it.

06:56 I didn't fall in love with this game on first impressions. Okay. It... The first thing I do in a game is attack. Yeah. You know? I just automatically go on the offensive. In any video game I have, I have to figure out how to kill everything else. Exactly. That's what video games are for. And I hated attacking in this game. So... We'll get into that, yeah. So, that was my first impression was, wow, I'm really not loving this. So, Wizards and Warriors comes with what I would consider not a manual, but a booklet. Yeah. 23 pages, a full story, and then some.

07:30 Basically a whole... Beseechiary? How do you say that? Bestiary? Bestiary. A whole... Like, you get to see everything in the game pretty much. There's really nothing they're hiding from you. You can see every kind of power-up you'll get, every item, in immense detail too. What every single thing is worth in terms of points. Mm-hmm. Even, like, nice little tips and secrets and stuff like that. But I believe we have some things that we want to talk about in specifics. Yeah. So, Sean, what do you have specifics to talk about? So, I love it when a manual gets into the world, when it could be mistaken for a document from that world. Okay. I like to think of, I mean, the first thing that pops into my head is Twisted Metal Black.

08:17 The manual for Twisted Metal Black was like a bunch of medical records from a psych ward. That was cool. Okay. But it also had a bunch of, like, clear information and all the other stuff was sort of adjacent. Okay. It was stuff that you could ignore if you were just looking for the controls or something. Whereas this is just, whoever wrote this manual was writing the book first and just assumed that, like, as long as he put in a couple references to, like, how you played the game, that it was enough. But I think this guy has wanted to be a novelist, but he got stuck making these manuals and was really angry about it. So, he made us read this 70-page opera.

09:03 Right. Yeah. I mean, as much as some of it is absurd, I definitely feel like, as a kid, this would have been, like, the manual I'm reading in the car on the way home. I'm like, there's so much in there. There's story in there. I would have been such a sucker for it. This is much needed, actually, in terms of, like, including story in games on the NES.

09:21 There's just something to be said about the people who read these things on the car ride home. Yeah, that's true. And this essentially is filled with spoilers, you know, for a game that is essentially, like, 50 minutes long if you're good at it. Yeah. You know? Like, it would take a first-time player a lot longer than that. Yeah. But you can play through it in 50 minutes in total. And you're basically, like, reading what's happening in, like, I mean, it talks about the castle, which is the very last level in the game. But it is on the map when you see that you're going to a castle.

09:48 Right. I don't know. I think it's just, like, the way that things are talked about is with a little too much detail for me. Yeah. Because it even continues on, too, to talk about, like, you know, the many lives of Kuros and the warrior's white magic. And then there's also this call to action at the end of, like, the time is upon thee. She's waiting and time is short. And it's like, there's no timer in this game. Like, you could do whatever you want. I just think that I would be more appreciated if it was written better.

10:17 Because I just need to read this segment. Yeah, please. The kingdom of Elrond is riddled with obstacles, both alive, unalive, and even undead. Yeah. What does that mean? I don't know what unalive and undead, what's the difference between the two? What is an unalive thing? Unalive is just dead things. Yeah, regular old dead things.

10:36 Alive, dead, and undead. That makes so much more sense. Okay, no, I think I get it, actually. The unalive things are, like, things that were never alive to begin. Yeah, like a table. But if you're going to referee. There are rocks. Okay, this table that we're currently sitting around is not unalive because it was never alive. Well, maybe, what is this? It was never alive. It's like anti-alive. It's just not alive. It's non-alive.

10:58 I guess we're getting into linguistics now. I don't know. No, I think you're right. It's definitely a weird sentence. We're just busting your tongue. And my eyes immediately glanced to that section. I had no idea what you were about to say, but I was just scrolling through it. For some reason, there's something about unalive being on, like, two separate breaks.

11:17 You know, that, like, just all of a sudden you catch around and you're like, no, it can't be. If we're going to get into, like, little tiny things, let me, I mean, not that that's a tiny, but one that I noticed, I just thought was funny. It's just, now I'm just being, like, a bully to the person who wrote this. Yeah. But, uh, he does say, um, inside the castle are a series of mazes, each more complicated than the next, meaning that they get easier as you go. Each more complicated. Each more complicated than the next. Yeah. Okay. So the hardest one is what you're going to start with.

11:46 It's obviously just like a... I've never noticed that. And typo or whatever, but... This is, this is, if you're being a bully, I'm just being a straight up jerk here, but there's something very funny to me about when, when it does finally break that wall and just starts showing you the controller. And, like, goes into all these things. It's like, to move, right or left, press the controller, right or left. To crouch, press the controller down. To jump, for a diagonal jump, to levitate. It's like, wait, what, what, what?

12:12 You had me with walking right and left, crouching, jumping, to levitate. It's like everything you could ever do. There's, there's something else in there too that's, let me scroll down to it here, but there's something else in the control section that's like, oh, to restart the game, press start again. And I was like, what is it talking about? It just means when you pause the game to start again, like not to restart the game. So that was a little bit.

12:35 That's a treasure trove, the whole thing. But speaking of kind of going into the technical side of things, I did find it funny, off of the like, intense, like, epic intro, in my head, I'm reading that in like an epic voice. And the very next thing is preparing for your quest. I'm still reading this epic voice. Make sure the power switch is off. Insert Wizards and Mario cartridge as described in your Nintendo Entertainment System.

12:58 Manual, I'm sorry. Yeah. Number three, turn the power switch on. To start, push the start button on player one's controller. Have we ever had a game that told us how to put the game into the NES? I think they all do. Do they? I don't think this, I don't think, I don't think, I know that there are certain things like, don't leave it on for a certain amount of time and stuff like that. But like, this is the kind of thing that is like, we need to put this in the instructions because in the event of an apocalypse, when civilization rebuilds, they'll need these kind of instructions to understand.

13:31 And they call it preparing for your quest. Like it's like a canonical part of the story is putting the cartridge in the very meta of them. I'm actually surprised that before preparing for your quest, there wasn't like a little section on how to read. You know, just explaining like words should be read from left to right. How to buy the game.

13:51 I'm sure that was included at some Funkoland or something like that. Anyway, that's enough of the manual, right guys? Does anybody else have anything more? Nothing else. All right, perfect. So now we're going to talk about the objective. Okay. And I will personally walk you through this. All right. As we mentioned in my, when I was reading the back of the box, you're the hero Kuros. The princess has been captured by the evil wizard Malkyl in the castle Iron Spire. And you have to go through the forest of Elrond to get to the castle. But Mike, how do you do that? Well, it's simple. You got to explore the levels, obtain the three keys and have enough gems to get to the end of each level. So is this the first or a very early example of a collectathon?

14:36 Oh, I've never really thought about that. Okay. Are collectathons, like what's an example of one now? Sure. Well, Super Mario Odyssey is like an idea of a collectathon because you have to keep getting all the moons and stuff like that to progress. The idea here is that you need a certain amount of gems to unlock things within the level. And then you need the three keys to get to, to unlock the, to basically get to the damsel in distress. And then that's how you get to the end of the level. Or essentially you need the three keys to get to the boss fight. Right. I guess this is the first example. So I just think that's really neat because Rare is known for those collectathons. They did Banjo-Kazooie. They did, um, Diddy Kong Racing.

15:23 We went through the rest of them in the beginning. Uh, in the beginning. Yeah. They're known for that. But then Super Mario 64 popularized, uh, collectathons and stuff. So I wouldn't say this is like, you know, there's no, there's no necessarily like tally at the end of the game that says like, you've acquired this many gems, but it's still in many ways, an idea of just explore the level. You don't have to get every single thing in the level, which I appreciate.

15:48 Most of them though. You have to get most of them. Yeah. But the idea of just like, here's the level, go and find the things that you need and then move on. You know, you don't need to, uh, defeat every enemy. You don't need to, um, like the keys aren't actually locked behind anything. They're just hidden. You just have to find them. Yeah, you have to find them.

16:26 I can't remember why I can't remember why I can't remember why I can't remember why why I can't remember why I can't remember why I can't remember why I can't remember why I can't remember why I can't remember why I can remember why I can't remember why I can remember why I can remember

16:41 Before we move any further, though, we do need to talk about the controls of the game because I think this is where the game falls apart immediately. Sean, do you want to walk us through your gameplay situation? Yeah. I don't know if it's so much the control scheme itself. The control scheme is pretty basic. It's, you know, B is attack or A is, I don't know. I think B is attack, A is jump. Yeah, B is attack, A is jump. Your jump is very Mario in which, you know, you can control in midair. It's got enough floatiness to it. So it's not the base controls. It's more the animation and, like, the actual act of attacking because I think that this game is the closest it's ever gotten to the player character

17:28 wielding a sword in the same way that I would because it doesn't so much, like, attack or slash. It's more just sort of wiggles it around in front of him. He just, like, lets things bump into the sword.

17:38 I've never played a game with such, like, a fruitless attack animation. But I feel like that only matters until you get the knife, and then I never use the sword again. Well, sure. I mean, like, you know, you get the little projectile with it, but it just feels so toothless. It's funny, though. I never feel like I'm actually a threat in this game. No, I think you're definitely right because I actually,

18:04 until you guys are talking about this, kind of forgot how the sword controlled at all because I was never inclined to use it again once I got that throwing knife. Like, that was my primary means of attack. And not only that, your jump does also count as an attack as well. So I was mostly using that, if we're being honest, just attacking things from above me because while this game is both vertical and horizontal in exploration,

18:26 it's a lot more vertically focused. It leans more. So I was just using that to attack things above me. Or if you're skilled enough with it, you can hurt almost anything while you're jumping with the sword. And it's weird because he's, like, he's doing, like, a pencil dive, but he has his knife out, like, diagonal, so it winds up taking a lot of things out. But the actual sword fight enemy animation thing of you is exactly how Sean is describing it. It's this small little, like, wiggle of a sword.

18:56 And I feel like the hitbox range is realistic to what the guy is doing, but I can't help but feel like if he would just lunge his sword out a little, more things would be taken care of. It was the opposite of a power trip, the way that this character controls. Right. And the levels themselves, exploration-wise, how did you feel about that?

19:17 So I felt like design of the environment was cool. That was the first thing that stood out to me. But design of the level itself felt not particularly deliberate, like we see in a lot of other games. And I think that's – I know it wasn't the worst offender of this by a long shot, but I think a lot of times we have a problem when there's, like, enemies kind of appear at what seems like a random time, and especially when you're in that, like, forest level in the beginning. There's just enemies everywhere. And it's a little much. What happened at that forest level?

19:50 Can we talk about that for a minute? Because there's all these stumps, like, all over the place, right, that look like they're in varying ranges of the third dimension. You know, like some look further away from you. Some look like they're right next to each other. But as long as it's got a platform on that stump, you can land on it. So is my character also jumping, like – Backwards? Yeah, backwards to land on some of these? It's got a very strange perspective. And, like, in a more general sense, though, I think that the reliance on a more – at least in this level, because I didn't play too many more –

20:27 the reliance on the verticality I think hindered this game because there are only – I don't know how many screens wide this level is, but most of what you have to do is just jumping and jumping, and if you miss, you fall back down. And it's just an act of frustration navigating this level, especially when you might just jump through a door you didn't mean to.

20:53 You can continue. I'm sorry. No, just a clarification of that is that they don't act like screens. It actually is free-flowing. You can – Yes. Like, you know, it's not – it's not like when you get to the end of the screen – Yeah, it scrolls. It just does that seamlessly.

21:07 But to completely agree with Sean's point, the verticality is only weird because the jumping in this game – I was kind of surprised to hear it be referred to like Mario. Yes, it's Mario in the sense that, like, you can control while you're in the air, which is nice. Yeah. But the actual, like, landing areas for a lot of the things in this game, regardless of if it's like a tree branch or a little piece of a rock inside of a cave, a lot of those things are very small and easily missed, and then you do fall back to the beginning of the level.

21:39 This being – It seems like a – I don't know what the rule is for that. I feel like sometimes when I was falling – Sometimes you won't. Yeah, I could hit a platform and land and stop myself, but other times I'd just fall straight through. I think there's a certain – There's actually a certain amount that you can fall before you just start free-falling. I know what you're talking about. And the free-falling, seemingly, then you fall back to the beginning. But sometimes in free-fall, I was interrupted by a platform that saved me.

22:02 Oh, okay. So I don't know what triggers that. The rules of movement in this game just seem very haphazard. Yes. And I think the verticality thing would have been interesting if the things that you needed to collect didn't go away once you had collected them because then that would be like, Oh, okay, well, I'm back down here, but at least I can find new things to collect.

22:24 Once you've gotten every single gem at the bottom, when you fall back down to the bottom, now it's like, okay, cool, I just got to go climb this whole thing again. Well, I think that regeneration of those things could just – cause you to break the game. Absolutely. I'm actually not saying that it's a valid point. I'm just saying that it kind of stinks when you fall and there's nothing. Now it's just literally the only thing to do is to climb back up to the top.

22:45 Yeah, and I will say, I think you're kind of saying this, but I just want to articulate that. I think that the jump itself feels good. I think that the problem is that the platforms are poorly designed. Yes, absolutely. I think the jump – I think maybe that's why people say it's like Mario. I know that when Mario lands, he takes like a few steps, and we've talked about how that gives him weight. Yeah. And I feel that in this game. But if you have that weight and you move a few steps and you land,

23:07 and there's one pixel to land on, that makes it very difficult. Yeah. Right. And this is most annoying just to continue on that first level when you're climbing through the trees and stuff. There's – besides all the weird stumps all around, there's also these perfect doors inside the trees that like – who knows how those got there. But you go inside the trees then, and those are entirely vertical levels. Yeah. Where they're all filled with just little stumps that like – it kind of reminds me of Metroid.

23:36 Yeah. When you're in like a very vertical area, and it's like if you fell the wrong way, you'd have to climb your way back through there, which is fine in Metroid. For some reason, it's not fine here because in Metroid, the whole idea is like you're in this cave and stuff like that.

23:50 For this, it's like I'm really just climbing a tree. You feel more of a sense of space in Metroid in the sense that you like – you know where you are and you've gotten familiar with the map and you like the map. It's actually like a handmade design of like enemy placement. Right. Whereas in this, like if you can – you can't catch your breath because if you fall, you'll get attacked by some bees or whatever, and then you get rid of the bees and you're like, okay, now I can finally start making my way up. And more bees come. Right. And if it's not bees, it's spiders.

24:22 Bees are in that final tree of this level. I know what you're talking about. There's randomly just like all of a sudden bees showing up before the first boss, which is just a giant floating skull.

24:32 We'll get to all that in a minute. So the other thing to mention about exploration, though, is that this might be the least punishing game of all time in the other respect where it's like I just wish that if I would have fell from a blinding height that it would just kill me because then at least I would respawn immediately where I started because that's exactly what happens whenever you die. You respawn exactly where you should be. Where you died. Yeah, where you died, right? And you have unlimited continues.

25:03 So now I'm on the fence about that lack of punishment because usually I like to be like a good middle ground. But I think that because this game has that like jankiness, I was trying to figure this out earlier. I was like what I think that made for me the game a lot more palatable because then I was like, okay, if I did have to do what I do in most games and go back to the beginning of the level or back even to a checkpoint,

25:24 I would probably have shut the game off. But I will say, reading the room and thinking that no one's going to agree with me, I had fun playing this game. I really did. And I 100% agree with all the bad things we're saying about it. I don't want to spoil anything.

25:38 I don't want to color my view so fast. I'm not saying whether I had a good or bad time. I'm more curious though because we've been talking about this continues thing since like the first launch games for the NES. We finally have seen a game that practices unlimited continues with almost no repercussion. How do we feel about that? Now that we're seeing it in practice, would you have wished that other games would have handled it this way? I think it just feels a little out of place in terms of like where we are in this retrospective because I'm so used to it with games nowadays. Like I know in The Last of Us, as soon as you die, you get respawned like 15 feet behind you and you just keep going. So I'm used to that.

26:21 It's just odd to do it in a game that looks and feels like this. Right. I do think that, like I said, it made this game because of the flaws in the game more palatable to play. In general, I think that there's, like I said, a middle ground. Even from The Last of Us, I think as much as I love that game, I think that could benefit from a little more punishment, just something to make the stakes higher.

26:44 Yeah, because I mean you even keep the items you've collected when you die. And so I think I'm agreeing with Joe on this, and not that you didn't say this, Sean. I just think like... He just likes me better. Just to follow up with the point is that I think the middle room is that all games, in my opinion, and I understand why they didn't do this back then. We're looking at it 30 years later.

27:06 All of these games should have unlimited continues. I think seeing unlimited continues in this game is like, yes, thank goodness I don't have to collect all that stuff again. Like I already did it. I got the satisfaction of collecting it. The satisfaction of me beating games has nothing to do with how hard they are. I don't get satisfied by that. I get satisfied by checking off the tasks. In this game, you collect the gems, then you collect the keys, then you beat the boss, and then you move on to the next level. Once I collect the gems, I don't want to do it again because I died. That's true. You know?

27:35 So I think that the only alternative answer is like, when you die, you also, because there's no live system, it's more like a Super Mario Odyssey system, where you also lose like 20 gems, and they go back to like a different place or something. Maybe 20 is too much. Maybe it's just five. But like that's a creative way. But you know, that's a lot of programming to do. So I'm not saying it was possible. I'm saying that's my 30-year-later solve. Yeah. Like when I think of Ghosts and Goblins, granted that didn't have as much punishment as a lot of games on the NES as far as like how far it sends you back.

28:11 But I didn't mind. I mean, you know, it would get frustrating in like a good way when I died over and over again and had to keep doing the same part. But that's like you're learning that part, and you're like, okay, this is the part with the Red Devils, and this is this part. Obviously, there were flaws in that too. But the idea being that like I was okay with generally with re-traversing those areas because they were still fun. In this game, if I had to go back and re-traverse some of these areas, I'd be like, oh, yeah, this whole bland area again. And then I would get much more tired of it. Sure, sure. Ghosts and Goblins, though, just to clarify,

28:39 I think is still in line with what I'm thinking is a good recipe for this kind of game because that did have a couple of checkpoints too. And also like unlimited continues in the sense that like it would take you back to the screen, but you could start right where you were on the level that you were last on. So that was still good. And that's like a good punishment because it didn't like – it wasn't like, oh, that Red Devil killed you? Well, now you spawn right in front of that Red Devil again. Exactly. It's a good in-between. I'm also never an advocate of start the whole game over when you die.

29:08 I think that's what I'm saying is like the worst thing that we continually see on most of these NES games is like I know that that's like a – This is a little off topic. No, I don't think it's okay. No, no, no, I don't mean that. What are your thoughts? What I'm about to say. I'd love to hear it. But what are your thoughts then on like the ever-expanding genre of roguelike,

29:31 roguelite, like those kinds of games? What I like about those games, and you can clarify for me, but for me, from the ones that I've played, is that with that, every single time you play, it's mostly a new experience. There might be new items that you find as you're traversing through. The map layout might be different. The enemies you encounter might be different. So that's not as punishing because at least I'm getting an entirely different experience. When you're playing through Karate Kid and you die and you have to start back at the beginning, you're just doing the same fights again and again.

30:04 When you say roguelike, are you talking about procedurally generated things? There usually are. Okay. Yeah. Like Binding of Isaac. Binding of Isaac. Okay. The one I just played, Streets of Rogue. Streets of Rogue. Okay.

30:17 But they're, yeah, it's basically like a new experience, a very similar experience. They also usually have like an overarching progression where you can unlock stuff after you die. Right. Or, yeah. And I love that part, too. I think that's a really interesting concept that I would love to see in some NES game. I don't know if we're ever going to see it. But it's this idea that like as you get like more experience playing the game, you unlock things that then can be found somewhere in the world of that game if you get like a lucky roll. Like I think that would be really cool to see if a Legend of Zelda 2 proper to the Legend of Zelda 1 ever came out.

30:55 Like something like that where it's like, hey, now in your treasure chest in Dungeon 1, you might find this instead of that. Like that would have been really cool. Because that's kind of what Binding of Isaac is, right? Yeah. Pretty much. Anyway. Yeah.

31:08 Tangent. No, that's a tangent. I think we're done with the continues, too, right? Yes. Nobody else has any thoughts on that? Okay. So now we can talk about the collecting parts with the keys and gems and stuff like that. Did you guys find the keys? Hard to find? The gems are everywhere, obviously. So that's not a problem. I feel like usually I would end up finding the keys and passing. And once in a while, I'd have to go back, especially in like, I mean, in the first level, I think it was pretty, I just found them accidentally. Before I even knew I was looking for keys, I just started finding these.

31:35 I was like, I'll pick that up. And then in later levels, I think I maybe had to like go seek them out. I'm like, wait, did I miss a key or something? Yeah. But otherwise, I didn't think they were like ever too difficult to find. It would just encourage you more to explore. And I think that while I didn't have trouble finding them because it's a relatively small map, I think that the level design, like the actual creation of landmarks and recognizable environment is not conducive to finding keys and then finding the door again. Because it just, it looks all too samey to me.

32:13 Whereas like if this, if this map was any bigger, it would be a problem because I wouldn't even know where the key I just found opens. Yeah. And the maps actually, if you look at them online, like now there's people who can capture the entire map and lay it out for you. If you look at them online, they're really not that big. I think the problem that we've already echoed is that they're very vertical. So that's when things become a problem.

32:34 But if you take your time and actually like look through every crevice as you're going through it, you really won't have a hard time finding anything in this game. It's not like any, that's what this game is missing as well. You know, and I'm sorry that I'm always bringing up criticisms. I do think this is an okay game, but it's also missing like a puzzle aspect to it. There's no like, oh, I see that. How do I get that? You know, there's nothing really like that in this game. You'll mostly just get things by exploring and noticing them. And then like, you know, like I would have wished that some things would be hidden behind the items in the level themselves.

33:09 And that's not really the case for most things. Yes, there's a time where like you'll need to levitate or something like that. But it's it's that's not really puzzle solving. That's just more like a barrier thing that make sure you get that before you do this. Yeah, it seems like this game could have just existed as not collecting gems, but just get key open door and that the gems were just there to pad time. Um, because as as long as you had those barriers, if you were able to create a level that use those barriers a little bit more creatively than they were in this game, it would have been just fine.

33:47 You know what I'm saying? Yeah, no, totally. And the gems are the only reason why you have to collect them is because there is another knight who's red who looks just like you that like wants a certain number of gems before you can get through. And it's like, yeah, dude, there's there's women on there.

34:03 Why is this guy so powerful? I can't take him. Yeah, it doesn't look like you can take him. And then he also has like a speech bubble box, but with nothing inside of it. Like, what is is that like? Yeah, they forgot. I think that's where they're where he's asking for gems. Oh, OK. That makes sense. So then once you've fulfilled that, it just goes blank. He doesn't have like a number and then like a question mark. Once you've fulfilled that, he's just gone, right? No, he's not gone. He just he just leads. He slays down. Yeah, you know, seriously, like he just puts his weapon down. Like, his knife sword.

34:34 He just wasn't there again when I went back to. No, I remember him being there. OK. Like from from what I played through. Yeah. Oh, we played a different game. Yeah. Very good. Very good, Joe. OK. And I'll just say about the collecting part of this game that that didn't bother me at all. Like whether it was gems, keys. I would have actually liked to collect more different kinds of things. And maybe they unlock bonus rooms or something, you know, like like where a new power up is or. Yeah. Stamps. I would like to collect stamps, old coins and newspapers. Spapers. No.

35:16 Thanks for clarifying. But after you collect all that stuff, you get to the boss fights of the game. But before you get to the boss fights, you're probably going to want to have some power ups. So do we want to talk about the power ups at all? They find them in the chests. OK. Does anybody need a little refresher on what power ups were? Boots of walking. Boots of booting. Boots of walking on lava. Yeah. Yes. The boots of walking on lava. Boots of levitation. The boots of levitation.

35:41 And there's something of feather fall. You're thinking of the feather of feather fall. Is it the feather? I was going to say that. I was like, no way. That's what it is. It's the potion of levitation. The potion of levitation. I love that they're just like using this very archaic like D&D naming situation. Yeah. But you also forgot the boots of force, which allow you to kick. Yeah. So this you have to cycle through with select. And then you can have that power up be your thing. We talked about early on the dagger of throwing. Yes. Which is just a dagger that you throw.

36:13 A lot. And then the battle axe of Agor, which is. Actually named after somebody, apparently. Apparently named after someone. And it works just like the dagger of throwing. And it even replaces it when you pick it up. But it does two damage instead of, I guess, the one damage that the dagger of throwing does. And is there. So for a lot of these dagger of throwing. Is there one place to get the dagger of throwing? Or if you miss it. Is that random? It's not random. It is. It is determined by the chest. Okay. But. But like if I miss it. Because that's only in that first level. Which is, by the way, the only level we've talked about so far. Which a lot of these stuff. We'll talk about the level.

36:51 But yes, I think to your point, it's like once you get those things, they can be swapped with something. So if you have the dagger of throwing and then you get the battle axe, it's like you probably missed your chance to get another dagger of throwing unless it's hidden in another chest somewhere else. Hmm. There's also some special equipment that we talked about like the lava walking and the boots of lava walk and the boots of force.

37:15 That you can only have one of it each time. So you either have the boots of force or the boots of lava walk. But it's usually dependent on the level that you're in. Because you need the boots of lava walk to walk on lava. But here's the thing. You really don't need them. Because when you, you can walk on them and still get hurt.

37:33 And you can walk for quite a long time. And then when you die, you respawn right where you died. So that does, honestly, that's just like dawning on me now how broken that is. Like I was doing that, not realizing that I was just breaking the game. But you really don't need the boots of lava walking. I guess they're just, they're depending on your not wanting to die. You know what I think they're depending on for me was my not wanting to hear the close to death music over the, like that was like my biggest concern. When I lost health, I would be like, oh, I don't want to hear this music again. And I'd just die on purpose to hear the good music again.

38:27 So we talked about the forest of Elrond. Right. And that was with the skull. The floating skull is the boss. Did you get to that part, Sean? I did get to that part. Fantastic. The skull bounces on the floor and then spits projectiles at you. I don't really care about these boss fights to begin with. Yeah, I'm very good. But also, bosses as themselves are very unimaginative. Yeah. It's a skull. It's a bat. It's a rock spirit is how it's referred to in the manual. I do like the apparition. The like, the like, the death looking thing. Yeah. I like that. Does he do a little dance? He doesn't do a dance, surprisingly. Actually, I don't like him anymore. Usually they all dance, except for him.

39:13 He, what does he do? He still fires projectiles and stuff. I feel like they all kind of do like their own version of projectiles and stuff like that. But. It's a different sprite. At least the bat seemed like it was doing something different to me. Where on your way to the bat, there are bats on the ceiling that come down as your. The motifs are fine.

39:34 I'm talking about like, just like in terms of inventiveness. You know, like in Castlevania, there was this idea behind the bosses that they would all be from like universal horror films and stuff like that. And that was fun. So it was okay. They also had like a different mechanic that they used. Right, right. For this, it's like, is this the best we have? Is like, you know, oh, you finished the skull? How about you deal with a giant spider? Yeah. Because that's the one we're missing, right? Skull, spider, then bat, right? Well, it's skull, bat, rock, spider. Oh, okay. The giant spider is right before you get to the castle. It's a lettuce, tomato, onion, mustard. Yeah.

40:11 It's right before you get to the castle. And then at the castle, you fight what is referred to as a growing skeleton because he starts off really small and then gets bigger and bigger. And then finally, you get to... Like more bones or just bigger bones?

40:25 No, bigger bones. He drinks milk throughout the boss fight. Yeah, right on screen. Yeah, the whole thing was actually an advertisement for that campaign. To your guys' point, at least the first three bosses, it's the same fight. Yes. But what I was getting at was at least leading up to the second boss, I was actually having some trouble on those bats that are on the ceiling because they come down and they follow you. And as you go, there's like 20 of them. So you have to take out one at a time as much as you can. The further you go, the more bats come at you.

40:57 And the later bats take more hits. So by the end, you need to hit three bats and there's like 10 of them on the screen. They're just killing you. Is it possible, though, that you are just continuously walking to the right throughout this whole portion?

41:09 I mean, you could. That's what you do at first. You're not saying like... I'm saying that I would just take care of them at a time. Yeah, that's what I did. Okay. But even that was tough because if you step accidentally a little too far, one comes down. Right. And when they attack you, hitting them three times, there's no kickback on the enemy. So you hit it once and it's still going to hit you. Take down three of your limited, what, 10 health?

41:34 So then you've got to hit it again. Hits you again. That's another six. So you've got to be very careful as you're doing it. And what's weird is, is like you stamp a bat, you think it's dead. Right. Right? Not the ones that live deeper in the cave. Those are... Yeah, I don't know. I'm thinking like... Knife-resistant bats. Right, exactly. Exactly. But we... So we've talked about some of the bosses, but we haven't really talked about the levels. And I think there's a great motif with the map of going through... First you go through the forest and there's two forest stages.

42:01 Then you get to the ice cave. Icy boys. And am I crazy or is this slippery? It's a little slippery. I think it's real. I actually didn't notice. I did notice. It's more apparent when you're trying to jump onto a ledge that has a slope next to it. Maybe that's where I noticed that slipperiness that I was talking about before. I just thought that was the whole game. Also, I was just being quiet. I didn't notice any kind of slipperiness in the first level. Because I do... The part I'm talking about where I kept trying to jump and kept missing was in that level. I remember that jump.

42:30 I didn't even connect it with the ice. It was... Yeah, it was all... There's a lot of them in that stage where it's just like, am I supposed to get back up there or am I permanently locked out of that area? There was one part in particular I kept getting really, really close to... I was trapped. I knew I had to go back. I kept getting really close. I was pretty close to resetting the game thinking I locked myself in an impossible place. And then I got it. And I was like, oh, it is possible. So after the ice cave, Sean, you're our billiards expert. You're our NASA guy.

42:59 You're our Mr. Science. Okay. Billiards are part of science. Yes. You're Mr. Science. Geometry. Would a ice cave be geographically located right next to a lava cave? See, what it could be is there is a massive air conditioner between the two. And what an air conditioner does is it cycles temperature gradients. And it could make the ice cave more icy and the lava cave more lava-y. We got it. If it's big enough. Okay. Yeah. Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. Also, Malkill is like a wizard. I was just going to say, you're probably forgetting the second paragraph of the manual. He is wizard Malkill.

43:43 That's written like Bible. You know? It was also so great that, in fact, even the renowned Merlin was his pupil. But alas. I'm just running out of the manual. No, I know. I think it's funny that the guy who wrote the manual is listening to this episode and he thought that we were done like 20 minutes ago. And then all of a sudden you start reading again and he's like sweating bullets. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, manual writer. I enjoy it. He's like, I have a real job now. I didn't say anything bad about it there. I just said he is wizard Malkill. He is wizard Malkill. I am legion. So there's the ice cave, the lava cave, and then what is only referred to as the purple cave.

44:24 So I like how there's a motif. There's the elements, you know? Yeah, yeah. Earth in the first one, ice, fire, and purple. Purple is... And what's funny is, like, purple doesn't have anything going for it other than the fact that, like, as far as, like, a motif goes, other than the idea that the apparition, who is that, like, grim reaper, ghost, ghoul-style thing, wears a purple robe. So clearly he would live in the purple cave. Every boss always color codes their sections by where they are.

44:57 Wow. So that's all that. You get through all of that. Is there anything that we would have liked to see? Other elements or other... Other colors. You know, there's... Green is used in the forest. Blue is used in the... So what would be a yellow stage? The sun. Or a desert. Or a field of dandelions. I would have actually appreciated a desert. Yeah, desert would have been cool. Forest, it should have been... An underground desert? No, you could come out from the caves. Oh, okay. Yeah, it should have been, like, forest, ice cave, desert, lava cave, and then, um, purple cave. Sure. Purple cave, which would obviously lead you right back to the same forest.

45:41 This is the weird thing about the map, is that the map only lets you go under the trees. If you're looking, if you're thinking about the map, you're climbing in those trees, but you're actually going down. Through the roots. You're going as a... You're making a giant U to get to the other side of the castle, whereas the map clearly shows that if you just would have kept walking right, you would show up to the castle. Yeah, but then you gotta deal with that much more forest.

46:05 I mean, maybe it's... Maybe there's, like, a big rock in the way. I'm thinking... Like a Snorlax. A big rock makes sense. But it got there after the map was made. Yeah. So, like, it's not on the map. I'm also just thinking that maybe that, like, you know, because the spire of the top of the castle is so tall that, like, he would have seen you coming, and you want the element of surprise. So you're gonna come from the area right next to him with all the bushy trees. Right. Okay. Yeah. It's like the Lord of the Rings Eagles argument.

46:34 The classic Lord of the Rings Eagles argument. Everybody knows that argument. And so you get to the castle exterior, and this is actually really cool when you're climbing up the castle, and they have, like, you actually see these really nice, like, shadow elements of the other spire casting on there, and, like, the triangles are really smooth. And you see...

46:59 And you see the, like, bricks moving in and out in 3D space that you jump on. Wow, I really missed the best part of this game. The smooth triangles. The smooth triangles will blow your mind. It's just shading. It's just a shading trick, but it's actually some of the best sprite work we've seen. Ever. On the NES. Oh, okay. Not ever. But definitely some of the best sprite work we've seen on the NES.

47:22 People who've gotten to the castle exterior will know exactly what I'm talking about. Shout out. You know what it reminded me of? It's just because of my own personal experience and no other reason, is that the level of Crash Bandicoot slippery climb where you're climbing the castle is very, very similar. No one's played Crash Bandicoot. Nobody in this room but me has played. I just wanted to make Joe feel weird. Well, you succeeded.

47:44 Okay. I can't even say. I just don't remember that level. Otherwise, I'd agree with you. I'm sure. It's a good level. One of my favorites. It's okay. So you get to the interior of the castle. You fight the growing skeleton. Otherwise, mostly the game is still at the same difficulty as most of it, and there's no real punishment, so just continue on if you're willing to trick through it. And you'll get to your face off with Malkil. He is a wizard all decked out in pink, so he's not scary at all. In fact, now I'm starting to question, am I the bad guy?

48:19 He kind of looks like Gandalf a little bit, right? With the staff and everything. I actually didn't get to him. And the long beard. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I didn't get to him either. I'm going to reveal.

48:29 I actually, it's not that we couldn't get to him. I want to make it clear. I didn't have the patience to continue to play this game forward. I know. I did actually still want to keep playing, but then I tried to leave my system on, and I shut it off, and I didn't really want to go back through the whole game. Right. And the same thing I was saying, if I was punished to go back through the whole game, I wouldn't want to do it. You wouldn't want to do it, right? And that was proof. Can I just say real quick that I think it's weird that, yeah, you've got to save the princess, but all of the other women that you find throughout this game are just sort of incidental.

48:59 Yeah. You're like, yeah, well, since I'm here, I guess I'll untie you, but that's it. Like, you're on your own. Yeah. I was like, oh, I could take it or leave it. I think maybe they just wanted to show you that Malkiel is like, he's not playing around. He's done this before. He's captured other women. I didn't know that there were other people captured you. You're like, oh my God, you're captured too? They're like named characters now. Yeah, like Penelope. Yeah, maybe Penelope is the other knight's lady, you know, and you're finally rescuing them. Right. Okay.

49:27 The one thing that I have to mention with the battle with Malkiel is that the room that you're in, you'll never know it by playing the game, but if you actually get the map data, it's like a very, very cartoon skull. Aw. Like, with the eyes and everything, and it's actually, like, kind of funny, and I think that's weird. But Malkiel works in a very weird way that he teleports throughout the room, but it's not like, actually, it's kind of like Ganondorf, I guess. But the idea is that, like, wherever Malkiel will teleport to will usually be, like, near you.

50:06 And so, if you move around the room a lot, you're not helping your odds of finding him. So you actually want to, like, when he teleports, you actually want to do the opposite of looking for him, and you just want to kind of stay still until he reveals himself to you again. So it's like, attack, attack, attack, like, as fast as you can. Yeah. And I think some guide online said that you want the boots of force for this battle, and I'm not sure why. Like, it says, you, oh, it says he won't avoid any particular locations just because you're there.

50:39 You can even use the boots of force to kick him when he arrives. Aw. I like the idea that, like. It's just like a, it's just like a personal thing. Yeah. You're just like, yeah, I'm going to kick this guy. You just nudge him. And that's the game. That's it. You defeat Malkiel, the usual supply of things appear, and then what's different is that killing Malkiel doesn't provide you with a pile of treasure, but instead it gives you the blue key, which you can escape from the room in the lower right corner,

51:12 which is what the blue key requires. And then once you do, you'll rescue the princess and earn a 100,000 point bonus, which is quite a hefty bonus. Wow. And then the game will end. Where can you spend the points? You can't spend the points anywhere. Oh, yeah. You register your initials. Yeah, that's true, too. And I don't know who, I guess, like, you know, the game is, like I said, if it's only 45 to 50 minutes, if you know what you're doing, I guess you could try to get a new high score each time. But I don't care about high scores that I never have, and I never will.

51:42 So that's, wow, you guys have lost your energy all of a sudden. This is Wizards and Warriors. Wizards and Warriors. I will mention on the cutting room floor of this game is that there was a map special item fully programmed into the game. You can still find it if you use, like, Game Genie or whatever, but you can't get it through normal means in the game.

52:06 What you would do is you would press select, and it would bring up the map screen at any time rather than just at the beginning of the level. The map would then track where you are in the level. Oh. It would have come in handy in the early part of the game when you're trying to, like, collect things, and then the person notes, especially in the purple caves. I don't remember why in the purple caves. I guess it was just, like, everything's purple, so it's harder to navigate where you are. So that would have been nice. Were there any other, like, power-ups that we didn't see that we would have liked to see or quality of life improvements?

52:41 We talked about the biggest ones. Yeah, I mean, I just think that this game could have really done with some better attack animations. Yes. I just... A lunge. Any kind of feeling power aside from your really heavy boots. Agreed, agreed.

53:14 As I mentioned that the music was done by David Weiss, I did check an interview that he did with OC Remix, which is a fantastic website that does, like, you know, basically user-created remixes of video games, and you can basically search for your favorite games, and the chances are someone has done a remix of a song for that game, like, even very obscure ones.

53:35 So this was DJ Pretzel, and he wrote to David in the interview, You started writing the main Wizards and Warriors theme when you were still in school as a means of using arpeggios to suggest a chord progression. Relative to the elaborate soundtracks being composed for big-budget Hollywood-scale games these days, this theme is relatively simple, yet more gamers remember it and remixers arrange it than many modern scores. Is simple better?

54:06 David responds. Simple is always better. For something to sound simple, there has usually been a whole development cycle behind it. When I hear a piece of music and think I could have done that, I now think there has probably been a very involved process to hone down the melody to get to the final result. In the early days of video game music, with the limited resources we had at our disposal, the melody was incredibly important. To some extent, this has been taken over by other musical elements.

54:35 That, in an ideal world, we would have liked to have used way back when we only had three channels. Yeah. I mean, I don't remember the music from this game, so I can't really comment on the quality of it, but whenever I think about music composition for machines this powerful, whether it's like the C64 or the NES or even as far up as the Super NES, it's amazing what they could do with the limited resources that they had.

55:10 But, yeah, I just don't remember the music. See, I made a crack earlier about dying on purpose to not have to hear the low on health music, but that wasn't so much about that being bad. It wasn't my favorite for sure, but it was that I really did like the regular music in the different caves. Oh, okay. I think even in the forest, the first track, it's a little short of a loop, so I think it got repetitive, but I liked the music overall.

55:37 Yeah, and I think one thing that should be echoed is the, you know, and this doesn't just apply to music. I think this applies to everything. The whole, I could have done that thought. Oh, yeah. Usually, if you have that thought, it's like, chances are, if you think you could do it, it's a lot harder to be the first one to do it. You know, I always think about that with art, even, and a lot of people are like, oh, that's art. I could do that, but it's like, but you didn't, you did it. You didn't do it now. That's always the end of the conversation.

56:03 And I don't even see that as like a slap to the face of the people. I mean that more in like a, really think about like what that means, and how like some of the best works of, or most remembered works of art in history,

56:16 usually have to do more with the idea of how they resonate with a larger group, of people. It doesn't mean that they're necessarily the best. They're just what, like what has become public consensus, because it's, it resonates with more people. And I think that's why David thinks simple is better, because you can communicate bigger, you can communicate with a bigger audience when your ideas stay simple, but remain effective. Yeah. But I think that even anything, just because it sounds simple, or it looks simple, doesn't mean that it is. Totally. Like any kind of,

56:48 a one note leading into another may be super easy if you're just playing those two notes, but in the larger whole. Yeah, to make something simple sound good. Yeah. Probably takes a lot, who knows, but probably takes a lot more thought. Oh, it does. And creativity than something that's more complex. Exactly. All right. And now we'll just briefly do the sequels and spinoff section. I say briefly because we have to play most of these games in this section for future episodes, so we're not really going to get into them. But just to look ahead, in 1989, so not, we're in 87, this is the last game of 87, so not next year, but the year after,

57:28 Iron Sword, Wizards and Warriors 2, is going to come out. And then in 1992, one year after the Super Nintendo has released, Wizards and Warriors 3, Kuros, Visions of Power. And that's with two colons in that title. Wizards and Warriors 3, colon, Kuros, colon, Visions of Power. Colon, Redemption. So those are the two NES games that make up the trilogy. However, there's also a Game Boy game that came out in 1990 called Wizards and Warriors 10, or X,

58:04 I think it's funny that like, we would go up to, you know, if we're doing the Roman numeral system, it's like, where did four through nine go? Wizards and Warriors X, the Fortress of Fear. And it plays just like all the other Wizards and Warriors games, nothing too much to say about that.

58:19 But are we looking forward to seeing how Wizards and Warriors 2 and 3 improve the system? I'm hoping for improvement, yeah. Yeah, I think that, I mean, just from my background knowledge, I feel like these are pretty popular series, right? Wizards and Warriors? I've never heard of it before we were assigned to this game. Really? Oh, interesting. It's funny because I had heard really, really good things about this game, which is why I was a little let down when I played it.

58:49 Interesting. Yeah, and Wizards and Warriors sold so well that it's actually like a pretty common find for like NES people who do like garage sales or look on eBay. Like it's pretty cheap, all things considered, because so many people bought a copy. So I had this game like when I was like 16.

59:07 Wow. Like I never really played it. I just collected NES games. But this was one that I already had in my catalog. Wow. And then the last thing that's not a sequel or a spinoff, but it's worth mentioning is the Wizards and Warriors Worlds of Power book. The Worlds of Power book, there was a couple of other NES games that got this treatment, but they are like chapter books that you could get in like Scholastic, if you remember that, like from the school and things. They would have them at like book fairs or whatever.

59:39 It basically would take the idea of the Wizards and Warriors story, but usually take someone from like the real world and put them into that. So here's the little logline for you. Featuring like Kobe Bryant? Like featuring regular people. So like Matthew, this is the logline from the actual book. Matthew, an ordinary guy, finds himself in the middle of a quest full of danger, a quest through caverns of fire and ice, forests and treacherous castles, all the while fighting against a wizard with terrifying powers.

1:00:14 I get it. I think that's a cool idea for like an anthology of kids books, but I just think that Wizards and Warriors is so rote of a concept that that could be anything. Yes. What I described to you was nothing. They didn't even use Malkiel's name or anything. They didn't use Excalibur. Anyway, that's not the point.

1:00:34 Apparently, people loved this book. They have fond memories of the Wizards and Warriors Worlds of Power book. All right. There's that. It also included game hints upside down. So if you wanted to not be spoiled, you didn't have to worry about it. But if you flipped your book upside down, you could read game hints on how to actually play Wizards and Warriors and little tips. Okay. That's nice. But you know what's nicer? The essential games list.

1:00:57 All right. It's that time. Wizards and Warriors. Last game of 87. Just tell me if it's essential, but also your thoughts if you have any. Sean? I think this game commits too many errors in terms of like essentially like game feel. I know that's a pretty, it's an overused term in like the criticism community, but this game just doesn't have it to me at least.

1:01:26 So all other criticisms aside, that was probably my biggest problem with it. So no, it's not essential. So like I said, I had heard a lot of really good things about the game, which led me to go into really high expectations, which were immediately let down. But then after that, as I was playing, I did, I do want to say we gave this game a lot of flack, but I did have fun playing this game, and I probably would have continued had I been able to continue from where I was. But there's just too many things that it does wrong. Like particularly some of the things with the platform, forming and areas feeling samey and stuff that it just doesn't,

1:02:06 it definitely does not merit an essential vote for me. Okay. And I think that for viewers that have been wondering how I feel about the game, I am, I'm putting this in like the middle of all NES games I've played. There, there are some things I like about it and it's a very like relaxing NES game. So I definitely think it's like, try it. Like it might be for you. There's really nothing to lose because the game isn't that punishing. It's relatively easy. You, you could beat it. I just didn't really feel the need to.

1:02:37 But all that said, I really don't know. I don't think that there could have been enough improvements. Like this would almost have to be a relatively different kind of game for me for it to get on my essential games list. I I'm looking forward to seeing what wizards and warriors to given that it will have two years to fix these things. I'm looking forward to seeing what that is, but I can't help but feel like knowing that this one got a positive reception,

1:03:04 that they're going to, rare is going to learn the wrong lessons from this game and, and improve things other than the kind of things we wanted them to improve. But I'm, I'm willing to be proven wrong. I'm not looking at wizards and warriors to it all until we play it. I just want to mention one last thing about just the concept of difficulty and, and continues.

1:03:28 I think it's hard to really argue for one side or the other, unless you really are just a masochist that wants the most challenge possible. But there, I don't know what games like this need to balance actual stakes that make you want to overcome challenges.

1:03:49 And being more gentle to the player and where, where like the marriage of those two ideas makes a compelling experience, because this game was so forgiving that you could, you could just not fight anything. And I think that that was also like a problem. And I think that that will be a problem for future games as well. That, that you choose to go this more, uh, friendly route.

1:04:15 If you agree. Some people hate to hear this, but lately Nintendo has been doing like the, like an assist mode of shorts for most of their games. It's like, you don't even really have to play the game, but you know what? That's that mode that was never designed for people who are gamers. You know, that mode was designed for like three year olds who think Mario is like fun and cute, but they have no idea how to play a video game. So they use the assist mode instead to get all the feel of playing a video game before they like,

1:04:45 eventually they'll grow up and learn how to play video games. And this makes video games accessible to them. I have no problem with like a range of difficulty levels. And I think people who are get upset by an easy mode or like just not thinking the bigger picture through,

1:05:00 but this game could have used two difficulties. Yeah, for sure. This game could have used a normal and hard mode. And this could have been the normal mode. It definitely feels like it didn't feel like baby mode to me. I understand what you're saying. Like you could play the whole game without necessarily like killing too many things, but you'd have to have a big test of patience. Yeah. Continuously die and just move a little bit forward. And I don't mind because a lot of games that I like to play are, have strong stories or, or pretend to have strong stories. So I don't mind wanting an easier difficulty so you can experience the story, but because this game, it only has the challenge it has laid before you.

1:05:40 If you're not going to accept the challenge, then what are you playing the game for? Yeah. I mean, I think you're completely right. That, that is, that is one of the biggest problems is that there's, like I said, with the lava thing, like, why is there even lava? I will just die. It'll take me one second to come back where I was with full health and I'll keep walking along the lava. Yeah. It, there needs to be some sort of stake,

1:06:02 some sort of stakes, but, um, I guess it's just finding that balance that's, that's difficult. All right. And that is all the time we have for this episode of Nostalgia, but please join us next week for our best of 1987 episode. It's sure to be a,

1:06:19 Yeah. It's sure to be lit. You know, why not? Um, it's, it's going to be crazy. Sean's going to do a backflip. I will. And you will hear it. Oh, he's doing one right now. I'm not, I'm going to save it for the next episode. You save it for a big episode. Joe, what will you be doing? You'll find out. You'll find out in the next episode. If you watch. Everybody should have something up their sleeve for the next episode. I feel like, we'll have more games than ever to cover in a single episode. Um, I think this, this year, hold on. I have actually have the count up this year in 1987, we got 53 games. Um, so that's pretty crazy because, in 86, which would have been the most because 85 was only 17 in 86.

1:07:02 We got, come on, come on. 19. Yeah. This is going to be a little bit more homework. This is a little more homework. Uh, let's see right off the top of your guys heads. Do you remember, uh, Athena? I, yeah, I do. And elevator action. Yes, of course. Who could forget? What about alpha mission?

1:07:22 I remember playing a game called that. I can't remember. Which one? Yeah, which one is that? I can't remember if I played that one or not. There's a difference also between like remembering like, oh yeah, that's a shmup. And actually like knowing. Oh, that was with the cursor, right? Yes. Okay, yeah, I got it. The cursor for the selection of your power up. I'm Michael Esposito. You can find me on, at Esposito Film on Twitter. Make sure to tell everyone you know about nostalgia, including your dog. Your dog's awesome. Don't leave him out. He understands you. Even if you don't think you can understand us,

1:07:49 just stop being selfish, unplug your headphones, and blast this shit. You know? Seriously, there's people on the subway blasting music. Why don't you just blast nostalgia to fight them back? We're the number four dog podcast in the United States. They don't know, like they only listen to it via one iPod from 2007. So the, the, our listen count is way off, but we're still up there. Yep, absolutely up there. Uh, woof, woof to all my doggos out there. Okay. And meow if you're a cat.

1:08:35 I can't do it. I can't do it. Thank you.