173 · Amagon

• Amagon, the most decorated Marine, was assigned a mission by his commander to investigate a strange, monster-infested South Pacific island, from which no man has ever returned alive.
• Introductions
  • Sammy USA Corporation
  • Can we talk about the greatest box art of all time?
  • https://www.mobygames.com/game/nes/amagon/cover-art/gameCoverId,26361/
• Overview
  • Action Platformer game where you run from left to right clearing your way through enemies until you get to the boss of each stage.
• Storyline
  • players take the role of Amagon, a Marine who is trapped on an island after his plane crashed. Inconveniently, his rescue ship is on the other side of the island, which Amagon must now cross on foot.
  • The storyline used for the original Japanese release was somewhat different.
    • The main character is a scientist named "Jackson" who transforms into his "Macho Man" form by using the special drug "Macho Max" that has been taken from his plane by the creatures of "Monster Island"
• Gameplay
  • Amagon
    • The Rifle and Combat
    • Contra but with a Wimp
  • Megagon
    • HP determined by score. A neat EXP ->Arcade action
    • Megagon cannot use the machine gun, but instead has a punch which does eight times the damage and never runs out of ammo.
    • At the cost of one hit point each, he can also fire waves of energy from his chest; these are much broader than machine gun shots, do 16 times the damage, and can hit multiple enemies in a single blast.
  • The bosses
  • Why is all the music so high pitched?
• Sequels and Spinoffs
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagon,_Arkansas
• EGL
• Next week - Dr. Jekyll

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

00:00 Amagon, the most decorated Marine, was assigned a mission by his commander to investigate a strange, monster-infested South Pacific island from which no man has ever returned alive.

00:28 NOSTALGIA And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. I'm Joe. And I'm Sam. NOSTALGIA Sam, speaking of Sam, this game was made by the SAMI USA Corporation. NOSTALGIA Oh yeah. NOSTALGIA Never heard of them, but what are your initial thoughts on SAMI? NOSTALGIA It's American SAMI. NOSTALGIA I mean, just off the bat, it sounds like a very nice and well-respected organization. NOSTALGIA Prestigious, probably, like, with big muscles, too.

01:03 NOSTALGIA And probably has, like, a good sense of humor and nice wit. NOSTALGIA Sean, you were saying something- Should we call you SAMI? Should we call you SAMI going forward? NOSTALGIA I have nothing to do with that. I don't know what you're talking about. NOSTALGIA I'm just asking if we should call you SAMI. I mean, you're Sam. NOSTALGIA You seem to like the name SAMI. NOSTALGIA You can call me American SAMI. NOSTALGIA Okay. NOSTALGIA Anybody get a chance to look at the box art for this game? NOSTALGIA It's crazy. It's wild. It's probably one of the best box arts we've seen.

01:38 NOSTALGIA I feel like, you know, there's something about this little kid who's apparently supposed to be a most decorated Marine who then, like, transforms into a macho version of himself. NOSTALGIA But then he's, like, firing at, like, dinosaurs and UFOs and then, like, bumblebees and bats. NOSTALGIA So, like, there's just a lot going on on this box art. And I just, I think it's very abstract. And I don't know if I'd know what kind of game I was getting into off of this.

02:11 NOSTALGIA Yeah, I kind of get some vibes that maybe this game, the story of this game was, like, changed in development. Like, I feel like they made a game with one story and then they're like, oh, let's just make the story something else and not change it in the end of the game. Oh, 100% was. NOSTALGIA Was it? NOSTALGIA

02:42 NOSTALGIA

02:59 chubby cherub sure um so i think it's sort of like that yeah when i was reading the manual and i was like all right there's they're talking about the greatest marine in u.s history right greatest marine or soldier i forget what they call him and then the game boots up and it's just like it's like this little tiny guy in a pink jumpsuit with like a stupid expression on his face i'm like all right terrible does not scream decorated marine yeah i thought he was supposed to be like a caveman or something yeah it looks like they gave a flintstones character a gun especially when you transform you look even more like a caveman it's got that big lower jaw

03:42 i guess i'll just lower yeah yeah it's very like uh i don't know like neanderthal um but also point out that when you when you run out of ammo with your gun you hold it over your head in a way that you wouldn't hold it but you hold it what to what i look think what looks like what i think you would hold like a caveman club yeah it's like i really thought that this was like it was just like a re-skinned caveman that was barely even re-skinned yeah i think that's that's about right um and yeah i whatever i know this isn't something that i should be thinking but i was just cringing every time

04:15 because i got to that point where i ran out of ammo we're gonna get into this but i got to the point where i was swinging the gun like a club pretty often and it just i just felt bad because i feel like you're just breaking the gun like what you're gonna break it right i mean i guess you know you got you got to survive you got to defend yourself you got a bullet you could like pick up one of the other guys that you beat and then use that that's true because in a way this is kind of how they would have made cast away the uh film with tom hanks this is how they would have made this set that into a

04:45 video game it would have been like this is there an nes castaway castaway came out in 2000 i think with robert zemeckis directing yeah it was based on the nes game that came out in 1989 true the movie got rid of the uh the elephants that walked on their their hind legs and shot out eggs so players take the role of omegon the uh marine which is also just a weird name for a person but let's just let's just say that that makes sense right he's trapped on this island after a plane crash now he has to get to his rescue ship which is all the way on the other side of the island so the only way to do it

05:20 is to cross on foot so you're looking at an action platformer you know run from left to right you clear your way through all these enemies until you get to the boss at the end of each stage very very straightforward um you know except for it's like if mario had a gun right because there's there's your gun that you use to shoot uh honestly some really cute looking enemies i wasn't expecting i thought they could you know for a game with a gun you would expect the enemies look a little more vicious but it's like nice little you know i'm sure it gets a little bit worse later on but like nice little purple spiders and some birds and stuff like that i don't even know if all these enemies are

05:55 necessarily trying to get in your way or if they just exist on the island and you're just torturing them but joe take me through like take me through why this is different than your normal action platformer what makes omegon stand out just on like a initial impression well all right so what you were saying is a big part of it that that it looks it looks a little brighter it looks a little more mario like i think just because the color palette is like more more simple um and that makes

06:20 it look a little cleaner but as far as like gameplay elements uh your major little the major kind of gimmick here is that you can collect a power-up that allows you to transform from omegon into megagon which is funny because that means nothing to anyone but once you once you uh kind of get the hang of it you realize that megagon is just a is just a jacked more powerful version of omegon that is looks like a caveman and has uh an actual health bar and has more powerful attacks and basically you're just like

06:54 a more of a juggernaut version of your original self so like that's i think supposed to be the like the hook is that like you need to you need to struggle through the jungle as omegon to to get to the more difficult parts and and have gained the ability to transform into megagon i like that struggle in the jungle i love that and as as sean mentioned the in the japanese version uh the story is a little different so um megagon which again doesn't mean anything actually sounds like a power

07:21 ranger uh like you know like one of those things they would call on right or like a shape with a lot of sides it's just it's just that omegon sounds too like it should be like steve turns into megagon not like or like steve turns into omegon like they both sound like the thing you would turn into like the powerful thing right so in the japanese version the main character is a scientist named jackson who transforms into macho max by using a special drug um i could have sworn it was macho man

07:56 uh no i i think it's he he transforms into a macho man like character known as macho max or the drug is named macho max which makes sense because you're your maximum macho that makes more sense to me yeah yeah so before we talk about like that whole mechanic of becoming megagon or macho max or macho man or the incredible hulk whatever you think it is um before we talk about that can we just talk about when you're playing as omegon with the rifle and the combat with the enemies um you know what's what's the flow of that like sam uh it's hard it's it's really hard um because you get hit once you're dead uh you can run out of ammo and then you have to be right up next to an enemy to hit them and some of these enemies like the

08:44 standing ones require i think 12 or 16 hits before they're done and um it's like they they have predictable moving patterns i think but it's still like like each enemy kind of responds when you get to a certain point near them like if you get underneath those guys who are on the tree and they drop down in front of you and then go to the left but sometimes it that trigger point doesn't happen until you're a little bit past them so even though they respond the same way and you can predict what the enemies are going to do they are they're placed in a way and they're like there's these little changes that make it

09:31 still that still make it unpredictable if you're not playing it hundreds of times um which this seems like that kind of game that you would just play over and over and over again until you memorized it um and i think that that's really the only way to get through levels so sam what's what's the issue there though is it the enemy behavior or is it omegon and the way that he like his gun handles combat uh or is it bull uh i i think it's like it's more just it feels like an onslaught sometimes and it's a little bit hard to i would say it's kind of enemy behavior where like you'll get

10:13 you'll try to jump over one guy but at the second you jump they'll jump things like that and between that frequently yeah between that and the fact there are so many of them and so many of them of different kinds that have different patterns and like they they don't seem to respond to uh the terrain they can just sort of like like a walking enemy won't get stuck if if there's like a ledge like it like it would when you're sort of trained in super mario to expect that it'll just sort of teleport to the top of the ledge and continue to follow you there's a lot of things that uh are sort of you have to unlearn from a lot of different platformers action platformers to kind of get the hang of this

11:01 yeah i will say i i think that i feel like this game is like a step in the right direction compared to a lot of other games when it comes to enemy placement where like at least there's they clearly like are the enemy placement is not random like it seems like they had some thought into like where and when they come the problem is that they just still made it too much of a cluster so it doesn't really matter that they put thought into it because like they didn't think about should this enemy be here but you know you know what i mean it's not like any enemy just shows up at any time and

11:31 they're just always running at you like you can tell like there's a part where you come where the crocodiles come so yeah they do still do the thing where like if you're just standing still they'll just keep coming so you can't get trapped and it does seem like and i agree that there does seem to be more thought in the enemy placement but i think that there's more like trolling going on here where uh it knows that the the player sort of sees the optimal route and like is gonna dodge this thing so they place another thing that's gonna spawn in as soon as they get there and i i don't appreciate

12:06 that when it's this dense um yeah i i totally agree yeah yeah i think that that that is a big negative that like enemies will just keep coming even after you kill them until you've moved on um but i but i think that it would be manageable if you were to like if you were like thanos these enemies and literally just cut them out in half you'd you'd be able to at least manage it and it wouldn't be as bad as like uh what was it like karate kid i think that was a was a big offender of that yeah yeah there's

12:34 something about um the the pacing of the game because of the way that the enemies behave i think damn you were talking about a lot of the game just comes down to enemy behavior but because of how you have to handle them and you play this game of like chicken with some of them where it's like okay wait are they gonna jump that new height or are they gonna jump their highest height like or are they gonna come at me it slows down the game a lot and your gun is like i don't know it's a it's great

13:03 that you have some kind of ranged weapon but it feels like you're playing contra but like with a wimp who can barely do anything like the action element of this game is is putting it like that's very kind to the game because it's not really an action like game you're not you don't feel like a badass with a gun tracking down like through the jungle like you're kind of you kind of have to if you know because everything is one hit you gotta play the game slow if you want to get anywhere was that your guys experience definitely but i thought that that was what they were going for i mean i don't think that

13:37 they pulled it off in a way that was particularly fun but i thought that the point was that you are very weak as amagon so then you can feel very powerful and i think they went too far in both directions uh when you're powerful i think you're too powerful and when you're weak i think you're too weak i think that part of it is memorization also i think that that does play a big part where like if you don't know what you're doing you're going to go slow and be careful but once you do know how to

14:02 take care of enemies i think that you can do a little faster like there are some enemies enemies that you can just skip like the the tall enemies because a lot of them jump and so when they jump if you can get underneath them then you don't even have to fight them but the trade-off there is also that a lot of those big enemies have the what is it the the meg megagon power up in them when you defeat them yeah that's a good point sam i think you know ultimately the biggest problem i have with just the the level design is that because of how challenging they've made you know some of the

14:36 enemies and the cluster of enemies that the pacing just doesn't it feels off here like either the levels are too long and they should have shortened them or the uh enemy should have been more spread out so that you have time to deal with them appropriately it feels like somewhere along the line they they took a misstep in both of those directions where the level is just too long and there's just too many enemies so it's very hard you know in a one-hit ko game it's very hard to get very far in this game now challenging things is not something that we're not used to but i like when a game is challenging for other reasons not because um you know i'm supposed to be

15:15 slogging it out and and memorizing and and trying to dodge things rather than take them on it it feels like that it's at odds with itself yeah i also don't really like the idea of memorization being the like like that's the primary source of challenge i uh that that seems kind of like a cop out to me not not that anyone is saying that that's where they so they get enjoyment from any particular game but that's just my opinion on that

15:57 to me this feels like the prime example of like an old nintendo hard kind of feel where it's like a little bit in the gameplay itself and a little bit in like the the kind of janky old school construction of it yeah and it's funny because like the game has a reputation for being incredibly difficult and i'm not saying it's not but i also feel like even in the like only 170 other games we've played we've definitely played stuff harder than this um this one has has has elements that

16:33 are are definitely hard because i think it's a little unfair like when so there are those upright you you alluded to them earlier sam there are those upright enemies sometimes they're elephants or in some levels they're crocodiles or robots or whatever and those take most things in this game to take either one hit or 16 hits to kill which is just kind of a ridiculous like disparity there and the uh the the 16 hit things sometimes two of them appear on the screen and i've found that if two of

17:02 them are on the screen in in my experience you're gonna die yeah it's like you're dead until you try like the fifth or sixth time you get there and you could finally maybe like luck your way through yeah but you have to like cheese those guys yeah like try and get them off how do you cheese them what like get them off the screen or a lot of them jump so you are like you can predict when they

17:23 jump or if you jump they'll jump so you have to like get around them without killing them gotcha get under them or get over them yeah that's how i what i felt anyway which is an interesting idea right for an enemy no doubt uh it's just that it happens too often to make it um yeah to make it worth it you know it seems like you you should reserve that so this way it's like a teachable

17:45 moment not just like a this is a part of our our design the teachable moment in the game you know like yeah i i think that's a good idea the game should work with you here rather than fight you further the the further along in the game you go no i i just like that because it just i'm thinking of like a morality thing when you say that right right you don't have to kill them

18:10 all right let's talk about megagon um which is the you know maxed out macho man form of omegon which is this is pretty cool you know it takes the rpg side of like experience points and mixes it with the arcade element of a score and i can't think of an earlier instance of this but it'd be like if you got a certain score in pac-man you know after like a certain amount of dots being eaten and all of a sudden you just became like twice pac-man size and you could chew

18:43 through the walls or something like it is a neat idea to to tie the amount of experience points you get in um in the game just to the arcade score no that's what i really liked about this is that like yeah every five five thousand points i think yes five thousand is like a little tick of the box of uh of uh megagon's health um or uh a use of his like uh his actual like superpower i guess which is a beam of energy coming out of his chest while he flexes um and i mean we have been complaining about

19:22 the uselessness of scores in any kind of game for over two years and i don't know how long we've been doing this but i was just amazed that we finally found like an application um that it seemed so intuitive so i was i was a big fan of the way that they did this megagon thing i just wish it like i for me megagon had like that like i don't know if there's like a name for this but like

19:50 that that syndrome where like you you don't want to use a very special power until like you know that you you really need it so i was always sort of uh i was always trying not to use megagon um but anyway that's that's my two cents on it you can use it more than once though you have to you have to get a drop yeah but can you all right here's my question for you guys i wasn't sure about this well first of all do the drops drops are random right the drops are not tied to points random

20:19 okay then second of all that's what i thought second of all if you pick up two drops does it save the other one no become megagon okay that's what i wasn't sure about because once i get a second one i'm like well that's kind of pointless at that point i never never tested it out but um but yeah i do love that uh it gives you a reason to kill enemies and a reason to to do you know to participate in the main gameplay loop of attacking things because that gives you health as megagon yeah so megagon cannot use the machine gun anymore his hands are i guess too big for it so instead he has a punch uh which does eight times the damage and obviously never runs out of ammo like the gun however you've

21:04 now completely lost your ranged weapon and you must fight in closed combat did we prefer closed combat over uh the the rifle or was it kind of like uh this is strange now i was i was doing better when i was able to tackle enemies from afar well you still have a ranged weapon it just also uses some of your health yeah it's like a trade-off though right so it's like forget that for a second just just talking about like now you your primary combat is the fifth like is that is that like somehow too harsh of a trade-off for megagon and now it's kind of like oh i wish i had the rifle

21:39 like like i think it is a fair trade-off because i think that a lot of the enemies are weak to attacks from underneath them and your punch is also works like an uppercut and it gets things slightly above you too so what was once your own weakness like attacks from above is now your advantage and so now you have a hitbox there or hurtbox i always mix them up but um so i think you gain this whole other like dimension of available places to fight yeah i agree yeah i i i wanted to say off the bat that that i always 100 percent prefer to be megagon but when i'm thinking about that i mean the reason that i prefer to be megagon is because he's so much more powerful and because like you can

22:28 easily easily beat all the bosses as megagon and like waves of enemies but if i'm thinking about it i mean it didn't really run into this because i like you sean didn't use megagon when i didn't need to just to kind of save it but um but if i was using him the whole time i mean those close quarters attacks plus the the ranged attacks taking down your health just means you're losing a lot of health

22:51 between the two of those so like it probably is like responsible to be amagon until you absolutely need to so like for what it's worth i think they they that they did that's a good they did a good balancing act between those two i suppose yeah to be fair i'm not i don't uh think that like it i think it would be just too crazy if he also had the machine gun and and could do closed combat so i

23:17 do think it's a fair trade-off as sean was alluding to that like you still have your ranged weapon it just comes at a cost now i i think that's the best way to handle things but it's the it's like at the the cost of one hit point now you can fire those waves of energy from your chest um and they do 16 times the damage which is great because again we were talking earlier like the rifle sometimes takes

23:38 16 shots to kill some stuff yeah uh but it could also hit multiple enemies in a single blast which is nice too uh reminds me of some shmup power-ups there yeah i'd say so so joe you were talking about you prefer megagon and then you know your reasoning for that and everything like that but do you think just on a on a level progression scale were they giving you the megagon ability often enough

24:03 um to make the game interesting like i i would say that if i was just omegon if there was no megagon component to this game i wouldn't care for it at all like the megagon component is what makes the game so did they give it to you enough to keep you intrigued um i think it was well it was often enough for the like i said already the way i was playing it like maybe that's not the way that they

24:23 intended you to play it the way i was playing it was get to the end of the level then use megagon so so i was always like looking out the whole time i did not want to get to the end of the level without a power-up without whatever the drop that you need to pick up in order to transform because that happened to me on like my first few tries and that made the game i think i could be wrong but i

24:44 think literally impossible i don't think you can beat the bosses as omegon you technically can okay well i can't it's literally impossible for me yeah through some questionable uh ways of beating bosses like you know with the lion head smacking him with the butt of my rifle uh i was able to beat him that way but it took it took a very long time and uh i was kind of cheating so it's technically

25:11 possible i i guess yeah so i guess after the first boss i never even tried to fight with amegon because the first boss just runs at you and i just fire as many bullets at it as i can stay as far away from it and it just doesn't kill it yeah um but then i do think you know i'm talking about how much i i like playing as megagon i do think that like i like playing as megagon because it gets me through the things i don't think it's like more fun i just think it's really really easy like it would have been

25:39 cool if the balance was a little was there a little more as far as like gameplay difficulty balance because i i that first that first boss either literally to me impossible to beat with amegon or like almost impossible to lose with megagon like it's just it was like two hits with that blast and the whole the boss is done and i found that with most of the bosses with megagon so it was nice and there was like a satisfaction to like being that powerful but then it also robbed it of all challenge yeah i think that's a good point joe is like with the bosses it it shouldn't be impossible to beat these guys with uh amegon and by impossible i mean like it shouldn't be a slog because you didn't design

26:22 your game with the idea that you would become megagon every time at the end of the stages or else that would just be something that happens via a cut scene or something you know you watch him take the pill or or whatever it is and then he becomes megagon and now you deal with the megagon portion of the stage level so because they didn't design it that way uh it's kind of unfair for the way that they build out the bosses and i also just found these boss fights not to be uh interesting at all either they

26:48 were uh they were more just you know stronger enemies that didn't really do anything uh they just run at you well the first one just runs at you yeah so it's like there's something about that i would have expected like a cool you know some of the enemies have cool patterns so i would have expected some cool um ideas for larger enemies in this game but the bosses are just that they're just larger

27:09 i'm gonna start sounding like a broken record here but i did think that some of them had interesting patterns but it didn't matter because it was way too easy to kill them has been you know it's like a lot of things that i think this game did well are just kind of ruined because of that weird difficulty imbalance so like for example there's like the the lion head has like an interesting pattern i don't know if it's necessarily great boss design but i thought it was interesting there's also that like snake at the end where you have like you have to take out the bottom layers of the snake so you can reach the horn that's kind of interesting except taking out the bottom layers of the snake is just hitting

27:43 a three times and then hit a one more time and hit the corn it's like literally rapid fire kill of the boss so it's like they it's like they went through the trouble of designing an interesting boss but then never really made the gameplay work with it yeah i i hear you there completely um and i'm not sure what they would have like they would have had to change something about the way omegon plays to make it more interesting right because the the solution certainly isn't just to bring down their total number of hits or something so maybe not quite sure what the solution is there sam you have

28:16 something yeah i'm saying maybe like decrease his power like instead of he does eight right for every one that omegon does so maybe make him do four instead oh okay yeah yeah you know something yeah or or something like make it so it's not so easy to hit your target every time you know what i mean like make it so it's like you have to wait for your opening or you have to you have to get to it or something if it's just hit the target and the target's right in front of you and you can just you can just you know turbo fire the thing as long as you have enough because i think also like

28:46 the fact that you have a life bar now instead of one hit ko is already super powered like like that's enough to justify turning into a new guy i think to me like yeah i think that also needs he also needs to be stronger so i think even if it was just like each hit is like two hits like not even like four times because like the most difficult part of this game is just the fact that like there's so many enemies and you only you can't you can't even get hit once uh as as the base amagon uh so i think that would kind of solve that to at least the too easy portion of um uh of this problem i don't know how you fix the too hard portion of amagon aside from maybe at least giving him a bit more ammo i don't know

29:41 but his ammo is gone yeah oh that's fun yeah they're not all funny why is all the music in this game so high pitched i i don't know i like the music yeah i didn't even notice i didn't like it there's something about it it was just like you know the the tones that they use unpleasant to my ears i i really liked the megagon music the amagon music i've completely forgotten about but the when you transform it just it just it just pumps you up a little bit i like how each level has some music though yeah that is nice coming off of lolo yeah now if you want to hear something else about amagon though look no further than amagon arkansas uh it's a small little town in jackson county uh which

30:34 is weird because jackson county is uh would be a reference to in the japanese game the scientist jackson so in the american version right his name is amagon but in the japanese version he's a scientist named jackson game takes place in amagon arkansas jackson county who can say uh only 98 people living in amagon arkansas which if you flip it is 89 which is 1989 the current year that we're in in our nostalgia journey so there's just a lot going on here it makes sense that there's only 98 people living there because it's like so dangerous because you get hit with one thing and you die right right yeah and it's an anagram for abraham lincoln

31:22 it's the birthplace of former arkansas governor mike bb oh of course yeah yeah so that's the sequels and spinoff section so one more big thing we got to do and that is to decide whether amagon is an essential game on a little thing we call the essential games list

31:45 sam hey it's all about amagon not megagon so when you are giving this game your essential games list vote how do you feel about the nes video game amagon amagon the american sammy video game uh wow what a game uh there's i think this game has so much that's working for it i think that

32:08 visually it looks great i think all the enemy designs are really fun i think that the core gameplay loop for it is also really fantastic the fact that you have to you have to get points in this game like we were talking about points are essential you're weak and then you become strong but the strong uh megagon has a limit with like the beam which is his strongest attack which makes him weaker i think that there's all these really great kind of gameplay loops that

32:37 are all happening at the same time and i think that if you are the kind of person who likes a challenging retro action platformer then that the one that you can really invest yourself in and like know all of the like nooks and crannies of it and invest yourself in it um then you i think you would honestly really enjoy this game um and for that reason i'm going to add it to my essential games list um i think that it's not for everyone but i think that there is a certain kind of person

33:18 who when they play nes games they're looking for a game like this and i think that it should be on more people's radar very well said very interesting take sam joe your take so i'll say i think that there there are the the bones of a good game here but i but i i don't think that they pulled it off i think that like the a lot of the things that you're describing sam i i also think are like really cool concepts for gameplay and it's like a nice change up to things where we've been used to and

33:50 and it's it's cool ideas for game design but i think that there's just too many things in it that that frustrate me like enemies that take 16 hits among a bunch of enemies that take one hit that sometimes feel like you're just screwed when they appear or the fact that i keep bringing up that you are really overpowered as megagon um i i just think that they didn't they didn't nail it they didn't

34:21 i would i i wish that there had been a sequel to this because i think that that would be something that they could look at like okay what went wrong with with amagon and like what was right and if they were like really refine those things i think you could make this into a good game um and and if we were to do the old thought experiment that we do all the time of uh if you got this game in 1989

34:40 um and it was like it was like your only game and you got really good at it you you probably would have fond memories of it but uh but i i think the frustrations outweigh the the pros for me so so i'm not putting it on okay sean where do you stand um i i can see that this game has some interesting ideas i appreciate that the score is more than just uh something that gives you an extra life after 50,000 or whatever um the powering up does give you that power trip uh but i think everything else about this game is just kind of strikes me as a little lazy um it's i don't really appreciate uh the uh the the core loop i i don't like the decisions they made in a lot of tiny ways um so yeah i know that there

35:33 are some people that this is their jam uh but i don't think that i can put this on an essential games list i maybe for like you know a uh an obscure cool list but not an essential games list all right so it can't be on the essential games list uh now that it's been uh at least tied i will just say where i stand here is you know it's uh there's a lot of work to playing this game and i don't know about most people but unless i'm playing like harvest moon i don't like to work that much when i'm playing my video games i like to just enjoy them and i feel like as i was talking about on the episode you know there's a lot of pacing issues here and just if i actually wanted

36:19 to play this like how i play video games i can't i'll die pretty quick um and it just wasn't overall like an enjoyable experience in that way uh you know seeing every single enemy and treating it like a life or death situation could be what they were going for uh but it wasn't fun for me to play it that way every time i see a tree and i know that there's a bat dangling down from it or i know that some enemies are going to fly in from um the right side of the screen you know it's like just being on edge like that didn't make for a fun game experience and i'm not saying it was cheap but it wasn't um it wasn't delivering on what i thought it was trying to do so for that reason

37:01 it's not an essential game but you gotta respect sam mine i kind of knew it wasn't gonna be so it was more of a protest vote so you did the the old sean uh top gun hell yeah brother yeah free top gun but that's the show you know like you gotta you gotta take your shot when you see a game that you like you gotta call it out and so this way eventually the show just becomes uh listeners who follow different uh people on the show they're the you know the followers of joe who only listen to his word of mouth and swear by spy versus spy spy and uh what's the other one that i've wanted on there it's my you don't even know zelda 2 it's it i know i don't even know it's zelda 2

37:44 well zelda 2 that's that's not my own zelda 2 sure but like no there's there is another one is it i don't know it's i'll find it keep going i'll find it before the end of the episode sure sure i was just gonna say then there's like that one listener who uh roots for me and says i hope the other guys like stop picking on that dude but they won't where are my disciples of sean my slalom followers who have seen the light rygar rygar i voted that on i love rygar yeah i would where

38:13 were you on the essential list i know i'm sorry i'll get back on there i think rygar is getting better with age right i won't this kind of gave me some some rygar vibes like the colors or something the the look of it well i'll tell you one thing there are many games that we can go back and look on but we have a lot of games to look forward to as well like next week's episode dr jackal and mr hyde it's you know that's a famous novel so it must translate well into a video game yeah i can't wait

38:45 so we're gonna look at that one um made by the advanced communication company and um i just i think it's funny when i've never heard of a company before you know like it's like okay cool they made it sure um and then we got a lot of other games coming up too though we've got uh fist of the north star the guardian legend mappy land what do you think mappy land is i think it's that game it's that hit cartography game with what yeah i think it's with those mice i can't remember exactly what it is but i think it was an arcade game looking forward to it yeah looking forward to a mouse

39:20 arcade game uh where's the mousetrap nes game everybody wants that it broke after the first time we played it did anyone ever play mousetrap no mousetrap is the kind of game that you just set up uh but you don't actually ever play it you know you just set it up and then watch the mouse get caught and you're like yay it happened and then you put it all back in the box exactly how how i played mousetrap like monopoly you just put the houses on everything but you don't play that game right yeah no that's ridiculous uh anyway for more ridiculous action check out

39:53 nostalgic cast on twitter at nostalgic cast and we're posting ridiculous stuff all the time over there weird box art funny youtube videos um you know interviews with me and shigeru miyamoto one day maybe i could see that happening just keep listening and maybe it will anyway in the meantime we're gonna keep releasing episodes every friday so check back here i'm michael esposito you can find me at esposito film on twitter and i'll talk to you soon you