180 · Predator

• IF IT BLEEDS, WE CAN DESTROY IT
• NES Longplay - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBzeba_J2N8
• Introductions
  • The movie
  • We’ve seen a lot of games influenced by ALIEN, what about Predator?
• Overview
  • Action shooter where you play as Dutch Schaefer clearing your way through a variety of levels taking down predators.
• Gameplay
  • Starting with no weapons
  • Side-Scrolling Action
    • Some levels have two exits, one of which will warp the player ahead several levels.
  • "Big Mode" named after the larger sprites than in the normal action stages.
    • Here, the game takes place in an auto-scrolling environment where the screen scrolls to the right.
• MSX Version
  • Weapons were not limited to one at a time BUT you did not have infinite ammunition
  • Weapons carried over between levels
• Sequels and Spinoffs
  • Predator 2 - Genesis 1992
    • Isometric shooter without that fake 3d look
  • Predator: Concrete Jungle - 2005 PS2
    • the player controls a Predator
  • Predators - Mobile 2010
    • Predator Clan pay2win style game
  • Like Jason, Predator also showed up in Mortal Kombat X
  • Predator: Hunting Grounds - 2020 PS4
    • asymmetrical multiplayer* shooter that pits man against Predator. As part of a Fireteam, complete missions before the Predator finds you. Or be the Predator and hunt your prey.
• EGL
• Next week - Taboo: Sixth Sense

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

00:00 Predator, if it bleeds, we can destroy it.

00:18 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. Guys, before we talk about this video game, I have something to admit. I've never seen any of these Predator movies. I don't really know what the Predator is other than just from seeing it in like Aliens vs. Predator. Who has seen this movie? I've seen it. I'm surprised you didn't watch it in preparation, Mike. But is it just Sean? Like Joe? I've never seen it.

00:55 So, Sean, I'm going to pick on you then. One, yes, it's true, I should have watched the movie. I don't know, it just doesn't call me, maybe because I don't believe that aliens will ever visit Earth. But what is Predator? What is going on in this movie? It's a classic 80s action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger where he's like a commando spec ops guy and he's doing some shady stuff down in Central America and then it turns out that they're being hunted by an alien race that just seems to like to hunt things.

01:36 But then he becomes the Predator while after he kills all his friends and then they have a showdown to the death before Predator ultimately succumbs to Mr. Schwarzenegger. That's a great synopsis. That was a major spoiler though at the end. Nah, if you weren't going to watch it. It succumbs to him how? If you're going to do an episode about a game based on this movie, you probably weren't going to watch it. I had that on my list. I have it queued up on my TV right now.

02:11 I'm deleting it right now. Actually though, but to be fair, Joe, Sean brings up a great point because I remember renting Spider-Man the game from Blockbuster which came out a week before the movie. And I'm talking about the very first Spider-Man movie. And I played that game. And at the end, the end is the cut scene where the Green Goblin is killed by his own hover device. And I remember thinking like, oh, that's crazy. And then seeing it in the movies and being like, that was the spoiler.

02:42 That was a great game. Yeah. Well, also now you just spoiled that too. I mean, this episode now has two movie spoilers. Now what the game would lead you to believe is that Predator was a movie in which a pink-wearing Arnold Schwarzenegger runs around some forests and caves killing lots of scorpions, some strange monsters,

03:08 sort of minecrafting his way through some caves, fighting all of the Predators that have ever existed. And then I guess just surviving. Sean, you bring up a great point. Predators, Predator. Now in Alien, there was only one. And then in Aliens, the twist is there's more of them. In Predator, is there just one? Because in the video game, there's a bunch. In Predator the movie, there's only one. And I guess in the game, it could be seen as like each of these fights that you have with the Predator is just like him coming back. Yeah, actually the manual kind of alludes to that. The manual is like no matter how many times you defeat him, you'll have to fight him again or something like that.

03:55 All right. I guess that makes sense. It's like one of those video games where you beat the boss and then you watch the cut scene where you lose. Yeah. Well, I never, I didn't beat this one, but do you ever have two Predators on screen at once? No. All right. Well, then that checks out. But there are weird, like, there are other alien objects that are on the screen with the Predator, so it's non-canon, you know?

04:21 Or maybe the movie's non-canon. Yeah. Okay, we can do it that way. Now, I mentioned Alien vs. Predator, and we have seen a lot of video games influenced by Alien. I think most notably Metroid and Contra were games that were heavily influenced by Alien. Where are the games that have been influenced by Predator? Can you guys think of any off the top of your head? Or is this the lackluster, like, stepchild of the Alien vs. Predator series? Friday the 13th. There you go. Interesting. Are you asking about, like, media in general or video games? Video games. Like, where are the video games based off of Predator? I guess it's just AVP. Because I remember the one, I forget what year it came out, but it was actually a pretty detailed representation

05:15 of, like, the way that... And there's nothing that alludes to it in this game. Like, in Predator, one of the biggest stylistic choices they made was that the Predator only sees in, like, thermal vision or in this other weird red vision. And it's got, like, the lasers,

05:37 and, like, he's got a nuclear warhead at some point. None of that's in this game. But I remember AVP from, I think, like, the early aughts or the late 90s had stuff like that. And it was very entertaining, if not a very... It wasn't a good game, but it was an entertaining game. Got it, got it. All right, well, today we're talking about pretty much an action shooter where you play as Arnold Schwarzenegger, otherwise known as Dutch Schaefer, and you clear your way through a variety of levels,

06:11 basically picking up weapons as you go. You don't start with a weapon. You just take what you can find. And as Sean alluded to, there are destructible environments. That's being very kind to these levels. But there are destructible environments that you have to navigate around. Based on the weapons you pick up, you'll take down enemies, be they humans, animals, or predator. And eventually you will get to the predator, which is part of the, I guess, like, bigger stage structure of the action. I think that's a fair overview. So if we could move into the... Yeah, Sean. I do want to make a quick correction. You do start with a weapon.

06:50 It's a punch. Well, you're holding a gun, I'm pretty sure. But you can't use it. No, but you still start with a gun. That's important, because the ammo, like, is something you have to pick up.

07:02 I guess so. Or it's just your favorite guns. You don't, like, shoot a gun until a little bit later in the game. Your first weapon is a grenade, aside from your fists. But who brings a gun to a jungle without ammo?

07:20 I don't know. I think that this kind of feeds this other theme that I've noticed of there's a little bit of, like, laziness when it comes to designing sprite animations in this game. And it's just a theory. But I think that, yeah, they didn't want to get rid of the gun sprite. And also the other thing I noticed is that when you duck, you can shoot your gun if you have ammo, but you can't punch while you're ducking. And I think that's because, I'm guessing, that's because they don't have a sprite design for when you're ducking and punching.

07:51 Well, have you ever duck punched in your life? It's really hard. I duck punch most of the time. Well, here's the thing. Like, most punches I throw. You know, your punching strength comes from the rotation and comes from your hips and your legs. So it's not really going to do you much good if you're just ducking, I think. Yeah, but, you know, it's simulating other things that you would do while fighting on the ground that they can't put in due to technical limitations. Hmm. I'll conceive that. Bye-bye.

08:57 one thing i wanted to point out the fact that they like clearly say this is arnold schwarzenegger but it's like as if he was like playing this video game character in this game like they don't you know like there's a picture there's like a an eight-bit picture of him

09:14 but it's not like he's in the game it's like arnold schwarzenegger as i forget the guy's name oh as gus schaefer yeah yeah but the fact that he's arnold has nothing to do with anything else i don't know i just have we seen the actor like credited in any of these other games based on movies no i mean the the top john the biggest font on pretty much every page or the second biggest uh text on every page is the word schwarzenegger every page that big of a deal yeah they really uh they

09:48 really wanted to make sure we knew who was in the movie yeah he has a good agent so joe you're saying you're upset that in karate kid they weren't saying machio they should now that i've seen this i think it's an injustice to ralph machio got it got it okay well if i could start with a question for the gameplay section because i'm not really sure where to start here uh what did you guys think of starting

10:11 with no weapons um you know we you do have your punch and everything but you know for some video games that we've played that's been a really cool feature of like you gotta you gotta find your weapons and you gotta explore this world to to figure out like how to fight these enemies did it translate well into predator let me tell you about my first five to ten minutes in this game

10:36 so you get spawned with you know with your fists and then you you you come to a fork in the road you can either take the low path uh which has some enemy walking around down there or you can take the high path but down the low path is where you pick up your grenades so i took the low path and uh picked up uh that sprite of grenades and then proceeded to spend seven to ten minutes trying to break my way out of like this this brick wall because there's no way to jump over these destructible objects that you need

11:13 to get past it um and it's a very not fine-tuned system as to how you throw grenades and uh like what what those grenades will destroy so it was like pulling teeth trying to get out of like the first screen of the game for me i did end up like you know trying again later and i just didn't go that way and it took me 15 seconds but that was my first experience yeah i'll say that i think on paper the idea of

11:47 starting with no weapon works well for this game because you feel like prey you know but uh but i think that uh another big problem with it is that you start with no weapon you only have your punch which i mentioned before you can't use while you're ducking and all the enemies at the beginning of the game are like knee height to you so you actually just can't hit any of them and also i mean there there is that one guard who's kind of guarding the grenades right and i felt like when you get the grenade

12:20 that guy is so much harder to deal with than when you just have the punch because the punch you just walk he's at someone who's actually your height so you can just walk up to him and punch him and he's gone but the grenade he's walking towards you and you have to throw the grenade which has a timer on

12:34 it so by the time you have to walk backwards to give yourself enough space to throw a grenade at him and hope that he runs into it and also the with the way enemies respond in this game if you leave the screen and then come back the enemy is going to respond so if you're trying to give yourself enough space to throw a grenade and let's say you get him and then you move to the side he's going to come back and this happened to me a lot while i was trying to escape that pit but sean was talking about too because i ran into the same problem and i felt like the ability to just switch back to

13:09 your punch is that is needed in some cases oh yeah i agree it's weird that once you get the grenade you can only throw i don't think i've ever played a game where you can only throw grenades like grenades you usually want to like they usually make you like a secondary weapon that's like an extra thing but this like becomes your your primary weapon it replaces whatever else you were using

13:33 yeah it's kind of insane when you think about the way that enemies spawn like sam mentioned but also the placement of the power-ups themselves that some of them are designed i mean like i would say frankly the whole game is designed in a way where they're aware that your life meter isn't just like one hit to death but they also presume that you're willing to take a lot of damage at any particular

13:57 moment i don't know if you guys felt that way or if i'm just terrible at this game but i felt like in order to progress there were times where you just kind of have to accept that you're going to take a ton of damage did you guys feel that way absolutely oh yeah i did but i always felt like i was taking a shortcut like it did it wasn't how the game wanted me to play it but i was just taking advantage of the fact that i did have those extra hits uh because otherwise i mean it's not like

14:24 it it takes more skill it just makes it more tedious to try and like time jumps with a laser gun and take one little tick off of an enemy's health uh when you could just run past him and take that one like physical contact hit um but yeah that's sort of how i was playing it

14:45 all right yeah you're saying if there was like a speed run of the game which sam i know you usually watch those so i don't know if you can confirm or not but you're saying that there would be a lot of just damage boosting to get through most of these levels right sean i would say so i did not look at speed runs of this game but i would also assume that especially the level where you're just going down and then you go up the other side of it yeah that one was and i think you get grenades at the

15:12 beginning of that one and you just i don't know there there was one guy near the very bottom that i was just like all right screw it i'm just gonna get bumped by this guy because it's he's following me as i go above him on the platform below me and so i can't get a good angle to throw a grenade at him because i'm just gonna land on him if i try and drop down so i just landed on him and took a hit

15:33 and yeah i also noticed i think on the whatever the the ice level the second or third level there's a spot where it like wants you to it gives you the laser at some point and then there's a spot where it's just the fist again as a power-up and you have to try and jump without hitting the power-up because then you lose it and it's like good against the enemies that uh kind of like rain down

16:05 uh attacks on you do you know what i'm talking about yeah absolutely there are times where this game will just force you to take a certain power-up or lose a certain power-up yeah uh to progress and it's and i remember thinking like long and hard i think it happens pretty early on sam too where you're like in the begin middle of the first level where it's like you had that great gun and now it's like no you're going back to grenades and it's like i don't want to go back to grenades yeah

16:32 um speaking of that one moment in that sense that one moment where they force you to take the the fist again in order to sort of move forward you don't actually have to um because you can just sort of jump under it and that's uh for me it leads to a discussion of the worst part of like the level design in these games and it's the fact that if like in like let's say it's super mario let's say it's castlevania whatever side scroller if you run into a platform um you're gonna stop or if you just

17:12 like move up if it's like uh if it's a um the ground is uneven and you have to jump up a ledge you're gonna run into the ledge and stop moving whereas in this game each ledge is also a you could fall through the wall and the fact that you can sort of duck under that um fist pickup uh because you can run through the wall and sort of jump jump away from it is really just because this game uh you have to be careful with your platforming or you'll just continue to fall into the depths um for with a feature that i've don't think we've seen before where you could just at all times run

17:55 off the ledge like in the middle of in the middle of the screen yeah that was 100 my biggest gripe with this game also and what like what it what it seemed like to me is that all all of the platforms are only solid from the top yeah so you could jump under them and get up and a lot of times i think it's pretty early on also there's like a bunch of platforms that are only like one like they're like one quarter of of your character's height apart so there's like there's so there's like four of them that are just your height so like you jump once you're landing four platforms higher no matter

18:34 what you have to you just can't like you can't land back on the platform you started on and it made it really frustrating because i'm trying to like jump over enemies and i just end up back at the top when i'm trying to go down so it's just like and there are a lot of instances like that in this game where it's just like the the the physics or the hit boxes of the game were just working against me getting where i was trying to go and i felt like those ledges tricked me in one spot also it was uh it was

19:05 in one of the levels there's the main you know the main floor that you're on which has those ledges that you can slip through and then fall to your death but i noticed that in one part of it underneath it there was another ledge like underneath the main floor and there was a way to get down there if you kind of slide up against a platform you can drop down to a lower platform and it just it doesn't look like there's anything there but i figure there's a platform down here so i must there must be a way for me like to do something down here so i dropped down there and there was nothing and i couldn't get back up to the top and i had to kill myself it's just like what's what's

19:45 the point of that just to trick me yeah well you guys will notice that i did not call this a platformer in any sense i called it an action game for a reason and that's because as much of this game wants you to scale vertically or horizontally across platforms uh thankfully at least for the vertical stages they indicate through like a pointer finger whether you can go up or down any further i'm not sure how useful that is and why they don't include it for the sides is interesting but as much as they want this game to be like a scale this jungle environment and stuff like that and see

20:22 how good your platforming skills are the platforming in this game is a secondary thought to even the developers and i feel like in a lot of ways um you know you guys were talking about the the boundaries like the the what defines like landing on a platform i i would agree that in a lot of ways that's what makes this game not a platforming game and more of just an action game is the fact that you could clip through most anything and from a 3d perspective if we're pretending that you are arnold schwarzenegger and you're jumping across these platforms from a 3d perspective that is just ridiculous to imagine that you are jumping like out and around these platforms before you land on them again is

21:06 it's just it you know the programmers did not think this through and it's the most frustrating part of the game by far i would still call it a platformer because these are still like kind of precision platforming sections and yeah they're they're poorly executed but i don't think that makes it not a platformer yeah i i would agree i think that there's some levels where you need those precision jumps and you have to kind of figure out how to get to the next area and which you have to plot your path ahead of time and you're thinking about platforming it's not just a run and gun kind of thing where it's easily accessible so i would i would call this like an action platformer um and one thing i also

21:52 want to note is that you're it's all the floors are so slippery in this and i fell to my death a lot because i would just slide off the end of the platform and i don't know if that happened with you guys but i felt like this is super slippery yeah it's it's it's got some of that going on i'm not i'm not done here yet though on the platformer debate because i would just i would just argue that the game is designed in a way that it wants you to essentially just be a violent killing machine that just continues to press on forward yes there are some platforming obstacles based on like jump here

22:29 then jump there but i don't think the game carefully thought any of that out and i think that's an important distinction so yes we could call it an action platformer but i'm saying if i think about this game i never think of it in the terms of like this game is known for you know it's uh it's level traversing and jump mechanics uh it's more it's much more about just taking down enemies and and taking damage for that matter as quickly as you can to progress to the second levels of the stages where you're taking down the predator i guess i i don't i don't buy it but i i i accept your opinion i accept your opinion you

23:28 so let's talk about that big mode because uh and that's what they refer to it as the big mode um and i guess it's called that because of the larger sprites yeah that happens it wasn't from the movie yeah there's no like you're now entering the thx big mode

23:47 the screen changes sizes and everything no that did not happen and it doesn't happen here either it's just the level concept changes to uh i'm pretty sure it's auto scrolling and you are just a you actually look less like arnold schwarzenegger now than when you did as the little no no you look more like him now are you kidding me i i at least he's wearing green this is a russian guy he looks more like arnold schwarzenegger than this guy wearing a leotard with a gun running around the jungle i arnold schwarzenegger maybe with like you know some greasy italian guy's haircut

24:26 anyway that's not what the argument is the argument is more about uh that you know this gameplay shift uh and you know we could talk about it first and then decide whether it was better or not i don't think that's even up for discussion but you know all of a sudden you're you're shifted into an entirely different kind of game and we've seen this a few times recently uh i don't know if you guys felt like this was as stand out as those other games that we've seen where they switch genres this isn't really a switch in genres it's just more like now you're doing the game this way uh sean any thoughts i can't tell which one i i think is like more half-baked um the fact that you're firing at a bunch of like

25:13 spheres or bubbles or whatever the hell um is i can't i don't understand what the thought process was here i i do understand that like the way that they sort of make the the predator um hard to hit like they'll do like a triple a triple view because like eventually you'll you'll fire at all the bubbles and then you'll you'll fight the predator and i guess that that sort of plays into the fact that you know he's hard to see in the movie and that's sort of like the character but i i don't understand the rest of it i don't know why you're in cyberspace i don't know why uh that's what you're shooting

25:53 it it's it's a lot of head scratchers for me yeah if you have if you present the question of which one is more half-baked i i 100 think that this is more half-baked in my opinion it is like i just don't get it it's just a plain red background that yeah the enemies are just are just bubbles like what the heck is going on and then i get with the predator thing the way that i killed him was i just shot when i couldn't see him and i just hit him like every time oh like i would just shoot i would just shoot like before those like those like four bubbles would come up and like he would be

26:32 somewhere randomly on the screen but like he takes up so much of the screen that nine times out of the 10 if i just shoot towards the end of the screen i hit him that's big mode so it just felt it just felt really like i i just like what what is it felt like it was just like the like they just took a bunch out of the game made it an auto scroller and they're like all right keep going but now there's way less going on i will say this though i think that the shooting is a little bit more satisfying in the in the auto scroll oh yeah i agree because like at least now you know that you're always going to be able to shoot and it's not like auto scrolling punching and auto scrolling grenading

27:13 that would be oh my god i can't even think about it well not just that but i feel like the gun is a little bit more responsive in this like you can fire a little bit more often um yeah you're right

27:26 i think there's like two you can have two bullets on screen at once yeah but also there's like some weird power there's like that boomerang bullet power up that just like yeah bullet just goes to the edge of the screen and then comes back to your gun which is i guess is can be useful but it's just like i don't know it just seems like you come up with a better power up than that now was the auto

27:49 scrolling portion of the of this like big mode did that actually add any like sense of urgency or difficulty for you guys or was it just like uh you know we have to figure out a way to make the predator fight more interesting like it wouldn't be as fun if you were playing in the in the smaller mode uh so so therefore it's an auto scrolling fights this way the predator can constantly be on screen and move around i'm not sold that the auto scrolling was the best method for a predator fight

28:19 i mean you fight predators in both modes um and i think this is the worst the worst version and it's not even like the other version is any better it's just yeah uh at least there's some use of his cloaking device so it makes it more like the movie i guess instead of like in the uh in the standard fights he just does like a ground pound over and over and he like curls up into a little ball in the air which i assume is in the movie he also like doesn't really attack in the in the other part like you just shoot him and he and he curls up and he waits for you to shoot him i mean as long as you

28:58 just keep shooting yeah i'm not even trying to sound crazy here but i didn't read the manual and i had no idea that that was the predator in the other stages like if you it looked like just another one of those guys who are like confusingly like oh shouldn't these guys be on my team like aren't we trying to take down the predator why am i fighting my own military he didn't look like the predator those are gorillas well i think the ball is supposed to clue you in this is the ball yeah i can i can bail you out there's no scene in predator where he curls up into a ball

29:31 oh well mike i can i can bail you out if you're feeling if you feel at all dumb for not realizing that because i've played a little bit of this game not realizing this was based on the movie predator

29:42 it wasn't until i looked at like the manual and the cover art i was like why did you think arnold schwarzenegger was doing this i didn't know it was arnold schwarzenegger because i hadn't read the manual yet oh man and you know not until the uh the big mode came up and then he looks identical to arnold schwarzenegger and then i was like oh of course that's arnold schwarzenegger honestly i

30:01 think that the the big mode the whole purpose of it is just to have better graphics of the main characters i think yeah that sounds about right just to show like character recognition like this is a game about this thing that you recognize and here it is remember remember when you watch this and i think that's all it is yeah that makes sense i did like that at the end of the movie that um

30:25 uh the predator's head popped off grew five times as big and then just started shooting projectiles at you while floating around in midair um that that was probably the most uh that was probably the best detail i liked that they kept but even there there's just something i don't know i'm really upset with whoever programmed this game because like yes it's silly that there's just a floating predator head that is like the final boss of the game or whatever but the way that the head moves and like not even just

30:57 the randomness of it but just like the way that it the way that that fight goes down is half frustrating but also just feels kind of like uh i don't know like we were supposed to put a final boss here so let's let's do this you know i i think that sean after hearing you describe the predator's abilities in the movie i don't see any of that really no the only thing in this game that they that they did it all

31:25 was like give some kind of approximation of the cloaking device that's like the big effect in the movie from like you know it was the big cool thing from the 80s that hadn't really been done before

31:40 um and they they did that a little bit in big mode but nothing else is in is in this game yeah i mean and even like the i mean i imagine in the movie predator is like yeah like you said he's terrifying because you don't know where he is and because he's a hunter or whatever there's nothing terrifying about like running into the predator in this game i honestly think that the regular enemies are more difficult than the predator for the most part yeah okay wait more difficult maybe but like i do have a gripe about the rest of these enemies because they're just like this is like the second episode in a row maybe i

32:16 don't remember what we recorded last week but this is pretty close to another episode where these enemies aren't anything intimidating though like oh no not at all yeah but the predator is just not even a challenge i think the legacy of the wizard is that what we're talking about yes that's what i'm talking about um but but you know joe you brought up a good point something i hadn't thought about you're right the predator is not scary in any way yet running into um freddie in friday the 13th uh jason in friday the 13th was scary yeah like that was like i don't want to be in the same room as

32:48 this guy a floating predator head i'm like all right i guess i gotta i guess i gotta shoot at it i think that any movie can be adapted into a game if you if you use this template of just like um fight enemies that vaguely like some enemies vaguely look like characters in the movie uh you take one little bug that was casually mentioned and make it like the most common enemy um and then at the end you take the you take at the head of the main villain and make it float around and shoot stuff

33:20 at you and that could be any movie that could be that could be adam's family i can't wait to play the adam's family game yeah how would the terminal turn into an nes game um you'd have like yeah you'd have like uh who's the who's the main antagonist of the terminal the guy who won't let him at the airport yeah you put his face on a floating head on a floating head by the exit of the airport and you have to shoot exactly anything what are the enemies though like just people milling about the airport yeah okay gotcha you collect like ketchup packets or whatever yeah exactly love it already i can't wait to play the terminal nes game

34:28 the only thing i'll mention about this game outside of like what we've been talking about is that if we go back to the beginning here about the side scrolling levels in general we talked about that for the vertical stages they'll have arrows pointing up and down um for the horizontal love parts of those levels because they're not always just vertical stages they're just horizontal stages but when that happens for some reason they won't point that out to you so that already feels

34:52 kind of weird but then there's this other weird element of warp zones in this game did anyone find the other exits in any of these levels that like warp the player ahead several levels oh no i'm not even sure where that would be i wouldn't even know if there's only one path in my mind right i wouldn't even know if that was in the next level or several levels ahead because all it all looks the same i agree you're either i read about that in the manual when i took it to mean in the manual i thought that they were it was like oh there's just because there's what there's there's 40 levels but you only need to do 20 of them and i just thought it was like there's 40 levels but that there's not like necessarily

35:35 like a sequential order that you need to go in where it was like i know it does come up with the level number but i thought it was like oh there's just there's just two paths basically but did you ever feel

35:46 like you were going in that second path i always felt like i was just going in the way the game wanted me to go i never felt like oh i bet if i jump here i'm going a different direction i'm going in the wrong way the game doesn't want me to go this way i guess what i'm saying is i never thought that it that it wanted you to feel like there's a there's like the main way and then there's like the secret way i just thought it was always like okay i found this door i'll go through that like i just kept going forward and i was like okay maybe if i play again i'll find different doors

36:11 but like i i don't know if i would have been like oh like i would i found a secret door like i feel like there's nothing different about them so they may as well both be counted as like the primary route right in the msx version of um this game

36:29 weapons were not limited to just having one at a time but you did not have infinite ammunition so like when you picked up in the nes i think it's called laser it is just a gun but you had to actually pick up ammo for that but you could switch between the weapons as you pick them up i don't know what's the trade-off there i feel like the ammunition adds some strategy to it being

36:54 able to switch weapons adds some strategy but also some fun variety to the gameplay sounds like i kind of want to test out the msx version anyone have any objections to thinking why that wouldn't work i mean it's definitely a positive i think that's a step in the right direction of fixing this but if that's the only thing they change it's still a shit game whoa yeah i i think definitely anytime

37:19 that you're giving your player a little more agency is it's a good thing like you know at least it's like you're making the choice of when to use up your ammo and it's not just like well you randomly ran into this thing that you can't avoid now you have this weapon i think that's a good idea but yeah i would i would need to see a lot more changes also to be enticed and that just reminded me

37:39 weapons don't carry over between levels or no they don't segues like segments like what is up with that what is the story there you just you're like i guess i won't be needing this anymore before you enter the next level filled with enemies sean how did that happen in the movie i mean they do end up losing weapons in the movie but it's not like a plot point does it happen when the scene changes

38:06 uh oh yeah you'll you'll it'll cut to like later that afternoon and all of a sudden they're empty handed yeah like they notice the cut in the movie they're like what how do we get here where's my weapon i mean it's probably just easier to program this way also like without keeping track of what the player has in between scenes just loading all like all the stuff in fresh i would guess yeah that's something i'm struggling with when i make games or it's just because you're lazy that's true but there's a there's a hard it's it's like you know i i'm assuming that

38:45 it's like on the on the nes you have you do everything from scratch um when you're programming for it so to have some kind of thing or some kind of program it's keeping track of what you have between levels and there's 40 levels i so that it has to you have to repeat that program at the end of each level and the beginning of the next one i i don't know it seems like maybe there's not enough space for it or they just didn't want to do that or they figured that the levels themselves are kind of like set pieces that you should only like you should yeah maybe but i i don't know i think that there's something no i get what you're saying yeah yeah uh it is a possible explanation yeah uh i so

39:30 i'm i did just watch a speed run as we were talking and the guy is just running through enemies and not caring about health and it seems like you pick up health so often in this game and your health resets on each level that you really it seems like you really got to try to get killed by the enemies in this game so if you disregard all the enemies in the game and you're just constantly gaining um health

39:59 it seems like it's more of a platformer yeah yeah i guess so i well how does he play in the big mode because i feel like you're a lot more like you're gonna if you're gonna die you're probably gonna die in big mode oh he's blasting in big mode or she or that they're but also like yeah yeah sam the big mode is also arguably for a speed runner someone who plays this game over and over again it's a short

40:24 enough experience that they probably are just really good at hitting everything as it as it appears yeah uh i have i have one more thing uh maybe a small little uh little special episode of uh of of joe's pause sounds where i won't actually talk about the sound that you pause that it makes when you pause but the fact that in big mode only you just can't pause it oh yeah i don't understand why you can't pause it especially that's the auto scroller that's the one where it's like well i can't just step away for a second because it's always moving that is odd it's to create urgency just like why they added

41:01 the auto scrolling to begin with it's it's all about like this is happening and there's nothing you can do to stop it i mean i guess that's probably true i'm not for it though i will state uh that in the movie when uh arnold schwarzenegger and his team come upon uh some hanging skinned alive bodies he does not exclaim out into the ether i will find i will find whomever did this um they made that line up uh it's not in the movie uh zero out of ten i believe that production management would be hard enough to work with that they wouldn't be able to get them copies of the script in time for the game

41:40 i will find whomever did this is is arnold schwarzenegger's character in that movie the kind of character that would say whomever exactly not i laughed out loud when i read it

41:55 in terms of sequels and spinoffs we will not be playing another predator game on the nes but predator 2 is a game that is not a sequel to the predator game but is just uh you know the game adaptation of predator 2 the movie and that came out on genesis in 1992 and what's confusing me about this and i don't know if you guys are quick enough on google to like just google search predator 2 but if you look at it it is like what i would call an isometric shooter but without like that fake

42:29 3d look like it takes the 45 degree angle but doesn't add any depth like it doesn't have a pyramid look to it all and so it's just very strange it's like i've never seen a game take a 2d shooter and just put it at a 45 degree angle oh this is odd right like there's no sense though yeah it doesn't not work it's just weird yeah exactly it's not there's no actual uh depth to anything but it's not wrong it's just a different way of looking at a 2d shooter it looks like they just kind of messed up the uh the projection of it like it's they're definitely trying to do isometric but this

43:10 does not look isometric and then we have predator concrete jungle from 2005 on the playstation 2 uh sean i was wondering if this was the game you were referring to at the beginning of the episode because this is the one where you control the predator and maybe that was you know like the one that most was like you know what the movie was like in terms of giving you all the predator's abilities and letting you carry out taking out the the humans the prey um no uh that is that's not the game i was referring to um one second take your time uh in the meantime if you don't mind i will

43:52 mention predators you know like aliens we always needed a predators and that is on uh mobile phones in 2010 uh it's a your play is a predator but you're also part of a clan and it's like a pay to win style clash of clans game which just cracks me up for some reason like the idea that predators would fall into some kind of like pay to win scheme and build their build their own unique predator armies against each other like i don't know it's really funny they fall to capitalism one way or another wow um no okay so the game that i was referring to is called aliens versus predator um

44:39 and it is a it's from 1999 you can play as a human which is just a standard like fps uh an alien which is like you you get some weird like visual elements and you could crawl on walls and you can eat people's faces off and then you can play as a predator and you get all these like weird logistical not logistical but like you get these cool visual modes that you get the you get the thermal vision uh you you get the the laser stuff like it wasn't again it wasn't a great game but the way that they sort of incorporated the designs of these uh movie monsters basically uh into how they played

45:24 um it'll always have a lasting effect on how i view uh first person shooters i appreciate that insight i think that adds to your personality on the show yeah definitely it soups into every episode of this show alien right if you go back now there's actually a reason to go back and listen to the past 179 episodes catch all of those i already have i think now now it all makes sense like now everyone gets shot like oh that's why he said all that stuff just like jason predator also showed up in mortal

45:57 combat x um i mean it's cool but it's not its own game so it's just kind of like a cameo thing i'm not going to go further into that but you know it's always nice to see any kind of fighting game incorporate pop culture elements i think there was a mortal combat game or injustice right that had like the teenage mutant ninja turtles and i always thought that was neat that like you just get to play as all four at once they're one character yeah they're like one character um i'm sure like it's skins or

46:28 something but technically you you know like you can swap out between them or something yeah uh and then the last game i have here came out last year predator hunting grounds 2020 on the ps4 it's an asymmetrical multiplayer shooter that pits man against predator it is very much like the recent friday the 13th game where you either play as part of a fire team or you play as the predator so it's a team versus one kind of thing so be the predator or hunt the prey predator prey i don't know who depends on who's who in this situation right technically they're both looking for their prey

47:11 i i i always have found these kinds of games interesting but i didn't i never ended up playing any of them like the ace i don't think it works i've never even heard about this one so i doubt it's it's got a following no evolve right that's the one that that was the first big one that people were talking about all right well speaking of big things that we still have to talk about we have to talk about whether predator is an essential games list or a game on it

47:46 sean we need your vote although i feel like we kind of got it in the middle of this episode i need it again what is your vote for predator it was definitely in the last third of this episode so it wasn't it wasn't a huge spoiler but no this game is shit um so no not essential joe how about you yeah i mean i'm gonna say play play contra you know i feel like contra scratches the itch that this is trying to scratch and it's good this game's got too many too many bugs too many bugs like a little like actual enemy bugs and bugs that like where you where you phase through the environment things like that

48:26 there's just uh this game needed a lot more work so i'm gonna say this is not an essential games list and it is not on the essential games list sam how about you how about me um i mean i think that some of the the level design of this is a little bit interesting like having to you know go around and platform and it's like you know it's not good but it's better than what we've seen in some games so i'll give them that and the fact that there's two different kinds of gameplay is interesting i

49:00 guess but it's also not good but um so all in all i'm gonna say this game is not very good it's not essential and it's it's just okay i think i i don't think this is the worst game that we've played but i still wouldn't call it a good game okay i think we have an answer there and uh the final thing i'll say is that the the platforming sections of this game alone are unforgivable uh you know there's there's there are quite a few games on the nes jank folder according to sam but i really think this one belongs on there i'll talk i really didn't have a i really didn't have a good time with this

49:48 game and a lot of it just came down to how you can how you feel when you play as uh duke schaefer arnold schwarzenegger predator whatever you want to call him some people would make that mistake i imagine just like they make samus metroid um but you know at the end of the day i really can't see anything in this game that is worth replaying so for that reason it's not going on the essential games list but who knows what the future holds for the essential games list maybe we'll find out what the future holds next week in taboo the sixth sense that is our game next week guys do you have a good feeling about the future uh and taboo yeah i'm getting yeah i'm getting a strong strong vibes

50:38 yeah yeah i don't know what that means but yeah yeah no strong vibes is all you need it's like that's the new thing now good vibes all around strong vibes only yeah okay if i'm bad i just want them to be strong they're just strong yeah anyway that's our game next week uh remember we post episodes every friday if you want to hear more about these games follow us all week long and every week on twitter at nostalgia cast and if you want the occasional musing or sassiness from myself i am on twitter as well at esposito film we will talk to you next friday with our sixth sense in a little game we like to call taboo and until then maybe tweet at us at nostalgia cast and tell us what you thought of this episode we'd love to hear it you