231 · The Three Stooges

• Painfully Funny
• NES Longplay
• Introductions
  • Today we’re gonna talk about Ghostbusters 2
    • Starts off strong in the wrong game and Moe acknowledges it
  • Any familiarity with 3 Stooges? I haven’t really bothered with it
• Overview
  • The Three Stooges must rescue an old woman's orphanage by earning money in minigames based on various Three Stooges films.
  • Players select minigames by timing a button press as a hand randomly points to various symbols representing in-game events, including non-interactive events that can raise or lower the Stooges' cash total. Each event takes up one in-game day; players have 30 in-game days to earn as much money as possible.
• Gameplay
  • The original Wario Ware
  • The mini games - Any stand outs
    • The soup cracker game
    • Unlike wario ware, where the first time you play a game its supposed to be surprising to learn what to do and then you memorize the quick actions, this game doesn’t quite ever meet that flow. Some games are just not as much fun or short as others.
    • Creates more of a Mario Party like effect where you see a certain mini game on the wheel and pray it doesn’t get picked.
  • The player must avoid mousetrap spaces, which injure the fingers on the hand; landing on four such spaces immediately ends the game, regardless of the number of days completed.
  • The voice acting in the game
  • The replayability?
• Sequels and Spinoffs
  • In other versions instead of Ghostbusters 2 they walk into Defender of Crown
  • Versions for the Game Boy Advance (developed by Crawfish Interactive) and PlayStation (developed by Flying Tiger) were published by Metro3D, Inc. and released in 2002.
  • A port was completed for the Game Boy Color, however it was cancelled in 2000 and only footage of the beta has been released.
• EGL
• Next week - The Three Stooges
• NEStalgia Byte - Battle City

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

00:00 The Three Stooges, Painfully Funny.

00:18 And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. And I'm Sean. And today we're going to talk about Ghostbusters 2. Oh, but not really. We're in the wrong episode, Sean.

00:39 Well, let's just start there. I think this is the first time we've seen a fourth wall break in an NES game. Absolutely. And arguably the strongest, not to say that the game sucks or anything, but that is a very strong start for this game. It's a very Stanley parable. Yeah. And considering that Ghostbusters 2 hasn't even released yet. So it's like at least a video game, you know, it's like, why would you make that joke? Like, I wouldn't think that I was getting Ghostbusters 2 at all. If anything, they should reference an older game that they already made. Like Ghostbusters. You know? Or Defender of the Crown. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:21 I don't think they made the original Ghostbusters. The Ghostbusters 2, as far as I know, is not a Ghostbusters franchise simulator. That's true. I mean, maybe it isn't. I don't know. Yeah.

01:33 Now, you know, we have to talk about, so you start the game, Ghostbusters 2 shows up, and then there's some good voice acting, too. Like, you can actually hear, I don't know who's who, Moe, Curly, the other guy. Yeah, the three people. Who is the third one? Moe, Curly? Come on, let's like make people cringe.

01:51 It's Jerry, no. Larry. Larry, Curly, and Moe, yeah. There you go. Yeah, so obviously we have no familiarity with the Three Stooges, but just not even because they're like not from our time or anything, but like I haven't really ever thought that like that kind of like comedy would be appealing to me today.

02:13 I don't know. That's like, that's back when like throwing a pie in someone's face was funny. That's gone now. You can't get a laugh. I think it's probably, it's still funny, but you just have to do it like in the right context. Like you have to ironically throw it into their face now. Like it's not just straight up funny. Or it's got to be like on YouTube with somebody who didn't know that they were going to get pie. It can't be like in the show.

02:37 You know, the fact that like a television show would have like, this is like to me, I would think of the Three Stooges as the original impractical jokers, but minus the reality section of it. See, I know of the impractical jokers, but I know nothing about them. Are they like lame? Are they lame? Yeah. Well, okay. Look, I don't want to upset anybody. I just don't think they're not the funniest people in the world. They laugh at their own stuff more than it's probably been laughed at.

03:05 I mean, that's probably going to upset some people, but I get what you're saying. Now, the Three Stooges video game, I don't think it's weird to say, but this is strange in 1989. We've talked about some games, some questionable movies that then get like, you know, an NES port and it's like, all right, that's a little strange for the audience, but whatever. This time, it's actually strange, right? The Three Stooges, the guys from like the 30s and 40s now are getting a NES video game where you basically do like a bunch of different mini games. It's Mario Party. I was thinking it's even like WarioWare. Yeah, WarioWare, Mario Party, Three Stooges.

03:53 But like, just going back to what you were saying, like, is there any, to our knowledge, any cultural relevance to this game being released now, like 1989? Like, is there a re-release or something? Do we know?

04:08 To the best of my abilities, all I can tell is that the Three Stooges was still running in syndication in the 80s. Okay. That makes sense, I guess. There was no movie, but this also wasn't like the first version of this game. The NES one is a port of, I forget which computer, but one of those, like either the Apple II or... Amiga. Yeah, the Amiga or something. It's a port of this to the NES. And this is a game that will only become more confounding. I'm not going to do the sequels and spinoffs now, but just a tease for later in the episode. You won't believe the kind of legs that the Three Stooges, this exact game with no added bonuses or remastering, you won't believe what legs it has in terms of ports.

04:54 So stick around for that. But in the meantime, let's talk about the actual game. The Three Stooges, it's essentially like setting up what I would think would be the stronger thing to do is set up like an episode of the Three Stooges and then you like go through it. But instead, they have to rescue an orphanage by earning enough money in mini games that are based on various Three Stooges films or TV episodes or what have you.

05:23 I just feel like that's a little complicated because there's the whole somebody is trying to steal the orphanage first, right? Like this Mr. Money guy. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's got the keys to the orphanage. So you have to earn enough money to buy it back from him as if he would. He wasn't just doing it for nefarious purposes. He's just doing it for money accumulation.

05:46 I thought it was just rent. Like they just need to pay rent that month. But it's not even their orphanage. It's like some. Yeah, like, you know, but like they're just like, oh, we're going to take up the cause of this orphanage and their late rent. I got it. Okay. That's just something that the Three Stooges do. So you hope that like in your own hometown, you run into them and be like, hey, could you pay my rent this month?

06:09 Well, I mean, if you have orphans in your house, maybe they will. But what was so? Okay. Then you get into this other thing where they sort of congregate on against a brick wall. And now they're going to select the jobs they're going to do that day.

06:27 And I don't know what was what were your thoughts on this? Right. So this is the this is how they gamify it then, because now you only have 30 in game days to earn enough money to get the orphanage back. So the jobs that they take are the minigames. That's where it gets clever again. Now I'm like, oh, I understand what the assignment is. And the the the jobs being the minigames. Yes, it's it's Mario Party. It's WarioWare. These are short bursts of gameplay that I'm not sure if I fully understood all of them. But at least they didn't at least they didn't last forever. And at least you got to like, you know, you got to like experience some really weird stuff.

07:12 I feel like at, you know, at this point, we could just talk about every single one of them. But for me, in terms of standout minigames, that soup cracker one. Oh, okay. It's just it's just wild. Okay, I get that this is a reference to an episode. And maybe some of our listeners are big Three Stooges fans and they get what's happening, what happens in that episode. But I have zero context. But all right. So one of them is they're there for for eating soup really fast. And there's clams in the soup and there's crackers that they want. And you have to get all the crackers.

07:49 But then the clams will close on a cracker, sometimes uneventfully. But other times we'll get this ear piercing screech of what I imagine is the Stooges in question shrieking in horror from a clam eating his cracker. But I can't really tell because I didn't really know what triggered it. Do you know what's going on here? Yes. So the Stooges in question is curly. I don't know why he's wearing that hat because he wasn't wearing it a minute ago. But now he's wearing a hat and he's got a bottle of wine, which is also questionable because like, I don't know. Do you ever have like wine with your other liquids? No, no, no. That's olive oil. Oh, wait. I don't know. For the soup? Yeah.

08:32 Anyway, I guess like olive oil is less objectionable, I suppose, because at least that would like be infusing another taste. Whereas maybe I can't imagine like I'll have the lobster bisque and a glass of red. Like it just doesn't happen. You know, you're drinking one thing. Stick to one. Nobody says, can I have, you know, a bottle of red and a bottle of cool blue Gatorade? I mean, don't knock it till you try it. That's true. So, yes, what's happening here, Sean, is exactly what you think is happening.

09:01 The first off, kudos to the sprite work here, because that's a pretty good image of curly. But then even the over, you know, the top down view of the hand with the spoon trying to like be, you know, hovering over the soup and trying to get the crackers before the clams eat them all up.

09:21 That is a very easily understood assignment. This is where I think about like WarioWare, right? Where in a WarioWare game, you only have like 10 seconds of actual gameplay anyway, and they don't tell you what to do. It just comes across the screen. It's like jump. And then you just like, OK, I guess I'm jumping. And then you as you play it over time, you figure out like what you actually like need to do and get used to the rhythm. And the game gets faster and faster here. It was like right away. I was like, I get it. I'm supposed to be eating these crackers.

09:49 If the clams get to them first, Curly's just pissed. And yeah, he shrieks the loudest, maybe the maybe the noisiest audio file I've ever heard on the NES yet. And it's not pleasant, but also it's unclear about like the timing of how long it takes a clam to get a cracker. And it's not every cracker. It's not every cracker that is then eaten by a clam. I don't know if it's just the first cracker that gets eaten by a clam in each bowl or if there's just a random time that like you're never going to get that cracker.

10:25 Because then there'll be a bunch of times where the clams close on the cracker and nothing happens. I don't get that little screen that little FMV. Yeah. And I mean, we see we see some stuff in terms of just confusing sprite work and and very pixelated images of the Stooges featured throughout other mini games, too. There's that one where you're like simultaneously boxing and trying to dodge obstacles and look at a stopwatch that that one has like a very like Tim and Eric picture of of I think Moe. You know, it's it's all like the visuals are whatever for me. I'd rather, you know, stick on the on the mini game thing for a moment just because.

11:10 Like a lot of these games created for me the Mario Party effect where if you're not in the mini game mode of Mario Party and selecting the mini games you want to play, if you're actually on the board, there's that time where like after everybody's gone for their turn, the wheel comes down and you just pray that like that one game doesn't get picked. You know, like that. And it does. And it's it's the trivia. And it's not because I don't know the three Stooges like, yeah, that sucks. But like in general, trivia for the three Stooges implies that like in this game, at least.

11:45 Right. Only super fans should be owning a copy of the three Stooges. Like there's no accessibility here for newcoming fans or people who are just interested in these three weird characters. It's like, no, now you won't earn a penny because you don't know anything about the show. And thankfully, there's only three possible solutions. So like you're bound to get some money from this if you just randomly select. But that's not how you want to play this game. Like you. But the questions that are asked are like, in what year did Curly join the show played by whoever the hell? And it's like 1936 or 1942. Like, I don't know.

12:25 And I guess it's just the less the least fun part of the game. Yeah, you brought up a great point there, Sean, though. The trivia isn't like. All right, so I'm going to change it to something I know. Right. So Simpsons trivia. Right. If you ask me about something that happened in an episode of The Simpsons, I might be able to like answer a lot of those potential questions. But if you start saying like, who was the executive producer of season 12?

12:50 Right. It's like, oh, I might know, but I wouldn't. I'm a super fan here. It's like the three stooges questions aren't always about just like the pranks that they pulled on each other or like famous catchphrases. It's like actual actors names or celebrities who appeared on the show. And that just makes it all the more confusing. Yeah, I don't truly get like.

13:13 I think if you chose any like piece of fandom, that's that's just that's not the kind of trivia you're going to ask. It's just it's yeah, it's very strange that it's more like making of stuff or maybe the fans of this show are disproportionately knowledgeable about the making of the three stooges.

13:55 There's another minigame where you're at like a fancy dinner banquet. And you have to throw pies in the faces of the more regal looking guests. And they are the hoity toity club. Oh, there you go. And they will throw pies back at you and you're trying to hit them with pies to earn money. So, again, unclear. But then again, I also I don't think like, you know, technically the more soup Curly ate, the less the more money would have cost him to eat the soup.

14:29 So, you know, by that logic, you shouldn't have earned any money for eating crackers. I don't think he was just going to like a restaurant ordering of all these soups. I think he was a part of like a competition, like a soup eating competition. Oh, OK. So this is a pie throwing competition. No, no, no. You're a waiter. You're supposed to be serving pies to these people and you don't get paid if you drop pies. Got it. OK, it's all making sense now.

14:56 Thank you so much for explaining it to me and the listeners. Absolutely. I found the control scheme of this one to be something that made me say, please don't ever pick this one again because you don't have a clear like.

15:12 So the three are, you know, just like in a row, but you control all three of them at once. And there's different inputs for like who's going to pick up the pie versus who's going to throw the pie. And when the other people are ducking, you have to like look out for that. It had that whole, you know, we've used this before, that quop thing going on where it just felt unintuitive because it's not how I would actually think about targeting people with pies in a two dimensional video game. Instead, they just created their own rules about what buttons you might have to press. I actually found it relatively intuitive. Like basically they're lined up in a row, like going into the depth of the frame and.

15:58 Um, to select who on your team, who of the stooges is going to duck up is for the farthest back, left or right is for the middle guy. And, uh, down is for the one closest to you. And so like, you know, when you're viewing the guys from these angles, from this angle, it kind of like lines up with the D pad. But then when you want to throw, it adds a button you have to hold and then you're pressing the same button again. So it's, it's elegant in one way and then really fumbly in another. So I get what you're saying, but I also kind of got what they were trying to do.

16:40 Then you have, you know, on the wheel, you have a bunch of other mini games and stuff too, but you also have some weird things like mousetraps that just immediately are like that. That's it's not a game over necessarily. I think you need to, uh, how many mousetraps is it? Four? It's either four or five where you like, oh, game over. You ran out of fingers or something. Yeah. They injure the finger, um, of one of the stooges. And then once they have, uh, four, five would make more sense, I suppose, but there's nothing you can do with just a thumb. So, uh, what, you know, once you've lost four fingers, it immediately ends the game regardless of the numbers of days completed.

17:21 Dude, does it really need that? Do we really need like a, um, this is like similar to wheel of fortune with the bankrupt, uh, thing on the wheel. It's like, there's already other ways to lose money in these games. Do we really need one that just stops the game for you?

17:37 Yeah, because there's, I think there's only one other, um, tile that loses you money. And I think that's, um, you know, the gangster looking guy who I think is the banker or whatever, or the person that is the landlord of the orphanage. One of these things. Um, and he'll take money from you, but, uh, I don't know what the thresholds are for each of the endings of this game, whether you save the orphanage or not. So, I don't know if it needs more negatives, but I guess it's a balanced thing.

18:10 Um, but the only thing that I don't appreciate about it is if you do land on one of these mousetraps, it should move the screen. Or, sorry. It should change, like, what your board looks like. Because the way that this game works, like, every time you select a minigame or a, like, free space or a negative thing, um, the board moves forward. So, you have new things to choose from, uh, more or less each time, each, like, in-game day. But if you hit the mousetrap, you got the same view again, and there could be, like, three or four mousetraps on this thing, and you could just, like, end up losing everything.

18:51 I, I, I'm not, I should not be getting this riled up over the Three Stooges board game proportion, but I did find it rather annoying. I just find that if the whole thing is that they need to, you know, raise money or whatever, then the job should be more like the, you know, now that you've clearly explained it to me, they should be more like the waiter and doctor jobs that are things that are more practical occupations where I can kind of understand how they're acquiring this money, but also understand why, if they don't do a good job, they, you know, they, they won't have enough money at the end of the day.

19:27 The mousetrap thing is, like, maybe that's a hilarious Three Stooges trope, but it just, it should have been something that, like, now there's a minigame where you have to walk through a room of mousetraps and try to avoid them all, but if any of them hit you, then it's a potential, you know, just three more and then game over.

19:45 Like, make it more interactive than just a consequence on a wheel for this kind of game, because they've done it with the waiters and the doctors thing, where they're also really silly. They're not actually performing open heart surgery or anything. They're on, like, little scooters or carts or something following behind a real doctor as they try to collect red crosses, which I'm not even sure what that's supposed to imply, but the more of those you collect, the more money you make.

20:14 I just appreciate, like, you know, going back maybe a minute or so when you said that, like, you know, the more feasible solutions of, like, you know, like, answering a help-wanted ad as a doctor and the things you can actually do. Like, just thinking about in the world of the Three Stooges where there is a help-wanted ad for being a surgeon and this is... It was tough in the Great Depression.

20:38 Yeah. I guess that's just how it was back then. Things were tough. But, no, when it made more sense, like, the fact that they were working these odd jobs and the boxing thing didn't really make too much sense to me. I don't know what that episode... Sorry. What episode that's supposed to be referencing, like, is there a boxing episode where another one of the Stooges is rushing underground somewhere? Like, is that what's happening?

21:07 Right, because you're doing, like, two things at once here. You're controlling Larry on, like, he's an obstacle course where he has to dodge everything. And it's not that easy. This is not Super Mario Brothers platforming where you control, like... You gotta be precise. Yeah, exactly. And it's not, like, clear what's... How you dodge everything, at least the first time. So, how to dodge a pole, to me, was just something the first time around where I was like, Guess I'm gonna hit all these poles, like, I can't figure out how to get around them.

21:42 Now, there's other, you know, there's plenty of other obstacles. But you're doing that to get to a radio shop, to get a radio, so Curly will be able to hear Pop Goes the Weasel. That's what's supposed to be happening? And Curly is in the ring and has to survive six rounds with Killer Kilduff at the same time.

22:03 So, I guess, yeah, like, that's what's happening. It's like, two... It should have just been the boxing minigame, right? It should have just been, like, a fun punch-out light-style thing where you're just trying to dodge the moves. Because clearly, Curly wouldn't be able to take on Killer Kilduff. Obviously. We all know Killer Kilduff and how good he is. Yeah, and his shenanigans.

22:27 Yeah, there's the banker one where you'll either get a letter saying... You'll never make enough money. Like, what a... That's like when you go to Super Mario 64 when you get inside the castle for the first time and Bowser, like, just says something really rude to you about, like, how you're never gonna beat the game or whatever. And it's like, the banker here, again, just a non-event that barely needs to happen. Could just be built in at, like, turn 10, right?

22:54 Just, like, have the banker say that regardless. Some of them are like, I'm gonna take, you know, like, you know, my safe fell on you and I don't appreciate that that happened, so I'm gonna charge you $1,000 for it. But then there's also another one that just says safe where you let a safe fall on your head and then you get the money inside.

23:14 The fact that we... We already covered all of the minigames and now the rest of these are just, like, sort of non-sequitur free spaces that you will land on and either get money, have money taken away, or nothing happens. And then there's the last one, which is where you get to beat up your co-stooges and I think change the speed at which the hand that selects the game moves. It's all very unclear.

23:42 Did you have any luck with that? Yeah, so I didn't have any luck with that, but I found that to be, you know, true to the spirit of, I guess, what the Three Stooges is all about. That was funny. That was funny to just, like, slap the shit out of each other and make that into some kind of game where, you know, hitting the stooge makes the meter go toward slower or faster depending on, you know... Sure, I'm sure that helps later if you want to land on a specific space when you need more money, if you want it to be slower, so that you can stop it. Because you do stop the wheel. You hit the button. Yeah, you have to do it. Right. It's just, at a certain point, it gets so fast that you're not...

24:23 It's just random. Right. So I guess you're hoping to... But why would that... Why would beating the shit out of each other make the wheel slower? Are they spinning the wheel? It was in the episode, Mike. Right. I guess, like, theoretically, if I'm on The Price is Right... I like how many references to other games we've been doing, but if I'm on The Price is Right and someone beats the shit out of me beforehand, I'm not going to be able to spin that wheel one full turn around, you know? Yeah, that's true. Yeah. The giant wheel with all the different money on it that only goes up to a dollar. But that should mean, though, that the mousetraps should help slow everything down, too. So who knows?

25:16 There was a reason for me to list off everything that happens in this game, Sean, and that is because there's really 10 different events. You know, yes, sure, the trivia can be different. What happens with the safe, whether you break it or you get the money inside, those things can change, but they really don't actually change. It's still an inconsequential event that you can't decide what happens to you. It's told to you. Are these 10 enough? Like, Mario Party, even the first one had, I believe, 50 minigames. WarioWare has, like, you know, 100-plus minigames in theirs because they're so small and short.

26:00 I just don't see myself... I gave one full playthrough of this game to understand it. I don't see myself going back because there's just not enough variety here. No, absolutely. Like, we... In the Jeopardy! Jr. episode, I think we... Did we come out to something around, like, 28 permutations of Jeopardy? Like, we could play, like, 28 games with unique...

26:26 Unique categories. Is that sort of... That's exactly what it was, and then it's actually technically double if you don't mind getting a Final Jeopardy that you've already received. Yeah. So, there's that in that game, and then you've got this game where it's only got 10 things to do, and it makes you do it 30 times. So, at the very... If all the things are average, and you just sort of, by the luck of the draw, play an average amount of everything, you're already going to be playing these things, like, 3 times. And if it's not average, and you get more of one thing than another, you're going to be playing waiter or follow the surgeon into the operating room 7 times. So, there's really not enough to even support a full playthrough of the game here.

27:13 Yeah, you're already running into replaying these things. So, if you're like me, and you didn't particularly enjoy the pie throwing, the trivia, the boxing, then all of a sudden, now you've got, like, seven potential things that you're looking forward to. It's just soup. Yeah, in a... Yeah, it's just... Let me go into the free play mode and just keep trying to get the soup high score.

27:37 Which is ridiculous, and that shouldn't be the case either. Sean, you were asking about how much money is required for the various states. There are no various states. It's win or lose with the orphanage. There's no, like, bigger party or anything like that. It's either get $5,000 to buy the orphanage. You could walk away with, like, $8,000. Great. Now you just... You don't get to see, like, what you do with the other $3,000. It's just... You either have more than $5,000 or you have less than $5,000. So, you either buy the orphanage or you don't. Okay, again, I think it's just pay their rent.

28:10 Right, right. Probably just pay their rent because what would they do with the orphanage? Would they then be involved in, like... Is it, like, a clown college? Is it now, like, a pie-throwing factory? Okay, maybe this is not in all the versions because you did say there's several versions of this game, but I could have swore when I was just initially reading the Wikipedia article that you could marry the orphanage runner's daughters or something, and that was a viable ending to this game. There's... To the best of my knowledge, there's no way that happens in the NES one.

28:47 Okay. I hope I'm not just making this up. That's a fun thing, though, because I think that's, like... If you... You know, you probably haven't... We're going to throw it to another game. You haven't probably played Luigi's Mansion on GameCube, but in that game, your main quest is to rescue Mario, but you're collecting, like, money along the way, and eventually,

29:09 there are, like, I think, ten different scenarios for the ending based on the amount of money you've accumulated that, like, that will be the mansion that you can buy. So, like, if you barely collected any money in the game, you don't even get a mansion. You get, like, the world's smallest house, and then if you collect all the money in the game, you get this gigantic mansion that looks just like the one on the box, and you're like, oh, great. I got the... I want, but there's also states... Is it still haunted? You know, good question. I don't think so. You do vacuum every last ghost, and that is how we get rid of ghosts. You vacuum them. We've learned that now from Ghostbusters and Luigi's Mansion,

29:48 but I guess what I'm saying is, like, I prefer to find out that there were other things that could happen, but I only played it once, and I did buy the orphanage or rent it, sorry, or pay for its rent or whatever, or turn it into a soup-eating competition. Let's just go with buy the orphanage. Great. Privatize the orphanage.

30:24 In terms of sequels and spinoffs, Sean, the other versions before Three Stooges did not have the Stooges come out to Ghostbusters 2. they walk into, as I mentioned, as a potential idea, Defender of the Crown, which is a game that we did play on the NES, if you remember, and I liked that one. You know, we just played Romance of the Three Kingdom a while back, and that was a game that I didn't enjoy as much as Defender of the Crown. It certainly was like that, though. Yes.

30:59 But those are all the computer versions of this game, and, you know, again, I do think it's weird that Ghostbusters 2 hasn't come out, but they're just seeding that idea of like, oh my god, if they ever make a Ghostbusters 2 video game, I've gotta buy it. And do they, Mike? Do you know? They do. Cinemaware does wind up making a Ghostbusters 2. They also decide to continue to bust out Three Stooges ports for the foreseeable future, because in 2002,

31:27 they released a version for the Game Boy Advance and a version for the PlayStation. The same game? The same game. I posted on Twitter earlier this week a side-by-side comparison of the Game Boy Advance and the NES of the boxing minigame, where it's literally the same exact frame, so you can actually see what improvements there were. And it makes it look like in the 11 years since the Three Stooges came out, the technology really hasn't developed that much.

32:03 Oh no. For the Game Boy Advance version at least, the Three Stooges on PlayStation, to the best of my knowledge, it is 3D, but it's not good-looking 3D. I just can't believe that they still, like, that that has cultural staying power. Like, where is the Three Stooges remake for PS5? Right. It needs that. But actually, looking at the Three Stooges now on PlayStation 1, it's that fake 2D CG that was, like, common in, you know, like, Super Mario RPG and stuff like that. But I will say that this one at least explains this, like, I think it's much clearer now what's a cracker and what's an oyster or who's attending. You know, they look like waiters here in the Help Wanted Waiters game, so that's a big improvement. Yeah. Absolutely.

32:55 But if you look back, I don't know, if you look back now, I'm looking at, like, Amiga gameplay footage and it looks kind of similar to the PlayStation footage, but it came out more than 11 years before it. We have to play these games. Yeah, very confusing. A port was completed for the Game Boy Color, but it was canceled in 2000 and only footage of the beta has been released. Wow. But I imagine it was canceled because they were like, oh, guys, screw the Game Boy Color version. We've got a Game Boy Advance version coming out. The people demand more Stooge.

33:30 Yep, absolutely. I wouldn't be surprised to find out, you know, when E3 comes back in 2023 that, you know, the Three Stooges is, like, part of Microsoft's big plans. Yeah, it'll be a Bethesda game. Yeah, well, yeah, I was thinking either Bethesda or just Microsoft in general just acquiring the entire franchise IP rights.

33:52 Sean, it feels like we kind of voted already. Yeah, we did. Should we just in Unis? Yeah, should I play the music? Play the music. Yeah, here's the music. Right. And here's our answer. Yeah, it's not essential, right? Yeah. It's not essential, yes. All right. Not really much else to talk about because we really deconstructed the game. Here's the issue. I will, I will concede that our lack of knowledge of the Three Stooges definitely makes the game less fun. However, we all, you know, like, we didn't have familiar with a lot of these IPs and they didn't ruin any of the other games. So your game shouldn't be fun just because it's part of a franchise that you know. Yeah, this is the first, like,

34:39 instance of a reference-based game. Like, you know, with the Rick and Morty VR game, like, that's all just references or stuff like that where it's just like, oh, I get it because those are the things from the movie or the things from the TV show and you're just gonna laugh at those jokes that aren't really set up in the game but you're laughing because they're the in-jokes. I think this is what happened here and... Oh, 100%. And we're just not in on it. So, there you go. Yeah. So, I'm not trying to yuck anyone's yum but I think you should really, like, think about if this game didn't have Mo Curly and Larry, would it be fun? Is that where you're getting your enjoyment? Because I'd question that if I were you.

35:26 Next week, we will be playing Twin Eagle, just what everybody wanted, another vertical shmup where you are a helicopter. Everybody keeps saying, where are the helicopter shmups? And they're still making them. Don't worry, they're gonna make many more. Yeah. Yep, exactly. I actually was expecting one helicopter shmup ever, but I guess, you know, helicopters are cool. Well, you know, we'll get into it in the episode, right? Yes, helicopters are cool, maybe. And maybe Joe will come back. Joe? Maybe he won't. Please? Maybe you guys upset him. Maybe he'll come back. Maybe he'll come back. Maybe he'll come back. Thank you.