288 · Kid Kool

• This is the fastest paced video game anywhere
• NES Longplay
• Manual
• What is going on with these claims lately? Jack Nicklaus is the most detailed game ever? And now this is the fastest paced?
• Platformer
  • The main character is on a quest to obtain seven herbs needed to help cure a king from an illness.
• The Mario dilemma - The first game I’ve seen take the WRONG lessons from Mario when trying to copy it
  • Momentum
  • Enemies hit twice to kill
  • Screen scrolling vertically
  • Probably the only cool addition is the water skip
• The game will gradually progress from "day" to "night" modes as a timer counts down, with each cycle taking one hour in play time.
• Wicky the sidekick and other things that appear in the grass
  • Wicky is your projectile
  • The other things can help and hurt you
    • What’s up with the doll that sucks up all enemies on screen and kills em
• The herbs just being literal herbs is disappointing. A mushroom is the reward for beating the boss?
• The roulette bonus game
  • The cash bags you collect in each stage allow for multiple spins of the wheel
• There are multiple endings to the game, with the ending gained based on the time taken to complete the game.
  • These range from the king having died if the player takes more than three hours, to being given four other rewards, starting with a bag of money for the fourth best ending, a bag of gold and a high position in the kingdom for the third ending, a chest of gems and the princess for the second ending, and finally a chest of gems, the princess, and the promise to rule the kingdom for the best ending.
• A little more comedy about the ending
  • You have to watch him give each of the herbs individually as if it’s possible to show up without all of them
  • The text boxes just keep stacking over each other
  • In the bad ending - you know the assistant is sad cause he says “I’m so very sad” and the king is dead and his coffin is just laying where his bed was.
• Sequels and Spinoffs
  • The Vic Tokai games Decap Attack (Magical Hat no Buttobi Tābo! Daibōken in Japan) and Psycho Fox are part of the same family of games, sharing various design similarities.
• EGL
  • In the time you could learn to control this game you could’ve probably played SMB 1,2,3 so why the heck didn’t you just do that?
• Next week -
• NEStalgia Byte - Fire Emblem

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

00:00 Kid Cool and the Quest for the Seven Wonder Herbs. This is the fastest paced video game anywhere.

00:22 And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. There's no way. There's no way it said that. What is going on with these claims lately? Jack Nicklaus is the most detailed game ever, and now this is the fastest paced? Yeah, come on. That's wild. That's just like a slap in the face to the players to say that. The only reason I can think of the fastest paced is because it is timing you. Like the game cares. It has a clock that it's constantly showing you, telling you that you better get a move on. You know, I think I have a thought about the fastest paced thing, but maybe I'll put a pin in that until like we've talked about the game a little more.

01:10 Because I feel like I'll be coming out of the gate with like some late game opinions on this game. I could start this episode by talking about how kid cool on the box doesn't look anything like kid cool in the game, but that ground's been covered before. I could start this episode talking about Victor Kai making this game and how Vic's a friend of the show, but that's been done before.

01:32 I could talk about how this game kind of looks like Chubby Cherub, but it's now been four years since that game came out. So it should look better. But we've talked about that stuff before. Instead, I want to talk about something else that we've always talked about before. And that is the Super Mario Brothers dilemma of like a great game like that comes out and you get a bunch of imitations. And we've talked about Super Mario Brothers clones on this podcast. We've played a few of them. But this is the first game I've seen where, you know, kid cool is a platformer.

02:07 The main character is on a quest to obtain seven herbs needed to help cure the king from an illness. But other than that, it's pretty much just Super Mario Brothers where you're going level to level scrolling left to right getting, you know, beating enemies and getting to the goal. This is the first game I've seen have that Mario dilemma of trying to copy what worked in Super Mario Brothers and taking all the wrong lessons from Mario.

02:35 The first one being that it seems to be trying to copy Super Mario Brothers 2, which is like probably the weirdest one to try and shamelessly rip off, you know? The one that's not even really a Mario game, albeit we like it. It's on the essential game. Yeah, yeah. It's just, you know, it's a weird baseline. It's a weird baseline to start off with.

02:57 Well, it's trying to copy, you know, Mario in so many ways. But the wrong lessons are, in my opinion, and we can break down each one, you know, most importantly, the momentum base jump. Everybody talks about how it's great that Mario has a little weight to him and slides a little bit. And as you're going faster, you jump further.

03:19 The momentum stuff that they applied here, you know, Vic, I mean, we're even playing the same game as us before this because your momentum is all over the place. The weight of this character, he goes from like sloth to jackrabbit in a weird ratio. You know, we were talking about the power meter in Jack Nicklaus going weirdly from like 0, 5%, 30%, 50%, 125%, like, you know, like it just jumps so fast. Same thing with the momentum here.

03:51 The enemies in Mario games like Goombas, you stomp on them and then they die. In this game, I guess to up the challenge, enemies have to be hit twice. First, you like flatten them, but then you must hit them again to successfully squash them.

04:13 Hold on, hold on, hold on. Let me, yep, yep. First, when Mario jumps, he gets pretty high up in the air, but for the most part, it's about horizontal distance covered. But Kid Cool is able to jump not only very far horizontally depending on how hard he's running, but he can jump so high vertically or maybe because his sprite is just so damn large that he will go into the next vertical screen, which will cause the entire screen to scroll up and, you know, kind of pause the excitement factor of your momentum. And I feel like those three things, the momentum, the way that the jump carries, the way that enemies behave in a way that is like somewhat, you know, somewhat Super Mario Brothers, right? You're stomping them, but not quite there.

05:05 And then the screen scrolling vertically on top of horizontally, but in a way where it's still mostly, you know, Super Mario Brothers 2, Sean, was a game that had vertical levels. This is still horizontal for the most part. And so it's all just things that like, I feel like, as I said earlier, they learned the wrong lessons from trying to copy a game like Super Mario Brothers. I wouldn't say that it necessarily learned the wrong lessons. I think that those are mostly the right lessons. They just implemented them poorly.

05:38 Like the momentum thing, I think that's what makes Mario a great platformer. I just think they did a terrible job of implementing the momentum here. And the like the double, double hit, I think, like for most enemies, first of all, that does happen in a lot of Mario games. But second of all, I think that the only reason that sucks is because of the first problem where the momentum is an issue.

06:02 And the like the only two things there that I thought were like really, really big misses were the the momentum and the screen scrolling upward all the time, every time you jump. And I feel like those two things just compound on everything else and make what could have been good much, much worse. Yeah, there's a lot to unpack here. So. It is it is indubitably a momentum based platform like that is it.

06:31 That's it's very Mario in on paper. But like when Mario was sort of like this, this sort of like not RC car, but, you know, it's like you can you can push him around. And, you know, the movement is fairly expressive. Like you don't really need to.

06:50 It's not a simulation game. But like while where Mario is sort of like this RC car, the King Cool, not King Cool, Kid Cool is a dump truck. Like you really need to get the really need to get that engine in gear and you got to get some runway in front of you if you want to make any kind of movement.

07:12 And then there's the like, yes, those sort of vertical transitions, the height transitions. When you're trying to to get to that, like really long jump and because the sprite, as Mike mentioned, is so tall and you're kind of zoomed in in general, like almost any jump that goes hot that goes farther than like, I don't know, the equivalent of 10 feet is probably going to put you up into that zone that triggers the transition. So you're going to be up in that zone for maybe a second at the at the apex of your jump.

07:50 And then you're going to come back down. But you're the elapsed time has now added a second or two because it needs to stop what you're doing and then just move that whole screen. So that any kind of momentum in play, like that fluid motion, getting into that, getting into the zone and like holding that momentum is completely stopped dead in its tracks because you have now waited for two scene transitions.

08:21 And now you don't even know where you're going to land until you're there. There might be an enemy in front of you. Then you've got to try and jump again. But now you like the momentum is so sticky and you were so heavy. King Kid Cool is the heaviest platformer character I've ever played that you're just not going to do it. You're not going to make it. You're going to have a bad time. Yeah, you have to basically have the course memorized. I mean, one, for that reason that like when you jump up, you lose all your bearings because too much time elapses before you can see where you are again. And then by that time you're landing.

09:01 But then also so much of the game, so many times does it require you because of that slowness. You can't just jump forward. If an enemy is in front of you and you're still, you can't jump forward onto it. You need a running start to jump forward at all, like period. So it's very, very frustrating in that sense. But then also even to get across gaps or do anything, you need a running start.

09:23 And then you jump. And then once you're in the air, you see what's coming next. Sometimes you don't even see where you're going to be able to land until you just take a leap of faith. And then once you're in the air, you cannot adjust that speed you're going and you might just die. So like, it's just... You also... Yeah, I feel like we're just coming right out of the gate just absolutely shitting on this game. We're going to dogpile this. Rightfully so.

09:46 Now yet you also, because you need that runway, you need that runway to jump. This is also one of those games where you cannot scroll backwards. You cannot go back to a previous part of the screen that has been scrolled away from. You might have just scrolled past the entire runway that you need to make a jump and now you're just not going to make it. Because you can't run long enough to get to that point. So you may as well just jump in the hole and try and restart.

10:14 Yeah, I think that's one of the bigger issues of this game is like, I'm talking about Super Mario Bros. 1, right? But it's like one thing to come out like a year within release of Super Mario Bros. 1 and try to be an attempt. And it's like, oh, okay, kind of forgive them a little bit. Like they're learning the ropes or whatever. But we're in a timeline where not only has Super Mario Bros. 3 been out, you know, in America, but it's been out in Japan for a long time. And we're getting a game like this that, you can't remember, Super Mario Bros. 3, right? Like that even took momentum-based physics in Mario games further with the idea of the P mechanic and being able to like build up momentum even further so that you could fly, right?

10:57 Like, and as to really pull that off, they had to make it just way you can scroll backwards. In this game, because you can't scroll backwards, not only is it bad for the game that they made here, but it makes it immediately feel so much more outdated knowing that it came out after Super Mario Bros. 3. It's almost like not forgivable anymore that you can't backtrack in a game like this that requires you to gain some speed. Indeed, I'm sure you guys have some thoughts on other things, but I wanted to just like slow down on the insults for a second and compliment them on something.

11:38 Okay, what do you want to say, Mike? I wanted to comment on one thing because I was trying to, I was coming up with a list of all the things that they were doing wrong for a platformer in the Super Mario Bros. realm of things. Because again, you could be a platformer in the Mega Man realm of things. Some people might think those are action games. I think they still are more platformer than they are action. You know, you could be that kind of game, but this is clearly more in the Mario side of things. And I think the one thing that they did that I was kind of like, hmm, I don't want to see this in a Mario game, but I'm welcoming its presence here.

12:11 Is if you do have enough momentum going into a run and then approach some water, you are able to skip on the water because you are going so fast. And that's a nice touch to something that like surprised me the first time it happened. Like, you know, it's like, oh, I would have thought that would have just been a death. Like, that's kind of cool that the game thought about this. You know, like it's funny when a game is that bad that you're starting to get surprised by good decisions. But that is clearly a good decision. Absolutely. And I'll say this, like there are moments in this game where you have just sort of parkoured your way and done something that you would deem impressive.

12:56 And getting fast enough to make those skips and to like even then like skip off the water onto a platform for a split second and then turn that into a big jump where you reach a high platform. And like that feels empowering. And that's what these movement based games are sort of designed to do. Make you feel very empowered and like challenge you along the way. Now, what this game also does is once you do feel empowered, once you do hit that jump, it'll then just like throw an enemy right because it's calculated.

13:29 And like they marketed this game and put it in the manual like that. This is this was the design of the game. It was supposed to be the movement is the star. They know you're going to land there if you've really knocked it out of the park with your movement.

13:44 And then they just put like this little thing right in the exact moment, right in the exact point where you're going to land. Just a stupid little Goomba stand in that is going to just kill you on the spot or take away your dude.

13:59 And that's often. Yeah, go ahead. It's often it's often an invisible block. Oh, yeah. The invisible blocks, too. That's the worst. Where it's like it's less designed to challenge and less designed to reward and more designed to frustrate. Like they're trying to say like, nah, like you thought you were doing something cool there. We had other plans.

14:21 Yeah, but I will. I will see your compliment, Mike, and I will raise you this compliment. I actually think that most of the level design and the ideas in this game are food for a very good, very interesting creative platformer. Like almost everything it does. I'm like, wow, that's really cool. If I can. I'm thinking that's really cool.

14:47 If I can find that thought under my frustration. I think I think that all 90 percent of what I think frustrates me about this game is all the mechanics of your player, how he moves. And like, yes, there are like little things where it's like, why did they place things like this? But I think there are really cool little mechanics. Like there's there's one whole world of this game where it's like everything is these like spring loaded platforms. And then there's other one where there are these collapsing platforms. And there are, you know, the water skipping. You get this little backpack creature that you can throw at things. There's all these really cool things.

15:21 And like it just adds to the frustration because I see what fun of a game this could be. And like I want to have fun with all this stuff. So I don't know if that was really a compliment or a backhanded compliment. But like I think that like somewhere there was some really good design for this game. And it was just ruined by this other this other element of the of the game design. I think, you know, the idea of the game can help and hurt itself is even in the design in like subtle ways such as the items that you can just mysteriously pull out as you're running across the screen. That's that is how sometimes items just appear. You I don't know if it's based on it. You run too fast through the grass.

16:03 Something will pop up. But it's not it's not a guarantee what that thing will be. And it's not a guarantee that it will be good. Like what the heck is that about that like you can literally get things that like make you lose a life inside. And it's like I know Super Mario Brothers 2 in Japan had the poison mushroom, but nobody liked that idea. And they basically abandoned it for so many years before they ever reintroduced that thing.

16:29 So, again, like what's you know, like what could have been a cool thing of just like, yeah, you know, like you want to keep building up speed to collect these items is like, well, but not too much speed. Because then you might get the wrong item. And then, you know, and then you're in trouble again. It's like, is there any moment even, you know, another weird item while we're on the subject of items.

16:47 There's like a doll that pops out that you if you collect like the doll freezes up the screen, sucks in all the enemies and kills them off screen. And I guess that's a great thing. But like what's up with that doll? Like that's kind of strange. Is that like a voodoo doll? Like are you doing something to the enemies? That's what I got from the manual. But yeah, it does seem oddly creepypasta adjacent.

17:14 Another thing that you can get out of the items in the grass is Wiki, your sidekick, which Wiki is basically the fire flower of this game. He's your projectile. A little more creative because he sticks on your back and you can throw him and if you don't collect him, you'll lose him. So more like a boomerang, I suppose. I don't know. Wiki has mascot material, right? Yeah, he's like a red blob. You know, the most iconic thing you can think of. No, but it's like it's not his blobby-ness that I like. It's his backpack-iness. You know, it's kind of like a Ratchet and Clank thing, you know, this iconic duo, Wiki and Kid Cool. Right, before there was Banjo-Kazooie. Yeah. Yeah, that's funny.

18:22 Okay, so we've talked a lot about things that we don't like in this game and then we tried to give some praise and, you know, the jury's out if that was praise or not. But here's something we need to talk about. There is a whole other thing that this game wants you to do and other than just complete stages, it does want you to complete them fast and it is timing you. There is a timer in the top left that is counting and I just thought like, okay, cool, that's just keeping track of how long I've been taking to like get to the end of the game or whatever.

18:58 But little did I know that that was actually going to have an in-game clock that would also do like a day-to-night mode where like after an hour of playtime. That's what was happening. Yes, on the course of an hour, so it's not like exactly when it hits one hour, it's just like it's going from day to night and a full day is one hour of game time.

19:21 And the game actually like other than just simulating like, you know, what something like Pokemon Gold would wind up doing, you know, it's like other than doing something like that. But it's also keeping track of time because you will have, and we will touch on these later, multiple endings depending on how long it took you to complete the game. So this is a game that it's not like, okay, a game I was thinking of is Metroid, right? Metroid, I mean, if you beat it fast enough, you can see Samus without any of her armor on, right? And they're like, whoa, Samus is a girl, right? Cool reveal and everything like that. And then it's like, whoa, she was wearing a bathing suit.

19:59 Not sure why. That's weird. But okay, sure. But like Metroid managed to do that in an effective way where you never actually felt rushed. And you just kind of heard about that secret afterwards and said, well, now I got to beat the game faster. But it was never showing a clock in the top left being like, time's ticking, you better save Brine Star, right? It's like, no, nobody's thinking that. But instead, you're just thinking about like, I got to figure out where I am in this world and where I'm going to find the next power up. In this game, the whole time you're thinking, I got to be faster. I got to finish this fucking game.

20:34 Yeah, and I don't think that that's a bad thing. Like, I think that that's a cool, I mean, I don't think the story is anything to write home about. But it does tie into the story. The king is sick.

20:46 Apparently, the disease is incurable, but it's also curable by these seven herbs that are found in like a neighboring kingdom. So yeah, you have some urgency to try and heal him. Now, one might say maybe these kingdoms should sign some sort of economic treaty so that these herbs can be available. And, you know, market forces can make one kingdom make some money off of these resources instead of just sending like a lone spy to go and steal the other nation's supply of them in some form of, you know, banditry. But, I mean, that's neither here nor there. But the time mechanic, you know, it plays into that. You don't want the king to be sick for that long or he may have some long-term issues.

21:40 Sean, you touched on the herbs. And was I the only one disappointed to find out that they are just literal herbs? They're just plants. Yeah, like a mushroom is the reward for beating a boss. Like, that's bullshit. But at least they're not like, you know, there's not some big like Zelda opening a chess theme. It's just very like matter of fact, like there's the plant. Pick it up. Keep on going. We got to go. We got to keep going.

22:08 Yeah, because every minute counts. So you just got to keep going. I also thought it was funny that although like it's three stages in a world and then you get to a boss and then you move on to the next one. And there are seven, I guess we'll call them worlds. In the manual, they give names to these worlds and they try to describe them. But what they wind up doing is, and this is again just like me attacking the manual writer. They wind up just covering a bunch of different ground in here. So just a couple of like highlights for you. The first world is called Dragoir. And that's with a D, not a J.

22:50 Dragoir. And it says, get used to the speed of play and acquire skills like skipping on water and vaulting with a pole. So when you look at that, you might think, oh, okay, this is just giving me like general gameplay tips, not describing these worlds necessarily or what I might inhabit in them. Then the next one is Mountain Bulb. This is full of traps that you will need to evade. Okay, so that is actually like more descriptive about what happens in these worlds.

23:20 Then scroll down to number six, Pippo's heart. You will find Pippo's heart. That's just like, that's just obvious. Okay, that's neither a tip nor helpful. And then number seven, the final world, Elektra. It just says, this may be shocking. That's just a pun. Yeah, and now it's just, yeah, switching right to puns.

23:43 But yeah, the training wheels are off now. You're on the seventh world. It's like, we're not going to tell you much, but we'll give you a hint. The six, I don't know. They're just, I don't know why they didn't do anything for six. I just can't tell what the theme is or what I'm supposed to be taking away from these rounds. But it'd be funny to be like, you know, oh, you get stuck on world threes. You're like, let me check out what the manual has to say. And it just doesn't say much of anything or help you at all. No guide. So a little bit of a tangent and not related to what we were previously talking about with the herbs, but still funny nonetheless.

24:15 Obviously, these levels are, they intend you to go quickly through them, right? That's the point. Yeah. Yeah, that's the point. So that's what the manual, or that's what the back of the box was saying.

24:26 But just the levels aren't designed for you to go fast. So like, I feel like their whole, sorry, I'm going back a little bit here to what we were talking about. But their whole, their whole idea of like, okay, this is about you like going as fast as you can, beating the time, you know, getting there in less than a day or whatever it is, is there's a, what do you call it? A cognitive, cognitive dissonance between what you're trying to, what they want you to do and like how the game actually plays. Here's, here's how I'm going to describe it in another roundabout way.

25:09 Okay. Like, that's the game saying to you like, let's see how fast you can go through this or like how fluid you can make your movement and like, let's see how, like how parkour you can get. Whereas this one is saying, I bet you can't go fast on this. Like, let's, let's see how fast you think you can go on this. And because like, like there are, unless, because obviously another analogy I was thinking of is like, this game is, it's the game version of like hostile architecture.

25:46 And I understand that like a level is supposed to be filled with obstacles. It's supposed to be challenged. Like it's supposed to be in engaging in that way. But there are points in this game all over the place where it, there's this one mechanic or just like recurring object that you'll come across. That just is a cannon that blows air at you at regular intervals. Maybe it'll stop for a few seconds so that you have some amount of time to get through it. But a lot of times it doesn't even have that. It's just always blowing air at you and you will just keep falling off of platforms onto the ground below you. You have to keep trying again. You have to keep doing it.

26:31 And there'll be five of these in a row, all lined up with the platform that you're supposed to be on next. And it's just like, it knows that you're trying to get through this and there's no real quick way to get through it. Maybe there's a speed run that knows the exact timing, but it's like, it's not, it doesn't feel good to do it. You just keep, you're just bashing your head against a wall. And I don't think that it's possible to describe to someone who hasn't played the game just how unnecessary these air cannons are. It really, to me, feels like somebody said, this part's not frustrating enough.

27:08 So let's just make it like, yeah, there's not like a skill to get through it. Let's just make it like, you got to just try over and over again, try to get into that one, that five frame gap of puffs of air. Otherwise, it's just going to keep pushing you back. Like it's your only way forward. Like, I do want to say good things about this game. I do. But I'm just so frustrated. The entire experience is so frustrating.

27:36 Joe, maybe you could say something nice about the little roulette bonus game. No. Yeah, the roulette bonus game. Maybe I'm just bad at it. Maybe this, this one, this one I didn't like. I was frustrated, but I could maybe be convinced that like, hey, I just want it to be too easy. Like, this is a very, very difficult thing. There's no way to time it. Yeah, there's no way to time it. It's all like, it truly is. I mean, you're not gambling because I think the currency that you use to actually use this bonus thing can only be used for these bonus things.

28:19 But there's, there's no way to time it. It's too fast. Yeah. But those, those hidden blocks I was talking about earlier that just, as soon as you think you're going to about to jump on an enemy, that's easy there. They put a hidden block that like knocks you back down like Mario maker style. Apparently Mario fans didn't make that up. It came from this game. But like those blocks are what give you the, the bonus, like round, like the bone tickets to, to, to spin the wheel again or whatever it is. So like even getting attempts at this bonus round probably killed you. So it's like, it's like, is it even? It's a zero sum. Yeah. As I mentioned, there are multiple endings to the game and they're based on how long it takes you to complete the game.

29:03 If you can believe it, I think that they have things that like all the way up to like, if it took you three hours to beat the game, which I mean, you know, I'm watching a long play where it took them.

29:16 Technically 48 minutes, but the game only counts when you're in the levels. So I think they completed something like 12 minutes, but those are usually computer optimized and everything. However, you know, three stages, seven worlds.

29:29 If you're going to get it to the end, it's probably not going to take you three hours. Like if you're good enough to get to the end, it's not going to take you three hours. I guess is what I'm trying to say here, but it's nice to have a variety of endings. So how much really changes? Well, they just kind of keep like they give you things or they take it away. I guess I should say it's like the best ending gives you everything. And then they just kind of like each one, the longer it took you, they're like, well, you're not getting this. OK, well, you're not getting this. So if it takes you if it takes you more than three hours, when you get to the castle, the king will be dead.

30:08 He will be in a coffin, which is funny because his coffin is just laying right where his bed was. There's no like you're not like at a funeral or at a graveyard. You're just where his bed was. And they just replaced it with a coffin. And you know that the assistant or court jester dude is sad because he says, I'm so very sad before kid cool walks in. So he's only saying it either to himself or to the audience because kid cool is not aware that the assistant is sad. Then if it takes you like something, I guess like less than three hours, but more than two, etc. He's now wheelchair bound, but alive. No, no. You get a bag of money.

30:52 It's like, well, that's not money I can use in real life. And it's not money I could use in the game for like a new game plus. So that's worthless to me. I collected all of these herbs for money. That's not what he's alive.

31:07 Yeah. We don't know. We objectively know nothing about this king. We don't know what else he's doing to the kingdom. If this is like, is he a popular king? Yeah, exactly. We have no idea of his motivations or convictions or if he's going to war with these other nations or whatever. So I don't care whether the king lives or dies. I'm more about my reward. And granted, I get it. You're like, you're kid cool. You can't be older than like 11 or 12 because then you'd be. Teen cool. Yeah. You'd be like terrific teen. Yeah. Terrific spelled with like an L or something. There you go. Yep. Okay. So then after the bag of money, eventually it's a bag of gold and a high position in the kingdom. An unspecified high position.

31:56 Maybe you'll replace the assistant. The assistant guy. Yep. Then a chest of gems and the princess for the second best ending. And the princess. Yeah. It's an arranged marriage. Like I don't. Oh, okay. I thought it was like human trafficking. Yeah. Well, I don't think that, you know, I'm sure it's like the king is giving away his own daughter for your hand in marriage.

32:22 But I thought you could have interpreted that another way is to say you become the princess. Yep. Very progressive first time game. And lastly, of course, if you do complete the game fast enough, you will get everything. The chest of gems, the princess, and believe it or not, the promise to be the king when all is said and done.

32:44 Wow. So a little more comedy about the ending because I did watch the final one. And whatever, sorry, the final being the best one. Whatever ending you get, obviously you had to collect all the herbs. And so the king requests to see them and you have to watch as Kid Cool individually hands out like or throws rather each herb to the king as if there was an option to like skip a world and show up at the castle without going to that place.

33:19 Like did we really need that? Like couldn't we have just seen him like throw them all or just hand something like neatly wrapped up or a bag or something? But no, you have to watch this long animation of one after another after another of all the herbs going into the king, which, you know, I'm not saying they didn't even watch them. Like you could have made a fun meal with it. Right. It's all plants and stuff, but they didn't even make a salad.

33:42 Here's the the missed opportunity that I have with this whole king story. When you first start the game, you are, you know, you're there. He's sick. The assistant's there. But the assistant looks pretty fucking suspect. Like the assistant has this weird face. He's got like a crooked smile or frown. It just he's not a good looking guy. But, you know, ugly in old in old video game terminology usually means, you know, evil. So I thought the twist was going to be that the guy that poisoned the king was this assistant. Yeah, I thought that the whole time. Yeah, but it's not. It's not the case. He has nothing to do with it. He's just there to to ask questions to say like he's sad.

34:32 I think, you know, there should have been a second act or like a disc two where now you have to fight the the cowardly assistant. Yeah. Actually, no one's behind anything. Right. Like there is no reveal. Yeah. There's no reveal of a big bad because the last boss is just some robot, you know, which I mean, I guess is kind of cool, but not hard.

34:58 But, you know, like it feels like you're just going to these other places and pillaging and taking down their leaders and then just stealing their herbs and bringing them back for your king. Again, I just get uneasy about the message.

35:15 One other thing, though, and this happened at the beginning of the game, too, but it's even worse at the end. The messages, they couldn't figure out a victim. I guess couldn't figure out a way to like get them to disappear after people talk. So they just keep stacking up on top of each other. The boxes to the point where at the end of the game, there's like I think it's like five text boxes stacked on top of each other. But the text is still there, too. So it's not even just the boxes. Well, that's to symbolize them talking over each other. Funny because they had a clock. So the king could have even been like that only took you 27 minutes and 12 seconds. You know, like it could have been really precise, but they chose to ignore that.

35:55 On the sequels and spinoff side, this is more spinoff than it is sequel. But Victakai also made two games, one called Decap Attack and another one called Psycho Fox. Both Sega games. And allegedly they're like loosely related. Because they have like similar gameplay mechanics.

36:16 So if you're looking for two other games to never play, call them Decap Attack and Psycho Fox. Because if they're anything like this, they're probably not worth playing. Psycho Fox was a master system game. Decap Attack was a Genesis game. And so in a weird way, we kind of have like the chronological order of Psycho Fox, Kid Cool, Decap Attack. But again, not like I don't believe there to be a continuous story. It's just that they're like updated versions of the same game because they have the same mechanics.

36:56 Boo. Yeah, we hate that. But you know what we love? What's that? The Essential Games List. Aw. In the time that you could learn how to properly control Kid Cool and do some cool, you know, momentum physics jumping based stuff in this game. Where it doesn't become a pain in the ass. And you feel completely in control and know not to like stop so that you don't have enough room to carry the momentum of your character enough to clear these jumps. In the time that it would take you to learn all that. You probably could have played Super Mario Brothers 1, 2, and 3. So why the heck didn't you just do that? This game is not essential. Sean? Yeah, you've heard me talk.

37:47 I'd say this is probably one of my least favorite games we play for the podcast. You know, games that are just clearly broken notwithstanding. It was just not fun in any way. So I'm gonna say it's not essential. Joe? Yeah, so obviously I didn't like this game. It wasn't good. But I think I'm even more frustrated by like, I just want to stress that I think that there's like a really good game here underneath some really bad decisions.

38:20 Like, it just seems like it's designed, the levels seem designed really well for a different character that moves differently. Minus a couple of things we talked about, like those cannons that just shoot air at you, like, that feel like an afterthought, like just to make it artificially more difficult. But, like, there's a lot of charm to the mechanics that, like, could be seen if you dig beneath the terrible movement and, like, the weird screen scrolling.

38:51 So, like, I think that, like, a lot of this, naturally, we were talking about, like, what you could do to make it so you can go as fast as they want you to. Like, you need to be able to see things ahead of time. You need to be able to see the screen. They would need to reposition enemies so they're not just, like, out to kill you because you did it. Because you did what they wanted you to do, which is move fast. But I think that, like, the better way to fix this game would be to take away the need to go fast.

39:27 Like, I could see it going both ways. I think this could be fun if you could go fast. But I feel like this game is just largely designed to just be a regular Mario-style platformer that has enough unique charm to feel different than Mario. But those two elements of, like, their level design and the goal of the game with the way that the character moves don't work together and really ruin, like, what I think could have been a really fun experience. And instead, like, I'm with you, Sean. This is, like, one of the least fun games I've played on the NES. Yes. So, not essential. Okay, so that's three votes for no. And it will not be on the essential games list.

40:09 Not sure if there was a surprise there. But I have perused some forums that some people will defend this game that it's not one of the worst. So, you know who you are. Yeah, you know who you are. Next week, we will be playing Magic Johnson's Fast Break. Guys, are we sure that's how you say his last name? I thought it was Johansson. Magic Johansson.