419 · Thunder and Lightning
Thunder and Lightning is an Arkanoid-style paddle game that the manual sells as another of Mr. Chin's misadventures, as if we all knew him. We didn't. Joe sat this one out, so it was just Mike and Sean, and we spent a good while debating whether this is Breakout with personality or Breakout with distractions. We landed on personality.
What works
- Power-ups that stack and clash. Slow ball and multi-ball combine nicely, with a three-arrow and a six-arrow version. The long paddle and the magnet glove cancel each other out. The big ball smashes through everything, even blocks that should be unbreakable, and the missiles turn it into a small shmup. We called the missiles close to game-breaking, and wished for a three-way spray.
- Hazards with attitude. A sea anemone splits your ball in two, the octopus grabs your paddle and slows you to a crawl, and a bird takes away your control while also smashing blocks. The Thunder Warrior shocks you but wipes out most of the blocks around him. The turtles are the best of the lot: they drop fresh blocks down the screen, so you race them, and we were genuinely upset with them.
- Getting the ball stuck at the back. Wedging it into a crevasse and letting it clear things on its own is, as we put it, about as primally satisfying as video games get.
What doesn't
- Level 11 or 12. Four columns of unbreakable tiles, a thin corridor and a steady supply of turtles, which can drop a block right next to your paddle. It plays like a reverse Tetris and was our least favorite stage.
- The story lives in the manual. Nobody but the person who read it had heard of the Thunder Warrior, and he is just another enemy. Clear stage 30 and Mr. Chin warps off the top of the screen, then you get a bare Game Over. No boss, no meal, no final score.
- Two-player modes. Type A alternates turns, Type B is simultaneous with paddles on opposite sides. Better than watching, but we thought it was more fun alone.
Beyond the game
It began as an arcade game. Thunder and Lightning 2, also called Block Carnival, replaces the bricks with food such as sushi and cakes, which is the personality we wanted here. It ends on "The End" and then a Game Over anyway. Its ranking board says "top" instead of 1st. We also learned of Revenge of Doh, which fans of Arkanoid apparently love.
The bottom line
Skip it. Mike called it serviceable with some original ideas, but original ideas aren't on the Essential Games List checklist, and he wouldn't say "let's run it back." Sean found it more hypnotic than engaging, fun but not essential, and said he could have spent the time on something more thoughtful. Neither of the two voted it onto the list. If you love Breakout, the turtles alone are worth ten minutes.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
- The Thunder warrior is not pleased with Mr. Chin’s meal chasing escapade
- General Overview
- What it is: A Breakout/Arkanoid-style paddle game where Mr. Chin bats a “Demoe Ball” into block patterns called the Walls of Regret. MobyGames+2GameFAQs+2
- Alt title: Known in Japan as Family Block (published by Athena, release listed as 04/12/1991). GameFAQs+1
- Big hook: It is a paddle game, but with a goofy story wrapper, power-up “carriers,” and nuisance enemies that actively sabotage your paddle and ball. MobyGames+2DigitPress+2
- Offbeat questions
- Is this “Arkanoid with personality,” or “Arkanoid with distractions”?
- Does the Mr. Chin framing make it memorable, or just confusing?
- Franchise and Context
- Mr. Chin continuity: The manual positions this as another Mr. Chin misadventure, that’s cause he was in a Game Boy, Mr. Chin's Gourmet Paradise. It was not an arkanoid game. It was a puzzle platformer.
- Story and Objective
- Setup: Mr. Chin’s endless search for delicacies lands him in trouble with the Thunder Warrior, who traps him within the Thirty Walls of Regret. DigitPress+1
- Shouldn’t it be a 7 deadly sins thing and he’s in the thirty walls of gluttony?
- Goal: Break through wall after wall by clearing the block patterns, keeping the Ball in play, and surviving hazards long enough to escape. DigitPress+1
- Why does the manual frame this as punishment and regret, instead of a simple arcade challenge? https://www.world-of-nintendo.com/manuals/nes/thunder_and_lightning.shtml
- Core Gameplay Loop
- Moment to moment
- Move
- Hit the ball into blocks
- Deal with enemies that interfere with your control or rebuild the wall. DigitPress+1
- Offbeat questions
- Do you prefer your Breakout games as clean puzzles?
- Speed tech
- The manual notes Mr. Chin can run faster if you hold direction + B. DigitPress
- Is the “run faster” trick a convenience, or secretly mandatory once the game speeds up? DigitPress
- Game Types and Multiplayer
- 1 Player: Three lives. DigitPress
- 2 Player Type A: Alternating play, separate screens and scores. DigitPress
- 2 Player Type B: Simultaneous play, each player controls one side, scores are totaled, and you effectively share fate. DigitPress+1
- In Type B, do you naturally divide responsibilities (left player controls low angles, right player controls high angles), or do you both chase everything?
- Power-Ups and How You Actually Use Them
- How power-ups appear: Carriers float by (flying saucer, submarine, airplane). Hit them with the ball to drop an item, then catch it with your paddle. DigitPress+1
- Notable items
- Glove: Catch and hold the ball, release with A. DigitPress+1
- Long: Longer paddle. DigitPress+1
- 1-Up: Extra life. DigitPress+1
- Missile: Fire a missile (A), can stack for two missiles. DigitPress+1
- Big: Big ball that smashes through blocks. DigitPress+1
- Slow: Slows the ball. DigitPress+1
- 3-Arrow / 6-Arrow: Multi-ball chaos (three balls or six balls). DigitPress+1
- Offbeat questions
- Does multi-ball feel like a power-up or a panic button you immediately regret?
- Is there anything better than Globe?
- Enemies, Hazards, and “Why am I losing control”
- These are the game’s real personality.
- Sea Anemone (Uh-nem-oh-nee): Captures the ball and splits it into two smaller balls. DigitPress+1
- Octopus: Pops out of a vase and latches onto your stick, slowing your movement. DigitPress+1
- Turtles: Walk over the wall and turn into blocks that hinder progress. DigitPress+1
- Bird: If you hit it, you temporarily lose control as it smashes through blocks, then leaves. DigitPress+1
- Thunder Warrior event: Appears in cloud scenes, surrounded by lightning. Hit him with the ball to stun him briefly, but if lightning hits Mr. Chin you get paralyzed. DigitPress+1
- Arcade Original and Ports
- Arcade roots: Thunder & Lightning also exists as an arcade release (1990), with Seta involved in the arcade version’s production/publishing history. MobyGames+1
- NES version: US release via Romstar, Japan release as Family Block via Athena. GameFAQs+1
- Later re-release: MobyGames lists a Windows release (2016) of the NES game.
- Sequels and Spinoffs
- Thunder & Lightning 2 / Block Carnival: There is a follow-up commonly associated with Thunder & Lightning 2, also known as Block Carnival, listed as a 1992 release in arcade databases. Arcade Italia+1
- Much more food focused (you hit food instead of blocks), but it looks like shovelware.
- Essential Games List segue
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Thunder and Lightning! The Thunder Warrior is not pleased with Mr. Chin's meal-chasing escapade!
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. And I'm Sean. Did you know that this breakout game had a story? I was going to ask what you meant by meal-chasing? Like he's... Meal-chasing escapades. Like a shooter, like having a cup of coffee after dinner? Is that what we're talking about? So, the manual positions this as another one of Mr. Chin's misadventures. Like as if we're all familiar with Mr. Chin and his crazy antics, and this is like the seventh NES game in the Mr. Chin franchise. But that's not true. There's just... There was a Game Boy game that came out before this called Mr. Chin's Gourmet Paradise.
And what's weird about that is that's not a breakout or I guess like this maybe Arkanoid's better here. It's not a Arkanoid clone. It's a puzzle platformer. It's like a completely different game. But in that one, it at least is more food oriented. So, I guess Mr. Chin is like maybe a chef or maybe he just loves to eat or something. Cool. But that's where this all comes into. But I don't think you can just frame this around Mr. Chin if you don't know him. Yeah. I know there's turtles and anemones, but I don't know about food. And are we calling them... So, wait. I don't really know much about Arkanoid.
Like is that like actually notably different than Breakout? Because I was thinking Breakout clone the whole time. Yeah, I guess I'm struggling to remember now like why I wrote down Arkanoid instead of Breakout. So, I'll need to just look at a quick visual. But for me, Breakout is always like the simplest version of that. And then like Arkanoid, I feel like added the power ups. Hmm. Okay. I get that. You know, like Breakout was just like you keep hitting. It's like... It is paddling, ball and block. Breakout is like single player pong.
Yes. Yes. And then they're like, well, wait a minute. Hold on. We can go somewhere with this. And so Arkanoid introduced like the power ups and stuff. But then Thunder and Lightning here is like, well, hold on a minute. What if instead of it being a... Because I believe in Arkanoid, the paddle is actually supposed to be a ship, even though it's a very long board. Mm-hmm. It's supposed to be like an alien craft or whatever. Here, they're like, what if it's just Mr. Chin holding up a board? And he just runs across the screen. And what if there were turtles? Well, the turtles...
Listen, here's one thing I'll say about this game. Especially if you're just joining us and you're like, Arkanoid clone, I'm out. Like, what can we say that we haven't said? They find a lot of ways to like reinvent or spruce up the genre here. Can you agree with that at least? I'm not going to go so far as to say reinvent, but I am going to agree that there are lots of fun little spins on it.
Because you mentioned the turtles, and I think that's like the fourth level or whatever. And that one to me is like, oh, well, this game could go places. Yeah. That was like one of the first... Like, I already thought the power-ups were pretty good. But then I was like, well, now there's turtles coming down the screen adding new blocks. Like, that's devious. It is very... How am I supposed to clear them faster than the turtles? I was very upset with the turtles. At first I thought it was very cute. And then they just kept coming. And they didn't stop coming. And they don't stop coming.
They just keep coming. The turtles. So I guess like, what's the big hook though of the game? You know, because it is just a paddle game with some new power-ups and stuff. Like, it's not Mr. Chin. I think we've agreed on that. There aren't like cute cut scenes or anything.
So is it like fans of... You have to be a fan of Breakout and Arkanoid to even want to play this game? Like, can this game bring in an audience that either one of those didn't? I mean, I guess so. I'm kind of getting comparisons to like Tetris Effect or something. Even though like Tetris Effect didn't change Tetris beyond making it like cool to take drugs to. But it is like an enhancement of Breakout slash I guess Arkanoid. With lots of fun ideas. It's a classic game with fun ideas.
And a lot of new ideas too. There are enemies on the screen that can affect your ball. There are solid blocks that you can't break. There are other types of enemies that will mess with your board. There's like one level with a squid who will like suction onto your board and make it so that you have to walk really slow. And most likely you're not going to recover your ball. So is this Breakout with personality or Breakout with distractions? I'd say with personality. I think that I have never played Breakout for longer than 15 minutes because I get bored of Breakout. And this, you know, I played this for longer than that.
And there is actually a story here where Mr. Chin's endless search for delicacies puts him in trouble with the Thunder Warrior who, I don't know, like is that, is the Thunder Warrior something other than Zeus? You don't know the Thunder Warrior, Mike? I don't know the Thunder Warrior. I guess I know the Thunder Dome. Well, if you played Chin, then you would have known. Right. I would have met it. Yep. So the Thunder Warrior is upset with him and traps him in the 30 walls of regret. But if we're going to do the seven deadly sins thing, shouldn't it be the 30 walls of gluttony? Were we doing a... He's searching for food and... Were we doing a seven deadly sins thing? No, I'm saying regret is one of the sins, no?
Um... I totally made that up. No, that's not real. All right. I just have... I just have regret for saying that out loud then. You gotta watch seven again. Yeah. Uh, okay. So then never mind. But still, regret for what? Like, he doesn't have regret. Well, he... Did he eat everything that he could in the past games? It's the only thing I can think of. No. Because he's searching for the... I guess, like... I guess he should have regret for entering the Thunder Warriors, uh... Zone. Yeah. Domain. I would also regret, uh... Sort of... Intruding.
Sounds like it was a private area. These characters, though. Mr. Chin and the Thunder Warrior. It just feels like a bad, like, Scooby Doo crossover. You know, like, Scooby Doo meets, like... And then insert, like, something way too serious. Like, Scooby Doo meets the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Ha ha ha ha. Right? Like, technically, they could go together. Yeah. Because they're both horror. But, like, one is way scarier than the other one ever tried to do. I would watch that. I think... I think they could actually achieve it today.
Where they... Where, like, they couldn't do that in, like, 1980. No, no. Because nothing matters anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. We're, like, so desensitized to it that they could probably show Scooby getting, you know, like, chainsawed apart or whatever. And Shaggy being like, like, zoinks, man! They just chopped up my dog, you know? And it's like, no one's gonna care. I think you're right. Yeah. People want to see that, actually. I want to see it. That's a whole new... Yeah. That's what the Terrifier series is, right? Oh, is it? It's just like... Well, not with Scooby-Doo. Well, sure. I guess it just meant, like, people just want to see terrible things happen on screen. Like, the most violent possible things you could imagine.
I mean, I guess that's not totally new. I mean, Hostel came out, like, 20 years ago or something. So, maybe it was longer than that. And that, I think, is a movie without any kind of reason to exist. So, we've been there. We've been there. Right. And we've been here with Mr. Chin and Breakout and everything. So, I want to talk about these unique power-ups because there are some really cool ones. I think we've seen, at least in Arkanoid, we had the long power-up, which makes your paddle just longer. And we had the... It wasn't an actual baseball glove. Like, this one, it comes down and it's a mitt. It's like a magnet, right? So, you're like, okay, cool.
Yeah, I think it was a magnet, but still, it works the same. Every time you touch the ball, it glues onto your paddle and you choose when to release it, which feels incredibly powerful. But it's only really, like, useful, in my opinion, like, towards the end of the stage. Yeah, like, when you know that you have to hit, like, a very specific thing. Because otherwise, it just makes things really slow. Well, speaking of, there's also a slow ball.
That's true. And that's not the one I really like, although that one is a good power-up because that one stacks. There are some things, like, if you have the long paddle, you can't use the glove and vice versa. Like, it switches. So, that is weird. But the slow and the multi-ball, they work together. And that's really useful because now, all of a sudden, tracking three or, get this, there's even a larger multi-ball for six.
That helps because now you can keep track of them all and juggle them appropriately. Whereas, like, when you get the six, yeah, they're going to do a bunch of damage while they're up there. But chances are they're all going to fall back down at the same time. And you're going to get maybe two. Yeah. And then you're only going to have one after that. The one thing, though, Sean, did you notice this or did you expect this maybe?
When you have one ball and you collect either the three-arrow or the six-arrow and it becomes the appropriate multi-ball based on the number of directions, did you expect it to happen again if you had a bunch of multi-balls active and then you got another three-arrow? Did you expect those, like, remaining balls to then again split off into three?
I did, yes. Well, at least one of them. It wasn't just, like, one that would resplit. Yeah, the main ball, I guess, like, then does split. So you still can continue to extend your multi-ball, but I thought for true chaos they should have made it so that if you had six balls in play and collected another three-arrow, right, it's like now you have 18. That would be kind of, I feel like that would break the system. Yes, I agree. Would it be 18? It would be. Wait, six and six? Six and three. Oh, 18. Yeah. Yeah, cool. That's probably also, like, just an NES limitation, right? I don't think they could have that many balls. We'll go with that.
I really don't know, but that sounds like you shouldn't do that. It's really hard to juggle these balls in the first place, right? Yeah. You gotta look at a lot of balls. It is very satisfying, though. Like, the combination of getting a multi-ball and also getting your ball stuck into a crevasse so that, like, you don't really need to, like, really worry about it for a while. Like, there are fewer, like, primally satisfying things in video games than just getting it right in there. And it will be fun. And it will be fun.
so and when you have the the longer paddle or the glove or the slowing the balls or the multi-ball like all that stuff is the kind of power-ups that i feel like you put us in a brainstorm and we're gonna come up with them right like we're in a we're in a developers meeting conference thing that probably never happened back then but like probably happens nowadays and we could probably come up with some things that happen to the ball uh even the big ball the one we didn't talk about
yet which is awesome where the ball goes through um the blocks and continues to smash through even the ones that you shouldn't be able to break right right exactly it breaks every block in its way and truly goes all the way back up to the top of the screen or if it hits an enemy that makes it come down as well but otherwise it can hit a lot of blocks and clear a lot of blocks at once all those things feel somewhat um predictable um but novel the missile one is just like whoa like now they're
thinking now they're really talking my language because now the game becomes a little bit of a shmup where you can also simultaneously shoot missiles at the blocks while you still have to balance the you know hitting the um you know using your reflexes to catch the block the ball that is in the air you're able to shoot missiles and the missile power up stacks so that you can have two missiles at ones too but it only it like i get that it would be able to clear two next to each other but i guess
i was hoping for more of like a a spray missile you know like a three-way where it uh shoots one two diagonally and one uh straight up okay that would have been a little better i get that i mean i've it's it's so incredibly useful it's almost a game-breaking thing like it's like if you had the option to throw a grenade and madden in a way like you're not supposed to be able to to shoot directly the things you're breaking out with your ball uh but i think it's fun it's it's cool that it's there i agree and i think
if this was a uh a normal game of breakout that would be completely defeating the purpose the only way that this cut these kinds of power-ups are allowed in the first place because i'm sure we're making the game sound pretty easy is because of the hazards on the stages uh you have the um the sea anemone that captures the ball and splits it into two smaller balls you have the octopus as i mentioned i think
it's a squid but i have it i think it's an octopus i wasn't gonna say anything okay great so well then my notes are right at least yeah the octopus which uh grabs onto your paddle and slows you down uh the turtles as we mentioned uh probably the most memorable of the batch that um i do like scroll down from the top of the screen and we all like turtles yeah uh they scroll from the top of the screen and they drop new blocks so you have to clear faster than they keep laying down blocks
uh and then there's the the bird i love the bird bird's my favorite yeah the if you hit it you lose control yeah and uh it smashes through some of the blocks though too so it's kind of like uh well there's also some positive to this yeah so um i was very surprised by the bird um actually helping and i think that it sort of sets a precedent for other quote-unquote enemies that actually kind of help like there's also one where maybe it is like a god of thunder or god of fire or something that if
you hit him with the ball no it is thunder then yeah he's the thunder warrior is that the thunder warrior is the embodiment the living embodiment of the thunder warrior yeah uh he will shock you but he will also clear out lots of blocks around him almost all of them to be honest so uh i did like the interplay between the the whatever you want to call the obstacles whether they're enemies or just things
i think yeah i think they could just be treated as like hazards in general because they all also have this uh even though even the um whether it's a aircraft or a spacecraft um they these things wander on the screen and give you your power-ups if you hit them though all of those things are hard surfaces so whether it's a right whether it's an enemy or uh something that rewards you they snap the ball back
uh towards your direction so you have to be ready with the reflexes and you know one thing i'll say about uh even the designs of the levels here is the it's hard to think about these being like new designs like i have no idea how i because i just don't play breakout and arkanoid long enough outside of like the initial levels to see how things change up but these feel at certain points like particularly low to the ground
uh you know like in most of these games it's usually like intricate patterns but they require you to bounce the ball pretty like high up to hit it before it comes back down pretty early on in these stages the blocks that you have to clear which will again i'll remind you mean that the ball is going to come back down to you can be as it can be as low as like two tiles away from your paddle and so that requires some crazy fast reflexes uh to be ready for yeah the one that i really didn't appreciate the most was i i want i want to say was level 11 or 12 uh where you haven't seen you haven't seen the turtles in a while and you're like oh thank god the turtles they just keep coming they don't stop coming and now this one has
lots of unbreakable tiles uh and a very thin sort of corridor that you it's you can't really get one of those satisfying bounce throughs to clear it all out um but you also have these turtles coming so it it should be pretty simple to get there but they just keep you cannot make any progress unless you have the missiles or something which i did not have and then it ends up like almost becoming a reverse tetris where you have no room to work with on the front end um but that was that that that was my
least favorite level i think yeah and i think you you know you bring up another good point about the turtles there that we probably didn't discuss is that they lay down new blocks but they do it based based on uh like it based on the chain of blocks from the line that they crawl down so if you have no blocks on the column that they are cascading down they will just put it at the very top of the screen but this particular level has like eight columns of uh no not eight four columns of unbreakable blocks and so if the turtle just happens to spawn on those unbreakable blocks it will spawn a new
block at the end of all of that which will be very close to your paddle yeah not not my favorite yeah uh and i i guess i never really thought about it in terms of like columns and rows but that is what's happening here it's just blocks in different columns and different rows and there is sort of a uh there is a strategy for people to like clear these things faster than just like aimlessly just
hitting the ball back to the corners every time do you do you have a particular strategy with even with these power-ups in mind of like clearing a level faster well i think each of them requires a different strategy but like if there is if you can kind of see a back entrance so that you could just let it do its thing for a while i'll always try and do that but again i don't think that that's like like tactical thinking i think that's just like i want to scratch that particular itch in my brain
um when it comes to using the power-ups though like if if i can find big i'm gonna use big big is just brute forcing it like you're not really thinking about strategy you just clear it out as fast as possible yeah because i think even in the the turtle stages too with how uh three of them come down at a time the multi-ball feels like it would be helpful but if it's not hitting the exact um the exact blocks that you need it to then the turtles are just going to keep coming down but the big takes
care of that by just wiping through everything in its direction so especially for those columns in that stage you didn't like uh they would get rid of those columns and so you'd have a much easier time absolutely should they have weighted power-ups based on that or is it fine to just like sometimes you just have to fish out for a while and hope you get the big i don't know there definitely is a hierarchy though like you getting the long paddle is kind of a disappointment if you're if if you're farming for power-ups uh but i think it's fine like i don't think that this is it's not a particularly
strategic game like i think it is just sort of like a a fun time even though i'm sure that there's power users out there so i think it's the balance is fine i kind of want to watch like a speed run yeah
i'm sure it's all tass and if you don't read the manual then you're not really paying attention to this thunder warrior stuff anyway but is it weird he's just like another enemy like the turtles and the um yeah that was weird octopuses like there's not even the game just ends retroactively it's weird because i did not read the manual and you were the first time i heard about the thunder warrior
right but even just like thinking about what what the game could end on it could end on like a fight between you and the thunder warrior where you have to like use the ball to hit him a certain amount of times right to defeat him while he's throwing those lightning projectiles down at you and trying to paralyze you that could have been an idea for a boss fight at the end of the game but instead
you just clear the 30th stage and mr chin just kind of like warps up to the top of the screen and then you just get greeted with a game over screen and it's like well wait a minute you don't even get to see him eat anything no exactly but also like game over that that means i lost like don't don't give me game over as my congratulations and is that there's not even any like score to sort of be the
the replacement uh for your like sense of accomplishment you get the score at you get the score at the end of every stage though right oh that is true that is and that's stacking i believe that's not just like you know these stages continuously get worth more and more yeah that is just like your overall score but does it at least give you a readout of your final score during the game over
that i didn't get there uh no that's a good question and no i don't think it does wow i think you have to clear to see because the game over screen is just a game over it's pretty silly pretty silly stuff all right now joe's not here but there is one other mode in this game uh and uh there's two versions of it it's called two player uh you might have heard of it if you had a friend in your life
and uh the the first one is two player type a and the second one is two player type b and i think uh they could have figured out better ways to phrase this than just like oh type a look it up in the manual if you want to know what it is or play for two seconds i guess but like can i guess type a and type b is so boring uh to to put that on your game menu type a is a competition you know two players alternating so once one makes a mistake then the other one uh can go and you just watch each other play riveting riveting stuff yeah and then type b is it two at the same time two at the same time two player simultaneous game um and uh that is uh like interesting because you can also bump into each
other like you're you're blocker player one is a is a person with a paddle on the left and player two is on the right with a paddle so you you can't like you could dominate the side of the screen you know and like you can block you have to the other side well there's no reason to do that you know because you're playing together but i guess what i'm saying is like so it does involve communication
of like you know you make sure you know like when you play um even a tennis video game right and you're like okay you're gonna be in the front i'm gonna be in the back and then like all of a sudden you don't trust the other player and you just like run up to the front and it's like well what the hell i thought i was in the front you know that's what could happen sounds like you have some
some trauma from this i think that just happens even in real life sean i think there are times where you know it's like you know okay i'm in center field and then the guy in right field just runs over to center field to catch my ball and it's like well hold on a minute why'd you put me in center field also if you're ever put in the outfield that's just because you suck well yeah i mean i knew
that i was always outfield yeah me too buddy we'll join the club we suck however you got to admit that's a pretty cool idea two players simultaneous rather than the alternating one sure but is it fun in practice i actually think it's more fun to play alone cool this is this is what i said this is this is single player pong at the end of the day that's what that's what that's what this scratches
and uh people just still want to like you said you want to get it up the back and watch it clear a bunch of things before it comes back down the worst version of this game is where you just keep hitting one block at a time and just having to keep juggling the ball right like nobody wants that to happen yeah that that's kind of i feel like that might be somebody's version of hell right not mine uh i've got more vivid dreams than that but lately i've been feeling a little lost yeah is everything okay mike oh in my dreams i meant do you want to talk to the to the listeners no orientation
no not necessarily okay um but if anybody else has dreams where they don't recognize they don't know where they are then just yeah just know that i've been there buddy for a while should anything else have happened in this game uh from the like should there have been cut scenes should there have been uh more enemies uh are we getting greedy now is this is this doing enough i i if anything i i think that this
is this is totally fine as is but if they really wanted to have the story in the manual mean anything at all maybe some like miss pac-man style cut scenes between some of the levels would have been welcome but i'm not complaining about that because it's not like i was actually aware there was a story so yeah here's an idea i don't have okay fleshed out but one i've thought of in in the last two seconds
so bear with me here could it have been other shapes besides a square for the entire entirety of the board like obviously where the blocks are placed is different but did it always have to be in a square could it have been like weird voids to make it a little more interesting like things there's like different like shapes that the squares make but are you talking about like the individual but it's like the entire no the entire board is a square could it have ever been anything
else i mean maybe if like this if if tvs were circular maybe yeah i i realize that that is the limitation but i guess i meant like you could also just like cut out the like you could make it an even more narrow screen yeah like it only has half the information or the or it's a the the ceiling is coming down on you uh after a certain amount of time and the blocks move down with it you know like that kind of idea from that dream you've been having this is the the dreams i've been having i've figured out i can't place it it's because i'm in mr chin's 30 levels of regret
it wasn't levels it was 30 walls he has 30 walls of regret pretty 30 walls of regret and only gets his game over when it's over i guess he does regret the experience thunder and lightning was a uh an arcade game first but this is the kind of thing that like it's literally the same like you you wouldn't even notice right like sure if the graphics are even nicer who cares it is what it is but thunder and lightning 2 which also uh is known as block carnival uh it it's uh i couldn't really find much about it but i was able to eventually find some visuals but it's one of those things where
it's like it was an arcade game and i guess it is still like part of this mr chin continuity thing the mr chin expanded universe yeah mr chin expanded universe because you get a better i'm going to share this with you uh and listeners i guess you could look this up on your own time but like it still has block carnival as the title instead of thunder and lightning 2 but you get uh you get a better idea of what mr chin looks like and um in this and i'm assuming he's the one on yeah he's the one on
the left right yeah gotta be with the corset and his is the guy on the right like his boss i think that's his boss thunder warrior yeah i'm not true i don't really understand what any of this means but i'm sure uh it's very funny in a japanese context yeah like you know it's just your boss yeah you hate him but you got to work for him for the rest of your life i think that the the one thing i would complain about this is that like the the name the title of this game is i mean it's generic in one
way but it just is not descriptive of what happens here like this should be i thought we were going to be playing a schmuck like maybe yeah but even like this block carnival makes so much more sense like make this like uh block ocean or or break block well you know what's crazy about block carnival what's that you're not destroying blocks you're destroying food so now it actually even has the food comes into play exactly like you like technically it's built out into blocks but they don't look like squares but it's like sushi and then another level has cakes and you know it's very
um it's very fun with like what you're destroying so i suppose that is what this game was missing was like a little more personality if they wanted to lean into the whole mr chin uh you know loves food angle because we're just not getting that here no i just know that he does not like turtles also weird in thunder and lightning too um mr chin isn't holding a paddle anymore he's just like he's just stretching
out his body as if he's like you know doing um doing like a standing press with a barbell and he's just hitting the balls back up to the food like there's an animation of him slamming it back up no no i wish there was an animation it just kind of like bounces off of him hmm well regardless it sounds like the this the sequel is is more cohesive than this one but yeah but it looks ugly
but yes more thematically cohesive and instead of ending on game over it ends on the end which is i guess more appropriate i think that does it gives more closure would you believe it would you believe it it actually says game over right after the end so it's just like a thing that they do it's they they psyched me out there they had the end and then game over like barn doors in on the shot
i guess they just want you to know that you could no matter what you could do i mean the person who's doing this long play finished with the highest score like number like first off here's another interesting thing now this became a thunder and lightning 2 episode it has rank right and it shows you like 10th place 9th place 8th place and it says those numbers 10th 9th 8th for first place they don't give a one with an st they just say top huh i don't like that i don't like being being the top i want to be the first i i think i'm okay with being the top well yeah you don't want to be bottom not when you have to juggle that many balls here we go and i guess we'll juggle some balls of our own in the essential games list
okay so look on the one hand i i gotta give them credit for you know first off i didn't know what this game was going to be so when i found out it was a breakout arkanoid game i was like all right well sure this will be an easy playthrough i'll play for a couple minutes figure out what it is and then you know get to my notes and it wound up being something where i was like all right you know i'll stick around for a little bit the power-ups are interesting the enemies are interesting uh and the
game does you know like just like any of these games it relies on your reflexes and so you know you screw up or whatever and uh you lose you run out of balls eventually and you're like you know what let's run it back and if you can say let's run it back then you got yourself a pretty good game on your hands so i do like the fact that this provided a spin on breakout i hadn't seen before and power-ups that were interesting however i don't think i would say let's run this back i think i experienced it
and i'm putting it in my bucket of video games i experienced along with 419 others so it's definitely not a bad game by any means it's completely serviceable it has some original ideas but original ideas aren't part of the checklist for the essential games list and so this just gets a nice thumbs up from me what about you sean yeah i think this is more hypnotic than it is engaging um like it you know flappy bird was was uh addictive but i don't think anybody was calling it
a great game i think that anything breakout arcanoid adjacent is gonna kind of fall into the same uh the same vein uh i had fun with it but i i can't say that i couldn't have found something more thoughtful to do with my time and so yeah it's it's fun but not essential i would like to find out what is the ultimate breakout game like what is the tetris effect of breakout games i don't think i've played enough to even know where to start can we get like the guy who made rez to make a breakout game where it's like the music is created as you break the blocks that'd be
pretty cool i feel like that's somewhat possible maybe it's like a midi file you know is that my saying that right midi i just say midi midi midi okay i think i like that better because midi sounds like like you know like a steak yeah really meaty meaty yeah give me a nice meaty song there uh okay so midi uh you could do that right like and you're like hitting the blocks but then maybe it's like absolutely song is moving along like so the the track is moving but you're still breaking parts of the
midi file well now now we're getting into some some stuff that i don't truly understand because i don't have actual like skills but it sounds like somebody that that knows what they're doing could probably make something like what you're describing it sounds like they can make a lot of money if they do it too will you be needing some royalties for this uh i would be expecting them i won't reach out
directly but i would be expecting them to just like just show up into your account just show up in my mailbox as you know in a check for 34 cents because i assume that's how this all works uh i i'm looking just now because i thought about it and apparently there is uh a game called revenge of dough like d-o-h like how homer says it and apparently that is um that's the ultimate breakup that's an arkanoid game
that people are fond of does it have a subreddit i thought this game might might be coming to the nes but it doesn't look like it looks like it came to the famicom oh should we make this a bites episode maybe if you really want to let's freaking go uh just remember that the bites episodes are for patreon users only so subscribe at uh patreon.com slash nostalgia uh that's all the time we have for
from uh the best of 1990 and it should just be a nice four hour conversation of ultima four quest of the avatar will it be fun will it be fun will it be fun
will it be fun will it be fun will it be fun
