In this episode, Tom Towers and Phil Fogg cover everything from IGN's plagiarism scandal, the NES Classic, cats and fashion, Santo, Sam and Ed, and whisk[e]y—and that's just trademark banter!
More importantly, the two return to their dissection of Silent Hill; revealing even more fascinating parts of its complex anatomy.
You don't want to miss it. You can't miss it, if you click here.
Just over a year ago, I was very interested in Hyperkin's Retron 77 announcement at the 2017 E3 conference in Los Angeles. Hyperkin, who has a mixed record with emulation and product quality, was showing promise by releasing hardware on which you could use your own Atari 2600 cartridges, or homemade ROMs, on modern televisions by use of an HDMI cable.
As any Atari owner knows, hooking up an Atari to any television made in the last twenty years or so is not without it's challenges. The Atari 2600 relied on a coaxial radio frequency (RF) connection -- not something that you'll find too often (though I did, check out this story).
You no longer need one of these to re-visit your Atari 2600 collection.
Which is why an HDMI Atari 2600 clone was so promising. But would it come to Australia? And would it have some of the difficulties of the Retron 5, with ill-fitting cartridge slots that make you feel like you are destroying pins every time you use it (not to mention the questionable provenance of the emulation engine).
The unopened box is a good start. Very high quality with the Hyperkin dog-eared edge to the upper right corner of the box.
The Retron 77 has not yet had an official release in Australia, but a store in Sydney, which I've been buying games from for over 30 years is selling what appears to be imported North American versions and selling them for $155 (they sell directly from Hyperkin in the United States for $69 USD ($94 AUD). The delivery time was prompt, and for an Atari 2600 fan, the price was right. Aussie buyers please note that you will need to buy an adapter to connect the USB power source to an Australian power supply, but to most Aussie's this is not a new thing, you can find them on Ebay for less than $5 or at any airport or Big W for slightly more.
The console itself evokes the original "woody" design, and is embellished with the Hyperkin dog ear on the front right-hand side. replete with blue LED back lighting.
When first confronted with the Retron 77, I experienced a feeling of measured satisfaction with the industrial design. It's small, because it makes sense, less than twice the width of an Atari 2600 cartridge this is a pleasing choice, regardless of the technological and economic factors which lead to the finished product. When put in a world of Nintendo's miniature consoles the choice by Hyperkin makes even more sense.
The Retron 77 compared in size to one of the most famous releases from Atari (right up there with Warren Robinet's, Adventure).
What left me a less satisfied was the quality of the wood grain sticker and die-cut of the plastic molding. Clearly the design was set to the best intentions, but the fabrication could not meet the same level. Even so, it's the best that Hyperkin has managed to accomplish to date, and for the price understandable.
Hyperkin really went all out in terms of giving players options available on the original Atari 2600 and then some more.
On the front of the system you have original Atari 2600 controller ports (more on this later), skill levels for both players (nice touch), a mode selector and reset button. And, new to an Atari-like device a Save and Load button. The appreciation that Hyperkin included six option buttons was not lost on me (a likely tribute to the six switchers that preceded the four switch option Atari's).
Even more mystery's onthe back with a FRY and Memory slot
Moving to the back of the box (Game Under Podcast fans rejoice), Hyperkin included even more tributes, which when you think of the extra expense they could have excluded, no-one would have complained. They include a black and white colour option, which is completely unnecessary, but appreciated. They included a memory slot, which appears to have a Micro SD card inserted. I tried to remove it to see what it was, but there was some resistance, so rather than potentially damage my unit I relented.
There is a video ratio button which enables a choice between 4:3 and 16:9, which for classic Atari players is not a choice at all. In fact, one of the few disappointments with the console is that this must be selected each time you play, (to change to 4:3, which really should have been the default).
Hyperkin also included a "FRY" button, which to me, was again an indication that the designers of this hardware were devout in their actual appreciation for the Atari 2600 or at least consultative with the Atari community. "Frying" a cartridge was an activity of turning the off and on button rapidly, either by itsel,f or in combination with other inputs while playing. This would often lead to the game "glitching" in an entertaining manner, sometime opening up later levels of a game prematurely. This is something Hyperkin could easily have left off the design, but chose to include, which even if I don't use more than once, is appreciated.
Identical? Read the review for more.
As for the included controller, a lot of reviews say that the Retron 77 and the original are identical. This is not the case, as you can see from the photograph above. The dimensions are slightly different, but not in an unpleasant manner. If one did not have the direct comparison you would not discern the difference.
Hyperkin has pleasantly dog-eared both lower corners of the controller, consistent with their aesthetic, but also more ergonomic than the original controller.
While they were in an accommodating mood, they also tipped the hat to the lefties out there by providing a second button (much as Atari did with they Lynx design).
It really is more comfortable.
The only substantial difference from the original controller is that the buttons on the Retron 77 have half (yes half) of the "throw" of the original button. While the original has a spring, the Retron 77 is purely digital. This more responsive button makes most twitch games way too easy. Fortunately, you are able to plug in original Atari 2600 controllers.
For those that do enjoy the Retron 77 controllers, the uncomfortable question arises, what if you don't already have an Atari 2600 controller for a second player? As of now, you cannot buy a second controller from Hyperkin. Given that the system requires actual Atari cartridges, it is unlikely that you would not already have a second controller ready to go as an aficionado.
Another difference (thankfully) is that the Retron 77 controller has a cable twice the length of the original Atari 2600 controller, a choice that sadly Nintendo went in the opposite direction with it's NES classic.
In terms of actual use, I put almost every cartridge I could find in the Retron 77 and it worked perfectly with both Atari and second party games from Imagic and Activision.
I cannot but heartily encourage Atari 2600 owners to pick up a Retron 77 -- the only way they cold have improved it was by having it emulate Atari 7800's, let's hope that is in the plans.
- Phil Fogg
Join Phil and Tom on the awesome adventure of amateur podcasts, as they discuss the prequel to Life is Strange season 2 (does it stand up to Papo y Yo?), petrol sniffing, Harlan Ellison's legal legacy, C-Span, the present state of the internet (part 2 of a trilogy), and whether or not Silent Hill is a church—God took umbrage at this, and cut us off; but we will return to the subject in the next episode!
In the meantime, listen to the current episode here.
Takayoshi Sato single-handedly produced the FMVs, living in the office for 2 and a half years.
I happened to be up in the early morning (watching Australia lose to Peru) after finishing Silent Hill so, as one does after completing what is widely considered to be one of the most terrifying games ever, I decided to go on a walk in the dead of night*—only to discover I had been transported to the foggy fairyland of Silent Hill itself!
I wouldn't advise parking here.
I decided to document my discoveries as if I've learnt anything at all from classic horror games, it's that you must make a record of what you witness; if only so you may continue once you die. But rather than put pen to notebook or ink ribbon to typewriter, I made a photographic record instead. Which is a completely different mechanic from Siren that has nothing to do with saving, but discovering ghosts.**
Oops.
Luckily I survived.
—And maybe I even found a ghost or two?
Oh! And please look forward to my full impressions of Silent Hill, coming in episode 103 of the Game Under Podcast!
As you can see here, it really is fog; not just the auto-focus failing in lowlight.
*The early morning being the night is a bit confusing, isn't it?
**I think. I haven't actually played it.
Having filled the entire front page with filler, Tom and Phil finally return with a new episode of the Game Under Podcast.
There's some stuff about games in it, some stuff about the internet, too, but the real attraction is Phil's new feature, Tom's Five in Five.
Please look forward to hearing it in all the podcasts you actually listen to. But now, at least, you know where it's from!
By now it's generational trope, told year after year by those pining for their youth, or at least the dollars that their toys/ comic books/ baseball cards/ pogs/ video games could now be generating on Ebay. It goes like this, "I left my X collection at home when I went away to college, and my parents threw out/sold at garage sale all my favourite stuff. It'd be worth a fortune these days".
And for over 20 years, that is what I thought had happened with my 1980's collection of Legoland Space sets. A few months ago, my mother revealed that in fact all the LEGO I had carefuly saved for during my childhood, were in fact intact.
As a kid, I played with these a lot, but I was always careful to keep the boxes, instructions, even the small plastic bags that held the legos. I don't know why, I just did. And for the last couple of decades, I figured they had been thrown out, sold or given away to neighbours. Mostly becase the first time I went home after about 10 years, they were nowhere to be found. I never said anything to my Mom as I did not want her to feel bad.
I've been very busy since, so I've only slowly started to put them back together. There is still a third more to go. I was happy to see that all the catalogs and ephemera I picked up from the toystore was also still together, along with the hand drawn plans and inventories I put together as a 11 year old.
I'll finish up this story in the next episode of the Game Under Podcast.
Phil Fogg
Without intention I was able to pick up the Limited Edition copy of the second season of Don't Knod's Life is Strange text adventure. (I was strolling through a GameStop looking to buy a copy of Playstation All Stars Battle Royale, but sadly their PS3 selection has dwindled down to about 30 games).
Square Enix chose Nine Sticks to develop the Life is Strange: Before the Storm, which is set prior to the events of the first game, which Tom and I recorded a spoiler cast.
Quality matte finish cardboard was used. The inserts inside smartly hold everything together.
Since I really enjoyed the first game, and always regretted not having a physical copy, I picked up the Limited Edition for $47 on sale (usually $80 in Australia - US customers can pick it up for $29 USD as of the time of this writing).
Unlike many "limited edition" games, whch come with digital trinkets, this is one of the better ones I have picked up in recent years. It comes with a hardcover full colour artbook, an original soundtrack on CD, as well as a disc version of all episodes of Life is Strange: Before the Storm
A music CD! I may have to pull out my Dreamcast to listen to it.
In addition to the physical items you also get a code to download the entire first game, as well as a bonus episode for Before the Storm. A few digital trinkets in the form of additional outfits are also offered.
In terms of value, I was hapy with the package, for impressions of the game, you'll have to wait until the next episode of the Game Under Podcast.
- Phil Fogg
It is perfectly symmetrical. But so was the thing about Cibele. I'd recommend listening to this episode of the Endless Backlog Podcast as well, or instead, wherein I discuss Braid with Gagan.
But if you do want to read this anyway, here it is.
It doesn't even have any pictures. But if it did, they'd be pictures of Braid, which is one of the ugliest games ever made, so maybe that's a good thing.
You could also read this instead, which has at least one good picture, and offers great advice to all.
I have mentioned my exciting childhood history of vandalism on the Game Under podcast before, but, alas, in recent years my vandalism has been limited to boring acts of civic duty, or incompetent attempts of upholding the ideals of beauty and truth. Unfortunately civic duty, no matter how well meaning, may never uphold an ideal, due to its inherent pragmatism. (Admittedly, it is usually used to support the ideal of love; but more often it simply perverts it.)
Nevertheless, I can't help myself responding when I come across stickers or scribbles by people engaged in public acts of self-pity. This is not something to be lauded, but it is an act of civic duty, since most acts of public self-pity are political statements.
One longs for those Great Days of Yore, when one could still ride the Punt Road punt across the river.
Thus, when I came across the self-pity slogan Make Australia Great Again scrawled on a local stretch of the Yarra, I was doomed to self-degradation. Not only did this statement fail to tell us when Australia was great, it offered no ideas on just how to make Australia great again! Even worse, if we assume the greatness of Australia had anything to do with its culture, the use of the slogan itself suggested that Australia was still great, as one of the few cultural inclinations that can be traced back to the very beginnings of anything like a national character (if such a thing even exists; the experts are divided) is jealousy and fear of America; depending on whether you were for or feared liberty (revolution).
To make matters worse, Australia Day was just around the corner. So, when the day of national celebration and condemnation came along, I couldn't help myself, and walked down to the Yarra with a Sharpie in my pocket; all ready to perform my patriotic duty of participating in civil society.
So, taking the statement at face value, I assumed that something must have changed in Australia at some point, even if my fellow citizen wasn't sure what had. Along the way there was plenty of evidence that a lot had changed even very recently: instead of a bunch of drunken fellow citizens enjoying the resplendent surroundings of the Yarra on another meaningless public holiday, there was a convoy of cyclists riding past with Australian flags waving in the wind protruding from their helmets and/or bicycles (this must be terrible for aerodynamics; nevertheless, all were dressed in Lycra—something to be ashamed of not so long ago), and instead of people paddling past on cheap kayaks or canoes, there were whole teams of rowers spending the public holiday training! What the fuck? There was even an expensive yacht with an Australian flag as big as its bow motoring along this residential stretch of the Yarra, not showing off in the city. At least its spiffily-dressed sailors were almost certainly drunk; further flaunting their wealth by sipping on full glasses of (presumably tremendously expensive) champagne.
But this sort of change is a bit hard to encapsulate in a pithy slogan, so I humbly suggested that Australia could be made great again with decolonisation; colonisation being the most obvious, and greatest, change in the history of this country—a country that suppresses its own history in the most effective way possible: making it as uninteresting, unimpressive, and pathetic as it can. As a result, everyone's heard of Captain Cook and the convicts He shipped to Australia on His First Fleet, but not much else. Oh sure, some people know there was a gold rush in Victoria, but other than making a bunch of true blue cobbers rich, it probably didn't affect the state much—let alone the country—right? And fuck rich cunts, anyway! Well, maybe not anymore, since politicians have started affecting posh, educated accents, rather than middle class (British) or bogan ones (unless they're Lotharios), and I find myself living not in South Yarra, but Soho Yarra; I digress.
Now, while I do not believe in censorship, other citizens do, so rather than coming up with a suggestion that might be better for making Australia great again than my own modest proposal of decolonising it, they simply crossed it out. So I came up with a few alternative solutions, as well.
![If you can't read my awful writing, clockwise it goes: Decolonisation (censorship inevitably fails) or White Australia policy to [make Australia great again], [make Australia great again] with another gold rush, with censorship, or import …](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/51661d34e4b035d7482e8ce6/1524272776094-OD2O10LKZ67UCK3UWJA6/IMG_3102.JPG)
If you can't read my awful writing, clockwise it goes: Decolonisation (censorship inevitably fails) or White Australia policy to [make Australia great again], [make Australia great again] with another gold rush, with censorship, or import criminals to [make Australia great again].
The White Australia policy wouldn't really have much material effect on the country, but it would result in better integration for incoming migrants, because we'd be importing migrants explicitly supported by the country's racial policy; that's better than being supported by a shitty citizenship test that most citizens can't pass anyway. Which would you rather be told on becoming a citizen: you're the people just like us who we like just because you're just like us (incidentally, you're a fucking wog and we still hate you, cunt), or: we begrudgingly accept you, because you're smarter than most of our dumb as dog shit citizenry, but, hey, at least we're still racially superior, so fuck you, too, mate? Indeed, the current policy results in a feeling of inferiority for the citizenry, as it provides objective proof that once a migrant has stayed in Australia for long enough to be able to take (and pass) a citizenship test, they have in fact become better citizens than the citizenry itself!
The gold rush, which not only materially affected Victorian history, but Australian, British, and even world history, was surely a time when Australia (or at least Victoria), could be considered great. Another gold rush would enrich the country's economy, while solving unemployment for a brief period of time (albeit simultaneously resulting in a massive labour shortage), all over again. Then we can go through another crippling depression, but at least a lot of great architecture and institutions will have been built in the meantime.
Censorship. Now, other than allowing us to spend less energy thinking or being outraged, I can't really imagine how it would make things much better for anyone.* But apparently this was the only plan anyone else could come up with to make Australia great again, so I thought I'd mention it, as my fellow citizen was only cable of drawing squiggly lines, and not actually writing it themselves and, as you can see, their plan failed as I simply rewrote the same statement. At least they were leading by example?
Importing criminals would not only complement a new trend in Australia's post-war history of copying America (specifically: sadism for profit; or, the privatisation of punishing criminals), but also give Australia a pliable labour force that would work not only below the minimum wage as migrants do today, but for no money at all; instead they need only be promised clemency! Almost-but-not-quite slave labour, a new market (human trafficking of the criminal class; a throwback to Captain Cook's First Fleet), and more jobs for Aussie tradies (someone has to build the penitentiaries)! Everybody wins.
Luckily, someone else came up with a better, apolitical statement, subsuming my own—and my fellow citizens'—bullshit. It may not have made Australia great again, but it certainly made this little patch of concrete a bit better than it was before.
*If this constitutes censorship, then perhaps the subsumption of bullshit, by something less bullshit, is a valid form of censorship, after all.
As I've mentioned on the show a couple of times, my relationship with Activision's Call of Duty franchise is very casual. After the release of World at War, I have only picked up used copies of the games, often 2 years after release. I am not even console-loyal -- bouncing around between the various Playstation and Xbox systems.
I was therefore surpised that I've only missed out on five games in the series, the original, Black Ops 2 and 3, Infinite Warfare and 2017's WWII.
Not quite in release order.
The list for the main series so far:
1. Call of Duty (2003)
2. Call of Duty 2 (2005)
3. Call of Duty 3 (2006)
4. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007)
5. Call of Duty: World at War (2008)
6. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009)
7. Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010)
8. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011)
9. Call of Duty: Black Ops II (2012)
10. Call of Duty: Ghosts (2013)
11. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (2014)
12. Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015)
13. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (2016)
14. Call of Duty: WWII (2017)
Ghosts was the first Call of Duty game to not include a gun on the front cover. Tom and I used to have a segment on game covers called "Gun or No Gun". The joke was there was a gun on 99% of game covers.
It was leaked this week that the 2018 entry in the series will not feature a campaign mode, which is the only reason I pick up the games, so depending on how that experiment pans out for Activision WWII may well be the last Call of Duty game I buy, which will be a fitting capstone given my introduction to the series was the incredible Call of Duty 2 on the Xbox 360.
Call of Duty's players are mostly derided in gaming culture, with the games seen as being intended solely for the same narrow band of player that buys Madden every year, which is an easy and unfair categorisation. Despite the online braggadocio and bombastic style of the game, they are none-the-less enjoyable shooters with unmatched polish and can be a mindless, though engaging game experience.
I found Ghosts campaign to actually be thoughtful and reflective, and throughly playable and diverse (though not quite up to the standard of Titanfall II, which it was clearly emulating).
If WWII is the end of the road for Call of Duty as we have known it, I am completely at peace with that. It's been a very long and succesful run with relatively original take on the FPS genre.
- Phil Fogg