Ep. 371 - Insert Credit Annual #6

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Ep. 371 - Insert Credit Annual #6

As has become tradition, Insert Credit ranks the best games of all time, or at least 87% of them: the ones the industry won’t sell you anymore. Plus, the first ever spending of credits on Insert Credit Show. Hosted by Alex Jaffe, with Frank Cifaldi, Ash Parrish, and Brandon Sheffield. Edited by Esper Quinn, original music by Kurt Feldman.

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SHOW NOTES:

1: Round 1 - Frank’s First Nomination (08:13)

2: Round 1 - Ash’s First Nomination (13:08)

3: Round 1 - Brandon’s First Nomination (16:12)

4: Round 2 - Frank’s Second Nomination (19:34)

5: Round 2 - Ash’s Second Nomination (28:00)

6: Round 2 - Brandon’s Second Nomination (32:43)

7: Round 3 - Frank’s Third Nomination (36:50)

8: Round 3 - Ash’s Third Nomination (43:37)

9: Round 3 - Brandon’s Third Nomination (51:06)

10: Round 4 - Frank’s Final Nomination (01:02:04)

11: Round 4 - Ash’s Final Nomination (01:09:02)

12: Brandon’s Honorable Mentions (01:15:17)

13: Round 4 - Brandon’s Final Nomination (01:18:18)

14: Frank and Ash’s Honorable Mentions (01:20:19)

Why do games go out of print? (01:24:58)

Credit Report (01:37:58)

THE INSERT CREDIT ANNUAL #6

  1. Silent Hill

  2. Raw Danger!

  3. Panzer Dragoon Saga

  4. Crazy Taxi

  5. NBA Jam

  6. Tekken 3

  7. Rock Band

  8. Animal Crossing (GCN)

  9. Virtua Cop 2

  10. Puyo Puyo~n

  11. Mr. Bones

  12. Concord

This week’s Insert Credit Show is brought to you by patrons like you. Thank you.

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It’s really easy to see through those spoiler tags if you hover over them, so be careful if you’re particularly averse to that sort of thing. Found out number 2 by accident (it’s well deserved!).

Anyway, love a list episode. Excited to see what the new crew gets up to.

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I bought Silent Hill 1 on the PS3 online store like last year. But I guess the PS3 is like not really available anymore…

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Dennis Rodman was made for voguing AND basketball.

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We experimented on this one with a shorter list that allowed us to discuss games further in depth. We’ll likely go back to the 21 game format for GOTY in February. Let us know what you think!

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To Brandon saying if Ash was just 10 yrs older, she wouldn’t have been able to avoid Mr. Jones and Me:

I think it might have been more of a cultural separation than anything. I’m 35, a black man, lifelong new yorker, and that song lived on the alternative and easy listening stations for as l early as I can remember. That song is PEAK supermarket bgm. I think you really just needed to be in a region where they were cranking it.

edit:
While typing this I unlocked a repressed memory. I remember really liking The Frighteners as a kid. I think I saw it within the year of release though no one took me to the movies to see it. I was shocked to learn later when i was like 23 or something that the Mutton birds’ cover of “(Don’t Fear) the reaper” used for the ending wasn’t the original song. I actually think it might be far inferior version now.

But it made me susceptible to the sounds in the Silent Hill 3 commercials which got me into the series.

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There are some games that are still super relevant today that are no longer available to purchase.

One of the biggest ones is Super Smash Bros. Melee! That game’s meta is still evolving 24 years after its release with no updates since it was released in the PAL region. People are discovering new tech and characters are still shooting up the tier list nowadays. Yet, there’s no way to obtain Melee aside from emulation or hunting down an expensive and fragile Gamecube disk. Imagine what kind of shit we would be finding if the Melee scene was easier to access.

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Here’s a writeup on that multi-dev preservation roundtable that Brandon mentioned (while it lasts, anyway… Cohost was supposed to be dead by now, so don’t ask me how long it’ll still be readable). They recently gave that same conference again at SIGGRAPH, delivered in English—to Brandon or anyone else affiliated with GDC, please reach out and see if you can get any or all of these folk over to GDC to re-present this talk, if only because I know certain folk put in way too much effort to be able to deliver their portions in English and they’d probably appreciate being able to wring a little more juice out of it. (I believe S-E’s Miyake ran point on this talk; they’re active on twt and can/will respond in English.)

One big JP company that didn’t participate in this talk, but was one of the earlier players in this most recent wave of archival efforts, is Namco, and they’ve put out several of their own discussions on their own archival practices—those reports came with their own specific takeaways, like how they have more comprehensive archives for their obscure works vs. their more popular stuff for the simple reason that people are forever messing with their big-ticket games, and how a lot of their y2k-era archives suffered from substandard archival practices (like only saving low-res versions of high-res visual data for the sake of lower file sizes) that severely diminished the value of those archives.

Tekken 3 was never released as a PS Classic—Namco pushed for it for years but Sony allegedly couldn’t get it to emulate correctly, and considering the terrible emulation quality of some of the PS Classics that did come out, I presume it was literally non-functional. It did appear on that PS Classic Mini plug-and-play, and it does indeed emulate terribly (and they did in fact try to include Tekken 2 instead until the Tekken producer browbeat them into including Tekken 3 instead, naively believing they wouldn’t fuck it up).

The version of Tekken 5 that contained Tekken 1/2/3 (and strictly speaking, those were ports of the arcade versions, which bore significant differences to the wildly more popular PS ports) is not the version that was and may still be available on PS3. PS Tekken 1 and 2 were on PS Classics and may be on modern PS via PS+ or whatever, I don’t remember.

That same producer has spoken on why so little has been done to reissue vintage Tekken and other early-3D Namco stuff, and one of the big reasons is that they personally believe the big hits of that era sold on the shock-and-awe of 3D and that people don’t actually want to revisit them, no matter how much they say they do. This is hardly just a Namco thing, either; some of you might recall Sony’s former chairman being similarly dismissive of old games not too long ago.

I do think one of the other issues pertaining to multiplayer series is that developers don’t want to make it too easy for players to retreat back to older games in the event that they don’t like the new ones.

FWIW Nintendo does have an in-house Gamecube and Wii emulator, optimised for Switch and capable of HD texture replacements and so on; they used it for the 3D Mario collection, Pikmin 1 & 2 HD, etc and while it’s not drag-and-drop, I can’t imagine Animal Crossing would cause them any issues. (They also whipped up a very solid DS emulator for the Wii U that they’ve yet to bring forward.)

The actual issue is that Nintendo knows there’s more money in limited-running some of these old games that selling them or even using them as a value-add for their subscription service; to give another example, they whipped up a second NES emulator with on-the-fly text injection and have used it precisely once, to sell a translated version of the original Fire Emblem for a few months and never again.

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  1. Donkey Kong (1994) - This was still purchasable until recently, on 3DS, but now there is no way to buy it
  2. Diddy Kong Racing
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Diddy kong racing isn’t even on NSO?!

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Commenting before listening to say this is a nice ep to get so early into Ash being a permanent member since it’ll be great to get more of an understanding of where her priorities are with games. We’ve obviously learned a lot in these recent eps but two hours of just listing best games will sure help!!

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I checked and nooooo
It pissed me of sooo bad.

@Funbil
Prepare to be disappointed because i did NOT understand the question properly :flushed::flushed:

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I gotta say, if the primary selection criterion this time was “games that are not available to acquire officially anymore”, then not only does Concord deserve to be there, but it should top the ranking because it speedran that category like no one’s business.

@Jaffe
Animal Crossing: New Leaf (Tobidase Dōbutsu no Mori) = the 3DS one.
Animal Crossing: Wild World (Oideyō Dōbutsu no Mori) = the DS one.
(Probably named as such because it was the first one that could connect to the World Wide Web.)

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Excited to see Mr. Bones be featured.

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Three Saturn games! Which means there were only 9 wrong answers in this year’s podcast.

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The PS3 Online store is actually still online, so Silent Hill 1 is actually purchasable. That being said, it no longer processes credit card transactions, so you would have to add the necessary funds using a PC, PS4 or PS5 in order to buy it on your PS3.

What isn’t available is the original Silent Hill 3. Sure there’s the HD collection, but it still have lots of bugs the original voice acting was replaced with new performances by different actors, so the original game is not preserved.

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Ash misunderstanding the prompt and bringing Concord and Mr. bones to a best games of all time discussion is hilarious.

Also, @adashtra, I’m not sure you’re using the term “redshirt” properly. Please don’t refer to yourself that was unless you’re planning to be killed, mourned with a throwaway line, and never mentioned again.

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I think in that instance I mean it more like a redshirt in football (which was just explained to me by the husband and was therefore at the forefront of my mind).

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I think it will potentially be on there as they’ve gotten other Rare games on there in the last couple of years, but not in there yet