Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Episode 026: Link Travel Agency

Welcome to The Diad Presents!

We're back (a dinosaur story). Diad makes lemonade out of lemons, when there isn't quite enough time to rock.

The show can be downloaded here,

or streamed here:
The Link picture I mentioned is here:



And the track list below:

# - Game - Track - System - Composer
1 - Illusion Blaze - Opening - IBM PC - D.A.C. (Seung-Hwan Ro, Myung-Jin Ahn)
2 - Famicom Grand Prix II: 3D Hot Rally - Wind Commander - FDS - Hideki Kanazashi, Soyo Oka & Hiroaki Suga
3 - Akiko Gold - Meeting Akiko! - PC-98 - Yoshihito Hata
4 - Twinkle Tale - Stage 7 - Genesis / MD - Hiroshi Nishikawa
5 - Tobal No. 1 - Shinto Shrine - PSX - Masashi Hamauzu
6 - "Wai Wai World 2 - SOS!! Paseri Jou" - TwinBee Stage Theme - NES - Yuichi Sakakura, Satoko Minami & Kenichi Matsubara
7 - Captain Planet and the Planeteers - Title Screen - Amiga - Anthony Crowther

7 comments:

  1. Welcome back to the grind! It's nice to proceed with business as usual.

    That was one hot rally! I think I just Soyo'd myself. The Famicom 3D glasses seem to use the same tech as Sega's 3D glasses for the Master System(reportedly developed by Mark Cerny of Marble Madness fame). This is the same technology as was used in active shutter glasses found in a lot of 3D HDTVs until recently. 3D Home Theater has pretty much died in the last few years, but there has been a really interesting idea kicked around for gaming purposes(but not implemented yet, AFAIK). If two players are playing a competitive game, for example, They can wear the active shutter glasses, and the TV can rapidly cycle from one player's screen to the other's. Each player will see only their own image, thus you can have two player full-screen gaming using one TV.

    I'm guessing you already know about Pixelated Audio's coverage of Illusion Blaze, and their interview with Seung-Hwan Ro, so I'll say no more about the topic.

    You forgot the most notable aspect of Tobal no. 1, and the reason why it was NOT ignored in North America: It was released with the demo to the hotly anticipated Final Fantasy 7. It was popular to purchase the Japanese import just for the FF7 demo(I had a friend who did just that).

    I'm going to get to work. Incedentally, Satoko Minami has the best composer alias ever....but again with the stereo NES tracks! :P

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The two-player-same-tv-full-screen thing would be great for console players. Of course, it comes about 20 years too late now that online gaming is so huge. If nothing else, the tech is interesting...

      I do know the PA guys did an episdoe on Illusion Blaze, but I haven't heard it yet. I was meaning to check it out prior to playing a track from the game, but just staying current with all these podcasts is a lot of work, let alone getting into back catalogs!

      I didn't know about the demo CD! I never owned a PSX, I went straight to PS2, but not until the slim model in like... 2005. I remember I bought mine because I wanted to play Tekken 5...

      Maybe "ignored" wasn't the right word. But it certainly didn't match the success of Tobal in Japan, as evidenced by the Japan-exclusive sequel. And just buying a game for the demo CD is sort of a murky area.

      Yes yes, I know, stereo. I thought of you actually. I even downloaded a different file, but it wasn't playing correctly in my player. It might have been a plugin issue. Either way, it was stereo or nada, so you'll have to live with it :)

      This is Whip Whip Pudding Diad signing off.

      Delete
  2. Sorry about losing half of the episode! Updates are the worst. But that Captain Planet track is the best! I hated the show, but I can stand to listen to his Amiga OST......it has the element of the Heart.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I see what you did there.

      I am pretty sure this is actually a rework of an existing game to re-brand for North America. Because it was a close-out track, and I was running low on time I didn't follow-up on it. I will be playing more from it in the future and you can look forward to the mystery being revealed!

      Delete
  3. I've been looking forward to this episode because that hilarious picture of Link's Travel Agency catches my eye every time I scroll back through the blog history to comment on an old episode. I thought you had drawn it in MS Paint. I'm surprised it is an actual DOS "game." The tangents you wound us through on this episode had more curves than any racetrack in Grand Prix II. Wow! I never knew so much could be tied back to Rad Racer! Now I feel like I could play a 5-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon style game about it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In retrospect, I wish I had pulled even more pictures from the "coloring book." Link really got around.

      Delete
    2. Also, I had to go back and re-listen to remember what tangents I even covered. My memory is le terrible. I was surprised I kept finding things I wanted to tack on to the episode. Glad you got something out of my raving.

      Delete