Innsmouth no Yakata retrospective: Chthonic adventure | Virtual Boy Works #17

[@BenCol]

Great videos to watch while sipping a cool Gin & Chthonic.

[@FloatingSunfish]

Been looking for a channel with well-researched content and a nice, relaxing voice to listen to for years. About to binge-watch all your videos. Please keep up the good work!

[@cashnelson2306]

You're in for a treat. This channel's been my lullaby for weeks now!

[@azekeprofit]

Let me tell you about Chrontendo which started the whole concept of "playing game console's entire catalogue of games" more than a decade ago.

[@JeremyParish]

The original, and still the drowsiest

[@MatWBT]

Jeremy Parish Now you’re playing with drowser!

[@pentelegomenon1175]

@@azekeprofit a very low hanging idea though, to be sure

[@KuraIthys]

Pathways into darkness reminds me of the programming book that's somewhere on a shelf near me. It dates to 1994 when doom was released but wasn't quite regarded as genre defining just yet, but it mentions some rough guesses about how doom works, and a more accurate statement on how Wolfenstein 3d works, and also a bunch of other games and variations... The thing is, wolfenstein aside, the vast majority of games that use the kind of technology the book describes (which includes raycasting, but also pre-rendered techniques) are in fact RPG's... In fact, even ID software made an RPG of some description with broadly the same tech before they made Wolfenstein 3d. The book calls these games from a fairly wide variety of genres '3d maze games' and that is a fairly solid description of what they have in common (whether they be first person dungeon crawlers, or first person action games...)

[@JeremyParish]

And don't forget Bethesda's open-world Terminator from 1990.

[@ArleThePoss]

I feel like the sharp, 90 degree turns and instant movement was done to make you seem confused and possibly insane and that adds to its lovecraftian setting.

[@Zackcatyt]

been waiting for this since you started the VB series. Spent a lot of time routing and speedrunning this game back in 2014-5

[@hemangchauhan2864]

Man... pre-Halo Bungie history is very interesting!

[@CandisClassicGameShrine]

I was looking forward to this review. This game is one of the last ones I needed to complete my VB collection. It’s also one of my favorite VB games now

[@MisterNinten]

The virtual boy works series really makes me realize that the virtual boy did have several great games. It really seemed like a neat little console that had several great ideas, and some really excellent games, but wasn't what people wanted.

[@HighPriestFuneral]

Quite an interesting game. Such a concept has so much potential, especially in our randomize-happy age where everything is desired to have a bit of randomness to it. It seems like this game really was decades ahead of its time.

[@orianesynahel3078]

So happy to see Pathways into Darkness quoted there, very nice

[@JoeBushOnline]

I freakin hate it when I'm a sleeping god and I begin to stir from a millennia-long sleep

[@thegaminghellyoutubething]

i did some writing/research on this a while back, and as far as i could tell there is no connection between this game and the tv adaptation of the story, Insmus wo Oou Kage. no mention of any company or staff involved with the tv version in the game. additionally, that tv version aired in 1992, three years before this release, so aside from taking inspiration from the same story, i don't think it's an adaptation of any kind. the connection appears to have been just made up by wikipedia. a summary of the tv version if you're curious tokyoscum.blogspot.com/2010/06/shadow-over-innsmouth.html aside from that, good work as always!

[@willmistretta]

Then again, it wouldn't be the first time a game adaptation barely resembled its source material. Gunhed/Blazing Lazers and Spartan X/Kung-Fu Master both come to mind. Fans of those games that watch the movies (or vice-versa) hoping to see anything remotely similar unfold will be very disappointed.

[@TravisPilgrim]

So this is pretty much a must get for when I finally pick up a Virtual Boy

[@JeremyParish]

I recommend it. There's a fan translation, but you don't really need it since there's no text outside of the passwords throughout the actual game.

[@Tubewings]

Next up, will be "Space Invaders Virtual Collection", followed by "Virtual Lab", then the last two games will be "SD Gundam Dimension War" and "Virtual Bowling". I don't know what order those last two games will come out, but I think that's the Final Four of Japanese Virtual Boy, all released in the same month (December 1995).

[@fearanarchy]

And the completed unreleased titles. He alluded to FaceBall by saying this was the only "official" fps

[@JeremyParish]

Exactly, thank you.

[@fearanarchy]

@@JeremyParish Waiting for you to shrug your shoulders at Lab is my #1 game i want to hear about. But then Bound High -> FaceBall -> Gundam, Bowling's big contribution is more its secondary market value. Iirc, it was THE last released game.

[@JeremyParish]

Virtual Bowling was the last game in Japan, but Waterworld/Nester/3-D Tetris came after in the U.S. And VBowling is actually really good! Meanwhile, Virtual Lab is actually really not good at all! Lotta quality whiplash there.

[@EmmBee27]

I commented about Sonic Adventure on the last video and here it is being one of the first things uttered in this video. Nice.

[@bjornh1527]

Oh no, now I want this game too! Looks fascinating...

[@SEGAClownboss]

Getting some mad 3-D Maze for the ZX81 PTSD from that jump scare

[@AbandonWare_Music]

managed to play through the whole game without realizing that you could move the cross-hair. Got the B-ending too.

[@nekononiaow]

Great review, thanks Jeremy! It is interesting indeed that very few Virtual Boy games really do exploit the 3D-ness of it but this is not so surprising when one looks at how developers struggled when moving from 2D 16 bit systems to 3D 32 bit ones: it took quite a few years and a large number of iterations for them to relinquish 2D gameplay conventions and create/discover uniquely 3D ones. I would expect that the same can be expected of a VR system, which the Virtual Boy essentially is and hell, I actually wonder if any current VR game has yet managed to create gameplay which did not already exist on regular "flat" systems. It is a shame though that Innsmouth no Yakata is so action oriented, Dungeon Master would seem to be a much better candidate for translation to a VR system since a lot of the charm of the game came from being able to interact with the world from a distance and its ambiance derived directly from being 3D palpable.

[@jasonblalock4429]

Yeah. If the VB had (somehow....) become successful, or at least not failed within a few months, undoubtedly the developers would have started getting more adventurous in how they used the 3D. Although I'm not sure if an RPG like Dungeon Master would have ever been a good fit for the system, given the whole "gives people headaches after half an hour" thing. it would take *forever* to beat a dungeon crawl if you were having to take breaks every few minutes.

[@KuraIthys]

The virtual boy surely doesn't not help things here in that it barely has the performance to manage actual 3d graphics. - quite the logistical oversight for a device that tries to invoke 'VR'. Even if it wasn't ever mainstream, VR as a concept has existed since the 1970's at least - so it's not as if nobody had any idea what it was. I myself had been to several VR arcade attractions in the early 90's, which while exceedingly primitive, still contained all the major elements you see in the modern headsets... And of course, the film 'lawnmower man', strange as it is, still shows off the concept somewhat. The Virtual boy though, seems almost incapable of doing any actual 3d, which is absurd. It struggles with wireframe 3d, as proven by one of the games, and evidently wouldn't even have been up to the task of doing flat-shaded 3d, of the kind that starfox managed on hardware that should be in the same ballpark of performance. (SuperFX 2 should be fairly comparable to the Virtual boy's CPU in many ways... - at least, in terms of general performance) So... Yeah. A system built around a 3d concept, that can't manage 3d... If it had had the performance to render say 6000 polygons a second (flat shaded even. Doesn't have to be amazing, just... Actual 3d), that would've made things more sensible. - extremely primitive, sure, but actual 3d... But, no. And just as a point of reference for what 6000 polygons is, performance wise... The PS1 could do about 350,000 theoretically. And the n64 can do 150,000 a second with a lot of pretty heavy texture effects (bilinear filtering, perspective correct texture mapping, environment mapping), and is rumoured to be capable of something like 750,000 polygons a second if you strip it all back to flat shaded polygons. So... Not even 1/100th the performance of an n64 would have still been enough to have at least something to work with, but... No. Not even that... It's nuts.

[@gravyfan]

The channel is so underrated

[@HybridAngelZero]

So it's a Doom, Mystery Dungeon Survival Horror... That sounds amazing, I absolutely have to play this sometime. Also, that Final Fantasy music at the end ;D

[@JeremyParish]

Not really Mystery Dungeon. The maps are always the same, it's just that enemy and object placement is randomized.

[@HybridAngelZero]

@@JeremyParish Ah, I gotcha. Still, that's really cool

[@nintendokolekcjoner239]

Great review and great virtual boy games on Your chanel ! Good work !

[@youdontneedtoseehisidentif4939]

Firstly, it's nice to hear somebody talk about _Pathways into Darkness_ ..! Secondly, a minor correction - whilst Bungie did innovate/introduce the keyboard+mouse control scheme for computer first-person shooters in _Marathon_ , to the best of my knowledge the dual-analogue control scheme for _console_ first-person was first innovated/introduced by Argonaut in _Alien: Resurrection_ , released a little over a year before _Halo_ .

[@221b]

The original Medal of Honor was released a year before Alien: Resurrection, and it also included a dual-analogue setup as one of its selectable control schemes.

[@JeremyParish]

I didn't say Halo introduced the idea of dual sticks. I said it established dual sticks as the default.

[@youdontneedtoseehisidentif4939]

Fair enough :)

[@MapleMilk]

I was trying to remember what the graphics of the Virtual Boy reminded me of for the whole series but the sharp 90 degree turns reminded me that the Virtual Boy looks alot like Smile BASIC on the 3DS. If you look at some of the more impressive games on that...platform? Game? Program? Tool thing. You'll find a few more games like this with surprising accuracy.

[@GouldFishOnGames]

Seems to take far more from the dungeon crawlers from the home computers of the 80s and 90s. Which tended to use the grid layout, with combat done in first person. Or even from games like Total Eclipse which had a strict time limit or even 3D Maze.

[@evenmorebetter]

This reminds me A LOT of the horror-heavy proto-FPS approach that Silent Debuggers for TurboGrafx takes

[@JeremyParish]

Oh, good call. I forgot about that one.

[@SaxcatGamingCorner]

This game looks awesome.

[@OKeijiDragon]

Love the Sonic Adventure dig at the intro.

[@ethelchip3620]

Wow I've never heard of pathways into darkness. Anyways yeah insomouth looks really cool. Reminds me of tunnel runner on Atari 2600. I wonder what lovecraft would have thought of this game.

[@Darkkfated]

~wonders why the Four Fiends Boss Fight music from FF IV is playing~ ~Jeremy drops line about the next 4 videos being about the 4 "bosses" of the VR Japan-only line-up~ *sighs audibly*

[@PSPMan]

Oh I've gotta play this one

[@LpSamuelm]

I keep getting this mixed up with the Game Boy's Ayakashi no Shiro… They're both "[Something] no [Building]"!

[@JeremyParish]

Here's a handy mnemonic! One has you fighting rats via turn-based combat while the other is a desperate race to evade unknowable eldritch horrors.

[@efreeteater2270]

Reminds me a lot of Kileak: The DNA Imperative, though there are some key differences too

[@Jac2Mac]

This horror game was going to be released in America by Acclaim Entertainment.

[@dezm101]

very interesting game, kind of reminds me of Mysterium on gameboy

[@willmistretta]

Chiptunes instead of Don Henley? Maybe Virtual Boy did get something right after all.

[@KuraIthys]

Huh. And here I was thinking that Goldeneye may have been the first obvious step towards the FPS control convention, even though it's dual stick control is an optional dual controller scheme...

[@benb3316]

Cool! Nice vid!

[@LpSamuelm]

I believe you touched on this in the latest episode of Retronauts, but… I don't think this game is based on a movie! The clip shown in this video is from a movie called _Innsmouth wo О̄u Kage_ (which translates to _The Shadow Over Innsmouth_ - the title of one of the stories about Cthulhu), and I'm fairly certain this game and that movie are simply both based on Lovecraft.

[@famuel2604]

yeah, i think he said apparently because he's not sure.

[@LpSamuelm]

@@Deadguy2322forreal Wow, rude! I'd personally call this a dungeon crawler, first and foremost, but I think there's an argument for calling it a shooter in addition to that - the battle gameplay is shooting gallery-style, after all.

[@paulojoffily7444]

Loved this one. Good works, Jeremy. How expensive is this one?

[@JeremyParish]

Not cheap, I'm afraid. Expect to pay in the $100 range at a minimum.

[@maurollamastrivi3432]

This is the one game I regret not shelling out the cash for while I was in Japan on my vacations, I want to own it but it has become quite expensive. Jeremy will you cover some of the homebrew as well or just stick to the official releases? Would love a little episode dedicated to oddities such as the Street Fighter 2 adaptation for the VB.

[@goop_lord]

9:47 Remember... no Yakata.

[@GalaxyStranger01]

Magazine. Also, "InzMUTH".

[@fcseven]

When are you going to livestream again?

[@JeremyParish]

I want to. I wish my schedule would allow it.

[@joshuaburton154]

i wish i woulda got a virtual boy from toys are us for like 30 bucks when they was just trying to get rid of them and games was dirt cheap

[@jasonblalock4429]

Hey, where'd the Evangelion music go? Were you even getting flagged for the chiptune version?

[@JeremyParish]

No.

[@TearyEyesAnderson]

Fairly well researched review, however many of the interesting things about the game seemed to just be ignored. There is no mention of how the password system works. For a game that has levels that can take 2 minutes to complete progress with passwords seems like it would be unavoidably easy. The only mention of the games music is "chip tunes". I think the music is a cross between NES "Nightmare on Elm Street", and Metroid atmospheric sounds. The actual story isn't even mentioned, it doesn't take much more research to look up a translation of the instruction booklet. It has a two page story summary. The story takes place in 1922, the player is a detective, {similar to the game Deja Vu} the mansion is in the Forrest. He was hired to take back a book. He gets the book and then decides to read the book, and that's when all the evil is released, and he must exit the house.

[@JeremyParish]

Luckily, Wikipedia exists to enumerate such details so I am able to focus on contextualizing and editorializing about games in my videos instead of recounting rote facts.

[@TearyEyesAnderson]

Interesting, to you those are "rote facts", and not the focus of your videos. I always wondered about that, when I watched several of your videos. They basically seemed to skip a lot of review topics that every other reviewer will at least describe; story, audio, graphics, gameplay, difficulty, originality, continuation/password system/save features, playing tips. Your videos will mention some of these things in one video, and then seem to ignore at least a few of these topics in the next video. To me your videos appeared to be a rushed attempt to finish reviews, incomplete, and missing segments. But you seem to feel that they are more of a spin off of your "Anatomy of..." books, and are a analytical dissection of a few key elements of these games. In your section of comparisons to other games, I'm surprised that you didn't compare it to "Tunnel Runner" from 1983, for Atari 2600, which had a seemingly more advanced random level generator, {rather then just moving items}, and it had a similar map style screen. But I understand that analyzing, and comparing a game to others in that way can go on forever. I was hoping for a more detailed review of the all the Virtual Boy library of games, such as "Candi's Classic Game Shrine" did, when she finished reviewing each Virtual Boy games, and a few of the unreleased games. While in your video, you describe the story of the "Pathways into Darkness" game more then you did this game. I prefer the video review style of video games, rather then your analytical dissection. But at least ‌I know what to expect, and not except from your videos.

[@JeremyParish]

"Teary_Eyes"_Anderson Most videos on my channel are explicitly labeled as retrospectives, not as reviews-on the rare occasion I produce a review, it’s labeled as such. They are not the same thing, and that is all right there in the title. If you watch a video that is clearly indicated not to be a review and then feel ill-used because it is, indeed, not a review, I’m not really sure what to tell you.

[@BradTheProducer]

1:25 - First Person Stabber

[@JSSMVCJR2.2]

Chthonic Th'tulu!

[@happysatanproduction8854]

what movie is it based on?

[@FanbyteOnDemand]

oh man been waiting for this one. are there any mice in it?

[@nathandaniels4823]

Pathways into Darkness: "Its awakening would spell doom for the human race".....I see what you did there.

[@TanookiSuit]

The harsh time limits alone is why I will never buy this game. I loved everything else about it, but as everything looks similar inside the mansion you get lost far too easily as nothing is distinctive so the really crappy short time limits made it quite unbearable.

[@160rpm]

More like a Wolf3D clone hehe

[@jiggajuice17]

Haha you almost demonetized yourself @9:50

[@JeremyParish]

How so?

[@jiggajuice17]

Jeremy Parish youtube doesn’t like the whole video game gun violence thing. Remember back in 2017?