Klax / Klax / Ginga retrospective: Double draggin' | Game Boy Works

[@zubizuva]

It is Wednesday my dudes, and there is time for watching Jeremy talk about puzzle games for the Game Boy.

[@segadriven]

I’m a lot more familiar with the Japan version of Game Boy Klax because it was always the version that showed up on the bootleg multicarts

[@Daryoon]

All we are is tiles in the Klax machine, dude.

[@BenCol]

Ginga seems to be Clubhouse Games except that the titular Clubhouse is a ramshackle treehouse only a slight breeze away from coming crashing to the ground.

[@JeremyParish]

Hence the name Tornado Appetizer, I guess

[@jessragan6714]

Oh, so the treehouse I had when I was a kid, then.

[@garrickgreathouse]

Thanks to this video, he will forever be known as Jeremy Parish: Ginga Enthusiast.

[@ChrisGorski]

Jeremy Parish spent more time developing this video on Ginga than all the people in the world have ever spent actually playing the game.

[@BenCol]

Jeremy Parish: The first person to acknowledge that decades begin in the XXX1 year and not the XXX0 year.

[@gooniesneversaydie8350]

Uh I wondered much the same thing. So if this is the case, the 90s ended on 12/31/00? Makes no damn sense to me.

[@BenCol]

@@gooniesneversaydie8350 Yep. Blame it on the fact that there was no Year 0. So the first decade of the Current Era ran from the year 1 to the year 10, the second decade from the year 11 to the year 20, the third from 21 to 30, and so on and so on.

[@balohna]

@@BenCol That makes sense if you called the 90s "decade 200", but if you're calling it the 90s (or 1990s) it consists of years in that decade that start with 9 (or 199). 2000 is not a 90, but 90 is.

[@TransmitHim]

@@balohna Yes, exactly this. The "no year zero" bit of pseudo-logic was trotted out a lot around the Millennium, but a surprising amount of otherwise intelligent people don't seem to get that it only applies to time periods that are being defined in an ordinal manner (21st century) rather than casually defined (in this case by the tens unit of the year).

[@Skawo]

Here lies Jeremy Parish The Tornado Appetizerer

[@jessragan6714]

"Tornado Appetizer" sounds like a trailer park in the deep south.

[@magus2342]

Ironically, there wouldn't truly be time for Klax until the 2020s.

[@RemnantCult]

I love how this series has been having a comfy retro theme to it. Really adds to it and makes it more engaging to watch. Thanks for your continuous work, Jeremy!

[@Dwedit]

Oddly enough, the GBC version of Klax ended up being very faithful to the Arcade original, due to extensive use of sampled sounds.

[@thecunninlynguist]

GB Klax doesn't have the same satisfying sound of when the titles fall of the other versions.

[@JeremyParish]

Which GB Klax, tho

[@thecunninlynguist]

@@JeremyParish both :P lol

[@duffman18]

@@JeremyParish yes

[@hellsfirefreedomtube6984]

I have a early 90’s GameBoy bootleg cart from overseas with 54 games on it. One of the games on it is Hudson version Klax. My dad was in the Navy at the time and his ship stopped at a port somewhere where a shop near the docks sold bootleg GameBoy games

[@DaneeBound]

You say a rare victory for Lynx. But we all know Japanese Game Boy owners (and importers) were the true winners here.

[@jeremiahthomas8140]

Are you saying the Japanese Game Boy version of Klax is better than the Lynx version? Because you are definitely wrong if you are.

[@DaneeBound]

@@jeremiahthomas8140 I am saying the Japanese Game Boy version was the best portable version that was *widely* available. Because who the f*** had a Lynx anyway?

[@jeremiahthomas8140]

@@DaneeBound Me.

[@DaneeBound]

that was a rhetorical question :P

[@LagBlowz]

Klax had some weird marketing, first, the slogan,”it is the 90s and there is time for Klax” almost felt like they were saying, the world’s gonna end, but here’s Klax for the time being. Then, there was the Klax branded cigarettes. Yes, really.

[@PastoKage]

Tornado Appetizer... Wonder how the Box Art was going to look like..

[@diegog1853]

Love your channel and your content and as a game boy collector I am glad to see gameboy works coming back! You are doing a great service in documenting each game in visual form and giving them their needed time. What a weird game that last one is. Looks like if an old japanese buisness man learned to program and decided to adapt his favorite games, but without any clue on what advantages a digitial medium could have in adapting the games. Like tutorials... hints... blinkying pieces to illustrate what would happen, etc.

[@duffman18]

Yeah I absolutely love this whole project of his. These videos (and the accompanying books) are genuinely like museum pieces, they're so incredibly valuable for the preservation of all these works of art. Because he goes through literally ever game released for these systems, it makes his channel unique. He covers all the terrible forgotten games as well as the good ones I genuinely think these videos, and the book versions that he's written, are going to be highly valued in 100 year's time. No really, I think they're that important, and they're that well made, and he covers every single game to ever get released, so he often has the only video on the entirety of KZbin that heavily documents certain games. He researches these games so much more than anyone else. He really goes into the background of everything. I've never found another channel that does that. Except perhaps the Gaming Historian, but he only covers a few specific games at a time, he doesn't cover literally every release like Jeremy parish does. Man it'd be cool if Jeremy and the gaming historian made a podcast where they just drink a few beers and chat about retro games. It'd be like being in the pub with a friend who is absolutely obsessively passionate about a certain thing and it's so fun to listen to them talking about it for hours. Those are the best parts about parties, and going to the pub

[@diegog1853]

@@duffman18 Yeah absolutely. I really appreciate it. I mean, legitimately, there are games that barely even have some form of documentation or review in some obscure forum. But here is jeremy parish giving it a full video essay, not only reviewing the game but commenting on the historical context of the game and the company who made it. It is brilliant! Although it saddens me that he will never cover everything in the current consoles he covers in his life time. Even doing two or three a week. But I love the format so much, I wish he could get a whole team to cover more. I think it is an important project and if it dies, then someone else would have to start from scratch, risking again not finishing it.

[@ezymarolda]

I watch everyone of these episodes but holy shit when you got to Ginga I fell asleep. I don’t know how you would make that more interesting.

[@BLINDCABBY]

Your productions are so aesthetically pleasing it’s from another time period , I have no doubts.

[@rugan0723]

Use to play Klax on my Atari Lynx. It looked and played great in vertical mode. And the music was just amazing. You found yourself just jamming to the opening music.

[@EinDose]

I wonder if the rough Tengen version of Klax might've been intentional, in a way. There's at least one instance in the 80s British home computer wars where a publisher that produced one of those computers specifically sabotaged ports of a game they made on other systems to make theirs look better. Maybe the Atari-made Klax port is similar; made intentionally bad, so that their own Lynx would be so obviously the superior Klax Machine.

[@JeremyParish]

Entirely possible. Coleco supposedly fubared its 2600 games to make the ColecoVision look better by comparison.

[@RabbitEarsCh]

I had seen a screenshot of He Is Over There Because's Tornado Appetizer before, but I had never actually tracked down what it actually was. Thank you for the world's best (and possibly only?) retrospective on Tornado Appetizer.

[@Panzer_the_Merganser]

0:49 My God, that cover art is full of stars....

[@Larry]

There's two versions of Klax for the Mega Drive/Genesis too (western one by Tengen, Japanese by Namco), But Atari/Tengen just wanted to flood the market with as many ports as possible to spite Nintendo who refused to give them an official NES license. Which is why it got ports on incredibly obscure consoles like the Amstrad GX4000, But never the SNES.

[@Poever]

Two versions of Klax? That’s crazy talk!

[@alex_-yz9to]

Theres actually a reason as to why japan has a bunch of weird ports of klaxs, Tengen wanted to piss off nintendo! And Namco was in on it!

[@orichumo]

klax feels like the most popular 90's game from another timeline

[@Foxxy999]

Jeremy Parish, Tornado Appetizer Scholar stationary and business cards forthcoming??

[@JomasterTheSecond]

I see Tornado Appetiser and all I can think of it *_TORNADO TWEESTER._*

[@nightelf5007]

3:14 You can apply for a modern video game journalist job with a sentence like that!

[@lightspeedmurphy7546]

I was expecting a Gingamen reference at first. Also it took me 5 minutes before I saw the video to question why Klax was in the title twice and then I remembered that there were 2 different versions.

[@SoftwareAgentsTV]

Klax is one of my favorite arcade games!!

[@galloe8933]

Star Gazers II: Card and puzzle collection. HOT-B was just kicking out classic after classic.

[@DeathCrustPunk]

hey jeremy im sure more than a few of your videos are the most comprehensive retrospectives of whatever particular game on the internet.

[@JeremyParish]

It’s true, 1 > 0

[@SuperTrainStationH]

Turning the “knights journey” into an video game should have been far more interesting than what they turned out.

[@SECONDQUEST]

I always said "it is the 90s, and there ONLY time for Klax"

[@kuririnzrp]

The only way to make GInga even remotely interesting would be if there was a hidden Heiankyo Alien connection

[@MadeByJoey]

Jeremy thank you for your DEEEEEEEP historical geekery

[@TeruteruBozusama]

I had the first one on a multikart under a different title

[@hemangchauhan2864]

How have I never stumbled on this game... Looks like an accessible arcade game that less experienced folks can play.

[@GameplayandTalk]

Hey, it's the 2020's. There's still time for Klax!... I think?

[@XanthinZarda]

Sometimes I wonder if like Coleco's ports of Donkey Kong to the rival systems, that Mindscape/Tengen's Klax was made not with actual vestment, but purely out of spite to the rival. Galaxy of Games Solitaire, on Game Boy? At least it looks to take after Romtech and not eGames.

[@jamesmoss3424]

I got klax on the game boy color. 😀👍🎮

[@absolutezeronow7928]

Hot-B nearly blew American audiences minds with Tornado Appetizer. But as you say, sanity prevailed and Ginga is just another obscure Game Boy title that never left Japan. It will be quite a while before we see Klax again on Videos Works though (probably NES Works 1990 would be its next appearance).

[@BlUsKrEEm]

Oh man, I hope he covers the difference between the Japanese and American Godzilla GB game. It's so disappointing that we got such an inferior version in the US

[@nfugitt89]

Atari was kind of in a damned if you do/don't situation. Make a game that's more playable but doesn't look like Klax and it probably sells less in the devious, looks obsessed West

[@jessragan6714]

Q: How do you make a port of Klax for a black and white game system? A: You don't.

[@bfish89ryuhayabusa]

I spent the video trying to fit a Pratchett reference (to the Klacks in Going Postal), but I got a big fat nothing on that front.

[@JeremyParish]

Surely he must have had a minor witch named Ginga at some point

[@bfish89ryuhayabusa]

@@JeremyParish Best I can do is the book Jingo.

[@JeremyParish]

I'll take it

[@bongatumtum]

Thanks for the episode, Jeremy! I wonder, when you get to games like this, does the gin flow a little more freely to help you power through?

[@VEGANVANIA]

If anyone ever tells me that "there's no such thing as a wrong opinion", I'll send them the link to this video: if anyone here has _actually played_ the second version of Klax for more than an hour...

[@OhChrisFreeman]

I assume the rules for all the Ginga games would have been in the paper instruction manual that came with the game? Has that been reprinted anywhere online?

[@JeremyParish]

It's in Japanese, so...

[@DeepWeeb]

Hot B is the same publisher as Hoshi wo Miru Hito So I guess the "B" stands for *bullcrap*

[@HPRshredder]

Cover looks like 2001: A Klaxterf*** (in space)

[@lmeeken]

Skreonk's got me all excited for next week. Can't wait for that purposeful grimace and terrible sound.

[@JeremyParish]

Next episode, not next week. Sorry.

[@lmeeken]

@@JeremyParish I guess a DIFFERENT well-produced video from a DIFFERENT extremely interesting video series will have to suffice 😆. (Or no video at all, if you're taking a well-deserved break.)

[@YarsRevenge]

We were all so naive back then. Hopefully the people of the 2090s will be better prepared than we were.

[@JeremyParish]

The last surviving morlocks will be grateful for Game Boy's battery efficiency in their underground warrens, but they'll rue its lack of backlighting

[@perpetualcollapse]

Aight then

[@thejackal007]

14:30 How does it feel to be number one?

[@JeremyParish]

It only hurts when I smile

[@Magnero]

14:55 Godzilla?

[@Seksibro]

Still no comments on Jeremy's choice to use a clip from Legend of the Galactic Heroes? Shame on you lot!

[@JeremyParish]

Excuse me, I think you mean Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu

[@ThomasMHead]

Sorry. I was stranded by the roadside after that shot of Captain America drove off with my attention.

[@zanforian]

What is this the 1991st circle of hell? Where bad to mediocre gameboy puzzle games go for eternal torment.

[@jessragan6714]

Yeah, who needs a bunch of boring old board games when you've got a handheld video game system, anyway? (hides Switch copy of Clubhouse Games) Anyway. The Sega Genesis got the double Klax treatment too, although the differences between the two conversions are far less profound. In fact, I don't know what made Namco's version of Klax better than Tengen's, but fans swear there's a difference.

[@a-bas-le-ciel]

Klax: one of the most successful games to be absolutely terrible of all time.

[@jamesmoss3424]

Ginga should have been released in the USA in the first place. 😀👍

[@JeremyParish]

Should it, tho?

[@johneymute]

Klax and also dr mario in my opinion don’t belong on gameboy because they both require colors to make objects distingible from each other and turning those colors into different shades of gray makes it still hard to play,heck even the sipergameboy and gameboycolor can’t make up for this(not be default) Those mentioned games should,ve originally belong on gameboycolor instead.

[@RalphBarbagallo]

Wow, what an absolutely terrible version of Klax!