Ladies and gentlemen, what can we do? We're at 725. Mm, as I was your host, Justin Baker, and as always, I'm joined by Bible Human Chris Saturn. Yeah, hi, Justin.
I'm struggling with this intro. I'm almost made it all the way through. I was very impressed. I cannot speak.
I can't talk good. Yeah, we're here. We made it. Yay.
We continue to exist. True. This show continues to continue existing. Based on chat from the pre-show, I happen to have the Wiki for Mainer G.
Krebs pulled up. And so I'm just staring at that picture now. I like that the picture of him is three people. So unless you know what Mainer G.
Krebs looks like, you would not know which one of them that is. That's the one that's Gilligan? No, I figured that out. Have you told me that that's Gilligan's name?
Yeah, because my dad loved Gilligan's Island. It was his favorite show. And I don't know why. It's not a great show.
No. It was something to put on. Yeah. Anyway, my week.
Yes, sir. I'm still doing more network server stuff. I've got my NAS all set up. I set up a couple more servers, and I'm running fresh RSS, because I do get all my news from RSS feeds, because I don't like using shit that powers my data.
But previously, do what? Did you say, how did you pronounce it? Fresh RSS. No, no, no, your network's short.
NAS? NAS? NAS? I was just curious, because I always said it NAS.
And one of the guys at Workaway says, NAS. No, that was. He also refers to a LAN port to take LAN port. And I'm like, no, I'm like, no, I'm the thing you know.
I think he's the problem there in that particular. I am certain he is, but I still wanted verification. I think NAS is definitely the more accepted version. Yeah, guys, it's not as the shit you put your card to make it go faster.
Anyway, my server. Yeah, I set up fresh RSS. So because I previously checked all my RSS feeds on Cappy Reader on my phone. I just opened source RSS reader with no accounts or anything.
But if I ever wanted to check news on something else, my phone wasn't in front of me. I couldn't do it. So now it all syncs with Fresh RSS, which is nice. I also set up a server called Audio Bookshelf.
My wife has a ton of audible books. And we downloaded all of them when she quit audible, because Amazon kept fucking with it. In fact, then you could still do that. So we had this gigantic folder of audio books.
And I was like, we don't have a way to listen to these other than just downloading your phone and putting them in an audio book reader. An audio bookshelf is just that. It's just kind of like Plex for audio books. But it also does regular ebooks.
And it also does podcasts. And so now I can ditch pocket casts, which is more than just a podcast reader. It's a whole platform you have account, and they track metrics about you, and presumably share it with third parties and all this stuff. And so now I podcast download locally to my server, and then they're fed to my audio bookshelf app.
And I can download them there or listen to them and stream them over the network or whatever, which is nice. But I discovered that audio bookshelf also lets you make local RSS feeds out of any object in your library. So if I'm like, hey, Saturn, you and I are going to listen to this audio book together. I can send you an RSS feed from me that is an RSS feed of that audio book.
And you can put it in any podcast player and listen to my audio book, just like good. Am I house listening to the CD or whatever? And then I'd tell you no. Right.
Yeah, you'd be like, no, I'm not going to listen to this. But Courtney was excited because she's like, oh, so my book wants to listen to an audio book together. I can just send them to RSS. And I was like, yeah, and it splits all the chapters out in a different episode.
It's really slick. The part that she's missing from that is she can just send them to the RSS. And then they will all say, what's an RSS? And then you'll have to explain it to them.
Well, if she tells them like it goes, it's a podcast. It goes to your podcast app. They all know podcasts. And then they'll say, well, I search Apple podcasts.
And it's not there. No, they don't have to do it because they do like Patreon podcasts and stuff. They're all pretty big in the podcasts. I guess they're things that are really popular.
OK. I guess. And so she was like, well, that's really cool. And I went to show it to her.
Pocketcasts will not let you add an RSS feed that they have not personally scraped. See, there you go. So for me to access my own personal RSS feed in Pocketcasts, I have to submit my personal IP address RSS feed to them and let them vet it before I can listen to mine. And I was like, this is, I didn't know that this was a bullshit app made by assholes.
If your podcast app does not take naked RSS feeds, and I thought it did this whole time because every podcast I tried to add, they've already indexed. And so I will say that YouTube music will just take whatever fuck RSS feed you really did. I did not know that. What's another thing I'm trying to get off of is YouTube music on the Plex amp, which is really nice for music.
I also, after that, started ripping my Godzilla Blu-rays, which has pretty much become my part-time job now. I'm a Blu-ray River. And this is what I do. I did that last year.
So I understand. Blu-ray Ripping and Transcoding. I am annoyed. I'm ripping my Criterion Godzilla collection because they just got Criterion just did Godzilla vs.
Violante on Blu-ray, which is one of the hard to get ones. Now there's only one Godzilla Blu-ray that I don't own. It's never been reissued. And it's like $200 on eBay, which is the dual pack of Godzilla vs.
Mothra in 1992 and Godzilla vs. Kingie Dora in 1991. And they're impossible to get. But I was like, well, I've got all the guys on movies, except for those.
So I'll rip them. I rip all my Blu-rays, which weren't Criterion. And they ripped great. And my Criterion collection will not rip a third disc, which just won't fucking rip.
Play's fine. Won't rip. And I was talking to someone else in the Discord. And they're like, yeah, my third one won't rip either.
Something with the encryption or making TV or something. And so I did end up downloading a backup of those ones. Yeah, the thing you purchased. Yes, which feels frustrating.
It's so annoying. I'm so annoyed anytime. I'm like, I'll just rip my disc and then transcode it to a reasonable file size. Oh, no, fuck me.
No, no, I hate that. But I've been learning a lot about trans coding video files and stuff like that, which is cool. Now when I see pirated stuff and it's like H.264 and whatever, I know what it is, just neat. I also downloaded about a little over a half a terabyte of all of my pertinent and important to me, GOG installer files.
I used a utility called Elgog Downloader, which I was able to just run in a Docker container and download it all. I did learn this. GOG will start throttling you if you're downloading for too long. So it took me three days to download all that stuff.
I downloaded my important GOG stuff, Silent Hill 2 control in the Resident Evil games. Yeah, Silent Hill 4, I guess. Yeah, no, they throttled me. And so it took some time, but I now have them.
And it is surprisingly freeing to have a huge amount of GOG and it's always just on my server. I've installed a bunch of games and I've been playing stuff and it's been a good time. I will say I am annoyed that GOG does not have a way for you to just download offline installers. And it's kind of alarming how much of a pain it is to do that.
I mean, you can still go through your library and download the offline installer for each one. Sure, let me give you an example. The Witcher 3, pretty popular game. I own it on GOG and I went and I was like, well, I'm getting throttled and running into this Docker is kind of weird.
So I'll just download this one manually. And so you got to download the setup file, right, which is a couple of megabytes. And then you need to download 21, 21 individual 4 gigabyte bin files that you must click on and HTTP download. And I don't know if this only happens to me, but when you're downloading like 30 files at a time in Firefox, it's kind of a fucking train wreck.
Yeah, I grabbed a file downloader like we used to use back in the day, just to manage my GOG downloads when I was downloading my game. You have to. And so I'm a little annoyed that for their whole thing, where it's near and free and you own it, whatever, it's kind of a pain in the ass to get them. So I was like, I'm going to get them now in case the tide changes.
And I don't think they take that ability away, but I could see making it. If it's one more layer of skier than I'm willing to go ahead and say that they're actively trying to keep me from downloading my shit because between the like, it's just frustrating. Like you should offer me an option that is all of it zip together in one big file. I know it's going to be a huge file, but come on.
Well, their option for that is to just use GOG Galaxy. Yeah, but GOG Galaxy deletes the installer after you hit install. And I say this, what they need to do is give you an option to only download the installer in GOG Galaxy. So I'm just like 15 games, right click, download installers.
It's absurd that they don't have that. Her own can do it. Can I download Justin's dollars? Well, I like to save the installers after you install.
Yeah, you still got to install the game. A lot of these like, I downloaded like 80 or 90 games. I don't want to install them all. I just want to have the downloaders.
And so it's been an ordeal. But just yeah, I've been obsessively doing server stuff for hours and hours a day, every day. And in the pursuit of the day that it's all perfect, and everything is where it needs to be. And I'm sure that'll happen for real one day.
Alternatively, it's in pursuit of the day when the internet goes away and you're forced to do everything offline. That's also true. That's also true. Today my power flash and all my stuff stayed out because it's only UPS and it's like, yes.
That's always the best time. The first time that happens, that's just the best day. And you're like, I'll just keep watching television on my phone. And I'm like, anyway, what are you even doing?
Actually, I wanted to ask you real quick since you're talking about Godzilla. Have you seen Shelter 54 yet? No, you've seen it to me. And I have not watched it yet.
I've been meaning to watch that. That was that horror film. Yeah, it's a horror film made by fans about Godzilla's reign and the creation of Byolante. And so I get sort of like a lot of fun.
Anyway, so I was talking a couple weeks ago about my new laptop. And the CPU in it is the AMD Ryzen AI. Right. I remember us making fun of the AI code processor.
And so I was like, you know, if it's got the NPU in it, I should see if there's anything I can do to actually utilize the NPU. Sure. I was looking at offline local LLMs. And I found the software called Olamma, which is an offline LLM program.
And so I downloaded that. And it lets you download whatever language model you want. But on their website, they've got several of them listed. And the ones that are available for free to the public.
So I downloaded DeepSeek, which is, I believe, made by the Chinese government and therefore probably is based on my own information. Yeah. Both of those are. One of those is for sure true.
And the other one is most likely true, yeah. And then also I downloaded Gemma, which is Google's freely available LLM. So it's almost certainly based on my personal information. That one is definitively.
And so I was playing around with both of those. And Gemma gives very similar answers to Google's Gemini. But it only knows up through the end of last year. Right.
It's offline. Yeah, because it's offline. So if I try to ask it about anything more recent, it's like, I can't tell you unless you let me go online. But Olamma doesn't seem to have an option to let it go online, which is good.
That's what I want. But then I also tried DeepSeek. And for some reason, whenever you use DeepSeek on there, before it shows you the answer, it shows you the LLM's thought process. I have seen this before.
The first time you see it is a little alarming. It's very unnerving. Because yeah. And it's not just like the first question.
It's each successive question you ask it. Like it'll say things like, oh, well, three or four questions ago he asked me about this. So now I believe the user is probably tech savvy. But this question is still a little vague.
So I wonder if he's looking for this. No, I should stick to the word of what he said. And only answer this. And it's just very unnerving.
I don't like it. And I think I'm determined. I just don't like LLM's at all. I've not found a real good use case for any of them yet.
And the few things that I've thought to ask it, I just watched it in real time hallucinate answers based on bad information. I couldn't think of a use for an offline one. And the online ones that as you're illustrating do collect and postulate huge amounts of information about the user. And the only thing I found am useful for is my wife uses them sometimes to write emails when she, the only email she can write is fuck you.
Why are you so stupid? And she's like, I can't write that. I got to write something nicer. So it helps her there.
And then I'll use it whenever you know when you have one of those web searches where you have to put on site, Reddit, and then Google something. Because you know the answer to the thing you want only exists buried three Reddit comments. Yeah. And then it can usually dig those up faster than I can.
So I don't go scroll through 10 Reddit posts. There's only two actual uses I found. Well, the thing is that I have two major complaints with that one. I have a lot of minor complaints, but my major complaints are one.
It's all this stolen data. And it's constantly accumulating more stolen data, as well as getting information from us and feeding it back and all that. And then the other major issue I have is how the resource draw, because it's used up as a user. How does it annihilate your computer?
Because this is something you would be like, oh, maybe I'll run this on one of my servers or something. Just have a thing or is it two? Well, I don't have any other computers that have an MPU. So it would have to use the GPU to do it on any other device.
But on my laptop, where I'm running it, after 15 minutes or so of asking it what I thought was fairly straightforward questions that it effectively mocked me for and it's trained a thought of. But they didn't say that. You don't understand how I work yet. Yeah, this idiot.
And so after 15, 20 minutes of that, the temperature sensors on my laptop reported that it was well over 80 degrees Celsius. Oh, that's getting up there. And that's an aluminum case. So it was really difficult to touch the laptop at that point.
And then as soon as I killed the process for it, it dropped below 60 degrees Celsius within a couple of seconds. So it is using enough energy to greatly heat up my laptop, at the very least. I tried it on my older laptop. I plug it in an eGPU that was a little beefier of a GPU.
Just to see how it handled it. It ran much faster than it does on my laptop, but that's dedicated in PU. So clearly these things are still built first around GPUs and not around dedicated hardware. So, but yeah, I don't know that I have any specific use for it.
It was interesting to play with, but I don't, the whole thing still makes me uncomfortable. Which makes me feel like an old man yelling at claps. Cause I've always been tech positive and interested in new tech and new operating systems and new hardware. So I feel like some old curmudgeon, but I just don't, I can't find a good customer.
I don't dislike the tech. What I dislike is that one, they call it AI. Two, they're selling it as general artificial intelligence. And three, it's basically just an avenue to guzzle gargantuan amounts of user data back to corporations.
Even more analytic data from us. The tech itself, much like the tech behind cryptocurrency, is really cool. But it is used in a way that I do not agree with. I don't know.
I don't think that it makes you a Luddite to be like, I'm a long, comfortable with this shit. That was part of what I wanted it for offline use for was, cause that way a lot of the concerns I have with it are less. Sure, you can play with it without worrying about like how much data is getting reporting. And it's still using stolen data in the first place.
We can't put that toothpaste back in the tube, but at least it's not reporting more information back. And it's not in some server farm that's being doused with water 24-7 just to function. It's in your house where you're throwing water on your laptop and cool off before it burns through a couch. Right, just leaving my laptop in the fridge, connected through a USB-C cable to a monitor.
It's been my upstairs AC struggles to keep up when it hits almost 110 in Texas, which is now through the next few weeks. And I've been checking my server tips like every day, like hold on little buddy, a couple more weeks. It's hitting like a low 70s. So like I think I'm okay.
My server is fortunately pretty cool. It only has an air cooler in it. My desktop has a water cooler. And it stays like right at 45 to 50 degrees Celsius.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Let's do some news. Okay.
This shows about video games after all. Not just servers and LLMs. Nintendo has pushed a Switch to update for Super Mario 3D All-Stars years after delisting the game and making it unavailable for sale. So cool.
You have to already bought it. Now it works better on Switch too. That one for awhile even after they pulled it didn't really go up in price. I imagine it's gone up now.
Oh yeah, quite a bit. Even GameStop is selling it used in the like 200 plus range. Oh my God, I'm gonna sell mine. Shit, man.
I don't fucking well I get that much. Holy cow. Microsoft has killed its movies and TV store for Xbox and Windows without saying anything. There was no preamble as far as I know.
They were just like, yeah fuck that thing. So it's gone now. They are going to continue to allow people to watch their movies for the present. But this isn't the first time they've unsaminated.
Airs unceremoniously killed one of their online marketplaces. And the last time they said that they weren't going to take away any purchases until they quietly did as soon as few enough people were using them that they didn't get the pushback. Yeah, just a reminder, if it's not on a hard drive, you don't own it. Yeah, just period.
It's in your hands. You don't own it. You know, CED has announced two new models of the fin rear ODE for a Sega Saturn, a light model for $50, which you know, that's crazy. You're 50 euros is crazy cheap compared to the other one.
And an enhanced slash improved version of the original with more information on that one to come. So I'm really excited to see some more affordable E options. Yeah, right. For the Saturn, which is really cool.
My hope is that we're approaching like, ODEs are one of those things that have been on the market for a while now, but they're still very often in the $300 plus range. I know there are a few cheaper ones now, but I would love to see them become real cheap. That's where you know, you know, this seems to be doing that. So it's good to see.
Right. Ooh, we stopped releases a statement that they believe that microtransactions make games more fun for players. I know they don't have to tell you that. Oh, right.
Yeah. I shared a video in the chat and I share this video on the chat any time that the Wailers video the Wailers video. Yes. And I wanted to mention that it's called Let's Go Whaling, like a Wail tricks for monetizing mobile game players with free to play.
It's put out by pocket gamer business. Eight years old. If you've never seen this video, please go watch this video. That's the one where they say that it should the socially acceptable way to play your game should be spending money or something.
It's literally a guy that runs a company. I don't know. My whole point was if you don't think these companies are investing time and money and resources into understanding your brain chemistry to trick you into doing things they want, then you are wrong because eight years ago, they were celebrating that they were doing exactly that. They probably progressed since then.
They are predators and they are proud of it when they are among themselves. So when they say more fun, I think what they mean is for them, I guess, I guess, yeah, conflicting statements from Way Forward imply that they may not have been initially involved in Mod Retro's release of their GBC Sabrina the Teenage, which game that they've since said they're working with Mod Retro on the release, kind of a weird, this is a weird release to begin with because the game is 15 bucks used on eBay. It's not a very game. It's a really cheap game put out by a company run by an arms dealer that may or may not have asked for permission.
It's very bizarre. Well, he seems to have asked for permission from Archie Comics, just right from Way Forward, which Way Forward didn't own the right to his own. Yeah, I don't know. It's all very weird.
It's a very strange release and continues to be strange, but cool, I guess. Square Enix is at least temporarily closing access to new players on their most popular Final Fantasy XI server due to overpopulation 23 years after the game's initial release. Man. I keep, I think, about three times a year, I think, about going back to 11.
Yeah. Because I did enjoy it. I just, I don't know. I tried to go back to it not that long ago when they did a free play weekend or whatever.
And I don't remember at all how any of it works. Just building around was enough to make me overwhelmed and turn it off. It wasn't nostalgic, though. What I've learned about myself is I do like old, weird, antiquated in the mose.
It's true. This is what I'm learning about myself in real time. The most recent patches for Final Fantasy XIV have added a Final Fantasy XI themed raid. And it has a bunch of music from Final Fantasy XI.
And that scratches those nostalgia itches for me without me having to relearn how to play Final Fantasy XI. If I could get in the game and find people to chat with that would explain shit to me, I'll absolutely be all over it. That's what got me never questions. I get in the game and be like, I don't know what's happening.
And people would, you know, anyway. Where are we? Here we are. Atari and Namco are adding the 2600 ports of several of Namco's games to Atari 50 if you want to play some bad versions of- The worst versions of those games.
Namco games. There you go. For posterity. Yeah, they're so bad, though.
3DS Virtual Boy emulator Red Viper has officially reached version 1.0. Coincidentally, we just talked about that. Yeah. We just have to put out that episode like two days before the 30th anniversary of the Virtual Boy.
Yeah. And so right after we did that episode is when this was announced. Yeah, I need to download the new version and see what's up. Also, it was pretty good.
I believe it's this one supports colorizing the games now. Like full colorization? Not just changing the color. It's based on the game, but they have some like the pictures that I showed to Warieland with some color.
It's not like full, full color, but it's got some colors. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Cool. A user has broken his switch to by spray painting his Donkey Kong but an answer cartridge yellow to match his DK64 and DK Lang cartridge is pretty pretty out there. Yeah. Paint is made of physical matter.
It exists in 3D space. So if you put paint on something, it adds thickness to that object. Also stickiness. So and stickiness.
Yeah. So for very low clearance objects, even a couple of coats of paint can make it difficult to jam it into your switch to. Yeah. Like if he had peeled the label off, sanded it down and airbrushed it real thin.
Maybe maybe it maybe but you can't just spray paint. Well, you've been covered up the label first. So that's part that part's still fine. Good for him.
Yeah. Microsoft has reversed course on their prior plan to charge $80 for the outer worlds to it will now only cost $70, which only 70. That's cool. I guess that's you know.
I'm glad they they took the public pressure. I'm glad I'm glad. I'm also glad I would prefer that they have not even floated the idea in the first place. Yeah.
I don't love that really 70 already feels high. It does. I don't I don't love this whole life. What do this?
OK, you don't like that. What if we do it again a couple years later? Well, no one's paying attention. It's just it I don't like it.
I don't like companies trying this like tactic of hyper normalization of outrageous things and then pulling it back, wanting to be praised for it and showing up at the same fucking package. Yeah, right. But again, like you said, I think it was a good. It's a good thing to do.
The switch to is officially the fastest selling console of all time with 1.6 million units in its launch month beating out previous record holder PS4. So yeah, cool. You're apparently sold 1.1 million. Again, let's keep in mind this is fastest selling.
Yes. Not high of selling. Not highest selling, fastest selling. And fastest selling is also one of those metrics that's extremely dependent on how fucking many units they can get out there to begin with.
Yeah. Not that I'm trying to say this is an accomplishment. It is an accomplishment, which seems to be doing really well. Yeah, but just which is weird because there's still like no major games announced for it.
You got Donkey Kong bananas. That's pretty much it. Play that you painted yellow. It's not I.O.
has followed steam's lead in banning some adult content following protests from an Australian parents group and interference from payment processors. They came out after the fact and said that they actually had just delisted the stuff from certain areas of the marketplace. It's been a whole fiasco. Since reinstated, the ones that were free.
So if there was no money involved, they're back up. And then they said that they are working now on a method to reinstate all of them. They're trying to work with payment processors. There have been some mixed rumors and reports about other non-adult games being removed.
But so far, I haven't seen anything that fully verifies that. I think it's a combination of one collective shout. Someone put it really succinctly in the chat. I don't know that I can regurgitate it accurately, but basically said something along the lines of collective shout seems like what they really want to do is get rid of any type of pornography and take any LGBTQ plus voices along with it.
And that's kind of the vibe I get from what they're doing. But then they've already, like what's confusing to me is what they claim to be trying to get rid of, it's already had strong payment processor related rules about. Yeah. On their website, their guidelines say you can't include these certain things.
And that's almost one to one the list that they collected from the chat says they're going after. It's already had guidelines against that. And it's in steam or both. They enforce those guidelines.
And so it's just very bizarre. It's just a series of overreactions and what seem like bad faith arguments from the group creating these reactions. So it's all just kind of a shit show. And finally, Nintendo and Lego have revealed a Game Boy DMG Lego kit for only $59.99, which is pretty affordable in the realm of Lego.
Right. Yeah, that's a good cheat for Lego. I'm struggling not to pre-order this. It's apparently a one-to-one size almost.
God. I'm struggling real hard not to pre-order this, because it's just going to get built and stuck on a shelf and I'm just going to stare at it and be like, logo like there's no. I love building Lego. I just got done building a big Lego set.
I've created an entire medieval diorama above my television with a castle and a dungeon and a village and a Viking ship invading. It's a whole thing. A holder. And there's a beholder.
And my problem is I build these Lego sets and I'm like, yeah. And then I set it on a shelf and I'm like, now I can never get rid of it ever. Yeah. And I just don't know that I need more of that in my life.
Big space ears that don't do anything and can't do anywhere. Right. Anyway, speaking of. Big space ears.
Big space ears. That brings us to our topic hand, which is Play it Loud. Yes. A history of Nintendo stand against mothers who kept asking kids to turn down the dang volume.
Play it Loud was Nintendo's marketing campaign. Ran approximately from mid 1994 ish, as best as I can tell through around late 1996 ish. As far as first encounters, this was the Nintendo I knew. 1994 for me was kindergarten.
And so I didn't know Nintendo marketing before the Play it Loud era. This was my introduction to who Nintendo was. It was very different. It was indeed very different.
And I was better. For me, the trajectory of Nintendo was started in your face and loud and then slowly ramped it down. Whereas for someone like you, the trajectory was probably more kind of back and forth. Yeah.
Yeah. Because for me, I remember early Nintendo ads, while they were clearly marketed towards kids, we're still trying to be relatively clean and parent friendly. And then suddenly this came around and they decided to do the opposite. Yeah, it's wild.
And we're going to discuss it. As far as I do want to talk about the history of Nintendo advertising at this point, and the Spider-Made, you can talk more about this. Sure. But before this marketing campaign was a previous marketing campaign called the Best Play here, I saw a little bit of it.
And it's pretty, pretty planned stuff. It's just Nintendo stuff. Here you go. And it didn't really land, either.
Really, Nintendo's bigger marketing push was the, now you're playing with power. That was the big one prior to this. And they labeled that on literally everything they had. And yes, Game Boy was portable power.
The Super News was super power. Fortunately, it didn't last long enough to become virtual power, because that makes no sense. Yeah. Yeah.
They were relatively tame. You had some weird stuff like that, Dr. Mario commercial. Sure.
And the original Legend of Zelda commercial, there's some weirdness in there. Weird and goofy, but not like a crass or anything for inappropriate. Yeah, that's true. We're going to be talking a lot about crass and then pro-piercially, still.
As far as the funding and launching of the Play Loud campaign, it did coincide with the six-year redesign of the original Game Boy that added new colors to the lineup, red, yellow, green, blue, black, white, and the best one, clear. That all launched alongside the campaign. Weirdly, a lot of the Play Loud ads were absent from Nintendo power. I scoured a lot of issues from 94.95 and found only the tinnest Play Loud ads.
Nintendo power itself is an advertisement, so they didn't need to load it with first-party Nintendo ads. Sure. I just kind of was expecting kind of a vibe shift of like Nintendo power generally being in your face right along with the ad campaign. It just kind of didn't happen.
It was present in other magazines, which I did take screenshots of for us to look at. But it was very, I was kind of expecting a little more of a Play Loud vibe from Nintendo power and it was just sort of business as usual for them. Nintendo power was still trying to keep parents on the good side, because that was a monthly subscription. That wasn't a one-time purchase.
So they needed to keep the family on board for Nintendo power. Which is so weird. It kind of flies on the flex of the whole point of the Play Loud campaign to be with. The other gaming magazines seemed to be a little older.
And so they were trying to put the ads that skewed older and the magazines that skewed older. That was always my thing. Yeah, they does make sense. I don't remember what I went through with EGM Game Fan.
And I think that might have been, I think it was EGM Game Fan. Because in my head, I was like, DC mother. Because the tricks also always had it. Of course, yeah.
Because the tricks was published by the same guy that published Hustler. So of course it was gonna have to have some more crass ads in there. The campaign itself was $10 million and farmed out to Leo Burnett, USA. Leo Burnett is a long running ad agency.
They've been around since 1930s. They were responsible for things like Deep Hillsbury, Doboy, Charlie, The Tuna from the Starcast, Tuna Cans, Jogrean Giant, and helping Philip Morris market cigarettes more heavily to men. That's good. Quite a...
Because according to what I read, the time cigarettes were seen as a feminine product. Women smoked cigarettes and they wanted to market cigarettes to men. And so they were partially responsible for characters such as the Marlboro man who was rough and tumble, but still smoked. Cigarettes.
Like at the time, real men did. Right. So they've got quite a history. They also worked on Nintendo's previous ad campaign, The Best Play Here, Advertising.
And I found a quote, I dug through, it was referenced in Wikipedia so I went and found the article from The New York Times in 1994 and the ad manager at Nintendo, I think it was Nintendo of America, Don Coir said, quote, it came through pretty loud and clear that while we did a good job in our advertising explaining what our games were about, we didn't do it in kids' speak, but like an adult talking to a child. And he went on to talk about how they wanted that 15 to 16 year old demographic. Which was what they were after. I think it shows with the product of their work.
I hope you were able, because this is getting into the ads and we're starting with the commercials as far as I go. I watched a two hour playlist of the ads. There's no fucking way we can cover all these. There's just a bunch of them.
I just kind of picked a random assortment and focused on the weird and notable ones I liked. Also I tried to date them, but a lot of them are undated or I found conflicting date information. So it's hard for me to tell if there's any trajectory to these. Also commercials often run for long spans of time.
So it's hard to pinpoint when they start exactly. Right. I was watching that Campbell soup commercial where that kid comes in. He's a snowman, but then he eats soup and it turns him into a regular kid because it warms him up.
I think they're going to be wearing that for at least 30 years. It's so old. Yeah. Also, there are some Sears air conditioning repair commercials that I watched many years after they were made.
So yeah. You know they're down to like one Sears store left? Who cares? Yeah.
Sears. I always hate Sears. I didn't like it. Anyway, let's get into the ads themselves.
The first one and I'm going to get one information I can so people at home can look it up. I might do like a Google Drive folder with links to these and the print ads that we're going to look at later if people want to have reference material. If I think about it, if I didn't and you're listening to this and it's not in the description of it. Come to this and Discord.
Yeah. Come, I'll put it out for you. Yeah. The first one I watched was the Give the World a Wedgie.
Yeah. And this one I think was pretty early because that New York Times article mentioned it. Yeah. This is what I don't actually remember seeing on TV.
This is it's so bizarre. First of all, it's playing a butthole surfer song. Right. And the song is Who Is In My Room Last Night, which is not the kid friendly a song in the world.
No. No. The sounding speech of like, we don't need to do what we feel like and play games and be free. Like that kind of genealogic, you know, sort of speech thing.
Right. And I thought I was imagining this, so I didn't write it down. But then when I was reading the article about play it loud in the New York Times, they were talking about this commercial, they mentioned it. So I had it because I thought it was my YouTube fucking operation just a bad conversion because most of these are beyond low quality that you find on YouTube.
But they talked about how there's a sensor beep over the word he'll in the ad. Yeah, yeah. We've got it when I watch it and I watched a higher quality Scholarship where you got the point here. You sit here again, yeah.
is jarring. I didn't know what word it was that they were sensitive. It was hell. I can look up the lyrics.
It was hell. But what gets me is I'm like, just don't include that part of the song. I mean, it's a 30 second commercial, and it's a two minute song. Or a different song.
Yeah, or a different song. I was reading, I think it was that article or a different article from the 90s talking about this campaign. And they were like, I can't remember how they phrased it. God, I should have wrote it down.
But it was like, Nintendo's going after teenagers who like bands named stuff like Wet Nipple. It's like, I don't know if this is a real band, or if this is a joke. But this one's weird. It's very loud.
And teenagers doing teenager stuff, like holding big boomboxes and running around. Yeah, stuff that we did at the teenagers at the time. Right. Hellboomboxes and sprinted through grassy areas.
Yeah, so we did back then. But definitely in your face, really loud, really alarming. The only reason I can think they kept the sense of being in is because it makes it kind of loud and distract. Slightly edgier.
Yeah. It's like, oh, we've got a naughty word in our head. Were the butthole surfers big at all outside of Texas? I don't know.
I think butthole surfers were originally Canadian. They're Canadian. They're the Texan. Are they?
I don't know why they're Canadian. No, they're from Texas. Well, yeah, I mean, they're a big band. I mean, they're triple platinum.
So they're there, which I only know because of one joke speech from the show community. When someone makes fun of the butthole surfers and another person goes, they go, butthole surfers are triple platinum. Are you triple platinum? Presumably.
That's that's they're big enough. I was looking them up there. Yeah, they had a number one pepper hit number one on the board. So it's the big one.
Yeah, I don't know why I thought they were Canadian for some reason. Very strange. Anyway, yeah, big, bright, loud in your face. Definitely quite loud.
I'll give them that one. And the ad does say give the world a wedgie. It's got a few different pop-up things that say different stuff and give the world a wedgie as one of the. Yeah, that's the most bizarre thing that it produces.
I found a killer instinct ad, which is fucking wild. That one I do remember seeing on TV. It's someone just literally chainsawing a killer instinct arcade cabinet in half. Yeah.
And then they take out a super Nintendo with the killer instinct cartridge in it. Yeah, it was inside the whole time. Yeah, very weird. Yeah, I was seeing this like while watching Animaniacs or something at the time.
So this was definitely on TV. Yeah, this one pretty tame in the lineup of loud commercials, but still loud in your face, kid chainsawing an arcade cabinet in half. It's a lot different than the earlier stuff. This one I know we talked about on the commercials episode.
The Yoshi's Island 1995 commercial. It is a large man eating too much food with horrible smacking sounds. If you have a mizaphonia, do not watch this commercial. While the narrator talks about how much Yoshi eats, and then the man explodes for eating too much food.
Yeah, they could have reused this exact same commercial for a Kirby game. Absolutely. It's just literally a rip off of that Meaning of Life, Money Pylons Meaning of Life, Mr. Creason.
Creason, yeah, skit. But somehow way grosser because he's like, it's the noises. Yeah. There's so much mouth noise in it.
And he's in this like low rent diner. Yeah. It's very, it's very weird. It's literally that skit.
But what if you bought Yoshi afterward, which is very very alarming and it's gross, it's so gross. I like this one a lot. This was a Tetris 2 ad 1995. This was weird to me when it came out because Tetris 2 had already come out on NES and Game Boy the previous year.
I already knew it was a boring game. No, no, I can't. It's still trying to advertise it if it's super exciting. It has a kid playing Tetris 2 while the narrator is describing how it's so radical that you'll get old, but the game never will.
And as he's saying this, the kid playing sitting on the edge of a bed playing Tetris 2 is morphing into an old man. And then he dies. Yeah. And then it shows you play Tetris 2.
The kid fucking dies and it shows you his tombstone. And as the tombstone reads, played it loud. For the record, I want my tombstone to read it. I want mine to.
Yeah. Everyone, this is on record. We want our tombstones to say played it loud. So everyone knows that we played it.
Just the idea of like, what if we're going to put a kid in our Tetris 2 commercial and he fucking died in the commercial. Yeah. The tombstone was like, played it loud. And so I was like, yeah.
OK. That's good. That's what Tetris 2 was like. It's almost as good as Guy Exploding in a Diner.
Yeah. Kirby's Dream Land 2 features a biker reading poetry about friends. That was Kirby's commercial. Friends from the game beat the shit out of all the other bikers.
This one almost sold me on Kirby as a franchise. This was pretty funny. I had not played the games before this one came out. And I was already kind of eye-rolling about Nintendo's edginess campaign.
I'm like, OK, this is actually pretty good. This one's funny. Apparently, there's a more violent, unedited cut of it somewhere. You can find a boat on YouTube.
Yeah. Next one is of all games. Mario's Bikross. Yeah.
This is another masterpiece of grotesqueness. It's some kid's brain. And it has gotten so big that his entire head is bulging. Yeah.
And he's got this like sinu-y pulsating brain head. Yeah. And the words play it loud are engraved on the side of his throbbing skull. Yeah, it's like spelled out in veins.
It's so nasty. and there's some clean air that's really into it. It's weird because it's a good game, and I don't know what the fuck they're trying to say about it. I think they're trying to say you're gonna get laid and die from your brain crushing into your own skull.