Thanks to some new legal requirements from the European Union, Apple is now required to allow emulators in its walled garden of an App Store worldwide.  This opened the door for retro console emulation to the masses spanning the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 through Nintendo's iconic hardware and beyond up to the Sony PlayStation Portable.  On this week's podcast we're discussing what this means, what your options are, and why it'll be a long time before you can fire up a PlayStation 3 game natively on your iPad.  Please emulate responsibly! Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, subscribe via iTunes, Amazon Music Podcasts, and toss this RSS feed into your podcast aggregation software of choice, and be sure to catch up on past episodes if you're joining us late. Remember that you can reach us via , you can leave a message on the Power Button hotline by calling (720) 722-2781, and you can even follow us social media like Bluesky and Mastodon. We also have a tip jar if you'd like to kick a dollar or two of support our way. 

We're strolling on the shady side of the tracks this week as we focus on some favorite retro ROM hacks and the baked-in achievements that go with them.  All of this talk of emulation inevitably leads us to touch on the Nintendo/Yuzu Switch emulator lawsuit, too.  Join us and bring your ROM patching tools for some new takes on old fun.

ROM Hacks Mentioned In This Episode

• The Real Ghostbusters Remastered
• Sonic 3D Blast Director's Cut
• Mega Man X3 - Zero Project
• Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Color Edition
• Mega Man World 5 DX
• Smash Remix
• Ghostbusters - Special Edition

Download this week's episode directly from PTB, listen with the player below, subscribe via iTunes, Amazon Music Podcasts, and Google Podcasts, toss this RSS feed into your podcast aggregation software of choice, and be sure to catch up on past episodes if you're joining us late. Remember that you can reach us via , you can leave a message on the Power Button hotline by calling (720) 722-2781, and you can even follow us on Twitter at @PressTheButtons and @GrundyTheMan. We also have a tip jar if you'd like to kick a dollar or two of support our way. 

Sega experimented with content for older audiences beyond the teen market in the 1990s, from allowing Mortal Kombat's blood code on the Genesis version of the arcade smash to creating the Deep Water series rating for games with mature themes.  The company was ready to go beyond those markers though through a subsidiary with the development of its erotic thriller title The Sacred Pools.  Planned for release on the Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, PC, and Mac back in 1997, Sacred Pools was one of those underwhelming full motion video games from that era.  Dylan Mansfield at Gaming Alexandria has the story of the multimillion dollar game that was never released until now, and you can download and try the unfinished version of the game if you want to be, y'know, erotically thrilled.

“If you crave mystery, power, and seduction, step into the world of Sacred Pools,” read SegaSoft’s original press release. “The once secure, safe, and beautiful island of Amazonia is now a land of temptation and danger. […] Sacred Pools exploits today’s technology creating a new level of gameplay so unreal you have to feel it to believe it.”

The game’s story revolves around the mystical sacred crystals on the far-off island of Amazonia. The island was once a safe area but has now become a dangerous spot littered with lust and desire. On your way to the titular sacred pools, you’ll encounter a plethora of far-out sci-fi enemies, who you’ll need to navigate past to get to the crystals.

Although the game featured many scantily clad women, none of the footage contained any fully naked bodies (and certainly no “hardcore sex scenes,” as some websites claim). Sega of Japan actually announced in August of 1996 that no future Saturn games would feature nudity of any kind.

The United States Congress already didn't like Mortal Kombat and Night Trap.  Can you imagine their reaction if this game had actually made it out?  Just the hint of a "sex video game" produced for mainstream consoles where children play would have sent the politicians running for both their committees and 60 Minutes.  It doesn't matter how titillating Sacred Pools was or whether or not there was any nudity in the game.  Just look at how everyone reacted to the Hot Coffee mini-game in Grand Theft Auto: Andreas in 2005, and that was supposed to be deleted content.  I think overall the industry was better off without it.  That said, I'm also glad that pieces of it survive for curious players to examine today as part of the historical record.

While it's fun to talk about video games that have major anniversaries this month (both Donkey Kong Country and the Sega 32X turn twenty-five years old), it's seemingly less fun to reminisce about the anniversary of the creation of a regulatory body, but thanks to author of Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation and friend of the Power Button podcast Blake J. Harris, we're going to have a good time exploring the genesis of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary.  Harris has written a seven-part oral history article that chronicles the ESRB's rise to ratings prominence, and each week the ESRB blog will publish an installment.  Everything kicks off this week with the first part in which the United States Congress learns about a horrifying new video game called Mortal Kombat and then uses it to score political points with family-friendly constituents.

On October 20, 1993—mere weeks after the release of Mortal Kombat—California’s Attorney General, Dan Lungren, spoke to a group of police investigators at an event in Los Angeles:

“We’ve got impressionable young people dealing with interactive games that are very realistic and I wonder if that is what we should be teaching our kids. The message is: destroy your opponent. I would ask you if that is very different from some of the messages in gang culture.”

The following month, Lungren upped the ante asking game manufacturers to stop selling games that teach youngsters to “demean and destroy.”

It's easy to point the finger at Mortal Kombat with the benefit of hindsight, but if it hadn't been Scorpion and Sub-Zero raising government hackles, it would have been another game (most likely Night Trap which was also in the hot seat around the same time).  Video games were becoming a major business, and whenever something becomes popular and successful, people take notice and put it under the microscope.  The same kind of exaggerated political rhetoric we hear today in government over pet causes was used in 1994 to demonize video games.  Was it all worth it?  Well, Congress eventually left the gaming industry alone to regulate its own content, and while there was a renewed burst of censorship and "are games art?" discussions in the 2000s as Grand Theft Auto sparked the same reactions as Mortal Kombat did a decade earlier, we've largely come out on the other side with fantastic gaming experiences presented as their creators generally intend them.  Just nobody show Congress the new Fatalities in Mortal Kombat 11.  I don't think they could handle that.

Many video game developers work their entire careers to have the opportunity to make a game involving popular icons such as Batman, Spider-Man, or Godzilla, but if those opportunities can't be earned, why not just take Batman and make him your own?  Hardcore Gaming 101 has put together a fun list of games that, ahem, "borrow" famous characters that, legally speaking, really should not be there.  The king of this kind of thing has to be Sega's The Revenge of Shinobi which runs wild with unauthorized cameos and, as a result, has been revised many times over the years.

The Revenge of Shinobi is probably the most famous game for these type of changes, with numerous revisions. REV00 was only released in Japan and has enemies that resemble Rambo, Spider-Man, Batman and Godzilla. REV01 changes the Rambo enemy (by removing his bandana and making him bald), and Batman (by making him resemble the manga character Devilman). However, the Spider-Man enemy originally only looked kind of like the comic book character, but here he was redrawn to look exactly like him. The REV02 version included a copyright notice for Marvel, indicating that his appearance was official. This was done because Sega had the license for Spider-Man arcade and console games, so they decided to go for a bit of cross promotion. REV03, which appeared on compilations, changed the Godzilla boss by turning it into a dinosaur skeleton. The final revision, released on the Wii Virtual Console, changed the Spider-Man enemy’s color to pink, and changed the ninja on the title screen to less resemble Sonny Chiba.

There's a major difference between an indie hobbyist thinking he's going to make the next Metroid game without Nintendo noticing and a professional outfit like Sega deciding to just co-opt Batman and Godzilla for the hell of it.  In a strange way you have to admire the chutzpah of it all. 

The limited photographic capabilities offered by Nintendo's 1998 Game Boy Camera accessory have long since been surpassed by even the most basic digital camera, but there is still a hobbyist community out there exploring new ways to use the monochromatic camera for interesting things.  Consider this astrophotography project from Alexander Pietrow, an astronomy and instrumentation student of Leiden University in the Netherlands.  He recently used a Game Boy Camera combined with a telescope to capture images of the Moon and infinities beyond.

I wondered if it would be possible to do astrophotography with this camera. Searching the internet I was surprised that nobody had tried this before and decided to give it a go. Using the 1838 6'' Fraunhofer telescope in the Old Observatory of Leiden in combination with a 'Gosky Universal Cell Phone Adapter', it was relatively easy to properly align the camera with the telescope eyepiece. The biggest issue was a typical Dutch one: waiting for a cloudless night.

A few weeks later the clouds finally broke up and the Moon was high in the sky together with Jupiter. Not wanting to pass up on this opportunity, I rushed to the observatory and clicked away. The Moon was observed trough the viewfinder for a more zoomed out image and the main telescope for detailed shots. The viewfinder images are not very impressive, although the phase of the moon is clearly visible, especially when compared with a Stellarium image of that night. (Note that telscopes flip the image.) The second moon series was much better, especially when looking at the border between the light and dark sides. We can clearly see craters on the Moon.

He has actual photos of celestial objects that you absolutely must see.  I love a good "because I could" vintage technology project and this has to be one of the most "because I could" projects I've ever seen.  I don't know what possible use this telescope application has beyond being an interesting lark, but my compliments to Pietrow for his ingenuity.  I hope that word of this reaches the Game Boy Camera's original development staff.  I bet they would be pleased to learn that their own "because I could" project has been used to photograph other planets.

(Link via Reddit, photo via Alexander Pietrow)

There's a neat recurring feature over at Defunct Games in which classic interviews from old video game magazines are produced as little audio plays.  I'm featured in the most recent installment which reenacts a 1995 interview from Next Generation magazine discussing horror elements in video games and how far is too far when it comes to digital scares and gore.  I read the part of Jay Wilbur, former business manager at iD Software who is there defending Doom.  It was a fun lark to do and I hope you all enjoy listening to it.

Late night talk shows have been mining video games for humor for a while now, but I believe this is the first instance of HBO's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver tweaking the medium for a laugh.  Here's a clip from this past weekend's episode which advertises the new alternative to war-based video games.  Why fight on the battlefield when you can fight in the conference room?  Prepare for World of Peacecraft. It's a parody now, but give it time. Someone will create this game and put it up on Steam Greenlight before too long.

Perhaps you've seen this clip of Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert discussing potential gun control legislation and how/if video games can influence human behavior on The Colbert Report.  It's been making the rounds online through the gaming community in the past day (the gaming material is near the end of the clip).  At one point, Colbert points out that games do influence children by pointing out how many children played SimCity years ago and have since gone on to become urban planners.  I had a good laugh at that notion until I realized that I'm a perfect example of Colbert's theory.  I played a lot of SimCity as a kid.  I had the Super NES version of the game and spent many, many days off from school laying out the familiar residential, commercial, and industrial zones.  I placed power plants around the landform like there was no tomorrow.  Airports?  Seaports?  No problem.  Over the years I shifted my SimCity habits to PC and picked up SimCity 2000, SimCity 3000, and SimCity 4 along with all of the expansion packs (and I still play them; over the holiday break last month I created another thriving city in SimCity 4).  Do you know what I do for work when I'm not writing about video games?  I work in urban planning.  For nearly fourteen years now I've designed construction concepts in a large community of over 50,000 people to maximize building relationships and encourage efficient design.  I am the culmination of Stephen Colbert's gaming nightmare.  Somehow, I think I can cope with that.

It's Election Day in the United States of America once again, so if you're eligible to vote, be sure to grab your ID, charge your portable gaming gadget's batteries, and get out there to the line at your local precinct. Tonight we can all come together as a nation and celebrate the great news (by which, of course, I mean that we've finally come to the end of the glut of political advertisements and automated telephone calls stumping for candidates and policies for another few years). Whether you support Barack Obama or Mitt Romney for the presidency, I think there is one thing on which we can all agree: it would be more fun to vote for fictional characters for the office of Commander-in-Chief. Here's a conversation that the Evilcast's Chris Nitz and I had yesterday morning on Twitter in which we debate the policy issues and scandals surrounding two third-party candidates from distant lands.

No matter how tomorrow turns out, one side of the political spectrum is going to declare our country lost & we are all DOOMED! #CavemanDays

— Starven Marven (@starven) November 5, 2012

@pressthebuttons Man, how could you vote for her? Her stance on Luigi is atrocious. Also, her affair with Bowser....c'mon.

— Starven Marven (@starven) November 5, 2012

@pressthebuttons And seriously, Mario? That dude is so effing high on shrooms all the time! He'd ruin our country for some crappy coins.

— Starven Marven (@starven) November 5, 2012

@pressthebuttons I dunno man. I fear Mario would rather be on a kart or tennis court over deciding health care issues for Toadstool.

— Starven Marven (@starven) November 5, 2012

@pressthebuttons Friggin pill popper. He thinks everything is curable with a double red pill....prick.

— Starven Marven (@starven) November 5, 2012

@starven Now now, sometimes the pills are yellow, blue, or a combination.And Mario has an alternative energy policy. It's called Starman.

— Matthew Green (@PressTheButtons) November 5, 2012

@pressthebuttons Wait, if we elect Mario, does that mean Chomp Chomp gets chained up on the White House lawn?

— Starven Marven (@starven) November 5, 2012

@pressthebuttons Psh, then I am staying with the Powdered Toast Man/Sven Hoek combination. #TeamSugar #WeAreAllDOOMED

— Starven Marven (@starven) November 5, 2012

@pressthebuttons Oh like it matters. The council in Hyrule is so divided that nothing is going to get taken care of anyways.

— Starven Marven (@starven) November 5, 2012