Games for this episode:

Darkwing Duck (NES)
Robotrek (SNES)
Streets of Rage 2 (Gen/Wii)
Shadowgate 64 (N64)
Battletoads (NES)

Only played game 1 (yes, I have avoided game 5 all these years). Thought the phrase was "Let's get dangerous."

Hm... my user submission wasn't used.  I wonder if I sent it to the wrong email or it was outright rejected.

:'(

0 for 5 this time, but I will say that there was some really good songs involved here. And I liked the discussion that closed out the episode. Well done.  :D

The latter seems unlikely given some of my suggestions that have been used.

I thought the first trivia was Let's get dangerous! as well. I got the fifth game after the trivia question.

Chad, I did receive your suggestion. I don't usually use requests right away, since I have a backlog and all. I'm sure I'll get to it soon :)

Glad you guys are intrigued by Robotrek.  It's definitely an enjoyable JRPG, and one that's fairly quirky in its humor.  The intro, for instance, illustrates the bad guys' villainy by showing them stomping on little children's sand castles.  Early on you can walk into the mayor's office and surprise him with his head in his secretary's lap.  The determined female reporter will pursue the bad guy all the way to the heart of his volcano base, and then let him go because he fled into the men's room, where no woman is allowed to enter.  The game's full of those moments.

In terms of gameplay, I'm not sure I'd compare it to Pokemon.  You only get up to three robots (which you must build), and none of them have static movesets:  each of them can equip something different in each hand, on their legs, and on their back, plus you can "program" combos into them, but you're always in control of these aspects.  There's a lot of customization involved, although I tend to favor projectiles in the early game and melee later on, so my robots tend to become identical.

The game shines most in its puzzle solving though.  Your character is a young inventor, so you often use simple inventions in creative ways to proceed.  For example, one of your earliest tools is a simple noise maker, which makes a loud bang.  There's a haunted house which is being explored by the bad guys.  The grunts are feeling nervous because of the ghosts, so in order to get one to abandon his post you can flick the lights on and off and use your noise maker to spook him away, thus giving you access to what he was protecting.  Simple, but satisfying.

What about a whole podcast about Robotrek:
http://www.rpgamer.com/backtrack/2010/backtrack013.mp3

Man Robotrek sounds cool  Wish it was on virtual console.  Shadowgate64 and that other game Zach mentioned for n64 sound interesting.  Great to have a lot of obscure stuff mentioned.

Also glad to see someone else listens to RPG backtrack.

Thanks for the additional info on Robotrek, noname2200 & mjafyx!

You, sir, are amazing!  Will listen when I get home.

Backtrack rocks, I won their Castlevania contest :P I really appreciate having an archive of deep discussions on games that I enjoyed or would like to someday play.

I do think there is plenty of room to improve Backtrack. They often have too many hosts; I think I counted seven once. The audio quality gets pretty hairy, some hosts are very sleepy because of geographical diversity, and those radio dramas... oh god, the radio dramas.

And if they do another 4 hour special on Super Robot Wars, I'm going to find each host involved and slap them in the face.

Yeah...I really don't care for those radio dramas at all; however, they have made me wonder whether Mike or Phil were responsible for the "Team Rocket" calls that RPCast was getting last year.  Those were actually very well done.

There's one other thing: when the hosts talk about high-profile games of the past (e.g. FFVIII), I notice that the conversations are sometimes unbalanced...some of the hosts just had a natural tendency to focus on the things that make them hate the game, despite Phil's best efforts to keep the discussion objective. :D

This is either a bizarre coincidence or some kind of deep sub-conscious realization, but while the Robotrek music was playing, I started to think that I should pick out Robotrek sometime for Radio Trivia. Of course, I had no idea that's what I was listening to at the very moment. In any case, I have fond memories of the game from when I rented it in the mid-90s. It's one of many excellent Enix RPGs that should be on Virtual Console but, for whatever reason, has not.

Not to derail this thread too far, but Phil is the one that commits the worst sins of unbalance, to the point where he will not-so-jokingly threaten to kick someone off if FFVIII is their favorite.

ALso, Robotrek is something I have wanted to try for quite some time, but don't really have a way to do so.

Fair enough.  It's actually been a long time since I've listened to an episode of backtrack, so it's entirely probable that I'm misremembering.

Back on topic, it's amazing how great all of those NES-era Capcom/Disney collaborations were.  I never got around to trying Darkwing Duck, though.  As Zach states, I could have sworn that the third song came from a Megaman game.

By the way, TYP, what is the largest listener request backlog you've ever had?  Got a ballpark number?

Somewhere in the fifties, Sundulous. I have 38 right now, plus others from staffers. Mind you, I tend to skip over requests that I cannot honor or am not super interested in using.