Why sleep when you can watch a new Game Sack video?

The Wacky Races games released by Future Pirates on 3DO only in Japan are because of Iwao Takamoto, who created some of the Hanna-Barbera characters, in fact some of the Hanna Barbera cartoons that he was involved were popular in Japan. It did come out in English but on PC and Mac.

Fun fact, I was actually an extra in King Kong Lives. It was shot in Tennessee and a friend of mine's mom was dating someone on the crew (can't remember his title) and he got my friend and I in one scene with a bunch of other people all of us "running in fear" from Kong.

"If this game were better then it would suck less than it does." True words of wisdom from Joe.

The Snoopy/Peanuts franchise is HUGE in Japan. There's a Snoopy attraction in Universal Studios Japan, a Snoopy museum and a ton of official Snoopy store. They were even used in advertisements for MetLife in Japan until 2016. Thunderbirds also still has a following too, since it got manga and the animated series Thunderbirds Are Go is brodcasted on TV there. Thunderbirds: The Anniversary Episodes got a Japanese TV release being supervised by Hideki Anno of Evangelion fame. Fun fact: The late Thunderbirds creator Garry Anderson wrote for an anime series called Firestorm in 2003 that lasted 26 episodes. It failed to gain a huge audience, but Gary's son Jamie made a pilot for a Firestorm reboot on KZfaq in 2019. Also, Terrahawks was originally supposed to be a Japanese anime in association with Tohokushinsha Film Corporation (the Japanese film company who would own the Japanese rights to Thunderbirds since 2015), due to the success of Thunderbirds in Japan. Thunderbirds 2086 is just an edited English dub of the anime Scientific Rescue Team Technoboyger and is not canon since Garry and his wife Sylvia Anderson were not involved.

Lol, that "Hello You" killed me 🤣 Larry, get out of that body!

If you ever run out of Japanese exclusive, there's an entire plethora of American properties turned into UK exclusive games too!

Batman cleaning paintings is... Oddly fitting for nowadays. He was trying to warn us from the future!

The lady name is Bonnie Barstow and the elder man is Devon Miles. They both worked for the Foundations in the Knight Rider tv series. As for the game itself, i quite enjoyed it. Better than the NES and Ocean version during that era. You don't have to constantly hold down the d pad to accelerate as it drives on its own (As what KITT usually do) and you have to only worry about steering it. Fun Fact. When you reach Stage 5, you have to lose on purpose because the boss is too powerful for you to beat. Then , your car is upgraded which allows you to fight the final boss.

3:15 NEW Ghostbusters II also came out in Europe and there's a North American prototype too.

Very much enjoy the “BLOW ME DOWN” screen transition in the popeye board game

The female mechanic in Knight Rider is named Bonnie Bairstow and was played by Patricia McPherson.

The idea of using Woodstock as the mouse pointer in that Peanuts game is super cute.

Pepsi Man would've made a great mail away game in the USA. They should've done something like cut the Pepsi points off your 12 packs. Mail, like 10 of them in for a copy of the game. It is definitely an above average title for a mail away title. Probably would've boosted Pepsi sales, too.

I am absolutely incensed over your review of Super Back to the Future II, a game I had no idea existed.

Very nice to see the Peanuts game covered! I bought it a few years back for cheap because the music is great and I believe composed by the same person that did the music for Earthbound 😄

New ghostbusters II saw a european release so it was not left in Japan entirely. It just didn't see a US release😉

Thunderbirds had a renaissance here in the UK after a well publicised and high-quality repeat from 1992, which would fit with a 1993 game. Of course the question why a Japanese dev and why not a release in the West are beyond me. It was definitely a phenomenon at that time though, a run on toys lead to a special of children's magazine show Blue Peter detailing how to make your own Tracy Island.

Even the Japanese version of the SNES PopEye game has that weird mosaic effect.. it's the Sea Hag casting a curse or some such nonsense..

One thing I noticed that was strange on the Snoopy game is that it was produced by Mitsui Fudosan (三井不動産) and Dentsu. Mitsui is a real estate company here, and Dentsu is a marketing company. Seems like an odd combination to make a game. And yeah, Snoopy is somewhat popular here in Japan. Not extremely, but enough to keep a following.

This is an instant classic episode! The combination of familiar IPs with rarely seen games makes it a winner.

Lenar is an author, ie game developer. They didn't make many good games, but Gunple Gunman's Proof was a great one at least

5:03 Damn, Joe dishing out the spooks.

New Ghostbusters 2 was also released in Europe for the NES. Great game.

Man, Joe has some good taste in music. I caught that rare cut from the sf3 new generation soundtrack, the ibuki bonus AST.

Spiderman swings with the L & R buttons. If I remember correctly you have to hold them down. It's still bad though. No boshi

Imagining an excited Japanese game voice over saying Peanuts characters names is great. Peppaminto Pattiiiii!

I am constantly surprised what western franchises even make it to Japan. Some just seem too… "native" to bother exporting. But hey, you never know…

I remember Thunderbirds being common in the US in the 80's. Reruns were on various channels like Showtime, and in video rental places.

You definitely need to read a guide or manual for the Popeye SNES game. As the game does not tell you anything whatsoever unfortunately. Anyway you got stuck because enemies on the board can steal the heart from the stages as well. So if you collect all the hearts you saw and nothing happened, that mean one or more enemies got a heart or two. And you need to fight them get those back. Bluto/Brutus will appear somewhere on the board if you got all the hearts on the board and serve as a boss fight. The items also has a use on the board! like "Fly" item will make you able to move anywhere, "Axle" double the amount of the dice roll number (or a roulette in this case) "Frog" make you only move 1 or 2 spaces. And items like "Bomb" and "Zap!" will deal damage to a random enemy on the board so it'll be quicker to take them down when you fought them. It's an interesting game. Board game nonsense aside, I think there's fun to be have. Though Popeye fans will probably get the most out of it.

Id love to see an "obscure Batman games" retrospective compilation, maybe showcasing all the plug and play Batman games, the lesser known ones out there etc...that would be an awesome episode for Gamesack to cover..just an idea

Thumbs up to the Guru Larry ref at 30:08

8:56 So this was the character that you played in the Konami Wai Wai World game on the famicom. For the longest time, I thought it was Donkey Kong but that was impossible because he's Nintendo, not Konami.

Joe, Wacky Races got a European PS1 release (SLES-02468), released October 19, 2000. Good but pretty darn hard to find. Source: The Sony PlayStation 1 Sanctuary Channel & Museum (Willow Grove, PA)

We got that Ghostbusters II in Europe too. I had that game and I LOVE IT.

In Spider-Man Lethal Foes, you need to use L and R buttons for web swinging

Popeye: Tale of the Teasing Witch Sea Hag This is why we love you Japan 😂

I mean Super Back to the Future is still better than any of the ones we got but that was already a low bar.

Nice Guru Larry homage. I think Wrestling With Games did a stream where they played Pepsi Man. It is just a running game with some quirk

I spent an entire summer overseas when I was young, and lucky for me, had access to a Family Computer, which when I heard about, was not very exciting. I freaked out when I realized that a Famicom was a freakin' Japanese NES… but "weird" to my American sensibilities (the mic, the wired in controllers, the cart shapes). I played the hell out of King Kong 2 despite not knowing what the hell the story was about. It's a great game, and the sometimes eerie soundtrack plus the language barrier made it all very mysterious. I also got to play all sorts of things that didn't make sense to me, like the original Super Mario Bros 2 (not the Americanized version), and the Japanese version of Star Wars, which was even more insane to my brain. I came back to the US and no one understood what the hell I was talking about when I tried to explain this stuff to them…

22:52 --- Bonnie Barstow. KITT's personal Maintenance Technician. She was kidnapped by KARR in the episode Trust Doesn't Rust and he forced her to give him a laser that was meant for KITT.

" Big spider swallows the different types of cows" - I want that on a T shirt

I need another 'Left in Arcade' episode.

King Kong 2 for the MSX has always been a game that intrigued me. Hlave always wanted to try it. & yeah, that Django guy did a ton of basic translation jobs for many MSX games, thank god for him. I actually bought an old Panasonic MSX2 unit a while back that I haven't really messed with yet along with a Carnivore2 cart. One of these days I'll break it out & give it a try.

Thank God many of the games featured in this ep stayed in Japan. Happy Halloween Game Sack et all.

A big reason Google Translate doesn’t work great for old games is that they often can’t use kanji due to resolution. So the word meanings rely more on context - something Google Translate struggles with even more than usual.

That air plane dropping bombs in Knight Rider Special is certainly a reference to the After Burner easter egg/cameo in OutRun, a game Knight Rider Special already seemed very inspired by graphically.

MSX2 can do scrolling, even horizontal scrolling if you jank a bit with the screen adjust register. But for some reason, the developers were mostly allergic to it.

Popeye is still a big thing in Japan, they even have Men's magazines named after him 18:57 Rambo picking up flowers is so movie accurate LOL

Woah. I haven't seen this channel in almost a decade. What a trip. Mad respect for you man, and I wish you well.

5:54 lol how relevant nowadays. Could you imagine Batman coming out to beat up the punks that threw the tomato soup to the paintings and then proceeding to clean them up.

Now I wanna know how many games based off of Japanese IPs were left here in the States or "across The Pond."

30:04 Spot on Guru Larry there!

I always hated when people say the old Gameboy was black and white. It was green and gross green lol

In fact, having lived in Japan for over 3 years, I can confirm that every known platform has tons of great Japanese games released only for the domestic market. They were not released outside of the country due to the fact that they could potentially be unsuccessful for Western audiences (as my Japanese friends explained to me).

"You remember being British back in 1965 and watching Thunderbirds on TV?" No, but I remember being British in 2002 and watching Thunderbirds. It was popular for a long time

It's weird that Popeye Volleyball never came to the states, but we did get the sequel DOAX Volleyball. Funny how life works.

Glad to see that mcdonald's game on the game gear. It's a pretty good game

Thunderbirds was still popular and on tv in the early nineties here in the Netherlands. There were also action figures.

Finally, I have an excuse to call Spiderman for those bees in my lawn.

Popeye 2 is some dumb fun, I like it for a quick playthrough. Upgrading your fist to get all huge and eventually shoot cans of spinach is fun, the breakable blocks, it's a nice little Game Boy platformer ppl don't usually talk about. As always, I wanna see you go through the 3 Ganbare Goemon PS1 games that are 2D platformers, I really love those games(there's a fourth 3D platformer as well).

I love these left in Japan episodes. Good work!.

They could have called that Batman game "Heiankyo Mr *Ass* Special" and no one would have been the wiser, because other than the character sprite, there's nothing Batman about it.

Thunderbirds also had a Japanese exclusive Gameboy game, and there was a 2nd Snoopy game on Gameboy in japan: Snoopy no Hajimete no Otsukai (snoopy's errand adventures), which made good use of the Super Gameboy.

Always love me some game sack. This indie game studio thanks you :D

In Spider-man you can swing with L and R triggers. I think the game is fine, you can skip the stages easily with the swinging. XD

Im just here for the 2 second long Guru Larry impression. HELLO YOU!

There is a fan translation patch for Snoopy Concert. I recommend it as point and click games are near impossible without dialog.

90% of Japanese games have "No" in the title

17:56 Peanuts has a massive following in Japan. They love Snoopy over there.

Am I the only one that automatically thumbs up the video because I already know its gonna be good?

Kudos to Game Sack and Joe Redifer. I really enjoy this channel. Your ever growing body of work is amazing. Long live the Sack! 🤘🎮🤘

30:09 he had to do it. We know he did

That was thoroughly enjoyable, Joe. Thank you.

It would be nice to see Dave with you in a video with you for a anniversary episode whenever that is

"If this was better, it would suck less than it does." Truer words of wisdom have never been uttered.

Wow the PC Engine batman has the best track from the NES version. Straight to playlist

20:05 It's time for Joel to make a REALLY big jump!

I love this series

As a Canadian living in Tokyo for the past 5 years, peanuts but mostly Snoopy is huge here.

25:20 the music in the game labyrinth is a certified bop.

Perfect timing! Just when I'm about to sleep! Boom! Best episode yet!

What is going on at 5:03? If you pause the video at the point where Joe flashes, his skin has been all filled in with some kind of weird photoshop brush, but his shirt and lips remain untouched. It stays for two frames and then his skin cuts back to normal. There is some kind of garbled text to the upper right when the odd effect is on the screen but it's hard to make out and I can't read it. Judging from the effect this basically has to be intentional, as it took masking and painting. So it's either a gag or a setup for a spoof that was left in on accident, but it's not image corruption or compression artifacting or anything like that. It almost looks like he masked out his shirt and lips and then went over his skin with a semi-transparent clone-brush sample of his hair? Weird.

Japan... The cradle of whatever that exists can become a game (if you check some old games, you'll see that I don't lie)

1989.... My A500. :) I didn't buy a Genesis, because I spent all my money on college tuition and my beloved Amiga. :)

i will never stop watching game sack

The greatest channel ever!

Snoopy/Peanuts is big in Japan, I saw lots of merch, toys, books and such while I lived there.

For the time Pepsi man is revolutianary, it is the first runner,long time ago before the smartphone games like Temple Run or subway surfers.

Just some trivia; Miyamoto fucking LOVES thunderbirds. We probably wouldn't have Starfox without the show.

I could swear I'd seen a few of these in old Nintendo Power issues I read at a library.

There are some pretty intense flashing lights in the Airwolf segment that starts the video, so lookout for that.

Thank YOU for making Game Sack. I have watched your show so many times and for so long I can't help but remembering the first "Left in Japan" episode, and how you were wondering if there'd be more...

Why not consider that Batman PC Engine game for a “Better on 8 bit than 16 bit” episode? Such an episode could also include: Donkey Kong (Atari 2600 vs Intellivision) Blaster Master (NES vs Genesis) Darkwing Duck (NES vs Turbo Grafx 16) Talespin (NES vs Genesis) Ultima (Master System vs SNES) Aleste (Master System vs SNES) Race Drivin’ (Game Boy vs SNES) Jurassic Park 2: The Chaos Continues (Game Boy vs SNES)

The Game Boy capture on Popeye looks more authentic than anything I've seen aside from a camera shot. Very cool!

OMG! Thunderbirds in the back! "Thuderbirds are go!"

Betting Im not the first one to comment this, but Ghostbusters 2 got released in Europe, and was pretty popular! 🙂 Just because something didnt get released in the US doesnt mean it "never ever left Japan". 😉

/31:29 Is that timer supposed to look like NIXIE TUBES?! How often do we see THAT represented in retro games?

LMAO...the Japanese making Winston blue is somehow not the most racist thing they did in an NES or Famicom video game.

Wow the music in that Batman PC Engine game sounds amazing