It is a rare treat when I get to introduce one of my co-hosts to one of the stranger stories in the gaming industry. This is particularly true if the subject involves strange use of tech and the audience is Jon.

Jon had never heard of Monster Rancher. This is completely understandable, it's a late-90s monster catching game from Tecmo. It also never really got beyond a cult following outside Japan, despite getting the full tie-in anime treatment on national television in many countries.

Networks were chasing the Pokémon dollars, and Monster Rancher was the next fifth best thing.

By now you're aware that I'm stringing this out, so let's just get to the point: Monster Rancher was a PSX game where you got monsters by opening up the system, removing the disc, and replacing it with a CD. The game read the CD and used the data to calculate what monster you got.

This isn't hugely different from things like Barcode Battler, a weird Tomy-published thing from early 90s Japan. However, the extra layer is the invention of an entire meta-narrative about the discs (CDs) being ancient artefacts from God, in which he imprisoned the troublesome monsters. Most CDs just seem to give whatever - but occasionally, like Alvin and the Chipmunks' Christmas album getting "Santa," it feels as if the list was hand-built. And the builder was unhinged.

This results in the very funny visual of kids rummaging through their parents' CD collection to find John Tesh at Red Rocks to get Raindow.

Anyway, this week James gives closing thoughts on the Pokopia Bubbly Basin expansion and Jon wraps up his thoughts on Days Gone. Guillaume is reading Yoshi and the Mysterious Book and is finally getting around to playing with the cardboard Virtual Boy shell he bought in order to gives impressions of the "new" games Dragon Hopper and Zero Racers. Greg wraps New Business with some final thoughts on Splatoon Raiders. We're concluding a lot of things this week.

After a break we tackle a bit of Listener Mail. Our first task is to make Tecmo Koei's next crossover and our second asks us to examine our feelings on the return of Western developers to Nintendo systems.

You can examine our feelings here.

Reminder: Sonic Mania RetroActive is next week. Post your comments now!

• (00:00:52) New Business - Pokopia expansion pass.
• (00:26:58) Days Gone.
• (00:37:42) Yoshi and the Mysterious Book.
• (00:50:07) Virtual Boy headset novelty.
• (00:55:16) Splatoon Raiders.
• (00:59:01) Listener Mail - Dynasty Warriors (verb) a franchise.
• (01:25:01) Western devs are back! Do we care?

This episode was edited by Guillaume Veillette. The "Men of Leisure" theme song was produced exclusively for Radio Free Nintendo by Perry Burkum. Hear more at Perry's SoundCloud. The Radio Free Nintendo logo was produced by Connor Strickland. See what he's up to at his website.

This episode's ending music is "Auresco, Royal Capital" from Xenoblade Chronicles 2: Torna ~ The Golden Country. Composition by Manami Kiyota. It was chosen by Greg Leahy. All rights reserved by Nintendo Co., Ltd.