387 - Sesame Street Big Bird's Hide & Speak

Sesame Street, Big Bird's Hide and Speak. Big Bird talks and plays with you. And... And welcome to Nostalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. We're back. It's a sunny day. Everything's A-OK. And we're making our way back to Sesame Street. If you guys could just tell me how to get there. I don't know. I've never.

I've always heard the song asking me to tell them how to get there, and I've never been able to. Yeah, they don't give the directions in the song, do they? Well, they don't want a lot of people going there and bugging the... The actors and everything, and Big Bird tries to live a private life. Actors? I mean the real people. Yeah. Bird. Yeah, sorry. The bird. The people really do live there. The Muppets go home.

Oh, okay. I see. Where do they live? I don't know where they live. I think they live in like gigantic condos like facing Central Park. Even Grover? Grover lives... Grover's homeless. Yeah, I don't know why I was going to say Grover lives in Dover or something stupid like that, but I'm glad that I didn't say that. Grover's a stray. He wanders.

What is Grover anyway? He's like human, right? He's a purple. He's a dog. He's a dog? Is he not? His name's Grover. I know, but are you sure, though? So was a president. He doesn't look like a dog. Yeah, he was a dog, too. Oh. First dog president. That's true. He did have that dog in him. He's like an air butt of the 1800s. Or is Grover just like a monster?

I guess what we're all saying is there should be another NES game, Sesame Street, Big Bird Teaches You Directions, where it's like, you know, you learn about North, South, East, and West and never eat soggy watermelons. And, you know, that's how you find out how to get to Sesame Street. What was it about watermelon? That's how you remember. Northeast, Southwest, like in that order. The acronym, never eat soggy watermelons. N-E-S-W.

Ah, I've never needed that. Did you know that NES is in the compass? That's like a little bit of an Easter egg. What's the... Why'd they get written a W? Because it's a JRPG.

Ah, yes. Not a WRPG. We're striking out here. I'm really just flying by here. Let me get into the game. This one comes after the other two, which taught us about the alphabet and the numbers. Canonically. Yeah, it's very important that you know the alphabet and the numbers before you try and speak to Big Bird, right? That's true. If you don't know any of the letters, how are you going to talk? You do need to know the alphabet before this game, so that checks out.

And so this game, I think, comes by the same people, High Tech Expressions and Rydell Software Productions. But more importantly, this is an officially licensed Sesame Street thing, and it is licensed by the Children's Television Workshop. Street actually has a role in like the educational part of this game which you have to imagine is a big sell for parents if they're trusting kids to watch it on television and teach them that way they're probably also trusting them to

teach them at home rather than go to grade school, right? It's just like, all right, you're homeschooled now. Boot up the NES and start playing Sesame Street Big Birds Hide and Speak.

And Big Bird is in the game, but more than just as a sprite. It features his digitized speech by the actual actor of Big Bird, Carol Spinney. I think it's Spinney. I'm going to go with that for the rest of the episode. And that's... seems like a big deal and it is a lot of digitized speech but I just want to set the record straight because Sesame Street is lying to us on the box of the game but this is not the first and we know this it's not the first NES game with digitized speech

It's not the first, certainly, but is it the best? It has really clear visual speech. It has such a wide, like, it's so much more than everything we've heard before instead of just like a... uh in a sports game uh whatever like right tech mobile had like first down touchdown you know yeah but like not only is it all very clear but it's very clearly big bird's voice

And that's kind of impressive to me on the NES. Yeah, so maybe that is actually the deal, though, right? Is that there's some voice acting behind it. They didn't have the terminology back then for it. What they mean by digitized speech is really like... They didn't just teach a computer to manipulate the synth wave or whatever to make the sounds. It was actual Carol Spinney saying these things and then recorded because I believe...

I have this somewhere down later in my notes. I believe that there's a special chip. It uses a speech chip, the VRC6, to actually have all that extra speech playback. Otherwise... you couldn't do this on just a normal NES cartridge. It also must have been so much data compared to everything else that the game is. Yeah.

And the game is aimed squarely at preschoolers. It's an edutainment game. It's a memory game. Are memory games like part of edutainment? Or is this like, do you learn anything from that? I feel like you do. I don't really. It trains your brain in some way. Yeah, I think. Whether you're learning something correctly. One might think so. I mean, I guess, like, if you're going towards a preschool market, then you can't really.

teach anything. This is more so just like make sure that they have object permanence. Right, right. And in the game you play, really as yourself, but I guess as like a friend of Big Bird. You're like visiting Big Bird and you... roll up to a house on Sesame Street, and you have to help him find Elmo, Ernie, the Count, Grover, who are in the... I guess it's like...

What is that? Is that a co-op? Is that an apartment complex? That's like the Sesame Street house, isn't it? Right, but I mean, do they all live there? Is it a boarding house? Do they all have their own bedrooms, or do they all have their own floors? It's a tenement. Cool. You said that pretty definitively, so that's Sesame Street lore. Yeah. They live in a tenement. And there's no real story. It's just a, you know, set of...

increasingly tricky mini-games designed to teach... Well, they do... I mean, okay, we'll get into that, but I think there's actually... This gets hard kind of fast for the audience it's aimed at, but it's really just teaching basic word recognition, the memory skills that I mentioned above with the memory games. And I guess also it's teaching like...

listening skills right like you're being told by big bird find me ernie and so you have to you know also not only understand like the later things where it's like you know who has the who had the word bat but also like who is ernie yeah so it's like it's like simultaneously trying to teach kids but also sneakily trying to indoctrinate them into becoming Sesame Street fans. While they learn their letters, they're also going to understand our IP. Very important.

distinction there, Joe, because you're right. There's no rolling opening credits where they're like, this is Ernie, this is Elmo, this is Bert. Maybe not at the very beginning, but in the game, they say, here's Ernie. Here's the count. Here's Grover. The very first mode, they do an introduction. Basically, it's just like, do you remember their face? Can your brain... process a face. So yeah, I found this really great. Stupid idiot. Yeah, as long as you've played in order...

it introduces you, um, at least, well, I guess it doesn't introduce you to everyone. Cause in mode one, it swaps out. There's like a rotating cast member. So like in a mode one, you've got like Ernie's not in it.

But Elmo is. I think it's kind of random. I think, yeah, I think Ernie could be in it. Okay, so then either way, though, mode one, if you're just playing one game at a time, mode one teaches you four of their names, and then you move on to mode two, and it could be a different... combination of four people yes which doesn't help i agree uh but

More importantly, before we get into any of the minigames and modes and everything, you guys probably won't admit that you're wrong. And to be honest, that's fine. But this game resurrects and... definitely proves my point about the D-pad mending system in the other Sesame Street games and blows it up so hard that like there's no i i would love to hear the devil's advocate but now they have made it even worse because the the the time

It takes to watch the bird. So just for what it's worth, the way it works is no matter what, in the other Sesame Street games, no matter what you did, if you hit the up arrow, the down arrow, the left arrow, it didn't matter. Whatever you hit. It was just going to do the next thing, the next option below it until it hit the bottom of the screen and then it would go in reverse.

clockwise so now it's going counterclockwise and going counting back up and you know we had some debate about it whether that was smart or not for kids because apparently it's supposed to teach them something but it can't teach them about how the actual controller works god forbid Now the game says, well, hold on a minute. What if we made it cute and we have this bird that, you know, is like a, I don't know, what a...

Big birds like little friends or whatever. And he flies from window to window to select your choice. Because remember, you have to say who Ernie is. And so you see Ernie out of one of these four windows. But you can't just... If your cursor's on the top left and he's in the bottom right, you can't just press right on the D-pad and down on the D-pad because that will only select the next possible option for the bird. But it won't even do that in a particular order that makes sense. It goes...

It's clockwise. Yeah, well, sure, but, like, it's not... I guess it really didn't matter at this point because they botched it so bad. But you have to watch the bird fly to the destination as you select your things. You are forced to wait at least a second, maybe more. Between these options, and then if you don't want that one, it'd say that you know it's the fourth option, you must press the D-pad four times to get the bird to hit the correct screen. What's going on here, fellas?

So what you said, and I agree with you, this is much worse than it was in the other Sesame Street game. because the other Sesame Street game was just the menu, and it was a straight line, and there wasn't some weird animation for it. Those are the three things that make me agree that this is bad, but without those three things, it wasn't that bad in the other ones. So it's...

In this, it's definitely bad, especially in the main gameplay and it being this weird circle, not a straight line, and it having an animation. The other one, it was just completely, like, it was unintrusive to me. It was just a thing that it is. It doesn't bother me.

It's fine. I agree on every count. Alright, and we're not talking about the other games, so we're not going to open up that can of worms again. But you brought up the other game. Yeah, you brought it up. We're not going to talk about it. You wanted to re-litigate it.

I don't really want to do that, though, because I actually have a lot to say about Big Bird's Hide and Speak. Usually I would do that on a filler episode. Sure, no problem. But we haven't even gotten into the six game modes of which... It's like, I guess the idea is that one is the potentially easiest mode and six would be the hardest, but they change it up. So it's mostly...

One is introducing a concept and then the second one introduces like the memory element of that concept. So first you have to find the character that Big Bird names. And in mode two, you have to find the character by memorizing where they were after Big Bird says their name. Or in the following two modes, you have to find the letter that Big Bird says. And then in the next stage, you have to find the letter by memorizing where the letter was after it disappears.

Then you have to find the full word. So not just a letter, but an actual word, usually like bat, cat, easy words like that. And then obviously in the... toughest iteration of that you are once again just memorizing where they are before they uh vanish from the screen uh i just want to i don't want to talk about the i don't want to talk about the like um individual modes versus one about that concept of like

First, you have the mode where it like the easy mode, right? Where it says like, you know, where's Ernie? And it shows you Ernie out of the four potential options. And then in the other mode, it says, where's Ernie? But you just see four closed windows and you have to remember where Ernie was before the windows closed. What do we think about that? I think that basically like it's games like these that.

I really have to self-reflect about what we do this podcast for. That we are actually playing a game meant for babies. And trying to have a... a conversation about it and it's really hard to, to, to speak in an entertaining way about something this, this very basic. And yeah, I mean, I guess like to answer your question, I think it is. It's a good difficulty curve for a baby to go from just recognize this face to here are some letters.

Here's a time trial and spell as many three-letter words as you can. I think that given the constraints of the game, it seems to be a pretty good... system. Yeah, I mean, I think it's also even tougher because none of us are parents. I feel like it would be easier to review this game if we were parents. Where it's like, oh yeah, I could see I could see a parent in the 90s being, you know...

giving this to their kid and being like, oh, okay, this is going to teach you stuff. I feel like nowadays, this is, you know, obviously would be buried by the fact that everywhere you look, there's something that can do this. And there's probably a lot more like... developmental data backing it all up but exactly because i think right now the just how educational this could be like i think it's dubious

They really didn't know if this was going to be helpful or not to kids. Yeah, I think what they know is that it could work for kids. Not necessarily teach them, but it could be played by kids.

yes and after you complete any of the modes by successfully revealing all four characters or letters or words Usually what happens is one of the characters that was featured in that particular game goes outside and does something. So Elmo puts in a stick of gum and blows a bubble that lifts him up in the air.

Bert takes out a jump rope and starts doing jump rope. And Ernie paces back and forth before going back inside. What was that about? Is that all he does? He just kind of walked from left to right. No, he's got a skateboard. He's got a skateboard. Okay. It's easy to miss because it just appears out of nowhere. But isn't Ernie, like, kind of always, like, not, he's kind of upset most of the time? That's Bert. No, that's Bert, yeah. Oh, well, same thing. Yeah. Ernie's the happy one. I see.

Happy. That's all I'm going to say. But what does Bert do? Bert does the jump rope. Oh, yeah. I guess the pacing back and forth was more the character I would have imagined. Yeah, but, you know... Now that I know it's a skateboard, that's fine. But I like my joke better. Did... Did you guys know that Elmo was new at the time? Kind of interesting to see him show up here. He's already popular, but he was a late 80s addition to the cast where most of the cast is from.

the early 70s. So he looks a little different, right? He looks like a little... lankier? Taller, yeah. Yeah. Also, his thing, like, blowing the bubble and floating up into the air, his is kind of, like, a little scarier than the others. He just starts, like, floating away, and then he falls banging into the walls on the whole way down. And then he just trots away with his lanky, weird self. I think the weirdest part about all these is I don't... From what I remember of the show...

I just don't remember them being able to walk around in a way that looks like they're supporting their own weight because they're puppets. Yeah, you're right. You never see their feet. That's why they all look so weird. And it is a little disconcerting.

You do see their feed if you go to Sesame Place, though. Oh, okay. I've never been to Sesame Place. Isn't that weird? Why can't they just fucking call the amusement park Sesame Street? It has to be a whole place? It just feels like bad brand recognition. one other thing of these animations that bothers me this this bothers me on all kinds of animation and i feel like i've seen a video about why this happens but the count when he juggles

That's not the way juggling looks. He juggles and the balls all go in a circle. And I see that in cartoons. That's just not the way juggling looks. The balls will just go in one big circle. Why don't... They juggle where the balls cross each other. Are you a juggler? I mean, I have juggled. Because I feel like a professional juggler could make them go in a circle. But that's...

You can't go lower than your hands and have them still come up. Like... I don't know. Look up a video of someone juggling and see if, you know, like... You'll see what I mean. They don't go in a circle. They crisscross each other. I feel like going in a circle is easier than juggling. You just hand one over to your other hand over and over again. Is a professional juggler a juggalo? Yes, definitively. That is the professional term, yes.

And while Sean debated whether Sesame Street's Big Bird hide and speak, which is a fantastic title, by the way. I don't want to blow by that. Hide and speak is really cute. The hiding is only a part of one of the six. No. Three of the six, really, if you think about it. The letters are hiding. The words are hiding. I mean, the words are hiding within the letters that you have in front of you at all times, so I don't know. The letters are in front of you at all times?

I played all of them, and I'm pretty sure the only ones that the window closes... Okay, maybe there's two where the windows close. I thought it was every other one the windows close. No, because the last one, the windows are always open, and you're just trying to... make a bunch of words. Oh, right, right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, sorry. So hiding is maybe a third of the game. Yeah, I feel like hiding is like, it's a stretch, or, you know, they're taking...

They're being very liberal with the term hiding, where it's like, yeah, hide and seek, but you can see them all, you just gotta figure out which one is which. If they wanted to be... Yeah, if they wanted to be more reflective of the content, it should be... Sesame Street Big Birds Hide and Speak and Spell. But I guess they might run into some issues with speak and spell in there. Yeah.

But the same people, Rydell Software Productions, also made Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. And we've all used that. So, right? Did you guys use that in school? No. Mavis Beacon? I did not sound familiar. Wow. Okay. So Buffalo just didn't just have keyboarding class. Yes. I had a keyboarding class in middle school. And honestly, it was probably like the most.

frustrating class I ever took. I hated it. Because they tried to teach you how to use your fingers in a way that it was like, well, I can just do it faster this way. Yeah, right. I remember there was a program. There was a program that we used. that if you typed the wrong key at any point, it would delete your whole sentence.

And that was the most frustrating, because then you were timed. So you had to go as fast as you can, and you type the wrong key, it deletes your whole sentence. And I would be so pissed off all the time. That's a lot of stick and not a lot of carrot. Mm-hmm.

Now, let's bring up another great edutainment game, Donkey Kong Jr. Math. Great. Phenomenal. Yeah, well, of course it's great. On the gameplay side, big birds hide and speak, right? Very simple. You press a window, you hear a word, you see a face. I guess the idea gets, you know, more complex, but that's the general idea. Donkey Kong Jr. Math. It's based on like Donkey Kong Jr.'s platforming mechanics. But then the math like either...

You want to be able to do it faster, but you have to control Donkey Kong Jr. the way he controls in Donkey Kong Jr. So it's like, I guess Big Bird is, by process of having... less permutations and you know even though the bird takes forever to get across the screen like just less controls like you you could learn faster in Big Bird's Hide and Speak than finding out even if you got the math right in Donkey Kong Jr. Math. Yeah, I guess just to clarify, the little bird...

that is sort of hanging out around the building is basically your cursor. And I think that especially in... And I keep going back to... this sixth level which is that time trial like it actually kneecaps you because and going back also to being able to move in one direction You have to sometimes like go through like three or four rotations around the windows with this goddamn bird to be able to actually spell this three letter word that.

I don't even know how many words you could spell in the allotted time because most of your time is going to be spent watching the goddamn bird fly. Yeah, and it bugs me. I know it doesn't make any difference, but it bugs me that... to go from the top left to the top right takes like a second, but then to go from the top right to the bottom right takes like four seconds. I'm just like, why is it longer? I mean, it's more distance, but it's just poorly designed.

And then on the replay value side, right? Like, Big Bird's Hide and Speak, probably low replay value unless you're an actual toddler. But like for Dunyong Jr. Math, it's also low, but maybe because it's also like just the...

The time it takes to get into the game, like, again, being Donkey Kong Jr., it's like, on the replay side, I guess everyone is the loser, but Big Bird, like, seems to know that it's a... babysitting game and not really like an arcade hit like did it's almost like if pac-man had like you know this is the pac-man control and you gotta move them around the maze but you're just eating

like the letters to spell things out that it wants, you know, like spell tent. And then you have to go collect the T, the E, the N, and the T in that order around the maze. It's like, I'd rather just have the keyboard and...

press the T-E-N-T buttons than be Pac-Man doing it. Yeah, I guess that's also a part of it. You know, a part of... why i think a lot of these early edutainment games are more so just an excuse uh like a a like a pr campaign to say like see this isn't just brain rot right yeah Well, for the record, when I play regular Pac-Man, I usually wish I just have a keyboard and I just hit the period like 140 times. Ah, yes. Just type in a high score. Yeah. Yeah.

So was this game genuinely like a good use of NES tech for edutainment or is it a gimmick? It's so hard with these. It's just so outside of what we're looking for. We're obviously not the demographic in the sense that we're not toddlers or parents. And we're not in the 90s. I just...

I mean, I guess. I don't know. It depends on how well it's sold. I don't know. I don't think anyone's going to be like, this is amazing. But it's like, oh, is it a product that you bought for your kid and it worked in that sense? Then maybe. Yeah, I think that its stated intention is not fully honest, but it's the actual reason that a parent would maybe buy this, which is to distract a child while you do something else.

Because it can say words and names. It probably did its job. Right. So does this count as a video game or is it more like interactive flashcards? I think it's still a video game. I think it's a pretty wide... I think it's a pretty big umbrella term. And obviously, more NES games would have benefited from the special chip, the VRC6. But, like, could you think of one that, like, if it had...

Digitized speech with voice acting that would have been... Metal Gear. Why not? Great answer, Sean. I think if you just had a bunch of those chips stacked on top of each other, you could have done... Like some of the, you know, the long RPGs, like with full voice acting, a good like 20 years before that became really popular. Like, that'd be pretty cool.

And obviously this whole podcast uses the VRC6 chip to present any of the audio. Without that chip, you wouldn't be able to hear our voices right now. It's true. And you wouldn't be able to hear me say that it's time for...

The Essential Games List. I don't know where Big Bird's hide-and-speak even, like, I don't even know where it lands on the Sesame Street NES video games, which is interesting, but like... I guess what I was laying down with the Duncan Young Jr. math argument is just that like at least Big Bird's Hide and Speak isn't pretending to be...

an arcade game that that adds extra steps to the learning and it just makes it about learning which is like to everybody's point here on the podcast annoying for us to do an episode like this but For the actual audience that it's intended for, at least at the time, do I think anybody owes their education to Big Bird's Hide and Speak and it helped them with something? No, probably not. But...

It at least set out with exactly what it wanted to do. It did it with minimal conflict other than the stupid bird cursor. But the bird cursor is completely unforgivable, so it's not essential. Joe?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm going to lean towards that rare not applicable vote that we put out there once in a while. I mean, if I did just vote it normally, yeah, definitely not essential.

I do think we're giving it too little credit. Nobody learns anything from this game. It does let kids practice spelling and recognizing their letters and whatnot. Spelling, that's still something. There's still like... you know, whether or not, like, they're actually, like, learning how to spell from this game, no, but, like, it's always helpful for a little kid to sit down and practice a few, you know, get four letters and they gotta make a three-letter word.

out of the three letters that match, I've got to imagine that's a good exercise for a kid. But that's really, I think that's the only part of this game that does something like that. The rest is only simpler, and I think it is largely just a distraction for kids. Which, nothing wrong with that. But yeah, this is just hard to vote on other than the sense that obviously this is not essential. So I'll stick with that. Sean? Yeah, I'm gonna...

Keep on with the not applicable. And instead of explaining that in any kind of conclusion way, I'm just going to take this time to thank the listener for, I guess, leaving.

this on during this I know that they're like well I don't know what you expected out of the essential games list vote for a game like this but I hope you're like folding your laundry or or being productive uh because nothing of note was going to happen in this section well we can come back into the normal sections where we just shoot the shit And I'll let you know that there is one more NES Sesame Street game available to us. And it is Sesame Street Countdown. Wow.

DDR-like where you play as the Count. No. But Countdown's again. Very cute names. Obviously, these people are the masters of wordplay anyway, and that's how they keep learning interactive, but, like, you gotta hand it to them. Hide and Speak. Countdown. Countdown is definitely the most, like...

cool sounding of these Sesame Street games. Sesame Street Countdown? It sounds like Sesame Street Reckoning or something. It's just like a crazy 15th sequel. So I'm imagining that this is a... a the count special in which math is the majority of the game oh most definitely okay cool cool so it's like kind of we already had one two three yeah we already had counting Yeah, but the Count, though, this is his time to shine. Can't we get a Sesame Street Civics edition?

right well I mean I feel like economics yeah that's like the hidden thing in all the episodes right Sesame Street's like super woke and teaches people things like without realizing that they've taught them anything at all Is that in this game? I think it's actually in the credits. That it's like, oh, this is 90s woke. It is kind of 90s woke, right? Because people are living in the city. And I was told that New York City is very violent. . . . you