PixlBit

In the 80s, Popeye, who had originally appeared in Elzie Segar's Thimble Theatre comics as a supporting character in 1929, was at the peak of his popularity, with a new wave of cartoons, a movie starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, his own line of canned and bagged spinach, and even a licensing deal with the otherwise unrelated Popeyes fried chicken chain. An awful lot of American, and Japanese, children had grown up with Popeye over the preceding few decades. With that in mind, Nintendo wanted to use the Popeye license to create a video game. At first, however, King Features Syndicate refused to license Popeye to a then-unknown Japanese toy and game company, and instead, Nintendo would be forced to develop its own characters, which would lead to the creation of Donkey Kong, and Mario. As Garth Brooks once said, some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.

So, I've started channels on Twitch and YouTube, as The Low Effort Gamer. I bought a capture card and cobbled together a bunch of other stuff I had.

My gaming dance card is filled up at least until next summer, when Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom launches.

These past few months have been shaping up towards being rather hard on my gaming budget. There are too many upcoming games that I really want, and me being me, I'll probably end up getting all of them even though I am currently working my way through the Xenoblade trilogy. Incidentally, unless Bayonetta 3 really, really knocks it out of the park in October, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is likely to be my GOTY.

How primitive were graphics in video games in their early days? Some games didn't even have graphics. Instead, these games had textual descriptions of your environments and the on-screen action. You interacted with these games using a command prompt. 

In the summer of 2000, I needed a new game to play. At that time, I was still a PS1 gamer. Being a RPG lover, my two choices were Square's Chrono Cross and Valkyrie Profile, a game from a resurgent Enix and Tri-Ace, makers of Star Ocean: The Second Story from a year prior. Of the two, Valkyrie Profile looked more interesting, so that's what I went with. And while I did later play Chrono Cross, I wasn't too impressed by it. But Valkyrie Profile went on to become one of my favorite PS1 RPGs, and considering how many of those there were, that was pretty impressive.