PixlBit

I actually think a small-town GTA would be a good idea, which is why I suggested Texas, as it has a lot of small towns that lie between DFW, Houston, and San Antonio/Austin. In the 2000s on 1UP, I wrote a blog about a GTA set in Texas, where I proposed that the main character be a home meth cook. This was written right before Breaking Bad premiered on TV, too. That would be a period piece, since nowadays home meth labs have been replaced with meth superlabs run by the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels that regularly produce meth of the same purity as Walt was able to produce, and if they're cut with anything, it's fentanyl.

Stage Select:

1. Vault 87 in Fallout 3. It's connected to the children's settlement by tunnels full of hissing ghouls leading up to one of the most fucked up areas in the entire game, where Super Mutants are kidnapping humans to turn them into more Super Mutants. The holotapes of the last colonists to live there add to the atmosphere.

2. The opening village areas of Resident Evil 4, where you're being chased by zombified villagers who honestly probably weren't much changed from their basic personalities by the Los Plagas virus. And then the chainsaw dudes start coming after you.

3. When I was a kid, I had a Donkey Kong-esque platformer game called Miner 2049er, which is going to be released next month as part of the Atari 50th Anniversary Collection for Switch, PS, and Xbox. In this game, you had to "mine" ores from the floors while avoiding radioactive monsters and hazards. In one level, right above the starting point, I jumped up to get a power-up and died the radiation death because I failed to notice that the power-up had glowing parts, which in that game meant radioactive, and it made me distrustful of power-ups from that point forward in the game. What made it scary is that when you touch a radioactive creature, the game makes a lot of loud digital screeching noises and your character rapidly expands and shrinks before collapsing into a puddle of goo, and it's often rather unexpected. I know that's probably not what you were looking for, but I was 9 years old and that scared the crap out of me. My fears as an adult are of a more existential nature, so if we were going with that, my scariest game would be Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life when you're dying of old age, and years of doing hospice work have kind of taken the edge off of that fear. Zombies, vampires, and the like just aren't as scary as they were when I was watching them with my dad.

Cage Match:

Much as nubile CG ladies wrestling in lingerie is entertaining, I'm going with Rule of Rose. The scariest thing about it is the price you'll have to pay to buy it off of eBay. That's why I've never actually played it. Hopefully Sega will consider remastering it for current consoles.

I had Circle of the Moon, first game I got for GBA. I have this collection and the first one. I would like to see Konami put out a Castlevania 3-D collection that includes the N64 games and PS2 games. The N64 Castlevania games were a lot better than people give them credit for. I honestly thought they were more interesting than Symphony of the Night. Legacy of Darkness looks like the vision they had when they first started making Castlevania 64. They have beautiful music. 

Konami has definitely declined as a game developer (they are actually a huge conglomerate in Japan), but they do seem to be understanding that they do have a great legacy that they've neglected. They put out great collections. The TMNT Cowabunga Collection was absolutely fantastic, and I'm looking forward to the Suikoden collection. I'm guessing Eiyuden Chronicles lit a fire under them.

In my area, there are two game stores I like to frequent. Fallout Games is my favorite of the two. They've got a much larger selection of games and some genuine rarities. I keep going there hoping to find a copy of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. I've even seen the Bally Astrocade at Fallout Games a couple of times. Game Zone generally doesn't keep anything older than NES. They also sell a lot of repro/bootleg games. One of my finds there was the Mother 3 English Translation, which is on a repro cartridge and is playable on my Gamecube through the Game Boy Player. Game Zone does have an arcade with US and Japanese machines, as well as a couple of stations set up for Smash and Tekken 7, and I think a PC setup for Fortnite or CoD. 

There's also a couple of stores in my area that sell gameroom stuff. Mostly pool tables, but they have arcade cabinets and cocktail tables, foosball, and even a skee-ball machine. 

At the rate things are going, AAA games are going to require their own dedicated SSD. 

I propose that console and PC manufacturers design future SSDs so they can be plugged into SATA slots on the exterior. We could call this new storage format something like, say, "cartridges."

I haven't had a lot of memory cards just crap out on me. The last time I remember that happening was when I was using third party memory cards on my PS1 and lost my FF9 saves on my first playthrough of that game, after which I stuck strictly with Sony-branded memory cards for both PS1 and PS2. I guess that Sony made the PSV memory cards proprietary enough that third parties didn't bother with PSV cards.

I think I have a 16GB memory card that I shared between my Vita handheld and the Vita TV. I bought a few PS1 and PSP classics, but didn't invest heavily in the Vita otherwise. While i got it for Tales of Hearts R, the only real draw for it from my standpoint ended up being Falcom's games, and those are now available in better form on the Switch.

Part of why Sony used proprietary memory cards was to try and turn a profit on the Vita, which is something they couldn't do if you could just buy an Onn SD card for cheap at Walmart. The Vita was really over-engineered for the market it was competing in, and because of that, the Vita was a loss-leader despite being expensive on the consumer end of things. The razor-and-blades model employed by Sony and Microsoft, and tentatively attempted by Nintendo with the 3DS and Wii U, can really cause a company to hemorrhage red ink if the "blades" don't cover the cost of the "razor." In the past, PlayStation and Xbox have both wiped out their entire product line's cumulative historical profits when the "blades" didn't justify the razor. Sony tried to push Vita memory cards as both a "blade" and as a "razor" to encourage digital buying. I think my PS TV cost $70 brand-new, the memory card cost $40. 

That's why Nintendo uses older tech, something they did in the 1980s as well. They want to sell their products at mass-market prices and still turn a profit. 

That COVID is no joke. I count myself fortunate that when I got it I recovered within a few days. The father of my nephew's friend who is about my age ended up in the hospital.

I thought it was some kind of sequel to Pac-Land (a game that had its own design issues) until I read up on it some years later and found out it was a point-and-click.

Awesome stuff. Here in Phoenix, we have the Game On Expo every year. I've never been. I want to go next year.

Getting a lot of Nintendo CEs is generally pure luck. They sell out quickly and then show up on eBay being sold for $300 by scalpers. No thank you.

I missed out on Xenoblade 3. I was lucky enough to snag Fire Emblem's CEs though.