PixlBit

Mario's (and to a lesser degree, Link's) designs really do follow a similar path to Disney's design, with DK and Mario Bros Mario looking a lot like early Disney. SMB illustrations looked more like his modern depiction though it still had the vestiges of the arcade era, somewhat like Disney during the Golden Age. SMB 2 set the basic designs of the four main heroes in stone, and Super Mario Land's box art is the earliest I can remember seeing Mario's permanent color scheme.

 Link's artwork got more elaborate, and of course Zelda has varied art styles compared to the uniform appearance of Mario. I got a Hallmark ornament of NES Link a couple years ago. I appreciate the steady mechanical and QOL improvements Zelda has made over the years, especially starting with A Link to the Past, but I'll still go back and play the NES games. They have their own magic.

Mario Bros was based on Joust by, Miyamoto's own admission. He liked the cooperate/compete aspect of the game, and no doubt his boss, Mr. Yamauchi, was excited about possibility of quarters and 100-yen coins rolling in two at a time instead of one.. Not only that, but Iwata's first game was Balloon Fight, which was Nintendo's version of Joust. And a few years later, at HAL, Iwata led the development of a NES version of Joust. 

Yeah, Mario Bros may not have allowed you to directly hurt the other play like Joust and Balloon Fight did, but you could really make your friends mad at you with a few creative jumps and uses of the POW Block. A lot of the comments on the video do reference Car 54, but who knows whether their knowledge was first- or second-hand.

That would have been weird having Chuck E. Cheese playing, though maybe it would have been less weird then than now. When I was a kid, we went to Peter Piper instead of Chuck E. Cheese since we lived in Arizona. Do you remember Showbiz Pizza?

So AC is Von Kaiser to Quest 64's Glass Joe?

And yeah, the Dreamcast Dragonriders game was definitely no Skies or Arcadia or even an Evolution: The World of Sacred Device.

I'm a fan of the Dragonriders of Pern series, which you mentioned during the podcast. There were at least two games made based on that series. The first one was released for computers in the early 80s by Epyx, and was a mixture of RPG, strategy, and shooter (during the Thread sequences.) The second one I know of was the one released by Ubisoft for the Dreamcast. I wish they could get a developer that is actually good to work on the series.

On the Sephiroth intro, here's the thing: in the few battle scenes that take place, you actually can't control him, you can only control Cloud, who is pretty much along for the ride. Sephiroth is AI controlled. The dragon usually KOs Cloud, and Sephiroth may or may not cast Life 2 to revive you. Even when he's on your side, he's too powerful for you to control. It's like the opening of Dragon Quest 5, where your five-year-old hero is under his father's watchful eye. Only Cloud is a grown-ass man (he's 16, which is too young to enlist in the US Armed Forces) and he's supposedly a member of an elite special forces unit.

Did Assass Creed lose even worse to Mario Odyssey than Quest 64 did to FF7?

Always warms my heart to see a Sakura Wars fan. 

I can guess at least a couple of your top 5 composers. 

I keep wanting to go to Disneyland, since I only have a 6 hour drive to get there. I went there when I was 5 years old. Do you go to Six Flags Over Texas a lot?  

But did it have an ad campaign like this? Nintendo seriously needs to do a game called "Kirby's Bar Fight." I'd buy that one for sure.

Man, that flooding sucks.  It seems like Hurricane Ida hit the Northeast as hard as it hit Louisiana and Mississippi. I hope you are safe, along with a certain gray-haired gamer in Mississippi. We even got a couple days' worth of rain from Ida here in Arizona. 

Probably through marketing and focus groups. Feedback from arcade owners might be like, "hey, this Centipede game really seems to have a lot of girls playing it, we don't usually see a lot of girls here."  By that point, video games were definitely skewing male, between the number of shooting and sports games and games like DK that had male heroes.