PixlBit

Origin Systems experimented with that concept in the 90s, especially with the last two Ultimas they made before they sold the company to EA, but the playtesting was an expensive nightmare for them and the games yielded little profit to show for their troubles. I imagine those issues would be orders of magnitude more problematic now.  Garriott tried to replicate that concept online with Shroud of the Avatar, where they claimed you could be an adventurer, a local artisan, or anything else you wanted in the game world. I wonder if you could role-play as a harlot.  Sadly, it fell quite short of its ambition, met a similarly lackluster commercial reception combined with a chilly critical reception after six years of development (at least from the time it was announced) and he ended up taking the game FTP before selling it off to one of his colleagues and retiring from game development. On a grander scale, Garriott's former employee/rival Chris Roberts has collected almost half a billion dollars in crowdfunding for Star Citizen, also with very little to show for it after almost a decade.  That's part of why RPG video games try to stay focused on staying within a narrative. Such projects look great on paper, but in practice almost always fall victim to feature creep and a sense of feeling unfocused.

Probably the most successful game that approximates that kind of role-playing is not an actual RPG, namely Grand Theft Auto Online, which allows you to try and create your own brand of mayhem on the streets if you don't want to participate in missions. Even then, most of that ends being the same kind of stuff that ends up on Arizona news sites when some random fool decides to start trouble at the local Circle K. 

These are all great games. I'm thinking of picking up the entire Parasite Eve trilogy. 

It had very limited retail exposure in a crowded field dominated by Warner Communications (Atari). I'm also not sure how it did on pricing. The 2600 was about half the price of the Intellivision at the time, which helped it achieve a greater degree of mass market penetration. I'm pretty sure Bally was more expensive than the 2600. It had 28 games through out its lifespan compared to about 200 or so games for Atari. 

I first learned about the Bally system through Jeff Rovin's book, the Complete Guide to Conquering Video Games. It was published in 1982, so it covered the 2600, Intellivision, Odyssey2, and Bally along with most arcade games and some computer games. He seemed highly complimentary of it. The first time I ever saw one or the games in the wild was at the aforementioned Fallout Games store. I should have bought it then.

"Hate" seems like an extreme reaction. While it sucks that Sonic's famous speed is a liability in many parts of his games, they're still great games, for the most part.

I also remember catching a few episodes of the DiC Sonic cartoon where the hedgehog was voiced by Jaleel White, who was best known as Steve Urkel. He sounded more like Stefan Urquelle in the cartoon. 

My dad got a TI-99 computer. It had a lot of clones of popular arcade games such as Munch-Man (Pac-Man), Car Wars (Head On/Dodge 'em), and TI Invaders (Taito could honestly have sued over that one), as well as unique titles like Tombstone City, and in its later years it got official ports of arcade games through Atarisoft. I also had the tape recorder and remember typing in BASIC programs and saving them. It was kind of interesting listening to the digital noise pattern of the cassette recorder as games loaded and saved. I later wrote a few text adventure games for the Atari XE. My mom had a subscription to ANTIC, which had a lot of type-in BASIC programs for the Atari XE, though it also generally included these programs on floppy disk.

I really enjoyed the SNK Collection. I used to play Vanguard a lot on Atari, and one of my grocery stores had Time Soldiers back in the day. Athena is brutally hard in the arcade and on NES.

The Atari 8-bit line (400/800/XL/XE) had a lot of games, and I'd call it the second best gaming machine of the 80s, after the NES. It had RPGs, adventure games, action games, and most of the same ports that the 5200 did. I liked the XL/XE version of Donkey Kong better than Nintendo's NES version, in part because that was one of the few versions to have all four levels in it. Most home versions omitted the Cement Factory level, including the NES version.

And the best part was that you could play all these great games with a standard 2600 joystick instead of the horrible 5200 joystick. So the 8-bit line was basically what a really great version of the 5200 would have been like. And later on, I found out that Genesis controllers would work perfectly on the Atari 8-bit, since they both have the same 9-pin connectors.

Anyway, those were suggestions if you wanted to stretch this out to a twelve-part series.

There were a lot of intermediate systems that came out in the middle of a generation that don't fit in with the big dogs of the generation and didn't match the power of the following gen's mainstays. In the 80s and 90s, those systems came from would-be rivals, but over the last ten-15 years they've been mid-generation refreshes from the Big Three.

Examples would be the Atari 5200, which came out around the time of the Colecovision, so the CV and the 5200 could be seen as a mini-generation between the 2600, Intellivision, Odyssey2, and the Bally Astrocade. The Atari XEGS, which was an Atari XE repackaged as a console, and the 5200 itself was based on a simplified version of the architecture thaf powered the early Atari 8-but computers; it very was easy for hackers to port 5200 games to the 8-bit computers. Atari's third gen entry is generally considered to be the 7800, which was outclassed by the NES and Master System. The CD-I, 3DO, and Jaguar, which were positioned as more powerful competitors to the SNES and Genesis, yet were badly outmatched by the Saturn, PS1, and N64. The Wii U, which was not as powerful as PS4, X1, or the Switch. The PS4 Pro and the Xbox One X. The Switch itself is competing against the 8th and 9th generation Playstations and Xboxes. 

The Spring Yard Zone theme was my favorite track from the game.

I think that in some ways I enjoyed Sonic's first couple of outings every bit as much as SMW. One of my gripes with the series was the fact that there was so much emphasis on running and speed - blast processing, baby - yet the level design hindered that speed because you'd run smack into lethal obstacles before you could react, and a lot of levels simply weren't conducive to running. When it came to areas requiring tight platformong, that's where Sonic's weaknesses compared to Mario would really show. Sonic was simply nowhere near as responsive as a Mario game, and one of the things I love about SMB3 is that the controls are near-perfect. And that was an 8-bit game, not a 16-bit game. Sonic never really achieved that.