PixlBit

Spy Hunter was one of my favorite 80s games. I knew about the 2001 reboot on PS2, but I didn't know about a lot of these other games. 

It's a necessity in Phoenix, given how sprawled out everything is here. When I work on-call, I have to cover the East Valley, which is basically everything east of I-17. We have clients in San Tan Valley and Apache Junction. 

I like it, but I wish it had save points like Final Fantasy VI does. I'm stuck on the air castle, which is a long dungeon, and the boss is brutal, so if you lose, you have to start the dungeon all over. 

Cage Match:

Chex Quest is actually somewhat competent as a game, despite being a breakfast cereal tie-in. Even the Angry Video Game Nerd admitted that it wasn't a bad game for what it is. So I'm going with that.

I will say this for Quest 64: after getting curb-stomped by FF7, it got back up and jumped into the ring. Quest 64 is the Glass Joe of video games: It's inevitably going to hit the canvas, but it never quits.

Notes from the show:

I always noticed how Chun-Li was much less banged up than the male Street Fighters when she lost. When Super came out, Cammy looked a lot more roughed-up than Chun-Li, but Fei Long, DeeJay, and T. Hawk all looked like they'd lost a fight with a blender. Game developers were, and to a degree still are, a bit squeamish about the idea of women getting beat up by men. Capcom edited out Roxy and Poison from the SNES version of Final Fight for that reason, and their other solution around the problem of not wanting to beat up on girls in FF, especially for Poison, was just as much of an "oof" moment, especially now. This despite Double Dragon having Linda as an enemy character. In Punch-Out for the Wii, they originally considered Peach for the hidden bonus fighter, decided they didn't want Little Mac smacking the Princess of the Mushroom Kingdom around, and went with Donkey Kong instead. Over on Mortal Kombat, though, Sonya, Kitana, and Mileena got bloodied and beheaded along with everybody else, while Kitana was the bloodiest character the series had seen up to that point. Pretty much every one of her moves made the blood geysers erupt. Johnny Cage wouldn't do his groin punch on them in MKII, though he does now. 

Ninja Gaiden arcade came out before the NES version, but the two version were basically developed alongside one another. Back then, developers tried to add stuff to the NES versions of their games to make up for the lack of graphical fidelity, in many cases actually improving on the arcade games. The best-known example is Punch-Out!!, which was an interesting novelty arcade game that tried to give you a first-person view with a wire-frame boxer. Since that wasn't feasible for the NES, they gave the NES version a story line, new boxers, Mike Tyson, and their replacement for the wire-frame contender was Little Mac. When they had the technology to replicate the arcade games on the SNES, Super Punch-Out sold far less than the NES Punch-Out. There's a reason why the Wii game took its cues from the NES rather than the SNES. The most dramatic difference was Bionic Commando, which was one of the best-loved NES games of all time and a short, completely busted mess in the arcades.

Oh, man, i thought I was the only one who didn't worship Rare during the N64/PS1 days. Most of their games were prettier versions of stuff Nintendo already did, and they didn't have lot of of unique ideas for gameplay (save for maybe Blast Corps), so they relied on collectathons to pad out their games. I'd have happily traded Rare off for Square, Capcom, Namco, or even just Mother 3 N64, provided Nintendo were actually willing to localize it. I just wanted an RPG that was more competent than Quest 64.

I will eventually get a PS5, but so far I'm not too excited about next-gen systems (I'm not a fan of either Xbox or Microsoft as a whole and havent owned an Xbox following my brief stint as a 360 owner.) Hopefully by the time Final Fantasy XV drops, Sony will have gotten the PS5's supply issues sorted out. Right now, though, I'm having too much fun with the Switch. I'm honestly more interested in seeing what Nintendo does next than I am in the PS5 or XSX/S.

I actually picked up Sega Genesis Classics for the Switch. I was a SNES boy, so a lot of these games other than Sonic are new to me. Right now I'm mostly playing Phantasy Star IV (almost finished it) and Shining Force II. These were hidden gems that got overshadowed by the SNES greats and by Lunar and Lunar 2. 

The last educational game I remember playing was a game called Beginning Grammar that was released for the TI-99/4A, almost 40 years ago (good God.) Kind of amazed this game made it onto the SNES, and I'd never heard of the SNES version before.

I had a school folder that had Mario and Link (designed according to the artwork for the NES game.)

No, this was pirated by my uncle in Arizona. In the case of this game that wasn't a big deal. I'm sure Herr Reiscke and Herr Wiethoff were just happy someone was playing their game. Hopefully they at least got money up front from Atari.

Then, as now, there was rampant piracy, but pirates were based on private dial-up BBSs back then.  Most of my games came on floppies with generic labels hand written in Sharpie. Almost none of them had instructions, which was a bit problematic with games like Temple of Apshai.

The Mario egg decorating kit looks neat. There's so much Nintendo-related merchandise out there now that I wish had been available whwn I was a kid.