PixlBit

I had this when I was a teenager and was obsessed with it. I loved SimCity. I kind of wish I'd gotten the NES version so I could see the origins of Mr. Write in Link's Awakening. The next year my parents got me SimAnt for Christmas, which was also fun.  But I was also frustrated because I couldn't get my city's population higher than 250,000, which is about the size of Scottsdale or Glendale. My dreams of building a Tokyo-sized megalopolis never came to pass.

I didn't play a Sim game again until I picked up the PS2 version of The Sims, and in 2005 I got a laptop and got SimCity 4 for it. After that Maxis and EA went downhill. But I got Cities Skylines on the Switch a couple of years ago, and it's tied with Pokemon Sword as my second most played Switch game, behind Breath of the Wild. Cities Skylines handles traffic much better than SimCity ever did, although I seem to have ambulances everywhere on my city's freeways for some reason. And despite the fact that the city I built looks like downtown Los Angeles, its population has topped out at 170,000, about the size of Tempe. But it's still the best city sim out there these days.

Cities Skylines is a game to try. It's the best city sim out there these days, especially since EA killed Maxis and SimCity with the 5th game.

The run button probably came from Final Fantasy, where you held the shoulder buttons to run away starting on the SNES. I guess it's lucky Yakuza 7 doesn't take its dying penalty from Fire Emblem (permadeath). 

Moviewise, mostly Marvel flicks with the GF and her kids. We did watch A Quiet Place as well.

Gamingwise, 2019 was great, and September 2019 was more jam-packed than some whole YEARS. September 2019 brought Dragon Quest XI S, Link's Awakening, Ni no Kuni, and Astral Chain. It started out with FF8 finally getting released for current systems including the Switch, and with a graphical facelift (there were plenty of memes about Squall's originally pixellated face during the dance sequence.) A couple of months earlier was another amazing game, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and that one I managed to snatch up the last collector's edition at my local Best Buy.

64 is still my favorite Mario game. It was, and is, still fun to run and jump in, and I liked the sandbox lite aspect of its design.

Galaxy still looks really nice on a Switch, and I liked how they brought back some classic power-ups from 2-D Mario like the fire flowers, even though those were limited to context-specific situations. 

Sunshine is an odd beast. I skipped buying it on Gamecube, as I was more interested in Wind Waker, but I did play it at kiosks. It was definitely an experimental title, but I think it is better than its original reception indicated. 

Man, I hope Nintendo has a Zelda collection in mind for next year when rhat series celebrates its 35th anniversary in Japan. 

A lot of the stuff in Yakuza 7 is lifted from Dragon Quest, including the money penalty for dying. However, every Dragon Quest game I ever played, including the first one, did have the option to run. DQ also isn't as cut-sceney as the FF, Persona, or Xeno games. They usually try to keep things moving along, although VII had an extremely lengthy prologue where you didn't even fight a single battle until two or three hours in. 

Mortal Kombat did drop the numbering between MK5 (Deadly Alliance) and MK9 (which was simply called Mortal Kombat). It came back with X. King of Fighters XV is getting ready to release soon as well, and up until  KOF 11, those games were numbered by release year. 11 was also where they stopped doing annual iterations.

Stage Select:

1. Mostly I feel bad for the kids in my family for school. For me, personally, too much of what I missed because of the pandemic is basically First World Problems, so not really something worth going into here. I certainly haven't slowed down in my gaming.

2. I'd have to say the Hitchhiker Trilogy, by Douglas Adams (a trilogy which made it to five books before he passed away, no less.)

3. I've always been into video games. My local grocery store had Donkey Kong and Dig-Dug when I was a little kid, and the former is still my favorite arcade game of all time. I also just liked being able to move stuff on the TV, and this was back in 2600 days. The game that really made me a "hardcore" gamer was the original Legend of Zelda. I got lost in just playing it for months, and the Zelda series has consistently been my favorite game series ever since.

4. Favorite album would probably be Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, by the Beatles. 

5. Not sure about what Transformer I'd want to be. I suppose I'd like to be some kind of muscle car.

6. I buy them whenever they wear out. My friend got me two pairs of Nikes for my birthday last year, and I'm still wearing those.

Cage Match:

Final Fantasy VI still far outshines Chrono Trigger in my book. FF6 has a better story line that is long enough to really carry a 40-hour epic, a better soundtrack, and world that at least seems much more expansive. Plus I really like the cast of characters in FF6, 12 main characters plus two surprise characters. Chrono Trigger has some good bad guys, but none of them quite stack up to Kefka, who was really a standout villain who had his own evil 16-bit laugh, and Ultros provided a few moments of comic relief during otherwise heavy moments. 

2017 was the year I finally gave up on living in Baltimore and moved back west. Watched The Greatest Showman and Coco. I also got a Switch, and Breath of the Wild was the most awesome game I'd played in over ten years, I also got Xenoblade Chronicles 2. But I also liked that the Switch was the system that finally got the arcade versions of Nintendo arcade classics like Mario Bros. 

Valkyria Chronicles 4 is awesome. One of my favorites of the decade. And I understand the third wheel. I've had it done to me and also have been guilty of it myself.