PixlBit

As I mentioned on Twitter, I am behind on all my podcasts because I've been home so much lately. I haven't even started this episode yet  but I do love music Stage Selects, so I wanted to get my picks on.

Stage Select:

I have not played Ys VIII or, sadly, any Ys games (I don't even have any in my sizable backlog!) but I would play this game just for this awesome music. It's so happy and energetic and upbeat. This is one of those songs I can listen to as an extended youtube video and not notice as the time flies by.

This, actually, is my all-time favorite song. Not Melodies of Life from FFIX, though that version is very good. I mean this solo piano arrangement specifically. I'm not sure why it has always affected me so much but even as a self-important stoic high school student, this song always gave me the feels and still does. It's just so beautiful. What's espcially cool is that the sheet music is freely available online and back in the day I could play the first half of the song on the piano...before it got too difficult lol.

Cage Match:

I have never played either of these games in the arcade (I'm more an X-Men kind of guy myself) but I have played the NES port of the Turtles arcade game and so I'm gonna go with that. So as I see it the Turtles step into the ring and mistake with the residents of Springfield...wherever...for grotesque mutants because of their yellow skin and proceed to beat the crap out of everyone. It's over pretty quick.

P.S. That picture is amazing!

That was such a cool boss! The bosses in that game are by and large quite good, other than the one you fight while running on the highway. Not a fan of that one.

I would not have patience for MM Zero 1 if not for the extra checkpoints! The levels have all been quite short but I can't imagine playing through them again and again while trying to learn the boss patterns.

The online in EDF 2025 is definitely very finicky! There have been nights where my group would get very little done because of the online problems. 4.1 on the PS4, I assume, is much more stable.

It's often ridiculously on sale, so you haven't got much to lose.

I think your enjoyment of Sonic Mania is directly proportional to your amount of nostalgia for the Genesis Sonic games. I first played Sonic 1 in the early 2000s, so my nostalgia is very small.

I'm still surprised how many previously untranslated games are in that Double Dragon/Kunio Kun collection. That's really cool.

*sigh* I've been meaning to play this game for years now and just haven't gotten around to it. Too bad it's so difficult. I do love that Treasure weirdness though.

Oh yeah, it is definitely made for co-op play!

Last night I wanted to play something like Broforce, a game that is just stupidly fun. I looked and looked but couldn't find anything else that my wife and I could play together that seemed to fit the bill, so we went back to Overcooked, which has a similarly chaotic feel even if the gameplay is very different. We still could not beat the same level we were stuck on before (this insane lava level), so we tried one of the DLC episodes and plowed through several levels before going to bed. Sometimes fun is not about having a challenge. Sometimes that's what you need.