Fun fact: According to Nintendo Power, Demon's Crest (which they picked as one of their 100 best games ever made for a Nintendo system in 1997 for Nintendo Power's 100th issue) sold so poorly that in one week more people returned than bought it, causing it to register negative sales for that week, in spite of all the positive reviews. Wonder what happened there.
Nintendo of America has always been rather iffy on what we get. I'd hoped that with the Wii U struggling like the Gamecube it would result in Nintendo making some of the same kind of deals for Wii U games that they did with Nintendo games. Nintendo of America got Tales of Symphonia published over here, after all. I really wish we had the same people handling NoA these days that they do for NoE. Reggie tends too much towards telling people what they want rather than giving people what they want.
Along with Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest, Tales is one of my automatic buy series.
In Okahoma, they have a sort of scavenger hunt for people into quilting which is called the Shop Hop. My mother usually participates in it. This scavenger hunt, however, takes place across the entire state and lasts for several days.
My mother is also into geocaching. I've gone on some of these geocache hunts, one of which included the childhood home of Clarence Nash, the original voice of Donald Duck, who was born and raised in Watonga, OK, and whose house is a landmark in that town.
I've beaten it thanks to how super-straightforward it is, for the most part, although it does have some clever bits.
I also liked how they managed to slip implied sex past Nintendo's censors. You can take the girl in the first village, the Princess, or both to you to the Inn (threesome!), spend the night, and the innkeeper remarks on how much noise you made last night. LOL.
Wreck-it Ralph is my favorite, it was kind of like Who Framed Roger Rabbit for video games. Other than that, my favorites are FFVII: Advent Children, Mortal Kombat, and Tales of Vesperia: First Strike.
I wasn't a fan of Tron, but I did like another 1980s video game movie, The Last Starfighter. I even had the prototype tie-in game Atari made based on the movie for its 8-bit consoles and computers that my uncle downloaded from a "warez" site in the 80s. Atari ended up dropping the movie license and reworking the game into Star Raiders II for its official release on the XE Game System.
I liked all the super-cheesy 1980s cartoon shows that were based on video games, like Saturday Supercade, H-B's Pac-Man, and of course the Super Mario Bros. Super Show/Legend of Zelda and Captain N.
Dragon Warrior on NES. However, I also played it alongside the NES version of Ultima: Exodus, which had SD Japanese RPG graphics even thought it was a port of a Western RPG and even the NES version was produced in Texas rather than Japan. I also played a couple of Falcom games on NES. I didn't play a Final Fantasy title until FFVI on the SNES in 1995.
I kind of wish Nintendo and Zen would collaborate on some Nintendo-themed tables for the Wii U version of Zen Pinball, but that's asking waaaay too much. :)
When I was a kid, I had a couple of DIY games on my Atari 130XE computer. One of them was a platformer called Mr. Robot and his Robot Factory that allowed you to make your own levels with enemies, conveyor belts, elevators and stuff. It played like Donkey Kong or another platformer from the time called Miner 2049er. The other one was called Adventure Creator, which was a game that allowed you to make 20-room dungeons with enemies, treasures, and traps. I made my own "sequel" to Zelda and Zelda 2 on it with "Link" battling the cats from Mappy, a few years before A Link to the Past Came out. Don't ask me why, I guess I liked cats and you could make cat monsters. I do remember the course creation mode for Excitebike as well.
These days I'd like to learn RPG Maker, especially since the new version with side-view battles is coming out, but that's time-consuming. I'd like to get Mario Maker, but I hope Nintendo expands the concept with games like Zelda Maker and Metroid Maker.
I always preferred Daytona USA over Ridge Racer, but given the platforms they were tied to, Ridge Racer won out. Same thing with Virtua Fighter (which I preferred) versus Tekken. The former game was a lot more polished than the latter game.
What did impress me about Daytona and Ridge Racer was the sense of speed and smoothness in 3-D graphics. It was like nothing I'd ever seen. Those games were both leaps and bounds over Cruis'n USA, which was Nintendo's/Midway's competitor to Ridge Racer and Daytona (Nintendo's real racing gem, however, was the perfectly competent Wave Race 64). I kind of miss the days when arcades, primarily through Namco, Sega, and Midway, were proving grounds for home video game technology.
