It will be kind of sad, but Martinet earned an honorable retirement, and he will probably still do Mario's voice in an official capacity at Nintendo events. I kind of wonder if they want to have a more fully voiced Mario, but it's a lot harder to do it with the exaggerated Italian accent nowadays, as was lampshaded in the Super Mario Bros. movie.
1994 was a great year. I played Mortal Kombat II at the arcades every chance I got. I got a SNES for Christmas that year bundled with A Link to the Past, and I also got the SNES version of MKII. DKC looked pretty good. I later played Final Fantasy III (VI) and Super Metroid. My dad and I played Doom II and Heretic. I remember my parents playing through The 7th Guest in 1994. I played some, too, but the SNES was what held my attention.
My favorite 1994 game overall is Super Metroid, which is still one of my favorite games to this day.
Wizardry 6, 7, and 8 are all on Steam and GOG.
I actually enjoyed Trials of Mana. I thought its combat was smoother than SoM. The collection also has FF Adventure (Mana 1). I recently picked up the 3-D remake of Trials of Mana as well. But everything considered, that's a solid collection of games. I just wish they'd included Sword of Mana, which was a FF Adventure remake that was actually done by one of Nintendo's subsidiaries at a time when Nintendo and Square Enix were trying for a reconciliation.
I actually broke down and bought the cartridge version for Switch. It's an Asian version, but it supports English.
Ah, dang. I'd kind of have enjoyed a pinball meetup, LOL.
Stage Select:
A side questhas to be fun and not full of BS. The rewards you get for completing it, depending on how enjoyable the side quest is, can go either way. Giving a good reward to a fun side quest makes it even better. Locking a good reward behind a BS minigame increases the BS factor exponentially.
For that reason, I stuck out chocobo racing in FF7 long enough to use a gold chocobo to get Knights of the Round, Mime, Quadra Magic, and even that one crappy materia that's basically Square giving you the middle finger for raising the second best chocobo.. Ths racing and chocobo hunting wasn't hugely full of BS, especially using the racing cheat and a lot of save-scumming.
The Anju/Kafei sidequest from Majora's Mask is a great sidequest that tells a pretty complete story. The only downfall to it is that a lot of it is time-sensitive, so if you screw up something, you have to start over. But if you play it on Nintendo Switch Online, you can use save states.
The Chocobo Hot/Cold sidequest, on the other hand, is complete BS, especially for how tedious it is and given much stuff is locked behind it.After not finding anything in that miserable little pond after an hour of trying, I gave up. In terms of BS. Chocobo Hot/Cold smells like the Amarillo stockyards along I-40 on a hot day, and ranks right up there with The Spirits Within as one of Square's worst ideas. If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome.
Cage Match:
Going with Castlevania as a fan of the series. But I will say that, for a licensed character who has primarily existed as little more than a mascot for decades, Mickey had some pretty decent games.
Shining Force is on Sega Genesis Classics (NS/PS4/X1) and on Nintendo Switch Online, as are SF II and Phantasy Star IV.
I'm playing Etrian Odyssey sporadically, which is the closest analogue to Wizardry I can think of in recent times. Wizardry IV has an interesting story. Woodhead and Greenberg made it insanely hard, and it sold poorly. Robert Sirotek, the former president of Sirtech, said that people wanting ultra-hard games "would have to get their pleasure somewhere else." and they brought in D.W. Bradley for the next few games. He even did an interview on Youtube on the subject.
I have DQV on DS, and believe me, I've held onto that one through thick and thin. Not only is it one of my favorite Dragon Quest games, but it's worth a lot of money. As I always say, my video game collection has done better than my stock portfolio.
Yeah. It's not too hard and not too easy. It also has a lot of supplemental material.
