PixlBit

I really enjoyed 2018 in gaming. A lot of my favorite franchises got sequels, and my GOTY is a toss-up between Valkyria Chronicles 4 and Dragon Quest XI. My GOTY for past games is Donkey Kong on Switch, the first time my favorite arcade game of all time got a home release in its original glory.

FFXII is an amazing game. I bought it new on PS2 and took a day off of work for it when it came out, I bought it again on PS4. And what the heck, I'll probably triple dip on it when it comes out on the Switch (I plan to get all the Final Fantasy titles on Switch anyway.)

I also got Okami HD on Switch. I had the original on PS2 the year it came out (which was the same year FFXII and Twilight Princess came out, 2006 was a great year).

Celeste was a surprise hit. I was also one of many, many guys on forums noting that I got Celeste because my SO is named Celeste, LOL.

Congrats on the platinum! The only platinum I've ever gotten was for Final Fantasy VII on PS4. I wanted to get a platinum in Valkyria Chronicles but that game is hard to platinum. I haven't actually played DQXI yet even though I really want to. I picked up Valkyria Chronicles 4 instead.

Vanguard was one of my favorite old-school games. My best friend rented the 2600 version years ago (before we started playing NES games). When my dad got my mom an Atari 130XE, my uncle sent me boxes of pirated computer games on floppy disk. Vanguard was one of them. The 8-bit version of Vanguard was great, and it was almost better than the arcade version. Vanguard was the first scrolling shooter I saw where you could fire in multiple directions, and it was also the first game I ever saw that had a continue feature.

Time Soldiers was at a grocery store we shopped at when I was a kid. My friend claimed he read somewhere that one of the stages was in Disneyland where you fought Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, and other Disney characters. Of course, that was nowhere near true. I also remember seing P.O.W. a few times.

Athena came about at a time when I was super into Greek mythology as much as I was into Hyrule. She looked a bit like another NES goddess, Palutena (which was actually a Japanese misromanization of Pallas Athena.) That game is super-hard on both the NES and in the arcades, though.

Atari just released a compilation on the Switch, with all the games from all three Flashback Classics on one cartridge.

There was one game on this collection I remember playing when I was a kid, it was called Final Legacy.

Stage Select:

It's hard to believe this gen is already 5-6 years old. Overall, despite its slow start, I've been happier with this gen than I was with 7th gen, in large part due to the resurgence of Japanese publishers in the US and the decrease in the number of brown-tone FPSs. 

The PS4 has been a solid console with a thoroughly rounded library of games, kind of like the PS2, and still getting games. Hopefully Sony won't go into the 9th gen with the same kind of hubris that caused the PS3 to struggle and nearly took down the Japanese gaming industry with it.

However, ever since it came out, I've spent most of my gaming time on Switch. Breath of the Wild is probably my favorite game released since the turn of the century, except perhaps for another Zelda game, Twilight Princess. Even though this has been a relatively soft year for Switch, I've still found plenty to play on it, and next year looks fantastic. Nintendo is coming full steam ahead, and we're still getting great third party games like Mortal Kombat and Doom, Dragon Quest XI S, and almost every Final Fantasy game released from the PS1 onward. I'm even finding myself choosing the Switch for multiplatform games. The Switch even has a lot of Nintendo's arcade catalogue on it, including Donkey Kong. I haven't loved a piece of gaming hardware this much in 15-20 years. It's almost like discovering the NES when I was a kid.

I've pretty much skipped Xbox this gen, so I don't have much to say about it. The 360 was fun when it wasn't having hardware failures, but this gen most of the games I like are on PS4 and Switch.

I guess you won't be surprised that I went out and bought the DK arcade ornament. DK is my favorite arcade game of all time, and the arcade machine is probably my favorite cabinet design. I always wanted the Coleco Tabletop Donkey Kong when I was a kid, and as an adult I wouldn't mind having a full size DK machine even though I can play the original DK on Switch, which I still do regularly.

The original Link ornament was a pleasant surprise and I picked that one up too. My Christmas trees from childhood on have never had simple colored balls. My mom made all kinds of felt animal ornaments when my sister and I were growing up. They're now over 40 years old but my family still has them.

Your pretend present is a Jr. Pac-Man arcade machine.

Ocarina of Time was quite the game in its time. It was fun roaming through a 3-D Hyrule, and it had quite a few memorable characters. The dungeons were good for the most part, though the Water Temple sucked.

To me, however, it showed off the limitations of the N64 more than anything.The power-ups in general didn't show to as great form as I would have liked. One exception was the Hookshot, which was implemented very well in Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. I was also a bit disappointed by the enemies in the game. I remember the Zelda 64 prototype showing Link battling Octoroks in the forest, only to have those enemies in the final game be little more than water-dwelling Deku Scrubs. Most of the enemies were very simplistic. Majora's Mask rectified some of this because of the Expansion Pack. Hyrule Field was also very skimpy compared to the overworlds in either the older 2-D Zeldas or the later Zeldas on Gamecube, Wii, and Switch, and for me, the overworld is as much a part of Zelda as the dungeons are. Ocarina of Time was originally made when Nintendo had hoped to have a higher-capacity storage medium in place and it seems like a lot of stuff had to be cut out for the final release. That wasn't all bad: A lot of that cut content turned out to be enough to make another complete Zelda game, Majora's Mask.

So I'm a bit torn on the N64 Zeldas,  They were impressive at the time, but the Gamecube Zeldas were leaps and bounds above the N64 Zeldas IMO, with faster and more intelligent enemies and more expansive game worlds. I would look at Ocarina of Time today the way I look at the original Zelda compared to A Link to the Past. I prefer the improvements that later games and better tech brought, but you can't deny the pioneering work done by the earlier games, either. I

Stage select:

1. Beating the original Legend of Zelda before my friends did.

2. My first ever playthrough of Final Fantasy VI, I was fighting Atma Weapon (last boss of the World of Balance), he wiped out all of my party members except Mog, who was stuck in Dance mode where you can't control him. I went off and made a sandwich figuring I was screwed and not happy about it because it took so long to get there. I get back after eating my sandwich and Mog is doing a victory dance. I'd won the battle.

3. Beating Dragon Quest VIII with my wife, who I'd just married at the time. We played together along with my stepdaughter.

I know gamefying academia has been a topic in recent years. I used to play Oregon Trail a lot when I was a kid, who didn't have the fun of dying from dysentery or having a tombstone saved on the disk that other kids could run across?

I guess that maybe we could have Civilization VI as a teaching aid for history class. We could have Cities Skylines for American Federal Government to explain taxes and public policy. The Fallout series could be used as a teaching aid for the Cold War. I'm pretty sure my mother ate squirrel on a stick and told me about how Roger Maxson encountered the vats of FEV at Mariposa Military Base, right?

I'm actually halfway serious about Cities and Civ VI. I learned a bit about local government and public policy from playing the original SimCity when I was 13, as well as resource and waste management. Of course, now it's Cities Skylines because EA killed SimCity, which they then befouled.

And I'm sure I'd definitely pay attention in class if my teacher were dressed like Tifa... I'd pay attention, and... uh... I should really be saddling up now.... oh, found the fire door...

I liked the giant horse in Zelda. I managed to ride my horses off of a cliff a few times.

I haven't picked up RDR2 yet. Rockstar's sandbox games generally aren't my cup of tea, but I like playing with the physics engines they have in them (my favorite things in GTA 4 and 5 were getting into head on collisions in fast cars and watching my character get thrown through the windshield into oncoming traffic and causing more wrecks and deaths).

I kind of wonder what was like to be the guys who had the job of designing the horse testicles. Or the guys in charge of programming the horses taking a shit.