Too bad this didn't come out in the US. The NES had a lot of quirky RPGs on it. As a whole, the SNES and later consoles had better RPGs, but NES RPGs were pretty unique and varied for their time.
I expected it to go for $500, and I never expected to see one there at all. Astrocades are super-rare, and they were arguably the best consoles out at the time from a technical standpoint. They were sold only by mail-order when they were originally released.
No, I jumped into Super SFIV because Virtua Fighter 5, which was my go-to fighter until them, dried up online. It lasted longer than I thought it would, LOL. I haven't played SFV at all. The reviews have kind of deterred me on that, plus I have no shortage of other fighting games to play, like Mortal Kombat X, KoF XIV, and Guilty Gear.
Spirit Tracks had the same control scheme as Phantom Hourglass when you were on the ground. The trains were obviously different from the boat in PH.
I never played Intellivision growing up. I might have seen a few Intellivision games here and there. Apparently it was a lot more sophisticated than the 2600. Its controllers were a bit weird, but that was normal for then.
The one old school video game machine I always really wanted was the Bally Professional Arcade (later repackaged as the Astrocade after Bally sold its game division off). That system had a lot of really good home versions of Midway arcade games like Space Zap and Wizard of Wor. I actually saw one on sale at Fallout Games in Phoenix for $180. I didn't buy it though. :(
Of this batch of games, I played Spirit Tracks, SFIV, and Bayonetta. By 2009, I had switched from the 360 to the PS3, with some Wii gaming going on.
Like you, I wasn't a fan of the touch screen controls of the DS Zeldas. I liked Spirit Tracks better than Phantom Hourglass.
SFIV was pretty fun, and I played it quite a bit online, especially since the online community for VF5 had dried up a couple years ago. I think I played Super rather than the vanilla version though, so that may not count for 2009. But Capcom gonna Capcom, you know?
Bayonetta, now that was awesome. It blew DMC out of the water for me and the Bayonetta games are still my favorite games in that genre. I'll probably get Bayonetta on Switch along with Bayonetta 2. I actually had the PS3 version, which was supposedly worse than the 360 version although I think they'd patched it a few times by the time I got it.
Other games I liked in 2009 were Demon's Souls and Dragon Quest V on DS.
The Wonderswan actually seemed like a good portable system. Squaresoft supported it quite a bit with remakes of the early Final Fantasy titles. It's too bad that the WonderSwan, WonderSwan Color, and Swan Crystal never came out over here.
P5 was my favorite PS4 game of the year along with FFXII The Zodiac Age, though my overall favorite game of 2017 was Breath of the Wild.
I've never seen a physical copy of Nights of Azure 2 in the wild. Kind of thought about Fate/Extella, and I loved Bayonetta 2 enoiugh that I am considering double dipping on it for the Switch.
My physical collection is currently limited to BotW, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and Puyo Puyo Tetris, which is surprisingly fun but also frustrating. Digitally, I have Mario Bros (first game I got for the Switch, believe it or not, I'm excited about having Nintendo's arcade games on the Switch), Strikers 1945, World Heroes, Romancing SaGa 2, and Celeste (which is a really tough platformer in the vein of Super Meat Boy). I bought Celeste in part because a close friend of mine is named Celeste, LOL.
I hear mixed things about the SoM update. A lot of stuff they took out and changed didn't sit well with people, and I hear that the remixed soundtrack sucked, but you can use the original version. I hope that the Mana Collection comes out in the US, because I would like to play an official localized version of Seiken Densetsu 3 on my Switch.
I liked the aesthetic and story of Bioshock Infinite, though it was about as convoluted as any JRPG. The gameplay didn't quite match up though. They overpromised on a lot of things during development. The Boys of Silence were hyped up to be big-time enemies that appeared in a lot of areas in the game and stalked you by tracking your sounds, but in the final product they ended up being little more than security camerals. I also thought that the game would be more freely explorable than it ended up being. The dynamic between Booker and Elizabeth was well-done, better than in most games involving escort missions.
Good luck on the job hunt.
