PixlBit

On the N64, I enjoyed Star Fox 64 and Mario Kart 64. Goldeneye was okay, but I've never exactly been into FPSs. But 1997 was overall a disappointing year for the N64. There were a few other gems like Mischief Makers, but it was also kind of sad watching Nintendo try to do damage control for the huge game droughts the N64 had.

For me, one game really dominated 1997. It could have been the only game released that entire year and I still would have called it a good year for gaming. You can probably guess which one it is.

That was pretty neat. Now they have emulators for all those old computers. I have emulators for TRS-80, Atari XL//XE, and TI-99/4A, which were the computers we had when I was a kid before I got my first IBM-compatible PC with MS-DOS.

1996 was all about Super Mario RPG and SM64 for me. SMRPG was kind of sad as it was the last game Square did for Nintendo before their messy divorce from Nintendo. SM64 was probably the most technically amazing game I'd ever seen up to that point. Too bad the N64 didn't live up to the promise of SM64. I did get both KI Gold and Shadows of the Empire. Wave Race 64 looked pretty neat.

I remember a lot of the arcade games here. I used to see Area 51 at truck stops. Tekken 2 was everywhere, but I prefered VF2 and didn't get into Tekken until Tekken 3. Tomb Raider seemed really stiff and awkward compared to Super Mario 64. Probably my favorite game of 1996 on PS1 was the first Resident Evil, but I didn't feel any urge to buy a PS1 until after Final Fantasy VII came out the following year.

When I worked nights, I'd come home in the morning and then I could never wake up until it was time to go back to work. I didn't sleep well, either. I'd wake up a few hours later with the sun blazing in, try to "rest" my eyes, and it would be another 3 or 4 hours later until I woke up again.

Dragon Quest XI. Yes. I've been wanting a real Dragon Quest console game that isn't a handheld Monster Hunter-inspired game or a MMORPG, one in the style of DQVIII. I will probably get it on PS4, but I can also see myself getting it on the Switch as well.

I remember those days of shared keyboards on computer games. I never played Star Control 2, but it was made by some of the same people who made Starflight, a game I did play and enjoy.

Back then, I was still calling locally run bulletin board systems and playing simple games online like Legend of the Red Dragon. It was sad when they all closed down after people started using the Internet instead. I went to a couple of BBS parties in Oklahoma City where you could actually meet some of your opponents in the online games in person. The person behind my mortal nemesis in online games turned out to be a very pretty Thai-American woman (who was also 13 years older than I was, so there was no online love story to be had here, unfortunately).

Centipede was one of my favorites, along with Millipede. It was a truly sadistic game, forcing you to divide your attention between the centipede and the scorpions at the top of the screen and the spiders at the bottom. They were probably my favorite games that were originally made by Atari back then.

 When I was a kid, I also saw an Armenian made knockoff of Centipede that ran on hacked Galaxian hardware. It had the look and sounds of Galaxian rather than Centipede, and there was even a scrolling starfield in the background as in Galaxian and Galaga. The mushrooms changed colors when you shot them instead of showing deterioration. It was called War of the Bugs, or Monsterous Manouvers in a Mushroom Maze. That's how it was spelled on the title screen. I even made a Youtube video and wrote a blog about it on Pixlbit.

In KI's attract movies, they actually advertised it as running on the same hardware as what was then called the "Ultra 64" (a name they dropped because of fear of a potential copyright conflict with Konami, which had created a shell company called "Ultra Games" to sidestep Nintendo of America's limits on the number of games they could release every year). The game was made using Silicon Graphics workstations, and SGI was one of the main designers of the N64 hardware, but it was still a bit misleading of them. Cruis'n USA was a better representation of what the N64's graphics would actually look like. I believe they were originally planning to release it as a launch title for the Ultra 64/N64 when they wanted to release it in 1995 alongside the PS1 and Saturn, but the N64 got pushed back another year so they made a SNES version to try to tide people over and convince them to wait another year instead of buying a PS1. When the N64 did launch, they ported KI2 instead.

True that. I still wanted Lunar. Thankfully they remade those for a console I actually owned, and it was awesome playing them after five years of wanting them. I'd have even bought a Saturn to play them.

I played it in the arcades, too, but I was surprised at how much the SNES version sucked. It was slow as hell. I eventually bought the PS1 version at a used game store for a couple of dollars and it's a lot better.