Yeah, stuff like that is why I have such a hard time getting into adventure games. Text adventures exhausted all of my patience. My dad and I played a British point-and-click adventure called Dreamweb in the 1990s, it was really easy to miss stuff, and you had to do a lot of pixel-hunting on top of that. It had a great soundtrack, though.
Nintendo shadow-dropped Metroid Prime on the eShop during a Direct, and announced a cartridge version to launch two weeks after. Scalpers snapped it up. It was showing up on eBay for $80 the day it launched. However, Nintendo did promise restocks, and it happens that Walmart got restocks in my area. So holding out for a physical restock worked quite well.
I missed out on all the Xenoblade Chronicles collectors' editions. I did snag both CEs for the Switch Fire Emblem games, however. Trails to Azure is a niche title and so most of the copies that shipped on launch day were pre-ordered. Nintendo products and niche RPGs are a good idea to pre-order. I won't preorder anything else anymore. No point in it.
Definitely looking forward to Advance Wars. I'm enjoying Fire Emblem Engage immensely.
My most recent acquisitions were Metroid Prime Remastered and Legend of Heroes: Trails to Azure. Metroid Prime Remastered wasn't available for about a month due to scalpers. However, my local Walmarts seem to be getting it in stock now, so I picked it up there and am playing it now. Forgot how brutally hard the Phazon Mines are.. It would be nice if people would stop buying from scalpers, but what are you gonna do, I guess.
L.A. is only a four hour drive for me, so it's basically a weekend trip.
Shuttlecock-H. Crazy what you can find on Switch these days. We aren't living in that weird era of Nintendo that came between Hitler's head exploding in Bionic Commando and Nintendo allowing Mortal Kombat II to be uncensored after the first game bombed on SNES.
The only Amiibo I have is Toon Link, which I got for Breath of the Wild. I kind of wouldn't mind getting a Fire Emblem Amiibo since I'm playing Fire Emblem Engage. I did get one of those Mario Kart Hot Wheels, though, since they're only 5 dollars apiece. I got Luigi.
Definitely want to go to Super Nintendo World. I may try for March.
For me, Donkey Kong's bright colors and animation are what attracted my attention. Nobody made better use of color and animation in arcade games than Nintendo did. I was also there for Mario Bros and wished I could have played as Luigi more.
I had the Atari 8-bit version, which had all four levels and pretty much all the features of the arcade. Its only deficit was a somewhat limited color palette and slightly blockier resolution. Its sound even sounded pretty close to the arcade. It was partly for that reason that I never warmed up to the NES version, which had the cement factory cut out for memory reasons. Well that, and the fact that when I started playing NES, games like Zelda, Metroid, and Kid Icarus were the big thing.
The first one had a lot of old-school Capcom arcade games that I loved, like Ghosts n Goblins and 1943, plus later Capcom classics like Giga Wing. For the second one, the only game I got was Saturday Night Slam Masters. Part of the problem is that there's too much overlap with other Capcom collections. Street Fighter is already available in a collection, as are Capcom's beat-em-ups. Darkstalkers, Vampire Savior, and Super Puzzle Fighter are cool and were overlooked for a long time, but I have those in the Capcom Fighting Collection.
PS4 has been a solid console and an improvement over PS3. However, it did start out somewhat slow as far as games went. In 2017, the games started coming in heralded by Persona 5. However, that's also the time the Switch showed up, and the Switch ended up taking up a lot more of my gaming time and dollars than the PS4 did.
Stage Select:
I'd like to see Nintendo take another crack at a 3-D third-person Metroid. I prefer third-person games in general, and one of the problems with the Prime games (and I do love the Prime games) being first-person is that the format doesn't allow the same kind of acrobatics and use of power-ups as the 2-D games do. Other M had its heart in the right place. Maybe make it more open in structure like Prime and Super, and have Platinum Games, Monolith, and Retro collaborate on it. Each of those studios has something to bring to the table for a project like this. Just make sure there's an adult in charge who can put everything together without making it a case of too many cooks in the kitchen, and make it a true 3-D Metroidvania with an open world. There are plenty of templates where acrobatic 3-D action has been done successfully.
Cage Match:
Gonna go with Scott Pilgrim. It's got solid beat-em-up action combined with a bangin' soundtrack.
Suggestions for future cage matches:
Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure vs. Kartia: World of Fate. I'd love to see the listeners take this one on.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses vs. Valkyria Chronicles (1 or 4).
Fire Emblem Engage vs Tactics Ogre Reborn
No Man's Sky vs. Elite Dangerous. Or Star Citizen (snicker).
Atari 50 vs. TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection
Metroid Prime Remastered vs Hi Fi Rush (two games that were shadow-dropped by their publishers at Direct events).
