PixlBit

It's hard to think of Tak as a video game mascot because he was so closely tied with Nickelodeon.  The characters were designed by Nick execs as cross media characters, it just so happened they had games first and then a show later.  It's kind of like how Jimmy Neutron was a movie and then a show.  Tak probably failed because it wasn't making enough money for Nickelodeon.  But it must've been tough to compete with SpongeBob.  I reviewed one of the Tak games once, but I don't remember which one it was.  You climbed on giant living stone structures in it, so it kind of had a Shadow of the Colossus vibe.

My brothers showed me a Yakuza game once.  I'm not sure which one it was, but here's what happened when I played it.

"One day, a Yakuza Man went to an arcade.  He played a lot of Space Harrier and After Burner and maybe even OutRun.  After that, he met a really cute lady that worked at the arcade.  She flirted with him a little bit and helped him unlock Fantasy Zone."

And that's all I played.  Here's how I think the story ended:

"After that, the Yakuza Man decided to stop being a bad Yakuza guy and he married the cute Arcade Lady and they lived happily ever after.  The End."

One of the Taito collections has Space Invaders 95: Attack of the Lunar Loonies.  It's like the Parodius of Space Invaders.  I really like it.

I reviewed Space Invaders Forever:

http://www.gamerdad.com/blog/2020/12/15/space-invaders-forever-ps4-switch/

I've already played Guilty Gear -Strive- (sorta) so nanny nanny poo poo!

http://www.gamerdad.com/blog/2021/02/26/game-preview-guilty-gear-strive-ps4-ps5/

I've never played Rock N Roll Racing, but I've heard a lot about it.  I think it's neat that one of the Lost Vikings is an unlockable character.  

Speaking of which, Blizzard just released a "Blizzard Arcade Collection" that has The Lost Vikings, Rock N Roll Racing, and Blackthorne on it.  I sent them a message requesting a review copy, but I haven't heard from them yet.

I only wrote one blog, and it was just links to my GamerDad reviews. :)

I rented Uniracers once.  If you put in Sonic as your name at the beginning, the game says, "Not cool enough."  Uniracers was made by DMA Design, who would later go on to make the Grand Theft Auto series.  There's a rumor that the reason why Uniracers is so rare is that PIXAR sued them because they looked too close to a unicycle character in one of their shorts.  If that's true, I think that's pretty ridiculous on PIXAR's end.

I never played Blinx because I didn't own an original Xbox.

The 3DS was great.  Even though I think I liked the DS a tiny bit more, there was still a lot of good games on the 3DS.  One of the things on the 3DS that I liked that made it unique was the StreetPass feature.  Granted it wasn't made with the more spread out US population in mind, I still loved the StreetPass games and features it offered.  My friends and I even arranged meetups at places where people could get together to play StreetPass games.

I think it's interesting how many spinoffs the Dragon Slayer series has!  I never got into Faxanadu, but boy I sure did like Legacy of the Wizard.  I even owned it, which was unusual because I mostly rented games back then.  I don't think I ever beat it, but I sure had fun playing with it, especially since you could play as the pet monster who couldn't be damaged by monsters!  

I never really got into the Trails of Cold Steel games.  Just don't have time to play ALL the games out there.  So I just focus on Ys.  I've always been interested in Ys, even when it had very limited US releases and was on consoles I didn't own, like the SEGA Master System and TG-16.  So I mostly just read about the Ys games a lot.  I didn't get to finally start playing them until Falcom started re-releasing them on systems like the DS and PSP, and companies like XSEED brought them to the US.

Right now I'm currently playing Ys 9 (just finished Chapter 6).  I like it a lot more than I thought I would.  I still like Ys 8 and 7 more (7 is my favorite Ys game), but Ys 9 is still very fun.  My favorite character is Raging Bull.  She has pink hair and is really strong.  She also sometimes can't remember the names of attacks and moves, because when she shouts them out, she'll sometimes say stuff like "Shadow...something or another!"  

I've gotten my brothers into Falcom games, too, in the past few years.  One of my brothers sent me this interesting video on the history of Falcom.