PixlBit

I kind of wish Nintendo and Zen would collaborate on some Nintendo-themed tables for the Wii U version of Zen Pinball, but that's asking waaaay too much. :)

When I was a kid, I had a couple of DIY games on my Atari 130XE computer. One of them was a platformer called Mr. Robot and his Robot Factory that allowed you to make your own levels with enemies, conveyor belts, elevators and stuff. It played like Donkey Kong or another platformer from the time called Miner 2049er. The other one was called Adventure Creator, which was a game that allowed you to make 20-room dungeons with enemies, treasures, and traps. I made my own "sequel" to Zelda and Zelda 2 on it with "Link" battling the cats from Mappy, a few years before A Link to the Past Came out. Don't ask me why, I guess I liked cats and you could make cat monsters. I do remember the course creation mode for Excitebike as well.

These days I'd like to learn RPG Maker, especially since the new version with side-view battles is coming out, but that's time-consuming. I'd like to get Mario Maker, but I hope Nintendo expands the concept with games like Zelda Maker and Metroid Maker.

I always preferred Daytona USA over Ridge Racer, but given the platforms they were tied to, Ridge Racer won out. Same thing with Virtua Fighter (which I preferred) versus Tekken. The former game was a lot more polished than the latter game.

What did impress me about Daytona and Ridge Racer was the sense of speed and smoothness in 3-D graphics. It was like nothing I'd ever seen. Those games were both leaps and bounds over Cruis'n USA, which was Nintendo's/Midway's competitor to Ridge Racer and Daytona (Nintendo's real racing gem, however, was the perfectly competent Wave Race 64).  I kind of miss the days when arcades, primarily through Namco, Sega, and Midway, were proving grounds for home video game technology.

This is nothing new, it's just switched sides. The 1990s is when liberal "PC" started, but censorship has always been a big thing in the US. We had the Hays Code for film from the 1930s to the 1960s, which mean films were very sanitized. We also had the House Un-American Activities Committee censoring anything that was even mildly critical of government and ruining careers over it with the help of collaborators like Ronald Reagan (who was a B-list actor before he was a governor and President) and Johm Wayne. We had Jerry Falwell and Don Wildmon in the 1980s trying to censor anything they could on TV, as well as Congressional hearings on video games. This is nothing new, just a different ox being gored.

I ignored the PS1 until Final Fantasy VII came out. Didn't have any interest in Ridge Racer, Toshinden, or Tekken. I was kinda interested in Resident Evil but not Tomb Raider the following year. FFVII made the PS1 an irresistable proposition for me.

The Dreamcast I skipped out on. I bought Final Fantasy VIII on 9/9/99 instead. :)

Honestly? It probably would have crashed and burned, just like the Sega CD, maybe with a few interesting games like the SCD had with Lunar and Lunar 2. Expensive gaming add-ons like that haven't generally done well. And maybe Sony would have pulled out of the gaming market after that and let Nintendo and Sega (and maybe Microsoft) thrash it out in the fifth and sixth gens. Most gamers were still young and dependent upon parental generosity back then. My parents weren't about to shell out an additional 200 bucks for either a Sega CD or a SNES CD.

It would have been nice to see Nintendo and Sony work together on a fifth-gen console. Having games like Final Fantasy VII and Ocarina of Time together in one console would have made Nintendo dominant the way they were dominant with the NES.

Are you looking for friends on PSN? My username is Super_King666.

Ocarina of Time, Xenogears, Resident Evil 2, Parasite Eve, Banjo-Kazooie, and Tekken 3 were my big 1998 games. One 1998 under-the-radar gem I loved was Breath of Fire III.

I liked Doom 64 and Turok on N64, though my favorite games on that system were Mario Kart 64 and Star Fox 64.

Final Fantasy VII, however, stood head and shoulders above all else released that year.... and pretty much any year....

The amount of Minions stuff on social media and in the real world is mind boggling. A lot of the management offices where I work are decorated with it.