PixlBit

I thought it was some kind of sequel to Pac-Land (a game that had its own design issues) until I read up on it some years later and found out it was a point-and-click.

Awesome stuff. Here in Phoenix, we have the Game On Expo every year. I've never been. I want to go next year.

Getting a lot of Nintendo CEs is generally pure luck. They sell out quickly and then show up on eBay being sold for $300 by scalpers. No thank you.

I missed out on Xenoblade 3. I was lucky enough to snag Fire Emblem's CEs though.

Stage Select:

1. The Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. It's not the objectively worst level in gaming. I could dig up some real bullshit levels from obscure games dating from the dawn of home video games. It's more that it was a weak part of what was otherwise arguably the single most amazing game of the entire generation. Ocarina of Time didn't have great swimming mechanics, which would have been fine except that this level threw the game's issues with swimming into glaring relief, and Nintendo did a great job with swimming two years earlier with Super Mario 64. Having to switch between the Iron Boots and the regular boots was tedious. Having to repeat the level's mechanics because you missed something was tedious. Putting both of these issues together... ugh.

2. Riovanes Castle at the end of Final Fantasy Tactics Chapter 3, where you had a one-on-one boss battle locked behind a point-of-no-return save. If you weren't prepared properly and also didn't have a backup save on the world map before you started this sequence of battles, you were screwed. As in, you would have to start the game over from the very beginning screwed. The third battle in this chain of battles is no better. You have to protect a AI-controlled girl from being killed by two demon girls with lethal attacks. Unless you positioned your party in a certain way, it was very possible that your protectee would run right towards the demon girls and get herself killed before your first playable character even had a chance to act, thereby getting a game over through no fault of your own. The Angry Video Game Nerd should do an episode on FF Tactics.  As with Ocarina of Time, FFT is a great game with one section where they made groin-grabbingly baffling design choices.

3. Any racing or stealth section in GTA games, especially since the fail state for those is a complete failure of a long mission. It's not that I object to stealth or racing, per se, but GTA's engine isn't really built around either one. The cars all handle like old shopping carts, and stealth generally doesn't work great in games that around built around it as heavily as Metal Gear or Splinter Cell.

Cage Match: 

I'm not a fan of either of these things. I'm just going with GTA V because it's frankly amazing that Rockstar has pretty much coasted on this one game for almost ten years, in part by turning it into an online casino. Except that a real casino is actually required by law to pay out cash every once in awhile. Who can blame them? It still sells more copies every year than most entire franchises and most publishers do.  And I used to get the appeal of these games. GTA IV bored me to death and kind of put me off of the series, though. Also not interested in the Florida retread that the next game is going for. I've always thought that if Rockstar wanted to be truly gutsy, they'd set GTA in Texas and let their imaginations run wild with what Texas gives them to work with parody-wise.

But hey, RDR 2 has horses so realistic, they randomly take dumps, and you can see their scrotums swelling and contracting. That's why you're paying $1600 for a shiny new RTX4090, after all. 

I suspect that, much like the troubles Nintendo had with Ikegami Tsushinki that kept the arcade versions of DK 1-3 and Mario Bros from being (mostly) released on home systems long after consoles capable of playing them were on the market, that there are parts of the Ms. Pac-Man IP that ATGames inherited and parts that they didn't. Bandai Namco simply isn't going to take the chance of giving them any more leverage over the Pac-Man IP than they already do. ATGames, meanwhile, is probably still smarting over Bandai Namco accusing them of producing substandard Pac-Man plug-in games a few years back.

Thankfully, Nintendo and Ikegami got their issues squared away. It's awesome to have two of my favorite arcade games playable in their original form anytime I want. At some point maybe Ms. Pac-Man will be sorted out.

What kind of console is playing your Genesis games? I bought a RetroN-5 a couple of years ago, the one that has SNES, NES, Genesis, and GB/GBA. I wanted to play Mother 3 on it, but the thing continually crashed after 5 minutes. I ended up boxing it back up and putting it away since I could never get it to work. I later found a reasonably priced GB Player disc and got a new GB Player for my Gamecube, and played Mother 3 that way. For Genesis games, the Genesis and Konami collections on Switch cover most of those bases pretty nicely, and NSO is filling in the gaps those collections didn't cover.

PSIV is also on NSO, as are Shining Force I&II. The collection has all three Genesis PS games, though. 

Oh, and I managed to get a pre-order on Fire Emblem Engage: Divine Edition. That and Bayonetta are the first time I've been able to snag Nintendo special editions in three years (last time was with Three Houses.)

They're based on Atlantic City, with Boardwalk being the AC boardwalk. AC looks kind of run down these days, as the hopes of various developers to turn it into the Vegas of the east never came to fruition. I took my wife to AC for her birthday when we lived out there. We had dinner at a nice steakhouse (22 ounce prime rib and potatos with all the fixin's, $20 a plate!) and stayed in a nice hotel with a good hot tub, but as far as entertainment, we felt it would probably have been just as well to go play the slots at Maryland Live. I felt a little bad that it didn't quite pan out. Still, I can now say I've seen Atlantic City. And Marven Gardens.

My favorite early 80s racing game was The Great American Cross-Country Road Race, a racing game published for the Atari 8-bit computers by Activision. It was designed by the guy who made ATVI's 2600 racing game Enduro, so it bears a certain resemblance. You raced across the US from the West Coast to the East Coast, having to deal with driving conditions, changing traffic patterns, making sure you didn't run out of gas, and the police, where you either had to get your speed down to the 60s or try and outrun them. It was a precursor to games like OutRun and Cruis'n USA, and was inspired by a 1981 movie called Cannonball Run.

In the Namco vs. Sega arcade wars of the late 90s, I generally preferred Sega's offerings (one notable exception was Tekken 3, which was a better game than VF3). I did get Ridge Racer R4, sans the Jogcon. It actually had a catchy soundtrack. Nintendo kind of outdid both of them, not with Cruis'n USA, but Wave Race 64.

These days, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has largely spoiled me for any other racing game. I never could get into the Gran Turismo/Forza style of racing sim, though I did entertain building a sim racing cockpit at one time. One of the guys who was on 1UP had a pretty sweet racing sim cockpit. But at this point, it's hard for me to go back to racing without turtle shells, plumbers, and weird gravity stuff. I also briefly contemplated getting Mario Kart Live.

One other racing game I'd like to mention is Car Wars, which was a TI-99/4a clone of Dodge 'Em and Head On. I played that a fair bit back in the day.

I think there was a Choro-Q game on N64, which is when I first heard ot the toyline.

I was a SNES dude, so most of what I knew about the Genesis library came form kiosks at Service Merchandise and my cousin who had a Genesis. Almost got one for Mortal Kombat... then I saw the SNES version of MKII, plus the SNES got a Zelda bundle. Over recent years, I've been trying out Genesis games, notably Phantasy Star and Shining Force 1-2.

Recently, they added one of the Genesis games I did know: Alisia Dragoon. You're a sorceress with a pet dragon familiar, which was kind of novel back then.