There are very few games which I will pay $60 for, and mostly these are either games that are sure to be scarce on down the road or special titles like Ni no Kuni that I have been waiting for for a long time. The rest of them can wait.
Just look at how Tecmo Koei handled Ayesha's US release. If it hadn't been for NISA and Tecmo Koei Europe, I'd have never known it was coming to the US.
I enjoy the Atelier series (Ayesha is on my to-buy list), but damn, I wish Tecmo Koei had allowed NISA to retain the publishing rights to the series. I don't care about the dual audio, since I never use it when it is an option anyway, but NISA at least promoted the hell out of these games instead of leaving them withering on the vine.
I visited East Germany in 1990, the summer after the Berlin Wall fell and East Germany (and East Berlin) were opened up by the Soviets. There was a striking contrast between the two Germanys that in some ways still persists 20 years later.
East Germany was run-down and still bore bullet holes and bombed-out shells from World War II, as well as bullet holes from more recent alteractions (the Execution Wall in East Berlin was particularly grim), and the place was very smoky. The East German Trabant cars used a very low-grade of gasoline that burned into yellow exhaust.
West Germany, by contrast, was very clean and fully rebuilt. Frankly, West Berlin was much cleaner than most American cities. There was no vandalism in the Berlin subways, compared to the extensive vandalism the New York subway system showed at the time - when we got back from Germany, we had to take a KLM flight from Frankfurt to JFK in New York and then took a bus back to Tinker AFB in Midwest City, OK, where we had started our trip.
Wow. Those houses look like the houses I saw in East Germany that still had WWII bullet holes in them.
Do you have used game stores in Mississippi? Here in Oklahoma there are two different chains - Game X-Change and Vintage Stock. They carry everything from the Atari to the Wii U. Vintage Stock also carries movies, CDs, vinyl records, and toys. I've found some very rare PS1 and PS2 games at very reasonable prices at those, and definitely better than what I could get the same games for on eBay or Amazon.
The PS2 and the Cube were, and still are, wonderful systems, and I'm always discovering new goodies on them. Now that I've upgraded from a Wii to a Wii U - the Wii U plays Wii games but not GC games - I want to buy a GC to replace the one that was stolen, and I want to get a Game Boy Player for it like the one I had on my old Gamecube.
I like the AVGN's Toaster NES. It powers on when he pushes the toaster lever down. I assume it doesn't automatically pop up, eject the cartridge, and kill the juice on the game.
I know I'm not touching SimCity, especially after the Spore fiasco. Apparently within the EA system, even Maxis wasn't too big to fail. I'll stick with SC4 for now, and if I want to look at a more up-to-date city sim, I'll look at Cities XL instead.
Xenoblade proves that great artists and engineers can overcome technical limitations. While it doesn't have the same sharp details as later PS3/360 games it is quite technically impressive.
I never did like Tomb Raider on the PS1. Nothing about it impressed me. Super Mario 64 was a far superior platformer with better controls. Resident Evil was far more interesting as a "mature" game. And I didn't even see her appeal as a video game sex symbol, when Namco and Square had far better offerings in that rather dubious department. Maybe it was a British thing?
That said, I'm interested in the new Tomb Raider. It's on the back burner behind games like Ni no Kuni or Bioshock Infinite, but it's the first time I've even been interested in Tomb Raider since the PS1 days, when I was primarily curious about all the hype behind the series. Maybe this will turn out to be another case of overhype, maybe not.
