Three Houses is indeed an awesome game. It's on my short list of Switch essentials, along with Breath of the Wild, Dragon Quest XI S, Mario Odyssey and the Xenoblade trilogy.
Also, Tactics Ogre is coming to Switch and PS4 in November.
Singaporean versions of games are usually in English and Chinese, which are the two official languages of Singapore. In fact, Bandai Namco low-key encourages Americans to buy the Singaporean versions of Super Robot Wars games.
Anyway, I rented the PS1 Klonoa from Blockbuster a couple of times. I saw it in the little flyer that came with Tekken 3 and thought it looked interesting.
Stage Select:
I agree with SuperStep: Game streaming does suck. I'd easily rather download, or better still, own on cartridge, rather than stream games. I'm personally tired of game providers using subscriptions trying to establish permanent ongoing connections with my wallet. You know who else does that? Drug dealers. Just sell me what I want and go away until I ask for you again.
I never use Microsoft products as long as there are viable alternatives. I even own a Macbook instead of a PC.
On a related note, the Nintendo Switch is my favorite system of all time, and that is a hill I will not die on, because I will never lose that battle.
Cage Match:
This matchup takes either in the back lot of some honky-tonk beer joint, or maybe on the yacht in international waters where Homer Simpson and his friends watched the monkey knife fight. You have John from Plumbers Don't Wear Ties squaring off against Brian from Quest 64. For once, Brian actually holds his own instead of being knocked out within ten seconds of the bell ring. John brings out the big guns, namely Jane in her dominatrix outfit with her whip (insert whip sound here), but Brian wisely decided to grind for earth element this time and is actually holding his own... It looks like he might win... both contenders are in their respective corners, breathing hard, both bruised and bleeding, exhausted. Brian got some good offense in the last round... but then the karate lady from Plumbers beats up the judge and declares John the winner. A few seconds later, a stock clip of machine gun fire plays, bullet holes randomly appear, and the karate lady is lying on the ground with Xs over her eyes, with Brian having ditched his magic staff for a Tommy gun. Could it be... that Quest 64 could win?
...Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that Brian from Quest has been disqualified for use of dog doo on a stick, and we award the match to John from Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.
I definitely remember this one in arcades. It looked pretty neat. Sega probably did the most graphically advanced arcade games of any company.
The SNES got a port of Namco's Suzuka 8 Hours, which utilized Mode 7. It had split-screen racing and was pretty smooth.
Since we were talking about plumbing games, I just remembered that there is a game on the Atari 8-bit computers called Electrician, where you have to run wires. Of course, you have to deal with pests chewing through your wires before you can complete a circuit, power surges, and Goddamned Bats. It was a pretty fun game, too. To go from house to house, you had to crawl through sewers infested with alligators. It even got a Famicom port, which sadly didn't get released over here even though the original game is American in origin.
I can vouch for PaRappa being rather janky, but it was a lot of fun and the songs were catchy. I think part of the reason it was that way was so that you could try to do things a little more free-form without being penalized or even being rewarded if the game liked your rhythm.
I have Theatrhythm Final Fantasy on 3DS. Played it quite a bit.
My favorite rhythm game is one that people don't think of as a rhythm game, and doesn't even use music. That game is, of course, Punch-Out!!, which at its heart is a rhythm game that uses boxing and the body language of your opponents as a rhythm device rather than music.
I had a TI-99/4A computer as a kid, and when I saw "Car Wars," my first thought was a game on that system that was a clone of Head-On/Dodge 'Em.
The only Wizardry game I've actually played was one of the Japanese-made Wizardry games on PS3, years after Wizardry 8 was releeased and Sir-Tech disappeared completely. I was always more of an Ultima fan. I have played the Wizardry-like Shining in the Darkness in Sega Genesis collections. My favorite first person RPG from the 1980s was called Alternate Reality, it was on the Atari 8-bit computers. My favorite 1981 game is Donkey Kong, which is still my all time favorite arcade game. It was, and is, brilliant.
I didn't really play Xevious much. I did play a similar game, Megazone, which was made by Konami and which I keep hoping shows up on Arcade Archives.
1943 is an awesome shmup. I have Capcom Arcade Stadium and still play it.
A lot of the fun in Smash is using Nintendo characters, and since Brawl, the crossovers in the video game industry at large. Smash Ultimate was a huge love lettter not only to almost the entire Japanese game industry (the only thing I think that they could have added was Adol Christin for some Falcom representation), but there was also a fair bit of Western representation there as well. Just wish Nintendo had allowed Scorpion to be in Smash. None of Smash's clones have that kind of cachet, though Viewtiful Joe RHR was pretty good. PSABR honestly came at a pretty weak period for PlayStation, plus the characters weren't nearly as iconic as the ones in Smash. All I could think about was how Sony should have bought Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon when they had the chance to do so. Cloud and Sephiroth were an especially glaring omission given that Final Fantasy VII pretty much built the PlayStation brand single-handedly, but I'm pretty sure Nintendo had already secured Cloud for Smash Wii U/3DS by that point.
The first sports games I ever played were a couple of TRS-80 games. One was a baseball game, the other was a decathlon game made by "Micro Soft." Yes, it was the same company before they turned into the giant company-swallowing behemoth they are today. I played Track and Field and Activision Decathlon on Atari. I had an Atari Trak-Ball with a rapid fire switch on itb(and was about the size of a Sega Genesis) so I cheesed my way through those games. My favorite sports games are the NBA Jam games by Midway, the ones that featured digitized players and had Mortal Kombat characters and even President Bill Clinton as hidden players. I do play the Nintendo sports games once in awhile.
