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SanAndreas's Comments - Page 29

Episode 227: Summon the Air Horn!


Posted on 07/06/2022 at 07:19 PM | Filed Under Feature

Stage Select:

3. Kid Icarus. I would like to see this return as a full-fledged third-person platforming/action/shooting adventure with freedom of movement. Of all of Nintendo's dormant series, this is easily the one I most want to return. 

2. Earthbound/Mother. I've pretty much accepted that this series is gone for good. I would at least settle for a Switch port of Mother 3. On that, I've heard various theories from Nintendo insiders that Nintendo was looking at a Switch port, but nixed it. One theory is that Nintendo rejected it because they simply thought that some of the content was too problematic for the United States, and that localizing it would be a no-win situation. Reggie Fils-Aime continues to insist that it was purely a business decision, though Reggie always seemed to have a lot of antipathy towards RPGs during his tenure at Nintendo. I kind of lean towards the former explanation. The bowdlerization that Nintendo employed in the 1990s wouldn't fly anymore, judging by the Twitter hostility towards some of NoA's decisions regarding Fire Emblem Fates and Tokyo Mirage Sessions. On the other hand, I can just see Ron DeSantis or some other politician flipping his lid about some of the content in the game.

It's also telling that as zealous as Nintendo is about copyright protection, that they have never really made any serious attempts to go after the well-known fan translation of Mother 3. They know it exists, and the translation team even sent letters to Nintendo saying they would provide the translation as an official translation free of charge, or that if Nintendo wanted to do its own localization that they would take their localization down. Typically that kind of thing results in C&D letters from Nintendo's legal team, but not in this case. So it's pretty safe to say Nintendo has washed its hands of the whole thing and is willing to leave the fan translation alone as a compromise.  At this point, Xenoblade Chronicles pretty much fills Nintendo's traditional RPG niche.

1.This one is kind of iffy according to your criteria thanks to a very late PS4 port, but I would really like to see Virtua Fighter 6. Virtua Fighter is my favorite fighting game franchise of all time. I always preferred it over Tekken, both for the visual design and for the gameplay mechanics. It's an elegant system that works on just three buttons. We got a little taste of the series when Ryu ga Gotoku Studios worked with AM2 on a PS4 port of VF5, a game which originally came out 16 years ago. Virtua Fighter deserves another chance to shine.

Cage Match:

In this battle of Bioware space games, I'm going to give it to store-brand Star Wars over Star Wars, just because the games had a lot more time to advance in technology and design, plus I have never had an easy relationship with licensed games, for the most part. I have also never really gotten into Bioware's game design. I've tried Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Jade Empire, and always end up going back to Bethesda or CD Projekt.  

The tag-team cage match actually looks like a good concept. I'd like to propose a future cage match of Tales of Vesperia and Tales of Symphonia versus Dragon Quest VIII and Dragon Quest XI. 

70s Gaming


Posted on 07/03/2022 at 07:01 PM | Filed Under Blogs

My dad built one of those Heathkit TVs. For a long time, the TV tube with the bare circuitry sat on a console in our living room. My parents made sure to put the fear of God into me if I ever touched anything behind the screen. A little later, my dad built a console to house the TV, so they didn't have to worry about me electrocuting myself. We had a TI-99/4A computer hooked to it that my dad would let me use on special occasions, and my sister had an old Pong clone console. I thought it was just cool making stuff on a TV screen move. My mom also had a TRS-80 computer, but since that had its own monitor includede, it wasn't as neat as making things move on the living room TV.

Welcome to the Pocky and Rocky Shrine!


Posted on 07/03/2022 at 06:57 PM | Filed Under Blogs

I think the first time I saw the word "tanuki/tanooki" was in a 1989/90 Nintendo Power feature on Super Mario Bros. 3. While the leaf power-up was stil called Raccoon Mario, the full-on suit was called a Tanuki Suit. Other than that, most English localizations of Japanese media, including anime like Ranma 1/2, referred to them as "raccoons." I guess even Animal Crossing's resident loan shark is still referred to as a "raccoon" in US media even though he's called "Tom Nook."

70s Gaming


Posted on 07/02/2022 at 06:19 PM | Filed Under Blogs

I've played all of the games on the top list except for Computer Space MUD 1, Mattel Auto Race, and Sprint 2. I've played plenty of derivatives of Computer Space, including Atari's Space War. One game from the 70s that I played that isn't on the list was Temple of Apshai.

Fun fact: the best selling video game hardware of the 1970s wasn't the Atari 2600. It was Nintendo's Color TV Game, which was a Pong clone sold only in Japan. Even in the 1970s Nintendo was still the king, lol.

Surprise! Games Appear


Posted on 07/01/2022 at 06:39 PM | Filed Under Blogs

I bought the Capcom Fighting Collection. One of the games included is Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo, and I've been playing that online quite a bit. I used to play it a lot when I had a 360.

Moldy Oldies: Infocom Interactive Fiction


Posted on 07/01/2022 at 06:27 PM | Filed Under Blogs

Computer games were still in their infancy, so those of us who were interested in them played what we had at the time. It should also be noted that 50,000 copies sold  was considered "blockbuster" status for a computer game back then, so there were admittedly not a lot of us who were interested. Crowther's kids loved his game, though. 

Moldy Oldies: Infocom Interactive Fiction


Posted on 07/01/2022 at 06:21 PM | Filed Under Blogs

At the time, it was still a novelty. I played these games on Atari 130XE, which was still pretty primitive. While RPGs and graphical adventures had begun to come out by then, text adventures were still in preference as a way to present a game that didn't involve shooting space bugs, eating dots, or jumping over barrels on limited technology. However, by the time more graphical adventure games had come into vogue, I had gotten into RPGs, though my parents were into point-and-click adventures. So while they were playing The 7th Guest and Myst, I was playing Final Fantasy and Ultima. 

 I'm a pretty avid reader. I was reading Stephen King and Douglas Adams in grade school, which is part of why I missed out on so many free Personal Pan pizzas through the Book It! program. So that was part of why I took to these games relatively well at the time. 

Late to the Party: Horizon Zero Dawn


Posted on 06/30/2022 at 03:26 PM | Filed Under Blogs

I never played this one, mostly because it came out around the same time as the Switch and BotW did, and I've kind of been heavily invested in the Switch since then. Maybe once I can get my hands on a PS5 I'll take a look at this series.  Graphically, it looks pretty damn good.

Shallow Dive into Kiddy Pool


Posted on 06/30/2022 at 03:00 PM | Filed Under Blogs

One reasons why Microsoft doesn't do more in the phone space is that mobile market is where Microsoft sufffered a pretty humiliating defeat in the market. Windows Mobile was one of the first moblie phone platforms, and the iPhone slaughtered it easily ten years later. Windows Phone never had a chance against both iOS and Android. I think Microsoft is scared of the mobile market because if more casual users ditched PCs for mobile devices, they'd lose a lot of money. It's one of the few threats to the dominance of Windows. 

Moldy Oldies: Infocom Interactive Fiction


Posted on 06/30/2022 at 12:39 AM | Filed Under Blogs

I remember doing that too. 

Of course, in Leather Goddesses of Phobos, the computer would take those four-lettter words as literal commands, meaning the player character would carry them out depending on context. 

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