PixlBit

I had a lot of these games, as well as the Scott Adams games. I didn't really play point-and-click graphical adventure games until Shadowgate on the NES and Martian Memorandum on PC. I didn't play a lot of those, either, because RPGs filled that niche for me a lot better.  I actually did some of the Scott Adams games at 5 or 6 on TRS-80, then played the Infocom stuff at 10 on Atari 130XE.

 Now that I think of it, I do remember playing a graphical adventure on a friend's Apple IIe called Tass Times in Tonetown. The guy who wrote it, Michael Berlyn, started out as an Infocom implementer (he wrote Suspended, in fact), and went on to create Bubsy the bobcat on SNES/Genesis.

I remember dealing with a lot of copy protection schemes. Starflight had a code wheel, and if you failed to enter the correct code, you'd be stopped by the "Corporate Police," who would give you one last chance. If you failed then, they'd destroy your ship. SimCity constantly bombarded your city with earthquakes. And supposedly, Earthbound could detect whether it was being played on a SNES or an emulator, as it had several spot-checks throughout the game that would not only freeze the game if a bootleg was detected, it would also delete your save files. 

Plus, I used to love reading the manuals for Zelda I, Metroid, and Kid Icarus.

I definitely want GrimGrimoire. It came out right after OdinSphere and I missed it because by that point I had mostly moved onto the Wii and 360.

I remember an old Pepsi commercial from the time that was doing a promotion for Sony and FF7. It had a couple seconds of footage from Titan's summon. That was before I'd actually gotten the game. I didn't even have a PlayStation at the time.

Kao the Kangaroo somehow reminds me of an old arcade favorite, Kangaroo. I know they aren't by the same developer (the arcade game was from Sunsoft and published in the US by Atari). 

Stage Select:

3. The monster team from Dragon Quest VIII. There's something so amusing about summoning a team of cyclopes and trolls to whale on a bunch of slimes.

2. Shadow from Tales of Symphonia. He has a really creepy voice clip that plays when you summon him.  Plus, I like the battle music (Fighting of the Spirits) that plays when you're fighting Summon Spirits in that game.

1. Shiva and Siren from FF8. Their biggest power of all was how they managed to get those Demi Moore pelts they sport on the PS1 past both the ESRB and Sony Computer Entertainment America. There is no way you can even pretend those are costumes. The first time I saw them, I was like "What. The. Fuck."

Cage Match:

Terry Bogard was like "Evil What?" So someone handed him a copy of Evil Zone on PS1 to play. After playing it, he was like, "nah, this is too easy," and spent the rest of the evening looking at Mai's OnlyFans.

Does this Gems of War game have Quick Draw McGraw in it or something?

I'm playing TMNT: Shredder's Revenge now. I was briefy into the Ninja Turtles as a bridge between Garfield and The Simpsons. I really enjoyed the arcade games, though I like the Simpsons arcade game better.

When I was a kid, DC Comics was dominant and Marvel was kind of an afterthought (the only Marvel thing on TV when I was a kid was Lou Ferrigno's Incredible Hulk) so I'm more comfortable with Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman.  I was a fan of Garfield when I was a kid. I even had the 9 Lives book, where one of the stories is of Garfield being a housecat that mauls his owner. And unlike the other stories, where other artists contributed, that story was written by Jim Davis himself. 

I also liked Heathcliff, which actually came out a few years before Garfied did, and was still pretty well-known at the time. 

Neither of y'all ever saw Misery or read the book?

In contrast to Fallout 3 and 4, New Vegas's endings took into account your faction standings, the story arc you chose, the choices you made throughout the game, and your interactions with the NPCs.  New Vegas was exactly the way a game like that should end. Of course, New Vegas had a different set of writers and developers (namely, the guys who actually created the franchise in the first place). One of the biggest WTF moments in gaming was how badly Obsidian got screwed over by Bethesda over a one-point Metacritic score, and it helped contribute to my complete distaste for Metacritic.

Boston "Frogs"? 

I have never been much into sports games other than a few tries with Nintendo Baseball and with NBA Jam. This was a pretty good-looking sports game, though. A lot of work went into this and Blades of Steel, also by Konami.

I'd always wished a company other than EA had become dominant in the sports arena. It might have changed later video game history. EA's big break in consoles came when they borderline extorted Sega into granting special licensing privileges for EA by threatening to release Madden 92 unlicensed on the Genesis at CES if Sega didn't accept their terms. Their refusal to support the Dreamcast was also seen as one of the final nails in Sega's coffin as a hardware manufacturer, though it certainly wasn't the only issue Sega had. Konami seems to have been the best Japanese company when it came to sports.