PixlBit

Donkey Kong Junior NES is a much better port than DK NES is. The sound is still off and the colors don't pop as much as the arcade version, but the gameplay feels all right. I still got the Arcade Archives version. I missed out on the Original Edition, but I'm not too fussed about it especially now that the real DK arcade game is available.

Mario Bros arcade is also day and night compared to the NES counterpart, and again, that game's appearances in Smash Ultimate take more of their cues from the arcade than the NES compared to older Smash games. It wasn't a bad port for the time, but I'm not going to play it when I have the real thing to play. 

I got Romancing SaGa 2 and 3 mostly based on me being a fan of SaGa Frontier. They looked good for SNES games, but I wish Square had released them back in the day. They're a bit rough compared to SaGa Frontier, which is a somewhat rough game in itself.

Neo-Geo systems were a regular feature of arcades around me. Mostly they had various fighting games (Fatal Fury, SamSho, and World Heroes), and then Bust-a-Move and Metal Slug when those games became popular. It's kind of neat that it works in both portable and TV form, just like the Switch.

Remember this magazine ad for Sudeki from a couple years earlier?

I never loved the NES version because it only had 75% of the game, and I didn't like how the NES rendered the game's sounds. The best home version I saw was the Atari 8-bit version, which had all four levels and sounds that were much closer to the arcade than the NES version, despite decreased graphical fidelity compared to the NES version. The physics also felt rather "off" on the NES compared to the arcade or even the Atari 8-bit version.

Miyamoto designed DK under orders from Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi to make a game geared towards Americans - originally, DK was going to be a Popeye-themed game, where Bluto would have filled the role occupied by DK. However, the actual coding was done by a company called Ikegami Tsushinki, who also manufactured the arcade boards. DK was a success, and Nintendo went ahead with a sequel. Unfortunately, Nintendo utilized Ikegami's code in making DK Junior without permission from Ikegami. Ikegami sued Nintendo, and it took the case almost ten years to work its way through the Japanese courts, after which they settled. However, Nintendo effectively lost the lawsuit, because the court acknowledged Ikegami's ownership of the code. Nintendo still had the copyright to its characters (though Mario Segale once joked that he was waiting for his royalties in one of the few interviews he ever gave), and since the code for the NES versions of DK and DK Junior was done by Nintendo itself, the NES versions are the versions they re-released. So other than what was likely an innocent mistake in not understanding still-nascent copyright and patent laws as they pertained to software, Nintendo wasn't really to blame for not releasing the arcade versions of those two games. Even the 3DS "ambassador" version was the NES version with the extra level added.  I wonder if Nintendo was worried that tangling with Ikegami in court again might give Ikegami some kind of legal hold on Mario, which would have been very bad for Nintendo. That's not as far-fetched as you might think. Bandai Namco has been involved in a long-running lawsuit with AtGames over the code to Ms. Pac-Man, which is why we haven't seen her in the past few years.

With that said, you actually can get the arcade versions of DK, DK Junior, DK3, and Mario Bros legally on the Switch. They were all released as Arcade Archives titles by Hamster, with Mario Bros coming a few months after the Switch launched. DK came out in the summer of 2018, and DK Junior (the game which originally caused the Ikegami lawsuit) somewhat later that year. I'm guessing that Nintendo and Ikegami finally buried the hatchet and decided it wasn't worth fighting over, especially since Ikegami is no longer in the games business. The Arcade Archives version includes the original Japanese version, the revised Japanese version, and the US version. The US version is structured so that Level 1 only contains the barrel and rivet screens, Level 2 adds the elevator screen, and Level 3 adds the cement factory screen. Level 4 adds a second barrel screen between the cement factory and jack screens, and from level 5 onward, there is another barrel screen between the jack screen and the rivet screen, for a total of 6 screens. So the US version does better at upping the challenge for progression.   To this day, Donkey Kong is my favorite arcade of all time, and it may possibly have been the first game I ever played. Its colors and the personality of the characters always captured my attention away from Pac-Man.  My second favorite arcade game was Mario Bros, which also held the same allure as DK. 

Nintendo regaining the rights to the arcade version of Donkey Kong even reflected itself in Super Smash Bros Ultimate. The music for the hammer now sounds like the arcade rather than the NES version, which was used for the first four generations of Smash, and the hammer now does the same effect when you hit someone with it that the arcade version does.

I mostly liked the old arcade games on the service, since back then only Namco's arcade classics were easily available. I was also introduced to Phantasy Star and Shining Force on Gametap.

I'm never going to be on the streaming bandwagon. I've also been trying to remove Microsoft from as many aspects of my life as possible. When Gametap was a thing I did kind of dabble with that until I got into 7th gen systems. 

I pre-ordered Ys IX on Switch. I'm going fi have a large collection of Falcon title, especially after NISA announced all those Legend of Herors games for the US. NISA is one of my favorite developers.

I want to get Gsme Builder Garage. I like these DIY game design programs. I keep vowing that I'm going to work on RPG Maker.

Balan Wonderworld isn't the greatest game, but I'm not sure how much of the criticism is merited. Unfortubately, Yuji Naka was quite stung by its reception, to the point where he is considering retiring.

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I actually buy most third party games on Switch when available. The Switch is my favorite system, in part for the "intimacy," as Mike put it, and in part because while I did buy it for Nintendo franchises, third party stuff is a nice bonus, especially when I think how starved for games the N64 was. My thinking is that it's legit cool that stuff like Doom, Witcher 3 and Outer Worlds works on it, and is portable when I want to take it on planes. As far as the downgrades that were necessary, we're hardly talking about a functional or visual difference between, say, the PlayStation and the Game Boy, which was still sold throughout the 5th gen. There are legit third-party gems like Dragon Quest XI S and the upcoming SMT V. Right now, the PS5 doesn't really have anything that justifies a $500 purchase, so I'm content to wait for Final Fantasy XVI to drop. As for Xbox, I'll just say that I'm not very fond of Microsoft itself, and leave it at that. So yeah, I'm all for "bring it to Switch." I'll probably pick up the upcoming Switch port of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, just for kicks. I'm also having to travel out of state a lot due to my father's illness, so I appreciate being able to play full-fat console RPGs and action games in portable form. 

The Amico, though... I'm not really sure what Tallarico is thinking there. I just don't see it succeeding against Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft on one end and the mobile market and Apple TV 4K on the other end, especially at a price point higher than a Switch Lite. Some versions of the Amico retail for $300, which is the price of the full-sized Switch or a Series S. There was some drama over the Amico last night, which I assume was after you got this podcast in the can, where Ars Technica got ahold of the Amico's specs and leaked them, comparing the chips to those of low-end smartphones. Needless to say, Tallarico was wasn't happy and threatened to lawyer up against AT for copyright infringement. That, plus the lack of any concrete information on Amico just three months before it's supposed to launch, doesn't seem to bode well for the Amico, and I'm not at all sure than Earthworm Jim will be enough. Tallarico seems to want to bring back couch multiplayer, but Mario Kart 8 and Smash Ultimate fit that bill pretty nicely. Astrosmash looks kind of neat. I used to play the 2600 version when the 2600 was the big thing. Maybe they could bring it to Switch at some point?  That said, they're a lot more reasonable than Atari. The VCS costs as much as the PS5 Digital Edition. I have been playing since the Atari days, and I don't have that much nostalgia.

I believe that the handheld cartridge system you talked about is called the Evercade. 

Fallout: New Vegas is my favorite of the Fallout games because of how the number crunching and character development works in interacting with the game world. It was leaps and bounds above 3. Unfortunately, it fell just short of critical and commercial benchmarks set in the agreement between Bethesda and Obsidian. New Vegas ended up being a big financial loss for Obsidian. I will also say that the delays with South Park: The Stick of Truth after its original publisher, THQ, was liquidated, were nearly the nails in the coffin for Obsidian. Pillars of Eternity, a low-budget, crowdfunded game, saved Obsidian from the same fate as Black Isle. To a degree, The Outer Worlds does recapture the brilliance of NV to a degree, and tries to make the decisions as weighty as those in NV. It was one of my favorite games of the past couple of years, but it's a more abbreviated experience because of limitations, specifically the limits of Obsidian's bank account. 

Bethesda's takeaway from New Vegas was to adopt a very play-it-safe approach for Fallout 4. Your choices weren't really consequential and didn't stand between you and the finish line. There was no cap on leveling and perks. If you play long enough, you'll be as much of an OP god as Terra in FFVI's endgame. There's only one choice in the entire game that changes the ending cinematic. At least the settlement-building was amusing, at least as far as testing the weapons and traps you set up by setting monsters against them. Fallout 4 opted to dial back the RPG stuff, go back to Fallout 3-style set-pieces, and the gameplay actually verges on Borderlands territory.

The less said about Fallout 76, the better.