PixlBit

Stage Select: Top Three Family Members

1. The first one is obvious: Mario and Luigi, the original video game family. I've been following the brothers since the original Mario Bros. arcade game in 1983. I'd take them as my brothers.

2. The Worzen family from Legacy of the Wizard. Each member of the family - Mom, Dad, the brother, the sister, the grandparents, even the family pet - has their own abilities and role in the adventure. 

3. Sojiro Sakura, the guardian of the protagonist in Persona 5. He starts out as a "tough love" parent to the protagonist as he believes the protagonist to be a criminal, then becomes more open as their relationship progresses and the protagonist shows an interest in his hobby of coffee-making. 

Cage Match:

Quest "Glass Joe" 64 is remarkably resilient. But much like Glass Joe, it will inevitably end up face-down on the mat. Castlevania 64 was not the greatest game, but it was far from a terrible game, either. It suffered from a protracted development cycle; their original plan was four playable characters, including a chainsaw-wielding protagonist, day/night cycles, and the player being able to being turned into vampires. I think by 1999, they felt they had to get the game out the door. A lot of the ideas they had for the first release were realized later that year in Legacy of Darkness. Castlevania was flawed but ambitious, while Quest is still the bare minimum of a video game RPG that Nintendo was pushing in an effort to downplay the fact that they screwed up when they lost Final Fantasy VII. However, since Quest 64 seems destined to be a frequent flyer in the ring in an effort to prove itself, I would like to suggest a match where it will stand more of a chance: Quest 64 vs. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties (3DO). 

No, it's all the original sprite work.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance might be what you're looking for. 

Origin Systems experimented with that concept in the 90s, especially with the last two Ultimas they made before they sold the company to EA, but the playtesting was an expensive nightmare for them and the games yielded little profit to show for their troubles. I imagine those issues would be orders of magnitude more problematic now.  Garriott tried to replicate that concept online with Shroud of the Avatar, where they claimed you could be an adventurer, a local artisan, or anything else you wanted in the game world. I wonder if you could role-play as a harlot.  Sadly, it fell quite short of its ambition, met a similarly lackluster commercial reception combined with a chilly critical reception after six years of development (at least from the time it was announced) and he ended up taking the game FTP before selling it off to one of his colleagues and retiring from game development. On a grander scale, Garriott's former employee/rival Chris Roberts has collected almost half a billion dollars in crowdfunding for Star Citizen, also with very little to show for it after almost a decade.  That's part of why RPG video games try to stay focused on staying within a narrative. Such projects look great on paper, but in practice almost always fall victim to feature creep and a sense of feeling unfocused.

Probably the most successful game that approximates that kind of role-playing is not an actual RPG, namely Grand Theft Auto Online, which allows you to try and create your own brand of mayhem on the streets if you don't want to participate in missions. Even then, most of that ends being the same kind of stuff that ends up on Arizona news sites when some random fool decides to start trouble at the local Circle K. 

These are all great games. I'm thinking of picking up the entire Parasite Eve trilogy. 

It had very limited retail exposure in a crowded field dominated by Warner Communications (Atari). I'm also not sure how it did on pricing. The 2600 was about half the price of the Intellivision at the time, which helped it achieve a greater degree of mass market penetration. I'm pretty sure Bally was more expensive than the 2600. It had 28 games through out its lifespan compared to about 200 or so games for Atari. 

I first learned about the Bally system through Jeff Rovin's book, the Complete Guide to Conquering Video Games. It was published in 1982, so it covered the 2600, Intellivision, Odyssey2, and Bally along with most arcade games and some computer games. He seemed highly complimentary of it. The first time I ever saw one or the games in the wild was at the aforementioned Fallout Games store. I should have bought it then.

"Hate" seems like an extreme reaction. While it sucks that Sonic's famous speed is a liability in many parts of his games, they're still great games, for the most part.

I also remember catching a few episodes of the DiC Sonic cartoon where the hedgehog was voiced by Jaleel White, who was best known as Steve Urkel. He sounded more like Stefan Urquelle in the cartoon. 

My dad got a TI-99 computer. It had a lot of clones of popular arcade games such as Munch-Man (Pac-Man), Car Wars (Head On/Dodge 'em), and TI Invaders (Taito could honestly have sued over that one), as well as unique titles like Tombstone City, and in its later years it got official ports of arcade games through Atarisoft. I also had the tape recorder and remember typing in BASIC programs and saving them. It was kind of interesting listening to the digital noise pattern of the cassette recorder as games loaded and saved. I later wrote a few text adventure games for the Atari XE. My mom had a subscription to ANTIC, which had a lot of type-in BASIC programs for the Atari XE, though it also generally included these programs on floppy disk.

I really enjoyed the SNK Collection. I used to play Vanguard a lot on Atari, and one of my grocery stores had Time Soldiers back in the day. Athena is brutally hard in the arcade and on NES.