PixlBit

You never do see a lot of Santa Claus games. I had one in the 80s for my Atari computer called Special Delivery, which had a flying sleigh sequence where you had to catch presents dropped by angels and avoid mountains, trees, lightning, and evil presents dropped by red angels (who were ostensibly devils.) Then you had to deliver the presents without being caught by kids.

The only Santa Claus I remember seeing on the SNES was the one in Secret of Mana.

Sorry to hear about your mom. Here's hoping she will have a speedy and complete recovery, and make sure you take care of yourself as well.

For Christmas, I'd give you one of those old Pac-Man candy mazes from the early 80s. My mom got me one when we were on my first car trip, from Arizona to San Diego, when I was 5. The Pac-Man candies were like SweeTarts or Smarties (the US version, not the UK kind that look like M&Ms).

Hard to believe we're going into yet another console cycle. When the gang migrated over here, it was 2013 and Ni no Kuni was my big game of the year.

My favorite PS4 games were Final Fantasy XV, FF Type-0, Yakuza 0, Sakura Wars, and Fallout 4. Nights of Azure was a fun little gem as well. for me, the Switch was where the good gaming action was, and since I got mine, that's what I've been focusing on. 

This year I've watched Ratched and Peaky Blinders, and High Score. Also got a new season of F is for Family.

Gaming, been doing Animal Crossing, Xenoblade Chronicles Remastered, Pokemon Sword, and Trails of Cold Steel. 

I had this when I was a teenager and was obsessed with it. I loved SimCity. I kind of wish I'd gotten the NES version so I could see the origins of Mr. Write in Link's Awakening. The next year my parents got me SimAnt for Christmas, which was also fun.  But I was also frustrated because I couldn't get my city's population higher than 250,000, which is about the size of Scottsdale or Glendale. My dreams of building a Tokyo-sized megalopolis never came to pass.

I didn't play a Sim game again until I picked up the PS2 version of The Sims, and in 2005 I got a laptop and got SimCity 4 for it. After that Maxis and EA went downhill. But I got Cities Skylines on the Switch a couple of years ago, and it's tied with Pokemon Sword as my second most played Switch game, behind Breath of the Wild. Cities Skylines handles traffic much better than SimCity ever did, although I seem to have ambulances everywhere on my city's freeways for some reason. And despite the fact that the city I built looks like downtown Los Angeles, its population has topped out at 170,000, about the size of Tempe. But it's still the best city sim out there these days.

Cities Skylines is a game to try. It's the best city sim out there these days, especially since EA killed Maxis and SimCity with the 5th game.

The run button probably came from Final Fantasy, where you held the shoulder buttons to run away starting on the SNES. I guess it's lucky Yakuza 7 doesn't take its dying penalty from Fire Emblem (permadeath). 

Moviewise, mostly Marvel flicks with the GF and her kids. We did watch A Quiet Place as well.

Gamingwise, 2019 was great, and September 2019 was more jam-packed than some whole YEARS. September 2019 brought Dragon Quest XI S, Link's Awakening, Ni no Kuni, and Astral Chain. It started out with FF8 finally getting released for current systems including the Switch, and with a graphical facelift (there were plenty of memes about Squall's originally pixellated face during the dance sequence.) A couple of months earlier was another amazing game, Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and that one I managed to snatch up the last collector's edition at my local Best Buy.

64 is still my favorite Mario game. It was, and is, still fun to run and jump in, and I liked the sandbox lite aspect of its design.

Galaxy still looks really nice on a Switch, and I liked how they brought back some classic power-ups from 2-D Mario like the fire flowers, even though those were limited to context-specific situations. 

Sunshine is an odd beast. I skipped buying it on Gamecube, as I was more interested in Wind Waker, but I did play it at kiosks. It was definitely an experimental title, but I think it is better than its original reception indicated. 

Man, I hope Nintendo has a Zelda collection in mind for next year when rhat series celebrates its 35th anniversary in Japan. 

A lot of the stuff in Yakuza 7 is lifted from Dragon Quest, including the money penalty for dying. However, every Dragon Quest game I ever played, including the first one, did have the option to run. DQ also isn't as cut-sceney as the FF, Persona, or Xeno games. They usually try to keep things moving along, although VII had an extremely lengthy prologue where you didn't even fight a single battle until two or three hours in.