PixlBit

Great music too.

I kind of wish they'd gone with Arc System Works instead of the developer they went with for BC. ASW did a good job with Hard Corps: Uprising as an update to Contra.

One of the big selling points of the PS5 is its SSD, which is supposedly super fast and meant to cut down on loading times. I remember in the days of 2x CD-ROM drives that if you were playing as Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat 3 on PS1, the game would freeze when he morphed back and forth in order to load the new character. 

I used to play PC-Hack a lot, and I still play Nethack every once in awhile (despite the name, it's offline). The most random stuff happens in roguelikes. Sometimes it's good, sometimes not.

Hudson was one of the few Japanese publisher/devs that really remained on good terms with Nintendo during the N64 era. The last game I remember them putting out was Miami Law for the DS, which was localized by the guy who did all the localizations for Working Designs. I was a little surprised that Konami bought them instead of Nintendo. Nintendo would have at least kept them nominally independent like they do with HAL Labs.

I remember the Animatrix had a segment done by the remains of Square's animation studio, then they got shuttered over the bad box office performance of FF: The Spirits Within. 

I got a Gamecube for my birthday, just in time for The Wind Waker. Later that year I picked up the Gamecube version of SoulCalibur II, which featured Link as a guest fighter. Also Skies of Arcadia Legends for Gamecube. I graduated college that spring. Despite the hostile reception Wind Waker's cel-shaded look got from most people, it was pretty amazing to see it on the screen at the time. It looked like an animated movie, and I ended up liking it (and Twilight Princess) a lot more than I did the N64 Zeldas. The Gamecube was the best Zelda machine to come along, at least until the Switch came out with Breath of the Wild.

Stage select: Mostly RPGs on the Switch such as Pokémon, Xenoblade Chronicles, and Trails of Cold Steel. My friends and family all have Pokemon. Early on in the pandemic, I built a mini arcade machine using a Raspberry Pi. I painted it up like a Donkey Kong arcade game. 

Cage Match:

Since I have no actual dog in this fight, not being a huge Star Wars fan, I'm going to go with the one that wasnt made by EA. So 2005 Battlefront. 

Other than Mario and Zelda, Dragon Quest is the video game series that's stuck with me the longest. I played it when it first came out on NES - I didn't get into Final Fantasy until VI on the SNES.

I actually had experience with RPGs before I played Dragon Warrior, as I'd played Exodus: Ultima III on PC and NES, and Alternate Reality on the Atari 8-bit. So I had a general idea of what to do. The game had good graphics and great music. After that, I didn't really play the series again until the first two games were re-released for the Game Boy Color. Of course, Enix completely skipped the SNES in localizing the series or I'd have probably gotten Dragon Quest V and VI. When I got married, my wife and I, and my stepdaughter, played Dragon Quest VIII on PS2, and we all finished it on our individual game files. I wish they'd re-release VIII on Switch. But XI managed to be even better, and given how awesome VIII was, that was an amazing feat. I still want VIII on Switch though. What the heck, I want the entire series on Switch. I have the first three games on Switch already.

HAL Laboratories' NES conversions of Atari-era Western arcade games like Millipede, Defender, and Joust all used sound effects from Punch-Out!!, even the little jingle that plays when a round starts. Satoru Iwata did all those games, which was interesting because his first game was Balloon Fight, which was a clone of Joust.

I saw Spider-Man in theaters while on vacation. In gaming, I got Virtua Fighter 4 on PS2, which was one of my favorite fighting games of the generation and came after Sega abandoned the Dreamcast and hardware in general. I also got into the Sims, and I picked up Grand Theft Auto III. I mostly liked causing havoc in the game environment rather than doing the missions, although you had to play through the story to unlock the other two areas. I liked the Flashback station, which was the soundtrack to Scarface, and the talk radio station with Lazlow Jones was really funny. I also got Devil May Cry and Kingdom Hearts that year.