This one definitely has an interesting design. The one minus I would give it is that the explosions sometimes obscure enemies and bullets. That said, I think I prefer Hard Corps to Contra III on SNES, and I'm generally a SNES guy otherwise.
Stage Select:
1. The Dragon Quest Oveture. Epic in an optimisitc way, the intro music to Dragon Quest always promises a grand adventure.
2. The intro to Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete. Like with the Dragon Quest Oveture, this song perfectly captures the optimistic tone of the story and of the hero, Alex, as he embarks on his quest to become a Dragonmaster. Plus, the Lunar games are a couple of games that hold their own special place in my heart.
Cage Match:
The Simpsons, easily. First of all, as a franchise, The Simpsons >>>> TMNT. The Simpsons arcade game perfectly captured the spirit of the Simpsons as seen in its earliest years, when it was fresh and new.. Given the time frame in which it was developed, the game sported the rather raw look and feel of season 1/season 2 Simpsons, with a dash of Life in Hell thrown in here and there. The plot was just an excuse to beat up on Mr. Burns, who was the villain in pretty much every early 90s Simpsons video game. It was the closest thing at the time to a playable cartoon. It also just played better than TMNT, and the Japanese version is even better than the US version. I blew an embarrassing amount of quarters on this game. It's just too bad that conflicting licensing between Konami and Acclaim kept it from being ported to SNES and Genesis.
So basically, Bart and Lisa prank-call Moe for "Amanda Huggankiss" as Leonardo, Moe shows up with a knife, the Ninja Turtles break down crying and reveal that they're really Nelson, Jimbo, Kearney, and Dolph in disguise. The Simpsons win.
I remember seeing this at rental places along with Contra: Hard Corps. I was a SNES kid, so I didn't get to play these until they were released on the Castlevania and Contra Anniversary Collections on Switch. Bloodlines is a lot gorier than SCIV. It also marked the debut of a musical piece, Sinking Old Sanctuary, that I first heard in Circle of the Moon for GBA.
I used to have Alleyway, Nintendo's Breakout-style game for Game Boy. It looked and sounded an awful lot like Arkanoid, only without the power-ups and aliens. I don't have the reflexes to smack a tiny ball with a small paddle anymore, though.
Fun fact: Breakout was originally designed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their pre-Apple days.
Wow, so Nintendo left the door open for vandalism in AC? Those scoundrels!
Stage Select:
My biggest gaming regret was asking for Revolution-X for the SNES for my birthday. I got it. It was an awful port. In retrospect the arcade source material wasn't really an enduring classic, but hey, it was Aerosmith. Years later I bought a used copy of the PS1 game for 5 bucks. It was serviceable and I would have been reasonably satisfied with it had I owned a PS1 in early 1996. Knowing then what I know now I probably would have asked for Chrono Trigger.
Cage Match:
My vote goes to XCOM. That kind of turn-based strategy agrees well with me as a fan of Valkyria Chronicles and, well, Sakura Wars. Extremely well-done and detailed. I passed HZD over at the time in favor of Breath of the Wild.
Nice. Glad I could help spread the word, lol. It's a fun, charming game. Not exactly a looker compared to Final Fantasy XII or Dragon Quest VIII, but it gets the job done.
In response to your question on this podcast, yes, there was a Sakura Wars game released in the US: So Long, My Love, which was localized and released in the US at the end of March 2010 by NIS America for the PS2 and Wii. The PS2 version got a deluxe edition which I bought.
This game was rough even by 1980s RPG standards. It definitely laid a foundation for great things to come, for sure.
On the NES, Dragon Quest/Warrior was the better series. Maybe I'd have felt different if FF3 had seen a US release, since it apparently squeezed out every drop of performance the NES could manage, but as things stand now, the SNES is where Final Fantasy really started to shine. Dragon Quest was better suited to work within the framework of the NES.
Fun fact: a lot of the basic design work for FF came from an American programmer, Nasir Gebelli, who worked on a lot of computer games during the 1980s through his company, Sirius Software, and who was one of the design leads of Secret of Mana.
My life has changed relatively little with this. I still work every other week (been mostly staying home on off weeks). My lady friend gifted my two rolls of TP, and I was actually in the store early enough that they still had it. I don't understand the hoarding. TP won't protect you from the coronavirus, and people are acting like the virus is an EMP that will knock out the power grid and the water supply. Our governor has mostly taken the old head in the sand approach to the pandemic despite calls from our Senator (the one that actually won her election rather than the one that got a participation trophy when McCain died) to be more proactive.
Mostly I've been gaming and working on my arcade mini-cabinet. I'm thinking of entering it in the state fair as an arts and crafts project.
