PixlBit

Most of them were awful, and tended to be made by mediocre companies like Acclaim, Activision, and EA. Spider-Man was made by Sony, which relies on a reputation for quality to sell the PlayStation, especially with Nintendo stronger than ever and Microsoft trying to brute-strength the video game war with its checkbook. Game companies have also come to understand that people don't want to simply play a movie's storyline in a game. They can just watch the movie if they want the story.  GoldenEye didn't follow the plot of the movie rigidly and focused more on gameplay, as a result, the game is arguably more successful and better-known than the movie that it was based on. 

For a long time, almost all legacy media had their own studios or bought into the industry. Warner sold off Atari after the crash through their purchase of Midway's IP, they own the IP of Atari Games, the arcade division which was split off when the home division was bought by the Tramiel family and later bought by Midway. Other than the wildly successful Mortal Kombat, they don't seem interested in any of the video game IP they bought, which includes legacy franchises like Joust, Defender, Gauntlet, Rampage, Paperboy, and Tapper.  Warner has had limited success at leveraging DC, most of that with Batman. Warner also gave up the license to Lord of the Rings, which is now owned by the rather dubious Swedish conglomerate Embracer. Disney tried at multiple times to break into the industry only to be rebuffed. They stopped making Infinity early on and go through third parties now, and prefer to sell to little kids with iPads and iPhones. MGM, Viacom and Universal had their own home divisions at one time, now gone. Many of the games produced by these companies were part of the "interactive movie" craze of the mid 90s that fizzled out. Lucasfilm, seeing the video game industry as a natural medium for an special-effects laden sci-fi action IP like Star Wars, entered early on, but they developed a lot of original IP like their adventure games and early first-person games like Rescue on Fractalus and BallBlazer. They're gone now, victims of declining sales and the Disney buyout. Star Wars games are made by third parties. 

One factor that may play into this is that a lot of video game companies actually outgrew legacy media companies. Even Nintendo could buy its own major movie studio, albeit at great risk. They're worth more than WB Discovery and Paramount are. They could afford to buy Mortal Kombat, Bugs Bunny, and Batman. They could probably buy a sizable stake in Universal Studios from Comcast if they were so inclined to cement Universal as a Nintendo movie studio after the Super Mario Movie. Now, movies that tie into video games are made. Warner Bros had more success leveraging Rampage, a long-dormant video game IP, into a movie than they've had trying to make their movies into video games. And that's not even going into the mammoth budgets sported like companies like Microsoft and Tencent.

Setting that aside, with few exceptions, I don't care for licensed games. I'd rather play actual video game IP. I'd rather play Mario or Zelda than Spider-Man or Lord of the Rings. I'd rather play Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy than Game of Thrones. Metroid is a better Alien game than any of the actual licened Alien games. No Man's Sky and Starflight (in the 1980s) captured the spirit of Star Trek perfectly in gaming without being tied to the license. The best 2600 game ever made, Solaris, started out as a tie-in to The Last Starfighter. Untethering it from the license helped make it into a game that could hold its own against a lot of NES games.  Licensed games are a trend that I'm glad to see going away, especially when the SNES/Genesis, PS2, and PS3/Xbox were so glutted with them.

I will say that I do enjoy video game based TV and movies, however, and I hope to see Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Fire Emblem movies in the future.

There are exceptions to licensed games for me as well. I loved Konami's licensed arcade games (TMNT, Simpsons, X-Men, Aliens). I even bought the Cowabunga Collection and Shredder's Revenge last year and would buy The Simpsons Arcade Game in a heartbeat. I enjoyed Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle. And I even had Judge Dredd for SNES, and it was fine. It just didn't get as much play time as Super Metroid or Donkey Kong Country.

I really enjoy Atari 50, but part of that is because those are the games I played before the NES came out. In particulary I was happy to see a few Atari 8-bit games on in this collection, namely Miner 2049er and Caverns of Mars. Thanks to my uncle giving me access to questionably legal Atari content back then, I also had a copy of the Atari 8-bit prototype version of Millipede when I was a kid, and I sitll enioy playing that. The remasters of Yars' Revenge and Haunted House were great as well.  The Lynx and Jaguar games are interesting. And I did play Dark Chambers back in the day as well; it was originally an Atari 8-bit game. 

It was also awesome that they got Solaris for this colleciton. Solaris is one game that almost never appears in Atari collections. It has appeared on a few versions of the Atari Flashback, but this is the first time I've seen it in a collection for consoles or PC. It originally started out as a video game tie-in to The Last Starfighter - Atari made another game for the Atari 8-bits that they tried to tie into that movie before they retitled it as Star Raiders II. Doug Neubauer, the author of Solaris and creator of the original Star Raiders, held onto the rights to Solaris, and so I guess Solaris's appearances are dependent on how nicely Atari talks to him.

Speaking of Star Raiders, the version included on Atari 50 is easily  the best console version of the game. Star Raiders has never translated well to consoles because its controls were hugely complicated, requiring either a keyboard as in the original 1979 release, or the 9-button 5200 controller. Even the 2600 version came with its own controller. The version included in Atari Flashback Classics was a huge pain in the butt to play. With this version, they gave it a very controller-friendly interface, and it is finally as fun to play on modern hardware as it was on my Atari 130XE. I do kind of wish they'd included more 8-bit content, including Final Legacy (which was in Atari Flashback Classics). A little bit of third party content would have been nice as well. Frogger and Jungle Hunt have been included on older Flashback consoles under license from Konami and Taito, respectively, and it definitely would have been nice to see a few Activision games. The 5200 version of Pitfall II was a huge game. But overall, it's an awesome collection.

I also believe that one of the producers on this collection, Frank Cifaldi, was a 1UP staff alumnus. 

Stage Select:

From the very beginning, I've been a Nintendo fan, and that starts with their earliest arcade games, which had an attention to detail that went above and beyond even Namco. Donkey Kong, DK Junior, and Mario Bros were lavishly animated and very colorful for 1980s arcade games, and had great (for the time) sound engineering. 

I've been playing Tears of the Kingdom, and enjoying all the little details there as far as the graphics and physics.

Cage Match:

No Man's Sky was one of the great comeback stories of the past decade. It was widely derided at its initial release in 2016 for its sparse content and unfinished state. Flash forward six years and it is finally the Starflight successor I'd always hoped for, with lots of free exploration and story-based content, plus the ability to name your discoveries. One point NMS has in its favor is better ongoing support, with a recent free expansion that was fairly substantial, and Hello Games supports all platforms as well, where Elite Dangerous has stopped console development because Frontier Developments simply doesn't have the resources available to support it. Both games are ambitious space sims with plenty to recommend about them. Elite Dangerous functions as a sort of space MMORPG as well. But as someone who grew up on numerous space games on the 2600, Atari 8-bit computers, and PC before exploring the verdant lands of Hyrule and Alefgard, No Man's Sky is what I was looking for in a modern space game. It wasn't overy difficult to get into, but I've enjoyed mastering the mechanics of the game. 

3-D keeps trying to be a thing. In the 70s and 80s it was those red and blue glasses. In the late 00s, my dad got 3-D glasses for his PC. I had the Playstation 3-D display and of course a 3DS. There were also a few 3-D TVs, but they never took off. 3-D never really takes off when they try it, and the 3DS was probably the most successful attempt. My dad really loved 3-D, though.

Stage Select:

This is an odd one, but when I see a challenge ahead, especially a challenge that resulted from entirely avoidable circumstances, I can hear the voice of Yuri (in Troy Baker's voice) from Tales of Vesperia saying, "Ah, man. All right, all right..." And by that same token, I can hear one of his victory quotes, "Resound! O cry of victory!" Really, though, Tales games in general have these fun little sound bites that play before, during, and after battles. 

Reyn from Xenoblade Chronicles is a found of meme-worthy sayings. "Now it's Reyn Time! Yeah, I'm turning up the heat! You can't have.a rainbow without Reyn, baby!" This last line is even cringe-worthy in universe.

Xenogears had a soundbite from Citan that plays in my head when I get trounced in Mario Kart and Smash: "Uh... welll...  nice move, that... last one."

When something has gone wrong, I'll sometimes say, "You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?" especially if I know the person is a gamer.

Cage Match:

The match ultimately ended up being a non-starter because Monster Rancher couldn't find any CDs at Best Buy. Monster Rancher then tried Walmart, which does sell CDs since they're now outdated technology, only to find that the local Walmart had shut down after forcing every other business to close. Pokemon Yellow, meanwhile, got a boost from Let's Go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee. but that didn't really matter since Monster Rancher couldn't fight. So Pokemon Yellow wins by default. Resound, O cry of victory!

I've played games from the 70s, but my birth year was close to the end of the decade, and I wasn't really old enough to engage with video games until 1981-82. Space Invaders is the same age as me. 

Watching MJF and Christopher Lloyd somehow manages to be both heartbreaking and heartwarming at the same time. It's shockiog how badly MJF's Parkinson's has affected him. He's still relatively young and has been dealing with it for years. But seeing Christopher Lloyd, who looks great for a guy well into his 80s, helping his colleague at public appearances is moving. The love these two longtime colleagues and friends have for each other is apparent in these appearances. Tom Wilson seems like a chill guy. He used to be on the Nerdist podcast. For some reason, I'm never lucky enough to get to meet people like that at expos, as they didn't come to places I lived in very often. 

Recently I discovered, through YouTube, an platforming arcade game called Mouser, by UPL. It's basically the reverse of Mappy: You play as a cat trying to rescure your cat girlfriend from some evil mice. That has become my most wanted Arcade Archives game. 

My first attempt at building in TotK was to build a fan-powered wagon with a flame emitter. It went pretty well... until it rolled into some tall grass and caught on fire. 

Taito did a variation of Puzzle Bobble called Puzzle de Pon! I used to see that in Neo-Geo machines at truck stops a lot, which is kind of funny.

One game that I'd like to see come to Arcade Archives (there are a lot, but this one is somewhat germane to this discussion) was called Senkyu, or Battle Balls. It had the same sort of animated anime background characters as Magical Drop.