PixlBit

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.

One kind of interesting detail was how they codified Luigi as a coward who needed Mario to protect him, long before Nintendo itself did so.