PixlBit

I imagine that Japanese see Judeo-Christian symbols the way we see Greco-Roman or Norse mythology, and to a degree, Japanese mythology. So many Japanese games have Judeo-Christian symbolism in them. Final Fantasy, Xenogears, Bayonetta, some Tales games (Symphonia had a lot of not-too-subtle and not-too-flattering references to Catholicism in it), some Pokemon, and even Zelda. Originally, according to Miyamoto, Christianity was the main religion of Hyrule, with Link having a Latin cross on his shield in the NES games. It wasn't until A Link to the Past that Zelda started really developing its own mythology and pantheon. Since Japan isn't Christian (and in fact, their rejection of Christianity is said to have kept Japan from falling under European colonial rule the way China, Africa, and the Americas did), it doesn't mean much to them. They do celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday with their own spin on it (for single adults, Christmas involves dinner at KFC followed by a night at a love hotel), and they are aware to a degree of how religious the United States is. They almost didn't release Xenogears or Final Fantasy Tactics in the US due to concerns about backlash from religious groups.

We could call it "dickety." Or we could call the whole century "dickety", as in "dickety-eighteen" or in two years, "dickety-dickety."

My big games of this year were Fallout: New Vegas and Yakuza 3. F:NV was the best of the Bethesda Fallout games and combined the Bethesda graphics and gameplay engine with a lot of the best elements of the PC Fallout games.

Is this a recreation of the Scooby-Doo movie where Scooby-Doo Meets Batman and Robin?

I had a game like this on my Atari 130XE computer when I was a kid. It was called Trivia Quest, and was a board game where you and up to three other players answered questions and moved around a game board with a medieval theme. Some of the squares were dragons that you had to fight with bows and arrows. You had to complete three circuits around the board to your castle as a page, knight, and prince. These classes of characters also differed in their ability to fight dragons. The Page was weak, while the Knight was actually better than the Prince, even though the Prince was supposed to be higher-ranked. It was made in 1985, so its questions were even more dated. There were questions in it about the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

Too bad this didn't come out in the US. The NES had a lot of quirky RPGs on it. As a whole, the SNES and later consoles had better RPGs, but NES RPGs were pretty unique and varied for their time.

I expected it to go for $500, and I never expected to see one there at all. Astrocades are super-rare, and they were arguably the best consoles out at the time from a technical standpoint. They were sold only by mail-order when they were originally released.

No, I jumped into Super SFIV because Virtua Fighter 5, which was my go-to fighter until them, dried up online. It lasted longer than I thought it would, LOL. I haven't played SFV at all. The reviews have kind of deterred me on that, plus I have no shortage of other fighting games to play, like Mortal Kombat X, KoF XIV, and Guilty Gear.

Spirit Tracks had the same control scheme as Phantom Hourglass when you were on the ground. The trains were obviously different from the boat in PH.

I never played Intellivision growing up. I might have seen a few Intellivision games here and there. Apparently it was a lot more sophisticated than the 2600. Its controllers were a bit weird, but that was normal for then.

The one old school video game machine I always really wanted was the Bally Professional Arcade (later repackaged as the Astrocade after Bally sold its game division off). That system had a lot of really good home versions of Midway arcade games like Space Zap and Wizard of Wor. I actually saw one on sale at Fallout Games in Phoenix for $180. I didn't buy it though. :(

Of this batch of games, I played Spirit Tracks, SFIV, and Bayonetta. By 2009, I had switched from the 360 to the PS3, with some Wii gaming going on.

Like you, I wasn't a fan of the touch screen controls of the DS Zeldas. I liked Spirit Tracks better than Phantom Hourglass.

SFIV was pretty fun, and I played it quite a bit online, especially since the online community for VF5 had dried up a couple years ago. I think I played Super rather than the vanilla version though, so that may not count for 2009. But Capcom gonna Capcom, you know?

Bayonetta, now that was awesome. It blew DMC out of the water for me and the Bayonetta games are still my favorite games in that genre. I'll probably get Bayonetta on Switch along with Bayonetta 2. I actually had the PS3 version, which was supposedly worse than the 360 version although I think they'd patched it a few times by the time I got it.

Other games I liked in 2009 were Demon's Souls and Dragon Quest V on DS.

The Wonderswan actually seemed like a good portable system. Squaresoft supported it quite a bit with remakes of the early Final Fantasy titles. It's too bad that the WonderSwan, WonderSwan Color, and Swan Crystal never came out over here.