I remember a point in the first Gears of War. There was a checkpoint right before a boss that was giving me major problems, and every time I got killed by the boss, I'd have to listen to the dialogue over and over again. I really got sick of it after the first two or three times.
Nena was the original artist behind "99 Luftballons." That song, incidentally, was a protest song released during the 1983 nuclear standoff in Eastern Europe. I
West of Phoenix is Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, which is purported to be the largest nuclear power plant in the United States. I guess it supplies Phoenix and a lot of Southern California with power. It doesn't look like a stereotypical nuclear power plant, and since water is a limited commodity in the desert, it uses waste water, i.e. sewage as a coolant.
It looks a bit like Magician Lord, a game I saw on a lot of Neo-Geo arcade machines and is available as an ACA Neo-Geo game on current systems.
Japan launched several thousand balloon bombs over North America in 1945. Almost none them exploded. Unfortunately, one of them did explode in Oregon, killing five people. It had been there for several weeks according to the authorities and the group had discovered it and accidentally detonated it.
I drove by Three Mile Island a few years ago and took pictures. I kind of have a morbid fascination with some of these environmental disasters. Some day I'd like to visit Love Canal.
I'm familiar with a couple of the Arcade Archives titles that Taito made, like Legend of Kage and The Ninja Warriors, but other than Bubble Bobble, I don't see any of Taito's better known classics on there.
I buy cartridges for retail games and digital for small games like arcade games and indies.
Too bad Square Enix doesn't make Taito collections for consoles. I liked quite a few Taito games like Space Invaders, Space Dungeon, Qix, Arkanoid, Bubble Bobble, and Jungle King (Hunt).
I never saw this in the wild, though I read about it in an old book of video game cheats.
Fun fact(?): Phoenix was possibly licensed to Centuri from a company based in.... Phoenix. That's from the game's Wikipedia page.
Sony actually didn't do too badly in handhelds, especially with the PSP. That said, I liked Sony's handhelds for the niche Japanese games rather than for games like Uncharted. Now those type of games are going to the Switch and PS4. The problem is, Sony's success was built off of third-party games like FFVII and GTA, so the PSP and PSV didn't really have anything to make them stand out compared to Nintendo's offerings. Even GTA didn't keep the PSP from getting hammered by the DS.
As for Microsoft... no, just no. They can't even sort out the Xbox One at this point. A Microsoft handheld would have all the same problems Sony did, only worse. With how dead the Xbox is in Japan, they wouldn't even get most of the niche games that made the PSP and PSV still worth playing after Sony gave up on them.
