PixlBit

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.

Other than possibly VF3 vs Tekken 3, I've always liked Virtua Fighter better than Tekken. I like the game mechanics a lot better. I loved VF4 on PS2, it was my favorite fighting game of the generation. I just wish the series had been more successful in the US.

You can count me in as one of the people who like SM64 better than Sunshine. Sunshine was good, but I didn't enjoy it as much. Metroid Prime was my 2002 GOTY, but I kind of wish that the Prime games could have incorporated more of the game mechanics from the 2-D games, like the real Space Jump and Screw Attack, and the ability to freeze enemies into platforms. They did pretty good with the Morph Ball, though.

BMX XXX... that and The Guy Game were a couple of the lowest points the video game industry had seen since Custer's Revenge.

Gaming is a good way to recuperate from the flu. I got the flu right after my 21st birthday, and used one of my birthday gifts, Xenogears, to recuperate.

2003 was a great year for gaming. Wind Waker is an obvious winner of GOTY for me, and I also enjoyed Viewtiful Joe and SoulCalibur 2 on Gamecube. I do remember The Simpsons Hit 'n' Run, though it still didn't capture the same Simpsons magic for me that Konami's arcade game did twelve years earlier.  I played the PC version of Jazz Jackrabbit back in the 90s when it was new. Before they did Jazz, Epic MegaGames did a platformer called Jill of the Jungle that I played as well.

One other 2003 game I played was the first Xenosaga. Unfortunately, although KOS-MOS was an iconic character, the game itself didn't quite live up to Xenogears, as it played more like the second disc of Xenogears than anything else. Xenosaga was the weakest of the three Xeno series. :(