PixlBit

Congratulations on the new baby!

Visceral Games is just the latest in EA's graveyard. I hate what EA does to the industry. Origin is gone. Maxis is gone. Bullfrog is gone. I have no doubt that we'll be reading about Bioware's closure at some point, maybe not now.

Sadly, there are two reasons why EA gets away with this crap without going bankrupt: the NFL and FIFA. A stream of guaranteed Madden dollars and FIFA euros keep EA afloat, and they seem to think that every property they have can be turned into a perpetual cash cow. They honestly seem to be trying the mobile microtransaction-based "pay to win" model on console gaming. I wish the NFL and FIFA would open their licenses to other publishers, because that would really break EA's stranglehold on the industry. "EA Sports" isn't even a big brand anymore because other companies made better NBA and MLB games and pushed EA out of those markets. Yet they are allowed to continue to hold a monopoly on both kinds of football. Sigh.

I don't really have a Halloween game of the year. Castlevania is usually what comes to mind for that. Or Ghosts 'n' Goblins. Or Zombies Ate My Neighbors.

No Twitter account, but #Delaware.

 Stage select: What game characters I would like to eat.

 1. My first choice is Tif.... errr, never mind, I'll just show myself out now.

 How about Cuccos? I'll bet they taste just like chicken.

2. That giant pig in Wind Waker. That's a lotta bacon, ham, and sausage right there. Hopefully some good ribs.

3. Maybe the cake boss in Super Mario RPG? Not sure how a living cake would taste, especially after being jumped on by Mario.

Chrono Crossing:

Starflight (PC). This is the only time you'll ever see me naming an EA game as a game of the year. I didn't play it until a few years after it came out, but it was an amazing game. It was set in the year 4620, a thousand years after the fall of a galactic civilization, and you were charged with exploring the universe. You outfitted a ship, trained a crew in five different jobs (science, engineering, navigation, communication, and medicine), with the ability to pick from five different species (Human, the insectoid Velox, reptilian Thrynn, plant-like Elowan, or androids). You could explore star systems, individual planets, and nebulae looking for life forms, minerals, and treasures that would enhance your ship or fill in the game's backstory. There were multiple alien races to communicate, trade, and do battle with. Eventually, you would find a certain familiar planet within a "dead zone." Shortly after you start your game, you are also given an impending crisis to resolve that will require you to explore carefully to find all the tools you need to save your home world. Most space video games were space battle games inspired by the Star Wars craze in the early 80s; this game was definitely more Star Trek than Star Wars.

I didn't pick up a lot of my favorite game series until they had several iterations spanning over 10 years. I didn't get into Final Fantasy until the SNES was on its way out the door to be replaced by the N64. I didn't get into Fallout until the Bethesda games. I've been playing Mario and Zelda from their earliest incarnations, but I still enjoy their newer stuff. And Mario and Zelda games are made so that no prior knowledge of the series is needed. The fact is, people being what they are, younger gamers aren't going to get excited playing a game made in 1985-1987, but they can still appreciate those same mechanics in Breath of the Wild or the latest round of Mario games.

Gaming companies cannot survive by simply catering to the same cohort of people born from the mid 70s to the mid 80s.

What about Plumbers Don't Wear Ties? What's special about that one?

Stage Select:

This is a hard one for me. Video games aren't really scary for me beyond the jump-scare effect, and even that is only because I startle easily, as anybody that knows me personally can attest. But I'll take a whack at this anyway.

1. The Arch-Viles from Doom 2. There was nothing I hated more than to hear them roaming around. They have this attack where if you are in their line of sight, they will blow away most of your life, and it's worse when they are in higher levels when you are trying to deal with other enemies. I always found them worthy of expending 40 cells in my BFG-9000 to put them down quickly, but the problem is that they can do a lot of damage before you can even see them to shoot at them.

2. Balio and Sunder, the twin horse gangsters from Breath of Fire III. BoFIII is a brightly colored, cheery, cheesy game, and there is nothing really "scary" about it per se. Balio and Sunder are more of a kid-based fear, since Ryu and Nina are kids when they are being pursued by B & S. You meet them after they've burned down your house in retaliation for stealing their protection money. They have no qualms about beating up and kidnapping kids, and they are relentless pursuers. If you're a kid, this is a great example of video game "stranger danger". Your party can't get away from them. They are apparently so brutal that even when you're in seemingly friendly towns, the townspeople will almost instantly sell you out to them  out of fear of retaliation. Every. Single. Time. I guess this could be an adult fear if you were to run afoul of gangs or organized crime syndicates in real life.

3. The ReDeads in Wind Waker. The scream they make when they jump you. It's a stock horror-film sound of a girl screaming, but the acoustic effects Nintendo used make it even more piercing.

Chrono Crossing (1987):

The Legend of Zelda. I credit this game for making me a lifelong gamer. I played games for most of my life, but up until them, they were either simple single-screen arcade games, or at most, side-scrollers like Super Mario Bros. Here was a game that had its own world to explore, with forests, lakes, deserts, mountains, and a graveyard to explore, not to mention 8 huge dungeons. It was a game that was an epic ongoing adventure instead of a 5-minute time killer. It had a huge variety of enemies to battle. Secrets were constantly dangled in front of you, and you were really encouraged to explore. And it all played out to the tune of what is still today my single favorite piece of game music, the Zelda Overworld Theme, which has only been improved with technology. The icing on the cake was the fact that once you beat Ganon the first time, the fun didn't stop. You got a second quest with the difficulty cranked up to 11, with all new dungeons and enemies.

I was in 4th grade the year it came out, and in my spare time in class, I drew a lot of scenes from the game. My teacher noticed me doing this one day. I tried to hide it. At that time, video games had the reputation among adults for being brain-rotting garbage, and I got plenty of that attitude at home from my parents. She insisted in looking at it, however. Much to my surprise, she began a conversation with me about Zelda. She asked how far along I was (I think I was in the midst of the Second Quest). She then told me that her husband was playing the game and was really wrapped up in it, but had gotten snagged on a dungeon that I had already finished. She asked me how to get past the point he was stuck at. I wrote it down for her and even drew a map. The next class, she told me that her husband thanked me for my help and would appreciate any further help I could give. So for the remainder of the 1987-1988 school year, I corresponded with him through my teacher. That was one of my fondest memories from childhood.

That list is solid. I'd add Zombies Ate My Neighbors myself, and Earthbound. If we count import games I'd definitely add Seiken Densetsu 3 and Tales of Phantasia. I've only played the emulated version of the former and the GBA version of the latter. My favorites are Zelda and Metroid (of course.) If it's a Nintendo console, you can bet that my favorite game on it will have the word "Zelda" somewhere in the title.

This is how I imagine this episode is going to go down.

Stage Select: Overrated Games

1. Grand Theft Auto as a series. Disregard my Pixlbit user name, which was from the series but was more of a video game-related play on my real name than anything else. When GTA III came out, it was fun just causing havoc in the streets, especially when you could jack the wanted level up to 6 stars and steal a tank. The story was as goofy as anything from an anime. But from there, the novelty of its sandbox died. Vice City was fun for a bit, then the series got too serious and full of itself. They've focused more on creating ersatz versions of NYC and LA, which is ambitious but kind of sterile. Since GTA V still shows up on top 10 sales lists four years later, that is the direction the series will continue to use, and maybe I'm just full of you-know-what. But the sandbox stuff has fallen by the wayside. Even the sandbox veneer wore thin kind of quickly once you realized that you could instantly erase all the havoc you just created with a tank rampage by just driving into a Pay 'n' Spray. The gameplay mechanics in the series today are just as unwieldy as they always were. There are a lot of games which do sandbox play a lot better than GTA, like Bethesda RPGs and now Breath of the Wild. I'd also like the series to take its parody of American culture off of the coasts and roast Middle America in its next entry. And I'm not talking Chicago either, which has also been done to death in gaming. Let's see places like Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, or North Carolina skewered by Rockstar Games. I even wrote a blog on 1UP and on Pixlbit detailing a GTA treatment of Texas. Then I might be more interested in the next entry.

2. Metal Gear Solid series. I realize that Kojima is seen as something of a Japanese auteur and was a rare success during the lean era for Japanese games that was the 360/PS3 era. The games are unparalleled at stealth gameplay mechanics. And Kojima brings his experiences growing up into his games. The series just never really clicked for me, and I don't have the same reverence for it that a lot of my fellow PixlBitters do. I do tend to be a RPG guy, but I enjoy action games as well.

3. And now to really kick the hornet's nest. I enjoyed Final Fantasy VI much more than I did the game which shows up at the top of a lot of people's best-ever RPGs, Chrono Trigger. In fact, I honestly enjoyed the Lunar games, which were probably made on a budget a fraction of that of Chrono Trigger, more than CT. It's a great game with good design. I just enjoyed a lot of other RPGs more.

Please send all hate mail with regards to the above to: Andrew Tiberius "Rusty" Shackleford, 61923 Dead Weasel Road, Tent # 469, Kivalina, AK 99750.

Chrono Crossing (1988):

Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. For a whole year or so, every video game my friends and I played was just a way to kill time until Zelda II came out. We checked the mailboxes daily for the next issue of Nintendo Power and groaned when we read stories about the supposed DRAM chip shortage that conveniently delayed the release of Zelda II into December of that year.

Zelda II is the black sheep of the series today because of its unusual design. Gameplay-wise, it was heavily inspired by Xanadu/Faxanadu and Ultima, with side-scrolling gameplay and RPG leveling mechanics. Given that A Link to the Past was (thankfully) a return to the top-down view of the original game, clearly the changes in Zelda II didn't take with fans. But Zelda II was a typical sequel of its time. Nintendo didn't want to simply rehash the first game, they wanted to make a bigger, better, and different game within the limitations of the NES hardware, and in the "bigger" and "different" aspects, at least, they succeeded. A lot of game designers wanted their sequels to be different from the original games in that way. A lot of times the changes didn't work out too well, but they were still interesting experiments in game design that are a contrast to the annual Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed iterations we were getting on the Xbox 360 and PS3. See also: Super Mario Bros. 2 (USA), Castlevania II, Final Fantasy II, Ultima II.

Despite being a huge fan of Metroid on NES, I never got this game until it came out on the 3DS virtual console. I think I asked for it for Christmas but never got it. My next Metroid game was Super Metroid on SNES. Along with Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters (which I did own), it signified a turnaround in Nintendo's approach to handheld gaming, where they tried to make a Game Boy game as good as a console game within the limitations of the hardware instead of half-assing it.