PixlBit

You can hoof it in DC, MoCo, PG County, and NoVA pretty decently due to the Metro. Baltimore, unfortunately, doesn't have comprehensive mass transit like DC, NYC, or Boston do. Most of the city is serviced by an inadequate bus system. There is light rail, but it mostly connects Owings Mills and Timonium to Downtown, with a couple of stops in Glen Burnie. It does connect to Penn Station and the Acela line that services the BosWash corridor. 

When I lived there, I was as stranded without a car there as I would be in Phoenix. And that's a shame, because the city really needs something more than a bus that comes by every few hours to service a lot of its poorer neighborhoods.

There is definitley lots of interesting stuff there. One of my favorite places there was Boring, home of the Boring Volunteer Fire Department and the Boring United Methodist Church. It's northwest of Baltimore.  

I lived in Baltimore for a couple of years. Expensive AF, especially car insurance. Not to mention your car pretty much has to be driven right off the dealer lot to the nearest inspection station to have any hope of passing Maryland's motor vehicle inspection.

Zestiria had an interesting premise based around Arthurian legend, but it looks like it was built around monetization. That's notably the game that ended with the ouster of Hideo Baba as head of the series. Berseria and Arise were definitely headed back in the right direction.

I tried a Retron 5 because it played GBA games, but it kept crashing randomly, no matter which system's games I tried. Plus, no used game shops would take it. :(

Stage Select:

The Ding Dong Dell theme from Ni no Kuni, from Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi.

Cage Match:

Going with Rhapsody on this one, as it was pretty much America's introduction to the zaniness and style of NIS. I've been playing it on Switch as part of one of the NIS Classics collections. It wins just because you can actually attack your enemies with a stack of giant pancakes with syrup. Kartia was interesting, too, as it was illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano, whose art-style was noticeably absent from FFVII. The main character looked a lot like Terra from FFVI. 

I want to go to PAX Prime and Tokyo Game Show. If things are settled down, I may make serious arrangements to go to TGS. I've always wanted to visit Japan anyway.

E3 was hugely expensive, and that was a long-standing criticism of it that predated the rise of Nintendo Directs and Sony's State of Play. In 2007, they even tried to scale it down to a "strictly business" form, the E3 Media and Business Summit, which was basically like a business seminar. Nobody cared about that, so they tried to go back to the glitz. The other problem is that inevitably, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo would drown everyone else out and suck the oxygen out of the room. Mostly, it was Sony doing that, not because they intended to, at least with regards to their third party partners, but simply because they are the largest single presence in the gaming world. 

Companies just decided it was more cost-effective to do their own presentations on their own schedules. And frankly, I like the Nintendo Directs approach better. I think part of why Nintendo prefers them is because Nintendo now seems to prefer making its major launches in spring and summer rather than Christmas, strategies that worked well for the 3DS and Switch.  Most of what E3 showcased was for holiday announcements.

I think E3 was also undone by the fact that it was an exclusive club for business and media, and that's really kind of a wasteful for what amounts to an echo chamber. If E3 had been open to the public from the beginning, it might have survived. Instead, shows like PAX filled that niche with both press events and public events. Tokyo Game Show likewise is open to the public.

I think the last one I really paid attention to was E3 2013. That was the one where the PS4 and Xbox One were showcased, and Sony absolutely roasted Microsoft over their policies on Xbox One used games, "always on" Internet, mandatory connect, and "TV TV TV." I think E3 2015 was where they had all those Kickstarter games. The Wikipedia edits were pretty funny, too.

I hope to see you here more often, though I see you in other places. That said, self-care is key. 

Stage Select:

Parasite Eve on PS1 came with a demo disc that had videos of Final Fantasy VIII, Bushido Blade 2, and Brave Fencer Musashi, but more importantly, it had a playable demo of Xenogears, up until the Gears attack the village. Xenogears was a pleasant surprise that became one of my favorite PS1 games and was the forerunner to one of my current favorite series, Xenoblade Chronicles. 

Dragon Quest XI S had a great demo on the Switch, and you could transfer your progress to the final release.

Speaking of Dragon Quest, I got a demo for Dragon Quest VIII on PS2 which really sold the game for me. And the final version of the game contained a playable demo of Final Fantasy XII, which was a great twofer.  The DQ8 demo played up to the first boss, while in FF12's demo, you could pick between two different areas with two different sets of characters.

Doom Episode 1: Knee Deep in the Dead was a shareware title composed of the first eight levels. A lot games from id Software and Epic Megagames, as it was called in the 90s, were distributed this way, with the full releases being episodic as well.

Cage Match:

It takes a lot more than virtual tiddies and azz to make a game these days, and there are plenty of games that offer that in more robust titles. So I'm going with Super Mario Sunshine. It may not be Mario's best game, but it was emblematic of the experimental nature of some of Nintendo's Gamecube classics, and it is still a Mario game. Fun fact: I actually have Tomonobu Itagaki on my Facebook friends list.