PixlBit

When I was a teenager and limited to 2-3 games a year, I wrung every bit of gameplay out of my games. I'm a long way off from my game-buying peak in my early 20s, but my game library sometimes still has the decadent excess of a Roman banquet. I limit myself to a handful of games, most of them RPGs, yet I don't finish a lot of them. If my wife and I aren't too tired in the evenings, then we go out and spend time together instead of playing video games. And these days, my latest gaming hobby is gaming videos. Since I don't see a whole lot of point in posting videos of games that pretty much everybody knows about, I stick with obscure games or trying to do really cool stuff like getting the 30K bonus in the shooting coaster in FFVII or winning Valkyria Chronicles battles in one or two turns. My wife even got me a game capture box for my birthday.

I enjoy travel, and with that comes photography of interesting things I see on the road. I took a lot of pictures of New York from the top of the World Trade Center. I have a DSLR camera but I haven't become dedicated enough to worry about making artistic photos, LOL.

I am ready for the cold weather to be done. It's cold where I'm at. When I was in Arizona visiting my parents around Thanksgiving, people were still swimming in their pools. That's where I want to be.

I've said it before, but for me the big draw of GTA was the ability to cause havoc, which is what set it apart from other video games. Once it became clear how sharply segregated the story missions the designers wanted you to do were from the day to day havoc, to the point where merely having your car sprayed would erase all of your misdeeds no matter how great they were, the novelty wore off for me.

I like FF15 and the Xenoblade games myself. I also like the later Fallout games, which do at times suffer from empty sandbox syndrome, but the post-nuclear settings are interesting and there are fun bits to do.

I actually got bored with GTA once the novelty of causing havoc with pedestrians wore off. And even with that, you couldn't cause any lasting chaos. As soon as you took your car to a Pay-n-Spray, law enforcement went away and things returned to normal like nothing ever happened. Even if you went on a rampage with a tank. The day-to-day havoc of GTA is segregated from the story missions even in the more recent games. I had the same issue with Red Dead Redemption.

Ubisoft is just kind of a crappy, overrated developer. They do make an occasional good/okay game, but I never understood how they went from obscurity to being a major third party other than getting lucky with Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell back on PS2. They were a decidedly lower tier publisher/developer up until then. Most of what made them successful was scripted set pieces, so that's a lot of why their efforts at open world are falling so flat.

Snake had a smoking habit in the old Metal Gear games, too. Even on the NES, you start out with a pack of cigarettes.

I first got exposed to Metal Gear through the NES game. I know Kojima doesn't like this version because of the changes they made to it, but the stealth gameplay was still groundbreaking for its time since they didn't release the MSX versions over here in the 1980s. The music is pretty catchy in the way that many NES games are.

I got my start with Final Fantasy in FF6, FF7, and FF Tactics. I missed out on the earlier games, and three of those games - FF2, FF3, and FF5 - didn't get US releases until after those games came out. It was interesting to see how the elements of the series evolved and how many of the thematic elements in the later games originated in the older ones. I think that the old Metal Gear games were a big revelation to the people who started with MGS and first played them on PS2 as part of MGS3 Subsistence. A lot of people thought Metal Gear originated with Metal Gear Solid, where the people who started with Final Fantasy VII at least knew there were six earlier games.

I like a balance between linearity and empty sandboxes. Right now I'm really enjoying FFXV, and I'm enjoying doing all the small stuff, chewing the scenery, and learning the battle system. It, and FF Type-0, are a huge relief compared to the rigid linearity of FFXIII. It's also for that reason I far prefer FFXII over FFX - FFXII isn't completely open world, but it's much more open than FFX. The second half of FFVI played as an open-world game as well, but you had distinct objectives like finding your friends, collecting weapons and magicite, and defeating the dragons.

No Man's Sky was a concept I'm really interested in, an open space exploration game, but they didn't have the resources to flesh it out. Back in the 1980s, I played a game called Starflight, which was an open-world space exploration game where you could explore planets, mine minerals, and capture life forms. It only recognized space in a flat X-Y plane due to the limitations of the time, but within that limitation it was impressive. But the developers also added a storyline with a conflict, as well as alien races to interact with, each with their own personality, and that's what made the difference there. They provided a big space to play in, but gave you stuff to do that actually meshed well with the universe they created. And in order to find the main storyline, you had to pick up on clues from alien communications and communication messages you found scattered on the planets. I'd hoped that No Man's Sky would scratch that itch using modern technology, but they relied entirely on procedural generation. A few scripted events and conflicts would have made a huge difference in that game.

Super Mario Run seems to me to be an incredibly dummied-down Mario game gimped to fit within the limitations of mobile gaming. I'm not too nuts about runners. It's the best one there is, but that isn't saying much. I'd rather play any Mario game on a 3DS, Wii U, or Switch. At best, I hope it has the same effect for Nintendo that Pokemon Go did. The 3DS is sold out everywhere thanks to Pokemon Sun/Moon, not bad for a six year old system. That game probably got a huge boost from the Pokemon Go fad.

The statements about people not wanting to pay more than $5 for Super Mario Run really illustrate a big problem with the mobile space. When companies got people used to "free" as a price tag, they kneecapped mobile gaming. If you can't talk people into paying for apps when they're used to free, there's no real incentive for quality. Despite mobile chips becoming more powerful, the games are as simplistic as ever. The only thing that does well on mobile are Skinner boxes that rely on "whales", the people that get addicted to the point of spending thousands of dollars on microtransactions.

As far as PS4 games, I would actually recommend FFXV. I know you're not into Final Fantasy like you are Dragon Quest, but I really enjoy it, I think there's a demo out there so you can try before you buy. Valkyria Chronicles Remastered is another one I love, but I don't know if you played it on the PS3. They did upgrade it to 60 FPS on PS4 and it comes with all DLC included on the disc, so there's that. Odin Sphere Leifthrasir is one you might enjoy if you haven't played it on PS2. One under the radar title I enjoyed last year was Nights of Azure. This year I'm looking forward to games like Akiba's Beat, Persona 5, Yakuza 0, and Valkyria Revolution. And Ni no Kuni 2, if it releases this year.

WoFF is on my to-buy list, but I'm really enjoying FFXV. Also loved TMS #FE and DQVII this year.

Thanks for watching!

Since these videos were grabbed directly off of my desktop, the video quality has no excuse for being anything less than good. I knew that sound was was going to be a weak point. I don't know much about sound mixing, which would balance out the voice-over and the game when properly executed, and the software I use (OBS Studio) doesn't offer that. As to my narration, I didn't do a lot of things that the big YouTube gamers do. They have good sound editing equipment that allows them to filter out noise, they use scripts and rehearse, and it's going to take some practice before I become anything resembling a good broadcaster. Honestly, a lot of these old games have really annoying sound. That's been one of the hardest aspects of game design for developers to wrap themselves around.

Twilight Princess is far and away my favorite Zelda. In fact, on my list of all time favorite games, it ranks at number 2, behind only Final Fantasy VII.

To me, it was everything I wished Ocarina of Time could have been. A large world, lots of enemies, and TP's Epona actually seemed like an integral part of the game instead of just a novelty for being an admittedly good-for-its-time horseback-riding simulation. I had the Gamecube version rather than the Wii version and was glad that TP HD took its design cues from the Gamecube.

Your game collection is a collection after my own heart. I ought to post pics of my setup, but I'm kind of embarrassed about it. I have an unhealthy number of games, but the problem is, I don't have a lot of space where I currently live. Most of them are packed away and only my PS4, Wii U, and PSTV are connected. :(