PixlBit

It's funny how we've come full circle on media - sort of.

When CD-ROMs first came out, they seemed like a godsend. 650MB of storage compared to 1.44MB for 3 1/2" floppies or 64MB for the biggest N64 cartridge ever made, the N64 port of Resident Evil 2. Heck, most HDDs at the time CD-ROMs came out sported less than 100MB. Nintendo's failure to embrace CD-ROMs is universally seen as the unforced error that handed the video game market to Sony for almost every generation from the 5th gen onward.

Now flash memory continues to decrease in price to where there are flash cards with the capacity of multiple Blu-Ray discs. BD-ROMs are still cheaper per GB, but that difference is rapidly fading and I don't see Sony or MS making much noise about using 4K Blu-Ray discs for games. Meanwhile, though discs have improved, their drawbacks are still evident.

Sony went from optical discs on the PSP to cartridges on the Vita. Nintendo is going from optical discs on the Wii U to cartridges on the Switch. Unless the next PlayStation or Xbox go digital only (assuming those machines ever come out, that is), I wouldn't be surprised to see them go to cartridges.

Most stores I've seen here, even big box stores like Target and Walmart, have the cashiers do the bagging. Come to think of it, the only place I've seen baggers in the past few years is at the base commissary at Tinker AFB when I went with my dad to fill his meds at the base hospital. I've never lived in an area that didn't allow paper bags, though. I have some of the reusable bags but never remember to bring them.

Yeah, I saw a couple of reviews of the Super Famicom games and a few pieces of Fire Emblem fan art in NP in the 1990s. I always wanted to play FE Thracia 776 in English.

Awesome series. I just wish they'd kept making console games like Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn. That's one reason I'm hyped about the Switch and why I like the PSTV. Handheld is nice, but I'd really like the option to play on the big screen at home.

Just wait until the metal bubble slimes and the metal slime kings start showing up. You also get to deal with gold golems on one of the islands in DQ8, but they aren't as much of a tease as the metal slimes and you can generally kill them consistently and reap a huge reward in gold.

Yeah, my wife and I both wanted to give Charmless a good kick in the you know where. I wonder if Yuji Hori was watching the Scooby Doo episodes with Scrappy when he was doing the writing for DQVIII. :)

Here's my confession: of the three games that originated with the NES - of those, the only one I actually played on the NES was the first game since the other two were never localized until the PS1 - my favorite was Final Fantasy II, which is universally considered the worst of the three because of its admittedly broken levelling through practice mechanics (they did better with the spiritual successor series to FFII, SaGa). It had the most relatable story of the three (yes, I know that the NES games all had bare bones stories, including FFII) and my favorite music of the NES games, and I actually did well in figuring out the leveling system to where I destroyed the last boss.

FF9 is a great starting point. Its mechanics are enjoyable and representative of the series as a whole, and its fusion of classic aesthetics with 3-D graphics give you kind of a best of both worlds view of the series.

I agree with you. Blizzard games are automatically treated like the second coming of Jesus, Buddha, Zeus, and Odin rolled into one, always have been with regards to reviewers.

I wish I had gone to Distant Worlds in Pittsburgh in 2015, which would have been close since I am currently in Maryland. Hitoshi Sakimoto was in attendance for that one. I wanted him to autograph Final Fantasy XII or Final Fantasy Tactics. I wouldn't have minded him autographing my Valkyria Chronicles CE, too, but that would obviously be out of place at a Final Fantasy concert even though he did the music for that game, too.

I want Fate/Extella, but unfortunately it came out around the same time as Yakuza 0 and Tales of Berseria, so those are what I got. I like a lot of games that the critics don't (I also don't like a great number of critical "darlings" these days). One of my favorite games last year was Nights of Azure.