That's awesome picking up gaming like that. That was around the time I got my first job outside the home. I motivated myself by saving up for a PlayStation and Final Fantasy VII. That's my annual game, my favorite game of all time.
I always wanted to try Christmas NiGHTS. I do remember that Secret of Mana had a section where you had to rescue Santa Claus. The music for that region wasn't particularly Christmasy.
When I was a kid and playing on the Atari XE, I had a game called Special Delivery where you were Santa Claus. In the flying stages you'd have to catch presents dropped by angels (and avoid presents dropped by red angels, who were ostensibly Satan's angels) and avoid mountains and trees. If you caught a certain quota of presents, you'd then have to land your sleigh on the roof of a big house, climb down the chimney without getting burned, and then sneak presents under the tree without being caught by the kids. If you didn't catch enough, you had to drop the presents you did have into the chimneys of little cottages. Then the game would repeat at a higher difficulty level.
One neat little easter egg in Fallout 4 was how the town in that game would deck itself out in Christmas lights and a Christmas tree on December 25th of the in-game clock.
You ought to look into Trails of Cold Steel if you like Trails in the Sky. I've been playing Falcom games since Faxanadu back in 1989.
My first Ridge Racer game, like Cary, was R4. However, the version of R4 I got also came with a disc containing Ridge Racer and RR Revolution. It's too bad it didn't also have Rage Racer on it.
Resonance of Fate was probably Tri-Ace's best game since Valkyrie Profile.
Our system doesn't really allow third parties anyway. First politicians past the posts wins everything, which is the real defining feature of our voting system. The losing party doesn't get proportional representation, they get no representation at all. Technically, all you have to do to have one-party rule in a state is to have every district vote 50% + 1 person and you've disenfranchised 49.9% of the population (in real life, such a close contest requires an automatic recount and extensive investigation to ensure that voter fraud wasn't committed). Forget trying to have more than two parties under that system. I lived in such a state that was dominated by a single party, Oklahoma, for a good part of my life. There are two ruling organizations in Oklahoma: the Republican Party and the Southern Baptist Church, and they collude with each other closely. The governor has spent millions trying to get a monument of The Ten Commandments erected on the state capitol grounds in violation of the State Constitution's clause which forbids use of public monies to advance a single religion. She backed down when a Satanic group successfully sued to have a statue of Baphomet erected on the state capitol grounds. She also threaten to abolish marriage in Oklahoma altogether rather than allow gays the right to marry, citing "family values", when she destroyed her own marriage by having an affair with an Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer.
Voters are divided into arbitrary and heavily gerrymandered voting districts that in most states are redrawn by the dominant party after the census is taken and Representatives (and therefore electoral votes) are redistributed, always to dilute the opposition and ensure that their own party holds the majority in as many districts as possible. Arizona has taken steps to end gerrymandering and hopefully other states will follow suit.
For me other than perhaps Missile Command's cursor, the control issue isn't as huge. I played a lot of these games at home using standard Atari sticks as well as third party sticks like the Slik Stik. Since I got acclimated to these games with joysticks, I don't notice it as much with controllers - I got this collection on PS4 and am using Dualshock 4 -, but I can definitely see how trackball controls might be useful. My two favorite arcade games on this collection are Centipede and Millipede, which both used then. I tried the Save Mary game, too. Still wish these collections would feature Solaris more regularly.
I voted early, on last Tuesday. In the 2014 election, Oklahoma and Texas both had about 30% voter turnout, which is pretty sorry. OK and TX are regularly featured on the list of states with the worst voter turnout. Then the people in those states complain loudly and bitterly about the governor, President, and everybody in between. Get off your butts and viote!
Sadly, I never got to play LotW. I did know of it through Nintendo Power's RPG section where I would read about games I did play, like Dragon Warrior, Ultima: Exodus, and FaXanadu; even on the NES I was big into RPGs. I always wanted to play it, liking the multi-character approach. The NES wasn't mine, though, it belonged to my friend, and while we would rent games like the above for his NES on the precious little money available to 10- and 11-year-olds, we never rented LotW.
I am sure I probably read about Sorcerian in computer catalogs of the time, and if I'd gotten to see that one I would have probably found some way to buy it..
On that note, there is one other Falcom game upcoming that I definitely plan to support: Tokyo Xanadu. Aksys (best known as the US licensee for Guilty Gear and BlazBlue, but they also occupy the same under-the-radar Japanese niche as Xseed, Atlus, and Natsume) picked up the US rights to that game on the Vita. There is an enhanced version of Tokyo Xanadu in the works for the PS4, but so far that version has not been announced for a US release. If Aksys picks up the PS4 version, I'll go with that,but if not, I'll get the Vita version anyway, as it looks quite good. Falcom more than any other company has justified the PS TV my wife paid $60 for with titles like Ys: Memories of Celceta and Trails of Cold Steel I and II.
That actually is something I'd like to see in VR, the ability for the player to transform themselves in-game rather than just be a set of disembodied eyes. The technology isn't there yet, whether it's in the form of wearable sensors, or whether recognition and tracking software improves to that point.
Yes, even if it is Kirby.
