PixlBit

I had the Atari 8-bit version, which had all four levels and pretty much all the features of the arcade. Its only deficit was a somewhat limited color palette and slightly blockier resolution. Its sound even sounded pretty close to the arcade.  It was partly for that reason that I never warmed up to the NES version, which had the cement factory cut out for memory reasons. Well that, and the fact that when I started playing NES, games like Zelda, Metroid, and Kid Icarus were the big thing.

The first one had a lot of old-school Capcom arcade games that I loved, like Ghosts n Goblins and 1943, plus later Capcom classics like Giga Wing. For the second one, the only game I got was Saturday Night Slam Masters. Part of the problem is that there's too much overlap with other Capcom collections. Street Fighter is already available in a collection, as are Capcom's beat-em-ups. Darkstalkers, Vampire Savior, and Super Puzzle Fighter are cool and were overlooked for a long time, but I have those in the Capcom Fighting Collection. 

PS4 has been a solid console and an improvement over PS3. However, it did start out somewhat slow as far as games went. In 2017, the games started coming in heralded by Persona 5. However, that's also the time the Switch showed up, and the Switch ended up taking up a lot more of my gaming time and dollars than the PS4 did.

Stage Select:

I'd like to see Nintendo take another crack at a 3-D third-person Metroid. I prefer third-person games in general, and one of the problems with the Prime games (and I do love the Prime games) being first-person is that the format doesn't allow the same kind of acrobatics and use of power-ups as the 2-D games do.  Other M had its heart in the right place. Maybe make it more open in structure like Prime and Super, and have Platinum Games, Monolith, and Retro collaborate on it. Each of those studios has something to bring to the table for a project like this. Just make sure there's an adult in charge who can put everything together without making it a case of too many cooks in the kitchen, and make it a true 3-D Metroidvania with an open world. There are plenty of templates where acrobatic 3-D action has been done successfully.

Cage Match:

Gonna go with Scott Pilgrim. It's got solid beat-em-up action combined with a bangin' soundtrack. 

Suggestions for future cage matches:

Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure vs. Kartia: World of Fate. I'd love to see the listeners take this one on.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses vs. Valkyria Chronicles (1 or 4). 

Fire Emblem Engage vs Tactics Ogre Reborn

No Man's Sky vs. Elite Dangerous. Or Star Citizen (snicker). 

Atari 50 vs. TMNT: The Cowabunga Collection

Metroid Prime Remastered vs Hi Fi Rush (two games that were shadow-dropped by their publishers at Direct events). 

The Ultima game that Garriott was talking about was Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, which is widely considered a high point in the series, including by Garriott himself. It was a huge departure from the way RPGs were/are traditionally designed, which was a response to a combination of the 1980s moral panic going on in the US in the wake of Reagan's election, and Garriott's own concern that the earlier games encouraged too much thievery and senseless killing from supposed heroes. There was no overriding villain to defeat. Your quest was to become the Avatar, the personification of the Eight Virtues of Britannia. As such, besides the pilgrimage to the shrines of the Eight Virtues, almost every action you took in the game was judged by its own karma system. Fighting thieves, bandits, and monsters would raise your valor, while letting animals like snakes escape would raise your compassion, and so on. The shopkeeper was a test of the player's honesty.

I attended two Distant Worlds concerts, one in St. Louis, and one in Omaha where I got to meet Nobuo Uematsu and have him sign my FFIX cover art. In the one in St. Louis, Susan Calloway performed the opera song that Celes sings in FFVI. 

It had a lot of good RPGs, but honestly, most of them should have been on PS3 instead. 

I got a Wii as soon as I found one in stores, however, I got Twilight Princess on Gamecube. It was a fun system. My stepkids and I enjoyed Wii Sports, and I got Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. The middle years of the Wii were kind of weak, loved Punch-Out though. It made a strong finish with the Op Rainfall games, but I wasn't very happy with Reggie. He had a tendency to tell people what they wanted rather than give people what they wanted. 

Of the 7th generation, I'll say this:

The 360 started strong (online and a few JRPG catches) and had a weak ending with their emphasis on Kinect and non-gaming applications..

The PS3 started weak with a high price tage and no games, and ended very strongly (JRPGs made their comeback in the later years of the PS3, and The Last of Us has blown up into a media franchise).

The Wii started strong, had a weak middle (Wii Music? Really?) and had a strong lineup in their last years (Skyward Sword and the Operation Rainfall RPGs), though sales of the Wii slowed pretty rapidly after 2010. 

I got one of these for Virtua Fighter 5 Online, since the PS3 didn't have any comparable online fighting games (and was still very expensive). I also enjoyed Fallout 3 and Tales of Vesperia on 360. It almost made me overcome my general antipathy towards Microsoft products in general... until it crapped out with the E74 error, another defect that Microsoft tried to lie about until they were threatened with legal action.  I switched to PS3 after that.

Had a lot of interesting games on it, though a lot of them were games I wish they'd made for Wii or PS3 instead of DS. Sadly, it was the weakest Zelda machine, though Spirit Tracks was better than Phantom Hourglass.  The DS ultimately became a Dragon Quest machine for me since they released the Zenithia trilogy on it, which included Dragon Quest 5 and 6, never before released in the US. Dragon Quest 5 ranks up there with 8 and 11 as my "holy trinity" of Dragon Quest, and I would like to see it get a console re-release.