PixlBit

Ugh, that blows about the PS4. Non-Nintendo consoles can sometimes be spotty. I still have my launch PS4 and it's still working perfectly. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. My PS1 and PS2 lasted two years before they started giving me disc read errors, while my PS3 lasted a long time before yellow-lighting.  The only Nintendo console I ever had fail on me was a Nintendo 64 (still outlived my PS1 though!). My launch Game Boy still works and that thing has taken almost as much punishment as the Gulf War Game Boy!

I kind of want to start looking for Fragile Dreams on the Wii. I'm also wanting to find Sakura Wars: So Long My Love. That's one of my favorite games of all time. I have the PS2 collectors' edition, but I don't have a system to play it on now. I was playing PS2 games on my OG 60GB PS3 fatty, and that console bought the farm around New Years'. I'll probably try to get it fixed, but it still sucks, and in the meantime, I've kind of wanted to play Sakura Wars again (mostly since I started replaying Valkyria Chronicles, which was made by many of the same people.)

The first time, my Game Boy simply stayed at home. My dad was in the military for over 20 years and he is also an expert on electronics and anything to do with radio/television. He told me that I probably wouldn't be able to take my Game Boy on the plane due to potential radio interference, so I didn't. I wasn't mad until I saw the flight crew playing their Game Boys. My dad actually called Space-A and confirmed that while I couldn't actually play my Game Boy, it could travel with me. So it went to Germany that summer. And when we were trying to fly back home from Rhein Main Airbase near Frankfurt (at a bad time to catch a military flight home to the US, it turned out; we eventually had to catch a commercial flight from Frankfurt to JFK in New York City and then had to take a Greyhound bus from New York City to Oklahoma City) a boy my age was interested in my Game Boy. His dad was an American airman, but his mother was German and he had lived his entire life in Germany and spoke little English. So with his dad intepreting, I shared my Game Boy and we had a good time. That Game Boy kept me sane during the ordeal of trying to get home! When I first got the Game Boy, I got Super Mario Land in addition to the Tetris that came with it, and by that summer, I was probably playing The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle.

One of my souvenirs from Germany was a German-language Tom and Jerry comic book that I bought at a convenience store. One of my most memorable experiences was us going to McDonald's in Germany and finding out that 1) they served beer at McDonald's and 2) you actually had to pay for ketchup pouches, about 50 pfennig for a ketchup pouch.

I've actually played a couple of the more obscure games on this blog. Attack of the Mutant Camels was a knockoff of the Atari 2600 Star Wars game where you shot AT-AT walkers, only you were shooting giant mutant camels instead. It was written by Jeff Minter, who also wrote a game called Hover-Bovver where the object was for you to successfully mow your lawn, and who later went on to develop Tempest 2000 for the Jaguar.

Jumpman Junior was a Donkey Kong style jumper that had looser physics and a lot of BS deaths.

I never saw the original box art for these games until years later. My copies were given to me by my uncle on self-made floppy disks. :)

The last time I saw a movie in theaters was when I took my wife to see Star Wars: TFA on New Years'. I almost never go to movies otherwise. As far as the movies above, the online hysteria over Ghostbusters reminds me again of why I deleted my Twitter account and never looked back. Twitter is like the open sewer of the Internet.

VisuaLIES reminded me of something with his post. In 1989-1990, my family visited Germany. The first time in 1989 was more of a trip to Dover AFB in Delaware with a 19 hour layover in Germany wherein I was miffed because the Air Force told my dad that I couldn't bring my brand  new Game Boy onto the plane because of radio interference only to find the Air Force crew playing their brand new Game Boys during the flight to Germany. The second time, July 1990 was three weeks. I saw a lot of posters for a movie called "Der Fledermausman (The Flying Mouse Man)" with a familiar logo. "Der Fledermausman" was the German title for the Batman movie with Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. There were even more posters for "Zurück in die Zukunft III", which translates to "Back to the Future Part III".

Dragon Quest VIII, hands down. It is a magnificent RPG set in a wonderfully rendered world.

Viewtiful Joe is a great game as well, but I like the Gamecube version better.

I think laws and public backlash have curtailed food/snack based promotions aimed at kids somewhat.

I have played a few versions of Track and Field (Atari 8-bit, NES, and arcade). You really needed a Trak-Ball controller to play games like this and Activision Decathlon, since "running" required you to wiggle a joystick back and forth. But the home version of the Atari Trak-Ball controller had a "cheat" switch which broke both of these games and turned you into the video game equivalent of Usain Bolt. :)

I actually liked Other M. Although the execution was off, I'd rather have Metroid as a third-person game than as a first-person game. The Prime series had to neuter a lot of Metroid's classic power-ups to make them work in first person.

LOL, I remember Ecto-Cooler, and all those Ghostbusters toys with slime. Funny thing is, though, I never really cared much for Ghostbusters. It had a good cast, and Sigourney Weaver is my favorite movie actress (Katey Sagal is my favorite on TV), but I just could never get into it. All the furor over the remake never really registered with me other than the ridiculousness of it all.