PixlBit

Any long-running series runs across this. The Simpsons is a prime example. When it was in season 7, people claimed that it all went downhill after season 4. In season 10, it was season 8 that was the jump the shark point. Now season 15 seems to be the jump-the-shark point. In video games, you see this a lot with Final Fantasy and Zelda, with VI, VII, X, and to a much lesser degree, XII, all being the "last great FF game".

I was just being facetious on this one. :) I honestly haven't heard much about this one as I don't pay much attention to the Kickstarter scene.

I wish Sega was still making fighting games. I like Sega fighting games better than Namco fighting games, for the most part.

I'm more excited about under-the-radar stuff than I am about the annual AAA refreshes myself. I don't think it's hipsterish if you're not hating stuff just to jump on some hate bandwagon. God forbid you could genuinely not be interested in the latest CoD, Battlefield, AssCreed, or whatnot.

You're wrong. Adventure and Pitfall inspired them. :)

I'm lucky to do a Blog a Year. :)

Oh, man, I love Trails of Cold Steel. I'd be playing it now, but I have the PS3 version and a dead PS3. :(

I'm on the fence about FF Explorers, but recently I downloaded Final Fantasy Tactics Advance on Wii U and started a playthrough of that. Really enjoying it.

I used to see stuff about the trade gap with Japan all the time, and I saw a lot of American companies end up under Japanese ownership. Columbia Pictures went from Coca-Cola to Sony Pictures (which still owns it), and economics magazines depicting the Statue of Liberty dressed in kimonos and carrying paper fans instead of the torch and tablets. In my family, my mother was all "buy American", and she still is. She's never driven a non-American car. By contrast, my dad has driven nothing but Japanese vehicles since 1989 or so.  My father was in the Navy from 1957-1971 and loved being stationed in Japan, and he worked for the Postal Service thereafter. My mother worked at a Motorola plant in Arizona for a couple of years.

The thing is, we did have the "burn anything not American" mentality coming from the government in the 1980s, but very few people walked the walk. People kept buying Sony TVs over Zeniths and Toyotas over Fords and Chevys, while politicians beat the populist "buy American" drum while insisting on a deregulated trade market that worked in favor of Asia and Mexico at the expense of American workers. Wal-Mart used to post "Made in the USA" signs, but that pretty much went away after Sam Walton died.

And in video gaming? Trust me, there was nobody out there that believed that the Atari 7800 and the Atari Lynx were viable alternatives to Nintendo. Atari even touted "Made in the USA" as an advertising campaign for the Jaguar. :)

In the 80s, Japan was honestly more hated in some circles than Russia was. It wasn't workmanship so much as the fact that their automotive and electronics industries were eating the US alive in the 1980s, and the fact that Japanese companies were buying up a lot of American companies and real estate. In 1995, due to a stock market spike, the Japanese economy was briefly worth more on paper than the entire US economy was. The market correction that followed pretty much put an end to the "Japan is taking over the world" meme. If you've ever seen movies from the 80s set in the future, notably Back to the Future II, you'll notice they all have America's economy pretty much owned by Japan in its entirety.

And Nintendo got a lot of this hate because it was the most familiar face of Japan in American homes. The American video game industry was on life support at that time. Atari and Activision were going bankrupt, and even EA wasn't doing all that well.

I'm lucky to do a blog a year, and I don't have the excuse of six kids to hide behind. :)