PixlBit

Ocarina of Time, Xenogears, Resident Evil 2, Parasite Eve, Banjo-Kazooie, and Tekken 3 were my big 1998 games. One 1998 under-the-radar gem I loved was Breath of Fire III.

I liked Doom 64 and Turok on N64, though my favorite games on that system were Mario Kart 64 and Star Fox 64.

Final Fantasy VII, however, stood head and shoulders above all else released that year.... and pretty much any year....

The amount of Minions stuff on social media and in the real world is mind boggling. A lot of the management offices where I work are decorated with it.

I've been following your adventures on Facebook, but welcome back to PB!

My 1995 was largely keeping up on games I missed from 1994, like Final Fantasy VI/III, Super Metroid, or Donkey Kong Country. Of new 1995 games I did play stuff like Judge Dredd and NBA Jam TE on SNES, as well as Mortal Kombat 3, Virtua Fighter 2, and Tekken 2 in the arcades. I didn't pick up Chrono Trigger until later.

Meh, Nintendo is still far and away my favorite developer, especially since a lot of my favorite developers have been in decline (Namco and Square Enix are doing pretty nicely by me lately, however) and I have zero interest in the EA/Acti/Ubi triopoly. I do have a PS4 and a Wii U and they get pretty equal playtime from me.

1. Yes, I like female player characters, especially when they're pretty. That aside, female characters are often more fun than their male counterparts. Don't know if it's sex appeal per se, because even in my teenage years my hormones could tell the difference between a real woman and a depiction of one, but I do like the aesthetics.

2. Kinda. I don't play online games (other than fighters) much and I don't talk much when I do. I mostly play online games with my wife anyway.  "Male" players give me stuff, shrug. I don't return their banter. Nor do I return the stuff they give me, for that matter. If they want to give away their in-game goodies, that's their problem, not mine. :)

3. Don't really give a damn one way or the other. I don't think trying to pick up dates in online games is such a great idea to begin with, so more power to 'em. I can see where women might want to play male characters so as not to be bothered by guys trolling for female attention, although that's kind of a sad commentary on the environment in some games more than anything.

Octoroks and Ultros are classics.

I'd also give a nod to Octomamm(oth) from Final Fantasy IV. One of Yoshitaka Amano's more memorable enemy designs.

Shantae is pretty good.

In the pre-Internet area a lot of people ran Bulletin Board Systems out of their own homes, and you could dial the number of the lines their computers were connected to and access those sites. They offered shareware games on BBS's for download (some more unscrupulous sites also offered commercial games as well). You could download these games at any speed from 300 baud to a blazing 14.4 baud! (1/4 of today's dialup speeds of 57.6K, and a mathematically insignificant percentage of the speed of broadband). Wolfenstein 3-D shareware would take you two hours to download at that speed.

DMC 4 is a great game and better than DmC, but I do agree on one thing - Bayonetta and especially Bayonetta 2 are the gold standard in that genre and DMC4 isn't quite going to measure up to them.