PixlBit

Personally, I would kill for original arcade versions of Donkey Kong and Mario Bros instead of the crappy NES versions. I'd also like Nintendo's Popeye arcade game, but I realize that Nintendo isn't going to deal with the licensing behind that these days.

From Square, I would want FFI-XII in a single collection. For the SNES games I want the original SNES roms instead of the iOS/Android ports they push these days.

Namco has actually done a pretty fair job of curating its classic library. You can buy all five volumes of Namco Museum on PSN for play on PS3 or Vita, and they usually offer their old games in muti-game bundles. The Namco Museum titles are unfortunately not 100% comprehensive and are missing classics like Rolling Thunder, but they're pretty good.

Yeah, instruction booklets used to be a lot of the fun of getting a new video game. The instruction booklets for the origina NESl Legend of Zelda and Metroid were epic. Square used to put out great booklets for Final Fantasy that were 60 pages and had maps and such in them. FFII came with a mock newsletter from Squaresoft USA called the Ogopogo Examiner, if I remember correctly. You simply don't see that anymore except with niche publishers like Xseed or NISA. Nowadays we get crappy in-game manuals and patronizing tutorial levels that make you demonstrate your ability to press "A" to jump to the game's satisfaction before you can proceed.

That said, I got Super Mario Maker for Christmas and it did come with a pretty good size tip book, as well as an in-game manual.

I hate it when trophies make you repeat stuff over and over to get them.

The PS4 version. I've been streaming it through twitch and uploading videos. If I could find my mic I'd do voice commentary. :)

Looks fantastic, can't wait. Playing the original now.

Are you one of the Hammer Bros. ?

Congrats, buddy!

Game Boy for Christmas 1989.

SNES Christmas 1994.

Unfortunately, they are niche publications writing about a niche market, and that dictates some incestuous relationships. Everybody knows everybody else, and there's nothing GamerGate or anyone else will ever do to change that. Part of the problem is that the revenue they need to survive comes from the industry they write about. They're never going to attract ad money outside of the industry.

Late to the party....

While it's popular to hate on Kotaku these days, they do have a point. Publishers do have a history of getting in a snit, taking their ball, and going home whenever anyone criticizes them, no matter how legitimate the criticism is.

Ubisoft (a mediocre publisher/developer if there ever was one) is particularly thin-skinned. Dan "Shoe" Hsu was unkind to the first AssCreed game (which had a pretty poor Metacritic score, and Ubisoft blacklisted 1UP/EGM. So they have a long history of this sort of thing. I am enjoying Fallout 4, but if Bethesda did something wrong they deserve to be pilloried for it. We have the industry we do now, with DRM, microtransactions, and pay-to-win, because nobody holds the publishers' feet to the fire.

But at the end of the day, this is a niche industry, and any publications related to it are dependent upon the goodwill of the content providers. They aren't going to attract broad advertising dollars from megacorps like Procter and Gamble, most of their ad money comes from the industry they write about.