I missed out on these games, as well as on the Coleco tabletop games. I did have a few LCD games from Radio Shack as well as a Nintendo Game & Watch, which tided me over until Nintendo released the Game Boy in 1989.
We had a knockoff Pong console. We may still have one somewhere.
Fun fact: Nintendo's Pong clone consoles were the best-selling video game systems of the 1970s. So Nintendo actually won the first generation of game systems. Even before the NES they were kickin' tail.
And there was a sequel to Fuga that was just announced.
I never played the NES or GB games much. I loved Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon, though. It was my favorite N64 game that wasn't made by Nintendo of Japan (yes, I liked it better than Rare's games.) It was basically 3-D Zelda before Ocarina of Time. It even had a hookshot, although much more limited in ability than the hookshot in the Zelda games.
I will admit that part of it was because the N64 was absolutely starved for RPGs and action-adventure/exploration games, and of the few RPGs that even got announced for it, most of them were never released. Meanwhile, the system was getting buried in racing games. Quest 64 was a poor attempt to fill that yawning void. Anything that was even remotely RPG-adjacent was welcome. In time, I gave up and got a PlayStation. However, Mystical Ninja is a great game in its own right. I hope it does come to Nintendo Switch Online or a collection.
Given all the PS2 games that were legitimately crappy and still got released in the US, I wonder if Goemon PS2 getting denied had more to due with personal issues between Sony management and Victor Ireland. He was already openly critical of them because they wouldn't let WD release Growlanser 1 and 2 separately on PS2.
Goemon is the Protagonist's starting Persona in Persona 5. He looks more like his traditional Japanese representation than he does like Konami's rendition.
That Fuga game completely slipped under my radar. It's on the Switch as well. I may have to get it. It looks like it's connected to Tail Concerto and Solatorobo, neither of which I have played yet.
As long as it's better than "Velma."
Come on, now. Natsume Championship Wrestling has a certain ring to it.
None of the papers I've read ever ran Popeye strips. I watched all of the old Popeye shorts on afternoon syndicated TV, where it was easy to find them until the 90s when they replaced those with contemporary Fox Kids cartoons, and I watched the newer Popeye stuff. A lot of the older Popeye cartoons I watched had him dressed in his Navy whites and dixie-cup hat instead of his traditional merchant marine shirt and hat with jeans, and Bluto was called Brutus (or "Brutusk") because King Features wasn't sure if they owned the trademark to Bluto (they found out later that they still did, and they changed his name back). There was also "Private Olive Oyl," where Olive and Alice Goon joined the Army just like Laverne and Shirley did.
On the comic strips, it's kind of funny that Olive existed several years before Popeye did, dating a guy named Harold Hamgravy.
Probably not, Popeye's popularity began to peter out in the late 80s and has never really recovered. A lot of people attribute this to the poor reception of the Popeye movie. There was a 3-D Popeye game on Switch that was supposed to be a homage to the arcade game, but it mostly made the news for being really bad. When you say "Popeye" nowadays, people think fried chicken, not spinach.
There's a similar store in Phoenix. It has classic gamimg gear but also has an arcade attached with a lot of US and Japanese cabinets. You pay $5/hour to get in, but the machines are set to free play. There are also stations for consoles so people can play stuff like Smash, Tekken 7, or SFV. The classic gaming stuff is a bit on the pricey side, but I did get my repro English translation cart of Mother 3 there for $25 a couple of years ago. I will probably do a streaming/Youtube playthrough of Mother 3 at some point.
The Switch has almost all of Nintendo's arcade classics on it, so I enjoy them there. It's always cool to see DK or its brethren out in the wild, though. Nintendo had the best Golden Age arcade games.
