PixlBit

If my computer will run VC I'll get it.

I still have an Atari 130XE and a metric ton of floppies with games on them. Losing that kind of stuff sucks. I had a lot of my games stolen a few years back.

And as to quibbles over Bayonetta's sexual themes, meh. That game is fun as hell, and I'd play Bayonetta or Bayonetta 2 over any God of War game in a heartbeat. I also rolled my eyes over all the pearl-clutching over Dragon's Crown's art design.

I started with Japanese RPGs with Dragon (Warrior) Quest and Faxanadu, as well as with Ultima III, which was actually made in Texas but made a huge impression on Japan. I think that the best things people could do to try the genre would be to download some of the big PS1 RPGs from PSN, or, as stated above, pick up the DS remakes of Dragon Quest IV-VI, which are accessible.

Some Japanese RPGs are quite beautiful. Ni no Kuni and Valkyria Chronicles come to mind, and Square's RPGs are always technically proficient.

At this point, I've long since given up on professional reviewers, but I didn't really care much about them to begin with. I started losing interest in gaming magazines when they moved away from talking about how to beat games I liked and started focusing more heavily on reviews and other shit like that.

Most of the games I enjoy are 7s and 8s in the world of game reviewing. A few are 9s. Most of the 9.5s and 10s, with the exception of Zelda games, are games that put me to sleep. Of the hundreds of games I own, I can count the games I own made by EA, Activision, or Ubisoft on the fingers of one hand..

My one quibble with game review scores that's hard to ignore is Metacritic. Its weighting is skewed. Because of our years in school, Americans are used to seeing 70-79 as a "C", or mediocre, and anything below 70 as a failing grade. Metacritic does even worse: if a game site uses a school-style letter grading system, Metacritic weighs a "C" as a 50, which is a grade a student that is either mentally slow or simply completely fucked off in class gets. Sadly, Metacritic does impact the games somewhat. Fallout: New Vegas was a better game in most ways than Fallout 3. Obsidian simply did a far better job on the franchise than Bethesda Game Studios did The 84 aggregate it got on Metacritic kept Obsidian from profiting on it (the game sold very well, but Obsidian lost a bonus they really needed from Bethesda specifically because of the score) and it all but ensures that Obsidian will never work on the series again. And that's just one example. I'm pretty sure that some developers see the hostile reception their games get on MC and it kills their enthusiasm for making games that follow-up to some perfectly decent and fun products.

But I agree with the main point of your story. It's ridiculous getting so over-the-top angry over game reviews. My flip response has always been that getting angry at game journalism is like getting violently angry at Cupcake Baking Monthly or Model Airplane Enthusiast. But really, game reviews are irrelevant. What I wouldn't give for a Nintendo Power-style gaming publication that sticks with how to find every secret in good games instead of gushing over the latest annual EActubi refreshes!

No, they're officially dead as of this season. All the major networks have abandoned them by now. NBC stopped doing them in 1992.

Vs.Duck Hunt, the arcade version, let you shoot the dog.

As a matter of fact, there was a Fido Dido game on Sega Genesis.

I remember before they came with the Fido Dido bumpers they had some weird claymation bumpers on CBS.

At the time Fido Dido was on CBS, Fox had its own set of interesting bumper sequences for its Saturday morning and weekday cartoons: the Dynamo Duck bumpers which starred a live duckling as a secret agent.

It's funny how the little throwaway bumper sequences were kind of memorable. But then, The Simpsons started out as a bunch of bumper sequences on the Ullman show. :)

My two favorites were definitely Garfield and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which were my favorite cartoon shows until The Simpsons came out.

On your list, I also liked Captain N (was also a watcher of the Super Mario Bros Super Show and the Zelda cartoons). I also did watch Muppet Babies when I was a kid.

Other favorites of mine:

Smurfs. That one ran for a LOOOONG time.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: one of my big exposures to pop music back in the 1980s.

Galaxy High: A joint Japanese-American production about a couple of Earth kids (a popular football jock and a nerdy girl) sent to an intergalactic high school, where their roles in the social hierarchy are reversed. The series was produced by Chris Columbus, the music for it was done by Don Felder of the Eagles.

ABC also had the "Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show" which aired both old and new Looney Tunes shorts, though they tended to stick with more recent (for the time) shorts. I'm a big Looney Tunes fan, so I dug that.

One other aspect of Saturday morning cartoons in the late 1990s I enjoyed were the "Fido Dido" bumpers that announced commercial breaks on CBS cartoons like Garfield, Muppet Babies, and TMNT.  The characters were originally created for a marketing campaign for 7-Up and are still used to advertise 7-Up in Brazil and India. They were pretty creative.

Finally, one of my favorite episodes of Futurama is "Futurama Saturday Morning Fun Pit" which spoofs 1980s cartoons and their consumerism. It even includes a humorous bumper sequence.

Cool. Good job on making the front page. Wasn't this blog on 1UP? I seem to remember reading it there.