I haven't seen a Marble Slab since I lived in OK. Marble Slabs are based in Texas, Cold Stone is based in AZ. Cold Stone was also successfully able to go national. I saw one in Times Square, over a decade after my dad and I went to the very first one in Tempe, AZ.
We actually have Kura Sushi here in my area, and I've eaten there. I had sushi and one of those sweet red bean dessert buns. Cold Stone Creamery is local to Arizona (our outgoing governor was its president for a time), and I like their Mario stuff. They have a Mario Kart cake that I would have been all over when I was a kid. I don't eat ice cream as much as I did when my metabolism was better, sadly.
Fates sounds like it was developed with the idea of trying to cater to both casual and hardcore SRPG fans. Birthright is more forgiving and structured more like Awakening, while Conquest is tougher and more rigidly structured, with less room for error. I'm guessing they probably took inspiration from the Zelda Oracle games in that regard.
I've gotta say, I'm more excited for Atari 50 than I should be. It seems to have a fantastic selection of games and content. Other than Solaris, I was pleased to see Miner 2049er, a favorite of the Atari 8-bit line, on board. They also made a new Yars' Revenge game, and Swordquest: Airworld, which was planned to complete the Swordquest quadrilogy but was canceled due to the 1983 crash and Warner selling Atari to Jack Tramiel. Atari Karts for the Jaguar is also on there, starring Bentley Bear from Crystal Castles.
Its music was composed by George "The Fat Man" Sanger, who composed for a lot of late-80s/early 90s CRPGs and adventure games, including Wing Commander, Ultima Underworld, and 7th Guest/11th Hour.
At oe time, Fire Emblem's entire future rode upon Awakening, and it almost didn't get a US release. I'm glad that we got Three Houses and are about to get Engage.
The only Etrian Odyssey game I've played was Untold: The Millennium Girl. I wish the series had continued on Switch, since it's one of the closest things to a continuation of Wizardry that we have.
My current games are the Switch versions of Persona 5 Royal and Bayonetta 3. Next week I'm picking up the Atari 50 Collection. It has games fromt the 8-bit line (best gaming machines of the 80s other than the NES), Lynx, and Jaguar. They even got Doug Neubauer to release the 2600's swan song, Solaris, for this one. He somehow managed to work it so that he owns Solaris and Atari has to have his consent to release it, even though they own his previous work, Star Raiders.
I had Fall of the Foot Clan on Game Boy. They actually did a good job within the limits of the GB hardware of replicating some of the spirit and feel of the arcade games. The home ports of the arcade games on SNES and NES were amazing. I never played Manhattan Project, but Konami clearly understood that isometic beat-em-ups were a perfect medium for the Turtles.
I just wish they could make a deal to get Simpsons and X-Men onto Switch and other current systems. I'm kind of tempted by The Simpsons Arcade 1UP.
The digital double-pack of ZAMN and Ghoul Patrol has an interview with Mike Ebert, the lead designer of ZAMN. He details how the bosses and story were Konami's idea, and how, in a rare moment of development heaven (as opposed to development hell), they finished the core game of 20 levels so far ahead of schedule that they made 35 more levels that made it into the final game.
Stage Select:
1. Buy $1000 or more of Apple stock during MacWorld 97.
2. I keep going back to the animated trinity of Simpsons, King of the Hill, and Futurama. Also Bob's Burgers.
3. Given how much time I spend at my job cleaning up company messes, I've decided that Jonathan Banks should play me in a movie.
4. "Spoony" should make a comeback. Maybe "gift certificate" - see below.
5. Most foods are too much work for me to bother with when I'm working. I prefer quick and easy in both prep and cleanup. I eat out a lot.
6. I guess it's debatable how much the presence of HFCS so many of the foods we consume in this country has on us.
7. They're basically store-specific gifts of cash, so that people can feel better about giving them. But they also cut down on gift-shopping time. That said, I see a lot more pre-paid gift cards than gift certificates.
8. I'm going to refer you to the words of the immortal Brad Goodman - "if it feels good, do it." For my part, I'm a Mac user due in part to my intense dislike of Windows and Microsoft in general, and I've never really been a PC gamer, secondary in part to said distaste for Windows. So I may not be the best person to ask. For what it's worth, I did indulge in a new M2 Macbook recently.
Cage Match:
Ken and Ryu are game, but they're dealing with the greatest intergalactic bounty hunter in history. After a few charged plasma shots, missile blasts, and a screw attack or two, Ryu and Ken have had enough. She's just fought a bunch of space ghosts and demons, after all. Metroid Prime 2 wins.
I don't kno about Child With a Knife, but there is a game called Squirrel With a Gun in the works.
Game X-Change used to be big in the Plains area. They were displaced by Vintage Stock and closed a lot of their stores, though they still have a few. I remember the first time going into one and being amazed by all the hard-to-find RPGs on SNES and Genesis they had, including a lot of games I'd never heard of.
In Arizona, we have two local chains. Fallout Games is my favorite. I've found rare RPGs on Gamecube, PS1, PS2, GBA. They also have a lot of rare game systems from the 80s. A couple of times I even found a Bally Astrocade in a Fallout store. Game Zone mostly deals in more modern games. They also have a lot of reproduction carts (which would more properly be called bootlegs.) One of them has an arcade area with a lot of Japanese and Western arcade machines.
When I was a college student, games never went more than $60-70 even for sought-after games like Chrono Trigger. The pandemic really drove up the market for game collectors. I bought Shining Force III on Amazon for $80 in 2011. It now costs $400 and up from most sellers. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance went from $60-70 to 300. Even the collectors's edition of Three Houses goes for $300. I was lucky to buy mine new at Best Buy. I got the last one they had.
I actually think a small-town GTA would be a good idea, which is why I suggested Texas, as it has a lot of small towns that lie between DFW, Houston, and San Antonio/Austin. In the 2000s on 1UP, I wrote a blog about a GTA set in Texas, where I proposed that the main character be a home meth cook. This was written right before Breaking Bad premiered on TV, too. That would be a period piece, since nowadays home meth labs have been replaced with meth superlabs run by the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels that regularly produce meth of the same purity as Walt was able to produce, and if they're cut with anything, it's fentanyl.
Stage Select:
1. Vault 87 in Fallout 3. It's connected to the children's settlement by tunnels full of hissing ghouls leading up to one of the most fucked up areas in the entire game, where Super Mutants are kidnapping humans to turn them into more Super Mutants. The holotapes of the last colonists to live there add to the atmosphere.
2. The opening village areas of Resident Evil 4, where you're being chased by zombified villagers who honestly probably weren't much changed from their basic personalities by the Los Plagas virus. And then the chainsaw dudes start coming after you.
3. When I was a kid, I had a Donkey Kong-esque platformer game called Miner 2049er, which is going to be released next month as part of the Atari 50th Anniversary Collection for Switch, PS, and Xbox. In this game, you had to "mine" ores from the floors while avoiding radioactive monsters and hazards. In one level, right above the starting point, I jumped up to get a power-up and died the radiation death because I failed to notice that the power-up had glowing parts, which in that game meant radioactive, and it made me distrustful of power-ups from that point forward in the game. What made it scary is that when you touch a radioactive creature, the game makes a lot of loud digital screeching noises and your character rapidly expands and shrinks before collapsing into a puddle of goo, and it's often rather unexpected. I know that's probably not what you were looking for, but I was 9 years old and that scared the crap out of me. My fears as an adult are of a more existential nature, so if we were going with that, my scariest game would be Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life when you're dying of old age, and years of doing hospice work have kind of taken the edge off of that fear. Zombies, vampires, and the like just aren't as scary as they were when I was watching them with my dad.
Cage Match:
Much as nubile CG ladies wrestling in lingerie is entertaining, I'm going with Rule of Rose. The scariest thing about it is the price you'll have to pay to buy it off of eBay. That's why I've never actually played it. Hopefully Sega will consider remastering it for current consoles.
