PixlBit

I got the Namco Museum Archives vol. 1 and 2.  I should've waited for a sale, but I have a weakness for classic Namco stuff.  Vol. 1 has an 8-bit demake of Pac-Man Championship Edition, which is cool.  And vol. 2 has FREAKING MAPPYLAND!  I loved that NES game.  I'll write a blog about both volumes sometime in July.

I reviewed Totally Reliable Delivery Service.  It wasn't very good on mobile.

I liked New Super Lucky's Tale on Switch.

I never could get into Crash games.  I'm not a big fan of 'one hit and you die' games, especially in 3-D, and it didn't really do anything better than Donkey Kong Country or Super Mario 64 did.  Only Crash game I really liked was Crash Team Racing.  It rivaled Mario Kart in some aspects.

I was almost finished with high school in 1994 (graduated in 1995).  

I remember seeing The Tick comic books and watching the Saturday morning cartoon a few times.  It was funny, but I couldn't get into it like I could Sam & Max.  That's a comic I highly recommend for you, and it even had a Saturday morning cartoon, too!  TellTale made some great games about it, too!  The guy who created Sam & Max now works at PIXAR!

While I think that Donkey Kong Country is SLIGHTLY overrated, I still think it's a GREAT platformer.  I like that it's tough, but not too tough, like the most recent DKC games were.  I can beat DKC, but not DKC Returns or Tropical Freeze.  I got DKC that year for Christmas.  It still amazes me to this day that the underwater music is coming from a SNES!

One of my top five favorite games of all time came out in 1994: Final Fantasy 3! (or 6).  If i could ever get you to play that game someday, oh man that would be cool!

I've noticed that Japanese games with trophies are less creative or fun to get.  Or they're a lot harder or less frequent.

I've noticed that for the most part, Western game developers have a better idea of fun trophies and achievements to get over developers from Japan, so that may explain why Contra ones aren't so accessible to get.

So have you ever seen Creature Comforts?  That's what Aardman did before Wallace and Gromit and it won the Academy Award.  A Grand Day Out was nominated, but didn't win.  The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave both won the award, but the last Wallce and Gromit short, A Matter of Loaf and Death, didn't even get nominated I don't think.  It's not Wallace and Gromit, but Wat's Pig also won the award one year, and it's a good one, too. 

Like Mega Man, Wallace and Gromit was so popular that even its spinoffs have spinoffs!  The main spinoff is Shaun the Sheep, which even has two movies.  I don't know if we'll get the second movie anytime soon, thanks to this pandemic crap.  Shaun the Sheep has a spinoff starring little Timmy Sheep, which is called Timmy Time and aimed at preschoolers.

TellTale even had a four part Wallace and Gromit point and click adventure series that was really good.  Each one felt like a short you could play.  This was back when TellTale made REAL games, not 'follow your nose' adventures.

At Christmastime, see if you can watch Aardman's Robbie the Reindeer and its sequel.  They're really good, too.

Right after college I took a just for fun day class on clay animation.  It took us ALL DAY to make a few seconds of crappily animated clay, so I have a lot of respect for the folks who did that for real.  The lady in the class animated a boy making a snowman, the other guy operated the camera, and I animated a snake coming out of the ice, sniffing around, and biting the carrot off the snowman's face and going back under the ice.  Then the snowman frowned because he had no nose!

And I think that's all I have to say about clay animation!

I knew about Final Fantasy Adventure, but I didn't play it until after I had beaten Secret of Mana.  Even back then I knew those two games were related.

A guy on a high school band trip showed me Link's Awakening and that was when I realized there may be something to this handheld gaming thing.

Super C does sound like the name of a grocery store!

Definitely try all versions, achievements or not.  Those games are so hard I'm not even worried about getting many achievements or trophies or whatever.  Achievements and trophies are neat, but only when they're fun to get.

I remember going to a friend's house and playing this over there.  Didn't really get into it, though.  I just can't get into wrestling.  Games or otherwise.  Only other wrestling game I remember playing at a friend's house was Rumble Roses.  That was, uh, something.  I have friends who watch it on TV but it just never grabbed me.

I was smack dab in the middle of high school in 1993.  I didn't know about Wallace and Gromit until I was in college.  One evening when I was by myself in the dorm, I was flipping TV channels and came across this weird show on PBS with a silent clay animated penguin (The Wrong Trousers).  I told my roommate and other friends later about what I saw, but didn't think anything of it other than that.  But a few weeks later, they had a stop motion animated film festival on campus.  One thing I miss about college is activities like that.  They don't do stuff like that in the suburbs!  Anyway, that film festival showed both The Wrong Trouses and A Close Shave, which was fairly new at the time.  And after that I was an Aardman fan.  I watch pretty much anything they do, including commercials like the talking Chevron cars and Serta mattress sheep.