If I had to guess, I'd say that the former Disney stars are afraid of being typecast in their frothy, feel-good kid roles and never being able to hack it in more serious films, ending up in the same obscurity as the Brady kids or at worst, like George Reeves, who played Superman in the 1950s, and was so typecast by the Superman role that his career completely ground to a halt. He killed himself at the age of 45.
Right now, it's a sign of a generally tense political environment in this country on the subject going both ways. We saw some of this with the recent brouhaha over a certain reality TV celebrity. I also agree with Machocruz in that "segregated" is not a correct concept for this. If the LGBT gamers were only allowed in this particular area, by law, it would be segregation. Rather, this is a cover-your-ass move by Penny Arcade so as not to attract any more controversy on this particular subject. I'm not saying it was a great idea, but it is what it is.
A lot of LGBT "wear their LGBT status on their sleeves," as said above, because they can, and because I think a lot of them feel that for safety reasons it's better to be open with it than to keep it in the closet. While others may protest loudly saying they don't really care what someone else does in their bedroom as long as they don't "shove it on my face", the reality is that people are nosy and intrusive, especially when they're prone to snoop around for scandal and gossip. When LGBT people are quiet about their status, the too-curious will notice certain things amiss in a person compared to their perception of "normal", ask increasingly intrusive questions, and figure it out on their own anyway. I've seen plenty of folks who are absolutely outraged at finding out that someone they've known for years was gay/lesbian/transgendered, and never told them, feeling that they had been "deceived" and "betrayed" by the person living a "double life". In some cases, that suddenly becomes a big safety issue for the LGBT person. Yes, this still happens even today.
Like many other people, I would far more readily buy a Wii U remake of this game with Link in it. While SoulCalibur II was a great fighting game in and of itself, it was Link and the great job Namco did with Zelda fanservice that made this game for me, and playing it in any other form just feels severely diminished. I never even tried the PS2 or Xbox versions of this game. Namco should have licensed Cloud, Sephiroth, or Squall for the PS2 version.
Looks like Irem and Sega tried to do more than the Master System was built for with this one. The best developers during the third gen recognized the strengths and weaknesses of the NES (and Genesis) and worked around them. That's how we got games like Bionic Commando on NES that were actually superior to their arcade counterparts even with the hit in audio and video fidelity.
Ni no Kuni is my GOTY, hands down, but that's more a testament to how much I really loved it than anything. This has been by far the best year of gaming since the Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3 came out, mostly on PS3.
A lot of the games you listen in are in my library. Blue Dragon was good, but deeply flawed. I thought Lost Odyssey and The Last Story were improvements. Tales of Vesperia is my favorite 360-exclusive game, although I wish Namco had brought the PS3 version over since it has more content in it. I bought the PS3 version of Eternal Sonata instead of the 360 version. I think the PS3 version has extra content as well. Namco was known for giving Microsoft limited exclusivity and then putting better versions of its games on PS3. I really liked Soulcalibur 4 and 5's character-building systems.
I mostly got stuff like Fallout and Dragon Age on 360 myself, and after getting a PS3 and being hit with a E74, I pretty much became a PS3-exclusive gamer from 2009 onward. So my 360 library is mostly games that came early in the console generatiom, while my PS3 library is mostly games that came out in the last half of 7th gen.
32-bit Mega Man game... like Mega Man Legends 3, maybe? The Mega Man Legends games were the only Mega Man games I really, really enjoyed. I thought it was complete bullshit the way Capcom pulled the plug on MML3 and then blamed gamers for killing it.
This was a really impressive racer for the NES. Come to think of it, other than this and Rare's RC Pro-Am, I can't really think of any other good NES racing games.
Square has always been good at pushing the limits of the hardware it is making games for. They've made a few racing games since then, like Driving Emotion Type S, but they haven't really made an impact amongst the Ridge Racers, Gran Turismos, or Forzas of the modern gaming world. It's also kind of mind-blowing that Nobuo Uematsu did the music for this one. I got to meet Mr. Uematsu in person at Distant Worlds in Omaha this past March. I got a picture with him, conductor Arnie Roth, my wife, and myself, as well as having him autograph the front cover of my copy of Final Fantasy IX.
The Legend of Zelda was my favorite game for quite awhile, surpassed only by A Link to the Past. However, in all honestly, it didn't really stand the test of time even in 1994, when I got a taste of A Link to the Past (a game which really does stand the test of time in today's environment), let alone here in 2013. Still a great game and a landmark in video game history, but mechanically, time has left it far behind.
I liked some of the obscure Japanese titles that found their way to Xbox Live in the early years, before the PS3 really started coming into their own. I've been pretty much PS3 and Nintendo exclusive for the past 4 years and haven't had a Live Gold account since then, so I'm really out of the loop on Xbox. The Simpsons and Pac-Man Championship DX I bought from PSN, and I got Zen Pinball 2 for PS3 instead of Pinball FX 2. I have the original TMNT arcade game which was never ported to PS3, but that game's been delisted anyway. I mostly liked stuff like Bangai-O, Radiant Silvergun, and Ikaruga that are extremely difficult to find anywhere else.
