My game of the year so far is Unicorn Overlord. A great homage to Ogre Battle 64 with Vanillaware visuals. I also enjoyed Paper Mario. Right now I'm playing Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak, which is the latest arc in the series.
Most anticipated games later this eyar are Zelda: EoW and Dragon Quest III HD.
Microsoft did pay Japanese companies for limited excusivity. The companies that took the deal ended up regretting it when the fans didn't show up on Xbox 360 in either Japan or the United States. Microsoft did a lot of damage to by doing that. That's why I dislike that they won't take the hint that Xbox is never going to be a thing in Japan (it isn't doing well anywhere these days).
I don't back Kickstarters because it's basically investment without return and without any of the fiduciary laws that govern businesses and protect investors. After the initial wave of Kickstarter games was kicked off by Double Fine, it's kind of petered out with too many disappointments. There have been some decent ones. Bloodstained and Eiyuden Chronicles were follow-ups to Konami games that the company doesn't seem to be interested in making anymore. I think Yooka-Laylee was a KS game, too. Tesla Effect was the sixth game in the Tex Murphy series, which was a series of PC adventure games that I loved. They even brought back the original Leisure Suit Larry with the intent of remastering the whole series, except that the development process didn't go smoothly and Al Lowe decided to back out and go back into retirement. Another company makes LSL games these days. Shenmue III was interesting, but it was also criticized for largely being stuck in the 2000s as far as game design. I think Bloodstained probably got the best reception of any KS game I can think of.
And then there was the Ouya...
Kicikstarter seems to have done better for board games than for video games.
At this point, I'm going to say that the 360 was a lucky fluke on Microsoft's part whose success owed more to Playstation's mistakes than to any good planning on Microsoft's part. My 360 E74'd, and by that time, games like Valkyria Chronicles that were more my taste were starting to show up on PS3. So I dipped out on Xbox. I just wish they would stop buying up other game companies, because they're only leaving more wreckage behind. Hopefully the board of directors is going to tell Nadella and Spencer to STOP at some point. To borrow a phrase from Better Call Saul, Xbox is like a chimp with a machine gun.
I think with Kickstarters, the excitement was over games and genres being made through crowdfunding that major publishers wouldn't touch anymore by game designers who had made their names at big publishers. Unfortunately, it's been hit or miss. A few of them turned out okay. I've been playing Eiyuden Chronicles, which was made by the creators of Suikoden. It's good, but probably needed more time in the oven. Mighty no. 9 was pretty much a disaster.Some of those guys really needed a publisher to be the adults in the room and ride herd on them. Chris Roberts comes to mind here. Star Citizen has raised a half-billion dollars and is still in alpha.
My two favorite games out of this era were Valkyria Chronicles, Fallout 3, Super Mario Galaxy, and Tales of Vesperia. I bought VC on PC, PS4, and Switch. I own Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition on Switch. Demon's Souls also came out around this time. Among some hidden gems of the era were Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn and the DS re-releases of Dragon Quest 4 and 5. It's really a shame we didn't get Dragon Quest 5 in particular, it's easily as good as any of the SNES-era Final Fantasy games.
The last E3 I really enjoyed was seeing Microsoft get torched by Sony and everyone else at E3 2013 over the myriad poor decisions they made for the Xbox One, decisions which are still dragging them down eleven years later.
I guess I also sort of enjoyed the reveals of the crowdfunded games at E3 2015 like Shenmue III. Pity so many Kickstarter video games turned out to be complete busts. Nintendo shadow-dropping Earthbound Beginnings was kind of cool, too, even if they were doing it to try to tide themselves over until they could get the Switch out the door.
Other than that, though, E3 was a product of its time, and that time passed long before E3 itself closed up show. Even Geoff Keighley's Kojima-fest... I mean, Game Awards doesn't quite attract the same interest as E3 in its heyday.
2004-06 gave rise to some of my favorite games to this day.
2005, in particular, my jams were Resident Evil 4 and Dragon Quest VIII. Dragon Quest VIII was such an awesome game. It was what I hoped PS2 RPGs would be.
Hey, Larry. Good to see you. Sounds like you've been busy. I've been getting into real estate investing myself.
On the subject of anime, the Dragon Warrior anime aired for a time in my area, but it was at 6 AM on Sunday. I got up to watch it because I loved the games on NES.
I always thought it was funny that people started who started playing Dragon Quest after Dragon Ball Z came out would ask why Dragon Quest looked like Dragon Ball. When I first saw Dragon Ball, I was surprised by how much it looked like Dragon Quest.
My favorite Saturday morning cartoons were Garfield and TMNT. That was also the time that they started phasing them out. NBC stopped doing cartoons altogether in favor of Saved By the Bell and golf. I also liked The Smurfs, The Littles, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. "Dave Seville" was actually Ross Bagdasarian Sr. His son Ross Jr. and Ross Jr's wife Janice still own the franchise, and they did the speaking voices. In one of my mom's high school yearbooks, she and a couple of her friends are dressed as the Chipmunks (that was the year that "Witch Doctor" was a huge hit). I had one of the first albums Ross Jr. released after he brought the Chipmunks back, Urban Chipmunk.
I also liked Saturday Supercade and Captain N, just because video game stuff was hard to come by.
Tales of Symphonia is actually pretty reasonable priced on Gamecube. It's also available on every modern ecosystem. The Switch version was kind of rough at first but they've patched it up nicely.
The only thing is, the Gamecube version runs at 60 FPS where the modern versions run at 30 FPS. PC modders have tried for years to get it to run at 60 FPS but it doesn't work right.
