PixlBit

I had Circle of the Moon, first game I got for GBA. I have this collection and the first one. I would like to see Konami put out a Castlevania 3-D collection that includes the N64 games and PS2 games. The N64 Castlevania games were a lot better than people give them credit for. I honestly thought they were more interesting than Symphony of the Night. Legacy of Darkness looks like the vision they had when they first started making Castlevania 64. They have beautiful music. 

Konami has definitely declined as a game developer (they are actually a huge conglomerate in Japan), but they do seem to be understanding that they do have a great legacy that they've neglected. They put out great collections. The TMNT Cowabunga Collection was absolutely fantastic, and I'm looking forward to the Suikoden collection. I'm guessing Eiyuden Chronicles lit a fire under them.

In my area, there are two game stores I like to frequent. Fallout Games is my favorite of the two. They've got a much larger selection of games and some genuine rarities. I keep going there hoping to find a copy of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. I've even seen the Bally Astrocade at Fallout Games a couple of times. Game Zone generally doesn't keep anything older than NES. They also sell a lot of repro/bootleg games. One of my finds there was the Mother 3 English Translation, which is on a repro cartridge and is playable on my Gamecube through the Game Boy Player. Game Zone does have an arcade with US and Japanese machines, as well as a couple of stations set up for Smash and Tekken 7, and I think a PC setup for Fortnite or CoD. 

There's also a couple of stores in my area that sell gameroom stuff. Mostly pool tables, but they have arcade cabinets and cocktail tables, foosball, and even a skee-ball machine. 

At the rate things are going, AAA games are going to require their own dedicated SSD. 

I propose that console and PC manufacturers design future SSDs so they can be plugged into SATA slots on the exterior. We could call this new storage format something like, say, "cartridges."

I haven't had a lot of memory cards just crap out on me. The last time I remember that happening was when I was using third party memory cards on my PS1 and lost my FF9 saves on my first playthrough of that game, after which I stuck strictly with Sony-branded memory cards for both PS1 and PS2. I guess that Sony made the PSV memory cards proprietary enough that third parties didn't bother with PSV cards.

I think I have a 16GB memory card that I shared between my Vita handheld and the Vita TV. I bought a few PS1 and PSP classics, but didn't invest heavily in the Vita otherwise. While i got it for Tales of Hearts R, the only real draw for it from my standpoint ended up being Falcom's games, and those are now available in better form on the Switch.

Part of why Sony used proprietary memory cards was to try and turn a profit on the Vita, which is something they couldn't do if you could just buy an Onn SD card for cheap at Walmart. The Vita was really over-engineered for the market it was competing in, and because of that, the Vita was a loss-leader despite being expensive on the consumer end of things. The razor-and-blades model employed by Sony and Microsoft, and tentatively attempted by Nintendo with the 3DS and Wii U, can really cause a company to hemorrhage red ink if the "blades" don't cover the cost of the "razor." In the past, PlayStation and Xbox have both wiped out their entire product line's cumulative historical profits when the "blades" didn't justify the razor. Sony tried to push Vita memory cards as both a "blade" and as a "razor" to encourage digital buying. I think my PS TV cost $70 brand-new, the memory card cost $40. 

That's why Nintendo uses older tech, something they did in the 1980s as well. They want to sell their products at mass-market prices and still turn a profit. 

That COVID is no joke. I count myself fortunate that when I got it I recovered within a few days. The father of my nephew's friend who is about my age ended up in the hospital.

I thought it was some kind of sequel to Pac-Land (a game that had its own design issues) until I read up on it some years later and found out it was a point-and-click.

Awesome stuff. Here in Phoenix, we have the Game On Expo every year. I've never been. I want to go next year.

Getting a lot of Nintendo CEs is generally pure luck. They sell out quickly and then show up on eBay being sold for $300 by scalpers. No thank you.

I missed out on Xenoblade 3. I was lucky enough to snag Fire Emblem's CEs though.

Stage Select:

1. The Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. It's not the objectively worst level in gaming. I could dig up some real bullshit levels from obscure games dating from the dawn of home video games. It's more that it was a weak part of what was otherwise arguably the single most amazing game of the entire generation. Ocarina of Time didn't have great swimming mechanics, which would have been fine except that this level threw the game's issues with swimming into glaring relief, and Nintendo did a great job with swimming two years earlier with Super Mario 64. Having to switch between the Iron Boots and the regular boots was tedious. Having to repeat the level's mechanics because you missed something was tedious. Putting both of these issues together... ugh.

2. Riovanes Castle at the end of Final Fantasy Tactics Chapter 3, where you had a one-on-one boss battle locked behind a point-of-no-return save. If you weren't prepared properly and also didn't have a backup save on the world map before you started this sequence of battles, you were screwed. As in, you would have to start the game over from the very beginning screwed. The third battle in this chain of battles is no better. You have to protect a AI-controlled girl from being killed by two demon girls with lethal attacks. Unless you positioned your party in a certain way, it was very possible that your protectee would run right towards the demon girls and get herself killed before your first playable character even had a chance to act, thereby getting a game over through no fault of your own. The Angry Video Game Nerd should do an episode on FF Tactics.  As with Ocarina of Time, FFT is a great game with one section where they made groin-grabbingly baffling design choices.

3. Any racing or stealth section in GTA games, especially since the fail state for those is a complete failure of a long mission. It's not that I object to stealth or racing, per se, but GTA's engine isn't really built around either one. The cars all handle like old shopping carts, and stealth generally doesn't work great in games that around built around it as heavily as Metal Gear or Splinter Cell.

Cage Match: 

I'm not a fan of either of these things. I'm just going with GTA V because it's frankly amazing that Rockstar has pretty much coasted on this one game for almost ten years, in part by turning it into an online casino. Except that a real casino is actually required by law to pay out cash every once in awhile. Who can blame them? It still sells more copies every year than most entire franchises and most publishers do.  And I used to get the appeal of these games. GTA IV bored me to death and kind of put me off of the series, though. Also not interested in the Florida retread that the next game is going for. I've always thought that if Rockstar wanted to be truly gutsy, they'd set GTA in Texas and let their imaginations run wild with what Texas gives them to work with parody-wise.

But hey, RDR 2 has horses so realistic, they randomly take dumps, and you can see their scrotums swelling and contracting. That's why you're paying $1600 for a shiny new RTX4090, after all.