PixlBit

Oh he's never liked bugs.

My friend and I played Dragon Warrior (and Final Fantasy) at his house on his NES when we were kids.  We would take turns playing while the other one would draw maps or look at ones we had or the beastiary in the instruction booklets.  I enjoyed those games, but not enough to buy them myself.  But that changed once I played FF4 on the SNES!

I loved Joust in the arcade!  It's one of my favorites as well.  I didn't have a 2600 as a kid, but I did have a 5200 and I had Joust on it.  It was one of my most played games on the 5200 alongside Pengo and River Raid.

On one of the early Midway collections, they put in Joust 2!  I didn't even know Joust 2 existed until that collection.  I've never seen it in an arcade.  If I saw it in an arcade as a kid, I would've freaked out!  Have you ever seen it or played it?

Only other game I know of that plays like Joust is Balloon Fight.  Andrew mentioned this before, but Balloon Fight was made by Satoru Iwata, former president of Nintendo and HAL Labs.  But sorry Iwata up in Heaven, but I still like Joust better.  I read somewhere that to get the hang of programming for the NES, Iwata made arcade games like Defender 2 and Joust.  Later on these were actually published by HAL for the NES!

Here's an interesting video I watched recently about Joust.

I rented Kid Icarus once and just didn't like it.  Jumping just felt off which isn't good when falling into a pit is what kills you most of the time here.  I also didn't like Kid Icarus: Uprising because the controls were horrible.

I saw a lot of Konami games in the early 80s like Time Pilot and Gyruss.  I even saw Time Pilor 84 and Kicker a couple of times!  But I didn't see much from them after that until the late 80s during the TMNT arcade days.  Then they were everywhere!

When he asked to borrow it, I wanted to say, "HA HA HA HA HA HA HA...no."  But I didn't.  I was nice about it.

I don't know if I would call it 'joining the internet' but I first got an AOL account in my senior year of high school.  That was about 1994.  Then a year later in college, I got my first personal email address. That was a big deal at the time.  And I've been on the internet ever since.

I knew about that song in Frogger.  I know some versions of it on collections don't have it, but some do.  Weird.  Did you know the Xbox 360 remake of Frogger also plays "Froggy's Lament," from the same guys who sang Pac-Man Fever?  And that Wendy's did Frogger kids meal toys a long time ago (more than ten years ago, but still in this century).  Man I'm beginning to sound like Blathers from Animal Crossing, huh?  Well I did work at the National Videogame Museum for a while, so there you go. :)

I've always liked Frogger.  Very approachable game.  When I was a kid and we'd go to the arcade as a family, I would always run to the Pac-Man machine, my dad would make a beeline for Centipede, and my mom would hop to Frogger.  She liked that game, too.

Since I never had a Genesis, I didn't play this game until I dabbled a bit in emulation in college.  Once I did try it, I was blown away how good it was.  If I had a Genesis as a kid, I would've totally been into this one like I was with FF4, 6, Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, etc.  Now I wish I had more time to play it!

I don't know if SNK just has a good distribution center around where I live, but SNK has always seemed to be popular around here, especially during the NEO GEO days.