PixlBit

My GOTY for 2012 was Theatrhythm Final Fantasy for 3DS.  It was a music game featuring songs from the FF franchise.  It was really good.  It spawned a sequel and a Japan only arcade game that I was lucky enough to play at Round 1.  In November, Square is making a spinoff music game of sorts with Kingdom Hearts.

2012 was also the year the Wii U came out. Even though it bombed, I really liked the Wii U.  I only got another new console that generation once the Wii U had 'died' and I found a PS4 on a Black Friday sale a couple of years after it released.  

I never played the N64 Castlevania games.  I never saw them to rent anywhere, and I certainly wasn't going to pay full price for them.   I'm not much of a Castlevania fan anyway so they were never on my radar.  But I'd be willing to give them a try given the chance. By the time the N64 came out, I was reviewing games for the newspaper, but I don't remember reviewing too many Konami games outside of a couple of Yu-Gi-Oh titles.

The only Konami N64 games I really regret not playing were the Goemon ones.  Mystical Ninja 64 came out early in the N64 life and was a 3-D title.  It was pretty commonplace in stores, but I was a poor college student at the time and couldn't afford to get all the games I wanted.  The second game was a 2-D platformer and was called Goemon's Great Adventure.  I would've been willing to pay for this one, but it was extremely rare and I never saw it in a store to buy.

Sometimes it's hard to prioritize what I need to review and what I want to play.  And it can be easy to get sidetracked.  Llke for instance, I just reviewed a game that was just like Puzzle League/Tetris Attack, but it was really hard.  I wondered if I was just getting rusty, so I played the Japanese version of Tetris Attack called Panel de Pon, on the Switch's SNES collection.  And I did pretty good at that, so I figured that the other game was just hard.  So then I saw that the Japan only Mario's Picross was on the SNES channel, too, so I started playing that for far too long.  Then I was like, "Argh!  Why are SNES games so addictive?"  I wondered if I'd be perfectly happy for the rest of my life just playing SNES games.  I had the same question when I first got my SNES Mini.  The SNES is my favorite console, after all.

You know, as a kid, I honestly don't remember seeing Scramble or Super Cobra in arcades back then.  But then, if I did see them, they probably wouldn't have made much of an impression on me since there were so many space shooters out there back then.

I think it's weird that sometimes Konami says that Scramble is part of the Gradius series.  Especially since the only things they have in common are that they're side scrolling shooters and you can bomb targets.  But then, sometimes Konami puts Rush N Attack/Green Beret in the Contra series, so yeah.

Only way to get me to play Overwatch would be if it were LEGO.

I'm revieweing a Hot Wheels game on my iPad, but you probably wouldn't like it because it's designed for very young players.

I just got finished reviewing WWE 2K Battlegrounds.  It's all right.  It's great for wrestling fans, but it didn't win me over.  Still a good game, though.  I made a female wrestler that was like a cross between Reiko Nagase from Ridge Racer and She Hulk.  Except I accidentally put a giant red bow in her hair but was too lazy to remove it.  

I remember going to computer game stores like Babbage's and seeing Populous everywhere, so I knew it was popular.  I rented the SNES version once and had no idea what I was doing.  But Populous was certainly influential, as you can tell it inspired other games, like my favorite 'god' game: ActRaiser on the SNES.

My favorite god game is ActRaiser on the SNES.

Next time you do a search for it, try searching for the Japanese title for Fire Shark.  It was called "Same! Same! Same!" there, which translates to "Shark! Shark! Shark!"  I think we got the better title this time.

I know eventually in the future, all games will be digital, but I'll have to be dragged kicking and screaming all the way, as I buy phyiscal whenever I can.  I even do that with games I've reviewed, if i like them enough, like Streets of Rage 4.  The last physical game I bought was Super Mario 3-D All-Stars, and I have physical copies of the Kingdom Hearts music game and Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity pre-ordered.

Pardon my ignorance, but both those pictures look pretty sketchy to me.  That top one with the very plain cartridge 'art' looks more like a preview version or a pre-release review copy of the game.  Did other Genesis games do that?  And if that bottom picture is from Japan, why does it say "SEGA Genesis" on it?  In Japan, the Genesis is called the Mega Drive.