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.
I suspect that, much like the troubles Nintendo had with Ikegami Tsushinki that kept the arcade versions of DK 1-3 and Mario Bros from being (mostly) released on home systems long after consoles capable of playing them were on the market, that there are parts of the Ms. Pac-Man IP that ATGames inherited and parts that they didn't. Bandai Namco simply isn't going to take the chance of giving them any more leverage over the Pac-Man IP than they already do. ATGames, meanwhile, is probably still smarting over Bandai Namco accusing them of producing substandard Pac-Man plug-in games a few years back.
Thankfully, Nintendo and Ikegami got their issues squared away. It's awesome to have two of my favorite arcade games playable in their original form anytime I want. At some point maybe Ms. Pac-Man will be sorted out.
What kind of console is playing your Genesis games? I bought a RetroN-5 a couple of years ago, the one that has SNES, NES, Genesis, and GB/GBA. I wanted to play Mother 3 on it, but the thing continually crashed after 5 minutes. I ended up boxing it back up and putting it away since I could never get it to work. I later found a reasonably priced GB Player disc and got a new GB Player for my Gamecube, and played Mother 3 that way. For Genesis games, the Genesis and Konami collections on Switch cover most of those bases pretty nicely, and NSO is filling in the gaps those collections didn't cover.
