PixlBit

Stage Select:

I love when Nintendo throws in little cameos between its own game series. Mario, of course, made a ton of appearances in early NES games. He did some prosaic things like golfing and reffing for tennis and Punch-Out!! but he also piloted the paddle in Alleyway for the Game Boy and you can unlock a Mario statue in the SNES version of Sim City.

I'm playing Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate with some friends and the cat helper of one of my friends has armor that looks just like classic Mega Man, which is pretty cool.

Cage Match:

I think Syphon Filter wins by forfeit because Driver 2 can't get out of parking garage. (Maybe that was Driver 1 that had that ridiculous tutorial but that's what I associate that franchise with.)

Congrats on ten years! Wow, that is no small milestone for a podcast and I think the show is the best it has ever been. I was delighted to find this surprise episode in my feed. Always glad to hear from Rob again.

If Shadowrun Trilogy gets a physical release somewhere, I'm in trouble 

I didn't know those Dark Alliance games got rereleased. That's pretty cool. Always wanted to play those.

You know...I don't think I've played a single brand new game this year!  But hey, I've made some good backlog progress. And I know we're getting Kirby for one of the kids' birthdays later this year, so at least I'll play that.

I'm told you can buy the Happy Meal toys without the meals, so you might try looking into that.

When I first got a smart phone, I downloaded a solitaire game (because not everything was free to play back then lol) and I played that so much! Solitaire is underrated.

The only Darkstalkers I've put any time into was the PSP game Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower. It was a mash up of all the previous Darkstalker games, so the roster was nuts (I liked the Little Red Riding Hood girl who packed a machine gun in her basket). It was a neat game! And the Chaos Tower was a neat idea that didn't quite pan out. It was a 100 floor fight fest but (my memory is failing here) you either had to get as far as you could with a team you selected at the beginning or you played with predetermined characters along the way. I can't remember but it was entirely too hard and the PSP's control input didn't feel quite up to that level of play, but it was a blast just playing with all the characters in the regular modes.

That sound for deleting stuff from your harddrive is great! Sorry to hear about your Minecraft woes though. At least there is so much other stuff to play!

I remember one song in Streets of Rage 2 that I found really catchy. It came up several times. But people really love the soundtrack as a whole. I should probably spend some time just listening to it.

I appreciate that they tried something different with Gunvolt rather than cloning Mega Man more slavishly but I'll agree that it does lack the simple charm of Mega Man. The story is total anime nonsense lol. Fun to play though.

All of the Ace Attorney games are varying degrees of good but I think the original trilogy—Ace Attorney, Justice for All, and Trials and Tribulations—is still the best and still readily available. You can get the trilogy on pretty much any platform these days, Xbox included.