PixlBit

Soulcalibur looked pretty good on Dreamcast, but in Sept. 1999, I was more interested in Final Fantasy VIII on the PS1 I already owned, and I like SCII on Gamecube better. When I got my GC, the first game I bought was Skies of Arcadia Legends.

I recently saw a used game store selling the first four Sakura Wars games for the Dreamcast, and I'm really tempted to buy them. Sakura Wars on PS2 is one of my all time favorite games. I just wish I knew Japanese. :)

I'm more interested in the Cyberpunk game CDPR is working on myself. Might turn out to be smoke and mirrors, but we'll see.

You can add me. I'm not on Steam a great deal myself (what I mostly like from Steam are the Ys games).

At this point, people are so used to Konami's antics that MGS games are the worst-kept secrets in the business.

I'd recommend Final Fantasy X-2 for Cary. It's kind of silly, and the battle system is just like an old-school Final Fantasy battle system.

FFX is nice, and I will be getting the PS3 version, but I'd much rather have a remaster of Final Fantasy XII.

There are very few games which I will pay $60 for, and mostly these are either games that are sure to be scarce on down the road or special titles like Ni no Kuni that I have been waiting for for a long time. The rest of them can wait.

Just look at how Tecmo Koei handled Ayesha's US release. If it hadn't been for NISA and Tecmo Koei Europe, I'd have never known it was coming to the US.

I enjoy the Atelier series (Ayesha is on my to-buy list), but damn, I wish Tecmo Koei had allowed NISA to retain the publishing rights to the series. I don't care about the dual audio, since I never use it when it is an option anyway, but NISA at least promoted the hell out of these games instead of leaving them withering on the vine.

I visited East Germany in 1990, the summer after the Berlin Wall fell and East Germany (and East Berlin) were opened up by the Soviets. There was a striking contrast between the two Germanys that in some ways still persists 20 years later.

East Germany was run-down and still bore bullet holes and bombed-out shells from World War II, as well as bullet holes from more recent alteractions (the Execution Wall in East Berlin was particularly grim), and the place was very smoky. The East German Trabant cars used a very low-grade of gasoline that burned into yellow exhaust.

West Germany, by contrast, was very clean and fully rebuilt. Frankly, West Berlin was much cleaner than most American cities. There was no vandalism in the Berlin subways, compared to the extensive vandalism the New York subway system showed at the time - when we got back from Germany, we had to take a KLM flight from Frankfurt to JFK in New York and then took a bus back to Tinker AFB in Midwest City, OK, where we had started our trip.