My favorite intro songs:
Bonds of Sea and Fire - Xenogears
Dragon Quest Overture - Dragon Quest series, particularly that of DQVIII on PS2
The original Zelda title screen music, updated versions of which also play on the GBA version of A Link to the Past and Twilight Princess
SaGa Frontier's title screen music
The character/party creation music from the NES version of Ultima III
The intro music for Ultima V and VI
....EA's ham-handed approach to DRM has pretty much wrecked SimCity. Not surprised. My wife bought Spore when it came out and that game was so chained down with DRM it wasn't funny. I love city sims, but I will either get Cities XL instead or just stick with SimCity 4.
I generally try to avoid EA games on principle anyway. Since I don't really like EA Sports or Bioware, that's a surprisingly easy choice, because anything EA makes, someone else makes a better version of it. :)
Liked this game on the NES, though I never got past the first level. I only played it when my NES-owning friend rented it a few times.
Hard Corps: Uprising is a pretty nice sequel to Contra for HD consoles, made by Arc System Works (Guilty Gear and BlazBlue).
I own this game. I bought it at a used game shop. I have never played it underneath my backlog, but it looks great.
I wish more of the recent Shining games would come ot, and I wish they'd do a full 3-D Shining Force game. I own Shining Force I & II on Steam and Shining Force III (Scenario 1) on Saturn.
Tomb Raider may have broken 1 million sales within its first two days on the market, according to an Eidos rep.
It's too bad they couldn't have kept Yasumi Matsuno and Hitoshi Sakimoto. Final Fantasy XII fit the bill of nearly everything you just described.
While I don't think there will be any more huge graphical leaps or revolutions, there are still room for games to polish up. Two of my favorite games this generation were Valkyria Chronicles and Ni no Kuni - games that could technically have been done on a PS2, but look so incredibly stunning on PS3 that it's hard to imagine them there. I'm not in such a hurry to return to the good old days myself.
This was one of the first PS1 games I bought. It was better than a lot of reviewers at the time gave it credit for and was Square's earnest, if uneven, attempt at a non-linear RPG. Wonderful music too. I have my PS1 copy still, but I think this game would be a success on PSN. Almost all of Square's PS1 games sell well there.
I thought FFX-2 was pretty awesome. It was a great implementation of FF5's job system and I loved the costumes.
In the case of Demon's Souls, Atlus saw an opportunity for the game after Sony passed on selling it in the US. Once that game became a success, there was no way a small publisher like Atlus could have hoped to outbid a megapublisher like Namco.
Atlus did a lot of publishing work on the HD consoles for other small publishers, stuff like Spectral Force 3, Operation Darkness, and the Game of Thrones video game. Their in-house work, however, was devoted to handhelds, but I think Atlus has made a solid reputation for itself this generation. It was an almost completely unknown publisher until the final years of the PS2. Hopefully Catherine's relative success will encourage them to develop more on the PS4.
