PixlBit

Stage Select:

I was going to come up with some elaborate reworking of a favorite franchise, but after reading stories about how much money Actiblizzard is making off of Diablo Immortal, screw it. If you really want to make money, just call Tencent or NetEase and throw some mobile gachapon stuff together and and call it a day, since all you need is a few rich whales to keep you afloat. More and more, video game technology is about monetization rather than graphics, sound, and gameplay.

Cage Match: 

Gonna go with the Colonel Sanders visual novel on this one. That said, it's too bad that Wendy's didn't turn its pen-and-paper RPG Feast of Legends into a video game.  I thought about trying to rework it into a computer game using RPG maker and running it past Wendy Thomas or Nelson Peltz to see what they say about it.

Hope you enjoy Three Houses!

Advance Wars is on indefinite hold, and while I know that Nintendo is trying to navigate what's happening in Ukraine in real time, I hope it sees a release. I was really looking forward to it. Wouldn't be the first time a game got delayed because of real world events. Fun fact: GTA III got delayed by several months because they wanted to remove references to the World Trade Center, since GTA III released in 2001.

My first exposure to FF5 was through references in Tactics, and then a year later I got FF Anthology and played it. I thought it to be the weakest of the PS1 games at first because its narrative was a little thin compared to IV, VI, and VII, but my appreciation for V has grown over time. 

Based on the numerous references it gets in other games compared to VI, it seems to be the most fondly remembered of the Nintendo-era FF games for Japanese players.

Three Houses is indeed an awesome game. It's on my short list of Switch essentials, along with Breath of the Wild, Dragon Quest XI S, Mario Odyssey and the Xenoblade trilogy.

Also, Tactics Ogre is coming to Switch and PS4 in November. 

Singaporean versions of games are usually in English and Chinese, which are the two official languages of Singapore. In fact, Bandai Namco low-key encourages Americans to buy the Singaporean versions of Super Robot Wars games.

Anyway, I rented the PS1 Klonoa from Blockbuster a couple of times. I saw it in the little flyer that came with Tekken 3 and thought it looked interesting. 

Stage Select:

I agree with SuperStep: Game streaming does suck. I'd easily rather download, or better still, own on cartridge, rather than stream games. I'm personally tired of game providers using subscriptions trying to establish permanent ongoing connections with my wallet.  You know who else does that? Drug dealers. Just sell me what I want and go away until I ask for you again.

I never use Microsoft products as long as there are viable alternatives. I even own a Macbook instead of a PC. 

On a related note, the Nintendo Switch is my favorite system of all time, and that is a hill I will not die on, because I will never lose that battle. 

Cage Match:

This matchup takes either in the back lot of some honky-tonk beer joint, or maybe on the yacht in international waters where Homer Simpson and his friends watched the monkey knife fight. You have John from Plumbers Don't Wear Ties squaring off against Brian from Quest 64. For once, Brian actually holds his own instead of being knocked out within ten seconds of the bell ring. John brings out the big guns, namely Jane in her dominatrix outfit with her whip (insert whip sound here), but Brian wisely decided to grind for earth element this time and is actually holding his own... It looks like he might win... both contenders are in their respective corners, breathing hard, both bruised and bleeding, exhausted. Brian got some good offense in the last round... but then the karate lady from Plumbers beats up the judge and declares John the winner. A few seconds later, a stock clip of machine gun fire plays, bullet holes randomly appear, and the karate lady is lying on the ground with Xs over her eyes, with Brian having ditched his magic staff for a Tommy gun. Could it be... that Quest 64 could win?

...Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that Brian from Quest has been disqualified for use of dog doo on a stick, and we award the match to John from Plumbers Don't Wear Ties.

I definitely remember this one in arcades. It looked pretty neat. Sega probably did the most graphically advanced arcade games of any company.

The SNES got a port of Namco's Suzuka 8 Hours, which utilized Mode 7. It had split-screen racing and was pretty smooth.

Since we were talking about plumbing games, I just remembered that there is a game on the Atari 8-bit computers called Electrician, where you have to run wires. Of course, you have to deal with pests chewing through your wires before you can complete a circuit, power surges, and Goddamned Bats. It was a pretty fun game, too. To go from house to house, you had to crawl through sewers infested with alligators.  It even got a Famicom port, which sadly didn't get released over here even though the original game is American in origin. 

I can vouch for PaRappa being rather janky, but it was a lot of fun and the songs were catchy. I think part of the reason it was that way was so that you could try to do things a little more free-form without being penalized or even being rewarded if the game liked your rhythm.

I have Theatrhythm Final Fantasy on 3DS. Played it quite a bit. 

My favorite rhythm game is one that people don't think of as a rhythm game, and doesn't even use music. That game is, of course, Punch-Out!!, which at its heart is a rhythm game that uses boxing and the body language of your opponents as a rhythm device rather than music.