Yeah, I'd wear the cat ears. Bonus points if it has a big bow tied to one of the ears.
Stray seems like an interesting game, but it isn't a cat simulator until the cat walks across a keyboard while you're trying to type stuff. I remember playing an Atari 8-bit game in the 80s called Alley Cat.
Stage Select:
3. Cloud in Smash 4 and Ultimate. Now we could finally settle the age-old 5th generation question of Link versus Cloud. Now you can even have Link and Cloud square off against Ganon and Sephiroth. Or Link and Sephiroth against Cloud and Ganon. Or whatever. But Cloud was my favorite third party character in Smash.
2. Link in Soulcalibur 2 for the Gamecube. The developers really did their homework on Zelda lore. On the basis of Link being in that game, it was tied with Virtua Fighter 4 as my favorite 6th gen fighting game.
1. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat 11. He really nailed Shang Tsung in the movie, and it was neat that Netherrealm was able to get permission to use his likeness in the game. To get a little personal, I recently watched Mortal Kombat on HBO Max. It's one of my favorite video game movies of all time. When I was 17, I went to see it in theaters with my dad, so watching it now is somewhat bittersweet, since it makes me miss my dad.
Cage Match:
Driver 2 never made it to the match. On the way to the match, Driver 2 stopped to rob a gas station in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, but somehow only managed to steal a pack of Bubble Yum. Driver 2 couldn't figure out how to get back on I-40, so it asked the clerk how to find the highway. The directions the clerk gave Driver 2 led it straight to the Okmulgee County Sheriff's Department. Driver 2 is currently facing 5 years in the Oklahoma state prison for armed robbery. Syphon Filter wins.
Earthbound Origins was actually released on Wii U in a surprise release in 2015. However, I believe it was already translated by Nintendo around 1990. It never got released because Nintendo didn't think it would sell, especially with the SNES on the horizon. So it was one of those games that Nintendo had lying around that never got released. For context, Wii U sales were pretty much in the tank in 2015, and they figured that Earthbound Origins would be a way to make a little quick cash and to remind Wii U owners that they were still out there. Maybe when Switch sales dip a little bit, which might be awhile since the Switch is still selling circles around PlayStation and Xbox, Nintendo might release Mother 3. Typically with Nintendo, once the toothpaste is out of the tube, they don't try to put it back in.
Part of the reason why Nintendo no longer makes Ken Griffey Jr/baseball games is because when they were making those games, Hiroshi Yamauchi personally held a full ownership stake in the Seattle Mariners, which was the first time a Major League Baseball team was owned by a non-American. However, it was thanks to Mr. Yamauchi that the team stayed in Seattle.
So Nintendo had a ready-made entry into the baseball video game market. When he died, Nintendo sold most of his stake in the team. I think they still hold ten pecent ownership, and the team's financial interests are managed by Howard Lincoln, Nintendo of America's 1980s-era CEO.
I got bogged down in the last couple of chapters of FFXIII.
As for Paw Patrol, this is a pretty funny video.
This has been a quiet year for me. My GOTY so far is Triangle Strategy. However, the back end of the year is pretty loaded, what with XC3, Bayo 3 (does it have a release date?I never saw), Pokemon S/V, and Persona 3-5 coming to Switch. I've spent this year working on games like SMT V that I bought last year.
Fallout Kirby was a pretty interesting concept for a game, I have to say.
I have a Zelda-themed 3DS XL that came with a voucher for A Link Between Worlds. I bought a lot of rare games for it over the years, including SMT IV, Bravely Default, Dragon Quest VII, and 7th Dragon Code VFD. It's kind of sad that the 3DS is retired, but I wish more of its library would come to the Switch. I'd love a new 7th Dragon or Etrian Odyssey.
I can remember playing the first game in pizza parlor arcades back when it was new. By then, Mortal Kombat 3, Killer Instinct, Virtua Fighter, and Tekken were taking up most of an ever-decreasing supply of oxygen in the arcades, so I didn't see it a great deal. The second game actually released on Saturn before the first game made it out on PS1.
The computer fights cheaply in the original game.
I've been playing Vampire Savior (Darkstalkers 3) online. I always use either Felicia or B.B. Hood/Bulleta, who is an characterization of "humans are the real monsters."
I played an Atari 8-bit remake of Temple of Apshai plus its two sequels, Upper Reaches of Apshai and Curse of Ra. It was very abstract even as a remake. It had graphical player character and monster sprites, but you were supposed to use the paper documentation that came with the games for descriptions of the dungeons, which were depicted as simple walls and floors. So it was kind of a hybrid of a computer RPG and a pen-and-paper game. You were even supposed to create your character based off of your D&D characters. I had a pirated copy, and didn't have the documentation. I also didn't play D&D, so I just gave all my characters stats of 18 and +9 armor and weapons.
Stage Select:
3. Kid Icarus. I would like to see this return as a full-fledged third-person platforming/action/shooting adventure with freedom of movement. Of all of Nintendo's dormant series, this is easily the one I most want to return.
2. Earthbound/Mother. I've pretty much accepted that this series is gone for good. I would at least settle for a Switch port of Mother 3. On that, I've heard various theories from Nintendo insiders that Nintendo was looking at a Switch port, but nixed it. One theory is that Nintendo rejected it because they simply thought that some of the content was too problematic for the United States, and that localizing it would be a no-win situation. Reggie Fils-Aime continues to insist that it was purely a business decision, though Reggie always seemed to have a lot of antipathy towards RPGs during his tenure at Nintendo. I kind of lean towards the former explanation. The bowdlerization that Nintendo employed in the 1990s wouldn't fly anymore, judging by the Twitter hostility towards some of NoA's decisions regarding Fire Emblem Fates and Tokyo Mirage Sessions. On the other hand, I can just see Ron DeSantis or some other politician flipping his lid about some of the content in the game.
It's also telling that as zealous as Nintendo is about copyright protection, that they have never really made any serious attempts to go after the well-known fan translation of Mother 3. They know it exists, and the translation team even sent letters to Nintendo saying they would provide the translation as an official translation free of charge, or that if Nintendo wanted to do its own localization that they would take their localization down. Typically that kind of thing results in C&D letters from Nintendo's legal team, but not in this case. So it's pretty safe to say Nintendo has washed its hands of the whole thing and is willing to leave the fan translation alone as a compromise. At this point, Xenoblade Chronicles pretty much fills Nintendo's traditional RPG niche.
1.This one is kind of iffy according to your criteria thanks to a very late PS4 port, but I would really like to see Virtua Fighter 6. Virtua Fighter is my favorite fighting game franchise of all time. I always preferred it over Tekken, both for the visual design and for the gameplay mechanics. It's an elegant system that works on just three buttons. We got a little taste of the series when Ryu ga Gotoku Studios worked with AM2 on a PS4 port of VF5, a game which originally came out 16 years ago. Virtua Fighter deserves another chance to shine.
Cage Match:
In this battle of Bioware space games, I'm going to give it to store-brand Star Wars over Star Wars, just because the games had a lot more time to advance in technology and design, plus I have never had an easy relationship with licensed games, for the most part. I have also never really gotten into Bioware's game design. I've tried Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Jade Empire, and always end up going back to Bethesda or CD Projekt.
The tag-team cage match actually looks like a good concept. I'd like to propose a future cage match of Tales of Vesperia and Tales of Symphonia versus Dragon Quest VIII and Dragon Quest XI.
