PixlBit

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. 

My dad built one of those Heathkit TVs. For a long time, the TV tube with the bare circuitry sat on a console in our living room. My parents made sure to put the fear of God into me if I ever touched anything behind the screen. A little later, my dad built a console to house the TV, so they didn't have to worry about me electrocuting myself. We had a TI-99/4A computer hooked to it that my dad would let me use on special occasions, and my sister had an old Pong clone console. I thought it was just cool making stuff on a TV screen move. My mom also had a TRS-80 computer, but since that had its own monitor includede, it wasn't as neat as making things move on the living room TV.

I think the first time I saw the word "tanuki/tanooki" was in a 1989/90 Nintendo Power feature on Super Mario Bros. 3. While the leaf power-up was stil called Raccoon Mario, the full-on suit was called a Tanuki Suit. Other than that, most English localizations of Japanese media, including anime like Ranma 1/2, referred to them as "raccoons." I guess even Animal Crossing's resident loan shark is still referred to as a "raccoon" in US media even though he's called "Tom Nook."

I've played all of the games on the top list except for Computer Space MUD 1, Mattel Auto Race, and Sprint 2. I've played plenty of derivatives of Computer Space, including Atari's Space War. One game from the 70s that I played that isn't on the list was Temple of Apshai.

Fun fact: the best selling video game hardware of the 1970s wasn't the Atari 2600. It was Nintendo's Color TV Game, which was a Pong clone sold only in Japan. Even in the 1970s Nintendo was still the king, lol.