PixlBit

Valkyrie Chronicles 1 on PS1 is very pricey these days. Video games have been a better investment for me than some stocks nowadays.

Yep, I have Odin Sphere as well. Great game.

One thing I didn't mention in the blog is that the original PS1 dub was done by 4Kids Entertainment, the company that handled the original English dubs for Pokemon. So most of the voice actors in VP were from Pokemon, including the actors who played Ash, Misty, and Brock. Lennetjh's voice actor is Megan Hollingshead, who voiced Nurse Joy. 

1. Not great right now. My sister and I are having to make a lot of difficult decisions regarding the care of our mother. 

2. Pete Davison, a former GamePro editor, does "A to Z" channels on various classic platforms like the Atari 8-bit and the C64. He also does Evercade as well as a channel where he tackles various games from various other platforms.

3. I'd take the knife, as I could probably take a few hits from the bat, but the knife would probably incapacitate me a lot more if I got stabbed.

4. After a day in the hot Arizona sun, you don't really want to know.

5. The only things I get at McDonald's are Chicken McNuggets and fries, or occasionally hot cakes and sausage or bacon. Chicken McNuggets are my favorite fast-food chicken nuggets, whereas if I want a hamburger, I'd rather go to Wendy's, In-n-Out, or Whataburger. My favorite hamburgers are from Red Robin.

6. Stage Select: Top 5 playable female characters. I'm old enough to still remember when Ms. Pac-Man was pretty much it for playable females, and when Samus being a woman was a huge shock. 

7. Something Zelda-related, as Zelda is and will always be my favorite game series. When I was a kid, I even used an Atari 8-bit program called Adventure Creator to make an extremely abstract "Zelda 3," three years bafore A Link to the Past came out. Needless to say, my version didn't really measure up.

Both Binky and Krusty had episodes where they were framed for robbery by impersonators and had to be cleared by Garfield/Bart. Binky's episode actually predated Krusty's episode.

The "evil clown" thing probably got its start in the 80s, from Pennywise the Clown in Stephen King's It. I'm pretty sure that came from either King remembering some loud, scary clowns in his childhood or his kids being frightened by clowns. Garfield and the Simpsons had their own obnoxious clowns as well (Binky the Clown and Krusty the Clown, respectively.)

A lot of "indies" seem to be thinly veiled "homages" (to be nice about it) to well-known games. Eastasiasoft seems to really try to push the limits of what the new, more tolerant Nintendo will accept as far as nudity. We've come a long way since Mortal Kombat on SNES. 

You've kind of seen me elsewhere on the Intertubes - the good and bad of it. 

Love Breath of the Wild. I keep coming back to it.  Also been playing Shin Megami Tensei V on and off.

I really enjoyed the remaster of SaGa Frontier. I had the original game on PS1, and despite the fact that it got heavily panned by critics, I really liked it. The new version really made it a better game and fixed a lot of complaints about the original.

I remember Stratego from my childhood. 

Cage Match:

Currently, the finals are on hold pending an investigation. Besides the interference from Quest 64, there are also questions about whether Quest 64 was taking performance enhancing drugs. Quest 64 is the game that got a one-punch KO from Glass Joe. Quest 64 once lost a battle against those squirrel monsters on the deserted island in Final Fantasy VI that automatically die five seconds after the battle starts. Quest 64 once got its lunch money stolen by Lester the Unlikely. In light of these facts, an investigation is being conducted, and Congress is discussing holding hearings.  This is one of the worst scandals since Vince McMahon's 1994 doping scandal. Comparisons are even being drawn to the 1919 Black Sox Scandal. 

Chrono Cross, having showered for two solid days after its mini-vacation near the Stanfield Stockyards, demands answers, and is joined in this endeavor by Tetris and its former rival, Mario. 

When confronted by reporters from The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Norman Transcript, Quest 64 covered its face and ran into its home, while Chex Quest called the reporters "vultures."

When I first played Tactics in 1998, I did a lot of the "side quests" in the taverns. These would often unlock information on locations and artifacts in the earlier games of the series. At the time I played Tactics, I had only played VI and VII, and I might have rented IV from Blockbuster. So I didn't recognize any of these except what came from those games. Due to VII being pretty new and VI not being as popular in Japan as soms of the earlier games, most of these references came from 1, 2, 3, and 5. So that meant that i recognized very few of the references until I played V, which came out the following year as part of Anthology, or Origins. 9 had a lot of callbacks to older games as well (a lot of the Tactics staff worked on 9). It was interesting seeing how old some of the thematic elements of the PS1 games really were. I guess it would have felt the same seeing 8-bit Lynels for the first time if my first Zelda game had been Breath of the Wild or A Link Between Worlds, but I have been a Zelda fan since the first game released in the US. 

Apparenty ATGames did a Namco plug-in game that Namco felt was far short of its standards, and ATGames got a little snotty about their criticism. So I think Ms. Pac-Man is probably long gone.