PixlBit

I found the game I was thinking of. It was Tooth Invaders, for the C64.

The main FFVI World of Balance theme, Terra, is one of the best overworld themes I've ever heard in a game. One track I like that doesn't get a lot of love is The Floating Continent, which is one of the final precursors before things go to hell at the halftime mark.

Nowadays you can get it on Steam. But I'm really digging Ys 9 right now.

I rented the SNES version of Ys 3 a long, long time ago. Before that I was a fan of Faxanadu. But for a long time, the only place I saw Falcom games was on sites like RPGamer, though I know they did Brandish on SNES and Popful Mail on Sega CD.  Ys VI and The Legend of Heroes on PSP really seemed to kick-start Falcom in the US in the mid 00s. 

I did watch that video last year, on my blog on Falcom's Dragon Slayer/Legend of Heroes games.

Sounds like a simple version of Super Mario Sunshine.

Most US developers were doing games like this with blue-screened live actors (Area 51, Revolution-X).

I never played much in the way of educational games unless you count The Oregon Trail as one. The Oregon Trail was a strangely addictive game. I did have an edutainment game on the TI-99/4A called Beginning Grammar which went over the parts of speech. In Oklahoma, there is a science museum called the Omniplex. They had a bunch of educational video games that looked like they ran off of Apple IIs. One of them was a tooth brushing game where the evil plaques were represented by scary Russian music, namely the Volga Boatmen's Song (the theme that plays when Soda Popinski is introduced). Gotta love the Cold War.

I usually manage to come up with one or two BaD posts. Which may or may not be bad posts.

I do remember WinBack getting covered in Nintendo Power, though it didn't get a cover feature. I rented it back in the day. It was an interesting game and I might have bought it a year or two earlier. But after Ocarina of Time and Castlevania came out, I pretty much moved on from the N64.  I was all into the RPG library on PS1. 

I'm playing it on the Switch. Honestly, with Nintendo's close relationship with Koei Tecmo, and all the recent consolidation of the game industry lately (I'm not saying any more), Nintendo ought to consider reviving this series as its own in-house version of Metal Gear. 

Awesome to see you picked up Sakura Wars. Aside from the fact that it's a type of game I love from one of my favorite lineages of that genre, it was also the last new PS2 release I ever bought. It came out in March 2010, which was when Final Fantasy XIII came out on PS3 and 360.  Almost exactly a decade later I bought Sakura Wars on PS4. 

Scarface was a late 6th generation game. The only 7th generation console that got a port of it was, ironically, the Wii, probably because the Wii maxed out at 480p instead of 1080 like the PS3 and 360. A 360 port had been in development, but it got cancelled. 

I loved Virtua Fighter 4 myself. I never bought any Namco fighting games on PS2 because it was that good. I did get Soulcalibur 2 on Gamecube, of course, because Heihachi was kind of lame (how difficult would it have been for Namco to go to Square Enix and say hey, could we borrow Cloud or Sephiroth?)

Xenosaga was bizarre, and I don't mean in the way Xeno games are bizarre. Xenosaga is like they built an entire series around Xenogears Disc 2 - you know, the part of Xenogears that got truncated into a bunch of cut scenes and dungeons because Square needed the money and manpower to work on Final Fantasy VIII. It was supposed to get six parts originally. I think the only thing they ended up accomplishing was selling KOS-MOS models and body pillows. Even Takahashi had a lot of regrets over it. Xenoblade Chronicles was when Xenogears finally got a proper follow-up. 

Oh, yeah, Yugioh is still around. Konami probably makes more money on it than they ever did on Metal Gear.