PixlBit

I think Goldeneye was the best-selling game of 1998 despite also being the fifth best-selling game of 1997. Ocarina of Time was number 2.

That show came on at 6 AM on a high number channel in my area. Too bad only 13 episodes got localized. 

Stage select:

I'd probably choose to live in Hyrule. C'mon, you probably knew in your hearts I would pick Hyrule. Anyway, Hyrule has plenty of nice areas to live, and plenty of dangerous areas if you really want to go swinging a sword about. It's not a sucking pit of despair like Temeria or most of the Fallout world, which would be fun to adventure in until you wanted to take a rest or eat. I'd probably build a cottage in the mountains or the forest near Lake Hylia, or maybe I'd go hang out in the desert. I'd have a horse on hand to ride to Castle Town.

Cage Match: My PixlBit avvy as of this post is from Dragon Quest XI, so that should tell you which game I'm voting for.

 Final Fantasy has gone somewhat off the rails with its experimentation. FFXV was an improvement from XIII, but was still somewhat of a mess from its tumultuous development as FFVsXIII.  The story was a mess, and I gotta tell you, it was kind of weird seeing Final Fantasy characters camping out with Coleman tents and gas stoves and stores taking American Express. One of the diners in the game looks suspiciously like a Whataburger. I enjoyed the game, but it didn't quite grab me in the way that 7 or 12 did.

Dragon Quest XI, especially the "S" version, is pretty much a distillation of everything I like about Japanese RPGs. It's a beautifully rendered world, with all of the familiar monsters in their glory. There's a lot to do. The characters were a lot more charming than Noctis, Gladio, Ignus, and Prompto. It's also incredibly loaded with content, many will probably say too much. It still has the turn-based battle system, though they've marched it forward in increments rather than trying wholesale to reinvent the wheel. It's incredibly polished on all fronts, in comparison to the unfinished feel of FFXV. 

If you'd told me at 22 that I'd be picking a Dragon Quest game over a Final Fantasy game in a match up, I would have laughed. But here we are. Final Fantasy is still trying to find its way back; Dragon Quest, meanwhile, is better than ever.

(And you thought I was going to point out that GTA does, in fact, have six wanted levels. HA!)

I still do things around here. Much more peaceful than Facebook.

Boulder Dash was a staple of my youth. I played it on Atari 8-bit, which is the platform it was originally developed for. i had quite a few of those digging type games. Henri was a knockoff of Mr. Do. Man, I wish Hamster would release Mr. Do as an Arcade Archives title. Firebug gave you the ability to dig and shoot. I also had the official 8-bit version of Dig-Dug from Atari, but it was kind of poorly done, being slow, buggy, and with awful graphics and sound.

I've kind of thought about giving Ring Fit Adventure a try. That sounds like a fitness game that's up my alley.

The place where Lucas receives his PSI powers is a bit on the oof side. I can easily see someone freaking out and Congress going apeshit in this day and age. I'm pretty sure Nintendo's lawyers could see that scenario. There was some to-do over Tomodachi Life a few years ago. Maybe it's just the way Tomato translated the scene. 

I prefer the tighter design and power-ups of SMB3 myself. That game was hard to beat even with better hardware. SMW was unparalleled in terms of SNES platformers though. The only area DK Country had it beat in was the graphics, and that's subjective in itself. 

Stage Select

There's a certain button in Fallout 3 that, if you press it, causes a lot of awesome fireworks. And a little bit of ghoulification. It's going to be hard to top a button like that. No failsafes, no long codes from a suitcase, just a simple button. 

I like the big green A button on the Gamecube controller. It's the primary button for controlling in-game action, so it's naturally more prominent. 

Remote detonation car bombs in the GTA series. Open-world games have made numerous advances over the past 20 years in terms of graphics and interactivity, but sometimes you just want to rig up a car bomb and cause some random chaos. It's a fast way to get you up to the vaunted 6-star wanted level where the military gets called in.

Cage Match:

Giving it to Turok Evolution. How bad... ass is Turok Evolution? It had an award named after it: EGM's Tobias Bruckner Memorial Award for Excellence in the Field of Crapulence. Serious Sam has no such honor. I rest my case.

 Konami is a huge company with lines of business outside of games, and at the time video games were underperforming the rest of the company. Metal Gear Solid has never sold anywhere nearly as well as, say, Resident Evil. Pachislots were a tempting market for a lot of video game manufacturers at the time. SNK went through its own period where they were going to skip console video games altogether and just stick with mobile games and licensing its characters out for pachislot characters, though they've made a hard pivot back to traditional console games. Sega's parent company, Sammy, was also steering Sega towards pachislots at the time (Sammy originally started as a slot machine manufacturer.) So hopefully Konami will make a similar comeback in video gaming. 

`I have the English translation of Mother 3 on cartridge. I am in fact playing it on a GameCube Game Boy Player. I, too, wish that Nintendo would localize Mother 3. They could package it on a cartridge and hype it up., and one oft the biggest disappointments I can think of in gaming is that they couldn't finish the N64 version, especially given that they were very, very close to completing it. They tried enlisting the people who did Pokemon Stadium for the project. 

I don't think it's going to happen. There is no way to bring over the game without one aspect of it or another being problematic to people on all sides of the aisle. Nintendo's 1990s-era censorship doesn't really fly in this day and age. The memories of the outcry over censorship in the US versions of FE Fates, Tokyo Mirage Sessions, and Xenoblade Chronicles X are no doubt still strong at NoA. Nintendo's legal counsel was likely concerned that some aspects of the game might attract unwanted attention from certain members of Congress, and Nintendo definitely has bitter experience with Congressional hearings. The Magypsies, which are a core element of the story, would be difficult to localize no matter how Nintendo tried to approach it. Even the name "Magypsy" is problematic these days due to the negative connotations of "gypsy." Nintendo doesn't seem to have problems with third party games being risque anymore. South Park made its video game debut on N64, both South Park RPGs are on Switch, and Trey and Matt even mentioned Earthbound as a direct inspiration for Stick of Truth. Switch has Witcher 3 in all of its naked glory, but they're still reluctant to release such content themselves. I guess that's for the same reason that Disney doesn't release R-rated movies under its own label. 

Plus, the localization would be a huge, expensive effort and Nintendo isn't sure they'd get a good ROI given how weak sales of Earthbound games have traditionally been. The fan-translators did try to donate any legal rights to the fan-translation to Nintendo if it meant Mother 3 would get an official release, but Nintendo didn't bite.

It's kind of telling that Nintendo, which is infamous for swinging the C&D hammer around iike a madman, has never made any attempt to stop the Mother 3 fan translation from being distributed even though they know it exists.  They've pretty much given tacit approval of the fan translation through their silence on the matter. (Fun side fact: making inadequate attempts to defend a trademark can be seen as approval in the eyes of judges in our precedent-driven common law court system, which is part of why Nintendo is so aggressive about its trademarked products.)

But hey, Nintendo has surprised me before. Maybe when the Switch hits its end-of-life slump while Nintendo is getting its successor ready, Nintendo will make a surprise release of Mother 3.