PixlBit

I like the Sakura Wars and Dragon Quest shout-outs. Working Designs was supposedly trying to get localization rights to Sakura Wars in the 1990s, but Sega management turned them down. 

My top games of the decade:

1990: SMB3

1991: Final Fantasy 4

1992: A Link to the Past

1993: Link's Awakening 

1994: Super Metroid

1995: Chrono Trigger

1996: Super Mario 64

1997: Final Fantasy VIi

1998: Ocarina of Time

1999: Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete

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.