PixlBit

Mario Bros was based on Joust by, Miyamoto's own admission. He liked the cooperate/compete aspect of the game, and no doubt his boss, Mr. Yamauchi, was excited about possibility of quarters and 100-yen coins rolling in two at a time instead of one.. Not only that, but Iwata's first game was Balloon Fight, which was Nintendo's version of Joust. And a few years later, at HAL, Iwata led the development of a NES version of Joust. 

Yeah, Mario Bros may not have allowed you to directly hurt the other play like Joust and Balloon Fight did, but you could really make your friends mad at you with a few creative jumps and uses of the POW Block. A lot of the comments on the video do reference Car 54, but who knows whether their knowledge was first- or second-hand.

That would have been weird having Chuck E. Cheese playing, though maybe it would have been less weird then than now. When I was a kid, we went to Peter Piper instead of Chuck E. Cheese since we lived in Arizona. Do you remember Showbiz Pizza?

So AC is Von Kaiser to Quest 64's Glass Joe?

And yeah, the Dreamcast Dragonriders game was definitely no Skies or Arcadia or even an Evolution: The World of Sacred Device.

I'm a fan of the Dragonriders of Pern series, which you mentioned during the podcast. There were at least two games made based on that series. The first one was released for computers in the early 80s by Epyx, and was a mixture of RPG, strategy, and shooter (during the Thread sequences.) The second one I know of was the one released by Ubisoft for the Dreamcast. I wish they could get a developer that is actually good to work on the series.

On the Sephiroth intro, here's the thing: in the few battle scenes that take place, you actually can't control him, you can only control Cloud, who is pretty much along for the ride. Sephiroth is AI controlled. The dragon usually KOs Cloud, and Sephiroth may or may not cast Life 2 to revive you. Even when he's on your side, he's too powerful for you to control. It's like the opening of Dragon Quest 5, where your five-year-old hero is under his father's watchful eye. Only Cloud is a grown-ass man (he's 16, which is too young to enlist in the US Armed Forces) and he's supposedly a member of an elite special forces unit.

Did Assass Creed lose even worse to Mario Odyssey than Quest 64 did to FF7?

Always warms my heart to see a Sakura Wars fan. 

I can guess at least a couple of your top 5 composers. 

I keep wanting to go to Disneyland, since I only have a 6 hour drive to get there. I went there when I was 5 years old. Do you go to Six Flags Over Texas a lot?  

But did it have an ad campaign like this? Nintendo seriously needs to do a game called "Kirby's Bar Fight." I'd buy that one for sure.

Man, that flooding sucks.  It seems like Hurricane Ida hit the Northeast as hard as it hit Louisiana and Mississippi. I hope you are safe, along with a certain gray-haired gamer in Mississippi. We even got a couple days' worth of rain from Ida here in Arizona. 

Probably through marketing and focus groups. Feedback from arcade owners might be like, "hey, this Centipede game really seems to have a lot of girls playing it, we don't usually see a lot of girls here."  By that point, video games were definitely skewing male, between the number of shooting and sports games and games like DK that had male heroes. 

My first handheld was the original Game Boy, in its launch year. It came with Tetris, but these days I actually remember Super Mario Land more fondly. 

The NGP Color looked really good, I was kind of hoping SNK would be able to at least make sales on par with the Game Gear. I also kind of wish we'd gotten a US release for the WonderSwan. I actually saw a lot of SNK arcade games like P.O.W. and Time Soldiers, and almost every arcade had a Neo-Geo system when those came out. Vanguard was one of my favorite early 80s games, but I thought it was made by Atari, who published the home versions in the US.

I actually had mixed feelings on the DS. It had some great games, but too many of them relied on touch screen gimmicks. The DS Zeldas were my least favorite Zeldas (not counting the CD-i games, of course). The games I liked were conventionally controlled. The DS ended up becoming a Dragon Quest machine, owing to the first-ever releases of V and VI as well as IX. The 3DS was somewhat better, as it had a lot more conventional games and some great RPGs.  A Link Between Worlds was a definite step up from the DS games, and the 3DS will always get props from me for being the savior of the Fire Emblem series and helping it to become one of Nintendo's tentpole series. That said, I'm very glad that Nintendo mostly seems to be putting dual screens and touch-screen controls behind them. I never did learn to love touch-screen controls, which is also part of why I never got into mobile gaming. I remember reading rumors back in the day that Nintendo was prepping a fourth-generation Game Boy that would have had specs on par with the Gamecube and conventional controls, and being excited. 

The PSP had some great RPGs. Valkyria Chronicles 2, a port of FF Tactics that had a competent translation, Crisis Core, Persona, Trails in the Sky, and more. I wish I'd gotten the Bandai LoH games. The Vita was interesting, but Sony's heart clearly wasn't in it.  That system ended up being mostly a Falcom machine for me. 

I definitely agree with you guys on the GBA. Castlevania and Golden Sun started me out on it, and I got a SP in 2004. Metroid Zero Mission was awesome, and I got the GBA port of Tales of Phantasia not long after I finished Tales of Symphonia. The GBA kept me entertained during my sophmore year of college, when I had to take a night class that was several hours after my last daytime class. I even had the Game Boy Player, which was amazing. Unfortunately, it got stolen, which is a pity, since the boot discs now go for $200 on eBay. I would really like to play Mother 3 on my TV. 

My favorite handheld is also my favorite system of all time, and it is none other than the Switch. It made me fall in love with video games all over again after I was kind of becoming a little disinterested. It pretty much stays in its dock at home, and I play it with a Pro Controller. However, it's accompanied me on the many trips I've had to make to Oklahoma this year. Being able to play a few rounds of Donkey Kong and Mario Bros, explore Koholint Island, fight a few Fire Emblem battles, or have a few matches of Smash, really helped me keep my sanity during these difficult trips.

Excellent podcast. Looking forward to more.