PixlBit

Both are on Switch for sure and likely on PS and Xbox as well. This game is available under its original title, Another World.

Stage Select:

This track from the 1994 British-made PC point and click adventure, Dreamweb. Composed by Matthew Costello. This track is a bit long and obviously you're not going to play the whole thing, but it's quite excellent and worth listening to start to finish. It is called Total HeAd Control [sic].

 My second piece is from Ultima III: Exodus on the NES, one of the first, but definitely not the last, RPGs I played. The music for the NES version was produced in Japan and was much different from the music for the computer versions, at least the computer versions that even had music to begin with. I found out years later that this track, and another U3 track, had a full J-pop rendition with vocals, called "Hitomi no Naifu" or "Knife of the Eye."

Cage Match: 

Final Fantasy VIII. Aside from the fact i thoroughly enjoyed the game itself in spite of, or even because of the junction system being pretty broken, it holds a special place in my heart. I really identified with Squall's inner turmoil, for one. Aside from the military and magical stuff, Squall's experience in high school was a lot like mine. It also came out the fall before I started college, so the school theme kind of stuck with me. 

Chrono Cross... when it came out, my finances gave me a choice between it and Valkyrie Profile. I chose Valkyrie Profile, thinking it looked more interesting. When I finally did play Chrono Cross, I learned thaf I had made the correct choice the first time. 

Show response: on the subject of Insomniac doing Mario, please, no. And by that I mean God, no. Among other takeaways I had from 7th gen was a strobg distaste for Western interpretations of Japanese franchises. The one allowance I might make for that is Retro Studios, which had strong leadership from Nintendo of Japan. I'm actually okay with the blank slate nature of Mario. I come for the gameplay, not the story.  I wouldn't mind a bit of interplay between M&L, but I would definitely prefer it to be left in Japanese hands.

This game and Flashback are available as downloads on modern systems. I think they even gave Flashback a physical release.

i was the opposite. I was like "is this the same Mario that died if he fell 3 feet?" 

Donkey Kong Junior NES is a much better port than DK NES is. The sound is still off and the colors don't pop as much as the arcade version, but the gameplay feels all right. I still got the Arcade Archives version. I missed out on the Original Edition, but I'm not too fussed about it especially now that the real DK arcade game is available.

Mario Bros arcade is also day and night compared to the NES counterpart, and again, that game's appearances in Smash Ultimate take more of their cues from the arcade than the NES compared to older Smash games. It wasn't a bad port for the time, but I'm not going to play it when I have the real thing to play. 

I got Romancing SaGa 2 and 3 mostly based on me being a fan of SaGa Frontier. They looked good for SNES games, but I wish Square had released them back in the day. They're a bit rough compared to SaGa Frontier, which is a somewhat rough game in itself.

Neo-Geo systems were a regular feature of arcades around me. Mostly they had various fighting games (Fatal Fury, SamSho, and World Heroes), and then Bust-a-Move and Metal Slug when those games became popular. It's kind of neat that it works in both portable and TV form, just like the Switch.

Remember this magazine ad for Sudeki from a couple years earlier?

I never loved the NES version because it only had 75% of the game, and I didn't like how the NES rendered the game's sounds. The best home version I saw was the Atari 8-bit version, which had all four levels and sounds that were much closer to the arcade than the NES version, despite decreased graphical fidelity compared to the NES version. The physics also felt rather "off" on the NES compared to the arcade or even the Atari 8-bit version.

Miyamoto designed DK under orders from Nintendo CEO Hiroshi Yamauchi to make a game geared towards Americans - originally, DK was going to be a Popeye-themed game, where Bluto would have filled the role occupied by DK. However, the actual coding was done by a company called Ikegami Tsushinki, who also manufactured the arcade boards. DK was a success, and Nintendo went ahead with a sequel. Unfortunately, Nintendo utilized Ikegami's code in making DK Junior without permission from Ikegami. Ikegami sued Nintendo, and it took the case almost ten years to work its way through the Japanese courts, after which they settled. However, Nintendo effectively lost the lawsuit, because the court acknowledged Ikegami's ownership of the code. Nintendo still had the copyright to its characters (though Mario Segale once joked that he was waiting for his royalties in one of the few interviews he ever gave), and since the code for the NES versions of DK and DK Junior was done by Nintendo itself, the NES versions are the versions they re-released. So other than what was likely an innocent mistake in not understanding still-nascent copyright and patent laws as they pertained to software, Nintendo wasn't really to blame for not releasing the arcade versions of those two games. Even the 3DS "ambassador" version was the NES version with the extra level added.  I wonder if Nintendo was worried that tangling with Ikegami in court again might give Ikegami some kind of legal hold on Mario, which would have been very bad for Nintendo. That's not as far-fetched as you might think. Bandai Namco has been involved in a long-running lawsuit with AtGames over the code to Ms. Pac-Man, which is why we haven't seen her in the past few years.

With that said, you actually can get the arcade versions of DK, DK Junior, DK3, and Mario Bros legally on the Switch. They were all released as Arcade Archives titles by Hamster, with Mario Bros coming a few months after the Switch launched. DK came out in the summer of 2018, and DK Junior (the game which originally caused the Ikegami lawsuit) somewhat later that year. I'm guessing that Nintendo and Ikegami finally buried the hatchet and decided it wasn't worth fighting over, especially since Ikegami is no longer in the games business. The Arcade Archives version includes the original Japanese version, the revised Japanese version, and the US version. The US version is structured so that Level 1 only contains the barrel and rivet screens, Level 2 adds the elevator screen, and Level 3 adds the cement factory screen. Level 4 adds a second barrel screen between the cement factory and jack screens, and from level 5 onward, there is another barrel screen between the jack screen and the rivet screen, for a total of 6 screens. So the US version does better at upping the challenge for progression.   To this day, Donkey Kong is my favorite arcade of all time, and it may possibly have been the first game I ever played. Its colors and the personality of the characters always captured my attention away from Pac-Man.  My second favorite arcade game was Mario Bros, which also held the same allure as DK. 

Nintendo regaining the rights to the arcade version of Donkey Kong even reflected itself in Super Smash Bros Ultimate. The music for the hammer now sounds like the arcade rather than the NES version, which was used for the first four generations of Smash, and the hammer now does the same effect when you hit someone with it that the arcade version does.

I mostly liked the old arcade games on the service, since back then only Namco's arcade classics were easily available. I was also introduced to Phantasy Star and Shining Force on Gametap.