PixlBit

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.

I'm never going to be on the streaming bandwagon. I've also been trying to remove Microsoft from as many aspects of my life as possible. When Gametap was a thing I did kind of dabble with that until I got into 7th gen systems. 

I pre-ordered Ys IX on Switch. I'm going fi have a large collection of Falcon title, especially after NISA announced all those Legend of Herors games for the US. NISA is one of my favorite developers.

I want to get Gsme Builder Garage. I like these DIY game design programs. I keep vowing that I'm going to work on RPG Maker.

Balan Wonderworld isn't the greatest game, but I'm not sure how much of the criticism is merited. Unfortubately, Yuji Naka was quite stung by its reception, to the point where he is considering retiring.

Show notes:

I actually buy most third party games on Switch when available. The Switch is my favorite system, in part for the "intimacy," as Mike put it, and in part because while I did buy it for Nintendo franchises, third party stuff is a nice bonus, especially when I think how starved for games the N64 was. My thinking is that it's legit cool that stuff like Doom, Witcher 3 and Outer Worlds works on it, and is portable when I want to take it on planes. As far as the downgrades that were necessary, we're hardly talking about a functional or visual difference between, say, the PlayStation and the Game Boy, which was still sold throughout the 5th gen. There are legit third-party gems like Dragon Quest XI S and the upcoming SMT V. Right now, the PS5 doesn't really have anything that justifies a $500 purchase, so I'm content to wait for Final Fantasy XVI to drop. As for Xbox, I'll just say that I'm not very fond of Microsoft itself, and leave it at that. So yeah, I'm all for "bring it to Switch." I'll probably pick up the upcoming Switch port of Kingdom Come: Deliverance, just for kicks. I'm also having to travel out of state a lot due to my father's illness, so I appreciate being able to play full-fat console RPGs and action games in portable form. 

The Amico, though... I'm not really sure what Tallarico is thinking there. I just don't see it succeeding against Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft on one end and the mobile market and Apple TV 4K on the other end, especially at a price point higher than a Switch Lite. Some versions of the Amico retail for $300, which is the price of the full-sized Switch or a Series S. There was some drama over the Amico last night, which I assume was after you got this podcast in the can, where Ars Technica got ahold of the Amico's specs and leaked them, comparing the chips to those of low-end smartphones. Needless to say, Tallarico was wasn't happy and threatened to lawyer up against AT for copyright infringement. That, plus the lack of any concrete information on Amico just three months before it's supposed to launch, doesn't seem to bode well for the Amico, and I'm not at all sure than Earthworm Jim will be enough. Tallarico seems to want to bring back couch multiplayer, but Mario Kart 8 and Smash Ultimate fit that bill pretty nicely. Astrosmash looks kind of neat. I used to play the 2600 version when the 2600 was the big thing. Maybe they could bring it to Switch at some point?  That said, they're a lot more reasonable than Atari. The VCS costs as much as the PS5 Digital Edition. I have been playing since the Atari days, and I don't have that much nostalgia.

I believe that the handheld cartridge system you talked about is called the Evercade. 

Fallout: New Vegas is my favorite of the Fallout games because of how the number crunching and character development works in interacting with the game world. It was leaps and bounds above 3. Unfortunately, it fell just short of critical and commercial benchmarks set in the agreement between Bethesda and Obsidian. New Vegas ended up being a big financial loss for Obsidian. I will also say that the delays with South Park: The Stick of Truth after its original publisher, THQ, was liquidated, were nearly the nails in the coffin for Obsidian. Pillars of Eternity, a low-budget, crowdfunded game, saved Obsidian from the same fate as Black Isle. To a degree, The Outer Worlds does recapture the brilliance of NV to a degree, and tries to make the decisions as weighty as those in NV. It was one of my favorite games of the past couple of years, but it's a more abbreviated experience because of limitations, specifically the limits of Obsidian's bank account. 

Bethesda's takeaway from New Vegas was to adopt a very play-it-safe approach for Fallout 4. Your choices weren't really consequential and didn't stand between you and the finish line. There was no cap on leveling and perks. If you play long enough, you'll be as much of an OP god as Terra in FFVI's endgame. There's only one choice in the entire game that changes the ending cinematic. At least the settlement-building was amusing, at least as far as testing the weapons and traps you set up by setting monsters against them. Fallout 4 opted to dial back the RPG stuff, go back to Fallout 3-style set-pieces, and the gameplay actually verges on Borderlands territory.

The less said about Fallout 76, the better.

Stage Select: Top Three Family Members

1. The first one is obvious: Mario and Luigi, the original video game family. I've been following the brothers since the original Mario Bros. arcade game in 1983. I'd take them as my brothers.

2. The Worzen family from Legacy of the Wizard. Each member of the family - Mom, Dad, the brother, the sister, the grandparents, even the family pet - has their own abilities and role in the adventure. 

3. Sojiro Sakura, the guardian of the protagonist in Persona 5. He starts out as a "tough love" parent to the protagonist as he believes the protagonist to be a criminal, then becomes more open as their relationship progresses and the protagonist shows an interest in his hobby of coffee-making. 

Cage Match:

Quest "Glass Joe" 64 is remarkably resilient. But much like Glass Joe, it will inevitably end up face-down on the mat. Castlevania 64 was not the greatest game, but it was far from a terrible game, either. It suffered from a protracted development cycle; their original plan was four playable characters, including a chainsaw-wielding protagonist, day/night cycles, and the player being able to being turned into vampires. I think by 1999, they felt they had to get the game out the door. A lot of the ideas they had for the first release were realized later that year in Legacy of Darkness. Castlevania was flawed but ambitious, while Quest is still the bare minimum of a video game RPG that Nintendo was pushing in an effort to downplay the fact that they screwed up when they lost Final Fantasy VII. However, since Quest 64 seems destined to be a frequent flyer in the ring in an effort to prove itself, I would like to suggest a match where it will stand more of a chance: Quest 64 vs. Plumbers Don't Wear Ties (3DO). 

No, it's all the original sprite work.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance might be what you're looking for. 

Origin Systems experimented with that concept in the 90s, especially with the last two Ultimas they made before they sold the company to EA, but the playtesting was an expensive nightmare for them and the games yielded little profit to show for their troubles. I imagine those issues would be orders of magnitude more problematic now.  Garriott tried to replicate that concept online with Shroud of the Avatar, where they claimed you could be an adventurer, a local artisan, or anything else you wanted in the game world. I wonder if you could role-play as a harlot.  Sadly, it fell quite short of its ambition, met a similarly lackluster commercial reception combined with a chilly critical reception after six years of development (at least from the time it was announced) and he ended up taking the game FTP before selling it off to one of his colleagues and retiring from game development. On a grander scale, Garriott's former employee/rival Chris Roberts has collected almost half a billion dollars in crowdfunding for Star Citizen, also with very little to show for it after almost a decade.  That's part of why RPG video games try to stay focused on staying within a narrative. Such projects look great on paper, but in practice almost always fall victim to feature creep and a sense of feeling unfocused.

Probably the most successful game that approximates that kind of role-playing is not an actual RPG, namely Grand Theft Auto Online, which allows you to try and create your own brand of mayhem on the streets if you don't want to participate in missions. Even then, most of that ends being the same kind of stuff that ends up on Arizona news sites when some random fool decides to start trouble at the local Circle K.