PixlBit

It's a tough game, and the difficulty ramps up rather quickly. The worst are the Cobra ships, especially in "red zones" where the game reverses the controls. To add insult to injury, the Cobra ships are only worth 30 points apiece, which is really low. The only upside to them is that they apparently are incapable of attacking base planets. 

Solaris is a really ambitious game and was a great swan song for the 2600. I'm glad they finally put it on a home collection. The author, Doug Neubauer, made sure he retained the rights to the game in his agreement with Atari, so he actually owns his creation and that's why it doesn't show up in a loot of Atari collections. 

Atari's executives had hoped that between scoring exclusive home rights to the biggest arcade game in the world and a game licensed on what was the most successful movie in history at the time, that people would flood the stores trying to buy Atari 2600s. At that time, they were also trying to push the 5200 as a competitor for the ColecoVision, which launched with Donkey Kong, And in addition to giving Warshaw an impossible time frame to make a video game based on a movie that really didn't lend itself well to video games, they paid what was considered an exorbitant sum for the rights to E.T., $25 million. And given that this was in 1982 dollars, they basically Shemued themselves.

Another Gaplus afficionado. I first saw Gaplus at the Air Force Exchange at Tempelhof in Berlin, it was branded as Galaga 3, and it was in 1990, so it was a long time after the game first came out. I later got it on Namco Museum Vol. 2 for PS1. I have the Arcade Archives version on Switch. Nowadays, it kind of depresses me to put my age in on the high score screen. 

The Exchange services on military bases always had arcades, and in a lot of cases they were arcade machines that were made for Japan and not intended for the US market. One of them, Chelnov, even had a big disclaimer saying "Warning: If you are playing this game outside of Japan, you are involved in a crime." That one was in England.

Since I was pretty young when the 2600 was a thing, I didn't know until years after the fact that there was a big stink about Pac-Man on 2600. We naturally assumed back then that the home version was never going to be as good as the arcade. Look at Space Invaders, which was pretty bastardized on the 2600. Or Donkey Kong, which was incredibly primitive. I did know that Atari lost money on Pac-Man despite it being the best-selling 2600 game of all time by virture of still having 2 million cartridges sitting on store shelves, most of which ended up being buried in New Mexico. 

When I was in kindergarten, there was a puppet show called The Great Space Coaster, which starred a space clown named Baxter and had a "news segment" starring Gary Gnu. My favorite characters on Sesame Street were Cookie Monster and Oscar the Grouch. Watching Cookie Monster demolish those cookies always made me want Chips Ahoy. But other than that, I didn't watch a lot of TV tailored for little kids. I preferred Garfield and Ninja Turtles over Muppets, and I used to watch the Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show.

One other favorite kids' show I had was local to the Phoenix TV market, Wallace and Ladmo. They were on TV for 35 years starting in the 1960s. They did a lot of shows from a local theme park, Legend City. They gave away paper goodie bags known as Ladmo bags, which became such a staple in Phoenix that lunch bags at the Maricopa County Jail were apparently known as Ladmo bags. One time they had rock star Alice Cooper (a longtime Phoenix resident) on the show and gave him a Ladmo bag.

I would call "the best" a toss-up between Yars' Revenge and Solaris, which was good enough to hang wiith the NES games that were coming out at the time. And the NES didn't have a lot in the way of space sims.

Vision of Mana, Ys X, and Paper Mario are my most wanted games of the moment. 

It's on Switch and PS4. 

SMRPG was great. My GOTY is Tears of the Kingdom, though. 

On the subject of RPG remakes, Star Ocean: The Second Story R was an amazing remake that had a lot of care put into it. 

I found a three-in-one cartridge of Dragon Quest I-III in Maine while I was visiting Ranger, another former 1UP acquaintance. I picked it up. It's in English and everything.

Fire Emblem Engage was great, I loved it. It's my favorite game of the year other than Tears of the Kingdom and *maybe* SMRPG and Baldur's Gate 3. Also liked Advance Wars a lot. I actually first played a game like that on NES called Desert Commander. It was made by Kemco, as we didn't get Nintendo Wars localized.