PixlBit

Hey, Larry. Good to see you. Sounds like you've been busy. I've been getting into real estate investing myself. 

On the subject of anime, the Dragon Warrior anime aired for a time in my area, but it was at 6 AM on Sunday. I got up to watch it because I loved the games on NES. 

I always thought it was funny that people started who started playing Dragon Quest after Dragon Ball Z came out would ask why Dragon Quest looked like Dragon Ball. When I first saw Dragon Ball, I was surprised by how much it looked like Dragon Quest. 

My favorite Saturday morning cartoons were Garfield and TMNT. That was also the time that they started phasing them out. NBC stopped doing cartoons altogether in favor of Saved By the Bell and golf. I also liked The Smurfs, The Littles, and Alvin and the Chipmunks. "Dave Seville" was actually Ross Bagdasarian Sr. His son Ross Jr. and Ross Jr's wife Janice still own the franchise, and they did the speaking voices. In one of my mom's high school yearbooks, she and a couple of her friends are dressed as the Chipmunks (that was the year that "Witch Doctor" was a huge hit). I had one of the first albums Ross Jr. released after he brought the Chipmunks back, Urban Chipmunk.

I also liked Saturday Supercade and Captain N, just because video game stuff was hard to come by. 

Tales of Symphonia is actually pretty reasonable priced on Gamecube. It's also available on every modern ecosystem. The Switch version was kind of rough at first but they've patched it up nicely.

The only thing is, the Gamecube version runs at 60 FPS where the modern versions run at 30 FPS. PC modders have tried for years to get it to run at 60 FPS but it doesn't work right.

Tamson is loving it as well. I'm enjoying it myself.

I just wish someone could wrestle Ultima out of EA's grip and give it the same treatment. I'd be so down for that. I'd even settle for re-releases of the Ultima games on NSO. 

I actually picked up the Paper Mario: TTYD remake. It's a lot of fun. It was a game that i missed in 2004 for... reasons, plus, I was really into Harvest Moon and Tales of Symphonia at the time. 

My early 2000s shortlist:

Zelda: Wind Waker

Metroid Prime

RE4

Final Fantasy X

GTA Vice City

Virtua Fighter 4

Tales of Symphonia

Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance (this game is super-rare)

Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life

Soul Calibur 2 (Gamecube version)

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King

My shortlist of 95-99 greats

Chrono Trigger

Super Mario RPG

Super Mario 64

Star Fox 64

Mario Kart 64

Goldeneye

Final Fantasy VII

Resident Evil 2

Shining Force III

Panzer Dragon Saga

Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon

SaGa Frontier

Parasite Eve

Xenogears

Ocarina of Time

Pokemon Red/Blue

Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete

Final Fantasy VIII

Star Ocean: The Second Story

SoulCalibur

Square and Enix were rivals back when FFI was first released. When FFI was released on PS1, Square was in the midst of being bought by Enix and wasn't on great terms with Nintendo. 

The NES version of Ultima III also mentions Link. 

I thought about the TG-16. The Japanese version had a lot neater games than the US version (which was also true of the Sega ones). Maybe if they'd had some of the PC-Engine CD games included on it i would have gotten it, auch as the first Legend of Heroes game, which was fully localized in English for the US market.

In addition to the fact that the Atari 8-bit games aren't widely available (with the exception of a couple that appeared in the recent Atari 50 and Llamasoft collections), the Atari 400 was designed out of the gate to allow you to import your own Atari 8-bit titles into it, as it includes a USB port specifically for a USB thumb drive and can recognize Atari ROMs. It even has a full version of Atari BASIC which you can type programs into. When I'm feeling more ambitious, I might try typing in a couple of games from archived ANTIC Magazines. Early computer magazines generally included type-in BASIC listings for games and such.