PixlBit

I generally stay away from third party peripherals other than the occasional arcade stick. They simply aren't as good as the first party stuff.  In the early 80s, I did like Suncom's Slik Stik and Epyx's 500XJ sticks as alternatives to the Atari joystick. But since then, I've generally stuck to first-party controllers.

I got a big lesson in sticking with first party accessories when I had two Mad Catz PS1 memory cards die after 2 years, one of which died  halfway through my first playthrough of FF9. So I stuck with Sony cards after that, and when I got a Gamecube, it was nothing but Nintendo-branded cards.

The one third party accessory I can think of that I really liked is the Action Replay Plus cartridge for the Sega Saturn, which has cheat codes, memory storage, and regional bypass, which means you can play Saturn games from anywhere in the world just by plugging in a cartridge and entering a couple of codes rather than having to mutilate the console. I pretty much use this to play my PAL copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga. 

Cage Match:

Winter Heat was an interesting game, but going with Elden Ring on this one. What's next, are you going to pit Quest 64 against Final Fantasy VII? Plumbers Don't Wear Ties versus Alan Wake II?

Metroid Dread was great. My 2021 GOTY was Shin Megami Tensei V.

One of my best friends is another 1UP alumnus, who is a park ranger in Maine. I was there visiting a couple of months ago, and we went to a store in Topsham called Game Box. They had physical copies of the FF Pixel Remasters, the Dragon Quest trilogy, SaGa Frontier, and a lot of other stuff I've never seen in the wild. I loaded up while I was there.

In my neck of the woods we have Fallout Games, and there, I've found such oddities as the Gamecube and Wii Fire Emblem games, Skies of Arcadia Legends, and some rare consoles. Among the ones I've seen there are the Fairchild Channel F and the Bally Professional Arcade, which was also known as the Astrocade.

Best Buy has had some cool stuff from time to time. I was able to snag a Fire Emblem Three Houses Seasons of Warfare edition from them at the last moment, and they had physical copies of Ys Origins.

Cage Match:

I had to look up I Am Bread. Super Meat Boy I knew about since it was pretty well known a decade and a half ago,. I think I'm going to go with I Am Bread, since it seems to take the spirit of games like Goat Simulator and Untitled Goose Game to the realm of inanimate objects.

2004 wasn't a great year for me. My Gamecube helped get me through a bad time in my life. My favorite game of the year was Tales of Symphonia, and the runner-up was Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life. Both of those games got re-releases this year, as you saw with my Story of Seasons: AWL video.

I mostly played games of yesteryear, like Pokemon Sword, Tokyo Mirage Sessions, Witcher 3, and Falcom games. Like with Cary, 2020 wasn't a good year for me beyond the pandemic. My dad had the stroke that took his life the following spring, and my mother survived him by a year. The Switch helped save my sanity during that time.

Stage Select:

Prehistoric. Not sci-fi settings like Turok or Dino Crisis, but legit prehistoric settings where you play as a cave (wo)man. I don't even care if the old trope of mixing prehistoric humans with dinosaurs and Permian Period synapsids comes into play or if they stick with the prehistoric mammals that actually coexisted with humans. Heck, I'd take a gritty RPG version of The Flintstones.

The United States in a setting that is not in New York City, LA, Vegas, or Miami. I've always said that GTA in Texas would be funny as hell if they really played up the things Texas is known for. They could do a 21st century version of New Austin. North Florida (Jacksonville, Tallahassee, Sarasota), would also be funny with everything going on there that's so ripe for parody. Or Oklahoma. Or Albuquerque. I'm surprised there weren't games made that were based on Breaking Bad. 

Larian should tackle a D&D game based on Dragonlance, with Dragonlance characters like Raistlin and Caramon playing roles in the story. Or maybe they shoud make a D&D RPG based on the 1980s Saturday morning cartoon.

I'd like to see more medical-themed video games. We kind of got a taste with that with Atlus's Trauma Center series on the Wii and DS, which launched concurrently with the Ace Attorney series in the US, but Atlus stopped making those after five years. Maybe a game where you play as a heroic nurse.

And there's another idea I just had: Capcom should team up with Vince Gilligan and Bob Odenkirk to make Ace Attorney: Saul Goodman.

 Cage Match:

Going with Heretic, mostly for nostalgia reasons as I played that with my dad when I was a teenager. It also had a pretty good soundtrack.

It will be kind of sad, but Martinet earned an honorable retirement, and he will probably still do Mario's voice in an official capacity at Nintendo events. I kind of wonder if they want to have a more fully voiced Mario, but it's a lot harder to do it with the exaggerated Italian accent nowadays, as was lampshaded in the Super Mario Bros. movie. 

1994 was a great year. I played Mortal Kombat II at the arcades every chance I got. I got a SNES for Christmas that year bundled with A Link to the Past, and I also got the SNES version of MKII. DKC looked pretty good. I later played Final Fantasy III (VI) and Super Metroid. My dad and I played Doom II and Heretic. I remember my parents playing through The 7th Guest in 1994. I played some, too, but the SNES was what held my attention.

My favorite 1994 game overall is Super Metroid, which is still one of my favorite games to this day.

Wizardry 6, 7, and 8 are all on Steam and GOG.

I actually enjoyed Trials of Mana. I thought its combat was smoother than SoM. The collection also has FF Adventure (Mana 1). I recently picked up the 3-D remake of Trials of Mana as well. But everything considered, that's a solid collection of games. I just wish they'd included Sword of Mana, which was a FF Adventure remake that was actually done by one of Nintendo's subsidiaries at a time when Nintendo and Square Enix were trying for a reconciliation.