PixlBit

My first exposure to Pokemon was the Nintendo Power article where they first talked about Pocket Monsters, I got Pokemon Red in 1999 for my 21st birthday. But I also had a young nephew with whom I'd watch the Pokemon cartoon, and i got him and myself one of the gold-plated Pokemon cards from Burger King.

Of the Pokemon spinoffs, Pokemon Stadium on N64 looked most interesting, mostly because i thought it was going to be a full on RPG and I wished to God that Nintendo would make a couple of N64 RPGs, that being back when I still held out hope for Earthbound 64.I could see the appeal of having your Pokemon live on TV in 3-D. A lot of the battle animations were actually more detailed than in Sword/Shield. That said, didn't invest in Stadium. I never played Colosseum, either, but I was kind of interested because the region it's set in is based on Phoenix. 

Other than Pokken, I never got into the other spinoffs.

Is it still up there for free? I'll have to get this. Never plated one of these games before.

Stage Select (took me some time to think about this):

3. Dragon Quest XI S: This is quite possibly the perfect turn-based Japanese RPG. It's the pure essence of RPGs, from its visual presentation to its music to its gameplay. And on top of that, it seems to have a nearly bottomless pool of content. 

2. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: When I played this, it was like playing the original Zelda for the very first time. I loved just exploring the world and battling monsters, and not feeling pressured to go to the next quest goal. The little things in the game are also fun to play with. The Zelda series is my favorite game series of all time, and BotW captures everything I love about it perfectly.

1. Final Fantasy VII: This game is pretty timeless, and while game design has advanced over the years, nothing has quite come close to improving on the total package that is FFVII. It will never get old exploring the game's world, collecting materia, and facing Sephiroth.

I've been hearing a lot about "blue light" contributing to depression. I just wonder why they don't engineer screens to filter it out on their own, similar to how CRT TV manufacturers were ordered by Congress to develop better shielding for TVs after it was discovered that color TVs were emitting gamma rays back in the 1960s. Even in late model CRT TVs i remember you could feel the electromagnetic energy from the screen if you were close to it. If you remember your parents yelling at you for sitting too close to the TV, that's why.  The joke in the Simpsons where there's a shadow burned into the wall with a silhouette of young Homer visible in it was an exaggeration, but maybe not much of one.

They were both founded by the same family but split apart decades ago. I liked Fry's Electronics. They had a combination of the kind of stuff Best Buy has with the kind of stuff Radio Shack had, plus things that neither place had. I bought a TV and a few odds and ends there over the past few years before they shut down. I remember back in the early 00s the one in Tempe AZ had a PS2 hooked up to a Jumbovision display with Virtua Fighter 4 running on it, and I played a few rounds. Then a few months ago, I went in, and most of the shelves were already stripped bare.

The Fry's grocery store chain is the local Kroger's affiliate.

I thought Texas had opened the vaccination up to everybody over 16? Keep looking, and look for sites like Walgreens or CVS that might have vaccination clinics open. Can you look in another county, or perhaps across the state line in Oklahoma?

I got the Pfizer vaccine, with my first shot being three days after Christmas as I work for the largest hospital system in the Southwestern United States and I happened to be looking at my work email at the right time to see that they had opened up a bunch of extra slots. I'd already signed up with the county at that time and had gotten an appointment for the following week, but this expedited it.  Mine was done at the Arizona State Fairgrounds, which had been set up as a vaccination site as it's one of the properties that has the largest about of open space to move cars through in Phoenix and is also located in Central Phoenix.

First shot, no problem. Second shot, I had a days' worth of aches and chills.

My elderly parents are just now getting their first shots this weekend after months of trying.

I only remember the ad campaign for this game, where two women were looking out at their neighbor's open window, implying they were watching him compiulsively whip his weasel... and then it cut to the game. And that campaign ran during afternoon TV and pro wrestling. How did that get past mid-90s censors?

Spy Hunter was one of my favorite 80s games. I knew about the 2001 reboot on PS2, but I didn't know about a lot of these other games. 

It's a necessity in Phoenix, given how sprawled out everything is here. When I work on-call, I have to cover the East Valley, which is basically everything east of I-17. We have clients in San Tan Valley and Apache Junction.