PixlBit

Stage Select:

1. Big Boo's Haunt in Super Mario 64. That's still the first thing I think of when I think of haunted houses in video games. 

2. Owzer's House in Final Fantasy VI. You have ghosts, paintings randomly attacking you, and a boss battle against a painting of an Esper possessed by a demon, complete with a slow-motion morphing effect that was pretty cool in 1994.

3. Old Kasuto Village in Zelda II is a deserted town haunted by invisible fireball-tossing ghosts which looked pretty creepy on the NES.  Not a bad piece of storytelling by gameplay for a NES game.

Cage Match:

Left 4 Dead 2 is the winner by default here as it's the only one of these two games I've actually played.

He's out there, I see him on Facebook. School is back in session and he has classes to teach.

2009 I got a PS3 so I could play Valkyria Chronicles and Demon's Souls. I also got Punch-Out!! on Wii, which is one of my favorite games on that system, and Dragon Quest V on DS, which was one of my favorite DS games and one of my favorite DQ games. These were highlights in what was otherwise a sucky year.

I've been seeing ads for this game on Facebook. They're offering physical versions for Switch and PS4.

I never had Kinect, in part because I had abandoned the 360 for the PS3 in 2009. Plus the Wii gave me my fill of motion controls, and even Nintendo had mostly moved on from motion controls after Skyward Sword.  Pandora's Tower used them, but neither Xenoblade Chronicles nor The Last Story used them at all. Neither did Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for that matter.

I remember seeing the minigame in the demo mode, whuch would run until the player missed and got killed. Reminded me a bit of the opening cinematic in Ninja Gaiden where Joe Hayabusa gets killed.

In 2007 Futurama made quite a revival. My wife and I both loved that. In fact, we were on vacation and watched the series finale together a few years later.

I took a few classes at The University of Oklahoma that year. Gamingwise, I started out with Rogue Galaxy on PS2. Then I finally found a Wii. I got Mario Galaxy and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for that. Good system, but it had a bit of a lull mid-life. It ended with a heck of a bang with Xenoblade Chronicles though. It was around the time of the Wii that I joined 1UP as well. That was 13 years ago.

I got a 360 for Virtua Fighter 5 Online. That was actually a leap of faith. I was notoriously anti-Microsoft, especially after Windows Vista, which was a buggy disaster of a OS. The 360, as it ended up, ultimately only ended up reinforcing my bias against Microsoft a year later, but I did enjoy playing fighting games and even Halo 3 for awhile. Plus, Microsoft was buying up a bunch of Japanese RPGs (grrr). 

When Minish Cap came out, I had just gotten a DS, and there was a huge rush of good games on the PS2 and the GameCube. Nintendo didn't promote Minish Cap much, so I skipped over it. The first time I played it was on the Wii U. It would be nice if Nintendo brought it over to the Switch. 

While the censorship certainly hurt sales, with the SNES version selling 1/4 of what the Genesis version sold, the port was bad for reasons beyond the censorship. The sound and graphics (aside from the blood and gore) were spot-on, but the game itself was very buggy. The combos were broken due to lag, and when two players threw projectiles at each other, when the first projectile hit, both disappeared. Not only did that look bad, but MK's designers deliberately wanted projectiles to pass through each other as opposed to Street Fighter, where projectiles canceled each other out. One of the fun things in the arcade was having two Sub-Zeros freezing each other and then having one player try to be fast enough to where they would thaw out sooner and be able to go in for the kill. The Genesis version didn't have these bugs and played a lot better than the SNES version. According to Ed Boon, the issue was apparently that the SNES couldn't handle both making the characters big on the screen and good hit detection at the same time. The character sprites in MK2 were somewhat smaller on the SNES, and the game played a lot better.

Despite the fact that MK was one of the main motivations behind the creation of the industry-wide ESRB ratings system, MK2 came out on the SNES and Genesis exactly one week before the ESRB ratings system went live. Nintendo put its own content warning label on the front of the SNES MK2 box. 

My best friend who was my Atari 2600 go-to got this in the last year the 2600 was the main system before he got a NES. This game was pretty amazing for its time. You'd have never thought just a couple of years earlier that the 2600 was capable of running a game like Solaris. The worst parts of the game were those "snake" enemies that would materialize out of thin air and were incredibly hard to hit. Especially if your base planet was destroyed, which would cause the screen to be red with constant lightning flashing and your controls to be inverted while you were on that map. I had Star Raiders on the Atari XE, so I got into the Solaris game pretty well. I do wish it was available on the Atari Flashback Classics on Switch.