PixlBit

I knew of the Williamses in the 90s, at Sierra's peak. They were pretty renowned in game developer circles. 

I actually learned of Gay Blade through a blog called the CRPG Addict, whose author is trying to play through every computer RPG ever made. He occasionally dabbles in console RPGs when it's pertinent to the development of computer RPGs. I was surprised it existed and it was exactly what it said it was. The big bad of the game was apparently Pat Buchanan, a politician known for espousing anti-LGBT views.

I enjoyed this series, especially the interviews with Garriott and Amano, and hope they continue it at some point. A lot of the stuff in the documentary is stuff I already knew of, but it was great to see interviews with the actual people behind it. 

The one game with a card battle system I played was Baten Kaitos on Gamecube. I think that Nintendo liked Baten Kaitos so much that they ended up buying Monolithsoft. And that's how we got Xenoblade Chronicles. It looked like a card-based version of FFX. Even one of the characters looked like Wakka.

Somehow, Arizona has a hockey team. 

Stage Select:

My first selection is "Samus Aran, Galactic Warrior" from Super Metroid. However, it's at its most epic when combined with the sound effects and visuals of Samus's brutal beatdown of Mother Brain after Mother Brain kills the baby Metroid. That is the single best example of an angry "mama bear" in a video game, all without dialogue or a cut scene.

My second selection is "Fight to the Death" from Final Fantasy XII. This plays during the battle with Vossler, who has betrayed the party and turned the Dusk Shard over to the Empire. However, Vossler didn't betray the party out of a desire for power, he did so in the belief that it would save the lives of his countrymen rather than see their lives lost in what he felt was a futile struggle. He was misguided, but was still a "son of Dalmasca" at heart.

Cage Match:

Voting for Cyberpunk on this one. My enjoyment of Witcher 3 and like of cyberpunk games combined with my prejudice against licensed titles wins the day here.

P.S. Still trying to get in touch with y'all about contributing a few pieces to the site. 

This game was, and still is, awesome. One of the best playable casts of characters, great villains, and even a good supporting cast. Its localization was top notch. It still looks good on current gen systems. It was the only 360 exclusive game I really cared about. 

Unfortunately, almost every JRPG developer who threw in with Microsoft lost a lot of money, including Namco. Microsoft needs to face the cold, hard facts that Japan will never be receptve to the Xbox brand and that the Xbox will never be the first choice for most American fans of Japanese games, either. I wish they would stop trying to moneyhat Japanese developers.

I saw this in demos at the now defunct Service Merchandise. At the time, however, I was much more into fighting games, Super Metroid, and a rekindled interest in RPGs ignited by my dad's physical therapisf bringing me her son's copy of Final Fantasy 6. So I didn't really play this until it got re-released on the SNES Classic and on Switch Online.

 I saw 40 Year Old Virgin with a buddy and Dukes of Hazzard and Revenge of the Sith with girls I was dating. I started seeing my wife later that year. Gaming wise, there was Resident Evil 4, Atelier Iris, Final Fantasy XI Online, and especially Dragon Quest VIII, which my wife and I played together. 

I thought Alex had a very monkey-like appearancd and read up on the game. He looks like a monkey because he was originally supposed to be Son Goku. The game started out as a Dragon Ball game, but Sega lost the license. King Janken likely started out as Emperor Pilaf.

I read somewhere that the NES's side scrolling capabilities were something of a technological feat at the time and were one of Nintendo's closely guarded industrial secrets. Other machines had varying degrees of difficulty in handling side scrolling graphics compared to the smooth way Mario did it. Nintendo even took Atari to court one time for copying some of Nintendo's side scrolling code. Maybe that's why this game was a vertical scrolling game, since that was more inherent to computers at the time. 

Pac-Man ironically contributed to the crash as much as E.T. did. At 7 million plus copies sold, Pac-Man would have been a blockbuster success back in the day... if Atari hadn't overmanufactured Pac-Man cartridges to the point where there were more copies of Pac-Man in existence than there were 2600s in homes. A lot of those ended up getting a New Mexico burial, too.  Nor did Mystique's "Swedish Erotica" games, which included Custer's Revenge, help the reputation of video games any. Oklahoma City actually banned Custer's Revenge from being sold within city limits.

A lot of Nintendo's practices on the NES were them being very protective of what they considered to be a still-fragile market. The whole "no more than five games per publisher per year" thing. Even Super Mario Bros 2 was a product of Nintendo of America feeling that the brutally hard "Lost Levels" would give Mario games a reputation for being punishing and unfair that they didn't want. Interesting trivia: By now we all know that SMB 2 started out as Doki Doki Panic, but not many people know that Doki Doki Panic in turn started out as... a Mario game. 

Anyway, my best friend at the time had an Atari 2600 Jr, those skinny black-and-silver 2600s that Atari made late in the system's life-cycle, and he had E.T. That game sucked. However, I had the 8-bit Atari E.T. game which was a little closer to the movie, where you started out as Elliott trying to find pieces for E.T.'s "phone," then had to get to the landing site as E.T. When you completed the Elliott part of the game, you got this scratchy digitized voice saying "E.T. PHONE HOME."