2004 was one of the worst years of my life. My Gamecube got me through a lot of hell that year. though things started to look a little better. Didn't watch much in the way of movies, when I went out with friends we went out to clubs. I really started reading the Harry Potter series. My favorite games of the year were Tales of Symphonia, Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, and Baten Kaitos.
Damn, so NBA 2K20 runs better on Switch than PC?
I have Shadow of Middle Earth on PS4, haven't really played much of it.
It's funny you say how Kirby is soft but has a hardcore name. It reminds me of how Nintendo of America markets Kirby as this tough, angry character in ads and on the packaging, to the point where Kirby named an entry on TV Tropes: American Kirby is Hardcore. This was probably my favorite Kirby commercial even though I never actually played the game.
I need to watch High Score, especially the Nintendo episode. On Facebook, I am friends with Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, and he's in High Score. His version of EA was awesome, but by the time he left they'd started turning into the studio-killing behemoth we know it as today.
Castlevania: Dracula X was the SNES version of Rondo of Blood, but it was heavily stripped down from Rondo. It had fewer levels. And where Maria was a playable character who used chibi versions of the Four Guardians (Genbu, Suzaku, Seiryu, and Byakko, who also appear in a lot of Square's games), she was only a NPC on the SNES. The soundtrack was good, but the PCE version is considered to be superior because it uses Redbook while the SNES uses MIDI. Among SNES owners, Dracula X was also seen as being stripped down from Super Castlevania IV, since Richter didn't have the 8-way whip and abiity to rope-swing. It had really good graphics.
As I said before, I wish Working Designs had been able to get the license for the Tengai Makyo games, those were the PCE games I would have liked to have seen. And too bad this didn't have Dragon Slayer 6: Legend of Heroes on it.
Great music too.
I kind of wish they'd gone with Arc System Works instead of the developer they went with for BC. ASW did a good job with Hard Corps: Uprising as an update to Contra.
One of the big selling points of the PS5 is its SSD, which is supposedly super fast and meant to cut down on loading times. I remember in the days of 2x CD-ROM drives that if you were playing as Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat 3 on PS1, the game would freeze when he morphed back and forth in order to load the new character.
I used to play PC-Hack a lot, and I still play Nethack every once in awhile (despite the name, it's offline). The most random stuff happens in roguelikes. Sometimes it's good, sometimes not.
Hudson was one of the few Japanese publisher/devs that really remained on good terms with Nintendo during the N64 era. The last game I remember them putting out was Miami Law for the DS, which was localized by the guy who did all the localizations for Working Designs. I was a little surprised that Konami bought them instead of Nintendo. Nintendo would have at least kept them nominally independent like they do with HAL Labs.
