PixlBit

Never played these games, but I remember when the first one came out on PS1. At the time I was all wrapped up in Lunar: Silver Star Story. I do think it's funny how they came up with this whole storyline about Dig-Dug and Kissy getting married, having kids, cheating, and divorcing. Kind of like an arcade soap opera. It'd be like Nintendo having a story about Mario and Luigi fighting because Mario was mad about Luigi making moves on Peach.

1998 was when I got my first full time job at Wendy's, and I bought a PlayStation with my first check. My first game on it was Final Fantasy VII, then I bought Resident Evil and Tekken 3. I bought so many games that year. Besides Ocarina of Time, my favorites were Xenogears, Resident Evil 2, and Parasite Eve. 

I also remember taking the girl I was dating at the time to see Rush Hour. 

I liked a lot of other complicated games on my Atari. Alternate Reality was a RPG that had realistic lighting, weather, and character health but they only finished two parts out of seven total before the company went belly up. Temple of Apshai was one of the oldest RPGs out there, but you needed the documentation to really understand it, since all the descriptions of what was going on were in the book, kind of like the DM of a tabletop RPG. But these games helped foster my interest in NES RPGs like Ultima: Exodus, Dragon Quest, and Faxanadu. 

I played this on the Atari XE. I could never win it because Stay Puft would start destroying buildings at $4000 a pop with no apparent way to stop him. I ended every game flat broke. I had no instructions since it was a bootleg copy, as almost all of my Atari XE games were. It wasn't until the Internet when I learned that using the "ghost bait" was necessary to stop Stay Puft and give you a little cash bonus on top of that.

The Ghostbusters theme playing constantly got pretty annoying too. It did have a cheesy digitized voice saying "Ghostbusters! Hahahaha!" when you booted the game up, and I read somewhere that that three second voice sample blew through a sizable chunk of the game's development budget, 

For me, 9.9.1999 at EB Games was memorable, but it was memorable as the release date for Final Fantasy VIII. That game not only looked great, but between its college theme and Squall, who was me when I was 17 or 18, it came out at the perfect time in my life, which was the fall before I started college. I did rent Dreamcast for a couple of days with Soulcalibur. I also played Skies of Arcadia... on the GameCube.

Also gotta give it to Angelo during the Cage Match. I, too, never could get into BioWare games. I tried Jade Empire as a Xbox classic on 360 (a console I bought for, wait for it, Tales of Vesperia!), and a couple of Dragon Age games, but never could get past the openings. It wasn't even my general bias in favor of Japanese games: i enjoyed Fallout (we will not speak of the abomination that is Fallout 76) and Witcher 3 greatly but not BioWare. Something about the design bounces off me kind of hard.  But Julian, you and me are gonna have words about you disrespecting my boy Repede. /s

Stage select;

in 1989, when I was 12, I got a Game Boy. The Game Boy seemed in my young mind to be a technological miracle on the level of the moon landing. Mario on the go that didn't look like a digital watch!  And the Game Boy got better as time went on.

1994 was SNES. I originally wanted it for the relatively arcade perfect Mortal Kombat II, but mine came bundled with A Link to the Past, which is the best bundled game I've ever gotten with a system.

1996 was N64, and as much as I rag on it, I loved Super Mario 64. Two years later I got the gold cartridge Ocarina of Time. 

2001 was a PS2 with Gran Turismo 3 for Christmas. I went out the next day and got Final Fantasy X. 2003, I got a GameCube for my birthday. Just in time for Wind Waker. In contrast to how much I rag on the N64, my Gamecube was in a dead heat with my PS2 with how much I enjoyed the games. Two great Final Fantasies and Dragon Quest VIII versus two of the best Zeldas, Tales of Symphonia, and Fire Emblem... tough choice.

When I got married, my wife has bought me all kinds of gaming gifts over the years: Okami, Mario Kart DS, a PSP, a Wii U, a PS4. The Switch was a gift from my parents. She also got me the Hyrule Historia and a collection of books of Amano art for Final Fantasy. For her birthday, I bought Pokémon Sword for myself and Pokémon Shield for her.

Cage Match:

Tropical Freeze wins. I never was a huge Rare fan. DKC was impressive on a technical level, but after that I moved on to games like Chrono Trigger. Retro is a much better developer than Rare, and I'm more receptive to their take on DKC. That said, neither game compares to the orginal arcade DK, which remains my favorite arcade game of all time and was the very first video game i can remember playing.

At the Target on Thomas and 44th Street, the Switch was posted as one of the items in short supply along with toilet paper and hand sanitizer. 

Nintendo actually addressed that by coating them with a non-toxic but nasty-tasting substance.

Kinda... but Mace is no Soul Edge/Soulblade, and sales reflected that.  The game was very slow and stiff compared to Namco's fighting games.

Ellie, the main character, is a lesbian, and Abby's character design apparently looks like she's a transwoman, so out cake the cries of "feminism" and "SJW agenda." And death threats against her voice actress, Laura Bailey. Keep in mind these same people were mad at CD Projekt for not including the question "are you make or female" during the character creation in Cyberpunk 2077.

I've been done with "gamer culture" since the whole Gamergate shit show. 

Quest 64 was a localization of Holy Magic Century, which was made in Japan by Imagineer (best known for big head baseball games.) It only had one playable character (down from three in early previews), a broken magic system where only earth magic really mattered, and a simplistic structure so linear it almost made FFXIII look open world. There wasn't even any money or shops in the game. But it was the only thing resembling an RPG on the N64 until Harvest Moon, Ogre Battle, and Paper Mario showed up, so Nintendo tried to hype it up for people disappointed at the loss of Square and who could see the handwriting on the wall for Earthbound 64/Mother 3. But it sucked hard. It summed up every problem I had with N64 and 5th gen Nintendo in one game.

An awful lot of games that wouldn't have registered a blip on the SNES or PS1 got highlighted on N64 due to lack of competition on a fairly popular console. Acclaim and THQ even became briefly respectable, though Turok was a legitimately good game.