PixlBit

I wouldn't be too sad to lose E3. Since it wasn't open to the public unlike most other major shows, I never saw the point of all the expense of it, and that's even more true now that the Internet and social media allow companies to hold their own reveals. And for the most part, most of the attention was focused on the big dogs, such as the console makers as well as the three largest Western third parties, none of whose products I care much about. I mostly read about it after the fact, though I suppose I'd have loved to have seen the reaction at E3 '95 to Sony's simple "$299 USD" announcement of the PS1's launch price. I always thought Tokyo Game Show was more interesting, and even Gamescom in Europe got announcements that E3 didn't. PAX and TGS have pretty much supplanted E3, and both of those shows are open to the public. For press announcements, I'm fine with reveals being done through things like Nintendo Direct and equivalent showings from other companies. All that pomp and circumstance for an event open only to industry insiders is honestly kind of wasteful. 

While I do think E3 was winding down somewhat, the coronavirus scares are pretty serious (how justified the scares are remains to be seen as to how the pandemic spreads), and I definitely think they'd have been doing E3 if the concern wasn't there. Trump just closed off all travel to the US from Europe for a month, and right now, air fare is otherwise dirt cheap ($113 from Phoenix to New York, round trip, on a midday direct flight would have been unheard of two weeks ago). The Utah Jazz and the OKC Thunder are quarantined in the OKC arena due to Rudy Gobert of the Jazz testing positive. Certainly China is feeling the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic, and for better or worse, so much of the video game industry now is tied to China. Maybe the industries in Japan and the US will start to realign themselves away from China in the wake of the disruption caused by the coronavirus. Do y'all think that this will end up with the PS5 and the Xbox Series X being delayed to next year?

Your thumbnail picture reminds me of amused I was with some of the  product placement in FFXV. The crew camped out using Coleman camping gear, and most of the shops in Tenebrae took American Express. And I know a famous fashion designer designed some of the costumes in the game, she got a lot of product placement as well. FYI, Vault 112 was a virtual reality simulation run by a mad scientist where the "good" solution was to sabotage the life support system, allowing the inhabitants to die in real life. 

Stage Select:

Wrestling isn't my cup of tea. I did play the occasional WWF game in the NES/SNES era. I might try wrestling if it were included as a mini-game in a RPG or adventure; Twilight Princess had a couple of sumo-wrestling segments in it that were kind of fun. I did notice that Take-Two doesn't seem to be using Yukes anymore for its WWE games and is trying to just utilize their California studio, Visual Concepts. Maybe if FFVII Remake included it in the Wall Market segment or the Gold Saucer arcade.

Cage Match:

I'm going to go against type here and vote for Doom: Eternal over AC. Doom is my go-to for first-person shooting action. I'm actually waiting on the Switch version of Doom: Eternal, which apparently impressed id Software with how well done it was. While Nintendo is far and away my favorite publisher/developer, Animal Crossing is not one of my favorite Nintendo franchises. Other than dabbling in the original Gamecube game, I've never gotten into it. So there you have it: I voted for a US-made FPS over a life sim made by Nintendo.

Sounds like you've been busy. I need to get to working out and in practice for hiking myself. I was able to score hard-to-get passes to for a hike to Havasupai Falls, which is in the Grand Canyon on land owned by the Havasupai Tribe. It's a 14 mile hike where the overal climb in elevation is equivalent to the height of the Empire State Building. The falls are beautiful. I go in the first week of August. 

I watched Dragon Quest Your Story. Its ending was pretty meta. I liked the fact that it was based around one of my favorite games in the series.

They have released it in some of the recent Flashback models. I'd just rather have it on the Switch collection.

The Battlezone franchise was sold to Rebellion during another of Atari's periods where they were trying to get out of bankruptcy. Rebellion turned it into some online F2P game, I think.

The Switch is one of my favorite systems ever. Dragon Quest XI S and Fire Emblem were my favorite games released for Switch last year, but I also enjoyed Witcher 3, Link's Awakening, Astral Chain, Mortal Kombat, FFXII Zodiac Age, and even the Mana collection. It's got all of Nintendo's stuff plus the best of the third party software (I couldn't care less about EA, most of Activision or Ubisoft, or Grand Theft Auto). Witcher 3 was an impressive port, and CD Projekt is even open to porting Cyberpunk 2077 if they can figure out how to make it work well (Cyberpunk may simply be a bridge too far for the Switch.) There were also re-releases of Ni no Kuni and Tales of Vesperia, which were among the few games left that I really cared about from last gen that hadn't been ported over. Apparently the Switch port of Doom Eternal is pretty well-done, according to an id Software developer.

My primary is in 2 weeks, LOL.

I think development on the game was well underway while Square was still trying to figure out how to squeeze FF7 into a N64 cart. It was apparently a difficult decision for Square to make. I read somewhere from a Square developer that they met with Nintendo one last time to try and work things out, and Nintendo cordially, if somewhat stiffly, wished them the best of luck on the PS1. January 12, 1996 was a massive bombshell in the gaming industry. I remember when that happened. Enix followed suit shortly thereafter. Now, Square Enix just released the second-best Switch game made to date back in September. :) And CD Projekt Red managed to make Witcher 3 run nicely on Switch, and entirely off the cartridge no less (until a QOL update was released, there was no install file at all for Witcher 3 on Switch).

I'm going to look for that book. Although most of my Atari experience was with their 8-bit computers as mentioned above, my cousins and my best friend did have 2600s, with my friend having one of the slim 2600s they released in the mid-80s. I have the Atari Flashback Classics on Switch, which is a compilation of all three volumes released on PS4 and X1 - and once again, no Solaris. Sigh. Also no Battlezone, since Atari sold the IP to someone else while they were strapped for cash.  

Atari Anthology on PS2 had a lot of interesting factoids about the games. On Missile Command, they mentioned that the designers actually had nightmares about nuclear war while making it. On the 2600, the world in Missile Command was an alien world being attacked by another alien race, according to the manual. In the arcade version, the cities were meant to represent five major cities in California being attacked by the Warsaw Pact.

The Atari 8-bit computer line is what the 5200 would have been like without all of its issues and a good controller. Atari was ahead of the curve on analog control, but neglected to put a self-centering mechanism in it (then again, Nintendo didn't get it right the first time with the N64 controller, either, since those sticks got pretty loose after awhile of using them and grinding up the plastic). Almost all of the games on the 5200 were on the 8-bit line, either officially or thanks to hackers since the 5200 shared the same basic architecture, just with less memory, plus many more. Atari 8-bit computers were the second-best game-playing machines of the 1980s after the NES.