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.
I've mostly played this through the Namco Museum series on PS1, but I remember it was ported to a lot of home computers in the 1980s. In the SNES RPG Earthbound, you can hear bits of the Xevious music playing in the Onett arcade. I guess Namco didn't get ruffled up about it enough to sue Nintendo over it.
This was a good note for the SNES to end on, at least in the US. Japan was still getting SFC Fire Emblem games until the 2000s. And it came out right after Square announced they were dropping the N64 in favor of the PS1. What might have been...
