PixlBit

Stage Select:

From the very beginning, I've been a Nintendo fan, and that starts with their earliest arcade games, which had an attention to detail that went above and beyond even Namco. Donkey Kong, DK Junior, and Mario Bros were lavishly animated and very colorful for 1980s arcade games, and had great (for the time) sound engineering. 

I've been playing Tears of the Kingdom, and enjoying all the little details there as far as the graphics and physics.

Cage Match:

No Man's Sky was one of the great comeback stories of the past decade. It was widely derided at its initial release in 2016 for its sparse content and unfinished state. Flash forward six years and it is finally the Starflight successor I'd always hoped for, with lots of free exploration and story-based content, plus the ability to name your discoveries. One point NMS has in its favor is better ongoing support, with a recent free expansion that was fairly substantial, and Hello Games supports all platforms as well, where Elite Dangerous has stopped console development because Frontier Developments simply doesn't have the resources available to support it. Both games are ambitious space sims with plenty to recommend about them. Elite Dangerous functions as a sort of space MMORPG as well. But as someone who grew up on numerous space games on the 2600, Atari 8-bit computers, and PC before exploring the verdant lands of Hyrule and Alefgard, No Man's Sky is what I was looking for in a modern space game. It wasn't overy difficult to get into, but I've enjoyed mastering the mechanics of the game. 

Final Fantasy 6 is one of my top five favorite games of all time, and it has a lot of little details in it that you might miss if you blink.  I love how each character has his or her own theme song, and even remixes of the same song depending on the mood.  Even the last part of Dancing Mad, the final boss theme, is just a remix of Kefka's orignal song.

Sometimes in FF6, you can change out your party members, and depending on who you might have in your party, some characters may say different things which might add insight to the story you might've not known otherwise.  My favorite is when you trick the gambler Setzer with a one sided coin.  There is an earlier cutscene where Edgar and Sabin use a coin to decide who will be the king, and if Edgar and Sabin are in your party when you trick Setzer, Edgar flips the coin and Sabin says something like, "Brother, that coin!  It couldn't be..."

One final thing in FF6.  In the snowy mining town of Narshe, some of the townsfolk claim they've seen a Yeti.  That Yeti is Umaro of course, but you can spot him, too, peeking out of holes in the walls in caves, long before he can join your party!

In other games, character standing animations are also fun details.  Some of my favorites are in Mega Man X.  Normally he just blinks his eyes when standing still, but if he's low on energy, the light on his helmet flashes red, and he'll breathe heavier.  And if you are on Chill Penguin's stage, you can even see frost smoke come from his mouth like how you can see your breath when it's cold.  Never though robots had to breathe, but this is a video game so oh well.

One last standing animation I like is in Donkey Kong Country 2.  One of the stage themes is a giant beehive, and you can stick to the walls if honey is on them.  While sticking to the wall, sometimes Dixie Kong will put her finger on the honey and then lick it.

OK sorry for being so long.  By the way, I just posted a new podcast that I hope you all can listen to.  It's about Transformers, so I think you'll like it.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/07zOFGLATchbGTpZBXuOO8

STAGE SELECT: The one I always here about is Arkane's classic example, where in Prey your domicile's toilet seat defaults to up if you play as the guy and down if you play as the girl.  But UnderTale's the main one I wanted to bring up since I have a... well, not a story as that would mean it goes somewhere but stay with me.  The demo is what I want to talk about, it includes a manual and as you go through the demo it changes.  In particular it gets creepily defaced when you do the Genocide Route as it became known.  If I remember correctly there was even plans to replace your computer's wallpaper but it fell through (along with the manual being in the full game) due to mainly computer system rights issues and antivirus detections.  UnderTale always comes to mind for me personally because it was sort of a right place, right time kind of thing for me.  I got in the demo VERY early because I happened to be frequenting an indie game development topic on some forums for a very short time and a user was like, "Hey, my friend from another forum that made like a couple EarthBound hacks just released this demo thing."  I got hooked on it immediately and even messaged Toby Fox a few times.  We even went back and forth and figured out a bug (which I thought was another branching path at the time!) although if I remember there's actually still a version of it in the final game.  Just a weird thing that happened to me because I was on the fringe edge of a thing where someone in that circle was part of a weird fringe in another circle that just barely interconnected!

CAGE MATCH: Ummm, mirror check time!  "Elite Dangerous" sounds like what that little brat Tommy in your fifth grade classroom started calling himself after he bought a cheap pair of sunglasses at a drug store and starting wearing them to school until the home room teacher, Mrs. Temsley, had to confiscate them which only took like a couple days but was still way too long.  Gag!  "No Man's Sky" sounds moody and poetic and deep and like what the emo kid calls himself but then you kind of figure out it's just a word play on the term "No Man's Land" which just sounds stodgey and it's not even like a good pun or anything and then you just feel bad for him and embarressed and not in a good way.  Thank god you are one of the popular girls!  But unfortunately for you, you told Venessa that you kinda thought Robert Smith from The Cure was kinda cute and if Vanessa tells anyone YOU WILL JUST DIE!  No Man's Sky wins.  Fer sure!