PixlBit

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Sorry, these are kind of random. I just like any excuse to bring up some of my favorite game music.

For Julian, I am going to go with Ride the Tiger, Akira's theme from Virtua Fighter 2. Mostly because that's my favorite fighting game series and it gets so little notice. It has great music, and I could honestly do all three songs from the series.

Patrick, I'm going to give him "Sail Over The Storm", Maxi's theme from SoulCalibur.

For whatever reason, I couldn't get the video to work here.

And for Angelo, there is this track from Final Fantasy Tactics, inexplicably named "Antipyretic," a name which brings Tylenol to mind more than epic tactical battles. A lot of the tracks in FFT had rather bizarre names for such a great soundtrack.

Pak Watch:

I have more familiarity with the arcade version of Final Fight than the home version. I guess Nintendo censored Poison out due to the Japanese version having her as a transwoman? The intro and the "Continue" screen, where your character had dynamite strapped to his chest, were memorable. The arcade version of Ninja Gaiden used the same general idea with the continue screen. Way to try to guilt people into spending more money, guys. The bad guys who look like Andre the Giant. I've played it through to the end. Final Fight was all right, but I wasn't a huge fan. My favorite beat-em-ups at the time were Konami's licensed beat-em-ups like TMNT and The Simpsons.

I'm sorry about the job. I'm sure you'll be fine, but that probably isn't much comfort right now.

I got my SNES Mini from Toys R Us in Phoenix the week before they announced they were closing down. I never saw the SNES Mini anywhere else, but every Toys R Us in the area had three or four in stock.

I haven't been to SF since I was 5. I am currently planning a trip with my friend to Rocky Point in Mexico near the Arizona line for her birthday.

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I guess the closest thing I ever had to a gaming spirit animal was Squall from FF8. I was a lot like him when I was a teenager, though the game came out when I was 21. I was a lone wolf who didn't really want to be a lone wolf, like Squall, I had extremely poor social skills like Squall, and I was sometimes a belligerent jerk like Squall. Squall even looked a bit like me. Well, I didn't have the face scar and I didn't wear a leather jacket with a fur collar, but you get the idea.

Pak Watch:

I'm actually going to second Tyrone's opinion on GoW. The gameplay was okay, but Kratos was thoroughly unlikeable as a character. I know he's an antihero of sorts, but I disliked his design and characterization, which came off to me as Extreme Angry Dudebro Asshole, very strongly to where it's kind of off-putting to the series as a whole. For that kind of game I much prefer the Bayonetta series.  Shame, too, I was into Greek mythology when I was an adolescent and still have a fondness for Greek mythology, and I thought it was cool that they got Kevin Sorbo (TV Hercules) to do Hercules in GoW III. The game is high-quality, I just didn't enjoy it.

Oh, and I really liked the Project A-Ko soundtrack in the podcast. Project A-Ko was one of my first anime movies (along with Akira and Ninja Scroll), and as such, I still have a fondness for it and will watch it once in awhile. I used to have a DVD collection of all four of the Project A-Ko movies.

I have the original Tokyo Xanadu for Vita. Not a spectacular game, but solid.

I haven't picked up Ni no Kuni 2 yet, but I will on payday. I loved the first game, combat and all. This game looks incredible.

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This was a tougher category than I thought it would be. A lot of my favorite games did get sequels. Until last year, my top pick for this category would have been Ni no Kuni, as an example. A lot of the games I would pick would be games that I felt never got a "proper" sequel.

1. Rogue Galaxy

This would probably be my favorite one-off game I can think of, and it's from the same company that made Ni no Kuni, no less. It's a shame this game never took off. As a space-faring RPG, I honestly enjoyed this game a lot more than Mass Effect.

2. Okami

This is one of those games that I felt never got a "proper" sequel. The DS follow-up didn't do justice to the scope and grandeur of the PS2 game, which sits in my top 20 list of all time favorite games and is my favorite Zelda-style game that isn't a Zelda game. Given that Okami didn't sell well, we were probably lucky to even get a DS sequel, but this situation illustrated a lot of the frustration I felt with the late 2000s in gaming. A lot of sequels to great console games ended up on DS and PSP instead of consoles due to economic issues, and were hamstrung by the constraints of those platforms, not only in graphics, but in terms of gameplay structure. Hopefully the Switch will mean the end of stripped down console-to-handheld sequels.

3. Eternal Sonata

This was a charming little RPG for the 360 and PS3 (I owned the PS3 version) that was based very loosely on the life of Frederic Chopin. It would have been interesting to explore this theme in other games.

Pak Watch:

I skipped MGS2 on its first go-round on the PS2. My sights were set on games like Final Fantasy X and Devil May Cry. I did play it some as part of the MGS HD Collection on PS3, but since I wasn't that invested in the series and had already read a few spoilers, the plot twists just weren't as shocking to me as they would have been if I had been a fan back in 2001. I never finished it.

Breath of the Wild is an awesome game. I didn't think that a Zelda game would ever impress me the way that the original, ALttP, Ocarina of Time, and TP did. Nintendo said, "Hold my beer..."

I always thought there were three types of 80s vertical shoot 'em ups: the Space Invaders type (slow marching aliens with shields and bombs), the Galaxian/Galaga type (diving aliens), and the Centipede type (the insects, mushrooms, and the ability to move through the bottom area of the screen). I played a lot of clones back in the day as well as the actual games.

I remember when the bosses in Ghosts 'n' Goblins on the NES were named Satan and Lucifer. Even Nintendo Power called them that. I guess that was before Nintendo really started cracking down on religious/demonic imagery.