PixlBit

Of this batch of games, I played Spirit Tracks, SFIV, and Bayonetta. By 2009, I had switched from the 360 to the PS3, with some Wii gaming going on.

Like you, I wasn't a fan of the touch screen controls of the DS Zeldas. I liked Spirit Tracks better than Phantom Hourglass.

SFIV was pretty fun, and I played it quite a bit online, especially since the online community for VF5 had dried up a couple years ago. I think I played Super rather than the vanilla version though, so that may not count for 2009. But Capcom gonna Capcom, you know?

Bayonetta, now that was awesome. It blew DMC out of the water for me and the Bayonetta games are still my favorite games in that genre. I'll probably get Bayonetta on Switch along with Bayonetta 2. I actually had the PS3 version, which was supposedly worse than the 360 version although I think they'd patched it a few times by the time I got it.

Other games I liked in 2009 were Demon's Souls and Dragon Quest V on DS.

The Wonderswan actually seemed like a good portable system. Squaresoft supported it quite a bit with remakes of the early Final Fantasy titles. It's too bad that the WonderSwan, WonderSwan Color, and Swan Crystal never came out over here.

P5 was my favorite PS4 game of the year along with FFXII The Zodiac Age, though my overall favorite game of 2017 was Breath of the Wild.

I've never seen a physical copy of Nights of Azure 2 in the wild. Kind of thought about Fate/Extella, and I loved Bayonetta 2 enoiugh that I am considering double dipping on it for the Switch.

My physical collection is currently limited to BotW, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and Puyo Puyo Tetris, which is surprisingly fun but also frustrating. Digitally, I have Mario Bros (first game I got for the Switch, believe it or not, I'm excited about having Nintendo's arcade games on the Switch), Strikers 1945, World Heroes, Romancing SaGa 2, and Celeste (which is a really tough platformer in the vein of Super Meat Boy). I bought Celeste in part because a close friend of mine is named Celeste, LOL.

I hear mixed things about the SoM update.  A lot of stuff they took out and changed didn't sit well with people, and I hear that the remixed soundtrack sucked, but you can use the original version. I hope that the Mana Collection comes out in the US, because I would like to play an official localized version of Seiken Densetsu 3 on my Switch.

I liked the aesthetic and story of Bioshock Infinite, though it was about as convoluted as any JRPG. The gameplay didn't quite match up though. They overpromised on a lot of things during development. The Boys of Silence were hyped up to be big-time enemies that appeared in a lot of areas in the game and stalked you by tracking your sounds, but in the final product they ended up being little more than security camerals. I also thought that the game would be more freely explorable than it ended up being. The dynamic between Booker and Elizabeth was well-done, better than in most games involving escort missions.

Good luck on the job hunt.

Those were good years, with Twilight Princess, Okami, and FFXII in '06, VF5 Online, Rogue Galaxy, and Halo 3 (yes, I did play Halo for a time back then) in '07, and Valkyria Chronicles, Tales of Vesperia, and Fallout 3 in '08. Valkyria Chronicles was the game that got me to get a PS3.

As far as Twilight Princess goes, I definitely prefer the Gamecube version, and that's actually the canon version of the game, since it was originally a Gamecube game. The Wii U remake is based on the Gamecube version, including the maps being oriented in the same way as the Gamecube version rather than being flipped as in the Wii version.

I'm digital on small stuff like the Arcade Archives stuff and other little goodies like Celeste, but I buy cartridges for stuff like BotW and Xenoblade. I did get Puyo Puyo Tetris on cartridge though, but I tend to buy cartridges/discs when they're available. I tend to play the small arcadey stuff on the go and the big stuff at home with the Switch docked in TV mode. I will admit there are certain advantages to not having to switch carts, but with big games I'm not at that point.

Pressure Cooker was quite a novel little game for its time.

That was pretty good for a 2600 skiing game. Most of Activision's programmers at the time were people who had quit at Atari because Atari didn't credit them for their work. Maybe if these guys had stayed on at Atari, the 1983 crash wouldn't have happened. Oh, well, Nintendo was light-years better.

And then a lot of them left Activision for the same reason and formed companies like Acclaim, Accolade, and Absolute. All of these names were chosen so they'd be ahead of Activision in a phone book, kind of like Activision itself choosing a name that would appear before Atari.