PixlBit

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.

You have been playing a lot of balloon games. My favorite balloon game is Balloon Fight, but that didn't come out until 1985. The arcade version is slated for release on the Switch, though, This game looks a lot like the Balloon Trip mode in the NES version. I guess it probably inspired it.

Too bad Square Enix doesn't release more Taito games as arcade classics.

You have been playing a lot of balloon games. My favorite balloon game is Balloon Fight, but that didn't come out until 1985. The arcade version is slated for release on the Switch, though,

Too bad Square Enix doesn't release more Taito games as arcade classics.

Which Bayonetta did you get? I kind of want to pick up Bayo 2.

One of the more interesting games of 2005 was Haunting Ground, a game made by Capcom as a successor to the Clock Tower series. It had a panicky heroine with few means to fight back other than her dog (and you could mistreat the dog badly enough to where it wouldn't help you), plus a lot of gruesome off-camera deaths.

Resident Evil 4 would have been my GOTY 2005... if Dragon Quest VIII hadn't come out in 2005. That game is still one of the best I've ever played. My new wife, myself, and my stepdaughter all played the game to completion and had our own save files.

Is it true that you paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 for her silence?

It was actually Zero Mission where I was referring to the hand-holding, and the statues that told you where to go next weren't skippable. Still, loved the movement mechanics of the game and the fact that you didn't have to spend hours re-finding the Ice and Wave Beams every time you wanted to change them.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is my alternative game to BotW. Great game, but like BotW, it gets punishing at times and at random. Odyssey is just awesome.

I'm tempted by Fire Emblem Warriors, but I really hope Nintendo brings out the Fire Emblem SRPG soon. That's what I really want, a console Fire Emblem that we haven't seen since Radiant Dawn on Wii.

2004 sucked for me, too. It was probably the low point of my adult life up until then. My only consolation was video games, specifically Tales of Symphonia, which is a game I still dig out every once in awhile. I also played MGS: The Twin Snakes, but I'm not a huge MGS fan the way a lot of other people here are. I did enjoy the Psycho Mantis sequence, since I had saves from Wind Waker on that memory card.

Metroid: Zero Mission was an interesting beast. On the one hand, it was too linear and hand-holdy. One of the points of Metroid for me was always exploration, and when the game tells you where to go it takes a lot of that out for me. On the other hand, the controls and graphics were really nice. The original Metroid is one of my big classics from childhood, but it is a really rough play these days just because of the controls. Super Metroid remains my gold standard for Metroid games. Metroid Prime 2 I didn't get into as much as the first game.

Activision really ran Tony Hawk into the ground, didn't they? They did the same thing with Guitar Hero a few years later.