Mario Strikers was done by Next Level Games, which started out doing an arcade hockey game for Midway (NHL Hitz). They also developed Punch-Out for the Wii and the last two Luigi's Mansion games.
Burnout satisfied my need for racing that at least looked more realistic than Mario Kart back in the 2000s. Unfortunately other than a remake of Burnout Paradise that recently released it didn't survive the 7th generation.
Moviewise, my favorite 1999 movie is Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Those movies are so quotable. I also took my girlfriend at the time to see Big Daddy, which was funny. Me and a couple of buddies went to see Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in theaters. Not having a particular attachment to Star Wars to begin with, I didn't think it was as bad as people make it out to be, and it sucks what happened to Jake Lloyd.
Gamingwise, it was a good year. FF8 came out the fall before I started college, so its themes really resonated with me. But my favorite game of the year was Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete. I wanted to play Lunar ever since I saw the ads for the Sega CD versions, so I was incredibly excited.
I loved my OG Game Boy and I love my Switch. I've bought more Switch games than for any other system I've ever owned.
Glad you had a break. I've been off work ahd in Oklahoma, but it wasn't exactly a pleasure trip, it was because my mom recently broke her shoulder. I still got to see my family. I brought my Switch and have been splitting my time between Pokémon Sword, Trails of Cold Steel III, and Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition.
DK was a surprise blockbuster to everybody, including almost everybody at Nintendo except for maybe Miyamoto and Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo. Once DK became a smash hit, everybody came out with DK clones. Sega even tried to one-up Nintendo by making an isometric take on DK called Congo Bongo.
The home versions were easier because there was no gorilla and fewer monkeys on screen at one time due to graphics and memory constraints. The monkeys would start throwing two fruits at a time if you stayed in one stage trying to get more valuable fruits, so Sunsoft actually did a really good job on game design by scaling the risk and reward.
I had this on the Atari XE and it was one of my favorite games on there, mostly because my favorite arcade game was (and still is) DK. The Atari XE had a lot of great arcade ports on it, most of which were basically the 5200 ports since the 5200 was basically a console version of the Atari 8-bit computers. The Donkey Kong port was the best port until the Arcade Archives version on the Switch. My 2600 owning friend played Kangaroo on my Atari and liked it so much he got the 2600 version.
When I got my Wii I considered getting Mario Strikers Charged. That one was more sci-fi and futuristic.
