PixlBit

I missed out on this game's initial release, being a broke kid with limited means. It looked like an interesting title. I first got it on Wii U and played it to the end, and now I have it on SNES classic. Did you find the spot in the arcade music where notes from the Xevious music can clearly be heard?

One of the biggest disappointments of the 5th gen was the N64 version of Mother 3 getting canceled. It looked really good. I think that hearing that Mother 3 wasn't going too well and not having any real RPGs to play was what finally made me give up on the N64. That and FF7 was too cool to pass up. With that said, I hope that Nintendo looks at the positive response to Earthbound and to Trials of Mana in the recent release of the Collection of Mana and puts out a Switch release for Mother 3.  There have been three games I've always wanted localized above all others: Sakura Wars, Seiken Densetsu 3/Trials of Mana, and Mother 3. Sega and Square Enix did their part. Hopefully Nintendp will do theirs.

I was kind of disappointed in the lack of Square Enix references in Kingdom Hearts, But Tetsuya Nomura himself said that the crossover is no longer as necessary as it was in 2002, given the fact that Disney is well on its way to becoming a monopoly in the entertainment world and pretty much sells itself now. I'm pretty sure Disney doesn't want to share the limelight with another company's IP.

If they do make a KH4, I'd actually like to see Springfield and New New York added as Kingdom Hearts worlds. Disney owns those too, now. 

I wonder if Kangaroo will get an Arcade Archives release. I don't know if you're old enough to remember Saturday Supercade, but it had Kangaroo cartoons on it. Pooyan is a fun game, but I can't get past round 5.

I never saw the arcade version. I played Pooyan on the Atari XE computer. Datasoft handled that version.

It was on a PS1 Konami Collection, I believe.

I've heard differing things on that. It used to be that people claimed that Shenmue is what bankrupted Sega and drove them into third party status, though that's a bit reductionist. Yu Suzuki, the creator of Shenmue, said later that this wasn't the case, that Sega just fell victim to the results of multiple failed consoles and an inability to compete with Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft. But it is also true that he got "kicked upstairs" into an office job where he had few duties despite still getting paid, and that's a typical passive-aggresive way in which corporations punish miscreants.  It's clear he wanted to do a lot more with Shenmue than he did, and stuff had to be cut for time and budget reasons. 

I've had that feeling of arcade games not looking or sounding quite as good as I remember them in a few cases. Nintendo's games tend to hold up pretty well in that regard, as they were among the best in class to begin with. Part of it, I think, is because of how primitive the 2600 and Intellivision were compared to the arcade. Doesn't stop me from loving those games, as I have a great many of the Arcade Archives releases on PS4 and Switch. But the arcade version of Contra, as seen on the Contra Anniversary Collection, is a bit jarring. 

I remember Ninja Gaiden for its opening cut scene, its game over scene (where Ryu has a buzz saw coming towards his chest unless you stick another quarter in), and the breakabld objects in the environment, which were a bit of a novelty at the time. 

Shenmue was a bit ahead of its time, much as I hate that cliche. Yu Suzuki just wanted to do more than could be done economically. The voice acting sounds like it was ripped from a casette tape recorded on a Tiger Talkboy. Its tank controls are unwieldy, like those in GTA. The difference being that Sega scrapped tank controls for Yakuza while Rockstar keeps using tank controls in GTA. But they're still good games, and I will be picking up Shenmue III. Sega became one of my favorite developers/publishers after they quit making consoles, ironically.

It's pretty much what it says on the tin, Puyo Puyo and Tetris, with Sega's anime Puyo Puyo characters and a couple of crossover modes. They did a pretty fair job of balancing the two games in head to head matches. Anyway it's pretty much my default Tetris and Puyo Puyo fix these days.

I've been playing the Castlevania, Contra, and Mana collections on Switch, all of them for games I missed out on, namely Castlevania: Bloodlines, Contra: Hard Corps, and Trials of Mana. Trials of Mana has been right up there with Mother 3 and Sakura Wars as my most wished-for localization. It's better than Secret of Mana in every way, starting with combat which is faster paced and actually remembers that it's an action RPG, along with six playable characters. Contra: Hard Corps is one of the funnest Contras I've played although it's a little over-animated to the point where it's hard to see enemies sometimes. Bloodlines is a great Castlevania experience.