Castle Magus

"Earthbound might be the most personal game from the 16-bit era. It's a game that feel like its aware of you, testing you - you specifically - for the trials ahead."

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(Spoilers ahead.)

Right from the start of the video (and peppered throughout the rest of it, too), I learned a lot more about Shigesato Itoi than I ever knew before. Granted, I didn't really know much about him before now other than that he was the Earthbound guy (that and the whole "he walked into the wrong theater as a child and was traumatized by what he saw, which resulted in Giygas" thing).

And yeah, Phil Sandhop (a guy I knew IRL and who worked on the original Mother English prototype that was later released as Earthbound Beginnings, as I've mentioned several times in the past) agreed that the whole "This game stinks" marketing campaign was pretty silly and kind of counterproductive as far as making people want to buy the game. I mean, I bought it, on the day it was released, but that was because I was told about it in a response to a letter I sent to Nintendo when I was somewhere in the 13-15 years old range, as I've also mentioned before. I didn't even see the dumb ad campaign for it until after I had already finished the game itself.

As for the rest, the video goes into a spoiler-filled essay about how Earthbound increasingly starts to crack the fourth wall until, at the end, it just shatters it completely. For me, to this day, it is still one of the most fascinating endings to a video game that I've ever seen. And, as I know I've said before, while Earthbound may not necessarily be the best game, or even just the best RPG, on the Super Nintendo[1], it was and still is absolutely my favorite. I'd say Earthbound is without a doubt in my top three best most favorite games of all time, along with Planescape: Torment and The Longest Journey.

[1] - Chrono Trigger, for one, was probably a "better" game over all, and make no mistake about it, I, Kane Magus, love me some Chrono Trigger... but I still consider Earthbound to be above it on my "favorites of all time" list.

"The Nerd celebrates 20 years of Angry Video Game Nerd in AVGN episode 215, with the series that started it all and this time he's going to decide what the greatest Castlevania game of all time is for good!"

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It's an interesting video, but just to be clear, he's talking about what he thinks is "the greatest Castlevania game of all time" ...while not even mentioning any game post-Symphony of the Night at all, aside from Castlevania Chronicles (which was a remake of a much older game), and no game beyond the original Playstation era. So, take it with a grain of salt.

However, even with that said, even taking all the newer games into account, I personally find it difficult to argue with his pick of Castlevania 4 (aka Super Castlevania) for the SNES as being the best of all time. I love allmost of the later Metroid-inspired games, but still... CV4 is up there, too. (And, no, not just because it lets you swing the whip in eight directions.)

(EDIT) Oh, and I was reminded by some of the comments under the video that the Castlevania: Nocturne series came out last year. I'd completely forgotten about that. Guess I need to get on that. (/EDIT)

"Barbie Super Model and the unreleased Barbie Great Adventure"

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Yeah, all two of them, one of which was never officially released, as mentioned above.

Honestly, the main extent of my familiarity with any of this stuff comes from the OCRemix track "Plastic Goddess" by Children of the Monkey Machine. And that's the only reason I'm aware that the soundtrack for Barbie Super Model, some of which you can hear in the above SNES Drunk video, is actually pretty okay. (The SNES version, anyway, as I'm not as familiar with the Genesis or PC versions' soundtracks, though from what I little I heard of them when I skipped around in those two longplay videos there, those versions seem fairly similar.)

And yeah, same as with a "proper" game based on My Little Pony, I wouldn't be above playing a "proper" Barbie game, either, if such a thing ever existed. And by "proper," I mean "not a nigh worthless, cash-grab, piece of shit game pumped out on the cheap because 'little girls don't care about video games'" or whatever. Where are the games for Barbie and MLP with equivalent quality to Ghostbusters: The Video Game or South Park: The Stick of Truth or Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People?

As for the Barbie movie, I'm not writing off the possibility that I may actually watch it someday, but I haven't seen it yet.

"This is episode 206 of the Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN)! In this episode of AVGN, the Nerd talks about everyone's favorite Lasagna Eating Orange Cat, Garfield. From Atari to Sega Genesis, The Nerd will dig into a big pile of Cat Crap!"

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"I didn't know Garfield had such deep lore..."

I thought for sure when he said this, especially on the heels of talking about all the crazy and dark Lyman fan theories stuff, that the Nerd was about to bring up the infamous and very weird 1989 story, "Garfield Alone," but... then he didn't.

However, this video is so much more than just Garfield. Well, no, mostly it's Garfield, but I knew when he showed that Game Boy game near the end, things were about to get weird. I used to own the US version of that game, which was, as the video points out, decidedly not a Garfield game. (Though, to be fair, it really wasn't much of a Ghostbusters game, either. ¬_¬) I didn't have the slightest clue about all that other weird shit, though, like how the Bugs Bunny games in the US were Mickey Mouse games in Japan, and the like.

Speaking of Bugs Bunny, it was nice to have Mike back again, even if this was probably just a one-off thing. Maybe not so nice to hear him, though... Nyeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh... (I'll admit, I did chuckle a bit the longer it went on.)

As a kid, I was more of a Heathcliff guy, though even with that, I preferred the bits with Riff Raff and the Catillac Cats, rather than the actual Heathcliff stuff. The Heathcliff comics stuff... not so much. Also, this.

"What are the top 25 SNES games? We discuss a game list curated by journalist Seth Abramson."

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As always, lists like this are the opinion of whoever made the list (Seth Abramson, again, in this case) and nobody else. As such, Pat "throwing shade" (his words, not mine) for the list being "wrong" (my word, not his, but that's basically what he implied if not outright said) is kind of petty, as he (Pat) is not the arbiter/gatekeeper of that shit, any more than Seth Abramson or me or anyone else is. Basically, my enjoyment of this video was marred by Pat's constant "I don't think <insert game> should have been that high on the list" shit and his "well clearly these list-makers have only played the 'popular' games and don't know the full breadth of the library like me (even though there were several games on this very list that I myself knew nothing about) so their opinions are inferior" shit.

Additionally, to "throw shade" back at Pat, I've heard of all the games on the actual list, even if I haven't played all of them. The ones Pat called out as ones that he thought should have been on the list but weren't... not so much. And some of the ones on Pat's list that I have heard of and played, no... not top 25 for me. And I don't even have to have fucking played Tecmo Super Bowl to know that I wouldn't have put it anywhere near the top 25 on any list of SNES games, mainly because I don't give a shit about football games, no matter how "good" they are. See how my opinion, which obviously differs from Pat's, would inform how I'd rank things if I made a futile list like this? Yeah.

I absolutely disagree with both of their opinions about Castlevania IV, regardless of where it may have appeared on the list. Sure, Bloodlines is great, too, but Castlevania IV is one of my favorites. To say "it's not my favorite" is fine. To say "I don't like it" is fine. To say it "doesn't feel that much like Castlevania" is asinine.

And Ian calling Secret of Mana a "Zelda clone" is kind of ignorant and silly. *eye roll*

I mean, I still like these guys, and I agree with their opinions about 99% of the time otherwise, but sometimes they just get a little too hoity-toity for my tastes, such as here. And I don't even necessarily fully agree with Seth's list myself, either.

(I would've probably had Terranigma in my own such list somewhere, if I ever were to make one, but then, that game wasn't even released in North America, so it's not surprising to me that neither Seth nor Pat and Ian mentioned it at all.)

Of the games in this list, I've played Fallout: New Vegas, EarthBound, Pathologic, Alpha Protocol, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. So, I'll do a mini-review of each of those, just for the hell of it.

• Fallout: New Vegas - I've never finished this, but I've played a pretty long way into it. And... it's 3D Fallout. It's pretty cool. I'd say that it's somewhat better than Fallout 3 (which I did complete, unlike New Vegas), so I'm not really sure why I've never actually finished it. Not sure if it's better than Fallout 4, given that I've yet to really play far enough into Fallout 4 in the couple of times I've tried it to be able to make a determination, but... the fact that that's even the case maybe answers the question all on its own. I'd say that New Vegas is probably closer in spirit to the original, sprite-based, isometric Fallout games made by Black Isle than the others are, which makes sense given that it was made by a lot of the guys who made those, too.
• EarthBound - Well, I've said a fair bit about this one in the past, so I'll just recap two of the most important (to me, personally) things here. This is my favorite game on the SNES and definitely my favorite RPG on the SNES. That's not to say that it's the best game and RPG on the SNES, mind you, just that it's my favorite. I didn't find out about EarthBound via the usual ads in magazines and such, which were pretty crappy when I did eventually see them. No, I first found out about it when I wrote a letter to Nintendo of America as a kid (one of several such that I wrote), shortly before it came out, saying that I'd just recently gotten a SNES and asking what cool games were coming out, and the person who replied to me talked about (to paraphrase, since I no longer have the original letters, sadly) "a new RPG that takes place in the modern day, where you can use items like baseball bats and ATM cards." I bought EarthBound at a local mom-and-pop game store (back when those things still existed) on day one of its release, and I never once regretted it. Also, I actually worked with Phil Sandhop for a time, when I lived in WA. So that was pretty cool, too.
• Pathologic - I've never really been able to get into this one. It's rather dark and also unforgiving in its gameplay. I've tried both the original version and the remake. It seems like it would be cool, if I could just get past the difficulty wall. Alas.
• Alpha Protocol - Hmm... well... I remember next to nothing about this one, probably because I barely played it for more than an hour or three, over a decade ago. Seemed vaguely interesting, but apparently not enough so that I played it for more than an hour or three. *shrug*
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines - I played and completed Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption, and I will say that Bloodlines is a superior game to that, for a variety of reasons. While Redemption is a sort of 3D, third person, party-based, turn-based RPG, from what I recall of it, Bloodlines is a first person-based, adventure/RPG/action game, neither party-based nor turn-based. However, though I finished Redemption, I've never completed Bloodlines, mainly due to the fact that I didn't have the fan patches/restoration stuff at the time, and I simply haven't bothered yet to try it with those. Gonna have to do that one of these days.

"We discuss the top 25 NES games ranked, as compiled from journalist Seth Abramson. Do we agree with the list?"

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I've got no real problems with the list, but then, same as last time, I haven't played a ton of NES games to be able to make such a list myself. I'd agree that either Super Mario Bros. 3 or The Legend of Zelda should be in the top spot, for sure, as that's kind of a no-brainer really.

I still just find it rather surreal to be thinking about Seth Abramson in a context of "video games" rather than a context of "exposing Donald Trump's bullshit six months to a year or more before anyone in the mainstream media even sniffs at it."

"What are the *worst* arcade ports to appear on 8- and 16-bit consoles?"

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As much as I played the hell out of the NES port of the TMNT arcade game as a kid, yeah... no, it does not in any way, shape, or form hold up at all to the actual arcade game.

Aside from Mortal Kombat (which did indeed suck on SNES), I haven't really played a lot of the other ports they talk about (or the original games either, in some cases). I vaguely remember the arcade Ikari Warriors being cool, but the only experience I have of the NES version is the AVGN video about it.

"We think The Legend of Zelda (1986) is the most influential game of it's time, if not of all time. On this episode of Cinemassare's Retail Reviews Mike, Ryan, and Kieran take a look at what made the first Zelda so groundbreaking. Zelda is an action-adventure video game developed and published by Nintendo and designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka. Set in the fantasy land of Hyrule, the plot centers on an elf-like boy named Link, who aims to collect the eight fragments of the Triforce of Wisdom in order to rescue Princess Zelda from the antagonist, Ganon. During the course of the game, the player controls Link from a top-down perspective and navigates throughout the overworld and dungeons, collecting weapons, defeating enemies and uncovering secrets along the way."

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I don't think they said anything here that was really wrong or controversial or whatever. I tried to think of any other game that might be more influential than The Legend of Zelda, and I honestly couldn't think of anything.

And yeah, I'm like that Kieran guy a lot of the time. As I've mentioned in other posts, I'll often start playing a huge game like, for example, Oblivion or Fallout New Vegas and get super far into them, maybe even right up to the point of almost finishing them, but then I'll stop playing, for whatever reason and sometimes even for no real reason, and just move on to something else. Like in Oblivion I did pretty much everything that it was possible to do in that game, except for doing the final few quests of the main storyline. Or like the one time I've played Fallout 2, I made it all the way to the start of the Enclave oil rig, and then never touched it again.

That said, however, I have finished every Zelda game that I've ever played, which is most of them. The only ones of the mainline series that I haven't played yet are the most recent ones, A Link Between Worlds and Breath of the Wild (or the new Link's Awakening remake). I don't really count those multiplayer things (Four Swords, Four Swords Adventures, Tri Force Heroes) as mainline games, and I'm definitely not talking about the spinoffs like Hyrule Warriors or the Tingle games or especially the CD-i shit or whatever else, regardless of however good or bad those may be on their own merits (or lack thereof, as the case may be).