Duke75

I think part of the problem there is that the gaming industry in particular has always been so ruthlessly focused on "NEWER, BETTER, ALL THE TIME BABY!!!" that there really hasn't been much of an effort to define what the Important Games really are. Modern console fanatics will instantly say stuff like "everything Nintendo does!" or Sonic the Hedgehog or whatever, but non-DOS/Windows PC gaming and pre-Crash stuff especially are roundly ignored. Or if they're not ignored people are gleefully throwing trash on the memory of them because they can't comprehend how old video games could be even be playable much less interesting or fun. They've drunk the gaming industry's Kool-Aid for so long. So Digital Eclipse does have a bit of work ahead of them in terms of establishing why games old enough to have been enjoyed by Babylonian kings should be canonized. I don't know, I got the impression that Atari 50 actually went over reasonably well so maybe they've hit on a good strategy. This Karateka thing looks cool to me, but I'm a weirdo who prefers old books, movies, music, TV...

Thanks to the growth of indie and AA-level games, there's plenty of room for Atari to not worry about being a big budget powerhouse and instead occupy a niche of making games that have a certain Atari/retro aesthetic, either updates of classic names or new games that work on a similar level. IMO, Atari should look to be a facilitator/publisher of games like Donut Dodo or Annalyn (just naming a couple of the top of my head) while keeping up stuff like the Recharged line or Akka Arrh.

Star Control seems to have a peculiar situation where Stardock owns the name/trademark while Toys for Bob has the right to make sequels to the original 2 games. There was an ugly legal situation a while back that they all sorted out through a face to face meeting.

I'm not sure they really own any IP? Aside from doing the System Shock remake, their thing is remastering old games; e.g., Powerslave, Doom 64, Shadowman, Turok... I think the question is what does Atari own that such a studio would be well-suited for?

I think the Splinter Cell games are generally regarded as best played on the original Xbox. They had some light/shadow effects that don't play nicely with the ports, especially on modern PCs. I've also heard that some prefer the Xbox version of Riddick to the PC version. Buffy and Crimson Skies, and various Sega games, as already mentioned. Deathrow was a really good future sports game, sort of like an updated take on Speedball. Hunter: The Reckoning: Redeemer was pretty good. Breakdown is...interesting at least. I always thought the Blinx games were underrated.

Ninja Gaiden also enraged me, but not the birds. It's the fact that if you get to the end of stage 5, if you die the game throws you all the way back to the beginning of one of the hardest levels in the game. It's hard enough to get the boss, but then if you lose (which you certainly will if you've never seen him before), you get to go through hell just to get another shot. I read somewhere that the checkpointing on this level was bugged and the developers thought it would be funny to leave the bug in to add to the game's challenge. I beat Ninja Gaiden 2 without too much problem but this game can piss right off.

After a certain point, my N64 was only being played for its wrestling games. The games that AKI made are still widely regarded as the best pro wrestling games ever, or at least very high ranking (Fire Pro certainly has a lot of backers). But it's kind of sparse beyond that, especially if you're not a wrestling fan.

Well, I'm happy you liked it. I have one and...I dunno, I just found it kind of boring? Moreso than just about any other system I've owned besides the N64. I'm certainly no "JPRG or whatever" fan

I find the Xbox 360 pretty underwhelming. A lot of FPSs and open world games of varying quality, many of which were probably better on other systems. I actually prefer the original Xbox to it. I don't get the sense that the N64 is rated all that highly nowadays. I remember people actually really liking its controller at the time, but now everyone makes fun of it (they are pretty fragile, though...), and a lot of its signature games have been remade or improved on. If we're including computers, I think the C64 is a bit overrated. I certainly like it and it had tons of games, but in general I think the Atari computers were more fun to play on because many games are faster and smoother.

The one that always got me was playing Castle Wolfenstein and the SS barging into a room yelling at you to halt.

A few channels I like that don't get a lot of notice: Pete Davison: https://www.youtube.com/user/ejaypierre/featured. I don't have much interest in his "Moe Gamer" stuff, but he's doing this concept called Atari A-Z, in which he picks an Atari 800 game, an Atari ST game, and a game from the Atari Flashback release on the Switch based on the first letter of the game's title, and plays through it a bit, giving some information and a review of it along the way. Pixelmusement/Ancient DOS Games: https://www.youtube.com/user/Pixelmusement/featured. What is sounds like: reviews of old DOS games. I wish the guy had a better vocal delivery (he's a middle-aged guy who sounds like a teenybopper in some ways), but he gives decent reviews and footage of the games. Sharopolis: https://www.youtube.com/user/sharop/videos. He's not very prolific, but he does videos on obscure systems. If you want to see what games on the Tatung Einstein look like, he's got a short video on it. Atari Archives: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo_f7y6sBDmFnGbZoq1Ce_w/videos. Basically an Atari 2600 version of what Jeremy Parish does.

C64 games I particularly like: Project Firestart Toy Bizarre Turrican 1 and 2 Uridium Ultimate Wizard Impossible Mission The Last Ninja trilogy Airborne Ranger Wizball Aztec Challenge Armalyte Gunship Space Taxi Maniac Mansion Paradroid Trolls and Tribulations Demon Stalkers Just for starting out. I've generally found that, with some exceptions, when it comes to multiplatform games the C64 version plays the worst except in terms of music. For instance, all the Synapse games are superior on the Atari 800, and games that originated on the Spectrum are often better on the Spectrum. The Apple II version of Dino Eggs is better than the C64's (although it's still a fun game on the C64!).

Leaving aside cartoony games that are still fun, my favorite sim-style sports games were the NBA Inside Drive games for the original Xbox. They didn't get much attention at the time because they were Xbox exclusive and all the hype was for the NBA Live/2K rivalry as those games had slicker graphics and animation, but I found that with some tinkering of the sliders, I could get a very statistically realistic game of basketball that flowed a lot more like a real game and put up a fair challenge. The games also have what I think is to this day the best voice commentary for a sports game that I've heard by Kevin Calabro and Marques Johnson - it just sounded extremely natural and often funny ("Nice dunk by the old vet!" "Hey, now, he's not old. He's just a guy with a good record collection, that's all..."). The guys would chat about players or random stuff but if a big play happened, Colabro would smoothly interject to remark on it. They sounded like real people instead of robots. I can't play the games anymore because my Xbox is dead, but if I can ever get them running, I'm definitely going to check around and see if there's still a community doing roster updates, which you still see with stuff like the NES Tecmo Bowl games. I'll second the recommendations of the N64 AKI wrestling games. Those are still the best pro wrestling games ever made, IMO. WWE games in particular have been incredibly lazy since the early 2000s, so there's not much competition against No Mercy or Virtual Pro Wrestling 2.

Wasn't the story with Nasir ending up at Square that he didn't have anything going on after his company folded, and he was hanging out at a show when he got talking to the Square reps, who upon realizing that he was the genius who did so much with the Apple decided to hire him? I think I read that he gets so many royalties from working on the Final Fantasy games that he's been comfortably retired for years.

I still have a soft spot for my Jaguar. I had fun with various games (Alien vs. Predator, Iron Soldier, Wolfenstein 3D), but I played Tempest 2000 probably more than any other console game in the 90s.