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.

I'm always interested in anything Jeff Minter does. Eugene Jarvis's name was a big factor in my picking up Ex Machina. Derek Yu is really good - I wish he made more games but I'm looking forward to Spelunky 2...

I take a very simple, self-centered view of the case: Reiche and Ford have made some of my favorite games going all the way back to stuff like Archon, and if they say they want to make a new Ur-Quan Masters game, I would definitely like to see that. Stardock doesn't really make games in which I'm interested, but if they're somehow standing in R&F's way then I'm not on their side.

Tecmo Wrestling was my favorite NES wrestling game, and probably my favorite overall until the AKI N64 games started coming out. Loved the huge and easy to use movesets, the announcer calling the action, the cinematics, and the storyline. Tough one to beat.

IMO old games are easier to run on GOG compared to Steam because GOG actually does try to pre-configure them for you. I still usually adjust dosbox or ScummVM to my liking, but at least it's more like minor tweaking, whereas Steam's mentality is more like "We got your money, now you make it work, sucker." (Unless the publisher takes the setup GOG tested and just resells it on Steam ) One major downside about GOG is that, like all other stores, it's tiny compared to Steam, which means that a lot of publishers are happy to release games on GOG and then completely ignore it when it comes to stuff like patches. Because Steam is where all the money is, publishers always make sure the users there get updates first and always, but GOG/DRM-free users are frequently left in the dust. And then there's just the fact that a lot of publishers are still terrified of the whole DRM-free thing, so don't look to GOG in general for really major releases. If GOG does get a AAA game, it's usually because the game is seen as being used up after a few years on Steam and therefore safe to put up on a DRM-free store.

For me it's about time and what my mood is. I go for NES-and-later systems when I'm in the mood to play something that's going to stretch over a few days or even weeks, but when I just want a game I can get into immediately and blast away, I'm more likely to gravitate toward the 2600. Super Mario Bros. 3 and Legend of Zelda are not games I'm going to decide to throw in and have quick fun for a single afternoon - they demand a slightly different sort of commitment than something like Turmoil or Yars' Revenge.

Huh, I did not know about the bug. I played the DOS version - maybe that's why I was never quite able to beat it

Wizardry was my main RPG series when I was younger, so aside from Ultima 3, I missed a lot of the Ultima and Might & Magic games. I've since played most Ultima but I got distracted a little ways into Ultima 6 and never finished it or the rest of the series, and I've never played much M&M at all. I also need to play the later (5-8 ) Wizardry games. I'd like to actually beat Pitfall someday. Just need to sit down and really do the work, I suppose. Same with Montezuma's Revenge. I've played through Ocarina of Time a couple of times, but Majora's Mark is the one that gets talked up a lot that I've never even played. Others that come to mind: Shamus, Yoshi's Island, Metal Gear 2 (MSX), Contra Hard Corps, most of Treasure's output, Impossible Mission, the Starflight games and Star Control 2, Privateer and Wing Commander 3-5...

Heh, that reminds me of how people pronounce Conan as Co-NAN when they're referring to the barbarian hero. They sometimes get irritated when you remind them that Conan is an actual Irish name usually pronounced as CO-nan, and it's supposed to be pronounced that way because Robert E. Howard was very enthusiastic about his Celtic ancestry.

I think your first is correct for Gradius. Maybe I'm totally wrong but I get the impression that the game is "supposed" to be named Gladius, in reference to the short sword used by ancient Roman soldiers, but the interchanging of L's and R's in Japan got everyone confused. For Faxanadu, at least, it's a portmanteau of Famicom Xanadu, since Xanadu was already a popular series over there and they were just doing a Famicom-specific version.

Well, technically the Karate Kid in Japan is known as "The Best Kid"