This is one of those games I replayed the first stages of a bunch. I loved the "crunch" factor of the combat. But oh man, did I hate the platforming stuff! I wrote about it 11(!) years ago for my buddy Andrew's blog. I still haven't gotten past Stage 4.

distantarcade.co.uk/level-hell-s...

The other prominent example of this is Battletoads. Those first few levels rip, and I can actually get past the Turbo Tunnels, but then it's like 5 more stages of absolute platforming hell.

Ha, this game alternates cool design elements - the character swap screen, different weapons and subweapons - with maddening decisions (those damn jumps and walks, long levels, scrolls outclassing everything else). It is absolutely one of those games I'd play 1 o2 levels of then bounce as a kid.

Who's handwriting is this and do they do Christmas cards?

We got a plastic Little Tikes tree for our 16-month old, and the first thing he does when he wakes up in the morning is run out to the kitchen and excitedly throw every plastic ornament off of it.

... this was after a different Tom Brady won his first Super Bowl. This Tom Brady was a retired man in his 60s that enjoyed boating, and was already sick of the mistaken identity.

One other thing that helped the replay value - If you installed the game locally, you could put any other CD in the drive and it would play tracks off it. Gravity Kills, Chemical Brothers and The Crystal Method all made for decent soundtracks for online deathmatch too, haha.

Quake was my first experience with online gaming - Played so much on MPlayer, and then Heat.com, a Sega initiative that let you earn points to spend like money. I got FF8 and a Voodoo graphics card from playing Quake, essentially.

How could we possibly pay attention to anything except the glasses she took from the corpse of Charles Nelson Reilly?

At least in past playthroughs for me, Archers were just completely irrelevant once you got guns. Until then, they can be vaguely useful on some stages thanks to range and elevation.

Heck yeah, this was a favorite of my youth! I did a run through of both parts again earlier this year, and it still hit that sweet spot in my brain thanks to the fight-loot-retreat loop, a la Diablo. Many memories of this, OMF, Synthetic Reality's Warpath and Dungeons of the Unforgiven.

This and its predecessor, Battle Clash, were a lot of fun! Although admittedly, I kind of had more fun playing them on an emulator with a mouse way after the fact than trying to use a Super Scope as a kid, haha.

Not a perfect game, but one I played, really enjoyed and still think about like once a week! The cast of characters and narrative was delightfully unique, even if I found the combat kind of meh.

This is another game I've probably played through 5+ times. I don't think I've ever triggered max or min Brave / Faith without purposely going for it, though! A trait of Square games from that generation was deeper mechanics that you could delve into but could also ignore. (See: FF6, 8 stat gains.)

One note is that according to the creator, Olivia did survive the last encounter with Delita - the scene in the game isn't meant to show her death. But I definitely took it that way when I saw it initially, and that tracks more with the tone of the game. - www.frontlinejp.net/2020/08/26/f...

Hey, I'm actually seeing one in real time, instead of way after! :D Haha. I think I'm more bullish on the remake than others - Having the recruitable characters actually get dialogue when they're in the team strikes me as being better than the kind of fanservice-y stuff from WotL.

The Quintet IP rights stuff is also interesting to me. ActRaiser is older than SoulBlazer, so my unfounded theory is that maybe Enix was a partial rightsholder (they published it), but weren't for any future Quintet efforts. Strange that not even emulated packages of Quintet games have made it out.

This was one of my favorites growing up, probably played through it 5+ times. The vibe reminds me so much of "coming of age" Amblin-y sort of movies. The inverse of FFMQ, which was hurt by my playing it at 12, Gaia was probably helped.