B coma

In no particular order... Crazy Taxi Bangai-oh Soul Calibur Sonic Adventure Jet Grind Radio

despite the technical limitations I always liked the SNES version of Panel de Pon/Puzzle LEague/Tetris Attack the best, so I hope that makes it to the US. Huh, and it looks like Earthbound is rated by the ESRB, making it's release likley. I agree with the poster that said the Super Mario All-Stars feels off. I appreciate it for what it is, for sure, but some of the changes still don't sit right with me. This is a strange thing to say, but does anyone else feel that the softening up of the color palette in All Stars SMB3 totally destroys the mood of the game?

There is a pretty great article in an old Next Generation I have concerning Shaq Fu. To summarize it says that not only is it one of the ultimate arguments against licensed games, but apparently rotoscoping is worst possible technique to create animation for a fighting game. Apparently, one of Shaq's hobbies at the time was martial arts (hence the push to create a fighting game), and rotoscoping Shaq doing martial-arts was deemed by developers (maybe EA though?) to be the only LOGICAL conclusion for using Shaq's likeness in a 16 title.

I've been a long time fan of Nights, probably ever since I played the hell out of it in the store kiosks while other folks were too busy waiting in line to play Super Mario 64 to bother with the Saturn stuff. Come to think of it, it was kind of funny, since the kiosk was running the full version of the Nights while PSX and N64 stations either contained demos or periodic resets. Anyhow, I wasn't able to play Nights again until I was an adult with a full time job, as I purchased my Saturn from ebay not too long ago. Shame to hear about Journey of Dreams - I was quite weary of it after my experience with Sonic and the Secret Rings. Not that it was bad game per se, infact, it was quite good compared to other recent Sonic titles. It's just that, as another poster here mentioned about JoD, Sega was content to divert it attention by cramming a bunch of junk into the game. Not many people developing Sega games these days seems to realize that the pure joy of movement was rewarding in and of itself in the classic iterations of their major franchises... I mean content is okay, but I'd rather play through a well designed Genesis Sonic game 8 times than to be forced through a bunch of arbitrary missions in Secret Rings just to see all of the levels. So I will probably pick up JoD at some point, probably because of this thread even, but I'll probably wait for a bargain.

I have spent at least a little time with all of the CDi Zelda titles, enough to say that they are all shoddy pieces of software in their own right... but until now I hadn't seen so much as a video of hotel Mario. Now, I don't know how that game plays in practcie, but going off of youtube alone it looks like it probably hold together much better mechanically, and also seems to lift it's design from games like Burger Time. And, while lacking on its own, compared to some of the Zelda games that animated intro was Walt freaking Disney.