By Scott Tibbs, June 22, 2017
♣ - I find it amusing how in role-playing games you can just walk into people's houses, look through their cabinets and drawers and take stuff. It was actually very amusing in one of the Phantasy Star games for the Sega Genesis when a fellow party member tells the player that sort of thing is not allowed.
♣ - Speaking of role-playing games, having enemies on-map as opposed to random encounters makes the game much more fun. It is a useful feature to allow players to avoid fighting or to hunt certain enemies. Chrono Trigger for the Super NES was great in that regard.
♣ - If a video game has multiple game modes, the "easy" mode should actually be easy. This is especially important in fighting games, to allow a player to learn the moves and learn how to play as various characters. Throwing the player into the deep water with a nearly-impossible "easy" mode is an exercise in frustration.
♣ - More games need to include a "New Game Plus" option. There are few things more rewarding in a game than fighting an especially difficult early boss a second time using an end-of-game party and completely curb-stomping him with basically no effort.
♣ - The NES Classic was a good idea but it was too limited. It would have been better to offer the ability to play old cartridges like the Sega Genesis Throwback or (better yet) download more games via the Virtual Console onto a memory card. Maybe this will be fixed if a Super NES Classic is released.
♣ - I am still surprised that games for the PlayStation 4 and XBox One were not distributed entirely by digital download. Piracy would be a problem, but not an insurmountable one.
