Sumer

Man, interesting game, so far. I didn't know if armies would be randomly placed or not, but, yes, random they are. Makes you think a little harder about your strategy as the game opens rather than going after a continent with army placement like the actual board game. And, of course, this assassination thing is just another wrinkle...

Welp, I deleted that email weeks ago! Not in my trash, so, guess I will have to wait for the next one, if they send one by April!

So how do you sign up for the damn newsletter? On my account, I have checked the box for the promotional emails from Nintendo. Nothing specific about a newsletter, though. I don't think I ever received the October newsletter or November newsletters, if they went out.

I got my GameBoy Player with the disc and all right before they went up in price. Glad I did. I enjoyed Metroid: Zero Mission greatly on the big screen compared to the small screen.

OK, looks like I am in game!

Never played Risk in an assassination-type way. This should be interesting...

Too late! I signed up as Sumer...just to make it easier.

Risk! My all time favorite board game (Sorry all of you new fangled games like Catan, Pandemic, and Terraforming Mars). Count me in on playing, especially if you get 24 hours per turn and don't have to be sitting at the computer at a specific time. I will head over to the website and make an account!

Gotcha...but I guess when I first saw the question, art came first to my mind. When I think of a box, I tend to think of art first, then practicality second. For what it's worth, Atari's boxes, if handled with care like a NES box, still holds up well 40 years on (man, almost 45 years for some of the early games).

I am also going to say: ATARI! The first thing I thought of for this poll was the box art...I didn't even consider the practicality of the box (that would be Sega's Master System or Genesis clamshells). So many of us were built up, hyped up, and geeked up by the box art when we got a new VCS/2600 game, only to be disappointed most of the time by the game itself. Not always, but many times. If you haven't checked it out, a great book on the phenomanal Atari work is available from Tim Lapetino:

I gave it an 8...and that is my rating for it when it first came out. Sonic 2 would be just about a 10 (9.75?) to me. Didn't really care for Sonic 3 (7) and Sonic CD was fun (8.5), but Sonic 2...now that is a game! Anyway, when Sonic 1 came out, being a NES fan boy defending the NES from my rich kid friend who had a Genesis, literally, right when it came out (a few years later...his heart surgeon dad also bought him a Neo Geo AES and he had about 10 games for it...yeah...) and he just TRASHED the NES at that point. And when Sonic 1 came out, I just about waved the white flag a bit due to the speed of the game. I was secretly very jealous of him and his Genesis with Sonic 1. Sonic 2 and Mortal Kombat are the games that made me and my brother pool our allowance, Xmas money, bday money, etc. all together to purchase a model 1 Genesis. We needed the fatalities in our MK after playing it non-stop at the Aladdin's Castle. We also hogged the Genesis demo unit at a local Software ETC (remember THAT store?) when Sonic 2 came out. The clerk had to tell us to let other kids have a turn at Sonic 2.

I am down for the Monkey Island Anthology. I got the Sega CD release earlier this year, but still prefer it on a PC. One of my all-time favorite computer game series, right after Wing Commander.

I thought about the Shenmue III package, but then realized I still haven't played Shenmue 1 or 2 yet and probably will be another 10 years before I even touch THOSE games on my PS4. So, I passed.

A sports pack G&W does sound pretty cool. Ice Hockey, Tecmo Bowl (not Super, since the NFL would not allow that word), and, of course, PUNCH-OUT!!!

Aren't there four of them? I include Arkham Origins in that as well, too. I actually like Origins the best out of the ones I have played (Asylum, City, and Origins). I haven't played the last one. I think I enjoyed the story to Origins quite a bit, and Gotham itself just felt more like Gotham than in City, for some reason. Maybe it has to do with the constant, drab snow that is falling.

This is spot on. I absolutely dislike Final Fantasy 7. I loved FF 1, 2, and 3 (1,4, and 6 I suppose, as we call them now), but for some reason, FF7 ruined FF for me. It just seems like it was a departure from the old school, where "Vintage JRPGs" were Japanese replicas of old school Western CRPGs, like Ultima and Wizardry, which I love, into something totally too...too annoying? What I mean by annoying is exactly what you mean when you say "the older I get, the harder it is to get into JRPGs." I guess I call these Neo JRPGs. I think I tried one more FF after 7, and that was 10 for the PS2. Played the game for about 3 or 4 hours and just had to stop. Again, too "Neo JRPG" for me.

Welcome!!!!

^You know, that Sequel Trilogy, as you call it, was definitely awesome. All of those #2s seem to get flack for being too different from the first one, but as a kid back then, all three of those were deemed to be fun games amongst my group of friends because they were so different! Even Castlevania 2, which gets mocked (because of AVGN?) nowadays I still find to be, at times, more fun than the first. Yeah, '88 in the USA is probably when the craze was getting some strong headwinds (though '87 was starting to heat up...I got mine for Xmas '87 after playing Vs. Super Mario Bros arcade cab at a Mexican restaurant in the fall of 1987 and absolutely had to have the NES that year). But 1989, with SMB3 being announced and all the other games coming out that year, seemed to be the high explosion year. I could be totally wrong, but that was the perception at my school...I was one of the first ones to get a NES in 1987, and most friends of mine got theres by the end of 1989. Heck, I had one friend who did not get a NES until the SNES was out...his parents really held out on not buying one for him and told him his Magnavox Odyssey 2 was good enough.

Oh, it was a very big deal, definitely. But what others don't realize is that SMB2 was also a big deal when it came out. Not as big of a deal, of course. Its just that Nintendo-mania was perhaps not yet at its zenith, or the install base as big, in the US until 1989...a year after SMB2 came out. I can honestly say, as a kid, I was more hyped for SMB2 than SMB3, what with the new Nintendo Power plastering it on its first cover and it being the first magazine I ever had in my life (counting the Fun Club as a newsletter and not as a mag!). SMB3 was definitely a bigger deal nationwide at the point when it came out, but thats just because of the extra two years that the install base could grow through the Xmas Days of 1988 and 1989. And yes, it definitely is an objectively better game than SMB2...but subjectively, SMB2 was my "manic moment" for the NES. I even went to The Wizard with my dad on a day off from school and remember getting the "mini Nintendo Power" or whatever it was they were giving away at the movie for SMB3. I was still more excited for SMB2 for some reason. I remember my brother and I being the first people to rent SMB2 from our local video store. We got to the rental store right when they were putting the game out on the rental rack. I snapped it up quick and waited for my mom to finish getting her movie for the night. In the two or three minutes since I snapped up SMB2, two other kids came running over and saw it was already "checked out." They then ran to the front counter as we were going over to check out. I remember the kids asking the clerk if it was really checked out and he said, as we were ringing up, "Yep, this kid here just brought it to the counter." I made some kids super mad that day at our local video store.

Which is crazy, because Amazon has its own listing up for 49.99!

Totally forgot about this G&W until 11 pm this evening. Easily ordered one from Amazon a few moments ago no problem. Really surprised they are so readily available after what happened with the NES and SNES classics!

I gave it a 6. Definitely fun to fire up once in awhile. I never owned one as a kid (had the NES, of course), but was always intrigued by the "look" of it, since one of my friends had one. Years later, I bought one in the early 2000s with the 3D glasses and still have it. I enjoy playing Wonder Boy on it. Barely touched my copy of Phantasy Star, but from the little I have played of it, it seems more fun than Final Fantasy 1 to me.

Well, Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! is my favorite game of all time, and it features Mario as a ref, so I guess that one. If we are going to say "starring Mario," that would be the USA version of Super Mario Bros. 2.

We have a few Stone Colds here close by in the Cincinnati-area. We barely go to them...but, I am making a point to visit the closet one to us just for this stupid mission.

And, they just came today, finally! Yep, very nice packaging and the pins look very nice!