YPB: Vidya Game News – November 17, 2016

- Polygon has released their massive video game gift guide, which is neat to read just to catch up on all of the cool stuff you didn’t even know existed.

- The new Daytona USA game, confusingly called Daytona 3 Championship USA, has some trailers out now.

- To hype the (incredibly hard to get) NES Classic, Nintendo has interviews with the developers of Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3 here. And hey, check out our episodes for the first and second games of that series!

- In a fun feature, Polygon’s Owen S. Good tallies up how much it would cost to just buy an NES and all of the games on the NES Classic, instead of paying the prices online for it.

- From Motherboard and other sites, a guy is shooting for 2017 for the release of Tanglewood, a new Genesis game programmed on an authentic development kit.

ON THIS DAY (OR CLOSE TO IT!) IN VIDEO GAME HISTORY…

- Mentioned prominently in last week’s show was WWF No Mercy, which was released on this day in 2000 by Asmik Ace and AKI. It’s still considered to be one of the gold standards for wrasslin’ video games.

- The ole Xbox was released on Nov. 15, 2001. That old chestnut didn’t sell well in Japan, and ultimately came out behind the PS2 in America, but it established a firm beachhead in console sales for Microsoft.

- Three days after the Xbox came the Gamecube. Again, it finished behind the PS2 in the sixth generation console wars, but it had some very well-received games, like…

- The Metroid series is kind of a big deal in November. In 2002, both Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion had concurrent releases for the Gamecube and GBA. The sequel to Prime came out on Nov. 15, 2004. (And hey, check out our episode on Super Metroid here!)

- On November 16, 2004, Valve released Half-Life 2. The incredible FPS was followed by sequels, Episode One and Episode Two, and then NOTHING. The third installment will never come out because Valve clearly hates us now.

- Dragon Quest VIII, the first of the series to drop the “Dragon Warrior” name for an American release, came out for the PS2 on Nov. 15, 2005. It was a solid effort, although not as long and deep as previous efforts from Enix.

- In 2006, the PlayStation 3 came out. It was a swell system, but it ceded the control of the market that the PS2 and PSX had established because of a high initial price and lack of third party support. (And by the way, the PS4 came out on Nov. 15, 2013, so Sony likes to push them consoles out in the holiday season.)

Video game history information comes from GameFAQs and Moby Games. And as always, if you’d like to support the show, do so via our Amazon link.