I still have my SNES cart, box, and guide proudly displayed in my home office, and I wouldn't sell them for 1,000 times what they're going on eBay, because EarthBound is one of my favorite SNES games and sits high on my list of favorite games EVAR. Nintendo Power and the legendarily bad "this game stinks!" marketing convinced me to fork over the $70 for that ginormous box. Once I fired up my SNES, I fell in love with Eagleland and its quirky inhabitants. It's a damn shame that it's never been rereleased and that Mothers 1 and 3 never got to the US of A (although you can play both in English with emulators).

I have really had it with console makers screaming from the rooftops about how powerful their system is, and idiots using that as a measure of its worth. No console that has claimed to be "the most powerful" has EVER won a console war. Power is UTTERLY MEANINGLESS without good games. Saying the most powerful console will have the best games is like saying you'll make a great painting because you're using the most expensive paint supplies.

Let's take a quick trip inside the Wayback Machine:

-1989: The Sega Genesis and TurboGrafx-16, the first consoles I can recall specifically pointing out in their marketing that they had better hardware, burst onto the scene. Both struggle to gain significant market share until they get good games, or in the TG-16's case, die horribly from a lack of them.

-1996: The Nintendo 64, arriving a year after the competing Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation, absolutely SMOKED those other two systems hardware-wise. It also had a lot of great games. However, Nintendo's use of cartridges in the CD era, failure to understand where the game market was going, loss of killer app franchises to competitors, and longstanding disdain for third-party developers all combined to put that system on ice.

-1999: The Dreamcast pitches that it's prettier and more powerful than the N64 or PlayStation. People buy it until the PlayStation 2, arguably an inferior system from a hardware perspective, crashes in on the hype tsunami Sony built for it and utterly drowns the fledgling system. Also, it gets amazing sequels to all those games everyone loved on the PlayStation, along with a bunch of new ones.

-2001: Microsoft releases the XBOX after it recognizes the PS2 as a threat to Windows, and makes a huge deal out of all the cool hardware it was going to have. In fairness, the original XBOX cast a long shadow over the industry that's still there today, but the hardware-challenged PS2 simply pointed and laughed maniacally while becoming the best-selling video game system of all time. Although the XBOX had some great exclusives, they weren't great enough to win with.

-2006: Sony tells us the PlayStation 3 is going to be the most powerful system ever made, then tells us it's going to cost more than some people's rent, doesn't do a good job of explaining why it's worth it, and that it's so awesome that we should be prepared to work more hours to get one. That same year saw the release of the Nintendo Wii, a system which one developer mockingly compared to two GameCubes duct-taped together. It absolutely blew the doors off this console generation, to the point where both other companies are trying to rip it off as much as they can possibly get away with a good year or two after the Wii craze has mostly ended.

OK...that wasn't quick. But I hope I made my point. As Steve Jobs said at Apple back in the day, "SOFTWARE SELLS SYSTEMS!"

@BoneFox: I agree. TFU got middling to lousy reviews, but I don't think I have ever had more fun playing a Star Wars game. They should have just dispensed with the pretense and called it God of Star Wars.

Spiritual successor to MechWarrior 2 and 3 = Awesome.
Having to deal with d-bags online = Avoid.

TIE Fighter is not just the best Star Wars game, but one of my favorite games of all time. It was complicated but not incomprehensible, fun as hell to play as the bad guys (who strongly believed they were doing good!), and the multiple levels of objectives meant that you could play as much or as little as you wanted. My only complaint is that the game seemed to lose its nerve about five battles in, and became primarily a battle against Imperial traitors instead of Rebel terrorists. Force Unleashed did the same thing; I personally think the game should have ran with the "kill Vader and take his place" ending.

I always thought of Wind Waker as chronologically last in the series, and also as taking place in an alternate reality where Link never showed up to get rid of Ganon. Twilight Princess logically follows from Ocarina, which I believe to be first.

The real question is where the older games (Zelda 1, 2, LTTP, and Link's Awakening) fit in there. Those four obviously form a chronological sequence, but are they after TP/Wind Waker or before Ocarina?

Disclaimer: I haven't played Skyward Sword yet.

Loved this game in 1995, loved it again on the 360, and I'll love it again now!

The most important question is: will the GLA be in it? Between the Angry Mobs, the tanks with anthrax-tipped shells, the dump trucks full of high explosives, and the bored, oppressed, shoeless workers, they were by far my favorite faction in any RTS. I want my al Qaeda exaggeration!

I am very impressed with the overall package, and believe that this game is the standard by which HD re-releases should be judged going forward. After blasting through the first two levels on Legendary, I stand corrected on my initial thought that slapping a fresh coat a paint on a dinosaur of a game would be a mistake. When everything clicks, Halo is just as fun as it was back when it came out, and its campaign still overshadows a lot of what the series produced in later installments. Additionally, switching between the old and new graphics on the fly lets you see the frankly astonishing amount of detail that the art team added to the first game's overly drab environs.

My favorite part of the game, and it's one I feel hasn't got a lot of attention, is the redone sound and music design. The full orchestra and choir is a massive improvement over the first game's great but synth-heavy tracks. However, the weapon sounds are the stars of the show. All of them, including the Covenant guns, feel like real instruments of death now instead of kids' toys.

Definitely a must-buy if you're a Halo fan. If you were too young when it came out but are open-minded, give it a try too.

Maybe GameStop is losing money because every time I go to one of their stores, I feel like they're trying to punish me for wanting to buy something there:

1) They're generally tiny and usually crowded, such that you feel like you're at a party in someone's studio apartment, and they've put all the furniture in the middle of the room and invited half the neighborhood.

2) So, let's say you have no choice but to deal with this because your fiancee has seen videos of PokePark Wii nine months after it came out, and now wants it badly (I won't deny I loved name-dropping all the Pokemon on the box and the in-game Pokes as she found them). After shoving a bunch of loud kids and clueless parents out of the way, then finding the extremely tiny "new" section, you grab the case and bring it up to the register. Time to pay and go home, right? WRONG. These guys rival Windows Vista with the amount of questions they'll ask you before letting you complete such a simple transaction, and the amount of stuff they try to upsell you on dredges up memories of bad encounters with used car salesmen. I've listed these questions and their translations below:

GS: Do you want to buy that used?
T: Do you want to reward us, instead of the people who made the game?

GS: Do you want to pre-order anything?
T: Do you hate driving to more than one place if you can't find a game? Also, do you want us to earn interest on your $5 while we hope you forget you ever paid us, so that we can get your money for nothing and the chicks for free?

GS: Do you want to buy a strategy guide/subscribe to our magazine?
T: Have you ever heard of the Internet? No? Perfect!

GS: Do you want to join our discount/rewards program?
T: Do you want to pay for the privilege of making money for us (since the discounts mostly apply to used games), as well as let us track your purchase history so we can turn you into our marketing slave?

I just want to buy my game and play dammit, LEAVE ME ALONE!

(before the GameStop employees jump in: I know you guys have to do this because employees live and die by these numbers. It's your company that sucks, not you).

3) Also, if you buy the last "new" game they have, they'll pull a disc out of a drawer and put a sticker on the case you bring to the counter. I like to keep my game collection display-quality, so this practice, where I'm given a case that's been manhandled God knows how many times by customers, along with a big honking price sticker on the front and and another sticker on the side that'll leave gooey adhesive residue all over my heavily-fingerprinted case, really makes me mad.

Bottom line: I avoid GameStop like the plague. The ONLY time I'll go there is for an old last-gen game, and even then I'll try to patronize any other local game store first.