Arcades C/D

I was a kid at a movie theater that had Street Fighter II and some older teenagers were playing. I jumped in and realized that most of the buttons were broken, incl. fierce kick and fierce punch, and I still PWNED the dudes using only Ryu & the medium punch button.

The Street Fighter II era was the last gasp of the arcade, really-- the very thing that made them fun and exciting again for a while eventually destroyed them by eliminating species diversity. It's weird, because in a way the arcade has come full circle in its de-evolution-- the machines of the popular genres today are slightly more advanced versions of what was popular/possible during the age of the big electro-mechanical attractions. It's not all SFII's fault obviously-- improved competition from console and PC is what really did it. Arcade hasn't > the home experience for a long time, for better or worse.

Best memory: Too many to choose, really. I'll pick the first one: believing I'd won Missile Command by getting the world nuked-- it said "THE END", after all!

The arcade I play at (and play often) is actually an arcade machine shop, so I suppose it's really what Chris F called a "retro arcade". Though, I do often drive out with a friend to crappy seaside towns where they've got all the new ones.

There are so many fantastic new arcades though, they're not all dead and gone! What about the Virtua Tennis, Soul Calibur and Time Crisis series, that new Namco "Point Blank but for money" game, Outrun 2, Tekken 5, Initial D and, of course, we've got the Sega Lindbergh just on the horizon.

Is no one excited about the new Afterburner and Virtua Fighter? It looks like Sega are putting a lot of time and money back into their machines, so perhaps arcades will be on the up again soon.

yayayay im going this weekend.

I have a nostalgic love for these two Boardwalk-style arcade games. Skeeball remains classic for me, and aside from the occasional pinball machine in a bar, you don't get much opportunity to these games except in arcades. For pinball, search: Cyclone, Fun House, Addams Family, & old pinball machines, esp. baseball themed ones.

I started losing interest in arcades when they shifted the emphasis away from the games and towards the tickets and prizes. So many of the machines I see in arcades these days are just slot machines for kids. Dud.

"ooh look there's a helicopter flying off in the background how amazing"
"oooh doesn't it all just look the bloody same as all the other sega driving games"

pinball rocks. i remember a local pub having one which was themed on construction and diggers. haha it was great!

crosspost

Except for the one closest to my house, which only has one.

The Sopranos.

Which is great.

But I always took the bus to the arcade; it was a half-hour trip!

Driving games are probably the only reason to go to arcades now anyways and they're probably the biggest modern-day genre that can't be topped by a playing on a home system -- yeah, stores sell wheel controllers, but they're not bolted in place and you have to balance it on your lap. This does not work if you have a papasan chair.

http://images.webmagic.com/klov.com/images/P/cPolice_24-7.jpg

hahaha. i heard this happened all the time in south korea. real life gangs would play each other, then get into real fights after one of them got pissed off at losing.

Yep, it was really neat to have that open up, especially since it filled the niche left vacant when that arcade by the Pizza Hut closed down. I'm sorry I didn't get to go more while it was there, but I forgot before that originally Aftershock was a seedy place way the fuck out someplace way northeast of downtown, with busted retro machines in a room behind the guy's used video game sales space. I guess it was just too good to last in its State Street incarnation. Pity.

What about the Virtua Tennis
Driving games are probably the only reason to go to arcades now anyways
Gun games can't be topped by home systems either!

This is what I mean by "de-evolution"-- the days when the arcade experience was unquestionably the absolute pinnacle of the video game playing experience are long over. Shooting games, racing games, etc.-- this is what was in arcades before the video game was invented! It's sorta like what it would be like if movies went back to strictly being representations of theatrical performances, "proscenium arch" approach to mise-en-scene and all. Well, it's not quite as bad as all that, but the heart of things has moved to the home irrevocably, I think-- which is not a bad thing, mind, now that we have the internet. (And even this is an oversimplification, considering that the second video game ever invented was Space War, which totally prefigured what we have today. But for one brief shining moment a little later on the zeitgeist for video games was in the arcade-- never again.)

Pinball culture here is so strong that every dive bar/Non-Starbucks-type coffeeshop I frequent has at least 2 machines.

That's pretty sweet. Here in Milwaukee, the dive bar games of choice are fucking Golden Tee and that bullshit MegaTouch thing. I'm still very over the wanting to emigrate to Portland thing, though. (You know, I noticed that the Seattle retro arcade had a LOT of classic pins too.)

my local arcade is pretty much dance dance revolution + retro games

Yeah, this is the formula at the only semi-decent arcade (attached to a bar/bowling alley) left here in town-- a few of the simpler retro machines for the drunks, a couple newish shooting games, a fighter or two, a racing game, a NeoGeo, and DDR and air hockey, which probably get the most attention by far since they're a thing drunk couples can do together. Retro gaming as a fad/phenomenon is probably pretty dead by now though, no? I think now the appeal is simply familiarity and the fact that the things are mostly more player-friendly (certainly more drunk-player-friendly) than all the stuff melton is bigging up. Hmm. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but I think that dial-a-combo stuff (and even earlier, the more demanding experiments from Atari and Williams and the like) kinda killed arcade games accessibility-wise-- sort of like when American comic books went fan-only in the '70s and '80s. I know for sure that the world of the fighting game has become so specialized and esoteric that I have no personal interest in ever exploring it again.

"See that A-frame over there? That used to be called The Playful Quarter."

I was an arcade rat between the ages of eight and eleven. I could go around this town and point out all the places where the arcades were located. Now they're all frozen yogurt places and discount tobacco stores.

I do remember watching the junior high kids whup each other at Moral Kombat. They had television monitors on top of the consoles so that everyone could see the action. I think that's the last time that I saw any real excitement at an arcade.

There are still games that I keep an eye out for that I'd love to play again. Mappy. The trak-ball game that was kind of a cross between Pac-Man and Q-Bert where you were a bear in a castle. I miss the bootleg games like Crazy Kong.

All of my family members each had "their" game. My step-brother liked that bear game. My dad always played Frogger. My step-dad was a Q-Bert man, and my mother enjoyed a nice match of Qix.

The thing that I appreciate about Milwaukee is that there's an electronic dart board in every bar. For some reason, all we have down here are real dart boards. That might be okay for the true darts enthusiasts, but for part-time [drunk] players like me, it's nice to have the machine keep score for ya.

I never got to be an true arcade rat, unfortunately-- by the time I would have been old enough to go unattended, the big arcade blocks away from my house burned down and never reopened, since it was past the peak days of the independent arcade. But I did get to experience the magic of those places a bit, and a lot of arcade experiences are still burned in my memory, come to think of it.