I remember when the grocery stores used to have arcade games. That’s how I got pretty good at Ms. PacMan… standing on the little footstool they had, feeding a quarter to the machine… sigh
There’s this one place by my house called Parkway Bowl. It’s a combo Bowling/ Billiards/ Resteraunt/ Fun Zone/ Arcade. It’s awesome aand they have a whole section dedicated to the old school games.
There’s a pizza parlor just around the corner from my place with a few arcade games; they’ve got one of those tabletop Arkanoid games they used to have in bars!
But aside from that, I haven’t seen a good old fashioned arcade in ages.
And I used to love arcades. I’d spend my quarters on games like Tumblepop, Lagoon, Point Blank, X-Men, The Simpsons Arcade Game, Final Fight, Street Fighter II, Road Riot 4 X 4, Super Buster Brothers, and Saturday Night Slam Masters. Ah, the memories…
Oh the arcade. How i love thee. I go to my local arcade pretty much everyday. Walk over after school for a few hours, and then go on the weekends.
We have Wing War, AfterBurner, and SF2Turbo (its currently down). We also used to have gradius.
Though i miss some of the standard games, i think the current path of the arcade game industry (crazy controllers, new ideas on gameplay, looking in your direction konami/bemani) is just the next evolution. Why would you go to an arcade to play a game that you can play at home? But with these new games that use special cabinets, you can get a fresh experience, and one that in impossible to be recreated at home.
Nope. No arcade games around here. I probably was 15 or 16 the first time I went to the arcades and I don’t remember what I played. That place has considerably reduced in size since then. The last time I went to some similar place was last month in France and it was horridly expensive, so I played nothing.
We have gotten new entries in the Gradius and OutRun series in the last year. Ridge Racer got new iterations on PSP and DS. Despite how much <I>I</I> enjoyed going to arcades, the fact of the matter is that us gamers much prefer to stay indoors, so they’re just bringing our games to us.
Some people enjoy the arcade atmosphere, though. I for one kind of like the sound of 40 to 50 video game machines playing VGM and SFX in unison, drowning each other out. I could always recreate that by hooking up all my game systems together to a myraid of TVs, but it’s just not the same. 8)
The billiards hall I used to hang out at during high school had a few machines. Ones I remember are Ms. Pac Man, the Simpsons, one of those Cruis’n games, Simpsons Bowling something or other, some Tekken crap, some pinball game, and Time Crisis, Time Crisis 2, and some other Time Crisis-type game that I can’t remember.
The Santa Cruz Boardwalk has an arcade, maybe two, but I only remember one right offhand. It has a pretty decent variety of stuff, as recent as Soul Caliber II to as old as well. Something REALLY old that’s way before my time. Chuh would know more about it, I’ve only been there a coupla times. :x
If you think you’re the only one who misses 2D gaming after all the discussions we had about it, I should stab you, DG. >.>
There’s an arcade in a neighboring town that has nearly every arcade game I can think of. Gradius, Tekken, Pacman, you name it, they (probably) have it. I’m suddenly really thankful given all of these other replies. Some of my best memories are in that arcade struggling to understand Pac-Man for the first time.
There used to be a retro arcade near where I lived. I fell in love with a lot of those games in that MAME video.
Here are my favorite retro arcade games:
Black Tiger - It had great platforming action and the ability to upgrade your weapons. Also people gave you time as thanks for saving them.
APB - You had to meet your quota of arresting certain people by the end of the day. It had the announcer from Gauntlet’s voice as well.
Death Race - I wouldn’t expect anyone to know what this is. It was the first arcade game to be banned. My friend, (the owner of the arcade), got it after moths of searching. There really isn’t anything that exceptional about the game, but we found a dead mouse inside the thing! That game did derserve to be banned! :eek:
Robocop - It’s not a very good game, but it was the first game I ever beat with one credit.
Tron - I’ve never been good at it. I never will be good at it, but it’s still a great deal of fun. The Discs of Tron was originally supposed to be packaged with the game, but due to space conditions couldn’t fit. It then became a game by itself.
Mario Bros. - The mini game from Mario 3, only this this it’s expanded! I have a lot of fun with this one especially when you are playing competitively with an opponent!
There’s lots more, but I don’t want ot spend all day writing.
I actually witnessed how the old pinball machines were slowly replaced by the video arcade machines, back when I was in High School. I thought they were much cooler, thought I sucked at playing them (I did have friends who were very good with both types of machines, one of them was a pinball champion and another ruled at Galaga.) I wouldn’t start playing the games seriously until the NES came out, then I became very good at Mario and Megaman.
We used to have an arcade in town, and I would often hang there just to watch others play. I even gave quarters to some kids who were about to beat a game but ran out just short of the ending. The fighting games had the best characters- Marvel vs Capcom was my favorite, especially the Darkstalkers characters. But the best game IMHO was Dragon’s Lair, which used animation instead of computer graphics, had wonderfully crazy designs, and got you a REALLY sexy princess as a reward.
There’s a new arcade at the local mall, and it has some machines but they’re mainly the new types that DG mentioned. However, the old arcade machines can still be found at small diners around town, and they’re still popular with teenagers here.
That’s how I got pretty good at Ms. PacMan… standing on the little footstool they had, feeding a quarter to the machine… sigh
