oh lord. you were probably using, like, mame 0.37b5 or 0.78, then. fucking ancient shit. 0.78 is from mother fucking 2003
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That’s exactly what I thought!
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My Samurai Shodown 1 memories are that it was everywhere discerning arcade gaming was purveyed forever, Fudruckers, Bowling Alleys, The Mall, the front section by the doors in Walmarts where also one time in a Wherever Walmart there was a Sonic the Fighters cab inexplicably next to the sticky gummy hand rope vending machine, gas stations, etc.
My Samurai Shodown 2 memory, though, is that oddly I think I’ve maybe only encountered it once, at holy Mikado. I had been in there an hour or two being basically destroyed by a string of guys at 3s and then had some success in ST. As I played, and went back and forth to the change machine, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed an old guy playing Samurai Shodown 2 alone the entire time. So I, an american idiot, march up to him, tap him on the shoulder and start smiling and nodding my head and holding up my coin to his face and making like ‘put up your dukes’ pantomimes (this had worked well with others so far) but he just kinda half glanced for half a second so I kinda…did it again and then he kinda scoffed a little bit and returned back to his solitary game. ‘Oh he’s just a jerk, fine’ I think to myself as I kinda linger there. But it was then I realized I had just been mistaken and there was another short old guy on the other side of the Vs. cab that he was fighting against the whole time and the first guy just thought I was trying to pull a ‘mom said its my turn now’ and kick him off.
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Nice. Did you take any pictures?
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Star Wars: The Arcade Game with the wireframe graphics was at the now-defunct Berkeley Iceland, which is the ice rink we’d go on field trips to periodically (and my parents may have taken us like twice). It was a sit-down cab and for a Star Wars-obsessed kid it was an absolute dream. I can still remember the thrill the first time that I cleared a wave and the game restarted only harder.
Golden Axe was outside of the general store in the tiny resort town of Pinecrest. My family has a cabin on the far side of the lake and when we were staying up for an extended period of time, like two-three weeks at a time, my mom would have me hike across with a rucksack and some cash so that we could get some milk, bread, and other sundries. If there was change, I’d play Golden Axe. Inseparable from the feeling of summer heat, dirt, sunscreen, and the dangerous/attractive kids that had come up to the lake from Sonora/Tracy/Oakdale.
Hard Drivin’ was at the local pizza place, LaVal’s Northside, the only game that I can remember my dad ever playing because it had a manual setup, which he said was “crappy”. This is the same pizza spot where the bands at my high school would play in their basement area (and also where we would put on our school plays), of which I can only remember one: Trout Farm. Main dude from that does jazz mostly now: https://nathanclevenger.bandcamp.com/
Cyberball was the arcade machine I played the most at the ASUC Underground, the arcade attached to the bowling alley underneath the student union at UC Berkeley. I wasn’t good enough to even do that well against the CPU and the one time I played an adult (probably a college student really) they trashed me and said “you always go to the fade pattern don’t you” which was just a real introduction to YOMI BABY.
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Weirdly I have very hazy memories of a star wars game at an ice skating rink too, But this one was in the mountains somewhere–didnt you say you went to pinecrest a lot? I want to say it was in Long Barn but I’m not sure
Anyway I wanted to list it here but in my mind it was Return of the Jedi but according to the internet the wireframe ones were only for Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, RotJ was a pixel art isometric thing
Maybe they had both?
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Rude.
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The local pool hall, Corner Pocket Billiards, for whatever reason had quite a robust rotating selection of arcade cabinets and thus all arcade games I ever spent significant time with only exist in this pool hall in my mind, even if I’ve played some of these games elsewhere.
NFL Blitz, Soul Calibur, Cruis’n World, Cruis’n Exotica, Hydro Thunder, Offroad Thunder, Arctic Thunder, Marvel vs Capcom, Marvel vs Capcom 2, Gauntlet Legends, Monster Bash, Silent Scope 2.
Down the block from my high school (which was also across the street from a pet cemetery where for a time Richard Nixon’s dog Checkers was buried), there was a beer distributor. They used to buy a bunch of pizzas from a local pizza place and resell the slices at a slight markup to the highschool kids because it was a shorter walk and thus easier to make it there during lunch break. They had a House of the Dead of machine, and that game lives there in my mind.
Conversely I’ll drop everything and play Galaga whenever I see a machine, so that one I can picture in multiple locations.
I played this only ever at my older cousin’s house, and it’s really the only place I ever played any Atari at all as a kid. The hardest level in the game is the Long Island Expressway, which is close to where I live.
Select game with game select switch. In all games, there
are ten lanes of traffic, five in each direction.
Game 1: Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, 3 A.M.
Game 2: Interstate 5, Seattle, 6 A.M.
Game 3: Santa Monica Freeway, Los Angeles, 10 A.M.
Game 4: Bayshore Freeway, San Francisco, Midnight
Game 5: John Lodge Expressway, Detroit, 9 P.M.
Game 6: The Beltway, Washington D.C., 6 P.M.
Game 7: LBJ Freeway, Dallas, 5 P.M.
Game 8: Long Island Expressway, New York City, 3 A.M.
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same brother same
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Used to be there was a time when a man could raise an entire family on the back of one or maybe two of these simple and honest grifts.
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Soul Calibur: Travis Burger
I can’t believe I forgot this one! This game was brand new but surprisingly was set up in the local 24 hour diner a block away from my high school. In the later years of high school, I had super early morning off campus classes, but on the rare days where those had days off but my main school was still open, I’d get breakfast here and play Soul Calibur. Despite what GQ says, I was never really into their food, so the game was the main draw. They also had a really shitty country centric jukebox, and it was a bad omen if that was blaring over the crazy shit the Soul Calibur announcer was spouting. Tekken 3 had recently reopened my heart to 3D fighters which I had sort of ignored since Virtual Fighter 1 at Roscoes (which I probably should have included in that list up top).
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I’ve got a strong memory of playing Marvel vs Capcom 2 at a local hockey rink my little brother played at. When I returned to that arena years later, the alcove the cabinet was in had been boarded up and painted over to blend in with the wall. Only a bit of doorway trim told you there had been something there. I like to think the cabinet is still waiting, unplugged, behind that plywood.
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only place i ever played Street Fighter (1) was at All-American Skating Center, later Stone Mountain Skates. i had SF2 at home on the SNES so it was always weird and neat seeing the first game in the wild
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Lingering guilt that I always made my parents take me to a dingy wharf arcade to play this while we were on vacation. It was just a 2D rail shooter where you fly around in a hover car but the tunnel they put around the screen of this game made it feel like actual virtual reality
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I feel like Long Island has a pretty good mix of the fancy new style bowling alleys and old school blue collar bowling alleys. Maybe a bunch of the old ones have replaced their crts with lcd panels but they still play bizarre pin animations.
A lot of them do blacklight bowling nights now to capture The Youth
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Just remembered a local Nathan’s had a pretty good arcade attached to it, and this is where a lot of the more competitive MvC2 players gathered.
There was an arcade game purveyor in the latter years that took up residence in the basement of the local flea market and my buddy and I went there a lot. We’d play Guilty Gear and he’d play a ton of Beatmania which held no appeal so I’d play R-Type Leo on the MAME cabinet while he was occupied. On the way out I’d stop at the pickle cart.
Same buddy got deep into Derby Owner’s Club at the local Dave & Buster’s so that’s another powerful association. I kinda miss that fuckin guy, another friendship that fell victim to a toxic relationship I was in during my mid 20s
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Last Friday my dad drove into town for a previously-scheduled bonding afternoon. In my recent bowling research I rediscovered that the University of Houston campus has some lanes in their student center, and they are open to the public. So Dad and I went to check it out.
Not the specific old bowl vibe, but it was nice and $4 a game + free shoes, hard to argue with that. They also had ping pong tables. And to bring it back on-topic, this lone bad boy was in the corner.
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The fucking SHRIEKING attract mode from Saint Dragon at the Concord flea market concession stand.
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Cruis’n USA and X-Men vs. Street Fighter: just outside the HEB Video Rental section inside the grocery store. Then they got rid of the video rentals, but kept the machines, then soon got rid of the machines…
Dance Dance Revolution: Le Fun Arcade out sort of the the middle of nowhere, across the street from a movie theater nobody really went to and next to a pet shop. This was our “high school arcade” because it was mostly empty and I think they put up with us.
Street Fighter II with a super faded CRT monitor: on the driveway at a garage sale, my dumb kid ass begging my parents to pay $150 for what would have been a terrible investment.
Virtua Fighter: inside the ice skating rink I finally got to go to by playing the long con and joining the school choir for a semester in 5th grade, with the express idea of getting to go ice skating for free around Christmas time. I think I played this twice and didn’t understand that it wasn’t like Street Fighter or Tekken…
CarnEvil and maybe Marvel vs. Capcom 2: some big ass arcade in downtown Dallas, maybe a Sega City? I only vaguely recall going in there. Maybe I dreamed it.
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