The Namco 22 holy trinity of Ridge Racer, Prop Cycle and Time Crisis. They were on fire.
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never had change as a kid so for me arcade cabinets were part of the same lineage of “inaccessible games” as: amiga games with floppydisks missing or inscrutable copy protection systems; rental games with inscrutable controls where the manual wasn’t included in the box; playing a copy of Yoshi’s Cookie without the gun attachment and just watching the screen; pc games that took an hour to install and then would immediately refuse to load on my dad’s computer. also my cousin’s copy of FF8 on psx where i was terrified of deleting his save so would only watch the intro sequence and then wander around the hospital for a bit before turning it back off.
i think it was a good experience overall, i remember having a good time pressing buttons at random during the metal slug / jurassic park demo reels in the hopes i could somehow trick their primitive machine brains into letting me play.
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running into an mvs machine with windjammers on a cross-channel ferry was also a moment
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There was a Pancho’s buffet a couple miles down the street from our suburban Houston area home, during our family’s first stint here in the 90’s. I remember it being the first sit-down restaurant we ate at after moving in, but that is just as likely untrue. I remember only going once, and not liking it. I don’t remember ours having any arcade games.
Pancho’s was in the same shopping center as the CiCi’s pizza buffet, which we obv. went to numerous times, and that place did have a little arcade room in the back. I specifically remember them having a knock out two-punch combo of Data East also-rans: Captain America and the Avengers and Fighter’s History.
I would, in the same general time period, be visiting my godmother in our hometown during maybe my birthday or xmas, and was gifted a full-sized Simon machine. I played with it for an hour or two, but then concocted a scheme to pretend like I didn’t like it, kid-brain ‘subtly’ hint that she would probably be allowed to return it to Toys “R” Us for a full refund, which could be applied towards, oh I don’t know, a SNES game. She relented, foolishly, and drove my ungrateful butt to the Toys “R” Us where we exchanged it for the SNES port of Captain America and the Avengers with which I would shortly thereafter quickly tire of.
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dig dug is great cause the music runs when i run. only other game i know that does this is torquel
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Arkanoid, Galaga are two of my old faves. I’ll play them whenever I see them.
This one really stuck with me as a kid. I probably only played it like three times in total, but I used to daydream about it perpetually. 1989 was a wild year!
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How have I never heard of this?
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I love to hum or whistle along. And breathe heavily when the psycho pump music plays
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It was buried by the Street Fighter II craze at the time. I believe there were very minimal cabinets made for it and thus hurting any potential exposure to arcade gamers.
I think its probably my favourite arcade game just above Tempest.
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i would be remiss not to mention @azurelore’s fave, Vs. The Goonies.… i’ve actually never played it! but from binging the (extremely good) MSX version i get the sense that the famicom/arcade versions are even better
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It’s funny, I just had the brain garbage thought today:
Who remembers this classic arcade game???
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I have a high score in that one!
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I also used to like the idea and look of Stun Runner a lot, but I played it maybe once ever.
There are a lot of other arcade games I didn’t encounter too often but would play when I did, such as
- Ataxx
- Bubble Bobble
- Crystal Castles
- Darius
- Dig Dug
- Klax
- Pig Out
- Psycho Soldier (just because of the music)
- Raiden (actually, this one should go under games I played a lot)
- Robotron: 2084
- Star Wars
- Twin Eagle
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my dad fucking loves this game. i’ve seen him play for an extremely long time too. he just got on the machine at a pizza hut one time and i realized my dad is real good at centipede. he went to town on the xbox 360 live arcade release too
those fucking spiders just come out of nowhere and they are so fast, i get spooked
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I think it’s my mom’s favorite game. I can’t last too long because I’m no good at mushroom maintenance.
I love dancing with the centipede heads when they get in the operational space. Those spiders are a hoot too but they can be bastards when you’re too close to the sides. The cannonballing spore spreaders are the most frustrating thing to get merked by
Millipede adds some cool stuff, but I haven’t played much of it
I really like the separate scoring of the namco museum challenge modes.
This is some smb3 shit, I was totally unaware
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Shinin’ Queen is unironically the greatest piece of video game music ever created
I will die on this hill
I just want to hop in to remind everyone that The Cliffhanger Edward Randy is the greatest game ever made
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I have some fond arcade memories.
As a kid I used to play Arkanoid a lot in part because one quarter got me more game time then newer games did, and also because the spinner was fun! I came across an Arkanoid cabinet again as an adult and the spinner is still great fun.
On several occasions when I was young my Dad drove my Mom either to or from the airport, and my Dad and I would play Vindicators in the airport’s arcade.
At one of my favorite arcades (now closed), there was a man who would come in and play Batsugun. I never saw him play anything else, only Batsugun.
One year I was at Mikado on New Year’s Eve, and a guy came in and played Night Striker from start to finish with steel-gazed focus then smoked a cigarette in a very satisfied way when he was finished.
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Xybots guy is my favorite of those interviews.
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