I also recall doing really well at silent scope. I really like the mix of finding the target and manual shooting skill. like a murderous Wheres Waldo.
Though for lightgun shooters Time Crisis 1/2 is untouched as far as I know, especially once you get into the scoring mechanics. It was a fixture of the local arcade growing up. I couldn’t DDR so I played Time Crisis. The rhythm game scene in Jax Florida was huuuuge in the 2000s. Really wish I wasn’t an angsty dork back then and had just dug into it.
The only good part of working at directv was that they had a couple of arcade games in the break room, and i had a lot of fun with Cruis’n USA, Donkey Kong 3, and Frogger. I got pretty good at the latter, to the point where I had the high score across the building. But I also think nobody was playing Frogger because they were too busy playing that golf game with the fucked up trackball
Beyond that I never really went to arcades as a kid, and mostly went to barcades as an adult to play lightgun shooters and get drunk.
this thread is inspiring me to just revisit a bunch of arcade games. other people who adore dragon buster?
this whole thing of awkward platformer with manic pace, kinda off in several aspects, it speaks to me. just enjoying having a run at this every once in a while and quickly move between stressful encounters.
also there’s a double jump in this 1984 game. is this the first instance or do we have earlier?
The Best arcades I went to was on the board walk in Miami. There open to the air was like the entire 2d mame library.
Tottaly played some loud-ass zookeeper.
I worked in a sports bar that had the Golf trackball game Golden Tee. A screw on the trackball bezel came loose and the bezel came up and this bro-dog wound back, slapped it, sliced his hand bad. Like diagonal across his whole palm. Splashed a line of blood up the screen. We cleaned it up and gave the guy the first aid kit. The other 2 bros with him insisted they be allowed to keep playing and the boss was like “what ever”.
i remember the first time i ever glimpsed a virtua fighter cabinet in an arcade. we had street fighter 2 at home, which i loved, but i had never seen anything like virtua fighter. it was one of those moments where you just stare with jaw slackened and eyes widening while your guardian tugs you away to whatever errand needs attending
I also remember seeing Virtua Fighter for the first time in '93? or maybe early '94? My older brother was in a children’s bowling league and we would tag along to the alley. They also had a Hard Drivin’ and a Star Wars. I remember my paraphrased takeaway for it, and by extension all early three dimensional polygon shape videogames was, basically, ‘this is pretty jank, really’
god i remember playing stun runner and thinking it was the most futuristic thing ever. maybe the first 3d game i’d seen? it was the most expensive game at the local mall arcade so i’d maybe get to play it once or twice. when you only had a couple bucks worth of quarters, 4 25c games sound a lot better than 1 $1 game
my actual favorite arcade memory was at the laundromat next to the vietnam kitchen in louisville (ancient SBers who made the pilgrimage to kentucky will remember this place, i think i dragged everyone there for pho at one point or another) that i’d play to kill time while my laundry was tumbling. i’m not very knowledgeable about how arcade machines decay but their raiden ii (hereafter known as Acid Raiden) was trapped in this miraculous state of near total graphics corruption while still being functionally playable. everything left weird trails all over the screen, wrong-sounding sfx would play from time to time, sometimes enemy sprites would just be totally garbled. i don’t think i ever actually cleared it even thru credit feeding since it eventually got too incoherent to play around but it was definitely a Unique Arcade Experience. sometimes i wondered if dumping it would’ve yielded a similarly gnarly rom but that’s far outside my wheelhouse i never really tried talking to them about it
with regards to early 90s 3d arcade games, i didn’t live near any arcades, so i’d see screenshots of virtua fighter and virtua racing and just think “looks like a bunch of coloured cubes, what’s the big deal?”
then i went on holiday to cleethorpes, where i saw the arcade games in motion and instantly understood what the big deal was
'95-'96 era my older brother worked at a roller skating rink. They had S.T.U.N. Runner and Virtua Racing, which were fine and good but by that time I guess the foreignness of high performance 3d had worn off and, not so many months later, they seemed antiquated. The thing that stood out to me most about Virtua Racing, at the time, was that the camera view buttons worked during the attract mode, which seemed like a smart trick.
I guess by that point we had played Daytona, so makes sense kinda.
They also had a Lucky & Wild that was functional for a brief time and it was instinctually clear that it was correct.
Probably at least in part due to their very wide availability, the trashy pre-rendered lushness of the mid-90s western oeuvre was more compelling to the neighborhood and schoolyard, and stuff like the Cruis’ns, Mortal Kombats, Killer Instincts, Area 51s, NBA Jams pierced into our peer group much deeper at the time. I mean def. the highly detailed sassy graphics, but I wonder if also the prevalence of their trade-able secrets and codes and shit was key.
I love lightgun games and arcade games with unique hardware, so my very favorites are the Time Crises and Police 911, with side dishes of LA Machineguns and its sequel
I played this game exactly once but the crazy turret with the physical HUD and the candy colored ghosts made it stick in my head forever
Absolutely adored this machine and the game with its light tactical elements
I guess all this proves is I really love PSX style mid 90s 3d
I think those '80s machines just have banks and banks of socketed RAM chips and they can physically fail, so you can get garbage data piling up in a way that doesn’t touch or break the rest of the game
In the town I grew up in, there was a pool hall. Corner Pocket Billiards. I think after it shut down it has since been a grocery store, a dollar store, now it’s a BJJ dojo which I’m not sure is even in business anymore. Anyway, in the back of the place they always had a rotating selection of arcade games. Through those games, I made a pretty good buddy who was one of my most steadfast Gamer Pals for many years.
I used to play Hydro Thunder and various Cruis’n’ games a lot there, because I was good at them and a lot were set to allow you to play additional races as long as you kept on winning. When some of my friends worked the day shift at the pool hall we figured out how to pry up the control board on the NFL Blitz machine so we could flick the switch to add credits and play for free. For some reason I always played as the Miami Dolphins.
A much older dude threatened to kick my ass if I kept beating him in Soul Calibur but I beat him anyway. I’m pretty sure that guy is in jail for unrelated shit nowadays. A girl I had a years-long crush on (though perhaps these feelings for her were just a pretense to allow me to justify never pursuing a real relationship with another girl – a story for another day) told me that she though Kilik was sexy and I was quite jealous.
Marvel vs Capcom 2 was by far the game I got the most serious about, there. Enough that me and aforementioned gamer buddy took our show on the road to play against various other people in what amounted to the local “scene”. I was probably the worst, but also I refused to use high-tier characters.
It was also here that Monster Bash became my favorite pinball cabinet.
One of my bosses/good friends owns an SF2 Hyperfighting cabinet. Back before everyone got old and married and had kids we used to work on cars at his house and drink beer/smoke cigs while playing it. He was/is insanely good at that game. He used to drive to New Orleans in the 90s to challenge people for money. He wore a glove when he played so you knew he was serious.
as a kid i lived like an hour away from a quiet little seaside town we’d go on day trips (and most years a summer holiday) to quite often, they had a couple of little arcades that were always really, really well stocked and i read way too many magazines so i knew what to look out for. some highlights:
they always had a ton of fighting games, world warrior was the single coolest thing i’d ever seen in my life when i was barely tall enough to reach the controls. in ~94 they had this really nice pair of sitdown setups with huge screens and speakers - one super turbo, one mk2. every year they’d have whatever the current hot fighting games were in here, alpha 2, the early vs games, 2nd impact, tekken tag etc.
there was always one of those four cart mvs setups and i can vividly remember watching two kids burn through the original metal slug
house of the dead always had a huge crowd when it first dropped and one year i was working on trying to 1cc die hard arcade but that never happened
by i think 2001 it was all fruit machines and ufo catchers, welp
I ordered a Naomi 2 the other day so I can have Virtua Fighter 4 Final Tuned and slightly better versions of what I already own on Dreamcast. If you have the right setup with a Net Dimm, you can load Naomi games onto the system from a PC or Raspberry Pi, giving you access to the entire library.
I’ve been looking further into Sega arcade games that I missed and also looking into what it takes to collect this hardware and it is rather sad. Sega had two pieces of hardware, Hikaru and Chihiro, that had issues in the factory. Hikaru in particular, they forgot to tin the pads on the ICs and now because of corrosion, Hikarus are so brittle that they are impossible to ship or transport anywhere, and even a bump to the arcade cabinet can break the CPUs. Repair would require an extensive reball setup which would be thousands of dollars.
And this sucks big time because Nagoshi (Yakuza, Super Monkey Ball, Daytona) directed a sequel to Space Harrier that was on the Hikaru and it looks incredible!
Hikaru emulation isn’t really there and currently the game will freeze in Demul at the start of the third stage. There is really no proper way to play the game!
Virtua Cop 3 is one on Chihiro that I’ve tried and it is excellent. I was always more of a HotD guy but VC3 just feels right to play. You can actually play this one on your Xbox but you need to solder an additional 64MB of memory to the console so it matches the Chichiro’s specs (which were modelled after the Xbox). This is tricky and I’ve seriously considered doing it but I believe the Madcatz lightgun for the Xbox isn’t properly wired to match all the buttons of the arcade lightgun so oh well!
There definitely aren’t the only cases and maybe I’ll rant about others in this thread later but they are prime examples of games that are not only unavailable on modern hardware, but can’t really be enjoyed in any form today because you can’t emulate them, they never had any ports, and collecting the arcade hardware is not only hard to track down and expensive as hell, but requires extensive technical experience and in the case of Planet Harriers IS A TICKING TIME BOMB that could die at any time.
I can’t think of a company with more unported gems than Sega. They were the kings of the arcade and so much of their stuff is trapped there. Obviously light gun tech on LCDs is not currently there in the case of VC3 but I hope that someday we’ll get these games in another format.
I have not played Golly!! Ghost! but I have played Namco’s other tactile gun game, Quick & Crash.
This game is incredible. The cheesy announcer, the pulse-pounding music, the anticipation between rounds. The round doesn’t start until you pull the gun out of the holster, so you can’t preemptively line up your shots, and if you run out of bullets then it’s the end of the game, so you have to play your shots conservatively.
And that cup at the end. Every time I show someone this game they gasp at the cup. There is no higher graphical fidelity than watching this cup explode. How do they do it? When you shoot the cup it is pulled down and then pieces of a broken cup are thrown up in the air in the same spot. It’s magic.
You can actually play this one at home, in the PS2 port of Time Crisis II. But without the holster sensor and the physicality, the game loses all weight.
