games you played today 12 times the fun and the excitement!

[captainlove]

I played a bunch of arcade games at Royal Game Centre in Umeda, Osaka still going strong.

Raiden

Decent, held back a bit by the need to mash for semi-automatic fire. Found it very easy to be caught out by the colour-changing weapon drops and accidentally switch when I meant to upgrade.

Diet Go Go

Really weird Marios Bros.-y thing where the goal is to inflate enemies and then kick them to ricochet around the screen. Taking damage makes you fat. Collision detection and any main movement makes it so that it’s very easy to get hemmed in. A game where you can really feel your bounding box. Feels like the kind of game where the beginning concept was food, and strange politics around becoming fat and losing weight emerged from designers trying to get an arcade game out in time and having to stick closely to the theme on the whiteboard.

Dodonpachi

The best game I played. Felt the most compelled to continue and did so many times. It just feels so good to fire a big spread of bullets or a thick laser charge. Felt the shift from Raiden, Dodonpachi a lot more about dodging given how big the spread of your ship’s fire is. Target acquisition was more of a politeness. Looked incredible too. Gotta collect those big stars.

World Heroes Perfect

There were a lot of fighting games there, almost all of them certainly better. So, I opted to play the thing I probably would never see again. Besides, this arcade visit was secretly a a hand recovery diagnostic and I didn’t want to stress things too far. My usual fighting game go to is ‘the tomboy’ so I picked Ryoko and got destroyed by the first CPU. I got the super off though and isn’t that really what fighting games are all about?

Cadillacs and Dinosaurs

Serviceable beat-em up. I’m sure there are like 40 YouTube video essays that make fun of the title. I certainly heard the three hit combo sound effect quite a lot. Dinosaurs seem to be an optional/neutral enemy that you can fight if you want? I saw a Cadillac for all of two seconds. Very generous with weapons which I liked.

Zooo: Action Puzzle Game

A game I’d never seen before. It’s just animal themed match three but has a nice boxy art style that drew me to the cabinet. When you run out of time the little animal faces start to tremble.

Metal Slug X

I realised I’ve never enjoyed the classic GameCenter CX pleasure of playing Metal Slug out in the wild. MISSION COMPLETE.

Idol Mahjong Final Romance 2

I’m not sure if sexy mah-jongg cabinets are a mainstay at most old school Japanese arcades but they certainly were at this one.

I think the interface is what fascinates me most about these since you have so many buttons representing the tiles in a hand. There’s like 14 buttons in a row! It feels excessive and yet I get it. These games introduce a very strict timing rhythm to ensure you can’t spend all day thinking about your turn. You got like five seconds to choose your discard tile and do anything else like make a pon or chi from the opponent’s discard. I get that these games really do 1v1 mah-jongg for the sake of having a sexy opponent to focus on but I really think a lot of other mah-jongg mini games in things like Yakuza could stand to have a 1v1 mode to ease people in if they’ve never played the game before. I managed to win couple of hands reading the basic Japanese of the control scheme, but I had no idea what I was doing lol.

No young mah-jongg pros will be disrobing.

Mahjong Hot Gimmick Integral

I tried another one to get a sense of how similar these games are. This one is just fucking slow. The game went on endlessly and It was time to leave. Probably the most eye-catching cabinet given the art style does a not-3D morph deform on the ladies’ chests. Very unclear when I was allowed to input to make bets or interfere with my opponent’s discard. It was taking so long I discarded the cabinet itself.

Another stop was to make pilgrimage to the Tekken Museum at one of the Namco arcades in Namba. Sadly, it has been shutdown and the guy manning the UFO catchers was very apologetic about it. The Namco arcades only seem to have those Gundam cabinets that feel like they’re tied to some sort of inscrutable app or card game. The rest is just gacha, carnival prize plushies, and bishoujo figures. I wasn’t expecting much from the museum but it was unexpected how genuinely sad the staff seem to be about my consolation prize - looking at the thin line of adolescence.

[smbhax]

Oh whoa I didn’t know there was an arcade version of ZOOO.

[boojiboy7]

@GherkinForce

I mostly played it with the music set to X64K, which seemed like the best option

I’m pretty partial to the PC-88 version , but I really wish it has the Mega Drive version on it, because that one is so good. The X68K version is pretty great though.

[GherkinForce]

Yeah I was surprised there was no Mega Drive version either, or PC Engine. I assume they decided to just have one 8-bit and one 16-bit version. I was listening to the Mega Drive OST while working yesterday, I think I still prefer the X68K version slightly more, but it’s pretty good.
The modern soundtrack is good too, but it has too much of the standard anime energetic violins that everything from the last decade seems to have.

Hoping the recent Memories of Celceta Switch release gets an english language release too

[hellojed]

Played Ecks Vs Sever for the GBA on the plane. a decent first person shooter that runs at an ok frame rate. Sniper controls are goofy. it sort of works. I’m impressed what they could do. L and R strafe, which is the correct thing to do for controls imo. You mainly shoot cops and agents. Each level had a different gimmick.

maybe I’ll try Doom for the GBA i bet that’s the optimal way

[VastleCania]

the worst thing about DOOM for the GBA, and there are a lot of really bad things, but the worst thing is that the music is assigned to the wrong levels. starting E1M1 and hearing the music from E1M2 is incredibly jarring

[Kilroy]

26 missions left to get an A rank or better in for MGS V. Currently at 80% completion. Might do that then stop there. 100% seems annoying.

[boojiboy7]

IIRC, the PC-88 and the X68K ones were the only ones they released albums of, so that might be why it is just those two, for ease of access.

I do know they released the Sorcerian Mega Drive OST though, which rules.

[Sykel]

WITCHAVEN

Capstone, AKA Crapstone, were known for their shoddy licensed games and the occasional shoddy original game. Well here they made a game that’s ALMOST good! And then were promptly shut down after the sequel.

Based on a tabletop RPG I’ve never heard of, this uses an early version of the Build engine and is about a knight sent off to take out a big tiddy goth witch. Sometimes she’ll randomly show up and smack you around if you’re into that sort of thing.

The big things about this game are that it focused on melee combat, and it has some light RPG stuff such as…

• spells, offensive/defensive ones, plus ones that let you fly or open otherwise key-requiring doors… could make this a good speedrun game. I didn’t end up using the offensive/defensive ones much because you don’t get many and they’re clunky to use.
• potions which are basically drinkable spells. These give you buffs or cure poison and such. Useful, easy to use, and they are all over the place.
• Weapons have durability! Eventually they’ll break (after a warning) and you’ll have to find another one. Really annoying in the early game, but eventually become easy to replace… or rather, the short sword becomes easy to replace and you’ll be using that for most of the game.
• There is experience! After collecting enough items and killing enough enemies, eventually you’ll gain a level (8 is the max). This lets you hit harder, access higher level spells, spells/potions last longer, and you can dualwield (kind of).
• Other little stats here and there.

These all add some nice depth, though it’s still very much an action game first and foremost. Still, leveling up and being able to do more feels nice, and some of the items you find let you fight tactically like going invisible or using a fire protection spell to easily wipe out otherwise deadly fire demons… this also helps the combat from getting too boring too quickly…

Because the combat in here kinda blows! Since almost everthing is melee (aside from some spells and a bow), it’s a whole lotta running towards an enemy, timing your mouse click so your weapon will collide with them, then running back before they attack you. All the RPG stuff manages to keep it interesting for a while, plus the variety of enemies, but eventually I just started running past most enemies (especially weaker ones) as it just felt like a waste of time. To make matters worse, some weapons have two different kind of swings, each with different timings… and you can’t pick which one you use.

There are lots of other annoying things too… hard to see instakill traps, not being able to drop a weapon to pick up a newer one unless it’s already blunt, using spells during combat is WAY too fiddly, most of the game is way too dark and the nightvision spell doesn’t help at all, there are enemies that DRAIN your level, and so on. Oh, and make sure you don’t waste your “open door” spells before level 5, because you need one to get past that level due to a glitch.

HAVING SAID ALL THAT… until about halfway through, I was having a lot of fun with this. Well, not at first because the controls took some getting used to, especially movement since your character feels so heavy and tends to take too many steps forward. BUT once I got used to that, I enjoyed the weighty movement and combat, I enjoyed the claymation enemies, I enjoyed how grim dark and gory the world was, I enjoyed how the levels felt like deathtrap filled dungeons dangerous to explore, I enjoyed how you had to find a pentagram then the exit to finish a level making many rather non-linear/open maps which I could exploit with flight… there are also lots of cool little features/details like being able to make stairs by shooting arrows into a wall. I was having a great time for the most part!

But yup, around halfway you’ve seen everything the game has to offer, and it starts to feel repetitive and the levels become too big and annoying, and all the little problems start to really add up.

So yeah, enjoyable with caveats for about half of it, then it frankly becomes a bit of a slog.

NOTES: I looked up a speedrun… under 20 minutes to beat, mainly thanks to just running past every enemy and NOT making lots of use of flight/open-door/arrow stairs as I had hoped…

SECOND NOTE: An “updated” version of this is available, that makes the controls much more accessible and responsive… but the game also loses the weighty feel in the process. It also makes the game TOO bright, making the game lose some of the grimdark appeal. It plays better for sure, but loses some of the game’s soul.

[lune]

this is a really interesting post to me, since it seems like you don’t have a lot of arcade knowledge and you just happened to play a bunch of iconic and well-regarded games by accident

[captainlove]

Yeah, my knowledge of arcade games is very second hand. I’m aware of the acclaim of some developers and have seen many of these through documentary form or reading about them but don’t have any firsthand contact with a lot of it. I think the selection was very curated so whoever runs the place is obviously trying to keep regular arcade-goers happy in a city that otherwise doesn’t really cater to that anymore. The only arcades I grew up with were like London Trocadero or some random arcades abroad. DDR, Time Crisis, and Daytona are what I think of when I think arcade of my youth in the UK.

I think there’s something about this kind of arcade that also means it’s relatively hard not to have a good time. Even if you spend your money on something that sucks it’s still a relatively novel experience for someone like me and adds to the flavour of the place. I don’t tend to stick with one machine very long either so it fits my fickle sensibilities. I’d compare it to trying out a whole bunch of demos except that you are investing some money and getting the ‘full’, intended experience. I have a follow-up post I should do about Silver Ball Planet as I did not grow up with pinball games either and my firsthand knowledge is limited.

[Rudie]

Godddddd I got to get to Silver Ball Planet some time.

[Sakurina]

@captainlove

Another stop was to make pilgrimage to the Tekken Museum at one of the Namco arcades in Namba

Dunno if you’ve been already, but I think the only Tekken museum left in Namco arcades is the one in Sugamo, Tokyo. They were advertising Tekken 8 (Steam) cabs there when I was last in Japan.

[captainlove]

Oh I didn’t know, thanks for the tip! Hopefully it remains open until I get back to Japan again.

[drastic_bb]

Sanvein ザンファイン - ALL - 93.131,1pts - Inner Ward route - Gluon Body & Photon Parts

i had a random urge to play sanvein ln… this game is so cool. also one of the least afraid of ripping off neon genesis evangelion’s graphic design games ever

really admirable nonstop flood of semi-abstract graphics and awesome sound design, it was almost released as an arcade title, developed by success corp of cotton and psyvariar fame but instead got released as a simple series title in japan and an agetec budget title in the usa. the US and japanese releases seem nearly identical and this is one that is probably destined to be a future cult title that goes way the fuck up in price when some idiot youtuber learns about it idk

the basic way it works is that your power increases on a floor based on how many adjacent floor tiles you’ve cleared on the hexagonal grid up to 6, so you’re balancing this factor against the constantly running timer with time extensions for every boss floor cleared

recommended for fans of raycrisis, einhander, g-darius, r-type delta…

[wourme]

That was a great line of games. They cost next to nothing and had the genre name bigger than the actual title just to avoid any confusion.

[extrabastardformula]

AstroAquaKitty is on sale on Switch so I picked it up. The first game was very much like Fantasy Zone with In the Hunt aesthetics. This is not that. It reminds me a lot of the NEs Cobra Command game. It’s level based with exploration within the levels but once you’ve cleared them it time to move along. There’s xp and a shopping mechanic which are just sort of there, not really ugly enough to get in the way of enjoying the game unless maybe if you were going to speedrun it. Seems fun so far, though the tutorial level has so much talking. video is not mine but is here as demo of what the game is.

Astro Aqua Kitty Nintendo Switch Gameplay

[iguferon]

I installed a music mod for Tales of Maj’Eyal for variety’s sake but it’s someone doing arrangements inspired by JRPG songs, and so many of them are based on Breath of Fire III, so I think I should probably play that because it seems like the music kicks ass

[spacetown]

omg yeah i remember these…we had the weird rpg board game adventure one that i don’t remember the name of it was wild

[wourme]

If it wasn’t Top Shop it was probably Culdcept. Would have been too early for Price of Flight.