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Problem with arcades right now is I haven't found a good middle ground. Everything I've seen is either pinball/80's Atari arcade games and the like, or Dave & Busters-style shooters and racers. I miss the days of big old arcades that had a bit of everything, especially fighting games. I'm a filthy casual and I don't play fighters online or have my own fightstick or anything, but I really miss playing Street Fighter and whatnot at an arcade. When I was in China a few years back there were arcades everywhere that were amazing, brand-new cabinets for the latest SF and Tekken games, old-school sit-down cabinets for King of Fighters and such, and a whole separate room for rhythm and music-type games, etc.
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Sep 10, 2016 20:46
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Problem with arcades right now is I haven't found a good middle ground. Everything I've seen is either pinball/80's Atari arcade games and the like, or Dave & Busters-style shooters and racers. I miss the days of big old arcades that had a bit of everything, especially fighting games. I'm a filthy casual and I don't play fighters online or have my own fightstick or anything, but I really miss playing Street Fighter and whatnot at an arcade. The few places in Portland are kind of like that. A good middle ground. They have a fair amount of 80s games, some pinball, and a couple of newer things too. Mostly centered around things you can do with other people, which is great because it dovetails nicely into a lifestyle of PC gaming, where you don't sit down in front of the same screen very often. I think the barcade that invests fully in nostalgia will die quickly from a lack of people consistently going there. The barcade that invests in the ultra modern arcade cabinets won't make enough money. But if you find a happy medium and offer events (like pinball tournaments, constant high-score tournaments touted on social media, nerd-focused drink and trivia), you can do well. I've never seen Ground Kontrol empty after 4, for example. And on a Friday night around 8 it's positively packed.
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Sep 11, 2016 19:03
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Three-Phase posted:Some of those old arcade cabinets were absolutely awesome as far as how they were built and designed. I used to have one of these:  .Good times. How I miss that old beast. I hope some arcade hobbyist has it and is giving it the love it deserves.
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Sep 11, 2016 23:01
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SquadronROE posted:The few places in Portland are kind of like that. A good middle ground. They have a fair amount of 80s games, some pinball, and a couple of newer things too. Mostly centered around things you can do with other people, which is great because it dovetails nicely into a lifestyle of PC gaming, where you don't sit down in front of the same screen very often. It's really about the market and location. People will say that they love barcade-style stuff but really, they're only going to go occasionally. You have to have the walk-in traffic and new blood to keep it going - you aren't going to have regulars the same way a cocktail or local dive bar will.
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Sep 11, 2016 23:52
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SquadronROE posted:The few places in Portland are kind of like that. A good middle ground. They have a fair amount of 80s games, some pinball, and a couple of newer things too. Mostly centered around things you can do with other people, which is great because it dovetails nicely into a lifestyle of PC gaming, where you don't sit down in front of the same screen very often. Ground Kontrol in Portland is indeed cool good and I wanna say most everything in there is 25c and generally working. Hell they even got one of those crazy Tetris grand master machines after all the noise about those were being made. It is as loving hard as it looks if you've ever seen it in action. but someone else was right it's not something I do too regularly, but when I'm there at night it's never fully empty. Plus they are smart and have a couple nights a month in the middle of the week that are $5 entry but everything is free play. Course everyone instead drinks & eats bar food while the place is so packed there is a line going out the front.
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Sep 12, 2016 00:12
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LethalGeek posted:Ground Kontrol in Portland is indeed cool good and I wanna say most everything in there is 25c and generally working. Yeah everything is $.25 except for a couple of the machines. Pinball is usually $.50, with the really new stuff being .75. I never feel ripped off. They get a massive amount of walk-by traffic during the week and weekends. Their current competition is Quarterworld. Little walk-by traffic, a larger number of games (most of which are .50, but some are up to $1) but some are broken, and there's a cover. I seriously don't think it's gonna make it in the long run. It's just too expensive for what it is.
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Sep 12, 2016 19:13
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Problem with arcades right now is I haven't found a good middle ground. Everything I've seen is either pinball/80's Atari arcade games and the like, or Dave & Busters-style shooters and racers. I miss the days of big old arcades that had a bit of everything, especially fighting games. I'm a filthy casual and I don't play fighters online or have my own fightstick or anything, but I really miss playing Street Fighter and whatnot at an arcade. I guess I should feel lucky to live in New England, it seems like all the big arcades around me have a really good mix. Joe's Playland in Salisbury, MA, while definitely teeming with little rear end kids during the summer, has a second floor with tons of classic cabinets and machines. Surprisingly there aren't any good photos of the place, but they do have this: 
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Sep 12, 2016 19:45
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About 10 years ago we saw sort of a boom in places that had a bunch of consoles and PCs, comfy chairs, and would let people play games by the hour on those systems. It was probably at its height when Rock Band/Band hero were big as you'd have a big 55" TV, and audience and a lot of room and no one cared how loud the music got. This was after the more or less death of arcades, though. Even they vanished before the WiiU, PS4 and XBone launches, if I recall.
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Sep 12, 2016 20:00
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For the few years that large, high definition TVs were expensive and reliable high speed internet was rare, gaming cafes/lounges/whatevers were definitely A Thing. Cheaper TVs and better internet killed them off. There's a holdout in Seattle called PLAYlive Nation up by Northgate, I have no idea how they stay in business. Arcades and pinball are surely making a comeback which is pretty nice. I don't mind that they're pandering to a generation of nostalgia addled nerds. There's something nice about the tactile nature of old school arcade and pinball games.
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Sep 12, 2016 20:58
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JediTalentAgent posted:About 10 years ago we saw sort of a boom in places that had a bunch of consoles and PCs, comfy chairs, and would let people play games by the hour on those systems. It was probably at its height when Rock Band/Band hero were big as you'd have a big 55" TV, and audience and a lot of room and no one cared how loud the music got. This was after the more or less death of arcades, though. There was one of those in my town in the Genesis/SNES era, not sure when it closed.
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Sep 12, 2016 22:31
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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It's too bad you guys aren't as old as me because in the 1970s you could still find pinball machines going back to the 1950s. They'd be in some forgotten spot, like the rec room of a Holiday Inn. My dad would be stoked since they were the ones from when he was a teenager. Although I played my first video arcade game around 1971 (Computer Space) electro-mechanical ones were the most common. This video is lousy but it's of a machine I played plenty of times back in the early seventies. It had a rifle stock as a controller and you'd take shots at little mechanical animals flitting back and forth across the playing field. It's hard to believe that something so hokey came out the same year as Computer Space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz5NJGuuzNs It wasn't until around 1978 that video games really took over, pushing the old fashioned ones to the periphery. Digital upgraded pinball machines were still going strong when I was in college (God knows how many quarters I poured into ones like "Whirlwind" but the mechanical ones faded away until they took on a retro cachet. EDIT: Heh, found a video of Whirlwind. Best part is when the fan on top of the cabinet starts to blow on you as the twister arrives. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb-HoYSb9FY
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Sep 12, 2016 22:48
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I'd love to play an original Wild Gunman cabinet that used 16mm film.
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Sep 12, 2016 22:52
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Instant Sunrise posted:I'd love to play an original Wild Gunman cabinet that used 16mm film. There were film based quickdraw games in the 1970s. You might be familiar with those. The gunman's eyes would flash and that was your cue to draw and fire. One had a pistol, another cabinet had a rifle and during one sequence you'd fire at a row of bottles. Around 1977 I played a film arcade game that featured Japanese Zeros flying across the screen and a mini .30 cal machine gun. I loved that game since it came out around the same time as the movie Midway. EDIT: D'oh! We're talking about the same thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzxcsaIxaZg Dick Trauma has a new favorite as of 22:58 on Sep 12, 2016 |
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Sep 12, 2016 22:54
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SquadronROE posted:Yeah everything is $.25 except for a couple of the machines. Pinball is usually $.50, with the really new stuff being .75. I never feel ripped off. They get a massive amount of walk-by traffic during the week and weekends. lol if you're running an arcade and you let games go for more than a day broken you deserve to be going broke Turdsdown Tom posted:I guess I should feel lucky to live in New England, it seems like all the big arcades around me have a really good mix. drat, I lived in Boston for 8 years and never found a place that quite scratched my itch.
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Sep 12, 2016 23:09
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How could they have a gunman game like that with film? how would it switch whatever film it had for winning or losing?
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Sep 12, 2016 23:09
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Two reels and two lenses, running in sync, light switches on win/loss? edit: I remember a very large arcade in the early 90's (now it's an indoor golf course I think) at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk that had a ton of aging machines. I think I saw Night Driving there once, and there was a large shooting gallery in a corner. Related to the gunslinger game, I believe there was also a cartoon racing game that ran on film, and when you crashed, it would somehow flip a slide that said CRASH in front of the film. It was enormous as well. doctorfrog has a new favorite as of 03:29 on Sep 13, 2016 |
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Sep 13, 2016 03:26
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I am actually so paranoid about arcade machines no longer existing in their classic form that after four years of searching, I finally found a guy who managed to find brand new 25" arcade crts. In 2007 when I began getting interested in making a MAME cabinet, you could get these Wells Gardner monitors for $50. Now only a few years later and you're looking at $400 with burn-in. I bought two of them off the guy and now I have 3 total like some kind of dorky doomsday preper. I don't even remotely regret it though because I know if I have to replace the monitor in even ten years from now, it will be literally impossible (never mind finding one new which took me four years). These arcade monitors are not the same as CRT TVs that people used to watch TV on. Using those in an arcade cabinet does not look correct (though obviously way more correct than LCD). God bless these people hell bent on preserving arcade machines because me doing it to only one was an excruciating process.
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Sep 13, 2016 03:55
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They are about to open a Dave&Buster's around here. Worth going to?
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Sep 13, 2016 04:05
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No pinball, and like I spent $120 there without blinking on lovely games and lovely food, yesterday. Do not go.
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Sep 13, 2016 04:07
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tactlessbastard posted:They are about to open a Dave&Buster's around here. Worth going to? Food is TGI Friday's quality at double the price The arcade's decent
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Sep 13, 2016 04:09
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^^I actually don't mind TGI Friday's but I found Dave and Buster's to be so much worse. tactlessbastard posted:They are about to open a Dave&Buster's around here. Worth going to? They can be OK. Good times with a date. But don't expect any decent arcade games because they are usually just loaded with crap like Fruit Ninja. Though one I went to had the rare Mario Kart arcade game so your mileage may vary. The food is absolutely horrible though and I am not a food snob. Bowling and drinking and skiball can be good fun. Not the worst place in the world. But what I wouldn't give for a barcade that had Mortal Kombat 2/3 and Killer Instinct.
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Sep 13, 2016 04:10
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Dave & Busters has all the shooting games like Time Crisis and House of the Dead if that's your thing. No fighting games and no old-school Simpsons/X-Men type beat-em-ups. I've also noticed a disturbing new trend where literally cell phone games get big-screen arcade versions that are exactly the same game. Fruit Ninja was first, nowadays you see Angry Birds and Crossy Road and Cut the Rope and poo poo.
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Sep 13, 2016 04:24
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Yeah, it was disgusting. Air hockey is always fun, though.
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Sep 13, 2016 04:25
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There was a place in NJ where I grew up that was loving incredible. Indoor blacklight minigolf, candlepin bowling, laser tag, bumper cars, skeeball, and every drat kind of arcade game you could think of. All the standard racers and fighters, and those gun games where you sat in a car like the Lost World one and poo poo. They had all the cooler less popular stuff too, like those awesome Virtual On cabinets, Star Wars Podracer, the Punch-Out arcade game where you rotate the handles like actual fists to throw punches, etc. Man I loving miss that place so much. It closed years back, right around when Dance Dance Revolution got super-popular among high school goths; I remember they brought in a few of those machines right before they closed. IIRC they also did punk and metal shows on the second floor, though the place was long gone by the time I hit that phase. also Virtual On was/is a loving awesome game and both the arcade cabinet and the Saturn/PC ports were way ahead of their time as far as fighting games went e: the worst thing is it closed so far back that I can't even find pictures of it on peoples' defunct Flickrs and poo poo, it sucks 
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Sep 13, 2016 04:30
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The only good thing about Dave & Busters is that if you are with a large group, they usually forget to give someone a bill. One time I ate for free and another time my friend ate for free. I don't really feel bad because I've probably spent enough money on drinks and lovely games to make up for it.
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Sep 13, 2016 04:42
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drunk asian neighbor posted:Dave & Busters has all the shooting games like Time Crisis and House of the Dead if that's your thing. Half of them will be broken or uncalibrated.
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Sep 13, 2016 05:04
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Dave and Busters is more or less equivalent to Chuck E. Cheese if memory serves. Both are not good. This place was good, but apparently no longer exists. Arnie's Place arcade in Westport, Connecticut. It was one of the highlights of the time I spent on the East coast as a kid. http://www.arniesplacearcade.com/aboutarnies.html
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Sep 13, 2016 05:11
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CaptainSarcastic posted:Dave and Busters is more or less equivalent to Chuck E. Cheese if memory serves. Both are not good. thank you for my new sig 
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Sep 13, 2016 05:14
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:I am actually so paranoid about arcade machines no longer existing in their classic form that after four years of searching, I finally found a guy who managed to find brand new 25" arcade crts. In 2007 when I began getting interested in making a MAME cabinet, you could get these Wells Gardner monitors for $50. Now only a few years later and you're looking at $400 with burn-in. This is basically what made me not finish my MAME cabinet. The 25" CRT that came with the cabinet itself wouldn't sync to the required rates for various games and the OS, and trying to find a WG or similar multi-scan CRT in Australia was too hard. I'll finish it one day and use an LCD instead, but I'll be dirty about it the whole time.
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Sep 13, 2016 05:20
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My local arcade had Star Wars Pod Racer and 18 Wheeler American Pro Trucker, two unique takes on racing games 
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Sep 13, 2016 05:46
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Those were both great-rear end games
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Sep 13, 2016 06:48
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CaptainSarcastic posted:Dave and Busters is more or less equivalent to Chuck E. Cheese if memory serves. Both are not good. Hooooooooly poo poo! I used to go there all the time when I was younger, it's been probably 20 years since I last even thought of it, so thanks for posting this!
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Sep 13, 2016 07:37
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there is a pretty cool story on ars technica about crazy people that still use OS 9 http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/09/an-os-9-odyssey-why-do-some-mac-users-still-rely-on-16-year-old-software/
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Sep 13, 2016 12:14
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I spy a goon being quoted in it
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Sep 13, 2016 12:59
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Uncle at Nintendo posted:These arcade monitors are not the same as CRT TVs that people used to watch TV on. Using those in an arcade cabinet does not look correct (though obviously way more correct than LCD). Is it a difference in resolution, or something else?
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Sep 13, 2016 19:53
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Is it a difference in resolution, or something else?
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Sep 13, 2016 19:55
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thathonkey posted:there is a pretty cool story on ars technica about crazy people that still use OS 9 I have a pair of G4 Towers that run it because I cannot find OS X Drivers for my Formac ProFormance 3 video card which drives my sweetass SGI 1600SW
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Sep 13, 2016 19:57
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This was mentioned in the SA sagas thread. The schadenfreude is off the loving charts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTqhyHuKVKA
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Sep 13, 2016 20:36
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To this day I'm not sure what the difference is between the Ouya and those $20 Android boxes, except the Ouya has a decent-looking controller. e: also those cheapo boxes never started a several-hundred-page thread full of hilarity as goons desperately tried to defend their sinking crapware ship
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Sep 13, 2016 20:51
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Is it a difference in resolution, or something else? Refresh rate on arcade monitors are only 15hz, also they are much lower resolution than even an SD CRT. When I tried arcade games on a standard CRT TV (like one you had in the 90s) everything had a slight fuzziness too it and it just looked wrong. Also if you go the MAME cabinet route you need a special video card so you can run Windows at 15hz and 320x240.
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Sep 13, 2016 20:56
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