Be Excellent To Each Other

I have been in 5 arcades today for a total of nearly 3 hours. Did my head in.

We had to take Mrs Chinny In Law to Southsea to play on the 2p machines. I scoured each arcade looking for something decent. Despite Southsea having a huge amount of arcade space, not much to see.

I scoured the place for 80's stuff but nothing there. The best I could manage was to wistfully stand in the place the Space Harrier moving cab used to be and think of the memories.

The best that could be managed were a load of beaten up 90's Sega games that I have on my Dreamcast and that look and play exactly the same on the aforementioned console. Crazy Taxi doesn't have much appeal when it's played on a knackered CRT and I have it at home anyway.

So what of the new games? There was a new Afterburner. However the problem is that frankly the graphics on the Xbox blow away anything I saw all day. The entire point of going to the arcade was that you could see stuff that you'd never see on a home system in a million years.

Perhaps the arcade machine companies should make some games that have better graphics than you can get at home? Just a thought.

I think they've realised that would be a waste of money to try and keep one step ahead of consoles. The focus seems to be on games with custom controllers and sit-down cabinets to try and give you a game of something that you're unlike to find on a console. It used to be DDR machines all over the arcades of North Wales but than be done at home now too.

There are *some* classic arcades with both old fruit machines and old arcade games but they are few and far between.

Most arcades are filled with 5p / £5 jackpot fruit machines and knackered gun games with a section cordoned off for the £500 and £70 fruit machines.

It depends what your looking for - but 'new' games are just not really there - if i was going to the arcade by the sea around here i'd have probably gone further along to Haling Island where (last time i was there) they had a whole section of the arcade dedicated to pinball tables (around 10 or so in a row) but i've not been there in a few years - in the other direction theres the Arcade Barn in devon http://www.arcadebarn.co.uk/ (about 3 hours away from here - i've never been but each time i look on the website i want to go *now*)

Don't forget you can play old fruit machines (including some really old ones, like, early 80s) via Fruit Machine Emulation!

Arcades are awful these days, I went to Blackpool a few years ago expecting to have a fun-filled day out only to find that nearly all my old favourite arcades had either closed down or metamorphised into gambling dens, with £5 jackpot machines for the next generation of addicts, and the £25/£500 jackpot (as it was then) machines for the over-18s.

I don't think I managed to find a single interesting/classic video game anywhere I went - just the big £1 a go 'showcase' games where you get about two minutes no matter how good or bad you are.

I guess it hasn't got any better since.

Fleetwood Pier RIP

The man in the photo looks like he may kill again.

But that place looks aces. Can't see the opening hours on there.

Also says its available for parties, that's a BEEX meet if ever I saw one.

The last time I had any fun in an arcade was about 4 years ago on the Isle of Wight in Sandown. On the pier, especially, there were at least some decent machines and some older ones too. You could practically watch the fruit machines encroaching on the video machines space though.

The problem with arcade games nowadays is that they can't really offer anything you can't get at home. To try to make a distinction manufacturers build these massive hydraulic cabinets which, effectively, are nothing more than theme park rides. The added complexity makes these machines extremely expensive and also unreliable, and if you owned an arcade you probably wouldn't want to blow £30k on a video "ride" that you may not see your money back on when you could buy 20-30 fruit machines for the same money.

If Sega, Namco et al got a bit smarter and made their video machines award prizes (like quiz machines in pubs) you might see a small resurgence in the arcade market, but probably not much - and that market is fraught with difficulties involving HMRC. For the likes of Sega etc. they almost certainly make far more money from software sales on home consoles than they ever could from arcade hardware, which is notorious for its tight margins.

Quite how arcades still thrive in Japan I don't know, but the memories of our youths are likely to become extinct in the near future.

The last time I was at an acceptable-looking arcade, I discovered a miserably grotty R-Type II cabinet with fucked sticks, and stormed out almost in tears, slipping slightly on a crisp wrapper just outside the doors. I felt thwarted, and wanted the entire planet to explode.

Well I still enjoy myself every time I visit the Trocadero arcade.

I hope it is still there as I plan a visit soon. It has old classics and new machines (or it had).

Yeah, it's still there and over 500 games! http://www.funland.co.uk/entertainment/Games

A couple of years ago I almost exploded with excitement at the sight of a non moving sit down Outrun cab.

However the gearshift was fucked.

They had one of those 3 years ago in Skeggy. It'd disappeared by the next year

I remember that well into the mid-to-late 90s you could go to Blackpool and still find the big versions of After Burner, Out Run, that massive ridiculous 360 degrees version of Galaxy Force, the even more ridiculous G-Force thing you had to properly strapped into, banks of old video games, shooty games, jetski games, pinballs, driving games, you name it.

You could see it all dying a death by degrees as the gambling took over, until that fateful visit I made (2004 or so I would think) when it was totally depressing.

I guess the old stuff gets moved on when it finally breaks and/or stops making money - but I suppose a gang of chavs pumping £5 jackpot fruit machines with pound coins can make more cash per square metre than people who remember going to arcades to be genuinely entertained for the investment of a few pounds......

BEST USE OF SPARE ROOM EVER!



Jealous is not the word!

They've got Thunder Cross II!

We went there as a Beex meet after seeing Watchmen at the IMAX.

I still have a video somewhere of Gaywood taking on Grim... at some weird horse riding game. It looked from a distance like one of them was on a shire horse and the other a Shetland pony...

In relation to the thread title, try offering the plump girls cigarettes and lambrini.

I think a lot of the problems people are mentioning in this thread are down to liking things that are old and rubbish, like.

Did I just hear Chinny starting up his C5 with a flick knife?

*dances snakelike inside pentagram markings, bellowing RRoD curses*

I hesitate to link directly to them but is seems that has been having some similar thoughts recently

from WOS blog

Why cant you buy a 'new' classic arcade cabinet

http://wosblog.podgamer.com/2010/03/14/ ... #more-2234

What happened to arcades

http://wosblog.podgamer.com/2010/03/15/ ... #more-2074

Ooh no. Not falling for that one again.

Oh come on Klatrymadon even drew the pentagrams out with real human blood n stuff.

Next thing we'll know is that we'll be stuck on top of a gothic apartment block in New York carrying proton accelerators as a huge flattop slowly crawls up the side of the building.

Sorry to go a tad OT but is GTI club emulated yet? if so, can someone please help me get it running?

Gosh that game has to be on my top five desperate to play at home games.

No thanks.

You don't want to not get Aids?

I was originally going to say to play it you would need a ridiculously overpowered machine then realised who i was talking to :-)

From the various websites for MAME it seems its in there and 'works' however i guess the only real way to know if it works correctly and at more than 1 frame a second is going to be download and try it

Thanks M. I got the roms (well I think I have) and they're 11mb or something. Seems too small..

Thing is I know that Mame changed their rom lists by the second so I am no doubt going to need to find a specific emulator.

For 'new' stuff there are the roms (which 11mb is probably about right for) and then there is the hard disk from the machine (which in MAME will be a CHD file) which will be a few hundred meg.

You'll need both , and an uptodate or optimised version of MAME - at work so cant check now but can have a quick look around tonight - otherwise sort out the CHD file and any newish MAME and give it a go.

Ahhh kinda like KI then? SF3 used a CHD too.

I'll have to dig for that. No doubt it'll be torrent being that big

(Linda - Ed) has a point. But I doubt the big games companies actually have the code or templates. You'd be surprised what gets thrown out from companies once something is no longer commercially viable.


As a side note, this is an important post. One more post and I enter a dark place. Possible madness awaits and a flouncing may be immanent. I'll have to think about this........

I should really pop into Fleetwood's other arcade near the ferry terminal. Saw and played on my first R-Type, Darius (3 screens wide!), Super Sprint and Gauntlet cabs in there. I have a strong feeling it will be gamblers only though now...

I remember that 3-screen cab - shame the game looked pretty dull and didn't really seem to make much use of the extra screens. Was it Ninja Warriors that also used 3?

Yeah, it did.

Loved that game.