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Best Arcade Game of All Time!
So many great titles have been named, and I haven't seen Super Mario Bros. mentioned yet. It's not the greatest game, but man do I remember where I was the first time I saw it. It was that revolutionary. Other favorites:
Mr. Do (good call, Michael)
Shinobi
Crystal Castle
Paperboy
Karate Champ (I have a version of this on iOS)
Kid Niki, Radical Ninja
Donkey Kong (the only way to play the cement factory level, none of the home versions had it)
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Could be a fun replacement to the ThrashDomes.
(I think in this case the winner will rightly be some flavor of SF:II...or Warlords!)
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Star Wars (prolly top vote)
Zaxxon
Xevious
Mr. Do (apples!)
Leprechaun
Crystal Castles
Dragon's Lair
Pole Position
Galaga
Golden Axe
Arkanoid
Karateka
Berserk
1942
Donkey Kong Jr.
Burgertime
Dig Dug
Rally X
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C'mon, you can do better than that. Enough of these lists of titles, I want to hear some stories! (Although I did love me some Xevious)
In high school I worked as a bagger at a grocery store. We'd get two 15 minute breaks and one half-hour break for every 8-hour shift. I decided to spend my breaks on Space Ace, the follow-up game to Dragon's Lair.
Soon enough, it was eating up my whole break. Then I had to grab a quick sandwich and use my hour break to play. Sometimes I'd skip the sandwich. I was determined to beat this thing. Then one day I show up to "work" and it was gone. I was devastated.
About a month later, I found it at a 7-11 not far from my house. One night I was bored. I went up there, dropped in a quarter, played the whole game through to the finish, then walked out. It was sad, lonely, and anti-climactic, but I finished the damned thing.
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- Erik Twice
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I love arcade games, but some of my favourites are far more modern than the ones you guys are talking about, OutRun 2 SP, for example is from 2004 if I recall correctly. SO I'll restrict myself to games made before 1990.
Xevious is not the best nor my favourite shooting game, but I really like Masanobu Endō's arcade games and that means I like Xevious. It has a very deliberate quality to it, the ship movement's is slow and the player has to positionate himself so as to hit the ground targets. The lack of rapid fire also means the player needs to get into range, shoot a squadron down and then move elsewhere, it's not like more modern games in which you constantly move in cricles to avoid aimed shots. Xevious Arrangement is probably the best game of the series, it's far more varied and frantic while still being Xevious but I haven't really played it much.
I tried to beat Gradius II a couple months ago, but I couldn't make it past the last level before obligations turned me away from it. It's a timeless title, really fun to play and not too difficult, learning how to beat each section is very interesting, it makes you feel like you are in this big adventure through space.
Once I beat it, I wanted to beat a Ghost'n Goblins game. I like the rawness of the original, but the sequel, Ghouls'n Ghosts is just so much fun and the reduced level of frustration (lower difficulty, better polished second loop, less quirky physics) makes it better. Neither is really as difficult as their reputation would make you believe, though, at least the first loop.
I love most Williams titles, specially Robotron and Joust. Sinistar is also great, but the difficulty and the special joystick which can't be easily replicated drives it away from being a classic.
I'm always willing to defend Dragon's Lair. It's not a great game, but the most common complaints about it are simply false, namely the idea that it's reliant on "trial and error" when it has less memorization involved than something like Mega Man or Castlevania, much less Ikaruga or Truxton.
It's more commonly known as Elevator Action Returns. Unless you own a Japanese Saturn, the best way to play it is either MAME or the DRM-heavy Taito bundles. (Or both)ZMan wrote: I have not seen or recall Elevator Action 2. And I don't know why!
It's a very good game, even if I've grown indifferent to it.
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Sagrilarus wrote: Two things really screwed video games -- Mortal Combat games and First Person Shooter games. I don't have anything against either one, but they became such an overpowering influence that games like Star Wars, Atari Football, Spy Hunder and the like with different controls and different concepts for play just got rolled out of the arcades. I remember stopping into an arcade as a 25 year old (1989 or so) and seeing one Mortal Kombat game after another, one with dinosaurs of all things, lined up in a big long row. Games with steering wheels or track balls evaporated from the industry.
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Home consoles (NES, SNES, and Genesis) were already driving the stake into public arcades before the fighting games hit the market. Zelda, Castlevania, Mega Man, etc where providing deeper experiences than any adventure game at the mall.
I'd guess that SFII and it's clones prolonged the life of traditional arcades for about 2 years.
For me, arcades were always a lot of fun. I too, enjoyed the dark, seedy vibe a lot of them gave off. It really wasn't until SFII though where you really got to 'know' the other local arcade players. I met many folks from the high schools across town down at the local arcade. No other game had a regular group of bystanders waiting around for their turn, watching, waiting, and discussing strategies of the various characters and their human operator's play style. It was a really unique time.
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My only recent arcade experience was at one of those ticket arcade places connected to a sports bar (it's since closed). My boys and I liked to play a couple of really good light-gun rail shooters: Let's Go Jungle! and Deadstorm Pirates. Pirates is better (shooting a kracken in a whirlpool with cannons FTW), but LGJ! had some really fun enemies (giant, mushroom-infested tarantula, for example).
I never had enough money to just go to an arcade for hours, except for one time when I was invited to go by one of my friends, Patrick, from high school. His dad owned this little independent, hole-in-the-wall grocery store, and he was pretty well off. He never spent his money on much of anything, other than his (only child) son. He had a ridiculous number of toys: Sega Master System, TurboGrafx-16, NES, Sega Genesis, NEO GEO, a laser disc player, and he may have also had the Sega CD. He was kind of a shit to his mom (which his dad enabled), but he was generous and funny and fun to be around.
Anyway, the point is that it was an "open bar" for me when we went to the arcade. I think the only thing we played was Magic Sword, a side-scrolling, fantasy-themed hack and slash. After defeating the final boss, you're given the choice of whether or not to take the Black Orb, the source of the final boss's power. Patrick, of course, chose to take the Orb, and it cuts to a scene showing your character sitting on a throne, looking exactly like the final boss. So what did we do then? We started over, of course, so we could see the other ending. I swear that we must have blown at least $30 on that game.
Flash-forward about 4 years, and Patrick gets into an argument with his father about him going to college, moving out, something like that. He hits his father over the head and his father, who is now bleeding from the scalp, goes across the street to his neighbor to have them call the police. Patrick takes his father's car and leaves, and the police finally catch up to him a couple states away in Indiana where he rolls it on the interstate during a high-speed chase. Info after that point is sketchy. His father is understandably reticent to talk about it, and I've yet to come up with a way to ask about Patrick without sounding like a voyeur. The only thing I've heard is that he's in some sort of group home due to him having mental illness issues.
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Xevious is not the best nor my favourite shooting game, but I really like Masanobu Endō's arcade games and that means I like Xevious. It has a very deliberate quality to it, the ship movement's is slow and the player has to positionate himself so as to hit the ground targets. The lack of rapid fire also means the player needs to get into range, shoot a squadron down and then move elsewhere, it's not like more modern games in which you constantly move in cricles to avoid aimed shots. Xevious Arrangement is probably the best game of the series, it's far more varied and frantic while still being Xevious but I haven't really played it much.
I played a lot of Xevious when it came out. For me, it had a lot of that, "Hmmm, I've never been this far on the map befo - OH SHIT!" vibe to it. Even today, when I hear Bowie's Let's Dance or China Girl, I want to play some Xevious. It's not exactly First Love or anything, but still...
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