THE ARCADES- So very 80′s
Arcades have been dead for a while. You can walk past them these days and just look inside with curiosity. 95% of games you play in arcades are inferior to what you could get on a PS2 though Street Fight IV shows there’s at least a pulse.
I grew up playing games in the arcades, though I was never very good at them. With my brother, we would visit the local arcades whenever we went into the City. Or when we were at a takeway with a Space Invaders machine, or anywhere that had arcade games, we were there. I recall playing lots of Donkey Kong, Rally X, Moon Cresta, Moon Patrol, Pleiades, Space Invaders, Asteroids and Space War (the only game you played on a keyboard back then- the numpad at least). These were what I enjoyed then. Platformers and Shooters. I’m still playing those sorts of games today so my personal development as a gamer has been almost zilch. Crazy Climber, Elevator Action and of course the original Star Wars game. Xevious and Time Pilot and Gyruss. Wow, that’s half of Xbox Live Arcade right there. But those new versions, the ones that I’ve played, aren’t all that great. XBLA Missile Command, is truly an abomination. But Pacman CE is a revelation. But Assault Heroes and Braid are better.
Defender was fun, but Zaxxon was ‘wow.’ Marble Madness everyone remembers, as people still fondly remember Gauntlet, but what about Atari’s Peter Pack Rat? What about Equites? My Bro loved that game so much to the point he’s still looking for a cabinet version for home.
I used to blow through my playing money way too fast to call it fun and so I stopped being drawn to arcade games in the mid 80s’. While everyone else was in a lather over Double Dragon, I looked at the games in the arcades and thought whatever the 1985 equivalent of ‘meh’ was.
Every now and then, I will still venture into the arcade and have a quick go of a light gun game. I still remember the image of a young man playing with Infant in one arm and clacking light gun pistol in the other. Last time I went into an arcade it was a friend who knew the owner. He showed us the inside of a Confidential Mission cabinet. A Sega Dreamcast with a few modifications ran the show.
The arcades fought back in the 90′s with the more specialised cabinets such as the Dance games, motobikes on a gimbal, and light gun games. Consoles replaced the arcade games, but at the same time, PC games have found their own arcades in the form of the Cybercafe. Here you can find CS and WoW Players (and probably TF2 by now) whiling away the hours until death’s sweet embrace.
And to rub salt into the wounds, Rock Band and Guitar Hero are doing what the arcades haven’t been able to do for years, getting people to play games in public. Bars and pubs are using Music games to get people in, just as Pong was first ‘focus tested’ in Andy Capp’s bar all though years ago.
