End of the Arcade

Well, it's almost the end of 2010, which has got me thinking about the end of arcade gaming. There are still plenty of arcades around, especially at seaside resorts, in motorway services and in theme parks, but they are no longer filled with shoot 'em ups, platformers and beat 'em ups from the likes of Capcom, Taito, Midway or SNK.  Sega has managed to hang on, thanks to their generally more elaborate cabinets still attracting attention, so games like Sega Rally, Manx TT, Daytona USA, Ghost Squad and House of the Dead can still be found.  Likewise, Namco's Time Crisis and Final Furlong and Konami's world conquering Dance Dance Revolution are still common sights, but most of these machines are pushing a decade old now and usually in pretty poor condition.

Dance Dance Revolution - bringing teenage girls to arcades since 1998.

What killed the arcade? 

General consensus is that it was the rise in home gaming during the mid to late 90s. For starters, there was the birth of the 32-bit, polygonal games consoles, the Sony PlayStation, the Sega Saturn and the Nintendo N64. These machines were capable of providing the best conversions gamers had ever seen, with even the latest games migrating relatively unscathed. Plus they offered their own unique, often more cinematic experiences, with games such as Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII. As for the hardware in the consoles, it was often based on the same hardware as current arcade machines. A case in point was the Sega Dreamcast, from 1998, which was essentially a home version of the Naomi system board.

Sega Naomi logo

There was also more and more gaming hardware emerging for the PC, with major leaps forward including the 3Dfx Voodoo graphics add-on card. By the end of the 90s, the PC had left arcade games far behind, with increasingly more powerful hardware and landmark games like Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament and Half-Life offering a new breed of fast paced, competitive gaming.

The Quake series was one of the first to popularise online competitive play.

Another issue was pricing. Back in the 80s, a credit on an arcade game would cost you 10p to 20p, with only light gun games and hydraulic cabinets costing more than that. At the time, the average price for an 8-bit video game was around £30 (with console games generally costing more than computer games). Fast forward to the end of the 90s and average price for a console game was still only around £35, while the bottom price for a credit was 50p, with some arcades charging as much as £2 for games like Silent Scope.
This rift seemed to get worse during the current console generation, with some really good indie games costing less than a tenner and smart phones offering some decent gaming experiences for the price of a Mars bar. In short, arcades priced themselves out of the market.

My own time with arcades - at least the time when I sought out arcades as my primary gaming fix - was while I was at university in 1995. As well as frequenting the arcade in town, the city centre where I studied had a fairly well stocked Namco Station arcade. Between lectures, a few friends and I would spend our spare time playing Tekken, Ridge Racer, Time Crisis, Area 51, Virtua Fighter 2, Street Fighter Alpha, Mortal Kombat 3, Sega Rally and few others I can no longer recall. Sega Rally was certainly the biggest draw for my friends and we would take it in turns to race against each other on the twin-seat cabinet.

Sega Rally was the last arcade game I played a lot.

Happy days, although it arguably contributed to my premature departure from uni. After that, I too drifted into PC and console gaming and I have only visited a handful of arcades since. I guess that made me part of the problem, but in my defense - and in defense of all lapsed arcade gamers - I don't think we ever thought it would end like this. Once arcades failed to deliver gaming experiences above and beyond home machines, their appeal waned.

Is the end nigh?

Reportedly the biggest arcade in the world, Funspot in New Hampshire, USA, is still going strong but there are also retro arcades popping up in America.

Fun Spot in New Hampshire, USA, is apparently the biggest arcade in the world.

In Japan arcades are still huge, with fighting games being the biggest draw.  Virtua Fighter 5, Super Street Fighter IV and Tekken 6 are as big now as their predecessors were in the 90s. And new fighting games include such as Guilty Gear and BlazBlue continue is this proud tradition. Shoot 'em up developer CAVE also appear to be unstoppable, with games likes Progear, Espgaluda, Deathsmiles and numerous sequels to DonPachi appearing in arcades since the turn of the millennium.

Club Sega in Akihabara is one of the most famous arcades in Japan.

And every few years, you'll get wind of another arcade starting up and doing well, partly because of retro nostalgia, but also because the owners have modernised their pricing structure, offering blocks of time, rather than charging per game or coming up with gimmicks like offering tournament nights.

But what about here in the UK?  There are two noteable arcades in London.  First there's Funland in the Trocadero Centre,  Piccadilly Circus and also a Namco Station in County Hall on the South Bank, but elsewhere things are not so promising. Even places like Alton Towers, which has about a dozen mini-arcades, has no traditional arcade games. And if video arcade games are suffering, pinball machines are defunct entirely. You don't even see them in bars any more. You'd think they would have survived better, thanks to there more mechanical and elaborate designs, but sadly they died out with the video games that they paved the way for, back in the 70s.

The truth is, arcades games on the whole have had their day. They are no longer scattered around the country in random locations and there are unlikely to ever be again. When a smartphone can play games like Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and Cut the Rope, and the internet gives people access to all the emulators and ROMs you could ever want, only the most die hard fans of the arcade will ever miss them.

MTW

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More Info

• Funland, Trocadero's website: http://www.funland.co.uk/entertainment/Games
• Namco Station, County Hall website: http://www.namcostation.co.uk
• To find out more about Funspot see: http://geekoutnewyork.com/2008/06/funspot.php.
• To find out more about the Japanese arcade scene see: http://www.retrogarden.co.uk/features/big-in-japan-a-look-at-the-japanese-arcade-scene/

 And if that isn't enough, check out Arcade Mania: The Turbo-Charged World of Japan's Game Centers by Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft and Jean Snow.  It's available from Amazon, priced £7.99: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/4770030789

Classic of the Month - LifeForce (AKA Salamander)

Manufacturer:	Konami
Genre:	Shoot 'em up
Board:	Konami GX400
Year:	1986

Life Force (also known as Salamander) is a Gradius spin-off, which introduced a number of changes that would later be incorporated into the main series.  These included a mix of both horizonal and vertical scrolling, two-player co-op and a revision power-up system, where by enemies dropped specific weapons, rather than the playing selecting weapons from a menu.  Not that my 12 year-old self was aware of any of this when I first saw it.  I was too busy gawping at the crazy visuals, from organic landscapes that grew around your star fighter, to blood covered teeth or solar flares bursting from the floor and ceiling to tentacle-covered brains trying to attack you.  I later discovered that these kind of effects and environmental hazards were common to the Gradius series, but seeing it for the first time will stay with me forever.

MTW

Movie review: Tron Legacy

The Tron arcade game was one of my formative arcade experiences. I first played it in a neon-lit arcade on a caravan site by the sea when I was 9 years-old. All the other games in the arcade were great, from Centipede to Pac-Man to Time Pilot, but Tron looked like something straight out of my sci-fi fantasies. It was a perfect storm of age, imagination, atmosphere and location. Despite seeing the trailers, I didn't see the film until a few years later. It didn't disappointment and much like Last Star Fighter it felt like a glimpse into the future of gaming. Now, almost 30 years later, Disney have released the long-awaited sequel, but in a world where high definition gaming and 3D movies are common place, has Tron lost its edge? Given I don't normally have an excuse to review movies, this seemed like the perfect opportunity.

Bruce Boxleitner, still a
handsome SoB

The plot to the original movie film was little more than window dressing and the same can be said for the sequel. Following the events of the first film, Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) takes over ENCOM International and makes it the most successful software company in the world, partly due to his games, including one based on the heroic Tron program, who helped him escape the binary clutches of the errant Master Control Program. Despite his success, he continues to visit the computer world within the company's mainframes. With help from Tron and also his own CLU program, Flynn builds a grand new world inside the mainframe. Then then one day in 1989, he mysteriously disappears, leaving his friend Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) and his young son, Sam (Owen Best/Garrett Hedlund) behind. As the decades roll by, Alan and Sam take a back seat in the running of the company, but it's clear neither of them have forgotten about Flynn Senior. So when Alan gets a message from Flynn that apparently came from his old office at the (now abandoned) arcade, he sends Sam to investigate. Sure enough, the arcade is empty, but when he goes to play a Tron machine, Sam discovers his dad's old tales of the world of Tron were real.

Flynn's Arcade, mothballed like most arcades these days

And so, as you might expect and have probably worked out from the trailers, Sam ends up in that same world, which is now under the control of Kevin Flynn's doppelganger, the program known as CLU. This is a bigger, brasher adventure in the world of Tron, starting with a gladiatorial battle which makes the games in the original seem... well, like Gun Smoke compared to Call of Duty. Sam is not alone in this world and soon meets a program called Quorra (Olivia Wilde), who is your typical free-spirited femme fatale — and rather pleasant to look at in her tight, black plastic leggings. Ahem. Together they battle CLU's drones and uncover the plot that lead Sam into this world and the mystery behind Kevin Flynn's disappearance.

Sam and Quorra go for a drive in one of Legacy's many new vehicles

The first thing to be said about this film is that it looks gorgeous — even when Quorra's not in shot. There are no Star Wars prequel-like redesigns, that effectively ret con the whole aesthetic of the original. Instead, it looks precisely like a HD version of the original, with the changes to things like the light cycles being respectful towards their ancestry. What is disappointing is the 3D. In a world of such stark contrasts, it seems the 3D technology fails to provide much depth perception. Basically, there's no enough detail to actually give the scenery and characters much visual depth, unlike Avatar, which is a rich, colourful and densely populated world. What's even better than the visuals is the music, provided by French house masters, Daft Punk. They even make a cameo, in what for me is the best scene in the film.

When Flynn makes an opportune appearance in that same digital night club, just as Sam and Quorra about about to get their hides tanned, I genuinely had a little bit of a nerdgasm. Overall, the acting is a little flat; Hedlund is your typical pretty-but-bland Hollywood actor, who is outshone by every other actor in the film, including Wilde. The best performance is probably given by Micheal Sheen, who plays club owner Castor, but then Sheen is one of those actors who always delivers the goods.

If you're going into this with a love of the original, but at the same time accept that it was a rough diamond, I reckon you'll enjoy this follow up. It's far from perfect and could actually be accused of being a little unambitious, but it isn't the sort of train wreck we've seen in recent years when people have tried to cash in on classic films (Lucas, Wachowski brothers, I'm looking at you!). For everyone else, it's one of those films where the trailer tells you everything you'd need to know, both about the world of Tron and whether or not it's for you.

And because the soundtrack is so brilliant, here's Daft Punk's single from the OST, "Derezzed".

MTW

Darius returns in widescreen HD

Back in the summer, Taito announced Darious Burst: Another Chronicle and now it has finally been released in arcades... in Japan. 

As a cabinet I think it looks incredible.  I know we all have widescreen HD TVs for our Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s, but still, given the atmosphere of an arcade, I think this will be quite an experience, with 4 players ducking, dodging and blasting their way through the waves of enemies.

But enough of looking at static images, here is Taito's (Japanese) trailer:

MTW

Irem Arcade Hits comes to PC

Arcade legends Irem, in association with DotEmu, have brought out a collection of 18 classic coin-op games called IREM Arcade Hits.  The full list of games is as follows:

1. Ninja Spirit
2. Gun Force
3. Gun Force II
4. Superior Soldier
5. Undercover Cops
6. In The Hunt
7. Blade Master
8. Battle Chopper
9. Legend of Hero: Tonma
10. R-Type Leo
11. Image Fight
12. Mystic Riders
13. Hammerin' Harry
14. Cosmic Cop
15. Kung-Fu Master
16. Dragon Breed
17. Vigilante
18. Air Duel

They've even produced a nice little video to highlight what you get for your money:

Priced €9.99 (approximately £8.60) compilation is download only, but DRM free.  For more information visit: http://www.dotemu.com/en/download-game/24/irem-arcade-hits

MTW

Dragons Lair comes to PSN

Dragon's Lair was simultaneously one of the most revolutionary, shallow and infuriating arcade experiences of all time. I remember being wowed by it's cartoon visuals back in the early 80s, but a few plays revealed that there was not much of a game underneath. Despite this fact, Dragon's Lair has been ported to pretty much every platform you can imagine, to 8-bit computers of the time, such as the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 to modern handhelds including Nintendo DSi, Android smartphones and iOS platforms. It has now been ported to the PlayStation 3 via Sony's PSN downloadable service in the US. Judging by the screenshots and videos it looks like the closest the game has ever come to matching the visual quality of the original LaserDisc arcade game and it's just as impressive to look at today as it was 27 years ago -- it's also just as repetitive and annoying. Nonetheless, this is an important piece of arcade history and if you don't mine forking over $10.

Here's the trailer:

MTW