I have a confession to make, I didn't play Dig Dug until I got it as part of the Namco Arcade Museum for the GameBoy Advance, back in 2003. When I first played it, I wrote it off as a Mr Do clone and didn't go back to it for years. I know, I know, as an arcade fanatic, I should be ashamed of myself, but we all make mistakes. I have since played it on Xbox Live Arcade and a Namco Plug 'n' Play TV system and realised that there was a lot more to the game than first meets the eye.
The basic gameplay is simple enough. As Dig Dug, you have to tunnel through 255 screens, killing the Pookas (the red blobs in scuba goggles) and Fygars (the fire breathing dragons) that dwell underground. There are two ways to kill these creatures: by tunneling under rocks and letting them drop on the monsters heads or by sticking them with a harpoon pump thing and inflating them until they pop. That all sounds simple enough, but Dig Dug has a number of unique gameplay tropes. First, Dig Dug can walk through partially inflated enemies. Since it takes a few seconds to make them pop, partially inflating them can buy you the time and distance to finish them off safely. Secondly, there are lots of different score attack mechanisms built into the game. First, rock kills score more than pump kills. Secondly, the depth at which an enemy is killed increases your score, hence the yellow, orange the red banding to the levels. Finally, the points you score from killing a Fygar depends on your position - facing them scores more than attacking from above or behind. All this means that if you are a highscore junky, Dig Dug can be a seriously competitive game.
In 1985 Namco released a sequel, predictably called Dig Dug II. Back them most sequels were simply more of the same, but Dig Dug II tried to be different, shifting perspective to a top-down view. Now when you dug down, large sections of the landscape collapsed into the sea. Sadly, it wasn't as much fun as the original.
A couple of months ago I posted an article called 'Dreaming of the 80s', which were undeniably the years when my love of arcades (and gaming as a whole) were formed. However, my love affair with arcades did not end there. No, hanging around in arcades, the 90s was just as important a decade as the previous. So to complete my arcade gaming history, let's head back to the decade of Madchester, raves, Britpop, alcopops, the Spice Girls, the internet coming to the masses and George Lucas's screwing up Star Wars, the decade that also saw me go from school boy to working man.
Turn of the decade
My arcade gaming in the 1980s was limited to the Old Hall and the arcades along Yarmouth's sea front, but by the 1990s lots of things were changing; my older siblings (who are all 9-13 years older than me) stopped holidaying with my parents and as a result I lost my main mode of transport into Great Yarmouth for a few years. This meant I had to make the most of Old Hall's arcade, but by now they had stopped installing new games on a regular basis. I remember them adding Golden Axe, TMNT and Galaga '88, but they still had Galaxian and Gryzor all the way up until 1993, which is when I last stayed at the site. Nonetheless, the first time I played Street Fighter II was in a Yarmouth arcade (I think Circus Circus) in 1991 and it was this game above all others that I pursued over the next decade, both in the arcade and at home.
The Capcom Years
As I said, I did a lot of growing up during the 1990s, which meant I started visiting the arcades of my home town, some 5 miles from where I actually lived. There were only two proper arcades in town. First up there was Shipley's Amusements, which was mainly a fruit machine joint, but did have a handful of arcade games, including Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting and an SNK Neo Geo MVS, containing such classics as Metal Gear, Neo Turf Masters, Magician Lord and Art of Fighting. Then there was a Cashade Amusements on the far side of town, which was a decent-sized arcade, but it was also dark, smokey and full of scary looking older kids. There were also a couple of video rental shops and the local computer shop that had a handful of machines in them. It was these quieter mini-arcades that my friends and I visited the most.
Title screen for the black market Rainbow Edition.
Because of Street Fighter II and Final Fight, in the early 90s my favourite manufacturer was Capcom. Street Fighter was everywhere and between Capcom's frequent updates and the numerous hacked versions of the machines, including Rainbow Edition and Accelerator, there most arcades had a couple of versions of the game. If you never played Rainbow Edition it was completely bonkers. Among the numerous changes in the hacked ROMs there was the ability to change character mid-fight by pressing 1Up and 2Up Start buttons, fireballs for Honda and some other non-projectile characters, high speed lariats for Zangief, super slow fireballs for Ryu and Ken, low and wide Dragon Punches, akin to Sakura's Dragon Punch found in the later Alpha games and the ability to keep jumping until eventually your character reappeared at the bottom of the screen.
But it wasn't just Street Fighter and Final Fight I loved from Capcom. One of the video rental shops also had the over-the-top super hero beat 'em up Captain Commando, a game that I never saw again, but which was great fun to play with three friends. Mack the Knife was my favourite character, although there was something appealing about playing as a robot controlled by a dummy-sucking infant.
Namco Station, Nottingham
Nottingham's Namco Station, now just fruit machines
In 1995 I began a degree in Computer Science at Nottingham Trent University. It was a disaster. The syllabus was fluffed up with unrelated modules such as German, European History and Chemistry. I quickly lost interest and started hanging out with some mates from a different course when I should have been in lectures. We used to kill time in one of two venues, a Riley's Pool Hall and a Namco Station in the city centre. This was a proper gamer's arcade, with loads of brand new machines, including Street Fighter Alpha, Tekken 2, Mortal Kombat 3, Time Crisis, Area 51, Sonic Blast Man and cockpit versions of Sega Rally and Daytona USA. By this point games cost a quid a go and unlike the 80s it was my own money. God knows how much of my uni grant I spent on Sega Rally in particular.
The End
I dropped out of uni in the summer of 1996 and my time frequenting arcades quickly came to an end. From then until now I've only been in an arcade a handful of times, usually when I go to a theme park or seaside resort. Mansfield's Cashade was bulldozed one day in the early 2000s, along with a few shops, and replaced with a shop, restaurant, bar and nightclub complex. Rumour has it Nottingham's Namco Station closed down it's games section in May 2007 -- I'm surprised it lasted that long. It sounds as though towards the end it was just Tekken and Virtua Fighter keeping the dream alive.
We all have fantasies about what we would spend out money on if we were multi-millionaires. Super cars, mansions and luxury yachts are par for the course and sure, that stuff would all be great, but one dream I've had since I was a kid was to have my own arcade. The machines I would put in it have changed over the years, but long-term favourites such as Street Fighter, R-Type, Gradius, Sega Rally and Space Harrier have always been high on the list. And it seems I am not alone; the late king of pop, Michael Jackson, owned such an arcade. Now you can say what you like about his personal life, but his private arcade was truly the stuff of dreams, as this incredible virtual tour demonstrates:
Everybody's got a favourite arcade manufacturer and for me it's probably Sega. As much as I loved games like Street Fighter 2 and R-Type, Sega created so many iconic games and cabinets. Perhaps the most iconic of all was Space Harrier. Let's have a look:
It would be fair to say the deluxe hydraulic cabinets were just a gimick, but we're talking about arcade games - a gimick was all you needed to get people to shovel in another 20p. Sega produced lots of hydraulic cabinets over the years, the ultimate of which was the deluxe G-Loc cabinet, which was a gyroscope that could spin 360 degrees in every direction - but they were incredibly rare.
As a game, Space Harrier was bloody quick. In typical arcade style, getting anywhere in took real skill and your best chance of playing the game properly was on a standard cabinet.
Now I started this blog with the opening line from Space Harrier, but reading it does not compare with hearing it, so here's a 2nd video containing the sample and a better view of the actual action.
If you want to play Space Harrier legally, the closest you can get is the Sega MegaDrive Classics Pack 1 on Steam, which contains the MegaDrive version of Space Harrier II. I realise that's not the same as the arcade version and the lack of voice samples is disappointing, but that really is your best bet these days.
Gradius was never released on PC, but if a version had been it might have looked something like this.
Hydorah, a freeware indie shmup that was released a couple of months ago. I know this is meant to be an arcade blog, but with new arcade games so few and far between, us old school gamers have to seek out arcade-like experiences where we can - and few modern games capture that feeling quite as well as Hydorah.
Visually it looks like an late 8-bit or even early 16-bit game; sonically, Gryzor87's brilliant soundtrack sounds like something from a late 90s CD-based game, but with an evocative chiptunes aesthetic. The gameplay is not at all original, but let's be generous and call it a homage to classic shoot em ups. What's important is that the levels design, enemy patterns and weapons are well thought out and the controls are as tight and responsive as you could ask for. When you die in Hydorah you know it's your mistake, not the game being cheap or flaky. I highly recommend it and since it's free you have nothing to lose.
Time for another BMI Gaming show reel. This time some highlights from their fall (autumn) 2010 catalogue. It's great to see that while arcades are no longer gaming meccas, they do still survive, with new titles from all our favourite manufacturers, including Namco and Sega, as well as up and coming manufacturers like Raw Thrills and Play Mechanix.
If someone asked you to think of a classsic Sega arcade game to spruce up and re-release today, but one which hasn't already had a makeover in recent years, you might suggest Space Harrier or Zaxxon or Fantasy Zone. You probably wouldn't suggest 1982 ice block pushing puzzler, Pengo, but that's the one Sega choose.
As the screenshot below shows, Sega have kept a very retro look for this remake, with no polygonal graphics, HDR lighting or particle effects. However, pay attention to the aspect ratio - this is a 16:9 game, some that definately did not exist back in the 1980s.
This new Pengo game is also supports 8 players, each battling for points and control over the three power blocks. It could be interesting - assuming we ever get to see it here in the UK.
