Movie review: Pixels

Hollywood made a movie about classic arcade game characters and I write a blog about classic arcade games, so I had to review Happy Madison Production's new flick Pixels, whether I wanted to or not.

Anybody who calls themselves a gamer, anybody who grew up in the 80s and anybody with kids under 12 will have had Pixels on their radar for the last few months, and the trailers show you everything you need to know about the film. In 1982, NASA sent a probe out into space that contained, among other things, footage of several hit arcade games. Decades later, a race of aliens find this footage and take it to be an act of war. So they launch an attack on Earth using that very same footage as the inspiration for their weapons of mass destruction. Cue Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Galaga, Centipede, Arkanoid and a whole host of other classic sprites tearing up city streets around the world as giant, voxel monsters, while Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Peter Dinklage, Josh Gad and Michelle Monaghan try to stop them.

Galaga kicks things off by attacking an air base

The movie actually starts in 1982, with young friends Sam Brenner and Will Cooper heading to a newly opened arcade on their BMXs to check out the hottest games. Sam, it seems, is a natural, able to spot the patterns that were intrinsic to games of that era and exploit them. Such are his skills, that he and Will enter a national arcade competition, where the pair meet the even younger Ludlow "Wonder Kid" Lamonsoff and the devious Eddie "Fire Blaster" Plant. And this, it turns out, is the source of the ill-fated footage that NASA sends out into space.

Fast forward 30 years and Sam (Adam Sandler) is now a divorced 40-something, installing TVs for a living, despite his promise as a youth, while his chubby best friend Will (Kevin James) is the freakin' president of the freakin' United freakin' States of freakin' America! The only possible explanation for this is that it puts both characters in positions that allow them to be involved in the ensuing chaos. Enter also Violet van Patten (Michelle Monaghan), a hot single mom who's also happens to be a Lieutenant Colonel and weapons specialist. Sam and Violet cross paths when he is sent to her house to set up a new TV and PS4 for her son. Naturally, there is a clash of personalities, with an undertone of attraction, as you might expect from a film like this.

When a US military base is attacked by unknown forces, capable of rendering people, hardware and buildings to little glowing cubes, President Cooper brings both his friend and the Lieutenant Colonel on-board as advisors. On studying footage from the attack, Cooper has a hunch that the aggressor's formation resembles that of the aliens in the Namco classic Galaga and he wants his friend to confirm or deny his suspicions. It's around this time that an adult Ludlow (Josh Gad) is brought into the picture as a "typical gamer", i.e. a 38 year-old virgin, living with his gran, obsessing over fantasy female characters, namely Lady Lisa from Dojo Quest. This is the only non-authentic video game and character portrayed in the movie and also the only circa 1982 video game character to appear as flesh and blood, rather than a bunch of primary-coloured cubes, because bewbs! As well as being a true-to-life representation of us gamers [insert sarcasm here], Ludlow is also a conspiracy nut, who already knows about the invasion and has come to the same conclusion as Sam and POTUS Will.

The Arcaders, Lieutenant Colonel Violet, Sam, Wonder Kid and Fire Blaster.

The aliens then reveal themselves through a montage of 80s icons, such as Madonna and Fantasy Island's Mr. Roarke and Tattoo to throw down the gauntlet to planet Earth. Each side gets three chances or lives, if you will, in a series of battles based on the games contained in the space probe. Only, Sandler and crew had already lost two rounds before anybody had figured out WTF was going off, so the next battle is an all or nothing fight in Hyde Park, London. Here the aliens attack using the Atari classic Centipede. Armed with "light cannons" (developed by van Patten's team), Sam, Ludlow and a bunch of US soldiers battle the Centipede through the streets of London and Earth gains its first victory. The story then continues with a giant game of Pac-Man through the streets of New York. It's at this point that the team break Eddie Plant (Peter Dinklage) out of jail to help with the fight, because he was the world's best Pac-Man player. It's a decision that costs them later, as Eddie is not to be trusted. Things soon escalate, with a chaotic showdown that doubles-up as a who's who of classic arcade gaming. In terms of plot, there are no surprises, but did you really think there would be?

The Centipede scenes are genuinely great

Pixels has been mauled by both movie critics and the gaming press alike, but I will say this: the Centipede and Pac-Man scenes are intense and authentic, right down to the movement patterns, rules and colour schemes for each wave. By the end of Centipede battle, I had a big smile on my face and I was willing to go along with Sandler and co for the ride. To be fair, this is probably the highlight of the entire film, but throughout Pixels does do justice to its source material. But there are problems, not just with its cookie cutter plot and characterisation, but also its portrayal of women; they are shown as being either pretty and insubstantial or simply prizes for the men to win. There are other problems too; Sandler and James seem uninterested in the proceedings and Dinklage has very little to work with, other than being a sneaky, diminutive Billy Mitchell look-a-like. Gad's character, on the other hand, is very muddled, alternating between being so obsessed with Lady Lisa that he has written and published his own book on how she could be real, to lusting after the muscular soldiers and touching their asses (as the Americans say) whenever he can. Michelle Monaghan's character is also ill-defined. At one moment she is a strong, confident woman who can hold her own with the big boys and the next she's reduced to crying and drinking in a cupboard because her husband has dumped her for a 19 year-old bimbo. We can only assume the speed at which she falls for Sandler is a classic case of rebound. The movie also wastes the talents of Jane Krakowski, who plays Will Copper's wife and is therefore First Lady, Brian Cox, who plays a typical crotchety US army general and Sean Bean, who plays a British commando who gets shown up by Sandler when the chips are down.

Verdict

Despite all this, I must confess to enjoying the film. There is no denying I got off on all the obscure gaming references and it was great to see Q*Bert getting another moment in the spotlight (he also appeared in 2012's Wreck-It Ralph). I will also admit to laughing from time to time too, but then this is only my fifth Sandler movie (the previous ones being Eight Crazy Nights, The Wedding Singer, Big Daddy and Airheads — yep, they are really the only ones I've seen), so his schtick is still relatively new to me. I also got a strong Ghostbusters vibe from this movie, although I won't pretend it's in the same league as the original. They both have a group of no-hopers in jump suits trying to save the world from forces they don't really understand, they both feature futuristic, bespoke guns, designed to deal only with the enemy at hand and the pixel monsters can be likened to the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. My kids (who are 5 and 9) loved it too and the only video game characters they knew were Donkey Kong, Pac-Man and Frogger. So as someone who has had to suffer such kid-friendly dross as the Nativity movies, the Tinkerbell movies and Post-Man Pat: The Movie, Pixels really did not seem all that bad. In fact, I'd happily watch it again and if I had to chose just one kids movie to see this summer, I would chose Pixels over Minions every time. Yes, I really did say that.
However, if you're a big gamer who wishes the medium was treated with more dignity or your're an adult with no interest in video games, you probably won't enjoy this movie at all.

MTW

P.S. They actually made an 8-bit mobile game of Dojo Quest, which is available for free on iOS and Android.

Nostalgia Trip - Hunting High Scores

Completing the story mode of some sprawling adventure game is like finishing a long book; there is a sense of triumph and closure that you just don't get from watching a movie or TV programme and it's one of the many reasons why I've always felt a strong connection between the act of reading and the act of gaming. However, back in the days of arcade gaming, even if there was a story mode, it was really all about the high score, destroying enemies in as an efficient a way as possible and getting your three letter moniker on the electronic leader board (MTW in my case). If you were at the top, those three letters were like planting your flag, staking your claim. With those three letters you were saying, "I am the best!" It was an open invitation for all comers to try to topple you and even if you didn't know who belonged to a particular name, seeing your initials above theirs was a tiny bit of a rush. If you were a regular at an arcade, you might even see the same names appearing on the leader board of your favourite game. But of course, nothing could be better than beating a friend's high score, both in direct competition or just beating their score when they weren't around, knowing they'd get a nasty surprise next time they played.

My earliest memories of competing with friends for high scores were on a trio of games back in the mid-80s. There was Irem's Jackie Chan beat 'em up Kung-Fu Master, Konami's Olympic mini-game collection Hyper Sports and at number 1 by a considerable margin, an oft-forgotten shoot 'em up by Tekhan called Star Force. 

Star Force's highscore board

Yet again, these were games I played on holiday in Caister-on-Sea. As I met up with the same friends for several years in a row, the rivalries continued year-in-year-out, with the games changing every few years. Other games that sparked similar rivalries included Taito's bat-and-ball space epic Arkanoid, macho light gun blaster Operation Thunderbolt, pop culture phenomenon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Atari's stunt simulator Hard Drivin'. The latter was a difficult one for me as an 11 year-old, as I was trying to compete with my brother and brother-in-law, both of whom were a decade older. Talking of my brother, I still have vivid memories of people gathering around him while he played 1942. While he never finished it, he was one of the best players in that little seaside arcade. 

It wasn't just the arcade. At home, my friends and I would compete on our 8-bit computers and consoles, though very few games stored the scores between sessions. Of course, there was always the risk that either you or your friend would go off in a off if you beat each other at your favourite game you got for your birthday.

High scores go legit

While arcade gamers the world over competed for high scores, in Iowa in the early 80s, Walter Day had plans to take it one step further. After opening his own arcade Twin Galaxies, Day set about collating high scores from hundreds of different arcades, as well as organising contests at his own venue. Then in February, 1982, he released his records as Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard. Throughout the 80s through to the early 2000s, Day and his black and white striped referee jersey, came to symbolise serious arcade competition play and official high score record keeping. If you thought you were good, it was the high scores on the Twin Galaxies' database you had to beat.

Then in 2007, two independent films brought Twin Galaxies to the attention of the whole world. Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade was very much a celebration of Day's work as a national record keeper, but then just months later, King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters portrayed Day and his organisation as corruptible and dishonest, pandering to the whims of celebrity gamers.

In 2013, Twin Galaxies appeared to have folded, only to be resurrected the following year by American TV personality Jace Hall. Now, the organisation mixes its origin as gaming record keeper and competition organiser with a combination of sport commentating and Twitch's live streaming of gameplay. You can check out their YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/user/TwinGalaxiesLive.

Evolution of the high score

For a while, outside of retro gaming and a few throwback games, chasing high scores lost its popularity. Online games, such as Quake and Counter Strike had no need for running high scores, just a kill count from match to match, while adventure games from Half-Life to Ratchet & Clank did away with scores altogether.

Then, in 2005, Microsoft launched their new games console, the Xbox 360, which included a new feature called Achievements. They were integrated into every game, including downloadable Xbox Live Arcade games, and offered players numeric rewards when they activated certain triggers. These triggers could be something mundane like finishing a level or beating a boss, something repetitive like getting 50 headshots or having 10 match winning streak, or something just plain stupid, like jumping off a bridge into water without dying or putting masks on zombies (a real achievement in Capcom's Dead Rising).

It all seemed innocuous at first, but achievements had a couple of tricks up their sleeves that were quite unlike the world had seen before. Firstly, the points you earned from achievements were aggregated across all of the games you played as your "gamerscore". With full price games offering 1000 achievement points, it was possible to get gamerscores in the hundreds of thousands, much like a typical high score. Secondly, the whole world could see your gamerscore and what games you'd played to earn them. Now the contest wasn't between you, your mates and the locals, it was between everyone who owned a 360, no matter where they lived in the world. High scores had evolved and for a period during the late 2000s, people went gamerscore crazy. There were even online forums springing up where people could not only boast about their gamerscores, but also exchange tips on getting elusive achievements. It became so popular, both Valve and Sony retro-fitted similar (but no where near as successful) systems into their games platforms.

Microsoft continued to develop the system themselves with their current console, the Xbox One, but the general consensus is that gamerscore hunting peaked with the last generation.

Full circle

So where is the humble high score now? Well, it's probably more popular now than it has been for 20 years, thanks to the increased popularity of retro-gaming. Not only are old gamers, such as myself, able to go back to games they loved, but new gamers are getting to experience these high score driven games for themselves. It seems to me that this is most apparent in the popularity of Far Sight Studio's Pinball Arcade on tablets and phones. Pinball has always been about the pure pursuit of high scores and Pinball Arcade has high scores that automatically feed into an online database. You can check them out for yourself here: http://www.pinballarcade.com/Leaderboards

But whether you are trying to beat your friends or strangers online, ultimately a high score is also a challenge to yourself. Much like your personal best time in a marathon or the amount of weight you can bench press, beating your own high score means one thing: you're getting better at the game itself.

Classic of the Month - Pong

Manufacturer:	Atari
Design:	Allan Alcorn
Genre:	Sports
Year:	1972

Last month I talked about the game that, for me, represents the beginning of the end for arcade gaming. This month, for my final Classic of the Month, I'm going to talk about the game that was the beginning of my love affair with video games — and yes, it really is Pong! I really am that old!

I was born in May 1975, by which point video games had just got a foothold in arcades. Before then, arcade games consisted of mechanical devices, such as shooting galleries, one-armed bandits, shove penny games and of course, pinball machines. That all changed in 1972, with Atari's Pong, a table tennis game designed and built by Al Alcorn and Nolan Bushnell. The first Pong machine was sited at Andy Capp's Tavern, a bar popular with students in Sunnyvale, California. The game was a huge hit. Legend has it, a few weeks after being installed, Bill Gatiss, the owner of Andy Capp's, complained the machine had stopped working. When Alcorn opened the machine to check it, money started pouring out of it — it was stuffed with more quarters than it could handle.

There had been electronic games displayed on a monitor and controlled with buttons and dials before Atari's Pong and there's a lot of debate about whether Bushnell plagiarised Ralph Baer's designs in those early days, but however you look at it, Pong is the game the established video arcade games as an entertainment medium. All too often when people talk about Pong, what they end up talking about is those halcyon, but controversial, days at Atari, before they were first taken over in the late 70s. There are the tales of lawsuits, drug use on company premises, Steve Jobs working for Bushnell while he and Steve Wozniak built their first Apple computers and more, but all of that stuff is well documented. What I want to talk about is Pong as a video game.

Full disclosure time, I've never played an original Pong arcade machine, because by the time I was old enough to enter an arcade (around 1984), Pong was ancient history. However, I played one of the many (and there were a great many) home Pong clones. In fact, my earliest memory of playing any kind of video game was a machine called (generically) TV Video Game 5 in 1. My brother-in-law gave it to me when he moved on to home computers and it became my first video game system (the word console seems too generous for such a basic a machine). As its name suggests, it included five variations on the Pong theme, from the original two bats and two-players, to a version with both bats at one end and a wall at the other, which was Squash, to a four bat, two-player version generously called Ice Hockey and even a single-player mode called Handball. Like all of those early machines, the TV Video Game was controlled using paddles with variable resistors (or rheostats) that connected via 2.5mm jack plugs. I mainly played this Pong game with my brother-in-law, who, despite being 13 years my senior, was generous enough to let me win every now and then.

Like he real Pong, the idea was as simple as it gets. A square white block bounces around a black court, with various white lines representing the edges, the centre net and the players, who had to knock the square block hither and thither in an attempt to get it past the other player and score a point. However, as simple as was, it still contained everything that makes gaming such great fun: direct, intense competition between two players, each trying to out-do the other. It's the same formula that worked for countless other Pong and tennis games, as well as fighting games, racing games, sports games, flying games and military simulators. The number of players and the intricacies of each game may vary, but that kernel of competition and skill remains in all video games.

As my simple TV Video Game system demonstrated, Pong could be easily adapted into other games and mine wasn't the only one to do so. Atari themselves adapted the game to create Breakout and in thousands of homes across America, the Magnavox  used the same building blocks as the basis for a dozen different "games" for their Odyssey console (the world's first console, based on Ralph Baer's designs). The idea lives on today, not such in the countless tennis games on the market, but also retro-inspired games, such as Bit.Trip Beat.

There are a lot of video of Pong on YouTube, but this is the only one I've found of a Pong arcade machine in its natural habitat, an arcade — something I've not seen myself. Plus it has a Jo Garcia in it, so you know — blokes!

MTW

Classic of the Month - Marble Madness

Manufacture:	Atari
Design:	Mark Cerny
Genre:	Maze
Year:	1982

Marbles. We all played with them as kids and so when, in 1982, Atari's Mark Cerny created Marble Madness, a game based on the venerable playground activity, it was a guaranteed hit. The premise behind the game was simple: guide the marble to the exit, avoiding hazards en route. It's as basic as can be, but the combination of great course design, challenging game play, eye-catching visuals and one of the best video game sound tracks of the early 80s meant that it was as addictive as they get.

The game is played from an isometric perspective, in order to give the illusion of the courses being three dimensional. With the aid of some Escher-like level design, you genuinely feel as through you are progressing through a 3D terrain and can clearly determine when hazards are on your platform. All told there are just 6 courses in the game, some of which take less then a minute to complete, meaning that it's possible to finish the game in less than 10 mins. However, like most games of that era getting good enough to finish at all takes months of practice. I've never got past the 4th. The difficulty comes in two parts. 1.) The hazards, which range from narrow or steeply banked sections of the courses, to hostile marbles, acidic platforms and marble-gobbling bouncing tubes.

Marble Madness was subsequently ported to every platform going throughout the 80s, 90s and 00s. Even today you can get a rather good clone on Android and PCcalled Flarble Badness. However, the arcade machine used trackballs to provide control over your marbles, which were far more precise and responsive than using a keyboard, joystick, mouse or even touch screen controls of any of the home versions.

The video below shows the game in action. The screen display isn't the best, but it does show how crucial the trackballs were.

Finally, I can't talk about this game without talking about a cover of the title track by indie musicians Stemage and Disasterpeace. They manage to take everything that makes the track so memorable and elevate it to become a soaring, majestic, uplifting piece of music. You can listen to it here.

MTW

Classic of the Month - Rampart

Manufacturer:	Atari
Genre:	Strategy
Board:
Year:	1990

A few years ago, when gaming on smartphones took off in a big way, a new sub-genre of games emerged, the tower defence game. These touchscreen-friendly affairs lacked the complexity of fully blown strategy games, but still provided enough of a mental work out to be fun and challenging. There are hundreds of tower defence games out there, with titles such as Plants vs Zombies, Defence Grid and Kingdom Rush being among the best the genre has to offer. Bizarrely, despite being a sub-genre to begin with, there is now a sub-genre of tower defence games, which include elements of first and third person shoot 'em ups. These include the brilliant Orcs Must Die, Monday Night Combat and Sanctum. 

It would be easy to think of tower defence as being a relatively new genre, born out of the need to create strategy games that aren't as demanding as games like Star Craft, Civilisation or Total War, but like most modern games, tower defence games can trace their roots back to arcade gaming. And for tower defence, Atari's Rampart is that first game.

The game is set in some unspecified medieval period and charges players with both defending and expanding their territory. At the start of the game, players must choose one of several castles situated on a coastline. When they make their choice, an initial rampart is built around the castle and players are given a handful of seconds to place their cannons along the walls. In true tower defence style, the placement of your guns is key to effectively defending your castle, because after that comes the onslaught. The nature of this onslaught depends on whether you play alone or against others.

In single player mode, your castle walls are initially attacked by a fleet of ships, attempting to land on the shore around your castle. As the ships come in, they fire their cannons at you - and in turn you fire back at them. Unlike (most) modern tower defence games, you actually get to aim. If you were lucky enough to find a trackball version of this game, that was a considerably easier task than with the joystick version. Once the enemies are vanquished, you are given a few seconds to place a number of randomly shaped walls. You could use these to thicken your walls or alternatively expand your territory and eventually capture additional castles. You're then awarded a few more cannons to mount and the whole thing starts again. If you successfully fend off the invaders, you get to move on to a new territory and things start to get tougher.

If the invading ships make it to land, they then have the opportunity to overrun undefended castles. Fail to protect your home castle and it's game over. The video below shows just how quickly things can unravel, once the invaders make land.

In multiplayer mode, things are a little different. This time there are no ships, just two or three territories going at it, building ramparts, placing cannons and knocking seven shades of chivalry out of each other. Here's a video of three people using netplay on MAME to play multiplayer rampart - for 40 mins.

Rampart is a game I didn't really appreciate it when I first played in the arcade at The Old Hall, but it is undeniably a great game. It requires quick wits and quick reflexes, something of a rarity in arcade gaming.

MTW

Top 10 licenced games

It's nearly Christmas, the decorations have been adorning shops since Halloween, the cheesy songs are playing on the radio and everywhere you look there are adverts for toys, gadgets, chocolates, booze, food, DVDs, books, games, you name it. With this in mind, I thought I'd end my run of top 10s genres with licensed games.

Video games have been part of the merchandise for TV shows, movies and toys for a long, long time. These days the term "licensed game" is generally regarded with derision, but once upon a time that wasn't always the case and there were plenty of classic arcade games that were also nothing more than merchandise for something else. Sticking to my rule of one game per franchise (sorry, Marvel), here is my top 10:

Star Wars

Let's start the show with a show stopper! Released in 1980 (the same year as the best Star Wars movie of all), this vector graphics X-Wing simulator set the tone for decades of Star Wars games to come. Despite the psychedelically-coloured graphics, the cabinet, the yoke controls and a samples from the movie meant this was as evocative as any games based on the classic franchise could hope to be. It's probably one of the most highly regarded arcade games of all time, let alone licensed ones.

RoboCop 2

Movie trailers are such delicious teases. I remember when the trailers for RoboCop 2 came out and thinking the antagonist robot, Kane, looked awesome. I can remember recording Film '90 just so I could replay the snippets of RoboCop battling Kane. My 15 year-old self was dizzy with excitement to see the film and sadly I had to wait for several years.

Data East had made an arcade game for the first RoboCop film, but where as that film was superior to its sequel, the sequel to the game was much better. From the gorgeous, sharp graphics to the novel little set pieces (such as forcing the truck back against a wall to crush it, as pictured above), this game let the player re-enact loads of key elements of RoboCop. At times, as a video game character he felt a little stiff, but the ability to shoot in a different direction to the one you were moving in (there was a button to shoot left and one to shoot right) did compensate for his rigidity some what.

WWF Super Stars

"I am a real American, doo doo doo dar dum dee doo dar." Sorry, where was I, oh yeah, WWF Super Stars hit the arcades at the same time as I first discovered "American wrestling". Although this game had a limited roster it did at least feature venerable favourites of the era Hulk Hogan, Randy "Macho Man" Savage, "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan, Ultimate Warrior and Big Boss Man (a favourite of mine at the time) among others. The game features lots of hallmark moves and the context-sensitive controls mean that with just two buttons and a joystick, each wrestler has a pretty good repertoire. The controls were a bit woolly to be honest, but this was as much a game of atmosphere as anything else and it captured the over-the-top action of 80s wrestling brilliantly. And given I only got to see wrestling when I went to a friend's house who had satellite TV, this game formed a major part of my childhood wrestling fanaticism.

Aliens

Man alive were there some great movies in the 80s and one of the best was James Cameron's Aliens. There were a number of arcade games made out of the franchise, but this (as far as I know) was the first. You take control of Ripley (with player 2 controlling who I can only assume was Hicks) as they try to rescue Newt from the alien infestation on LV426. There are one or two suspect aliens in this game, which I don't believe ever appeared in any of the movies, including weird bat creatures and mutants, but it's still a blast.

Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara

Capcom made a shed load of side scrolling beat 'em ups in the 90s, though few managed to better their classic Final Fight. However, this D&D brawler's use of simple RPG mechanics, including an inventory (something that was very rare in arcade games), makes it stand out from the pack. Of course it has all the staples of the genre: elves, dwarves, wizards, rangers, paladins, you name it. And all wrapped in a lovely bit of hack 'n' slash action. This game is now available of XBLA and PSN as part of a double-pack with its predecessor, Tower of Doom, both of which are great.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Talking of classic 80s movies, the original Indiana Jones trilogy might be my favourite 80s trilogy; there isn't a dud in the pack. Many people say Temple of Doom was a let down, but the film's cheesy morbidity delighted me as a kid ("Ahh, chilled monkey brains!") and the mine cart chase was superb. As with some other movies in this list, I played the game long before seeing the film. The Temple of Doom game was in the arcade at the Old Hall, so I played it a LOT. There's not a lot to the game and if you aren't bothered about high scores you can always play it in easy mode and get a feel for the whole thing in just a few minutes, but in that short time you do get to play through many of the movies most memorable sequences, including the mine cart chase and the fight over the lava pit.

The Simpsons

There is a pattern to this list of games. WWF, Simpsons, D&D, Indiana Jones and Tron (see below) are all franchises I knew about because of the games as much (or something rather than) the source material. I didn't get to watch Simpson's until the late 90s, when my parents finally got cable TV, but because of this game I knew precisely who Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie were. The game itself was a madcap brawler, with each member of the family sporting their own special (and canonically accurate) moves. Marge's use of a vacuum cleaner could be seen as sexist, but it was funny to see one used (quite literally) in anger.

X-Men: Children of Atom

Here we are again, Capcom churning out loads of versions of basically the same game. Over the years they've made loads of Marvel-themed fighting games, primarily ones incorporating either Street Fighter characters or other Capcom characters. However, I prefer the purity of this super hero-only instalment, even if the roster of fighters is much reduced from the other games.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

What boy in the late-80s and early 90s didn't love the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, as they were known here in the UK)? I never read the comic, but I watched the cartoon and loved it. However, it was decidedly lacking in actual ninja action, with the turtles usually dispatching Shredder's foot soldiers with a bowl of spaghetti or a rubbish bin. So when the game let you wield each turtle's signature weapon (katana, bo staff, sai and nunchuks), what fan wouldn't lap it up?

Tron

This is an important game for me, because although I had played video games before it was this game, above all others, that made me fall in love with arcade gaming. It was so futuristic, with its neon paint and glowing pistol-grip joystick. In an arcade with a black light (which in my opinion is an essential piece of equipment for any arcade) this cabinet was stunning to behold.

It's 30 years since I first played this game and sadly its bespoke controls do not map to modern controllers very well at all. Whether it's on MAME or on XBLA, there is no good version to play, other than the original. As much as I love Street Fighter, if I had to have just one arcade machine, it would be Tron cabinet.

And that's it, all of the top 10 games by genre. I probably won't publish anything else this side of Christmas, so until next time, Merry Christ and a Happy New Year.

MTW

Classic of the Month - Warlords

Manufacturer:	Atari
Developer:	Atari
Genre:	Puzzle
Year:	1980

Atari's Pong inspired lots of clones and spin offs, most notably Atari's own Breakout, which went on to become almost a genre in its own right. One of Atari's other variations on the same basic concept was Warlords. The game combined Breakout's block breaking with the four-player action of the rare 4-player Pong follow up Quadrapong and dressed it all up in a medieval theme. The idea is simple, you take control of a shield and have to protect your castle walls (I'll avoid saying rampart for obvious reasons) from a fireball, which is kindly donated by a dragon at the start of the game. When you deflect the fire ball it cascades around the screen and will hopefully take down one of your opponents' walls, unless they deflect or even capture it, in which case be prepared to defend yourself. Once a gap has been made in a castle wall, the warlord inside is exposed. If a fire ball hits a warlord it's game over, however there's no reason why a skilled player couldn't indefinitely defend a warlord with no castle walls - although a skilled player probably wouldn't end up in that situation in the first place.

The machines came in upright and cocktail form factors. The upright version supported up to 2 human players and actually used a mirror with overlays to give the otherwise basic black and white graphics a colourful and detailed look. However, the cocktail version (pictured right) is the one you want. It used simple colour graphics rather than the overlays, but it supported 4 players, each with their own corner of the machine. And Warlords is one of those games that gets exponentially better with more players. It's a great party game, especially if you decide to play in teams, as it's really hard not to accidentally bat the fire ball at your team mate. Warning though, many expletives may be uttered during the course of a game of Warlords, so those of you who are sensitive to curse words should bear this in mind.

The game also uses paddle controls, so it's another classic that does not play well on MAME. Not that you should be using an emulator to play any games and in the case of Warlords it was re-released a couple of years ago on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network with updated graphics and comical goblin characters running around the battlefield. Despite that, here is someone playing it via MAME and doing a hell of a lot better against the CPU than I ever could.

(UPDMTWE: 8:05, 02/12/2013) Turns out there were two versions of Warlords on XBLA and PSN. The first was one of the many Atari updates by Stainless Games, it included both the original 4-player game and a graphically enhanced version, with a future sport sort of vibe. The other was more of a remake, which really played up the medieval fantasy theme, complete with goblin minions and dragon riders, all beautifully rendered by a modern graphics engine. It also added new game modes, including a one-on-one versions of the game. Of the two, only the Stainless update is still available (and it's this version my kids and I have been playing for this article). Shame, because the remake looked really cool in the trailers back in 2011.

MTW

Top 10 hack 'n' slash games

More of a sub-genre of beat 'em ups than a genre in its own right, hack 'n' slash games differ from other beat 'em ups and fighting games in that they tends to have medieval and fantasy settings rather than being about dingy backstreet dust ups. So, it's time to put on your elf ears, dwarf beards and maybe dig out your shurikens too, as we look at MTW's top 10 hack 'n' slash games:

Golden Axe series

Of course Sega's seminal Golden Axe was going to be in the list, so let's get it out of the way to begin with. Although there had been co-operative games before, with Golden Axe it felt like the way the game was meant to be played. I've always put this down to how well the three characters' skills complemented each other. My favourite, the dwarf Gilius Thunderhead, has melee range, but weak magic; the barbarian, Ax Battler, has balanced melee and magic; the armoured bikini-wearing Tyris Flare had the best magic, but the weakest melee skills. By playing Golden Axe with a friend you didn't just double your fire power, you increased your tactics too.

Rastan Saga

Taito's Rastan Saga is was one the granddaddies of the hack 'n' slash genre. The titular hero is your typical, Conan-esque barbarian, who has to carve his way through hordes of lizardmen to rescue, what else, a princess. Rastan's gameplay has almost as much in common with platformers as it does hack 'n' slash beat 'em ups, with Rastan having to jump and plunge his way around the landscape in order to reach his destination at the end of each level.

Ninja Spirit

After Tolkien-esque fantasy, the next most common topic for the hack 'n' slash genre is ninjas. Few arcade games give players as strong a sense of being a stealthy night blade as Irem's Ninja Spirit. From the outset players are able to choose which of four weapons they want to use (a katana, shurikens, bombs or a kusarigama), but things get really interesting when our hero, Gekkou, collects the magic gems that summon ninja spirits, which follow him and repeat his actions (with about a half second delay). But don't let all this arsenal fool you, Ninja Spirit is rock hard! 

Rygar

Playing Rygar again for this article, I'd forgotten just how bloody fast it is. The game throws everything at the player and there's a surprising variety of creatures and minions to deal with too, like pteranodons, headless hulks, burrowing centipede monsters and rhino dog things. Thankfully, Rygar's flying, spiked shield has plenty of reach, so with a bit of good timing it's possible to stop all of these monstrosities from ever getting close.

Magic Sword: Heroic Fantasy

In the early 90s, Capcom released a load of great fantasy hack 'n' slash games, starting with this, Magic Sword. The game has character classes that will be instantly familiar to anyone who's ever played a tabletop role-playing game or indeed a MMORPG. There's a knight, a priest, a thief, a wizard, a ninja, an amazon, a lizardman and the bizarrely named bigman. Whatever. Each one has their pros and cons, such as the priest who is generally the weakest, but is particularly powerful against the undead. What's different here is that the players do not take control of these different classes. Instead you control a generic warrior and have to rescue the other classes, at which point they will fight alongside you, mimicking your moves (a bit like the spirits in Ninja Spirit). The game also got ported to Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network a few years, in the Final Fight: Double Impact compilation, so there's no excuse to miss out on this one.

Knights of the Round

Released in 1991, Capcom's Knights of the Round is obviously based on the legend of King Arthur. Players get to choose from Arthur, Lancelot or Perceval and in classic style, each one has their own skills and abilities. In a nod to role-playing games, each character can be levelled up during the course of the game (a theme that we'll see repeated a lot in this top 10). Ostensibly, KotR is pretty basic, but it's the game's blocking system that really makes it shine. Hit attack and back at the right time and you gain a few seconds of invincibility. It's a simple and effective system, that was rarely seen at the time.

Shadow Dancer

Despite the ninja hero, the Eastern magic and the white wolf, we switch to modern day (or at least modern at the time) for our next game. Sega's Shinobi series is legendary, but the series really upped its game with this instalment. The addition of Shinobi's canine companion seemed remarkable at the time, especially as you were given limited control of the beast in order to set him on certain, otherwise hard to reach, enemies (such as the sniper in the screenshot above).

Gauntlet Legends/Dark Legacy

Released 13 years after the original, Gauntlet Legends and the sequel from the following year, Dark Legacy, features 3D polygon graphics and an isometric view that's more akin to modern action RPGs such as Torchlight, Path of Exile and Diable III as anything else. I originally played Legends on my Dreamcast, but it was a pretty close conversion by all accounts. As with other fantasy-themed games in this list, Legend and Dark Legacy feature a rudimentary levelling sysem, but the health and gold works much as it did in the original games. Unlike the original, the game has much more focus on melee combat, as opposed to throwing an endless supply of axes at your foe (how did the barbarian ever carry so many?), which is why it gets to join this list.

Strider

When I first saw Strider, I was blown away by how agile Hiryu was and dazzled by the flashing arc of his katana as he cut a swathe through scores of Soviate soldiers and bizarre robots, such as the ape pictured above. The game's future Russian setting and multi-lingual voices also made this one stand out from the crowd. For me, this is the game that first made me pay attention to Capcom and as this list has shown, they were a company to watch in the late 80s and early 90s.

Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom/Shadow Over Mystara

With the official Dungeons & Dragons licence attached to it, Capcom's pair of hack 'n' slash games Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara are perhaps the closer to a proper role-playing game than any other arcade game. Both games are great, which is why they are sharing a spot in this list, but for me Shadow Over Mystara probably has the edge. With all the typical classes and creatures, a rudimentary inventory system for both clothing and weapons, and dripping with fantasy lore, this game has pretty much everything you'd want from an arcade D&D game. Both games are available on Steam, Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network as a double pack called Dungeons & Dragons: Chronicles of Mystara, so as with Magic Sword, there's no need to miss out.

There we have it, all the swords, knights, ninjas, magic, princesses and dragons an arcade throwback could want. As with any of my top 10s, there are bound to be games other people would have included in their list (I have no doubt there are a few people screaming, "What about Ninja Gaiden?!" or "Err.. you forgot King of Dragons!" but these are the ones I'd be putting 20p into, given the choice.

MTW

Classic of the Month - Lunar Lander

Developer:	Atari
Manufacturer:	Atari
Genre:	Simulation
Board:	Dedicated 6502-board
Year:	1979

Released in 1979, not only was Lunar Lander one of the earliest video arcade games, it was Atari's first vector graphics game and ushered in such classics as Asteroids, Battlezone, Tempest, Gravitar and Star Wars. But what are vector graphics? Well, if you imagine a child's dot-to-do drawing, but with perfectly straight lines between the dots, you'll get basic principles of the technology. The lines are the vectors and unlike a sprite, which is just an arrangement of pixels of different colours, the shape of a vector drawing is controlled mathematically. This means if you rotate, expand or shrink the shape, each point is moved relative to the position of all the other points; the angles of all the lines that make up the shape stay the same, so the shape itself is never distorted. Again, this is unlike a sprite, which is distorted when its rotated, because the individual pixels cannot be rotated, just moved, so they no longer fit in exactly the same position relative to their neighbours; everything has to be rejigged. Likewise, sprites don't scale well, because the only way to scale a sprite is to add or remove pixels; removing pixels loses detail and adding pixels disrupts the ratio of each coloured pixel (unless scaled by a factor of 2, but now we're perhaps getting a little too technical), so the shape becomes warped. These simple graphics emulate the stark landscape of the moon and the vastness of space beautifully, which is probably why so many early games were set in space. Vector graphics were the precursor to polygonal graphics, which take exactly the same rules as vectors, but apply shaded faces to the area between the points to make the shape appear solid. Later, we learnt to apply sprites to these faces, to give the polygonal shape the detail of a sprite and the flexibility of a vector.

But let's get back to the game itself. Arcade games are usually fast-paced, hectic affairs, but not so with Lunar Lander. The game was inspired by the Apollo 11's moon landing of ten years earlier and puts players in control of their own "Eagle". Play starts with the lander at the top of the screen and the rocky, nay mountainous landscape below. On surface of this vector moon there are several flat spots, each with a point multiplier written below. The trickier the landing (such as on a narrow ledge or in a deep gully) the higher the multiplier. Players must rotate the lander and use their limited supply of thrust to control the landing of the vessel on one of these spots. As you approach the landing zone, the screen switches to a zoomed in view, which gives players the chance to fine tune their approach. And fine tune you must if you are to stand any chance of landing without destroying or at the very least damaging the lander. A successful landing adds points to your high score, along with whatever multiplier was associated with the zone you landed on, then it all starts again.

It's a very simple game that rewards patience and care over quick reflexes or pattern recognition. This makes it a very rare beast among arcade games and about the only comparable experience I can think of is Rampart, not in terms of gameplay, but in terms of the mindset required to play it. As early arcade games go, this is one of the most rewarding and that is in part down to the rarity of the experience it provides - even by today's standards.

MTW

Top 10 maze games

While I've been doing these top 10s, I've realised some of my favourite games simply did not belong in any of the lists. Then I realised they they shared their own common theme: they were all maze games. The maze game is genre you don't see as a separate entity any more, in fact with one or two obvious exceptions (such as a certain ghost-hunting yellow blob), maze games like the ones in this list had all but disappeared by the early 90s. These games, though, are true arcade classics.

Boulder Dash

I played the BBC Micro B Boulder Dash clone, Repton,long before I played the original arcade game. Where the BBC game was a relatively slow-paced adventure, the arcade game is fast and punishing.

Bomber Man/Dyna Blaster

Competitive puzzle action does not come much better than Bomber Man — or Dyna Blast as it is also known. Again, the idea is simple: plan bombs blow up the surrounding walls and your opponents. Playing against the CPU is challenging, but playing against three others is a riot.

Dig Dug

Dig Dug, the dragon and weird tomato monster inflating maze game from Namco. It's an all time classic that Namco has pushed out on numerous occasions — which is fine by me, because it's brilliant. The moment when the last monster makes a break for it and the tables are turned is akin to collecting the power pill in Pac-Man, only with a distinct sense of desperation, as you scramble to jab it with your harpoon pump before it gets away. It's also one of a couple of games in this list where music only played when you move, which is not relevant, but it's very endearing. 

Mr Driller

Namco's spiritual successor to Dig Dug, Mr Driller has a far great puzzle element than its predecessor, but it's also more of a maze game, as you battle through the series of multi-coloured blocks, desperately trying to balance scoring as highly as possible with escaping the level. What's interesting about Mr Driller is it's possible to get quite far just drilling down and doing nothing else. However, if you want more points, you have to go for bigger blocks and more chain reactions. That's when the game gets a lot more interesting.

 Burger Time

Data East's Burger Time was one of a handful of food-related games to appear during the 80s. It's also a great maze game, as you control fast food chef, Peter Pepper, along a series of ladders and platforms to assemble truly super-size burgers, all while being pursued by some truly demonic foodstuffs. Seriously, it's brilliant.

Pengo

Pengo might look cute, but that little penguin has no qualms about crushing snow bees (which I'm assuming are very rare) with huge blocks of ice, reshaping the maze around him as as he does so. It's a real cat and mouse game, as you try to simultaneously try crush the monsters, evade their pursuit or simply block their path. 

Mr Do

Mr Do offers a blend of Dig Dug and Pac-Man, as the little wizard tries to collect all of the fruit before the monsters get him. And when the going gets tough, Mr Do can whip out his crystal ball and blast the little buggers out of the way. It's a real risk/reward system, as you then have a few desperate moments running like hell while you wait for your one weapon to regenerate. 

Marble Madness

Marble Madness is one of those games that almost seems out of place in the arcade. Like Lunar Lander, Marble Madness is a little slow and deliberate compared to most arcade games. It is a true classic and the forerunner to games like Kula World and Marble Blast.

Gauntlet

I never played the Dungeons & Dragons board games nor did I read Lord of the Rings (at least not until the Peter Jackson films came out), but I loved the cartoon and fantasy films like Krull, Conan, Beast Master, Hawk the Slayer and all those other cheesy sword and sorcery films of that era. The opening screen for Gauntlet, pictured above, sold me, even if the game itself was rather lacking the graphical process. So until the likes of Golden Axe and Rastan came along Gauntlet was the quintessential fantasy game to play.

Pac-Man series

The Pac-Man series are absolutely arcade royalty and I'm not sure there's a dud in the pack. And what's more the new games, such as Pac-Man Championship Edition are absolutely brilliant. I'm not sure there's anything else to say.

MTW

A brief history of Star Wars arcade games

Today is Star Wars day! Hurray!

Let's be honest though, most people fell out of love with George Lucas's meandering sci-fi epic when he started to ret con the originals to fit the contrived story of the lacklustre prequels. However, with Disney recently buying the rights to all things Lucas and getting JJ "Lost" Abrhams on-board to make Episode VII over the next couple of years, Star Wars isn't going to go away any time soon and may even get good again.

Why do I mention this? Well, not only is today today Star Wars day, but this year is the 30th anniversary of Star Wars arcade video games, so I thought I would do a brief history of Star Wars arcade games, starting with one of the most iconic arcade games of all time.

Star Wars

Manufacturer:	Atari
Developer:	Atari
Genre:	Rail shooter
Year:	1983

What better sequence from the original Star Wars film to use for the basis of an arcade game than the seminal Death Star attack run? And that is precisely what Atari did with this magnificent vector graphics rail shooter. The multi-coloured vector graphics may have been incongruous with the film, but they still managed to be incredibly evocative. The game appeared around the same time as another first person vector graphics space game, Elite, for the BBC Micro B. Just like Elite, the way Star Wars looked and moved was closer to "real" space flight than anything else out there. Add in the beautiful cockpit cabinet with the flight stick controls and the digitised voice of Alec Guinness telling you, "The Force will be with you ... always" and Star Wars everyone were in sci-fi heaven.

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

Manufacturer:	Atari
Developer:	Atari
Genre:	Shoot 'em up
Year:	1984

A year after the first Star Wars game and the last Star Wars movie in the trilogy, Atari switched from vector graphics to sprites and an fixed isometric view for Return of the Jedi. Like latter half of the film, the game switched between the battle on Endor and the battle in space to take down the half-built Death Star (2). The Endor levels consisted of racing through the forest on speeders and blasting up rolling logs and eventually the shield generator in an AT-ST. The space levels put you in control of the Millenium Falcon during the attack run on the Death Star, then the escape. The final level has you swapping between both scenes every few seconds, which is simultaneously exciting and disorientating. Like their first game, Atari filled RotJ with digitised voices and also added a few pixellated cut scenes for good measure.

The video below shows a complete play through, although watching the game from beginning to end will give you a frequent sense of deja vu.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Manufacturer:	Atari
Developer:	Atari
Genre:	Rail shooter
Year:	1985

No, I'm not losing it, the game of Empire Strikes Back may have looked like the original Star Wars game, but wasn't released until a year after Return of the Jedi. The game also used the same vector graphics and cabinet as the original game. The reason for this was simple, Empire was not a full game, but a conversion kit for the original, which included a new daughter board, a new marquee and a decal for the yoke. In terms of game play, it is very similar to the first game, as you might expect. Instead of doing the attack run on the Death Star in an X-Wing, you alternate between flying a T-47 airspeeder (my favourite Star Wars fighter) in the battle to defend Hoth, then escaping the Empire through an asteroid belt in the Millenium Falcon.

The video below is from John's Arcade, who has a brilliant little arcade in his basement. I'm really very, very jealous.

Star Wars Arcade

Manufacturer:	Sega
Developer:	AM5
Genre:	Rail shooter
Year:	1993

Here's where an appreciation of proper nouns is important, because Sega's Star Wars Arcade game is should not to be confused with Atari's Star Wars arcade game. See the difference? Anyway, this game does actually play a lot like the original, but with it being released in 1993 and made by Sega, it benefited from being polygonal, not sprites or vectors. Polygonal graphics were exploding in the early 90s and Sega with their Model-1 board were one of the pioneers of the new tech. It wasn't always done well (looking back at Virtua Fighter 1 now is quite hard), but simple textured polys work great for space ships.

Star Wars Trilogy Arcade

Manufacturer:	Sega
Developer:	AM5
Genre:	Rail shooter/Weapon combat
Year:	1998

By 1998 it was common knowledge that a new Star Wars film was on its way, which would explain Anakin Skywalker's origins, from his rise in the Jedi order to his eventual fall to the dark side. Despite the ham-fisted way Lucas handled the reissue of the original trilogy, Star Wars fans all over the world were still excited about the prospect of a new film. We all know how that turned out. Anyway, I digress. As the name suggests, Star Wars Trilogy featured scenes from all three of the original films, specifically the rebel attacks on the Death Stars in the first and third films and the Empire attack on Hoth in the second film. While these all played out in much the same way as both Sega's and Atari's previous games, this game had a trick up its sleeve. The cabinet featured a force feedback joystick that allowed you to take control of a light sabre in two special stages. The first pits you against Boba Fett in the battle over the Sarlak pit; the second has you facing down Vader himself. Exciting stuff and it's one of those games that does not emulate well, because the force feedback joystick really added to the atmosphere.

Star Wars Racer

Manufacturer:	Sega
Developer:	AM5/LucasArts
Genre:	Racing
Year:	2000

Would it shock any of you if I said I didn't like Phantom Menace? No, I didn't think so. However, the pod racers were a cool (if utterly ridiculous) idea and one that lent itself well to a hectic arcade racing game - which is precisely what Sega AM5 and LucasArts did when they made Star Wars Racer in 2000.
Despite the cabinet looking like Anakin Skywalker's pod racer, the game did give the player a choice of Episode 1 pod racers to play as. While that is a nice idea, I doubt most people could name any of the other racers, with the exception of the villainous Sebulba.
There were many pod racing games on home computers and consoles and to be honest, none of them, not even this arcade version, were as good as WipeOut series on the PlayStation or Nintendo's F-Zero series, both of which did futuristic racing better.

Star Wars Starfighter

Manufacturer:	Tsunami Visual Technologies, Inc.
Developer:	Tsunami Visual Technologies, Inc.
Genre:	Rail shooter
Year:	2003

By 2003 the second Star Wars prequel had come and gone, and Star Wars fans were no happier about the direction these new movies were going in. While Attack of the Clones was marginally better than Phantom Menace it was still a terrible, lumbering, incoherent wreck. Anakin Skywalker was now being played by Hayden Christiansen, whose wooden acting earned him the nickname Manikin Skywalker. Even the presence of the world's most potent actor, Christopher Lee, or the appearance of Boba Fett's dad, Jango, could do nothing to save the film. Also by 2003, the arcade scene was all but dead, with modern consoles like the Sony PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube and Microsoft Xbox offering experiences that could match or sometimes even better a typical arcade machine. So it seems hardly surprising that Sega did not do another arcade game. Instead, for the last ever Star Wars arcade game, Tsunami Visual Technologies took us back to Episode I. This time the player got to pilot a Naboo StarFighter in a series of aerial challenges followed by an assault on the Trade Federation Droid Control ships around the planet, in much the same way as many previous Star Wars star fighter games. Actually finding footage of this unexceptional game is tough, especially as there was the similarly named Jedi Star Fighter available on many home platforms. It's not a big loss and to be honest, you'll have more fun playing the 30 year-old Atari game instead.

And so it seems whether it's Star Wars movies or Star Wars arcade games, the quality can go up as well as down, but one thing you can say in favour the classic Star Wars arcade games is that George Lucas has never gone back and ret conned them.nj

But wait, that's not all...

Anyone who's been following Arcade Throwback for a good while will know I love pinball machines almost as much as video games, and there have been a fair few Star Wars pinball tables over the years. In fact, they pre-date video arcade games by 3 years. So as an appendix to the brief history of Star Wars arcade games is the even more brief history of Star Wars pin games. 

Empire Strikes Back

Manufacturer:	A. Hankin & Company
Developer:	A. Hankin & Company
Year:	1980

Star Wars 

Manufacturer:	Data East
Developer:	Data East
Year:	1992

Star Wars Trilogy Trilogy 

Manufacturer:	Sega Pinball
Developer:	Sega Pinball
Year:	1997

Star Wars Episode 1 

Manufacturer:	Williams
Developer:	Williams
Year:	2000

Sadly, not only is Episode 1 pinball the only Star Wars pinball table I've played, it was also the last real pinball table I ever played. I found it in an seafront arcade in Blackpool, back in 2002. Based on William's Pinball 2000 platform, the game included a holographic display, which you could interact with by firing the ball at targets on display. It also had a light sabre toy inside the table, which lit up at various points during play. This was before those more authentic light sabre replicas were on the market, so it seemed more special at the time. General consensus is that, like William's only other Pinball 2000 machine, Revenge from Mars, this Star Wars table was not great. Still, I wouldn't mind seeing it in Far Sight's Pinball Arcade.

So there we have it, all of the official Star Wars video games and pinball tables to have appeared in the arcades over the decades. And as rich as this history is, it's nothing compared to history of Star Wars games for home computers and consoles, but I'll leave that to another blog. In the mean time, May the forth be with you - until midnight, then it'll be May the fifth.

MTW