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.

Nostalgia Trip - Coin-ops and chlorine

Such was the ubiquitous nature of arcade machines in the 80s and early 90s that you could find them installed in all sorts of locations. I've spoken in the past about video rental shops in my home town having Street Fighter II in them, but as the idea of family pubs grew drinking establishments started to add cabinets and pinball tables along side their fruit machines, jukeboxes and pool tables. Sometimes lone machines appeared in youth clubs, chippies, cafes, launderettes, shops, cinemas and even break rooms in businesses. However, there was one non-arcade establishment that frequently trumped them all and bizarrely that was swimming pools.

The Marina Centre in Great Yarmouth had a dedicated arcade for a while.

I first played a number of significant games at swimming pools. It was in the canteen at the pool in my village where I first played Atari's vector graphics Star Wars; it was at a pool in a neighbouring town that I first played Gorf and Mikie; and it was at a surprisingly well equipped arcade at a pool in Great Yarmouth that I first played Paper Boy, Hang-On, Fire Fox and a number of other machines.

As such, taking my own kids to the pool now often brings back a strong sense of nostalgia; when I visit the same pools I used to go to as a kid, I can sometimes picture the machines they had and where they were located. Sadly these days, traditional video arcade machines and pinballs rarely have a place in modern, so-called arcades, let alone leisure centres. Where as all of the other businesses I mentioned replaced their video games and pinball tables with fruit machines and quiz machines, swimming pools have either simply removed the machines altogether or, paradoxically, replaced them with drinks and snack machines.

While it would be easy to say swimming pools got rid of their arcade machines for the same reasons as everyone else, I have to wonder if there is another, more sinister factor. The truth is, businesses simply do not want kids loitering their premises. Growing up I used to see crowds of kids congregating a number of unlikely locations, from the fountains in the shopping centre to the wall outside mini-super markets. These days such crowds of teenagers are a rare sight. Indeed there is even a device called a Mosquito alarm (also known as SonicScreen) that businesses can install outside their building that emits a high frequency sound that only people under 25 or so can hear, which is designed to irritate their young ears to the point they move away. This is all part of the demonising of teenagers that has plagued British tabloids and daytime chat shows for the past decade or so and which is incredibly unfair to the vast majority of kids. So when an old arcade throwback like myself thinks back to those days when spotting arcade machines was as easy as spotting pigeons, I have to wonder, what have these businesses really go rid of?

MTW 

Nostalgia Trip - My Arcade Garage

We've all dreamt about it, but Penny Arcade's Mike "Gabe" Krahulik has only gone and done it, he's built his own arcade garage. He turned this:

into this:

He apparently has room for seven machines and he's chosen:

• Pac Man
• Dig Dug
• Donkey Kong
• Super Mario Bros
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Gauntlet Dark Legacy
• A Neo Geo

You can read about his journey here:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/2013/07/01/my-garage-arcade

It's a fascinating read and he's clearly put a lot of effort into the project. It got me thinking, if I had the time, space and money to build my own garage arcade, what seven cabinets would I put in there. This is my list:

• R-Type
• Space Harrier
• Golden Axe
• The Machine: Bride of Pin*Bot (although a new machine from Stern or Jersey Jack would probably be more reliable)
• Super Street Fighter IV
• Tron
• Pac-Man Arcade Party (which contains all the Pac-Mans, Xevious, Galaga, Dig Dug and a bunch of others).

(A Geo Geo would be my number 8 if it was a top 10, but these are Gabe's rules, not mine.) So come on, what seven would you guys choose?

Nostalgia Trip - Songs from the 90s (Arcade)

Last weekend I talked about the songs that take me back to my childhood, playing games in the arcades of Caister and Great Yarmouth in the mid-to-late 80s. This week I thought I would talk about songs from the 1990s that remind me of when I was in higher education and frequenting various arcades around Mansfield and Nottingham. This period was from 1992 to 1996 and coincides with the Britpop explosion, a time when I discovered more music than ever in my life. Whittling this list down to 10 was tough and I ended up editing it numerous times, even after I first published it. As such there are loads of bands I loved from that era that didn't make the list, including Supergrass, Suede, Bluetones, Elastica, Reef, Kula Shaker and Pulp. In the end, these are the 10 songs that I most associate with those care free years, when I would hang around arcades during the day playing Street Fighter 2, Tekken, Sega Rally and Time Crisis, then head to the nearest student pub in the evening to drink myself into oblivion.

Say Britpop to anyone and two bands instantly spring to mind, Blur and Oasis. I liked them both, but in the beginning Blur's greater back catalogue meant I listened to them more. Nonetheless, it was 1994's "Parklife" album that really propelled them into the spot light and my favourite track from that was not "Boys and Girls" and certainly not the silly title track, but this one, "End of the Century":

By the time "What's the Story?" was released in 1995 Oasis felt like the more credible of the two Britpop giants, as Blur became increasingly twee. The first time I heard "Don't look back in anger" I was pulling into the university car park in my Peugeot 309, listening to Radio 1. I remember the DJ saying it was like the Beatles, which meant nothing to me at the time, but Oasis did ultimately introduce to the Fab Four's peerless music.

Now we've got that out of the way, it's time for a bunch of Britpop acts with female vocalists, all of whom I fancied the pants off at the time. Let's start with the cutest of them all, Louise Wener and Sleeper with "Inbetweener":

Next up, a band made up of Butch Vig, producer for Nirvana's "Nevermind" and Smashing Pumpkin's "Siamese Dream" and a wee Scottish lass who looked like she would eat you alive, man or woman. It's Garbage with "I think I'm paranoid": 

Echobelly were a great band and "King of the Kerb" is one of my all time favourite songs from the era. Why they were not bigger I will never know: 

Born from the ashes of The La's, Cast's 1995 debut "All change" was one of the very best albums released during the height of the Britpop scene and is brimful of great singles. Despite this fact, I can't find an official video, only a video of them performing the brilliant "Alright" on the now defunct Top of the Pops. Ahh, the memories:

Technically, Ash were not part of the Britpop scene because they were Irish, but like so many Britpop bands they debuted in 1995 and so they are often swept up with that pack. They recorded their debut album, "1977", when they were just 18. Despite their youth, it was brilliant body of music, full of memorable tracks, perhaps none more so than "Girl from Mars":

A band I absolutely loved in '95 and which hardly anyone else remembers is Honeycrack. Founded from the remains of the Wildhearts, Honeycrack's songs were full of witty, quick-fire social commentry. This is the first single I ever heard, although again, I cannot find an official video of it. No matter, the music is more than enough: 

One of the biggest British bands to emerge in the 1990s was Welsh rockers the Manic Street Preachers. The first time I heard any of their music was actually in a computer game shop in town in 1993. They were playing the whole of the "Gold Against the Soul" album, so I got to hear most of it before I bought it myself a few weeks later. This is "La Tristesse Durera (Scream to a Sigh)":

I'm going to end this trip down memory lane with a band that emerged in the 90s and whose music still sends shivers down my spine today. If I was ever asked to pick my absolute favourite album of all time, it would be "The Bends" by Radiohead and this is the first song I ever heard by them, "Just": 

And there you have it, the two decades where arcade games were a big deal and the music I listened to in and around those venues. Thank you for indulging an old gamer. Hopefully some of you out there have similar sense of nostalgia for the 20 songs I chose. 

MTW

Nostalgia Trip - Songs From the 80s (Arcade)

When I started this blog a year ago I talked a lot about the games I used to play, the places I used to play them and the nostalgia I have for them. The one thing that kick starts my nostalgia more than anything else is music. Because most of my time playing coin-op games was on a camp site that had a bar and nightclub as well as an arcade, there are a lot of songs from the 1980s that I associate as much with gaming as I do the games themselves.

With that in mind, here (in no particular order) is my top 10 songs from the 80s arcade, starting with the song that somehow conjures up more memories of those happy days better than any other, not because I particularly liked it, but because it was played everywhere! It's the Material Girl, Madonna, and "Get into the groove".

The Old Hall arcade always had a juke box in it and when I could stop myself shovelling 10ps into one of their many games, this is one of the songs I would play. It's the band with the beards,  ZZ Top and "Legs". See if you can spot Space Invaders and Berzerk machines in the video:

I am a big Van Halen fan, but for me it started with Sammy Hagar and "Why can't this be love" from their 1986 album "5150". This was another juke box favourite of mine back in the day, even if it's not a David Lee Roth track:

Here's another track that I played on the juke box from time to time. As you can probably tell by now, in the mid-80s I was into my hair metal. The passion and drama of "Still of the night" by Whitesnake made me want to be a rock star. Instead I got into IT. Oh well:

The Old Hall's night club was quite relaxed and since you had to be a member to use the camp site's facilities  they allowed kids on the dance floor.  Their DJ was open to requests and one song I remember asking for on several occasions was Sly Fox's epic "Let's go all the way".

The Old Hall night club may have let kids one the dance floor, but my folks still wanted me home before it got to late. Back in our caravan we could often hear the music and the opening drums from this track were unmistakable. This is 80s electronica at its best. This is the '88 remix of New Order's "Blue Monday":

When the Beastie Boys emerged in 1986 I was just 11 years old and I didn't really know what they were singing about. What I did know is that "(You gotta) fight for your right (to party)" was a great song to shout along to:

If movies like Last Star Fighter and games like Star Rider felt like the future to my adolescent self, then Sigue Sigue Sputnik and "Love Missile" felt like music of the future. Shoot it up, comrade:

There were some great films with great pop sound tracks in the mid-80s, but for my 10 year-old self, the best one was  "Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News, taken from the 1985 smash hit Back to the Future. I wanted to be Marty McFly so bad I even took to wearing a (grey) body warmer over my denim jacket that year. Classic stuff.

And I'll end with one of the biggest bands of the decade, Duran Duran. There's tonnes of their songs I remember playing in those days, but I'm going with the one that hooks into another piece of 80s nostalgia, Roger Moore as James Bond. What a combo:

MTW

Nostalgia Trip - Dreaming of the 80s

My parents have always been caravaners and for years we went to the same, dull caravan sites, where there was nothing for kids to do.  Then in 1984 we went to one called Old hall, near Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, and it was much better than the sites we had been going to; it was a 5 minute walk to the beech, it had a small farm, an open air swimming pool, a bar, a nightclub and an arcade.  I was 9 when we first went to Old Hall and although I had played games on my brother-in-law's Atari 2600 and my older brother's BBC Micro B, this was the first time I got to play an arcade game.  Over the next eight years or so, we went back to Old Hall every summer.  Over the years the games changed and the arcade itself changed location on the site, from behind the nightclub, to the games room in the pub to finally ending up in a brightly-lit brick conservatory-come-reception, pictured below:

The Old Hall, Caister-on-Sea, contained the first arcade I ever visited.

The Old Hall is still there, but the camp site, farm, pool and arcade are gone. It's now a restaurant and health club.  It's a shame, but I can't say I'm surprised. When I last visited around 1994 they just had a few, rather old machines left. A sign of the times.

Sun, sea and shoot 'em ups

As well as the small arcade in the Old Hall's arcade, there were also the numerous arcades along Yarmouth's seafront.  The Flamingo, Circus Circus, The Mint, Silver Slipper, Golden Nugget, Majestic, Caesar's Palace, I visited them all, often switching arcades every pound or so in order to find the games I wanted to play.

Circus Circus, formerly the Yarmouth Hippodrome, was my favourite arcade in the 80s

The Flamingo, still one of Yarmouth's biggest arcades

The Mint wasn't big, but did have a number of niche games in it.

I only got to visit these arcades when either my parents or my old older brother took me, but they still formed a major part of my early coin-op gaming. It's for this reason that I think I associate hot summer days as much with playing Golden Axe, Space Harrier or Wonder Boy as I do beaches, sun bathing and ice creams.

Yarmouth's arcades still exist, but like most arcades these days all that's left are a few light gun games, driving games and dancing games.  The rest of the space is now occupied by fruit machines, quiz machines and claw games.

Night-time nostalgia

In order to write this blog, I've been thinking about those holidays and those arcade more than I have done in decades.  And here's the funny thing, for the past week I have actually been dreaming about Old Hall.  Not specifically its arcade, but the site in general, from the pool to the grassy area where the kids played football and frisbee, to the pub and club, where they even let under 18s have a bit of a bop around - as long as they stay out of the bar.  Great days and when my own kids are old enough, I hope to take them on holidays they will remember for the rest of their lives.

 MTW

Nostalgia Trip - Top 10 Seminal Arcade Games of my Youth

What's a fan blog without Top 10s? It's a tradition or old charter or someting, so I thought I'd talk use a Top 10 to talk about how I fell in love with arcade games in the first place.

I was 9 years-old when I first entered the neon gloom of an arcade and my love affair with coin-op gaming began.  From then until the death of the classic arcade in the late 90s, I have been to dozens of different venues and sunk hundreds of pounds into hundreds of different machines.  However, those early days will stay with me forever and these are the games that cemented those days in my heart.

Tron 

I was obsessed with Tron long before I ever saw the film.  With the exception of Street Fighter 2, no other arcade game captured my heart and mind like Tron.  From the neon-stripped cabinet, to the unique controls (a pistol-grip joystick and a paddle) to the fact it was four games in one, Tron seemed like something from another planet.  If ever I thought a game could transport me to another world, Last Fighter style, it was Tron.

Galaxians

There's something almost comforting about Galaxians' familiar formula.  The game is barely any different from Space Invaders, but I think it's the sound effects that did it for me more than anything.  That initial ditty still puts a smile on my face today.

Time Pilot

This is one of the few arcade games to get a respectble conversion on the BBC Micro B and it was that version I played the most.  However, I did first encounter the game in an arcade at a caravan site in Caister, Great Yarmouth.  I loved the idea of travelling through the ages, fighting planes and helicopters from different eras.  Unfortunately I rarely got past World War II.


Kung-Fu Master (Spatan X)

The first of several beat 'em ups in my list, Kung-Fu Master was the first beat 'em up I ever played that pitched the player against waves of enemies, as opposed to one-on-one.  Despite being based on the Jackie Chan film Wheels on Meals (or Spartan X as it was known in Japan), it actually played out very similar to Bruce Lee's film Game of Death, with each floor being guarded by a different boss.  I always remember hearing people talk about what the boss was on the final levels, but I don't think I ever saw past the Man of Brute Strength on floor 3, so I never knew if those rumours were true.

Gryzor (Contra) 

Characters that looked like Arnie and Sly?  Loads of big, crazy guns?  Soldiers, robots and aliens to blast?  What was not to like about Gryzor - or Contra as it is also known?  I was truly terrible at this game, but it wasn't until I was much older that I discovered it is generally considered one of the hardest games of that period.  I own the Xbox Live Arcade version and even when I lower the difficulty and use all my continues, I still can't get past level 3.

1942 

 
My older brother doesn't really game any more, but once upon a time he loved 1942.  He was really good at it too; I still remember crowds of people gathering around him to watch him play.

In a genre that is full of crazy over-the-top weapons, enemies and locations, there is something refreshing about 1942's simplicity.  There have been many sequels and remakes over the years, but none have quite lived up to the purety of the original.

Hard Drivin' 

Hard Drivin' is another game my brother excelled at, but unlike 1942, I could not play Hard Drivin' to save my lif.  At the time of its release, it felt like a proper driving simulator, because he had a clutch and a proper 5 gate gear stick.  Looking back now it's has not aged well at all; the primative polygonal graphics are incredibly slow.  Compared to sprite-based driving games from the same era, Hard Driving is ponderous.  Nonetheless, in its hay day it was a game that really separated the men from the boys.

Golden Axe

Although there had been co-operative games before, with Golden Axe it felt like the way to play the game.  I've always put this down to the fact the three characters' skills complemented each other.  By playing Golden Axe with a friend you didn't just double your fire power, but your choices as well. 

Final Fight

After Street Fighter 2, Final Fight is Capcom's biggest beat 'em up.  Like Golden Axe it featured a co-op mode that was enhanced by the differences between the characters.  I was a Cody player at the time and because of the bizarre universe Capcom games occupy, that continued in Street Fighter Alpha 3 years later.

Street Fighter II series

This is The One, the game that has stayed with me above all others.  From the first time I played Street Fighter II: World Warriors in a Great Yarmouth arcade, I was hooked.  Since then I've played almost every incarnation of the game and bought it on every system I've owned, from PC to PlayStation to Dreamcast to GameBoy Advance to Xbox 360.  I don't know precisely what it is that makes me come back to Street Fighter time and time again, but I know my urge to play it has barely waned in two decades.  My favourite iterations are Super Street Fighter II, Street Fighter III 3rd Strike, Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Super Street Fighter IV.  Each one has something different about them that makes it possible to enjoy them all equally, without feeling as those the older games have become antiquated.

So there we have it, the 10 arcade games that made the biggest impression on my childhood.  When I compiled the list it was interesting to realise I still play more than half of the games on this list, which is surely a testament to their design and creativity.

MTW