Arcade Throwback hiatus

It's no secret this blog has slowed down over the last few years, but it is with a heavy heart that we have to announce a complete hiatus of unknown duration. This is due to our head writer and editor needing to undergo hospital treatment for a long-term illness.

Arcade Throwback has always been a small operation and because we aim to never publish inaccurate or false information about classic arcade and pinball games, researching and writing for the blog is very time consuming. As such I hope you understand our decision to close shop until we are all fit and well enough to work on it again.

Regards

The Arcade Throwback team

Happy 2015

Happy New Year! Again, an automated message from me, as it's my little girl's birthday today, so we're in Cardiff for the Doctor Who Experience. Just hope I get to Jenna Coleman — I mean Peter Capaldi, yes, the Doctor. Ahem!

Anyway, I'm sad to say this marks the end of Arcade Throwback's scheduled publications. I've been running this site for 4½ years, but I no longer have enough free time to work on the site regularly and even my Classic of the Month feature has been slipping. A quick look at the archives will show in 2014 my post count was a third of what I'd posted in previous years — and my post count for 2015 is going to drop again. I've already dropped my other regular features and this year I am going to stop writing Classic of the Month as well. There are still a few arcade games I'd like to talk about, so I will replace the monthly feature with an ad hoc one called Nostalgia Trip, which I can use to discuss both random games and random arcade memories. I've actually gone back and tagged up some older articles that already fit that description, so the tag is already well populated. I still have plans for one or two Brief Histories, so the site will be updated every once in a while, just not routinely.

Believe me when I say this is purely out of necessity. I have other projects in progress that unfortunately have to take precedence over Arcade Throwback. You can read about those on my technical and creative writing blog http://themattwardle.wordpress.com. I did have plans for other monthly features, but I know I won't find the time to do them justice.

I'll still be tweeting and retweeting from @ArcadeThrowback, so please follow (or keep following) me, as I still love talking to fellow retro gamers. I will also announce my sporadic posts through Twitter and my Facebook page. In the mean time, enjoy the rest of your holidays and I hope 2015 is a great year for us all.

MTW

MMXIV

Happy New Year, arcade fans. This is a pre-programmed post, as it's my daughter's birthday today. Happy birthay, Chick Pea!

2013 was a great year for this blog. My Twitter follower count shot up, thanks to some careful use of hash tags, my Worth a Look feature allowed me to talk about lots of modern games with retro vibes and I managed to tell you all about 120 of my favourite arcade games, thanks to my Top 10 feature.

So what have I got planned for 2014? Not much, I'm afraid to say. This year is shaping up to be crazy at work, plus I'm in the middle of a major personal project which sadly has to take precedence over blogging about old arcade games. I will still be putting up posts, just nothing routine (not even Classics of the Month, although I my do one for the road). But the great thing about writing a retro blog is I rarely have to worry about specific dates and deadlines.

So I hope you all have a great year and if you got an Xbox One or a PS4 for Christmas, take a moment to find something retro to play and don't forget how important those early games still are today.

Bye for now

MTW

Relabelling session

Adding labels (AKA tags) to posts is a fine art. It's all to easy to add labels that are either too vague (and so you end up with loads of posts with the same label) or too specific (in which case the label gets used once or twice and that's it). For Arcade Throwback's labels I've always used manufacturer names so that fans can find all the posts about manufacturer, but after that my labels have been improvised. So I've decided to have a tidy up. The following labels are now gone :

• Clones *
• Conversions *
• Emulation *
• Feature
• Homages *
• Play now 
• Ports *
• Remakes *
• Show reels
• Tournaments *

* Posts with these labels now have one of the following new labels:

• Clones & Homages
• Expos & Tournaments
• Emulation & Ports

Hopefully things keeps things tidier and also groups up several related posts that were previous separate.

Spring cleaning

Spring is in the air and in the coming weeks I will have some spare time on my hands, so I have decided instead of just sitting around playing games I should improve my blogs. For Arcade Throwback this means coming up with new ideas for more features, as well as going back and completing half-finished posts that have been sat in my drafts list all this time.

I hope you enjoy the changes and expect more posts over the coming weeks than ever before.

MTW

The devil is in the details

As with any social networking site, Twitter requires a profile picture. So, for my new Arcade Throwback account I decided to use a classic arcade joystick (in the site colours). I edited a picture of a red ball-style stick, making the shaft longer and the ball green and voila, one profile picture. Trouble is, I can be a stickler for detail, so I wasn't happy that the image was not present on the blog itself. Therefore, I've updated the blog logo with the stick and

Original image (right); joystick cut out (middle); finished logo, recoloured and stretched (right)

I've also fixed the fuzzy stars on the 'T' I took from Track & Field. I've also made a favicon (the little pic you get on the browser tab) with my new motif. I think it looks pretty good, especially since I am no artist.

MTW

Insert Tweet(s)

Arcade Throwback is now on Twitter, so for regular chunks of arcade chatter follow me @ArcadeThrowback.

Thanks.

MTW

Arcade Throwback is 1

Arcade Throwback is 1 today - hooray!

I started this blog as a labour of love. As much as I enjoy modern games and the way the the art form has progressed over the years, my heart still belongs to those arcade classics of the 80s and 90s.  So to celebrate I thought I'd make a proper logo for the blog (just as I did for Guide Writer a couple of weeks ago).  It's made up of letters from lots of different games and companies.  Can you guess them all?  Highlight the blocks to find the answers

A is from Altered Beast

R is from Ridge Racer

C is from Pac-Man

A is from Metal Slug

D is from the Data East logo

E is from  Centipede

T is from Track and Field

H is from Hang-On

R is from R-Type

O is from Arkanoid

W is from World Heroes

B is from Bubble Bobble

A is from the Sega logo

C is from Contra

K is from the original Konami logo

How did you do?  If it's anything over 10 you are truly an arcade nut.  If you got all 15 then you're some kind of walking coin-op encyclopedia.

And in case you're wondering why those particular games and companies, my choice was based on either how iconic the font was or how easy it was to extract from the rest of the logo. Lazy, eh?

MTW

Arcade Throwback reviews

I've been thinking, 'What's a games website without reviews?' So with that in mind, I want to write the occasional review for Arcade Throwback. The trouble is, new arcade machines are few and far between, so I will need to review things like ports, remakes and any other new, arcade-related games I encounter.

It's common for review sites to put a score at the bottom, but I think that's pretty much meaningless, so inside I'll end my reviews with two bullet point lists, one for the highs and one for the lows.

Look out for upcoming reviews under the http://arcadethrowback.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Reviews label.

MTW

Welcome to the Arcade Throwback blog

These days games are everywhere, from the Nintendo Wii becoming the must have console of the last decade to Angry Birds on smartphones in people's pockets. However, not so long ago, if you wanted to play the best games around you had to go to an arcade. Sadly, arcades are a rare sight now. Even seaside resorts have surprisingly few games and the ones left tend to be decade-old Dance Dance Revolution, Time Crisis and Daytona USA machines.  

I'm sure many of you are thinking, Why do you care? Why play Commando when you can play Call of Duty? Well, just think back, the big screens, graphics and sound that were years ahead of home computers and consoles, the custom cabinets, often with custom controls, the neon lighting and the sound of dozens of other machines bring played around you, getting your initials on a high score for all other patrons to see (not that my initials, MTW, appeared at the top very often), going to an arcade was an event and put simply I miss it, mourn it even. If that sounds dramatic, think about this: how would you feel if there were no more concerts or cinema? It does not matter how good your home music system or home theatre is, it just is not the same and if you enjoy going to concerts and the cinema, you'd mourn their end too.

So Arcade Throwback is a blog about those lost, classic arcade games, from the early 8-bit days to the beginning of polygonal graphics. Games like Space Invaders, Galaxians, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Dig Dug, Paper Boy, R-Type, Gradius, Wonder Boy, Gryzor, New Zealand Story, Final Fight, King of Fighters, Street Fighter, Virtua Fighter, Tekken, Twilight Zone pinball and many, many more. This isn't a review site, just a place to talk about what made those coin-op games so memorable and celebrating the origin of our beloved hobby.

MTW