speaking of arcades

[davemerrill]

We did drive a few hours north to Collingwood to the Just Push Play arcade downtown. Collingwood is a former shipping and shipbuilding town on Lake Huron that's now known for its skiing on the nearby Blue Mountain resorts and summer fun at Wasaga Beach, as well as its yearly Elvis Festival. The arcade has vintage pinball, vintage arcade games, and a few of those multi-game machines, both with hundreds of games each. Soooo, I got to play lots of old favorites and experience weird obscure games. It's $10 for all you can play in an hour (or $15 all day) and well worth it, in my opinion, just to play Frenzy and Red Baron and Moon War and Moon Patrol and Pleiades and Mappy and Robotron and even 'Streaking' to your heart's content.

We also had lunch at the Olde Red Hen, got our feet wet in the lake, got bug bit wandering down dirt roads in the Blue Mountains, and drove through tons of farmland across the back roads of rural Ontario. And that was Saturday!

Comments

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Red Baron = Atari raster game with a somewhat painful joystick (it's a brick, kinda) and you're flying around shooting dirigibles and biplanes and stuff?

*sigh*

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

it was a vector game, but yeah. Joystick was prone to break. Little fire button on top. It took a bit for me to adjust to playing with the multi-game joystick, but once I got my groove on I was blastin' biplanes and blimps outta the sky like I was 11 years old again.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Vector. That's what I got wrong. Raster is 'like your TV set', Vector is the lines, Vectrex, Battlezone, blah blah.

sorry.

So this was a cabinet like the old Neo Geo, that plays many games? astonishing.

Jerry loved to load up his Mac with Mame emulators and gank every arcade game we ever played, but he always lamented the lack of the actual arcade controls. There's a lot of controllers on the market but nothing can duplicate, for example, the spin wheel that you can also lift up and press down upon for Discs of Tron.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

the actual arcade controllers make a big difference, I find; the whole architecture of the cabinet makes the gameplay more, I dunno, "authentic". Shaun had a bunch of the old arcade games emulated on one of his PCs, but it wasn't the same. Anyway it's more fun to play video games in an arcade full of other games with noises and bleeping lights, and that faint ozone smell of the electronics. It's a package deal.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

There is a specific magic to arcade game cabinets. The really good ones (at least what I considered really good) just glow and scream, and the cigarette burns and Pengo ALWAYS would mess up your finger no matter how you grabbed the joystick and that amazing grip on Tron and Discs of Tron (and used in a few others) and playing the Firefox LD game which used the Star Wars controller...

and the old mechanical games too. the ever-popular 'Red Baron' style filmstrip shooter. The helicopter game where you spun it around and around trying to do something.

*snif*

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

christ, that helicopter game. Talk about non-intuitive controls! Armor Attack, that was it. Never could get it to do anything but die. Are you the jeep? Are you the helicopter? I'll never know.

[(Anonymous)]

Not too long ago, I had a plane stopover in Boise. They had a Ms. Pacman game there, and I thought that was a fun thing for an airport to have, so I put a quarter in. But the joystick was slack--you'd overshoot every turn you'd try to make, and in a maze game, that's a bit of a drawback. It really demonstrated how these games need regular mechanical and electrical maintenance to survive the decades. After all, they were only meant to last a few years (or maybe only months) before being replaced/refurbished with newer, hotter games.

--C.