Previously: We went to the biggest arcade in the world. Most of the machines were broken. There were a lot of Neo-Geo Machines.
What was this again?
Absolutely no idea, but it looks pretty vintage.
It was also one of the very few of these types of machines that were working. I feel like it was an old vector game.
And we had nothing to say about most of the games.
Here’s one I’ve honestly never seen in person.
Which Initial D is this?
The first one. When I played it for the first time, most arcades had upgraded to v2. Admittedly, it is the same thing with more content.
No reply from Tom
(I feel like I’m talking to myself here)
(Sorry, I’m not sure what to say on some of these)
OK, if you have nothing to say about Initial D, have some Cadillacs and Dinosaurs.
It’s got Cadillacs, it’s got Dinosaurs, what more can a man possibly ask for? This is a pretty bog standard beat em up, right?
As I’m sure you know, this is an adaptation of a comic book adapted into a cartoon. I think the arcade game is the medium that it’s most remembered for, though. It’s got a pretty big cult following. So does that game on the left there…
I can’t make it out, fill me in?
That’s Ninja Baseball Bat Man!
That honestly sounds like some game developer couldn’t think of any good ideas for a game so he asked his five year old son what kind of game they should make.
He was skimming through the newspaper and saw mentions of the Ninja Turtles and Batman movies in theatres at the time… This game is infamous for its silly title, but it’s one of the best beat-em-ups ever.
It’s a classic Snakes on a Plane type of thing. Ridiculous name to hook you in, but pretty good product aside.
It didn’t work out too well since reportedly, only 40 arcades in the west actually bought the game, making it extremely rare.
I don’t know how an arcade proprietor in the 90s sees a name like that in a catalog and doesn’t immediately buy 10 of them.
Darkstalkers Vampire Savior (and VS2)
The undisputed king of arcade anime tiddies in the 90s.
How classy of you.
I say what everyone’s thinking!
You main Morrigan in this, right?
Yes.
That’s a boring character, isn’t it?
I’m fine with maining a boring character. I play Ryu in street fighter too. Or Dhalsim, who’s less boring I guess.
I play Lilith, who’s way funnier. I spent our entire match doing nothing but trying to pull off her joke attack and couldn’t do it. It’s way too easy to block
Poor Lillith.
It cost me the match, too. Oh well.
What was this one called? FFF? Fighting Furious Fists or something?
That rings a bell. I hardly remember it though.
It was the game you were terrible at.
That really narrows it down, yeah.
It functioned like whack-a-mole, where you hate to push the button to attack the enemy in the square.
That’s right! Yeah, you’re underwater. Fighting sharks and shit.
That’s the one.
Kind of a gimmicky game, and yeah, I couldn’t keep up with it.
Your hands are just slow.
I didn’t know Speed Racer had an upright version.
Did you play?
I don’t think I bothered, but I played it in New York. It’s clunky as a racer, but one of the few arcade racers that use items. I’ve always wondered why they never really caught on outside of console Mario Kart clones.
I guess I never really thought about it but yeah, most racers don’t use a mechanic like that. Maybe it’s weird to think of picking stuff up in a speeding car?
In this game, you don’t pick up the items. They run on a meter where you get a set number of uses that refill at checkpoints.
Reminds me of F-zero in a way, with the boost meter.
Something like that. Every car has a set selection of 3 items, each with a set number of uses. As you’d expect, some cars are outright game-breaking.
Sounds faithful to the series.
Wanna know what’s REALLY bizarre about it? It’s a western-made game.
Speed Racer paved the way for anime’s popularization in America – forgive the pun – so I’m not surprised.
When I first saw it, I honestly assumed it was an import…
It’s Turbo-tastic!
…
Nothing? Nothing?
I’m not even sure what I’m looking at!
It’s an old 80s arcade game. Go watch Wreck-It Ralph one of these days. This game is featured pretty heavily in it.
Seems like an obscure choice for a movie like that… I didn’t know Wreck It Ralph was going for the deep cuts.
You’d be surprised at some of the machines in that movie.
Now’s a good time to mention why the 600-machine claim is a bit dubious. A LOT of the machines had two completely separate arcade boards hooked up to a switcher, and you pushed a button to swap between them.
I guess it saves on real estate but yeah, it does feel like a cheat.
Anyway, this particular machine had an interesting pair of games. Do you know who Dimps are?
Nope.
They make a lot of mediocre anime games on consoles, like the Dragonball Z Playstation 2 games. They’ve also dabbled in things like the handheld Sonic games.
So what makes this cabinet by Dimps interesting?
The game on the right side is Rumble Fish 2, which was their attempt to break into the fighting game genre with an original series.
I’m gonna go ahead and say it was a total bust because what the fuck is Rumble Fish?
Pretty much. This is strange since Dimps was founded by the guy behind SNK’s Fatal Fury series. He also made the original (non-2) Street Fighter while he was at Capcom.
What’s the game on the left side?
It’s Fist of the North Star, based on the anime. But unlike Dimps, the company that made it wasn’t known for licensed anime games. It was an obscure company that primarily made console ports of arcade games until they also tried to break into the original fighting game genre about a decade before this.
Also a failure?
That company was Arc System Works.
Ok, so not a failure.
It’s amusing to see these two games put together like this. One was an attempt at a breakout fighting game from a company that mostly made licensed anime games. The other is an anime licensed game from a company that did have a breakout fighting game. Then Arc System Works would later go on to kick their ass at Dragonball Z games.
Nintendo does it. Capcom does it. Even Sega AM2 did.
A crossover fighter?
Yep.
Crossover fighters are great but you need some recognizable faces in there too. I guess the Marios in this game are coming from Virtua Fighter?
Virtua Fighter is Sega AM2. Their crossover was called Fighters Megamix and was completely different. This one is SNK’s. By the way, do you know what the first major fighting game crossover was?
Tell me.
SNK’s King of Fighters. It was a crossover between Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury, and a few others.
I never thought about the meaning behind the title, but now it makes sense.
Yep, given how both Capcom and SNK were crazy for crossover fighters, it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened. Capcom made Capcom vs SNK, while SNK made SVC (SNK vs Capcom) Chaos.
Was this one of the machines that was broken, or did we just not get to it?
It’s one of the machines I always run into, so I naturally ignored it, lol. But the game on the right is Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, another crossover SNK decided to do with themselves. It includes some new franchises, like Metal Slug.
I wonder why it seems like the most popular format for giant crossovers between franchises is to have the characters beating the shit out of each other. I mean for fighting game franchises it’s obvious, but there are plenty of examples where non-fighting-game franchises get tossed in the mix. Can’t you play a tree or something in one of the Sega AM2 fighters?
The palm tree is AM2’s logo! You can also be the car from Daytona USA. That’s the Fighters Megamix I mentioned earlier.
“We want to celebrate our company’s history. So let’s have our logo beat up a car.”
You can thank King of Fighters for popularizing that.
I honestly forgot Joust even had a sequel.
2Joust2Furious
As you can see, the graphics are a hell of a lot better in this one. IIRC, this game even has some of those shitty 80s arcade game voice samples.
Oh, the Sinistar gimmick.
Berserk! Berserk is the game that started that!
Credit where it’s due, then. Thanks Berserk, for shitty, barely intelligible vocal samples in 80s arcade games.
Remember this?
Another mediocre game based on a franchise that was ancient even when the game came out. Really weird stuff.
You wanna know what’s even weirder? There was an NES game based on Three Stooges that I THINK was based on this arcade game.
It was the same way with Gunsmoke, too. I don’t THINK 80s kids were any bigger superfans of the 3 stooges and Gunsmoke than today’s kids are, which is to say, it seems like these projects were ill-advised.
(note: again, Gunsmoke had nothing to do with the TV show)
You haven’t even heard the weirdest part. The NES game had a goddamn Gameboy Advance port like a decade later.
Shovelware, ah, finds a way.
I had this game on the Atari 2600. Never knew it was based on an arcade game.
The Atari 2600 and arcade ports are a truly cursed combination.
The 2600 did have some legitimately good games, though. Dark Chambers, for example. Which was a port of the game Gauntlet ripped off.
Dark Chambers needed better intellectual property rights protections badly.
Why?
I’m just riffing on the old line from Gauntlet.
Oh right. The needing food thing.
Pac-land!
Thank you, Pac-Land, for the worst stage in Smash Bros. History.
Pac-land deserves that place in Smash!
How is the game itself? I’ve never played.
It’s a pretty standard side-scrolling platform. Only has three stages, though.
Pretty lame for an arcade game. Or any game, really. But especially one that tries to keep you replaying again and again.
Well, according to the creator of this game, there was another game in development when this came out. The creator of THAT game liked it so much that they retooled the game they were making to take influence from it. That game ended up being called “Super Mario Bros”.
Never heard of it.
Anyway, that’s probably a big reason this game is so prominent in Smash, despite it not being very popular.
It does make sense now, in that light. It’s still an unbearably shitty stage.
Flicky. This game is mainly remembered for its characters randomly ending up in the Sonic cast a decade later.
This game had a console port too, right?
A few of them. The Genesis version, in particular, is in a LOT of Genesis collections.
I knew I had played this at home as a kid. It was even on the Sega Channel!
I had it on a PC collection of Genesis games. It’s strange to think Sega ported so many of its console games to PC.
Doesn’t seem like a company that had a super coherent strategy.
The stranger part is they just kept doing it. Most people don’t even know games as late as Sonic Heroes, and Crazy Taxi 3 had a PC version. And that was AFTER they left the console market, but before, digital downloads were a big thing.
Most people don’t know which game was the first in this series.
Galaxian?
Yeah, but Galaga eclipsed it in popularity. See, that game next to them is Gaplus, the third game in the series. But they later had to retitle it to “Galaga 3” for brand purposes. If you look carefully, Galloping Ghost has both versions.
Even though even under that convention it would really be Galaga 2…
Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense.
This is that one you wanted to play but forgot about.
A Sonic fighting game, right?
Yep. Gameworks in Vegas is where I first played it, but we had one in Mall of America very briefly. This game only exists because when they were making Fighting Vipers, they threw Sonic in as a dummy to test the engine. Yuji Naka liked it enough to go, “wait, why aren’t we making this for real?”
So many good ideas in history happen by accident. But was it any good in the end?
It’s very awkward and, to my knowledge, doesn’t get any better at high-level play.
Too bad.
It later got a Gamecube port if you ever want to try it yourself.
I think this was one of those… try it if you get a chance, don’t lose sleep over it if you don’t kind of things.
Oh my god, it’s Virtua Fighter 4!
How many are we up to in the current year?
5!
Wow, 120 Virtua Fighter games?
No, Sega pulled the plug on the series after 5.
That was a math joke.
Either way, this is one of the most important Japanese arcade games ever made.
How so?
Remember the other day when I was telling you how Konami, Sega, Taito, and a bunch of other companies had online networks where you could save your data with a card swipe?
Sure.
This is the game that started that way back in 2001. And, of course, it would be Sega who pioneered the idea.
Have you had the chance to use the swipe card for this one?
Of course not. VF.net closed down long ago, and I doubt anyone bothered to make a pirate network for it, given how rare it is in the west. Plus, recovering online functionality from nearly two decades ago is almost impossible since it’s hard to analyse how it worked.
Fair enough.
Die Hard Arcade.
I can’t recall, is this a beat em up or a light gun game?
It’s a beat-em-up. I’ve wanted to play it for a long time because I’m a big fan of the sequel. Sadly, people were always on it.
Name recognition is a powerful draw.
The sequel didn’t have the name recognition, though, since they lost the license.
Perish Difficult Arcade
“Dynamite Cop”
Not much better.
That’s the cheesy 3D beat-em-up we played at Garcade, if you don’t remember.
I do. It was a ton of fun, and I had no idea that it had anything even tangentially to do with Die Hard.
I know, right? Arcade games are fascinating.
Here’s one I’ve wanted to get a photo of for the blog FOREVER. Or half of it, anyway.
Sunset Riders was one of my favorite games as a kid, playing on a home console.
Yeah, but that’s not the half I care about.
The other half is basically the same thing, only you play as some sort of anthropomorphic bull people, right?
COMET RAISED THE MESA TO THE WESTERN SKIES, WITH THE SOUNDS OF A THOUSAND CATTLE DRIVE. A CHOSEN FEW WOULD SEE THE LIGHT AND FIGHT THE WRONG WITH RIGHT.
The Real Cowboys of Moo Mesa was a Ninja Turtles spin-off cartoon of the early 90s about cowboys who were cows.
They should have been called Humanboys.
If there’s any game I have a nostalgic connection with, it’s this one. It was strangely common in Las Vegas when I was young, so I often got a group of four random players together for it.
We got fairly far into it but the difficulty ramps up pretty quick. Just like Sunset Riders, eventually you get to a point where you really need 4 human players to help tank the bosses.
Yeah, the bosses were balanced for the firepower of four players and take forever to kill otherwise. But what was important was that we killed the giant scorpion! If there’s ANYTHING from the arcade that left a lasting impression on me as a kid, it was the giant scorpion. See, it taught me that scorpions are the ultimate monster. They have two claws AND a tail to attack you with. Whenever I think of a giant monster rampaging, Iimagine it being a scorpion.
I can agree with you there. Scorpions freak me out, man.
You grew up around them, didn’t you? My friends in Nevada tell me they like to chill near palm trees.
Yeah, and once or twice I found them in the sink. They’d come up through the pipes – a dark, cool place with water.
That’s why I migrated to the midwest instead of Nevada.
I… didn’t know there was an arcade version of Super Punch-Out. (EDIT: there isn’t. This is just a minor enhancement to the original with the same name as the SNES game)
Soda Popinski’s terror knows no bounds.
I wonder how many times I’ve run into this and assumed it was the original. That’s a big reason I don’t advertise this blog much. I tend to make a lot of factual errors. In one of my first posts, I mistakenly said the final boss in Jambo Safari was unused content. It turns out that the forum where I read it was full of people who had no idea what they were talking about.
Shocking.
Have you ever played arcade Punch-out?
Nah. I’ve actually never played Punch-Out, period.
You should. It’s probably pretty different than you’d expect. It’s one of the few NES games that truly holds up.
See? It’s DISCS of Tron. Not Tron. (note: Tom thought this game was Tron and nearly put the photo in the “toss” list when we were sorting them)
It’s a totally different game, right?
Yep, nothing like the original. This one is a shitty game where you run back and forth on platforms and avoid shots. It’s best remembered for ONLY being distributed in those big sit-down cabs. A pretty fancy one for the period, with mirrors and early surround sound.
Tron basically HAD to push to the boundaries of then-current tech, that’s its whole gimmick.
Yeah, the only time I’d ever play this game is with the original cab. I got lucky enough to find one in New York. It’s pretty spectacular. This obviously isn’t that.
It should be mentioned that we’ve been going through in a strange order, but this is what you see to the right when you first get in.
It makes sense to put all the street fighter games right up front. They’ll always be popular.
Yep. Every single game in this photo is a Street Fighter variant. I also don’t think we’ve mentioned this, but every arcade game here has a little card on top listing the top three scores. By the way, did you hit the Pinball Hall of Fame when you were in Vegas?
No, I didn’t. It would have been nice to go.
Ah, well there, a lot of the games have little green cards attached that tell you their history. I REALLY wish they had those here.
Anyhow, I guess it’s time we get to these.
Which one was this?
Galaxy Force, aka the broken one. This is another Sega game from the 80s that’s extremely rare. I think this may be the only public one left in the US.
I’ve never even heard of it.
It’s not very notable outside of the big machine. If you’re ever at Niagara Falls, I know they have it working there.
Oh my god, I never thought I’d see this in person.
Another arcade bucket list item to cross off.
Yep. This is Cruis’n USA’s deluxe cab. Actually, I kind of wonder if this is the one that used to be in NYC’s Fun Fuzion. It disappeared around the same time Galloping Ghost got theirs.
What separates the normal cab from the deluxe cab?
Only what you see. It was extremely fancy-looking. The whole thing is built into a plastic car. I’m amazed that more of these didn’t stick around just for the novelty, but the shape of this one is a pretty good indicator of why they didn’t. It was BARELY playable.
It looks kinda small.
It’s bigger than it looks.
Here’s Sega’s Thunder Blade, another one of their 80s full-size machines.
This game would be really fun, but the cabinet was in bad shape. It really relies on being able to physically move the seat and it must have had fucked up bearings or something else wrong with it internally because it just wasn’t level and didn’t turn evenly.
Yeah, again most of the good games were either broken or barely worked. They also had F-zero arcade, which I couldn’t get a photo of because it was hidden behind a bunch of other games. You can kinda see it in the Galaxy Force photo.
The F-Zero machine was in good condition at least. It was another popular one and we almost didn’t get a chance at it. I was glad I did. I spent many hours 100%ing the GCN version.
It was in good condition because it’s not that old. It’s pretty rare, but they have three of them at Circus Circus, so I’m never impressed by it.
With our spirits struggling to keep up after writing these posts for five days, we end part 2. Just one more before we’re finally through this place.
