With the import half of 2D con done, let’s take a quick look around before getting to the retro game half. Be warned; this blog post won’t be nearly as interesting as the last since I have almost nothing to say about most of these. That’s the real reason I split it into posts. I figure that way; there’ll be one somewhat interesting post and one that’s little more than a photodump. Just skip the post if you’re not just curious about what games to expect at 2D con next year.
2D isn’t just an arcade room. It also has rows and rows of consoles set up. It just didn’t have, you know, anything else. The entire “convention” is just a large gameroom, a small dealer room, and about three panels. Calling it a convention is greatly overselling what it is. It’s really just a game room.
Have I talked about these before? There’s an “arcade” near downtown Minneapolis that is nothing but these pseudo-virtual reality pods. They drag a bunch of them to a lot of major cons, though not as often as they used to. I’ll talk about them if I ever get down there.
This local arcade parts dealer supplies a lot of the non-imported machines. I want to visit the place someday, but I don’t know if they allow walk-ins. It’s a workshop filled with bits and pieces of arcade games. From this point on, assume there’s about a 50-50 chance they provided any machine.
Anyhow, onto this half of the arcade area. While the left half of the room was filled with bright neon lights, this half felt far more akin to a dark, grungy 80s arcade.
Machine Count: 38
I originally had a draft of this blog post where I tried to talk about all of the games that I hadn’t seen before, but there’s not much to say about a lot of them. Games from this era aren’t particularly complex, and I’m not familiar enough with this era to talk about the historical significance of these. Instead, I’ll drop the photos in case someone who plans to go to this con wants to know what the game lineup was like in 2019.
Machine Count: 44
The machine the guy is playing there alternated between Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair. I thought I’d use this opportunity to really put some time into them since I didn’t have to pay every time I failed, but god damn, are those games frustrating.
Machine Count: 49
I had to take a LOT of these photos many times because it was so hard to get good lighting on them. As I was looking through them, I realized Crazy Climber (the orange one) came to the con late. I didn’t even notice.
Machine Count: 55
Still here? This is the last of the games I had nothing to say about.
Machine Count: 59
The Pac-man machine on the left was autographed by Billy Mitchell nearly two decades before the controversy. It looks like he missed his goal by 30 points.
With those finally out of the way, let’s talk about some of the more unusual machines they had up. The game in the middle is Pac-Man’s Pixel Bash, one of Namco’s most recent compilation arcade games. This is nothing new since Namco releases some new Pac-man/Galaga collection every few years. This one’s notable for having 33 games, including some of the more obscure “upgraded” variations like Pac-man Plus and New Rally-X. Namco doesn’t include those in collections often.
Machine Count: 62
Oh, and this specific machine is one of the promotional Red Bull coolers that they distributed to grocery stores and gas stations. Originally, this machine came with a special version of Pac-man where the maps and graphics were modified to look like Red Bull, but this one wasn’t running it.
There were a lot of games here that I just skimmed over, but this one I really had to dedicate its own paragraph to this one. This is Exterminator, one of the most convoluted games I’ve ever played. At one point, I saw someone struggling to figure out how the hell you play it, so I had to stand next to him and frantically try to explain how he was supposed to react to all of the various hazards flying around. I’ll see if I can explain this game in a way that expresses just how strange it is:
You control a hand flying around in front of a pseudo-3D room, similar to Glove Ball on the NES. Bugs are constantly flying at you. When they get close, you can grab them with your hand. Unless they’re a wasp. The wasp will hover around your hand before damaging you, so you need to stop and shake the stick to shoo it away. If you pull your hand all the way to the very left edge of the screen, your hand enters shooting mode. At this point, you have to rotate the joystick (no, not “make a rotating motion,” you have to turn the stick like a knob) to rotate your aim left and right. You can move up and down while in shooting mode, but if you go even slightly to the right, you’ll switch back to grab mode. On the bottom of the screen are cans/tanks/other things that move across the floor. To destroy these, you have to press the “slam” button when they’re directly below you. Whenever you kill an enemy, the tile of the floor directly below it turns red. To clear the level, you must paint an entire row of tiles red. Except they move and shuffle below you, so you have to keep tabs on which tiles you can paint at any given time.
If that isn’t enough to keep track of, later levels start introducing new elements like a spray bottle that will kill you if you sit still for too long, but you also need to perform a grab on them to refill your ammo (but if you accidentally grab a wasp, you take damage). I don’t think I’ve ever seen people so confused over how to play a video game before.
There were several fighting games set up in candy cabs, but between me not being very versed in fighting games and me writing this blog post up a month after the con, I’m afraid I can’t remember the exact lineup. Some version of King of the Fighters, Tekken, Marvel vs. Capcom, and, I think, Soul Calibur? Something like that, anyway.
Machine Count: 66
And four more candy cabs on the opposite side. I’m pretty sure one of these was Samurai Shodown. Unlike the four on the other side, not all these were dedicated to fighting games. The one with the vertical screen is a shoot-em-up called Raiden DX.
Machine Count: 70
The machine on the far left is Power Stone 2, one of my favorite four-player games. This machine’s only set up for two players, though. I’m just happy to have finally run into the arcade version, even if finding it at a convention kind of feels like cheating. (by the way, this machine isn’t visible in the photo above. It’s slightly off to the left)
Machine Count: 71
Behold, the one and only fighting game that wasn’t stuffed into a candy cab. Of course, it would be Street Fighter 2.
Machine Count: 72
I just outright don’t remember the name of this one, but it had a cool inner screen.
I warned you at the start of this post that it wouldn’t be full of interesting commentary.
EDIT: Editing these pages a couple of years later, I looked at this and went, “it was called Solar Fox or something, wasn’t it?” I’m not sure why I even know that, but it got absorbed into my subconscious at some point since I originally wrote this post.
Machine Count: 73
On the bright side, I got to play Die Hard Arcade! The last couple of times I ran into it, I couldn’t play it for one reason or another. It was freeplay, so I took the chance to play through the whole game. I don’t think it’s as good as Dynamite Cop, but it’s every bit as silly as I expected. The final boss is an old man who starts by mostly using the terrain to attack. Once you enter the second phase, he starts busting out moves ripped straight out of Street Fighter. I love this game so much.
Machine Count: 76
After playing some Gauntlet 2, I think I understand why it’s not as common as the original. It ramps up in intensity FAST. By the fourth or fifth room, you’ve got a big open area with few walls to protect you and enemies spawning everywhere. If you don’t know that you have to manage the enemies and work through them slowly, they’ll overwhelm you quickly.
Machine Count: 78
Oh, and Galactic Battleground, one of those Killer Queen-Esque neo-retro arcade games. Except this one’s based on Asteroids instead of Joust. Meh.
Well, that’s the last of the normal upright machines. We’ve just got a few left to sort through; then I can finally be done with this blog post.
Machine Count: 80
Yeah, the pinball wall featuring Crazy Taxi. I remember 2D Con’s website mentioning they were trying to get a bigger pinball selection this year.
Machine Count: 92
I wanted to make particular note of a couple of pinball machines. This is a really popular one called Whirlwind. Its primary gimmick is the big fan at the top that blows onto the player during the game. I don’t think it was working on this particular machine, though. The pinball machine for the movie Twister had the same gimmick.
If I tried to photograph this from any other angle, it would look like a regular pinball machine. This is a virtual pinball machine. The whole table is just a flat screen. I know these are popular in private game rooms since you can swap themes pretty easily (this one flipped between Jaws and Stranger Things), but pinball purists don’t look kindly upon these.
And here we had the cocktail table ally. Let’s look through a couple of these before getting our final machine total.
This Popeye machine had a piece of cardboard, giving the history of this game. I’m not sure why it had this, but I wish the other games did, too.
Let me tell you the secret to finding arcade machines: If you play up how rare finding a specific game in the wild is, another will appear shortly after just to prove you wrong. Every time. I’m half expecting to run into another Chunithm within a week.
I don’t understand. Why did this convention need so much Galactic Battleground?
Well, let’s end it here. With the cocktail machines, our final count is:
Machine Count: 98
Yeah, 2D Con had a total 98 arcade machines available to play. I had to half-ass the second half of this blog post because convention game rooms don’t give me much to write about. It’s just a room full of video games. Plus, I wanted to get it done before this year’s arcade trip.
Where am I going this time? You’ll find out soon enough. I couldn’t believe how many great arcades they have until Istarted looking into it. In just a few days, I get to spend an entire week doing nothing but hitting arcade after arcade.
