games

I lost a lot of quarters to Time Crisis and I have zero regrets about it

Shadows over Mystara and The Simpsons game in the lobby at the theater downtown.

Popped a couple quarters into Arm Champs 2 at lazer tag and accidentally picked the hardest opponent. I held out long enough that other kids wouldn't let me lose, so like 5 of us together beat it.

Went to Texas on vacation and absolutely annihilated the high score board on a Star Wars: Phantom Menace pinball machine.

I grew up in the sticks, but we did have some arcades. Most were relegated to pizza huts, although occasionally we'd take a trip out to the mall. They had an awesome arcade, the kind with ski ball, every street fighter, that one Area 51 light gun game. I was part of a regular Soulcalibur 1 tournament they'd do every month. I'd go bowling with my grandma as a teenager too. The bowling alley had a very small, but extremely well curated arcade. Whoever was in charge of the arcade selection there really knew what they were doing, and I should have asked. Metal Slug, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Crazy Taxi, NBA Jam, etc. Just hit after hit.

I occasionally go to the retro arcade near me, although it's aimed at a slightly more retro vibe than I'm into. It mainly has games from the late 70s to late 80s, but it's still a cool time. I used to have the high score on the Bubble Bobble cabinet (trust me, jump a bunch of times in place on the first few levels, it's important).

I've been to a bunch of arcades in Japan and a few in China. It depends on where you go these days. In Japan a Taito or a Gigo are always good bets. There's only one Sega left, so that's a shame. Namco centers are also pretty good. They're harder to find, but little tiny arcades are always the best, but what can suck is people in there will absolutely be smoking. Every Japanese arcade I've visited that had Street Fighter III: Third Strike also had ash trays and permanent yellow stains everywhere.

Also, heads up, very large arcades in Japan will be set up on multiple levels. If you actually want arcade games, you'll have to find the floor you want.

• First floor is always claw machines (or UFO catchers).
• Second floor is often photo booths, or some kind of odd hobby-game like confusing card games or those simulators where you're a train conductor. Sometimes there will be VR stuff set up on the second floor too.
• Third floor will be rhythm games. Japanese arcades absolutely love rhythm games and you will see someone blasting their hands all over some buttons to a bouncy Hatsune Miku song or dancing like crazy on DDR
• Fourth floor will be stuff like airhockey, multiplayer stuff like the taiko drum game, etc.
• Fifth floor and above are what I call the otaku caves. They're where the nerds are pushed. That's where you'll see fighting games, more action oriented stuff, retro games, whatever.
• Top floor will be something like a place to play collectible card games or maybe even something like a theater for some local idol group, if you're into that kinda thing.

Hope you can visit a game center someday! There's really nothing else in the world quite like them. Shout out to that lady who destroyed me in Street Fighter 6 at the Taito in Nipponbashi a few months ago.

23 skidoo! Me and my main squeeze used to take the Model T down to the Nickelodeon with 20 cents in our pockets to play Shoot the Duck and Ten Pins see!

DDR down at the putt-putt.

What came before was cool, TMNT at the pizza hut, etc. but DDR was peak.

Long lines for the machines, everybody having a great time.

People actually clapping when someone managed to get through a particularly hard song.

My high school had a deal with the college across the street to let us use the bowling alley in their student rec area for a bowling class that me and my friends all joined together. It was pretty cool. We bowled right before one of our scheduled breaks so pretty frequently we'd all just walk over to the next door arcade. Crazy Taxi, Dynamite Cop, Time Crisis 2... honestly amazing times.

teenage mutant ninja turtles beat'em'up at chuck e cheese

X-Men, Pac-Man, The one with the space centipedes that you have to shoot, Mario

Thats what barcades are for. Drink and relive the nostalgia.

Old ass hexbears lol. I was still able to play some all time classic games with ppl at arcades when I was a kid in the mid/late 2000s and early 10s. Plenty of street fighter, mortal kombat, soul calibur, local ones had carnevil, tmnt, it was great. Will 100% agree that arcades have become shit though. Ever been to a dave and busters? Most disappointing mobile game scam shit possible

No way were my folks going to drive me somewhere to feed quarters into a machine. We had nintendo at home.

golden axe at the pizza parlor baby

I really liked Burger Time. I felt like it wasn't mind numbingly hard and it was a good value proposition for a quarter. I similarly feel the same way about DigDug.

Spy Hunter was a revelation. But really hard.

Seeing Dragons Lair for the first time was mind boggling. But I sucked at it.

Street Fighter 2 definitely got me going back to the arcade.

Edited to add: look into the MiSTer FPGA project. I've had one for 5 or 6 years and it scratches an itch where most emulation falls short.

Full on Gen X. All we HAD was arcades. I mean.. the non-arcade versions of games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders was pretty janky.

Some of my fondest memories are spending Saturday afternoons at the arcade, back when $20 in quarters could last.

So many great games! First game I could ever finish was called Space Harrier. I figured out the pattern and could finish the game on a few quarters.

I admit I was sad when arcades started to shutter.

Pole position every Sunday night at Pizza Hut. I didn’t care for the fighting games at the time but man did I want to whiz around that track.

Sure do! In fact, my mom worked in an arcade when I was pretty young. She would hook me up with the quarters painted blue that they use to placate kids whose quarters were "eaten" by the game.

When my mom was dating my stepdad, we went to the arcade often.

When I was a young teen, I figured out you could eke out a few extra tickets if you gently pulled on the tickets that you won.

I liked the shooters the most. Driving was pretty cool too.

Side note, does anyone remember an Aerosmith themed shooter where you were the band, and you shot nondescript thugs? It was the kind of console that had the plastic gun. Pretty sure they were uzi style. I also remember the special button shot gold records.

there was a mall that died in the late 70s and all that was left by the early 90s was this enormous, mother of all arcades. I loved that place. divorced dad would take us there on weekends. I mostly just watched people play games, but the most memorable was this thing, a $10,000 arcade machine in 1989 dollars. the polygon count is a joke by today's standards, but the real value was in the sound and feel. it was a legit driving sim with serious haptic feedback from the steering wheel. trying to correct an oversteer as an 11 year old doing 90 mph around a gentle curve, it would rip the wheel out of my hands. you really had to fight it to drive fast.

also, the manual transmission was no joke. I lacked the ability as a kid to coordinate the knowledge, speed and strength of throwing the gears to downshift and recover traction, but it took the punishment with steel construction of shifter. I would just play with automatic, but I watched this guy in his 30s go hard on it, and it was made for it. shit was badass.

I bet if there's one out there that still works, it's probably worth like more than a new real car. I would love to play it again and kick the shit out of it.

Arcades such so much ass now.. It's all a bunch of gambling carnival games and a mortal kombat ii cabinet set to EXTREMELY BULLSHIT difficulty

golden axe. only arcade game i ever played to the end.

i had a stack of quarters and other kids jumped in for co-op until one who was decent enough i just funded him until we beat it

went to a birthday or two where the parents rented one of those "free arcade rooms" where you got pizza and unlimited plays on like 20 cabinets

i really do think we need some kind of third space for social gaming again. obviously not designed to just rob you of money

The six player X-Men was indeed so cool when you actually had the whole team going on it. Street Fighter 2 was absolutely my game, I remember putting my token in a line of them that we put on the cabinet to call next game at the arcade by the grocery stores my parents often went to. One time we were playing winning sits at Street Fighter II, I was on such a tear that I played for almost two hours straight and there were literal cheers when someone finally beat me.

My friends and I would all have our birthday parties at that arcade (the only one for like forty miles in any direction).

A lot of places had a few machines here and there though. I can remember going to a wedding venue for some people I honestly don't even remember, but I do remember stealing quarters from the bar tender's tip jar to play more games and when he caught me he was very cool about it and just put Pac-Man on free mode so I would stop.

My grandfather had no idea how to bond with us (first gen Eastern European immigrant) and so he would just take us to a local hotel that had some arcade machines and let us run wild with a roll of quarters. He'd taught us to pretend we were staying at the hotel if anyone asked us.

I'm right around the millennial/zoomer gap, and I have fond memories of playing a shitload of time crisis and tcII at my local arcade which also had a dope go-kart track.

Street Figher 2 (obv), TMNT, The Simpsons....

I'm playing them now as well on FPGA hardware thanks to the scene out there working to reverse engineer the original hardware and preserve them. Still waiting for an X-Men port though.

Lately I've been discovering that a bunch of classic NES games were arcade ports and I never knew because I had never seen the arcade versions, like Contra, Bionic Command, Strider, Castlevania (Haunted Castle)....

There was a laundromat that sold beer and had a 3D well type Tetris game called blockout. Played against my friends, competition got pretty intense. Would leave the mat late at night doing rotations is my brain, so fun

Younger Millennial here. Too young to have been around for the arcade craze, but the Fish and Chips shop near my childhood home had a Metal Slug cabinet me and my friends used to love.

My parents didn't have money to spare like that, and we didn't go out much, so in those brief moments I would watch others play arcade games. Cringe as it is one of my best memories growing up was watching some college kids play those simulated race car games with the actual steering wheel and everything. Was young enough it was just fun to sit there and watch the demo too.

In the mid 90s when I was really young I remember playing Galaga somewhat regularly in a diner near my parents house

Also later when I was older (mid 2000s) my class in school went on a day trip to an amusement park with an arcade, and towards the end of the day I got bored of rides and played Joust to the point where I got multiple high scores on the machine

It was the tail end of the era, but many of my friends were deeeeeply into the DDR scene.

Loved it as a kid. Gauntlet, Rampage, Arkanoid, TMNT, Cruisin' USA, the boating version. Obviously pacman+ms, qbert, galaga, I think there was a Terminator game with a gun, mortal Kombat, street fighter, X-Men. And of course plenty of pinball.

Surprisingly enough, I'm not much of a gamer.🤷

Virtual-On, Crazy Taxi, and Soul Calibur at the arcade

Metal Slug and Cruisin' USA at the pizza restaurant

Time Crisis and 1942 at the movie theater

Good shit

Earliest for me was playing the star wars (vector graphics) cabinet.

Playing children of the atom arcade.

The last big machine was beating star wars trilogy with £5 while some kid watched me play

I remember having chickenpox on the day of my friends birthday party so I had to stay home while everyone went to the Discovery Zone. I sobbed for hours while my mom covered me in calamine from head to toe.

That fucking place was awesome.

Snow Bros is my jam! Used to love playing that as a kid, got lucky on holiday once and found an arcade machine of it at the hotel I was staying at. I spent all my time (and all my money) playing that game. It was a great trip.

What y'all know about that Bucky O'Hare tho 👀 also when I was in high school they still had DDR machines at the arcade at the mall I used to frequent that was right across the street from my school

I got so good at it my friends and I started drawing crowds lol

Time crisis 2 was my shit back in the day! There's a "barcode" near me I hit up with my lady friend on occasion for some drinks and digital violence. It's a cool place

It’s still a thing in my shitty small town. We have a huge one with all the classics. Once a week I’ll go down there with friends and play classic Tekken or pinball.