Rise of the Triforce(dolphin-emu.org) |
Rise of the Triforce(dolphin-emu.org) |
Even for really old stuff like Space Harrier the feeling of moving along with the screen gives you a more visceral experience than almost any VR setup. Hard to fake the effects of gravity!
[0] has a list (in japanese) of moving arcade machines. Mikado in Takadanobaba has some of these. These things are getting older and older of course so the window of opportunity is unfortunately shrinking as time goes on.
(EDIT: just realised that list itself is over 10 years old at this point so YMMV)
The best arcade games sell did this - it doesn’t take much - like the pedal for time crisis. Sure you _can_ buy one at home but most people don’t and even then it’s a crap placid pedal.
It was like, $1 per game compared to $0.25 or $0.50 for a normal cabinet.
As a young person with limited income, it DEFINITELY mattered to me... I preferred to sacrifice a little bit of motion and enjoy 2x or 4x the playtime on something else. I mean realistically you'd be spending $20 an hour or more if you stuck to deluxe cabinets. At that point (according to my teenage mind) I was basically halfway to buying a home console game that I could keep forever.
Operators really should have priced those deluxe cabinets the same as regular games during off-peak hours.
I’ve seen a couple of bars open up that try to have an arcade as well but they never take care of the machines/drunk people break them, so after a few months half the games don’t even work. There’s only so many times I can lose a quarter or a dollar before I decide it’s not worth it anymore and I just go drink somewhere else with friends.
The only real arcade left in my city is attached to a laser tag, it would be super weird for a bunch of grown men in their 30s and 40s to roll up during kids’ birthday parties they weren’t invited to lol
WHAAAAAAAAAT
Seriously insane levels of money-no-object zero-fucks-given design.
Anyway, Mikado in Ikebukuro has the standard F-Zero AX cabinet, and it is great. I have never visited their game center in Takadanobaba though, it is still in my TODO list...
From there, Nintendo relied on gimmicks and corporate mascots/IP.
I guess sega was a few years ahead of them on their own timeline.
I’m not sure how successful it was, it was outsold by Xbox and PS2. Although the Xbox was a massive money pit for Microsoft. At least in Europe the Gamecube began to disappear from retail a fair bit before the Wii was out as well. Still, got things like a Wavebird for cheap on clearance though…
I think you're underselling the role of their game design expertise. They figured out that there's more to games than high fidelity graphics, a concept which has somehow alluded most AAA game studios.
It was a pretty great console, in its own way.
But thanks to the community, after reflashing it with Gekkoboot it can load Swiss from a SP2SD2, and from there load ROMs from the SD card! Reflashing the modchip was a pain in the ass though, the programmer required a parallel port and the software only runs on Windows XP, but in the end it worked and I am pretty happy with the results.
Must have taken a heckin' amount of work!
Sometimes, this overlap was quite profound but not 100%. NeoGeo home consoles famously use the same hardware and software as their arcade counterparts, but the game cartridges were not pin-compatible. The Nintendo VS line were technically the same as a Famicom/NES, but not the same build; the software has subtle differences. Perhaps the Nintendo PlayChoice would count but again, it's not like they used NES mainboards to build those.
So, the idea of taking a Nintendo console mainboard and grafting it to SEGA-designed components so it can run in a dedicated arcade cabinet, is just wild to me.
The Mega Drive derivated from the System 16, but was itself converted into an arcade system.
Titan-Video derivated from the Saturn, according to sources online.
NAOMI/NAOMI 2/Hikaru were derivated from the Dreamcast during development, and there is significant overlap in specs between them and the DC.
Chihiro derivated from the OG Xbox.
Perhaps as a result, we might see LLM and video model-powered games become mainstream in arcades before any home consumer platforms.
However, the GC has a CR2032 battery to save the time and a few settings, and that battery was dead. But in Nintendo's infinite wisdom, the battery is soldered, not socketed, and the space around it is quite tight so a normal socket will not fit. Removing it and soldering a battery socket was quite a chore, I needed to try different models until I found one that fits, but in the end I managed to do it. When the new battery dies in 10~20 years it will be much easier to replace it.
I think part of the barrier to expanding the attached-to-other-things arcade concept is the whole aesthetic: an arcade is loud, with flashing lights, giant and sometimes lurid artwork on the machines. I think if you were able to make some machines that gave a high quality experience without all that side of it, you might be able to install them in other semi-public spaces: airports, train stations, shopping malls, basically anywhere you currently see things like massage chairs.
That said, maintenance is for sure a concern. The state of most public pianos does not inspire confidence.
They have 50-odd full-motion Formula One simulators in each location and they seem to be aiming for a much higher quality experience than an arcade.
Zenius: https://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/arcade.php?id=2701#games has a list of the games, please bare in mind that this is a community driven database.
Etymology
From heck as a euphemism for hell.
I think maybe you were trying to cater to the "christians" or snowflake conservatives
Can't play DVDs (PS2, or XBox with the remote accessory,) can't even play audio CDs. Let's remember that this was also an era where half or less of the on campus freshmen had a desktop computer for their dorm, let alone something like a laptop.
That said one could also argue that Nintendo was more focused on mobile at the time, between the GBA and DS, both of which certainly carried them through that era.
I think one could argue that the DS's success alongside the challenges Gamecube had for adoption, led to the philosophy involved in the Wii's design.
Indeed, you have a community that wants to be family friendly but high energy, and so the technique is to start with "fucking", one of the top tier swears, and replace its root word with the lowest tier swears. And part of the charm is that "hell" is barely a taboo topic -- it's part of the Apostle's creed and plenty of sermons, and there's no commandment against its use[1], yet it gets minced to "heck"!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thou_shalt_not_take_the_name_o...
I should note the 'other' option that came up back then at college was just tossing a DVD Drive in a computer that they had or had purchased; by that point a majority/plurality of new/recent desktops had enough horsepower to do it, though drives were still fairly expensive...