Arcade games that never made it home

Some of these I may be off on, or maybe they had some super-obscure release, but here's what I recall from arcade games that never had a home edition of that precise game (by that I mean no attempt was made, not just a poor translation) :

1 - The Simpsons multi-player (May have been a PC, not certain)

2 - The X-Men multi-player

3- The Real Ghostbusters

4 - Sega Spider-Man arcade (with Namor, Hawkeye and Black Cat)

5 - Several lesser laserdisc lights

6 - Jack The Giant-Killer

7 - Avengers : Galactic Storm

8 - The various Jurassic Park arcade tie-ins

Well, I'm pretty sure this is a large list, and licenses probably play a role in why some never saw a home port, though I suspect some of them were released in the transition period between system domination and got shelved as their owners tried to decide between 8 and 16 and then 32-bit. Any others?

Vendetta and Violent Storm

edited 6th Oct '10 8:39:57 PM by Schitzo

• Armed Police Batrider
• Tetris: The Grand Master series (TGM2 was going to have a PS2 port but it got canceled, partly due to emulation, partly because Henk Rogers is a Jack Thompson-level asshole. And no TGM ACE is NOT a port.)
• Viper Phase 1
• Brave Firefighters

• Black Tiger
• Night Slashers
• Mystic Warriors
• The Alien Vs Predator beat em up by Capcom

The Ocean Hunter, which is a shame because that game is real fun.

edited 6th Oct '10 9:09:33 PM by Scisless

^^ Black Tiger has a console version.

Star Wars trilogy.

House Of The Dead 1... Yes, besides the Sega Saturn port.

edited 6th Oct '10 9:45:27 PM by JackMackerel

If I'm not mistaken, the X Box House Of The Dead compilation included Part 1 as an unlockable.

^^ Star Wars Trilogy was released for the 32X

If they ever made a console version of that classic Jurassic Park rail-shooter, I'd be happy beyond belief.

Punchmania

The Simpsons multi-player (May have been a PC, not certain)

If you're talking about the beat-em-up, that was ported to iOS.

@Edmond: He's talking about a different Star Wars Trilogy.

F-Zero GX: Arcade, or AX, or however it was spelt. I never played the courses outside of an Action Replay.(sadly so)

Mario Kart: GP(I think it was called.) The one with the Pac-Man guests.

Meh, I forget the exact names. Atleast the F-Zero one was released outside of Japan. So to speak on the term.

If they ever made a console version of that classic Jurassic Park rail-shooter, I'd be happy beyond belief.

Swap that with the Jurassic Park 3 one.

If Raw Thrill's other release (Target Terror and the Fast & Furious game) are anything to go by, I expect H 2 O Overdrive to receive a shitty port for the next generation of console one week before Halo 5, and the Terminator Salvation rail-shooter to not be ported at all.

Also, Sega promised they'd port House Of The Dead 4 on the Wii if the Wii compilation of 2&3 sold well. But we got Overkill instead.

F-Zero AX was specifically designed for arcade release. The problem was that F-Zero isn't a very popular franchise, so arcade cabinets were released in VERY limited quantities. I was barely lucky to play one when I lived in Florida.

The whole point of AX was to have connectivity with GX. Bring your memory card, and you can use whatever custom racers you have on there. Combine that with the print-out card that keeps track of your stats, and you had a potential winner for die-hard fans.

The Dungeons & Dragons Beat 'em Ups (both set in Mystara, if I'm not mistaken) by Capcom never got a home console release.

They did on the Saturn (both bundeled together, even), though of course it's Japan-only.

One of my favorite old school side scrolling beat'em ups was a bizarre one called Tecmo Knight. It was a strange combination of Ninja Gaiden (the old Arcade version), Altered Beast, and Golden Axe with a little bit of Rygar thrown in. You rode on the backs of these giant dudes who could turn into tigers and dragons. It was imaginative and lots of fun.

The graphics were pretty good for the time (around 1989-1990), it was developed on the same 16 bit arcade board as Tecmo Bowl, Gemini Wing, and Ninja Gaiden I believe. I still play it on MAME from time to time.

edited 7th Oct '10 8:46:50 AM by Nonapod

While Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!! are names of console games, they're not the same as the arcade counterparts. The NES and Wii Punch-Out!!s are more like adaptations, and Super Punch-Out!! on SNES is a sequel to the arcade titles. The spinoff Arm Wrestling only got a Mythology Gag in the Wii game.

I'd love to get Black Tiger on my PSP.

Lethal Enforcers 3. Although I imagine it would be hard to replicate 2-player mode (which is like 60% of the fun) without the dying-out console link feature, or online modes (yay lag!). There's always ghost mode I guess.

CRTs are slowly dying, which is pretty sad for the Light Gun Game genre. Namco's late 1990's / early 2000's gun games have some of the most accurate guns; nowadays because arcade machines are switching to plasmas, that sort of light gun technology is useless; instead you have the less precise infrared sensors (think Wii's motion sensor but with the sensors spread around the screen rather than just two clusters of sensors above or below).

Someone I know could regularly achieve 99% accuracy on Time Crisis 3, but on Time Crisis 4, which uses infrared sensors, he did an accuracy run and only got about 80-85%. I remember playing a The House Of The Dead 4 cabinet and having screwy aim because a promo sign was blocking one of the sensors.

And this generation of consoles is not suitable for gun game ports; you're not meant to aim the Wiimote like a (light) gun (as I tested right after getting my Wii, 4 years ago), the PlayStation Move I imagine will be just as inaccurate, and Kinect is...well, Kinect.

FML.    -1 Life   

edited 7th Oct '10 11:00:20 AM by TsundeRay

I'll list a few more if its allowed.

• I don't think the Quirky Beat em up Battle Circuit ever made it to a home console.
• Denjin Makai 2 did not make it to a home console or even out of Japan. Somewhat odd as the game it was a sequel to was on the SNES.
• Knights of Valour, Warrior Of Fate's spirtualSuccessor never made it to home consoles.
• Shadow Force, the ninja beat em up where the players could possess mooks was arcade exclusive.

edited 7th Oct '10 1:41:00 PM by Monsund

The Battle Toads arcade game. 10 times better than any of the console games. Also much gorier.

Adding four extra games in your list :

• The Astérix arcade Beat 'em Up by Konami
• Castlevania the Arcade
• Eco Fighters
• Tokimeki Memorial : Oshiete Your Heart

I at first thought Final Furlong would be one of those too, but apparently there's a Wii port of it, according to GameFAQs.