Arcades and all that entails

Also, Strike Force was the most awesome Defender-remake, ever.

Indeed. Shame Midway preffered to whore-out Mortal Kombat instead of giving this game proper distribution.

It works in MAME, so s'all good now.

Nothing will ever emulate Fist Of The North Star: Punchmania perfectly.

I take it that had some gimmicky control scheme?

Yes, and it was awesome. Look it up.

Also, sad to hear that Chuck E. Cheese's branches are closing down. I used to go there a lot as a kid.

I'd be less sad if all the ones I went to weren't Wretched Hive material. I've seen more sanitary outhouses.

That said, I'm sad arcades as a whole are fading. There's just something awesome about the crowd you can gather by kicking ass.

edited 17th Nov '10 4:28:22 PM by Pykrete

Well, the Chuck E. Cheese's...-es that I went to were pretty nice. Noisy but nice.

I also like cheap pizza.

Uh, guys? If you want to play arcade games, there's always MAME and Bittorrent to allow you to get your fix.

But you're still missing out on the original experience.

Wherein the difference between your experience and the original experience is far greater than the difference between a real home TV console and an emulated one.

Space Lords still does not (and may never) work on MAME. Also, it would lose the most awesome aspect: the multiplayer.

http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9674

Imagine X-Wing vs TIE Fighter (or its successor, X-Wing Alliance) without the Star Wars, and with all human players flying the same ship. Now imagine they can customize their ships attributes re: speed, shields, number of nukes, etc. Now throw in several AI-controlled alien races of increasing sophistication. Mix thoroughly. That's Space Lords. When you had four players, it was sweet.

@ Roxor

Did I not just say some machines are impossible to emulate?

I hate that some arcades are replacing the older DDR cabinets for the new DDR X cabinets. Those things are So Bad It's Horrible; unresponsive pads + HD lag = Rage Quit.

There is no functional difference between playing Star Fox Adventures in Dolphin on my PC with a gamepad and playing it on the original console. In fact, the emulator gives better graphics than the original console did.

Impossible? I doubt that. Difficult, sure, but I don't think there is such a thing as a computer which is impossible to emulate.

EDIT: Ninjas.

edited 18th Nov '10 12:54:10 AM by Roxor

Raiden II has been out as an arcade game for 17 years. Yet through the 140 or so versions of MAME, not one version has successfully emulated it.

I'm quite serious.

The MAME team has emulated Raiden, Viper Phase 1, and the whole Raiden Fighters series. Granted, with some inaccuracies, but emulated to the point of full playability nonetheless. Raiden II, the most well-known amongst the two series, is unplayable in MAME; apparently there is some serious encryption crap going on that prevents it from being emulated properly. There is an entire blog dedicated to getting it to work.

It's to the point where I'm starting to remember the original Raiden, which I've barely played in arcades and have only mostly experienced via MAME, more than its sequel.

edited 18th Nov '10 1:03:30 AM by TsundeRay

I actually like light gun on-rails games, even if they're, uh, linear. I especially like House Of The Dead, Time Crisis, and Police 911. Oh, and that Rambo arcade game. (Yes, seriously.)

My local arcade - "local" meaning "in the same city but twenty miles away" - manages to stay open, despite being nasty. I suspect it's all the free 1980s era games [admission's only five bucks, you pay credits in nickels].

Speaking of gun games (or rather, games that use light gun game technology) I wanna play Brave Firefighters again. Too bad the one place here that has it is Dave & (Wallet) Busters.

What makes me sad is that arcades failing means we'll probably never see games like, say, Border Break in the States.

HOLY SHIT, is that like PVP FPS a la Halo or Counterstrike, but with giant mecha piloted by animesque characters, and what sounds like a more engaging soundtrack?

That's like...the best of both worlds!

This is the machine I'm talking about.

If you can emulate this to it's original playability, I'd sure like to see it.

I'm not seeing any FPS there.

Impossible? I doubt that. Difficult, sure, but I don't think there is such a thing as a computer which is impossible to emulate.

Umm, you never heard of Pong? That's just impossible to emulate.

Wat.

That game doesn't use ROMs or a CPU.

edited 18th Nov '10 10:00:07 AM by SatanicHamster

I didnt read all the comments so I dont know if it was already proposed but have you tried googling "Vnes"

Exactly. Ergo, game is impossible to emulate.