f13.net

What's the consensus around here on coin ops?  Pinball and video.

I don't own any, but I was completely obsessed from 1980-93 with coin ops, then got back into pinball (a childhood love) from 1997-2003.

I still find pinball to be good fun.

Costco had a coin op machine with like 180 old school ROMs in it for about $2k. Would be perfect for a rec room/bar area at home. If I didn't live it a tiny apartment I would seriously think about procuring one. It would make having folks over that much more fun.

I dig coin-ops.  We've got a couple at work (a pinball machine and Asteroids with a vector display), and one of my uncles has a few at home (Millipede, Donkey Kong, Smash TV).  I've also got a coworker who's very into coin-ops; he keeps a few generic cabinets at home (with various types of controllers) along with about a hundred boards that he swaps in and out as appropriate.

There's something about playing Millipede with the giant trackball that you just don't get out of any other kind of controller.

That trackball's name is Frustration.

I miss arcades. Let's just leave it at that.

random stuff while waiting for wow to work...

TRACK AND FIELD - two buttons, the faster you push them the faster you run.  Long jump, shot put, concentrated fun.  I dreamed up a contraption made with an egg beater and spare parts that would allow you to push the buttons mega fast.  The contraption remained in the dream phase of development.

STREET FIGHTER 2 (pirated chips) - my friends and I would tour around town to all the 7-11's and liquor stores to challenge people at SF2.  About a year after it was released, people started fucking with the chips so that you could do moves in the air, throw super fast or super slow hadookens, etc.  I spent hours in convenience stores; think Christian Slater in Heathers.  The salad days of time wasting.

TERMINATOR 2 pinball - when I lived in Albuquerque New Mexico, back in 93, I spent alot of time at the Circle K down the street from my house playing this game.  Every night was 3 large sodas, lots of super jackpots, drunk people fighting outside, and no bathroom.  My heaven if the movie After Life is true.

MAJOR HAVOC - this was usually in a TEMPEST cabinet.  Vector graphics, lots of bizarre mini games.  Fun.

ADDAMS FAMILY pinball - King of them all.  Best pinball evar.  Played it every day in college, and still got passing grades.  Maintained the high score 70% of the time...there were some good players.  Oh, and it was the single most fucked up and badly maintained peice of shit I ever saw.  Ball would routinely get stuck every 30 seconds some days.  I felt like cutting the power cord or spray painting on the glass, but thought better.  I did manage to corner the maintenance guy one day, and told him that he'd make more money off the game if it worked properly.  He agreed.  The game was better maintained from that day on.   He simply didn't know it was broken.

GORF - my first obsession when I was a really young kid.  It was a bizarre mishmash of other games with a bouncy and more responsive single joystick/trigger thing.

DEFENDER - My buddy was really good at this when we were 10 or something.  He was the one who went on to UC Berkely on a double major of religion and philosophy, went mad, and ended up developing a way to convert old monitors into new monitors, or something.  I never really did understand it.  Anyway, when we were 10, he could turn the score over to 0 on Defender 3 times on one quarter.  It was insane.  And the Korean market where we played the game was cavernous and smelly, with large sections that never seemed to be used for anything.  The owners hated us.

Ok surely WoW is working now...

The early versions of the game had naked buttons- you could make a see-saw-type contraption with a pencil and use that to go extra fast. Later version had guards around the buttons that made this impossible.

Loved that game. I used to pwn at the long jump.

f13.net: Usefully Cynical Commentary Cheating at Arcade Games since 1980.

Yup, though we used combs instead of pens/pencils -- less painful on the bottom finger just as fast and didn't require as much accuracy since it covered most or all of the buttons.

I used a gel thing that went over the pencil to cushion my finger.

I wasted most of my money on that one. It IS the best pinball ever although I didn't ever make it to the end. Throwing odd bits of speech fom that one into a conversation with my friends will spur a lengthy discussion on the Addams Family Pinball even after all these years.

The makers of pinball dreams always wanted to adapt that one to the PC but never had the chance to though. A Pity.

I have always wanted a Shinobi cabinet.  Years ago I could beat the game with one quarter.  I still play it about once a month on mame, but it’s not the same.  I too miss the arcade…

I was basically raised by arcades. I used to spend basically all my free time in arcades.

I would probably still kill for a Lethal Enforcers Cabinet.

In college we had a Williams Space Shuttle pinball machine in our student union. The interesting thing about that machine was that its tilt mechanism barely worked -- you could literally slide the front of the machine a couple of feet in either direction and not have it tilt (it was on a bare tiled floor rather than carpeting). A friend and I had great fun playing on that since after some "sliding" practice you could on one quarter play as long as you could keep standing or until the union closed, whichever came first.

Forgotten Realms cabinet, plzkthx. With the 360 degree spin dial also.

Pretty much dedicated to Centipede, but Pac-Man gets my attention more than it should.  The real Pac-Man, not the sequels.

http://www.klov.com/D/Discs_Of_Tron.html

http://www.klov.com/S/Star_Wars.html

Off the top of my head, the first game I remember playing from beginning to end in an arcade was Double Dragon. Me and a buddy were taken to some smaller town nearby to see an old car show and parade and ended up in some convenience store playing DD instead.

BioWare, much to my joy, has one original version of Diablo (http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7922).

Oh snap!

It makes me wonder, what happens to arcade boards when the games themselves go out of circulation?

Final Fight, TMNT, SF2, and Moonwalker.

I stopped going to the arcades when the games started getting to be 50 cents per credit.  I was too poor back then.

It's too bad that, although I can now afford to play, I can't find a lot of the classics anywhere.  Plus, we have consoles with better graphics now.

Space Invaders, Tail Gunner, Galaxian, Pac Man, Tempest, Berzerk, Sinistar (the first game to make me shit my pants), Space Harrier, and my all time favorite: Wizard of Wor. That was the first game that taught me to be a dirty camping whore. I'd only come out of my safe place when the Warluk or Wizard came out.

Pinball: Never was much of a pinball fan but I loved Revenge from Mars. "Big-O-Beam!" "Martian Happy Hour!" "Paris in Peril!!!" Best game voice since Smash TV.

RUN COWARD!!!

That and the gawd awful roar were what made it brown trousers time.

Safecracker and Mars Attacks! Were both awesome pinball fun.  I did play the shit out of Addams Family though.

Samurai Shodown series ended up winning my love away from Street Fighter (Though, SF Alpha 2 almost pulled be back).  We got to the point that everyone pretty much had a character that no one else could beat them at, except for one foil.  Tampa Lanes, in Tampa... go figure, was a big ass bowling alley, but what made it stick out was it had one of the more impressive arcades I'd ever been to.  Changed later on depending on who was running the place, still a decent arcade, but they got sucked into the whole big money games, over all games.  Wall to wall Daytona machines, instead of a little of this and that.  Smart business probably.  Whatever.  There was a regular crew of fighting game advocates of about 20-25 people who were up there every night, and 30+ on weekends.  Lots of fun.  The Samurai Shodown games ended up giving us more options to play vs each other, rather than Street Fighter.  Less counters/foils, seemed more balanced.  Not as much.. fuck you're playing Balrog, so I gotta be Honda, or play one of the Uppercut Brothers.   Though.. in SS4, one of the Sogetsu's (Slash I think) was just crazy stupid, and some nights couldn't be taken out.

Gunblade: New York (SEGA) Just good.  Even better when you realized you could alter the helicopters path somewhat.  Kept great scores.  I could come back a few weeks later, and see who had knocked me off the top spot, then spend all night trying to win it back. 

Spacelords and T-MEK.  Awesome games if you had a crowd of people to play against.  I could sometimes play for hours on one quarter in T-MEK as long as I had people joining in, to get stomped.  Blind bombs!

GI-Joe.  The one that continually moved you into the screen.  So much stuff to blow up.  If you beat it, it didn't kick you out, it just started over.  Very good way to milk the rest of the evening, when you were short on money.

Raiden 2.  The big purple ribbon laser was great, but I ended up going back to the old blue laser for concentrated killing.

VF2, Gunbusters (first person 4 player free-for-all), Windjammers, Aliens vs. Predator, so many. 

I miss arcades.