Amusement Arcades.

[trip2themoon]

Here in my home town of Paisley we have about 4 arcades but they are all full of what we call puggy machines. I don't know where the name puggy comes from but a puggy machine is a fruit machine. The arcade where I used to go play Street Fighter 2 has one game machine which is a run around shooter by SNK, but I can't remember its name. In the mid 1980s through to the mid 1990s arcade games were really popular here. In 1990 I got the Master System for Christmas when I was 12. I went for the Master System because I loved Sega's arcade games and I knew I could play some decent conversions of my favourites of the time like Outrun, Wonderboy, Space Harrier, R type and Fantasy Zone.

I loved playing Space Harrier on the huge moving sit in machine that was only 10p a shot and Sega always produced some fantastic driving games. I was wondering if in America there is still a decent market for arcade machines and is there many places to go play the games any more rather than there just being gambling machines in the arcades now? I loved some of Capcom's stuff like SF2 and others like Final Fight, Strider and Willow. Konami used to make some great multi players like Turtles, Vendetta, Violent Storm and Simpsons (I have Simpsons on my PS3). Do the likes of Sega, Konami and SNK still make some decent arcade games anymore and do any of you guys still go and play them if they do? I'd be happy to visit my local arcades today if they had anything other than gamblers to play.

 

[AnOminous]

There are a few arcades left, in places like really large malls.

Arcade machines are now mostly a thing for museums and collectors, though. At least, the classic arcade that was just a bunch of coin videogames, or those stupid tokens they used to have, without other stuff thrown in.

I haven't really looked for them, though.

 

[XYZpdq]

Last I heard there were some arcade-ish places near me, but I barely get the chance to play video games already, so I can't justify adding a twenty-minute drive into the equation.

 

[exball]

I live in a big city so it's surprisingly piss-easy to find arcades. My favorite one actually only has an entree fee and they give you a card that basically bumps the quarter slot.

 

[ZepFloyd94]

There's a couple of Barcades here in NYC.

Celebrated my 21st at the one in Brooklyn and I've gotta say, the variety of games they've got is mind blowing.

 

[TheLateGreatBate]

I've only seen them more-or-less limited to seaside towns and amusement parks, with the odd few machines at cinemas and bowling alleys. Since I live in the midlands, this sucks as an arcade lover, so I have to make do with MAME

 

[Guardian G.I.]

Where I live, there's an arcade at the local amusement park, which has 2 machines "Need For Speed: Underground 1" and one "House of the Dead 2". I wonder how did they end up here in Belarus.

I miss the old arcades of the 1990s and early 2000s, which were usually situated in the lobbies of cinemas and had some really old Japanese arcade machines and Soviet ones. For some reason, I liked Soviet machines like the giant, mechanical and not particularly pretty "Morskoi Boi" from 1974 more than flashier foreign machines like Cruis'n USA.

 

[trip2themoon]

There's a couple of Barcades here in NYC.

Celebrated my 21st at the one in Brooklyn and I've gotta say, the variety of games they've got is mind blowing.

I like the sound of a Barcade. I would have loved to sit down to a game of SF2 Turbo with a cold pint by my side.

The last game I ever played in my local arcade was Super Streetfighter Turbo. When they had SF2 Turbo it was 30p a shot or 5 credits for the pound coin. When they got in SSF Turbo they jacked up the price to 50p a credit. We had been unimpressed with Super Streetfighter so were hoping for something better. We tossed a coin to see who got first crack at the new Streetfighter. I won the toss and with us both being well experienced SF2 players I was expecting a decent run for my first shot. I played it safe and went Ryu, won the first bout easily enough then in bout 2 got my arse kicked by Zangief. He finished me off with a super move that done about 70% damage and quickly found out that my super move if it connected would do about 30% damage. Another annoyance was the computer being able to get out of a throw move. It had been a long time since any of us had seen the continue screen in Streetfighter and I was like: What the fuck just happened? My mate got a good laugh out of that, he was a much better player than me. In SF2 Turbo I had an 800,000 average whereas he could crack a million points. He went Ken and also got his arse handed to him in bout 2 by Zangief. WTF Capcom what have you done to our game?

By the time Streetfighter 3 came along they had brought out so many versions of 2 that there was no real interest in Capcom fighting games. I think by that time Tekken 3 was available and it blew away any fighting game by Capcom. The Streetfighter games were too heavily weighted in Ryu and Ken's favour, but with Tekken 3 all the fighters seemed to have an equal amount of advantages and disadvantages.

 

[Steamboat_Bill]

There is one place in Cape Cod that I know of, a mini-golf course, that still has an arcade.

It has a ton of games, some pretty recent, plus some of the classics - Donkey Kong and Ms. PacMan - and the requisite non-video games, such as air hockey, skeeball and the like.

I visited it in August of this year and it was still open. It is somewhat comforting to know that stuff like that is still around somewhere...

 

[ATM]

The thing I enjoy most in arcades is UFO catchers, or claw machines as they're also called. I'm not really sure why, I think it's something to do with how hard it is to actually win on the things. The claws on the ones here are so ridiculously limp that's it's almost impossible but over in Japan they make it so it's doable (but still pretty hard). A while ago I started watching youtube videos of people who are pro at the things, and it's interesting to see their techniques and strategies. The japs have a thing called a "safety get", which is essentially winning a prize from a UFO catcher without spending more than said prize is actually worth. There's a market for resale of prizes so some people actually do it for profit.

Spoiler: UFO catcher action

These machines are pretty different from the claw machines we typically get. They rarely pick up well, the technique lies in pushing the box to the wider part of the bars and making it fall. Prize figures like the one in the video aren't terribly high quality, but something like that would still sell for around $20-30 if you tossed it onto ebay.

My second-most favourite arcade thing is air hockey. Air hockey is the shit dude.

 

[XYZpdq]

The thing I enjoy most in arcades is UFO catchers, or claw machines as they're also called. I'm not really sure why, I think it's something to do with how hard it is to actually win on the things. The claws on the ones here are so ridiculously limp that's it's almost impossible but over in Japan they make it so it's doable (but still pretty hard). A while ago I started watching youtube videos of people who are pro at the things, and it's interesting to see their techniques and strategies. The japs have a thing called a "safety get", which is essentially winning a prize from a UFO catcher without spending more than said prize is actually worth. There's a market for resale of prizes so some people actually do it for profit.

Spoiler: UFO catcher action

These machines are pretty different from the claw machines we typically get. They rarely pick up well, the technique lies in pushing the box to the wider part of the bars and making it fall. Prize figures like the one in the video aren't terribly high quality, but something like that would still sell for around $20-30 if you tossed it onto ebay.

My second-most favourite arcade thing is air hockey. Air hockey is the shit dude.

Claw machines aren't that hard, it's a matter of learning which items are gettable and which aren't. A lot's in the margins between the toy and the glass windows. I used to hit diners after late-night stuff a lot and we got pretty good at them.

Weirdest thing I ever got out of a claw machine was a Dear Daniel (Hello Kitty's boyfriend) plush toy from an Hong Kong McDonald's promotion at a truck stop off I-95. A few months later bootlegs of it started showing up at my nearby claw machines, I guess after they finished copying it they just threw it in a box to ship with whatever "random claw assortment" they sent that day.