Be Excellent To Each Other

I'd like to visit Funspot and the Pinball hall of fame in vegas

http://www.pinballmuseum.org/

John's arcade visits Funspot : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAtdvWpnzIw - if you havent watched other stuff on his Channel then have a look round a lot of classic machine stuff

As I've probably mentioned before, Four Quarters in Peckham is a decent bar with a load of arcade cabs. Also has/had Addams Family Pinball.

Living in Brighton now, I regularly go to the pier with mini Fop and am unfailingly distressed by the fact most arcade games are now things that started life on mobile, such as Jetpack Joyride, Fruit Ninja or Temple Run. Who really wants to spend 50p a pop on such things? I guess plenty of people do. Broken Britain etc.

20 'coolest' arcades in the world

http://mashable.com/2014/09/28/arcades- ... .S_a_0Iuqu

Cheers, Mimi. I really need to take my 'big' camera out more.

Yeah Zardoz, those pictures are great!

I was stood on the moon when I took those.

Incraterble!

Last one I went into was in Newquay in June.

Popped in with my son as he was acting up in the fish and chip place we were in and my wife wanted to eat in peace.

It had no arcade games in at all aside from 3 sit on things at the front, all that was inside was a huge over 18's slot machine area and a load of pushers and slots with £5 jackpots.

Didn't stay long as all the pusher prizes (that needed lots of hard to get tokens) were the Thomas train sets my son loves and he was kicking off as he didn't understand why he couldn't have one!

More recently we went to eat in the local cinema complex, my son ran straight into the local bowling ally, which is full of ticket pushers and expensive 1 life arcade ticket games. He was running around looking at everything and asked me for money for a pusher! Didn't even know he had a concept of money at his age. So straight out of there. These places are just setting kids up to like gambling from an early age.

Mostly just a copy and paste from Bits and Bobs before Zardoz started this thread, thanks Zardoz

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We don't have a single arcade left on the Isle of Man now, when I first came here in 1994 there were three big arcades in Douglas alone (one of which was really sizeable), with a very generous number of fruit machines and pinballs as well as fruit machines.

The bowling alley had a decent line-up too, and lots of big 'marquee' machines like that jetski one, big Daytona USA sitdowns, four player Manx TT Superbike and so on. (Manx TT Superbike was very popular here for obvious reasons, loads of pubs had them as well.)

On top of that pubs routinely had videogames and pinballs too, you could almost go out for an 'arcade day' just by touring the pubs of Douglas.

Over the years they've all gradually been lost and the last arcade closed, oohhh, maybe four or five years ago, and in tandem with that the other small arcades and locations with games around the island have been lost too.

There is still a cafe in Ramsey that has what could be called a 'games room' attached I suppose, but it's almost all just shitty old fruit machines (mostly on £5 jackpot) and a couple of videogames in the back. I'm barred from there anyway for 'winning too much' so it's sort of a moot point. That said it was a half-decent arcade back in the day, I remember there being a Data East Star Wars pinball in there, a Crazy Taxi, and a reasonable selection of other videogames. (You're going back to the late 90s there though.)

It's great that videogames still exist out on site in reasonable numbers, although I wouldn't make a trip to the Isle of Wight out of it, the ArcadeBlogger site is a wonderful read too, at least there are people out there committed to preserving these things.

A mate at work went over to Hungary earlier in the year for a holiday with his missus, they've got a pinball museum place in Budapest, flat fee to get in and then all the pinball you can eat. I could easily go there for a week and just spend the entire time in that one place.

http://www.flippermuzeum.hu/en/

No worries mate, I'm here to help.

Arcade Club is fantastic. I'm always up for a return trip.

We went through Sandown and Ventnor today, and the sea front arcades were both boarded up and looked to have been for some time.

Wow that's got loads of my old faves including Assault!

Have to get myself there.

Last time i was there there was a few good arcades there - checking on google maps this one in Shanklin

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.63115 ... 56!6m1!1e1

there was also one down at the needles (with the fairground)

Didn't realise how old some of them were.

http://www.arcadeclub.co.uk/games/black-widow

The one in Shanklin had precisely one video game - Time Crisis 3.
And it was turned off.

Might sneak down to The Needles tomorrow to check.

The last arcade in Barcelona closed down a couple of years ago. I passed by it every day on my way to work and witnessed the day they shipped all the machines off to Mallorca.

Here's a fabulous long read about Pac-Man if you really want to know everything about it. (Which I did!)

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3 ... hp?print=1

I went to Arcade Club for my birthday this year!



This makes the room look kinda small. It's actually really big and there's at least fifty machines set up.

Ooohhh new high score on Chase HQ this evening, 10.9M. (That's a five stage clear on a single credit.)

I'm sure I've had over 11M in the past but my MAME high scores were lost at some point over the last few years, or not so much 'lost' as the .hi file stopped working from one version of MAME to the next IIRC.

I love Chase HQ, it's one of those games I can just play again and again and again, and more often than not I'll fail to complete it, so it's always nice to get the full clear off one credit (I never use continues on this game).

When I was at college an arcade close-by - (I much preferred the arcade to the college) - had a stand-up Chase HQ but at some point the turbo boost button stopped working, and they would never fix the bloody thing, so it then became an extra 'game within a game' to see how far I could get without turbo boosts. I could clear three stages but stage four appeared to be impossible.

Just.... Wow!

That's incredible.

Even just looking at the pictures I can well imagine the excitement of discovering a haul like that. Amazing to think some of those machines are nearly 40 years old.

Nice to know that they've finally been saved and where possible will be restored, or at least donate parts to other machines.

Arcadeblogger is an awesome site, I've read everything on there now.

This thread is probably the best fit for this:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... g-df-retro

The Digital Foundry 'Retro' series at Eurogamer is really good, they're video retrospectives on various games and technologies from years gone by, albeit nothing particularly ancient. (The early 90s is about as far back as they tend to go.)

Very interesting watches IMO.

Just finished watching Man Vs Snake courtesy of a rental from Google Play (£3.49 IIRC but I had a 75% discount voucher they'd sent me) - a fantastic viewing experience, loved it from start to finish.

The only mystery about the thing for me was the Rick Carter guy, who broke the record twice but was featured only in archive reels, no actual new interview stuff from him at all, so not sure if he didn't want to participate or something?

The Italian dude Enrico Zanetti came over really well as a nice chap too, lots of love in his heart.

But yes, great stuff, could happily watch a film like that every night forever.

MAN VS SNAKE has turned up on Netflix, in the five days since I paid for it on Google Play, because I looked for it on Netflix and it wasn't there, so I paid for it on Google Play instead.

Truly there is no God.

Woohoo!

http://www.polygon.com/2016/11/1/134903 ... ega-arcade

Insert £2 to play. Insert £2.05 for an extra nitrous boost!

Hopefully we'll see a home conversion somewhere down the line as I doubt I'll ever play this otherwise.

Does that mean you've never played Daytona 2? Shame on you.

Would anyone be interested in a trip to Arcade Club in Bury over Christmas?

I could be, time it when visiting my mum

I've never been to Bury over Christmas. Is it far?

Even for me this is bad.

My brother has been talking about going there with his children, it's only a few miles away from where he lives.

If you watch the video on their site it looks very cool, and the chap who runs it all seems a jolly fine sort.

Head for the first star and turn right, then carry on till morning

It's great. Been a few times and it gets better and better.

I'd love to go there, was over Bury way in January for a family do, had no idea I was that close to the place, didn't know it existed! In fact I was walking down The Rock doing shopping and that's pretty much just over the road.

They have pinballs too, or at least in the video they do.

I'd love to play a sitdown Space Harrier and Out Run again. They've got the big sit-in After Burner as well I believe.

Afterburner isn't out at the mo - they rotate some games in and out.
There's a hydraulic original Outrun available, and linked Outrun 2s.

I'll likely be there on Saturday at some point.

There's a retro night in a bar in Cardiff toward the end of the month: https://www.facebook.com/events/346348215714835/?ti=as

Splendid YouTube channel here, 'Nostalgia Nerd'.

https://www.youtube.com/user/nostalgianerdvideos

Pretty much appears to be one guy with support from various user communities, so the professionalism of the productions is really very impressive, albeit with some limitations.

The long-view 'story of' videos in particular are very good.

One for the Amiga fans here, a splendid two-parter that's a couple of hours very well spent.

Fleshed out many details for me that I was unaware of, and TBH it could have been a lot longer and I'd have been happy!

Really good work from the guy himself, who readily acknowledges lots of assistance from the relevant 'scenes' he makes the videos about, but clearly puts in a massive amount of spadework himself.

I set up the CPS2 emulator on my 3DS and it's been fun revisiting Marvel Super Heroes which I had on the Saturn.

Yes Hearthly, I meant to say that I've watched most of that Amiga documentary on Youtube. I thought it was excellent with tons of stuff that I didn't know.

Like most people here I imagine, I have a real soft spot for the Amiga and (unlike most here I imagine) I still have my CD32 set up under my telly. I think it's a great console.

I reinstated the cd32 last month, when cleaning up my set up.. and even burned a new game for it, swos 16/17 ...

Don't suppose you have a link for it do you? I think I'd like that.

ofcourse i do, http://unofficial-cd32-ports.blogspot.n ... 2sx32.html

that site if full with cd32 ports they made possible.. as you might know, some games didn't work on the cd32 because it has a bit less free chipram than the 1200m( i think) but they made it possible

i myself made a cd32 iso for the great gravity power (gravity force 2), the makers even thanked me for it http://www.ricklindeman.nl/files/gravitypower.html

I was a big fan of the CD32 too. Only got a few games for it left now though and they're getting costlier to replace these days.

I'm sorted for pads though