This was a blog entry from a couple of weekends ago that sat unfinished for an unreasonable amount of time – so long, in fact, that we went a second time before the entry was finished! The good news is that the games described are still there!
Mom’s exhausted. The boy’s ready to get out of the house, having been stuck at home with dad for a few days with no car to go anywhere. I’m feeling a little cooped up myself. It’s time to let mom get some shut-eye and for the boys to do what they do best – find a place full of games and hang out! You can probably see where this is headed…
…it’s headed, once more, to Fayetteville for a visit to Arkadia Retrocade.
It’s been about a month since our last visit, but they’ve scored some seriously high-profile classics in that month. I know arcade game collectors and restrorers, I’ve had a single dalliance in that field myself (it’s not for the budgetarily challenged, as it turns out), and I know what the big-name scores are for arcade collectors. And I didn’t expect most of them to turn up on my next visit.
The biggest surprises were Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace, two of the earliest laserdisc games on the market. For those who don’t remember, these games produced no computer graphics whatsoever; rather, the entire visual content of the game was recorded on LP-sized laserdiscs, and players had to respond to specific visual cues on screen to perform certain actions – to move in a certain way or press the action button. Failure to perform the correct action at the correct time resulted in a “death scene” being played; doing the right thing at the right time led to the next animated segment being played, leading up to the next prompt to which the player had to respond. Really not a great game experience, especially with the laggy seek time of the pre-DVD technology in play, and the Pioneer laserdisc players built into the machines were prone to breaking down. It’s not entirely uncommon to see these cabinets turned into DAPHNE machines (DAPHNE is a PC game emulator that plays back the visual sequences from video files on a hard drive, usually resulting in a less leggy game that behaves more or less exactly like the original, minus the hardware headaches), and it’s hard to blame someone owning one of these to turn it into a DAPHNE machine. But these are the real deals with the real laserdiscs inside, lag and all. You’re playing them how they were played back in 1983 and 1984, when the lack of any real game quality was overlooked because the Don Bluth-drawn cel animation was such a phenomenal step up from blocky pixels.
Not that there was anything wrong with the pixels we were getting in 1983. Let me introduce you to Discs Of Tron.
Pretty neat immersive game there, right? All sorts of lighting and other goodness? What this picture doesn’t show you is that you have to stand inside the machine.
There is a sort of quasi-seat for you to rest your backside on in there, but you won’t be needing it much. You’re on the grid, man.
The interactive lighting goes from floor level to over your head. I hadn’t seen one of these machines since I was 11 years old, and forgotten a lot of these fine-grain details that were such a big part of the experience.
I’d also forgotten that the doorway into the game grid was designed for skinnier people from a different century. Talk about clogging the bandwidth of the computer world – I almost couldn’t get out of the game grid when I was done. 😆
I had not seen one of these in a very long time – a specialized late ’80s Nintendo arcade machine built to accomodate two, three and four player games.
Little E was much more enthralled by this unique Nintendo arcade game which turned Super Mario Bros. and other NES staples into coin-grabbing arcade games by imposing stricter time limits than the games’ home versions.
Drivers’ ed. ‘Nuff said.
The brand new Turbo machine is in outstanding shape. If you don’t remember, there are numerous LED speed/RPM/score indicators that are completely separate from what’s on the screen, and all of this stuff works beautifully on this machine. (This picture is a bad example of that – Little E wasn’t driving very fast.)
I love old ’70s video games. Sprint 2 wasn’t quite ready for prime time on this visit, but it will be before long. To have the number of machines on the floor (75+) that they have, and to have as few of them out of order as they have at any one time, is quite a feather in Arkadia’s cap.
Ironically, what me and the boy spent the most time doing was… playing Battleship. Not moderated by a computer with a screen, but a good old-fashioned game of Battleship.
When we returned a week later, the Mrs. quickly gravitated toward her favorite game from the old days, Spy Hunter. Me and E promised to pick her up – presumably from the weapons van – a few hours later. 😆
Also, you can find a piece of Little E’s artwork hanging from one of the windowshades. (Clip art five-universe-pile-up by dad, colors by Little E.)
A good time was had by all.
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