Is the entire concept of arcade games romanticized...

Is the entire concept of arcade games romanticized? I went to one recently because I have fond memories of going to arcades as a child, but every game was full of artificial difficulty designed for you to pump in as many quarters (or as in the case of this one, swipe a play card) as possible.

Only games I can imagine worth a damn were the two player competitive games but good luck finding one. I travel a lot and fighting games seem to be extinct in arcades.

Was the death of arcades a good thing?

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Yes. As you stated, the main problem with arcades back then was how cheap they were. Why pump a shitty game full of coins when you can pay a few dollars for the game itself and play it at home whenever you wanted?
I remember dropping at least 7$ on Dragon's Lair because of the shitty fucking artificial difficulty.

The main appeal for me was going to an arcade and play with a bunch of kids I never met before without even knowing their name

Arcades were always a step ahead it terms of visuals and sound, console ports just didn't come close. It was like owning a ps1 but you were able to play a ps2 game if you went to an Arcade. Special cabinets were also pretty appealing like Daytona USA.

It wasn't designed for me. It was designed for fucking casual plebs the lure them away from their lame-ass consoles. When consoles became roughly as powerful as cutting edge arcade machines (Dreamcast is very noteworthy here) the main target for games was fucking spoild-brat casual fags.

It used to be we went to the arcade to play games on the best technology. I remember when Street Fighter 2 arrived at our local arcade it cost roughly $12,000. Street Fighter 2 on SNES was fun, but we still drove up to the arcade to play the real thing.

The worst part about modern arcades in my area is they are all run by hipster retro faggots.

Wasn't MvC2 essentially run on Dreamcast hardware?

I found a game once that had 34 credits pre loaded. It was Simpsons arcade.

In a way, arcades are more pure than most current home games. They are distilled to what truly matters. When you start a game, you actually start playing it, right away. No boring cutscenes, no grinding exp points, no bullshit, just action all the way.


Close. That board is essentially a Dreamcast with twice the RAM and some other tweaks.
segaretro.org/Sega_NAOMI

I managed to beat this game with around 5 to 10 dollars. After buying it on PC and beating it 20+ times. Such a good game.

I know the artificial dificulty was utter kikery but considering all the handholding and spoon feeding in current vidya i really miss the arcades
Beat em Ups and shootem ups were fun stress reliever and, even if scarce, there were quite a few "git gud" games back then
also playing fighting and racing games with strangers was fun and even rail shooter were fun cus of the plastic guns you played with
Thereason arcades died was not because of consoles or even Xbox live
it was because of niggers
hey gahtered at the arcades to push drugs mug people or do all kinds of niggery wich in turn scared the arcade kids away
Japan has no niggers and Arcades are still going strong ove there

Im sorry you grew up in Detroit user but arcades around my way weren't like that, they were all in malls and they did well. One day they updated the mall to appeal to hipsters and Canadians and to add the new wing they cut out the arcades.

That was the big fear, really. Partially true for certain in more densely populated towns.


I am fairly certain the reason arcades died was really more over the budget battle for R&D between internal corporate divisions at places like Bally-Midway, Williams, Capcom, Sega, etc.

I still put a lot of the blame on Sega. As I mentioned it was really the Dreamcast that was the first home console to get like 95%+ parity with arcade hardware / software. It's way harder to find the history of the hardware R&D departments, but here's an example of what appened just to the arcade game developers:


So Dreamcast comes out in 1998 and the chaos and meltdowns of arcade machine R&D across multiple corporations was well established by 2000.

Nostalgia.

The only good arcade was a porn movie were they fucked the shit out of some Thai girl on a Sega machine.

Why would you keep pumping quarters in a machine that you clearly understand is cheating you? The arcade games that are seen as the most endearing are hard but fair, and a majority of them fall into this category.
Robotron and Galaga made arcade owners an astronomical amount of money, and in both of those games failure is completely attributed to the player.

This, you could force cinematic roadblocks and unskippable tutorials on console games even back then, but arcades were designed for short yet challenging playthroughs along with some multiplayer, so they mostly stayed safe from that. So either a Genesis or arcade games were the best options if you weren't a slow four-eyes nerd who can't press 2 buttons at the same time and just wanted to play fast-paced games.
They may have been the very first pay-to-win games, but they're even better now that you can just emulate them without dropping any quarters. Even mobile games, which are pretty much their modern counterpart on many aspects, aren't even fun to play on android emulators right now. but i know you faggots will be nostalgic over them in 10 years anyways

Aaand it's another retarded meme kid.

but every arcade game is the same thing

The only arcade around here in either Barcade or some shit in Chinatown. The problem is at Barcade all the controls are sticky as fuck because you guess it, hipster faggots drinking a 10% Hop-explosion IPA spill that shit on the controls. And the gook joint, they have a bunch of pretty cool shooting games, what's that one called with the elevator door, I forget but I used to play it a lot at the movie theater in Japan, anyway they never calibrate the shit so you shoot like 3 inches to the right of where you are aiming. I really miss Japan, the arcades there were pretty awesome and there were a lot of them. Pachinko was really fun too, it was a pretty good feeling too to be able to win a lot of money fairly easily as long as you knew what you were doing. I used to use my profits to fun my drinking/kabakura/soap habits. As to the user that said there are no niggers in Japan, yes there are they are mostly in Roppongi and Shinjuku, and there are plenty of shitty Japanese people and they do hang out at arcades, especially in places like Shibuya, but you have to remember that in a place like that there are plenty of plainclothes cops walking around so they tend to keep a cap on stuff, but still there are arcades that you can buy weed and shit at.

Our arcade market just wasn't willing to put the financial risk in to really make arcades feel unique like they did in Japan. They have arcade cabinets that act as virtual reality capsules for persistent world online mech simulator games out there. Unless we get something similar I don't think arcades will ever be able to live up to the hype again.

They were pretty much the grandfather of all the shitty micro transaction games.

It's okay user, just admit that you suck at real games and that you just want "comfy" bad-AI grinding sims, a lot of people in this board already did.

i rest my case

You only have to pay more if you die. And who's fault is that? Yours. Home entertainment is better but don't blame the game just because you suck, unless that game is Dragon's Lair, but that's because it's not skill-based.

People on Holla Forums constantly rails on companies for nickel and diming them to death with DLC. Imagine if this was 1982 and knowing that the only way you'd get to play the best looking games would be to constantly feed a machine quarters? It would be considered the most Jewish thing ever.

That's not necessarily a bad thing.
You also had on rail shooters and some adventure games like The Gauntlet. Racing games were pretty good too as long as they didn't limit your time, but I'm pretty sure 90% did.

No. They're actually really good.

hey im not saying there arent plenty of great games in arcades, just that in arcade games there doesnt seem to be a whole lot of variety between games in the same genre. fighting games and beat em up are hilarious examples because theyre some of the most extreme offenders even outside of arcades.

Nigger I just want to play metal slug

If you can't go into an arcade with 60 dollars and beat at least one game in there then you might as well just kill yourself.

I don't know what kind of shit arcade you're going to OP but fighting games are the only thing keeping my local ones a live.

Sounds like you're going to some hipster barcade and not a real arcade user. I know I'm lucky since my local arcade is considered the best one in the southeast atm.

You are a sad, sad little youngfag. The appeal was being able to play classics alongside bleeding edge vidya. There was also a ton of banter I'm sure your sad autistic ass wouldn't have been able to handle. I'd say it only started to get shitty when every other game was some sort of gimmick machine.

Because you're too stubborn to let the game beat you, and you still have a few dollars worth of quarters in your pocket.

Inflation with stagnant wages along with home consoles killed the arcade. We still use "pumping quarters" as a figure of speech, but really when was the last time you found an arcade machine asking less than a dollar per credit? Being real here, arcades used to provide proportionate entertainment for the money you were giving it. As the value of individual coins decreased, if you intended the machine to break even, you had to choose between 1) just raise the asking price from 50c to $1 per credit, which is going to drive all but the autists away, and 2) set the machine to some oddball combination of coins and credits to make it a little more affordable, then discard it when some drunk patron breaks in a fit if rage at being too stupid to figure the combination out.
At the time this pricing conundrum was making the entertainment value questionable (few credits should last more than 10 mins unless you want some guru hogging the machine for peanuts), the NES appears and drives all but the better arcades to the ground by virtue of being a single purchase for years of free play.
Then the few vendors still producing arcade hardware to this day come up with suicide boards to coax moar tech support money from end users, as if they actively wanted to kill their business.

I found one with 20, and i really needed them because i suck at Galaga.

What state?

This is my problem with arcades. When I pass by a rogue galaga cabinet or find a Jurassic Park setup I head right over only to find it asking a fucking dollar for one credit and I just nope out of there.

How much should it be?

This.

You would literally pay for more lives. I always felt dirty and ripped off when playing an arcade game.

50 cents at most

1 buck is way too much for one credit when it used to cost cents. Token prices are way too expensive nowadays just to play VS Super Mario Bros

answered what about you ? What should it cost for a credit?

So, VR might be able to revive arcades?

~5 a pop, remember that most games ask for ~3 tokens

It's a social experience that has always been tainted by the west's gang issues.
Japanese Arcades are a good way to get the feel as japanese gangs tend not to make a scene if they don't need to

20 to 50 cents

Any good arcades still left in the West? Last time I was in LV, I went to Circus Circus. Even though the place is now mostly visited by spics, the average white guy that goes there actually likes video games and I had some good times playing with the few white folks over there. Good game collection as far as I'm concerned because they had a lot of fighting games, F-Zero and Luigi's Mansion just to name a few.

Can't be romanticized enough, there was nothing before them. They changed the world for better or worse. Their death was inevitable due to the progression of tech. I am oldfag enough to remember what it was like before them as a child– it was shit. They made things a little more entertaining at least.

Stop playing shitty Western games. After the likes of Stargate, Q-Bert, etc. came and passed into the late '80s, Western arcade developers went full Jew and practically nothing they made had any semblance of fair challenge after that. Perfect example right here, and it's the reason all the console versions are superior.

Well at .50 i can pay off the recap kit for one board in 90 plays. That is not too bad i guess.

Pretty much. A large percentage of arcade games are 100% memorization, so that you can't really beat them without spending a shitload of money. You can 1cc them, but not before spending a ridiculous amount, and unless you do that, you are basically paying to win, so it's pointless. It's all or nothing. If you don't succeed in doing that, you are just wasting your time. Unless the game doesn't just let you keep going if you keep putting in more credits, like fighting games.

The good thing about arcades is that you can play games that you can't really own, with controls that take a lot of space. And multiplayer. Personally, I went to arcades just to play air hockey a few times. I don't think I ever played any of the actual video games. I emulated them. Still play them, and most of even the popular games with good gameplay are full of bullshit. There is no way to really counter this. The people that disagree have no real argument. It's all "muh childhood".

There are a lot of people here that defend this shit, but it died for a reason, and even my retarded parents knew that the games were made to immediately kill you and take your money. These nostalgiafags are just suckers in denial. After the Dreamcast came out, arcades became completely pointless. If you can buy a console with arcade hardware (or better), and buy the games, there is no reason to basically rent games for a few seconds of gameplay before you're killed by something that you can't really react to.

Are you that Eurofag that made the claim niggers killed arcades in whatever country you're from?

arcades were fucking garbage

See
You should probably git gud

get gud faggoulas

Arcade games, and the games designed expressly under their inspiration, are the only actual video games that exist. Everything else is a cinematic experience or a walking simulator.

How many arcade games have you 1cc'd?
How much money have you put into an arcade machine before to beat a game?

The first game you learned to 1cc in my local arcades was either Tumblepop or Snow Bros. Then Pang! 3. Then you branched into Mortal Kombat, SF Rainbow Edition or KoF.
The thing with arcade was that there was a clear punishment for being bad, losing money. If you were good, you played more, if you were bad, you lose all of your money. There is nothing like that in consoles, where a "game over" is just a slap in the wrist.

I've tried to compile it before and maybe we should get back to it. A list of easy single-credit clears to start with is useful for weening casuals into the hardcore mentality.

I wouldn't call them "the only actual video games", but they're definitely much more fun, challenging and unscripted than most singleplayer games even back in the 4th gen, there's no reason to not play them for free now that we have emulators unless you have deformed thumbs or downie reaction time.

Like said
If you can't beat even one arcade game for the price of what a new game costs today, you can just stop playing video games.

How many arcade games have you 1cc'd?
How long did it take you?

Yes. Arcade games were deliberately designed to squeeze the fuck out of money from you, albeit in a more-respectful and less-brazen way than Pay2Win and Microtransaction fuckfests do these days.

That said, there were some great games made for arcades and they can mostly be enjoyed without those issues thanks to the magic of emulation.

And spending a fortune in the process like a good goy, right?

Nice try, rabbi.

So less than a whole dollar? Because Steam's 'Budget Aisle' and the entire existence of Apple and Alphabet's app stores separately beg to differ.

What's like being poor not having been in an arcade? You think people bought the arcade machines home?


Smash TV with a friend, for one.

You know I meant "new AAA game" you nigger.

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congrats u played urself

You showed me.

What is it like being a dumb retard nigger that spends all of his money on nothing? Where is that money now?

You really were a poor nigger who never played arcade games did you?

That couple of bucks is inside of a fun arcade cabinet back about twenty years ago, you poor welfare nigger.

u cant tell me what 2 do bitch

Not bad, the bosses in that are a load of bullshit and it gets pretty tough in the final stage.

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So you only played a few times? What exactly are you missing, then? Well, you probably couldn't afford it now. Spending everything that you make from your affirmative action nigger quota job on weed, McDonald's and barrels of Coca-Cola, you obese retard.

What's it like being a nigger?

Beware kids, niggers like to exaggerate for the sake of sounding smart. Don't do this.

I found a good working OutRun arcade in a tiny lakeside town in Poland once but the owner tweaked the settings so that it was physically IMPOSSIBLE to beat the first stage.

They were really greedy with the artificial difficulty forcing you to drop coins, but at it's time they had very nice visuals which blew home consoles out of the water, nowadays it doesn't matter. Yeah, they are overly romanticized.

Bubble Bobble had secret codes you could input into the controls to let you start with powerups and shit and one godly code that gave you 256 credits. I remember some kid at a machine freaking and telling me and everyone that some dude put in a code and got 200 something credits and when we got on it there were still dozens of credits left, so we sort of believed him. Nostalgia.

feels good [email protected]/* */ 👌🔥🔥🔥🔥💯😂😂😂😂😂😂

Even as a sucker of color, you're a casual.

People only really defend arcades as a social experience

they died out because people at the time didn't want to continuously pay more money to keep playing a game they liked and because they wanted to play in the comfort of their own home.

You can see with how people nowadays either play arcade machines with MAME or with buying the machine and disabling that function.

It's a really good example of something that wasn't actually that great, especially at the time, that people look back on fondly because after they got older it seems more quaint. It's similar to people using shit like DOS and stuff.

Yes, many games were full-on kike, especially when they were or they programmed a timer into it. I'm not saying something like a fighting game, in which case you could use the timer in your favor, I'm talking about the ones that you put a quarter and it gives you 7 minutes of play even if you're doing well.

A factor that was really appealing about them and that some anons mentioned was that you actually interacted with other people. Nothing will ever beat being in the same physical place, not with a faggy headset or webcam, and playing with or against kids your age, the rare adult, the older guys that had a lot of practice, the occasional girl who was curious to try it out, etc. It was a thrill to play with a complete unknown person and being able to overcome or win the game, or defeating a person who was better than you or more cocky.

The biggest gripe would be destructive little shits, the ones that arrived and pulled and tilted the joysticks until they fucked them up, putting that arcade out of commission, because mommy was a lazy cunt and left her mongrel there. That or sleazy-looking people, because you know a fistfight would start at some moment, or someone would try to steal your money.

I miss pinball machines, wish I had the money to buy one. The Super Mario and Terminator 2 were my favorites, and the WWF one.

I find it hilarious that some hipster kids who never experienced them already fetishise VHS tapes when that's a prime example of a medium you DON'T want to go back to. At least something like arcades has the potential merit of say, specialized cabinets.

Or cassettes and vinyl. Both were total shit.

WE

Great argument, well shitposted my friend.

It was a nice alternative if you were a poorfag or your parents didn't buy you every single game. It might be the reason why someone is good at X game, because it was one of the few he had, so he played it over and over until he has it memorized even today.

With arcades, you could bring a couple of dollars and try out a new game, even if it was for a while. It was either play Super Mario World for the 20th time, or play Metal Slug 2 for an hour.

You start phasing out once you get a toaster that can run emulators, of course, which was also the age when you start becoming less social.


People who romanticize Mix Tapes probably never had a mix tape, let alone how to record one. I did find Sony's MD kinda neat, at least that one could store several songs.

4/8-track cassette recorders are crazy underrated on the other hand. more 'no bullshit' than trying to wrestle with a bloated pile of shit like Pro Tools or Cubase. It shouldn't require a fucking manual just to record audio. Unfortunately assholes have been upmarking Tascam shit, making quick tunes more inadvisable. Bruce Springsteen pretty much did the entirety of Nebraska on a 4-track.

Arcades can't exist because they represent the pure distillation of video games, something which is anathema to most modern "gamers", especially westerners.
Also, you're bad at video games and should kill yourself quickly.

there was never a good home version of this. even on emulator, cause who has an 8 way rotating joystick

The only defenders of arcades are nostalgiafags and hipsters. There's a reason the home console won, and it's not because everyone was bad at games.

Don't knock vinyl. It's made a big comeback in recent years, and the sound quality was excellent (at least until you've played the record dozens of times and it's getting worn out) Analog sounds trumps digitized. i always hated how high frequencies sounded compressed. Have to go with uncompressed music at the very least if you want something approaching those first spins on vinyl.

Despite the pointless shitflinging between to arbitrary sides clouding things, it's certainly romanticized, however it had a very strong impact both on vidya and the culture surrounding it that's far more than just rose tinted glasses.

Arcades, much like LAN Parties and even older netplay were a *social* activity and gathering; it built communities, relied on face-to-face interaction with other people (even if just as an audience), and was largely a part of a larger event or routine that left a lasting impression on those lucky enough to participate in it (see also: blockbuster threads).

As for the games themselves, they were just as much a mixed bag as the home consoles were, and home consoles took quite a long time to catch up in terms of playability (and even longer to be easily purchasable by most average consumers). There were triumphs and failures but I don't think anything in the arcade format, barring lightguns and a few niche products, was exclusively bad or good about the period– It's what it fostered and what surrounded it that is so well remembered and influential.

Yeah and it wasn't due to any perceived quality. This is the same dumb argument used to defend trash like Call of Duty. The market doesn't magically make products good.

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Of course it is, i mean it's CURRENT YEAR+2 and hipsters fucking love to circle-jerk about cultures and practices they never actually experienced first hand.

Very few games used to be like that and it was mostly a non-issue if the owner wasn't a greedy kike setting every game to the hardest difficulty and giving the less amount of continues per coin.

No but it was inevitable, your average gamer nowadays doesn't care about building communities and meeting others face to face to play videogames, hell they don't have interest in meeting people at all.


Arcades are still a thing in Korea too, in fact i dare to say they have better Arcade centers than japan.

Some 3rd world countries still have strong arcade communities but they are a mix of old original hardware and modded stuff to accommodate new fighting games and emulation.

DA HOSE OV DA DAD

why

The best arcades were also pool halls and grills. You could swing down and blow a Saturday playing arcade games, shooting pool, and eating double cheeseburgers and fries. Good fuckin' times…

the best arcades were chinese brothels

I didn't mind some tough games that took money as long as they were unique and offered something I truly couldn't get at home. I remember some 1996 shooter game I tried a few years ago with a giant mounted cannon and strong recoil to go with it. I sucked at it, but it was damn fun.

/thread

The average new game will give you much more gameplay time, and once you beat it, you own it and can beat it again as many times as you want without paying more. This stands true even for a lot of NES games. You had more arcadey ones, sure, but there were plenty that definitely gave you a lot more playtime.

Also, you're acting as if people never bought used games. Or as if rentals were never a thing. Would you rather pay $5 to play a game for maybe an hour, or for an entire weekend?

The other thing is that certain genres are more suited to arcade and some are more suited for playing at home. For arcades, you need things that you only play in short bursts. Shooters, fighters, and beat em ups being primary examples. So if you're not into those genres, you're not gonna be as attracted to the arcade. People talk about better hardware, but by the 16-bit era, casuals probably wouldn't tell the difference unless they were dealing with the newest arcade machines. You could still attract them with things like lightgun games and other types of physical gimmicks, but playing a beat em up at the arcade wasn't all that much better as renting a beat em up and playing it for a weekend at home. The graphics and sound might not be quite as good, but it was pretty close and you'd get better value. Meanwhile, if you wanted to play something like a platformer or an rpg or an adventure game, you're not gonna go to the arcade at all. Once home consoles got 3D, that drew a lot of the lure away from arcades as well. It might not have been quite as good, but most games at the arcade weren't 3D, and for the few that had slightly better graphics, you could still have a good time playing them on your tv at home. Daytona was great, but the cost and inconvenience of going to the arcade and paying per play wasn't worth the marginal increase in graphics over the console competition.

People talk shit about gimmick machines, but I remember by the mid '90s, those were the only ones kids wanted to play. If they didn't give you tickets or didn't have some unique control scheme, then way pay for it, when you could get an incredibly similar experience at home?

Not true at all. What people don't understand about short, highly challenging, score-oriented games is that they are designed to be replayed many, many times. In contrast, the average new home video game is designed to be as disposable an experience as possible, to prep the player to move on to the company's next game in 6 months.

Okay, I should have been more clear, when I said "new game," I meant from back when I still played new games, which was like a decade ago. Basically, you're pointing out that games aren't as good anymore as they were in the '80s, and you're right. But my point was that the reasons arcades died out had to do with the fact that you could get more value at home, because those games were longer, at the time arcades were dying.

Also, you could replay an arcade game again, but just because you beat it once doesn't mean you're not gonna have to spend a ton of credits to beat it again. It will cost you a ton of money again.

It will only cost you a ton of money if you spent tons of money for continues and never actually got gud in the process of playing of it, casual faggot.

You can't get a real pinball machine experience on any home console or computer. I'm not paying one thousand dollars for a pinball table, either.

This is too true. I went to an arcade expo recently, and even though it was about a 60/40 split between video games and pinball, I spent most of my time just playing pinball. You can play most arcade games at home even if the experience isn't 100% authentic, but the pinball experience is entirely unique and unable to replace/replicate.

It's hard for me to gauge personally whether pinball is withering away like classic style arcade machines in favor of rigged UFO catchers and other higher revenue gimmick machines. I still usually come across at least one pinball table for every dozen or so arcade machines in my area, at least.

Broh, I don't think you understand how mastery works. I can single-credit clear Darius Gaiden, Metal Slug, Cabal, and more at any time and any place and I haven't played either in at least a year.