arcadegames
Latest
Nintendo Switch gets SNK's arcade games this November
SNK is celebrating its 40th birthday with a triumphant return to the golden age of arcade games -- with a modern twist. On November 13, the creator is launching a bevy of retro games for Nintendo Switch, including Alpha Mission, Ikari Warriors, Athena, Guerrilla War and Vanguard, among others. There's more to be announced, too, although the titles already confirmed can be pre-ordered now as part of the Switch-exclusive pack.
The makers of 'Resogun' are leaving arcade shooters behind
Over the past decade, the name Housemarque has become synonymous with arcade-style games. From the early PSN title Super Stardust HD to the PS4 launch savior Resogun, the Finnish studio has produced many critically acclaimed and commercially successful games. In recent years, though, good reviews haven't been followed by strong sales. Nex Machina, a colorful top-down arcade shooter released earlier this year, is pure Housemarque. Created in partnership with arcade legend Eugene Jarvis, it's fast-paced, devilishly challenging and with tight controls. It received universal praise from reviewers -- a Metacritic average of 88 makes it the eighth-best-reviewed PS4 game of the year. When I visited Housemarque's Helsinki studio last year, I described the game as "a Hail Mary for arcade shooters" -- and it's now clear that the Hail Mary failed. The company confirmed that it's sold less than 100,000 copies of Nex Machina across both PS4 and PC. The studio has roughly 50 employees working on two games at any given moment, and doing some napkin math will quickly reveal that it lost a lot of money on the game, which it released without the help of a publisher. Matterfall, another arcade-inspired title, arrived in August and similarly failed to set the world on fire. As it was published by Sony, it hasn't affected Housemarque in the same way financially, but it clearly intensified the soul-searching.
Atari taps Jeff Minter to resurrect classic coin-op ‘Tempest’
As seen in this 1981 commercial, Tempest was one of Atari's flagship coin-operated arcade games. But unlike Space Command or Centipede, Tempest sent players down geometrically fractal tunnels in an advanced -- and vibrantly psychedelic -- semi-3D adventure. Atari thinks it's high time this title was revived for current consoles, and it's tapped celebrated game designer Jeff Minter to do the job.
How modern tech saved my 'Dragon's Lair' arcade game
In the early 1980s, the arcade was still the place to play the newest and best video games. Sure, consoles existed, and were just starting to give arcades a run for their money -- and were even starting to shed their wood-grain home-furniture look for a more modern feel. But home play still lacked the arcade's mystique. As attendance began to dwindle, game makers started looking for a hook; something incredible and new that would lure people back to the arcades to spend their quarters.
'Asteroids' travels to the Cold War and beyond in 'VEC9'
Asteroids is the quintessential vector arcade game, featuring a stark black background and simple, geometric images representing spaceships, bullets and floating bits of space rock. Now, that visual genre gets a modern upgrade in VEC9, a 3D vector arcade game about a cryogenically frozen USSR pilot who awakens 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union and assumes the American military violently overthrew his country's reign. The pilot's mission is to attack major American cities in a spaceship outfitted with a giant laser and a chain gun, as Motherboard describes. VEC9 creators and tech tinkerers Andrew Reitano, Michael Dooley and Todd Bailey created a big, blinking cabinet for VEC9, complete with a massive controller that Motherboard says was originally designed for an M1 Abrams tank. The whole VEC9 shebang -- including retro-styled full-motion video cutscenes -- will be on display at Chicago's Logan Arcade starting November 7th.
Flappy Bird arcade cabinet will empty your wallet in record time
Think that Flappy Bird is already supremely aggravating to play? Try flying between those pipes when there's money on the line. Bay Tek Games has unveiled an arcade version of the game that promises to be the most masochistic cabinet ever... and we've seen quite a few. It's largely the same tough-to-control title you've come to know and love/hate, just blown up to the size of a 42-inch display. In other words, you'll likely spend more time feeding cash into this machine than you will mashing its one and only game button. We could see it being fun if you're an expert (or just need to get rid of a lot of money in a hurry), but you're probably better off playing this stand-up Flappy Bird system in very, very short bursts.
Dragon's Lair 30th anniversary now available for iPhone
Has it been 30 years? Wow! Dragon's Lair is a classic video game that arrived way back in 1983 featuring animation by former Disney animator Don Bluth. The original game kept its extensive graphics on a LaserDisc, the now dead optical disc format that was replaced by DVDs. The game had plenty of limitations. LaserDisc players started to fail under the strain of gameplay, as early players were really designed just for movies. The game moved to the arcades, and was one of the earliest games to charge 50 cents. I have dim memories of waiting in long lines to get a crack at it. The game is one of only three that sits in storage at the Smithsonian Institution, along with Pong and Pac-Man. Today, the game hit the App Store at US$4.99. The Dragon's Lair app includes all the original scenes, and a watch mode where you can just sit back and enjoy the animation. The game features high-definition graphics and looks great on Apple's Retina display. It also connects with Game Center. Just as in 1983, you take on the role of Dirk the Daring, a knight trying to rescue the princess from an evil dragon. You'll battle wizards and other nasty creatures to complete your quest. So grab a piece of history, and make your way down to the Dragon's Lair. The app requires iOS 4.3, and is optimized for the iPhone 5. It's not a universal app, so it will have to upscale on the iPad.
Californians can now rent original arcade games like Street Fighter 2, Ms. Pac Man
Sure, there's a cool factor to having a vintage arcade game parked in your rec room. But there's more to it than that -- as we saw for ourselves at Engadget Expand, people are genuinely excited about playing the original cabinet games from their childhoods. Now you can rent titles like Ms. Pac Man, Pole Position 2 and Donkey Kong for $75 per month in California, thanks to a company called All You can Arcade. It started as just a collecting hobby for brothers Timothy and Seth Peterson, but has blossomed into a business that now rents over 100 games and is constantly adding more. The best part is that you won't have to part with any of your allowance to play -- hit the More Coverage link for the copious list of titles.
Beercade replaces arcade coin slots with beer taps, rewards winners with brew
Forget prize tickets or high scores. The minds at McKinney creative agency may have come up with the greatest reward for arcade victors -- an ice cold pour of beer. Created as a marketing tool for Big Boss Brewing Company, the aptly named Beercade features The Last Barfighter, a Street Fighter-like arcade game set inside a biker bar. To begin, two players place their cups in the tray below their respective tap, which replaces the machine's coin slots. Beer-thirsty combatants can do battle with a selection of five characters, all named after Big Boss brews. After three rounds of intense fisticuffs, fire throwing and unicorn horn impaling, the winner's cup is filled with a sample of beer from a keg placed within the machine. Don't believe us? You can click past the break for a video of the machine in action.
New York's Chinatown Fair arcade hits reset, plays a new game
When Chinatown Fair closed in March of last year, Filmmaker Kurt Vincent went to work documenting the New York arcade's final days, continuing to return to the location after it shuttered to work on his upcoming film, Arcade. Imagine his surprise when he ran into Lonnie Sobel, the famous amusement hall's new owner, stocking it with new game cabinets. It's been a few months since Vincent's discovery, but Chinatown Fair finally reopened its doors over the weekend. Old regulars may want to brace themselves, however, Sobel's playing a different game. "We're kind of a cross between a Dave & Busters and a Chuck E. Cheese," the new owner told Gothamist, "We're trying to do the best of both worlds." Sobel's hoping to merge the old Chinatown Fair's culture of fighting games with an assortment of family friendly amusements: skee-ball, air hockey, Guitar Hero, hoop basketball and a counter for redeeming tickets for prizes. The new Fair will also sell game time for use on a Xbox 360 and games like Call of Duty, played on one of two flat screen televisions. Not all of the old arcade's former regulars are happy with the changes, but, as Vincent noted, they "say they're just happy it exists." That makes more than a few of us. [Thanks, Katrin]
New York's Chinatown Fair arcade presses start to continue
Live in New York? Miss the familiar sound of a quarter dropping into an arcade slot? If so, then news that the Chinatown Fair arcade could be re-opening will definitely give you a power-up. It turns out that film maker Kurt Vincent headed down to the disused locale to shoot its vacant halls, only to bump into the new owner shuffling some game cabinets back in. Sadly there's sparse little other info about how or when we might see the flicker of screens lighting up the walls once more, but at least you should be able to beat that OutRun top score in relative comfort soon.
Pinball pioneer Steve Kordek dies at 100
Believe it or not, pinball (that most beloved of nerd pastimes) hasn't always looked this way -- a familiar field of bumpers with a pair of forward facing flippers at the bottom. That particular design originated with the 1948 title Triple Action, the work of Steve Kordek who died this week at the age of 100. Kordek is credited with a number of innovations to the analog arcade games, including multi-ball mode and drop targets. All told, the pioneer designed well over 100 different machines for Genco, Bally and Williams -- some of the biggest names in the pinball pantheon -- over the course of his roughly 60 year career. So, it is with a heavy heart that we bid farewell to a man that provided us with hours of entertainment and cost us plenty of quarters.
Mad Catz proves its soul still burns with Soul Calibur V Arcade FightStick Soul Edition
If you're a fan of arcade-style fighting games, you're surely hip to MadCatz's FightStick Tournament Edition for PS3 and Xbox 360. As it's done with Street Fighter in the past, the company is back with another variation of the arcade stick, this time officially themed for the upcoming Soul Calibur V. Launching near the game in January 2012, the Soul Calibur V Arcade FightStick Soul Edition features the usual masher-friendly eight button with joystick layout, but sports a casing endowed with visuals inspired by the game -- and an extremely unfortunate mix of hues. The crazy Cat hasn't announced a price yet, but considering these have gone for about $150 in the past, we'd imagine this one won't be too far off. Full details in the press release after the break.
Babycastles brings its indie arcade action to The Engadget Show (video)
The shuttering of New York's Chinatown Fair back in March marked the end of an era for the city -- a last vestige of a time when social gaming meant more than just logging on to Xbox Live. The arcade experience hasn't completely disappeared form the metropolitan map, however -- in recent years, a new crop of venues have remixed the concept of yesterday's arcades, places like Brooklyn's Barcade, a shrine to 80s gaming machines that does brisk business serving spirits to Williamsburg's 21 and up crowd. Launched in Ridgewood, Queens by game developers Kunal Gupta and Syed Salahuddin, Babycastles takes the re-invention a step further, offering up something between an arcade space and an art gallery.
iCade iPad arcade cabinet one step closer to late May release
It's almost here! Sources report that Ion Audio's iCade arcade cabinet for the iPad has passed FCC approval, just in time for the planned release on May 31. The cabinet was originally seen as an April Fool's Day joke on ThinkGeek, but in the past few years, it's steadily moved towards reality and will soon be available for US$100 from that site, along with partners Ion Audio and Atari, who've already released over 100 retro games that are ready to be played on it. One interesting note: the cabinet will apparently be powered not just by the dock connector on the iPad, but with two AA batteries as well. That's only a minor inconvenience (and a small price to pay for having a fully-working set of arcade buttons and a joystiq to play iPad games with), so it shouldn't stop retro-loving iPad gamers from grabbing this one when it finally becomes real at the end of May. [via TiPB]
Super Pong Table serves up four-way retro play, whole lot of awesome (video)
Sure it's just sliding sticks and bouncing balls, but anyone who grew up playing Atari can tell you that Pong rules. Unfortunately, its earliest incarnation only supported enough 2D fun for two, which is why our eyes just about popped out of our heads when we saw this. The folks over at Instructables are showing off another awesome retro gaming project that makes everyone's favorite game a party pleaser -- it's also a pretty good fix for an old coffee table. The Super Pong Table allows for up to four players and fives balls per game, and enlists 900 LEDs and four Atari paddle controllers to make the thing work. Each player controls his or her own stick and gains or loses a point depending on whether they hit or miss a ball -- the first player to reach 20 points gets their very own "YOU WIN" light up display. Looks like we just found something to do with our weekend. You can check out a video of the table in action after the break or follow the source link for instructions on making your own.
Kinect hack turns Arduino-controlled delta robot into aggressive claw crane (video)
Candy crane, teddy picker, claw machine, whatever you call it, this arcade mainstay was robbing children of their golden tokens long before we slid into our first pair of Hammer pants, but despite the changing face of the plush offerings within, the crane game's remained mostly the same. Now a team of students at the Bartlett School of Architecture have produced a Kinect hack that could change the way you drop that claw. The rather temperamental delta robot enlists the ever-hackable peripheral in combination with Processing and Arduino to mimic the movements of a user's arm. As you can tell by the video below, the delta hasn't quite figured out the subtleties of human gestures, but the robot's creators say they intend to implement "several autonomous behaviors" once all the kinks are worked out. Frankly, we'd pay our weight in tokens to see the crane game bite back at an unsuspecting whippersnapper. Video after the break.
Arcade Table's Stealth brings high design, crazy price tag to tabletop arcade
The tabletop arcade market isn't exactly a crowded one these days, and for the most part we'd say that's for good reason -- remember those Pac-Man-induced neck spasms? Then again, most arcade tables don't look like this. The Stealth console system from the aptly-named Arcade Tables offers 60 classic games, including Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Galaga, in a high gloss cocktail table, sporting an HD LCD screen with an 89-degree viewing angle, built-in speaker system, and two-player controls. Okay, so the thing costs $3,300, which is more than a touch too rich for our blood, but wouldn't it be nice if more throwback consoles looked a little more, well, Stealth-y.
Microsoft's Game Room for Xbox 'rewinds' the hits in our hands-on demo
Microsoft showed off its new retro-tastic Game Room UI for Xbox 360 in playable form at GDC last week. While the "make a virtual representation of a gaming space" idea might seem ripped straight from Sony's Home, there aren't really any actual similarities -- outside of the fact they're both in 3D, at least. You dive disembodied through the different game rooms pretty intuitively, with different company collections on the bottom "level" of the mall-like UI, and upper levels set aside for your own collections of the games. Unfortunately, once you actually select an arcade cabinet, the UI gets rather overly complex, with all sorts of modes you can play the game in, sorts of scores to be tracked and an indecipherable menu tree that makes it a real chore to exit a game. We're sure arcade fanatics, ready to pit their scores against the best of them and looking for truly in-depth functionality are going to love all this, but for us poor simpletons it's a little much to take in all at once. Luckily, Microsoft saved the best for the actual gameplay. Not only does it nicely emulate inserting coins and even entering in codes on a virtual keypad, but when playing games in the non-ranked classic mode there's a "rewind" function accessible at any time with the tug of the left trigger. The screen gets those VHS-style wavey lines and you can mend your errors instead of losing a valuable life or having to start from the beginning. It's perfect for patching over the quarter-munching difficulty of some of these games, and it might even be enough to pull us away from our polygon-drenched gorefests now and then to don an inexplicable bear avatar and spelunk some Crystal Castles. Check out a video of Game Room after the break, and stand by for a launch of the service on March 24.
Airport diversion: Adrenaline Golf Online
I think the iPhone really solves the 'sitting at the airport with hours to kill' problem quite well. As iPhone owners, we know we can browse the web, catch up on email or the news, even check to see why your flight is late. I have another suggestion. Give Adrenaline Golf Online [iTunes link] a try. It is one of the few games that really harnesses the power of 3GS graphics, but look quite good if you are on older hardware, and it works fine on an iPod touch too. The game is basically miniature golf, with a pretty accurate physics engine. There are 72 courses in 3 different game modes. You can play online with golfers all over the world, or just play by your lonesome. There are 4 different playing environments for 18 courses, which is how you get a total of 72. There is beach, forest, lava, and night. The animation and rendering of water and reflections is really stunning. The game play is challenging, and I easily blew an hour working through a couple of the courses. All the courses have 3 difficulty levels, and have interesting challenges in getting your ball in the hole past a series of animated obstacles. I'm not really a big game person, but I was instantly hooked by Adrenaline Golf. If I have any criticism it is that it is hard to predict how a particular hole will play and how far the ball will roll. Eventually I got the hang of it. It might seem a little pricey at U.S. $4.99, but I think the effort involved in making this game was substantial, and I didn't mind the higher tariff. If you're stuck at an airport or have time on your hands I suggest giving this game a try. I think it is especially good for people who like pool and miniature golf. Here's a gallery of some screen shots: %Gallery-79255%
