arcade games
Latest
Billy Mitchell is taking his ‘Donkey Kong’ cheating saga to court
Former Donkey Kong world record holder Billy Mitchell is taking the scorekeeping organization Twin Galaxies to court.
Two classic ‘House of the Dead’ games are being remade for current consoles
Arcades are a rare sight these days. But while nothing can match the experience of exchanging a $10 bill for a pile of quarters and binging on some games with your friends, many of the classics have made their way to consoles and PCs. Publisher Forever Entertainment will bring some zombie-blasting arcade action home with re-releases of House of the Dead and House of the Dead 2, Sega's iconic light gun games.
Konami is bringing 'Castlevania' and 'Contra' to modern consoles
Konami is celebrating its 50th birthday with three new compilations based on Castlevania, Contra and its early arcade games, each available on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Windows PC (via Steam).
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.
How To: Consolize an arcade game
Every so often, that console-modding Benjamin Heckendorn wanders away from his lair at benheck.com to share some interesting projects with Engadget. If you're like us, you probably have many fond memories of playing arcade games in your younger days. As the years passed the consoles became the most advanced machines available and arcades faded from the limelight, eventually popping up only as the occasional deer-slaying simulator or 500th version of Golden Tee.In this How-To we're going to describe the method by which you can take old arcade motherboards, easily attainable on eBay, and "consolize" them for use with a standard TV and controllers. Many people are satisfied with emulators such as MAME, and while they're become better and even more legal (thanks to the recent "abandonware" legislation) you still can't beat the real deal. Certain arcade machines, such as the Neo-Geo, are great choices for this project because you can actually plug new games into the hardware using the cheap and plentiful "MVS Cartridges."Another benefit of this project is that it can start you on the path to building one of the coolest home accessories around -- your own arcade machine! Since you can use a cheap standard TV instead of an expensive RGB arcade monitor it'll cut much of the cost out.Alright, let's get started on this puppy!
Paperboy on your cell
Break out your VHS copy of Goonies and tight roll your jeans, the Paperboy has jumped out of your, um emulator and onto your cellphone. Sega Mobile's release, now available through most major US carriers, has brought the popular title back into our hearts and pockets so you can spend those mind-numbing hours delivering the news (just like us!) -- even though we tend to break a lot fewer windows now than we did back in the day. Funny how twenty years later we're still wrestling with the cult question: does the paperboy have a bum arm, or are the people on the right side of the street just illiterate?
