Tuesday, January 17, 2006

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON A RANDOM TOPIC #2

TOPIC OF THE DAY: Video Arcades.

I thought of this topic because I recently read an article about how arcades have been on a steady decline for some time. Apparently there's just no money in it anymore.

I've seen this in arcades all around where I live. Out of all the arcades in my vicinity, most of them are maintained by a larger business whose main source of income does not come in the form of quarters.

There's the Brunswick Zone bowling lanes in Lowell, Massachusetts. My brother and I used to come here often, but we've slowly been losing interest as time passed. First, they removed some of the old fighting games. Then they put in more shooting games. My brother stopped coming after they removed the Blitz '99 football game. We'd spent many a quarter playing the only game that would allow you to play for a guaranteed 20 minutes, cursing at each other all the way. Then they removed it in favor of a DDR Extreme machine. I was still interested, but my brother wasn't.

Then recently, the DDR machine was replaced by a newer In The Groove machine. Same gameplay as DDR, different songs. This one has less songs than the old DDR Extreme machine, and it's nowhere near as well-maintained. The bars at the back of the dance pads are wobbly, the dance pads themselves stick, and the speakers are turned down way too low. You can barely hear it over the bowling. Not good for a game that relies on audio cues. So the only reason I'd go back there is if they fix up the ITG machine and turn it up to a level where my footsteps don't overpower what comes out of the speakers.

There are of course, the arcades at movie theaters. Again, the arcade games are a secondary source of revenue to the tickets and $5 popcorn. I haven't been to the arcades at the AMC in Tyngsboro or the Showcase in Lowell recently, but while I was at college, I would go to the arcade at the Cinemark near the Hampshire mall in Hadley every weekend. The only reason I got to arcades any more is for DDR, and this place delivers: a DDR extreme machine that offers 5 songs for 3 quarters, and an In The Groove 2 machine that offers 3 songs for one quarter.

This one also happens to be frequented by some really good players, though I don't know hardly any of them by name. We just stand around and watch each other perform songs that make the uninitiated stare on in amazement.

I suppose that since I'm talking a lot about DDR, I should explain my level of skill. The songs are rated from 1 to 10 steps in DDR but they go as high as 13 in ITG. I can reliably do most 8-step and below, and a handful of 9-step, in both games. The reason I haven't advanced much higher is probably a combination of factors. I don't have the stamina; I haven't learned some of the fancier footwork necessary for 10-step and above; I can't sightread the arrows fast enough.

The other major game I like playing in arcades is fighting games. There's usually at least one in most arcades, but I've started seeing them fade away in favor of more shooting games.

Whatever happened to Killer Instinct? That's a game begging for resurrection. KI3 can bring back all the classic characters and maybe a few new ones, and they can do it with 3D environments as well. I'd love to see a battle to the finish between Fulgore and Cinder again.

Another MIA fighting game is the Mortal Kombat series. It's still on consoles, with the latest incarnation, MK: Shaolin Monks, supposedly for XBox360, probably already on the shelves, but I haven't seen an arcade version for quite some time. The last MK4 machine I remember was at Skate 3 Roller Kingdom in Tyngsboro, and I haven't been there since...eighth grade? maybe longer. Again, a new arcade release is due. Midway brought out a handful of new characters with a new storyline, brought a handful of the old characters into 3D, and ignored the rest. What abaout Kabal? What about the evil sisters Kitana, Mileena, and Jade? What about the Lin Kuei roboticized ninjas, Sektor, Cyrax, and Smoke? It would be great to see them in 3D in arcades...get on it, Midway. I still play Blitz '99 and The Grid. You owe me.

Not going away any time soon: Tekken. The arcade in the UMass student union building has both Tekken 4 and 5, side by side. The 5 machine even has the nicer Japanese-style ball-topped joysticks rather than the common tapered-handle sticks you see on so many other game cabinets. And since my roommate brought a PS1 to the dorm, I picked up a $4 copy of Tekken 2 from a Gamestop at the local mall over christmas break. Who says bargain bins are worthless?
Now if only I could find the original and 3 as well...I'd have almost the whole series available.

Street Fighter. I still wanna play the original Street Fighter 1. Too bad it's not in any arcades I've ever seen anywhere. In this country or in others. Ah well. Unfortunately this series is slowly fading away as well. Not that there aren't any new versions. But Brunswick Zone getting rid of Street Fighter 3: Third Strike and Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 are part of the reason my brother stopped coming there. There's a SVC Chaos machine at the Cinemark, but I think the SNK crossovers are missing something. Probably because of not being pure SF.

The Street Fighter Alpha series is great because it has almost every SF character since its blockbuster Street Fighter 2.

Side note: I'm a Ryu player. There's something about being able to carry over your skills from one game into 15-25 others with minimal effort that I think is satisfying. It's nice being able to see a Street Fighter game, any game, and know how to play your character while others have to struggle with another character because this game left out his favorite. Why Ryu over Ken? Only real reason is that I find Shinkuu Hadou-ken more fun to kill someone with than Shoryuu-Reppa. And the fact that he's in MVC2 and I can't find Ken anywhere.

Fighting games are slowly being removed in favor of shooting games. Just like gangs have been slowly moving away from bare-knuckle fighting and just using guns instead. And the guns have been changing from handguns to automatic weapons too. Just a side thought.

Area 51. One of those games where if you memorize exactly where to shoot when, you can avoid being hurt the entire game. Commonly known as "Rail Shooters," because of the fact that you move like a car on a rail track. This one was the most widespread one that I've seen. Sometimes bundled with Maximum Force. Same principle, different places to shoot. Some more recent incarnations of this principle include Extreme Paintball, Target Force: Terror, and Area 51: Site 4. All of them are completely static, which gets boring after a while. Though if you go at it enough, you can impress people by beating the game on one credit.

A few games deviate from this formula, but not by much. House of the Dead and Virtua Cop only differ in that you have to shoot the enemies more than once to kill them. CarnEvil and House of the Dead 3 made your pistol into a shotgun. Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Revolution-X, which features Aerosmith, turned your pistol into a machine gun and added the ability to fire rockets (or, in the case of Revolution-X, exploding CDs). Then Gunblade and L.A. Machine Guns took that formula, ditched the rockets, and made it 3D. The Time Crisis series took the standard pistol and added the ability to go to cover, represented by a pedal that could be pressed to go forward and shoot, then released to find cover and reload. After two games in this series, Time Crisis and L.A. Machine Guns had a baby and called it Crisis Zone. Now you have the machine gun AND the shoot/hide pedal. Silent Scope made your gun a sniper rifle, which had a smaller screen in the scope, so you could actually see a zoom view. That was kinda cool. But it really made your eyes tired after a while. The latest new version of this formula I've seen is one called Ghost Squad, where your gun is now an assault rifle, which could become a shotgun if you so chose.

Given their long history, it's only a matter of time until we finally get to wield RPGs and Bazookas, which rest on your shoulder.

Picture this: A long row of 10 arcade machines. Some have assault rifles, some have heavier full machine guns, one has a rocket launcher and another has a sniper rifle. All 10 players must work together, since they play as an entire U.S. Army squad. If the arcade doesn't have room for 10 machines, the rest of the squad members could be computer controlled. Or better yet, connect the whole complex to the internet, and players in different arcades can play together on the same squad.

Ever play Point Blank? Just a test of accuracy. No plot. More fun than a lot of other shooters I've played.

Driving games are still on the rise. I never really liked these games. I don't like driving a real car much either. I'm not going to say much more, except that all you Initial D fanatics and your ilk should shut the hell up. I don't care how realistic the driving experience is, it's not fun.

I mentioned The Grid before. It's the first time I've ever seen an FPS implemented in an arcade, particularly with that sort of hardware: a joystick for movement and a trackball for aiming.

Some arcades have games where you can win tickets. Most common of all these is Skee Ball, and its successor in spirit Ice Ball, which are identical except Ice Ball multiplies all the point calues by 10.

I've never seen anyone like this but I could picture someone who plays Skee Ball with the same focus and intensity as some serious gamers I've met. He practices for hours, he spends rolls of quarters on Skee Ball, he can hit the 100-point hole 9 times out of 10. Saving his tickets for the one day he can finally "buy" that 20,000-ticket item behind the counter. Someone who brought in that many tickets was regarded by arcadegoers as a legend. A myth. If you caught a glimpse of him you were the luckiest person in the arcade. Especially considering that after you play one or two games of Skee Ball, you have maybe 4 tickets, just barely enough to win a handful of Tootsie Rolls.

But the ticket counters are gone. In the Time Out arcade at the Hampshire Mall in Hadley, there is a machine that takes your tickets and allows you to pick a prize. It's kind of like the experience of finding out that where there once was a counter serving food, there is now only a vending machine.

With all of this in mind, let me tell you about my favorite arcade. In Nashua, New Hampshire, off the Daniel Webster Highway, is a place called FunWorld. It's three stories tall and is packed with arcade games. It has Fighting games. It has Shooting games. It has Driving games. It has DDR and ITG. It has games that award tickets and a real ticket counter. It has vending machines...but also the counter selling pizza and nachos. It has a playplace for the little kids featuring a 101-foot tube slide, a sea of plastic balls, mazes, and a moonwalk area. I haven't seen any place like it anywhere else. They're getting rarer and rarer now, it seems. It's the last bastion of true arcades in the Middlesex County area, and I'm going to keep going.