Arcade Games Thread

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As I get older, I don't wanna see new shit anymore. I don't want to look forward to stuff! I wanna be grumpy, and NOSTALGIC. Maybe we can have a thread just to talk about arcade stuff. Memories of them, and what their current state are where you live assuming they are still around.

Arcades were quite a big part of my life growing up. I've had my share of playing on random cabinets of Street Fighter, Tekken, Final Fight or whatever. Light gun games like Virtua Cop, and later Time Crisis.

Even in my teens I would still drop by arcades when I was out with my family for dinner/shopping. I'd even play games I owned on PS2, just so I had someone new to play with. I often did that with Soul Calibur 2, and I even managed to find a Fate/Unlimited Codes machine here and managed to find an opponent.

My favourite games were always those with unconventional setups or peripherals. One of which is:
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Good old Virtual On. I remember my first time on it(I was pretty young, around 10 maybe, don't remember), I didn't realize there were triggers. So I just kept moving the sticks around and hitting the shoulder buttons which were used to boost. A random stranger came by and clicked the triggers and I was like oh. Then the game clicked.

Though almost everybody would struggle with Dorkas which was the third level.

The most time I had with the first VO game was during my teens. At my school we had something called activity week. Basically you choose an activity to partake in for the week rather than regular school. The rich ones would of course, go skiing in Switzerland or something. I however was not that rich. I did go to a local camping thing the previous year which involved jungle trekking and living in budget hotels, and I decided I didn't want to do that again and just do something near to home. So I signed up for ice skating at a local mall. We would basically have an hour or two of skating lessons, then we were kinda free to just continue skating or just piss off and do whatever until it was time to go.

That mall had a lot of these Virtual On machines and I had a week of fun schooling random people from my school. Before this I used to mostly play Viper II or Raiden cause they looked cool, but I decided to play Fei Yen as a joke and she kinda stuck. She was hella fast and had her hyper mode when your health dropped <50%.

I later discovered there was a sequel to this of course, my friend had it on Dreamcast. But well, I hated playing it on Dreamcast, I liked the twin sticks and cabinet and having shitty midi blasting into my ears. That friend also called it "Ontario Triangram", but it was actually "Oratorio Tangram".

I did discover some of these machines, in various states of wear and tear, often just a single pair. There weren't many of them in Malaysia, and I would make a mental note to visit them when I could. The one machine I played the most was quite far away though. There's a resort place my family would use to go yearly. It had theme parks and casinos, and one of the arcades there had this machine. Unfortunately one side was broken so you couldn't play VS. You could still insert coins and play on both sides of the machine, but one of the sides had faulty sticks and a broken trigger so you'd just lose to the CPU if you tried.

Interestingly I discovered a machine in an obscure local mall years later, and it had the same quirks as the hotel one. I was already in uni and my family stopped going on family trips and stuff, so I couldn't really confirm the status of the hotel arcade at the time. I wonder if it was the exact same machine that got passed around.

I have dropped by both locales between then and now and I can say both arcade centers no longer exist.

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The last time I played these was actually in Akihabara, not too long ago actually just last month. I was there for some work related stuff, and had a free day. But unfortunately it wasn't the original cabinets, it was some sorta retrofitted type like in the image above. Still better than nothing.

Considering most of the machines were all account card with online functionality type jazz, I was happy to find something I could just shove 100 yen coins in and play without giving much of a shit.

I kinda wish PC had a way to play the Virtual On games, at least in a more updated way that doesn't rely on emulation or janky old ports. I know the PS4 got the Virtual On Masterpiece Collection. And I believe the games were also on XBLA. But I haven't been a console owner since the PS2.

Closing note would be Virtual On Force I guess. I hate it. You need an account card to manage unlocks and stuff. They simplified shit. But I did have a chance to play on the actual machines while in Hong Kong. It was pretty novel being able to coop play with a buddy though, due to the new 2v2 format.
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