Random crap.
The Mandai Shoten store in Maebashi has a Famicom gachapon machine. For 200 yen, you can receive a random Famicom game. You never know what you will get! How exciting! What could it be? Pac Man? 1943? Arkanoid? Dragon Quest? Tetris? ZANAC?
My friend Lou got Derby Stallion, the boring-as-hell horse race simulator. Oh joy.
Unfortunately, game centers in Japan have become increasingly boring due to the lack of actual games. Even the Purikura (“Print Club”) photo booths are boring as while 20 years ago they were a fun way for friends to have pictures taken together, they are apparently now targeted at young girls who aren’t old enough to wear makeup and these things detect your eyes and add make-up, make the eyes freakishly big, etc. The tourist-y Purikura booths were the best, so if you went to Tokyo Tower you could have your friends get a picture taken with Tokyo Tower inserted behind you, etc. Now they just make you look like some anime freak with creepy eyes. To think that girls these days actually appreciate how these photo sticker booths treat their appearances is bewildering.
The UFO catcher claw-arm prize games can only be entertaining for so long. Most of the time the claws just caress the prizes, or maybe they will pick them up, only to drop them clumsily. I’m sure it’s all on purpose.
Space Invaders Frenzy provides a fun gaming experience that cannot be replicated at home. It is a retro throwback to the original Space Invaders, but you control it with rapid fire gun turrets, picking up power-ups to defeat the invaders. It’s pretty fun.
I recorded this at the Taito Game Station in Lirica Mall in Maebashi a couple of years ago.
Several years ago, I bought these jumpers at Shimamura and posted them on my Tumblr feed. I’ll repost these pics here.
This next one has Megadrive, Saturn, and Dreamcast patterns. It’s also slightly warmer than the Dreamcast one.
You may need to click each image to see the images in a larger scale to truly see the effect, since WordPress tends to shrink images to fit.
For scanlines/shaders, you’ve gotta go into RetroPie Setup. From there, Configuration/Tools -> Config Edit -> Config Basic libretro emulator options. Now here you can choose to apply the shader to ALL of the emulators (option 0) or do it for individual emulators. I’m using Final Burn Alpha, so I went to Configure additional options for fba. Option 3 is Video shader enable (3). Click that and enable “True.” Next is Video shader file (4). I chose crt/crt-hyllian.glslp . You can choose it with the glow (crt/crt-hyllian-glow.glslp) to add that aged CRT look. I think there are others that will mimic a curved monitor’s surface. Tinker around and see what you like.
In level 1-3, a secret area shows Snake Plissken from Escape from NY land atop the building on his glider and he hands you his special automatic pistol.
Level 4 is the section that most resembles Blade Runner. The secret area in level 4-4 shows Deckard holding onto the ledge of the building while Batty releases a dove. Cool.
I recently discovered a game publisher called Flynn’s Arcade (awesome name!). Basically, the game is a cross between Dig Dug and Bomberman. You play as a bunny rabbit that poops bombs. And no, I’m not being silly. the game actually says that you poop bombs by pressing the button!
The object of the game is to kill all of the enemies on screen before the timer runs out, and you get bonus points for eating the four carrots on each screen. Press the button to drop a bomb behind you. It’s not like Bomberman where you drop a bomb right where you are, but rather behind your bunny. The delay is very swift, so you must move quickly. You can also dislodge rocks to have them fall on the enemies. Points multiply when you kill more than one enemy.
The emulated CRT scanlines are great in this game. Sometimes these faux retro games go overboard with the scanlines, but they look nice in this game. The game is available for Steam OS, so it runs natively on Linux and Steam Deck. Last year, I discovered Annalynn. Murtop is another such fantastic neo-retro arcade game. Play it or else you suck!
Masaya’s “Assault Suit” series of side-scrolling mecha combat action games is fantastic. My first exposure to the series was Assault Suit Valken, aka “Cybernator” for North America, on the Super Nintendo. I played the crap out of that game, and then I later got Target: Earth for my Genesis. But Valken/Cybernator’s control was fantastic due to the extra buttons of the Super Famicom/Super Nintendo. Playing Target: Earth/Leynos with only 3 buttons, plus the inferior graphics, did not help me to enjoy the game much. I’ve played it again more recently on my Megadrive Mini, and it still just doesn’t play as well as it could, if only there were more buttons. I did, however, play Assault Suits Leynos 2 on the Saturn quite a lot and completed it.
So this is a remake of Leynos on Steam, and it is fantastic. It features Japanese voice acting for when the anime-style characters speak. For some dumb reason, the anime characters were removed for the North American Cybernator port, and I did a review of that game on my old Super Famicom page here. With extra shoulder buttons, this game plays very well. Of course it retains the 2D gameplay, but with updated graphics and beautiful lighting effects.
The game has mixed reviews on Steam, but I suspect that many are from people who are unfamiliar with the original game. I rather enjoyed it, and I waited for it to go on sale before nabbing it. Definitely give it a try if you are a fan of the series.
I like to have this handy in the car, especially on weekends, while my wife Mayu is shopping.
Here’s the Solvalou fighter, your ship in the game.
The Andor Genesis, the boss ships you fight against. Sort of looks like the top part of a Cylon Base Star.
Speaking of Battlestar Galactica, the Terrazi looks like a Cylon Raider.
This Jara is sort of TIE Fighter shaped.
The Kapi has a sort of Millennium Falcon shape to it.
I can’t say this Grobda tank really looks like anything, except maybe a cross from the Galileo Shuttle from Star Trek and the land rover from Battlestar Galactica.
The port of Xevious on the Atari 7800 is what I put the most time into, when I was in junior high. I remember how thrilled I was when I bombed the Andor Genesis with a one bomb kill. I’ll have to give it a try on my 7800 emulator for RetroPie again sometime to refresh my memory. IIRC, it wasn’t a bad port and it even had the hidden flags you can reveal by bombing secret areas on the screen.
In 1982, I saw the trailers for the movie on TV and wanted to see the movie so badly. My sister was 3 years older than me and had decided that since the movie was about computers, it would be too complex and I wouldn’t understand it. Yet she hadn’t seen it either, so how would she know? Older sibling syndrome, I guess.
It wasn’t until later when Tron came to the Disney Channel that I finally got to see it. It was a celebration of early ’80s video game culture. Fantastic. Recently I did a search for Tron stuff on Pinterest and wanted to post some of the cooler images I found.
I’ve never seen this poster image before. Super neat.
Jean “Moebius” Giraud did a lot of the designs for Tron. His graphic novel, The Long Tomorrow, was a visual inspiration for Blade Runner.
More Moebius art.
And speaking of Blade Runner, Syd Mead also did design work for Tron, with these black & white illustrations.
I’ve never seen this poster with Flynn, either. Perhaps this is fan art?
This poster for the “Space Paranoids” arcade game featured in the movie. It’s amusing since arcade games back then did NOT look like that, unless it was supposed to be a laserdisc game. There is no way we had FPS-style games like that back then!
But we did get an actual Tron arcade game by Bally Midway in 1984.
The design of this arcade cabinet is simply captivating, complete with the blacklights and lighted joystick. While it was cool, I really enjoyed the Discs of Tron game far better.
This was a step-in, environmental cabinet. It really blew me a way the first time I saw it.
Too bad Disney is more preoccupied with sexualizing children and wrecking Marvel and Star Wars to make anything cool anymore. At least a good sequel was made before Disney went down the crapper, although that movie and its spin-off cartoon weren’t enough to sustain interest in Tron. As for me, 40 years later, Tron remains dear to me.
Here is my DVD signed by Bruce Boxleitner. I only talked to him briefly, but I could tell he is BASED.
