Tag: arcade

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Senjin Aleste by M2 is classic shmup action!

I was at the Gunma Leisure Land game center north of Takasaki Station on a Saturday morning with plenty of kill since I wasn’t with the female family units and I played Senjin Aleste. I played this game last summer at a game center in Iida, Nagano Prefecture. I really love this game and I want M2 to release this on Steam, Switch, and Playstation. It’s been a few years already. What are they waiting for?

I totally love M2. They really know how to make neo-retro games. This game is 100% pixel graphics! It plays a lot like Blazing Lazers and Space Megaforce. You select a character, one of four girls. But really you end up playing them all as a team so you are just selecting the one to start with.

Each girl pilots her own ship, each with different weapons styles. There’s a Japanese girl Yuri Kunugi (Type-A), an ambiguous girl Ratna Francis (Type-B), a Slavic/Japanese girl Tanya Yaezakura (Type-C), and a Chinese girl Huang Kexin (Type-D). The Type-A is like a Dodonpachi-style fighter with orbiters that circle around the nose. Type-B has orbiters that fire in the direction you want them to. Type-C is more of a spread-shot. Type-D, the pudgy Chinese girl with glasses and big tits, has orbiters which fire ring lasers in 360 degrees. She really wrecks bosses, so I liked to try to save her for the end of the level.

A ring builds around your ship over time. Pressing a button will push back enemy bullets within that ring momentarily, hopefully enough for you to move out of the way. Destroying enemies give you P powerups, which gradually make your weapons stronger.

You have three buttons: your shot (which you can either rapid fire by mashing it or a focused attack by holding it down), the ring defense to escape incoming bullets, and a bomb that is actually weak. Picking up a Bomb powerup provides a much stronger bomb, so don’t hesitate to nab those when the screen is filled with badguys.

When you pick up a bomb icon, the bomb auto-activates. The four ships are A, B, C, D. Collecting any of these letter powerups will change you to that girl. When a girl gets shot down, she will slowly regenerate her ship. If all four are hit before any of them can repair, it’s game over. So the 4 girls are like a tag team.

Look how the fighters streak off at the end of a level! That’s exactly like Super Aleste/Space Megaforce on the SFC/SNES! It was a bit hard to play one-handed while holding my camera to take some quick pictures, so the focus isn’t the best. Sorry. If you don’t like it, you can lick me where I pee.

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The Mikado game center in Ikebukuro

On August 21st I returned to Japan from my trip to Arizona. I stayed a night in Tokyo before proceeding home. I looked up how to find the Mikado game center in Ikebukuro. This was my first time visiting there.

I didn’t take a whole lot of photos, actually. By then I was getting very hungry, so I went to Ueno and went to an Irish pub called The World’s End where I had fish & chips with two pints of Guinness. It was great.

That night I also went to Taito’s HEY game center in Akihabara and took these photos there.

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Visiting The Outpost Arcade in Chandler, AZ

My friends and i visited the brand new Outpost Arcade on August 16th. It’s small, but cozy. No booze at the time of the recording, which was a shame because I could’ve gone for a beer if one had been available. I settled for an IBC Root Beer instead. Lots of great pinball games and video game cabinets too: Tempest, Star Wars, Tron, Marble Madness, Joust, Afterburner II, and a couple of games I’d never seen before!
https://www.theoutpostarcade.com/

From left to right, here are Star Wars, Tac/Scan, Robotron 2084, Joust, After Burner II, and Centipede. I’d never seen Tac/Scan before and it was a very cool vector graphic game by Sega! I also didn’t know that there was an Atari 2600 port of this game which uses the paddle controller. Neat!

Here I am, playing Tron. It’s one of my favorite movies, but I admit that the game is only so-so. As a kid, I really enjoyed the successor, Discs of Tron, far more. That said, this game cabinet is an exquisite work of art, with all the glowing detail which matches the movie, and the blacklights that create that fantastic glow. These two aspects really capture the ambience to the movie so well.

This really matches the Syd Mead/Moebius design work of the Tron movie so well.

Star Wars. Oh, heck yeah!

Somehow, the arcades when I was a kid only had Asteroids and not Asteroids Deluxe. The 3D look to Asteroids Deluxe is quite exquisite, with the background and the vector graphics projected onto it. Fantastic.

And of course, plenty of pinball goodness. I really liked the Doctor Who Daleks.

My friend Lou knows this Star Trek: TNG pinball game well. How appropriate, since he’s the biggest Trek fan I know.

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A visit to TiltStudio Arcade at Arizona Mills Mall in Tempe, AZ

So while I got to spend time with friends on my recent trip to Arizona, on the day which I visited Andy’s Hobby HQ and Book Off, we also went to AZ Mills Mall in Tempe. TiltStudio is there, and this is where I found the Pac-Man Capsule Factory I posted about earlier. Tilt is what used to be Gameworks which opened in the ’90s when I was in college, and I took videos of Gameworks back in 2010 in the early years of my YouTube channel. Here is the playlist for those videos. At the time, the guy who ran that arcade was focused on bringing in many arcade cabinets from Japan, including an incredibly awesome air hockey table I’ve yet to even come across in Japan even.

Tilt now focuses on a great selection of pinball games, thus the name.

This is cool! It’s a Beatles pinball game. My friend Kevin is a huge Beatles fan, and so is my wife.

An OT Star Wars pinball game! Righteous.

Ghostbusters pinball!

This is a JIBUNGOUS UFO catcher! Holy crap. I had to have my picture taken with it.

Tilt also has a nice collection of some great classic arcade games. The rest of these photos are a collection of pictures of those games.

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Pac-Man Battle Royale

This game has been around for a while, but today I played it for the first time. I’ve seen it before at game centers. This would be more fun playing with other people. I was kicking ass, but the CPU still beat me. Oh well. Four players can play as Pac-Mans (Pac-Men?) in a survival match. You can bump each others into ghosts and even eat each other (cannibalism!). Whomever survives 2 out of 3 rounds wins. I was focusing on eating the ghosts rather than my opponent for points. I’ll change my strategy next time.

Recorded in the Apina game center in Iida, Nagano Prefecture.

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It’s the ’80s, and you have only one quarter. Which game will you play?

Pac-Man is my all-time favorite game. In fact, I’m wearing Pac-Man boxer shorts underwear as I post this. I’m nuts for anything Pac-Man. That said, Star Wars was my #1 go-to game every time, as I mentioned in my post about the old arcade Bag-A-Tel as a kid.

I didn’t really play Defenders or Space Invaders in the arcade that much. I’d play them on my Atari at home. I preferred Galaxian over Space Invaders and I found the controls of Defender in the arcade to be too complicated with all those buttons.

And Tempest… wow. Star Wars and Tempest are the two I’d most want to play today. Playing games on an emulator and my Sega Saturn Virtua Stick is a great way to go at home, but the flight yoke of Star Wars and the analog knob of Tempest are two experiences that emulators can’t truly capture. For that matter, Centipede’s trackball is worth mentioning too, although while I liked that game, it didn’t come close.

Perhaps my least favorite of all of these games was Donkey Kong. I actually liked Popeye better, and Kangaroo even more so.

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Memories of the Bag-A-Tel arcade in Valley West Mall (Glendale, AZ)

When I was a boy, the #1 game arcade I went to in Glendale, AZ was Bag-A-Tel in Valley West Mall. My #1 go-to game was, of course, Atari’s Star Wars sit-down cabinet. Released in 1983, this game came out the same year as Return of the Jedi, yet it involved the first Star Wars movie. I remember playing Atari’s Red Baron, a similar vector graphics shooter cabinet, before Star Was was released. The Return of the Jedi game by Atari came out in ’84, featuring an isometric view that I really could not get the hang of. Then in ’85 the first game was modified to play the Empire Strikes Back vector graphics game, which was not as good.

If Star Wars was occupied, my #2 choice was the Namco’s Pole Position II (released by Atari in the US) sit-down cabinet, which was located next to Star Wars. (This animated gif is actually of the first Pole Position game though.)

I have very fond memories of Bag-A-Tel. I loved that place. Whenever we’d catch a movie at the dollar theater, we’d be sure to stop by that arcade. Valley West Mall was eventually closed down, then later re-opened as Manistee Town Center. Eventually that mall went goodbye as well, and the mall was used for filming the movie Eight-Legged Freaks starring David Arquette and featuring a very young Scarlett Johannsson. The mall was demolished for that movie.

Here is a photo of the movie theater in Valley West Mall, courtesy of the CinemaTreasures nostalgia website.