Random crap.
Coffee Boss is doing a retro Dragon Quest campaign where entries to the contest can win limited edition prizes, as seen in the top picture. I love the pixel art on the cans. I didn’t buy the Black ones since I just cannot drink coffee black. I did buy the Cafe au Lait and Premium ones. I’ll feature this in my next Japanese Snacks video at the end of the year.
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.
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.
I was at the Tilt game arcade in Arizona Mills in Tempe, AZ (formerly Game Works) with friends when I came across this neat Namco gachapon attraction. I didn’t give it a try, but it looked neat. Of course, I’m a sucker for anything Pac-Man. Apparently you have to slide the capsules into the holes to gain the prize inside.
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.
I haven’t played Super Metroid for about 15 years or more. I love this game! It’s actually the only Metroid game I’ve ever played. This wireless gamepad is a recent purchase. There was no name at all on the package. I got it on Ali Express for something like 1500 yen. It comes with a dongle to plug it into the SFC/SNES Mini or you can take out the USB WiFi receptor and use it with your PC. Ali Express claimed that it’s compatible with RetroPie, but I couldn’t get it to recognize it. Steam didn’t like it, either. Maybe because I was using the wire? The wire is for charging the controller. Maybe it’s not meant for gameplay.
My goal is to hack this Mini console to add more games to it, especially shmups since it does not come with a single shmup! Not even Gradius III! I’m making a list of games like Area 88 and Macross to add to this. I found a page saying that the program used to hack it can actually be used in Linux, so hopefully I won’t have to get out my grodie Win10 SSD.
Earthion was released late last night. It’s a new shmup for the Megadrive, available for download on Steam. I stayed up and played it a bit. I’ll do a write-up after I get more used to the gameplay.
These are pictures I took a few months ago in the Taito Game Station arcade in Lirica Mall. From left to right: the sign in front, a vending machine, and Space Invaders Frenzy.
Mikado had these pin badge buttons in their gachapon capsule toy dispensers, so I got three. One big one that says “PUSH START” (I’m not sure why it says “2006” because according to the Japanese Wikipedia, it started in 2009), and a set of buttons for the Mikado location in Ikebukuro (top) and the original in Takadanobaba (bottom). As I mentioned in the previous post, Mikado is a legendary spot for retrogaming.
I visited Mikado next to Takadanobaba Station in Tokyo. Here are some more screenshots of game screens. (I made an earlier post of closeup screenshots of arcade games in Akihabara’s Hey and Super Potato here.)
