arcade

The Home Arcade Archive Chronicles

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Continued from here

Driving home from West Virginia with Mercs in the back of my minivan, I couldn’t help but think of what to buy next. The seller we had just left also had a Final Round cabinet. Like Mercs, it was $250 which is a fair price for a working machine and monitor with no PCB in it, let alone the game called Hard Puncher: Bloodsoaked Glory in Japan. My minivan lacked the space to carry two arcade cabinets simultaneously so I told my friend Rick, who had accompanied me to West Virginia, the seller, and my wife that I would have to think about Final Round. Rick and the seller both said ‘ok.’ My wife told me to work on the machines I had since I now owned three. It seemed like reasonable advice, but I still thought about Hard Puncher the whole 90 minute drive home from left Virginia.

Back in the garage, not much progress had been made on Bad Dudes subpar monitor and Mercs was proving a pain in the ass to get wired up correctly. →  The only thing we have to read is read itself.

A crisis of middling proportions

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There are many kinds of crises. A crisis can be a conflict between a god and a religion like some Jehovah’s Witness guy wrote about that one time, it can be a moral crisis like the characters in the Dostoyevsky books, or it can be a misspelled FPS people use as a benchmark for graphical power. Crises can be humanitarian, financial, or oil-based. Some say fascism is capitalism in crisis. I say fascism is not a useful term and we should develop new language for new things, which is why I will call the next world war a warld wor.

In my case, the crisis may be one of a center of longevity, or for you people who insist on reusing words, a midlife crisis. These things can be hard to detect, however. Resurrecting this website may be the most obvious sign of a midlife crisis to those who know I first started it when I was 23, which was now 20 years ago. →  Guitar Hero III: Legends of Read

Arcade Planning for People without an Arcade

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Some time in 2005, I bought a Golden Axe arcade cabinet for maybe $200 or $300 from Craig’s List, which with inflation comes to about $36,000 today. My brother and I, mostly him though, got it up and working nicely with some replacement sticks and buttons from HAPP. This was back when they were good, apparently – the internet says they were acquired and then started putting out mediocre equipment. The machine followed me to a few different apartments before I finally convinced my sister to keep it at her house along with boxes of console games. 15 or so years passed, I accomplished little, and then out of the blue my sister tells me it is time to take Golden Axe back (I had already taken the other boxes to add to my Closet Full of Games™). I told her to keep it, she said no. I told her I would find someone to give it to because I didn’t want it thrown away, then I didn’t. →  Michigan: Article from Hell

Out Run, I Mean Outrun Culture

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A few months ago I found myself buying (and playing) the Sega Ages version of Out Run on Switch. It’s a great port with some interesting new features, and it made me appreciate the game all over again. Eventually I found myself doing some historical research on the game to learn more about its development and legacy.

Unfortunately, this was easier said than done. My search results were dominated not by Out Run, but by …. Outrun.

As far as I can tell, “Outrun” is the name of both a subgenre of synth music, and a surrounding subculture. According to the Outrun subreddit’s description, Outrun is:

Dedicated to the synthwave music scene, a revisionist 80s music style of synthesizers and pulsing beats, and the retrofuturist 80s aesthetic of fast cars, neon lights and chrome.

And the wikipedia entry says:

Synthwave (also called outrun, retrowave, or futuresynth) is an electronic music microgenre that is based predominantly on the music associated with action, science-fiction, and horror film soundtracks of the 1980s.

 →  You reading at me?