Couple stand out to me:

  • Seeing Virtua Fighter for the first time back in what 1993 or so at an amusement park and being wowed by the graphics, thinking it was photo realistic.

  • Seeing Mortal Kombat 2 on a big screen CRT cabinet and thinking I was going to go to hell because of the violence (lol).

  • Playing X-Men with my dad and his friend and his kid on a 6 player machine that had widescreen, very cool for the time.

  • Pumping endless quarters into Aliens vs Predator (one of my favorite arcade games).

  • Seeing some dude beat Tekken Tag which I could never clear and thinking he was the coolest.

Arcades were great. A dream of mine is to visit a game center in Japan and play some of the classics on an actual machine.

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    7·
    4 months ago

    there was a mall that died in the late 70s and all that was left by the early 90s was this enormous, mother of all arcades. I loved that place. divorced dad would take us there on weekends. I mostly just watched people play games, but the most memorable was this thing, a $10,000 arcade machine in 1989 dollars. the polygon count is a joke by today’s standards, but the real value was in the sound and feel. it was a legit driving sim with serious haptic feedback from the steering wheel. trying to correct an oversteer as an 11 year old doing 90 mph around a gentle curve, it would rip the wheel out of my hands. you really had to fight it to drive fast.

    also, the manual transmission was no joke. I lacked the ability as a kid to coordinate the knowledge, speed and strength of throwing the gears to downshift and recover traction, but it took the punishment with steel construction of shifter. I would just play with automatic, but I watched this guy in his 30s go hard on it, and it was made for it. shit was badass.

    I bet if there’s one out there that still works, it’s probably worth like more than a new real car. I would love to play it again and kick the shit out of it.