4 ms·

this is also making me wonder... are in-person arcades really better than nowadays online massive multiplayer experience? or are we having a nostalgia episode?

dole 6y ago
I think it’s a case where both have their place. One recent/current outlier is the Killer Queen arcade game: dedicated hardware, console ports that may capture the game but the in-person experience is entirely different and exclusive.
toast0 6y ago
I think there's a couple things going here. There's certainly a lot of nostalgia. Arcade games at the time of Street Fighter II were significantly more capable than home games; unless, you had a Neo Geo at home, because somehow $900 for the console and $200 for a game was affordable to you in the 90s. Around the end of the 90s, we started seeing arcade systems that were really supercharged consoles: Sega Naomi is a Dreamcast with more memory and runs from either roms or a ramdisk that caches a whole optical disk at boot. Into the 2000s and beyond, games based on PCs started appearing (some of which will show BIOS screens and windows boot logos at power on... others have the decency to disable video until after the arcade program has started). Most games are simply not impressive in the arcade anymore, unless they're huge, or have a compelling deluxe cabinet. This is part of why you don't see a couple games at a grocery/liquor store anymore --- they'd either have to be classic games, or take up too much space, or a multicade, there's not much coming out that's a standard cabinet, which is mostly what would fit (lots of new pinball though, but those won't fit were you could have had one pac-man, that later became one street fighter II). The arcade style of game is of course very different than an MMO. There's not usually a lot of state saved between games; a handful of games let you setup a profile and keep upgrades between games, but most start you back at the bottom every time. That tends to make the games more immediate, and less grindy, but also they tend to be less deep. Although, if you want to grind, there's always redemption games.

dole 6y ago

I think it’s a case where both have their place. One recent/current outlier is the Killer Queen arcade game: dedicated hardware, console ports that may capture the game but the in-person experience is entirely different and exclusive.

toast0 6y ago

I think there's a couple things going here. There's certainly a lot of nostalgia. Arcade games at the time of Street Fighter II were significantly more capable than home games; unless, you had a Neo Geo at home, because somehow $900 for the console and $200 for a game was affordable to you in the 90s. Around the end of the 90s, we started seeing arcade systems that were really supercharged consoles: Sega Naomi is a Dreamcast with more memory and runs from either roms or a ramdisk that caches a whole optical disk at boot. Into the 2000s and beyond, games based on PCs started appearing (some of which will show BIOS screens and windows boot logos at power on... others have the decency to disable video until after the arcade program has started). Most games are simply not impressive in the arcade anymore, unless they're huge, or have a compelling deluxe cabinet. This is part of why you don't see a couple games at a grocery/liquor store anymore --- they'd either have to be classic games, or take up too much space, or a multicade, there's not much coming out that's a standard cabinet, which is mostly what would fit (lots of new pinball though, but those won't fit were you could have had one pac-man, that later became one street fighter II). The arcade style of game is of course very different than an MMO. There's not usually a lot of state saved between games; a handful of games let you setup a profile and keep upgrades between games, but most start you back at the bottom every time. That tends to make the games more immediate, and less grindy, but also they tend to be less deep. Although, if you want to grind, there's always redemption games.