13 ms·

I think more broadly, arcades have been coming back in US. Part of it is the nostalgia aspect but I think more so, they have finally figured out a sustainable b

I think more broadly, arcades have been coming back in US. Part of it is the nostalgia aspect but I think more so, they have finally figured out a sustainable business model: become a bar. For example I live in Denver and here we have a chain of popular Arcade bars called '1up'. I always find it a great place to go with friends or on a date because there's always something for everyone, machines of all types, photo booths, and if you just don't like arcade games they have a full bar as well. And as a result they attract a varied crowd and always seem to be making money one way or the other. I wish game bars all the best, as a 90's kid I never really got to experience arcades like they had them back in the 80's, so it's awesome to see arcade bars make a comeback now. Also it is just me or do pinball games just never seem to get the physics of the ball right? Every pinball game I've ever played always seemed way easier than playing "real" pinball.

pupppet 3y ago
Does anyone actually make new arcade machines/games anymore? Like real 80's/90's style arcade games, not the ticket dispensers.
- toast0 3y ago
  Yes, but there's not nearly the variety. Mostly new arcade machines are either retro stuff, or real pinball, driving games or other large cabinet experiences, or fighting games. Not a lot of new standard sized standup arcades that aren't fighting games (or at least, I'm not aware of them). The reality is all these machines are basically PCs now, and where's the excitement from playing a PC based arcade game on a ~25" screen for 50 cents to a dollar when you could play it at home on your PC or your PC based console.
  - pupppet 3y ago
    See this is what confuses me, are Arcades not still fairly big in Japan? What do they play there? Old machines?
    - throwaway_75369 3y ago
      Depends on the location, many of the best arcades in Japan are multiple floors, and each floor usually has a theme, so like the ground floor is crane games, and then a floor for shooters/shmups, then a floor or two for fighting games, and then a floor or two for music games. Maybe a floor with card games or those giant horse racing games... I was fortunate enough to go like 5 years ago, but I really fondly remember Taito Hey had a whole row of like 8 Super Sweet Fighter 2 Turbo machines which were basically continuously occupied, and then a floor down I watched somebody basically one credit perfect one of those Capcom Dungeons and Dragons side scrolling brawlers, and then on another floor was a widescreen Darius machine (which I'd never seen in the US). In other locations there were floors of like card-based army formation strategy games, music games with circular screens, etc. Pachinko is like its own thing, almost always in different buildings, usually like 3 times as loud as the arcades, and full of smoking. Strangely I don't recall seeing any western style pinball machines anywhere, though. Basically, it was arcade nirvana for someone like me (born in the early 80's) I heard things got pretty bad during Covid, though, so I don't know how much it's regressed. I do have a friend who just got back from visiting the first time though, and he mentioned he could still find tons of competition in old fighting games and stuff. (Man I wanna go back, especially since the exchange rate is so good now) Edit: typos
    - ranger_danger 3y ago
      Arcades are unfortunately slowly dying in Japan, but it's still a much bigger business there than in the states. Most new arcade machines since the late 2000s are off-the-shelf PCs with (already for its time) outdated graphics cards.
    - jdkee 3y ago
      From last year, see https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/news/another-iconic-gaming-arcade-in-akihabara-is-closing-this-september-081522 https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/news/another-iconic-gaming-arc...
  - johnvanommen 3y ago
    > The reality is all these machines are basically PCs now, and where's the excitement from playing a PC based arcade game on a ~25" screen for 50 cents to a dollar when you could play it at home on your PC or your PC based console. This is something that Michael Abrash hasn't really received proper credit for: he basically invented the model of using off-the-shelf PC components for videogames, which then spread to consoles and arcade games. If it wasn't for Abrash's "mode x" we wouldn't have DirectX, then Direct3D, then XBox, then arcade games that are nothing more than personal computers. At the time that Abrash came up with "mode x", there were basically two ways to play games on a PC. The first method was to use a PC that included a great graphics chip (like the Amiga), the second method was to add aftermarket cards. Neither method was ideal, because there weren't many Amigas in existence, and software developers couldn't maximize sales while selling software that required aftermarket hardware.
  - batty_alex 3y ago
    > The reality is all these machines are basically PCs now You could make the opposite argument back in the day. Arcade hardware was what home PCs, and consoles, tried to emulate. The truth is, these still use specialized hardware even if they end up targeting embedded Linux or embedded Windows (or a combination of the two). They are also incredibly efficient with their use of hardware
  - ohhnoodont 3y ago
    Killer Queen definitely managed to capture something unique.
    - toast0 3y ago
      I'm including that in large cabinet experiences. Two linked five player cabinets is certainly pretty big, and the screens are large too. Another category I missed would be rhythm games. You can play those at home, but it's not as fun (unless you have a really nice setup).
- nkozyra 3y ago
  The thing that baffles me is we're still stuck in these form factors that are mostly made for a) standing b) in a group of 1 or 2 The cabinets don't have to look like this anymore. We don't need a CRT, we don't need the full size cabinets. Seems like a real opportunity to design a more bar-friendly option, tables with multiple monitors that operate like the old desktop/seated machines or similarly. Standing is fine but after awhile people don't want to smoosh next to each other and stand in front of a crappy screen. But most of these places are too attached to the retro aspect, imo.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Video games have had a format like that, intended specifically for bars and restaurants, since pretty close to the beginning. They're called "cocktail cabinets".
    - nkozyra 3y ago
      > Video games have had a format like that, intended specifically for bars and restaurants, since pretty close to the beginning. They're called "cocktail cabinets". I referenced them above (but gave them a different name, "old desktop/seated machines"). They're still archaic and don't fit well with modern bar seating nor gaming. Playing on one screen split in half was sort of a necessity at the time but it never really worked that well.
      - JohnFen 3y ago
        > (but gave them a different name, "old desktop/seated machines") Ahh, I thought you were referring to a different format. I forget what they're called (Cabaret?), but they're upright, short, and meant to be sat at.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - batty_alex 3y ago
    > a) standing b) in a group of 1 or 2 You just need to find an arcade with some candy cabinets, those are seated. Also, most of them are set up for one player per cab with your opponent sitting on the other side of you
- throwaway_75369 3y ago
  Some indies still make arcade games - Killer Queens comes to mind, and I'm pretty sure Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge got a full on coinop release. Of course, Japan still puts out all manner of new machines with all kinds of creative gimmicks (especially music-based, or arena fighters), but they're rarely available stateside and they might not always be the vibe you're looking for, if you're trying to scratch a 90's nostalgia itch. https://sternpinball.com/ https://sternpinball.com/ continues to make modern (awesome) pinball machines - I'm fortunate enough to work for a company that stocks a couple in breakrooms. They also usually have a big presence in the floor of California Extreme (https://caextreme.org/ https://caextreme.org/) which is totally worth checking out if you're in the Bay Area in August. Edit: For a little bit more to search on in terms of Japanese stuff - https://arcadeheroes.com/2023/02/10/new-arcade-games-for-japan-jaepo-2023-round-up/ https://arcadeheroes.com/2023/02/10/new-arcade-games-for-jap...
- batty_alex 3y ago
  Yes. Raw Thrills, Sega, and Taito are still in the business of arcade machines. Pinball similarly has quite a few developers
laputan_machine 3y ago
I think you're spot on. Where I live there is a huge arcade in what's effectively an old millhouse in a suburb, over 3 floors, and has been selling beer for a while. It's so popular it's spawned a bunch of smaller arcade bars in the city centre. I think another part of it is that as the highstreet moves away from appliance shops there'll have to be things to fill these places instead, such as these kind of entertainment venues. I love arcades, so I'm hoping that they're here to stay :D
JohnFen 3y ago
> Also it is just me or do pinball games just never seem to get the physics of the ball right? It sure seems that way, but I think it's more nuanced. With a top-notch video version of pinball, I don't they get the physics wrong enough to notice. But what they are is incomplete. The physicality of playing a pinball game is an integral part of the experience. Standing at the machine, pressing the flipper buttons, feeling the vibrations of the ball and mechanisms, etc. If you don't have that stuff, then the game is going to feel wrong even if the physics of the playfield are 100% accurate.
- mikepurvis 3y ago
  There's also just the fundamental difference in motives— PC pinball is designed to be fun, while arcade pinball, at least historically, was designed to eat your money.
  - the_af 3y ago
    Agreed. But let me add the caveat that a lot of arcade videogames were designed to eat your money as well, something I always found infuriating as a teenager. Some were fair -- things like Golden Axe, TMNT or Sunset Riders can be won with a single coin if you know what you're doing. But plenty of arcades are unwinnable (or require unreasonable expertise) for you to have a good time without spending lots of coins. Which is why I always ended up playing Double Dragon, TMNT or Sunset Riders ;)
    - mywittyname 3y ago
      Mortal Kombat was designed to be Pay to Win. Someone reverse engineered the arcade version and later-stage opponents were programmed to strike you like 2 frames before you would have hit them, and there was a decay each time you put a quarter into the machine.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      I liked the Fighting Game PvP model, where if you won, you play your next game for free. You could go to the machine with one quarter and play all night if you were skilled.
hahamrfunnyguy 3y ago
I am on the East Coast and there are probably at least a half dozen places places to play in my area that have ten or more machines. Many bars now have at least a few machines. I'd say there is a large technical community here and pinball does really feel at home in nerd/tech culture.
vikingerik 3y ago
Yes, the barcade business model works. Mostly as a bar. Most often the machines are owned and operated by an outside contractor or dedicated hobbyist (who knows how to fix them.) The games make it a destination for families with kids, and the adults play some but really spend on food and drink. Same as how a tabletop game store is really making money on the food items, not the trading cards. And as for your last, yes, virtual pinball games don't come close on ball physics. Real ball motion is so much more than a pair of X-Y coordinates and velocities. A real ball slides and spins and scrapes across the playfield and the objects in all sorts of ways. A ball's motion is very 3d even on a 2d playfield - it can have a spin axis aligned anywhere on its sphere. Flippers too. It's much more than one object moving at one velocity. There are really subtle details in the interactions with the rubber on the flippers - a real ball will sink into the rubber by a fraction of a millimeter and rebound in ways that depend on that. Flippers accelerate and decelerate on a time scale of single-digit milliseconds, with all sorts of subtleties that an experienced player can feel. Response time matters too - a computer platform is usually limited to 1/60 second input resolution by the host hardware and OS, while a real machine responds hard real time instantly. And of course nudging - no virtual controller comes anywhere close to all the things you can do to a real machine, shoves and pushes and slaps. No game physics engine comes anywhere close to all that detail in all these areas.
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  If we're able to simulate airplanes before they fly, I'm pretty sure we can simulate a sphere.
  - vikingerik 3y ago
    It's way more than just the sphere, it's simulating all the surfaces and materials that the sphere interacts with. Particularly the mechanical pieces with their own movement as well. The comparable level of detail to get pinball right would be something like simulating all the rubber gaskets and surfaces in the ailerons and elevators, all the fluid dynamics in the hydraulics, and so on. If you invested something like the $100 million that Boeing or Lockheed must have done in their simulators, you probably could. Video pinball isn't exactly that big economically, though.
deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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dr_orpheus 3y ago
There is also a barcade near me that has a model I like (and is probably advantageous to them for staffing). It is a pour-your-own beer/wine/cider bar, so it isn't a full bar. But the RFID wristbands they give you for the pour-your-own also work on the arcade machines which is pretty slick.
MegaDeKay 3y ago
Which ones have you tried? My understanding is that the VPX physics engine is the closest to the real thing at this point in time. I'm really tempted to build a virtual pinball machine. It would be awfully nice if the display of choice (42" LG C2 OLED) would come down in price a bit more first.
m463 3y ago
> Also it is just me or do pinball games just never seem to get the physics of the ball right? There are plenty of "real" pinball machines out there, seems that they keep making them.
jhbadger 3y ago
Yes, it's an idea, but in the 1980s when arcade games were common, many "normal" bars had video games and pinball machines in them. These days they seem absent except in those dedicated barcades.
dylan604 3y ago
>they have finally figured out a sustainable business model: become a bar. There used to be a bar in my town that I always thought was a great idea, but this particular bar was not in the greatest of locations. It was called Bar of Soap, and it was a bar in the front, but a laundromat in the back. I think this would be much better located in a college town, but this one was no where near a college, and not really near any kind of residential to speak of.
throwaway675309 3y ago
Well one of the reasons that a pinball video game is always going to be easier is that by their digital nature they're significantly more deterministic from a Newtonian physics perspective. The "virtual solenoids" that control the paddles in a computer game are always going to exert the exact same amount of impulse on the ball each and every time they're activated. Contrast that with your average Addams family pinball machine that has been bruised and beaten have to death, and the flippers are practically flaccid. The analog nature makes the game less predictable and therefore more difficult for players.
gausswho 3y ago
The most realistic game of pinball physics-wise for me is Zaccaria. Its selection is of uneven quality. I recommend sticking to the historical solid state and electro mechanical tables, over the deluxe or remakes. My favorite table is probably Farfalla. VR mode is quite immersive. It has a free time limited mode for any table, and tables are quite cheap on sale.
ravenstine 3y ago
I think it's also a subtle reaction to the false promise that we can wear an Oculus, live in a pod, and be happy. Turns out that just going out and doing things IRL is more consistently interesting and has fewer bugs than your typical AAA video game in 2023. Better yet if you can drink while you're at it.
coldtea 3y ago
>I think more broadly, arcades have been coming back in US. Part of it is the nostalgia aspect For it to be nostalgia, 30+ year olds must be going there. Anybody below that would have been like 10 when arcades were on their last legs, and wouldn't have been allowed to go there as a kid, right?
- aamoscodes 3y ago
  Do we have a word for "pining over something you never got to experience?" The whole born in the wrong generation effect. FWIW, arcades were always alive and well in movie theaters. Maybe not the big, expansive arcades, but <30 year olds at least understand the concept (also Dave & Busters, GameWorks, other similar outfits)
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Probably not, because this wasn't such a major thing pre 00s - people believed more in the future. Of course, there also was a better future to believe in, instead of dwindling middle class, and increased insecurity, depression and loneliness.
chongli 3y ago
Part of it is the nostalgia aspect but I think more so, they have finally figured out a sustainable business model: become a bar. I’m not sure whether it took them so long to figure out the model, or whether society just had to wait for the first gamer generations to grow old enough to a) drink and b) become a little jaded with modern video games, so that nostalgia for the arcade classics would kick in. I think part of it is also the hobbyist factor talked about in sibling comments. The first arcade owners were business owners, not hobbyists. They were not kids when the first arcade machines were coming out, they were just in it for the money. Hobbyists and other nostalgia-driven folks feel very differently about these games. They take care of them and they enjoy talking to the customers about the games. The customers are older too, so they’re not like the little kids who used to beat the crap out of the machines. Everything about it is much better off.
- NovaDudely 3y ago
  I would say the age factor is a decent issue. I remember the first of these style bars turning up about 15-20 years ago and while they had some reasonable amount of attention initially it wasn't sustainable. One's that came along in the last 5 years have stuck around for the long haul.

pupppet 3y ago

Does anyone actually make new arcade machines/games anymore? Like real 80's/90's style arcade games, not the ticket dispensers.

toast0 3y ago
Yes, but there's not nearly the variety. Mostly new arcade machines are either retro stuff, or real pinball, driving games or other large cabinet experiences, or fighting games. Not a lot of new standard sized standup arcades that aren't fighting games (or at least, I'm not aware of them). The reality is all these machines are basically PCs now, and where's the excitement from playing a PC based arcade game on a ~25" screen for 50 cents to a dollar when you could play it at home on your PC or your PC based console.
- pupppet 3y ago
  See this is what confuses me, are Arcades not still fairly big in Japan? What do they play there? Old machines?
  - throwaway_75369 3y ago
    Depends on the location, many of the best arcades in Japan are multiple floors, and each floor usually has a theme, so like the ground floor is crane games, and then a floor for shooters/shmups, then a floor or two for fighting games, and then a floor or two for music games. Maybe a floor with card games or those giant horse racing games... I was fortunate enough to go like 5 years ago, but I really fondly remember Taito Hey had a whole row of like 8 Super Sweet Fighter 2 Turbo machines which were basically continuously occupied, and then a floor down I watched somebody basically one credit perfect one of those Capcom Dungeons and Dragons side scrolling brawlers, and then on another floor was a widescreen Darius machine (which I'd never seen in the US). In other locations there were floors of like card-based army formation strategy games, music games with circular screens, etc. Pachinko is like its own thing, almost always in different buildings, usually like 3 times as loud as the arcades, and full of smoking. Strangely I don't recall seeing any western style pinball machines anywhere, though. Basically, it was arcade nirvana for someone like me (born in the early 80's) I heard things got pretty bad during Covid, though, so I don't know how much it's regressed. I do have a friend who just got back from visiting the first time though, and he mentioned he could still find tons of competition in old fighting games and stuff. (Man I wanna go back, especially since the exchange rate is so good now) Edit: typos
  - ranger_danger 3y ago
    Arcades are unfortunately slowly dying in Japan, but it's still a much bigger business there than in the states. Most new arcade machines since the late 2000s are off-the-shelf PCs with (already for its time) outdated graphics cards.
  - jdkee 3y ago
    From last year, see https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/news/another-iconic-gaming-arcade-in-akihabara-is-closing-this-september-081522 https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/news/another-iconic-gaming-arc...
- johnvanommen 3y ago
  > The reality is all these machines are basically PCs now, and where's the excitement from playing a PC based arcade game on a ~25" screen for 50 cents to a dollar when you could play it at home on your PC or your PC based console. This is something that Michael Abrash hasn't really received proper credit for: he basically invented the model of using off-the-shelf PC components for videogames, which then spread to consoles and arcade games. If it wasn't for Abrash's "mode x" we wouldn't have DirectX, then Direct3D, then XBox, then arcade games that are nothing more than personal computers. At the time that Abrash came up with "mode x", there were basically two ways to play games on a PC. The first method was to use a PC that included a great graphics chip (like the Amiga), the second method was to add aftermarket cards. Neither method was ideal, because there weren't many Amigas in existence, and software developers couldn't maximize sales while selling software that required aftermarket hardware.
- batty_alex 3y ago
  > The reality is all these machines are basically PCs now You could make the opposite argument back in the day. Arcade hardware was what home PCs, and consoles, tried to emulate. The truth is, these still use specialized hardware even if they end up targeting embedded Linux or embedded Windows (or a combination of the two). They are also incredibly efficient with their use of hardware
- ohhnoodont 3y ago
  Killer Queen definitely managed to capture something unique.
  - toast0 3y ago
    I'm including that in large cabinet experiences. Two linked five player cabinets is certainly pretty big, and the screens are large too. Another category I missed would be rhythm games. You can play those at home, but it's not as fun (unless you have a really nice setup).
nkozyra 3y ago
The thing that baffles me is we're still stuck in these form factors that are mostly made for a) standing b) in a group of 1 or 2 The cabinets don't have to look like this anymore. We don't need a CRT, we don't need the full size cabinets. Seems like a real opportunity to design a more bar-friendly option, tables with multiple monitors that operate like the old desktop/seated machines or similarly. Standing is fine but after awhile people don't want to smoosh next to each other and stand in front of a crappy screen. But most of these places are too attached to the retro aspect, imo.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Video games have had a format like that, intended specifically for bars and restaurants, since pretty close to the beginning. They're called "cocktail cabinets".
  - nkozyra 3y ago
    > Video games have had a format like that, intended specifically for bars and restaurants, since pretty close to the beginning. They're called "cocktail cabinets". I referenced them above (but gave them a different name, "old desktop/seated machines"). They're still archaic and don't fit well with modern bar seating nor gaming. Playing on one screen split in half was sort of a necessity at the time but it never really worked that well.
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > (but gave them a different name, "old desktop/seated machines") Ahh, I thought you were referring to a different format. I forget what they're called (Cabaret?), but they're upright, short, and meant to be sat at.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- batty_alex 3y ago
  > a) standing b) in a group of 1 or 2 You just need to find an arcade with some candy cabinets, those are seated. Also, most of them are set up for one player per cab with your opponent sitting on the other side of you
throwaway_75369 3y ago
Some indies still make arcade games - Killer Queens comes to mind, and I'm pretty sure Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge got a full on coinop release. Of course, Japan still puts out all manner of new machines with all kinds of creative gimmicks (especially music-based, or arena fighters), but they're rarely available stateside and they might not always be the vibe you're looking for, if you're trying to scratch a 90's nostalgia itch. https://sternpinball.com/ https://sternpinball.com/ continues to make modern (awesome) pinball machines - I'm fortunate enough to work for a company that stocks a couple in breakrooms. They also usually have a big presence in the floor of California Extreme (https://caextreme.org/ https://caextreme.org/) which is totally worth checking out if you're in the Bay Area in August. Edit: For a little bit more to search on in terms of Japanese stuff - https://arcadeheroes.com/2023/02/10/new-arcade-games-for-japan-jaepo-2023-round-up/ https://arcadeheroes.com/2023/02/10/new-arcade-games-for-jap...
batty_alex 3y ago
Yes. Raw Thrills, Sega, and Taito are still in the business of arcade machines. Pinball similarly has quite a few developers

laputan_machine 3y ago

I think you're spot on. Where I live there is a huge arcade in what's effectively an old millhouse in a suburb, over 3 floors, and has been selling beer for a while. It's so popular it's spawned a bunch of smaller arcade bars in the city centre. I think another part of it is that as the highstreet moves away from appliance shops there'll have to be things to fill these places instead, such as these kind of entertainment venues. I love arcades, so I'm hoping that they're here to stay :D

JohnFen 3y ago

> Also it is just me or do pinball games just never seem to get the physics of the ball right? It sure seems that way, but I think it's more nuanced. With a top-notch video version of pinball, I don't they get the physics wrong enough to notice. But what they are is incomplete. The physicality of playing a pinball game is an integral part of the experience. Standing at the machine, pressing the flipper buttons, feeling the vibrations of the ball and mechanisms, etc. If you don't have that stuff, then the game is going to feel wrong even if the physics of the playfield are 100% accurate.

mikepurvis 3y ago
There's also just the fundamental difference in motives— PC pinball is designed to be fun, while arcade pinball, at least historically, was designed to eat your money.
- the_af 3y ago
  Agreed. But let me add the caveat that a lot of arcade videogames were designed to eat your money as well, something I always found infuriating as a teenager. Some were fair -- things like Golden Axe, TMNT or Sunset Riders can be won with a single coin if you know what you're doing. But plenty of arcades are unwinnable (or require unreasonable expertise) for you to have a good time without spending lots of coins. Which is why I always ended up playing Double Dragon, TMNT or Sunset Riders ;)
  - mywittyname 3y ago
    Mortal Kombat was designed to be Pay to Win. Someone reverse engineered the arcade version and later-stage opponents were programmed to strike you like 2 frames before you would have hit them, and there was a decay each time you put a quarter into the machine.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I liked the Fighting Game PvP model, where if you won, you play your next game for free. You could go to the machine with one quarter and play all night if you were skilled.

hahamrfunnyguy 3y ago

I am on the East Coast and there are probably at least a half dozen places places to play in my area that have ten or more machines. Many bars now have at least a few machines. I'd say there is a large technical community here and pinball does really feel at home in nerd/tech culture.

vikingerik 3y ago

Yes, the barcade business model works. Mostly as a bar. Most often the machines are owned and operated by an outside contractor or dedicated hobbyist (who knows how to fix them.) The games make it a destination for families with kids, and the adults play some but really spend on food and drink. Same as how a tabletop game store is really making money on the food items, not the trading cards. And as for your last, yes, virtual pinball games don't come close on ball physics. Real ball motion is so much more than a pair of X-Y coordinates and velocities. A real ball slides and spins and scrapes across the playfield and the objects in all sorts of ways. A ball's motion is very 3d even on a 2d playfield - it can have a spin axis aligned anywhere on its sphere. Flippers too. It's much more than one object moving at one velocity. There are really subtle details in the interactions with the rubber on the flippers - a real ball will sink into the rubber by a fraction of a millimeter and rebound in ways that depend on that. Flippers accelerate and decelerate on a time scale of single-digit milliseconds, with all sorts of subtleties that an experienced player can feel. Response time matters too - a computer platform is usually limited to 1/60 second input resolution by the host hardware and OS, while a real machine responds hard real time instantly. And of course nudging - no virtual controller comes anywhere close to all the things you can do to a real machine, shoves and pushes and slaps. No game physics engine comes anywhere close to all that detail in all these areas.

sdfghswe 3y ago
If we're able to simulate airplanes before they fly, I'm pretty sure we can simulate a sphere.
- vikingerik 3y ago
  It's way more than just the sphere, it's simulating all the surfaces and materials that the sphere interacts with. Particularly the mechanical pieces with their own movement as well. The comparable level of detail to get pinball right would be something like simulating all the rubber gaskets and surfaces in the ailerons and elevators, all the fluid dynamics in the hydraulics, and so on. If you invested something like the $100 million that Boeing or Lockheed must have done in their simulators, you probably could. Video pinball isn't exactly that big economically, though.

deleted 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago

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dr_orpheus 3y ago

There is also a barcade near me that has a model I like (and is probably advantageous to them for staffing). It is a pour-your-own beer/wine/cider bar, so it isn't a full bar. But the RFID wristbands they give you for the pour-your-own also work on the arcade machines which is pretty slick.

MegaDeKay 3y ago

Which ones have you tried? My understanding is that the VPX physics engine is the closest to the real thing at this point in time. I'm really tempted to build a virtual pinball machine. It would be awfully nice if the display of choice (42" LG C2 OLED) would come down in price a bit more first.

m463 3y ago

> Also it is just me or do pinball games just never seem to get the physics of the ball right? There are plenty of "real" pinball machines out there, seems that they keep making them.

jhbadger 3y ago

Yes, it's an idea, but in the 1980s when arcade games were common, many "normal" bars had video games and pinball machines in them. These days they seem absent except in those dedicated barcades.

dylan604 3y ago

>they have finally figured out a sustainable business model: become a bar. There used to be a bar in my town that I always thought was a great idea, but this particular bar was not in the greatest of locations. It was called Bar of Soap, and it was a bar in the front, but a laundromat in the back. I think this would be much better located in a college town, but this one was no where near a college, and not really near any kind of residential to speak of.

throwaway675309 3y ago

Well one of the reasons that a pinball video game is always going to be easier is that by their digital nature they're significantly more deterministic from a Newtonian physics perspective. The "virtual solenoids" that control the paddles in a computer game are always going to exert the exact same amount of impulse on the ball each and every time they're activated. Contrast that with your average Addams family pinball machine that has been bruised and beaten have to death, and the flippers are practically flaccid. The analog nature makes the game less predictable and therefore more difficult for players.

gausswho 3y ago

The most realistic game of pinball physics-wise for me is Zaccaria. Its selection is of uneven quality. I recommend sticking to the historical solid state and electro mechanical tables, over the deluxe or remakes. My favorite table is probably Farfalla. VR mode is quite immersive. It has a free time limited mode for any table, and tables are quite cheap on sale.

ravenstine 3y ago

I think it's also a subtle reaction to the false promise that we can wear an Oculus, live in a pod, and be happy. Turns out that just going out and doing things IRL is more consistently interesting and has fewer bugs than your typical AAA video game in 2023. Better yet if you can drink while you're at it.

coldtea 3y ago

>I think more broadly, arcades have been coming back in US. Part of it is the nostalgia aspect For it to be nostalgia, 30+ year olds must be going there. Anybody below that would have been like 10 when arcades were on their last legs, and wouldn't have been allowed to go there as a kid, right?

aamoscodes 3y ago
Do we have a word for "pining over something you never got to experience?" The whole born in the wrong generation effect. FWIW, arcades were always alive and well in movie theaters. Maybe not the big, expansive arcades, but <30 year olds at least understand the concept (also Dave & Busters, GameWorks, other similar outfits)
- coldtea 3y ago
  Probably not, because this wasn't such a major thing pre 00s - people believed more in the future. Of course, there also was a better future to believe in, instead of dwindling middle class, and increased insecurity, depression and loneliness.

chongli 3y ago

Part of it is the nostalgia aspect but I think more so, they have finally figured out a sustainable business model: become a bar. I’m not sure whether it took them so long to figure out the model, or whether society just had to wait for the first gamer generations to grow old enough to a) drink and b) become a little jaded with modern video games, so that nostalgia for the arcade classics would kick in. I think part of it is also the hobbyist factor talked about in sibling comments. The first arcade owners were business owners, not hobbyists. They were not kids when the first arcade machines were coming out, they were just in it for the money. Hobbyists and other nostalgia-driven folks feel very differently about these games. They take care of them and they enjoy talking to the customers about the games. The customers are older too, so they’re not like the little kids who used to beat the crap out of the machines. Everything about it is much better off.

NovaDudely 3y ago
I would say the age factor is a decent issue. I remember the first of these style bars turning up about 15-20 years ago and while they had some reasonable amount of attention initially it wasn't sustainable. One's that came along in the last 5 years have stuck around for the long haul.