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I grew up, and spent most of money, at the arcades. Luckily, a friend introduced me to MAME 22 years ago. I still play Golden Axe, Alien Storm, Altered Beast almost every day after work. I actually prefer MAME to the real thing. Wireless controllers, pause, auto fire settings and whatnot. I wish Gens was as alive as MAME.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So they are not operating Sega World or Arcade Centre, but still making arcade the machine? If that is the case I am fine. I was rather worry about the end of Arcade. Especially with Racing Games.
You should be exceedingly worried. If Sega has no ownership of arcade locations, they lose a very big reason to make machines for the arcade. For Sega, the money was in owning the complete operation.
GameWorks, the American-based joint venture started by Sega and Dreamworks, closed all of its remaining locations last month. RIP the downtown Seattle arcade.
Can anyone explain the appeal of arcades to me? It is expensive and games do not look really interesting.
I can't think of any other social activity I was involved in outside my home as a teenager. I was shy, quiet, no friends etc. but at an arcade there was a common interest. Watching someone else play or 2 player game with someone you didn't know.
The smell too arcades had a certain smell the plywood cabinets, sweet smells of food, and for a certain period in time cigarettes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So they are not operating Sega World or Arcade Centre, but still making arcade the machine? If that is the case I am fine. I was rather worry about the end of Arcade. Especially with Racing Games.
You should be exceedingly worried. If Sega has no ownership of arcade locations, they lose a very big reason to make machines for the arcade. For Sega, the money was in owning the complete operation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should be exceedingly worried. If Sega has no ownership of arcade locations, they lose a very big reason to make machines for the arcade. For Sega, the money was in owning the complete operation.
Why? Microsoft (Xbox) doesn't own arcade locations.
Can anyone explain the appeal of arcades to me? It is expensive and games do not look really interesting.
Sega Joyopolis in Tokyo was a next level experience. It had arcade cabinets that spin 360 degrees on X & Y axes, which makes flying games fantastic. It had racing cabinets with full sized Mazda Miatas & similar cars on full motion platforms. There was a snowboarding half pipe, where the rider is strapped into a full sized snowboard on a pendulum arm with a VR headset. Another ride was an enclosed pod with VR displays that ran along a rollercoaster track. And, the most unusual thing I remember, there was a holographic virtual pop star performance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? Microsoft (Xbox) doesn't own arcade locations.
Arcades in America and Europe have essentially been dead for a long time, which has to be a reason why Microsoft doesn't own any. But in Japan arcades were still thriving until recently. Unfortunately, times are tough.
Victim of COVID for sure, but I wonder if they were also a victim of the indoor smoking ban enacted in 2020. Japanese arcades were full of smokers when I was there. The smoking ban might well end up being the most significant legacy of the cursed Olympics.
The fact that there's no (legal) way to get some of those games out of Japan and into the hands of people who want to play them is a good indicator of a lack of wanting to do the work on the seller side. There's an article from Wired [1] a bit ago about the harrowing efforts of getting dancing game cabinets and the like out, and the DRM that goes into keeping them region-locked such that it's hard for gamers in the US to get to them.
I went to GameWorks in Seattle at one point for a party and roughly 1/3 of the cabinets were cobranded with companies like King or PopCap, played like slot machines, and were more at home in a Vegas casino than a kids arcade. The others were a mixture of Japan imports from Sega and such that had been semi-localized (or, for a few, not even localized at all, just laid there for the Ultra Weeb gaijin and homesick Japanese exchange students) and "classics" like super hang-on and mortal kombat.
Fact of the matter is that most modern arcade cabinets are just glorified consoles running a single game with a shitload of DRM on them, or windows/sometimes-linux machines running a single executable, stripped down to the bare minimum, then let sit in an arcade. If Konami can put the work into selling a game on a console, unless there's a really compelling reason to make the gameplay loop fit an arcade feel and not sell it as an "Arcade Console" game, they're not gonna put in the overhead of putting it into an arcade cabinet. Unless you've got some serious gimmick like a funny ridable controller [2] or a DJ style button set [3] then you're basically just selling a console game.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/gritty-underground-network-bring...
[2] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0c/c0/91/0cc0912f1b8248be89fc...
Can anyone explain the appeal of arcades to me? It is expensive and games do not look really interesting.
