Australia's Retro Gaming and Pinball E-Zine
Ah the good old days of the 1980s, hanging out at our local arcade parlours with mates and our monster mullets!
Thanks heaps to We Are Diehards on Facebook for sharing this most awesome vid with us all – let the nostalgia ooze baby!
source: We Are Diehards via Facebook
If you loved feeding coins into arcade machines from yesteryear and don’t want to spend big $$$$ on a 30+ year old machine, then Arcade1Up’s 3/4 scale classic arcade machines may be for you!
There are currently six arcade cabinets (see below), each cabinet housing multiple games. Before you get too excited, there will only be two cabinets available in Australia via EB Games (as at the time of this article) – Rampage and Street Fighter II Editions. Hopefully we’ll see the rest make their way to retails stores in Australia.
Release date (in Australia) is penned for October 11 with a retail price of $698. These aren’t exactly cheap, but they are cheaper than trying to find an original arcade cabinet which may require some TLC and parts to get it working.
With PAX Aus 2018 just around the corner, we wonder if EB Games could lend a few of these for our Classic Gaming Area…
Street Fighter II Edition with three brill Street Fighter II games
Rampage Edition: Rampage, Gauntlet, Joust & Defender
Galaga Edition: Walmart exclusive only, housing Galaga and Galaxian!
Centipede Edition: Centipede, Crystal Castles, Missile Command & Millipede
Asteroids Edition: Asteroids, Tempest, Major Havoc & Lunar Lander
Final Fight Edition (coming in 2019): Final Fight, Ghosts’N Goblins, 1944 & Strider
Specs:
Recreate that arcade parlour from your childhood right in your living room!
image source: Arcade1Up
By: Nintendork
It’s one of those things you never thought about when growing up – that these huge and heavy arcade machines would one day disappear and the amusement centres housing them would become extinct.
I always thought that arcade machines would be here to stay and that they would remain popular as ever with everyone. How wrong was I? Luckily for me, Hersheypark in Hershey, Pennsylvania is the big exception. Hersheypark could have gotten rid of their old arcade cabinets long ago but they decided to keep them and maintain them in working order. I love having my physical console games from when I was little and in this instance it is great to see these big arcade games remaining exactly the same as when I was a child, making them that extra bit special. To know that I put quarters in their Double Dragon machine when I was 12 and am playing the exact same game right now and doing the same thing beating up baddies means the world to me.
Hersheypark is the perfect destination for a hit of gaming nostalgia. Enjoy the pics!
In the beginning there was Dave Theurer’s tube shooter, Tempest. Then came Jeff Minter’s Tempest 2000 on the Jaguar, a psychedelic take on Dave’s masterpiece. This was then followed by Tempest 3000 on the defunct Nuon and finally the contemporary take on Tempest for the PS Vita, the awesome TxK. And now we have the imminent release of this iconic tube shooter, Tempest 4000, again coded by Llamasoft’s Yak (Jeff Minter), which means the franchise is still in great hands!
Strap into your Claw peeps, cause the adrenaline-pumping Tempest 4000 will be available on your PlayStation®4 and Xbox One systems on July 17, 2018 for $29.99!
The original Tempest was one of the first videogames to use 3D vector graphics, securing itself as one of Atari’s hallmark titles and one of the most popular arcade games of all time. It has been featured prominently across pop culture, including Ernest Cline’s dystopian Ready Player One novel.
Developed by legendary game designer Jeff Minter, Tempest 4000 remains faithful to the fast-paced gameplay of the arcade original, while adding brand new features and visually stunning graphics.
As in the original game, players are in control of the Claw, a powerful spacecraft equipped to destroy deadly creatures and other obstructions with rapid-fire shots on vibrant geometric prisms. With three game modes to choose from and 100 levels to conquer, players must eliminate all enemies as quickly as possible to survive, aiming for the coveted spot at the top of the leaderboards.
Additional Key Features Include:
We can’t wait to EAT ELECTRIC DEATH!
image source: Tempest 4000
Let’s reflect and gloat for one second – it was great to be alive during the Golden Age of Arcade video games and experience arcade joints first-hand; from the clean franchised ones to the decrepit dark and scary independent ones – we loved them all.
Oh yeah, we loved the games too, from coin dropping in Galaga, Bomb Jack, Pac-Man, Tron, Double Dragon, DragonNinja to Sega’s beasts like Space Harrier, Super Hang-On, OutRun, After Burner and Thunder Blade – we spent up big and loved every single second of it.
The 1990s started with us hammering coins into Atari’s Pit-Fighter, Capcom’s Final Fight and Street Fighter II. However, it was Sega’s Daytona USA that emptied our piggy bank of coins – we just could not get enough of it.
source: The Arcade Flyer Archive
Looking at the top 10 highest grossing arcade games (below), we can tell you that we played them all during their heyday and understand why the dot munching Pac-Man is perched right up top – the game was a breath of fresh air (for its time), as it wasn’t a derivative of the then plethora of space shoot’em ups. Pac-Man was truly a revolutionary title which had universal appeal, both male and female gamers loved chasing Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde.
source: A-1 Arcade Gaming
So what of Atari’s Pong then? Well, the 1972 game did very well for Atari, they sold somewhere between 8,500 to 19,000 units (1972 to 1973) grossing them around $11Million US dollars – not bad for 1973!
The revenues generated were quite staggering, reaffirming the Golden Age of Arcade video games period as the most prosperous of them all, with Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat and NBA Jam flying the flag for the 1990s.
Source: Wikipedia, USGamer and Goliath
Last week news broke that Atari’s Co-Founder, Ted Dabney had passed at age 81. We wouldn’t usually post this type of news on here as it has already been covered enough by the bigger online media outlets. However, we didn’t want Ted’s passing to go unnoticed by our readers, as Ted’s importance to the video gaming industry is equal to his contemporaries, like Nolan Bushnell.
Ted Dabney co-founded the tiny electronics company called Syzygy Engineering in 1971 (renamed Atari in 1972) with his more famous business partner Nolan Bushnell. Ted and Nolan had previously partnered to program Computer Space, the first coin-operated video game ever brought to market. Computer Space was produced at the Northern California trivia game maker Nutting Associates, named after its owner Bill Nutting.
image source: RePlay Magazine
At Atari, Ted played his part, along with designer Al Alcorn (and Bushnell, of course) in the design and production of Pong, the first “hit” TV game which ushered in the age of video gaming. If you have read Curt Vendel and Marty Goldberg’s Atari Inc: Business is Fun, you’d know the background to Ted leaving Atari (Ed: It wasn’t pretty nor fair to Ted). But Ted being Ted, he never harboured any ill will towards Atari and went on to work at electronics firms outside the coin-op business. Ted preferred a simple life to the limelight that Atari should have afforded him.
According to the Huffington Post, Ted died of the esophageal cancer he’d been fighting. He and wife Carolyn had spent part of his remaining years operating a grocery store up in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains.
May his legacy live on! Rest In Peace Ted Dabney.
After her awesome work on the Ausretrogamer Fun Factory, Ms Ausretrogamer’s turned her talents to creating the ausretrogamer social media header image you have all seen (and hopefully like) on Twitter and Facebook.
Check out the behind the scene of making this header image, as it it definitely wasn’t easy. The end result was all worth it!
By: D.C. Cutler, U.S.A.
Steven Spielberg, the legendary director of Ready Player One, has let it be known that he is not a gamer. But what if a gamer was given the chance to adapt Ernest Cline’s science fiction bestseller?
Spielberg’s ambitious film was entertaining and visually stunning at times, but there was something about the story, especially the virtual reality scenes, that felt detached and not cohesive. Cline’s book was heavy on the 1980s nostalgia (perhaps, a little too heavy); nevertheless, you really felt like you were in a fantastical universe.
What made the novel so good was the power of escapism for our young hero, Wade Watts. The film didn’t capture that heightened sense of stepping away from the real world into a new, immersive virtual world, like the book accomplished so brilliantly.
If a gamer had made “Ready Player One,” the OASIS would’ve felt more authentic. Don’t get me wrong, “Ready Player One” captures the virtual reality experience better than any film in recent cinema history; VR is not an easy plot device to pull off on screen. I just didn’t feel totally immersed in the world Spielberg and his digital wizards created. Cline put it on the page brilliantly.
A gamer knows what it’s like to be another virtual being. That innocent escapism is one of the reasons so many people play video games; especially first-person shooter games. Maybe a gamer’s eye could’ve presented a more engrossing and cohesive virtual world. Spielberg’s virtual world, unlike Cline’s, felt banal and, at moments, enclosed.
The film was fun, although, Spielberg could’ve consulted with some seasoned gamers to create a more unreserved, virtual world experience. But, for 71, Spielberg can still direct an action sequence with more skill and precision than most directors half his age.
image source: Teaser Trailer
If we had a dollar for every time we have been asked to list our favourite Atari Jaguar games, well, we’d be able to buy a few Snickers bars. Jesting aside, you can stop Googling for the ‘best atari jaguar games‘ as we present to you, the definitive list (in no particular order) of the best Atari Jaguar games of all time*
*List may change when another awesome Jag homebrew title is released!
Before you get all, “But where the hell is AVP?”, relax, it’s a great game, so it makes the honorary list:
So there you have it. What do you reckon, agree or disagree? What are your fave Atari Jaguar games?
PS: If you want to have a robust discussion about our choices, hit us up on Twitter or Facebook.
If you were like us, you may have backed New Wave Toys’ first Kickstarter which was a Replicade Centipede mini arcade machine.
When we got the note that their Replicade X Tempest mini arcade was now live on Kickstarter, we jumped on it right away! Yes, we broke our first New Year’s resolution – no backing Kickstarters in 2018, but we made an exception for this, cause it is that good.
The Replicade X Tempest Kickstarter has already blown past its goal, so this will happen and we can’t wait! For everyone that went gaga at our photos of the insert coin light up keychain, here is your chance to grab one by backing this campaign with as little as $25USD.
Instead of regurgitating all about New Wave Toys’ Replicade X Tempest mini arcade right here, why don’t you go and check out the Kickstarter now and decide for yourself.
source: Replicade X Tempest on Kickstarter