retrorussell

Hey all. Just thought it might be interesting to take one game a week, and test everyone's memory as to where they first saw it/played it/had the best memories of it. Maybe one game every Monday? Starting today, obviously. I'll throw out the first game, and people can suggest others as the week progresses: Mappy (1983), Bally/Midway (licensed by Namco) I believe I first saw this one at Wunderland in NE Portland on 103rd and Halsey.. HUGE nickel arcade. There's many locations but this was the biggest one I remember. I couldn't really get into it that much at the time but got to appreciate it a little bit more as I got older. I was 12 at the time and would get dropped off by my stepmom for a couple hours. I would go through about 3 bucks worth of nickels per visit.. I remember once on my birthday she made me pay for my cousin (bitch!) and I didn't have any play money left for myself. The guy at the desk was surprised to hear that I didn't have enough money for games for myself, and he gave me a dollar's worth. Nice guy!

I remember seeing Sea Wolf at Tigard Pizza Caboose too.. my most fond memories were playing it at Oaks Park back in the 70s. It might be kind of cool to start a thread where once a week (or 2 weeks) we pick a different game and ask where you had your fondest memories playing it. Just throwing the idea out there..

Ugh, really? Instead of "Oh no..." it says "Ah nahhh..." I mean, I understand "Ganbare" (which essentially means "Go for it" or "Do your best" in Japanese). But I like the sound effects in the US Climber much better. The fact that a lot of the Japanese CC sound effects were used in the crappy Crazy Kong probably has something to do with it too. I played this version once, at the Rose Festival in Portland OR. Everywhere else I've seen the Taito version. Oh yeah you better believe it. I also like how it just sounds a lot wackier, but the truth is I thought he was saying nonsense for a long time. For example I thought he was saying 'BAMBALA' . But really it's all just nostalgia. Since that's the version I knew, it just sounds odd and out of place to me now with english voices. Different strokes.. maybe if I grew up with the Nichibutsu version I'd feel attached to it similarly. But I saw the Taito one at Malibu Gran Prix back in '80 and got used to the US version; playing it to death but never getting good at it until recent years.

The original game, by Kural Samno, is called "Crush Roller". It was licensed to Exidy under the same name, and to Williams under the (most familiar) title "Make Trax". I guess there was also a "Magic Brush" by Olympia, a "Korosuke Roller" bootleg, and a "Paint Roller" bootleg. I've played the Famicom version, which I think was under the "Magic Brush" title.

Ugh, really? Instead of "Oh no..." it says "Ah nahhh..." I mean, I understand "Ganbare" (which essentially means "Go for it" or "Do your best" in Japanese). But I like the sound effects in the US Climber much better. The fact that a lot of the Japanese CC sound effects were used in the crappy Crazy Kong probably has something to do with it too. I played this version once, at the Rose Festival in Portland OR. Everywhere else I've seen the Taito version.

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Neat! Looks kind of like a DECO cabinet. So it is a DECO cabinet. Bummer, thought it was a dedicted Bomb Jack, did they even make dedicated BJ cabs? The guy only wants $100 for it, too bad he is about a 14 hour drive away A couple pics of what the (I believe) original cab is like:

Neat! Looks kind of like a DECO cabinet.

A little better with the mouse.. 14,904

8,320.. I'll get better when I get used to the controls. Even though it is a trackball game, I use an 8 way joystick. Mouse or keyboard doesn't cut it for me. I can get the mouse to work for some games better (like Kick); I just need to set it on a flat surface where I have a lot of space. Even then it takes a while to get used to. My normal controller is a dual analog pad, on which I almost exclusively use the directional pad. It just doesn't work for a game like Reactor. (or for double joystick games)

8,320.. I'll get better when I get used to the controls.

I'm happy enough with the above ideas.

I'd say the last arcade crash (about the mid-nineties) is pretty permanent and the arcade industry is pretty much dead, unable to recover. Playstation, Dreamcast/Saturn, Gamecube, etc. at that time, they all caught up to the graphics standards of arcade games and reduced them to driving, gun, interactive and redemption games. The home ports of arcade games were actually better due to the unlockable extra stuff, increasing the replay value.

31,700.. yuck

I think I've had that happen before a few times. As for Gyruss, have you tried the NES version? I was very, very impressed by it.

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I think the best I got was the 2nd white dragon. I hate how easy it was to accidentally leave the "safe spot" in the treasure/dragon room. For example, you could still be leaning left on the joystick just as you died getting hit by a fireball and then start edging out of the safe spot on your next life and get nailed again, just like that! In case you're into "frying" (slowly wiggling the switch between ON and OFF to get certain special perks from your game) I guess you can do it until you see a black and white castle. When you get into the castle the prizes look like the word "IN". The dragon seldom spits out fireballs, if any. You can park yourself over a treasure without running over it. This will continually rack up points as long as you sit there! I got this info from a "Tip Collector" file.

If you're running this in MAME you should record it and submit it to TG. That's why I sync up our settings with TG. Congrats Hmm.. it says on TG: NOTE: In MAME 1.06 the dip switches are backwards for MEDIUM & HARD. MEDIUM is actually HARD and HARD is actually MEDIUM. Please set your dip switches to HARD as this will be the tracking for MEDIUM difficulty. I've played both hard and medium settings on my version of MAME which is MAMEUI137. Medium is definitely Medium and Hard is definitely Hard. I guess they could just look at the gameplay in the video and determine that themselves.

So downloading a game from a ROM site for usage on MAME is illegal, just so I have that straight? And who are Robby Roto, Gridlee and Poly Play?? Those 3 games are 100% legal for download, due to the programmers/creators/legal owners of the rom giving their full OK to release these roms for public domain use. There's a lot more games 100% legal now, many from Exidy.

The first time I didn't even check to see the dipswitch settings. Oops! I noticed that it was set at 'easy' but the lives/bonus were correct. Played again on 'medium' setting and got a new high score! How 'bout that? 127,720

No, its more like a spaceship/timemachine looking thing. I just remember the game being real hard so I never got too far into it. It was really fast and jerky. Prop Cycle? Prop Cycle

rmaerz, At least as far as MAME is concerned (it shows the dates when you click on the games and look at their history) Moon Cresta came out first (which makes sense to me), by about 3 months before Eagle. I'd never seen Eagle before and since one of Moon Cresta's sequels is called Terra Cresta and there's been no sequels to Eagle, I'll assume Moon Cresta is the original.

planetemu.net Click on MAME on the right, then on the next screen click MAME (CHD & Samples excluded), then on the M tab above (for Mario Bros.) and that'll take you to the F revision. I just picked it up today. 105,410