retrorussell

Sure, skill games are okay too. Looks like a Galaga cabinet next to it.

Yes, it's called "frying". This can often yield crazy benefits. I was able to trick some arcade games' coin mechanisms by dropping in a slug, or foreign currency. And Random, I gotta concur with the others.. bumping the table has always been a part of pinball playing.. you don't have to do it if you don't want to, of course.. it just adds a cool skill element where you try to bump but not too much, else the classic TILT sign comes up and you lose a ball. If bumping were really discouraged, your game should flat out end, not just result in the loss of one turn. I thought that was cool that the Atari 2600 version of Atari Pinball let you guide the ball with the button and joystick to act as a bump, and if done too much the screen would go red (tilt) and the bumpers/flippers wouldn't work, and you would eventually lose a ball (you could still guide it around and avoid the hole(s), but you couldn't score any more points that turn).

I remember beating Casino Kid but not Wall Street Kid. The endings might have been similar. In Casino Kid you become a multi-millionaire, lounging by the pool and having your servants bring you drinks and food, and never having to worry about working again. Sweet ending! Hope you knew about the 10 extra lives trick to help get you through Super C. Otherwise it really is tough going. The King Of Fighters series had a lot of really good endings, where the 3-man/woman team would often interact with each other after the tournament ended. Hilarity often ensued. I also liked the endings to Gunbird and Gunbird 2. Very messed up, and side-splitting!

I think it is a UK thing, never heard of it here.. not that I get around though. Any video game, or anything, with the word "bible" in it I will steer clear of. Not that I am completely anti-religion or anything but I find it boring. Just my 2 cents, er, pence.

Um.. maybe I'm slow on the uptake but I'm not sure what that means. What's R.E?

Update: Apparently I need to find a way to change those out too. I still have washed out colors. How do I get that stupid bracket off so I can reach the remaining caps?

Nice tricks folks! There were lots of advantages to "frying" on the Atari 2600.. the great Activision game H.E.R.O. could grant 255 lives or so with this method. One terrible baseball game in Tommy Lasorda's Baseball for the Genesis was a breeze if you powered up a game, pulled it with the power on, and put in Lasorda Baseball and hit reset. Every time you pitched to the cpu they would pop the ball straight up and often right into the waiting glove of the catcher. I think the cpu might have been incompetent in the field as well, giving you easy runs. Can't recall exactly but the game was much easier this way. Numerous other games had positive glitches when you swapped with the power on.

The ending to 1942 was pretty damn awful. http://www.vgmuseum.com/end/nes/a/1942.htm One of my favorite endings was from Phantasy Star IV for the Genesis. http://www.vgmuseum.com/end/genesis/a/phant4.htm

What tricks do you remember doing on a game system or arcade machine, that would be ill-advised by a game manufacturer/arcade owner/game system manufacturer but actually turned out to be harmless and pretty cool? Which game was it? And what did these tricks do? Good examples would be "frying" on the Atari 2600 (wiggling the power switch inbetween on and off), switching cartridges on the Genesis while the power was still on, pulling the plug on an arcade machine, plugging it back in and getting a free game, etc.

What were some of the most memorable endings you came across for a video game, whether it was a long, interesting epilogue or just a lame-ass "Congratulations" screen that made you say, "I BUSTED MY @$$ ON THIS GAME FOR 24 HOURS AND THIS IS MY REWARD??!!!"? Feel free to put up pics of the ending if you can.

Thanks Cassidy. Just installed almost all of the cap kit, but there's a little bracket covering a couple of the caps. It's by the horizontal/vertical pots and I don't know how to get it off. Should I replace these too, or if I just have washed-out colors in my game, will I need to bother with these? Thanks again. Retro

The thing that stood out most for me in Crime Fighters was how small the characters were and the lack of any detail on them. That's what turned me off the most. For a game from Konami, this was totally unacceptable to me.

Sure I remember this game.. played it at the Tigard Cinemas when I lived across the street from it. Didn't think it was all that great personally. I liked Combatribes a heck of a lot better. http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7437

http://cgi.ebay.com/Williams-Defender-Joys...%3A1%7C294%3A50 This guy has a couple.

My favorite Intellivision death was on Advanced Dungeons and Dragons where an enemy would touch you and turn you into a puff of smoke. And those enemies could appear AS SOON as you made a section of path appear. Run away!!!

Yeouch! That game sucked arse!

Good for you Steve. Don't know what smoking bans you might have in N.H. but here in Oregon all bars are non-smoking. And since I don't smoke that makes me pretty durn happy.

I've always been happy with the standard red ball-top joystick(s) for all-purpose gaming. However, if you have "Blaster" in your cab, the feeling won't quite be right unless you have a flight-type stick.

I'm sure some of you out there that happen to own a vintage machine from the bygone era can attest to what smoke from cigarettes can do to a cabinet! Or anything. After my Grandma died 15 years ago we had to SCRUB all the cigarette smoke out of the walls in her house and repaint. Gross..

No prob CCG/Steve. There are some places where there are classic arcades (I got one in Portland called Ground Kontrol) that specializes in the era we remember best Well, hope things do get more financially sound for you in the future and you can own your dream machine. Even if installing a new cap kit can be a pain (doing that with Dig Dug right now, and craning my neck to look inside the cabinet at the circuit board is REALLY bad for me!), it's still worth it at least to see the familiar cabinet from your childhood in your own house. And you can smoke, drink, or eat on it; it's YOUR machine!

A couple I visited when I went to my Grandparents' house in Milwaukie, OR: The Chocolate Chipper mini-golf course Wunderland at Farmington Mall

I wasn't able to scrape up much money for Atari 2600 games but I did have a deal with my folks where if a certain list of school homework stuff was done x amount of times over a month I would get a new game. I ended up getting some good ones (Defender, Mario Bros., Venture, some other ones I can't recall). Now, of course, I got my emulator Stella that plays pretty much every Atari game ever.

No prob Carl. I thought it was pretty awesome too.. I never had an arcade that nice in my neck of the woods. My arcades had dingy carpets with cig burns, and no fancy fountains out front, no music videos on multi-screens, and no light shows. But there were some pretty sweet deals for tokens (6 for a dollar, extra tokens for good grades on your report card, etc.).

I'm not good at electronics either, but fortunately my mom worked for Tektronix nearly all her life and knows a thing or two about soldering and circuit boards, so she can be bribed with lunch. You owe it to yourself to own one someday.. just save some money here and there and you could probably negotiate with someone on a more reasonable price. $300 or less is probably doable with a lot of machines out there. Another thing to remember is even if you saw that it works before it got shipped to your house, things can change during the shipping and you might need to resolder a little. I've had the horizontal get a bit messed up just during shipping, so get a soldering iron and some wick just in case. And check the Video Game Collector's webring for help/info. Yeah, it saddens me too to know that the memories of busy arcades and pizza parlors abuzz with the sounds of video game zapping/shooting/jumping noises is just that: memories. I feel your pain brotha!!! Maybe this'll give you some warm fuzzies all over again.

Wow.. never heard of Noah's Ark. Probably as disgustingly easy as Pot 'O Gold/Leprechaun. I don't think they released more than 5 games for that "Moppet Video" cabinet. The kiddie cabinet idea died a pretty quick death. Konami's "Martial Chamion" was not that good a game, but it did have some large sprites for the fighters. Sega/Coreland's "My Hero" was pretty rare, though it got a SMS release, I think. Kung-Fu Master with cartoony characters. None too special. Gremlin/Sega's "Pulsar". Decent old game where you commandeer a tank to pick up keys and open doors. Secret bonuses were picked up by shooting an enemy the same color as the key you had, or by getting the doors opened in numerical order.