Lord Mushroom

I thought Mario Kart GP DX was popular, just with different people. It is more for females and young boys, whereas Cruisin´ Blast is mainly for older boys and young men.

Looks like a generic platformer to me. Wouldn´t have interested me at all without the Yar title. The only positive is that the character has more mascot potential than a fly.

There is also the XEGS, the new VCS and Home Pong.

Here is a video of it (starts at 7.20):

Powerups and different "maps" with different novelties.

Yes, such a game would have a better chance.

I didn´t know the 3-player screen was so big. That is a good sign.

I think these games will fail. They are too true to the originals, and not iconic enough to pull that off.

Pac-Man Battle Royale Chompianship has some advantages over Asteroids Recharged: 1) Fancy cabinet with one huge or two screens. 2) Supports more players. 3) Is based on a game with a character more young people are familiar with. 4) It is competitive. From what I understand, there will be a competitive element to Asteroids Recharged, but because it is a video redemption game, it will probably be limited to who gets the most tickets from playing a co-op game the best. Asteroids Recharged´s advantages over Pac-Man Battle Royale Chompianship are: 1) Redemption. 2) Higher appeal amongst very old school players due to being more similar to the original (see next paragraph). I think Pac-Man Battle Royale Chompianship is more different from the original than Asteroids Recharged for the following reasons: 1) The cabinet as a whole is much more different from the original than the Asteroids Recharged cabinet is. 2) It is now competitive as opposed to "beat the game". 3) The ghosts are much less important, whereas in Asteroids Recharged it is still all about the asteroids and UFOs.

It is not just about dying quickly. When the game is complicated, you die with a feeling of being in over your head. The first time you play Pac-Man, you die quickly, but you don´t have any problems with the controls or understanding the object of the game. So you still have some feeling of mastering the game. But if the first time you play Asteroids Recharged, and die quickly because you have difficulties making the ship do what you want it to do, you feel like a clumsy idiot. Back in the day, Asteroids succeeded despite this because the gameplay was really good compared to contemporary games. People were willing to put up with initial failures because they could see how fun it would be when they mastered the controls. Now there is no shortage of straightforward games with good gameplay amongst video only arcade games, so people won´t bother mastering a game that by today´s standards has mediocre, at best, gameplay. Amongst video redemption games, on the other hand, competition in gameplay is much less fierce.

I think the music in Dariusburst Another Chronicle is terrible. It is boring, depressing and artsy-fartsy. I would much have preferred something upbeat and catchy, like this: Failing that, I would have preferred scary music. But I agree that most games get better with appropriate music.

There are certainly differences between the two. The CC cabinet is flashier, has bigger screen, seats and more action-packed gameplay. But there are also similarities, and AR doesn´t have to be as successful as CC to turn a profit, so I give them a fair chance.

I have never even seen a video redemption game in real life, so I am not exactly an expert either.

Those games don´t have redemption, so they are not the kind of games Asteroids Recharged would be (mainly) competing with. Here is an example of a successful video redemption game:

I think Asteroids Recharged has a decent chance of succeeding in the arcades. That is because video redemption games, which they are competing against, don´t have spectacular graphics. They have simple graphics. In that sense, Asteroids Recharged delivers. Asteroids Recharged´s biggest problem is, in my opinion, that it has a steep learning curve. Steering, firing, thrusting and occasionally warping at the same time is difficult at first, especially for kids. I fear many will try it once, die quickly and not play it again if it is too difficult for first time players.

I think it would be very difficult to wow us with graphics in Asteroids Rehcarged while maintaining the same gameplay as in the original. They could have made it a lot more realistic. Made it look good even, like the graphics in Dariusburst Another Chronicle EX: But for a graphical wow-factor, they would have to make it 3D, and that would have changed the gameplay. Of course, they could have wowed us with (more) cool additions to the gameplay.

I don´t think that experiment is going to be very useful, because Asteroid Recharged´s biggest selling point is being a vdeo redemption game, and Shaggy doesn´t offer redemption. I think it is pretty safe to say it will do poorly in Shaggy´s arcade.

I have always thought the graphics in Asteroids is supposed to show the actual things, and not a representation of them on a radar screen.

It seems strange that sales should be that stable. I am guessing that is an average over all the years The Complete Edition has been available, and that the current annual figure is much lower.

Do you have a source for that?

It was published by Atari, but it was developed by Frontier. As they are buying it from Frontier, it seems likely Frontier owned it all along.

Sounds like an awful lot for a single old game. They are probably going to have Nightdive make a remaster, but at that price, I doubt it will be profitable.

I am sure it has a lot of resell value, so they only need to make up its price depreciation.

Those were high end video arcade games only, though. The software development for the Recharged arcade games should be minimal. They are just tweaking pre-existing games. I am sure they also spend less on hardware development, but nowhere near as much less as with software.

If they double the price for each additional player, a 5P model would be $52k.