Feel free to ask here or in the
dedicated topic, I'm sure people here, including myself, would love to figure out which games they were if you haven't found out already.
Thanks for this topic btw, made me reminisce of some happy times when I was a kid.
Actually, a lot of Sega Model 2 and 3 games are emulated very well with the Model2 and Supermodel emulators, respectively. Motor Raid is a Model 2A game and works pretty much perfectly on the Model 2 emulator. Here's the homepage for
Model 2 (1.1a is the latest version) and head out
here for the Supermodel (Model 3) emulator. Getting the ROMs is another matter but with a bit of googling you can find them. Also Daytona 2 works great on the Supermodel emulator, although I think there's some inconsistency in the loudness of some effects.
For me, arcade games hold a very special meaning. When I was a kid, my family would go to my grandparents in the summer during the 90s and me, my brother, a cousin and a very good friend would go to the arcades every day. We used to beg for a bit of allowance from our folks who would reluctantly give us a bit of cash. There was an arcade parlor (a few of them actually, surprisingly for a small town) with more than a dozen games. We only had a C64 for the longest time so for the most of my childhood I didn't own more current systems and most of my contact with more advanced and modern games was through friends and gaming parlors.
I remember a genuine Thunderblade cabinet, a flightstick and all and I thought it was mindblowing. The camera changes its position? Holy shit!
It was the upright cabinet, not the complex looking one with the seat and everything. Didn't play it much but I drooled over other people playing it.
What I did play a lot was Cadillacs and Dinosaurs or as most people there called it - Mustapha. Everybody used to pick him since he's the most balanced, all-around character. I absolutely love that game even to this day. I think it's one of the most well crafted beat'em ups Capcom's ever made. There are more advanced and complex games out there, but the responsiveness, the timing and feel of the punches is incredible. We all played the shit out of it, remembered all of the boss strategies and even managed to complete it with 2P with 3 or 4 coins/continues.
I remember an anecdote where the coin slot bugged out I guess and it automatically activated 99 credits. Me and my brother already had coins so we just pretended to use them, sat down and played for an hour or two, since nobody had noticed yet. We even went to my cousin, called him and our friend, went back and it still had like 70 credits left but the other kids in the parlor already caught on and that day, everybody played "the Mustapha game". There was a girl that worked there that was really nice, I believe she was the daughter of the owner, she figured out what was going on but let us all play anyway.
She used to occasionally give free credits to kids so it was our favorite place to hang out.
The cabinet we played on wasn't actually upright like in this picture, looked more like a custom made wooden candy cabinet, probably bootlegged stuff. A lot of the cabinets in that place were like that.
Another Capcom brawler we used to play a lot was Warriors of Fate. It had the addition of mountable horses that could dominate the screen if used correctly. Also lots of gore, dismemberment and blood. I remember the game being very hard for pretty much everyone that came to the parlor and one day a couple of older dudes (as in late teens probably) got through most of the game, up to a level we haven't seen before etc. So they ran out of coins and we asked them if we could chip in and continue their game to which they agreed. So my brother and I sat down and continued the game and I think we spent about 7-8 coins (yes, we were that bad at it) and finally completed it. It was an exhilarating moment because a lot of the kids gathered around us, it was quite the crowd and we were in the spotlight. And then the final boss just jumped off the god damn cliff. It was the most anti-climactic ending to a game we've seen 'till then, little did we know it was the bad ending, which we found out about years later.
Couldn't find a proper image of a WoF cabinet so here's the original japanese version (Tenchi wo Kurau II) in what looks like a candy cabinet.
Probably the most authentic and better looking of the cabinets in that place was the X-Men 4 Player version. The four of us played it a lot and the best bit about the game, aside from the awesomely animated graphics was learning the boss strategies, observing other people that knew some details, figuring out other stuff by yourself and so on. It was loud, flickery and full of colors with Colossus' HOOOOOAAAAAAA shout.
I think it was exactly this version of the cabinet.
The only arcade game I've ever mastered, so to speak, was Captain America and the Avengers, and it was in that same game parlor. By mastered I mean I learned the game so well that I could complete it with one coin. I even did that two or three times in a row just for kicks. I abused the jumping beam attack, mostly with Iron Man or Vision and figured out some tricks all by myself. Since I used to, shamefully, use a lot of cheats in games as a kid (mostly on C64), this was a huge deal for me. That summer the high-score table on that cabinet was mostly filled with my signature. Felt all sorts of proud about that.
I believe I had memorized all of the cutscenes and dialogues in the game, down to the ending text. Loved it even more so because of the broken English. "Why should it goes well?" is still one of my favorite video game quotes.
One day a younger kid approached me as I was entering the initials and asked me what they meant. He noticed me completing the game over and over for days and saw the initials in the high-scores. I explained they were just the starting letters of my name, my brother's and my cousin's. Felt a bit like a celebrity that day.
I guess I played a lot of brawlers, huh.
Man, there were a lot more games there, Track & Field, Captain Commando, P-47, Three Wonders, Sunset Riders etc. I remember another place where they had Mortal Kombat, Zero Team (which still isn't emulated, sadly, although there's some progress) and Cow Boys of Moo Mesa. The Mortal Kombat cabinet started to bug out after a while, showing sprite trails and all sorts of flickering, it was wild.
Some time earlier, was really young, I remember my brother playing Green Beret (Rush'n Attack), Soldier of Light (Xain'd Sleena) and Sky Fox. We actually only remembered the music and the fact there was a Valkyrie riding a space dragon in Star Fox and searched for the game for years. We were amazed at how accurately we've remember the tune.
That social part of playing in the arcades was an amazing thing. People would try to trick you into letting them play instead of you so they could "help you out" as they "knew how to beat this boss", gather around if somebody was beating the final boss, meet random people that would share a 2p game with you etc. The games were loud, colorful, with huge, beautifully animated characters and backgrounds. It was our temple where we'd worship these magical machines with joysticks and big buttons and feed them coins for their heavenly cause. Happy times.
