Athlete Kings is amazing. Girlfriend absolutely hates losing and wasn't doing too good but still wanted to finish the decathlon. Also tried Bust-A-Move 2, Dynamite Deka, Bubble Symphony and Jikkyo Oshaberi Parodius and enjoyed them all.
A fine handful of Saturn content there. Bubble Symphony is a lovely game. Oshaberi Parodius is probably my favourite entry in that series (though it is uniformly great).
A pinball would be lovely. I was asking the supplier about how much work they need to support and he said after they do their overhaul as long as it in a home situation it wouldn't need any work for years. These are commercial built things so in the home they are running for a fraction of the time in a commercial setup and also won't getting abused, so I can see the sense in that.
He replaces all the lights with LEDs (including the 7 segment displays - they have LED versions now), overhauls all the electronics (recapped, ICs re-seated and flowed etc) and they replace all the flippers & bumpers etc with modern materials that last a lifetime. You are talking 4-5K though for the better ones.
The crew in these videos really slag the owner off but you can tell they love the guy. He ran arcades in the 80s and seems to be a bit of a legend when it comes to figuring out what's wrong with these machines when they come in faulty.
My dream setup would be to also have a nice pin (Twilight Zone would be a great pick, but those TNT videos show some gorgeous games), a few other Atari vector games like Tempest and then a nice TATE JAMMA cabinet for shmups. Unlikely that will ever happen unless I convert my garage! I'd actually like a nice complex UK big jackpot fruit machine too , and a poker machine would be nice to complete the room!
Got my Panzer Dragoon Saga, it's actually in better condition that I thought and very happy with it. In preparation for Saga, been trying to get through Panzer Dragoon. Normal seems pretty hard and I finally gave up and changed it to easy but the game seems to only allow to play the first 4 episodes on easy. I'll give the normal one more try and after that it could be time for the unlimited energy cheat from Action Replay.
Enjoying the game, it's primitive but love the music and the overall atmosphere. Quite hyped for Zwei after reading how much better (and easier) it appears to be.
So we still don’t really know what the Ataribox actually is, do we? But it’s going to be available for preorders from Thursday. And now we have some images of the console, and an announcement that it will cost between $250 and $300. Which seems way too expensive for it to be just a nicely-packaged retro machine, a la NES Mini.
Given no-one knows what the offering is I think it's ludicrous to be asking for pre-orders.
I love the woody styling as much as anyone. I still have my woody 2600, but without more info I wouldn't go near this.
It's a sordid attempt at cashing in on the nostalgia of Atari's golden era. The combination of pioneering spirit and game design craft can no longer be recreated that's for sure.
It would at the very least need to support true classic Atari era arcade games. Not more bloody 2600 ROMs.
But even then - most classic Atari games had oddities such as vector monitors and extremely novel control schemes such as spinners (Tempest), yokes (Star Wars), trak-balls (Missile Command, Centipede, Marble Madness) , steering wheels (Super Sprint), handles (Lunar Lander), handlebars (Paperboy) et al.
It's why, for the most part, Atari emulation packs even on modern consoles are a bit shit. So I don't think that's happening
Could be just another generic games machine with a Steam like experience. Would be OK but not Earth shattering.