Newsbytes: Allied Tank Review; NW Pinball & Arcade Show; FTW Chicago Opens; NTG# 46

arcadehero June 6, 2015 5

Schools out for the Summer – at least everywhere around me. This means that it becomes busier in my case, which is great. Hopefully it is like that everywhere that an arcade can be found. This coming Monday is also important for my arcade business as it will mark 7 years since I opened my doors. Time flies by!

Allied Tank Attack Review – I shared this on the AH social media channels but in case you missed it, I put up a review of InJoy Motion’s Allied Tank Attack. I still need to do an official review of some other games like Dariusburst, I’ve just been dragging my feet a little as I deal with other things. Also stay tuned for another unboxing video, which will be up 1-2 weeks from now, depending on an arrival. I honestly had not expected to get this particular game that will be featured but it will be awesome. 🙂

Speaking of AH, I have a couple more T-Shirt designs posted to the Arcade Heroes TeePublic store, check ’em out here (the one pictured below is $14 for only 4 more hours at the time of writing this)

onlyat

 

Northwest Pinball And Arcade Show – This event is bringing us some pinball goodness with weekend, it is taking place in Tacoma, WA and pretty much everyone involved in making new pinball games is there.

KISS Pinball – KISS Pinball is just about to start showing up out there and Stern has published this video to show off the beta code. This is followed by a PinballNews video of the game as seen at the show:

The Hobbit Pinball – Jersey Jack Pinball sent a machine to the show running the latest code, which introduces a feature that I do not believe has been used in a pinball before but correct me if I am wrong on that. The feature is QR Code scanning to share high scores to Twitter:

It’s about time that we started getting features like this. Next up should be a system like Namco’s “NamCam” to take your avatar picture to combine with an uploaded score and linked machines (linking has been done in the past but has been forgotten).

Magic Girl Pinball – After the legal news surrounding Zidware’s bankruptcy, I didn’t really expect to hear anything else about this game but it is at the show. Whether or not that means this is the first and last public appearance remains to be seen. At least it looks really nice, I like that spinner object in the center left of the playfield as something unusual.

FTW Chicago Now Open – Chicago has no lack of arcade entertainment to find but the market continues to show that it can be sustained. A new bar/arcade location open the doors yesterday by the name of FTW Chicago but instead of a focus on retrocading, they have quite the selection of new games including Namco’s Star Wars Battle Pod and Sega’s Showdown Special Attraction version(pictured below at the right). One unusual feature (for a bar/arcade) they also have is a mini golf course that was designed by Creative Works. [FTW Chicago FB page]

showdownspecialchicago

Formerly Arcade Exclusive NeoGeo MVS Title Breaker’s Revenge to Get an Official AES release – Speaking of unusual items, Visco is officially releasing an AES version of their 90s title Breaker’s Revenge. I don’t know how many collectors are out there for that hardware,it seems like most ‘homebrew’ releases for old consoles reach a couple hundred sales if they are lucky while MVS stuff tends to be in the double digits. Where this will cost a mere €348, an educated guess will say that this will also sell a couple of dozen maybe. But if you have an AES and the cash, you might as well go for it! [Via Retrocollect H/T to ECM]

breakrev_a

 

Name That Game #46 – NTG45 was a challenge…I suppose one of the games was easy to me since I played it a ton on Atari 8-bit back in the 80s. It was just called Ninja for that platform as well as the Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST computers. By all accounts the arcade version is quite rare (it ran on Amiga based hardware). The last one turns 30 this year but since it is fondly remember by no one, that doesn’t matter 😛

1. Blood Bros by TAD Corp.

2. Ninja Mission by Arcadia Systems

3. Porky by Magic Electronics

For this week:

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5 Comments »

  1. The Dude June 6, 2015 at 12:00 pm - Reply

    1 Gunstar Heroes
    2 Robo Wrestling 2001
    3 I know it’s not it but it reminds me of Mappy

  2. Steffen June 6, 2015 at 12:49 pm - Reply

    Sharing pinball high scores is probably the biggest bullshit on earth as long as it’s not the same machine. Pinball is a physical game in which every machine has its own “personality”.

    Quite often I play pinballs I own also elsewhere to enter my initials just for bragging.

    This pin here has a top score of 200 millions? I reach that at home easily. So let’s give it a shot to make my typically 400+ millions the grand champion.

    Sometimes I get similar scores than at home. Sometimes I end up easily with scores much higher than at home. But most times I am also not able to beat that taunting 200 millions on that certain machine.

    And yes, all the machines are in good working condition.

    • arcadehero June 6, 2015 at 1:03 pm - Reply

      I wasn’t implying that pins of different kinds share/link to compete, just games within the same realm, like the NBA Fastbreak. Online leaderboards are used with just about everything, there is no harm in pinball catching up with technology as there used to be a time when it was cutting edge (which is also when they made a lot more money)

      • Steffen June 7, 2015 at 6:56 am - Reply

        I was also writing about comparing the scores of a e.g. Stern Star Trek Premium with that of another Star Trek Premium.

        A pinball is a mechanical device in which every component (like a bumper or the flippers) in another machine behaves a little different. And these small differences add up to a lot of a difference at the end of the day when it comes to two machines of the same model.

        It’s not like comparing the time trial of a racing game or the scores of a light gun game. As long as the controls are not completely misaligned e.g. time trial in Outrun 2 feels the same on every machine.

        This is not the case with pinballs.

        I have seen linked NBA Fastbreaks. And it was always one of two the machines that had a mechanical edge over the other.

        Or that networked Pinball 2000 tournament system. Interestingly the top scores always came from certain machines.

        Or in the golden age of pinball in the nineties where a local operator had two Indiana Jones by Williams standing next to each other due to their popularity. They had the same surroundings and the same slope. Yet their high scores and replay levels where extremely apart.

  3. chaos June 6, 2015 at 3:40 pm - Reply

    3. Pop Flamer – I totally forgot about this game! Need to find it now since I saw it once but never again. I didn’t even get to play it and honestly thought I might have just dreamt it lol

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