I’m not sure why but in my area it was back to school week for most districts. Seems a bit early for that as the schools also got out the 2nd week of June (Out of school is my busy season but that is not the case for every arcade).
This Weekend’s News
Spooky Pinball Unveils Domino’s Spectacular Pinball Adventure – The fine folks at Spooky Pinball has unveiled their next game and this one decided to not go down the route of a terror/horror game (their previous boutique titles are America’s Most Haunted and Rob Zombie Spookshow International). The latest was designed for Domino’s Pizza stores and from this streamed video, looks like fun. Seems like this could be a clever way to help drive carryout to Domino’s locations:
ColorDMD Support for Data East’s Star Wars – ColorDMD has announced colorization support for Star Wars Pinball, which will also support their new color LED displays. No video has been released of it in action yet but there is this:
UNIS Launches New Video Kid-Tainment Ride, Super Big Rig – More “Kid-Tainment” video games are coming the way of the market and this time it is UNIS who has something to compete with the likes of Sega’s Let’s Go Safari. Super Big Rig is posting big earnings according to this data sheet and among the unique features is a microphone for “voice commands”; it also has a cord to pull to honk the horn. I imagine that this will be at IAAPA, among other games:
Pac-Man Dog ( thanks to Michael L. for the tip) – If you love arcade games and dogs or just animals doing funny things, this is for you:
Joust Prototype discovered for Famicom/NES – In the quest to find games that are otherwise lost, another unreleased arcade port has come to light, this time of Joust for the Famicom/NES (link to Polygon story). What adds to the interest is that the efforts were among the first coding efforts by eventual Nintendo President Satoru Iwata and the project was being done for the Atari/Nintendo deal that never went through. That deal was going to have Atari serve as the North American distributor of the NES hardware as Nintendo felt it was going to be too difficult to break into the market with Atari still dominating it.
Here’s a very interesting internal memo at Atari which details what had been going on with the project (the MARIA machine referred to is the Atari 7800; the NES also would have been featured in a different shell). The deals the two companies eventually ended up with meant that games like Donkey Kong Jr. and Mario Bros. would end up on Atari systems. While the Joust proto shown here doesn’t look like it was completed at the time, it is still a very interesting find!
Sega NAOMI 2 Tech Demo – There aren’t a lot of “tech demos” for arcade hardware out there, small programs that work to try and show off game hardware capabilities. Such demos are found in abundance for different computer systems since it is much easier to write/test/publish a piece of code there but out of personal curiosity, I’d love to find more of these to see what effects certain pieces of hardware might have been capable of doing (not just graphics wise but audio as well, for systems that would use multiple sound chips) but we might not have seen used in a game:
(NAOMI 2 Specs are found here)
