Hello and welcome to Newsbytes, our weekend collection of quick arcade news. Let’s get to it as we enjoy the last weekend that April 2017 has to offer:
Battle Of The Arcades Begins
A 3 way tournament is taking place between Galloping Ghost Arcade, Kencade and Richie Knucklez & Arcade 2084 across 12 classic arcade games today. They are streaming the tournament on Twitch (click here to watch); the 12 games are: Asteroids, Donkey Kong 3, Galaga, Joust, Millipede, Moon Patrol, Nibbler, Pole Position, Robotron 2084, Track & Field, Zaxxon & ZooKeeper. This is always a great and fun way to promote different arcade locations out there, particularly those with a penchant for the classics.
Heighway Pinball Celebrates Alien Day
“Alien Day” was this week, marking the anniversary of the original Alien movie release. With that in mind, Heighway Pinball showed off the latest build for their LE version of their new Alien Pinball game, which you can check out below:
Heart of Gaming Reopens In Croydon, UK; Pinball Wizard Arcade In Pelham, NH To Close
Bittersweet news on this one. Over in the UK, The Heart of Gaming has finally re-opened after being closed for the past year. On the other hand, the Pinball Wizard Arcade in New Hampshire is closing tomorrow. Definitely check out each venue if you are close by and RIP PWA. We reported about their opening back in 2011 so they’ve had a good run for the past five years.
Another VR Arcade Platform; Via Chinese Firm QingFeng
The past few years have seen VR garner plenty of interest, especially from Chinese factories. I have only heard of a couple of US venues out there to have installed the UNIS Omni Arena; most “VRcades” (including the one just a door down from me) just throw some HTC Vives and drapes together to call it a day.
Rampage The Movie Seems To Be Underway
Via the creator of Rampage, Brian F. Colin. Hopefully, this means he is going to have a cameo role in the upcoming Rampage movie.
THE 'SHOOT' HEARD ROUND THE WORLD! Have you picked yours up yet? https://t.co/V9v7UsiX0u #rampage #videogames pic.twitter.com/7PxfdsCy6Y
— Brian F Colin (@BrianFColin) April 29, 2017
Step Maniax Coming To The Clark County Family YMCA
Step Revolution head Kyle Ward has announced that his latest rhythm game effort, Step Maniax, is coming to a YMCA in Washington state. I believe that this is the first public installation for the game out there although YMCA usually has anything like this on free play/non-coin. So don’t get excited in that regard quite yet – although what I would like to see are the pads made available to replace aging and beat-up DDR pads.
Bombergirl On Test In Japan
Konami’s latest non-Bemani arcade game is receiving some testing in Japan this week – if any our or readers are near the tests, check it out and let us know what you think of this fresh take on the Bomberman series:
Bombergirl is on location test at @llakihabara this weekend: https://t.co/H0j5UAQiwe #arcade #bombergirl #konami #loctest #bomberman pic.twitter.com/cKqfHlICoX
— Arcade Belgium (@arcadebelgium) April 29, 2017
Arcade-To-Console Port Of The Week – Bits ‘N’ Bytes
I believe this was mentioned on the last Newsbytes but there haven’t been many new ports of old arcade games to old hardware that I’ve come across lately…which is fine by me as I prefer to see original content in those instances anyways. I might change it up here in the future to focus on official ports from “back in the day” to see how they did. But this week we’ve got another homebrew to check out, a multi-game compilation for the somewhat obscure but awesome Vectrex. As a part of the software found on this cartridge is a vector version of Atari’s Pong (just called Vector Pong), a frog game where you eat flies (not unlike UPL’s Frogs) and an interesting variation of Midway’s Space Zap called Hex (which looks far more interesting and fun that SZ).
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
