Hey. How are you? Wanna read some Newsbytes? I knew you did.
Granted, arcade news has been rather slow all year and this week there wasn’t much to report on either, even in ‘quick’ stuff. So, this is a little short once again.
Let’s start off with an awesome Atari logo animation:
https://twitter.com/Lord_Arse/status/858337926102618112
The Stinger Report/BMIGaming/Arcade Heroes Releases Best Of Show Awards
While at IAAPA 2016 last year, our good friend asked if I would like to participate in the ‘Best of Show Awards’ program that his entity The Stinger Report and online distributor BMIGaming do every year. This gets the votes of various people in the organizations as to what products in different categories deserve Gold/Silver/Bronze/Honorable Mention awards. I obliged and the awards have now been published. While I can’t remember my personal votes off the top of my head, the final results aren’t too far off from what I recall picking but I believe there were six people total that participated, weighing things like originality, market impact, user-friendliness, etc.
If you could vote in something like this, what would be your picks for top games?
Atari Quad Pokey Replacement Now Available
If you have a Major Havoc machine (lucky you in that case) and have any trouble with the POKEY sound chips, then you are in luck. “Shupac” has developed QPokey, an FPGA-replacement/solution that can fix it for you. Other Atari titles like I, Robot, Return of the Jedi and Firefox also originally used Quad Pokey chips but the board has yet to be tested in those games at the moment. Check it out at Hot Rod Arcade.
May The 4th Be With You
As far as Fake Holidays go, MayThe4th isn’t too bad. I heard a rumor that Stern is indeed working on Star Wars pinball and there was a chance that it was going to be unveiled on the 4th but they decided to hold off on the unveil. Those in the pinball community that I’ve seen mention reliable information before seem to be pretty confident on this one. So, we’ll just have to wait and see. In the mean time, here’s an Atari Star Wars cockpit review from our friends over at Arcade Hunters:
Groot Enjoys Some DDR
Speaking of big movies, the mall & movie theater where my arcade is at had some Guardians of the Galaxy cosplayers over to promote the release of the latest GoG film release. Since the film has some ‘dance off’ stuff to it, they asked us to bring our DDR machine over, which we were happy to do. The machine wasn’t played very much but when marketing opportunities like this show up, it’s silly not to take advantage of it.
Sara Plays After Burner In The Motion Cockpit
You might recall that AH writer SaraAB87 recently completed a quest to find a Sega R360.She posted a new video from the Skylon Tower of playing the cockpit version of Sega’s Afterburner this week:
Arcade-To-Console Port Of The Week: Space Harrier (Sega Game Gear)
Didn’t find any “homebrews” so lets jump to official ports from BITD:
Yep, that’s all I could scrounge up for this weekend. Have a great and safe weekend yourselves and make sure to go visit your local arcade!
That Atari animation is very cool, thanks for posting the link!
I’ll be looking for to the Stern Star Wars machine once it officially hits the arcades, the AC/DC and Metallica tables I played at Fremont Arcade were really impressive. These new machines are a ton of fun, and have so much going on that the game-play remains immersive.