This week has been extremely quiet for arcade news, but there are a few items that showed up late in the week that are fine for Newsbytes. Let’s hop to it!
AtGames Launches Their ArcadeNet Service
Game streaming services are slowly starting to catch up to movie streaming services, although we aren’t close yet in terms of quantity. I can’t speak to how they work in practice (I know a lot was said about Google Stadia before they opened and it didn’t live up to their hype), as I haven’t used any yet, but if you are into arcade games and you have one of AtGames’ newer hardware solutions(the Legends Ultimate home arcade machine and the Legends Core game console), then they now have something for you. Called ArcadeNet, here’s how they describe the new service:
ArcadeNet® is the premier games service from AtGames designed exclusively for the Legends Arcade Family of products. Each licensed game in this ever-growing subscription library is optimized for the Legends Arcade Family’s high-performance hardware and arcade-quality controls. Thanks to its dedicated servers, ArcadeNet® supports instant play of every game in the library and optional downloads for select titles.
They have a Basic (Free) and Standard ($20/mo) option at the moment, with a very sizable library of licensed games – including pinball machines. If any of you out there have the hardware, have you used this yet and if so, what do you think about it?
Sega Back To Posting Videos
Sega Amusements was mostly quiet throughout 2020, but with a new year they are getting back into action with some new videos to promote their latest games. The first one was Mario & Sonic 2020 Olympics, which was released only a month before the pandemic hit; They also have posted some 360 videos that would work with a VR headset.
Owatch VR Launches The VR WOW
Another interactive VR ride joins the fray, this time from a Chinese company called Owatch. This one is much closer in style and gameplay to Trio-Tech’s Storm than it is to something like Virtual Rabbids or King Kong, although where it is on price I don’t know. It comes with six different games, all interactive involving your hands…I wonder when we’ll see one with mounted guns instead:
Big Buck Hunter Expands Merchandise
They’ve done shirts and other merchandise before, so now they have a variety of socks & stickers to grab. This of course is one of the better aspects of not licensing a property for a game – when it’s your license, you can do stuff like this 😛 Check out their full line-up here.
Mario Kart Arcade GP DX…Japanese TV Show Edition?
I’m not terribly familiar with Japanese TV shows, but just enough to know that there is plenty of weirdness to be found on the airwaves there. The style of constantly pasting words and reaction shots on the screen are not everyone’s cup ‘o tea, but if you happen to enjoy it, and you understand Japanese, then you’ll probably get more out of this new video from Bandai Namco Amusements than most:
The Unofficial Dragonball Z Pinball Machine
There’s only one of them in existence, but when the major pinball makers won’t turn your favorite franchise into a pinball table, then you’ve got to do it yourself.
Comparing PCB To Emulation On Sega’s Astro City Mini
H/T to Arcade Belgium on this one. It’s in French, but you don’t have to understand that to understand the charts 😛 Looks pretty close, but PCB comes out on top (from what parts I watched)
The Debate Over Arcade Ports
I hope to find some time to do a livestream video about this in the coming week, but until then, you can read some of my thoughts as well as Dustin Wilcox’s thoughts on modern arcade ports by clicking those handy hyperlinks.
To avoid a lot of repeating myself, it’s all about money at the end of the day – which also equals viability of this industry. Just because a game is hot in arcades doesn’t mean it will sell well on consoles, but that doesn’t stop people from asking. Granted, asking is fine, but sometimes there are developers who have received death threats over not porting this or that, and that’s a line that no one should cross.
Most port-beggars operate under the false assumption that arcades only exist in Japan and that they are dead everywhere else. The ones I’ve been arguing with also don’t understand (or care…maybe more of the latter) that ports are directly responsible for the declines in arcades in the first place. I could write and say more about this, but I’ll let those links suffice for now 🙂
Unfortunately, that’s all I could muster together for now…hopefully this next week is a little better with the arcade news.
There was also the seven new Arcade1up cabinets announced at CES.
Wilcox has a pretty good article on the subject, but I’m honestly thinking the real problems with hardcore gamer demographics runs a lot deeper and needs to be realized in study. I know arcades did exist well before videogaming was even a thing back in the mid 70’s and when 1999 rolled around, I saw that as one of the biggest nails in the coffin because technology caught up and developers either didn’t want to keep working on the arcade platform, or decided outside japan/asian territories wasn’t worth it. The 00’s did so much to kill locations, then surviving one’s either went classic, or turned into tourist stops where redemption and kiddie games similar to pre-70’s were becoming the norm as people were more into attractions then the video games they play at home. This was the tipping point I mentioned quite awhile back because the hardcore gamer audience ‘left’ the scene as they were no longer being provided, yet PS3 and 360 picked up the slack.
It’s this hurdle the industry has to get over to win gamers back. If you don’t provide, you won’t have an audience and playing needle in a haystack is not going to be an attractive bid to anyone.
Worthy subject to discuss.
Yeah those are more classics, but at least consumers have those titles available.