Well, it’s February, and it seems like arcade news is picking up to a point where there’s enough to discuss. I probably won’t be able to do a new Location Watch for a while, but hopefully, by the summer we’ll start hearing of new locations opening again.
Anyways, onto Newsbytes, a curation of quick arcade news pieces from around the world.
Maximum Tune 5 Qualifiers End Sunday Morning
Just a reminder that Bandai Namco Amusements’ North American qualifiers for Maximum Tune 5 are almost over – as I am writing this, you only have about 15 hours left to hop onto a machine and qualify. Starting tomorrow, the Main Event takes place, where those who qualified get to see who is the best-of-the-best. I gave it several tries but my skills on my maxed out car just weren’t good enough.
Stay tuned for more MT news sometime after this event is complete 😉
InitialD Car Seats
Speaking of hardcore racing games, Xavier at Arcade Belgium shared a post about a company called InitialP, which creates tons of items you can purchase to satiate your InitialD thirst. The most serious of these products are real ID arcade seats – for your car. I can’t find those listed on the website yet, so maybe it’s coming soon, or just a super limited thing but if you really love ID, then this the way to go:
A New Warehouse Raid In Europe!
Warehouse raids are fairly rare, as there just aren’t a lot of places left that have been storing a bunch of arcade machines for years – or decades. That said, such discoveries still happen – I believe this was in Italy, but I’m not 100% certain of that:
Walking around Super Nintendo World
H/T to Stingray_travel on Twitter for pointing this out – Universal Parks News Today on YouTube has several videos showing off the new Super Nintendo World in Japan. I guess spoiler warning since they show full rides
House of the Dead Scarlet Dawn Upright In Action
H/T to the Wiki of the Dead for this – Off-screen play of the upright version of Scarlet Dawn that Andamiro has released in South Korea:
Coin-op Arcade Guide Now Available
Several years in the making, you can now get your hands on the Coin-Op Arcade Guide by Greyfox Books. This features over 300 pages of “arcade bliss,” 600 screenshots from 100 different coin-op games from the 80’s & 90’s. They even made a nice trailer to accompany the release:
Alan-1 Releases Atari® XY Vector Monitor Transistor Upgrade Kit
I’ve mentioned Alan-1 before, they are a few arcade enthusiasts and collectors from my neck of the woods (Utah), who have been reproducing some hard-to-find arcade components. Their primary focus has been on vector games; The first time I mentioned them, they had created some brand new yoke controllers for Atari’s Star Wars. Now they have launched another handy product for Asteroids collectors, a monitor transistor upgrade kit. Back when I owned an Asteroids Deluxe, the transistor caps on that thing failed all the time – after a complete redesign and new setup of a heavy-duty heat sink+fan, they’ve had one of these operating at a local retro arcade for “11 months (and counting) of continual use,” when the transistors would normally fail once every 2-3 months. You can find the page for the kits here.
Indie Arcade Wave Talks Killer Queen
Well, the new home spinoff called Abs Vs. The Blood Queen. If you want insight into the process of making independent arcade games, then definitely check IAW out. I should also mention that on the 12th, they will post a podcast with a discussion with Yours Truly…
The Namco Museum of Art Presents: Bosconian
Self-explanatory, just note that the video is in Japanese. This is one game I’ve not played that much, but I love the artwork:
Congrats To Wilcox Arcade
Congratulations to Dustin for marking 4 years on his blog. I remember when he first popped up onto the scene, I had a few people within the industry asking me if he was legit 😛 He definitely was and it’s been great to have more perspectives on the circuit, particularly from the player side (which I used to be until I became an operator).
Arcade Trivia Game Update
It’s been a while since I’ve given an update on my trivia game for PC and possibly mobile…I took the opportunity of Covid isolation to really work on it, but I’m having a severe issue with the Categories (the game will allow you to pick questions from the 1970s/80s/90/00s at Easy/Normal/Hard difficulties). For some reason, the program in Unity will constantly delete all of the questions in one category, while saving them fine in another. I’ve been trying to get some help from the developer of the kit I’m using, but he will go dark for months on end, which is pretty frustrating. The only other issue I’m having at the moment deals with getting the leaderboards to work correctly – I’ve been looking at some free solutions offered on the Unity store, but likewise, the documentation for those is confusing and things aren’t working as they should be from tutorials I’ve tried to follow online. Once these issues are finally ironed out, I should be able to launch this…I just hope that it will be this year 😛
That’s all for this weekend – thanks for reading and we’ll see you on the next story!
