Everybody loves a good arcade. They smell of sugar (with a slight tinge of vomit, but you can overlook that), they flash enthusiastically, and shout at you to come and play. They draw you in, with a premise of fun and simulated violence or speed (and sometimes if you’re really lucky, both). Yeah, you can pretty much guarantee one out of every five machines wont work, half the games will be shit, and everything will be over priced, but dam it, arcades are fun.
I arrived at our Holiday camp confronted by one such arcade, and there was no way I could resist its charm.
Whats first to suck away my monies? I take a wander round, and spot the beauty that is…a Time Crisis 3 machine.
Time Crisis 3 is by far the best game I have ever played in an arcade. Now you can moan all you like about that, but you can both shut up and go away, TC3 is brilliant. The baddies and levels are varied enough, it has a nice learning curve, its fair, and it has weapon switching. It is also far superior to the newer Time Crisis 4 which is unfair, dull, and just generally rubbish.
I ready a pound out of my jeans, when I notice, its only 50p a go! Yay! I shove 50p in, and off I go. I think I’m pretty good at Time Crisis, and manage to get to the first big boss only having lost one life. He kills me though, and I refuse to cough up for a continue on the basis that I fucking hate credit munchers on arcade machines. You know who you are. Bosses, challenge stages, whatever. Bits that are just there take away your lives and your monies.
I move on to some racing, and a big machine from Sega grabs my attention.
Ferrari F355 challenge. I has 3 screens for fucks sake, sign me up. Once I’m settled in, it asks me if I want to race or do a tutorial. It’s then that I remember playing this many years ago, and I did the tutorial then. I also remember doing the tutorial cost a credit…so balls to that.
I start racing, but my car is going amazingly slow. It on automatic gears, but it wont go higher than third gear. This makes for a slow, boring, and very frustrating experience. I last all of a minute before I run out of time…fuck this nonsense.
I want something different to play, something I have definitely never played before. Another machine grabs me.
Primeval Hunt. Killing dinosaurs with pump action shotguns. £1, lets do it. It doesn’t accept my pound. I try again, denied. I try all my pounds…they all just drop through. For fucks sake. I wander round the arcade looking for something else. There is a Deal or No Deal machine, and despite my oh so strong urges, I resist playing. There are some Need for Speed machines, which again, I mange to resist, then I get fed up.
None of this arcade is any good, and as I am about to walk out, I have a thought. I go back to my old friend I throw a whole pound into Time Crisis. On 2 credits, I take out the bastard boss, and get a fair way through section 2. When I finally die, I leave the arcade happy. Any arcade that has a TC3 machine, will always be good – if it smells of vomit or not.
Takes me back does all this, coming from a seaside town (Aberystwyth). I remember playing Virtua Racing for the first time, and then progressing to Sega Rally and Daytona, before they came out on the Megadrive and Saturn.
The best thing was that I was a whizz at beat-em-ups, I could stay on SF2(vega/ken/akuma), winner stays on all day, same with MK2(scorpion/kung lao) and 3 and Killer Instinct(TJ Thunder/Orchid[for the infinite combo]) too, its one of the few times i get to blow my trumpet in public. *cough*
Whenever i’m at a service station on business, i’m always playing the games – generally House of the Dead.
Never heard of Primeval Hunt, might have to dig that out from the emulation folder somewhere and have a crack at it.