*ahem*

It's possible to beat any of them on 1 quarter. But to get that good at them, you have to spend a lot of quarters practicing. Arcade machines are something someone buys for their business. They are there to make money for the operator and have to justify the floor space they take up.

At one point, where fighting game machines were at their heyday here, and charging dollar a pop, they were making about a dollar a minute on a busy day when people were lined up to play them against each other.

Games designed for an arcade machine have different design goals than something that is made for a home release. They are designed to keep money flowing into the machine as much as possible. No different than carnival games, or those games you see in malls and stores where you put in some money and try to grab a prize with a robotic arm (and they are rigged to not give anything out until a certain $ threshold has been reached.)

I remember when the guy running one of the old arcades here would walk into the convenience store across the street, and buy a 2$ comic book to offer as a prize, and people would burn through 10$-20$ each trying to get it.

We are in a very different era. When the Saturn, PSX, and N64 came out, arcade machines no longer had any real technological advantage, and the bar was raised content wise. Arcade style games became simple and outdated almost overnight.

There was a store across the street from my highschool that had an X-Men machine, a Killer Instinct Machine, and a Virtua Fighter machine. We'd all blow our money in there at lunch time if we were lucky enough to play! We were lined up so deep there was no room to move in the store. The owner must have made a killing with those. A year later they were gone. They were no longer making enough to justify the space they were taken up.

Dedicated Arcades held on for a little bit longer and tried new things, like debit cards you had to pre-load, and dark rooms with Quake 2 lan parties you could play for 15 minutes at a time. That didn't go over well.

Why would you pay to play Quake 2 on local lan for a few minutes at a time in a room full of noisy arcade machines when you can play at home and have a much better experience?

Why would dump quarters into a beat em up when you could take 10$ to blockbuster and take 2 much better ones home to play all weekend?

Same with fighting games. The home releases got much better for most games. And the allure of going to the arcade to match up against good players was gone, because no one else was going. Your opponent would be a random kid who just begged his mom for a single quarter and never saw the game before.

This is probably all completely alien to anyone born in the early nineties.

Arcades are still going in some regions. Fighting and rhythm games are big in Japan.

Sony gave us all 10$ on PSN last week, so I bought FIGHTING FORCE which I never had a chance to play it before. It really shows that it started it's life as Streets Of Rage 4. All the characters got renamed and a slight appearance switch, but they are all there. Even the traditional level style is the same.

It's a bit sluggish, but it's still addictive. It's very basic in some areas, but more advanced in others. I like how you can use almost anything you find as a weapon, including pulling hand railings off the walls.

This series could have had a lot of potential to go somewhere. It's too bad FF2 was horrible, and FF3 (which went back to being a pure beat-em-up) was canned.

I started playing Yakuza 4 again just to do a little bit of analysis for this thread, and now I'm like 50 hours into a new game. I really like how the gang members blend in with the other NPCs walking past on the street, and they don't reveal themselves until the look-out guy approach you, then you get swarmed.

Then after you beat them, you shake them down for money and items, which is a nice alternative to them dumping loads of money on the ground River City Ransom style. You can also make friends with people who run shops, and they'll come to your aid if you get jumped near their place.

(I've written enough about these games now to have written a blog or something...)