Arcade machines munching on your coins

[Link | 2,818]

story from my aunt:

when you were 3 ish.  you & your folks came to new jersey for tessie's wedding (my best friend) and to meet your step grandmother, lil.  the week leading up to the wedding was very hot & humid.  the morning of the wedding arrived cold & wet. the ceremony was outdoors.  then the reception was outdoors, though it was a covered pavilion. after a few hours, we were all frozen, but not ready to stop partying, so we all moved to a local bar, called the barrel (because that's exactly the structure of the building!)

they had a ms pacman game.  your were entranced.  someone got a milk crate, or a chair or something for you to stand on, and stand & watch you did...for hours!  once in a while someone would put in a quarter for you, but it didn't matter. you were entertained just watching.  hope you played ms pacman at the arcade this year

 

 

[Link | 2,818]

4 hours ago, DoctorEncore said:

I've heard Killer Queen is a blast, but it really requires team coordination.

It would definitely be an advantage. 

I only got to play it once, and I didn’t know anybody else there. I just attacked the opposing team’s snails and let others play offense, which seemed like the most productive thing I could do. 

[Strange | 1,706]

Whenever I’m collecting for a console I’m always intrigued by the arcade ports.

Super Metroid? Shinobi III? Yeah, those are cool. Let me see how your system handled Space Invaders.

[Link | 2,818]

31 minutes ago, The Strangest said:

Whenever I’m collecting for a console I’m always intrigued by the arcade ports.

Super Metroid? Shinobi III? Yeah, those are cool. Let me see how your system handled Space Invaders.

Nice, yeah. I love Kung Fu [Master] and Defender and it’s really interesting what all the different ports were like. 

[Sumez | 3,042]

On 10/10/2020 at 6:44 AM, Dr. Morbis said:

honestly I've always looked down on point-pressing as just another way of gaming the system and doing shit the original designers did not intend

I'm not a massive fan of Donkey Kong, but I'm pretty fascinated by it, and one fascinating aspect is how well the intended point pressing mechanics actually work. In all of that game, honestly jumping next to DK on the rivets stage (which is such a small thing, and still requires a solid setup) is pretty much the only thing that could really be considered an exploit.

But the main scoring mechanic, which involves stretching the barrel stages, taking the bottom hammer to smash all the barrels you can, and letting barrels group together to get extra points when jumping over them, is absolutely intended. Someone programmed that, wanting to reward players for doing things that are harder to do than just beating the stage. It was great foresight all the way back in 1981, and has kept the game competitive to this day. Even though I'd say that a huge part of why the game works as well as it does it probably incidential (ie. being able to survive level 5 springs, making use of the barrel trapping mechanic to add depth to the controls).

I really recommend watching one of the most recent world record videos put out there, because the game has come a long way since its release, and most prominently since the release of King of Kong, at which point most of the world's top skilled players still hadn't even started out playing the game yet.
Seeing the way the play the barrel stages is incredibly fascinating and worthy of respect. There is no way you could "look down" on their method of playing.

[Link | 2,818]

Put me on the side of point-pressing being an intentional feature.

Look at Kung Fu: punch is 200 points, while the longer-range kick is 100. Jumpkick the 12th guy is 1000 – that takes a lot of concentration to keep up after the second or third time. And, like DK, you get points for getting to the end of the stage faster. Choose your strategy: save time or do more things?

Or Defender, where letting your people get captured and then rescuing them before mutation nets a big bonus.

In Pac Man you wait for a cluster to eat a power pellet and get all the monsters, instead of simply eating every dot as fast as you can. Not to mention the challenge of getting the fruit twice per stage: that exists only to give more points. 

Arcade games had high score boards for a reason. Pinball is about nothing but points. Sure, you want to keep your game going for as long as possible, but doing so gives you time to rack up a score, which is the goal. Without points there is no reason to play pinball. 

Then in console games, points exist (when they do) as a playability mechanic that you can choose to enjoy or not. You can beat Super Mario Brothers just by rescuing the princess, or you can challenge yourself or others by trying to get the high score.

100%, point pressing is expected by game designers. Why else would there be points? Why are points given in hundreds or thousands instead of ones?: it’s more exciting that way. Points are the basis of all gaming, from checkers to baseball. They’re a metric for competition, which is like conflict in storytelling. Games without points are just movies that you try to act in without knowing the script ahead of time. 

Point pressing is welcomed by the programmers, even if people have reached heights they never dreamed of by finding “exploits”. Which is not a term I would apply to waiting for barrels in DK. It’s just smart apprehension of the system. Miyamoto may not have expected that, but I would bet money that he would be pleased that people pay enough attention to understand the system he designed to find ways to maximize potential. 

[Sumez | 3,042]

19 minutes ago, Link said:

Put me on the side of point-pressing being an intentional feature.

Worth pointing out of course, that it isn't always. I'd say point pressing methods usually come in one of four ways:

• Intentional features that improve the game
  Eg. Donkey Kong's barrel jumping. I'd usually be referring to these as "scoring systems". Most popular shooters tend to be judged based on those, since it's what adds variety and depth to the gameplay)
• Unintended features that are tedious/unfun
  Eg. jumping next to DK, shooting at off-screen enemies in Metal Slug, etc. There's no shortage of these, and many competitive scenes don't allow them because they ruin the game
• Unintended features that still improve the game 
  Eg. controlling the barrels down ladders in Donkey Kong to group them. This is surprisingly common, and probably more likely to be a more divisive subject. It's similar to speedrunning using glitches or RNG manipulation in a way that requires more skill than playing the game "normally". Technically barrel control in DK isn't an "unintended feature", but using it to get more points probably is. That said, it might be hard to tell if developers actually discovered it while testing the game and decided to leave it in because it made the game more fun.
• Intended features that actually just suck
  I guess that's just bad design. Again, this can be divisibe and subjective, but if a scoring method doesn't properly manage to be an indicator of skill, it probably isn't very good. (using Link's pinball example, the left ramp in Theatre of Magic is probably a good example)
  Fortunately a lot of arcade games still are perfectly enjoyable without factoring in scoring at all. If you want to push points out of Ghouls 'n Ghosts, you want to finish the final stage without the psycho cannon so you're sent back and keep replaying that segment. But why would anyone want to do that? The fun part is getting to the end without dying.

Edited October 12, 2020 by Sumez

[GPX | 1,376]

Random Youtube algorithm landed this gem of a video clip. For the Streetfighter 90s arcade lovers!

 

[Sumer | 221]

2 hours ago, GPX said:

Random Youtube algorithm landed this gem of a video clip. For the Streetfighter 90s arcade lovers!

 

I got that one too on my YouTube algorithm!